July 2003 Archives

From Gutless Pacifist, a question of etiquette: how might the world's biggest oil companies tactfully apologize

There are plenty of conservative sites jumping on the recantation of the Voices in the Wilderness ex-member. Most of the posts to Charles Brown's article seem to be from former liberals who are too happy to condemn their own former naivete: bq. "But there was a time when, as a college student infatuated by radical politics, I once shared a similar naive perception of world events as Voices in the Wilderness (and as I recollect, probably distributed their literature as well)." Brown situated Voices in the Catholic left tradition (fair enough) and it's fascinating to see how many of the critiquers echoing Brown are from the Catholic right: "It's a timely read... given the prominence the anti-sanctions position was accorded by Church leaders." A lot of the pull of this story seems to be cultural politics within the Catholic Church and the role of politics and activism. I'd love to hear some reasoned debate about all this, not just self-congratulatory ex-liberal boasting. The Voices site is silent about this, maybe that's the right response for now.

The Idiot who came up with the "Terror Psychic Network" is leaving the Pentagon over the flap. What's even more striking is his identity: it's John Poindexter, one of the people at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked the Reagan Administration. For those too young to remember, in the Iran-Contra affair Reagan's kookiest spooks secretly sold arms to U.S. archenemy number 1 (Iran) in order to circumvent Congressional demands that they not fund an opposition army against U.S. archenemy number 2 (Nicaragua), with the money being funneled through the country that then and now still inexplicably isn't public enemy number 3 (Saudi Arabia). It was the circuitousness of it all more than anything that kept Reagan out of jail for all of this. Why Poindexter was ever allowed back anywhere near Washington, much less the Pentagon, is a mystery. Here are some articles on Poindexter's return to Washington and return of the Iran-Contra crew to the (Bush II) White House. Here's another article on the resignation of the Reagan crook turned Bush-II fool.

There are a bunch of fascinating rants against the contemporary peace movement as the result of an article by Charles M. Brown, an anti-sanctions activist that has somewhat-unfairly challenged his former colleagues at the Nonviolence.org-affiliated Voices in the Wilderness. Brown talks quite frankly about his feelings that Saddam Hussein used the peace group for propaganda purposes and he challenges many of the cultural norms of the peace movement. I don't know if Brown realized just how much the anti-peace movement crowd would jump at his article. It's gotten play in InstaPundit and In Context: None So Blind.

Brown's critique is interesting but not really fair: he faults Voices for having a single focus (sanctions) and single goal (changing U.S. policy) but what else should be expected of a small group with no significant budget? Over the course of his work against sanctions Brown started studying Iraqi history as an academic and he began to worry that Voices disregarded historical analysis that "did not take ... Desert Storm as their point of departure." But was he surprised? Of course an academic is going to have a longer historical view than an underfunded peace group. The sharp focus of Voices made it a welcome anomaly in the peace movement and gave it a strength of a clear message. Yes it was a prophetic voice and yes it was a largely U.S.-centric voice but as I understand it, that was much of the point behind its work: We can do better in the world. It was Americans taking responsibility for our own people's blindness and disregard for human life. That Iraq has problems doesn't let us off the hook of looking at our own culture's skeletons.

What I do find fascinating is his behind-the-scenes description of the culture of the 1990s peace movement. He talks about the roots of the anti-sanctions activism in Catholic-Worker "dramaturgy." He's undoubtedly right that peace activists didn't challenge Baathist party propaganda enough, that we used the suffering of Iraqi people for our own anti-war propaganda, and that our analysis was often too simplistic. That doesn't change the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died from sanctions that most Americans knew little about.

The peace movement doesn't challenge its own assumptions enough and I'm glad Brown is sharing a self-critique. I wish he were a bit gentler and suspect he'll look back at his work with Voices with more charity in years to come. Did he know the fodder his critique would give to the hawkish groups? Rather than recant his past as per the neo-conservative playbook, he could had offered his reflections and critique with an acknowlegment that there are plenty of good motivations behind the work of many peace activists. I like a lot of what Brown has to say but I wonder if peace activists will be able to hear it now. I think Brown will eventually find his new hawkish friends are at least as caught up in group-think, historical myopia, and propaganda propagation as the people he critiques.

Voices in the Wilderness has done a lot of good educating Americans about the effects of our policies overseas. It's been hard and often-thankless work in a climate that didn't support peace workers either morally or financially. The U.S. is a much better place because of Voices and the peace movement was certainly invigorated by its breath of fresh air.

David Rieff writes a good article in the New York Times asking whether sanctions in Iraq were ethical.

It seems like the relatively easy invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces were the result of the 13 years of military sanctions in that country. The lack of weapons of mass destruction can also be explained in part by the lack of money to fund research. That the sanctions were so sucessful make the case for war so much more difficult--why did the U.S. risk U.S. lives and the state of our economy if Hussein was already not a risk?

Like any sanction, the effects hit the Iraq poor the hardest. As Rieff points out "these observations do not answer the question of whether any policy... is worth the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children." The Clinton Administration thought the deaths were justifiable, in a just infamous quote from then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who told a television interviewer that "we think the price is worth it." Today's article gives a stunning admission from Albright, who now admits "It was a genuinely stupid thing to say."

peace groups have always had an uneasy relationship with sanctions. Once upon a time we called on politicians to use sanctions in place of armed war. The shock of hundreds of thousands of children dying from sanctions made us reevaluate them and groups like Voice in the Wilderness were founded to end the sanctions. Saddam Hussein used the effects of sanctions for propaganda purposes, putting U.S. activists in an almost impossible situation between the U.S. and Iraqi propaganda machines, one insisting the sanctions caused no harm, the other that it was a form of genocide. peace groups have to be bold enough to go into the grey areas of public policy but it's a hard struggle to keep our eyes on the truth in such situations (Voices did it admirably in my opinion, which is why they've become such a respected organization in so short a time).

I think this Times article is one of the first we'll be seeing over the next few years, as we all try to understand the role of sanctions in war and peace. See Sanctions on Iraq: Myth and Reality for Voices' overview.

For those of you pronosticators who want to get in on the ground floor of the Psychic Terror Network (a.k.a. the Policy Analysis Market), here's the home of dot-com Homeland Security. Its homepage is appropriately reminiscent of the Heaven's Gate Cult website, another modern pseudo-religion (their story here).

The Policy Analysis Market is cosponored by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects, and a spin-off of The economist magazine, confirming my suspicion that this is the cult of the capitalists at work. It's Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations here: there's a "guiding hand" to completely unfettered markets that allows them to meet people's needs better than individual intelligence ever could. Forget the CIA, we'll use internet surfers! They'll want to make money and they can do our intelligence gathering for us better than those desk jockeys in Langley! This Psychic Terror Stock exchange is the perfect marriage of Nineties dot-com can-do, eighties market-uber-alles and Seventeen-Seventies God-guides-the-rich Calvinism.

Trader accounts open in two days so get ready to join the Pyschic Terror Network yourself!

UPDATe: We're too late. Pentagon canceling Pyschic Terror Network under the weight of ridicule they've received to the idea. Maybe the Pentagon should hire Nancy Reagan's astrologer for their terror alerts instead (actually they should hire her great webmaster, whose great design sure beats that of the Heaven's Gate dropout they used).

The news sites are all reporting a Pentagon plan to bet on future terrorist activity (BBC). It's reported as a stock market-style system in which sucessful predictions by investors would win them money.

Someone at the Pentagon has read a little too many books about the infinite wisdom of the free market. There are those who have a religious faith in the power of unfettered capitalism, who posit it as a kind of all-knowing, self-correcting God. With the input of enough self-interested actors, the truth can be discerned. I'd argue that stock markets are more like blogs (the highly-linked New York Times version of the article), with everyone rushing to make the same links (Associated Press).

The truth of the matter is that recent intelligence lapses have been the result of political meddling in the collection and analytical processes. When the boss wants a certain result (proof of weapons in Iraq, proof of Al Qaeda links), then the group-think pressure to conform will warp the sifting process. A stock market-style system for predicting terror would be about as accurate as a poll of CNN and Fox News watchers--it will tell you what everyone thinks but it probably won't tell you the truth.

In a reminder that the politics of blame are overlaid on real countries, the African country of Niger has demanded UK's Blair to prove it's complicity in the Iraq uranium trade. Prime Minister Hama Hamadou reminds the world that Niger's forces fought against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War and he asks: "Would we really send material to somebody whom we had fought against and who could destroy half the world with a nuclear bomb?"

Through all the claims and denials, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has refused to retract the now disproven claim that Iraq actively sought uranium from Niger. Hamadou puts the scandal squarely where it belongs: as games in U.S. and U.K. domestic politics:

"We cannot get involved in the politics of the world's most powerful nations. We are a poor country. Our uranium is tightly controlled and our priorities are to produce enough food to feed our people and provide education for all of our children."

The Washington Post has an interesting article on National Secuity advisor Condoleezza Rice. She's being asked the same question we've wondered about President Bush in recent months: Is Condi Rice incompent or a liar?

She's long claimed not to have seen the CIA warnings about the authenticity of the claims that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. Yet it was her job to know everything about Iraq's nuclear aspirations and the CIA doubts were sent along to her White House office. They were even included in some blunt footnotes in an official report. It's hard to believe that Rice overlooked all this and that she wouldn't have had her aides confirm the Niger intelligence before passing it along to the President. She's too smart for that.

Last week one of her advisors Stephen J. Hadley claimed responsibility for the Niger scandal but like the former responsibility claim of the CIA's George Tenet, it felt wrong. The CIA did warn the White House and Hadley wasn't the one ultimately responsible for knowing the intelligence.

The question of "Who knew what and when" keeps going up the chain of command. Condi Rice is the next administration official to go under the microscope. Colin Powell and Dick Cheney are next. And soon enough it will be the President himself. It's almost certain that he was the one who gave the orders to fudge intelligence to implicate Iraq.

Uganda's Idi Amin, one of the most brutal dictators in the Twentieth Century is near death in a coma. As many as half a million people died during his rule but where is he now? This genocidal dictator is in exile courtesy of the Saudi government, and is currently lying in the King Faisal Hospital. I never did follow what happened to Amin after he left Uganda but apparently he's hopped from one repressive brutal regime to another in his days in exile. First it was Col. Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi's Libya, then was Saddam Hussein's Iraq and now it's the Saud family's Arabia. I guess tyrants of a feather flock together...

By Martin Kelley. The Bush White House is still giving a free pass to the real country behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Scratching for evidence is unnecessary for the country we all know bankrolls bin Laden and supplies his loyal footsoldiers.

A nine year old in Buena went joyriding in a bright yellow-school bus. Strange enough as that is, what’s even stranger is that the New York Times covered it as a “local” story.

There is now some hard evidence in the charges that the federal agency overseeing airlines has compiled a list that targets and harrasses activists. A Freedom of Information Act request has not turned up the names or who they represent but has discovered that the list itself is 88 pages long.

There have been a number of activists who have experience extra scrutiny and special searches, especially in the San Francisco and Oakland airports. The FOIA case, filed by the Northern California ACLU, is the first to start shedding light on the practice. Dissent is always challenged as unpatriotic in times of war and scandal. Contrary to the opinions of the many cranks who write in to Nonviolence.org, it's not the military who has ever protected our right to free speech--it's groups like the ACLU fighting to bring harassment to public attention.

It's obvious that the Center is just a holding pen for big bus trips. It's not as much a museum or national shrine as it is a highway rest stop. On your left's the super-sized cafeteria, on your right the store for crappy hats and t-shirts. And for this we rip up Philadelphia?

Timothy Noah of Slate talks about Vice President Dick Cheney's unapolegetic speech before the American enterprise Institute.

It's clear that Cheney's the real force behind the Presidency and it's hard to believe he wasn't the so-far unnamed administration official who insisted that the obviously-false Niger claim go into the State of the Union address. Noah's article is full of great links for those wanting to follow the in's and out's of the scandal.

It's becoming hip to start comparing President George W Bush with past holders of his office. CBSNews.Com's Dick Meyer is calling him George W. Nixon for his use of "Fall guys, intimidation and leaked personal attacks on enemies." It's quite a charge but then it's probably right on. The lying on Niger and the White House attack against former Ambassador Wilson is the certainly kind of dirty tricks that Nixon's boys used to pull.

Today the White House suddenly remembered they did get two CIA documents doubting the Niger/Iraq connection a full three months before the President's State of the Union address. For weeks the White House has been insisting that they never received any information from the CIA.

Meanwhile Stephen J. Hadley, an assistant to Condi Rice, has claimed responsibility for the oversight of including the charge in the State of the Union but adds "The president had every reason to believe that the text of the State of the Union was sound" even though we've already heard this isn't true.

The President should learn from history that covering up scandal can quickly become its own crime and achieve a notoriety far greater than the original indiscretion itself.

All the blogs are a-titter about the possibility that Saddam Hussein's sons might have been killed. Who cares? They've certainly had little power since the main fighting ended and interest in their death is of more gossip value than anything else.

No, the real story is who leaked the identity of Joseph Wilson's wife? Wilson is the man who was sent to Niger to investigate the yellow cake uranium papers to see if there was any truth to them. He determined the papers were forgeries and in the past month he's gone public with his findings.

This week two senior White House officials decided to get back at Wilson by telling conservative columnist Robert Novak know that Wilson's wife Valerie Plame works as an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. This is extremely confidential information and news of her identity threatens both her job and the assignments she was covering. This is more than a petty White House dirty trick--this is a dangerous breech of intelligence. Wilson's wife investigates weapons of mass destruction. We don't need a peevish President screwing up sensitive information just to get back at a political enemy.

For those wanting to follow the media storm starting to brew over this, check out Bush Wars. For those wanting to see what happens when people in the know speak out about military policy check the links and discussion on the NV Board's thread Pentagon Retaliates Against GIs Who Spoke Out on TV.

And please stop reading the Uday killed, Qusay killed, Hussein sons killed non-stories.

The New York Times' Paul Krugman must have read my morning essay. Well, or great minds think alike. In today's column he asks Who's Unpatriotic Now?. It's so true: the questions that were unpatriotic to ask a few months ago are exactly the questions that everyone is starting to ask. Skeptical criticism is patriotic, while skewing intelligence information to fit a political agenda should be a treasonable offense. One choice quote from Krugman:

Issues of principle aside, the invasion of a country that hadn't attacked us and didn't pose an imminent threat has seriously weakened our military position.

Feature essay by Martin Kelley. So the President lied. He passed along forged evidence to scare the American people into backing his war against Iraq. What strikes me is the obvious: we all knew all this too. Bush lied, yes, but we allowed ourselves to be lied to.

The Washington Post has an article about the Bush White House's common practice of making unattributed statements about Iraq without getting CIA feedback. Some of the whoppers include:

Sept 26: Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."

Sept 28: "there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq"

Oct 7: "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda."

All of these claims were strongly disputed by intelligence experts at the time and only the most die-heart Adminstration-booster would want to claim now that any of them are true.

The 45 minute claim has gotten a thorough rebuking in the U.K.

This is the second time in as many weeks where a Bush quote has suddenly taken me back to the Reagan years. That 45 minute claim just echos in my head of Reagan's "the Sandinistas are just two days drive from Harlingen, Texas." They both have that "oh my god, the barbarians are at the door" urgency. Both also posit an arch-enemy that turned out to be a paper tiger when all the propaganda was peeled back. (For the young'ins out there, Reagan responded to the two-drive fear by mining Nicaragua's harbors, an act which was later declared illegal by the World Court).

It's pretty obvious by now that the Administration of George W. Bush came into office wanting a second Gulf War. They used the unrelated tragedy of 9/11 and every half-truth they could find to drum up war fever in the U.S. Now the New York Times has news that U.S. bombing of Iraq command posts from the summer of 2002 on were actually designed to
pave the way for war.

At the time the Bush Administration defended the attacks as reactions to Iraqi violations of the No-Flight zone. The real purpose was to cut the fiber optic lines, radars and command and control centers that defended Iraq. The report detailing all this comes from Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the chief allied war commander, who's amazingly frank in his who-started-what admission:

"We became a little more aggressive based on them shooting more at us, which allowed us to respond more. Then the question is whether they were shooting at us because we were up there more. So there is a chicken and egg thing here."

And perhaps a pot calling the kettle black sort of thing too. Chalk up another Bush Administration pattern of deception for the war he wanted so bad.

A little bit of housekeeping: There have been a few behind-the-scene changes on the Nonviolence.org homepage this weekend. I've switched the blogging software over to Moveabletype.

The hard-core blog readers will appreciate that Nonviolence.org now has an syndicated news feed. That means that you can now read the homepage with software like Sharpreader, Newsgator, etc.

even the more-casual readers will appreciate that you can now comment directly on every article. There will be other subtler features added over time. Let me know if there are any problems.

This would be funny if it weren't serious. This would be serious if it weren't pathetic. A few days ago ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman ran a story about low morale among U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. The next day someone in the White House tipped off gossip king Matt Drudge that Kofman was openly gay and (maybe worse) a Canadian. Lapdog Drudge complied with the headline "ABC NeWS RePORTeR WHO FILeD TROOP COMPLAINT STORY IS CANADIAN." It's amazing what tidbits the White House thinks are newsworthy. You'd think the milestone that U.S. casulties in Iraq have surpassed those of the 1991 War might just get the President's attention.

Story here. In strange and sad news, the man who was probably the unnamed "senior official" who first told the BBC that Britain "sexed up" its Iraq weapons dossier has turned up dead in the woods near his home. Dr. David Kelly gave evidence to the UK foreign affairs committee just days ago, where he asked the committee "Have you ever felt like the fall guy?" One member of the committee told the Guardian that "We thought he'd been put up quite deliberately to distract us from the case of the government's case for war."

David Kelly has been described as a "soft spoken" man not used to the public glare he's been under. Reports haven't even given the cause of death, so conspiracy theories will have to be put on hold. It's quite possible that this faithful civil servant and scientist finally cracked under the pressure of the media onslaught and took his life. It is a tragedy for his family.

Recruiting Satire. I've always found U.S. Army recruiting advertising fascinating. It's not just that the ads are well-produced. They catch onto basic human yearnings in a way that's the teen equivalent of self-help books. "Be all that you can be" is wonderful--who wouldn't want that. And the current ads making the Army look like a extreme sport also hits the nexus of cool and inspiring. The current US Army slogan is "An Army of One," which might almost make potential recruits forget that a basic cornerstone of military training is wiping away individuality to mold recruits into interchangable units. The link above is to "Army of None," a smart parody of the official recruiting site.

Yesterday North Korea claimed that it has processed enough plutonium to make six nuclear weapons. I've often argued that wars don't begin when the shooting actually begins, that we need to look at the militaristic decisions made years before to see how they planted the seeds for war. After the First World War, the victorious allies constructed a peace treaty designed to humiliate Germany and keep its economy stagnant. With the onslaught of the Great Depression, the country was ripe for a mad demagogue like Hitler to take over with talk of a Greater Germany.

In his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush's team added North Korea to the "axis of evil" that needed to be challenged. By all accounts it was a last minute addition. The speechwriting team never bothered to consult with the State Department's east Asia experts. In all likelihood North Korea was added so that the evil three countries wouldn't all be Muslim (the other two were Iraq and Iran) and the "War on Terror" wouldn't be seen as a war against Islam.

North Korea saw a bulldog president in the White House and judged that its best chance to stay safe was to make a U.S. attack too dangerous to contemplate. It's a sound strategy, really only a variation on the Cold War's "Mutually Assured Destruction" doctrine. When faced with a hostile and militaristically-strong country that wants to overthrow your government, you make yourself too dangerous to take on. Let's call it the Rattlesnake Defense.

Militarism reinforces itself when countries beef up their militaries to stave off the militaries of other countries. With North Korea going nuclear, pressure will now build on South Korea, China and Japan to defend themselves against possible threat. We might be in for a new east Asian arms race, perhaps an east Asian Cold War. Being a pacifist means stopping not only the current war but the next one and the one after that. In the 1980s activists were speaking out against the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, an American friend who was gassing his own people. Now we need to speak out against the cowboy politics that is feeding instability on the Korean Peninsula, to prevent the horror and mass death that a Second Korean War would unleash.

The Washington Post has a remarkably-wrong assertion by George W. Bush. The President says he decided to start the war after he gave Saddam Hussein "a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."

Memo to Bush: Hussein did let them in (they were there when U.S. troop buildup started in the Mideast). Over the last few weeks the Bush Administration has had a lot of trouble keeping its alibis straight but now the President himself is just being out of touch with reality. (This is starting to feel like the glory days of the Reagan Administration.) He continues to bully reality out of the way, despite the exposure of forgeries and the non-discovery of weapons of mass destruction:

"I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence. And the speeches I have given were backed by good intelligence. And I am absolutely convinced today, like I was convinced when I gave the speeches, that Saddam Hussein developed a program of weapons of mass destruction, and that our country made the right decision."

The Bean Defense... Readers might remember the field day I had a few weeks ago when US occupying forces announced they had uncovered a cache of beans. They claimed Saddam Hussein had stockpiled a few hundred bags of castor beans to use to make a biological agent called ricin. In my post US: Iraqis Planned Operation Fart and Stink I pointed out that the supposed weapons worked on the well-documented principle that beans can produce gas and indigestion--ricin just works especially well and concentrates the effect enough to kill someone in a particularly messy way.

What I didn't do was Google ricin and Iraq. Today I did and found this fascinating article that I missed at the time. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed an Iraq/ricin connection before the House International Relations Committee back in early February:

"The ricin that is bouncing around europe now originated in Iraq -- not in the part of Iraq that is under Saddam Hussein's control, but his security forces know all about it," Powell said.

european intelligence sources quickly discredited this claim, pointing out that it was obvious the european ricin was home-made and not Iraqi. The French were "stunned" that Powell would make such a obviously-wrong statement, and the British flatly stated they were "clear" that that ricin found in London wasn't produced in Iraq.

Here we have another instance of a senior US official claiming an easily-disprovable claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, just weeks after the now-infamous Niger/Iraq forgery appeared in the President's State of the Union address. Powell and others in the U.S. have trotted out the ricin threat repeatedly yet it's hard to make a weapon out of the stuff. It's really only ever been used for a ridiculous James Bond-like assasination in 1991, when a Bulgarian agent is supposed to have killed a dissident in London using a ricin-filled pellet fired from an umbrella tip (one is reminded of Austin Power's Dr. evil: "I'm going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death"). As one site points out The current wisdom among biological defense experts is that ricin is more likely to be used as a tool in assassinations than as a weapon of mass destruction.

There is a clear pattern of the Bush Admininstration deliberately mis-interpreting Iraqi threats to make the case for war. These are purposeful deceptions with only the thinnest escape clause to wiggle through when the lies are exposed. Colin Powell isn't stupid enough to make this kind of repeated mistake and a year of disproven ricin alerts is a mark against the Administration's integrity.

The U.S. Justice Department might be throwing out its prosecution of suspected Al Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui because it doesn't want to allow him to question another Al Qaeda detainee in court. Without the testimony of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the judge might throw out the entire indictment against Moussaoui. What’s the Justice Department’s rationale? It says any testimony “would necessarily result in the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”

Almost three years later, what kind of classified information could Moussaoui possibly have? Surely nothing that future terrorists could use. The only thing he could talk about is conditions in the prisons. Bin al-Shibh is being held in a secret location under military law but has reportedly confessed to being part of the 9/11 attacks. Surely all the information he knows about the attacks is also known by dozens of other Al Qaeda members still at large. Why is U.S.Attorney John Ashcroft’s Justice Department so nervous about letting bin al-Shibh speak in public?

A government will classify a piece of information if it feels that its disclosure would threaten national security: that with it, its enemies could use it to launch some new attack. But everything that Moussaoui and bin al-Shibh know is already known by our enemies. Governments sometimes will abuse their power and declare something classified if it contatins information that would be embarrassing to its reputation or its political leaders.

It’s a big deal to risk throwing away a case like this, and it seems likely that Ashcroft is trying to keep some piece of information from the American people. He could be trying to keep skeletons of past U.S. misdeeds safely in the closet, using "national security" as the blanket to cover up the truth. The two suspected terrorists might know quite a bit about U.S. intelligence cooperation with Afghani terrorists during the 1980s (when they were aiming their attacks at the Soviet Union). They might know about U.S. intelligence mistakes that could have prevented 9/11. They surely know about conditions in the secret prisons were even detainees’ names and locations are considered “classified information.” Who’s security would be threatened if this kind of information got published?

"The president is pleased that the director of central intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged. The president has moved on..." Oh good for him.
But wait. The President also defends CIA director Tenet who gave him bad information. So Tenet covered Bush's bottom and now Bush is covering Tenet's so now we can move on. How convenient.
    In a TV studio a few blocks away Donald Rumsfeld has the balls to continue defending the inclusion of the obvious forgery in the State of the Union address. On a political talk show, he said the Niger uranium claim was "technically correct" since the President just said British Intelligence thought it was true. Of course, the Brits have said they said it because American intelligence had told them it was true. Again, how convenient. I almost expect someone to say the inclusion of the forgery was okay because the President had his fingers crossed behind his back as he read that part of the speech.
    I think we could go too far in the who-said-what department with this speech. It was one speech, granted the most important of the year, but still the big issue is that Bush repeatedly fed the American people dubious claims about Iraq's programs to build weapons of mass destruction. Whenever a reporter asked a hard question about these claims, the Bush Adminstration essentially told us there was more intelligence that they couldn't share and that we should all trust them. Well it's turned out the Administration was wrong. This is a colossal failure and this is the big scandal of the Bush Administration and the biggest source of shame for the American and British peoples.

From the Al-Qaida/Iraq forgery to the Niger/Iraq forgery, from the "rescue" of Private Jessica Lynch to the joke that Iraqis will get the money from their own oil, the UK Independent tallies up the modern hypocrisies of war.

After a war of finger-pointing between the White House and the CIA, George Tenet has admitted responsibility: "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president." While this sounds good, it doesn't jive with everything else we've been hearing about this breaking scandal. We know that President Bush himself knew that the Niger/Iraq uranium allegation was tenuous at best. He all but ordered the CIA to let him use it despite the fact that everyone suspected it was a forgery. He wanted to use it and Tenet finally buckled to the pressure last January. Now he's taking the metaphorical bullet for his President and taking all responsibility.
    I'm sure many of President Bush's supporters will now argue that the scandal has broken. But it seems like a desparate measure by Tenet and the White House who has undoubtedly behind this latest statement.
    Here's another question: have we ever discovered who actually forged the documents in the first place? Are any investigative reporters backtracking this story?

Update: For what it's worth, a few days later Time Magazine has to the same conclusion as I did about Tenet's statement: "In what looked like a command performance of political sacrifice, the head of the agency that expressed some of the strongest doubts about the charge took responsibility for the President's unsubstantiated claim."

CBS News is getting blunt with its headline "Bush Knew Iraq Info Was Dubious." From the article: "The statement was technically correct, since it accurately reflected the British paper. But the bottom line is the White House knowingly included in a presidential address information its own CIA had explicitly warned might not be true."

The CIA asked Britain to drop it's Iraq claim while President Bush said that the CIA "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services."
    Remember that Bush's State of the Union address didn't claim that the US believed that Iraq was buying nuclear material from Niger or other African countries. It said that British intelligence thought Iraq was. Shifting responsibility for the claim gave the Bush team the wiggle room to include an allegation they knew was probably not true. It's the triumph of politics over truth.
    As I've written before, there is a political brillance to the Bush Presidency. The Administration knows that it can sway large portions of the American public just by making claims. It doesn't matter if the claims are wrong --even obviously wrong-- as long as they feed into some deep psychic narrative. It's been awhile since we saw a President that could bully through reality as long as the story sounded good. Ronald Reagan, the ex-actor, was good at it but I'm suspecting our current President is even better. The question is whether enough people will start insisting on the truth and demand investigations into the lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and President Bush knew it. The American people would not have gone to war if we had known that Iraq wasn't a threat and this too President Bush knew.

"My thought was, how did that get into the speech?"This choice quote comes from Greg Thielmann, an intelligence expert in the US State Department (now retired). In today's papers this Bush Administration insider has come right out and said that the White House "lied about Saddam threat".
    Meanwhile the happy-go-lucky Donald Rumsfeld has said the occupation is costing the US $3.9 billion per month (see sidebar) and General Tommy Franks predicts high troop levels will be needed "for the foreseeable future."

Here's the wonderfully-smart Weapons of Mass Destruction spoof page, proving once again that satire can be the best weapon against blowhard self-assurance (see "no doubt..." below). See how this spoof page became famous overnight via bloggers.

Brit officials: "unlikely to be found" every day it becomes harder to claim or believe that US occupying forces will find weapons of mass destruction from the Hussein regime. Government officials wanting to change their tune will start with "leaks" like this one reported in the BBC. This is the first step in Anglo-American officialdom's eventual admission that weapons will never be found.
    Here's something I wonder: have US officials brought their own weapons of mass destruction into Iraq as part of the occupation? Might there now be US WMDs in Iraq?

I'll just let President Bush speak for himself (emphasis added):

There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to world peace. And there's no doubt in my mind that the United States, along with allies and friends, did the right thing in removing him from power. And there's no doubt in my mind, when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth.

One has to wonder when someone insists three times in as many sentences that's there's no reason for doubt.

UPDATe: Thanks to Sejenus (see first comment) for letting us know that this story has been declared a hoax. The article as it originally appeared on Nonviolence.org is below. See its debunking here.

Original story for reference only:

A CIA advisor named Terrance J. Wilkinson says he gave two White House briefings before the State of the Union address in which he said that the Niger-Iraq uranium papers were a forgery. Both times the President himself was present.

An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.

'The report had already been discredited,' said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. 'This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings.'

Bush's response was anger, Wilkinson said.

"He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said.

This certainly sounds like a direct order to falsify evidence. The President of the United States personally demanded that American intelligence be compromised to fit his political agenda. George W. Bush knows that his party's chances of staying in control depend solely upon keeping national security on the top of voter's agendas. As the economy continues to slide downward, he looses all chance of winning re-election on a domestic agenda. The Republicans' chances of staying in office are increasingly dependent building up the drama of security alerts and national threats. The U.S. went to war on a lie, a lie that came straight from the President himself, one which serves his party's political interests all too closely.

"This is a classic case of trying to jump out ahead of a story by conceding a point that no one is actually disputing in the first place" I highly recommend Joshua Micah Marshall's analysis on the White House's use of the the African uranium forgery in the State of the Union adddress. He asks the important questions and looks at both what reporters aren't asking (yet) and what the White House is glossing over (still).

One "senior official" at the White House is quoted as saying: "White House admits it was wrong about Iraq nuke program"
    How the claim got into the speech is itself still up for debate. As we reported here back in March, the documents behind the charge were obviously forged. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of uranium mining in Niger could have seen right through them. The African officials named in the documents were long out of office. A few phone calls could have exposed the fraud. The Vice President's office was clearly behind adding the claim in the State of the Union address. Was Dick Cheney and his aides grossly incompentent or did they simply not care that they were having the President lie (and make a fool of himself and the U.S.).
    Unfortunately the White House itself is still not admitting to any of this this, spinning away excuses--White House spokeman Ari Fleischer said "There is zero, nada, nothing new here."
    This weekend in the New York Times, the senior diplomat assigned to check on the Niger-Iraq nuclear connection told his story and asked did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?"
    See also: The Washington Post on the White House's back-tracking

News that the country that has recently defied the United Nations and started two wars in as many years now has plans to develop new types of weapons of mass destruction: "That policy paper embraces the use of nuclear weapons in a first strike and on the battlefield; it also says ... nuclear testing may soon be necessary." This renewed development is coming from the only country that has used nuclear weapons in wartime against civilian populations.

Yesterday Bush went macho when asked about Iraqi baddies: "Bring them on" he crowed to a group of reporters. Well today they did: ten more American soldiers wounded, three in downtown Baghdad (gotta love the detail: "A crowd of Iraqis kicked and jumped on the damaged military vehicle, which then caught fire"). Thank you Mister President. How much should we wager that none of the dead are fellow Yale alums, that none of their daddies are oil millionaires?

The big news of the day is some US Senator from Kansas saying he's seen the evidence of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. Its more claims without details, more "trust us" talk from a friend of the Administration: "We've had some success; I'm sorry I can't go into detail about that." Smoke and mirrors. You can almost hear another five percent of the American population watching Tom Brokaw tonight and going "they've found them, yes," "George Bush is keeping us safe, yes."

I've run up a lot of Nonviolence.Org expenses over Iraq War II--the flood of visitors have eaten up the bandwidth. Help keep the site going by buying a fundraising t-shirt, only $22 while supplies last!

President Bush yesterday told a largely-military audience at the White House that the occupation of Iraq will be a "massive and long-term undertaking." He also complained about the nearly-daily attacks against US troops--didn't they hear him declare the war over? "Despite all evidence our President is still trotting out the same unsubstantiated and self-serving rationales: "We ended a regime that possessed weapons of mass destruction [and] harbored and supported terrorists."