Amy Goodman calls the total pro-war propaganda of the media "the access of evil" and quotes a study by FAIR (Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting) which shows that in the run-up to the war, in just the two weeks surrounding Powell’s UN speech, 393 "experts" were booked on the network news shows. Number of antiwar spokespersons: three. And of course, the talking heads for the right all look like a good-looking older uncle of yours and the women are all pretty made-up blondes, and the representative of the left always what Al Franken described as "an assistant professor from the University Of South Florida with glasses and a lazy eye". In other words, right: Sean Hannity. Left: Alan Colmes. ‘Nuff said.
Noam Chomsky: "The target of preventive war must have (these) characteristics:
- It must be virtually defenseless.
- It must be important enough to be worth the trouble.
- There must be a way to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.
He forgot 4. Must have oil we can keep from pumping so the Saudis can make $66 billion in a year.
Bush: "(Saddam) is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons...(and he) has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his citizens dead, blind, and transfigured...If this is not evil, evil has no meaning." Chomsky says he didn’t add "with our help, which continued because we didn’t care". Praise and suppor shifted to denunciation as soon as the monster committed his first authentic crime: disobeying (or perhaps misunderstanding) orders by invading Kuwait in 1990. Punishment was sever—for his subjects." "If Iraqis ever see Saddam Hussein in the dock, they want his former American allies shackled behind him" (Reuters).
A lot of the "intel" about Saddam’s WMD came from false confessions from detainees tortured after extraordinary renditions to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, according to Goodman. A February 2002 report widely circulated in the White House and the Pentagon said that Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi, who Bush quoted heavily to justify the invasion, was "intentionally misleading the debriefers".
The Gitmo torture that was exported by Rumsfeld to Abu Ghraib was already controversial in 2002. In a report that said detainees were required to stand for four hours at a time, Rumsfeld wrote in the margin, "Why is standing limited to four hours? ...I stand for eight hours a day." Goodman says, "Perhaps if he was standing naked, with loud music blasting...attack dogs lunging, and guards softening him up, Rumsfeld would understand why limits, even flimsy ones, were needed." No wonder this Administration is pushing for more pro-torture laws to this day—they think what they do in their office is worse than what the detainees are going through. Bush told Robert Draper in "Dead Certain" that he cries a lot. I guess these guys ARE tortured. At least the innocent detainees can sleep at night—except for the blaring rap music and the strobe lights and being naked in the cold in a cage, but you get the idea...
There’s a lot of talk about torture in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and "black sites", but I didn’t know that the false connections made about Saddam and Al-Qaeda and Saddam and WMDs came from not only liars like "Curveball", but people tortured in other countries, even though all intel officials know that torture leads only to lies; as Goodman says, "tortured detainees will say or make up anything to stop the abuse". This is what they went to war on, because they had nothing else except "aluminum tubes". Of course, they turned out to be for rockets, not for nukes, but those tubes were pounded into us over and over by Bush and Powell and Cheney. Apparently, they thought Saddam might destroy America by throwing tubes at us.
Bush ignored all of this and in Cincinatti in October, 2002, he said: "We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases." Bullshit!!! Like they needed Saddam to tell them? Like they would even talk to Saddam? They hated Saddam—he was secular. He let his people drink alcohol and listen to music. He didn’t give a damn about Islam. He was bin Laden’s worst enemy, more than the US. He was our employee for many years. I think they already knew how to make a bomb—American kids who shoot up schools can make a friggin’ bomb. Anybody who’s ever watched an action movie or an episode of "MacGuyver" can make a bomb...The Pentagon’s own website had detailed blueprints of an atomic bomb recently. You can Google a nuke.
And Iraq and Iran and al-Qaeda don’t need to make a single nuclear weapon. You can buy any one or more of the thousands of loose nukes floating around post-Soviet satellite countries. The Democrats have tried to get a proper budget to contain these loose nukes for years, but Bush has refused. (But Bush claimed Saddam tried to buy yellowcake from Niger. He was close: Saddam once bought a Twinkie from a Black man.) No one needs to get yellowcake, or tubes, or centrifuges, or uranium-whatever. You can probably buy a nuke at any Alabama WalMart, for Christ’s sakes.
Chomsky: "...The US should be paying huge reparations to Iraq. So should Britain...Germany...France...Russia, and all the other states that have supported Saddam...These countries have tortured Iraq...(since) Iraq was created by the British in the early 1920’s." Chomsky goes on to say that Kennedy "apparently" sponsored the military coup that put the Baathists in power, Saddam among them, of course. He says only one state that sponsors terrorism has ever been removed from the list—Iraq, by Reagan in 1982, so they ("basically the guys in office now under Bush II") could supply Saddam with aid and weapons "’without Congressional scrutiny’" ("Financial Times"). Iraqi nuclear engineers were actually invited to the US for advanced training in 1989.
The radical Islamists were more or less created by the CIA, first by arming them against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. After their "victory", the jihadis fomented 20 year of terror and civil war. "CIA-backed excursions...into Soviet territory nearly provoked...as Soviet-American war..." (John Cooley, "Unholy Wars", quoted in Chomsky.) Like I’ve always said, we didn’t execute Saddam, we fired him. They don’t want to fire bin Laden, though, because he always has a tape they can release, like on, say, September 7, right before Petraeus testified, or right before Bush wants a new illegal wiretapping bill. As long as they can use him, he’s not going anywhere.
After we installed him, paid him, and taught him everything he needed to know, and backed his war with Iran, and told him what sights to bomb in that country, we decided to start provoking him. The Pentagon sold more than 100 advanced jet bombers to Israel telling them they’re perfect for bombing Iran, like the planes they used to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. It has now been shown this made Saddam start his nuke programs.
Military analysts John and Karl Mueller wrote in "Foreign Affairs" in 1999 that the sanctions against Saddam, meaning the Iraqi people only, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, possibly more human beings "than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history".
Chomsky says Thomas "My Head Is Flat" Friedman was "shocked, shocked" at the mass graves, which he knew of at the time of the massacres and approved of. Does Friedman really have any credibility anymore? They can blow out Judith Miller, but not him? He has his own column and TV shows and two-years bestsellers, and he’s just a slower-talking, well-disguised Rush O’Reilly.
Bush knew that he would be creating a humanitarian emergency on a massive scale, with the possibility that 1/3 of Iraqi children might die of starvation.... The NIC, intel’s center for strategic thinking (they have a center for thinking?!?), reported that an Iraq war would result in a society prone to violent internal conflict, according to David E. Sanger in the New York Times. But until recently, everyone behind the war said the insurgency was a surprise and not something anyone could have predicted. It’s too bad Bush doesn’t read the shit on his desk. He doesn’t even have an "In Box" and an "Out Box". He has an "Out Box" and a "Read It To Me While I Drink My Cocoa At Bedtime" box. Bush is proud that he goes to bed at 9:30. If you’re going to run two wars, maybe you might want to stay up late once in awhile. This man has caused a very impressive amount of shit for a guy who goes to bed early and has been on vacation one-fifth of his presidency, you’ve got to give him that.
...Then they all did a Condi, like she did after 9/11 when she said, "No one could have predicted that someone would fly airplanes into buildings". She had had eight months to read all the predictions. And that terrorist shit had been in movies for 15 years, including most of the stuff Al Qaeda did. "We never could have predicted an inusurgency, blah blah, woof woof, wank wank..."
According to the Downing Street Memos, Bush approved a "coalition" air campaign to provoke Iraq into war—10 tons of bombs in May ’02, 55 tons in September ’02. They were trying to do anything, no matter how criminal or devastating to civilians, to get Saddam to "draw first". It didn’t work—Saddam had nothing to fight back with. But that didn’t stop George. He was just getting started...
A week before the invasion, the Pentagon invited Washington's military press corps on a special field trip to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to witness the testing of the Moab, which officially stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast, but which everyone in the military calls the "Mother of All Bombs". At 21,000 pounds, it is the largest non-nuclear explosive ever built, able to create, in the words of CNN's Jamie McIntyre, "a 10,000 foot-high mushroom-like cloud that looks and feels like a nuclear weapon". CNN and the "urinestream" media loves this stuff—oooh, how much does it weigh? Does it blow up real good?
Maybe they named it "Moab" on purpose, which is some kind of sacred name for God in the Muslim world, I think. (Anybody who knows, please tell me.) In "Dept. Of "Defense": Where The Hell Does Our Money Go?", I talked about the movable howitzer designed for the military called "The Crusader". Of course, Bush called his war a "Crusade" early on. When it comes to naming weapons and making speeches, these people are always incredibly ignorant and offensive to Muslims. But when it comes to torture at Abu Ghraib, all of a sudden they are experts in everything that offends and humiliates Muslim men. They never wanted to win any "hearts and minds", but they should at least try not to push ALL their hot buttons. Maybe they need some of those 89 fired gay Arabic translators back...
Peter Bergen, Mother Jones, 4/07: "The Iraq War has generated a stunning seven-fold increase in jihadi attacks...fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased one-third..." What does Bush care about the rest of the world? He can’t even name other countries or the leaders of other countries, he just called the troops of Australia "Austrians". If a country doesn’t have oil, it’s not even on the Cheney’s map...(If Darfur wants help from this Administration, they better put some oil under their ground, or find some diamonds, or something valuable.)
As we all well know, Rumsfeld called any country that wouldn’t join the "Coalition Of The Bought" "Old Europe", and Paul Wolfowitz attacked the Turkish military for refusing to let us put forward bases in their country, because 95% of the Turks were against it. Wolfowitz demanded an apology(!) Chomsky: "There is ample evidence of Wolfowitz’s passion for democracy and his concern for suffering people, as he lent strong support for some of the most appalling murderers, torturers, and aggressors..." After the invasion, he issued a "Determination And Findings", saying that competition for prime contracts for reconstruction not include any country that did not follow Bush Administration orders. So Halliburton, Bechtel, JP Morgan, and others didn’t have to worry about competition from France, Germany, or Russia. General Tommy Franks constantly called Feith "the dumbest bastard, dumbest motherfucker on the face of the Earth".
March 4, 2003: Feith gave a secret briefing to Bush and the NSC, with – of course – a Power Point presentation, the way the whole pre—war, war, and post-war was run with what Woodward called a "wish list of high hopes with no how-to". Hicks in "Fiasco" said Power Point is what clusterfucked the whole war.
Later, during the occupation, Powell had to tell Bush and Rice that Garner would report to Rumsfeldl and Franks would also report to Rumsfeld, without the State Department, or the NSC. "That doesn’t sound right", Bush said, showing he knew nothing about it. Powell believed the Pentagon would not resolve any of these conflicts because "Wolfowitz and Feith were running their own little games and had their own agenda to promote Chalabi (Woodward).
Chalabi was paid $17 million by the Republican-led Congress in 1998 to print false articles in European papers about Saddam. He was being paid $380,000 a month by 2002 by the DOD, although the CIA had already told them his information was totally unreliable.
Later, after the war started, the military didn’t want to put Chalabi in the war zone, but under extreme pressure, they releneted. Abizaid said, ‘Okay, let’s put the son of a bitch in there and see if he can do what all of them think he can do. And I’ll tell you he can’t", he told Garner. Reports immediately came in that the "Free Iraqi Freedom Fighters", an offshoot of the Department Of Redundancy Department (long live The Firesign Theatre!), were carrying out reprisals and stealing and looting. Two intel officers passed Iraqis on the road one night, cooking a dog and dancing and smoking dope. They both said "Free Iraqi Freedom Fighters". Boy, the CIA sure can pick ‘em, can’t they? Noriega, Saddam, Chalabi—who gets $380K a month and still would rather eat dog.
This was Chalabi’s people, described by Amy Goodman in "Static" as "an oufit created by the CIA and funded by the Pentagon. Chalabi’s WMD lies were the main source for all the Judith Miller cover stories in the New York Times that fed all the Adminstrations lies right to the public with no journalism and no filter. Years later, the New York Times would apologize—too late, just like Powell and others.and fire Miller—too late again.
This is the paper Ann Coulter and the other right-wingnuts would constantly say was full of "liberal bias", as a great smokescreen to cover the fact that it helped Bush’s war push more than any other media source.
Even with Rumsfeld’s insistence on 160,000 troops instead of the recommended 500,000 plus, the Pentagon could not get enough troops. It practices data mining, even though it claimed it had stopped in 2003 after the "Total Information Awareness Project" was exposed (it wasn’t stopped—they just changed the name to the Terrorist Information Awareness Project"). Recruiters nationwide, with all the information on high school boys and girls, committed many acts of sexual abuse on female recruits in 2002 and 2003, according to the Indianapolis Star: "Nationwide, military recruiters reportedly have beeen linked to at least a half-dozen sexual assault...since the creation of the No Child Left Behind Act." Well, they’re just getting the girls ready for what they’ll experience in the military, that’s all...
To Be Continued...
(All my diaries are factual information culled from real sources. Like I say onstage, "It’s all true, except for the later funny part." For this series, I am indebted as always to "Countdown With Keith Olbermann". Other sources include: Thomas E. Rick’s "Fiasco", Larry Beinhart, Katie Halper, Joshua Holland, all on AlterNet, Noam Chomsky's "Failed States", "Interventions", "Imperial Ambitions", and "Hegemony Or Survival", Bob Woodward's "State of Denial", Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", and the new book by one of my heroes, "Static", by Amy Goodman and David Goodman.. I wish to thank these sources and I highly recommend them all.)
doug@dougferrari.com
