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| Sun, 03-28-2004 - 2:18pm |
This is a long article that ties the loose ends together about the 'need' to attack Iraq. All the many characters & their links make facinating reading. IMO. It's too long to post the whole thing, so I'll post a few quotes & the link.
Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.
>" Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews‚ -- some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity‚ -- exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion. "<
>"One of the most influential Washington neo- conservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans' wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for "regime change" in the region."<
>"Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists."<
>"In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.
The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted."<
>" Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office." "<
>"According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC's own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's intelligence "isn't reliable at all," according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches." "<
Quotes from Pages 1 & 2.............
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405-2.html


Here's lead-in to another lengthy article:
Defector's Tales Bolstered U.S. Case for War
Colin Powell presented the U.N. with details on mobile germ factories, which came from a now-discredited source known as 'Curveball.'
By Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now-discredited Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," according to current and former intelligence officials.
U.S. officials never had direct access to the defector and didn't even know his real name until after the war. Instead, his story was provided by German agents, and his file was so thick with details that American officials thought it confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Iraqis had developed mobile germ factories to evade arms inspections.
Curveball's story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of U.S. weapons hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that beset much of the prewar intelligence collection and analysis.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-curveball28mar28,1,764957.story?coll=la-home-headlines
If these reporters keep digging perhaps will know the truth without GWB's help.
I went on to read the Thirty Year Itch, and this is consistent with an article I found in the Asian Times entitled "The evangelical roots of US unilateralism". I haven't posted anything about this article, because I'm not sure I understand it completely. It is very long and footnoted. Here's the reference:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FC26Aa01.html
I must admit I am concerned about the future course of America. These men are not after oil to benefit the industry, or even America, they are after the oil because they want POWER--WORLD POWER.
Amazing isn't it? Old info. from the 80's, wasted time chasing lies, lies & more lies.
How could Powell give that speech
Thank you. Excellent article! Most unsettling.
>"When Christian Right activists entered party politics during the Robertson campaign in the late 1980s, the distinction between these activists and established Republicans was clear. For many party regulars, the Robertson activists were alien interlopers who had somehow descended on the party. In the words of the president's brother Neil Bush, they were "cockroaches" issuing "from the baseboards of the Bible Belt". Though tension between the Christian Right and other party factions continues, the Christian Right is now an established component, and in some areas even a dominant feature, of the party coalition. John Green provides an insightful analysis of the evolution of the "collective identity" of the Christian Right: from sectarian religious identities in the early 1980s to a pro-family identity that helped unite Christian Right members across religious lines to the current era of "evangelical Republicans", in which partisanship is central to movement identity. Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition and now chair of the Georgia Republican Party, exemplifies this trend. As Christian Rightists become party activists, Christian Right organizations may suffer, as the Christian Coalition has since Reed's departure, but their influence within the party grows. In a Republican Party dominated by conservative southerners such as George W Bush, Tom Delay and Dick Armey, Christian Right activists are no longer interlopers; they are insiders."<
>"Finally, the Christian Right's access to power has been greatly aided by the ties it has developed with neo-conservatives influential within the present administration. Neo-conservative intellectuals, many of them Jewish, may seem unlikely allies for the Christian Right, but this partnership has developed across several issue areas. The most important basis for this partnership is a common support for Israel or, to put it more accurately, for the Likud Party's vision of Israel's interests. The Christian Right's support for Israel harks back to the movement's beginnings in the late 1970s, but it has risen to a higher level in the past few years. The 2002 annual convention of the Christian Coalition culminated in a rally for Israel, and Ralph Reed and Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein recently founded a new group, Stand for Israel. Meanwhile, throughout Christian Right media, criticism of the Palestinians and support for hardline Israeli policies has grown more intense."<
"> In 1997, when the Project for the New American Century was born, it united conservative leaders around a call for a much more aggressive US foreign policy (including forceful action against Iraq's Saddam Hussein). The group's Statement of Principles declared: "Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and greatness in the next." Among the 25 signatories were leading neo-conservatives and future players in the Bush administration, including Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, Frank Gaffney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Also on the list were Gary Bauer, longtime head of the Family Research Council, and author William Bennett. "<
>"It is also a serious mistake to underplay the rationality of the Christian Right. Dismissed again and again as an irrational, reactive movement lashing out against the modern world, the Christian Right has continually confounded its critics by behaving in an effective and politically astute manner, building its institutions, forging alliances, and working pragmatically to advance its agenda. "<
>"Although religious-persecution issues spell tensions for the dominant foreign-policy coalition, progressives must be cautious in exploiting those tensions. In the present climate, concern for the treatment of Christians in Islamic nations can easily slide into promotion of a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. At a February 2003 "Symposium on Islam" sponsored by the Christian Coalition, featured speakers declared that Muslims "want to kill Christians by any means", and some compared Islam to Nazism (see Arab News). Franklin Graham, in a highly publicized statement, recently characterized Islam as an "evil" religion.
By Professor Rainer Rilling. Originally published as a Policy Paper by the German-based Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
11 September 2001 was a transformative moment in strategic and conceptual thinking among the American political class. One initial outcome is the National Security Strategy of the United States of America published on 17 September 2002,
"The process has been propelled by a group of neo-conservative intellectuals and military policy-makers that began to acquire a higher profile in the 1980s under Reagan, secured a minority position in the military executive in the first Bush administration and then finally achieved a hegemonic majority position in the second Bush Administration and subsequently in the Republican Party with the help of, and in an alliance with, the Catholic religious right, the radical market ideologues and the traditional, social conservative, mainstream right (“compassionate conservatism”). This group dominated the foreign policy debate in the USA in 2002. It outlined the key military policy aspects of the new grand strategy, incorporated them in an optimistic view of the state of the US economy and established itself in the course of 2002 as the avant-garde of the new cross-party movement for war.""
Followed by an impressive list of Republicans and news people. I am awed by the deviousness.
Strategy:
"Immediately after 11 September, the response of the U.S. Administration had focused on the struggle (“war”) against terrorist groups. However, the enemy image was very quickly extended to include states that support terrorism".
Namely, Iraq and more specifically Iraqi oil. Today I noticed an article that sais African oil will be next.
"The official Quadrennial Defensive Review (QDR) published on 30 September 2001 formulated the variations of the objectives as "changing the regime of an adversary state" and the occupation of "foreign territory until U.S. strategic objectives are met."
Does this sound like they are focused on al Qaeda?
In his programmatic speech in June 2002 at West Point, Bush then declared that the previous doctrines of deterrence, containment and the balance of power were no longer adequate. He put the emphasis on prevention and intervention. From now on, he said, "we must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.“5
The enemy is a vague concept. Do you think it applies to nations with oil?
"Finally, a claim is asserted to the global military sovereignty of the USA, which is regarded as the key to the reconstruction of a new international regime. In the words of George W. Bush: “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge."
"The claim to global sovereignty includes
the devaluing of international commitments in the form of multilateral agreements, international institutions and alliances,
the maximum possible enforcement of American law on an international scale
and a kind of U.S. Brezhnev strategy of “limited sovereignty”.
I am shaking in my boots--the terrorist understand better than America.