The Rag Blog

In Andrew Cockburn’s new book Rumsfeld, the gap between rampant power and its faraway victims is closed.

Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence until last year and a designer of the Iraq bloodbath, is revealed as personally directing from his office in the Pentagon the torture of fellow human beings, exploiting “individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress” and use of “a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.”

Cockburn’s documented evidence shows that other Bush mafiosi, such as Paul Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, “had already agreed that Rumsfeld should approve all but the most severe options, such as the wet towel, without restriction.”

In Washington, I asked Ray McGovern, formerly a senior CIA officer, what he made of Norman Mailer’s remark that the US had entered a pre-fascist state.

“I hope he’s right,” he replied, “because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode. When you see who is controlling the means of production here, when you see who is controlling the newspapers and periodicals and the TV stations from which most Americans take their news and when you see how the so-called war on terror is being conducted, you begin to understand where we are headed. It’s quite something that the nuclear threat today should be seen first and foremost as coming from the United States of America and Great Britain.”

McGovern was the author of the president’s daily CIA intelligence brief. I interviewed him more than three years ago and his prescient words are as striking today as Cockburn’s revelation of Rumsfeld’s secret life is illuminating.

His description of fascism within a nominally free society recalls George Orwell’s warning that totalitarianism does not require a totalitarian state.

‘The lies that have caused this extremely dangerous time are understood and rejected by a majority.’

The lies that have caused this extremely dangerous time are understood and rejected by the majority of humanity. This was illustrated vividly on February 15-16 2003, when some 30 million people took to the streets of cities around the world, including the greatest demonstration in British history.

It was illustrated again the other day in Latin America, which George W Bush on tour sought to reclaim for the lost US “backyard.”

“The distinguished visitor,” noted one commentator in Caracas, “was received with fear and loathing.”

There are many connections in Latin America to the suffering in the Middle East. The crushing of popular, reformist governments by the US and the setting up of torture regimes from Guatemala to Chile have echoes from Iran to Afghanistan.

The current attacks on the Chavez government in Venezuela by the media, which McGovern describes as being “domesticated by their wish to serve,” are essential in disclaiming the right of the poor to find another way.

Elected last December with a record landslide of votes cast by three-quarters of the eligible population – his 11th major election victory – Chavez expresses the kind of genuine exuberant democracy long ago abandoned in Britain.

In this country, the political class offers instead the arthritic pirouetting of Tony Blair, a criminal, and Gordon Brown, the paymaster of imperial adventures fought by 18-year-old soldiers who, on their return home, are so ill treated that there is no-one to change their colostomy bag.

Chavez, having all but got rid of the deadly International Monetary Fund from Latin America, dares to use the wealth from Venezuela’s oil to unite the Latin peoples and to expel a foreign economic system that calls itself liberal and is the source of historic suffering. He is supported by governments and by millions across south America from whom he derives his mandate.

You would not know this on either side of the Atlantic unless you studied carefully. The propaganda that converts a lively, open democracy to an “authoritarian” dictatorship is written on the rusted crosses of Salvador Allende’s comrades, of whom the same was said.

Guantanamo Bay has just marked its fifth anniversary. John Yoo was instrumental in setting up the prison camp that has been widely condemned. (The normally solidly pro-American Daily Mail newspaper in England, for example, has called it “the sort of show that once only dictators like Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao knew how to put on.”)

Yet Yoo’s infamy in America derives less from clearing the legal way for Guantanamo than from being the author of the “torture memo,” a legal opinion filed on Aug. 2, 2002, by the Office of Legal Counsel, a section of the U.S. Department of Justice. The memo examined what methods of inflicting pain and suffering constitute torture, and whether the U.S. president can order torture if he thinks it necessary.

Yoo’s memo was leaked to the press in the summer of 2004, in the aftermath of the publication of pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees inside Abu Ghraib prison. Overnight, he became a celebrity – but for all the wrong reasons. He was held personally responsible for Abu Ghraib’s horrors: The disgusting behaviour of U.S. service personnel was seen as the bottom of the slippery slope down which Yoo had started America’s military sliding when he wrote the torture memo.

“That was totally absurd,” he told me when we meet for lunch in a restaurant opposite his office at the Boalt School of Law in Berkeley, Calif. “Two bipartisan congressional reports and several military investigations showed that the Pentagon hadn’t even read the memo. Disgraceful behaviour of the kind which took place at Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with interrogation policy. Similar things have happened in practically every war. What was different was that this time they had cameras on their cellphones to photograph it. … But the idea that what went on in Abu Ghraib would never have happened without that memo is just silly.”

That, however, hasn’t stopped many people from believing it. Various distinguished lawyers and professors have called Yoo’s advice in the torture memo “disgusting,” “unethical” and “a disgrace to our profession” – and that’s without explicitly connecting it to Abu Ghraib. Others want Yoo indicted as a war criminal.

Even the Bush administration has disowned him: The OLC issued a subsequent opinion that, it stated, overturned his original advice. Yoo had opined that the president had the power to order torture. The new memo emphatically insists he does not.

Given his reputation, I was a little nervous about meeting John Yoo. I half-expected to encounter the kind of man who bites the head off a chicken each morning, and who has electrodes at the ready in his office. In reality, the man is nothing like the bloodthirsty sadist he is depicted as being. Yoo is gentle and reticent, and listens without interrupting. He’s polite, courteous and not yet 40. He gives the impression of being a conscientious academic eager to find out what the law is and to ensure it is never flouted.

Flouting the law is, however, precisely what he stands accused of doing by writing the torture memo. “I reject that criticism totally,” he said. “Everything I did was carefully crafted to make sure that it was consistent with the existing legislation. My obligation was to make sure that what the president did was lawful, and I took the obligation very seriously.”

Still, it is difficult to read that memo without being shocked by its conclusions. It states, for instance, that “acts must be of an extreme nature to rise to the level of torture” (within the meaning of the Convention Against Torture as ratified by Congress). “The infliction of pain or suffering … is insufficient to amount to torture.” “Pain or suffering must be severe.” “To amount to torture, an act must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure or even death.”

The memo gives examples of some of the activities that count as torture: forcing someone to play Russian roulette, beating him until he goes into cardiac arrest, applying electric shocks to the genitalia, rape or sexual assault. The memo also gives examples of forms of treatment Yoo thinks do not constitute torture – among them are kicking someone, forcing him to stand against a wall, subjecting him to noise and depriving him of sleep. And he provides the legal precedents to back up his case: not just U.S. statutes but also judgments from the European Court.

It is all very specific, and very unpleasant. Even if he’s right about what U.S. law permits, wouldn’t it just have been better left unsaid? “That was simply not an option,” Yoo said. “The CIA wanted – needed – a definitive answer to the question: how far can we go? They had specifically requested a legal opinion. They had captured senior Al-Qa’ida operatives who were not responding to being asked questions politely. CIA officers needed to know what, legally, they were entitled to do to them to get them to talk. They knew these guys had information on what Al-Qa’ida was planning. If the CIA could get that information, they could save lives. But they also wanted to be sure they would not end up going to prison for doing so.” That’s why they asked the OLC for answers – and in 2002 the OLC turned out to be represented by John Yoo.

Yoo’s answer to “How far can we go?” turned out to be indistinguishable from “as far as the president wants to.” The most controversial part of Yoo’s advice was that, as commander-in-chief in war, the U.S. constitution allows the president to be the judge of what is and what is not “necessary” to prosecute war successfully. That’s the claim the OLC later explicitly disavowed.

His hands were bleeding and his eyes filled with tears as, four years ago, he slammed a sledgehammer into the tiled plinth that held a 20ft bronze statue of Saddam Hussein. Then Kadhim al-Jubouri spoke of his joy at being the leader of the crowd that toppled the statue in Baghdad’s Firdous Square. Now, he is filled with nothing but regret.

The moment became symbolic across the world as it signalled the fall of the dictator. Wearing a black vest, Mr al-Jubouri, an Iraqi weightlifting champion, pounded through the concrete in an attempt to smash the statue and all it meant to him. Now, on the fourth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, he says: “I really regret bringing down the statue. The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day.”

The weightlifter had also been a mechanic and had felt the full weight of Saddam’s regime when he was sent to Abu Ghraib prison by the Iraqi leader’s son, Uday, after complaining that he had not been paid for fixing his motorcycle.

He explained: “There were lots of people from my tribe who were also put in prison or hanged. It became my dream ever since I saw them building that statue to one day topple it.”

Yet he now says he would prefer to be living under Saddam than under US occupation. He said: “The devil you know [is] better than the devil you don’t. We no longer know friend from foe. The situation is becoming more dangerous. It’s not getting better at all. People are poor and the prices are going higher and higher.”

Saddam, he says, “was like Stalin. But the occupation is proving to be worse”.

According to an opinion poll of 5,000 Iraqis carried out over the past month, 49% say they are better off now than under Saddam, and 26% say life was better under Saddam. More than one in four said they had had a close relative murdered in the past three years.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A high school senior’s 14-foot banner proclaiming “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” gave the Supreme Court a provocative prop for a lively argument Monday about the extent of schools’ control over student speech.

If the justices conclude Joseph Frederick’s homemade sign was a pro-drug message, they are likely to side with principal Deborah Morse. She suspended Frederick in 2002 when he unfurled the banner across the street from the school in Juneau, Alaska.

“I thought we wanted our schools to teach something, including something besides just basic elements, including the character formation and not to use drugs,” Chief Justice Roberts said Monday. (Watch why “bong hits” are on the court’s plate )

But the court could rule for Frederick if it determines that he was, as he has contended, conducting a free-speech experiment using a nonsensical message that contained no pitch for drug use.

“It sounds like just a kid’s provocative statement to me,” Justice David Souter said.

Students in public schools don’t have the same rights as adults, but neither do they leave their constitutional protections at the schoolhouse gate, as the court said in a landmark speech-rights ruling from Vietnam era.

Morse, now a Juneau schools’ administrator, was at the court Monday. Frederick, teaching and studying in China, was not.

Former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, whose Kirkland and Ellis law firm is representing Morse for free, argued that the justices should defer to the judgment of the principal. Morse reasonably interpreted the banner as a pro-drug message, despite what Frederick intended, Starr said.

School officials are perfectly within their rights to curtail student speech that advocates drug use, he said. “The message here is, in fact, critical,” Starr said.

Starr, joined by the Bush administration, also asked the court to adopt a broad rule that could essentially give public schools the right to clamp down on any speech with which they disagree. That argument did not appear to have widespread support among the justices.

Douglas Mertz of Juneau, Frederick’s lawyer, struggled to keep the focus away from drugs. “This is a case about free speech. It is not a case about drugs,” Mertz said.

Conservative groups that often are allied with the administration are backing Frederick out of concern that a ruling for Morse would let schools clamp down on religious expression, including speech that might oppose homosexuality or abortion.

The outcome also could stray from the conservative-liberal split that often characterizes controversial cases.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote several opinions in favor of student speech rights while a federal appeals court judge, seemed more concerned by the administration’s broad argument in favor of schools than did his fellow conservatives.

“I find that a very, a very disturbing argument,” Alito told Justice Department lawyer Edwin Kneedler, “because schools have … defined their educational mission so broadly that they can suppress all sorts of political speech and speech expressing fundamental values of the students, under the banner of getting rid of speech that’s inconsistent with educational missions.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, in the court’s liberal wing, said he was troubled a ruling in favor of Frederick, even if he was making a joke, would make it harder to principals to run their schools.

“We’ll suddenly see people testing limits all over the place in the high schools,” Breyer said.

On the other hand, he said, a decision favorable to the schools “may really limit people’s rights on free speech. That’s what I’m struggling with.”

After the arguments, two dozen sign-carrying demonstrators chanted, “Teachers should teach, not limit free speech.”

Scores of students waited outside the court early Monday for a chance to listen to the arguments.

Ninth graders on a class trip from Mosinee, Wisconsin, were in general agreement on the issue. Cari Kemp, 15, said Frederick’s protest was “just a joke” but that “the school took it too far.”

The justices, as they often do, sought to probe the limits of each side’s argument by altering the facts one way or another.

What if, Souter asked, a student held a small sign in a Shakespeare class with the same message Frederick used. “If the kids look around and they say, well, so and so has got his bong sign again,” Souter said, as laughter filled the courtroom. “They then return to Macbeth. Does the teacher have to, does the school have to tolerate that sign in the Shakespeare class?”

Justice Antonin Scalia, ridiculing the notion that schools should have to tolerate speech that seems to support illegal activities, asked about a button that says, “Smoke Pot, It’s Fun.”

Or, he wondered, should the court conclude that only speech in support of violent crime can be censored. “‘Extortion Is Profitable,’ that’s okay?” Scalia asked.

A clear majority seemed to side with Morse on one point, that she shouldn’t have to compensate Frederick. A federal appeals court said Morse would have to pay Frederick because she should have known her actions violated the Constitution.

The official version of the political battles over the environment in the late 1990s goes something like this:

As the Republican Visigoths swept into control of the 104th Congress, in January of 1995, trembling greens predicted that not an old-growth tree, not an endangered species would be spared. The Republicans’ threats were terrible to behold. They proposed to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. They vowed to establish a commission to shut down several national parks; to relax standards on the production and disposal of toxic waste; to turn over enforcement of clean water and air standards to the states. They uttered fearsome threats against the Endangered Species Act. They boasted of plans to double the amount of logging in the National Forests.

Then, the official myth goes on, the president, Gore and the national greens fought off the Visigoths.

American politics thrives on simple legends of virtue combating vice. As regards the environment, the Republican ultras did not carry all before them. They didn’t need to. Clinton and Gore had already done most of the dirty work themselves. The real story begins back in the early days of the administration, when Clinton and Gore had what might be called an environmental mandate and a Democratic Congress to help them move through major initiatives. But the initiatives never happened. Instead, those early years were marked by a series of retreats, reversals and betrayals that prompted David Brower, the grand old man of American environmentalism, the arch druid himself, to conclude that “Gore and Clinton had done more harm to the environment than Reagan and Bush combined.”

The first environmental promise Al Gore made in the 1992 campaign, he soon broke. It involved the WTI hazardous waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, built on a floodplain near the Ohio River. The plant, one of the largest of its kind in the world, was scheduled to burn 70,000 tons of hazardous waste a year in a spot only 350 feet from the nearest house. A few hundred yards away is East Elementary School, which sits on a ridge nearly eye-level with the top of the smokestack.

On July 19, 1992, Gore gave one of his first campaign speeches on the environment, across the river from the incinerator site, in Weirton, West Virginia, hammering the Bush Administration for its plans to give the toxic waste burner a federal air permit. “The very idea is just unbelievable to me”, Gore said. “I’ll tell you this, a Clinton-Gore Administration is going to give you an environmental presidency to deal with these problems. We’ll be on your side for a change.” Clinton made similar pronouncements on his swing through the Buckeye State.

Shortly after the election, Gore assured neighbors of the incinerator that he hadn’t forgotten about them. “Serious questions concerning the safety of the East Liverpool, Ohio, hazardous waste incinerator must be answered before the plant may begin operation”, Gore wrote. “The new Clinton/Gore administration will not issue the plant a test burn permit until all questions concerning compliance with the plant have been answered.”

But that never happened. Instead, the EPA quietly granted the WTI facility its test burn permit. The tests failed, twice. In one, the incinerator eradicated only 7 percent of the mercury found in the waste, when it was supposed to burn away 99.9 percent. A few weeks later the EPA granted WTI a commercial permit anyway. They didn’t tell the public about the failed tests until afterward.

Gore claimed his hands were tied by the Bush Administration, which had promised WTI the permit only a few weeks before the Clinton team took office. But by one account, William Reilly, Bush’s EPA director, met with Gore’s top environmental aide Katie McGinty in January 1993 and asked her if he should begin the process of approving the permit. He says McGinty told him to proceed. McGinty said later that she had no recollection of the meeting.

Gore persisted in maintaining that there was nothing he could do about it once the permit was granted. A 1994 report on the matter from the General Accounting Office flatly contradicted him, saying the plant could be shut down on numerous grounds, including repeated violations of its permit.

[Headline from Le Monde, France: Over 50,000 people demonstrate against the war in Iraq]

NEW YORK (AFP) – Thousands of protesters are expected to take to the streets here and in major US West Coast cities Sunday to demand an immediate end to the war in Iraq as New York takes the relay from other US cities that have held massive anti-war marches.

United for Peace and Justice, which describes itself as the largest anti-war coalition in the United States, said it expected the protesters to turn up here en masse to mark the fourth anniversary of the US-led Iraq invasion.

“The national anti-war movement is planning a unified surge of protest actions calling on Congress to end the occupation and for the immediate withdrawal of US troops,” the group said in a statement.

Massive anti-war rallies were also being organized in San Francisco, California; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched to the Pentagon’s doorstep Saturday demanding “US out of Iraq Now,” ahead of the fourth anniversary of the US invasion.

People from across the United States gathered on a cold winter day to descend on the US Defense Department offices and decry the conflict that has killed more than 3,200 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Former US attorney general Ramsey Clark called for President George W. Bush’s impeachment, while Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, demanded a US withdrawal.

“I marched in 1967 here,” Maureen Dooley, 59, said outside the Pentagon, site of Vietnam war protests, but results were not immediate: “It took seven years to end the war.”

The US is not happy about Germany going international with its hunt for the CIA agents responsible for kidnapping Khaled el-Masri. American diplomats vented their anger in meetings with German government officials.

The German investigation into what exactly happened to the German citizen Khaled el-Masri, and who was responsible, is becoming an increasingly prickly thorn in the side of Germany-US relations. Indeed, after a Munich court issued arrest warrants against 13 CIA agents at the end of January for complicity in his kidnapping and subsequent torture, high-ranking US diplomats sought to convince the German government not to expand the search for the perpetrators internationally, German government sources have told DER SPIEGEL.

Following the Jan. 31, 2007 issuing of the arrest warrants, US diplomats spoke with foreign policy advisors of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to express Washington’s displeasure that the case was being forwarded to Interpol, the international police organization that facilitates policing cooperation among 186 member countries — including the US and Germany. In addition, a representative of the US Embassy in Berlin likewise visited the Germany justice ministry to speak with the official in charge of international legal issues.

Despite the diplomatic offensive — and despite misgivings in Berlin — the government agreed to forward the case to Interpol on Feb. 21. Were they to have honored the US request not to get Interpol involved, it would have been a first in German history. Now, Interpol is searching for 10 of the 13 agents involved with the aim of arresting them and extraditing them to Germany for trial.

El-Masri was abducted in Macedonia in late 2003 before being handed over to the CIA and flown to Afghanistan in early 2004 as part of the “extraordinary renditions” program, which saw terror suspects abducted and flown to third countries for interrogation and, in many cases, torture. El-Masri says he was beaten and sodomized while in prison in Afghanistan. Five months later, after the US apparently realized it had arrested him in error, he was flown back to Europe and released on the side of a road in Albania. No charges were ever filed against him.

El-Masri has since taken the US to court seeking damages of at least $75,000 (€57,000). On Friday, though, a federal appeals court affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of the case. The judge agreed with US government lawyers that to pursue the case would expose sensitive information on intelligence operations.

The case of el-Masri, who has German citizenship but is of Lebanese descent, is not the only case in Europe focusing on possible misconduct of CIA agents. Prosecutors in Milan want the Italian government to get Interpol involved in their hunt for 26 Americans, many of them CIA agents, accused of having assisted in the kidnapping and imprisonment of the Egyptian Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. He had been granted refugee status in Italy and was abducted in Milan in December 2003 before being flown to Cairo where he was tortured so badly that he suffered major kidney damage.

Similar criminal investigations are also being carried out in Portugal and Switzerland.

Washington has done little to conceal its displeasure at these investigations. Just last week, John Bellinger, a legal advisor to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, criticized a recent European Parliament report on renditions. Calling it “unbalanced and unfair,” Bellinger also suggested that the US would not comply with extradition requests from Italy should they be made. “I do think these continuing investigations can harm intelligence cooperation,” he said. “That’s simply a fact of life.”

In response to the EU’s demand that the US terror-suspect prison at Guantanamo be closed, Bellinger chided Europe for not doing its part. “We have not seen Europe has been willing to help,” he told reporters in mid-February. “We have seen many statements from European governments that Guantanamo must be closed immediately. It’s not clear how Guantanamo would be immediately closed. Europe has been prepared to criticize … but has not been prepared to offer a constructive suggestion.”

The biggest transfer of cash in history took place from May 2003 to June 2004 when the U.S. Federal Reserve of New York shipped $12 billion in bills of various denominations to war-torn Iraq. Over the course of one year, a fleet of C-130s carried, from New York to Baghdad, 484 pallets weighing a total of 363 tonnes and holding 281 million banknotes. This is not an advertisement for a new board game but the summary of a memorandum prepared for a meeting of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, which is examining the “reconstruction” of Iraq under Paul Bremer.

No proper record of the funds, which were distributed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, is available. They seem to have been disbursed like Monopoly money. Contractors were paid in cash from the back of pickup trucks; thousands of “ghost employees”, people enlisted in ministerial jobs that did not exist, were paid salaries with bundles of currency; one million dollars was stolen from the CPA vault and nobody seemed to be bothered; $500 million was disbursed under the heading “TBD”, which stands for “to be determined”. An obscure consulting firm from San Diego was in charge of certifying the distribution of the money, yet it never conducted any review of internal controls, as was contractually required.

Bremer’s financial adviser, retired admiral David Oliver, seems surprised by the House committee’s concern, as if the billions that have vanished were really play money. When challenged by a BBC journalist about the consequences of the disappearance without trace of billions of dollars, he pointed out that it was irrelevant where the money had gone because it was Iraqi funds, not U.S. taxpayers’ money. The $12 billion came from Iraqi assets seized after the first Gulf War, from the sale of Iraqi oil, and from surplus payments from the UN oil-for-food program. The $12 billion is not included in the $400 billion spent by the U.S. in Iraq since March 2003.

The procedure for unfreezing “political” money is generally very long and requires the fulfillment of several legal requirements. After a legal battle of more than a decade, waged by a group of Cuban exiles, then-president Bill Clinton finally released some of the Cuban funds frozen during Fidel Castro’s 1950s revolution. Still locked in the vaults of the Federal Reserve is Iranian money seized after the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini ousted Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, some of Gen. Manuel Noriega’s dirty money, and even some assets belonging to the recently deceased Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

Iraqi funds were miraculously freed in less than two months. The procedure was quick and involved the approval of the United Nations, which, technically, was responsible for the oil-for-food surpluses. Those monies could have been used to bring back water and electricity to millions of Iraqis; if equitably distributed, they would have made each Iraqi man, woman, and child $15,000 richer. Instead, they were wasted by incompetent officers appointed by even more incompetent politicians.

It is surreal to think that the U.S. government rushed to fly hundreds of tonnes of cash to a country where its army could not stop people looting arsenals, banks, museums, and hospitals, to a country not yet pacified. As Waxman put it: “Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?”

War is not a board game; it is deadly serious business. Even more surreal is the fact that no plan existed for what to do with so much money.

Bremer claims that the CPA urgently needed the cash because the banking system had disappeared and Iraq was a cash economy. Yet his administration was not equipped to operate in a cash economy, proven by the way it wasted those billions. War zones are always cash economies. Did Bremer really think that after President George W. Bush’s famous “mission accomplished” declaration, ATM machines in Baghdad would miraculously start working again?

Those monies were also needed to inject U.S. dollars into a country where the local currency, the Iraqi dinar, was about to collapse. This is the other explanation Bremer put forward. Most currencies collapse after major conflicts. In the aftermath of the Second World War, devaluation spread like a virus among European currencies and new money had to be introduced by the central banks.

Tony Blair faces the prospect of an International Criminal Court investigation for alleged coalition war crimes in Iraq.

The court’s chief prosecutor told The Sunday Telegraph that he would be willing to launch an inquiry and could envisage a scenario in which the Prime Minister and American President George W Bush could one day face charges at The Hague.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo urged Arab countries, particularly Iraq, to sign up to the court to enable allegations against the West to be pursued. Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations said that his country was actively considering signing up.
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America has refused to accept the court’s jurisdiction and is unlikely to hand over any of its citizens to face trial. However, Britain has signed up and the Government has indicated its willingness to tackle accusations of war crimes against a number of British soldiers.

Mr Moreno-Ocampo said it was frustrating that the court was viewed in the Arab world as biased in favour of the West. Asked whether he could envisage a situation in which Mr Blair and Mr Bush found themselves in the dock answering charges of war crimes in Iraq, he replied: “Of course, that could be a possibility\u2026 whatever country joins the court can know that whoever commits a crime in their country could be prosecuted by me.”

Human rights lawyers remain sceptical about whether charges will ever be brought.

Tomorrow night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it’s an eternity. That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now …” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

By the time the ides of March arrived in March 2003, these warning signs were visible on a nearly daily basis. So were the signs that Americans were completely ill prepared for the costs ahead. Iraq was largely anticipated as a distant, mildly disruptive geopolitical video game that would be over in a flash.

Now many of the same leaders who sold the war argue that escalation should be given a chance. This time they’re peddling the new doomsday scenario that any withdrawal timetable will lead to the next 9/11. The question we must ask is: Has history taught us anything in four years?

Here is a chronology of some of the high and low points in the days leading up to the national train wreck whose anniversary we mourn this week [with occasional “where are they now” updates].

March 5, 2003

“I took the Grey Poupon out of my cupboard.”

— Representative Duke Cunningham, Republican of California, on the floor of the House denouncing French opposition to the Iraq war.

[In November 2005, he resigned from Congress and pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from defense contractors. In January 2007, the United States attorney who prosecuted him — Carol Lam, a Bush appointee — was forced to step down for “performance-related” issues by Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department.]

March 6, 2003

President Bush holds his last prewar news conference. The New York Observer writes that he interchanged Iraq with the attacks of 9/11 eight times, “and eight times he was unchallenged.” The ABC News White House correspondent, Terry Moran, says the Washington press corps was left “looking like zombies.”

March 7, 2003

Appearing before the United Nations Security Council on the same day that the United States and three allies (Britain, Spain and Bulgaria) put forth their resolution demanding that Iraq disarm by March 17, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, reports there is “no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.”. He adds that documents “which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic.” None of the three broadcast networks’ evening newscasts mention his findings.

[In 2005 ElBaradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.]

March 10, 2003

Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks tells an audience in England, “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” Boycotts, death threats and anti-Dixie Chicks demonstrations follow.

[In 2007, the Dixie Chicks won five Grammy Awards, including best song for “Not Ready to Make Nice.”]

March 12, 2003

A senior military planner tells The Daily News “an attack on Iraq could last as few as seven days.”

“Isn’t it more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness?”

— John McCain, writing for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

“The Pentagon still has not given a name to the Iraqi war. Somehow ‘Operation Re-elect Bush’ doesn’t seem to be popular.”

— Jay Leno, “The Tonight Show.”

March 14, 2003

Senator John D. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, asks the F.B.I. to investigate the forged documents cited a week earlier by ElBaradei and alleging an Iraq-Niger uranium transaction: “There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”

March 16, 2003

On “Meet the Press,” Dick Cheney says that American troops will be “greeted as liberators,” that Saddam “has a longstanding relationship with various terrorist groups, including the Al Qaeda organization,” and that it is an “overstatement” to suggest that several hundred thousand troops will be needed in Iraq after it is liberated. Asked by Tim Russert about ElBaradei’s statement that Iraq does not have a nuclear program, the vice president says, “I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong.”

“There will be new recruits, new recruits probably because of the war that’s about to happen. So we haven’t seen the last of Al Qaeda.”

— Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism czar, on ABC’s “This Week.”

[From the recently declassified “key judgments” of the National Intelligence Estimate of April 2006: “The Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”]

“Despite the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden, according to administration officials and members of Congress. Senior intelligence analysts say they feel caught between the demands from White House, Pentagon and other government policy makers for intelligence that would make the administration’s case ‘and what they say is a lack of hard facts,’ one official said.”

— “U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms,” by Walter Pincus (with additional reporting by Bob Woodward), The Washington Post, Page A17.

March 17, 2003

Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, who voted for the Iraq war resolution, writes the president to ask why the administration has repeatedly used W.M.D. evidence that has turned out to be “a hoax” — “correspondence that indicates that Iraq sought to obtain nuclear weapons from an African country, Niger.”

[Still waiting for “an adequate explanation” of the bogus Niger claim four years later, Waxman, now chairman of the chief oversight committee in the House, wrote Condoleezza Rice on March 12, 2007, seeking a response “to multiple letters I sent you about this matter.”]