The Rag Blog

Recall, back in May of 2004, a superficially contrite New York Times editorial staff admitting it published “questionable” information about claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, information that ultimately paved the way for the slaughter of 650,000 Iraqis.

In an rather unconvincing and apparently obligatory mea culpa, the editors shifted blame for publishing this blatantly false and obvious propaganda, more accurately described as neocon spawned fairy tales, to convicted embezzler Ahmad Chalabi and “a circle of Iraqi informants,” refusing to admit they were used as a propaganda tool by the neocons, described merely as “hard-liners within the Bush administration,” not psychopathic warmongers. “We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight,” the newspaper concluded.

Of course, the New York Times didn’t really mean it, as “unfinished business” would necessitate sweeping out the rogues and neocon agents ensconced deeply within its editorial offices. One such rogue is Michael R. Gordon, “the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion,” notes Greg Mitchell, writing for Editor and Publisher.

Recall Gordon’s absurd claim, following Colin Powell’s theatrical dog and pony show held before the gathered at the United Nations in the orchestrated lead-up mass murder in Iraq, “it will be difficult for skeptics to argue that Washington’s case against Iraq is based on groundless suspicions and not intelligence information.” As we now know, and some of us knew at the time, Powell’s evidence was little more than a donkey cart of steaming dung, rolled out into the public arena, offered as gospel truth, thus straining credulity, at least for those of us who recognized the stench immediately.

Gordon is at it again. “The Bush administration is expected to make public this weekend some of what intelligence agencies regard as an increasing body of evidence pointing to an Iranian link, including information gleaned from Iranians and Iraqis captured in recent American raids on an Iranian office in Erbil and another site in Baghdad,” the seasoned propagandist is allowed to write.

MediaAs Glenn Greenwald points out, the NY Times has apparently regressed to pre-Iraq stenographer mode when it comes to reportage about Iran. Witness today’s front page headline:

Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says

It is painfully clear that any headline asserting that the “U.S. Says” anything at all should be greeted with a very healthy dose of skepticism.

It was none other than the Times that treated us to these pre-Iraq war beauties:

U.S. Says Iraq Retools Rockets For Illicit Uses (March 10, 2003, Cushman & Weisman)

U.S. Says Iraqi Indicated Atom Project Is Continuing (December 10, 2002, Sanger)

Michael Gordon, the reporter whose story ran today, co-authored this gem with Judith Miller on Sept. 8, 2002:

U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS

Many such stories refer to “administration officials,” “military officers,” “intelligence sources” or “intelligence officials.” Anonymity was often granted because the matter was classified or the source was not authorized to discuss it. (Of course, one might argue the source needs anonymity because the bullshit s/he’s peddling is a flat-out lie and s/he doesn’t want to get caught in it, but that’s another story.)

NEW YORK — New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller today announced that the paper’s longtime staff writer Michael Gordon is not an actual person, but rather a voice-activated tape recorder.

“I’m not sure why everyone didn’t figure this out before now,” said Keller, pointing to the fact that, in Gordon’s 26-year career, all of “his” stories have consisted entirely of transcribed statements by anonymous government officials.

According to Jill Abramson, the paper’s Managing Editor, Gordon was purchased for $27.95 at a Radio Shack on West 43rd Street. Describing the situation as “a prank” that had “gotten slightly out of hand,” Abramson said the paper had decided to acknowledge Gordon’s identity because—after the tape recorder’s front page story today, “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says”—there “was no place left to take the joke.”

Keller described how he and Abramson “really had a good laugh” while editing the Iran story, which is based on the following sourcing:

U.S. Says…United States intelligence asserts…reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies…civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided…military officials say…The officials said…The assessment was described in interviews over the past several weeks with American officials…Administration officials said…according to the intelligence…According to American intelligence…Some American intelligence experts believe…they assert…notes a still-classified American intelligence report…a senior administration official said…according to Western officials…Officials said…An American intelligence assessment described to The New York Times said…Other officials believe…American military officers say…American officials say…According to American intelligence agencies…Assessments by American intelligence agencies say…Marine officials say…American intelligence agencies are concerned…Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week.

“You can’t deny that’s funny,” said Keller, adding that the lack of skepticism displayed by Gordon was “literally inhuman.” Keller and Abramson asserted that the Iran article is “even more hilarious” than Gordon’s 2002 stories on Iraq’s purported nuclear program, written with Judith Miller.

Crimes Listed by the Nuremberg Standard of 1947: a war of aggression, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for its accomplishment; murder or ill-treatment of civilian populations in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war; plunder of public or private property; wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity; crimes against humanity such as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war.

Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah, the rape of Lebanon, the concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza, clandestine prisons, the Iraq embargo of the 1990s, Halliburton, and Black Water. There are more, but these will suffice to compare against the Nuremberg Standard. It will not be a difficult task. For example, start with Halliburton and the plunder of public (American taxpayers’) property.

How many of you recognize the name of Army Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr.?

I do because he and I stood on and flew over the same ground nearly 40 years ago. Like him, I left a little blood and a lot of sweat in a Godforsaken place halfway around the world, earning four battle stars in 11 months. Plus some cheap tin and ribbon medals made even cheaper by the good friends who never came home with me. Thompson did, too.

Hugh was a helicopter pilot who aimed his guns at American soldiers–members of my brigade — to keep them from slaughtering civilians in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai 4. Spotting massacred civilians around My Lai, Thompson and his two-man crew landed beside wounded civilians to give medical help as the infantry company commander and others present kept shooting the wounded. Thompson ordered his crew to open fire if the slaughter continued. No more civilians were shot.

Thompson’s story is critical because the march to a nuclear war against Iran has begun, and YOU will the ones carrying it out. There is no way to effectively “confront” Iran except with tactical nuclear weapons. Tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children will die outright or suffer lingering deaths from horrible radiation sicknesses. It will be murder, pure and simple. Look at the suffering around you and multiply it by hundreds.

No doubt you know that back home, 80 per cent of the American people voted in the last election to end the Iraq debacle, but no one in Washington listened. Our two-faced media watchdogs are a gaggle of neocon propaganda peddlers, corporate whores and New World Order shills who helped orchestrate and cheerlead the slaughter, and they sneer at your patriotism behind your backs.

The offer of a ceasefire by one of the main Sunni insurgent groups will be received with interest in Washington. But there is scant chance it will be accepted by the Bush administration as a serious basis for a negotiated exit from Iraq – or that such talks are even practical amid the current chaos in the country.

Feelers between the two sides are not new. Over the past two years, as the depth and scope of the insurgency grew, reports surfaced of back-channel contacts between US military representatives and the insurgents – including the “1920 Revolution Brigade”, a wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement that is behind the latest offer.

Details of the talks, never officially confirmed by the US, were sketchy. But insurgent leaders were said to have been willing to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force, as the US forces pulled out. Then as now, however, Washington refused to accept anything resembling a fixed timetable for a pull-out.

The goal of the US in these talks was to detach home-grown insurgents – the “deadenders” from the fallen regime of Saddam Hussein, as the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld once called them – from the foreign fighters who had joined the war against the occupiers, above all al-Qa’ida. But while Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qa’ida commander in Iraq, was killed by the US in June 2006, insurgent attacks on US troops have continued and, if anything, become more sophisticated.

The new offer has some points acceptable to the US, notably the involvement of the UN and the Arab League in any deal. But the US would be required to sit down publicly with “terrorists”. Implicitly, too, it would be siding against the Shia-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki, to which the Bush administration is still committed.

It took an astonishingly stupid bomb scare in my town last week to really make me feel old for the first time.

“Old” isn’t the proper word, I guess, since I am only midway through my 30s. I live in Boston, temporary home to nearly one million students from September to June every year, and so I am surrounded by kids all the time. I used to teach high school English to roomfuls of teenagers. Neither of these things made me feel old. The now-infamous Lite-Brite Bomb Fiasco of 2007 that unspooled here last week didn’t make me feel old either, so much as it made me feel out of touch, for the first time, with those who are ten or fifteen years younger than me.

The gulf between my feelings and thoughts that day, and the feelings and thoughts of the twenty-somethings I talked to about it afterward, could not have been wider. Not to put too fine a point on it, that whole thing scared the almighty cheese out of me. The reports started coming in around noon – “suspicious items” that had “wires” and “electronics,” which were found strapped to critical infrastructure all over the city, according to the news media – and for a few hours, I entertained the possibility that my darkest fears were becoming a reality.

My fears were inspired by all the stuff I’ve been trying to telegraph to people for the last several years. This Iraq occupation, I’ve been arguing since the fall of 2002, will inspire more terrorism. A ten year old girl in Baghdad gets blown sideways out of her kitchen, a mother gets blasted in a sectarian street-battle in Fallujah, a father has menstrual blood smeared on his face in a cement cage in Abu Ghraib by leering US troops looking to humiliate those of his faith, a son gets shot by a US sniper in Najaf … and the families of those people are going to pick up a gun and volunteer to die that they might kill.

Combine this manufacture of terrorists with the legal aftermath of 9/11, the evaporation of Constitutional protections put in place “for our safety,” and the rancid motivations of those in power, and you have a recipe for catastrophe. The terrorists we are manufacturing in Iraq are not going to the beach, or heading off to a camping trip at the local KOA. Play the tape to the end, and one has to operate under the assumption that, sooner or later, they are going to show up here. If and when they do, they will not need to take down buildings to create mayhem.

A few hand grenades at a mall in Duluth, a car bomb in St. Louis, or a few bridges blown up in Boston, and that’s the ball game. We will see a declaration of “Red Alert,” which is martial law, the suspension of habeas corpus, the suspension of posse comitatus, and the end of the rule of Constitutional law in America. This great experiment in government of, by and for the people, with all its flaws and all its strengths, will be shelved, and a great light will be, perhaps forever, extinguished.

That is what I thought I was watching here in Boston last week. The places they were finding these items – a main railway bridge, an overpass on the city’s main highway, the hospital a few scant blocks from my apartment – are precisely the kind of soft targets that, if destroyed, would create chaos. Attacking infrastructure is one of the oldest and most effective tactics of warfare, and here it was in my neighborhood, or so I feared. I thought I was watching the Last Day, and it sickened me in a place within that words cannot touch.

This was not, of course, the case. Once images of those stupid little cartoon things made it to television screens, I was able to relax. When it came out that the whole mess was an advertising campaign for a cartoon, I thought my brain was going to leap out of my skull. The rest of the country saw those things and had a hearty laugh at our expense, especially the twenty-somethings who recognized it immediately.

So, was my fear an over-reaction? It is easy to say so in hindsight. How can anyone think one of those Lite-Brite things was a bomb? Easy. You spend a few hours watching the TV news people natter about “wiring” and “electronics” and things strapped to bridges and hospitals, but you’re not shown the actual items by those same news people. It was hours before I saw what they were talking about, and in that simple fact, we find one of the central afflictions of our wretched estate.

Originally published in Spanish on Rebelión

“Interview with Professor Agustín Velloso in the 11th Week of the Popular School José Luis García Rúa: The outcomes of fundamentalism,” – Gijón, Spain, from 2 to 10 February 2007

Civil war or coup d’état in Palestine?

Agustín Velloso interviewed by Rebelión; Translated by the author and revised by James Hollander

Is there a civil war going on in Palestine?

No, but this question and an affirmative answer is what pro-Israeli media are spreading all over the world. Hence, the average news consumer knows nothing of the reality of this “civil war.”

But aren’t we seeing the Palestinians are killing each other in the streets of Gaza?

What we are seeing is that since Hamas won the last legislative elections of January 2006, which were monitored by thousands of foreign observers, Jimmy Carter amongst them, the Western powers have made all kinds of political and economic manoeuvres to oust the winner with the help of the losers, Abu Mazen and his Fatah party.

However, the situation different than in Iraq. There are no Western armies in Gaza, so isn’t it just an internal Palestinian affair?

It is not an internal affair. Palestine is just another piece on the big Middle East chessboard, where the international community is moving pieces to further its own interests, namely: the control of oil and the support of its ally, Israel. The Western powers support Fatah because they say it represents the “moderate” Palestinians and are torpedoing the Hamas government because its programme runs counter to the agenda of Zionism and imperialism. Once Hamas obtained a majority of the seats in Parliament, the leaders of the powerful – Bush, Rice, Blair, Olmert, Solana and others – switched to plan B: oust Hamas from the government no matter what the price. This price would be paid by ordinary Palestinians, in any case.

What role is the international community playing in the fighting?

This fighting is the last move in the chess game. Previously, the West –the supposed democratic guardians of international law- invaded countries, flattened entire cities, bombed families at weddings and on the beach, and forced Arab and Muslim prisoners onto secret flights around the globe to torture them at will and put them in cages like animals.

What moves are you talking about?

They have totally isolated the legitimate Palestinian government, while Israel has declared its members a “legitimate” target for its death squads, kidnapping several of them as well as many members of the Parliament.

MOSCOW (AP) – Russia’s top military officer said the United States is expanding its economic, political and military presence in Russia’s traditional zones of influence and described that as the top national security threat, the latest signal of a growing chill in relations.

Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, chief of the military’s General Staff, said Russia now faces even greater military threats than during the Cold War and the nation needs a new military doctrine to respond to these challenges, according to a speech posted on the Defense Ministry’s Web site Friday.

“Russia’s cooperation with the West on the basis of forming common or close strategic interests hasn’t helped its military security,” Baluyevsky said in the speech, delivered at a recent security conference in Moscow. “Moreover, the situation in many regions of the world which are vitally important for Russia and near its borders has sometimes become more difficult.”

Russian-U.S. ties have worsened steadily over disagreements on Iraq and other global crises, and U.S. concerns about an increasingly authoritarian streak in Russia’s domestic policy and strong-arming of ex-Soviet neighbors.

Baluyevsky referred to what he called “the U.S. military leadership’s course aimed at maintaining its global leadership and expanding its economic, political and military presence in Russia’s traditional zones of influence” as a top threat for Russia’s national security.

Unless he had a dentist’s appointment late this afternoon, it would be hard for Douglas J Feith to have had a worse Friday. Already, one of the first neoconservative officials to have been jettisoned in the second Bush administration, the former undersecretary of defense for policy – the number three position in the Pentagon – just had his legacy torn apart by an official investigation by the Defense Department’s inspector general. The long-awaited report, released Friday morning, found that a unit set up in Feith’s bureau known as the Office of Special Plans engaged in “inappropriate” intelligence work on the case for war with Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans (OSP) is a murky thing, and, in Washington as well as on the internet, it’s taken on a life of its own. Feith has been right to complain that entire conspiracy theories have sprung up around it – like, according to some perfervid views, the claim that the OSP’s work was an effort to invade Iraq on behalf of Israel. The inspector general’s office didn’t dignify that with a response, but it did confirm, in broad outline, much of what has appeared in investigative reports: that Feith’s office “developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community, to senior decision-makers.”

These alternative assessments, developed in late 2001 and 2002, went far beyond the available evidence to assert a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Feith’s office further suggested that the intelligence community – which, by and large, didn’t put much stock in the idea of cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida – was hopelessly myopic. And that, in turn, served an important bureaucratic purpose: crowding out competitors. For instance, Feith’s intelligence analysts presented a briefing on their exaggerated findings to then CIA director George Tenet in August of 2002, in order to delay a CIA assessment on the issue that they considered insufficiently hawkish. Tenet later told a Senate panel that he “didn’t see anything that broke any new ground for me” in Feith’s briefing. But the next month, the OSP analysts took their findings to the White House, and included in their briefing a section that contended there were “Fundamental Problems With How (the Intelligence Community) Is Assessing Information.” The OSP’s analysis was established as the one worth trusting.

On Newsweek’s website you can flip through a short PDF slideshow of a presentation produced by the Pentagon in 2002. The presentation purports to show that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were working together and had been for years. Not only was this a presentation of intelligence at odds with what the legitimate intelligence community was saying, but the first slide in the presentation provides reasons why the intelligence community had it wrong. This hardly looks like the product of an office doing only policy work, rather than intelligence.

But Senator Jay Rockefeller, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a statement: “The IG has concluded that this office was engaged in intelligence activities. The Senate Intelligence Committee was never informed of these activities. Whether these actions were authorized or not, it appears that they were not in compliance with the law. In the coming days, I will carefully review all aspects of the report and will consult with Vice Chairman Bond to determine whether any additional action by the Senate Intelligence Committee is warranted.”

According to numerous reports, the law Rockefeller has in mind is the National Security Act of 1947, which appears to make it illegal to engage in intelligence activities of the sort engaged in by the Pentagon, without notifying Congress.

BLITZER: Did you and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney and Scooter Libby and the president make a mistake?

FEITH: Well, I mean, in the — lots of mistakes were made and lots of right things were done.

BLITZER: In your analysis?

FEITH: The issue here was not that we did an analysis. The issue was we criticized the CIA’s analysis.
===

Feith’s “Office of Special Plans” did not just critique Central Intelligence Agency conclusions. It requisitioned raw intelligence and cherry-picked it for the conclusions Feith was seeking. And, the group itself was not neutral analysts but was rather drawn from the Neoconservative network close to Israel’s Likud Party:

Jim Lobe wrote, “The heads of NESA and OSP were Deputy Undersecretary William Luti and Abram Shulsky, respectively. Other appointees who worked with them in both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud ‘Jerusalem Post’; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.”

Feith decries the “filter” the CIA had put on its intelligence on Iraq. Mr. Feith, that is called “intelligence analysis.” Raw, undigested tips are not intelligence and they can be extremely unreliable if not weighted properly. It then funneled those conclusions to Cheney’s office directly, by-passing real intelligence agencies. Its members also quite illegally briefed high ranking administration officials on the intelligence. See my earlier remarks on all this.

====
BLITZER: But right now.

FEITH: Hang on a second.

BLITZER: Are you ready to acknowledge there were no WMDs …

FEITH: You’re not letting me explain the essence of the problem.

BLITZER: I will let you explain but quickly. Are you ready to acknowledge there was no WMD, are you ready to acknowledge that there was no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda?

FEITH: We did not find WMD stockpiles. We found WMD programs. And the Duelfer report as I’m sure you know, was very clear on what we found in the WMD area, although we did not find the stock piles. We found that he had the facilities, he had the personnel, the intention. So there was a WMD threat but it wasn’t the way the CIA described it.

In fact, the Duelfer report found no sign of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or any active capacity to produce any of them:
===
“In his final word, the CIA’s top weapons inspector in Iraq said Monday that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction has “gone as far as feasible” and has found nothing, closing an investigation into the purported programs of Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the 2003 invasion. “After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted,” wrote Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, in an addendum to the final report he issued last fall.”

BLITZER: There wasn’t the stockpiles. What about on the al Qaeda connection?

FEITH: On the al Qaeda connection, George Tenet on October 7th, 2002 wrote an unclassified letter to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee laying out the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

BLITZER: So you believed there was a connection?

FEITH: I believed George Tenet.

Oh, now he has blind faith in the CIA? I thought it was completely unreliable because of its “filters” and had to be contradicted by Abram Shulsky?

BLITZER: But now you know that was now false.

FEITH: I never heard it was false.

Abu Zubayda was debriefed to this effect in 2002, and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad confirmed it on his capture in spring of 2003. Feith as the number 3 man in the Pentagon cannot have been unaware of what they were telling interrogators. He is therefore lying. James Risen wrote in summer 2003,
===
“Al-Qaeda did not work with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, two of the terrorist network’s senior leaders have told the CIA, intelligence officials say.

Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda planner and recruiter who was captured in March 2002, told interrogators last year that such co-operation had been discussed among the group’s leaders, but was rejected by Osama bin Laden.

The al-Qaeda chief had vetoed the idea because he did not want to be beholden to Saddam, Zubaydah said.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s chief of operations who was captured in Pakistan on March 1, has also said in a debriefing that the group did not work with Saddam.

The Bush Administration has not made these statements public, although it has frequently highlighted intelligence reports supporting its claims of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda as it made its case for war.”

===

BLITZER: You believe Saddam was working with al Qaeda?

FEITH: I believe that what George Tenet published in October of 2002 was the best information on the subject. And as far as I know, that is largely — I mean, there may be — look, I’ve not been in the government the last year and a half.