The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A classifed draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter has said.

Seymour Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine The New Yorker released in advance, reported on whether the administration of Republican President George W. Bush was more, or less, inclined to attack Iran after Democrats won control of Congress last week.

A month before the November 7 legislative elections, Hersh wrote, Vice President Dick Cheney attended a national-security discussion that touched on the impact of Democratic victory in both chambers on Iran policy.

“If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran,” Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion.

Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions “and thus stop Congress from getting in its way,” he said.

The Democratic victory unleashed a surge of calls for the Bush administration to begin direct talks with Iran.

But the administration’s planning of a military option was made “far more complicated” in recent months by a highly classified draft assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency “challenging the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb,” he wrote.

President Bush speaks Friday with Asian leaders who held a surprise “funeral ceremony for American influence in Asia” yesterday in Hanoi.

Ceremony Announced Only Minutes Earlier

In a surprise meeting for which White House press secretary Tony Snow said President Bush received “only minutes” advance notice, leaders of three Asian nations: Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, announced yesterday what the leaders called the “sudden death and long-overdue burial” of American hegemony in Asia.

According to sources at the early morning meeting, Bush was escorted into a small room off the main meeting hall, where a virtual cornucopia of cut flowers surrounded a casket labeled, “American hegemony in Asia 1800s – 2006”. Alarmed embassy staff said it apparently took the good-natured Bush most of the 45-minute ceremony to realize the event was not a joke, at which time he called for his security detail, which found itself locked out of the meeting and unable to enter.

But Singapore President Muhammad Olbliquar quietly suggested to Bush that translators could be of more use.

“Let us be clear,” said Obliquar. “The world economy runs on oil. China pays generously for oil and gets it; you bomb and kill for oil, and yet you still end up empty-handed, impoverishing your allies and your citizens while enriching your enemies. It therefore makes more sense for us to be your enemy — or at least not your ally — than it does to side with you.”

Taken aback, the US president initially tried to argue his case for “fighting for the petroleum we need,” said meeting attendees. “Cheney says I’m on the right track, and oil company profits are through the roof,” said Bush. “The old paradigm of conquer, steal, and sell is gone,” said Bush. “Today the oil we keep off the market by trashing oil producing nations has doubled the value of the oil we are able to actually get. It works for Exxon, and what works for Exxon works for us,” said Bush.

Obliquar, who said he apparently was designated to try to educate the US president about the waning influence of the US on Asian nations now hewing closer to China said, before he began addressing Bush again that he thought he was chosen to do so mainly because “my city-state is too small to be targeted accurately by US airborne munitions.” He then went on to deliver more bad news to Bush.

“All the Asian nations who want stability are becoming closer to China, and distancing themselves from a nation that seems not to have learned the lessons of even its longest war, held, incidentally in our back yard,” said Obliquar.

For example, said Obliquar, “You said on Thursday that the lesson of your Vietnam war for your Iraq war was that you would win in Iraq if you did not quit, that makes many people think you believe that had you only stayed twice as long and killed twice as many of our people, you might have won. Even if that fantasy were true, the fact you would say it in a land where you escaped being an imperial war criminal only through cowardice, not conviction, would make anyone question your judgement,” the Singapore leader said.

“Moreover, we have real concerns about US money value,” Obliquar said. “China’s money is backed by the value of the countless barrels of oil and oil futures it controls, bought with the prized Chinese yuan and with oil-for-oil-production infrastructure deals with its oil-rich friends, such as Hugo Chavez and the Africans. But US money is good only as long as China loans it to you. Your money is backed only by China’s good will and kindess. And its cleverness.”

“Bush, why do you think the Chinese have never objected to your war against Iraq — never said so much as one word against it?” sources said Obliquar asked the by-the-shocked US president, who had been guiled into the meeting by hotel staff who told him he could catch 30 minutes of the Ohio State-Michigan football game on cable TV, and would not be missed at the APEC summit.

“It’s because China has known that all the money it loaned you to pay for the war would never be used to build US production capacity, and instead would be utterly wasted. Yet China now finances your economy to such a great extent by buying your treasury bonds that if it were to slow down buying your bonds, or heaven forbid, begin to sell those bonds, your dollar would lose enormous value in very short order.”

“Which, quite frankly, has become the largest single reason they buy your bonds,” added Obliquar.

“Given that,” Obliquar asked Bush, “how could you ever meaningfully oppose big-difference items that China supports? Or get support from us for what China opposes, such as boarding North Korean ships to search them for weapons,” Obliquar asked.

“After all, China can protect us from North Korea — and will do so — but you cannot,” sources said Obliquar told Bush. “You are too far away, your military is tied up in a quagmire like your previous one, from which your nation seems to have learned something, but from which your leadership has not.”

“You cannot even protect us from China, which hasn’t grown outside its borders in 600 years, incidentally, but China can protect us from you and your once-ever-widening reach,” noted Obliquar.

Obliquar ended his solliloquy, according to sources at the ceremony, by thanking Bush for listening, and presenting him with a tape of the talk. “If you have any trouble understanding what I’ve just said, ask Karl Rove what it all means,” suggested Obliquar.

After the ceremony, Obliquar was heard telling Bush that Vietnamese officials had expressed concern about the Bush team hotel bill. “If you could settle up on that hotel bill — including the bill for the next few days ahead — before you have any more meetings with the Chinese delegation about North Korea, I know the hotel owners would greatly appreciate it,” said Obliquar.

Sources at the summit said that when the US security team caught up with the president shortly after the meeting, Bush seemed dazed and confused, and asked immediately that a key piece of information be determined by intelligence sources and relayed to him as soon as possible.

“I really, really, need to know,” said Bush, “who won that NCAA game.”

Told the game actually would not be played until the following day, Saturday, Bush was visibly agitated, but his reply could not be heard, as the security team hustled him back to the main meeting.

Later, Chinese officials announced the largest-ever single purchase by China of 10-year US Treasury notes, an amnesty plan for Taiwanese nationalists, and the lend-lease to North Korea of swifter, larger cargo ships to ply the trade routes between Pyongyang and Karachi, expected ultimately to bring North Korean cash from unspecified technology transfers to Pakistan and Iran into Chinese coffers.

Did anyone really imagine it would be any different? The Guardian reports that Bush has already decided on his “new” strategy for Iraq, ahead of the recommendations of the “Iraq Study Group” he appointed – and ahead of the internal government review of strategy which he ordered only this week. And what is the strategy? More of the same. How could it be otherwise? The Decider-in-Chief cannot admit, not even to himself, that any of his decisions have ever been wrong. How can they be, when they are dictated by his “gut,” and his gut is guided by God Almighty?

Yet no man rises to such a position – even with the enormous, endless help of his elitist family and friends – without some animal cunning. Bush knows that he cannot do what he would have to do to “win” the war on his terms: send in hundreds of thousands of more troops in a brutal, no-holds-barred campaign to eradicate all active opposition to the imposition of a docile Iraqi regime and the permanent installation of American bases. He knows there is no political will, even among his own party and most of his “base,” to take this route. (Barring, of course, another convenient terrorist attack on American soil, this time blamed on the Iraqi insurgents. Then there would be no limit to Bush’s “justifiable retaliation.” This scenario, although unlikely at present, is certainly not to be discounted altogether.)

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LONDON (AFP) – Downing Street moved swiftly to play down an apparent admission by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the invasion of Iraq had been a “disaster,” labelling his comments a “slip of the tongue.”

In an interview Friday on Al-Jazeera’s new English-language channel, broadcaster Sir David Frost suggested that the 2003 US-led and British-backed invasion had “so far been pretty much of a disaster.”

As Venezuelans prepare to go to the polls December 3, expectations are that President Hugo Chávez will easily win re-election, thanks to his wide base of support among the country’s poor and marginalized majority. In this election, however, people will be voting not just on hopes and expectations but rather on the proven track record of Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” and its gains in alleviating poverty.

An innovative series of social programs known as misiones, or missions–set up to parallel ineffective and often exclusionary government agencies or services, and largely funded through oil sales, which account for 47 percent of government revenue and 80 percent of exports–has delivered concrete benefits to Venezuela’s poor. As one example, roughly 3 million Venezuelans have enrolled in one of the four free educational missions–basic adult literacy, primary school, high school equivalency and university–since the programs began in 2003. Recently, in one adult literacy class, the pride of the students was palpable as one after another went to the chalkboard to transcribe–albeit with a few errors–short sentences that their facilitator read aloud. One woman in her late 60s told me after class, “This is the first time in my life when Venezuela has had a government dedicated to inclusion, not exclusion.”

A mission that brings doctors to live in poor neighborhoods, towns and villages to provide free, easily accessible healthcare is so popular that in 2004 alone it logged more visits than the entire public and private healthcare systems combined over the previous five years. There is a job-training mission, and a mission that provides food subsidies and soup kitchens. These and the other missions offer much-needed services and dramatically increase the quality of life for millions of Venezuelans, often in ways that are not easily quantifiable in commonly reported poverty indicators.

Even in the statistics, however, changes are evident. According to Venezuela’s most recent census, the number of households living in poverty has dropped from 42.8 percent in 1999, when Chávez took office, to 33.9 percent in early 2006. Households living in extreme poverty dropped from 17.1 percent to 10.6 percent during the same period. The poorest quintile of the population has seen its consumption power more than double. Official unemployment has been cut by more than half, to around 10 percent, although most jobs are either in the public sector or in the “informal” sector.

“Even a paranoid can have enemies.” — Henry Kissinger

Allen Hamilton kept his files secret until his death in 2005, long after his retirement as campus police chief for the University of Texas at Austin. His son discovered them while cleaning out his father’s office. The boxes of documents and photos from the 1960s included records of the most horrific event in Chief Hamilton’s tenure—the August day in 1966 when Charles Whitman perched atop the UT Tower with a high-powered rifle, killing 15 and wounding 33. Graphic photos from the Whitman archives were made available to newspapers to mark the 40th anniversary of that bloody day.

But Hamilton’s files also provide valuable links to the complex political and social currents that were washing over the campus four decades ago. These documents—made public here for the first time—tell the story of how the University of Texas spied on its nonconformist and dissident students. The records—covering a period from approximately 1963 to 1970—show the extensive efforts that campus police made to identify, watch, and follow students and faculty members whom it found suspicious.

CAMP FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 16 — Two former employees of an American private military contracting firm have claimed in a Virginia court that they saw their supervisor deliberately shoot at Iraqi vehicles and civilians this summer, and that the firm fired them for reporting the incidents.

The allegations, made in a lawsuit filed in Fairfax County Circuit Court, accuse Triple Canopy, one of the largest private military contractors to work with the United States in Iraq, of retaliating against the men for reporting that the supervisor had committed violent felonies, and perhaps murder, on the job.