Exposing Tony Blair’s secret army: Death Squads

7 April 2007

Features

Exposing Gordon Kerr and Tony Blair’s secret army

Two of Britain’s most secret military units operating in Iraq are run by a man who ran death squads in Northern Ireland.

British covert military unit the Joint Support Group (JSG) works alongside US covert forces in the aptly named “Task Force Black”.

Earlier this year the JSG was lauded in the Sunday Telegraph for its role in running dozens of double agents in Iraq, many of who had infiltrated the various insurgent groups and militias.

The Telegraph claimed the regiment is “one of the coalition’s most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror”.

The other unit is the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR). At its creation in 2005, suitably anonymous “military sources” told the media, “We want to place electronic ‘bugs’ close to terrorist leaders such as Osama bin Laden and have agents within the ranks of global terrorist groups.

Shooting

“We got very good at doing this in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, and now we want to transfer this capability to the global war on terrorism.”

In July 2005, the SRR was involved in the surveillance operation which led to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station in London.

SRR officers were apparently engaged in “low-level intelligence behind the scenes” when Jean Charles was shot. According to the “military sources”, this was the first time the new regiment had been engaged in an operation.

In December that year two British soldiers in the SRR were arrested by police in Iraq.

Who were the two men and what were they doing when they were seized outside al-Jamiat police station in Basra?

What prompted British soldiers to smash down the wall of the station and demolish several buildings inside the compound in the operation to snatch them back?

At the request of the MoD, the British media obscured the faces of the two captured men (pictured above).

They had been sitting in a car outside the police station in Arabic dress. They were heavily armed and had an impressive array of surveillance equipment with them.

It was claimed at the time that the two undercover men had opened fire when they were stopped at a police roadblock, killing at least one police officer. They were part of the Britain’s undercover war in Iraq.

Both the JSG and the SRR are run by Brigadier Gordon Kerr.

Kerr’s career has taken him to troublespots all over the world. An officer in the Gordon Highlanders, he served briefly in Cyprus before his first posting in Northern Ireland in 1972.

Tony Blair appointed Kerr to head up military intelligence in Iraq in 2003 – just two weeks after an inquiry into collusion with paramilitaries in Northern Ireland sent a file about Kerr to the director of public prosecutions.

Kerr is the most senior serving intelligence officer in the army and has been rewarded with both an OBE and the queen’s gallantry medal.

In Iraq Kerr applies the “methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles”, as the Sunday Telegraph excitedly relates.

The government has repeatedly claimed that Northern Ireland provides the blueprint for the British army’s operations in Iraq.

Paramilitaries

From the late 1970s, various British governments backed a secret unit of the army, the Force Research Unit (FRU), which, along with the special branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, supplied names, addresses and photographs of Catholic targets to Loyalist paramilitaries.

The FRU was led by Gordon Kerr. When Kerr became the FRU’s commander in 1986, the 100-strong squad adopted a more aggressive approach to the running of informers.

The key person supplying information was British army agent Brian Nelson.

He infiltrated the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the biggest Loyalist paramilitary group. His information was responsible for the murder of at least 30 Catholics.

These included many who had no connection to the IRA, including the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane who was murdered in 1989 by the UDA’s death squad, the Ulster Freedom Fighters.

The FRU also obtained “restriction orders” from other British security and military units whereby the FRU would withdraw from an area to allow Kerr’s UDA agents to get in and out without hindrance.

Drawing on his sources in British intelligence, Nelson passed on the names and addresses of apparent IRA activists to the UDA, whose gunmen would promptly go out and “execute” the suspects.

Nelson’s activities were regularly discussed at London meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

This was chaired by then Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

In January 1992 Nelson agreed to plead guilty to five conspiracies to murder, and at least four sectarian murder charges against him were dropped.

In a bizarre court case lasting less than a day, Nelson’s real role was effectively covered up. After a moving tribute to his sterling work for the British army from an anonymous colonel, Nelson got ten years.

Speaking from behind a security screen the colonel stressed the lives Nelson had allegedly “saved”. Nelson was released after serving less than half his sentence, and spent the rest of his life under a false identity.

The anonymous colonel was Gordon Kerr.

Beyond Gordon Kerr, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment includes at least 100 other veterans of Britain’s dirty war in Northern Ireland.

How much does Tony Blair know about what they are up to?

What's Leaking Out of the White House

By Peter Baker

Sunday, April 8, 2007; B01

Shortly before leaving Moscow after four years covering Russia, I was granted a rare audience by a top Kremlin official. As we talked about Vladimir Putin and his relationship with President Bush, the Kremlin official compared the Bush team to the Bolsheviks and laughed at how secretive their White House appeared. "They've adopted some of our techniques with the press," he said.

For most of the past six years, journalists covering the White House have indeed been forced to master the art of Kremlinology. The famously disciplined and leak-averse Bush team succeeded at hermetically sealing the building, keeping behind-the-scenes machinations, well, behind the scenes. Deprived of any genuine information about how the institution operated, reporters were left to extrapolate what was really going on based on who was standing where at a Rose Garden photo op.

But something surprising has been happening in the past few months. The hermetic seal is showing cracks, and now the most disciplined administration in modern times has begun to see its internal workings seep into public view. Bush's shake-up of his Iraq team appeared in the newspapers before he was ready to announce it. His fight with the Joint Chiefs of Staff over plans to send more troops to Iraq played out on the front page for weeks. Secret memos by his national security adviser and his old defense secretary showed up in print. And unnamed officials put out word that Bush's new defense secretary tried unsuccessfully to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"You always have more leaks when you have a combination of a late term and big controversy," observed Marlin Fitzwater, the only person to serve as press secretary to two presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. "Between the war and the last two years in office, I think it's pretty normal to have this kind of increase in leaked material. You've got to remember that the primary motivation for most leaks is that people want to influence the policy or the president when they're not otherwise able to do so. At the end of a term and in the middle of a controversy is when you can do that."

None of this means that the White House is suddenly leaking like a sieve. This is still not the most transparent institution; extracting information can be maddening at times. Just two months ago, as the Super Bowl neared, the White House refused to reveal what kind of television shows the president watches. And in fact, many disclosures that have come out lately seem to have originated from other agencies in the administration. But it signals that the White House is no longer able to enforce its will on all corners of government quite as efficiently as it once seemed to do.

"Discipline is enforced by fear, and there's not a lot of people right now afraid of the president, politically afraid," said Joe Lockhart, who was press secretary for President Bill Clinton. "The Joint Chiefs, the Republican leadership, former aides are not worried about political retribution from the White House. They're a paper tiger."

Indeed, the toughest criticism of the Bush White House these days seems to emanate from those who were once on the inside and are no longer reluctant to speak out. Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, told the New York Times this month that he is "so disappointed in things" that he has concluded that Sen. John F. Kerry was right about Iraq. John R. Bolton left his post as Bush's ambassador to the United Nations and within weeks complained that the administration was not being tough enough on Iran and North Korea. Kenneth Adelman, a former confidant of Vice President Cheney and adviser to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, now denounces his erstwhile friends for running the worst administration in modern times.

Some of what is happening now was commonplace in past administrations. During Clinton's tenure -- and, I'm told, during those of his predecessors -- it was possible within limits to gain insight into how the White House worked. Reporters who had a question about economic policy could call the president's economic adviser, those writing on health care could call his domestic policy adviser, those with legal queries could call the counsel's office. None of those officials in the Bush White House returns reporters' calls.

In the past, it usually became known who was being considered for the Supreme Court or top administration posts long before any announcements were made. Options for welfare policy and diplomatic initiatives were effectively vetted in the media before landing on the president's desk. At times, that put Clinton's disarray on public display, but on many other occasions, it helped air dissent and further legitimize debate.

"Within reason, it's healthy for the system," Lockhart said. "You can't govern through the newspapers. But you also can't govern with six people in the room. You have to strike a balance." In the first two years of Clinton's presidency, "there was too much public argument," he added. "But by the end of the administration, the balance was pretty good."

Bush didn't think so, and he came into office determined to do things differently. Leaks, in his view, were a sign of a disorderly White House. Nothing should get out that was not supposed to get out. And his ability to make that stick through so many years suggested an unusual solidarity among his team. Bush remembered people in his father's White House coming to him as the president's son to complain that they had no access to the Oval Office. The son vowed not to repeat that management pattern and believed that by keeping an open door, there would be less incentive for aides to go to the media to be heard.

"You've got two polar extremes there," said Trent Duffy, a former Bush spokesman, comparing his White House with the previous one. "The main reason the Bush White House was able to maintain such a level of discipline was largely because they and the vice president's office were really in sync and there wasn't a lot of freelancing, versus the Clinton White House, which was the opposite."

Still, as Duffy noted, the signature disagreement of Bush's first term did eventually become public -- the struggle over the Iraq war between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on one side and Cheney and Rumsfeld on the other. The losing side in that struggle, Powell's State Department, was more likely to leak, a pattern that irritated Bush and the West Wing.

Every White House engages in strategic leaks that are planned and authorized at the top -- information placed without fingerprints to advance a particular goal or undercut a rival. Some aides in the Clinton White House kept a list of whose turn it was to receive a leak of an initiative that the president was soon to announce -- if it's Tuesday, it must be USA Today. Those sorts of meaningless 24-hour scoops were designed to maximize coverage of something the White House wanted covered on the theory that the recipient media organization would play up its "exclusive" and others would chase it.

The other kind of authorized leak can blow up on a White House, as the Bush team discovered when an attempt to discredit former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Iraq war, triggered a special counsel investigation that ultimately led to the indictment and conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, for perjury and obstruction of justice.

But it is the unauthorized leak that every president rails against and, in the end, finds impossible to stop. Now Bush sees it happening more often. In the past few weeks, for example, The Washington Post reported on internal e-mails sent by White House aide Elliott Abrams blasting the president's nuclear agreement with North Korea. And the New York Times detailed an effort by Rumsfeld's replacement, Robert M. Gates, to shut down Guantanamo Bay, a proposal blocked by Cheney and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Those are classic Washington stories, where debates on important issues of unquestionable public interest are aired in the open, something that might not have happened all that long ago. Duffy said that may stem from a somewhat more open environment fostered in the past year by White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and press secretary Tony Snow, who are not wedded to rote talking points.

Rather than shun the media, Snow has made a point of putting the president and top aides out for more interviews as well as off-the-record meetings with journalists. "It's obvious the White House is doing things they didn't do in the first term," Duffy said. "Tony has a totally different approach."

Snow also hasn't sweated garden-variety leaks the way others used to. After Bush recently held an unpublicized meeting with a Russian general accused of war crimes in Chechnya, a government official leaked it to Human Rights Watch, which tipped off The Post. The resulting publicity prompted the White House to disavow knowing about the general's past and to swear off any future contacts.

The Russians were annoyed. No doubt they wished the old Kremlin techniques were still in effect.

bakerp@washpost.com

Peter Baker is a Washington Post White House correspondent.

Conservatives for the Constitution

BLOG | Posted 04/05/2007 @ 2:37pm

John Nichols

Just imagine if one of the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination endorsed this radical agenda:

• End the use of military commissions to prosecute crimes.

• Prohibit the use of secret evidence or evidence obtained by torture.

• Prohibit the detention of American citizens as enemy combatants without proof.

• Restore habeas corpus for alleged alien combatants.

• End National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping.

• Empower Congress to challenge presidential signing statements.

• Bar executive use of the state secret privilege to deny justice.

• Prohibit the President from collaborating with foreign governments to kidnap, detain of torture persons abroad.

• Amend the Espionage Act to permit journalists to report on classified national security matters without threat of persecution.

• Prohibit of the labeling of groups or individuals in the U.S. as global terrorists based on secret evidence.

Of course, it is difficult to conceive of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or even the somewhat more Constitutionally-courageous John Edwards going to such extremes.

They are, above all, cautious candidates. They don't want to be accused of getting too serious about maintaining the basic underpinnings of the Republic.

Only the nuttiest of radicals who ask that candidates for president would ask that candidates for nation's top job to start talking about the notion that the lawless presidency of George W. Bush has created a Constitutional crisis.

So what left-wing cabal is promoting the above assault on the executives excesses of the Bush administration?

The group that's advancing this so-called "American Freedom Agenda" is chaired by Bruce Fein, a former Nixon administration aide who served as deputy attorney general under President Reagan and who helped to formulate some of the serious -- pre-blue dress -- arguments for impeaching Bill Clinton. Fein is joined by former Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr, veteran conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie and David Keene, the former aide to Bob Dole who for many years has served as chairman of the American Conservative Union.

What gives? How come conservatives are taking the lead in the fight to restore basic Constitutional protections?

"The most conservative principles of the Constitution have been repeatedly violated in the last several years," says Fein. "[The] Founding Fathers engrafted a system of checks and review of one branch by another -- a system of due process safeguards against injustice that is likely to occur because of prejudice and fear. And those checks and balances have eroded enormously over the last several years, particularly since 9/11."

Viguerie is even blunter, suggesting that "a constitutional crisis... has developed to alarming proportion under President George W. Bush."

Rejecting the suggestion that conservatives must remain silent because Bush is supposedly one of their own, Viguerie says, "Conservatives must not fail to oppose the massive expansion of presidential powers out of fear they will be aid and comfort to the Left. Concern about one branch of government acquiring excessive power should not be the providence of liberals, moderates, or conservatives. It must be the concern of all Americans who value liberty…"

Barr echoes that view, arguing that, "[We]" cannot sit by and wait thirty years for court decisions. We cannot wait until another four-year election cycle is concluded to have the Bill of Rights restored and defended."

The American Freedom Agenda campaign is the vehicle that these conservatives have established, with a self-described twofold mission: "the enactment of a cluster of statutes that would restore the Constitution's checks and balances as enshrined by the Founding Fathers; and, making the subject a staple of political campaigns and of foremost concern to Members of Congress and to voters and educators. Especially since 9/11, the executive branch has chronically usurped legislative or judicial power, and has repeatedly claimed that the President is the law. The constitutional grievances against the White House are chilling, reminiscent of the kingly abuses that provoked the Declaration of Independence."

The agenda was launched two weeks ago. So far, one candidate has expressed support it: Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican who explains that: "[They] say that the executive branch is always hungry. That's why it's up to the people, up to the congress to reign in the power of the executive branch."

Paul's right to sign on. The question now is whether any Democratic presidential contenders will join him in doing so.

The restoration of the Constitution's system of checks and balances ought not be a project of the left or right. It ought to be something that every presidential candidate can endorse. And, for Democrats, the American Freedom Agenda initiative creates a perfect opportunity to do the right thing with "political cover." After all, if Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards were to express support for the restoring the system of checks and balances and undoing the damage done to the Constitution during the Bush years, they tell the Democratic strategists who constantly counsel ideological caution: "Don't worry, I'm not taking any risks. I'm just making like the conservatives."

Baghdad in the Midwest cornfields

What an outing to a market in Indiana would look like if a congressman's observations were correct.

By John Kenney

JOHN KENNEY is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

April 7, 2007

The delegation arrived at the market [in Baghdad], which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees … and attack helicopters…. Sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests…. At a news conference shortly after their outing, Mr. McCain … and his three congressional colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — "like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime," offered Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican. — New York Times

---

MY WIFE came into the living room wearing a Kevlar vest, helmet and night-vision goggles.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Have you completely forgotten, silly head? We're going to the market."

I placed my hand at my head. I'd been so caught up in stitching a minor wound I'd received earlier in the day after going to an outdoor fruit stand that I had completely forgotten.

"I'm a dope, aren't I?" I said, chuckling, slowly shaking my head back and forth. She chuckled too, also shaking her head. We both chuckled. Then I winced from where a stitch popped.

Carol helped the boys get ready, putting on their sneakers and body armor. I phoned the Indiana National Guard so that they could radio the 434th Special Air Wing at Grissom Air Force Base, which in turn scrambled two F-14 Tomcats. Then we hopped in the wagon.

Carol and I moved to Muncie from Detroit. Frankly, we were tired of the noise, the dirt and the crime. Here, you feel so safe, as long as you move very quickly through the market, keep your head down and have appropriate air cover.

Carol handed each of the boys — 8 and 5, and a handful, let me tell you — a juice box, a Xanax and personalized Navy SEAL-issue GPS systems.

"Dad?" said Kevin, our 8-year-old, from the back seat.

"Yes, Kev," I said.

"Can we go to that cotton candy stand again?"

The F-14s flew by low. Each of us activated our earpieces and hand-held mini walkie-talkies, agreed on a frequency, and I slowed the car to 15 mph as Carol and the boys opened the doors and rolled out, taking cover under shrubbery near the Bibb lettuce stand (the boys love salad!).

So far, so good.

I hit the gas and spun the car and parked in a ditch that had once been a Tasty Donut before a tactical nuclear weapon had decimated it. Great parking space, though.

I saw my neighbor, Larry, under his car, from the looks of it a spanking-new Bradley fighting vehicle. "Snipers today," Larry said with a smile.

"Nice ride, Larry," I said as I dove under the car, a sniper's bullet exploding inches away from my foot. "Looks solid."

"The hull is constructed of welded aluminum and spaced laminate armor," he said, burying his head in the dirt as another round came in. "The Israelis use them. I had an Explorer, but it was blown to bits last time I went out for garbage bags."

"Roomy?"

"Ton of room. Carries three crew, commander, gunner and driver, plus six fully equipped infantrymen. Mileage is awful, but with all the space in the back, it's great for the market."

I borrowed his high-power binoculars to check on the family's progress.

Kevin and his little brother had successfully bought lettuce, fruit and homemade jams before a particularly well-placed rocket-propelled grenade destroyed the stand (the owner managed to avoid the hit and began rebuilding immediately, as weekends are, obviously, his busiest time).

Carol, I noticed, had found cover behind the wall of a largely destroyed warehouse. A sniper had a bead on the glint from her eyeglasses, which the afternoon sunshine had caught (Indiana is known for its beautiful summers).

Larry asked me to cover him, and he rolled out from under the BFV and hopped in. I activated heavy smoke bombs, and his car tore out of the field. I made it back to my car as Larry's choppers came in low over the market, taking heavy fire and destroying the sniper's den (about time, thank you very much) as well as a Toys R Us that was closed for renovation.

I could see the smoke in the rear-view mirror when Carol dove onto the hood, managing to hold onto the bundles (that woman never ceases to amaze me). I hit the brakes and she got in quickly.

"You put on face paint," I said, giving her a quick kiss.

"You wouldn't believe how crowded it was," she said, panting. "I saw Margie Hynes. Boy, has she put on weight."

A CBU-52B cluster bomb exploded to our left, and I hit the gas. We could see the boys ahead, waving flares in the dense smoke. I didn't stop the car completely. Kevin threw Chip in first, then jumped in himself.

Both immediately vomited from the smoke.

"You kids have fun?" Carol asked.

"Yeah!" said Chip.

"He was holding a loaf of bread and it got blown out of his hand!"

"It was so awesome, Mum."

We all laughed. Really hard. That's how shopping is in Indiana in the summer. It's just fun. It's fun and safe and hopeful and full of warm and welcoming Indianans and insurgents and snipers and bombs.

"Oh darn," Carol said.

"What is it, honey?"

"We forgot milk."

The Complicity of Congress in a Criminal War

April 6, 2007

By Richard W. Behan

The US Congress has gone beyond compliance with George Bush’s illegal war, and is now technically an accomplice-it is assisting with full knowledge in the perpetration of a crime. Congress has attained this status through two grave errors, one of omission and one of commission.

The Error of Commission

The Iraq Accountability Act passed the House as H.R. 1591 and slightly differently as S. 965 in the Senate. The versions await reconciliation in conference committee. Both bills set deadlines for troop withdrawal, both appropriate the money the President requested for prosecuting his war, and both require the Iraqi Parliament to pass its “hydrocarbon law,” to enable the sharing of oil revenues among the Iraqi people.

Revenue sharing surfaced publicly when President Bush announced his troop surge initiative on January 10. It was one in a series of mandatory “benchmarks” he established for the Iraqi government to meet. “To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy,” Mr. Bush said, “Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.” On the surface that is a benign, compassionate thing to do for a war-torn people.

As usual, it seems, Mr. Bush was consciously deceiving us. He failed to tell us the whole truth. The Iraqi hydrocarbon law also privatizes 81% of Iraq’s currently nationalized petroleum resources, opening them to “investment” by Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, and two British oil companies, BP/Amoco and Royal Dutch/Shell. (For further details, see Joshua Holland, “Bush’s Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq’s Oil.”) These companies expect to sign the rarely used and notoriously profitable contracts called “production sharing agreements” which guarantee them extraordinarily high profit margins: they might capture more than half of the oil revenues for the first 15-30 years of the contracts’ lifespan, and deny Iraq any income at all until their infrastructure “investments” have been recovered.

So the Iraqi people will share among themselves all the revenue from 1/5th of their country’s oil reserves. But they will get only a fraction from the remaining 4/5ths, where the American and British oil companies expect to generate immense profits. (Read more in Crude Designs, Greg Muttitt, ed., a report by the UK’s Platform Group.)

This outcome has been on the Bush Administration’s agenda since it took office in 2001, and it is the reason we went to war. (For substantiation, see http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/47489/?comments=view&cID=516389&pID=516158 . See also The State of War, by James Risen, Bob Woodward’s State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, and The Greatest Story Ever Sold, by Frank Rich. )

The broad contours of oilfield privatization and the use of production sharing agreements (PSA’s ) were shaped five years ago in George Bush’s State Department, part of a policy-development project called “The Future of Iraq.” This was a year before the invasion. Afterward, Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority embedded privatization and PSA’s into the emerging structures of Iraqi governance, aided by the intense lobbying in Baghdad by the four oil companies. The hydrocarbon law, written originally in English, was eventually translated into Arabic and formally confirmed by Prime Minister Maliki’s cabinet early in 2007. It awaits passage now by the Iraqi Parliament, few members of which know much of its content and virtually none of whom were involved in writing it.

President Bush, then, is commanding the Iraqi Parliament to enact a law that was drafted first in President Bush’s State Department. It requires Iraq to engineer the foreign capture of its own oil.

And Congress has agreed to this. That is complicity.

Was Congress ignorant of the consequences of the deceitful “benchmark?” No. Representative Dennis Kucinich offered an amendment to eliminate it from H.R. 1591. In a letter to his Democratic colleagues, Mr. Kucinich said, “By…requiring the enactment of this law by the Iraqi government, Democrats will be instrumental in privatizing Iraqi oil.”

And so they were. With Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, the benchmark survived-essentially a prescription for theft.

The theft, however, is unlikely to take place. The war is at the point of stasis; privatizing the oil is in peril, because passage of the hydrocarbon law is increasingly remote. The law is a metaphor for the heinous sectarian strife which George Bush’s invasion unleashed, and is now shattering the country and its culture. If the Iraqi minorities cannot agree to stop killing each other, they are unlikely to agree on the disposition of their country’s crude oil. But the recognition of Bush’s thievery is growing in Iraq every day, and if the minorities can agree on anything at all, they will see their common advantage in assuring the hydrocarbon law is stillborn. There is talk of that now.

For Congress to abet an illegal war that cannot succeed is not only criminal, but bewildering in the extreme. There is no visible rationale for remaining in Iraq.

The Error of Omission

Invading Iraq was a textbook example of “the use of armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity, or political independence of another state.” That is the formal United Nations definition of military aggression, and a nation can choose to launch it only in self-defense. Otherwise it is an international crime.

The Bush Administration justified the invasion explicitly in terms of self defense. They linked Saddam Hussein directly to the terrorism of 9/11 and suggested further strikes were a near-certainty. Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Ms. Rice, and Mr. Rumsfeld told us Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, the means to deliver them, and the motivation to do so. They said the evidence was irrefutable.

But the evidence was refuted and refuted again. Nothing they said was true.

President Bush’s most egregious lie was not about weapons of mass destruction. It was his lie about the war’s purpose. He told us it was about security at home and spreading democracy in the Middle East: it was a “war on terrorism.”

That has been refuted repeatedly as well. The war was about oil, and here is how it began.

Six months before 9/11 Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force was scrutinizing maps of the Iraqi oilfields and documents about its nationalized industry. (See them at http://www.judicialwatch.org/iraqi-oil-maps.shtml .)

The Task Force concluded the Persian Gulf would be the “focus” of US international energy policy.

At about the same time, the National Security Council gave clarity to the word “focus.” At its very first meeting, the NSC shelved the long-standing priority for Middle East foreign policy-settling the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The Council would henceforth attend to the invasion of Iraq instead. “Focus” was defined. The ends were the Iraqi oilfields; the means would be war. (The relevant books to see here are Ron Susskind’s The Price of Loyalty, Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, and Elizabeth de la Vega’s detailed history and formal indictment in U.S. v. Bush.)

The collapse of the Trade Towers six months later gave the Bush Administration an appalling alibi to proceed with the planned invasion. Richard Clarke’s book explains the determination of President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld to attack Iraq directly and immediately. But the route would go through Afghanistan first, and a “war on terror” theme became the ingenious deception, to disguise the eventual seizure of Iraqi oil.

The success of the deception can be measured today by the infrequency of encountering the truth. The “war on terror” is still the unwavering story George Bush and Dick Cheney tell, in a campaign of propaganda to demonize “radical Islam.” (Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda .) In conduct and effectiveness what they do is strikingly parallel to the program Joseph Goebbels pursued in Nazi Germany, to demonize Judaism. (For more parallels between the Bush and Nazi regimes see “How Will History Treat George Bush?“. The “terrorism” story continues to resonate with most of the Republicans in Congress, not a few Democrats, and a great many American people who have yet to encounter-or admit-the truth.

The mainstream press has been derelict in its unwillingness to challenge the propaganda. The literature exposing the truth elsewhere, however, is truly voluminous and rigorously persuasive, both in contemporary books and in the endless informational resources of the Internet. The sources span the political spectrum. One of the most damning books is Crude Politics: How Bush’s Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism. It was written with intelligence and understated outrage by Paul Sperry, whose politics are far to the right of center.

Congress is aware of the first small lie about Saddam Hussein’s terrifying weaponry and savage antipathy. But it seems unable to acknowledge the far more significant lie about the war’s purpose, and fails even to conduct a serious inquiry into it. This serious error of omission allows the criminal war to continue unchecked.

Congress meanwhile addresses the summary dismissal of 8 US attorneys, casually ignoring the greatest Presidential malfeasance in our history.

The US Congress is surrounded by a mountain of evidence of impeachable offenses, but insists “impeachment is off the table.” To citizens recalling their high school classes in civics and U.S. History, that is intolerable. It seems to violate the oath to uphold and defend the Constitution every member of Congress has taken.

Restitution

The Congress has three compelling and immediate opportunities to expiate its disappointing behavior. Striking the revenue-sharing “benchmark” entirely from the Iraq Accountability Act. Mandating immediately the early, prudent, and orderly withdrawal of American troops from a criminal and unwinnable war. Then impeachment.


Richard W. Behan lives and writes on Lopez Island, off the northwest coast of Washington state. He is working on his next book, To Provide Against Invasions: Corporate Dominion and America’s Derelict Democracy. He can be reached at rwbehan@rockisland.com. (This essay is deliberately not copyrighted: it may be reproduced without restriction.)

The Press is playing patsy with terrorist propaganda

BY JONATHAN POWER

5 April 2007

DOUBTLESS, at the moment of impact, the shards of the suicide bombers’ device will turn me into an emotional wreck, not to say a physical mess. But until that moment arrives I trust that I am in charge of my mental faculties.

Pace 9/11, I am not afraid of terrorism, even though I lived in London during the worst years of IRA activity and already this year I missed a terrorist attack on my hotel in Islamabad by only a couple of days. Terrorism and the damage it can do -- in particular the political and societal damage -- is greatly overrated. Who to blame? Doubtless, the politicians have a vested interest in whipping up the populace’s reaction, but most of all we should blame the media. They behave like patsies to the terrorists. They give their dirty deeds every bit of publicity they could ever dare to hope for and, as I saw last month in Nigeria’s oil producing delta, ignore the often valuable activities of the plethora of non-violent activists.

By and large the media get the perspective totally wrong -- who but a few observant folk know that the Tamil terrorists (Hindus for the most part) have a much worse terrorism record than Al Qaeda, with their attacks on Sri Lanka’s Buddhists and fellow Hindu’s? If there is a clash of civilisations anywhere on the planet -- which frankly I doubt -- it is on this pear shaped, tropical paradise of an island in the balmy Indian Ocean far away from any strategic interests of the big powers.

Second, the media, with only a handful of worthy exceptions, do an appalling job of presenting the facts behind the outrages. In the new issue of Prospect Magazine, Robert Dreyfus reports that Wayne White -- who led the State Department’s intelligence effort on Iraq until 2005 -- describes most of the “terrorists” in Iraq today as POIs, or “pissed off Iraqis “ who are fighting because “they don’t like the occupation”. Yet the press, until relatively recently, constantly replayed the Bush administration’s plain chant that without the American/British military presence Al Qaeda might take over Iraq. No wonder it has taken four years too long for the American and British public to turn against the war.

Ronald Steel noted in the New Republic after the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans, that the US media were fixated on “who or what bin Laden attacked” but “what bin Laden had been saying about why he and his Al Qaeda forces were attacking was given short shrift”. Only since the publication of Michael Schueur’s “Imperial Hubris” in 2004 has some of the media been shamed into regularly publishing excerpts of Al Qaeda’s communiques.

But there is an even more serious problem than that. The way the media and the politicians always play it is that the terrorists are in danger of winning and unless our political leaders are licensed to get tough we are going to succumb. A new study by Max Abrahms in Harvard University’s quarterly, “International Security”, shows the shallowness of such thinking. The study analyses the political life of 28 terrorist groups -- the complete list of foreign terrorist organisations designated by the State Department. The data yield a quite unexpected finding -- the terrorists accomplished their objectives only seven per cent of the time.

This is not an argument for giving into terrorism. It is a foul tactic that claims too many innocent lives. It is an argument simply for de-emphasising it and allowing the space for diplomacy and negotiations to work, and for the terrorists to get old and tire of the rough life, as they often do.

Look at the political plight of the Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero. Since the first day he took office he has constantly been pilloried by the principal opposition party for being soft on the Basque terrorist group, ETA. The Popular Party has kept up the false refrain that the Madrid station bombings of three years ago that took 190 lives were the work of ETA. For long enough Zapatero tried to ignore them, and continued his quiet and seemingly progressing negotiations with ETA. But then late last year what is probably a dissident ETA grouping killed two people at Madrid airport and most of the media, softened up by three years of the opposition’s carping, turned on Zapatero. His negotiating hands are now effectively tied.

In Britain, progress was only made with the IRA because the government simply lied over many years that it was negotiating with the terrorists.

Who today would dare stand up and say talk to Al Qaeda, negotiate with the Taleban or treat the leaders of Hamas as sincere fellows whose agenda is worth discussing? There are few of our politicians, and even fewer members of the media.

Jonathan Power is a widely published commentator based in London. He can be reached at JonatPower@aol.com

Misery of Palestinian children

Children throughout the West Bank and Gaza have observed Palestinian Children's Day, which aims to highlight the plight of children living under Israeli occupation.

To mark the day, the Palestinian Network for Children's Rights issued new figures on Thursday showing how the Israeli occupation has damaged the lives of thousands of children.

"In 2007, the Israeli army continues to deploy the same violent policy towards Palestinian children with eight children being killed so far this year," a press release from the group said on Thursday.

"This brings the total number of children killed since the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, by the Israeli army and illegal Israeli settlers, to 860."

Additionally, 5,200 Palestinian children have been arrested by the Israeli army and about 400 are still being held in Israeli prisons and interrogation centres, the statement said.

Palestinian children also suffer unusually levels of stress and mental problems - largely as a result of living in a state of near-constant insecurity.

A child's story

Typical of many Palestinian children is Amna Ghaben. Ten years old, her name in Arabic means to be safe and secure but she has enjoyed little of either.

A year ago an Israeli rocket landed on her family's house in Gaza. Her eight-year-old sister, Hadeil, was killed and 11 other family members were injured in the attack.


Ismail Ahmad, Amna's psychiatrist, says drawings can illustrate children's personalities

Amna suffered shrapnel wounds all over her body. But although the physical injuries have now healed, she remains mentally traumatised.

"During shelling, I'm with them and their father hugs them too, but they keep telling us this house could be destroyed on our heads," her mother said.

Dr Ismail Ahmad, a psychiatrist, has been working with Amna since the attack, analysing her drawings.

He says her drawings are a window into how Amna has dealt with the tragedy.

"The smile is gone from Amna's face, her academic level went down, and she feels insecure in her house," Ahmad said.