Author: Scott Horton

When I interviewed [.mp3] former US Marine and lie-debunking UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, last year, he got all bent out of shape when I brought up Iraqi General Hussein Kamal [at about 38:00]. Kamal, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, defected to Jordan in 1995, after which he was debriefed by the CIA, MI-6, IAEA, UNSCOM etc., and told them – with the paperwork to prove it – that Iraq had initially attempted to deceive the UN weapons inspectors after Operation Desert Storm™, still keeping some of their chemical munitions, but that he had personally overseen the destruction of every last bit of it by the end of 1991. (Kamal later went back to Iraq and was executed.)

According to Ritter, “this administration despises the American veteran, and this administration despises the men and women who wear the uniform,” as revealed by Cheney’s willingness to lie right to their face when he gave his speech to the VFW in Tennessee on August 26, 2002:

“Saddam Hussein had sought to frustrate and deceive [the inspectors] at every turn, and was often successful in doing so. I’ll cite one instance. During the spring of 1995, the inspectors were actually on the verge of declaring that Saddam’s programs to develop chemical weapons and longer-range ballistic missiles had been fully accounted for and shut down. Then Saddam’s son-in-law suddenly defected and began sharing information. Within days the inspectors were led to an Iraqi chicken farm. Hidden there were boxes of documents and lots of evidence regarding Iraq’s most secret weapons programs.

That should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself. To the dismay of the inspectors, they in time discovered that Saddam had kept them largely in the dark about the extent of his program to mass produce VX, one of the deadliest chemicals known to man. And far from having shut down Iraq’s prohibited missile programs, the inspectors found that Saddam had continued to test such missiles, almost literally under the noses of the U.N. inspectors.”

In ommitting the important details that all of this had been over for 9 years and had been completely fessed up to by the Iraqis for 7, Cheney lied to the VFW – a group of men who have fought in the wars of the past and were the most likely to have been sending their own grandsons off to kill and die under Cheney’s care.

According to Ritter, the Iraqi government had already confessed to everything and all Kamal did was confirm it. After he did so, Saddam Hussein, not knowing exactly what Kamal had given them, panicked, and dumped every last bit of paperwork he had in the UN’s lap.

The US government knew good and well since then that Hussein had no chemical weapons – nevermind the far-fetched forgery-based claim that Iraq was “reconstituting nuclear weapons.” As Ritter explained to me, and all over the place, the only reasons for the continued weapons inspections after 1995 was as a pretext to continue the sanctions, and to provide the CIA with opportunities to assassinate Saddam.

An even more egregious example of the contempt that the War Party holds for their expendeble toy soldiers – our friends, neighbors, kin and the grandsons of those men at the VFW – is the shocking, but quite overlooked finding in the big new poll of American troops in Iraq: 85% of them believe that they are in Iraq to get revenge for Saddam Hussein’s role in the attacks of September 11th. Eighty-five percent!

Who could possibly be giving them that impression?

The President of the United States denies that he or his administration have ever even implied such a thing:

“This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

Audio here.

So, who supports the troops then? We in the antiwar movement who want them home at their bases, doing nothing in safety, or our neighbors who believe any lie the state tells them and support the politicians’ decisions to send them off to a desert to die for nothing?

Update: The great Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution – one of my favorite blogs – wrote in to set me straight. I had it wrong when I said General Hussein Kamal had overseen the destruction of the last of Iraq’s chemical and biological (such as they were) munitions in 1993.

It was 1991. That is, within a year of the first Gulf War. The above text has been changed to reflect that fact.

I know it’s in the highlights section today and all, but I really want to draw extra attention to the latest article by historian Gareth Porter, where he explains, “How the Neocons Sabotaged Iran’s Help on al-Qaeda,”

“The United States and Iran were on a course to work closely together on the war against al-Qaeda and its Taliban sponsors in Afghanistan in late 2001 and early 2002 – until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stepped in to scuttle that cooperation, according to officials who were involved at the time.”

This reminds me, didn’t I just read something about how one of the purposes of the famous Ledeen-Franklin-Rhode-SCIRI-SISMI-Iran-Gorbanifar meeting in Rome in December of 2001 was to thwart a plan that was in the works where the Iranians were going to turn over 5 al Qaeda terrorists to the US in exchange for some MEK terrorists?

Lemme see here, oh yeah, it was over on Juan Cole’s blog…

Ah, ha, here it is! Bastards. Everyone remember to link to this when something blows up and Iran gets the blame.

PS: One could do a lot worse than to go through that whole page at the Juan Cole link.

“Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.”

– George Washington, in a letter to Edward Newenham, Oct. 20, 1792.

Hat Tip: The other Scott Horton (you know, the famous anti torture hero.)

Rumsfeld at the CFR: “Some humility is in order.”

Of course, all he means by that is that it’s hard to Karen Hughes people into believing you’re trying to help them while you’re setting them on fire.

Also: “I do not believe we have reached the end of history.”

Of course, all he means by that is that there are wonderful new weapons systems out there to purchase that haven’t even been invented yet.

I must say, it’s an interesting thing to watch Rumsfeld spin at the Council on Foreign Relations – he’s quite pathetic really. After all, Rumsfeld is one of the leaders of the Military Industrial Complex/neoconservative cabal which seized the state’s foreign policy apperatus away from the Pratt House types after 9/11, and his Iraq project has turned out to be the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.”

The speech, “New Realities in the Media Age,” is on the danger of the freedom of information exchange made possible by satellite TV and the internet. It’s hard to get away with creating enemies and destroying them when everyone who feels like it can blog your every fascist move. The fact that the Secretary of Defense worries about the internet worries me.

“The press talks about my Copper Green torture program too much! Traitors! Didn’t I tell you, it’s all the fault of the night shift?!”

The question and answer section is the most fun. He resorts to the stupid Caliphate myth when asked whether he’s ever gotten around to figuring out his metrics, claims that the fact Don Imus is having to raise money for wounded soldiers is no indication that the state is letting them down and that Iran is a credible threat.

When Andrea Mitchell asked about the UN’s call for the close of the Guantanamo bay torture camp, Skeletor responded angrily:

“It’s absolutely … er, uh… beyond comprehension that simply because some of these people that have habeus corpus rights (over the executive’s objection – editor) they’ve hired lawyers and are telling lawyers exactly what to tell people, say exactly what they were trained to in the Manchester document, ‘tell em it’s torture, tell em this, tell em that,’ that’s what they do. … If someone has a better idea, I’d like to hear it.”

To see Rumsfeld pull the patriotism canard out at the CFR shows some real desperation: “Why, It’s a terrible thing for people to say bad things about the government! This is a great country we have.” You don’t disagree with that do you?

He also says that the terrorists in Iraq (Sunni insurgency) “hate democracy.” Perhaps this is because they are the minority?

Or maybe the neocon’s plan has worked and the Iraqis have been reading James Madison!

Video

Transcript

What is the basis of America’s emnity for Iraq, Iran and Syria? Is it that they might give WMD to The Terrorists™, are the enemies of the state of Israel, or live on top of “our oil”? Is it the threat of a Global Islamo–Fascist Caliphate, because they’re “evil doers,” or simply the subjects of an American social engineering project to liberate the world?

Some have concluded that Saddam Hussein’s real crime was denominating his oil sales in Euros in the fall of the year 2000, saying his switch challenged the preeminence of the US dollar.

There has been much debate lately on the matter of Iran’s plans to open their own mercantile exchange, an oil bourse, and perhaps not coincidentally, talk of imminent war.

As John Pilger wrote earlier this week,

“[Blair] knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8 trillion and a trade deficit of more than $600 billion. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2 trillion.”

The idea is that if Iran opens their own market and begins to denominate their oil sales in euros, it could cause the different governments of the world to divest some of their dollar holdings so that they can instead save euros for the large transactions, and that this could threaten the hegemony of the US dollar – which, of course, is just a lousy piece of paper backed up by police power.

If the world were to abandon the US dollar as the reserve currency, all those dollars would come floating home, causing massive inflation.

The government of Syria announced they were going to begin using euros for all their major international transactions on Monday.

There is disagreement among experts as to whether or not these moves by the last “rouge states” are really enough to disrupt the dollar’s supremacy. For example, Antiwar.com regular contributor and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, wrote to AWC director Eric Garris last weekend that he thought it unlikely:

“Oil is billed in dollars because the dollar is the world reserve currency. The dollar is not the reserve currency because oil is billed in dollars. The US is abusing the dollar’s role as reserve currency. When a trusted alternative appears, the dollar is likely to lose its reserve currency role. Iran, however, cannot cause that transition.”

Perhaps the real question is not whether Iran can cause the transition, but whether American politicians will let a major oil producing country set a bad example in front of the others. The real trouble for our criminal politicians is that, as PCR notes, “Today, US war-making capability is dependent on the rest of the world to finance it.”

Ron Paul MD (R-TX), another Antiwar.com regular contributor and the only economist of the free market Austrian school in the US Congress, gave a speech [.wmv video file] on the house floor Wednesday, February 15, titled “The End of Dollar Hegemony,” in which he explains how the Bretton Woods aggreement established the dollar as the world reserve currency, while at the same time transferring much of America’s gold overseas, which resulted in the government under Richard Nixon defaulting in 1971, which ended forever the promise to pay gold to bearers of US dollars on demand, and switching our currency to government-monopoly money. At this point, Dr. Paul explains,

“Realizing the world was embarking on something new and mind-boggling, elite money managers, with especially strong support from U.S. authorities, struck an agreement with OPEC to price oil in U.S. dollars exclusively for all worldwide transactions. This gave the dollar a special place among world currencies and in essence “backed” the dollar with oil. In return, the U.S. promised to protect the various oil-rich kingdoms in the Persian Gulf against threat of invasion or domestic coup. This arrangement helped ignite the radical Islamic movement among those who resented our influence in the region. The arrangement gave the dollar artificial strength, with tremendous financial benefits for the United States. It allowed us to export our monetary inflation by buying oil and other goods at a great discount as dollar influence flourished.

This post-Bretton Woods system was much more fragile than the system that existed between 1945 and 1971. Though the dollar/oil arrangement was helpful, it was not nearly as stable as the pseudo–gold standard under Bretton Woods. It certainly was less stable than the gold standard of the late 19th century.”

After describing the role likely played by Saddam’s switch to the Euro in 2000 in the decision for “regime change,” Paul reminds us,

“In 2001, Venezuela’s ambassador to Russia spoke of Venezuela switching to the Euro for all their oil sales. Within a year there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reportedly with assistance from our CIA. After these attempts to nudge the Euro toward replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency were met with resistance, the sharp fall of the dollar against the Euro was reversed. These events may well have played a significant role in maintaining dollar dominance.

It’s become clear the U.S. administration was sympathetic to those who plotted the overthrow of Chavez, and was embarrassed by its failure. The fact that Chavez was democratically elected had little influence on which side we supported.”

And that,

“Though we don’t occupy foreign countries to directly plunder, we nevertheless have spread our troops across 130 nations of the world. Our intense effort to spread our power in the oil-rich Middle East is not a coincidence. But unlike the old days, we don’t declare direct ownership of the natural resources – we just insist that we can buy what we want and pay for it with our paper money. Any country that challenges our authority does so at great risk.

Once again Congress has bought into the war propaganda against Iran, just as it did against Iraq. Arguments are now made for attacking Iran economically, and militarily if necessary. These arguments are all based on the same false reasons given for the ill-fated and costly occupation of Iraq.”

Eight out of Ten Americans, according to UPI, believe that Iran is a nuclear threat to the United States. Apparently the only thing standing in the way of the war with Iran is the fact that it would be at least as destructive to the American and world economy as about anything else we could do. Which brings up the question, as the War Party drives this country into the ground, are they trying to save the dollar or destroy it?

Either way, it’s clear, Empire is a bad deal for America.

Read Ron Paul’s speech here.

But they consider you the enemy.

U.S. concludes ‘Cyber Storm’ mock attacks

By TED BRIDIS
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON — The government concluded its “Cyber Storm” wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.

Bloggers?

Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose “Web logs” include political rantings and musings about current events.