Libby, Franklin, the OSP and Sibel Edmonds – What’s It All About?

For all those who have been trying to keep up with (and make sense of) the story of Sibel Edmonds, the woman who learned terrible things while translating for the FBI, blew the whistle and was promptly fired and gagged with the court invented “state’s secrets privilege,” there is good news.

Lukery, proprietor of the excellent blog wot is it good for?, has put in the time and gray matter to piece together what we can learn from what she can say around her gag order. (Which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court without comment.)

It seems clear at this point that the many scandals of the neoconservatives who lied us into Iraq, as Edmonds told me last August 13, are connected together. It seems more and more likely that her half-told portion is the puzzle piece to hold them all together, though many questions indeed remain.

Lukery’s excellent summary is here.

Notes from his interview of her here.

More from him on the subject here, here, here, here and here.

Christopher Deliso’s interviews of Sibel are here and here.

His 3 latest articles on all this here, here and here, my December 17th interview of him on the subject here.

Sibel’s website, the notorious Vanity Fair article, and the transcript of my most recent interview of her here, mp3 here.

Americans Don’t Mind Being Spied On by the Military – Claim Warbloggers

Check out these pathetic right-socialist warmonger types trying to claim that Americans aren’t bothered by the recent National Security Agency wiretapping scandal. Citing a Rasmussen poll, “NewsBusters” claims, “the nation doesn’t feel the Bush administration is doing anything wrong.”

“Busters” is right, because that wasn’t the question.

Media Matters has Pat Buchanan – typically right in writing and wrong on TV – making the same ridiculous claim on Hardball ,

“MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, CNBC host Lawrence Kudlow, and conservative radio host Michael Reagan referenced the Rasmussen poll in defending Bush’s authorization of the NSA eavesdropping program. The poll, conducted December 26-27, asked respondents: ‘Should the National Security Agency be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?’ Sixty-four percent of respondents answered ‘Yes.'”

Wowee, well I guess I can ignore the fact that the NSA has been tapping virtually all international calls and that the law has been broken, since this stupid unrelated poll question was tailored in such a way as to make for a useful soundbite for the warmongering and liberty hating Krauthammers of the world.

I give up. You conservatives are right. A “Democracy,” as the new leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iraq have taught us, “means accepting the will of the majority” – that is, as determined by misinterpreted phony poll questions on a day to day basis.

More war in ’06?

What a hell of a year that was, huh? Lots of killing. I’m hoping for less this year, though the number of people who can adequately debunk the State’s case for Iran building nukes is down to the Iranians themselves, and Dr. Gordon Prather of Antiwar.com and World Net Daily. (“I’m not a defender of Iran!! It’s just that Cheney-Rice are lying about everything,” he tells me.)

For those not familiar, Prather’s case is that there is no evidence, after 2 years of carte blanche inspections by the IAEA, that Iran has imported any ready made bomb materiel or begun to enrich uranium – which is their right under the nonproliferation treaty and all their “additional protocols” to their various “safeguards agreements” with the IAEA anyway – and that if they were to begin enriching uranium for the purpose of making a nuke, it would take them at least 10 years, since the centrifuges they have are old pieces of crap. My interviews of him on the subject, here.

A California professor named Jorge Hirsch has also been writing in a most exasperated tones about the threat of a war in Persia.

Most who imagine the various scenarios for war see major airstrikes by us and/or Israel on the supposed nuclear weapons sites, but not a full scale invasion, as that would be absolutely impossible, whether the slavery of mass conscription were imposed here or not.

Some of the neo-crazies have a belief [.wmv] that if they strike at the Ayatollah the people will then rise up and finish them off. A proverbial “cakewalk.”

For some reason that doesn’t seem very likely to me.

Whether or not the fact that Khamenei helped the Israelis fool the Republicans into invading Iraq is a cause for them to be spiteful or thankful is an open question, but the fact that the Iran-backed SCIRI and Da’wa factions rule the place now just serves as all the more reason to bomb them – unless of course, they care in the slightest that 150-something thousand American soldiers are sitting like ducks among their Shia “allies” in Iraq.

In my second interview of former CIA operative and journalist for the American Conservative magazine, Philip Giraldi, who last August wrote a brief entitled “In Case of Emergency: Nuke Iran,” he said the idea that they could get away with it’s time had passed. On December 3rd, Seymour Hersh agreed, saying that the world’s dependence on Iranian oil flows and the loss of government credibility after Katrina will keep us out.

Now, Martin Walker at UPI, citing the German paper Der Tagesspiegel, and other reports in the Turkish press says:

“The German news agency DDP cited “Western security sources” to claim that CIA Director Porter Goss asked Turkey’s premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets. Goss, who visited Ankara and met Erdogan on Dec. 12, was also reported to have to have asked for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation.

The DDP report added that Goss had delivered to the Turkish prime minister and his security aides a series of dossiers, one on the latest status of Iran’s nuclear development and another containing intelligence on new links between Iran and al-Qaida.

DDP cited German security sources who added that the Turks had been assured of a warning in advance if and when the military strikes took place, and had also been given “a green light” to mount their own attacks on the bases in Iran of the PKK, (Kurdish Workers party), which Turkey sees as a separatist group responsible for terrorist attacks inside Turkey.”

The Jerusalem Post claims the same. As Scott Ritter wrote back in June,

“The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.

The violation of a sovereign nation’s airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.

President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.”

If the plan referred to in Giraldi’s August piece is still the one they’d use if the silent war escalates to a full scale conflict, we’re talking about using nukes on their underground facilities. Which would be the second time that the US had used nuclear weapons on a country that was no threat to us.

What would Iran be like after being nuked?

What would America be like after nuking them?

I don’t think you could set us up for a fall any better if that was the purpose.

Perhaps reason can trump ideology in ’06.

April Glaspie Redux

Remember how the justification for the US government’s permanent blockade and eventual aggressive invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on the idea that Saddam Hussein was in defiance of the cease fire agreement that ended his war with the United Nations in 1991?

For the sake of making the real point of this post, we can neglect the fact that, as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has explained,

“Within months of this resolution being passed – and the United States was a drafter and voted in favor of this resolution – within months, the President, George Herbert Walker Bush, and his Secretary of State, James Baker, are saying publicly — not privately, publicly — that even if Iraq complies with its obligation to disarm, economic sanctions will be maintained until which time Saddam Hussein is removed from power. That is proof positive that disarmament was only useful insofar as it contained, through the maintenance of sanctions, and facilitated regime change.

It was never about disarmament. It was never about getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. It started with George Herbert Walker Bush and it was a policy continued through eight years of the Clinton presidency and then brought us to this current disastrous course of action under the current Bush administration,”

and instead focus on the question of what justified the UN war in the first place:

Why did Saddam want to invade Kuwait in August 1990? Seems he was having trouble paying off his debts from the war with Iran and Kuwait’s government was having more than their OPEC quota worth of oil produced, which was driving down Saddam’s revenues to the point where he was facing bankruptcy and perhaps the loss of his power. On top of this were allegations that the Kuwaitis were slant-drilling under Iraq’s border and stealing their oil in order to accomplish this.

Enter US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie.

As we are reminded in this piece for the Jang group by Kaleem Omar, “Is the US State Department still keeping April Glaspie under wraps?, the United States, during a meeting between Hussein and Glaspie, invited Saddam Hussein to send his army to invade tiny, defenseless Kuwait.

As far as I can tell, the cables to Glaspie with her instructions from Secretary Baker are still classified, as Ross “welfare cheat” Perot complained in the third presidential debate in 1992, but from the transcripts of the meeting it’s pretty clear what went on:

“We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”

Omar continues, “On July 31, 1990, two days before the Iraqi invasion, John Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, testified to Congress that the ‘United States has no commitment to defend Kuwait and the US has no intention of defending Kuwait if it is attacked by Iraq.'”

After the transcript was released and a reporter asked Glaspie, “What were you thinking?” she responded, “Obviously, I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”

Just some of it, huh?

I believe it is still open to question whether Bush I/Baker really intended all along to trick Iraq into the invasion so they could display the power of the UN under US leadership without the Russians in our way, or whether it was just his way of acting tough after Lady Thatcher called him “wobbly” in front of everybody.

Either way, every Iraqi life taken by the US government since then has been the victim of a criminal homicide. We better try these politicians before the global court system gets to set some more precedents of the authority of “international law” based on their crimes – precedents which would threaten the liberty of us all.

See also chapter one of Neoconned: Just War Principles: A Condemnation of the War with Iraq, “The Bogus Case Against Saddam,” by the late Jude Wanniski, his website or listen to my interview of him on the subject.