Antiwar.com Blog

Well, Murray Waas at the National Journal has another scoop, and this ought to be a big one.

It seems Waas has confirmed that Bush was told about the State Department’s INR, the DOE and the IAEA’s insistance that those infamous aluminum tubes were for rockets back in October of 2002. Rice has lied repeatedly, claiming that Bush never heard of such a thing until after the war started. The only reason they were getting away with it was because the administration had only released portions of the National Intelligence Estimates, but never the president’s summeries.

Never mind the fact that there were major dissents from within the government on the pages of the major American newspapers throughout the later part of 2002, and the beginning of 2003.

We are supposed to let him off the hook for that oversight with the common assumption that the man can barely read and doesn’t bother with the news.

HUME: How do you get your news?

BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you’ve got a beautiful face and everything.

I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.

HUME: Has that been your practice since day one, or is that a practice that you’ve…

BUSH: Practice since day one.

HUME: Really?

Now it is clear that Bush had been told that Iraq was not enriching uranium, and had no intention of causing harm to the United States unless attacked. The State Department even correctly predicted that even if the US did invade Iraq, Saddam still wouldn’t attack the US mainland.

So, this is just one more piece for the growing pile of evidence that the president knew good and well that he was completely full of it when he tried to pretend that Iraq was a threat to the United States. There’s Woodward, “F*** Saddam. We’re taking him out.” Paul O’Neil, “From the first cabinet meeting…” Richard Clark “Wolfowitz was pushing Myroie’s crack-pottery, but I told ’em!” The Downing Street Memos “Intelligence is being fixed around the policy.” and now a credible report about the NIE’s that Bush is known to have read “in Tenet’s presence.”

I still have one question that maybe some bloggers out there can answer, Who is “Joe the CIA agent” featured prominently in this New York Times piece from October 3, 2004 who was supposedly the major force in getting the CIA to back the Pentagon neocons’ lies about the tubes?

Considering the state of near total war that existed between the CIA and OSP, this seems like an interesting avenue to go down.

Any takers?

Update: Oops, it was CIA Joe, Joe T. (Turner?), not CIA Mike. Cooperative Research has a bit of information which makes him seem to be just some jerk, pushing his own crap on everyone, rather than a neocon plant, which is, of course, the easiest explanation. If Dick Cheney’s shopping for a bill of goods, why not sell him some and get a promotion? What’s a few hundred thousand dead people compared to a nice retirement?

Harry Browne died last night.

Harry was one of the leading antiwar voices within the libertarian movement. The author of 12 books, he was the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000.

Harry was one of the first libertarians to speak out after 9/11, taking a strong anti-intervention position at a time when virtually all that could be heard were calls for bombing everyone back into the stone age. He showed a direction to libertarians on the proper post-9/11 response with his strident op-eds (see more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and still more.)

Harry had been suffering a painful illness for the past year.

We at Antiwar.com will miss his presence and his insightful thoughts.

The DownsizeDC.org blog is posting memorial messages.

What makes the nuclear programs of India and Iran so different, other than the fact that, unlike the former, the latter is a signatory to the Nonproliferation Treaty and has no nuclear weapons program? From President Bush’s press conference in New Delhi:

Q: Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, following up on this just a touch, what kind of message, sir, does it send to the world that India, which has been testing as late as 1998, nuclear testing, and is not — has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — is this a reward for bad behavior, as some critics suggest? And what kind of message does it send to other countries that are in the process of developing nuclear technology? Why should they sign the NPT if India is getting a deal without doing so, sir?

PRESIDENT BUSH: What this agreement says is things change, times change, that leadership can make a difference, and telling the world — sending the world a different message from that which is — what used to exist in people’s minds.

I — listen, I’ve always said this was going to be a difficult deal for the Prime Minister to sell to his parliament, but he showed great courage and leadership. And it’s difficult for the American President to sell to our Congress, because some people just don’t want to change and change with the times. I understand that. But this agreement is in our interests, and therefore, Jim, I’m confident we can sell this to our Congress as in the interest of the United States, and at the same time make it clear that there’s a way forward for other nations to participate in a — in civilian nuclear power in such a way as to address nonproliferation concerns.

India has charted a way forward. You heard the Prime Minister talk about going to the IAEA. That group exists to help safeguard — safeguard the world from proliferation.

Listen, I proposed reprocessing agreements — that stands in stark contrast to current nuclear theology that we shouldn’t reprocess for proliferation concerns. I don’t see how you can advocate nuclear power, in order to take the pressure off of our own economy, for example, without advocating technological development of reprocessing, because reprocessing will not only — reprocessing is going to help with the environmental concerns with nuclear power. It will make there — to put it bluntly, there will be less material to dispose.

And so I’m trying to think differently, not to stay stuck in the past, and recognize that by thinking differently, particularly on nuclear power, we can achieve some important objectives, one of which is less reliance on fossil fuels; second is to work with our partners to help both our economies grow; and thirdly is to be strong on dealing with the proliferation issues.

Remember the magic words:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Sign the petition, which automatically sends copies to various political leaders and opinion-makers.

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.

Jeremy noted how evidence has shown Saddam Hussein pardoned two men who plotted to kill him, and jailed the head of his secret police when four innocent men were executed.

As part of his defense before the Hague Inquisition, Slobodan Milosevic has presented many documents showing that he never ordered any of the crimes he’s accused of (even more so, that there was no evidence many of the crimes he’s accused of actually happened), and that instead, his government actually prosecuted military and police personnel who were murdering or mistreating civilians, seizing or destroying their property.

Imperial aggression is always preceded by a propaganda campaign painting their target as the new Hitler, and coming up with fresh lies after the original ones have gone stale and rotten. As a libertarian, I’m opposed to both the kind of satrapy Saddam Hussein ran, and to the post-modern, managerial state Milosevic presided over. But the Empire, which has all but eradicated liberty at home and has military presence in just about every country abroad, engages in wanton aggression, torture and hate-mongering, has absolutely no right to judge either of them. Something about the speck in someone else’s eye and a beam in one’s own, as I recall from the religious heritage of America’s founders…