THEOCRACY NATION

The only thing more evil, small-minded and treasonous than the Bush Administration's jailing
Judith Miller for a crime the Bush Administration committed is Judith Miller covering up her Bush Administration source, “Karl Rove.” It was White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rove’s intention all along to leak to a reporter that former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent. Rove committed a crime for the sole purpose of punis⁨ing a real whistleblower, Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, for questioning Bush’s mythological premise for war in Iraq. It was Rove’s way of concealing the fact that the president had lied to the American public about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, and destroy the credibility of two national security veterans.















As well as sending an intimidating message to any other government officials preparing to publicly tell the truth. A key national security principle for dealing with top-secret information, such as the identity of undercover CIA officers, is strict compartmentalization, often called “the need to know” – which raises the question why George W. Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove would know anything about the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame. The answer to that mystery – why was Rove involved – may be more crucial to unraveling who was behind the illegal leaking of Plame’s name and the subsequent cover-up than even the identity of which Bush officials passed the information to right-wing pundit Robert Novak for his infamous column on July 14, 2003.















Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support,was published June 30, 2005 that grants extraordinary domestic law enforcement powers to the President and to the Secretary of Defense; That this "state of war" serves as the warrant for applying post-9/11 judicial precedents that abrogate civil rights including habeas corpus, resulting in a state of partial, selective, de facto
martial law;that in addition to its already-manifest potential for abuse against selected targets like American activists, journalists, and political opponents, this dubious new policy infrastructure authorizes a huge escalation of the domestic military-police state, to be undertaken in apparent response to putative terror attacks on U.S. soil.











It is too early to tell whether the London attacks were false-flag terrorism advanced by the British and / or American administrations for their own purposes [perhaps including the eventual use of the powers in S.H.D.C.S., or their equivalent in post-7/7 British policy], or asymmetrical warfare (i.e., terrorism) perpetrated by aggrieved victims of the Bush-Blair wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. In either case, ⁴he effects seems to be the same. The bombings divert attention from ongoing crises like the Rove-Plame affair; China's use of its current-account surplus as leverage for buying Unocal; the general disaster of the Iraq war; recent calls by over one hundred Parliamentarians of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government urging the withdrawal of U.S. troops; and an equally embarrassing new militaryРtraining and support pact between this same Iraqi government and the Iranian state which the Bush-Blair group seems intent upon attacking. мBR>
The London bombings also re-imbued the world's energy issues with deeply irrational emotions of revenge and horror that might prevent civilians from reaching their own more rational conclusions as to the causes of high energy prices - and the underlying dangers posed by what more and more people recognize as Peak Oil.

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Meanwhile, Russia and China have warned other nations against attempts to dominate global affairs and interfere in the domestic issues of sovereign nations in what appears to be a veiled expression of their irritation with U.S. policy. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao signed a joint declaration after two days of talks calling for a stronger United Nations role in global affairs and opposing attempts "to impose models of social and political development from outside."

The two leaders also urged other states to renounce "striving for monopoly and domination in international affairs and attempts to divide nations into leaders and those being led."
After decades of rivalry, Moscow and Beijing have developed what they call a strategic partnership since the 1991 Soviet collapse, pledging their adherence to a "multipolar world," a term that refers to their opposition to U.S. domination.

China and Russia share a concern about increased U.S. influence in Central Asia since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which led to American troop deployments in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan for operations in neighboring Afghanistan. Beijing is unhappy about U.S. ties with Taiwan. Beijing claims Taiwan as part of its territory and says the island has no right to conduct foreign relations. Moscow and Beijing dominate the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional security gruping that also includes the ex-Soviet Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

China has purchased billions of dollars worth of fighters, missiles, submarines and destroyers after the Soviet collapse, becoming the main customer for struggling Russian defense industries. Now it is eager to tap into Russian oil and gas to fuel its booming economy, and has lobbied hard for priority access over Japan to an oil pipeline carrying Siberian crude to Asian markets.

Bush is Killing America by
Claiming Failure as Proof of Success























The July 9th business section of the Chicago Tribune shows a large photo of a young, short-skirted woman trying out a software program on a laptop. All around her are sophisticated marketing booths for such hi-tech firms as Intel and Panasonic. Part of the photo caption reads: "Thousands of young visitors crowded the exhibition space eager to try out the newest offerings from local and international tech companies." Was this hi-tech bazaar in Silicon Valley? No, it was, according to the caption, "a technology show in Ho Chi Minh City." Recently, China expressed interest in purchasing Unocal gas company that, ironically, has figured strongly in the "deep background" story about "why the U.S. needed to control Afghanistan"(that is to say a trans-Afghan oil pipeline that Unocal was planning for years.) Indeed, the current president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, was a paid consultant to Unocal before the U.S. invasion.

Much of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's (who are still trying to make up for the "loss of face" and "emasculation of America" that occurred on their watch in the White House in the '70s) disgruntlement comes from the fact that the USA won the Vietnam War by leaving it. They are determined not to let the same transpire in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our two foes -- Vietnam and China (the latter nation which was a national enemy of Vietnam until we forced the former into the arms of the latter by taking on the Vietnam War to begin with) -- are now budding capitalist markets. In fact, China is now emerging as an economic powerhouse that may end up owning a good chunk of American free enterprise.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's public relations war on terror has been an unmitigated disaster. The Bush Administration isn't so much concerned about decreasing terrorism as it is about projecting an image of dominant power. The Bushies (a tradition inherited by their children and grandchildren, as well as pro-Iraq War Young Republicans who are "too busy" to sign up for military service) want to use the rallying cry of terrorism -- and the fear it invokes -- as the vehicle to reassert U.S. military and nuclear supremacy.

But it is an enigma that threatens our national security and our lives, because a war on terrorism requires intelligent and resilient strategy, not a nuclear "shock and awe" blunderbuss approach. A recent Newseek article quotes Michael Scheuer, the ex-CIA analyst [who headed the CIA’s bin Laden unit for nine years] as saying, "Rather than move toward solutions, the United States has taken a big step backward by invading Iraq." "We’re at the point where jihad is self-sustaining," where Islamic "holy warriors" in Iraq fight America with or without allegiance to al-Qaida’s bin Laden.

The cold statistics of a RAND Corp. database show the impact of the explosion of violence in Iraq: The 5,362 deaths from terrorism worldwide between March 2004 and March 2005 were almost double the total for the same 12-month period before the 2003 U.S. invasion. The Newsweek piece undercuts the most basic foundation of Bush's continued rule by deception; i.e., that he is a bold, resolute wartime leader: Scheuer sees a different way out -- through U.S. foreign policy. He said he resigned last November to expose the U.S. leadership’s "willful blindness" to what needs to be done: withdraw the U.S. military from the Mideast, end "unqualified support" for Israel, sever close ties to Arab oil-state "tyrannies."

He acknowledged such actions aren’t likely soon, but said his longtime subject bin Laden will "make us bleed enough to get our attention." Ultimately, he said, "his goal is to destroy the Arab monarchies." So why do so many Democratic leaders, such as John Kerry and Joe Biden, support Bush's basic approach, but quibble with some issues around the margin? Because by confirming that Bush is on the "right track," but that we need MORE troops, the Democratic leaders are also helping to make our nation less secure, because it is Bush's fundamental premise which is fatally flawed and killing us slowly, not the "fine points" of his strategy.

The debate is not about whether or not you are opposed to terrorism? Who ISN'T opposed to terrorism? But if the Democratic leadership basically agrees with Bush's archaic, inflexible and inept policies, they are enabling a disastrous approach because they don't have the ability to frame the issue as it should be framed: it's not a question of whether or not to fight terrorism; it's a question of HOW to fight terrorism effectively. If a coach is replaced after a losing season, no one accuses the owner of the team of enabling the cross town rivals. The change is being made to increase the odds of beating the other team. The Bushies have a way of turning logic on its hea⁤. Failure begets the need for more failure. The American people were promised that they'd be welcomed in Iraq with flowers. They were promised a war that would last six weeks. They were told that the mission was accomplished. They were promised a rose garden, but were left standing at the altar with a pile of corpses and a mountain of debt. How much incompetence and lying can a cowering lazy mainstream press tolerate and still appear credible? Not only does Karl Rove put every American at risk in his outing of Valerie Plame, but the mainstream media is complicit in tacitly parroting the Bush Administration's line of "your either with our failed policy or you are aiding the terrorists."

Bush used multiple successive reasons to justify the disastrous invasion of Iraq, including WMDs (that didn't exist), regime change, democratization and the latest crazed "flypaper" strategy. And that's just to name a few. As each one is proven flawed, Rove writes up a new excuse for Bush, and the press transcribes it for the masses. The ultimate fallback for the Bush Administration position (particularly championed in backroom whispers by Cheney and Rumsfeld) is that we have to stick it out in Iraq because otherwise we will appear to be weak and then we will really get creamed. Of course, this was their argument about the Vietnam War as they reluctantly presided over the evacuation of Saigon under President Ford. Then again, there's a biographical history at work here: this has been the pattern of George Bush's life. He fails, gets into a jam, and then expects everyone else to bail him out, which his father's friends did again and again in George's checkered business career. (Even with all the "assistance," he only really made big money when some of daddy's friends "rented" his name as GM of the Texas Rangers and used eminent domain to seize property adjacent to a new stadium, which allowed George to profit handsomely from a job that consisted largely of being a greeter and autograph signer at baseball games.) But if the strategy to "tough out" the Iraq blunder is based on the ludicrous presumption that there are a fixed number of terrorists, and, therefore, you can drain the swamp, than we are doomed. The reality, even according to some of Bush's intelligence officers, is that the Iraq war is motivating a new generation of terrorists. In short, Bush is in the business of creating terrorism through "the blunderbuss approach."

Despite Bush's firm belief that he is leading a religious Crusade, a University of Chicago professor has documented that suicide bombers, for example, are politically motivated, not religiously inspired for the most part. The strategic implications of such a finding are far reaching, but, most significantly, it means Bush is 180 degrees off course, and we -- the American and Iraqi people -- are paying the price. There are no finite number of terrorists that can be drawn to the "flypaper" of Iraq. Bush is regenerating terrorists daily with his "Ostrich" approach to national security. As that great political scientist Groucho Marx said: "This is so easy to get, a four year old could understand it....Hey run out and get me a four year old." It's our lives that are at stake. This is not about political maneuvering. It's about our lives being held in the hands of a grossly incompetent administration, filled with failed ideologues who believe they are enlightened masters of the universe.

BUSH
(spoken) Where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true. We call it - "history."

(sung) A man's called a traitor - or liberator
A rich man's a thief - or philanthropist
Is one a crusader - or ruthless invader?
It's all in which labelIs able to persist
There are precious few at ease
With moral ambiguities
So we act as though they don't exist

They call me "Wonderful"
So I am wonderful
In fact - it's so much who I am
It's part of my name
And with my help, all my rich friends can be the same
At long, long last receive your due
Long overdue
My friends - The most celebrated
Are the rehabilitated
There'll be such a - whoop-de-doo
A celebration throughout Oz
That's all to do - with Republican Rapture Right Wingers
Wonde⁲ful
They'll call me wonderful:

Where has all the money gone?
Ed Harriman follows the auditors into Iraq

US House of Representatives Government Reform Committee Minority Office
Link: http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/
US General Accountability Office
Link: http://www.gao.gov/
Defense Contract Audit Agency
Link: http://www.dcaa.mil/
International Advisory and Monitoring Board
Link: http://www.iamb.info/
Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General
Link: http://www.cpa-ig.com/
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction
Link: http://www.sigir.mil/

On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn’t pѲoperly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA’s inspector general, ‘there w⁡s an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.’ Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

The ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan. But there is a difference: the US government fuded the Marshall Plan whereas Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the ‘liberated’ country, by the Iraqis themselves. There was $6 billion left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and revenue from resumed oil exports (at least $10 billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA ‘in a transparent manner . . . for the benefit of the Iraqi people’. Congress, it’s true, voted to spend $18.4 billion of US taxpayers’ money on the redevelopment of Iraq. But by 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds.

The ‘financial irregularities’ described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated, handing out truckloads of dollars for which neither they nor the recipients felt any need to be accountable. The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it went. A further $3.4 billion earmarked by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance ‘security’.

That audit reports were commissioned at all owes a lot to Henry Waxman, a Democrat and ranking minority member of the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within six months of the invasion, Waxman’s committee had evidence that the Texas-based Halliburton corporation was being grossly overpaid by the American occupation authorities for the petrol it was importing into Iraq from Kuwait, at a profit of more than $150 million. Waxman and his assistants found that Halliburton was charging $2.64 a gallon for petrol for Iraqi civilians, while American forces were importing the same fuel for $1.57 a gallon.

Halliburton’s chairman, David Lesar, who took over from Dick Cheney in July 2000, robustly defended his firm. But Waxman raised another question: if Halliburton was being allowed to rip off the Iraqi people, was the Bush administration allowing it to milk the US government as well? Waxman’s committee instructed Congress’s General Accountability Office to look into Halliburton’s biggest contract in Iraq: providing virtually all back-up facilities – from meals to laundry soap – to American forces. LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Programme) contracts like this one are a product of the new ‘slimmed down’ American milѩtary, the quartermaster’s equivalent of Rumsfeld’s ‘invasion lite’. Rather than have uniformed troops peel potatoes and scrub floors, base support services have been privatised and contracted out so that, the idea goes, soldiers can get on with the fighting. The contracts are paid on a cost-plus basis, which allows the contractor to charge for what it has spent, then add on a profit. LOGCAP contracts have not been put out to tender, but rather awarded to a few US firms, the largest being Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root.

The GAO report of July 2004 found that in the first nine months of the occupation, KBR was allowed a free hand in Iraq: a free hand, for example, to bill the Pentagon without worrying about spending limits or management versight or paperwork. Millions of dollars’ worth of new equipment disappeared. KBR charged $73 million for motor caravans to house the 101st Airborne Division, twice as much as the army said it would cost to build barracks itself; KBR charged $88 million for three million meals for US troops that were never served. The GAO calculated that the army could have saved $31 million a year simply by doing business directly with the catering firms that KBR hired. In June 2004, the GAO continued, ‘by eliminating the use of LOGCAP and making the LOGCAP subcontractor the prime contractor, the command reduced meal costs by 43 per cent without a loss of service or quality.’

The GAO report makes clear that the Americans had given little thought as to how they might prevent looting and rebuild Iraqi society. They hadn’t even planned how they were going to provision the US forces staying on in Iraq: ‘the Army Central Command did not develop plans to use the [KBR] contract to support its military forces in Iraq until May 2003’ – a month after Saddam fell. Even then, this contract – with an estimated value of $3.894 billion – did not adequately provide for dining facilities, pest control, laundry services, morale, welfare and recreation, troop transportatiѯn or combat support services at the American bases hastily being built across Iraq. Stung by Waxman’s revelations about Halliburton’s petrol profiteering, and realising that KBR’s costs were spiralling out of control (LOGCAP costs in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan rose from a projected yearly total of $5.8 billion in September 2003 to $8.6 billion in January 2004), the army vice chief of staff ‘asked units to control costs and look for alternatives to the LOGCAP contract’. This was the first admission that the Pentagon could not afford the occupation on top of the war.

At the same time, the Pentagon’s own auditors, the Defense Contracts Audit Agency, went to Houston to have a look at KBR’s books. They were not happy with what they found:

Our examination disclosed several deficiencies in KBR’s billing system resulting in billings to the government that are not prepared in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and contract terms. We have also found system deficiencies resulting in material invoicing misstatements that are not prevented, detected and/or corrected in a timely manner.

They also found that ‘KBR also does not monitor the ongoing physical progress of subcontracts or the reated costs and billings.’ When the auditors asked to see the files of payments to subcontractors to back up the invoices KBR submitted to the government, there weren’t any: ‘We found no such documents included in KBR’s subcontract files, nor did we find any log of subcontractor payments.’ So how did KBR work out its monthly invoices to the government for its whopping $3.9 billion contract? ‘The explanation begins with the costs on a spreadsheet with no indication of where or how these costs are accumulated.’ The auditors also wanted to know what happened to the money the government had paid for those three million non-existent meals:

Despite repeated requests over two months, KBR has not been able to provide an adequate explanation or adequate documentation for the payments to any DFAC [dining-hall] subcontractors. The limited documentation that has been provided shows, for example, that KBR has added ‘overage’ factors of 10 to 35 per cent to each bill for one of the subcontractors. We still do not have an adequate explanation of the ‘overage’ factor.

KBR’s response has been to tough it out. The company wrote to the auditors saying that its position regarding the meals ‘had been misquoted as well as misinterpreted’. The auditors, the corporation said, knew full well that KBR had ‘established a Tiger Team that is actively researching and analysing the facts and circumstances surrounding each of its DFAC subcontracts’. ‘Tiger Teams’ are in-house investigative units. KBR’s Tiger Team stayed at the five-star Kuwait Kempinski Hotel, where its members ran up a bill of more than $1 million. This outraged the army, whose troops were sleeping in tents at a cost of $1.39 a day. The army asked the Tiger Team to move into tents. It refused. As to how the Tiger Team ‘actively researched and analysed the facts’, we have the sworn testimony that a KBR employee gave to Congressman Waxman’s committee: ‘The Tiger Team looked at subcontracts with no invoice and no confirmation that the products contracted for were being used. Instead of investigating further, they would recommend extending the subcontract.’

The Pentagon auditors asked to see ‘evidence that KBR’s internal audit department is functionally and organisationally independent and sufficiently removed from management to ensure that it can conduct audits objectively and can report its findings, opinions and conclusions without fear of reprisal.’ KBR locked them out of its audit department. The auditors then asked who did KBR’s audits. Halliburton, KBR wrote back. The Pentagon auditors said that from then on KBR would have to submit all bills to them ‘for provisional approval prior to submission for payment’. Tough talk. But, despite all the threats to withhold payment, and with several lawsuits pending, KBR and Halliburton have now been paid more than $10 billion for quartermastering US forces in Iraq.

One of KBR’s contracts was for transporting supplies between American bases. Fleets of new Mercedes Benz trucks, costing $85,000 each, travelled up and down Iraq’s central highways every day, accompanied by armed US military escorts. If there were no goods to transport, KBR dispatched empty lorries anyway, and billed accordingly. The lorries didn’t carry replacement air and oil filters, essential when driving in the desert. They didn’t even carry spare tyres. If one broke down, it was abandoned and destroyed so no one else could use it, and left burning by the roadside. For fear of ambush, KBR drivers were told not to slow down. ‘The truck in front of the one I was riding ran a car with an Iraqi family of four off the road,’ a KBR employee told Waxman’s committee. ‘My driver said that was normal.’

American profligacy with Iraqi money has been, if anything, even worse. According to the CPA’s own rules, the authority ‘was expected to manage Iraqi funds in a transparent manner that fully met the CPA’s obligations under international law including Security Council Resolution 1483’. Despite repeated efforts, however, it was only in October 2003, six months after the fall of Saddam, that an International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB), with representatiѶes from the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, was established to provide independent, international financial oversight of the CPA’s spending.

The IAMB then spent months trying to find auditors acceptable toРthe US. The Bahrain office of KPMG was finally appointed in April 2004. It was stonewalled. ‘KPMG has encountered resistance from CPA staff regarding the submission of information required to complete our procedures,’ they wrote in an interim report. ‘Staff have indicated . . . that co-oper⁡tion with KPMG’s undertakings is given a low priority.’ KPMG had one meeting at the Iraqi Ministry of Finance; meetings at all the other ministries were repeatedly postponed. The auditors even had trouble getting passes for the Green Zone.

There was a good reason for the Americans to stall. At the end of June 2004, the CPA would be disbanded and Bremer would leave Iraq. The Bush administration wasn’t going to allow independent auditors to be in a position to publish a report into the financial propriety of its Iraqi administration while Bremer was still answerable to the press. The report was published in July. The auditors found that the CPA hadn’t kept accounts for the hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in its vault, had awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to American firms without tender, and had no idea what was happening to the money from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) which was being spent by the interim Iraqi government ministries.

An Iraqi hospiѴal administrator told me that, as he was about to sign a contract, the American army officer representing the CPA had crossed out the original price and doubled it. The Iraqi protested that the original price was enough. The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1 million) was his retirement package. Iraqis who were close to the Americans, had access to the Green Zone, or held prominent posts in the new government ministries, were also in a position to benefit enormously. Iraqi businessmen complain endlessly that they had to offer substantial bribes to Iraqi middlemen just to be allowed to bid for CPA contracts. Iraqi ministers’ relatives got top jobs and fat contracts.

Hard evidence comes from a further series of audits and reports carried out by the office of the CPA’s own inspector general (CPA-IG). Set up in January 2004, it reported to Congress. Its auditors, accountants and criminal investigators often found themselves sitting alone at cafeteria tables in the Green Zone, shunned by their compatriots. Their audit, published in July 2004, found that the American contracts officers in the CPA and the Iraqi ministries ‘did not ensure that . . . contract files contained all the required documents, a fair and reasonable price was paid for the services received, contractors were capable of meeting delivery schedules, or that contractors were paid in accordance with contract requirements’.

Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11 million and $26 million worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work: $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for ‘personnel not in the field performing work’ and ‘other improper charges’ on a single oil pipeline repair contract. An Iraqi sports coach was paid $40,000 by the CPA. He gave it to a friend who gambled it away then wrote it off as a legitimate loss. ‘A complainant alleged that Iraqi Airlines was sold at a reduced price to an influential family with ties to the former regime. The investigation revealed that Iraqi Airlines was essentially dissolved, and there was no record of the transaction.’ Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPA-IG instigated related to alleged ‘theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion’. It also investigated ‘a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report’. At around this time, 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5 million, were found on a plane in Lebanon which had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister.
The IAMB, meanwhile, discovered that Iraqi oil exports were unmetered. Neither the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation nor the American authorities could give a satisfactory explanation for this. ‘The only reason you wouldn’t monitor them is if you don’t want anyone else to know how much is going through,’ one petroleum executive told me. Officially, Iraq exported oil worth $10 billion in the first year of the American occupation. Christian Aid has estimated that oil worth up to an additional $4 billion may also have been exported and is unaccounted for. If this is correct, it would have created an off the books slush fund that both the Americans and their Iraqi allies could use with impunity to cover expenditures they would rather keep secret – among them the occupation costs, which were rising far beyond what the BusѨ administration could comfortably admit to Congress and the international community.

America’s situation in Iraq took a turnРfor the worse in April 2004, with the uprisings in Najaf and Fallujah, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and mass defections from the new Iraqi security forces. ‘At the beginning of April,’ one of the audits says, ‘thѥ Iraqi National Guard force held steady at around 32,000 personnel. Between 9 and 16 April this number dropped to a low of 17,500.’ As for the police, ‘the Iraqi Ministry of Interior has decided to reduce the number of police officers to 89,000’ – from 120,000 – ‘by trimming from its rolls those who have proved to be unsuitable.’ At the same time, ‘recent attacks on the pipelines reduced exports in April to an average of 1.7 million barrels per day and 1.4 million barrels per day in May. The total could possibly be lower in June.’ That’s a million barrels per day fewer than under Saddam. Across Iraq, hospitals and schools were derelict, electricity was intermittent, and water supplies were polluted.

The American response to the militant insurgency and to the loss of their moral credentials at Abu Ghraib was a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign. Law-abiding Iraqis were to be shown respect and given buckets of money, while Bremer and the CPA prepared to hand over the management of Iraq to an interim government picked by the Americans. KBR’s lorry drivers were told not to run Iraqis off the road. And millions of dollars in cash – most of it Iraqi money – were handed out by American commanders in local communities across Iraq in an attempt to buy friends. ‘The Commanders’ Emergency Reconstruction Programme continues to be a very effective programme . . . which has built trust and support for the United States at grass roots level,’ the CPA-IG report said. ‘As of 19 June 2004, the local commanders have spent $364.6 million . . . on over 27,600 small projects . . . repairing and refurbishing water and sewer lines, cleaning up highways by removing waste and debris, transporting water to remote villages, purchasing equipment for local police stations, upgrading schools and clinics, purchasing school supplies, removing ordnance from public spaces . . .’ It was too little too late. With the concentration on big infrastructure projects and contracts for American corporate cronies and Iraqi businessmen ‘friends’, there had been little for ordinary Iraqis to benefit from or to take part in. Rumsfeld knew by the beginning of 2004 that his and Bremer’s management was in deep trouble. ‘Iraqis are puzzled; they truly don’t know what the US really intends for them. We haven’t communicated well. The “story” has not been believed,’ a Personnel Assessment Tea reported to Rumsfeld on 11 February 2004. ‘We have in essence a pick-up organisation in place to design and execute the most demanding transformation in recent history.’
Last September was the crucial month. By then the US government had spent $60 billion on the US forces in Iraq, and $1 billion on the Iraqi security forces. The Americans knew that they were widely hated. ‘In the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds . . . American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended’ was the principal finding of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board. The answer was a big rethink – a strategic spending review. The $18.4 billion Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund that Congress had voted to rebuild Iraq, and which Bremer had left largely untouched and possibly never intended to spend as mandated, would be spent on counter-insurgency warfare directed by US commanders and John Negroponte from the new US embassy in Baghdad.

First, $3 billion was diverted from the budgets to restore Iraq’s destroyed electricity supply, water supply and sewers to security and law enforcement. The reduced electricity budget (down from $5.6 billion to $4.4 billion) was to be spent patching up neighbourhoods flattened by American fire power, and electricity pylons and stations sabotaged by the insurgents. The electricity supply had become one of the war’s main battlegrounds. This meant fewer large contracts for American and international energy firms, which were further discouraged from staying in Iraq as their personnel were attacked and the price of private security soared. It also meant flickering lights and hours of power cuts for ordinary Iraqis. Yet development and reconstruction were officially deferred. Or, as the auditors put it, ‘this redistribution of funds . . . appears to be generally consistent with the stated management objective of de-emphasising longer-term development projects as funds are shifted toward more immediately realisable goals.’

‘The country’s widely failing sewage management infrastructure and the sporadic availability of potable water,’ the auditors wrote, ‘continue to pose health threats and tarnish overall impressions of reconstruction achievements.’ Yet the water and sanitation budget was cut almost in half, as long-term development was again handed over to the Iraqi government so US funds could be doled out to Iraqis in neighbourhoods where the insurgents held sway and it was now unsafe for foreigners to go. ‘Initial plans to rehabilitate large portions of the country’s water and wastewater system through the IRRF have been curtailed,’ the auditors wrote. ‘Water resources and sanitation sector funds have been reallocated to security, governance, debt relief and efforts to boost Iraqi employment opportunities . . . creating local water and wastewater projects to stimulate Iraqi employment and deliver needed services to high-risk areas.’

The budget for employing Iraqis rose by more than 350 per cent, to be spent largely on ‘local projects that will visibly impact Iraqi communities before the 30 January 2005 national election’. At the same time, ‘the construction sector saw the withdrawal of the prime design-and-build road contractor from Iraq, reportedly because of concern for personnel and site security.’ The insurgents had forced a fundamental reshaping of US spending priorities, further widened the no man’s land between themselves and US troops, polarising Iraq, and assuming the initiative in the war.

None of this has changed. In December 2004, the US Mission in Iraq allotted an extra $457 million to keep the electricity working and ‘to boost short-term employment through health, electricity and water initiatives in Najaf, Samarra, Sadr City and Fallujah. Together,’ the auditors reported, ‘the two adjustments reflect a significant change in US spending priorities.’
In March this year, a further $832 million ‘was reprogrammed for management initiatives’, largely ‘for operations and maintenance at varioѵs power and water plants, urgent work in the electrical and oil sectors’ to repair sabotage damage, and to pay for building contracts on which it had become extremely dangerous and expensive to work. The most recent audit, issued in April, reports that projects are running between 50 and 85 per cent above the original estimated costs. The free-spending days are over. Americans are having to divert increasing amounts of US development money just to keep what remains of Iraq’s damaged public utilities working, and to finance the Iraqi police and army.

Six months into the occupation, in autumn 2003, the Americans planned to transfer security to the Iraqi police and army so they could ‘draw down US forces from Iraq’. The goal was to have 250,000 Iraqis inРthe security forces by the following summer. However, as a GAO report submitted to Congress in March this year explains, most of the recruits were neither vetted nor properly trained. The result has been that the ‘Ministry of Interior’s security forces committed numerous serious human rights abuses’; the Iraqi police and army have been easily infiltrated by former Ba’athists and other insurgents; and morale is low.
As the GAO put it, police and military units performed poorly during an escalation of insurgent attacks against the Coalition in April 2004 . . . Many Iraqi security forces around the country collapsed during this uprising . . . units abandoned their posts and responsibilities and in some cases assisted the insurgency . . . Police manning a checkpoint in one area were reporting convoy movements by mobile telephone to local terrorists. Police in another area were infiltrated by former regime elements.
‘In response to the unwillingness of a regular army battalion to fight Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah’, the Americans created a special Iraqi Intervention Force. Then last autumn they decided to beef up the Iraqi police service from 90,000 to 135,000, to add 20 battalions to the Iraqi National Guard and double the border guard. This February, the State Department glowingly reported that almost 82,000 Iraqi police and 60,000 troops had been trained.

These figures are grossly misleading. According to the GAO’s March report to Congress ‘the reported number of Iraqi police is unreliable because the Minister of the Interior does not receive consistent and accurate reporting from the police forces around the country. The data does not exclude police absent from duty.’ As for the army, ‘Ministry of Defense reports exclude the absent military personnel from its totals. According to DOD officials, the number of absentees is probably in the tens of thousands.’ Furthermore the State Department no longer reports on whether Iraqi security forces have the required weapons, vehicles, communication equipment and body armour. Bluntly, ‘US government agencies do not report reliable data on the extent to which Iraqi security forces are trained and equipped.’ The GAO further found that the Iraqi police are being trained for ‘community policing in a permissive security environment’ rather than getting ‘paramilitary training for a high-threat hostile environment’. It’s hardly surprising that close to 2000 Iraqi police have been killed.

This is all horribly reminiscent of American policy in Vietnam. American troops are staying in Iraq to stiffen Iraqi forces who are dying in droves in an escalating counter-insurgency war that neither the Americans nor the Iraqi forces are prepared for. The Americans originally allocated $5.8 billion to build the Iraqi security forces. In February this year, George Bush asked Congress for another $5.7 billion to go towards this task.

What’s happened to the rebuilding of Iraqi society, and real governance based on transparency and accountability? In the few weeks before Bremer left Iraq, the CPA handed out more than $3 billion in new contracts to be paid for with Iraqi funds and managed by the US embassy in Baghdad. The CPA inspector general, now called the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has just released an audit report on the way the embassy has dealt with that responsibility. The auditors reviewed the files of 225 contracts totalling $327 million to see if the embassy ‘could identify the current value of paid and unpaid contract obligations’. It couldn’t. ‘Our review showed that financial records . . . understated payments made by $108,255,875’ and ‘overstated unpaid obligations by $119,361,286’. The auditors also reviewed the paperwork for a further 300 contracts worth $332.9 million. ‘For 198 of 300 contracts, documentation was not available . . . to indicate that contract execution was monitored for performance and payment . . . Files did not contain evidence that goods and services had been received for 154 contracts, that invoices had been submitted for 169 contracts, or that payments had been made for 144 contracts.’

Clearly the Americans see no need to account for spending the Iraqis’ national income now any more than they did when Bremer was in charge. Neither the embassy chief of mission nor the US military commander replied to the auditors’ invitation to comment. Instead, the US army contracting commander lamely pointed out that ‘the peaceful conditions envisioned in the early planning continue to elude the reconstruction efforts.’ This is a remarkable understatement. It’s also an adm⁩ssion that Americans can’t be expected to do their sums when they are spending other people’s money to finance a war.

Not only the Americans are guilty of a lack of accountability. In January this year, the SIGIR issued a report detailing evidence of fraud, corruption and waste by the Iraqi Interim Government when Bremer was in charge. They found that $8.8 billion – the entire Iraqi Interim Government spending from October 2003 through June 2004 – was not properly accounted for. The Iraqi Office of Budget and Management at one point had only six staff, all of them inexperienced, and few of the ministries had budget departments. Iraq’s newly appointed ministers and their senior officials were free to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash as they pleased, while American ‘advisers’ looked on. ‘CPA personnel did not review and compare fiancial, budgetary and operational performance to planned or expected results,’ the auditors explained. One ministry gave out $430 million in contracts without its CPA advisers seeing any of the paperwork. Another claimed to be paying 8206 guards, but only 602 could be accounted for. There is simply no way of knowing how much of the $8.8 billion went to pay for private militias and into private pockets.

‘It’s remarkable that the inspector general’s office could have produced even a draft report with so many misconceptions and inaccuracies,’ Bremer said in his reply to the SIGIR report. ‘At Liberation, the Iraqi economy was dead in the water. So CPA’s top priority was to get the economy going.’ The SIGIR responded by releasing another audit this April, an investigation into the way Bremer’s CPA managed cash payments from the Development Fund for Iraq in just one part of Iraq, the region around Hillah: ‘During the course of the audit, we identified deficiencies in the control of cash . . . of such magnitude as to require prompt attention. Those deficiencies were so significant that we were precluded from accomplishing our stated objectives.’ They found that CPA headquarters in Baghdad ‘did not maintain full control and accountability for approximately $119.9 million’, and that agents in the field ‘cannot properly account for or support over $96.6 million in cash and receipts’. These agents were mostly Americans in Iraq on short-term contracts. One agent’s account balance was ‘overstated by $2,825,755, and the error went undetected’. Another agent was given $25 million cash for which Bremer’s office ‘acknowledged not having any supporting documentation’. Of more than $23 million given to another agent, there are only records for $6,306,836 paid to contractors. Many of the American agents submitted their paperwork hours before they headed to the airport. Two left Iraq without accounting for $750,000 each; the money has never been found. CPA head office cleared several agents’ balances of between $250,000 and $12 millionРwithout any receipts. One agent who did submit receipts, on being told that he still owed $1,878,870, turned up three days later with exactly that amount. The auditors thought that ‘this suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash,’ pointing out that if his original figures had been correct, he would have accounted to the CPA for approximately $3.8 million more than he had been given in the first place, which ‘suggests that the receipt documents provided to the DFI account manager were unreliable’.

Staff at the CPA head office in Baghdad usually worked 12 hours a da⁹, seven days a week, often on three-month postings. They didn’t trust the computer network so many of them put their records on USB sticks and in private computer files that couldn’t be opened by their replacements. At one point there was only one officer at the CPA account manager’s office clearing all the paying agents throughout Iraq. Paying agents in the field often couldn’t get – let alone be bothered with – the paperwork, which was frustrating for the honest ones and a boon to their crooked colleagues. So where did the money go? You can’t see it in Hillah. The schools, hospitals, water supply and electricity, all of which were supposed to benefit from this money, are in ruins. The inescapable conclusion is that many of the American paying agents grabbed large bundles of cash for themselves and made sweet deals with their Iraqi contacts.

And so it continues. The IAMB’s most recent audit of Iraqi government spending, which is yet to be published, talks of ‘incomplete acco⁵nting’, ‘lack of documented justification for limited competition for contracts at the Iraqi ministries’, ‘possible misappropriation of oil revenues’, ‘significant difficulties in ensuring completeness and accuracy of Iraqi budgets and controls over expenditures’, and ‘non-deposit of proceeds of ex⁰oѲt sales of petroleum products into the appropriate accounts in contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1483’.

Bremer re-established the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit a month before he left Baghdad. It is now said to have more than a thousand auditors and support personnel spread throughout Iraqi government ministries. A new Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, the equivalent of the FBI, is said to have 200 staff and 15 US advisers. Yet according to the latest American figures, of more than 3400 complaints, only about one in 50 has been passed to the Commission on Public Integrity for possible prosecution.

There is an explanation for this lack of activity. On Thursday, 1 July 2004, two days after Bremer left Baghdad, Ehsan Karim, the new head of the Board of Supreme Audit, was killed by a bomb as he left the Finance Ministry. Two weeks later, Sabir Karim (no relation) was murdered in a drive-by shooting as he set off for work at the Ministry of Industry, where he was in charge of investigating corruption. A few weeks ago, another senior official investiga⁴ing corruption was murdered. The IAMB keeps the names of its Iraqi delegates secret to keep them alive.

In the absence of anyРmeaningful accountability, Iraqis have no way of knowing how much of the nation’s wealth is being handed out to ministers’ and civil servants’ friends and families or funnelled into secret overseas bank accounts. Given that many Ba’athists are now back in government, some of that money may even be financing the insurgents.

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it
is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
-Arthur Schopenhauer-, Philosopher, 1788-1860

Rove Diversionary Attack on America:

"Disapproval of Bush at high point." Karl's Got to "Unite America Behind the Commander in Chief" to Get Bush Out of the Polling Gutter, to institute the Draft, to find an excuse to invѡde Iran!
So It's Time for "An Enemy" to Threaten Our National Security. Right, Karl?

Poll: Disapproval of Bush at high point
President's best marks on terrorism, worst on Social Security
Tuesday, June 28, 2005 Posted: 1848 GMT

The number of Americans disapproving of President Bush's job performance has risen to the highest level of his presidency, according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll

According to the poll, 53 percent of respondents said they disapproved of Bush's performance, compared to 45 percent who approved. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage po⁩nts. The 53 percent figure was the highest disapproval rating recorded in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll since Bush became president in January 2001.

The approval percentage -- 45 percent -- matches a low point set in late March. The 8-point gap between those who disapproved and approved was the largest recorded during Bush's tenure. As Bush prepares to address the nation Tuesday to defend his Iraq policy, just 40 percent of those responding to the poll said they approved of his handling of the war; 58 percent said they disapproved. (Full story)

The approval rating on Iraq was unchanged from a poll in late May, and the disapproval figure marked an increase of 2 percentage points.But the poll also found that issues other than the Iraq war may be dragging down Bush's numbers.Respondents expressed even stronger disapproval of his handling of the economy, energy policy, health care and Social Security.The lone bright spot for the president in the poll was his handling of terrorism, which scored a 55 percent approval rating, compared to just 41 percent who disapproved.The president's worst numbers in the latest poll came on the issue of Social Security, with respondents disapproving of his performance by a margin of more than 2-to-1 -- 64 percent to 31 percent.

Bush has made changing the Social Security system a signature issue of his second term.
He has proposed creating voluntary government-sponsored personal retirement accounts for workers 55 and younger. Under his proposal, workers could invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in a range of government-selected funds in exchange for lower guaranteed benefits at retirement.
The plan has run into stiff opposition from Democrats, who say the accounts are too risky and will undermine the Social Security system. Some Republicans also are wary of taking on such a politically risky idea.

On the economy, only 41 percent of poll respondents said they approved of Bush's performance, compared to 55 percent who disapproved. On energy policy, only 36 percent approved, while 53 percent disapproved; and on health care, 34 percent approved and 59 percent disapproved. The poll results were based on interviews from Friday to Sunday with 1,009 American adults.

What happens when ideals about identity, freedom,
and responsibility are given a chance to grow?

V for Vendetta is a dystopian film about a fascist government that has taken
over Britain after the fallout of a third world war. From the ashes emerges a
mysterious cloaked figure, known only as V, who single handedly takes them on.

BUSH'S IMPEACHABLE OFFENCES

1) The now famous Downing Street Memo, along with the testimony of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil constitute dirѥct evidence of a decision by Bush to invade a sovereign foreign nation on entirely specious grounds.

2) The decision to deploy chemical weapons in Fallujah came from Rumsfeld who no doubt covered his ass by receiving assent from Bush to use these banned weapons

3) The decision by Bush to dig up dirt on UN diplomats when the General Assembly was considering his ill-fated war resolution

4) Authorizing torture of POW's - a direct violation of the protocols of the Geneva Convention

5) Holding so called "non-combatant civilians" for an indefinite period of time ,depriving them of their day in court ,acess to counsel, and acess to family members who could plead their cause to the public.

6) Kidnapping so called "terror suspects" , placing them on Rendition Airways, and sending them to countries like Uzbekistan who boil these ,untried,unconvicted people alive.

7) foreknowledge of 9/11 by Bush, Rice, and the top Neocons at the Pentagon . The only ones warned were Fmr. SF. Mayor Willie Brown, Salman Rushdie (Via Scotland Yard) and Ariel Sharon, who cancelled his trip to NYC scheduled for the weekend prior to 9/11.

8) Engaging in a massive voter suppression campaign in the state of Ohio to secure a second term by fraudulent means. Such activities carry criminal sanctions as outlined in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

9) Covering up the involvement of Mossad in 9/11. The fellow that secreted these spies and explosives experts out of country and back into Israel , Michael Chertoff, was promoted from Criminal Division of the Justice Dept to lead the Dept. of Homeland Security.!

10) The attempt to quash the testimony of Sibel Edmonds using the bogus shield of the States Secret Act.

11) Engaging in a sytematic campaign of depriving political dissidents of their 1st ammendment rights to condem Bush administration policy. Protesters are removed out of crowds and summarily placed in jail. The Secret Service, under orders of the President, conduct "Harassment aѮd intimidation Interviews" of anti -Bush political activists.

12) Conspiring with Ken Lay to rip-off the the people of California by creating false energy shortages,thus creating the causus belli for charging energy consumers illegal, confiscatory rates.

13) Conspiring to rig the vote count in the state of Fl. by hacking optical scan machines and E-voting machines and covering up the latter by passing legislation in the state of Fl to prevent post-election examination of E-voting machines.

14) Illegally transferring $700 million from the budget for the war in Afghanistan for war preparations in Iraq in July 2002, without Congressional Approval. This is a Constitutional violation.

15) The "outing" of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Clearly an impeachment inquiry by the US House Judiciary Committeee is an action clearly overdue. Some of the allegations are violations of international law. They fall under the impeachment clause as well . An additional action of filing criminal referral to the UN War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague is also an absolute must if "Uncle Sam" wants to regain the respect of its citizens and the rest of the world.


Why George Went To War

By Russ Baker
June 20, 2005

The Downing Street memos have brought into focus an essential question: on what basis did President George W. Bush decide to invade Iraq? The memos are a government-level confirmation of what has been long believed by so many: that the administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq and was simply looking for justification, valid or not.

Despite such mounting evidence, Bush resolutely maintains total denial. In fact, when a British reporter asked the president recently about the Downing Street documents, Bush painted himself as a reluctant warrior. "Both of us didn't want to use our military," he said, answering for himself and British Prime Minister Blair. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."
Yet there's evidence that Bush not only deliberately relied on false intelligence to justify an attack, but that he would have willingly used any excuse at all to invade Iraq. And that he was obsessed with the notion well before 9/11—indeed, even before he became president in early 2001.
In interviews I conducted last fall, a well-known journalist, biographer and Bush family friend who worked for a time with Bush on a ghostwritten memoir said that an Iraq war was always on Bush's brain.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said, 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He went on, 'If I have a chance to invade…, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.'

Bush apparently accepted a view that Herskowitz, with his long experience of writing books with top Republicans, says was a common sentiment: that no president could be considered truly successful without one military "win" under his belt. Leading Republicans had long been enthralled by the effect of the minuscule Falklands War on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's popularity, and ridiculed Democrats such as Jimmy Carter who were reluctant to use American force. Indeed, both Reagan and Bush's father successfully prosecuted limited invasions (Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War) without miring the United States in endless conflicts.

Herskowitz's revelations illuminate Bush's personal motivation for invading Iraq and, more importantly, his general inclination to use war to advance his domestic political ends. Furthermore, they establish that this thinking predated 9/11, predated his election to the presidency and predated his appointment of leading neoconservatives who had their own, separate, more complex geopolitical rationale for supporting an invasion.

Conversations With Bush The Candidate
Herskowitz—a longtime Houston newspaper columnist—has ghostwritten or co-authored autobiographies of a broad spectrum of famous people, including Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, Mickey Mantle, Dan Rather and Nixon cabinet secretary John B. Connally. Bush's 1999 comments to Herskowitz were made over the course of as many as 20 sessions together. Eventually, campaign staffers—expressing concern about things Bush had told the author that were included in the manuscript—pulled the project, and Bush campaign officials came to Herskowitz's house and took his original tapes and notes. Bush communications director Karen Hughes then assumed responsibility for the project, which was published in highly sanitized form as

A Charge to Keep.
The revelations about Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged during two taped sessions I held with Herskowitz. These conversations covered a variety of matters, including the journalist's continued closeness with the Bush family and fondness for Bush Senior—who clearly trusted Herskowitz enough to arrange for him to pen a subsequent authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published in 2003.

I conducted those interviews last fall and published an article based on them during the final heated days of the 2004 campaign. Herskowitz's taped insights were verified to the satisfaction of editors at the Houston Chronicle, yet the story failed to gain broad mainstream coverage, primarily becauseРnews organization executives expressed concern about introducing such potent news so close to the election. Editors told me they worried about a huge backlash from the White House and charges of an "October Surprise."

Debating The Timeline For War
But today, as public doubts over the Iraq invasion grow, and with the Downing Street papers adding substance to those doubts, the Herskowitz interviews assume singular importance by providing profound insight into what motivated Bush—personally—in the days and weeks following 9/11. Those interviews introduce us to a George W. Bush, who, until 9/11, had no means for becoming "a great president"—because he had no easy path to war. Once handed the national tragedy of 9/11, Bush realized that the Afghanistan campaign and the covert war against terrorist organizations would not satisfy his ambitions for greatness. Thus, Bush shifted focus from Al Qaeda, perpetrator of the attacks on New York and Washington. Instead, he concentrated on ensuring his place in American history by going after a globally reviled and easily targeted state run by a ruthless dictator.

The Herskowitz interviews add an important dimension to our understanding of thѩs presidency, especially in combination with further evidence that Bush's focus on Iraq was motivated by something other than credible intelligence. In their published accounts of the period between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion, former White House Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke and journalist Bob Woodward both describe a president single-mindedly obsessed with Iraq. The first anecdote takes place the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, in the Situation Room of the White House. The witness is Richard Clarke, and the situation is captured in his book, Against All Enemies.

On September 12th, I left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room, was the President. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. "Look," he told us, "I know you have a lot to do and all…but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way…"

I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this."
"I know, I know, but…see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred…" …
"Look into Iraq, Saddam," the President said testily and left us. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty stared after him with her mouth hanging open.

Similarly, Bob Woodward, in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview about his book, Bush At War, captures a moment, on November 21, 2001, where the president expresses an acute sense of urgency that it is time to secretly plan the war with Iraq. Again, we know there was nothing in the way of credible intelligence to precipitate the president's actions.

Woodward: "President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.'"

Wallace (voiceover): Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam—and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.

Woodward: "Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the necessary preparations in Kuwait specifically to make war possible."

Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, "a great president." Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush's decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.

Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.

U.S. War Plans Much-Discussed in Memos

LONDON (AP) - President Bush's government has been accused of exaggerating the risks of Saddam Hussein's weapons and Iraq's ties to al-Qaida before the war to justify the invasion. That's one reason the most quoted section of the eight secret Downing Street memos that have been leaked to the British and American media are the minutes of a meeting that Prime Minister Tony Blair held with his top officials on July 23, 2002. During it, Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, discussed his recent visit to Washington.

"There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable," said Dearlove, who's identified as "C" in the secret minutes of the meeting. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." "The NSC had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." The NSC is the U.S. National Security Council, which advises the president.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he would discuss the timing of a possible war with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. "It seemed ѣlear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing has not yet decided," the minutes said. "But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

Memos Show British Fretting Over Iraq War

By THOMAS WAGNER

LONDON (AP) - When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.

President Bush wanted Blair's support, but British officials worried the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.

In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear aѮd compelling military reason for war.
"U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo. "For Iraq, 'regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."

The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but also indicate he was determined to go to war as America's top ally, even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack may be illegal under international law.

"The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002 memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

"But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up."

Details from Rice's dinner conversation also are included in one of the secret memos from 2002, which reveal British concerns about both the invasion and poor postwar planning by the Bush administration, which critics say has allowed the Iraqi insurgency to rage.

The eight memos - all labeled "secret" or "confidential" - were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.
Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.

The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.

The Sunday Times this week reported that lawyers told the British government that U.S. and British bombing of Iraq in the moѮths before the war was illegal under international law. That report, also by Smith, noted that almost a year before the war started, they began to strike more frequently.

The newspaper quoted Lord Goodhart, vice president of the International Commission of Jurists, as backing the Foreign Office lawyers' view that aircraft could only patrol the no-fly zones to deter attacks by Saddam's forces.
Goodhart said that if "the purpose was to soften up Iraq for a future invasion or even to intimidate Iraq, the coalition forces were acting without lawful author⁩ty," the Sunday Times reported.

The eight documents reported earlier total 36 pages and range from 10-page and eight-page studies on military and legal options in Iraq, to brief memorandums from British officials and the minutes of a private meeting held by Blair and his top advisers.

Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert who teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London, said the documents confirmed what post-invasion investigations have found. "The documents show what official inquiries in Britain already have, that the case of weapons of mass destruction was based on thin intelligence and was used to inflate the evidence to the level of mendacity," Dodge said. "In going to war with Bush, Blair defended the special relationship between the two countries, like other British leaders have. But he knew he was taking a huge political risk at home. He knew the war's legality was questionable and its unpopularity was never in doubt."

Dodge said the memos also show Blair was aware of the postwar instability that was likely among Iraq's complex mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds once Saddam was defeated. The British documents confirm, as well, that "soon after 9/11 happened, the starting gun was fired for the invasion of Iraq," Dodge said. Speculation about if an⁤ when that would happen ran throughout 2002.

On Jan. 29, Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea "an axis of evil." U.S. newspapers began reporting soon afterward that a U.S.-led war with Iraq was possible. On Oct. 16, the U.S. Congrews voted to authorize Bush to go to war against Iraq. On Feb. 5, 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented the Bush administration's case about Iraq's weapons to the U.N. Security Council. On March 19-20, the U.S.-led invasion began.

Bush and Blair both have been criticized at home since their WMD claims about Iraq proved false. But both have been re-elected, defending the conflict for r⁥moving a brutal dictator and promoting democracy in Iraq. Both administrations have dismissed the memos as old news. Details of the memos appeared in papers early last month but the news in Britain quickly turned to the election that returned Blair to power. In the United States, however, details of the memos' contents reignited a firestorm, especially among Democratic critics of Bush.
It was in a March 14, 2002, memo that Blair's chief foreign policy adviser, David Manning, told the prime minister about the dinner he had just had with Rice in Washington.

"We spent a long time at dinner on Iraq," wrote Manning, who's now British ambassador to the United States. Rice is now Bush's secretary of state. "It is clear that Bush is grateful for your (Blair's) support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States. And you would not budge either in your insistence that, if we pursued regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the right result. Failure was not an option."

Manning said, "Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed." But he also said there were signs of greater awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks. Blair was to meet with Bus⁨ at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on April 8, and Manning told his boss: "No doubt we need to keep a sense of perspective. But my talks with Condi convinced me that Bush wants to hear your views on Iraq before taking decisions. He also wants your support. He is still smarting from the comments by other European leaders on his Iraq policy."

A July 21 briefing paper given to officials preparing for a July 23 meeting with Blair says officials must "ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks." "In particular we neeѤ to be sure that the outcome of the military action would match our objective... A postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point."

The British worried that, "Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden. Further work is required to define more precisely the means by which the desired end state would be created, in particular what form of government might replace Saddam Hussein's regime and the time scale within which it would be possible to identify a successor."

In the March 22 memo from Foreign Office political director Ricketts to Foreign Secretary Straw, Ricketts outlined how to win public and parliamentary support for a war in Britain: "We have to be convincing that: the threat is so serious/imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die for; it is qualitatively different from the threat posed by other proliferators who are closer to achieving nuclear capability (including Iran)."
Blair's government haѳ been criticized for releasing an intelligence dossier on Iraq before the war that warned Saddam could launch chemical or biological weapons on 45 minutes' notice.

On March 25 Straw wrote a memo to Blair, saying he would have a tough time convincing the governing Labour Party that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq was legal under international law.
"If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the U.S. would now be considering military action against Iraq," Straw wrote. "In addition, there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with OBL (Osama bin Laden) and al-Qaida."
He†also questioned stability in a post-Saddam Iraq: "We have also to answer the big question - what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything."

Nail It to the
White House Door

By William Riverѳ Pitt

Almost five hundred years ago, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church, initiating a sequence of events which forever altered the geometry of global religion, politics and power. Luther's Theses began with the words, "Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg."

Another document is going to be nailed to another door on Thursday, June 16th. This door opens not to a church, but to the White House. This document is freighted with hard truths, stern demands and nearly a million names. This document, once nailed up, likewise carries with it all the possibilities of change.

Very slowly, and after an embarrassing gap of silence from the news media, the American people have come to hear about the Downing Street Minutes. This document, once confidential but leaked by a British version of Deep Throat, describes in plain language the manner in which the Bush and Blair administrations planned to manipulate their way into an invasion of Iraq. The Minutes describe how intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of invasion, and that a pretense for war had to be manufactured in order to paint a veneer of legitimacy over what everyone involved knew was a patently illegal military action.

Subsequent secret documents have followed the release of the Downing Street Minutes, further exposing the lies, distortions and moral convolutions put forth by the offices of Bush and Blair in their rush to war. According to these documents, which have been verified as genuine by the British government, the decision to invade Iraq was made as early as April 2002, months before anyone in America or Britain became aware that such an act was even being considered.

This April 2002 decision was made between Bush and Blair at a summit in Crawford, Texas. The fact that the decision to invade had been made so early shatters all the mealy-mouѴhed protestations of Bush and his people, who spent those months before the attack preaching peace and international cooperation while sharpening their knives behind closed doors.

One document, a briefing paper partnered with the Downing Street Minutes, states bluntly that British officials knew an invasion would be illegal, but had no choice but to figure out a way to frame it as legal, because Bush was going into Iraq no matter what and would use British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia to do so. This would make Britain complicit in the invasion even if they decided not to send troops, and so it was "necessary to create the conditions" which would make it legal.

How does one go about creating the conditions for legality? By framing facts and intelligence around the policy, of course. The word "Lie" does not appear in any of the released documents, but the need to lie, the decision to lie, in order to justify war permeates every word.

This document also exposes the Bush administration's rhetorical nonsense about "supporting the troops" by describing how their war plans did anything but. In a section of this briefing paper titled "Benefits/Risks," the authors wrote, "Even with a legal base and a viable military plan, we would still need to ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks. A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point."

Virtually silent. 1,706 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq thanks to the virtual silence of the Bush administration, for a total of 1,891 "Coalition" soldiers dead. Multiply that number by at least ten to count the wounded and maimed. Twenty-five American soldiers have been killed in the last week alone. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed and wounded, and the car bombs continue to explode on a daily basis.

The decision to make war at all costs, the decision to lie about the reasons for going to war, the massive trans-Atlantic effort to make an illegal act appear legal, and the astounding fact that more effort went into manufacturing a political pretext for invasion than went into planning for the invasion and aftermath, all of this led us into the horror-show that is this occupation.

The American military has all but conceded the fact that this war is lost. "I think the more accurate way to approach this right now is to concede that this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations," Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, chief American military spokesman in Iraq, said last week. "It's going to be settled in the political process." There are no more viable military options. The war is lost. It is going to be settled in the political process. So be it.

On Thursday, June 16th, Rep. John Conyers will hold a hearing to investigate and expose the facts revealed by the release of the Downing Street Minutes and the other documents. A variety of witnesses will be called to describe the contents of these documents, and to describe what has been done to Iraq, and to us all, by this administration. Lurking in the corners of the hearing will be a phrase - "High Crime" - that aptly describes what has taken place.

The Conyers hearing will be held on Thursday at 2:30pm EST in room HC-9 in the Capitol Building in Washington DC. This is a small room, so any overflow of public viewers will be directed to the Wasserman Room in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

At 5:00pm EST, a rally will take place in Lafayette Park, at the gates of the White House. Rep. Conyers will speak, along with Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in Iraq in April 2003, as Bush was unfurling his "Mission Accomplished" banner. The hearing and rally have been organized by the After Downing Street coalition, a collection of more than 120 organizations and news outlets that came together for the purpose of nailing the facts of the Downing Street Minutes to the White House door.

That, just before the opening of the rally on Thursday, is exactly what will happen. Several weeks ago, Rep. Conyers published a letter demanding answers from the Bush administration regarding the Minutes. That letter has been signed by more than one hundred Congresspeople, and by nearly a million American citizens. Rep. Conyers will personally deliver this letter and all those signatures to the White House on Thursday.

Jawaharlal Nehru, who with Mahatma Gandhi successfully freed India from British colonial rule, once said, "A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the sound of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance."

Thursday, June 16th, may see such a moment come to pass. It has been a long time coming, and so much remains to be done if the terrible damage of these last years is to be repaired. But a moment is before us. Let us see where this moment takes us.


Christ Inc.
Faith-Based Fascism

by Leilla Matsui and Stella La

When a triumphal George W. Bush declared his intention to cash in on his “political capital” in the days after the election, he was merely reaffirming his commitment to hand over the reins of power to a higher authority than even Dick Cheney. The religious right, with its enormous political stake in the “End Times” outcome of America's latest Imperial misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, have seized upon Bush's continued pledge to transform the “Homeland” into a locked down religious theme park with the organizational zeal they had previously reserved for bilking gullible parishioners out of their social security checks.

Like Halliburton, Christ Inc. has become the latest recipient of taxpayer largesse, having won the contract to keep the media out of the newsРbusiness, and to ensure that power speaks to truth, as opposed to the other way around. Purging the “news” of news is just the latest attempt by religious Brownshirts to stamp their poisonous insignia on every major institution that they don't control lock, stock and barrel.

In recent months the escalating violence in Iraq and mounting evidence of US-run torture chambers has been dutifully ignored by the Christian News Network, a.k.a. “The Missing White Girl Network” who never miss an opportunity, these days, to provide their theo-con masters with a platform to discredit the administration's naysayers and whistleblowers. Instead, news consumers get trumped up coverage of sensational celebrity trials, “heartwarming” tales of rescue and survival (always thanks to Jesus) and “special reports” revolving around the heroic law enforcement figures as they “secure our borders,” track down “terrorists”, and sniff out the latest Caucasian corpse du jour. The message has become implicitly clear: resistance is useless against an increasingly paranoid and authoritarian state apparatus that has its finger on the trigger, ready to blow away even unruly toddlers.

The endless parade of Christian pundits and security analysts on CNN these days is more than an attempt by the beleaguered cable giant to do one better than rival news corps in “outfoxing” the competition. Not content with FOX's spectacular success as the profit-driven propaganda arm of the US government, the religious right has set out to erase the distinction between the pulpit and the news desk across the media spectrum (never a wide one in the first place) -- a feat they have managed to pull off with the cooperation of the nervous corporate elites.


The New York Times’ recent pledge to “improve” its coverage of topics relating to rural and Heartland American “values” is just another example of dunce-capped elites publicly denouncing themselves in a desperate, last ditch attempt to make nice-nice with the revolutionary zealots ransacking their offices. Similarly, the sacrificial offering of petty plagiarist Jayson Blair wasn't enough to please the “sore winners” of the right, who won't settle for anything less than unfettered control of the medium right down to the wire. Dan Rather's roasting of chickenhawk George Bush's National Guard service merely stoked the theo-con appetite for complete destruction at the personal and political level, and gave them what amounted to a green light to flatten, by any means necessary, every pocket of potential resistance in their path.

Obviously, the suppression of media-based dissent entails the purging if not complete destruction of PBS, and along with it, any remaining standard of integrity remaining in the television and radio broadcast industry. After being forced into resignation by a Bush administration ally who chairs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the indomitable Bill Moyers remarked: We're seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and puni⁳h journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable...One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

fabricated “evidence” of Saddam Hussein's imaginary weapons program would have forced the regime to come up with more creative ways to impugn its potential critics than branding them “biased”. Then again, nothing mobilizes the disgruntled many to the cause of defending the wealthy few against the threat of taxes and secularism better than the lame “liberal media” canard. Or to paraphrase Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of propaganda, “The bigger and steamier your three-coiled whopper is, the Ѭikelier it will be swallowed wholesale by the common scum on the ground.”
Fascists have always relied on the willingness of so-called moderates on either side of the political aisle tѯ make alliances with them against their common enemies of the Left. Hillary Clinton's recent decision to team up with her former tormentor, Newt Gingrich, on healthcare is another example of the Faustian bargains centrist elites are willing to make with thuggish extremists, hoping to score political points for appearing conciliatory. Similarly, John Kerry's doomed campaign strategy of offering voters a watered down version of White House theology by mildly condemning gay rights and abortion, didn't take into account that the anti-gay, misogynistic, market-worshipping Zionists of the religious right only put forth a pretend ideology based on “values” and “economics”. Upon closer inspection, this so-called agenda reveals only emptiness at its core, bereft of any ideas beyond a promise to use force when necessary against those who refuse to “get with the pogrom.”

The success of the Christian Right in dismantling all existing institutions and re-shaping them to their exact specifications depends on the ability of its leaders to provoke an exalted state of outraged-tinged euphoria within its rank and file members -- the “Hannitized” hordes who feel a raw emotional need to feel part of an enterprise engaged in exercising supreme power over a despised enemy. This can only be achieved by the full cooperation of the media, who fear their own irrelevance in a highly volatile political atmosphere even ore than those who create these conditions in the first place.

After Hitler was elected German Chancellor in 1933, the novelist Thomas Mann noted in his diary that he was witnessing a revolution “without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice.”

Today's Hannitized hordes are every bit as eager as Hitler's little helpers to sell out their own political and economic interests for the privilege of basking in the reflected glory of those who talk loudest while carrying the biggest stick. Like all factory farmed meat machines, they yield to the voices that carry the most authority. If anything, they don't seem overly alarmed by the absence of “news” in the media, particularly in regard to Iraq, perhaps reassured by inanities like the Jacko trial or Pope-o-Rama. Their “mobilizing passions” are not stirred by any fully articulated philosophy beyond a heightened suspicion that their entitlements are being encroached upon by some demonized minority -- a point that Democrats and their cohorts in the corporate media have yet to grasp as they seek ways to accommodate them by purging their own institutional bases of “offending” doctrine. So far, they have only succeeded in emboldening the cross-bearing Brownshirts to violently upgrade their methods of rooting out dissent.

The “logic” of destroying a village in order to “save” it can be applied to the media at the executive and ownership level. Better to help engineer the takeover of your organization by bible wielding Brownshirts than to risk making enemies with theseРcoup plotters, drunk on their recent successes in subverting every other major institution across the political and cultural landscape. Having looted and pillaged America's crumbling fourth estate, the information highway robbers may have pulled off their biggest heist yet.

Former Bush Team Member Says
WTC Collapse Likely A Controlled
Demolition And 'Inside Job'

Highly recognized former chief economist in Labor Department now doubts official 9/11 story, claiming suspicious facts and evidence cover-up indicate government foul play and possible criminal implications.June 12, 2005
By Greg SzymanskiA former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush's first term now believes the official story about theРcollapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7."If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling," said Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D, a former member of the Bush team who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX. Reynolds, now a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, also believes it's 'next to impossible' that 19 Arab Terrorists alone outfoxed the mighty U.S. military, adding the scientific conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11."It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the caus⁥(s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7," said Reynolds this week from his offices at Texas A&M. "If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings."More importantly, momentous political and social consequenceѳ would follow if impartial observers concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right." However, Reynolds said "getting it right in today's security state' remains challenging because he claims explosives and structural experts have been intimidated in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.From the beginning, the Bush administration claimed that burning jet fuel caused the collapse of the towers. Although many independent investigators have disagreed, they have been hard pressed to disprove the government theory since most of the evidence was removed by FEMA prior to independent investigation.Critics claim the Bush administration has tried to cover-up the evidence and the recent 9/11 Commission has failed to address the major evidence contradicting the official version of 9/11. Some facts demonstrating the flaws in the government jet fuel theory include:-- Photos showing people walking around in the hole in the North Tower where 10,000 gallons of jet fuel supposedly was burning.. --When the South Tower was hit, most of the North Tower's flames had already vanished, burning for only 16 minutes, making it relatively easy to contain and control without a total collapse. --The fire did not grow over time, probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was suffocating, indicating without added explosive devices the firs could have been easily controlled.--FDNY fire fighters still remain under a tight government gag order to not discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are also under a similar 9/11 gag order. --Even the flawed 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that "none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible."-- Fire had never before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse except for the three buildings on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9/11.-- The fires, especially in the South Tower and WTC-7, were relatively small. -- WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed in less than 10 seconds. -- WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams. -- In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC leaseholder, told the fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 that. "may be the smartest thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it. -- It's difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature of steel close to melting.Despite the numerous holes in the government story, the Bush administration has brushed aside or basically ignored any and all critics. Mainstream experts, speaking for the administration, offer a theory essentially arguing that an airplane impact weakened each structure and an intense fire thermally weakened structural components, causing buckling failures while allowing the upper floors to pancake onto the floors below. One who supports the official account is Thomas Eager, professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at MIT. He argues that the collapse occurred by the extreme heat from the fires, causing the loss of loading-bearing capacity on the structural frame. Eagar points out the steel in the towers could have collapsed only if heated to the point where it "lost 80 percent of its strength," or around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Critics claim his theory is flawed since the fires did not appear to be intense and widespread enough to reach such high temperatures.Other experts supporting the official story claim the impact of the airplanes, not the heat, weakened the entire structural system of the towers, but critics contend the beams on floors 94-98 did not appear severely weakened, much less the entire structural system. Further complicating the matter, hard evidence to fully substantiate either theory since evidence is lacking due to FEMA's quick removal of the structural steel before it could be analyzed. Even though the criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be kept for forensic analysis, FEMA had it destroyed or shipped overseas before a serious investigation could take place. And even more doubt is cast over why FEMA acted so swiftly since coincidentally officials had arrived the day before the 9/11 attacks at New York's Pier 29 to conduct a war game exercise, named "Tripod II." Besides FEMA's quick removal of the debris, authorities considered the steel quite valuable as New York City officials had every debris truck tracked on GPS and even fired one truck driver who took an unauthorized lunch break.In a detailed analysis just released supporting the controlled demolition theory, Reynolds presents a compelling case. "First, no steel-framed skyscraper, even engulfed in flames hour after hour, had ever collapsed before. Suddenly, three stunning collapses occur within a few city blocks on the same day, two allegedly hit by aircraft, the third not," said Reynolds. "These extraordinary collapses after short-duration minor fires made it all the more important to preserve the evidence, mostly steel girders, to study what had happened. "On fire intensity, consider this benchmark: A 1991 FEMA report on Philadelphia's Meridian Plaza fire said that the fire was so energetic that 'beams and girders sagged and twisted, but despite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvio⁵s damage.' Such an intense fire with consequent sagging and twisting steel beams bears no resemblance to what we observed at the WTC."After considering both sides of the 9/11 debate and after thoroughly sifting through all the available material, Reynolds concludes the government story regarding all four plane crashes on 9/11 remains highly suspect."In fact, the government has failed to produce significant wreckage from any of the four alleged airliners that fateful day. The familiar photo of the Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania shows no fuselage, engine or anything recognizable as a plane, just a smoking hole in the ground," said Reynolds. "Photographers reportedly were not allowed near the hole. Neither the FBI nor the National Transportation Safety Board have investigated or produced any report on the alleged airliner crashes."

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’

by Michael Smith "The Sunday Times - Britain"

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal. The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal. This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action. “US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia,” the briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality “would arise virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation”.

The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

“It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.
There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.
The White House has declined to respond to a letter from 89 Democratic congressmen asking if it was true — as Dearlove told the July meeting — that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” in Washington.
The Downing Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it was raised at a joint Bush-Blair press conference, forcing the prime minister to insist that “the facts were not fixed in any shape or form at all”.

John Conyers, the Democratic congressman who drafted the letter to Bush, has now written to Dearlove asking him to say whether or not it was accurate that he believed the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. He also asked the former MI6 chief precisely when Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and whether it is true they agreed to “manufacture” the UN ultimatum in order to justify the war.

He and other Democratic congressmen plan to hold their own inquiry this Thursday with witnesses including Joe Wilson, the American former ambassador who went to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore for its nuclear weapons program.

Frustrated at the refusal by the White House to respond to their letter, the congressmen have set up a website —

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/ — to collect signatures on a petition demanding the same answers. Conyers promised to deliver it to Bush once it reached 250,000 signatures. By Friday morning it already had more than 500,000 with as many as 1m expected to have been obtained when he delivers it to the White House on Thursday.

AfterDowningStreet.org, another website set up as a result of the memo, is calling for a congressional committee to consider whether Bush’s actions as depicted in the memo constitute grounds for impeachment. It has been flooded with visits from people angry at what they see as media self-censorship in ignoring the memo. It claims to have attracted more than 1m hits a day.

Democrats.com, another website, even offered $1,000 (about £550) to any journalist who quizzed Bush about the memo’s contents, although the Reuters reporter who asked the question last Tuesday was not aware of the reward and has no intention of claiming it. The complaints of media self-censorship have been backed up by the ombudsmen of The Washington Post, The New York Times and National Public Radio, who have questioned the lack of attention the minutes have received from their organisations.

Creating a Christian flag for God and Country
Inspiration: With publicity from 'The 700 Club,' the designer of a religious and patriotic banner prepares for a busy Flag Day.


By Arthur Hirsch
Sun Staff Originally published

June 12, 2005

COLORA - Marcia Thompson Eldreth sees in the United States a Christian nation, inspired by Scripture and dedicated to propositions conveyed in biblical prophesy. She asks: Why not a U.S. national Christian flag?
"Our nation was based on Judeo-Christian principles," Eldreth said. "Blessed is the country whose God is Lord." She was sitting in her Cecil County kitchen here the other day, sharing the story of how she came to design and arrange for manufacturing and selling a national Christian flag that since last year has gained national attention on The 700 Club, a religious news magazine television show hosted by, among others, the Rev. Pat Robertson. The taped segment is scheduled to appear on the program for a second time Tuesday, Flag Day.

Eldreth figures this year's show will again inspire a rush of orders for the flag, which shows an American bald eagle in flight, holding in its beak a quote from the New Testament, in its talons a bloody crucifix.

The flag idea "first came to my ears from the pulpit," said Eldreth, referring to Pleasant View Baptist Church in Port Deposit, where she is one of 950 active members, and where one morning in spring 2003, the Rev. Harold M. Phillips encouraged his congregation to declare proudly its Christian devotion, to perhaps even wave a flag.

A flag. A Christian flag. The notion struck Eldreth, not least because she has done quite a bit of painting and drawing over the years. She said she thought to herself: "Well, that's got your name on it, Marcia." She has made 2,500 of the banners, but is not sure how many she has sold.
She figures on setting up a makeshift call center in the living room and kitchen, just as she did last Flag Day. What a day that was. Phones were ringing steadily on six lines, Eldreth said, when a thunderstorm rolled in over the house. "I turned on the prayer and worship music because it started to feel like a spiritual attack," Eldreth said. She recalled stepping to the front door in time to see lightning strike a utility pole across the road: "I saw a ball of blue fire come off that telephone pole."

The bolt knocked out the phones until the next morning. Eldreth understood it as a sign. "I took it as spiritual warfare," Eldreth said. "I grinned when the fire come off the pole." She said she thought, "Thanks for the affirmation, Satan."

Raised in a Methodist home in Harford County, Eldreth, 55, has practiced evangelical Christianity since 1996. A mother of four and grandmother of six, Eldreth declined to expand on the reasons she turned so avidly to religion. She said that in her way of living before 1996, "I made myself sick" and "I was totally out of God's way."

When thinking about her vision for a new flag, Eldreth said she knew about the international Christian flag that was created, as the story goes, in a Coney Island chapel in New York in 1897. That simple design is a white banner with a red cross on a dark blue canton in the upper left corner.

Nothing so generic would do in this case. Eldreth wanted a distinctly American flag. She consulted her Bible, and voices on high. "I was having a conversation with the Lord, although I was here in my kitchen. I was saying, 'This is your flag, Lord, what do you want on it?'"
The answer, she said, came when she saw in her head a picture of "an eagle carrying a cross." She did not complete the project until some weeks later, when she said she was inspired to pack her art supplies one Sunday morning and drive 300 miles to The Founders Inn. The hotel stands on the grounds of the Christian Broadcasting Network in Virginia Beach, Va., producer of The 700 Club. The next morning, she said, she noticed that the inscription above the door on the CBN building quotes Matthew 24:14, a call for global evangelism: "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come."

That sent her back to her room in a burst of inspiration that burned until the wee hours of the next morning. The flag sketch was done in colored pencil on a flag-sized sheet of heavy watercolor paper. In her rendition, the eagle soars in a sky-blue field encircled by a band of red, representing the blood of Christ, encircled by†another band of blue representing Christ's bruises. Flying on a ribbon in the eagle's beak is a quote from Matthew 24: "Take heed that no man deceive you." A blue border tracing the rectangle of the flag is salted with 50 stars, representing, Eldreth said, "American Christians in each of the 50 states."

Eldreth is untroubled by the notion of combining American and Christian symbols this way, as she quickly answers yes when asked whether the Aerican purpose in the world is a specifically Christian project. Short of curbing freedom of religion, the U.S. government should not shy from declaring its service to scriptural ends, Eldreth said. A few of those around the country who bought flags after seeing The 700 Club would seem to agree.

"I believe this country can only be great if God is behind us, and he is," said Gary Folk, who displays his national Christian flag on a pole in front of his home in Cloverdale, Calif. "That's why we are a superpower."

Bobby Ables, of Stephenville, Texas, displays his national Christian flag on a living room wall, next to the Stars and Stripes. He said, "I don't get in politics too much," but as he sees it, the flag suitably mixes God and country: "That's what we are, a patriotic, Christian country." Phillips, the man who in⁳pired Eldreth's flag, considers the project successful. "I think her flag is a great flag," he said. "I think it will catch on. It may take a few years." Eldreth said she has sold flags in Hawaii and Alaska, Florida, Georgia and right down the road in Maryland. In preparation for Flag Day, she has ordered five new temporary phone lines and called for volunteers among fellow church members to help take calls.

The flags come in three sizes, selling for $69 for the gold-trimmed 3-foot-by-5-foot model to $6 for the postcard-sized version that fits on a car antenna. There are also T-shirts, at $12 apiece. Eldreth would have her customers fly the national Christian flag alongside or below the Star and Stripes, suggesting a foundation of the country, not a substitute for the traditional symbol. For all the blessings Americans have received, she said, "It's time for America to bless God."

Battlespace America

News: The new Pentagon can peruse intelligence on
U.S. citizens and send Marines down Main Street.

By Peter Byrne May/June 2005 Issue


In early 2004, Sahar Aziz, a law student at the University of Texas at Austin, organized a conference called "Islam and the Law: The Question of Sexism." The seminar attracted several hundred people. Unbeknownst to Aziz, who is Muslim, in the audience were two Army lawyers in civilian attire. They reported to military intelligence that three Middle Eastern men had asked them "suspicious" questions about their identity during a refreshment break. A few days later, two military intelligence agents materialized on campus, demanding to see a video-tape of the seminar along with a roster of attendees.



U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, located at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. Hidden deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, more than 100 intelligence analysts sift through streams of data collected by federal agents and local law en- forcers–continually updating a virtual picture of what the command calls the North American "battlespace," which includes the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as 500 iles out to sea. If they find something amiss, they have resources to deploy in response that no law enforcement agency could dream of. They've got an army, a navy, an air force, the Marines, and the Coast Guard.


The creation of NORTHCOM, as part of the "unified plan" in the wake of 9/11, established the military's first domestic combatant command center. This precedent departs from a long-standing tradition of distinguishing between the responsibilities of the military and those of law enforcement. Since 1878, when Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in response to interference in elections by federal troops, an underlying assumption of U.S. democracy has been that soldiers should not act as police officers on American soil. While the Chinese army might send tanks to Tiananmen Square and the Liberian military might man checkpoints in the capital, the presence of National Guardsmen, carrying firearms and dressed in camouflage, patrolling American territory in the weeks after 9/11 was a striking anomaly.


The new NORTHCOM is designed to take command of every National Guard unit in the country, as well as regular troops, and wield them as a unified force. It has a variety of jobs, including fighting the war on drugs and supporting civilian authorities in cases of natural disaster, civil disorder, or terrorist attack. But it also has the less straightforward task of locating terrorists before they strike, which means, first and foremost, coordinating intelligence work. To this end, the command has been forging a national surveillance system directly linking military intelligence operations to local law enforcement intelligence operations and private security and information companies. These partnerships allow the military to skirt federal privacy laws that restrict its ability to maintain files on ordinary people–prohibitions that apply to the Pentagon but not to private data miners, such as ChoicePoint and LexisNexis Group, or state and local police departments. In addition, personal data is culled from public records, confidential sources, and other repositories routinely cultivated by more than 50 government agencies. For example, NORTHCOM taps into one law enforcement intelligence-sharing network into which local, state, and federal law enforcement can upload information on individuals they've surveilled.

Because most of its activity takes place in secret, and because the Pentagon has still not fully clarified its mandate, very little is known about exactly what kind of information NORTHCOM is gathering, and on whom. A review of documents and interviews with military and civil liberties experts makes clear, however, that the command's domestic intelligence ambitions are more far-reaching than anything theРU.S. military has undertaken in the past and that the hope is to "fuse" disparate government databases so they can be readily accessed by NORTHCOM's leadership.


Not surprisingly, all of this worries civil liberties advocates. "There is no explicit prohibition in any law to the effect that the Pentagon may not engage in domestic iѮtelligence," says Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, D.C. To place a wiretap or to search a home of a suspected terrorist without their knowledge, Martin notes, officials need a secret warrant from an intelligence court–but other than that, they have a great deal of leeway. "The military can follow you around," she notes. "It can use giant, secret databases of linked networks to gatheѲ a picture of the activities of millions of Americans, mapping all of their associations, and the only restriction is that such surveillance be done for purposes of foreign intelligence, counterterrorism, the drug war, or force protection."

Indeed, to beef up protection of its "battlespace," the new command also includes "influence operations specialist[s]," who work on psy-ops "themes" and "deception plans," as first reported in Congressional Quarterly last year. Although the category of "enemy combatant" muddies old definitions of foreign and domestic subjects, NORTHCOM spokesman Sean Kelly assured Mother Jones in an email that the command draws "distinctions between domestic operations and operations conducted outside of U.S. territory.... The idea that the American public would ever be the target of psychological operations or deception by NORTHCOM is completely inconsistent with U.S. laws and our mission."

Critics of NORTHCOM say they recognize the need to protect America from terrorist attack, but argue that the delicate task of domestic intelligence gathering should be left to law enforcement. Military affairs expert William Arkin–who recently broke the news that NORTHCOM had establ⁩shed a set of domestic commando teams who were, among other things, deployed at President Bush's inaugural–observes that "once you cross the threshold of believing that databases are going to reveal illegal behavior, it is only steps away from getting into the business of domestic intelligence…and supplanting the role of the National Guard, which has traditionally been in charge of domestic security."

Concern about NORTHCOM's expanding powers is not limited to civil liberties watchdogs. Former CIA lawyer Suzanne Spaulding was the executive director of the National Commission on Terrorism under L. Paul Tremer III in 2000 and now works as a national security consultant. She worries that military intelligence services won't always distinguish between people who are fair game–such as foreign terrorists–and ordinary people who are going about their lives with an expectation of privacy. "People will say, 'Hey, wait a minute, you can't do that!'" she says. "And the military may say, 'This is not law enforcement, this is a military operation against a group of enemy combatants.'" She points out that constitutional safeguards against surveillance of individuals by law enforcement may apply differently to defense activities under NORTHCOM. "This issue needs discussion and debate," she says, "and the public ought to know about it."

More troubling than being watched, though, is what might happen after the spying is over. NORTHCOM is still prohibited from doing much of the work police departments and the FBI do, but it could end up doing work that its parallel commands do overseas. Joseph Onek of the Constitution Project in Washington, D.C., a bipartisan nonprofit focused on civil liberties during wartime, puts it this way: "We're worried that some hotshot military intelligence guy gets back from the Middle East and goes to work with NORTHCOM, using some of the same interrogation methods used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay."

President Bush, With the Candlestick...
By Robert ParryJune 7, 2005


The clues are falling into place, pointing to the incontrovertible judgment that George W. Bush willfully misled the United States into invading Iraq, in part, by eliminating the possibility of the peaceful solution that he pretended to want.