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Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
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Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
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O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
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Mickey Z
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Chonchocoro:
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Steve Perry
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January 12, 2004
Ben Tripp
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O'Neill's Revenge
Jason Leopold
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Uri Avnery
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January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
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Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
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Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
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Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
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Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
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The
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Kurt Nimmo
Saddam's Defense: Summon Bush Sr. to the Stand
Mike Whitney
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Deb Reich
Palestinians and Israelis: This War is Unwinnable
David Vest
Disabled
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January 8, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israeli
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Lenni Brenner
Dr.
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Ray McGovern
Bush: Driving Without Breaks
Mark Scaramella
Inside
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Yves Engler
Bush's Mexican Gambit
James Hollander
Journalists
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January 7, 2004
Democracy Now!
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Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured
Greg Weiher
The
Bush Administration's Ongoing Intelligence Problem
Ben Tripp
The Word of the Year, 2003
Dave Lindorff
Dean and His Democratic Detractors
Michael Leon
The NYT Does Chomsky
Bob Boldt
God Talk
Ramon Ryan
Small
Victories and Long Struggles: the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista
Uprising
January 6, 2004
Dave Lindorff
RNC
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Ron Jacobs
Drugs
in Uniform: Hashish and the War on Terrorism
Josh Frank
Coffee and State Authority in Colombia
Doug Giebel
Permanent Bases: Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won't Go
John Chuckman
Sick Puppies: David Frum's New Neo-Con Manifesto
Rannie Amiri
The Politics of the Iranian Earthquake
John L. Hess
A Record
to Dissent From
Thacher Schmid
A Cheesehead's Musings on the Sunday NYT
David Price
"Like
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January 5, 2004
Al Krebs
How
Now Mad Cow!
Kathy Kelly
Squatting
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Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons
Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm
Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the
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Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
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Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
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Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
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Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
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Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
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Ray McGovern
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Manufacturing Hysteria
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Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
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Michael Neumann
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Annie Higgins
When
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Alan Farago
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Jeffrey St. Clair
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Willie Nelson
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David Lindorff
The
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Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
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Chris Floyd
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Iraqi
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Will Youmans
Sharon's
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January
15, 2004
Memo to the President
Your
State of the Union Address
By Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
We write this, our fifth such memorandum to you
since our critique of Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN speech
last February, out of concern that the same advisers who served
you so poorly in drafting the Iraq section of last year's state-of-the-union
address will embarrass you again. Your credibility and that of
the intelligence community suffered a major blow from the hyperbole
that characterized that speech--not to mention the infamous 16
words based on the forgery alleging that Iraq was seeking uranium
in Africa. The panel led by Gen. Brent Scowcroft, whom you asked
to investigate how that wound up in your speech, reportedly attributes
it to desperation on the part of your staff to "find something
affirmative" to support claims like those made by Vice President
Dick Cheney that Saddam Hussein had "reconstituted"
Iraq's nuclear program. We suggest you ensure that those over-eager
functionaries responsible for the 16 words, and for your claim
last spring that weapons of mass destruction had been found in
the form of two "bio-trailers"--since proven to be
generators of hydrogen for weather balloons--take no hand in
drafting this year's address.
Spindoctors
Before your state-of-the-union address
last year we urged you to resist the temptation to favor "ideologues
and spin doctors over the professional intelligence officers
paid to serve you." Specifically, we noted that most of
our major allies, with whom we have extensive intelligence sharing
arrangements, had taken strong issue with US claims regarding
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They found the evidence
on the presence of weapons of mass destruction inconclusive--and
far short of what would be necessary to justify war. Ten months
of unsuccessful quest for such weapons, together with freshly
obtained documentary evidence, has proved them right.
After all the emphasis on weapons of
mass destruction as the main reason for war, it will take considerable
humility and courage to acknowledge error. But such a step is
needed to stem further erosion in the credibility of your administration's
statements and the intelligence adduced to justify them. Further
dissembling on Iraq will inevitably bring still more damage.
Besides, conceding error is the honorable thing to do--and the
only way to go forward with confidence and self-respect.
Each week brings new evidence that the
case for war was bogus. On January 7, for example, the prestigious
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a meticulously
documented study concluding that:
"Administration officials systematically
misrepresented the threat from Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and
biological weapons programs."
We in Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity recently completed a post mortem on why, hardened
professional skeptics that we are, most of us still expected
that some weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq
(not enough to justify war, but some). Why that conclusion? Our
post mortem found that our professional judgment was beclouded
by the repeated claims by you and your senior advisers that the
evidence available to you "left no doubt" about the
presence of WMD in Iraq. There were also hints that the evidence
was too sensitive to reveal, and we are very familiar with that
dilemma. In addition, there was a new factor for us who, until
now, have devoted what we used to call "propaganda analysis"
only to the pronouncements of foreign leaders. In all candor,
as Americans we found it difficult to be as objectively critical
of statements from Washington as we would have been of ones from
Baghdad or, say, Paris. Consequently, most of us were inclined
to give you and other administration spokesmen the benefit of
the doubt.
Hussein Kamel Also
Said: the Full Story
But we were being told only half the
story. Consider, for example, the information provided by Hussein
Kamel, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, who defected in August 1995.
He is the defector you quoted in the key speech you made on October
7, 2002, the speech that gave great impetus to the successful
attempt to persuade Congress just four days later to cede to
you its power to declare war. Referring correctly to Kamel as
"the head of Iraq's military industries," you noted
that his defection forced Baghdad to admit to having produced
"deadly biological agents."
Kamel had already been extolled as defector
par excellence. In his scene-setter-for-war speech of August
26, 2002, Vice President Cheney singled out Kamel "as a
reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections
than we learned from the inspection regime itself."
The vice president spoke truth in underscoring
the value of the first-hand information provided by Kamel. But
it was half-truth, of the kind we warned you about before the
war--in our memorandum "Forgery, Hyperbole, Half-Truth:
A Problem," for example. There we noted that:
"Kamel also said that in 1991 Iraq
destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons and the missiles
to deliver them."
That part of Kamel's debriefing was suppressed
until Newsweek disclosed it on February 24, 2003, several weeks
before the war. On the day the Newsweek report appeared, CIA
spokesman Bill Harlow pulled out his entire tray of deprecatory
adjectives, branding it "incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue."
But a few days later when the official transcript of the Kamel
debriefing (originally classified UNSCOM/IAEA SENSITIVE) was
made available to the press, there on page 13 was Kamel stating
categorically:
"I ordered destruction of all chemical
weapons. All weapons--biological, chemical, missile, nuclear
were destroyed."
The rest of the information that Kamel
provided about major WMD programs, many of them undetected before
his debriefing, proved to be accurate. Understandably, his assurances
that he had decided to "disclose everything" required
confirmation, but it is odd that those assurances were totally
suppressed--particularly since so much of what he said had already
proved true.
Confirmation has now come in two very
persuasive ways. First, none of the weaponry that Kamel said
was destroyed at his order has been found. Second, documentary
evidence corroborating Kamel's testimony has now come to light.
In a lengthy Washington Post article on January 7, "Iraq
Arsenal Was Only on Paper," Barton Gelman reported he had
acquired a handwritten letter written to Saddam Hussein's son
Qusay five days after Kamel's defection.
The writer was Hossam Amin, director
of the key Iraqi office overseeing UN inspectors. The letter
was essentially a damage report warning that after Kamel's defection
the cover stories masking forbidden weapons were no longer sustainable.
Considered together with the subsequent findings of the UN inspectors
who pursued every item in Amin's catalogue, the letter shows
that Iraq had in fact destroyed its entire inventory of biological
weapons during the summer of 1991, before the UN inspectors even
knew of their existence.
You will recall that in September 2002,
when your administration mounted a full-court press to make the
case for war in Congress, the Defense Intelligence Agency published
a dissonant report which, had it not also been suppressed, might
have caused a game-losing turnover. The DIA report asserted that
there was "no reliable information" that Iraq had chemical
or biological weapons. DIA specialists had read and evaluated
the Kamel debriefing reports as well as the other available evidence
on this issue. To their credit, even lacking the documentary
confirmation now provided by the Amin letter, DIA analysts apparently
decided that, since most of what Kamel said had proven accurate,
it would be less than honest to simply ignore his important claim
that chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed at his
order.
This did not prevent your advisers from
inserting into your important speech of October 7, 2002 an alarming
passage exaggerating what Kamel said about biological agents
and omitting altogether what he said about having had them all
destroyed:
"In 1995, after several years of
deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries
defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that
it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other
deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded
that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount.
This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never
been accounted for, and capable of killing millions."
In your state-of-the-union address last
year you reiterated those claims. And a week later, in his UN
speech of February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell emphasized
that it was only after Kamel's defection that Iraq finally admitted
that "it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent,
VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes."
Powell, too, neglected to mention that Kamel had also said that
such stocks had been destroyed. Nor did he mention that in the
seven and a half years since Kamel's debriefing the US had turned
up no evidence challenging his testimony.
It is important that you be completely
clear on timing. While the Newsweek report of February 24, 2003
was the first to publicize Kamel's testimony that the weapons
had been destroyed, US and British intelligence (as well as UN
officials) had had that information since August 1995. If you
were not given a full account of what Kamel said before it appeared
in Newsweek, your advisers should certainly have given you the
whole truth when Newsweek did break the story three weeks before
you sent US troops into Iraq to destroy those same weapons. If
they did not tell you, heads should roll. If they did, it becomes
necessary to explain why the information from Kamel had no apparent
effect on your decision to launch the invasion.
The "Bio-Trailers"
Barton Gelman's detailed report also
addresses other key aspects of the case made against Iraq on
weapons of mass destruction. Discussing the two trailer-mounted
"bio-labs" found near Mosul last spring--the ones that
led you to say while on a trip to Poland that weapons of mass
destruction had been found--Gelman quotes David Kay's description
of that find as a "fiasco." Kay told the BBC last fall,
"I think it was premature and embarrassing." The two
trailers, it is now widely accepted, are mobile hydrogen generators
purchased from the UK in 1982 to fill weather balloons measuring
wind and temperature for Iraqi artillery units.
Summarizing his talks with the investigators
working under Kay, Gelman writes that they have found no support
for the twin fear expressed in Washington and London before the
war--that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and advanced
programs for new ones. What is now clear is that Iraq did not
have the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything
like the scale it had before the Gulf War in 1991. In his interim
report of October 2, 2003, Kay reported no discoveries last year
of finished weapons, bulk agents, or ready-to-start production
lines, and some of the investigators working for Kay told Gelman
they now have little expectation of such a find.
Recommendations
--We suggest that you announce that you
will now permit the reintroduction of UN inspectors. It is time
to bring in the experts. They know Iraq; they know the weapons
and what it takes to produce them; they know the Iraqi scientists,
with whom they have dealt in past years; and they even have adequate
UN funding to do the job. If weapons are to be found, they will
find them.
In contrast, David Kay's is a highly
inefficient operation. Of the 1,400 people in his group, most
have no prior experience as inspectors because, for some reason,
previous UN inspectors were generally not invited to join. Consequently,
fewer than 100 of the 1,400 are actually involved in generating
information from field investigations, and the number of Iraqi
weapons scientists interviewed by Kay's inspectors is very low.
--Announce that you are asking Gen. Brent
Scowcroft, head of your Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board,
to look into why only half of Kamel's story was told. This would
be a limited investigation into one discrete aspect of the general
credibility problem, not unlike the inquiry Scowcroft recently
completed into how it was that the canard about Iraq seeking
uranium found its way into your speech last year. This time the
Scowcroft panel should find out which government officials and
which members of Congress were told the full story and when.
The panel should be asked to report back to you by May 1.
--Make it clear that you will hold people
accountable if the Scowcroft panel investigation turns up evidence
of ineptitude or deliberate distortion of intelligence. And be
prepared to make good on that. The buck does stop with you.
--Announce that you are widening your
circle of advisers beyond what has become known as your "praetorian
guard." This is all the more necessary as it grows clearer
and clearer that fresh ideas are needed on how to address the
post-invasion situation in Iraq.
A ready lesson can be drawn from what
President Lyndon Johnson chose to do when he began to realize
he had been misled on Vietnam by his closest advisers. Just weeks
after the surprise Vietnamese Communist Tet offensive in early
1968 (another major intelligence failure), Johnson asked Clark
Clifford to convene a panel of "Wise Men" to review
the entire Vietnam situation de novo and develop its own policy
recommendations. Just three weeks later the panel briefed the
president on the gravity of the situation; Johnson abruptly changed
course and sought a negotiated settlement with Hanoi. One key
lesson here is that a panel of distinguished advisers need not
take inordinate amounts of time to come up with constructive
recommendations.
--Looking toward more systemic problems
and the longer term, we suggest you endorse the following recommendation
from the report that the Carnegie Endowment put out this month,
"WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications:"
Create a nonpartisan independent commission
to establish a clear picture of what the intelligence community
knew and believed it knew about Iraq's weapons program throughout
1991-2002, which can be compared to what actually happened in
Iraq when that becomes known. The commission should consider
the role of foreign intelligence as well as the question of political
pressure on analysts and the adequacy of agencies' responses
to it."
--Finally, you may wish to read the advice
we provided prior to last year's state-of-the-union address.
We append our letter of last January, in the hope it will encourage
you to take this year's recommendations seriously.
/s/
Gene Betit, Arlington, VA
Ray Close, Princeton, NJ
David MacMichael, Linden, VA
Ray McGovern, Arlington, VA
Steering Group Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity
Attachment: VIPS Warning, January 2003
(from The Birmingham News, January 28, 2002)
Mr. President:
As you prepare to make the case against
Iraq in your State of the Union address Tuesday, beware the consequences
of favoring ideologues and spin-doctors over the professional
intelligence officers paid to serve you.
Until last week many Americans were inclined
to take your top aides at their word that the looming war with
Iraq is not about oil or vengeance but rather about Iraq's continuing
pursuit of "weapons of mass destruction." Now all but
the most unquestioning loyalists are having serious second thoughts.
Doubt grew exponentially as France and
Germany, with whom we have extensive intelligence sharing arrangements,
took strong issue with your administration's claims about Iraq.
Those two major allies and others have concluded that the evidence
that Iraq is continuing to pursue new weapons of mass destruction
is far from conclusive and that it falls far short of justification
for starting a war.
Your speeches on Iraq last October--in
Cincinnati and at the UN--were rhetorical triumphs. But you need
to be aware now that much of the evidence you adduced against
Iraq could not withstand close scrutiny. Your advisers had you
shooting yourself in the foot with hyperbole.
In both speeches they had you making
alarmist claims that our allies know do not square either with
the facts or the judgments of the US and wider allied intelligence
communities. I'll mention just two:
--Singling out the high-strength aluminum
tubes Iraq has been trying to purchase, you said they "are
used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." After an aggressive
investigation, the UN inspectors in Iraq have now concluded that
the tubes were not meant for enriching uranium but rather for
making ordinary artillery rockets, as the Iraqis have said.
--You also claimed that Iraq could produce
a nuclear weapon "in less than a year." Our allies
are finding it difficult to reconcile that with the formal estimate
of the US intelligence community that Iraq will not be able to
produce a nuclear weapon until the end of the decade, if then.
On January 3, to the well-rehearsed cheers
of our troops at Fort Hood, you stated three times that Iraq
is a "grave threat" to the United States. But for our
allies, and for an increasing number of Americans, repetition
alone does not enhance credibility. They are looking for proof.
(You are, after all, talking war.)
In the past, Mr. President, you have
said that the CIA delivers the world's best intelligence, but
now you seem captive to the "intelligence" coming from
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.
You will recall how stung Wolfowitz was last fall, when the CIA
insisted that reports tying Iraq to al-Qaeda lacked credibility
and that the available evidence on Iraq's nuclear program was
inconclusive. And you are probably aware that he has declared
publicly that CIA analysis "is not worth the paper it is
written on."
To be sure, CIA's conclusions are often
unwelcome. The question is whether they are more accurate than
the ones you are getting from the Pentagon.
When NATO ambassadors asked Wolfowitz
last month about the evidence against Iraq, he likened it to
pornography: "I can't define it, but I will know it when
I see it." He did little to rehabilitate himself as super
analyst last Thursday with his long, unpersuasive speech in New
York.
Rather than offering evidence to support
the points he was trying to make, Wolfowitz fell back on phrases
like "there is every reason to believe." Worse, he
has a peculiar affinity for information from defectors and exiles,
sources that experienced intelligence professionals know to be
notoriously unreliable.
Suffice it to say that were Wolfowitz
an apprentice intelligence analyst in his two-year probationary
period, I would not recommend taking him on as a career employee.
As you prepare for Tuesday's address,
you might consider giving your principal intelligence adviser,
Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, an advance look
at your draft this time. And please think long and hard about
the rhetoric.
Talk is cheap, and it is easy to play
down the significance of rhetoric. But it would be a serious
mistake to do so with reference to major pronouncements like
the State of the Union.
That words can have far-reaching consequences
is shown by North Korea's decision, after you labeled it part
of the "axis of evil" in last year's address, to renege
on its commitment to forgo nuclear weapons. No one should have
been surprised when the North Koreans concluded that, without
a strengthened nuclear deterrent, they would be next in line
after Iraq for a US "preemptive" attack.
Hopefully, your intelligence advisers
have warned you of the possibility that Pyongyang will decide
to take further advantage of your fixation on Iraq in the weeks
ahead and perhaps even go beyond words to threaten the 37,000
US troops who form a human tripwire south of the demilitarized
zone. There, beyond question, is a real and present danger.
Good luck Tuesday evening. Please cool
the rhetoric and stay close to the facts.
The VIPS can be reached at: RRMcGovern@aol.com
Weekend
Edition Features for January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
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