While I suppose it is fun to use the Wilson/Plame/Rove situation to attack the Bushites, and the incident may create a short-term partisan advantage for those opposed to the junta, and it would be very nice to see Rove do the perp walk, Cryptome has a much deeper truth:

"The idiot furor over naming Valerie Plame as a CIA officer, and the CIA's phony call for an investigation, should not obscure the need to name as many intelligence officers and agents as possible. It is a hoary canard - long-practiced intelligence disinformation - that naming these persons places their life in jeopardy. On the contrary, not identifying them places far more lives in jeopardy from their vile, secret operations and the overthrow plots they advance. These officers, their agencies and governmental funders want their names kept secret so they do not have to face retribution for cowardly misdeeds they are fearful of executing openly."

It is impossible to disagree with one word of this. There is certainly a great deal of irony in the continuing pattern that the Bushites make all their political hay on purporting to fight the 'war on terror', while simultaneously doing everything they can to subvert that war, in this case rendering ineffective an operative who was working on combating weapons of mass destruction. But the contradictions are everywhere. Bush can destroy the economy with his tax cuts, starve social programs, allow corporadoes to rape the country, destroy the environment, and start an illegal and immoral and extraordinarily expensive war, and nobody seems to care. When the CIA is insulted, suddenly it becomes a national issue. It was inevitable that the arrogance and stupidity of the Bush Administration thugs would lead to their picking on a foe who could fight back, but the CIA reaction shouldn't obscure the fact that this isn't a battle of Good against Evil, but just a contest to determine the greater of two Evils. While Democrats piously develop a concern for the well-being of CIA employees, some of these same employees are working right now to subvert the democratically-elected government of Venezuela.

It is fruitful to compare the Bush Administration negotiations over the contents of the Powell speech before the U. N., and what went on regarding the terms of Bush's state of the union address. The Washington Post has an interesting article on Dick Cheney's seeming inability to stop harping on an alleged meeting between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, despite the fact that all experts now regard that meeting as impossible (I actually think it may have been possible, but only on the assumption that there was more than one 'Atta'). Cheney tried very hard to get this allegation into Powell's speech:

"Cheney's staff also waged a campaign to include the allegation in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's speech to the United Nations in February in which he made the administration's case for war against Iraq. Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, pressed Powell's speechwriters to include the Atta claim and other suspected links between Iraq and terrorism, according to senior and mid-level administration officials involved in crafting the speech.

When State Department and CIA officials complained about Libby's proposed language and suggested cutting large sections, Cheney's associates fought back. 'Every piece offered . . . they fought tooth and nail to keep it in,' said one official involved in putting together the speech."

and:

"Libby - along with deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, a longtime Cheney associate - began pushing to include the Atta claim in Powell's appearance before the U.N. Security Council a week after the State of the Union speech. Powell's presentation was aimed at convincing the world of Iraq's ties to terrorists and its pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

On Jan. 25, with a stack of notebooks at his side, color-coded with the sources for the information, Libby laid out the potential case against Iraq to a packed White House situation room. "We read [their proposal to include Atta] and some of us said, 'Wow! Here we go again,'" said one official who helped draft the speech. 'You write it. You take it out, and then it comes back again.'

Libby described the material as a 'Chinese menu,' simply the broadest range of options, according to several administration officials. 'The papers were designed to assist [Powell's] preparation by organizing a lot of materials so that he could choose the order and evidence he found most compelling, although some of it, in the end, could not be declassified,' said one administration official.

But other officials present said they felt that Libby's presentation was over the top, that the wording was too aggressive and most of the material could not be used in a public forum. Much of it, in fact, unraveled when closely examined by intelligence analysts from other agencies and, in the end, was largely discarded.

'After one day of hearing screams about who put this together and what are the sources, we essentially threw it out,' one official present said.

Cheney's staff did not entirely give up. Late into the night before Powell's presentation, Libby called Powell's staff, waiting at the United Nations in New York, to question why certain material was not being included in the terrorism section, according to two State Department officials."

The pattern is to present what you want to see in the speech, and keep pounding it until you get your way from sheer force of will. You simply don't take no for an answer. In the Powell speech, Powell's will won out. However, in the state of the union address, we can see the same pattern resulting in the inclusion of the claim concerning Saddam's attempts to obtain uranium from Niger. In that case, the uranium claim was similarly highly dubious in the eyes of intelligence experts. The Bushites attempted to get it included in a speech Bush gave in Cincinnati in October, and it was only the insistence of George Tenet himself that kept it out of that speech (the CIA also had to fight to keep the same claim out of a speech by John D. Negroponte in December). Tenet knew what was going on and the type of pressures the drafters of speeches would be under, and wrote two memos on the subject after the Cincinnati speech to ensure that the uranium claim was completely buried and had a silver stake driven into its heart. One memo went to Stephen Hadley, the Deputy National Security Advisor, and one went to Rice and Hadley. Rice now claims that she may not have read the memo, and that both she and Hadley completely forgot about the fact that the uranium claim was not to go in another speech, and therefore it ended up in the state of the union address. Needless to say, Rice and Hadley both having forgotten an incident that was so important that Tenet himself got involved in October, made a personal phone call to Hadley specifically on that subject, and then followed it up with two memos on the subject, is completely implausible. It is even less plausible when we see that it was Hadley himself who was actively assisting Libby to force the same story into the Powell speech. Given what we've seen about Libby's assault on the drafters of Powell's speech, we can see exactly what must have really happened to the state of the union address. Dick Cheney is a relentless liar (and his continuing to repeat the lies about connections between Saddam and al Qaeda even after everyone else has admitted the story makes no sense may be an indication that his lying is a symptom of a deep psychological problem), and Rice just facilitates the lies. The reason the uranium lie reappeared is that Cheney doesn't give up. Considering that the outing of Ambassador Wilson's wife as a CIA operative is now in the news, it is worth returning to the scene of the crime - the state of the union address which contained the Niger uranium claim. It was Wilson's decision to go public with his concerns about the claim which led to the Bushites attempting to get revenge on Wilson by outing his wife. It is not impossible that this outing was a shot across the bow of the CIA and the State Department warning those in the know to keep quiet about the real source of the Niger uranium claim.

The whole Judith Miller/New York Times/Ahmad Chalabi/Iraq thing is just getting too weird:

1. Judith Miller spends much of the last year writing a whole series of articles presenting various pieces of propaganda promoting an attack on Iraq before the American public. Many of these articles contain information obtained from Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, a fact admitted by Miller, who seems to be very proud of, and quite jealous about protecting, her privileged access to Chalabi.


2. The Bush Administration relies on a lot of the information contained in the Miller articles to argue for the attack on Iraq.


3. The attack takes place.


4. Miller annoys the U. S. military by pushing them around as she attempts her own search for weapons of mass destruction, part of which actually involves Ahmad Chalabi, to whom she delivers a captured Saddam son-in-law for debriefing.


5. Judith Miller and Douglas Jehl write an article for the New York Times published September 25, 2003 concerning the upcoming report by David Kay on his fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, not once mentioning that it was Judith Miller's reporting which contained many of the main allegations that Iraq had such weapons.


6. Douglas Jehl alone writes an article for the New York Times published September 29, 2003, the first sentence of which states:

   "An internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value, according to federal officials briefed on the arrangement."

Not once in the article does Jehl mention that the main, if not sole, conduit for this information to the American public was none other than New York Times writer, and his co-author from 4 days before, Judith Miller. The Chalabi information, repackaged by members of the Bush Administration in various ways, served as the backbone of the case for an attack on Iraq.

So a prominent New York Times writer obtains a pile of crap and fashions it into articles, the articles are used to start a disastrous attack on a sovereign country, and the same paper eventually gets around to publishing an article on how crappy the crap actually was, all done as if it had nothing whatsoever to do with the writer, the crap, the articles, or the attack.

Some examples of recent American and British military violence against Iraqi civilians:

1. On August 23 soldiers from the 22nd Special Air Service clubbed and kicked 11 Iraqis they falsely believed to have been involved in the killing of six British military police officers in Majar al Kabir on June 25. They were arrested and detained for 18 hours during which time they were further beaten. They were released when it was determined that they had been arrested by mistake.


2. In early September in Mahmudiya, Farah Fadhil, 18, was killed when an American soldier threw a grenade through her window. She had been walking to the window to try to plead with the American soldiers who were spraying her apartment building with bullets. In the same incident, Marwan Hassan was shot to death when he went looking for his brother when the shooting began. The shooting was as a result of a raid which was a mistake. In what is becoming a pattern, the inhabitants of the house assumed they were being attacked by looters, and the 13-year-old son fired warning shots with a rifle. This provoked the full attack by the Americans, which resulted in the deaths (I note that the Americans have created their own very unconvincing version of the incident). The American troops did not record details of the raid with the coalition military press office. This is important as it also represents a pattern, and means that Iraqi civilian deaths are almost certainly intentionally being underreported.


3. The house of Dr. Talib Abdul Jabar Al Sayeed (or here) was attacked. At least three dozen American troops fired on his house for an hour. This was another mistaken raid. The Americans conduct their raids based on the slightest of intelligence, sometimes based on one tipster who may just have a grudge against the inhabitants of a house. In this case, no one was killed, but the doctor was roughed up, his three grown sons were arrested, and his sons remain in American detention. In a similar mistaken raid, Farid Abdul Khahir was killed on August 11. Again, he had fired a rifle out the window when he feared his house was being attacked by looters. The American response to this resulted in his death.


4. Sami Hassan Saref from the town of Baqubah thought American troops raiding his home were thieves, grabbed a rifle, and was shot. The Americans never reported his death.


5. There is the famous incident in Fallujah on September 12 where American troops somehow managed to attack a group of Iraqi policemen who were in pursuit of a suspect vehicle, killing eight Iraqi policemen and a Jordanian hospital guard. In late September, also in Fallujah, American troops fired on two cars at a checkpoint, killing four Iraqis and injuring five others.


6. In al-Jisr (or al-Sajr), an American raid on a house resulted in tragedy. Ahmad Hodood heard the American troops approach the house, and shouted at them. They opened fire, and fired on the house for at least an hour. Three people were killed and three injured. Zaidan Khalaf, brother of one of the victims, said:

   "My brother was a polite and decent man. He was poor and we had only enough farmland to survive. None of us are interested in politics, none of us worked in Saddam's regime. We got nothing from Saddam. I swear we don't have any weapons in our homes and we don't have any intention to fight the Americans. But the Americans have become a heavy weight on our shoulders. They don't respect human beings, they humiliate the Iraqi people. They promised freedom and democracy. Is it freedom to kill people, make bloodshed and destroy our house? Is that what they mean by freedom?"



7. Thirteen-year-old Omar Saad Jassem from Baquba was shot and killed when American troops who were chasing and firing on someone riding a motorcycle, missed and hit him instead.


8. The raids, besides being conducted violently, often leave the poor Iraqis with damage to their homes and possessions, loss of important documents, and stolen cash. Those who are detained are unable to work their farms.


9. An American soldier shot and killed Saad Mohamed Sultan, translator for Italian diplomat Pietro Cardone, while both men were riding in Mr. Cardone's car. The shot came for no reason, when Mr. Cardone's car attempted to pass an American Humvee (another version of the incident involves a roadblock). After the shot, the Americans just drove off, not bothering to stop.


10. Baghdad, in August.

Some common factors:

• completely untrained soldiers;


• violent raids on houses at night based on very flimsy intelligence that there are weapons inside;


• the complete lack of security caused by the American failure to provide proper policing has resulted in Iraqis assuming that noises indicate an attack by looters;


• Iraqis answer an attack on a house with warning rifle shots, which are taken by nervous soldiers to be a counterattack;


• the Americans are systematically covering up the amount of the carnage they are inflicting on Iraq;


• the American soldiers show complete and utter contempt for the Iraqis, and regard the taking of a human life as the equivalent to the shooting of an animal.

The Americans have developed all manner of complex theories to explain who is behind the Iraqi resistance, and why the occupiers are so disliked. The truth is that this constant violence against the Iraqi people is creating a natural reaction.

Alan Dershowitz has written a new book called "The Case for Israel", apparently another in the long line of books written to attempt to justify the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people. I assume the audience for these books is American liberal Jews looking for a salve for their guilty consciences, and the American elites who need a constant justification for American support for the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Since I fall into neither of these groups, I shan't be reading the book, but Norman Finkelstein has, and he has quite a story to tell. Alexander Cockburn does a good job on reporting on the whole mess. There is a much-derided book called "From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the ArabJewish Conflict Over Palestine" by Joan Peters, which has served as the basis for many of the incorrect claims made against the Palestinian cause. Dershowitz is aware of the fact that this book has no credibility in the academic world, but apparently found the propaganda contained in it to be too enticing to ignore. Finkelstein goes over many of Dershowitz's footnotes, and finds direct connections to footnotes made in Peters' book. Rather than overtly rely on Peters' book, Dershowitz went right through her book to her footnoted sources, thus relying on Peters' work without actually citing her. Some might call this plagiarism (although I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for ultra-Zionist Harvard President Lawrence Summers to discipline ultra-Zionist Alan Dershowitz over an ultra-Zionist book), but I think it is more accurate to see it as a symptom of the increasing panic amongst the American apologists for Zionism, who see their plans for Greater Israel falling away once the American public digests the real truth about what is being done to the Palestinians. The truth, which has effectively been hidden by the disgusting American media, is becoming impossible to conceal, and the Zionists needed to get a prominent book out before the American talk shows in a hurry, perhaps too much of a hurry. There was no time to concoct original lies, so a hidden recycling of Peters' lies had to suffice. Finkelstein is a formidable critic of Dershowitz, and appears to have easily won a bet proposed by Dershowitz by finding an error in Dershowitz's book. I wonder if Dershowitz has sent the check for $10,000 to the Palestinian Authority, earmarked for the victims of the massacre at Jenin?

George Bush went to New York to give a speech (or here or here) to the U. N. He needed to make it a good one, as the United States is in rather critical need of some help in the oppression of the Iraqi people, both in cold hard cash which will be funneled directly into the pockets of Dick 'Corruption' Cheney and his homeys, and for fodder units to die in lieu of the hillbillies from West Virginia who are dying in Iraq now. The entire speech was a tissue of lies, and contained only three important sentences:

"And the United Nations can contribute greatly to the cause of Iraq self-government. America is working with friends and allies on a new Security Council resolution which will expand the U.N.'s role in Iraq. As in the aftermath of other conflicts, the United Nations should assist in developing a constitution, in training civil servants, and conducting free and fair elections."

In the condescending view of neocons like Richard Perle, holding elections and drafting constitutions is just about all the United Nations is good for, and the United States is absolutely not going to give up one smidgen of political or military control. In particular, it is not prepared to concede any control over the corporate looting of the assets of the Iraqi people, including (of course) the oil, and the planned total privatization (i. e., corporate pillaging) of the Iraqi economy. In return for sending millions of dollars to Dick 'Corruption' Cheney, and risking the lives of soldiers to aid in the violent repression of the war for liberation of Iraq from its oppressors, the world community has been promised the right to draft a new Iraqi constitution, something the Iraqis could do themselves, and the right to organize an election, although the timetable for such an election is itself quite iffy. No country believes for a moment that any of the requested assistance will in any way benefit the Iraqi people (all the money would go to Dick 'Corruption' Cheney and his pals, and the soldiers wouldn't be 'peacekeepers' but a violent army of occupation, continuing to fight the Anglo-American war which was never properly ended, and effectively serving as security guards for the employees of the American corporations who are raping the country). It is simply required for Bush to get over what he feels is a temporary domestic political problem. Not surprisingly, the world has reacted with less than complete enthusiasm to this insult (described accurately by one writer as "bafflingly impertinent"), and the United States appears to be pretty much on its own. The American media has been spinning to give the impression that the neocons are no longer in a position of strength in the Bush Administration, but Bush's speech proves that they are just as powerful as ever. Continued complete control of Iraq is not only required for efficiency in the systematic American looting of Iraq, but is also required for the greater neocon plan to use Iraq as the American basis of control over the Middle East, with such control eventually ceded to Israel. Referring to the Bush Administration decision not to give up any control, a cynical, but insightful, U. N. official said:

"They're on their own. It's just between them and the American taxpayer."

Americans will continue to die in Iraq, and American taxpayers will continue to pay billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars, and the United States will continue to oppress and steal from the Iraqi people, leading to the certainty of increased risk of terrorist attacks against American targets, all so Bush, Cheney and the neocons can avoid the embarrassment of having to admit that they just might have been wrong about something. Wouldn't it be better for everyone concerned, and hundreds of billions of dollars cheaper, if the American government agreed to write a check personally payable to George W. Bush for $50 billion, in return for his agreeing to admit he made a mistake?

Here is the latest Judith Miller article in the New York Times. It concerns the investigations of David Kay in Iraq, and the somewhat surprising fact that he and his team were unable to find any weapons of mass destruction (I say 'surprising' as I assumed he went to Iraq to plant the evidence of weapons of mass destruction). The entertaining thing is that Miller manages to be the co-author of an article that discusses this issue without once mentioning that she was the key person involved in spreading the lies about Saddam's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (for some examples from the considerable Miller oeuvre, see here and here and here). Of course, she did this through citing various mysterious 'sources', but consistently showed a profound lack of a critical eye concerning what should have been clearly seen to be complete malarkey. With the podium of the New York Times to add credibility, Miller was responsible for establishing the justification for an attack that has cost the lives of over 300 American soldiers, led to the deaths of thousands of completely innocent Iraqis, and will cost the United States $166 billion and counting, together with the loss of its international reputation. She must be so proud.

From John Scarlett's latest testimony to the Hutton Inquiry, which begins with a question by Andrew Caldecott QC, counsel for the BBC (here, sections 136 to 141; my italics):

"Q. I just want to deal with one very short point. I think it was your own conclusion, I do not know whether it is reflected in the full JIC paper, which I have not seen, that the 9th September 45 minute claim related to battlefield munitions?


A. It did, yes.


Q. I think we can see how you might well have reached that conclusion if we look at BBC/30/3, very quickly. This is an extract from the Intelligence and Security Committee report.


A. Hmm.


Q. It deals with delivery systems.


A. Yes.


Q. The potential systems are set out in 46.


A. Yes.


Q. A number of serious doubts about almost all of them, except for artillery shells and so on, are expressed in 47. Then in 48: "The JIC assessed that the Iraqis might use chemical and biological weapons against neighbouring states or concentrations of Western forces. We were told that the weapons systems most likely to be used to deliver chemical and biological munitions against Western forces were artillery and rockets."


A. Yes.


Q. "These are battlefield weapons, which can be used tactically to great effect, but they are not strategic weapons." Firstly, was that made clear to the Prime Minister?


A. There was no discussion with the Prime Minister that I can recall about the 45 minutes point in connection with battlefield or strategic systems. Indeed I do not remember a discussion with the Prime Minister about the 45 minutes point at all.


Q. Who, apart from the internal assessment staff, was this message conveyed to?


A. Sorry, what message?


Q. Only battlefield munitions, not strategic weapons.


A. You say "only battlefield munitions". Do you know what a battlefield munition, a battlefield weapon, might actually involve? I can tell you the assessment from the DIS of what the most likely delivery system for chemical and biological, particularly chemical weapons, would be, and this was based on the experience of the Iran/Iraq War. Multiple rocket launchers, in particular the BM21 with a range of 20-kilometres or artillery up to the 155 millimetre artillery, which would have a range of 40 kilometres. In the Iran/Iraq War 20,000 Iranians were killed or wounded through the use of chemical weapons, so the difference between strategic and tactical in those contexts is quite difficult to draw, particularly as Iran's use of chemical weapons in the Iran/Iraq War had a strategic effect of halting a major Iranian advance. I just thought I would say that.


Q. Mr Scarlett, I totally take the point but you are well aware, are you not, of the distinction between range and casualty?


A. Yes.


Q. Yes. Strategic weapons have a far longer range, they could reach British bases in Cyprus, for example, which is what the newspaper said on 25th September.


A. A small number of newspapers said it on 25th September and not thereafter.


Q. A small number of newspapers with a readership of millions.


A. On the 25th September there were a small number of headlines about that; and afterwards virtually no reference to it.


Q. Were you concerned that that should be corrected, Mr Scarlett?


A. No, I was not and I will tell you why not. First of all, as regards my own assessment staff, we were ready to field enquiries from the press offices of No. 10, the MoD, the FCO with anything relating to issues of this kind. We received no enquiries whatsoever about the 45 minute point. The second point was I was of course following the press coverage of the dossier and I was interested to note that immediately after the headline flurry on various points on the 24th and 25th September the press coverage fell quickly into assessing the dossier as a sober and cautious document that most explicitly did not make a case for war, if anything it made a case for the return of the inspectors and it focused in particular, quite rightly in my view, on the importance of what the dossier had to say about the nuclear issue. I was content with the way that coverage came out; and that is - that was my attitude over many months indeed.


Q. Do I understand you to say that you do not correct it because no questions had been asked about it?


A. No, you may understand it but that would be wrong, but I have explained that the reason why that was not an issue in my mind was because of the very sober and sensible way in which media coverage of the dossier fell into place immediately after the 25th September.


Q. Well, what about the 25th September itself? This is the day it is announced in the House of Commons by the Prime Minister, and certainly a number of newspapers, with mass readerships throughout the country, have misunderstood it. Why was it not put right and why were you not concerned to put it right?


A. Because it was a fleeting moment and then the underlying assessment by the media of the dossier was as I have just described, and beyond that, of course, it is not my immediate responsibility to correct headlines and if I did that, I certainly would not have time to do my job."

It is amazing that Scarlett, like Geoff Hoon, is so arrogant in his testimony that he can't even be bothered to come up with a plausible reason why he didn't try to correct the reporting of British newspapers concerning the 45-minute claim. Scarlett gives three reasons why he didn't try to make a correction:

• no one asked him the specific question (Caldecott made the classic cross-examiner's mistake of allowing Scarlett to weasel out of this by asking one question too many, but it is clear that this was Scarlett's first reason);


• he was generally pleased with the whole coverage of the matter; and


• "if I did that, I certainly would not have time to do my job".

The first reason is ridiculous. No one asked the question precisely because they were all fooled by the way the dodgy dossier had been set up. No one asked because everyone reasonably assumed that the 45-minute claim wouldn't be in the dossier unless it related to a direct threat to British interests, and therefore had to involve strategic weapons. This is similar to Hoon's amazing assertion that it was all the fault of the editors and journalists for not making the correction, when of course they could not make the correction when they had no way of knowing that there was anything wrong to correct! The second reason amounts to a boast by Scarlett that he had gotten away with fooling everyone, and wasn't going to ruin the deception by pointing out the error. The third reason is outrageous, amounting to an assertion that it was outside the scope of Scarlett's employment to correct a grievous error based on a reasonable reading of a document drafted by him, an error which was being used to hornswoggle the British people into agreeing to a war they didn't want. If correcting such an error wasn't in the narrow terms of Scarlett's job, perhaps he should start looking for another one. Of course, we all know this wasn't a mistake: the point of the dossier was to deceive. That's why both Hoon and Scarlett find it impossible to come up with a good reason to explain why they allowed important falsehoods to be believed by the British people. They all must have had some good laughs about how they played the whole country for fools.

From the transcript of the September 22 Bret Hume interview with George Bush referring to Bush's upcoming speech to the U. N.:

"I will make it clear that I made the right decision and the others that joined us made the right decision. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. The U.N. is going to be - has a chance to be more effective as a result of 1441. That's the resolution that said if you don't disarm there will be serious consequences. At least somebody stood up and said this is a definition of serious consequences."

If you don't disarm there will be serious consequences? Bush is seriously going to go to the U. N. and explain to the countries of the world that the attack on Iraq represents the 'serious consequences' for Saddam's failure to disarm? There really is no hope for any of us, faced as we are with this combination of arrogance and utter stupidity.

From Geoff Hoon's latest testimony to the Hutton Inquiry (here, sections 80 to 84; my italics and bold print):

"Q. Did you know that the 45 minute claim in the dossier was taken from a JIC assessment which does not in fact identify any particular weapon?


A. Well, I recall at the time having some discussion in the Ministry of Defence about the kinds of weapons that could be deployable within 45 minutes; and I think the assumption was made that they would be, for example, chemical shells, which were clearly capable of being deployed, as I think Mr Scarlett has indicated to the Inquiry, in a time even less than 45 minutes; I think he suggested 20 minutes.


Q. So you knew, did you, that the munitions referred to were only battlefield munitions?


A. I was certainly aware that that was one suggestion, yes.


Q. Was there any other suggestion that they were not battlefield munitions but strategic munitions?


A. I recall asking what kind of weapons would be deployable within 45 minutes; and the answer is the answer that I have just given to you.


Q. Which was shells, battlefield mortars, tactical weapons of that kind?


A. Yes.


Q. Would your Department be responsible for correcting any false impression given by the press on an issue of this importance?


A. I think on an issue of this importance it would not simply have been the Ministry of Defence that was solely responsible. There would have been an effort across Government.


Q. Are you aware that on 25th September a number of newspapers had banner headlines suggesting that this related to strategic missiles or bombs?


A. I can recall, yes.


Q. Why was no corrective statement issued for the benefit of the public in relation to those media reports?


A. I do not know.


Q. It must have been considered by someone, must it not?


A. I have spent many years trying to persuade newspapers and journalists to correct their stories. I have to say it is an extraordinarily time consuming and generally frustrating process.


Q. I am sorry, are you saying that the press would not report a corrective statement that the dossier was meant to refer, in this context, to battlefield munitions and not to strategic weapons?


A. What I am suggesting is that I was not aware of whether any consideration was given to such a correction. All that I do know from my experience is that, generally speaking, newspapers are resistant to corrections. That judgment may have been made by others as well.


Q. But, Mr Hoon, you must have been horrified that the dossier had been misrepresented in this way; it was a complete distortion of what it actually was intended to convey, was it not?


A. Well, I was not horrified. I recognised that journalists occasionally write things that are more dramatic than the material upon which it is based.


Q. Can we forget journalists for the moment and concentrate on the members of the public who are reading it? Will they not be entitled to be given the true picture of the intelligence, not a vastly inflated one?


A. I think that is a question you would have to put to the journalists and the editors responsible.


Q. But you had the means to correct it, not them. They could not correct it until they were told, could they?


A. Well, as I say, my experience of trying to persuade newspapers to correct false impressions is one that is not full of success.


Q. Do you accept that on this topic at least you had an absolute duty to try to correct it?


A. No, I do not.


Q. Do you accept that you had any duty to correct it?


A. Well, I apologise for repeating the same answer, but you are putting the question in another way. I have tried on many, many occasions to persuade journalists and newspapers to correct stories. They do not like to do so.


Q. Can I suggest to you a reason why this was not done? It would have been politically highly embarrassing because it would have revealed the dossier as published was at least highly capable of being misleading.


A. Well, I do not accept that.


Q. So your suggestion is that this was a disgraceful exaggeration by the press of what was clear in the dossier as a reference to battlefield munitions?


A. I am certainly suggesting that it was an exaggeration, but it is not unusual for newspapers to exaggerate.


Q. Can you tell me, if you happen to have it to hand, where in the dossier it is made clear that the CBW weapons which were the subject of the 45 minute claim were only battlefield munitions?


A. Well, I do not have it to hand; and I do not know whether it was made clear."

The dossier was prepared with the intention of justifying to the Labour caucus, the British people, and the world, that an unprovoked and very unpopular attack by Britain against Iraq was necessary, based largely on the weapons of mass destruction threat posed by the Saddam regime. The dossier contained a rather prominent claim about Saddam being ready to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, but failed to make it clear that it referred only to battlefield munitions, and not the kind of missiles that could possibly have posed a risk to British interests. In Blair's introduction to the dossier he stated:

"Saddam has used chemical weapons, not only against an enemy state, but against his own people. Intelligence reports make clear that he sees the building up of his WMD capability, and the belief overseas that he would use these weapons, as vital to his strategic interests, and in particular his goal of regional domination. And the document discloses that his military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them."

In Chapter 3 of the dossier itself, the 45-minute claim was made under a section headed by the following sentence: "This chapter sets out what we know of Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, drawing on all the available evidence." The 45-minute claim was buried within claims regarding chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and claims regarding extended-range SCUD missiles capable of reaching, amongst other places, Cyprus. The claim later appeared in a section headed 'Recent Intelligence', again buried in a discussion of WMD and missiles capable of delivering them. Hoon admits that he was aware of the distinction between battlefield munitions and missiles capable of threatening British interests, that he was aware that British papers had assumed that the 45-minute claim referred to missiles, and that he did absolutely nothing to correct the misapprehension. Then he has the audacity to complain that newspapers rarely make corrections, and blames the lack of a correction on the journalists and editors! He makes this amazing claim while acknowledging that the journalists and editors had no way of knowing that they had something that needed correcting, because neither he nor anyone in the Blair government had bothered to tell them! It is completely obvious that the 45-minute claim was inserted in the dossier with the intent to mislead, and the failure to correct the completely understandable misapprehension of the newspapers that the 45-minute claim referred to weapons that could actually pose a danger to British interests was part of the larger conspiracy involving the creation and (mis)use of the dossier.

In what position was David Kelly's body when it was found? From the testimony of Louise Holmes, who officially first found the body (here, sections 12 and 13; all emphasis in this posting is added by me):

"Q. And did you notice anything about the position of the body?

A. He was at the base of the tree with almost his head and his shoulders just slumped back against the tree.

Q. And what about his legs and arms? Where were they?

A. His legs were straight in front of him. His right arm was to the side of him. His left arm had a lot of blood on it and was bent back in a funny position."

From the testimony of another searcher, Paul Chapman, the second person to officially see the body (here, section 26):

"Q. Did you see what Brock the dog had found?

A. Yes.

Q. And what was that?

A. The body of a gentleman sitting up against a tree."

and (section 27):

"Q. Could you see anything at all?

A. He was sitting with his back up against a tree and there was an obvious injury to his left arm.

Q. An obvious injury to his left arm. What was that injury?

A. In as far as it was all covered in blood."

From the testimony of Detective Constable Graham Coe (here, section 2):

"Q. And how was the body positioned?

A. It was laying on its back - the body was laying on its back by a large tree, the head towards the trunk of the tree."

From Police Constable Dean Franklin (here, section 33):

"Q. And what was his position?

A. He was lying on his back with his right hand to his side and his left hand was sort of inverted with the palm facing down (Indicates), facing up on his back."

From Police Constable Martyn Sawyer (section 49):

"Q. Before the paramedics approached Dr Kelly's body, can you remember what position it was in?

A. Lying on its back with its head at the base of a tree, a large tree. The head was tilted to the left. The right arm was by the side. The left arm was palm down. There was a large amount of blood on the back of the left arm."

and (section 50):

"His jeans - he was wearing jeans, they were pulled up slightly, exposing the lower half of his leg or his ankle. It looked as if he had slid down and his trousers had ridden up."

From paramedic Vanessa Hunt (here, section 73):

"Q. And when you got into the wooded area, what did you see?

A. There was a male on his back, feet towards us."

and, in the context of the paramedics unbuttoning Kelly's shirt to place the pads on his chest (section 75):

"Q. Did you yourself move the body at all?

A. The only part of the body we moved was Dr Kelly's right arm, which was over the chest, to facilitate us to place the fourth lead on to the chest. It was just lifted slightly from the body."

From ambulance technician David Bartlett (here, section 80):

"They led us up to where the body was laid, feet facing us, laid on its back, left arm out to one side (indicates) and the right arm across the chest."

From the testimony of forensic pathologist Nicholas Hunt, who arrived later, but at a time when the scene was supposed to be completely undisturbed except for the medical work by the paramedics (here, section 6):

"He was lying on his back fully clothed with his boots on. His left arm was towards his side and his right arm was over his chest area."

and (sections 8 and 9):

"He was laying on his back near a tree. The left arm was extended out from the body slightly, closer to shoulder level, his right arm was laying across his chest area and his legs were extended out straight in front of him.

Q. I take it from what you just said he was laying on his back?

A. He was, yes.

Q. Was any part of his body actually touching the tree; can you recall?

A. I recall that his head was quite close to branches and so forth, but not actually over the tree."

It appears that the first two witnesses saw the body slumped against the tree, but all subsequent witnesses saw the body completely flat on the ground, with the head near the tree. PC Sawyer believed that the fact the jeans had ridden up Kelly's leg indicated that he had perhaps slid down the tree, but in that case wouldn't at least some of the body be likely to still be resting against the tree? The really odd thing is that all the early reporting on this matter states that Kelly's body was found face down.

Why are Bush, Wolfowitz, Rice, and Rumsfeld all simultaneously contradicting Dick Cheney and months of heavy Bush Administration propaganda lies to clearly state that Iraq had nothing to do with September 11? Rice actually went so far as to state that the Bush Administration had never linked Saddam to 9-11!!! The Bushites managed to have 69% of Americans believe that there is a likely connection between Saddam and 9-11, so why upset the apple-cart now? Could it be that Rove decided he had sold the Iraq attack based on this lie, had milked it for all it was worth, and it was time to clear the decks so that the Bushites could now construct a new lie to attack a new country? If Saddam was responsible for 9-11, it would be harder to use a similar lie to start a war on Syria or Iran or Saudi Arabia. Now, the Bush Administration is all set to convince the moronic American people that their next target, whatever it might be, was actually behind the attacks on September 11. It is a reusable, recyclable lie.

Baruch Kimmerling has written what purports to be a review of a biography of Ehud Barak, but what is really an outstanding summary of the truth behind Barak's 'generous offer' and Sharon's manipulation of the 'roadmap'. It is an outstanding essay, and so I quote more than I normally would:

1. On Barak's 'generous offer':

   "It should be recalled that the Palestinians, from their perspective, had already made the ultimate concession, and thus were without bargaining chips. In the Oslo agreements, they had recognized Israel’s right to exist in 78 per cent of historical Palestine in the hope that, following the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan - and on the basis of the Arab interpretation of UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967 - they might recover the remainder, with minor border adjustments. Yet - although later there was a certain slackening of Israeli demands - talk continued concerning annexation of another 12 per cent or so of the West Bank in order to create three settlement blocs, thus dividing the Palestinian state into separate cantons, with the connexions between them very problematic. The Palestinians called the portions allotted to them bantustans; but the original enclaves created by the Afrikaners for South African blacks were far better endowed than those of Barak's 'generous' proposal."

   and

   "During the course of the talks Barak did indeed agree to be 'flexible' about the Israeli proposals on the various issues, and was close to a territorial concession of over 92 per cent. But each proposal, and each issue, was discussed individually; and it was stressed that, until everything had been agreed upon, nothing was agreed. Thus the Palestinians were made discrete offers in many different areas, mainly out of the certainty that all would be rejected outright regardless, while the Palestinians - or so it was reported at the time - did not make any counter-proposals. Afterward, Barak could group together all the separate instances and claim that he had made an incomparably generous offer to the Palestinians."

   and

   "There were further so-called 'non-talks' and 'non-papers' in Taba where, according to some sources, the parties came closer to agreement than ever before. As far as Barak and Arafat were concerned, however, the game at Camp David was over. From that episode to armed conflict was just a question of time."



2. On the Palestinian response:

   "After seven years of futile talks that had failed to make any significant advance in the Palestinian cause - accompanied by the intensification of the Jewish colonization process in the Occupied Palestinian Territories - the question was not whether but when the anger and violence would erupt, and in what form. The Palestinians were not entirely unaware of the asymmetry in the power relations with Israel, but they changed the paradigm. From an attempt to end the occupation and achieve independence that relied upon diplomatic efforts and depended on the kindness of the Jews and Americans, they moved on to a 'war for independence', fuelled in part by religious emotions; the type of struggle in which the people are prepared to pay a high personal and collective price in order to achieve what they see as a paramount objective."



3. On Sharon's real goal, politicide:

   "Under Sharon, Israel has become a state oriented towards one major goal: the politicide of the Palestinian people. Politicide is a process whose ultimate aim is to destroy a certain people’s prospects - indeed, their very will - for legitimate self-determination and sovereignty over land they consider their homeland. It is, in fact, a reversal of the process suggested by Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War and since then accepted as a standard international principle. Politicide includes a mixture of martial, political, social and psychological measures. The most commonly used techniques in this process are expropriation of lands and their colonization; restrictions on spatial mobility (curfews, closures, roadblocks); murder; localized massacres; mass detentions; division, or elimination, of leaders and elite groups; hindrance of regular education and schooling; physical destruction of public institutions and infrastructure, private homes and property; starvation; social and political isolation; re-education; and partial or, if feasible, complete ethnic cleansing, although this may not occur as a single dramatic action. The aim of most of these practices is to make life so unbearable that the greatest possible majority of the rival population, especially its elite and middle classes, will leave the area 'voluntarily'. Typically, all such actions are taken in the name of law and order; a key aim is to achieve the power to define one's own side as the law enforcers, and the other as criminals and terrorists. An alternative goal may be the establishment of a puppet regime - like those of the bantustans - that is completely obedient but provides an illusion of self-determination to the oppressed ethnic or racial community."

   and

   "The hard facts are, however, that a Palestinian people exists, and the possibility of its politicide - or its being ethnically cleansed from the country - without fatal consequences for Israel, is nil. On the other hand, Israel is not only an established presence in the region but also, in local terms, a military, economic and technological superpower. Like many other immigrant-settler societies it was born in sin, on the ruins of another culture that had suffered politicide and partial ethnic cleansing - although the Zionist state did not succeed in annihilating the rival indigenous culture, as many other immigrant-settler societies have done. In 1948 it lacked the power to do so, and the strength of post-colonial sentiment at the time made such actions less internationally acceptable. Unlike the outcome in Algeria, Zambia or South Africa, however, the Palestinians were unable to overthrow their colonizers."



4. On Sharon's use of the 'roadmap':

   "Similarly, it was in the run-up to its invasion of Iraq that the Bush Administration issued its new 'Road Map'. Its goal is to close down all armed resistance to Israel in exchange for the establishment, within temporary borders, of an entity described as a 'Palestinian state' by the end of 2003. This is to be followed by the withdrawal of Israeli forces from pa territories and elections for a new Palestinian Council, leading to negotiations with Israel on a permanent agreement, to be reached by 2005. The so-called 'Quartet' of the US, EU, UN and Russia is supposed to supervise implementation of the plan, which leaves all the matters in dispute - borders, refugees, status of Jerusalem, among others - open. This strategy fits well with Sharon's tactic of buying time to continue his politicide policy - a tactic that rests on the assumption that Palestinian terrorist attacks will continue, drawing forth a correspondingly savage Israeli military response."

   and, most importantly:

   "Being an able map-reader, Sharon has found the new Bush plan very convenient. Speaking in November 2002, he outlined a clear vision of how the conflict should be managed: with the implementation of the Road Map, Israel would be able to create a contiguous area of territory in the West Bank which, through a combination of tunnels and bridges, would allow Palestinians to travel from Jenin to Hebron without passing through any Israeli roadblocks or checkpoints. Israel would undertake measures such as 'creating territorial continuity between Palestinian population centres' - that is, withdrawing from cities such as Jenin, Nablus and Hebron - as long as the Palestinians remain engaged in making a 'sincere and real effort to stop terror'. Then, after the required reforms in the Palestinian Authority had been completed, the next phase of the Bush plan would come into effect: the establishment of a Palestinian state, within 'provisional' borders.
   
   The intention is obvious. The 'Palestinian state' will be formed by three enclaves around the cities of Jenin, Nablus, and Hebron, lacking territorial contiguity. The plan to connect the enclaves with tunnels and bridges means that a strong Israeli presence will exist in most other areas of the West Bank. To drive the point home, Sharon added:
   

   This Palestinian state will be completely demilitarized. It will be allowed to maintain lightly armed police and internal forces to ensure civil order. Israel will continue to control all movement in and out of the Palestinian state, will command its airspace, and not allow it to form alliances with Israel's enemies.

   
   Sharon knows very well that it would be virtually impossible for a Palestinian leader to end the conflict in exchange for such limited sovereignty and territory. However, the very mention of the code words 'Palestinian state' - taboo in the right-wing lexicon - endows him with an image of moderation abroad and positions him at the centre of the domestic political spectrum. Such gestures also win him an almost unlimited amount of time to continue his programme of politicide . . . ."
   



5. On the backasswards Israeli position based on a faulty presumption, namely:

   ". . . the presumption that the root of the violence lies in 'Palestinian terrorism', rather than in Israel's generation-long occupation and illegal colonization of Palestinian lands and its exploitation and harassment of the entire people. Thus the initial Israeli 'condition' states that: 'In the first phase of the plan and as a condition for progress to the second phase, the Palestinians will complete the dismantling of terrorist organizations . . . and their infrastructure, collect all illegal weapons and transfer them to a third party'. Were the document's framers to adopt a more accurate perspective on the historical and political causalities, they would propose the prompt termination of occupation, and withdrawal of Israeli military forces to the pre-1967 borders as the first - and not the last - phase of the process. Under such conditions, it would then make sense to demand that the sovereign Palestinian state cease its resistance against a non-existent occupation and act, gradually but forcefully, against terrorist organizations that might endanger its own authority or stability."



6. On a way to start the solution:

   "A minimal requirement of a realistic peace plan is to give the Palestinians some possibility of achieving one of their major aims: a sovereign state over 22 per cent of historic Palestine. An explicit statement of this goal could create a greater symmetry among the parties and provide incentives for settling all the additional issues such as Jerusalem, refugees, the division of water resources and so on."

I don't think I've ever read anything as sensible on the whole problem and the way it continues due to the crazy logic of the Israeli position. One of the great mysteries of the problem is how the Israelis have managed to convince the Americans that it makes sense to set up the negotiations as a series of insurmountable hurdles for the Palestinians. Only after they get over the hurdles are the Palestinians promised some fraction of a state. The Palestinians see the absurdity of this, react violently, and this violence is used to errect further hurdles. Somehow doing more and more of the same idiocy, which constantly leads to disaster, is supposed to lead closer to peace. The real root-cause problem is that the Israelis are violently occupying the homeland of the Palestinians, and this problem creates the symptom of Palestinian violence. Therefore, the only possible start to a peaceful solution is for the Israeli occupation to stop (i. e., evacuate all the settlements, and get the IDF out of the Occupied Territories). The reason this obvious solution hasn't been tried seems to rest in a combination of the continued American funding for Israel, which allows Israel the luxury of delaying the decision, and a certain bad faith in Israeli society, where the idea still exists that the Palestinians can be conquered, and their land stolen. Until the Americans stop enabling the evil and the Israelis make up their minds to give up 'wishful thinking' and do the only right and possible thing, there will be no peace (failure to do the right thing may lead to some rather unexpected consequences). We now see Bush, immediately after the Americans veto a UN resolution criticizing Israel for threatening to 'remove' Arafat, blaming (or here) the whole Mid-East problem on Arafat without once mentioning the threat by Israel to Arafat or the fact that the hudna was intentionally ended by Sharon with his constant series of useless targeted assassinations. The relentless focusing on Arafat, a tired old man caged in a falling-down compound with no real power to either cause terrorism or stop terrorism, is symptomatic of the utter failure by the Americans and the Israelis to acknowledge where the real problem lies. The Palestinians can do nothing to lead to peace; only the Israelis can.

From the Hutton Inquiry testimony of Sir Richard Dearlove, chief of MI6, pretentiously testifying from a secure location by voice only (so no foreign spies could see what Sir Richard, known as 'C', looks like), and answering the question: "Did you consider that the 45 minutes . . . was given undue prominence?" (here, sections 101 and 102):

"Well, I think given the misinterpretation that was placed on the minutes intelligence, with the benefit of hindsight you can say that is a valid criticism. But I am confident that the intelligence was accurate and that the use made of it was entirely consistent with the original report.

LORD HUTTON: Would you just elaborate what you mean by the misinterpretation placed on the 45 minutes claim, Sir Richard?

A. (Pause). Well, I think the original report referred to chemical and biological munitions and that was taken to refer to battlefield weapons. I think what subsequently happened in the reporting was that it was taken that the 45 minutes applied, let us say, to weapons of a longer range, let us say just battlefield material."

and, in response to a question of whether the 45-minute claim was unhelpful to an understanding of the issue (section 103):

"Given the misinterpretation of the original piece of intelligence, particularly as it was not qualified in terms of its relationship to battlefield munitions, this now looks a valid criticism; but I think the intelligence was accurate and that it was put to legitimate use in the drafting process."

This explanation is sheer nonsense. Note that Sir Richard wallows in the passive voice, saying "was taken to refer to battlefield weapons", and attempts to put the blame for the problem on the "reporting". But what else were people supposed to think? The point made by Blair was that the 45 minutes was the time between Saddam deciding to do something awfully bad to Britain, and Saddam's weapons taking off. The whole essence of the dossier was to make the claim that an attack on Saddam was the only possible way for Britain to avoid taking a terrible risk from an attack from Saddam. If Saddam's weapons weren't capable of reaching any British interests, the whole basis of the 45-minute claim evaporates. The reason that a 'misinterpretation' was made is that the 45-minute claim only makes sense if it refers to a real capability to attack British interests. Because such capacity didn't exist, and British intelligence and the Blair government knew it didn't exist, the 45-minute claim is a bare-faced lie.

Judith Miller has reemerged to deposit another steaming, fragrant, neocon propaganda piece for the New York Times. This one concerns the beginnings of the propaganda build-up towards an American attack on Syria. John R. Bolton, under secretary of state for arms control, testified to a House hearing (the International Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia) that Syria supports terrorist groups and has an ambitious program to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Some comments:

1. Even amongst the neocons, who are a completely disgusting group of evil ideologues, Bolton stands out as perhaps the most offensive. He was sent by the Bush Administration to deal with North Korea, presumably in order to scupper any chance of a negotiated peace. At a critical point of the negotiations, he delivered a scathing personal attack on Kim Jong-il, leading the North Koreans to refuse to deal with him any more. They referred to him as a 'bloodsucker', and 'human scum', which surely is a grievous insult to scum everywhere. It is impossible to see Bolton's personal attacks on the North Korean leader exactly at the time of the most crucial negotiations by South Korea as anything other than the message of the Bush Administration that it wants a war with North Korea.


2. Miller manages to write a whole article on Bolton's testimony without once mentioning the reason why it was delayed. The CIA, fresh from the embarrassment of having Tenet sit behind Powell while Powell lied to the United Nations about Iraq, thus tacitly putting a CIA imprimatur on statements the CIA knew to be wrong, refused to have the exact same thing happen when Bolton delivered his pack o' lies to the House hearing. Thus, Bolton's testimony, which was supposed to happen in July, was postponed until September. Miller is amazing (my emphasis):

   "Late last week, the testimony was cleared by the intelligence community and the White House."

   Do you think the 'intelligence community' still includes the CIA? If it doesn't, is the CIA supposed to stand by while people naturally assume that it does? Just what happened to the CIA concerns which were so important they delayed Bolton's testimony? She continues (my emphasis):

   "A copy of the public testimony, to the International Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, was provided to The New York Times by individuals who feel that the accusations against Syria have received insufficient attention."

   What the hell does that mean? Why would the New York Times have to have a copy of public testimony slipped to it by mysterious 'individuals'. What do you think the chances are that these individuals work for Cheney, perhaps even in the current manifestation of the Office of Special Plans? Isn't it amazing that Miller tips her hand here, expressly noting that the testimony was brought to her attention by those hoping she would spin it for them so bad things about Syria start to appear in the New York Times? Has she no shame at all?


3. Seymour Hersh wrote a long article explaining how attempts by Syria to curry good relations with the United States have been consistently rebuffed by the Bush Administration (see also here). In what is increasingly looking like a pattern, American refusal to deal with Syria in a mature way has led to the CIA losing access to important Syrian intelligence information on Islamic terrorism. Again and again we see the Bushites justify their actions on the 'war on terror', while simultaneously taking steps which actually hurt their fighting the war on terror, all because they really want only to proceed with their hidden agendas. In this case, the hidden agenda is Israel, and the neocons refuse to deal with Syria unless it stops supporting Hezbollah, something Syria can't, and won't, do.


4. Miller:

   "The testimony — some will be given in public, the rest in a closed briefing — pitted officials who wanted a much tougher critique of Syria against those who wished to encourage Syria to honor its pledges."

   In other words, she manages to misleadingly depict the scope of the debate as being between those who would like to start attacking Syria yesterday, and those who are prepared to wait a few weeks.


5. Miller:

   "Tensions between Washington and Damascus have flared in recent months. As major combat operations in Iraq wound down, administration officials, including President Bush, suggested Syria was harboring Iraqi officials who had fled (an accusation Syria denied) and was allowing remnants of Saddam Hussein's government to hide major weapons in Syria. The United States Army wounded and took into custody five Syrian border guards in June when it attacked what American officials said was an Iraqi convoy near the border."

   Note that Miller manages to slide into her article allegations that Syria is sheltering Iraqi officials, and hiding Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, both staples of the Bush Administration propaganda campaign against Syria. There is not one shred of evidence for either allegation, and Miller's repeating them shows exactly where she is coming from. The American attack on Iraqis at the border with Syria, which actually involved Americans entering Syria and killing Syrians in Syria as the Americans claimed to be in 'hot pursuit' of Iraqi officials, was a complete disaster. It appears that the rumor that the Iraqi officials were fleeing to Syria may have been planted by the Israelis (or here) in order to lead the Americans to make this attack, hoping that the Syrians would retaliate and be drawn into war. The Syrians wisely didn't take the bait, and have tried to play the whole incident down (when Miller she says tensions 'have flared', she implies that this is the fault of something that Syria did, while in fact the Americans continue to take provoking actions at the border). In fact, it appears that there were no fleeing Saddam officials, and the Americans just managed to kill a bunch of Iraqi smugglers and some innocent people who had the misfortune to live near the border. The Pentagon is so embarrassed by the matter that it tried to downplay it. In another example of the art of the propagandist, Miller includes it in her article in a place which makes you think it supports the neocon allegations against Syria, when in fact it clearly does not.


6. After regurgitating the lies of Bolton as a series of 'allegations', without the tiniest attempt to raise the slightest doubt about any of it, Miller/Bolton conclude with a tour de force of the art of propaganda (my emphasis):

   "The testimony also expresses concern about Syria's nuclear activities, noting that Russia and Syria 'have approved a draft program on cooperation on civil nuclear power,' expertise that could be applied to a weapons program."

   I guess Americans can expect those Syrian nukes to come raining down any time now! The extraordinary irony in all this is that the one country that does have nukes in the Middle East is behind all the neocon machinations.


7. In the context of the current debacle in Iraq, where neocon lies led to an immoral and illegal attack on a sovereign country, an attack which has led to what may very well turn out to be the most costly mistake in American history, Bolton has a tremendous amount of nerve starting the same lying process in aid of war with respect to Syria (it's particularly funny that Bolton tells his lies about Syria at the same time that Rumsfeld finally admits he has no evidence for the lies told by the entire Bush Administration about the connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam: that lie has served its purpose in justifying the last war, while Bolton's new lies lead to the next war). Miller has even more nerve, given all the criticisms she has recently faced, of coming out with such a blatant pile of manipulation. I've said it before and I'll say it again: these people are insane. Do they really think the American people are so stupid that they would allow another war based on lies after the example of the disaster in Iraq? (Are the American people that stupid?)

The New York Times has done us all a great service by continuing to print the short stories of Judith Miller. Because she has been identified as a pure Pentagon political spinner, we can see immediately what the lies of the future are going to be, and how the American public is supposed to be spun. The tragedy of all this is that Syria, like Iraq, had established the basis of a secular society within the context of Islam, exactly what the United States should be encouraging (read this excellent sympathetic article on Syria's American problem; see also here). Neocon attacks will destroy this secularism, and lead to more Islamic fundamentalism in politics.

I still don't understand the absence of outrage over the position of Dick Cheney in the Iraq debacle. Cheney is still getting paid by Halliburton. You can bet that after he is out of politics Halliburton will ensure that he is very well looked after. Due in part to Cheney's incompetent management when he was running Halliburton, Halliburton was in danger of disappearing under the weight of liability claims against it. Cheney is no doubt still assisting Halliburton in that battle, and the extremely lucrative contracts in Iraq, almost all of which are going to Halliburton, are ensuring that Halliburton remains in business. It is thus able to continue to pay Cheney and will still be around to reward him when he is out of politics. The attack on Iraq had extremely beneficial effects on Cheney's bank account. Here is a quote from an article entitled "Cheney was influential advocate of policy in Iraq" by Ron Hutcheson:

"According to other senior administration officials, Cheney, arguably the most influential member of Bush's inner circle, took the lead in pushing for Saddam Hussein's removal. He was also among the most optimistic in assessing the prospects for postwar Iraq, predicting that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators.

'His influence was at the starting point. He planted the seeds and the seeds grew into what he wanted,' said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the Pentagon office that dealt with postwar planning. 'The vice president was a player in this policy.'

Another senior administration official said Cheney 'has been the most powerful engine behind the Iraq policy from the start.' The official, who was unwilling to be identified as criticizing administration policy, said Cheney tipped the balance in internal debates by siding with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over Powell.

Rumsfeld shared Cheney's desire for military action and his distrust of the United Nations, while Powell pushed for diplomatic alternatives to war and now is seeking a broader U.N. role in postwar Iraq.

'If it weren't for the vice president, Powell would have a fighting chance against Rumsfeld,' the official said."

Hundreds of dead American soldiers, thousands of badly maimed American soldiers, thousands and thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, the enmity of the whole world (brand names associated with the United States are rapidly losing market share around the world), and $166 billion (and counting) later, it turns out that the war turned on the insistence of one man who directly financially benefited from that war. Why aren't Americans rioting in the streets over this?

The $87 billion that Bush demanded catches the eye. It sounds like some kind of joke figure that kidder Bush might have asked for on April Fool's Day. Just think of the ringing guffaws from the Republicans if the Democrats had requested a tenth of it for some social program. But consider:

1. The $87 billion and what Bush has already requested for Iraq and Afghanistan actually add up to $166 billion.


2. Bush made it clear that the $87 billion was only the first installment, and the U. S. was going to stay until the job of fighting terror in Iraq was done (or, I guess, until the United States completely runs out of money, whichever comes first).


3. Only $21 billion of the $87 billion actually covers reconstruction costs for Iraq (the Iraqi electrical and water systems by themselves are estimated to require $29 billion). It appears that, despite many pious promises by the Bush Administration, Afghanistan isn't going to be reconstructed.


4. Regardless of what the Bush Administration says, no other country is going to contribute any sizeable amount of money to the pot. The idea that Iraq's oil would pay for the reconstruction appears more and more to have been an hallucination Dick Cheney had during one of his heart attacks.


5. The great majority of the money is going to pay for what is essentially Pentagon operating costs (wages, fuel, etc.). These costs have been extremely inflated by the Pentagon's new propensity to contract out practically anything it can get away with. The money is not covering any appreciable amount of the capital costs to the Pentagon's equipment, which is literally being sanded down in the deserts of Iraq. When the operation in Iraq is over, the American taxpayer will have to completely repurchase most of the main military equipment for the U. S. Army, at a cost of untold additional billions.

While $87 billion sounds like a lot to the unsophisticated hillbilly, the neocons will tell you that it is really just chump change compared to the total cost of their little experiment in Iraq. The chumps will have to pony up a lot more change before the chimp is done.

Amidst all the doom and gloom there is a tiny ray of sanity. A while ago I wrote about the closing of the Army War College's Peacekeeping Institute at Carlisle Barracks, the only institute the U. S. army has which is devoted to peacekeeping. Given what is going on in Iraq, where soldiers untrained in anything other than killing are creating a disaster both for themselves and for the Iraqis, I thought this was typical miltaristic neocon dumbness. The good news is that it appears that the decision to close the Institute has been reversed, although they are being very coy about it (they first announced they were rethinking the issue in early July). I hope this signals the beginnings of a lot of reversals for the neocon civilians who are having such a terrible influence on the American military, the United States, and the world. A statement posted on the war college's site, which was scrubbed when MSNBC started asking questions about it, said:

"Following an Army senior leadership review, the capabilities of the U.S. Army Peacekeeping Institute (PKI) will be retained at the U.S. Army War College. The review determined that while the capabilities of the former PKI continue to be important to the Army, they are by themselves insufficient to address fully all aspects of stabilization missions such as those currently ongoing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Accordingly, the original PKI charter and structure are being adjusted in order to meet the full needs of the U.S. Army and the U.S. military in the coming years across a broad range of peacekeeping and stability operations. After restructuring, the organization will be renamed, most likely as the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI). The URL for the PKSOI’s specific web presence will be announced once it becomes active."

Good.

In international affairs, Americans always prefer violence to diplomacy. This has gotten worse under the current regime, but the problem didn't start with the chimp. Bush has, however, taken the United States into new depths of diplomatic incompetence:

1. If you're like me, you often find yourself in need of a handy list of some of the international treaties, agreements and understandings that the rest of the world has managed to live with but that the United States has never ratified or agreed to, or has decided to get out of. Here is such a list.


2. American incompetence at diplomacy is turning into a serious problem for the world and the United States. The particular example of American stupidity in the days and months which led to the disastrous attack on Iraq has cost Americans an immense amount of money, with only the most recent installment - with many, many more to come - amounting to $87 billion. Incompetence at diplomacy is expensive.


3. Here is a list of U. S. government assassination plots (I think it would be fair to add Hugo Chavez to the list, and, if Israel has its way, Arafat) from the book "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II" by William Blum (you can read some chapters from the site: this one is very interesting).


4. The Americans have long recognized two forms of terrorism: those acts committed against the United States or Israel, which are called 'terrorism', and those violent acts committed by the United States or Israel, which are ignored (which explains the surreal American reporting on the Palestine where the many, many appalling acts of state terrorism committed daily by the IDF against the Palestinians are completely ignored by the disgusting American media, while every single response by the Palestinians to the constant violence committed against them is depicted as a violent unprovoked breach of the peace).


5. Here, from the book "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower", again by William Blum, is a partial list of American global military and other interventions in the lives of other countries since 1945.

And Americans still wonder why they are not universally loved.

Paul Wolfowitz in an interview with the Washington Post on September 6 (or here):

"There are some thousands of former Baathists (members of Saddam's Baath Party) and some hundreds of al-Qaida and other foreign terrorists who are . . . killing Americans and Iraqis and U.N. officials and moderate Shiite leaders in order to destabilize Iraq."

or, as published (edited?) in DefenseLINK:

". . . there are some thousands of former Ba'athists and some hundreds of al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists who are killing Americans and Iraqis."

Paul Wolfowitz on September 11 on ABC's 'Good Morning America':

"We know it (Iraq) had a great deal to do with terrorism in general and with al-Qaeda in particular, and we know a great many of bin Laden's key lieutenants are now trying to organize in cooperation with old loyalists from the Saddam regime to attack in Iraq."

Paul Wolfowitz on September 12 tells the Associated Press that he had 'misspoken' and that U. S. military forces were still trying to identify the foreign fighters in Iraq and whether they are collaborating with Saddam loyalists. But isn't Bush's request for the absurd first-installment sum of $87 billion ($87 billion saved is $87 billion earned; $87 billion here, $87 billion there, eventually it adds up to real money) based entirely on the necessity for the United States to continue the 'war on terror' in Iraq until the forces lined up against the United States are defeated? How can Bush be sure he needs $87 billion to defeat terror until he is certain that al-Qaeda is really involved in Iraq? What if the Americans aren't fighting international terror at all, but just a bunch of Iraqis defending their country from invasion? Wouldn't it be nice if the neocons could keep their stories straight at least long enough to walk away with the $87 billion? Do you think it might be possible that they saw a chance to make the largest heist from the American treasury in history to feather the nests of their military-industrial complex friends, all on the basis of the universal Bush excuse for everything, the 'war on terror'? Is the 'war on terror' just being used as an excuse to explain why the United States can't withdraw from Iraq, as withdrawal would embarrass the neocons, ruin the neocon-Zionist plans for Israeli domination of the Middle East, and destroy Halliburton's (and Cheney's personal) pot o' gold?

In the Ontario election campaign which is going on now, the governing Progressive Conservatives are being challenged by the Liberals. Since the Conservatives have done such a lousy job as the government, they are attempting to make the voters question whether the leader of the Liberals, Dalton McGuinty, is up to the job of running the Province. In a press release issued Friday, the Conservatives said: "Dalton McGuinty: He's an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet." The leader of the Conservatives refused to apologize for the remark. It's nice to see that followers of the writings of David Icke are everywhere.

From an article in Time dated June 20, 2001 (emphasis added):

". . . For sheer diabolical genius (of the Hollywood variety), nothing came close to the reports that European security services are preparing to counter a Bin Laden attempt to assassinate President Bush at next month's G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. According to German intelligence sources, the plot involved Bin Laden paying German neo-Nazis to fly remote controlled-model aircraft packed with Semtex into the conference hall and blow the leaders of the industrialized world to smithereens. (Paging Jerry Bruckheimer . . .)"

In June of 2001, the author found this funny, but he probably doesn't find it quite so funny now. One has to wonder:

1. how Rice and Fleischer could assert that it was inconceivable prior to September 11 that someone might use a hijacked plane flown into a building as a weapon.


2. whether the Europeans believed that the weapon used would be remote-controlled model airplanes because they didn't believe that people would kill themselves in the attack (of course, there are some who feel the 9-11 planes were remote-controlled).


3. whether at least the more prominent hijackers were in fact German neo-Nazis, as that would be consistent with their behavior as German-speaking, drinking, gambling, womanizing thugs (traits not usually associated with pious Islam). The target may have been regarded by the neo-Nazis as a Jewish-owned building in a city associated with the Jews (as Jesse Jackson called it, 'Hymietown'). It might also explain why a group of Israeli art-student spies were following the hijackers around.


4. whether the planes used on September 11 were 'juiced up' by having explosives deposited in their cargo compartments by the hijackers' confederates who had access to the planes.

Why do the people of the Middle East hate the United States so much? From a very wise article by William O. Beeman:

All of the confrontations between the United States and the Middle East - ranging from the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis and the current tragedy - arise from a single source. This is the heritage of difficult relations between European colonial powers, with whom the United States is inextricably linked, and the Middle East."

and:

"Throughout this period the nations of the Middle East were treated largely as war prizes to be divided and manipulated for the good of the militarily powerful Europeans. Every current nation in the Mediterranean-Mesopotamian region was created by the British and the French without consent or consultation on the part of the residents. This increased the resentment of the fundamentalists against the West and against the rulers installed by Westerners.

After World War II, the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in the region dominated politics. Governments such as those of Egypt, the Sudan, Iraq and Syria were constantly pressed to choose between East and West. The choice was often prompted by 'gifts' of military support to sitting rulers. With ready sources of money and guns in either Washington or Moscow, secular rulers could easily oppress the religious fundamentalists who opposed them. This added still further to the anger of the religious reformers."

and:

"The United States became the sole representative of the West after 1972, when Great Britain, poor and humbled, could no longer afford to maintain a full military force in the region. The United States, anxious to protect oil supplies from the Soviet Union, propped up the Shah of Iran and the Saudi Arabian government in the ill-fated 'Twin Pillars' strategy. This ended with the Iranian revolution, leaving the United States with a messy patchwork of military and political detritus. Anxious about Iran, the United States propped up Saddam Hussein. Anxious about Soviet incursions into Afghanistan, it propped up the Taliban. These two monstrous forces are very much an American creation.

To make things worse, when America finally had to confront its former client, Iraq, in the Gulf War, they established a U.S. military base on Saudi Arabian soil, considered sacred by pious Muslims. Saudi officials had been resisting this move for years, knowing that it would be politically dangerous both for them and for the United States. This action was the basis for Osama bin Laden’s opposition to America.


All of this meddling only confirms the century-old assertion that the West was out to rob the people of the Middle East of their prerogatives and patrimony."

On the other hand, we've heard a whole line of crap from the American orientalists proposing the most absurd ideas about why people in the Middle East hate America:

• they hate democracy;


• they are all 'Islamo-fascists';


• they envy the American 'way of life';


• they fear the American success makes their lack of success look bad;


• they wish to establish a world-wide Islamic theocracy;


• they have a child-like naivete about the world, which means they mistakenly blame the United States for their own shortcomings and aren't capable of living in the modern world of industry, technology and democracy (we're seen this in the new neocon insistence, after justifying the attack on Iraq on the basis that it would restore democracy to Iraq, that the Iraqis aren't capable of understanding democracy, and should be given a benign pro-American dictator!); and


• they have been brainwashed by their nutty religious leaders.

The real answer is much simpler. The average person in the Middle East lives under a corrupt dictator who takes a large part of the wealth of his or her country for himself and his friends, and lets the Americans take the rest for themselves. This wealth, in the form of cheap oil, is the entire reason for the success of the American 'way of life'. The corrupt rulers are in place because the British or the French or the Americans put them there, and the Americans are the power which now ensures they stay in place. Not only do the people in the Middle East not hate democracy: they correctly perceive that they don't have democracy because of the actions of the United States. If they had democracy, a democratic government would probably nationalize the oil fields, thus demanding a fair price for their country's resources. People are fully aware of the example of 1953 Iran, where a democratic government was replaced by the CIA because it nationalized the oil fields. They can see how Saddam himself was installed with American help to serve as a servant to American interests, and was replaced only because he stopped doing what the Americans wanted. They can see utterly vile and corrupt governments in places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, propped up with American military assistance. And, of course, they can see Israel and its continuing murder of the Palestinian people, all enabled with American money. No amount of American propaganda is going to change the fact that the United States is responsible for the existence of the most unsavory bunch of dictators in the world, which it manipulates to steal the resources of the Middle East in order to serve as the basis for its own prosperity. Until the Americans decide to:

• stop supporting dictators (and learn to live on fewer, and more expensive, hydrocarbons);


• remove their military from Islamic holy lands; and


• stop providing completely one-sided support to Israel, support which allows the Israelis to continue their ethnic cleansing;

people in the Middle East will continue to have a justified hatred of the United States. Since there are crazy people in all societies, that hatred will manifest itself in attacks by these people against the United States and American interests.

From Gwynne Dyer (or here or here), on the chances of other countries helping the American neocons out of their little Iraq problem by bailing them out with some foreign cannon fodder:

"Nobody talks openly about this, but many governments are also privately debating whether they want to help save the Bush administration from the consequences of its own folly. Without a lot of military and financial help that can only come via the UN, Bush may be dragged down to defeat by the Iraq war in the November 2004 election. With the extra troops and money, he might contain the problem enough to survive. But, they ask themselves, do we really want that?

Few people in Washington grasp how alarmed other governments are by the Bush administration’s pre-emptive strategy. They see the neo-conservatives as a mortal threat to the UN, NATO and the entire multilateral order that has been built up over the past 50 years as the foundation of global stability. Maybe, they think, it would be better to wait until Iraq drags Bush down, and start picking up the pieces in early 2005."

Besides the delightful prospect that Iraq may be the end of Bush, neoconservative militaristic foreign policy, and Bushite American unilateralism, there are a number of other reasons for foreign hesitation to bail out the Chimp-in-Chief:

1. The neocons have spent the past six months insulting and attacking those who they now have to beseech for help. Revenge is sweet.


2. Through their own complete stupidity, the Americans declared the attack on Iraq over, without bothering to inform the Iraqis. In war situations, it is normal for there to be a handing over of shields or weapons or standards, or a peace treaty, or a formal capitulation, or something. Besides the capitulation of a few traitor-generals who were bought off by the CIA in the 'Deal', there has never been any kind of surrender by the Iraqis. The Americans, for domestic political reasons (so George 'Fly-Boy' Bush could make his photo-op carrier announcement), decided to declare the war over early, which has put the Americans in the almost unprecedented position of being in a battle zone while pretending that the war is over. There is a similar situation in Afghanistan, where German and Canadian 'peacekeepers' are actually carrying on the unfinished war left by the Americans (the Americans can no longer even win a war responsibly). The foreign troops would just be in Iraq to finish off Bush's war, without even the plausible pretense of being peacekeepers. They have to walk around pretending to keep the peace while the local populace has a free hand at picking them off one by one. Why would foreign countries want to get into such an impossible situation?


3. Bush wants to have foreign troops (in Bush-speak, 'fodder units' or FU's for short) to die in the place of Americans, while giving no military control to the countries who supply the FU's. That means that American commanders will have the ability to direct the foreigners to the areas of most risk, and thus avoid the political problems caused by a lot of American body bags. What foreign leader would be corrupt enough to agree to this?


4. As I've mentioned before, the whole point of the attack on Iraq has become the lining of American corporate pockets by leeching money off American taxpayers and Iraqi oil fields. By far the biggest pocket is that of Halliburton, and thus the whole Iraq operation literally fills Dick Cheney's retirement fund (not only the million a year he still gets from Halliburton, but whatever outrageous salary they decide to give him after he retires or is retired from politics, which of course will largely consist of payment for past services rendered). The Americans won't be prepared to share in the redevelopment loot from Iraq. Just how crooked would a foreign leader have to be to spend his country's money and the lives of his country's soldiers so that Dick and his close personal friends can afford bigger yachts?


5. It is simply not possible for the Americans to agree to allow any real democracy in Iraq, as real democracy will lead to governments worse for American interests (i. e., Israel and the oil companies) than Saddam was. Why would a foreign leader agree to spend money and lives when there is nothing in it either for his own country or for the future of Iraq?

Can't you just see the American helicopters lifting off from the American compound in Saddam's palace in Baghdad, with Iraqi collaborators vainly trying to hold on fearing their inevitable dismemberment by Iraqi crowds waiting outside the gates, and Bremer of Baghdad in his business suit and army boots flashing the V for Victory sign as he rises into the sky, abandoning the Iraqis to their bloody civil war? Peace with honor. Knowing that this is eventually going to happen, why would any decent country agree to participate in what amounts to the buying of some time for Hallibuton to steal those last few dollars from the Iraqi people? I imagine what we'll see is the agreement by some countries to help, with no troops ever actually showing up in Iraq.

From CBS News:

". . . while travelers endure tighter and tighter security at the front doors of most airports, CBS News has learned the backdoors and perimeters of airports across the country have less and less security. Employees say there are gaps that place passengers and planes at risk."

and:

"'There's opportunity for a terrorism attack. There's opportunity for someone to do something that could put everyone in harm's way,' says Dianna Rushing, who represents flight attendants at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

The flight attendants Rushing represents are upset about an employee gate where workers - some of whom it recently turned out were illegal aliens - have to show only an ID but get no screening. They just head into secure areas. More troubling, cars and trucks are rarely inspected."

and:

"At Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport, close to 1,000 construction workers enter the property everyday unscreened. Their coolers and toolboxes are not searched. Meanwhile, potential threats, including propane tanks and fuel trucks, are left unguarded."

and:

"'As far as we know every other airport in the country is just as wide open as it was before Sept. 11,' says Rushing.

According to federal documents, flight crews have been warning the government for years. One pilot wrote of airport perimeters: 'There is no security.' Another said: 'Airport security is a joke.'"

People are being forced to go through time-wasting, expensive and demeaning search procedures, with the main victims of searching being singled out for racist reasons or for reasons of political repression (with blacklists for certain 'enemies of the state'). At the same time, Osama bin Laden himself could enter supposedly secure areas of airports and gain access to luggage areas or the planes themselves. Since the security is only as strong as its weakest link, and the main danger is from terrorists gaining access to the planes or what is put on them, the process of subjecting passengers to searches while completely ignoring the real dangers is completely illogical. Why has this been allowed to happen?:

1. One important reason is the Bush Administration's constant use of 9-11 as propaganda to sell its policies. The war on terror has supported Bush popularity through thick and (mostly) thin, has justified the wars that have enriched his friends and helped only Israel while increasing the risk of terror, and has justified the draconian restrictions on civil liberties that are only now starting to be questioned. The main problem with the war on terror is that people tend to lose their fear of it over time, so it has to be constantly reinforced with bogus warnings, colored terror levels, and the obvious indignities of searches at airports. The searches can't be intended to stop terrorism, for otherwise the non-public half of airports wouldn't be left completely insecure. The reason for the security searches of passengers at airports is to keep up the illusion that terror is being combated while at the same time providing a continuing reminder that the terror threat still exists.


2. Under the Bush Administration, corporations have come closest to pure unobstructed rule of the United States. The corporations involved in flying wanted to create the illusion of safety so their customers would start flying again. At the same time, they didn't want to spend any money doing it. The most cost-effective way to create the illusion that something is being done to make planes safe from terrorism is to harass passengers with useless searches. While this is expensive, much of it can be paid for with public funds, and it is much less expensive than securing entire airports.


3. A very deep politics secret that we're not supposed to think about is the close relationship between politics and organized crime centering around airports. The politicians fight the 'war on drugs', the organized criminals support the politicians, and the criminals are allowed to infiltrate the airports to use the planes to smuggle the drugs. Logan Airport is just a branch plant of the Boston Irish mafia. Providing real security for airports would interfere with the smuggling (not to mention the organized rings which steal from luggage).


4. We are supposed to believe that the hijackers walked onto the planes with boxcutters - knives that were legal to bring onto planes at the time - and managed to hijack four planes with a handful of scrawny terrorists armed with these 2" long knives. We now know this original story was a lie, as there is evidence that the terrorists had at least a bomb and a gun, and therefore presumably could have had any number of weapons available to them. Once we admit that they had some weapons, we have to come to the conclusion that they had weapons that were smuggled onto the planes by confederates working behind the scenes at the airports. The original lie was created in order to reduce the fear of passengers who might fly in the future, who could be fooled into thinking that security had been beefed up due to the obvious harassment of passengers, and, more importantly, to reduce the amount of liability to the airports and security firms that failed to properly provide security at the airports (for intrigues of September 11 airport security, see here and here and here and here; with respect to Richard Reid, who is the real inspiration for much of the security searches, see here). The argument was that since the hijackers only used weapons that were legally brought onto the planes, no one was legally responsible for allowing this to happen. This lie is now creating a huge hole in security at airports. Since the real problem at airports, the complete lack of behind-the-scenes security, has been hidden by the lie, the problem has never really been addressed, and real security at airports is now not one iota better than it was on September 11.

On September 11, 2003, five men could walk onto a plane in any American airport without any weapons that would be detected by security searches, and do exactly the same thing that happened on September 11. The debilitating weapons they would use would be planted on the plane by confederates working behind the scenes at the airport, and the locking mechanism on the cockpit door could be disabled by the same people. The Bush Administration, which uses the bogus 'war on terror' as its main excuse for everything, has done absolutely nothing to stop a repeat of the September 11 attacks.

George Bush gave his pathetic speech on Iraq, answering once and for all the zoological question of whether chimps eat crow. With the once-mighty United States having to crawl on its hands and knees to ask 'Old Europe' and the 'chocolate makers' (an insult delivered, if you can believe the stupid arrogance, just before the Americans were going to have to ask these same countries for desperately needed help; the Europeans shouldn't even answer the phone about Iraq until Boucher is fired) to please, please, please bail it out for the stupidity of its leaders, the new American fashion should be brown paper bags worn over the head like embarrassed fans at football games. The United States is nothing short of a laughingstock, and very serious consideration has to be given to the idea that George Bush is the worst President in American history (the economy and the destruction of the chance for future economic prosperity, the environmental desecration, the lost opportunities to do good rather than line the pockets of his friends, the neo-fascist and unnecessary restrictions on civil liberties, the mishandling of relations with other countries, allowing 9-11 to happen when there was a ridiculous amount of specific foreknowledge, the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq . . . ). The funniest thing of all is that the neocons are acting like Iraq was a wonderful success, and worked out so well that the rest of their very specific Zionist plans should be carried out as quickly as possible. Here is Michael Ledeen, neocon guru, reacting to the chimp's speech:

". . . alas, he has lost focus. He reminded us that he had always expected this to be a long war, but he never mentioned the Evil Axis, never once talked about the several countries that are supporting the terrorist attacks against us, never mentioned the Iranian atomic bomb or the North Korean nuclear program or the ongoing Saudi and Syrian support for terror. This speech was narrowly about Iraq, with a couple of afterthoughts about Afghanistan. If he's aware that we can't possibly win in Iraq unless we bring down the mullahcracy in Tehran, he didn't give any sign of it.


We're dithering again, wasting time while the terror masters prepare their next assault, instead of going after them where they live."

So after thousands of American casualties (largely hidden by the disgusting American media), billions and billions of dollars (the $87 billion is just the beginning; at the end of one year Americans will look back and see that they have spent at least $1 billion a day on Iraq), and an Iraq in utter turmoil turned into a beacon of new hope for fundamentalist terrorists, Ledeen just wants to repeat the whole thing in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. These neocons are not just evil, and they are not just stupid. They are completely and utterly insane. At some point, the American government has to be reintroduced to the concept of diplomacy, and come out of this nightmare that every political problem can be answered by the violence of war. Bush's only solution for the problems he has gotten his country into through a profound lack of imagination is to ask for much more of the same counterproductive violence to be applied to the Iraqi people. This is putting out a fire at a gas station using gasoline, and the inevitable conflagration is surely going to singe the American people at home (again). Eventually even the stupidest people - and we now have scientific proof that the Americans are in fact the stupidest people in the world, with 69% of them believing that Saddam was involved in 9-11 - are going to find out the hard way that the Bush/neocon solution to everything, more violence, doesn't work. If nothing else comes out of this debacle, at least we can hope that the doctrines of neoconservatism are eventually seen for the insane nonsense that they are.

I have been thinking some more about Mata Hari Mai Pederson and David Kelly:

1. Mai Pederson may have been at the Defense Language Institute at the same time that 9-11 hijacker Saeed Alghamdi allegedly attended there (she was there from April 1997 to February 2001, presumably except for the time she was in Iraq). Since she was an Arabic translator, and the obvious reason for Saeed Alghamdi to be there was to learn Arabic translation (or, to be really cynical, perhaps he was there to learn how to speak Arabic!), I wonder if he was in her class. It's a small world.


2. Isn't it odd that Mai Pederson, American Air Force Master Sergeant, was working in Iraq as a translator for Kelly? Do you think Saddam knew about this? Do you think she was acting as some sort of spy? She was translating for Kelly in 1998. Saddam stopped cooperating with the inspectors in 1998 because he claimed they were American spies. The inspectors were withdrawn (the disgusting American press later consistently rewrote the withdrawal into a claim that Saddam kicked them out). The Americans at first denied that they had spies, but eventually had to concede that they had planted spies amongst the inspectors. Was Mai Pederson one of these spies? The Defence Language Institute is often thought to be a school for spies.


3. Pederson's name appears on the internet in an article dated May 2001. She was working for the air force as chief of enlisted skills management, apparently in charge of enlistment procedures.

How often do middle-aged hard-nosed scientists decide to convert to a new religion, particularly a somewhat flaky 'new-age-ish' one like Baha'i? Did he really have to go all the way to California to convert? The French have an expression: Cherchez la femme. Perhaps they should have a new expression: Cherchez le Pentagon.

There are still a few questions left for Lord Hutton:

1. The Sunday Herald has a very good summary of the current state of the Hutton Inquiry, and a list of those witnesses who may be recalled as their testimony appears to be contradicted by the later testimony of others (that is a nice way of saying that they lied). Of course, they leave off the man who most needs to be recalled - Tony Blair himself. Hoon has big problems over his testimony that he had nothing to do with Kelly's 'outing' (besides being contradicted by other testimony, Hoon's story made it seem that he had nothing to do with his own Ministry!), and Blair and Campbell both have the problem that they stressed the whole issue of 'ownership' of the dossier without mentioning that such ownership clearly reverted to Blair's office on September 20, at a time when there were still problems with the dossier in the minds of the intelligence agents whose comments were no longer being listened to. Blair, Campbell and Scarlett all have to explain how it is that none of them had an inkling about any of these problems (for Scarlett's obliviousness, see here, section 79). Blair's statements to the press regarding the mechanism of the 'outing' of Kelly also seem to be contradicted by the evidence, and his involvement in the whole matter of Kelly's fate is much larger than he has had us believe. Blair has blustered through the details by broadly taking 'responsibility' for the whole matter, but people would presumably like to know exactly what he did.


2. From the testimony of Roy James Green, a forensic biologist, who examined the scene where Dr. Kelly's body was found (here, at section 143):

   "Q. We have heard from some ambulance personnel, and they said they were not specifically looking, for obvious reasons, at the distribution of blood but they noted, just on their brief glance, not very much blood. What were your detailed findings?
   
   
   A. Well, there was a fair bit of blood.
   
   
   LORD HUTTON: There was - I beg your pardon?
   
   
   A. A fair bit of blood, my Lord. The body was on leaf litter, the sort of detritus you might find on the floor of a wood, which is - and that is very absorbent, so although it may not have appeared to them there was that much blood, it would obviously soak in.
   
   
   MR DINGEMANS: A bit like blotting paper in some respects?
   
   
   A. Yes."

   Note that he says that it would obviously soak in - he gives no indication that he checked to see if it did soak in. The same witness later said (sections 146 to 147; my emphasis):

   "The jeans, as I have talked about, with this large contact stain, did not appear to have any larger downward drops on them. There were a few stains and so forth but it did not have any staining that would suggest to me that his injuries, or his major injuries if you like, were caused while he was standing up, and there was not any - there did not appear to be any blood underneath where he was found, and the body was later moved which all suggested those injuries were caused while he was sat or lying down."

   So it is clear he relied on superficial appearances to judge that there was no blood under the body, thus putting into question his confidence about the blood soaking into the leaf litter (and what does he mean by major injuries?). Given that the police and the paramedics differed on the amount of blood at the scene, and it was the paramedics with the better view who noted the surprising lack of blood (presumably they would have had experience at attending scenes of suicides by slit wrists, and would have an appreciation for the amount of blood involved), this is an important issue that has not been properly resolved. If there is not enough blood, the body was moved to where it was found, and foul play would have been involved.


3. Blair has said he would have resigned if it were true that his government had inserted the 45-minute claim knowing it to be untrue (see here, sections 19, 20 and 21). Campbell says he had nothing to do with it (here, section 29 and 30, and 64 and 65), and it first appeared to his knowledge in the draft he saw on September 10. We know that the experts on the issue vehemently disagreed with it (Kelly thought it was 'risible'; see here, sections 63 and 64). So where did it come from? Somebody must have drafted it. Who is the culprit? According to Scarlett, the 45-minute claim first appeared in a document created by the Secret Intelligence Service, which was reviewed by the Current Intelligence Group on August 28, and reviewed by the whole JIC on September 4 (see here, sections 45 to 48). This process was parallel to, but completely separate from, the creation of the dossier. The 45-minute claim appears to have entered history in the dossier of September 10 (see the testimony of Julian Miller here, at section 148), and was altered somewhat in the draft of September 16 (see here, sections 69 to 72, in particular lines 20 to 24 of section 71). Scarlett says that the drafting was done mainly by two people, working under the leadership of Julian Miller (sections 72 and 77). We are left with the following questions:
   
   
   • Was it just a coincidence that the 45-minute claim appeared days before the drafting of the 'dodgy dossier' began (the claim has been revealed to be a single source and is based on hearsay with many questions about the source, who may very well be another of the infamous Iraqi dissidents who the neocons used to mislead the American people)?;
   
   
   • Was the claim inserted by the mysterious 'Operation Rockingham', and, if so, what is its relationship to the Blair government?;
   
   
   • Who instructed that the 45-minute claim be inserted into the dossier?; and
   
   
   • Who actually did the drafting?
   
   The 45-minute claim was considered 'risible' by the experts on the subject, and received specific negative comment from the CIA, who had seen the September 11 draft. The criticisms mean that the story that there was nothing out of the ordinary about the 45-minute claim, that it just ended up in the dossier in the ordinary course of drafting, is untrue. It was Scarlett, a personal friend of both Campbell and Blair, who was responsible for allowing it to survive into the final dossier. Of course, it was also Scarlett who turned over 'ownership' of the dossier to Blair's office at a time when there were still comments outstanding from the intelligence experts that had not been reflected in the dossier.
   
4. An American military linguist, U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Mai Pederson, acted as a translator for Kelly in Iraq in 1998, and he later visited her in California, where she helped him convert to the Baha'i faith. She may have been associated with the Defense Language Institute (in one of those weird coincidences, 9-11 hijacker Saeed Alghamdi may have taken classes at the Defense Language Institute). She is said to be 43 years old, Arab-American, and still much of a mystery.

Lord Hutton has been holding a clinic on how to run an inquiry. He started in a hurry; has had a disciplined list of witnesses; his Senior Counsel, James Dingemans, QC, has asked questions which lead right to the heart of the inquiry (none of the powder puff questions you often see lobbed at witnesses); and the transcripts of witness testimony appear on the website amazingly quickly. However, he still has quite a bit of work to do.

The Americans and the British used different mechanisms to create the sets of lies which were presented to their respective countries and which served as the justification for the attack on Iraq. We have seen how the Bush neocons used the Office of Special Plans to isolate the Iraqi defector lies from the scrutiny of real intelligence experts in the CIA or DIA. In Britain, the procedure was somewhat different. The trick was to create the illusion that the 'dodgy dossier' which served as the justification for the war was totally the creation of the joint intelligence committee (JIC) chaired by John Scarlett, and thus had the benefit of being the creation of intelligence experts supposedly untainted by political concerns. Both Blair and Campbell have insisted that the JIC had 'ownership' of the dossier, and that Blair was effectively just the messenger for the objective intelligence information contained in the dossier. As the Guardian reports, it appears that the reality was quite different than the testimony of both Blair and Campbell. Treasury solicitors (who are handling the legal presentation of the government's case) have at the last minute released a memo of minutes dated September 18 of a meeting chaired by John Scarlett in September 2002, together with an unconvincing cover letter trying to explain why this document has been withheld until now. The minutes, together with the testimony of Blair, Campbell, and Dr. Jones, make it clear what actually happened:

1. The minutes say, under the heading 'Ownership of the dossier', "Ownership lay with No. 10". The cover letter said:

   "I have spoken to John Scarlett about the reference to ownership of the Dossier. He has confirmed that he had ownership of the Dossier until the approved text was handed to No 10 on 20 September. Thereafter, arrangements for publication and presentation to Parliament were the responsibility of No 10."



2. Dr Brian Jones said (here, at section 128, lines 7 to 14):

   "The impression I had was that on about 19th September, as it may have been the 20th September, as it were, the shutters were coming down on this particular paper, that the discussion and the argument had been concluded. And it was the impression that I had, at that time, that our reservations about the dossier were not going to be reflected in the final version."



3. Alastair Campbell said (here, at section 11, lines 5 to 11):

   "The decision was taken, either at that meeting or certainly by the 9th, that John Scarlett, I think if we go on to the 9th, I mean he talked about - he used the word 'ownership', that John Scarlett felt he ought to have ownership of the dossier. And I emphasised, and this was spelt out in the minute that I circulated following these meetings - "

   and (section 11, lines 17 to 21):

   " I emphasised that the credibility of this document depended fundamentally upon it being the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee; and that was the touchstone of our approach right through this from that moment."

   and (section 16, lines 12 to 18):

   ". . . at one point I offered John Scarlett, a member of my staff, if he wanted it to help him write it. John Williams was volunteering for the job; so was somebody else at the Foreign Office. John Scarlett was absolutely clear the word was 'ownership', he wanted ownership of the dossier and the best way to have that was to write it."

   and, referring to an agreement made at a meeting on September 9, 2002 (sextion 19, lines 17 to 19):

   "The agreement was that John Scarlett would be in sole charge of the writing of the dossier and that we, at No. 10, would give him whatever support he asked for."

   and referring to a memorandum dated September 9 from Campbell to Scarlett (section 21, lines 3 to 15):

   "The purpose of the memorandum is to ensure that everybody on that copy list, which basically means anybody of significance to this process in all of the relevant Government departments and all of the agencies, understands that this is a new project and that it is being led and directed by John Scarlett, and the JIC. And I make the point that the work - that its credibility depends fundamentally upon that. It also makes the point that it is a new dossier, and I say: 'Therefore, the rush of comments on the old dossier are not necessary or totally relevant. People should wait for the new one, which will be more detailed and substantial.'"



4. Tony Blair said (here, section 4, lines 1 to 5):

   ". . . it had to be a document that was owned by the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Chairman, John Scarlett. That was obviously important because we could not produce this as evidence that came from anything other than an objective source."

   and (sections 5 to 7):

   ". . . it was important that it made the best case that we could make subject, obviously, to it being owned by the Joint Intelligence Committee and that the items of intelligence should be those that the agencies thought could and should be included. So if you like it was a process in which they were in charge of this, correctly, because it was so important to make sure that no-one could question the intelligence that was in it as coming from the genuine intelligence agencies, but obviously I mean I had to present this to Parliament. I was going to make a statement. Parliament was going to be recalled. We were concerned to make sure that we could produce, within the bounds of what was right and proper, the best case.
   
   
   LORD HUTTON: So you would agree, Prime Minister, that the wording that 'No. 10 through the Chairman want the document to be as strong as possible within the bounds of available intelligence' is a fair way of putting your view and the view of your staff in No. 10?
   
   
   A. Provided that is clearly understood as meaning that it is only if the intelligence agencies thought both that the actual intelligence should be included and that there was not improper weight being given to any aspect of that intelligence. In other words, given that the process was that they had to decide what it was we could properly say, then obviously we wanted to - we had to make this case because this was the case that we believed in and this was the evidence that we had, because all of this stuff was obviously stuff that had come across my desk.
   
   
   LORD HUTTON: And that is conveyed by the words 'as strong as possible within the bounds of available intelligence'?
   
   
   A. Yes"

   and (section 14, lines 5 to 8):

   "Q. Were you aware at the time about any unhappiness amongst members of the Intelligence Services with the process by which the dossier was being produced?
   
   
   A. Absolutely not, no."

   and (sections 17 and 18):

   "Can I just emphasise again, the whole purpose of having the JIC own this document was in order to provide the absolute clarity and certainty - whatever discussions were going on as to how you presented it - that in the end they were perfectly happy with this. And I think it was - it was certainly part of our conversation in the early December period that for very, very obvious reasons it was essential that anything that we said in the course of my statement or in the dossier we could hand on heart say: this is the assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee."

Blair and Campbell had a problem. They needed a dossier sufficiently strong to monger a war on Iraq, but lacked objective intelligence evidence to justify this war. Unlike the Americans, they did not have a constant source of lies from Iraqi defectors and dissidents to construct their fables about Iraq (I would really like to see the communications between Blair and Bush on how their joint propaganda campaign was going to work). Blair needed the dossier to appear to be objective, so he had it written by Scarlett, representing an objective intelligence point of view. The problem was that Scarlett had to run things by a group of tough-minded experts, including David Kelly, and these experts would take out all the good parts that Blair would need in order to have his war. The strategy was for Scarlett to write drafts taking comments from both the politicians and the intelligence experts. However, on the critical issues, particularly concerning chemical and biological weapons and the 45-minute claim, he would delay incorporating the objections and comments of the experts. They were led to believe that the process was ongoing, and these comments would appear in later drafts. Suddenly, at exactly the time when the dossier appeared in the form that the politicians felt they needed to justify a war, the shutters came down. 'Ownership' of the dossier transferred immediately to Blair's office, and it became frozen at that point, without benefit of some of the most important comments by the experts. This bit of trickery allowed Blair and Campbell to maintain the lie that the dossier was completely the product of intelligence experts, while at the same time ensuring that the experts didn't remove the parts that Blair felt he needed to lie to the British people about Iraq. It is an impressive bit of misdirection. David Kelly's objections to the dodgy process which resulted in the dodgy dossier effectively led to his death

I have a massive problem with the essence of the David Kelly story. Kelly was an expert on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, probably the most informed person in Britain on the subject. It now turns out that he actually worked on the drafts of the 'dodgy dossier', and his comments were heeded (see here, section 97, lines 16 to 23, and sections 98-99). He was such a senior and respected scientist and expert that the Ministry of Defence actually gave him the authority to talk to the press to answer their questions on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, without the need for prior specific authority. In fact, the BBC was talking to him for just that reason. My problem is wondering how he could possibly have thought that telling the BBC that there was something fundamentally wrong with the dossier ('sexed up', or as an intelligence scientist has now stated, 'over-egged'; there is now absolutely no question that the essence of the BBC story, that the dossier contained questionable material that was there solely for Blair's political purposes, was absolutely correct) would have fallen within the scope of his authority to talk to the press and would not have provoked the massive reaction in Blair's office and the Ministry of Defence. Kelly wasn't some naive academic with no knowledge of the real rough world in which these players operate. How could he possibly have made the obvious mistake of essentially calling Blair and the Ministry of Defence liars in laying the justification for an extremely unpopular attack on Iraq which has now turned into an utter disaster, all the while thinking that this was just the normal course of his dealings with the press and would not have created a bombshell? Kelly is being depicted as being devastated at the lack of support he got from the Ministry of Defence and the politicians. But what did he expect? Heads have already started to roll about this. Did he think he'd get a thank-you card from Tony Blair for putting Blair in this massive political crisis (the crisis might not have been as big if Kelly hadn't been assassinated, but Kelly's action could only have caused profound problems for both Blair and his bureaucrats)? The essential framework of the Kelly story is so absolutely unbelievable that I think we are being misled. Kelly knew exactly what he was doing. When he talked to the BBC he had to have been completely aware that:

• his comments would be made public;


• his comments would have a devastating effect on the Ministry of Defence and Blair's government;


• his comments could not possibly be construed as being within the framework of what he was authorized to say to the press; and


• his comments would not make him any friends in the Ministry of Defence or Blair's government, and would provoke a huge reaction.

What genuinely seemed to surprise Kelly was the fact that he was 'outed', dragged through the political mud by Campbell-Hoon on Blair's specific instructions, and roughly treated by the Ministry of Defence, who failed to offer him any support and indeed treated him like some kind of enemy (which, as far as they were concerned, he was). The only way to reconcile this is to suppose that Kelly was working on some specific instructions when he talked to the BBC, and had in return some specific assurances that his privacy would be respected and he would not face reprisals from Blair and the Ministry of Defence. Whoever was actually behind the scheme to get the truth out about Blair let Kelly down, and Kelly's failure to receive the protection he was almost certainly promised led to his murder by those he offended. Kelly's murder may even have been part of the original plan: it certainly is the only reason all these issues are being aired in the Hutton Inquiry.

From the testimony of Dr. Brian Francis Gill Jones to the Hutton Inquiry (here, sections 106 and 107; DIS refers to the Defence Intelligence Staff, which was working on the dossier; my emphasis):

"Q. You make the comment about the involvement of the spin merchants of this administration. Who were you referring to?

A. Well, it is really a general comment from the working level within the DIS about perceived interference and really that -

Q. Sorry to interrupt. What was the perception?

A. The perception was that the dossier had been round the houses several times in order to try to find a form of words which would strengthen certain political objectives."

and (section 128; my emphasis):

"The impression I had was that on about 19th September, as it may have been the 20th September, as it were, the shutters were coming down on this particular paper, that the discussion and the argument had been concluded. And it was the impression that I had, at that time, that our reservations about the dossier were not going to be reflected in the final version."

What Dr. Jones is referring to is that the Joint Intelligence Committee had stopped taking input from the Defence Intelligence Staff at a point which Dr. Jones thought was premature (sections 123 to 128). Dr. Jones wrote a memo to his director about this, which said, in part (sections 128 and 129):

". . . has been involved in the generation of the Iraq dossier which, in the last two weeks has involved a number of iterations which have incorporated new intelligence. It is my understanding that some of the intelligence has not been made available to my branch. Because of this they have had to express their reservations on several aspects of the dossier. Most of these have been resolved. However, a number remain in the document at reference and it is important that I note for you at this stage the remaining areas where we are unable to confirm the statements made on the basis of the information available to my branch."

and:

"Although we have no problem with a judgment based on intelligence that Saddam attaches great importance to possessing WMD we have not seen the intelligence that 'shows' this to be the case. Nor have we seen intelligence that 'shows' he does not regard them only as a weapon of last resort, although our judgment is that it would be sensible to assume he might use them in a number of other scenarios. The intelligence we have seen indicates rather than 'shows'. . ."

and, referring to the 45 minute claim:

"We have a number of questions in our minds relating to the intelligence on the military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, particularly about the times mentioned and the failure to differentiate between the two types of weapon."

and:

"We have not seen intelligence which we believe 'shows' that Iraq has continued to produce CW agent in 1998-2002, although our judgment is that it has probably done so. Whilst we are even more convinced that Iraq has continued to produce biological weapons agent (on the basis of mobile production intelligence) we would not go so far as to say we 'know' this to be the case."

Getting to the crux (section 137 and 139; my emphasis added):

" Was there a perception, right or wrong, amongst DIS personnel that spin merchants were involved with the dossier?

A. Well, 'spin merchants' is rather emotive. I think there was an impression, right or wrong, and I do not know, I did not allow that to concern me as this process - I think there was an impression that there was an influence from outside the intelligence community.

Q. And were people in the intelligence community happy with that?

A. No, I do not think - well, I cannot comment on the broader intelligence community. I think the people who had been involved on my staff and possibly others - I mean, one cannot make a general statement about this. But certainly those people that were working directly with me were concerned and unhappy; in the way I think I described earlier in my evidence, in the way that people can be unhappy. But I think there was a realisation that this was a different process; and I think, at the end of the day, what they were very keen to do is have any assessment reflect as accurately as possible the product of their work."

Earlier, Dr. Jones had noted that his chemical warfare expert was particularly concerned about the fact that his inputs weren't finding their way into the dossier. Lord Hutton asked about the expert's concerns, and Dr. Jones responded (here at sections 76 and 77; my emphasis):

" . . . they were really about a tendency in certain areas, from his point of view, to shall we say over-egg certain assessments in relation particularly to the production of CW agents and weapons since 1998. Indeed, I mean, I guess that goes all the way back to the end of the Gulf conflict. And he was concerned that he could not point to any solid evidence of such production. He did not dismiss that it may have happened, and there was certain evidence that suggested that it could have happened, but he did not have good evidence that it had happened.


LORD HUTTON: Yes. Could you just perhaps, and please say if you are not able to do this, but when you say that he was concerned about language and he was concerned that certain assessments were over-egged, can you give examples of that as regards the use of language? If you cannot, please do not speculate. I do not want you in any way just to speculate.

A. I think - I think it is the difference between saying, for example - making a judgment that the production of CW agent had taken place as opposed to that judgment being that it had probably taken place or even possibly taken place.

LORD HUTTON: Yes.

A. It was that degree of certainty in the judgments that were being made. I hope that helps."

What Dr. Jones is politely saying is that direct political involvement in the drafting of the dossier led to parts of the dossier being 'over-egged', meaning that statements that had varying degrees of certainty had all the uncertainty removed and were presented as outright facts. In the final analysis, this was done by simply failing to take the comments of the intelligence experts into account (aside from the details of the dossier, the experts had big problems calling many biological and chemical weapons 'weapons of mass destruction' due to problems with their delivery and effectiveness outside of enclosed spaces, problems which bring into question the essential purpose of the dossier; see here, sections 64 to 66). This process of removing the nuances of certainty from the dossier was particularly obvious with respect to the 45-minute claim. There is really no substantive difference between what Dr. Jones told the Hutton Inquiry and what Dr. Kelly told the BBC. Blair and his operatives manipulated the creation of the dossier for their political goals.

The strange saga of David Kelly:

1. David Kelly was found with four electrode pads on his chest, as if he had been given an electrocardiogram but the pads had not been removed. The pads would normally have been removed, and their presence remained a mystery until Tuesday. Police Constable Dean Andrew Franklin answered the mystery (here, at section 36):

   "The shirt was unbuttoned, they placed four sticky pads, I believe it is four, on to the body, the chest, and attached it to a medical machine - sorry, I have no idea what it is. And they pronounced life extinct at 10.07 hours that morning."

   Police Constable Martyn Sawyer said (here, at sections 48 and 49):

   "So I took a number of pictures as we approached the body, and of the body and the surrounding area; and then the paramedics asked if they could do their job, to which we said: yes. They tried to - they used the paddles of the electrocardiogram machine to try to see if there was a sign of life through Dr Kelly's shirt. They were unable to do so and said: could they undo the shirt? I said: yes. I asked them to wait for a second. I took another two more reference pictures. They then undid the shirt, put the electrodes on and got a graph from the machine which showed there were no signs of life. I then - they disconnected their equipment from the machine, leaving the electrodes in place; I asked them to do that. I then took a further reference shot to show the electrodes in place."

   
   
2. The Hutton inquiry heard from a psychiatrist who, without ever having met Kelly, managed to determine that it was 'well nigh certain' that Kelly had killed himself. He based his conclusion on the usual psychiatric nonsense, and concluded that the fact that the last person he supposedly spoke to (other than whoever killed him, of course) thought he acted perfectly normal actually proved that he was off to commit suicide (if the person had said he seemed depressed, Mr. Psychiatrist would no doubt have said that that proved he was going off to off himself; the witness' testimony is here at sections 1, 2 and 3, and the psychiatrist's here at section 122).


3. Kelly had told David Broucher that if Iraq were invaded: 'I will probably be found dead in the woods'. Broucher originally thought this meant that Kelly felt himself in danger from the Iraqis, but Broucher said he had different feelings in light of what happened to Kelly (see here, sections 145 to 148). Our extraordinarily helpful psychiatrist volunteered that this was 'a pure coincidence and not relevant to understanding Kelly's death'. There is another alternative. In 1984, a 78-year-old political activist, Hilda Murrell, was found dead in the woods, having been stabbed and left to die from hypothermia. The murder has never been solved, and some feel that it was a British intelligence job due to the fact that she may have had embarrassing documents about the British sinking of the Argentine ship Belgrano during the Falklands War, or perhaps because she was an anti-nuclear activist (for the conspiracy, see here or here; for the debunking of the conspiracy, see here; also see here and here). One writer believes that the expression 'found dead in the woods' is a possible reference by Kelly to Hilda Murrell, and to the fate of being murdered by British intelligence operatives because of what one knew.


4. Kelly was a member of the Baha'i faith. Barnabus Leith, the secretary of the national spiritual assembly of the Baha'i faith, confirmed that his religion did not condone suicide, saying self harm was 'an undue curtailment of life' (see here, section 91).


5. The two paramedics, Vanessa Hunt and David Bartlett, both expressed surprise at how little blood there was at the scene of death (see here sections 76 and 85). This was in contradiction to police accounts. Ms. Hunt said the 'amount of blood seemed relatively minimal'; Mr. Bartlett said he was 'surprised there wasn't more blood on the body'. Needless to say, the absence of blood at the scene indicates that Kelly was murdered elsewhere.


6. The dog handler who originally found the body of David Kelly testified (see here at section 13):

   "His legs were straight in front of him. His right arm was to the side of him. His left arm had a lot of blood on it and was bent back in a funny position."

   Bent back in a funny position? Police Constable Dean Andrew Franklin testified (see here at section 33):

   "He was lying on his back with his right hand to his side and his left hand was sort of inverted with the palm facing down (Indicates), facing up on his back."

   I don't even understand this, but it doesn't sound like a natural position to be found in.

The psychiatrist suggested that the thirty tablets of copraximol which Kelly had taken would have been difficult for someone to administer to him without signs of violence. I can think of some ways. He may have been kidnapped at some point in his walk and taken somewhere, perhaps for a final interrogation. He could have been threatened or pressured to take the pills, killed in such a way that it looked like suicide (with the blood loss occurring at the actual place of death), and his body moved to the place where he was found. I still think he was probably killed because he found himself inside some intrigue between British military interests and British intelligence interests, and someone in a position of authority broke a promise to him to provide him with some protection.

The truth about what happened on September 11, 2001 is starting to ooze out between the cracks of the lies that make up the official American government story:

1. There was a Congressional Joint Inquiry of the Intelligence Committees from the U. S. Senate and House into the events of September 11. From the 'Second Statement' dated September 20, 2002 of Eleanor Hill, Staff Director, Joint Inquiry Staff:

   "The Joint Inquiry Staff is aware of a media report that Ziad Jarrah, a September 11 hijacker suspected of having been the pilot aboard United Flight 93, was stopped by United Arab Emirate (UAE) officials at the behest of the CIA as he arrived in Dubai in January 2001. Based on our investigation, the media reports are incorrect. The Joint Inquiry Staff requested and reviewed all pertinent CIA records to determine whether such a request was made. The Joint Inquiry Staff determined that Jarrah was unknown to the CIA prior to September 11, 2001. UAE officials had detained Jarrah because of an irregularity in his passport, not at the request of the CIA, a fact acknowledged by them to U.S. Government officials. Additionally, the date in the media stories is incorrect. Jarrah was stopped in January 2000, not January 2001 as reported by the media. Further, our investigation could find no evidence that any other U.S. officials asked that Jarrah be stopped."

   It is extremely important to the Official Story that none of the hijackers (except Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Nawaf's brother, Salim al-Hazmi) had been known to American intelligence officials prior to September 11. If Jarrah, who officially was a Lebanese student studying in Hamburg of no interest to any American intelligence officials, and who had not been in the United States until he arrived in the spring of 2000, had been questioned in Dubai by local officials at the specific request of American officials, the Official Story has a serious problem. I quote myself:

   "The fact that the UAE officials persist in their claims in the light of CIA denials, the fact that they have specific information on the questions asked and the fact that Jarrah was detained until the answers were reported to the U. S. authorities who found them satisfactory, and the fact that the UAE can point to the fact that UAE and European intelligence sources claim that the Jarrah situation fits a pattern of a CIA operation begun in 1999 to track suspected al-Qaeda operatives who were traveling through the UAE (and one UAE source can even draw a map of Dubai airport, showing exactly how this type of questioning was carried out, with U. S. officials declining to comment on whether this is indeed how things happened), not to mention the fact that Dubai has no obvious reason to lie about this and the CIA does, leads me to believe that Jarrah probably was questioned in Dubai at the instance of the CIA. That of course leads to the obvious questions of how it was that they knew to single him out, and how it was that their knowledge of him affected his life in absolutely no way after that point, including when he reentered the United States, got a speeding ticket, or boarded Flight 77 on September 11."

   Jarrah would probably have been returning from the trip he made to Pakistan (he flew from Hamburg to Karachi on November 25, 1999 and stayed for two months). Except for the fact that the original stories might have the year wrong, there is just too much telling detail in them. From the CNN story:

   "UAE and European intelligence sources told CNN that the questioning of Jarrah fits a pattern of a CIA operation begun in 1999 to track suspected al Qaeda operatives who were traveling through the United Arab Emirates. These sources told CNN that UAE officials were often told in advance by U.S. officials which persons were coming through the country and whom they wanted questioned.
   
   One source provided CNN a drawing of the Dubai airport and described how people wanted for questioning were intercepted, most often at a transit desk. U.S. officials declined to comment on whether the CIA operated this way at the Dubai airport."

   and

   "Told of the CIA's denial, UAE government officials repeated to CNN that Jarrah was questioned at the request of the United States. Senior UAE sources said they had no reason to question him for their own purposes because he was in transit."

   So either the UAE officials are lying or the CIA is lying. The German magazine Stern, citing a confidential FBI document, backs the position of the UAE officials (original Stern article here). Since the CIA could have made up some story to explain the questioning (e. g., a mistake about someone with a similar name), the outright denial of the UAE story seems to show that the CIA is profoundly guilty about this incident.


2. Stern has also discovered that German officials informed the CIA of Marwan al-Shehhi as early as March 1999 (which may explain why the CIA is acting so guiltily about the Jarrah incident in Dubai). Germany's security agency BfV first noted the name of a man named 'Marwan' in January 1999 after he had placed calls to Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a German-Syrian living in Hamburg, who had been under surveillance since 1993 (and who is now presumably still in Syrian custody after he had been sent to Syria by the Moroccans). Two months later, they informed the CIA, who had his cellphone number and knew that he was in contact with Mohammed Haydar Zammar, whom they had suspected of being al-Qaeda's contact man in Germany. They began keeping surveillance on him from March 1999 (original Stern article here - see page 5 and 6 under the heading 'Dürftige Informationen für die CIA').


3. A report by Michael Phillip Wright suggests that a University of Oklahoma library computer terminal had been used for an online purchase of an airline ticket for a 9-11 hijacker who was on the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania. The author of the report spoke to a librarian, who said that the terminal user was a white American male. The University of Oklahoma is in Norman, a city with quite a history of connections to 9-11 hijackers. As Michael Phillip Wright says, one possible explanation for such assistance by a white American male is that there was a failed sting operation associated with 9-11. Foreknowledge by American counterterrorism experts of some of the 9-11 hijackers who were allowed into the country might also be consistent with a sting operation. Of course there are also darker theories.


4. It is interesting that the infamous meeting of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in Malaysia, which first tipped off the CIA's counterterrorism officials that something big was happening, took place in January 2000. There is much to say about Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi and their stay in San Diego, but for now I'll limit myself to quickly wondering about the renewed interest in Omar al-Bayoumi, who the Americans now desperately want to interview, although he has already been interviewed by both the FBI and British authorities. It appears that the Saudis are again being used as misdirection to hide the enormous and frankly inexplicable failings of American counterterrorism efforts. Foreknowledge of Jarrah and al-Shehhi puts the oddities concerning Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi into a new light.