9/11: Iraq and Afghanistan
By Matthew B.
Robinson, PhD
Associate Professor
of Criminal Justice
Appalachian State
University
robinsnmb@appstate.edu
Prior to the start of
the US war on Iraq, tens of millions of people around the
world and millions of people in the US took to the streets to protest
the war. Yet, although people in nearly
every country in the world opposed a US
invasion of Iraq, a large
majority of Americans supported the war on Afghanistan.
A smaller portion of
the country protested the war against Afghanistan. This is likely because (as we’ve been told),
the Taliban housed and sponsored al-Qaeda, the group that attacked us on
9/11. Most Americans wanted to get even
and to stop al-Qaeda there so they could not attack us again. Unfortunately, this is not what happened. And needless to say, the war on Iraq has not
gone well.
Former White House Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke
calls the Iraq
war a major national mistake and an “unnecessary tangent.” He says Iraq
posed no threat to the US. The right war, according to Clarke, was “to
fight for the elimination of al Qaeda, to stabilize nations threatened by
radical Islamic terrorists, to offer a clear alternative to counter the radical
‘theology’ and ideology of the terrorists, and to reduce our own
vulnerabilities at home” (p. 239).
Clarke already had laid out a plan to do this, but it never did reach
President Bush. Clarke claims President
Bush made Iraq
the “central front in the war on terror.”
Clarke says: “He turned it from a nation that was not threatening us
into a breeding ground for anti-American hatred.” (p. xviii).
Former Senator Bob Graham, who would later co-chair the
Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 intelligence failures, agrees with Clarke
that the war on Iraq
is a folly that left the war on terrorism incomplete “and a battered al-Qaeda …
able to regroup and recruit” (p. xv).
Graham says the war on Iraq is a diversion and his best proof is that we
obviously cannot fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan and another war in Iraq because
we diverted military and intelligence resources from Afghanistan to prepare for
the war in Iraq in as early as February 2002.
According to Graham, President
Bush (in early 2002) directed intelligence and military resources necessary to
win the Afghanistan war to Iraq, which at
the time was still unauthorized. This
includes most of the armed Predator aircraft even when UBL was surrounded in
Tora Bora. Graham reports on a meeting
with General Tommy Franks (Commander in Chief of the United
States Central Command from July 2000 through July 2003) where Franks said: “Senator, we are not
engaged in a war in Afghanistan
... Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an
action in Iraq. The Predators are being relocated. What we are doing is a manhunt. We have wrapped ourselves too much in
trailing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
We’re better at beating a meat axe than finding a needle in a
haystack. That’s not our mission, and
that’s not what we are trained or prepared to do.” Franks also said: “We can finish this job in Afghanistan if
we are allowed to do so. And there is a
set of terrorist targets after Afghanistan. My first priority would be Somalia – there
is no effective government to control the large number of terrorist cells. Next, I would go to Yemen. Its president is willing to help in the war
on terrorism, but has no capabilities to do so.
Iraq
is a special case. Our intelligence
there is very unsatisfactory. Some
Europeans know more than we do on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction
...” Note:
Tommy Franks reportedly denies this, and this is not the account Franks provides in his book, American Soldier. Keep in
mind, however, Bob Graham’s 2,500 notebooks (every experience and conversation
he has is documented in his notes each day).
This document provides some evidence suggesting the wars
on Afghanistan and Iraq were
planned in advance and that each may have different goals than those officially
stated. It also identifies some of the
key problems plaguing each war. Look for
the references, all prior to 9/11, of the need for a “Pearl Harbor” attack to
transform the US military and US foreign policy in line with the ideology of
the neo-Conservatives in the White House.
Afghanistan
·
In 1992, Colin Powell tells members of Congress
that we should develop significant power to assure that no one will ever challenge
us again on the world stage … this shows he is a supporter of US global
hegemony.
·
August 1996 -- UNOCAL and Delta Oil of Saudi
Arabia reach an agreement with state companies in Turkmenistan
and Russia to build a
natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan
to Pakistan via Afghanistan. UNOCAL is hopeful that the Taliban will
stabilize the country for a pipeline through Afghanistan. Some State Department officials are even ok
with the Taliban because they think they will bring stability to the country,
thereby allowing the pipeline to go through.
·
October 1997: Former National Security Advisor
to President Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski publishes his book, The Grand
Chessboard, where he says Eurasia is the key to determine world dominance and Central Asia is the key to that. He says that for the US to maintain its place in the
world order, it must prevent any adversary from controlling that region. He writes: “The attitude of the American
people toward the external projection of American power has been much more
ambivalent. The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely
because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor.” He says Americans
will not accept the Central Asian strategy “except in the circumstances of a
truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” (Pearl Harbor reference #1). Yet, in a later book, The Choice: Global Domination or Global
Leadership (2004), he sharply criticizes President Bush’s foreign
policy. In this book, Brzezinski
still argues in favor of hegemony, but a co-optive form of it. Although he still comes across as a foreign
policy hawk, he says we must address the root causes of terrorism and not
engage in pre-emptive war unless as a last resort. As a result of his government service,
Brzezinski was widely acknowledged as an advocate of peaceful engagement, human
rights, and forming & utilizing peaceful alliances instead of unilateral,
go-it-alone policies. He was, however,
intimately involved in planning for support the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, a policy he feels today is
justified based on the collapse of the Soviet Union.
·
December 1997, Members of the Taliban traveled
to Texas to
visit UNOCAL while George W. Bush was governor.
The Taliban agree to the deal will do so only if the US officially
recognizes the Taliban regime. (Keep in mind that Bush,
Cheney, and Rice are oil people … Rice had been on Chevron’s Board of Directors
since 1991 and has an oil tanker named after her … Cheney still gets deferred
payments from Halliburton, his oil company … Bush headed Harken oil, a failed
company until it was funded by Saudis and awarded a contract in the Persian
Gulf).
·
November 1998 -- former
President George Bush meets with the bin Laden family on behalf of the Carlyle
Group in Jeddah Saudi Arabia. They also meet in January 2000.
·
March 1999: Executive Director of the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments Andrew Krepinevich testifies before the
Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities and
says: “There appears to be general agreement concerning the need to transform
the US
military into a significantly different kind of force from that which emerged
victorious from the Cold and Gulf Wars.
Yet this verbal support has not been translated into a defense program
supporting transformation … the critical mass needed to effect it has not yet
been achieved. One may conclude that, in
the absence of a strong external shock to the United
States – a latter-day ‘Pearl Harbor’
of sorts – surmounting the barriers to transformation will likely prove a long,
arduous process.” (Pearl Harbor reference #2)
·
April 2000: The US is given permission to expand
its US Qatar military base … From September–December 2001, the US military is
building up forces in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and makes permanent bases there
too, as well as in Kyrgyzstan (which is only 200 miles from China) … In January
2002, the US improves bases in 13 locations in nine countries in Central Asia.
… All of the countries are led by corrupt dictatorships, and plagued by social
and economic problems. Some speculate
the US
presence is increasing Muslim resentment.
·
April 2001: An “Independent
Task Force,” Sponsored by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of
Rice University and the Council on Foreign Relations, publishes The Strategic Energy Policy: Challenges For
The 21st Century where it writes “[T]he
United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma, suffering on a
recurring basis from the negative consequences of sporadic energy shortages.
These consequences can include recession, social dislocation of the poorest
Americans, and at the extremes, a need for military intervention.” The document is on-line (http://www.ciaonet.org/conf/jaa01/jaa01.pdf).
·
September 11, 2001 – On the night of the worst
terrorist attacks against this country, President Bush writes in his diary,
“The Pearl Harbor of 21st Century took place today … We think it’s
Osama bin Laden.”
·
September 15, 2001 – CIA Director George Tenet
briefs President Bush on a plan to take out the Taliban in Afghanistan and
take over the country. He also presents
the “Worldwide Attack Matrix” that outlines covert operations in 80 countries
that are underway or recommended.
·
America’s
war on Afghanistan
began October 2001 and is ongoing. Afghanistan was a failed state prior to our war
there, due to its long war with the Soviet Union
and the subsequent civil wars that followed.
·
The war began only after President Bush made
demands to the Taliban that were unmet.
These included delivering al-Qaeda leaders and terrorists to the US,
releasing all foreign nationals, protecting foreign aid workers and diplomats,
closing terrorist training camps, and giving US access to the training camps to
make sure they were closed. The Taliban
ultimately agreed to meet to talk about convincing their leader Mullah Mohammed
Omar to hand over UBL to the US,
but President Bush felt the offer was insincere. The war also began after the Taliban refused
to abide by a UN Security Council resolutions from December 2000 and September
2001 calling for the Taliban to hand over UBL.
As of this writing, the US
war on Afghanistan
has killed between 1,000 and 5,000 civilians, and 20,000-50,000 total
people in Afghanistan.
·
Former
Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke says that the US was slow to put ground
forces in Afghanistan where al Qaeda was, and allowed them to escape ... we
knew Tora Bora was a good place to hide for al Qaeda leaders and we had
photographed it and mapped its caves, yet we did not stop UBL from going there
and escaping ... UBL is still at large, as is the leader of the Taliban ...
Afghanistan is still unstable ... warlords affiliated with the Taliban and
mujahedeen are still in power in most of Afghanistan.
·
Clarke
also asserts that America
should have established a security presence in Afghanistan
but did not, so Hamid Kharzi was given little authority outside of the capital
city of Kabul.
Plus our economic and development aid to the country was slow and
inadequate. Heck, we even forgot
to include them in the 2004 budget one year forcing Kharzi to come to the US and request
money!
·
Clarke says that the US
response to al Qaeda was slow and small.
He says Bush “began by again offering the Taliban a chance to avoid US
occupation of their country and, when that failed, he initially sent in only a
handful of Special Forces. When the Taliban and al Qaeda leaders escaped,
he dispatched additional forces but less than one full division equivalent,
fewer US troops for all of Afghanistan than the number of NYPD assigned to
Manhattan” (Clarke, p. 245) ... no US troops gave chase of the Taliban when
they fled ... we relied on the Northern Alliance to do this for us. Not
until November 25 (seven weeks after we started our war there) did the US insert ground forces (one Marine unit) to take
and hold a former al Qaeda and Taliban facility near Kandahar. This did not include any
effort to seal the border with Pakistan
or to cut off the al Qaeda escape routes.
·
Richard Clarke also points out that al Qaeda has
grown since 9/11 ... recruitment of al Qaeda is up ... there were more
terrorist attacks in the 30 months after 9/11 than before it! In June
2004 the State Department claimed that attacks were down but it had to withdraw
its annual report on terrorism and re-release it when it found its numbers were
inaccurate – terrorism had actually increased!
Senator Bob Graham agrees with Clarke and says it is the war on Iraq
that let “and a battered al-Qaeda left able to regroup and recruit” (p. xv).
·
February 2002 -- it is reported that US bases in
Afghanistan
have been placed along the proposed pipeline route.
·
Zalmay Khalizad is President Bush’s Ambassador
to Kabul, Afghanistan. He previously worked under Paul Wolfowitz and conducted a risk analysis for UOCAL for the proposed $2 billion gas pipeline. He also wrote op-eds in the Washington Post in 1997 in defense of
the Taliban.
·
Afghanistan’s new leader, Hamid Kharzai, was a paid consultant for
UNOCAL and had also been a Deputy Foreign Minister for the Taliban.
Iraq:
·
March 1992: The
Defense Planning Guidance is written by now Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz and now Vice President Chief of Staff Lewis Libby. It calls for pre-emptive attacks against
threatening regimes in order to protect against terrorism and assure access to
raw resources. According to Bernard
Weiner, the document called for “a new order” that accounts “sufficiently for
the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from
challenging our leadership” and a military power capable of “deterring potential
competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” According to the document, military
intervention in Iraq
is necessary to assure “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf
Oil” and to prevent the spread of WMDs. Excerpts
from the document include:
“The number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and
military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower.
Our first objective is to prevent
the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying
the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any
hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under
consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions
include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union,
and Southwest Asia.
There are three additional aspects
to this objective: First the U.S must show the leadership necessary to
establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing
potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a
more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the
non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the
advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership
or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally,
we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even
aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
Another
major U.S. objective should
be to safeguard U.S.
interests and promote American values.
… The U.S. should aim "to address
sources of regional conflict and instability in such a way as to promote
increasing respect for international law, limit international violence, and
encourage the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic
systems."
The draft outlines several
scenarios in which U.S. interests could be threatened by regional conflict:
"access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil; proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to U.S. citizens
from terrorism or regional or local conflict, and threats to U.S. society from
narcotics trafficking."
The draft relies on seven
scenarios in potential trouble spots to make its argument -- with the primary
case studies being Iraq and North Korea.
If
necessary, the United States
must be prepared to take unilateral action.
There is no mention in the draft
document of taking collective action through the United Nations. The document states that coalitions
"hold considerable promise for promoting collective action," but it
also states the U.S.
"should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies" formed to
deal with a particular crisis and which may not outlive the resolution of the
crisis. The document states that what is
most important is "the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by
the U.S." and that
"the United States
should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be
orchestrated" or in a crisis that calls for quick response.
·
These excerpts are on-line (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/wolf.html). A New
York Times analysis is also online (http://www.911truth.org/readingroom/whole_document.php?article_id=86).
·
According to PBS’s Frontline: “Controversy
erupts after the draft is leaked to the press. The White House orders Defense
Secretary Cheney to rewrite it. In the new draft there is no mention of
preemption or U.S.
willingness to act alone.” This suggests
our nation’s leaders were not quite ready for such a major shift in foreign
policy. The election of George W. Bush
to the White House provided the rationale for the shift.
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.html)
·
According to the organization, Global Security, the
Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) contains defense strategy and the guidance for
key planning and programming priorities to execute that strategy. The SECDEF
places responsibility and authority for program execution with the Services and
other DOD components but maintains central direction. Serving this central
purpose, the DPG presents the SECDEF's strategic plan for developing and
employing future forces. Prepared by OSD and published by 1 October in the odd
year, the DPG is a principal product of OSD planning. It reflects military
advice and information recommended by the CJCS; service long-range plans and
positions on policy and other matters advanced by Service Secretaries; and CINC
appraisals of major issues and problems bearing on command missions. By
promulgating the Defense Planning Guidance document, the Secretary of Defense
increased his authority over the development of programs and budgets. However,
the practice of publishing a new document annually denies DOD components needed
planning stability. This summary and
definitions of other key documents are on-line (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/intro.htm).
·
January 1993: Dick Cheney, while Secretary of
Defense, releases his “Defense Strategy for the 1990s” which reasserts the case
for US
global domination. Bill Clinton’s
inauguration means the plan is not put into place. The document is on-line (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/naarpr_Defense.pdf).
·
1996-1998: When US intelligence was tracking
UBL’s satellite phone calls, he made 260 calls to 27 numbers in Britain, more
than 200 calls to Yemen, 131 calls to Sudan, 106 calls to Iran, 67 calls to
Azerbaijan, 59 calls to Pakistan, 57 calls to Saudi Arabia, 13 calls to a ship
in the Indian Ocean, 6 calls to the US, 6 calls to Italy, 4 calls to Malaysia,
and 2 calls to Senegal. But he makes
ZERO calls to Iraq!
·
July 1996: Richard Perle (who later would become
chairman of President Bush’s Defense Policy Board), then a member of the
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), authors a paper
“A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” which calls for a hard
line Israel headed by Binyamin Netanyahu aimed at a restoration of
Zionism. The plan starts with the
removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq,
which would then destabilize the Middle East, including, it is hoped, new
governments in Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. The document is on-line (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/860941/posts).
·
June 1997: The Project for a New American
Century (PNAC) issues its statement of principles, which include shaping the
new century to be favorable to American principles and interests, achieving a
foreign policy that does the same, increasing defense spending significantly,
challenging regimes hostile to our interests and values, and accepting our role
in the new world as the sole superpower.
·
January 1998: PNAC sends a letter to President
Bill Clinton calling for war against Iraq and the removal of Saddam
Hussein because he is a hazard to the world’s oil supplies. It calls for the US
to go it alone and says the US
should not be crippled by the UN. Ten of
the 18 signatories end up in George W. Bush’s first administration (including
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowtiz,
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Undersecretary of State John
Bolton, Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, Presidential Advisor for the
Middle East Elliot Abrams, and Special Iraq Envoy Zalmay Khalizad).
·
In part, the letter reads:
“Given the magnitude of the
threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the
steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam
Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The
only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be
able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to
undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam
Hussein and his regime from power. That
now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy … We believe the US has the
authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including
military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue
to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security
Council.”
The letter is on-line (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm).
·
According
to former Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the 9/11 Joint Congressional
Inquiry, in 2000, the National Commission on Terrorism, chaired by Ambassador
Paul Bremer (who would later head the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq)
advised targeting states that support terrorism (Afghanistan, Syria, and North
Korea were mentioned but Iraq was not).
·
September 2000: “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”
is published by PNAC. It is commissioned
by future VP Dick Cheney, future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, future
Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and future Chief of
Staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby. It calls for maintaining US global dominance,
a military force in the Middle East, military control of space, regime change
in China, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran, and other countries, the development
of forms of biological warfare that can be used to target specific genotypes,
and preparations for multiple theater wars.
·
The report essentially calls for Pax Americana, an American empire, with
a greater emphasis on “Homeland Defense,” preparation for multiple wars, and
transformation of the US
armed forces. It asserts the US right to secure global hegemony, and this
depends, in no small part, to a US
presence in the Middle East. For example, the document states … “the United States
has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional
security. While the unresolved conflict
with Iraq
provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force
presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein” (p.
14).
·
The report puts forth the “axis of evil.” For example, it states “… adversaries like
Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are rushing to develop ballistic missiles and
nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American intervention in regions they seek to
dominate” (p. 4). Further, the report
states: “The current American peace will be short-lived if the United States
becomes vulnerable to rogue powers with small, inexpensive arsenals of
ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass
destruction. We cannot allow North Korea, Iran,
Iraq,
or other similar states to undermine American leadership, intimidate American
allies or threaten the American homeland itself” (p. 75).
·
The report also states the US right to
topple hostile regimes: “American military preeminence will continue to rest in
significant part on the ability to maintain sufficient land forces to achieve
political goals such as removing a dangerous and hostile regime when necessary”
(p. 61).
·
The report also explicitly calls for the
militarization of space and the implementation of “Star Wars” type programs to
achieve this goal, as well as increased defense spending to the tune of $15 to
20 billion per year.
·
The report also calls for the establishment of
more US military bases
overseas to serve as “deployment bases” and “forward operating bases,” as well
as expansion of US
nuclear weaponry.
·
The report says the desired changes will take a
long time, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” (Pearl Harbor reference #3)
·
The
report is on-line (http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf).
·
A comparison of this document with President
Bush’s National Security Strategy of the United States (September 2002)
is telling. In it, President Bush
asserts the US
right to prevent any nation from challenging us economically, politically, or
militarily. According to Bernard Weiner,
the similarities include:
1) the policy of
"pre-emptive" war – i.e., whenever the U.S. thinks a country may be
amassing too much power and/or could provide some sort of competition in the
"benevolent hegemony" region, it can be attacked, without
provocation. (A later corollary would rethink the country's atomic policy:
nuclear weapons would no longer be considered defensive, but could be used
offensively in support of political/economic ends; so-called
"mini-nukes" could be employed in these regional wars.);
2) international treaties and
opinion will be ignored whenever they are not seen to serve U.S. imperial goals;
3) The new policies "will
require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia."
In short, the Bush Administration seems to see the U.S., admiringly, as a New
Rome, an empire with its foreign legions (and threat of "shock &
awe" attacks, including with nuclear weapons) keeping the outlying
colonies, and potential competitors, in line. Those who aren't fully in accord
with these goals better get out of the way; "you're either with us or
against us."
The Strategy is on-line (http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf).
·
January 30, 2001: First National Security
Council meeting is held ten days after Bush’s inauguration. It was focused on Iraq, including finding a way to
remove Saddam Hussein from power.
·
February 1, 2001: Second National Security
Council meeting in President Bush’s Administration is held and regime change in
Iraq
is a central topic. Rumsfeld talks in
depth about what a post-Saddam Iraq
would be like. Memo titled “Plan for
post-Saddam Iraq”
is discussed.
·
February 2001: Documents planning regime change
for Iraq in the Bush
Administration are created, including one titled “Plan for post-Saddam Iraq”
and another “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Contracts.”
·
February 2001 – According to reporter Greg
Palast: “The State Department's Pam
Quanrud organizes a secret confab in California
to make plans for the invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam. US oil
industry advisor Falah Aljibury and others are asked to interview would-be
replacements for a new US-installed dictator. On BBC Television's Newsnight,
Aljibury himself explained, ‘It is an invasion, but it will act like a coup.
The original plan was to liberate Iraq from the Saddamists and from
the regime.’”
·
March 2001 – Palast also reports that Vice-President Dick Cheney
meets with oil company executives and reviews oil field maps of Iraq … Cheney
refuses to release the names of those attending or their purpose. In March 2003, some of this information is
discovered by Judicial Watch and posted on its web site. The materials are located on-line (http://www.judicialwatch.org/071703.c_.shtml).
·
April 30, 2001: First Deputies Meeting on
terrorism is finally held in the Bush Administration. The discussion was focused on Iraq, not UBL
or al-Qaeda!
·
April 2001: A report titled Strategic Energy
Policy Challenges for the 21st Century commissioned by the
Council on Foreign Relations and former US Secretary of State James Baker
is submitted to Vice President Cheney.
It says the central dilemma for the US is that “the American people
continue to demand plentiful and cheap energy without sacrifice or
inconvenience.” It warns that the US is running out of oil and that “the United States
remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma” with one of the consequences being
that there is a “need for military intervention” to secure our oil supply. It argues that Iraq should be overthrown so that
we can control its oil.
·
Spring 2001: An article in the Army War College’s journal by Jeffrey Record, a former staff
member of the Senate Armed Services Committee says it is legitimate to shoot in
the Persian Gulf on behalf of lower gas
prices. He also says it is all right to
use Presidential subterfuge in the promotion of a conflict. … in April 2001,
Tommy Franks, Commander of US forces in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, says
to Congress that his command’s key mission is “access to the region’s energy
resources.”
·
August 6, 2001 -- Richard Perle, head of the
Defense Policy Board, says there are three challenges to the US after the cold war: Saddam
Hussein, North orea,
and Iran. This becomes President Bush’s “axis of evil”
in his January 2002 State of the Union address.
·
August 2001 – Deputy Executive Director of PNAC
Thomas Donnelly tells the Washington Post
that the US
should embrace its role as the world’s only superpower. During the summer of 2001, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered a study of ancient empires including Macedonia, Rome,
and the Mongols to see how they maintained dominance.
·
September 4, 2001 – Bush cabinet members meet to
discuss terrorism for only the second time.
Neither Bush nor Cheney is there … CIA Director George Tenet stresses
al-Qaeda, Secretary of State Colin Powell outlines a plan to pressure Pakistan
to stop supporting them, but Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is only
interested in Iraq.
·
September 11, 2001 – Donald Rumsfeld is given
information hours after the attacks that three of the names on the airplane
passenger manifests are suspected al-Qaeda operatives. Notes from people in the
National Military Command
Center with Rumsfeld show
he wanted “the best info. Fast. Judge
whether good enough to hit SH at same time.
Not only UBL.” … “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and things not.” He also sets up a small team of defense
officials to focus on connecting Iraq with al-Qaeda and other
terrorist groups. In fact, it is
reported that by May 2002 Rumsfeld has asked the CIA on ten occasions to find
evidence linking Iraq
to the terror attacks of 9/11.
·
September 12, 2001 – Officials discuss attacking
Iraq … Rumsfeld says Iraq should be part of the first round of the war on
terrorism and that Iraq has better targets than Afghanistan … Colin Powell
agrees with Richard Clarke that the focus should now be on al-Qaeda but also
says: “Public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is
possible.” Bush says the goal should be
to replace the Iraqi government and the military warns him it will need a large
force and months to prepare.
·
September 12, 2001 – President Bush says to
Richard Clarke, see if Saddam did this.
This is now not denied by the White House, who says it probably happened
… Bush was told that there was no cooperation between Iraq and
al-Qaeda but he still wanted another report to examine it anyway.
·
Clarke claims that after 9/11, President Bush
was explicitly not concerned with international law. After Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
said war could not be pre-emptive, Bush said: “No! I don’t care what the international lawyers
say. We’re going to kick some ass!” (p.
24).
·
In the early morning hours of 9/12, the day
after the attacks, Clarke walked into a White House meeting expecting to talk
about “what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we
could do about them in the short term.”
Instead, he “walked into a series of discussions about Iraq.” According to Clarke, he had heard from
friends in the Pentagon that word was we would be invading Iraq some time
in 2002! Clarke claims that on 9/12,
Paul Wolfowitz insisted the attacks were too coordinated to have been conducted
without a state sponsor, and that Iraq had to be involved. In fact, Wolfowitz made the same argument in
April 2001 at the first Bush Administration Deputies meeting on terrorism,
saying that the first attack on the World
Trade Center
also was assisted by Iraq. By that afternoon, according to Clarke,
Donald Rumsfeld also was talking about Iraq. Rumsfeld said there were no decent targets in
Afghanistan and that Iraq had better
targets. President Bush said we needed
to change the government of Iraq,
not just bomb it! (pp. 30-31).
·
President Bush also directed Clarke on September
12th: “Look, I know you have a lot to do and all ... but I want you,
as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he is linked in any way.” Clarke responded that al Qaeda attacked us
the day before and Bush replied: “I know, I know but ... see if Saddam was
involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.” Clarke said he would look again, but then
pointed out: “But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship
of al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran
plays a little, as does Pakistan,
and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.” Bush replied: “Look into Iraq, Saddam”
(p. 32). A meeting the next day looked
into the relationship between Iraq
and al Qaeda and found that there was no cooperation between the two. A memo was drafted and sent to President
Bush.
·
Paul Wolfowitz, then assistant to Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, insisted all along that Iraq
also attacked us in 1993 the first time the World Trade
Center was attacked. In spite of overwhelming evidence against the
convicted bomber Ramzi Yousef, Wolfowitz followed the logic of American
Enterprise Institute writer Laurie Mylroie that the real attacker worked for
Saddam Hussein and was safely in Baghdad. Clarke insists he wanted there to be evidence
linking the first attack to Iraq,
so that a war on Iraq
might even be justified, but no such evidence exists.
·
Ironically, according to Clarke, it is Iran that
played a role in the 9/11 attacks and that funds and encourages attacks against
us. Iran
also funds Hezbollah, who historically has attacked US
ally Israel. In 1995, when Vice President Dick Cheney was
CEO of Haliburton, Cheney opposed US sanctions against Iran! The 9/11 Commission also reported that Iran played a
role in the 9/11 attacks.
·
Mid September 2001 – Retired General Wesley
Clarke says there is a concerted effort to pin 9/11 on Iraq. He says he got a phone call from an overseas
think tank urging him to push an Iraq connection on his TV
appearances.
·
After 9/11, former White House Counterterrorism
Czar Richard Clarke
points out that President Bush claimed on numerous occasions, as did other
members of his Administration, that Iraq was linked to al Qaeda, yet the 9/11
Commission concludes there is no evidence of this link.
·
Mid September, 2001 – A report tries to link Iraq and al-Qaeda by saying Mohamed Atta met an
Iraqi spy in the Czech
Republic in April 2001. This is based on a single informant in the
local Prague Arab community. In fact,
the story is false and there is no meaningful connection (see Thompson, pp. 321-322). Not only has the 9/11 Commission dismissed
it, so too have the French and the British in October 2002. Britain
says Iraq
has purposely distanced itself from al-Qaeda not embraced it.
·
September 13, 2001 –
According to PBS Frontline: “Wolfowitz expands on the president's words [where
the President said to the nation that he would "make no distinction
between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor
them"] at a Pentagon briefing. He seems to signal that the U.S. will enlarge its campaign against terror to
include Iraq:
‘I think one has to say it's not just simply a matter of capturing people and
holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support
systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. And that's why it has to be a
broad and sustained campaign.’ Colin Powell and others are alarmed by what they
view as Wolfowitz's inflammatory words about "ending states." Powell
later responds during a press briefing: "We're after ending terrorism. And
if there are states and regimes, nations that support terrorism, we hope to
persuade them that it is in their interest to stop doing that. But I think
ending terrorism is where I would like to leave it, and let Mr. Wolfowitz speak
for himself." (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.html)
·
September 15, 2001 – Paul Wolfowitz claims a
10-50% chance Iraq
was involved in 9/11. He, Donald
Rumsfeld, and Undersecretary of Defense
Douglas Feith argue in memos over the next days that Iraq should be included in the
first round of responses to 9/11.
·
September 17, 2001 – A top secret document
signed by President Bush outlines a plan for going to war on Afghanistan and that directs the Pentagon to
begin preparing for an invasion of Iraq. The document orders the military to be ready
to occupy Iraq’s
oil fields if the country acts against US interests. According to the media, Iraq becomes
the central focus of the Bush Administration for the next nine months. Richard Clarke asserts that President Bush
claimed on numerous occasions, as did other members of his Administration, that
war on Iraq was a last
resort, yet he began planning for the Iraq war early in his first term.
·
September 19, 2001 – The Defense Policy Board
has 19 hours of discussion on Iraq … attendees include Chairman Richard Perle,
Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi … Secretary of
State Colin Powell is not invited! The
attendees write a letter to President Bush calling for the overthrown of Saddam
Hussein, which is published as a letter from PNAC on September 20, 2001. Secretary of State Colin Powell delays an
attack on Iraq by stating
there is no link between Iraq
and 9/11. According to Richard Clarke,
President Bush relied on Iraqi exiles such as Ahmed Chalabi for intelligence
regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and paid them millions of dollars
for it, even though much of it turned out to be false. In fact, Bush admitted on ABC News to Diane
Sawyer that he invaded Iraq
because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait
in 1990! (Clarke, p. 266!)
·
September 20, 2001 – President Bush says to
Prime Minister Tony Blair that Afghanistan
would be first and then Iraq
would be next.
·
Late September 2001 – Former CIA Director James
Woolsey and Paul Wolfowitz fly to London to look
for evidence that would support President Bush’s goal of regime change in Iraq. Colin Powell and George Tenet are kept out
of the loop.
·
September-December, 2001 -- President Bush says
he wants UBL dead or alive. “If he
thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he
will be sorely mistaken.” “I want
justice. And there’s an old poster out
West, I recall, that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’”. Then on December 18, 2001, Bush says: “Our
objective is more than bin Laden.” His
January 2002 State of the Union speech lays out an axis of evil with no mention
of UBL. On March 8, 2002, Bush says:
“We’re going to find him.” On March 13,
Bush says: “He’s a person who’s now been marginalized … I just don’t spend that
much time on him … I truly am not that concerned about him.” On April 6, 2002, Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman Richard Myers says: “The goals has never been to get bin Laden.” Finally, Bush starts answering questions
about UBL by talking about Saddam Hussein!
·
October 2001 – The Counterterrorism Evaluation Group is created by Douglas Feith … it
creates analysis at odds with years of CIA data that concludes there are links
between al-Qaeda and Iraq … compare with Office
of Special Plans, also created by Feith, which was specifically intended to
second-guess CIA and DIA data. The
office relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on
information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group
headed by Ahmad Chalabi, and was led by Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in
the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. The Straussian movement has many adherents in
and around the Bush Administration. In
addition to Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky, they include William Kristol, the
editor of the Weekly Standard, and Stephen Cambone,
the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who is particularly close to
Donald Rumsfeld.
·
Ahmad Chalabi was convicted in Jordan for
crimes associated with his bank and sentenced in absentia to years of hard
labor in prison. The information he
provides is typically false, and thus his code name is “Curveball”! America paid Chalabi’s National Iraqi Congress $33
million. During the Iraq
war, he allegedly told Iran’s
Ministry of Intelligence that we had broken its top secret communications code.
·
October-November
2001 – According to reporter Greg Palast, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz convinces the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq. His plan scopes out the "sale of all
state enterprises" -- that is, most of the nation's assets, "… especially
in the oil and supporting industries."
·
November 21, 2001 – President Bush directs
Donald Rumsfeld to devise a secret plan to attack Iraq.
·
President Bush said in February 2002: “We have
totally routed out one of the most repressive governments in the history of
mankind, the Taliban.” But the Taliban still exists, even today. More
recently President Bush said Iraq
was on its way to becoming a free nation like Afghanistan
... but Afghanistan
is still not free from the Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters.
·
February
7, 2002 – President Bush signs an Executive Order saying that members of
al-Qaeda will not be afforded protections of the Geneva Conventions, but that:
“The United States will hold
states, organizations, and individuals who gain control of United States
personnel responsible for treating such personnel humanely and consistent with
applicable law.” Yet, it also says: “I
hereby reaffirm the order previously issued by the secretary of defense to the
United States Armed Forces requiring that the detainees be treated humanely
and, to the extent appropriate and
consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the
principles of Geneva.” This means when not appropriate and
inconsistent with military necessity, captured enemy combatants may be
tortured. This Executive Order is
on-line (http://lawofwar.org/Bush_torture_memo.htm). An analysis of the memos that led to this
Order, including that by now Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, can be found
at: http://lawofwar.org/Torture_Memos_analysis.htm
·
February 16, 2002 – National Security Council
directive signed by Bush establishes goals and objectives for going to war with
Iraq, which is in opposition
to what Bush and his officials had been saying publicly about no plans for war
on Iraq. This is a diversion from al-Qaeda as
resources are shifted from Afghanistan
to the Persian Gulf.
·
April 2002 – March 2003 – the State Department
begins its “Future of Iraq” project which is intended to develop plans for
post-Saddam Iraq. It is made up of 17 working groups, yet the
project is underfunded ($5 million).
Still, it produces 13 volumes of reports and 2,000 pages. Media accounts suggest none of the report was
used in post-war Iraq.
·
April 2002 – British Prime Minister Tony Blair
visits President Bush in Crawford, Texas and tells Bush that the UK intends to support military
action to bring about regime change.
First, however, a coalition will have to be constructed, public opinion
will have to be shaped, and people will have to be convinced that all efforts
to eliminate WMDs through weapons inspections were exhausted.
·
May 2002 – US
military increases bombing of targets in no-fly zones in Iraq, dropping 7.3 tons of
ordinance this month, compared with 0.3 tons the prior month.
·
June 2002 -- According
to PBS Frontline, in a speech to West Point, President
Bush “cites the realities of a new post-Cold War era and outlines a major shift
in national security strategy -- from containment to preemption. "Our security will require all Americans
to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when
necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives." The president
also calls for an American hegemony: "America has, and intends to keep,
military strengths beyond challenge." Both strategic aims -- preemption
and hegemony -- echo the recommendations Paul Wolfowitz made back in 1992 in
his controversial Defense Planning Guidance draft.” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.html)
·
June 2002 – March 2003 – Operation Southern
Focus is initiated, where bombing of no-fly zones increases tremendously. US and British planes flew 21,736 sorties
over Southern Iraq and dropped 606 bombs on
391 targets.
·
June 2002 – US and British planes drop 10.4 tons
of ordinance on targets in Iraq
no-fly zones.
·
July 2002 – The US military releases its new
Defense Planning Guidance which lays out a plan to prevent any other power from
challenging the US. It even says preemptive use of nuclear
weapons is justified. A news briefing
and slides associated with the document are on-line (http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2002/t05102002_t0510dpg.html).
·
August 2002 – President Bush’s advisers advocate
attacking Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran,
North Korea, Syria, Egypt,
Burma. …
·
According to PBS Frontline,
Colin Powell “reports trouble getting U.S.
allies on board for a war with Iraq
and wants to consult the U.N. At a private dinner with Bush on Aug. 5, Powell
warns the president that the U.S.
should not act unilaterally and must fully consider the economic and political
consequences of war -- particularly in the Middle East. Powell's view is championed by Brent
Scowcroft, former National Security Adviser in the Bush I administration, who
publishes an op-ed in The Wall Street
Journal on Aug. 15 in which he argues that Bush is moving too quickly on
Iraq, and advocates pressing for the return of U.N. inspectors. Soon after, Vice President Cheney emerges as
the administration voice advocating action against Iraq. In a Nashville
speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Cheney warns that ‘a return of
inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of [Saddam's] compliance with
U.N. resolutions.’ Cheney also outlines
a larger, long-term strategy whereby regime change in Iraq could transform the Middle East: ‘Regime
change in Iraq
would bring about a number of benefits to the region. When the gravest of
threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a
chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace. As for the reaction
of the Arab 'street,' the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts
that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are 'sure to erupt in
joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.' Extremists in
the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad. Moderates throughout
the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.’ As Bush leaves for an August vacation in Crawford, Texas,
he agrees to take his case to the U.N. and asks his advisers to start preparing
the speech. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.html). Bush’s speech to the UN on
September 12, 2002 seems to favor the Powell approach to resolving the Iraq problem,
but only five days later President Bush’s National Security Strategy is
released, which reifies the PNAC vision of preemptive and unilateral war.
·
August 2002 – US and British planes drop 14.1
tons of ordinance on targets in Iraq
no-fly zones.
·
August 5, 2002 – US military planners decide that
the operation to depose Saddam Hussein will begin with an air offensive in the
no-fly zones, and with special forces operations aimed at weakening air
defenses. The US and British also build
up forces in Kuwait
in preparation for an invasion. In
September 2002, planes drop 54.6 tons of ordinance, in October, they drop 17.7
tons of ordinance, in November, they drop 33.6 tons of ordinance, and in
December, they drop 53.2 tons of ordinance.
·
August 2002 – Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Science
Board recommends the creation of a super-intelligence support group it calls
“Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group” or P2OG, to bring together CIA and
military covert action, information warfare intelligence and cover-up and
deception. The body would launch secret
operations aimed at stimulating reactions among terrorists (that is to provoke
terrorism) and states possessing WMDs so that the US could respond quickly to threats
and attacks.
·
Senator
Bob Graham says that: “In the fall of 2002, the President allowed intelligence
agencies under his control to present erroneous, misleading, and incomplete
information to the Congress, our allies, and the American people in support of
the war in Iraq” ... “The President further adulterated that intelligence by
selective use and presentation of the evidence to justify a preemptive war to
the American people and the Congress, and to the world community at the United
Nations” (p. 231). He achieved this
through secret agencies such as the Office of Special Plans. According to Senator Bob Graham, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans in
2002. According to Graham:
“the Office of Special Plans circumvented the standard processes for
reviewing intelligence and operated free of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which
has supplied operational intelligence information to Secretaries of Defense for
over forty years. If you set up competing intelligence collection
agencies, the users will simply take information from the agency whose
conclusions are closest to what the user wants to hear, especially if one of
those agencies is created simply to validate pre-formed opinions.
Therefore, it was no surprise that the Office of Special Plans came up with
some of the most terrifying – and inaccurate – claims about Iraq’s weapons of
mass destruction and some of the most wildly optimistic pictures of the
reception Americans would be given should we invade” (p. 158).
·
Dick
Cheney, for example, alleged: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam
Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is
amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us
... Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon” (Graham, p. 178).
This logic made the case for war with Iraq a “slam dunk” according to CIA
Director George Tenet. Amazingly, a
study by the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform found that
in October 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice had made nearly 100 misleading or inflated statements about
the threat posed by Iraq.
Yeah, like the mushroom cloud!!! Bush said: “America must
not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of
peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come
in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
·
Graham
alleges that when President Bush approached Congress on September 12th, 2001
for authorization to use force (against Afghanistan presumably), he
actually left the language so broad that it would have justified any attack
against any nation preemptively – it was a blank check. See p. 105 for
the wording ... it ends with “and to deter and preempt any related future acts
of terrorism or aggression against the United States.” Thus,
Senators concerned with the language drafted an alternative and “granted the
President the authority to use force against those nations, organizations, and
persons that were learned to be connected to the tragedy of September 11"
(p. 105). So, since Iraq
was NOT connected to 9/11, the war on Iraq was NOT justified by the use
of force resolution passed by Congress.
·
The “Authorization for Use of Military Force
Against Iraq Resolution of 2002” (passed October 16, 2002) was based on the
following justifications: Iraq posed a threat with its WMDs, to both the United
States and his neighbors; Iraq violated its cease-fire agreement; Iraq
attempted to thwart weapons inspectors; Iraq brutally suppresses its civilian
population; Saddam Hussein authorized an assassination attempt against
President Bush; Iraq harbors terrorists and has links with al-Qaeda; the US
Congress passed laws (in August 1998) allowing the President “to take
appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of
the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international
obligations.” Congress as stated that
the “policy of the United
States [should be] to support efforts to
remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a
democratic government to replace that regime.”
·
The resolution gave the President the authority
to use military force against Iraq
to defend the national security of the United
States [even though Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the
US] and to enforce all
relevant UN Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq [even though the UN Security
Council resolutions only promised serious consequences for violation but not
war]. Further, the resolution required
the President, within 48 hours, to demonstrate that relying on diplomatic or
other peaceful means alone will either not adequately protect the national
security of the United States
from Iraq OR will not lead to enforcement of all relevant UN Security Council
resolutions regarding Iraq.
[UN weapons inspections and sanctions against Iraq are widely acknowledged to
have been effective at containing Saddam Hussein. Even Colin Powell said, in remarks to Egyptian Foreign Minister Amre
Houssa (February 24, 2001), that: "Sanctions
exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose
of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of
mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be
looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that
purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago
when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any
significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is
unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."
·
This comes after the 2000 National Commission on Terrorism, chaired by Ambassador Paul Bremer
(who would later head the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq), which advised targeting states that
support terrorism (Afghanistan,
Syria, and North Korea were mentioned but Iraq was not). The Commission’s executive summary states, in
part: “U.S.
policies must firmly target all states that support terrorists. Iran
and Syria
should be kept on the list of state sponsors until they stop supporting
terrorists. Afghanistan
should be designated a sponsor of terrorism and subjected to all the sanctions
applicable to state sponsors. The
President should impose sanctions on countries that, while not direct sponsors
of terrorism, are nevertheless not cooperating fully on counterterrorism.
Candidates for consideration include Pakistan
and Greece.” The document outlines from “potential
terrorist threats from a growing number of groups opposed to perceived American
hegemony.” Yet, the words Iraq
and Saddam Hussein do not appear in the document. Its
findings are on-line (http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/commission.html).
·
Senator Bob
Graham decided to propose amending the use of force resolution in October 2002
to explicitly allow the US
to go after any group that threatened us, to launch a true global war on
terror. At this time, the State Department had identified thirty-four international
terrorist organizations, of which six shared characteristics of great concern:
al-Qaeda, abu Nidal, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Liberation
Front, and Hezbollah (each is sponsored by a state that has WMDs, each has a
long history of hating and killing Americans, and each has the ability to
strike within the US). Congress gave the President the authority to go
after only one of these groups. President Bush’s reply was that the
Graham Amendment would slow the progress on considering the current
resolution. Graham’s Amendment lost 88-10. The other resolution was
passed 77-23 to give the President the authority he wanted.
·
Senator
Bob Graham made efforts to get a sense of whether Iraq
actually posed a threat to the US. The Joint Inquiry by Congress that Graham
co-chaired called CIA Director George Tenet to a closed session. After
his testimony, the Senators requested to see the National Intelligence Estimate
on the rationale for invading Iraq and the military and post invasion occupation
expectations (the NIE is prepared by the National Intelligence Council and is
the most comprehensive analytical document produced by the office of the
Director of Central Intelligence ... according to Graham, “It represents the
combined wisdom of the intelligence agencies, with agencies encouraged to
include their qualifications, nuances, and dissents in the final recommendation
so that the reader can evaluate the credibility of the final estimate” [p.
179]. Tenet said NO NIE HAD BEEN REQUESTED BY THE WHITE HOUSE AND NONE
HAD BEEN PREPARED!!!
·
So, the
Senators requested an NIE as soon as possible ... Tenet said he could not
produce the full NIE because his people were too busy with other intelligence
functions, but he said he would prepare an NIE on Iraq’s programs of
developing, building, and storing weapons of mass destruction. About
three weeks later, a classified NIE was delivered, and it was roughly 90 pages
long. According to Graham, the NIE did not justify the claim that the case
against Iraq
was a slam dunk. Graham says the NIE justified the war only if you ignore
the caveats, dissenting views, and assessment of Saddam Hussein himself.
Graham notes that the NIE concluded that “Saddam had shown little desire to
attack the United States and had few if any contacts with al-Qaeda and no
particular interest in assisting Osama bin Laden” (p. 181).
·
Graham
and the Senators asked Tenet to declassify the NIE on October 2 so it could be
seen by the American people. The declassified report was returned two
days later and was 25 pages long. Graham says they were struck that the
production value of the unclassified version equaled or exceeded that of the
classified version – it had maps, photos, and tables. Its conclusions
were ominous and frightening and predicted a nuclear armed Iraq within one to ten years, an Iraq with more biological weapons than before
the Gulf War, and an Iraq
with unmanned aerial vehicles that were intended to be used to deliver
biological agents [all of this was untrue by the way].
·
As it
turns out, the White House asked the CIA in the spring of 2002 for a document
that could be used to make the public case for war on Iraq.
This was the unclassified document given to the Joint Inquiry two days after it
was requested [So this means the White House asked for a document that was
inconsistent with the whole truth, simply to justify a war!]. As
noted by Graham: “The problem was that it did not accurately represent the
classified NIE we had received just days earlier. Gone were the
assessments of Saddam Hussein’s intentions that had made the classified version
of the document more balanced ... Intent is a huge component of an intelligence
assessment, and here it had been selectively removed” (p. 183).
·
Compare
Tenet’s “slam dunk” with the following facts offered by Graham: 1) We had no
human penetration inside Iraq and, therefore, no means of independent, current
verification of the intelligence; 2) The Defense Department was relying on
exiles, especially the Iraqi National Congress and its leader Ahmad Chalabi; 3)
Intelligence from other countries that whose intelligence we trust raised
serious doubts that Saddam Hussein had the capabilities that were attributed to
Saddam Hussein!
·
Graham
then sought more information from Tenet because of the discrepancies and three
days later Tenet sent a three-page response. In it were these words:
“Baghdad for now appears to
be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or
CBW [chemical or biological weapons] against the United States.
Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting
Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United States
would be his last chance to exact revenge.” Graham concludes: “In short,
Saddam Hussein posed no threat to his neighbors or to the United States
as long as he was left alone. Only when he was threatened did he become
dangerous, and at that point it became possible that he might partner with a
non-Iraqi terrorist organization” (p. 187). See the testimony of CIA
Director George Tenet to the Joint Inquiry where he said the likelihood of a
WMD attack by Saddam Hussein was low unless he was attacked, in which case it
would be high (pp. 187-188).
·
Information
on Iraqi and al-Qaeda links is classified!!! It is illogical
anyway. As explained by Graham, Saddam Hussein’s “leadership was not
about pan-Islamic brotherhood or Muslim fundamentalism. It was about
retaining and expanding his own power. Those facts alone argue that
Saddam would not want to grant a foothold in Iraq to a group like al-Qaeda,
which would be capable of undermining his power at home” (p. 189). In
fact, the only evidence of an Iraq and al-Qaeda link established by Colin
Powell when he made the US case for war to the UN was that a group affiliated
with al-Qaeda (whatever that means) operated training camps in Iraq. The
only problem was it operated in the Northern no-fly zone, where Saddam Hussein
had no power and where the US
could have bombed them at any time. Tenet even said to the Joint
Inquiry: “Our understanding of the relationship between Saddam Iraq and
al-Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some
of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of
high rank” (p. 189).
·
Ray
McGovern, retired CIA agent with 27 years experience, including preparing
National Intelligence Estimates and Presidential Daily Briefings that outline
threats posed by terrorists, is now member of the Veterans of Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He says
the war on Iraq is about
O.I.L. (an acronym that stands for Oil, Israeli survival, and Logistics or
bases in the Middle East).
·
McGovern
says that the CIA was intended to be a “central intelligence agency,” a
one-place stop for all needed information about any nation. It was intended to give its unvarnished
opinion and to serve no particular agenda.
According to him, the CIA was not supposed to change the minds of government
officials on policies but to given them all the relevant facts so they can make
the best informed decision. McGovern
asserts this is not the case today and that the CIA broke its own ethic when it
provided President Bush with faulty intelligence based on the pressure put on
it from Vice President Dick Cheney and his office. This supports the case made by Bob Graham. McGovern calls the CIA’s NIA on Iraq
to Congress in October 2002 the worst estimate ever delivered by the CIA.
·
McGovern
also claims that the outing of CIA Agent Valerie Plame was done not only to
spite former Ambassador Joe Wilson (who showed that the document on which the
claim that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy yellow cake uranium from Niger
was a forgery), but also to send a message to all intelligence analysts that
revealing anything counter to the case for war has high costs.
·
In the fall of 2002, President Bush sets up a
high-level interagency task force among Deputies Committee members to review
all available information on post-war Iraq to provide recommendations to
President Bush. Media accounts suggest
information by the Office of Special Plans take precedence. Among the many conclusions drawn include that
the US will likely be
involved in a lengthy occupation, that the US would not necessarily be greeted
as liberators, and that Iraqi oil will be used to pay for Iraqi reconstruction.
·
Also in
the fall of 2002, according to reporter Greg Palast, Philip Carroll, former CEO
of Shell Oil USA, is brought
in by the Pentagon to plan the management of Iraq's oil fields, working with
Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith.
According to Palast, this is after “Grover Norquist and other corporate
lobbyists meet secretly with Defense, State and Treasury officials to ensure
the invasion plans for Iraq
include plans for protecting ‘property rights.’” Palast says: “The result was a pre-invasion
scheme to sell off Iraq's
oil fields, banks, electric systems, and even change the country's copyright
laws to the benefit of the lobbyists' clients. Occupation chief Paul Bremer
would later order these giveaways into Iraq law.” Carroll refuses to participate saying: “There
was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was
involved.”
·
September 2002 – Philip Zelikow, who served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board (PFIAB) that reports directly to the president, and who would later go on
to serve as Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission (in spite of being in the
room when President Bush received specific warnings about an al-Qaeda attack on
the US), said to a gathering at the University
of Virginia: “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons
against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has
been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel…And this is the threat that
dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that
threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to
lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”
·
October
2002 – Ahmed Chalabi meets with executives of three major oil companies to help
decide how Iraqi oil will be divided up after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
·
October
7, 2002 – President Bush makes a nationally televised speech where he makes
allegedly false and exaggerated statements in defense of the forthcoming war on
Iraq. It includes claims related to aluminum tubes,
Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capabilities, Iraqi drone aircraft, giving WMDs to
terrorists, Iraq’s training of al-Qaeda members in bomb-making, poisons, and
deadly gas, and Iraq’s treating of an al-Qaeda member is a Baghdad hospital.
·
November
– December 2002 – National Security Council member Elliot Abrams, in charge of Near
East and North Africa, leads a group
charged with putting together post-invasion plans for Iraq. He puts forth a proposal for the US to take de
facto control of US oil fields. This is
the same man, who in 1991, pleaded guilty to two counts of lying to
Congress under oath in relation to the secret and illegal operation mounted by
the Reagan administration to fund the CIA-organized contra mercenaries’ war on
Nicaragua (the Iran-Contra affair).
·
In December 2002, Richard Perle says: “No
stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, and then we will do Iraq … this is
entirely the wrong way to go about it.
If we just let out vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it
entirely and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a
total war … our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”
·
December 2002 – Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz receives a report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessment that says the costs of occupation and care of Iraq would come
out of Iraqi oil. The report was
commissioned by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s director of New Assessment.
·
December 2002 – The Oil and Energy Working
Group, part of the State Department’s “Future of Iraq” project, meets and
discusses plans for the oil industry in post-Saddam Iraq.
·
December 7, 2002 – Iraq makes its declaration of the
state of its weapons programs to the UN.
The report consists of more than 2,00 pages of evidence of the state of Iraq’s
programs. Materials related to the
statement are on-line (http://www.iraqwatch.org/government/Iraq/For-Ministry/Iraqi-declaration-1202--TOC.html). The US consistently and emphatically
denies the report is complete and accurate.
·
January 2003 – Judicial Watch learns of maps and
charts of Iraqi oil fields as part of Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task
Force meetings. They show locations of
Iraqi oil and list potential foreign suitors of this oil. During this month, according to Greg Palast, Robert Ebel, former CIA oil analyst, is
sent, BBC learns, to London to meet with Fadhil
Chalabi to plan terms for taking over Iraq's oil. Greg Palast reports that Falah Aljibury, an
“Iraqi-born oil industry consultant” took part in secret meetings that
discussed plans to force a coup d’etat and to find a replacement leader for
Saddam Hussein. Aljibury says that the
original plan to sell off Iraq’s oil, which was backed by the US-installed
Governing Council in 2003, helped bring on the insurgency in Iraq: “Insurgents
used this, saying, ‘Look, you’re losing your county, you’re losing your
resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make
your life miserable … We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities,
pipelines, built on the premise that privatization is coming.”
·
2003- April 2004 – details about horrors at the
Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad,
Iraq come to
light, mostly after the publication of an essay by Seymour Hersh in the New
Yorker magazine. His essay is
on-line (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact).
·
According to Wikipedia:
Photos and videos revealed by the Pentagon to
lawmakers in a private viewing on the 12th of May, 2004, showed attack dogs
snarling at cowing prisoners, Iraqi women forced to expose their breasts, and
naked prisoners forced to have sex with each other, the lawmakers
revealed. Members of the Senate reviewed
photographs supplied by the Defense Department which have not been released to
the public. They note that in addition
to the abuses mentioned, some of the U.S. military guards have sex in
front of the prisoners.
Hersh has made other claims about
the abuses at Abu Ghraib, in his speaking appearances, where he has admitted he
will change facts and events for audience consumption. At the July 2004 conference of the ACLU, he stated there
are tapes of American soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys, and that these tapes are
being held by the Bush administration: "The boys were sodomized with the
cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys
shrieking," Notably, Hersh would revise this claim in his book Chain of
Command, stating, "An attorney involved in the case told me in July
2004 that one of the witness statements he had read described the rape of a boy
by a foreign contract employee who served as an interpreter at Abu Ghraib,”
Hersh wrote. “In the statement, which had not been made public, the lawyer told
me, a prisoner stated that he was a witness to the rape, and that a woman was
taking pictures."
The New York Times, in a
report on January 12, 2005, reported testimony suggesting that the following
events had taken place at Abu Ghraib:
- Urinating on detainees
- Jumping on detainee's leg (a
limb already wounded by gunfire) with such force that it could not
thereafter heal properly
- Continuing by pounding
detainee's wounded leg with collapsible metal baton
Sergeant Samuel
Provance from Alpha Company 302nd Military Intelligence battalion, in
interviews with several news agencies, reported the sexual abuse of a
16-year-old girl by two interrogators, as well as a 16-year-old son of an Iraqi
general who was driven through the cold after he had been showered and who was
then besmeared with mud in order to get his father to talk. He also pointed out
several techniques used by interrogators that have been identified as being in
violation of the Geneva Convention. He spoke to the media, even against direct
orders, about what he knew about at the prison (largely from conversations and
interactions with the interrogators). He explained that he did so because there
was "definitely a cover-up" underway by the Army. He was administratively
flagged and had his top secret clearance suspended in retaliation by the Army.
In her video diary,
a prison guard said that prisoners were shot for minor misbehavior, and claimed
to have had venomous snakes bite prisoners, sometimes resulting in their
deaths. By her own admission, that guard was "in trouble" for having
thrown rocks at the detainees.
Hashem Muhsen, one
of the naked men in the human pyramid photo, said they were also made to crawl
around the floor naked and that U.S.
soldiers rode them like donkeys. After being released in January 2004, Muhsen
became an Iraqi police officer.
It was discovered
that one prisoner, Manebl al-Jamadi, died as a result of abuse, a death that
was ruled a homicide by the military. One detainee has also made charges of
rape under supervision of the soldiers.
·
January 2003 – The Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance is created in the Pentagon to direct post-war
administration of Iraq. The office is later named the Coalition
Provisional Authority.
·
January 2003 – According to Bob Woodward’s book,
Plan of Attack, President Bush says to Condoleezza Rice, at his ranch in
Crawford, Texas:
“We’re not winning. Time is not on our
side here. Probably going to have to,
we’re going to have to go to war.” Rice
denies that this means the decision to go to war was already made.
·
January 2003 – According to Bob Woodward’s book,
Plan of Attack, President Bush tells Secretary of State Colin Powell:
“The inspections are not getting us thee … I really think I’m going to have to
do this.” Powell responds, “You’re
sure You understand the
consequences? You know that you’re going
to be owning this place?” Bush ask
Powell, “Are you with me on this? I
think I have to do this. I want you with
me.” Powell then says: “I’ll do the best
I can. Yes, sir, I will support
you. I’m with you, Mr. President.” Woodward also says Bush never asked Powell
for his advice on Iraq.
·
January 27, 2003 -- United Nations Monitoring,
Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) Chief Weapons Inspector Hands
Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA ) Chief Weapons Inspector
Mohamed ElBaradei present their reports to the UN Security Council. Whereas there is enough evidence in the Blix
report to suggest Saddam Hussein is still not fully cooperating with weapons
inspectors, the ElBaradei report finds no evidence of prohibited nuclear
weapons activity. Neither Blix not
ElBaradei supports war on Iraq. In fact, Blix asks the United States
why, if it knows where WMDs are located, it does not share the information with
the weapons inspectors so that they can locate and destroy them. On February 14, 2003, the two men update the
UN Security Council on the progress of weapons inspections in Iraq, and they
conclude there is no evidence to substantiate claims that Iraq poses a threat
to the US or Europe. The men believe
that inspections are working.
·
February 2003 – The Bush administration
completes a 100-page blueprint for post-Saddam Iraq.
·
In February 2003, US Undersecretary of State
John Bolton says to Israeli officials that he has no doubt the US will attack
Iraq and that later it will be necessary to take on Syria, Iran, and North
Korea too.
·
February 5, 2003 – Colin Powell testifies to the
United Nations that Saddam Hussein possesses WMDs that are a threat to the US and our
allies. His testimony focuses on
supposed recorded conversations of Iraqi Republican Guard, satellite images of
“active chemical munitions bunkers,” the fact that scientists had been banned
from interviews with UN inspectors, the presence of mobile biological weapons
labs, unaccounted for nerve gas, continuing nuclear efforts, aluminum tubes
supposedly to enrich uranium, hidden desert weapons, anthrax, unmanned aircraft
that could be used to spray chemical or biological agents, and links to
terrorism. Much of the speech has been
ridiculed and even disproven since.
Powell himself has acknowledged that the information on the supposed
mobile weapons labs was “not solid.” He
also calls his speech a “blot” on his record that was painful then and that
remains painful now. Powell’s speech is
on-line (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030205-1.html).
·
Further, Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s Chief of
Staff from 2002 to 2005, now says his involvement in the former secretary
of state's presentation to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
was "the lowest point" in his life.
Wilkerson
was one of several insiders interviewed for the CNN Presents documentary
"Dead Wrong -- Inside an Intelligence Meltdown" that pieced together
the events leading up to the mistaken WMD intelligence that was presented to
the public. A presidential commission
that investigated the pre-war WMD intelligence found much of it to be
"dead wrong." The report,
released in March 2005, is online (http://www.wmd.gov/report/).
·
Further, Charles J. Hanley, a special correspondent for the
Associated Press and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2000, also wrote in October
2003 a critique of claims made by Secretary of State Colin Powell. It refutes Powell’s claims one by one,
showing them to be inaccurate and/or highly questionable. Details of the critique are on-line (http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1971092).
·
February 18, 2003 – White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer says: “Iraq,
unlike Afghanistan,
is a rather wealth country. Iraq has
tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be
able to should much of the burden for [its] own reconstruction.”
·
March-September 2003 -- Bush claims Hussein is
linked with al-Qaeda type organizations and al-Qaeda types and says you cannot
distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam … “There’s no question that Saddam
Hussein had al-Qaeda ties.” Cheney says:
“There’s overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the
Iraqi government. I am very confident
that there was an established relationship” … there are “long established ties
with al-Qaeda”. Yet, in September 2005,
Colin Powell said “I have never seen a connection. I can’t think otherwise, because I’ve never
seen any evidence to suggest there was one.”
·
In early
2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz reached two conclusions: 1) That the US would be greeted as liberators;
and 2) The Iraqis would turn on the oil to pay for the occupation and
rebuilding of their country. Both of these were based on false
intelligence validated by Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans. Graham
calls this “incestuous amplification” where they reached a conclusion first and
then the conclusion was endorsed and amplified with faulty intelligence.
·
March 20, 2003 – the US
invades Iraq, and takes Baghdad just three weeks
later (April 9). Yet, almost three years
later and a rebellion (or insurgency) flairs daily. Far more US military personnel have been
killed since the war “ended” that prior to “Mission Accomplished” (see figure
here: http://www.ac.wwu.edu/%7Estephan/USfatalities.html).
·
The war only started after President Bush issued
warnings to Saddam Hussein (to leave Iraq within 48 hours) and after
violations of UN Security Council resolutions.
·
In
March 2003, the Defense Department is told by US Energy Information
Administrator Guy Caruso that Iraq's
fields are incapable of a massive increase in output. According to Greg Palast Deputy Secretary of
Defense Wolfowitz still testifies to Congress that invasion will be a free
ride. He says: "There's a lot of
money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money. …We're dealing
with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively
soon.”
·
March 27, 2003 – Paul Wolfowitz reports to the
House of representatives Appropriations Committee that Iraq’s oil wealth will
held pay for post-war reconstruction: “There’s a lot of money to pay for this
that doesn’t have to be US taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the
Iraqi people … ON a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could
bring between $50 billion and $100 billion over the course of the next two or
three years.”
·
March 27, 2003 – Deputy Secretary of State
Richard Armitage then testifies: “This is not Afghanistan
… When we approach the question of Iraq, we realize here is a country
which has a resource. And it’s obvious,
it’s oil. And it can bring in and does
bring in a certain amount of revenue each year … $10, $15, even $18 billion …
this is not a broke country.”
·
March 27, 2003 – Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld says to the Senate: “When it comes to reconstruction, before we turn
to the American taxpayer, we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi
government and the international community.”
·
The first codename for the Iraq war was
Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) but was changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
·
Once the
mission was accomplished, the occupation of Iraq began. According to Richard Clarke, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld ignored military advice regarding the occupation,
ignoring Army Chief of Staff Eric Shineski who claimed we needed at least
200,000 troops to secure Iraq and then forcing him to retire after he went
public ... Further, Paul Wolfowtiz
testified to Congress that he could not imagine it would take as many troops to
occupy Iraq as it did to conquer it ... Four-star General Anthony Zinni,
formerly responsible for all troops in the Middle East, charged the Pentagon
leadership with dereliction of duty. American troops have insufficient
body armor, HUMVEES, and not even enough troops. We also dismissed all of Saddam Hussein’s former military from duty, as
well as mid-level and high-level Baathist government officials, thereby making Iraq a less
secure country. Further, National Guard and reserve units are
being overused overseas, leaving the US less protected and families
broken up.
·
Clarke
goes as far to say that US
occupation of Iraq
is exactly what al Qaeda wants ... Clarke claims: “The ingredients al Qaeda
dreamed of for propagating its movement were a Christian government attacking a
weaker Muslim region, allowing the new terrorist group to rally jihadists from
many countries to come to the air of the religious brethren” (p. 136).
·
April 2003 -- Former CIA Director James Woolsey
says the US is engaged in
WW-IV (WW-III was the cold war) and lays out grand strategy to take on Iran, Iraq,
Syria,
and extremists like al-Qaeda. He also
says he wants the leaders of Saudi Arabia
and Egypt
nervous. … the July 2002 presentation to
the Defense Policy Board says “Grand strategy for the Middle East: Iraq
is the tactical pivot. Saudi Arabia
the strategic pivot. Egypt the prize.”
·
May 2003 -- General Jay Garner, who had been appointed by President Bush as viceroy
over Iraq,
is fired by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
According to an interview with the BCC, Garner said he was fired because
he resisted White House plans to sell off Iraq's oil and national assets. "That's just one fight you don't want to
take on," Garner told reporter Greg Palast. Garner also disclosed that the Bush plan to invade
Iraq and take its oil were
developed the US
asserted that Saddam was a threat due to WMDs: "All I can tell you is the
plans were pretty elaborate; they didn't start them in 2002, they were started
in 2001."
·
May 2003 – In a Vanity Fair article, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
said: “For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction,
because it was the one reason everyone could agree on” as justification for the
Iraq war. He also said another reason
for the war was to eliminate the need to have troops stationed in Saudi Arabia.
·
June 2003 – The Office of Special Plans reverts
to its previous name, the Northern Gulf Affairs Office.
·
September 17, 2003 -- Donald Rumsfeld says he
sees no Iraq-9/11 link. Bush also admits
this on March 20, 2003. Yet, Dick
Cheney, on September 14, 2003, says: “I think it’s not surprising that people
make the connection” between Iraq and 9/11 … “If we’re successful in Iraq …
then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you
will, the geographic base of the terrorist who had us under assault now for
many years, but most especially on 9/11.”
·
September 20, 2003 – the White House launches a
web site titled “Tales of Saddam’s Brutality” which outlines the numerous
crimes and atrocities committed by the Iraqi leader. Critics speculate the website was created to
divert attention away from the Abu Ghraib scandal and the fact that no WMDs
have been found in Iraq. The page is on-line (http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/tales.html).
·
October 2003 – The David Kay report on WMDs
(Iraq Survey Group) is released. It says
that it has not yet found WMDs in Iraq
and speculates that they may have been moved to Syria. Kay said: “We were almost all wrong – and I
certainly include myself here.” Kay also
said: “I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been
sufficiently intense that is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles
of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons there.”
·
November 2003 -- The oil industry objects to the State Department plans for Iraq's oil
fields. So it writes a 323-page plan,
"Options for [the] Iraqi Oil Industry." Greg Palast says that Iraq is “forced
to create an OPEC-friendly state oil company that supports the OPEC cartel's
extortionate price for petroleum.” That
the oil industry appears to have defeated the neoconservatives when it comes to
this one issue might explain why Paul Wolfowitz went to the World Bank???
·
January 2004 – Former US Secretary of Treasury
Paul O-Neill says in interviews with the media: "From the very beginning,
there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein is a bad person and that he needed
to go." … "From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was
about what we can do to change this regime." O’Neill also says: "In the 23 months I
was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of
weapons of mass destruction. There were
allegations and assertions by people … But I’ve been around a hell of a long
time, and I know the difference between evidence and assertions and illusions
or allusions and conclusions that one could draw from a set of
assumptions. To me there is a difference
between real evidence and everything else.
And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize
as real evidence."
·
January 2004 – Under guidance of the James Baker
Institute in Texas, a new plan to create a
state-owned oil company in Iraq
is created. Former US Secretary of
State James Baker, now an attorney, represents ExxonMobil and the Saudi
government.
·
May 2004 -- Retired Marine General Joseph Hoar, a former commander of US forces in
the Middle East, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May 2004: “I
believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure ... We are looking into the
abyss.” Larry Diamond, a former advisor to the US occupation authority in
Iraq said: “If the current situation persists, we will continue fighting one
form of Iraqi insurgency after another – with too little legitimacy, to little
will and too few resources ... There is only one word for a situation in which
you cannot win and you cannot withdrawal: Quagmire.” [also consider Bush’s
own admission during an interview on the campaign trail that the war on
terrorism is not really something you can win ... and Rumsfeld’s acknowledgment
that our military was not going to defeat the insurgency in Iraq, that Iraq was
going to have to do that politically ... and that the insurgency could go on
for up to 12 years!].
·
In its
July 2004 report on Iraq,
the Senate Intelligence Committee found that there was no Iraq and
al-Qaeda link. Yet, President Bush implied links between Iraq and
al-Qaeda time and time again, and in many different ways.
·
January 11, 2004 – Bush Secretary of Treasury
Paul O’Neill appears on 60 Minutes
and charges the Bush Administration began planning for a war on Iraq within
days of Bush’s inauguration. His claims
are based on 19,000 government documents, including transcripts of high-level
National Security Council meetings.
·
July 2004 – Former CIA intelligence officers
stated publicly that the White House ignored a CIA assessment warning of major
chaos in Iraq
after the removal of Saddam Hussein, that the White House paid little or
no attention to the prewar CIA assessment.
The review was led by Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central
intelligence, and was disputed by White House spokesman Frederick Jones, who
told the daily: "we did plan adequately for the postwar period."
·
The July 2004 National Intelligence Council
(NIC) assessment of post-war Iraq,
laid out three likely possibilities with the insurgency in Iraq. In the best-case scenario, Iraq could be
expected to achieve a "tenuous stability" over the next 18
months. In the worst case, it could
dissolve into civil war.
·
According to the Washington Post, the July assessment was similar to one produced
before the war and another in late 2003 that also were more pessimistic in tone
than the administration's portrayal of the resistance to the U.S.
occupation. One official involved in
evaluating the July document said the NIC, which advises the director of
central intelligence, decided not to include a more rosy scenario "because
it looked so unreal." White House
spokesman Scott McClellan called the intelligence assessment the work of
"pessimists and naysayers" and President Bush called the assessment a
guess. "The CIA laid out several
scenarios," Bush said. "It
said that life could by lousy. Life could be okay. Life could be better. And
they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like."
·
More recently (October 2005), Lawrence
Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005,
said: “There was simply no plan, other than humanitarian assistance and a few other things like protection of oil
and so forth, with regard to post-war Iraq.
There was no plan.” Wilkerson
also wrote: “In President Bush’s first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital
decisions about postwar Iraq
— were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small
group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld.” In describing how vital
information was handled in the Bush White House, Wilkerson said: “”The case
that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies
of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national
security-decision process … What I saw was a cabal between the Vice President
of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald
Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not
know were being made.” Dictionary.com
defines a cabal as “A conspiratorial group of plotters or
intriguers.”
·
Senator
Bob Graham also asserts that President Bush failed to prepare for the war on Iraq and its
consequences. Graham says Bush failed to
prepare us to judge whether Saddam Hussein or international terrorists pose a
greater threat “by refusing to release the information he had in his possession
as to the relative number of international terrorists and Iraqi operatives
present in the United States”
(p. 231). Graham asked Richard Clarke and Bob Woodward (who wrote two
books on President Bush) whether President Bush compared the threats of
al-Qaeda and Iraq
and both said no. The decision started and ended with how evil Saddam
Hussein was. According to Graham, al-Qaeda poses a greater evil: It is
more capable, willing, and present to hurt us. Graham says there are
hundreds of al Qaeda here. Graham alleges that there are between fifteen
and twenty thousand al-Qaeda recruits who went through training camps in Afghanistan in
the 1990s.
·
September 2004 -- UN Secretary-General Kofi
Annan says: “From our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, [the war
on Iraq]
was illegal.”
·
September 30, 2004 – the Charles Duelfer report (Comprehensive Report of the
Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s
WMD) is released. When Duelfer testifies
to Congress, on October 6, 2004, he says the group found no evidence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had produced any WMDs
since 1991 and that Iraq
was incapable of doing so under UN sanctions.
Yet, it did say Saddam Hussein wanted to restart his weapons programs
once the inspections were over, but that he did not have a plan in place to do
so. The report is on-line (http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/).
·
October 2004, a report by the International
Institute for Strategic Studies suggests that the Iraqi war will mean more
terrorism against Westerners in Arab countries, not less.
·
January 12, 2005 – US
military officially abandons its search for WMDs in Iraq.
·
March 2005, Donald Rumsfeld says that the US military
will not defeat the Iraqi insurgency / rebellion, but rather it has to be
defeated politically by the Iraqis.
·
May 1, 2005 – The London Sunday
Times publishes the secret “Downing Street Memo,” which contains the
minutes from a July 23, 2002. According
to the Center for Cooperative Research, the meeting indicates that several of Britain's top officials
believed the Bush administration had already decided to go to war with Iraq by
the summer of 2002 and that the head of the British intelligence service
believed at the time that US intelligence was being “fixed” around Washington's
plan to topple the Iraqi government. The
minutes are from “the official classified record of a meeting attended by the
security cabinet of America's
closest ally.”
The
Downing Street Memo is marked: "This record is extremely sensitive. No
further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine
need to know its contents." The
most controversial paragraph is a report of a recent visit to Washington by head of the Secret Intelligence Service Sir Richard
Dearlove (known in official terminology as 'C'):
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a
perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush
wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction
of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for
publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion
in Washington
of the aftermath after military action.
·
Other parts of the document
read: The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes
of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken,
but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin
was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US
Congressional elections.
The Foreign Secretary
said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that
Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not
yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours,
and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya,
North Korea or Iran. We should
work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons
inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of
force.
The Attorney-General
said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military
action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian
intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base
in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The
situation might of course change.
·
The Downing Street Memo can be read online (http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/)
·
As of this writing, the US war on Iraq
has killed between 27,000 and 31,000 civilians, and a total of 100,000 total
people in Iraq. Further, according to US military study, “Measuring Stability and
Security in Iraq,”
insurgents have killed or injured 26,000 people between January 1, 2004 and
September 16, 2005. More than 2,000 US
service personnel have been killed and more than 15,000 injured.
·
June 2005 – Donald
Rumsfeld says “Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, ten, twelve
years.” This is in response to the
question of how long the Iraqi insurgency might last.
·
June 2005 – Vice President Dick Cheney says:
“"The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I
think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will,
of the insurgency."
·
August 2005 -- British Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw says the US and
British presence in Iraq
is fueling the insurgency/rebellion.
·
September 2005 -- Top U.S. generals admitted in
testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee that only a single Iraqi
battalion (out of 119) was prepared to operate on its own without U.S. military
support. This was a decrease from the three battalions that U.S. generals
had assured Congress in previous testimony were ready to operate independently. They also said that the war in Iraq
is going worse than ever. After two and a half years of U.S. efforts,
only 750 men out of 200,000 can be relied upon to operate and obey orders
independently in combat situations. This
directly contradicts comments made by the same US generals, and President Bush, to
reporters and to American citizens, about the war effort and the ability of
Iraqis to defense their own country.
·
September 2005 -- retired Lt. General William Odom, the ex-head of the National Security
Agency (NSA) expressed support for bi-partisan legislation to withdraw from Iraq. He also called the invasion of Iraq "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history … We need a broad
coalition of Europeans and our allies in Asia
to put things in order.... We cannot do that as long as we are in Iraq. The precondition
for a serious and effective strategic engagement to stabilize this region
requires withdrawal and admittance to others that we may have made an
error." In an October 3 article he
wrote: "If I were a journalist, I would list all the arguments that you
hear against pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, the horrible things that people
say would happen, and then ask: Aren't they happening already? Would a pullout
really make things worse? Maybe it would make things better." For example: Leaving would "risk civil
war," and would "encourage terrorists." But, Odom says, there already is a civil war. "Iraqis are
already fighting Iraqis. Insurgents have killed far more Iraqis than Americans.
That's civil war. We created the civil war when we invaded; we can't prevent a
civil war by staying. "For those
who really worry about destabilizing the region," he writes, "the
sensible policy is not to stay the course in Iraq. It is rapid withdrawal,
reestablishing strong relations with our allies in Europe, showing confidence
in the UN Security Council, and trying to knit together a large coalition
including the major states of Europe, Japan,
South Korea, China, and India
to back a strategy for stabilizing the area from the eastern Mediterranean to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Until the United States withdraws from Iraq and admits its strategic
error, no such coalition can be formed … Those who fear leaving a mess are
actually helping make things worse..."
·
October 2005 – Former National Security Advisor
Brent Scowcroft, who served and was a close friend to President George H.W.
Bush (the first), criticized the foreign policy of President George W. Bush
(the second), saying the only thing he agreed with was the war on Afghanistan. Scowcroft also said that although he had once
considered Vice President Dick Cheney a friend that now he does not know him
anymore. A top State Department
official, former Ambassador Robin Raphel, also said that the Bush
administration was not prepared when it invaded Iraq, and that it entered the
country anyway because of “clear political pressure, election driven and
calendar driven.” She described
controversial decisions being made due to “neoconservative ideology”: “They
were not based on an analytical, historical understanding. They were based on ideology. You don’t counter ideology with logic or
experience or analysis very effectively.”
Having read all this evidence makes me wonder: Did
President Bush as candidate for office lie about his views of foreign
policy? Candidate Bush spoke in the 2000
debates about never engaging in nation building, about walking softly but
carrying a big stick, about not going around the world and telling countries
that they have to do it our way our else .
Compare these kinds of statements with the people he put into office on
his cabinet. Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and on and on, all pushed for regime
change in Iraq
throughout the 1990s while Bill Clinton was President. Cheney himself said on the campaign trail
that the US
should not act as though “we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into
capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments.” Yet, the evidence suggests they believe we
should do just this.
Dictionary.com defines a lie as: “A false statement
deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood … Something meant to deceive
or give a wrong impression.” The act of
lying is defined as: “To present false information with the intention of
deceiving … To convey a false image or impression.” Given the above information, is there another
explanation?
Before you make up your
mind, consider the following information from the Center for Cooperative
Research. They report:
Presidential
candidate George W. Bush tells prominent Texas
author and Bush family friend Mickey Herskowitz, who is helping Bush write an
autobiography, that as president he would invade Iraq if given the opportunity. “One
of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a
commander-in-chief,” Herskowitz remembers Bush saying. “My father had all this
political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of [Kuwait] and he
wasted it. If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital,
I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed I want to get passed
and I'm going to have a successful presidency.” Herskowitz later says he
believes Bush's comments were intended to distinguish himself from his father,
rather than express a desire to invade Iraq …
AND
Speaking
in Manchester, New
Hampshire, presidential candidate George Bush says as president he
would not lift the sanctions on Iraq
nor attempt to negotiate with Saddam Hussein. “I'd make darn sure that he lived
up to the agreements that he signed back in the early '90s. I'd be helping the
opposition groups. And if I found, in any way shape or form, that he was
developing weapons of mass destruction, I'd take them out. I'm surprised he's
still there. I think a lot of other people are as well.”
This is clearly NOT what Presidential candidate George
Bush said to the American people when he debated candidate Al Gore.