http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4498102.stm

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Saddam lawyers walk out of court

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The defence team in the trial of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has walked out of court, bringing the third day of hearings to an abrupt halt.

The incident happened after the chief judge refused to allow defence lawyers to address the special Iraqi court in Baghdad to question its legitimacy.

Saddam Hussein and seven former aides deny involvement in a 1982 massacre.

The defence argues it cannot present its case properly. Two defence lawyers have been murdered in recent weeks.

Shortly after the hearing began one of the defence lawyers, Khalil al-Dulaimi, questioned the legality of the court.

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"This is a law made by America and does not reflect Iraqi sovereignty." - Saddam Hussein in court

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One of his colleagues, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, asked for two minutes to outline the defence team's complaints.

But chief judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin ruled that the court would consider written complaints at a later time.

"This is the law," he said.

The hearing descended into chaos, with Saddam Hussein saying the law had been created by the Americans.

Co-defendant Barzan al-Tikriti stood up and shouted: "Long live Saddam."

The judge then declared a recess.

Death penalty

The trial is over the murder of 148 men in Dujail, north of Baghdad, following an assassination attempt in 1982.

All defendants deny the charges. They could face the death penalty if found guilty.

Up to 10 witnesses have been lined up to describe the Dujail massacre.

Some are expected to have their identities concealed.

The defence team has long challenged the legitimacy of the process - which is being conducted by an Iraqi court set up under a mixture of Iraqi and international statutes.

Defence lawyers are demanding additional security arrangements after the murder of the two of their colleagues in recent weeks.

Replacement

The UN representative for human rights in Iraq, John Pace, criticised the proceedings on Sunday.

"Weakness in the system of administration of justice, in addition to the antecedents surrounding the establishment of this tribunal, will never be able to produce the kind of process that would be able to satisfy international standards," Mr Pace told Reuters news agency.

Ahead of Monday's session, one of the five judges stepped down citing a potential conflict of interest, as one of the co-defendants may have been involved in killing his brother.

Another judge was due to replace him.

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Story from BBC NEWS

Published: 2005/12/05 09:51:38 GMT

© BBC MMV

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A 'MUST SEE' VIDEO!

InformationClearingHouse.Info: "Who is Saddam Hussein?: While we are feed the sensationalism on every news channel of the Saddam Hussein Trial, it would certainly be honorable to insert some truth and clarity in our coverage" ON-LINE FLASH VIDEO

http://lnk.nu/rawstory.com/6pb.html

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Times acquires Senate Republican Conference memo

RAW STORY

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A story by the New York Times slotted for Monday editions of the paper, which revealed talking points by the Senate Republican Conference, has been put on hold for unknown reasons, a source told RAW STORY late Sunday evening.

The memo urged members of Congress to give speeches and go on television promoting President Bush's speech at Annapolis on November 30 which outlined the strategy for victory in Iraq.

The Times had planned to run the story as late as six o'clock but opted for another story for Monday's edition.

It's unclear whether the story will run on Tuesday or later in the week. Editors at the nation's third-largest newspaper often make decisions late in the evening to weight other stories over others, nixing stories that were set to run.

About the SRC:

The Senate Republican Conference is the formal organization of the 55 Republican Senators. Over the last century, the mission of the Conference has expanded and been shaped as a means of informing the media of the opinions and activities of Senate Republicans. Today the Senate Republican Conference assists Republican Senators by providing a full range of communications services including Graphics, Radio, Television, and Internet.

DEVELOPING...

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"There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn't write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn't any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press." - John F. Kennedy

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Tomgram:
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Nation Institute compiled and edited
by Tom Engelhardt
 
Michael Schwartz, Ten Ways to Argue about the War

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What a couple of weeks in Iraq (and at home): Withdrawal was suddenly on everyone's lips, while tragedy and absurdity were piling up like some vast, serial car wreck of event and emotion. Before a massed audience of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy, our President announced a new war goal beyond finding weapons of mass destruction, bringing freedom to Iraqis, or liberating the whole of the Middle East; something more modest this time -- "complete victory" -- over whomever. In the meantime, ten Marines died in a trap near Fallujah. Remember Fallujah? The city we literally destroyed in order to save it and then didn't quite get around to rebuilding as the Sunni Triangle's first safe haven from insurgency and terrorism? Now, it's a danger zone again and still significantly in rubble. In these same weeks, the use of white phosphorus, a fierce burning agent, back in November 2004 to force rebels in Fallujah out of their defenses suddenly became a global news story and a scandal (though its use was actually known at the time); the Europeans began demanding explanations from the Bush administration for the kidnapping, transport, and secret imprisonment of suspected terrorists on their territory; a torture chamber/detention center run by the Interior Ministry but connected to the militia of the leading Shiite religious party in the Iraqi government was uncovered by American troops; it was evidently part of a long known-about "ghost network" of such centers linked to government and party-sponsored (and possibly U.S. backed or trained) death squads intent on intimidating or cleansing the Sunni neighborhoods of Iraq's cities. Ever more American war planes were reportedly taking to Iraqi skies and more American bombs falling on Iraq's towns and cities. Saddam reappeared in court, his hair dyed black, complaining and carrying a Koran like the good religious man he surely isn't; and it was revealed that, in the process of bringing freedom to Iraqis, a Pentagon-hired "business intelligence" firm had done its darnedest to turn a burgeoning Iraqi free press into a paid-for press. This was done in the struggle to conquer what is known in the trade as Iraq's "information battlespace." Not only that, but the story took us a full, ridiculous spin of the dial back to the earliest moments of our conquest of Iraq. At that time, administration officials arrived in Baghdad so filled with hubris that it didn't occur to them to bring along anyone who knew anything about Iraq, no less actual translators. In the case of our newspaper caper, clearly a psyops-for-dummies operation, some of the paid-for stories were written by American servicemen and then translated into Arabic. These must have been truly convincing accounts! (Imagine the opposite: Iraqi soldiers in camps in the U.S. hired to write articles translated into English to help win the war for American "information battlespace.") And believe me, that's only a bit of the week or two that was.

The President spoke of "progress" in Iraq, but who could possibly believe him at this point? A majority of Americans clearly no longer do, but a minority -- about 36% according to the polls -- seem to be hanging in there, though perhaps with difficulty, like worried Republican Congressman from Georgia, Phil Gingrey. While fretting about re-election, he was nonetheless quoted in the Washington Post, saying, "The light is there at the end of the tunnel. People need to see it." Again, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. In what follows, Michael Schwartz takes the arguments that remain for war supporters and that still can confound antiwar people and answers them one by one.

Tom

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Arguing about the War

The Top Ten Reasons for Staying in (Leaving) Iraq

By Michael Schwartz

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I often receive emails -- pro and con -- about my postings on the war in Iraq, and I try to respond to any substantive questions or critiques offered. But when I received an email recently entitled "10 Questions" in response to a Tomdispatch commentary detailing the arguments for immediate withdrawal, I must admit my heart sank -- the questions were familiar, but the answers were complex and I was in no mood to spend the time needed to respond properly.

After a couple of days, however, I began to warm to the idea of writing short but pointed responses to these common criticisms of antiwar positions because, I realized, they are the bread and butter of daily Iraq discourse in our country. When the war comes up in the media or in casual conversation, these are the issues that are raised by those who think we have to "stay the course" -- and among those who oppose the war, these are the lurking, unspoken questions that haunt our discussions. So here are my best brief answers to these key issues in the crucial, ongoing debate over Iraq.

"I read your article on withdrawal of American troops," my correspondent began, "and questioned the lack of discussion of the following…" (His comments are in bold.)

1. Nothing was mentioned about improvements in Iraq (elections, water and energy, schools). No Saddam to fear! Water and energy delivery as well as schools are worse off than before the U.S. invasion. Ditto for the state of hospitals (and medical supplies), highways, and oil production. Elections are a positive change, but the elected government does not have more than a semblance of actual sovereignty, and therefore the Iraqi people have no power to make real choices about their future. One critical example: The Shiite/Kurdish political coalition now in power ran on a platform whose primary promise was that, if elected, they would set and enforce a timetable for American withdrawal. As soon as they took power, they reneged on this promise (apparently under pressure from the US). They have also proved quite incapable of fulfilling their other campaign promises about restoring services and rebuilding the country; and for that reason (as well as others), their constituents (primarily the Shia) are becoming ever more disillusioned. In the most recent polls, Shia Iraqis now are about 70% in favor of U.S. withdrawal.

2. Nothing was mentioned about Iraqis who want the U.S. to remain (especially the Kurds and the majority of Iraqi women). Among the three principle ethno-religious groups in Iraq, the Sunnis (about a fifth of the population) are almost unanimous in their opposition to the American presence, while around 70% of the Shia (themselves about 60% of the population) want the U.S. to withdraw. Hence, even before we consider the Kurds, the majority of Iraqis are in favor of a full-scale American departure "as soon as possible." It is true that the Kurds (about 20% of the population) favor the U.S. remaining. However, they have their own militias and many of them do not want significant numbers of American troops in their territory. (The U.S. presence there is small-scale at the moment.) What they desire is a U.S. occupation for someone else, not themselves. I think we can safely say that the vast majority of Iraqis oppose the presence of U.S. troops.

I know of no study indicating that Iraqi women favor the U.S. presence. Perhaps you are referring to the fact that large numbers of women in Iraq are upset and angry over the erosion of their rights since the fall of Saddam. I know some commentators claim that the U.S. presence is insurance against further erosion of those rights, but everything I have read indicates that a significant number of Iraqi women (like all Iraqis) blame the Bush administration for these policies. After all, the Americans installed in power (and continue to support) the political forces spearheading anti-woman policies in the country. Polling data do not indicate that any sizable group of Sunni or Shia women support a continued U.S. presence.

3. Nothing was mentioned about the benefits of the U.S. military gaining valuable experience and knowledge daily. Certainly, the U.S. gains military and political "experience" from the war, as from any war, but at the expense of many deaths (2,127) and injuries (at least 15,704) to American soldiers. Beyond these publicly listed casualty figures lie the endless ways in which the lives of our soldiers are permanently damaged: On November 26, for example, the New York Times reported on a recent army study indicating that 17% of all personnel sent to Iraq have "serious symptoms of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder." Since about a million American troops have now seen service in Iraq, approximately 170,000 have gained the "experience" of having a severe mental problem. Moreover, the war experience in Iraq has proved so demoralizing to the military that many of the best soldiers are leaving at the end of their tours, instead of staying on in active or reserve status. This is undermining the viability of the military, long term.

U.S. casualties, of course, have been dwarfed by the damage done to the Iraqi people. Between 25,000 and 40,000 Iraqi civilians are dying each year -- and multitudes are injured. We are wrecking the country's infrastructure.

Certainly there is a better way to gain experience than this.

4. Nothing was mentioned about the future benefits of a strong democracy in the Middle East. We can all agree that a strong democracy in the Middle East would have huge benefits for Iraq and for its neighbors as well as for the rest of the world. If I thought that our actions there were actually helping to bring this about, perhaps I might also believe that the benefits of an active democracy outweighed at least some of the many problems we have been creating. But from the beginning, the talk of democracy was a hollow mantra, just one of a group of public rationalizations for a war motivated by the Bush administration's desire to dominate Middle Eastern politics and economics. The U.S. government has never actually relinquished sovereignty to the Iraqi government.

5. Nothing was mentioned about the future benefits of oil reserves. Though the Bush Administration denies it, many observers agree with you that access to Iraqi oil was a major motivation for the war. But we need to understand the nature of this motivation. Even before the invasion, when UN sanctions were still in place against Saddam Hussein's regime, American oil companies could (and, in many cases, did) buy Iraqi oil at market price. The issue was never "access" to Iraqi oil in the sense of simply being able to buy it. The Bush administration was thinking about other kinds of energy access, including controlling the heartland of the word's main future oil supplies and giving American oil companies privileged access to Iraqi oil reserves. (See, for example, the recent report by the Global Policy Forum). It's my contention that such privileged "access" for U.S. oil companies would not actually help the American people. The oil majors, after all, have a long history of exploiting Americans hardly less ruthlessly than they exploit the peoples of other countries, when they can make a larger profit by doing so. (The latest incident in their long and deplorable record involved the massive price increases they instituted at American pumps almost immediately after hurricane Katrina hit.) Moreover, such privileged access would have deprived the Iraqis of their right to use the oil to their own benefit -- something they desperately need now that the Saddam Hussein regime, twelve years of brutal sanctions, and the current war have gutted the country.

The best approach for us (but not necessarily for the American oil companies) would be to buy our oil on the open market, put our research money into conservation and renewable fuels instead of military adventures, and avoid trying to get "control" of something that doesn't belong to us.

6. Nothing was mentioned about what fundamentalist Muslims would like to achieve. I assume that, when you refer to "fundamentalist Muslims," you are referring to terrorists, including those in Iraq and those who attacked the World Trade Center, the London tube, and the Madrid trains. First, I have to disagree with this identification of the terrorists (who are indeed fundamentalist) with all fundamentalist Muslims. That would be the same as characterizing those who bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building as "fundamentalist Christians" and then implying that the destruction of such buildings is what all fundamentalist Christians yearn to achieve.

Second, I disagree with the implicit argument that somehow withdrawal will allow the terrorists to dominate Iraqi society and impose a horrible regime on an Iraq, bent on attacking its neighbors and the United States. A large part of my commentary in favor of withdrawal was devoted to debunking this prevalent idea. I think I made a reasonably good case for the possibility that Bush administration actions in Iraq are creating and strengthening the terrorist groups within the Iraqi resistance. The longer the U.S. stays, the more the Islamic terrorists there are likely to gain strength; the sooner the U.S. leaves, the more quickly the resistance will subside, and -- with it -- support for terrorism. The administration's Iraqi occupation policies are the equivalent of a nightmarish self-fulfilling prophesy.

7. Nothing was mentioned about the results of the U.S. evacuation from Southeast Asia (over a million killed within 5 years). I think we need to disentangle two different events involving the (forced) American departure from Southeast Asia. First, there was Vietnam, where it was always predicted that a horrendous bloodbath would follow any American withdrawal. Indeed, there were certainly deaths there after the U.S. left, and many refugees fled the country, some for the United States. But whatever these figures may have been, they were dwarfed by the incredible bloodbath that the U.S. created by being in Vietnam in the first place. Reputable sources suggest that millions of Vietnamese died (and countless others were permanently wounded) during the war years. We must conclude, therefore, that in Vietnam our departure actually resulted in a drastic decline in the levels of violence, and -- sometime afterward -- an end to the havoc and destruction; not to speak of the fact that, for years now, the United States has had plenty of "credibility" in Vietnam.

Second, there was the holocaust in Cambodia, which may well have resulted in a million or more deaths. This was also, however, a complex consequence of the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia, not a result of our departure. Cambodia had a stable, neutral government until the Nixon administration launched massive secret bombings against its territory, invaded the country, destabilized the regime, and set in motion the grim unraveling that led to the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge. If the U.S. had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1965 or 1968, that holocaust would quite certainly never have happened.

The situation in Iraq is not that dissimilar. If the U.S. withdraws soon, there is at least a reasonable chance that the violence will subside quickly and that peace and stability in the region might ever so slowly take hold. The longer the U.S. stays -- further destroying the Iraqi infrastructure and destabilizing neighboring regimes (like Syria and Iran) -- the more likely it is that horrific civil wars and other forms of brutality will indeed occur.

8. Nothing was mentioned about the reputation of the U.S. if it retreats. Don't forget the quotes about Somalia from Osama Bin Laden. "Cut and Run." Here we agree. If the U.S. withdraws, this "retreat" will undermine U.S. credibility whenever, in the future, an administration threatens to use military power to force another country to submit to its demands (and may also, as after Vietnam, make Americans far more wary about sending troops abroad to fight presidential wars of choice). I think there are two important implications that derive from this observation.

The first is that this has, in fact, already happened. The most crystalline case making this point is that of Iran, whose leaders were much more compliant to U.S. demands before the Iraq invasion than now that they have seen how the Iraqi resistance has frustrated our military. In fact, the invasion of Iraq has probably done more to strengthen the oppressive Iranian regime, domestically and in the Middle East, than any set of events in the past quarter-century. (See my recent article on this at Tomdispatch.) In other words -- from your point of view -- the longer the Bush administration stays and flounders, the more it undermines its ability to use the threat of military intervention to force other countries to conform to its demands.

From my point of view -- and this is the second implication I want to point out -- the undermining of U.S. credibility is one of the few good things that has resulted from the war in Iraq. I do not believe that anything positive is likely to come from American military adventures; quite the contrary, the Bush administration (and the Clinton, earlier Bush, and Reagan administrations) have used military power to impose bad policies on other countries. We would be much better off, I believe, with the multi-polar world that many Americans advocate (and this administration loathes the very thought of), in which no single state (including the U.S.) could impose itself on others without at least the support of a great many others. We would be far better off in a multitude of ways if our country stopped spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined and started spending some of that money on things that would actually improve the welfare of our people.

9. Nothing was mentioned about Germany, Japan, Korea, and the former Yugoslavia. Should we get out of those? Where was the pre-war planning to get out of all those locations. Did Lincoln have a pre-war plan to leave the South? I agree that some wars, some interventions, and some occupations can be positive things (without evaluating the particulars of the examples you offer). That does not mean that all, or even most, of them are good. The invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq is neither justified, nor moral.

10. Nothing was mentioned about 9/11, where we were attacked by fundamentalist Muslims. How do we change their attitudes? This query rests on two premises: The first belongs to the Bush administration and was part of the package of lies and intelligence manipulations that it used to hustle Congress and the American people into war -- the claim that Saddam Hussein's regime and the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 had anything in common or any ties whatsoever. They didn't and the truth is that 9/11, important as it was, really should have nothing to do with Iraq and no place in any discussion of the war there -- or at least that was certainly true until George Bush and his advisors managed almost single-handedly to recreate Iraq as the "central theater in the war on terror."

The second premise is one held by many Americans -- that the only way to change the attitudes of those who are fighting the U.S. involves "whipping their ass," which rests on another commonly held opinion -- that "these people only understand force." Attitudes are never changed in this way. Every serious scholar who studies terrorism agrees on this essential point: Terrorism arises from the misery that many people are forced to live in or in close proximity to. It is misguided and criminal, but it nevertheless derives from complaints people have about their daily lives, about the humiliations they experience in the larger social and political worlds they inhabit, and about the apparent impossibility of changing these circumstances.

The best way to transform such attitudes, built as they are on hopelessness, would be to take a fraction (a fraction!!) of the money we are now spending on the war in Iraq and on our military and invest it in the lives of others. One example: a panel of expert development economists just delivered a report to the UN saying that for $50 billion annually we could bring the income of the poorest people in the world up to a level that would largely eradicate the famines and mass starvation currently spreading from one continent to another. That project, if enacted, would do more to reduce terrorism than all the "anti-terrorist" activities of our government, including the entire official defense budget (about $400 billion a year), the $200 billion for the war in Iraq, and the $80 or so billion for the Department of Homeland Security. Put another way, if the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, it could fund an entire program to alleviate global suffering with but a modest portion of the money it saved, and start to reduce terrorism instead of increasing it.

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Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the internet at numerous internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times ,MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo).

Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz

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"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." - Albert Einstein

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8209

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December 5, 2005

'Urban Myth' – or Treason?

The Niger uranium forgery cover-up unravels

by Justin Raimondo
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The War Party certainly has its party line down pat. In response to allegations that he had deliberately misinformed the Americans about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" and alleged links to al-Qaeda, Ahmed Chalabi recently declared:

"The fact that I misled the U.S. is an urban myth."

The same phrase popped up when an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney denied that his boss was the recipient of bogus "intelligence" in the run-up to war, or is in any way beholden to the neocons:

"'That's an urban myth,' said this aide, who declined to be identified."

This is a longtime favorite theme song sung by government officials who would rather not even discuss an inconvenient issue, and it often works, but not so well these days. The stench of fraud – and worse – is rising over Washington so that the whole city seems permeated by a permanent miasma, a poisonous cloud so thick that denials seem to stick in the throat even before they are uttered. A majority of Americans believe this administration lied them into war, and the parents of our fallen soldiers remember that as they mourn. What must they be thinking? The voters, too, will remember – and our newly awakened mainstream media is unlikely to let them forget.

Amid all the lies – the nuclear centrifuges that didn't exist, the links to 9/11 that were strongly implied but never proven and later denied – one in particular stands out: the by now famous "16 words" that crept into the president's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he stated that Saddam was trying to procure uranium from "an African nation" as a preliminary step toward creating a nuclear weapon.

This falsehood leaps out at one in its brazenness, to begin with, because it was based on a cache of forged documents: not mistaken intelligence, but a deliberate attempt to deceive. Secondly, these documents fell into the hands of the U.S. government under highly suspicious circumstances and arrived in Washington – and found their way into the president's crucially important speech – via a circuitous and highly suspect route.

Furthermore, distinguishing itself from the many tall tales spun by Chalabi, and dressed up to look half credible by the neocons, this particular one takes on special importance because it stands at the center of a scandal that already threatens the War Party at its very core: the burgeoning investigation by special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald into top officials in this administration, including but not limited to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

It was former ambassador to Gabon Joseph C. Wilson, after all, who was sent to the African nation of Niger to investigate what turned out to be bogus reports of an attempt by Saddam to ship uranium from that country: and it was his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, who was exposed by a White House cabal acting under the direction of Libby and possibly others. As the special counsel looks into the matter and prepares what many anticipate as fresh indictments, the question of who outed Plame has taken center stage. However, the real underlying crime here is something much bigger and much more dramatically illustrative of how government officials doctored intelligence in order to make the case for war.

Who forged the Niger uranium documents? This is the most intriguing mystery surrounding the murky "intelligence" that lured us into the quicksands of Iraq. It continues to fascinate for the simple reason that here is the smoking gun, the plainly conclusive evidence that it wasn't all just a great big mistake, another unfortunate "massive intelligence failure" like the one that made 9/11 possible, but was instead part of a covert campaign of deception that succeeded magnificently – which is precisely why its authors are so reluctant to take "credit" for it.

When the scientists over at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced the whole thing was a hoax, and that the documents finally handed over to them were crude forgeries, the FBI went through the motions of launching an investigation. That inquiry, apparently, never got off the ground – because, as Joshua Marshall long ago pointed out, they never attempted to interview a key figure in the case. In any event, just about a week or so ago the FBI announced that their nonexistent investigation had reached its conclusion: the forgeries, they said, had been a financial scam pulled off by the man they had never bothered to interview: one Rocco Martino, an international flimflam man, in league with the mysterious "La Signora," a Mata Hari type who had access to Rome's Niger embassy like you or I might have access to our own boudoir.

Case closed. Move along, nothing to see here…

It wasn't long, however, before the case was mysteriously reopened, and – as far as I'm concerned – with quite a flourish. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

"The FBI has reopened an inquiry into one of the most intriguing aspects of the pre-Iraq war intelligence fiasco: how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion. …

"The FBI's decision to reopen the investigation reverses the agency's announcement last month that it had finished a two-year inquiry and concluded that the forgeries were part of a moneymaking scheme – and not an effort to manipulate U.S. foreign policy.

"Those findings concerned some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee after published reports that the FBI had not interviewed a former Italian spy named Rocco Martino, who was identified as the original source of the documents. The committee had requested the initial investigation."

The Times piece goes on to cite Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), and the concerns of others on the Senate committee, as if this is what motivated the reopening of the investigation, but that may not be the case, as indicated further on in the piece:

"Federal officials familiar with the case say investigators might examine whether the forgeries were instigated by U.S. citizens who advocated an invasion of Iraq or by members of the Iraqi National Congress – the group led by Ahmed Chalabi that worked closely with Bush administration officials in the buildup to the war.

"But the senior federal official said, 'I don't expect the results to be any different. I think the answer is going to be that [Martino] wasn't acting in behalf of any government or intelligence agency. This guy was trying to peddle this to whoever he could.' …

"A senior FBI official said the bureau's initial investigation found no evidence of foreign government involvement in the forgeries. But the FBI did not interview Martino, a central figure in a parallel drama unfolding in Rome."

This startling information – that American citizens, working in tandem with an unnamed foreign power, who wanted war and were willing to pass off forgeries as authentic intelligence to achieve their ends, may have been behind the Niger uranium scam – is fed to the reader with a big dollop of official denials, but let's focus on the facts, not the spin, and ask: what new evidence points in the direction of a U.S.-based cabal of forgers?

First they tried to explain it away as the prank of a few Italian fraudsters, in it for the money, and now perhaps they want to blame Chalabi and the Iraqis – who are conveniently beyond the reach of the law. It won't be long now before they're dismissing the whole matter as yet another "urban myth." I would note, however, that the FBI doesn't just reopen an investigation on Sen. Rockefeller's say-so: they must have some fresh leads, some new information that implicates these unnamed "U.S. citizens" as being somehow involved in the scheme.

I would also note that, for the first time, this affair – which has always smelled to me like a covert action carried out by professionals – is being framed as an investigation into an attempt to skew U.S. intelligence-gathering by agents of a foreign power. We are talking, here, about espionage.

Why reopen the investigation now, when they just closed it a short time ago? What new evidence do the Feds have – and what (or who) is their source?

We probably won't know the answers to the first two questions for at least a while, but we can credibly speculate about the third. There are, to be sure, several possible sources of fresh leads in the Niger uranium forgery case, but two of the most obvious are the Plame investigation and the lesser-known but just as important upcoming trial of Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, two high officials of AIPAC facing charges of spying for Israel. Their co-conspirator, the Pentagon's former top Iran expert, a man by the name of Larry Franklin, has already pleaded guilty to charges of handing Rosen and Weissman highly secret information: the AIPAC duo are charged [.pdf] with handing those vital U.S. secrets over to Israeli embassy officials.

The Plame investigation is the more high profile, albeit less likely, possible source, if only because Fitzgerald's investigation is part and parcel of the Niger uranium saga. Even if the scope of Fitzgerald's probe is limited to what actions were taken against Plame-Wilson, it would hardly be surprising if, in the course of his investigation, Fitzgerald came upon evidence of other crimes – especially the central, underlying crime at the center of Niger-gate.

The AIPAC case, however, seems the more likely source, in part because its central figure – Larry Franklin – pops up in the Niger uranium narrative at a highly auspicious point in the timeline: according to the Italian daily La Repubblica, he was present at a December 2001 meeting in Rome with the head of Italian military intelligence and two Americans, Michael Ledeen and Harold Rhode, both of whom might be called "instigators" when it comes to the invasion of Iraq – a meeting previously reported in The Washington Monthly.

La Repubblica goes into much more detail, however, describing the origins of the forgery as a composite project that evolved over time, and pointing to the Rome conclave as the point where the various elements came together. Passing through multiple channels (SISMI [Italian military intelligence], Martino, and Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, and then to the American embassy) until their true origins were lost in the mists and murk, the documents were cleaned up and filtered in the form of "intelligence" reports by Ledeen, who acted as the conduit to Washington via the infamous Office of Special Plans – one of those end-running ad hoc agencies set up by the neocons to bypass the normal intelligence vetting process, which has itself lately become the subject of an investigation.

La Repubblica confirms what Antiwar.com has been reporting, in part, specifically the key role played by Ledeen. It also confirms what the blogger known as eRiposte over at The Left Coaster has meticulously documented: that certain U.S. government officials must have known the Niger uranium documents were bogus.

Now we are learning that, not only did they know, but they also continued the process of cleaning up the forgeries so as to make them more credible to the IAEA. The Left Coaster reports that Private Eye, a British magazine, has blown this case wide open in a piece that reveals the complicity of U.S. officials, and gives us the money quote:

"When the US State Department finally gave international weapons inspectors its 'evidence' that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from the African State of Niger in 2003, they held back the one document even their own analysts knew was 'funky' and 'clearly a forgery.' Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency quickly discovered that all the papers were fake, but they did this by spotting errors that had slipped passed the State Department and CIA: The fact that the U.S. government handed over the whole bundle of what became known as the 'Niger Forgeries' except the one paper they recognized as a hoax suggests they were trying to pass off documents they knew were phony as the real thing."

This story is breaking fast: La Repubblica has come out with yet another story on this, one that points in the same direction: the journalistic team of Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo shows that the latest tack of the forgers and their enablers, which is to blame it all on the French – even going so far as to accuse Martino (the designated fall guy) of being in the pay of Paris – is nothing but a serio-comic diversion, another attempt to blow smoke in the faces of their pursuers, who are by now numerous and increasingly insistent. What the War Party needs to worry about at this point is that some of their nemeses may possess subpoena power.

La Repubblica reveals not only the utter absurdity of the "theory" that this was all a French setup, and that the evil anti-Americans of Paris cooked up a scheme to embarrass their American rivals and tormentors – a contention for which there is not a lick of evidence – but also reports that the Americans had the forgeries (or summaries of them) much earlier than previously believed, in the summer of 2002: the Americans came to the French with the forgeries for verification and were told they were bogus. As for the photos submitted to the Italian parliamentary committee investigating the matter and published in the Italian media, which show Martino meeting with his "French connection" in Brussels, La Repubblica conveys the amusement of the French counterintelligence chief, Alain Chouet:

"I'm laughing because these photos prove the opposite of what Sismi says. Let me explain. This photo proves:

"a. Sismi was shadowing Rocco Martino in the summer 2002, therefore they already knew who he was, what he was doing or what he was trying to do.

"b. Rocco Martino's 'contact' was Jaques Nadal. Well. Do you know when Jaques Nadal was posted to the Brussels station? I appointed him between April and May 2002. Therefore, if you want to claim that Nadal was Rocco's 'French contact', which is true according to the photo, the contact dates back to the summer 2002. Not before. (nor later, of course, in 2003, when all the world knew that those documents were a forgery and the meeting would have been meaningless). The photo, in short, proves the exact contrary of what it was meant to prove, that is that the French were behind Rocco."

Chouet's testimony is extremely damaging to the forgers and the cabal that passed their handiwork up to the highest reaches of the U.S. government, where their fraud became fodder for George W. Bush's cadre of neocon speechwriters. It blows their alibi to smithereens, because Chouet shows that everything they're saying about the forgeries – in Washington, as well as in Rome – is a lie.

The cover-up is unraveling. This crew, which believes in lying – for a "noble" cause – as a matter of high principle, is about to meet a richly deserved fate – that is, if the FBI and Congress will take off their blinders and confront what is staring at them – and the rest of the country – in the face. I don't place much hope in the latter – for obvious reasons – so that leaves us with law enforcement. The crime here is knowingly passing false intelligence to U.S. policymakers, including the president, possibly violating several laws in the process – up to and including certain sections of the Espionage Act [.pdf], which criminalizes:

"Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States."

Surely the injection of lies into the U.S. intelligence stream, which poisoned our ability to make judgments about the decision to make war on Iraq, interfered with the normal operation of the U.S. military – which was, at the time the deception was carried out, not yet mired in what Gen. William Odom calls "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

They lied us into a disastrous war – you can't "interfere with the operation or success of the military" much more than that. And if a foreign intelligence service was involved, and the Los Angeles Times is right about the direction of the FBI investigation, then what we are talking about here is nothing less than treason.

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"What the Iraq/Bush war shows the world is how a Cabal of Criminality, numbering less than a few hundred individuals, can bamboozle a nation into a war whose ramifications on our future we cannot yet fully comprehend. The Bush war, the single-greatest blunder in America's foreign policy history, was spawned by greed-addicted corporatists and treasonous neoconartists, presstitute lackeys and political hacks, placed in charge of US foreign policy." - Manuel Valenzuela, A Cabal of Criminality

http://lnk.nu/sfgate.com/6p7.cgi

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What Happened to Iraq's WMD

How politics corrupts intelligence

Scott Ritter

Sunday, December 4, 2005

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The recent exchange of vitriol between Republican and Democratic lawmakers over the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and more specifically the disconnect between the intelligence data cited by the Bush administration as justification for invading Iraq and the resultant conclusion by the CIA that all Iraqi WMD had already been eliminated as early as 1991, has once again thrust the issue of the use of intelligence for political purposes front and center.

Democrats accuse the president and his supporters of deliberately misleading them and the American people about the nature of the Iraqi threat. Republicans respond that the Democrats are rewriting history, that all parties involved had access to the same intelligence data and had drawn the same conclusions. Typical of the Republican-led rebuttal are statements made by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who noted that "every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russian, French, including the Israeli, all had reached the same conclusion, and that was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."

But this is disingenuous. The intelligence services of everyone else were not proclaiming Iraq to be in possession of WMD. Rather, the intelligence services of France, Russia, Germany, Great Britain and Israel were noting that Iraq had failed to properly account for the totality of its past proscribed weapons programs, and in doing so left open the possibility that Iraq might retain an undetermined amount of WMD. There is a huge difference in substance and nuance between such assessments and the hyped-up assertions by the Bush administration concerning active programs dedicated to the reconstitution of WMD, as well as the existence of massive stockpiles of forbidden weaponry.

The actions and rhetoric of the Bush administration were aided by the tendency by most involved to accept at face value any negative information pertaining to Hussein and his regime, regardless of the source's reliability. This trend was especially evident in Congress, responsible for oversight on matters pertaining to foreign policy, intelligence and national security.

One might be inclined to excuse lesser members of the legislative branch for such actions, given their lack of access to sensitive intelligence, but not so senior figures who sit on oversight committees, such as California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who occupied a seat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. Today, Feinstein all-too conveniently "regrets" her vote in favor of war on Iraq, but defends her yes vote in 2002 by noting that "the intelligence was very conclusive: Saddam possessed biological and chemical weapons." This is a far different from the statement Feinstein made to me in the summer of 2002, when she acknowledged that the Bush administration had not provided any convincing intelligence to back up its claims about Iraqi WMD.

In contrast to Feinstein's actions, Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who also sat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, noted in September 2002 that the Bush administration's decisions regarding Iraq had been made in the absence of a National Intelligence Estimate from the CIA. The CIA hastily rushed to produce such a document, but the resulting report appeared as much to be an example of intelligence being fixed around policy, as opposed to policy being derived from intelligence. Graham, his eyes opened by the seemingly baseless rush toward conflict in Iraq, voted no on the war. Feinstein and others, their eyes wide shut, voted yes.

The crux of the problem of this Iraqi WMD intelligence "failure" lies in the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and the products it produces are increasingly influenced by the corrupting influences of politics. The politicization of the intelligence community allows the process of fixing intelligence around policy to become pervasive, and the increasingly polarized political climate in America prevents any real checks and balances through effective oversight, leaving Americans at the mercy of politicians who have placed partisan politics above the common good. The recent overhaul of the U.S. intelligence community, which resulted in the creation of the national intelligence chief, only reinforces this politicization, because the new director reports directly to the president and is beyond the reach of congressional oversight.

The only true fix to the problems of intelligence that manifested themselves in the Iraqi WMD debacle is to depoliticize the process. The position of national intelligence chief should be a 10-year appointment, like that of the director of the FBI, and subject to the consent of Congress. Likewise, all intelligence made available to the president to make national security policy should be shared with select members of Congress, from both parties, so that America will never again find itself at war based upon politically driven intelligence. Finally, and perhaps most important, the American people should start exercising effective accountability regarding their elected officials, so that those who voted yes for a war based on false and misleading information never again have the honor and privilege of serving in high office.

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Learn more

Who: Scott Ritter

What: Former U.N. weapons inspector will deliver a speech on the truth behind yellowcake uranium, missiles and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

When: Friday, noon

Where: Commonwealth Club, 595 Market St., San Francisco

Reservations and information: (415) 597-6700; www.commonwealthclub.org

Scott Ritter is a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-98) and the author of "Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein" (Nation Books, 2005).

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"...any member of the US Congress who, despite a plethora of international evidence that the reasons for this invasion had been faked by the Bush administration, had voted for it, should be barred from ever running for any public office in America ever again! Because either they are too careless and gullible or else they are too stupid for the job, and they have unnecessarily endangered and killed many lives.." - Brigitte Schön, The Art of Not Wanting to Know - A Reminder from Abroad, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1119-26.htm