Bush Knew Iraq War Sales Pitch Likely Phony

Months before President George W. Bush asserted in his Jan. 28 State of the Union speech that Iraq had been shopping in Africa for uranium to build nuclear bombs, the CIA told the White House it had "serious questions" about key intelligence behind the claim, according to a senior intelligence official.

The CIA repeated its reservations - about purported deals by Iraq to buy uranium oxide from Niger - in a classified National Intelligence Estimate distributed to the White House and other agencies in October, the official said. He said the State Department, in the report, asserted "even more firmly" than the CIA that there were serious questions about the intelligence claim.

Within days of receiving the U.S. claim this year, United Nations inspectors found that the documents underpinning it were forgeries.

A White House official confirmed Friday that the National Security Council had received the CIA cable last spring but said the forged documents formed "only one piece ... in a large body of evidence suggesting Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Africa." The senior intelligence official agreed that the CIA had distributed to policy-makers "a little bit, not a lot" of other such reports, and had made clear they were unverified.
<full story>

Help prove me right. If you haven't done so already, you can send an email or a letter to your U.S. Senators and Representative, urging them to demand a full investigation, with just a few mouse clicks. Click here to read the letter I sent to my Senators. Feel free to copy and paste it, or write your own. Click here to contact your elected officials.

It's been said that "If the people lead, the leaders will follow". It's time for us to lead, folks.

Posted by Me at 23:41 link

More True War Stories

Samar Hussein, 13
Samar, who died on March 29, lived in the village of Manaria in Iraq's Mohammedia district, a lowland area about 30 miles south of Baghdad. Manaria is a rural community inhabited by about 50 farming families, and Samar's home was at the end of a narrow, unpaved track lined with wheat fields and irrigation channels. The family house, like most houses in Manaria, is built of soft brown stone.

She had left school a year earlier to help out on the farm of her parents, Hamida and Jasem, but loved books. She wrote letters for her extended family, and planned to continue her education when circumstance allowed it. "She made me promise that when we could afford it she would go back to school," says Jasem. "Maybe that would have been possible, but now all that is gone. I do not know why they did this."

Samar was in the kitchen helping her aunt Alia Mijbas make breakfast when a missile hit the house. Shrapnel cut into Samar's stomach, while her aunt was struck on both legs. Alia's five-year-old son Mahmood was hit on the chest and shoulders, and her 11-year-old son Sahal was severely burnt after the cooker exploded. All were taken to hospital, but Samar died before she got there.

"We heard a plane and went outside; it was very loud," says Ahmed, 12, one of Samar's brothers. "One of my aunts grabbed me and pulled me around the corner. There was a big, big sound, and smoke. Then I heard screaming inside."

There are no military installations near Manaria, and villagers are adamant that there had been no Iraqi military activity in the area. "There is nothing hidden here," says village headman Hassan Hussein. "Even if the Americans thought something was hidden here, why are they attacking the villagers instead of the hiding places?"

Wael Sabah, Noor Sabah, 12, Abdel Khader, 10
Wael lived in Baladiyat, an eastern suburb of Baghdad, with her daughter Noor and son Abdel. On April 9 a missile from a low-flying fighter plane hit their home, killing Noor and Abdel instantly. Their mother died a few hours later at Kindi Hospital. The doctor who operated on her commented: "These Americans are hitting civilians - their homes, their streets, their cars and even those who walk about. They hit anyone."

Nadia Khalaf, 33
Nadia Khalaf, who died on April 5, was one of two sisters from a working-class family who had become academics. Nadia had recently completed a PhD in psychology and was looking for a job. Her sister Alia, 35, is a lecturer in English at Baghdad University who specialises in Shakespeare. The sisters lived with their father Najem, a lorry driver, and their mother Fawzia in a flat on Palestine Street, Baghdad.

Nadia "was very clever", said her father Najem. "Everyone said I have a fabulous daughter. She spent all her time studying, her head buried in books. She didn't have a care about going out enjoying herself. My other daughter is the same."

On the morning of April 5, the daughters had risen late after a night of heavy shelling. Nadia was on her way to the shower, and Alia joked that it would take three hours for the water to come. Then the building was hit, probably by an anti-aircraft shell. "The missile, something big and unexploded, had come through her chest and her heart," Alia said. "She was covered in blood, unconscious. I ran down to the street, mummy and daddy behind me, screaming for an ambulance. There weren't any. A neighbour said he would drive us to the hospital."

Nadia died on her way to Kindhi hospital in northeast Baghdad. She was laid to rest in a wooden coffin that was strapped on to the roof of the family car and taken to be buried.

Sage The Wonder Dog

Mindfulness

Concentration

Persistence

Equanimity



Posted by Me at 22:12 link

Pursuing Naked Truth

Dear Senator Edwards/Dear Senator Dole,

As your constituent and a concerned citizen, I urge you to DEMAND a thorough investigation into the intelligence that the Bush administration used to sell us on the Iraq war.

I agree with Senator Levin that a formal investigation is needed. I never doubted that Saddam had WMD, but I believe the Bush administration may have deliberately stretched the truth (to put it politely) of intelligence reports to deceive Congress and the public into believing that Iraq posed an imminent threat to our country. If they did in fact deceive us over the reasons for going to war, that constitutes the gravest possible violation of public trust.

If the allegations are true, appropriate action must be taken against those involved. If the allegations are false, we'll all sleep better knowing we weren't lied to. In the words of Senator McCain, "The American people have the right to know".

Please stand up for our right to know the truth.

Sincerely,

If Reverse Cowgirl sent you here, you're probably wondering: where's the sex? Sadly, I haven't written much about sex, unless you count the way the Bush administration is screwing us all blind. (If it'll make my stuff more interesting, you could try the 7^th grade trick of tacking "in bed" to the end of each sentence that follows.)

I focus on nature. This is the sort of stuff I write; I'm not brave enough for this. Love of nature has led me to be concerned about environmental policy, which has led me to a broader awareness of politics generally.

I'd rather just write about the outdoors. But because Bush administation policies are damaging our environment, wrecking our economy, and making the world more dangerous, my conscience keeps nagging at me to speak up. Help me fix some of these problems so I can get back to nature.

See you on the trail...

Posted by Me at 20:04 link

It just don't add up

• We have the highest unemployment rate in 10 years.

• In just 2½ years, we've gone from record budget surpluses under Clinton to the largest federal budget deficit ever.

• Business Week compares the Bush administration's policies to Enron's, and warns of possibly dire consequences.

  Faith in the U.S. abroad already may be waning. A strong dollar has long been a foreign seal of approval for American finance. Other countries agreed to accept inflated dollars in payment for their goods because of their great faith in the U.S. economy. The dollar's fall -- it's down about one-third from its peak vs. the euro -- could be a short-term reaction to slower U.S. economic growth. But then, it also may reflect diminishing faith in America and its future.

  Just take a look at international polls. In recent surveys by the Pew Center for Social Research, large majorities of the respondents in Turkey (68%), France (63%), Germany (59%), and Russia (58%), believe that American foreign policy is having a negative effect on their own nations. Among those who take this view, a majority of the respondents blame the Bush Administration, rather than the U.S. generally -- a clear indication that the President might have trouble rallying global support in a renewed crisis.

In other news...

VH1 just released their list of the 100 greatest songs of the past 25 years. Random underinformed comment: If you really want to understand whitebread middle-class taste, this would be a great place to start. Having said that, I do like more than a few songs on the list. Perhaps I should be worried. The list contains no surprises, takes no risks and is full of soulless crap. Just like whitebread middle-class America, no?

My all-time favorite poem, aka Beck's "Loser", came in at #63. "Smells Like Teen Spirit", which VH1 predictably ranked #1, is itself quite a good poem:

Load up on guns
Bring your friends
It's fun to lose
And to pretend
She's over bored
And self-assured
I know, I know
A dirty word

Hello, hello, hello, hello
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello...

[CHORUS:]
With the lights out
It's less dangerous
Here we are now
Entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now
Entertain us
A mulatto
An albino
A mosquito
My libido

Yeah

I'm worst at what I do best
And for this gift I feel blessed
Our little group has always been
And always will until the end

Hello, hello, hello, hello
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello...

[CHORUS]

Yeah

And I forget
Just why I taste
Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile
I found it hard—
It's hard to find—
Oh well, whatever, nevermind

Hello, hello, hello, hello
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello...

[CHORUS]

A denial
A denial
A denial
A denial
A denial
A denial
A denial
A denial
A denial

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a five-minute revolution against global corporate culture. Unfortunately, the revolution was co-opted almost instantly by that very culture, turned into a neutered fashion statement. Still, for a couple of years, a few of us hoped a real revolution was about to start. Kurt Cobain's death felt like the end of hope for an entire generation.

Still, maybe the fact that this song topped that list shows the full nature of its subversive power. Or does it show that even the most subversive themes eventually get turned into theme parks?

Posted by Me at 21:18 link

The Mechanics of Crying Wolfowitz

By last fall, Rumsfeld had grown so impatient with the CIA's equivocal explanations of the Iraq problem that he set up his own mini-CIA at the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans. It was hatched and designed, as a former U.S. official puts it, to get "the intelligence he wanted."

...

Over the past two weeks, TIME has interviewed several dozen current and former intelligence officials and experts at the Pentagon and CIA and on Capitol Hill to try to understand how the public version of the intelligence got so far ahead of the evidence. The reporting suggests that from the start the process was more deductive than empirical. According to these officials, three factors were at work:

• TREATING THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO AS FACT. One official said the process often went this way: the agency would send to the Pentagon three ways to interpret one piece of information, such as a new satellite photo or telephone intercept, and the Pentagon would always opt for the most dire explanation...

• GLOSSING OVER AMBIGUITIES. Before the war, one of the little-stated but central realities of U.S. intelligence gathering in Iraq was that it was never great in the first place. It often depended on defectors with personal agendas and tall tales that some U.S. officials were eager to believe...

• FUDGING MISTAKES. One of the most dramatic charges came from Bush in his State of the Union speech this year when he said Saddam had sought to buy uranium from an African nation, later identified as Niger. It wasn't long before the claim, lifted from a British intelligence report, was revealed to be bogus. The documents on which the charge was based were discovered to be forged and faked. But rather than withdraw the charge, the White House claimed instead that Bush omitted any reference to Niger because reports that Saddam had sought uranium had come, an official explained, "from more than one country and more than one source." The other nation, if it exists, has yet to be named. But the mystery has led the Senate Intelligence Committee to ask the CIA for an investigation.

Read the whole article.

CIA officials now say they communicated significant doubts to the administration about the evidence backing up charges that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons, charges that found their way into President Bush's State of the Union address, a State Department "fact sheet" and public remarks by numerous senior officials.

— Washington Post, March 22, 2003

Contact your elected officials right now to demand a complete, thorough investigation.

True War Stories

Karar Khodier, 11
The son of Arouba Khodier, Karar died outside his house in al-Shula, a Shia neighbourhood in Baghdad, on March 29.

Malek Hammoud, 18
Malek worked in a restaurant at the Nasser restaurant on Abu Taleb Street in Baghdad He was preparing lunch for customers when a missile landed, and destoyed the front of the cafe, killing him and Abu Hassan, 48.

Mohammad Ahmed, 4
Mohammad Ahmed was killed by shrapnel in Radwaniyeh, Baghdad, on April 2 in a missile attack. His three sisters, including Aisha, 8, brother, mother and father were all injured.

Mohammed, 13, Mohaned, 18, and Akmed Abdul Hussein, 7
The three boys died on March 31 in a missile or bomb attack in Al Amiin in the south of Baghdad, a modest residential area, heavily populated by families and children. One of the boys was killed as he was walking to his uncle's home on the street in front of one of the houses. Another was outside his home and the third was in a patio area.

Shaza Shallum, 20
The daughter of Hasna Shallum, Shaza was hit by shrapnel while walking with her baby and two relatives on March 29 in al-Shula, a Shia Muslim neighbourhood in Baghdad. Fatma, 6 months old, was found alive in her mother's arms.

Abdul Majid al-Khoei, 40
Wise and moderate Shia cleric murdered before he could contribute to the rebuilding of Iraq. <continues>

Saman Hassan Hamid, 26
Saman, who was killed on April 6, was on his way to see his grandmother when Iraqi soldiers started bombarding the frontline town of Kifri. <continues>

Rowand Mohammed Suleiman, 8 months
On April 11, Mohammed Suleiman, a 47-year-old engineer from Baghdad, lost his eight-month-old daughter Rowand after his son Seif brought home a device that he believes was an American cluster bomb.The explosion also injured his wife Wafa'a Abdel-Fatah in her left arm and leg, and his nephew was wounded in the shoulder.

Suleiman, his wife and nephew brought Rowand to Baghdad's Yarmouk hospital, which had been struck by missile and tank fire earlier in the week. There was only one doctor and three male nurses present, the generator no longer worked and the paediatric ward had a gaping hole in one of its walls.

"Please look at her face and see how beautiful she is," Suleiman said to a visitor. The family was helped to a car to be taken to Iskan hospital.

<Read more true war stories> at the Guardian. This project is ongoing.

Those figures come from this article, written by ex-Marine infantryman Chris White.

Over 100,000 companies depend on the pentagon for their profits each year, which means that many people depend on "national defense" for their livelihoods. These people, especially the leaders of the corporations, are what the peace movement is largely up against in its fight to end our nation's permanent war footing. Companies such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, Raytheon, and thousands of others, rake in billions each year, which means that they will not give up the business of war without a fight. Therefore, ending war does not only mean struggling for peace in general, it means challenging the ways in which the currently-powerful corporations make money. Moreover, because corporations who benefit from war also support political candidates, the candidates have every reason to defend those corporate interests who depend on war making, and the politicians have very little reason to defend the nation's interests as a whole.