Month: April 2005

64 Sunni clerics of the Association of Muslim Scholars and the Iraqi Islamic Party gave a fatwa calling for Iraqi Sunnis to join the military and police. Juan Cole comments that , “Unlike Sistani’s this ruling does potentially change things,” which is rather an understatement, since the Sunnis have resisted recruitment into these organizations en masse, generally viewing those who participate as traitors and puppets of the occupation.

Cole goes on, “The Sunni clerics seem to have figured out that boycotting the new government is just a form of self-marginalization, and if Sunnis aren’t in the army and police, then those forces will be largely Shiite and Kurdish.” Cole doesn’t explain why he thinks the Sunnis joining the army and police means they’re suddenly doing a 180 degree turnabout and cooperating with the government they’ve relentlessly maintained is illegitimate, but it’s a conclusion more optimistic than is warranted, considering the context.

Swopadamus’s speculation as to the Sunni motives behind this sudden change of MO is more skeptical,

It’s also noteworthy that the statement apparently says nothing about supporting the new Iraqi government politically. Could the call for Sunni Muslims to join the army be a way to keep Anbar and other Sunni-majority provinces from being patrolled by predominantly Shiite military units? Assuming that new Sunni recruits are allowed to serve in their home regions, with fresh training and weaponry, they would be far more prepared to fight against the government when if the entire new scheme collapses into civil war among various sectarian/party militias.

The answer to swopa’s first question is surely yes. As for his second question, try to imagine a police squad from Ramadi patrolling Basra. Yeah, me neither.

In fact, there is precedent for a Sunni military unit in Iraq during the US occupation. It was called the Fallujah Brigade, and it was so successful (from the occupation’s point of view) that it lasted a whopping four months before the US military “disbanded” it. (They got to keep the weapons, vehicles and armor.)

According to numerous accounts, some Brigade members almost immediately integrated themselves among the various mujahideen resistance outfits that dominate the city to this day, collecting paychecks from the U.S. military all the while.

One Brigade leader expressed exasperation at the disbanding of the unit. “We don’t know where to go now after this dismissal by the American troops and the Iraqi interim government,” Brig. Gen. Tayseer Latief told the Times. “They leave us no other option but to join the resistance.”

So, will the Sunnis now flock to the Iraqi Army and police and form up some new Fallujah Brigades? At the moment, the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, Good News Division, is touting this as a positive development, seeing the Sunni fatwa as election-induced Sunni recognition of their marginalized, left-out status resulting in their sheepish cooperation with the Iraqi political process, rather than as a tactical move aimed at creating local Sunni police and Army units, armed at US expense, concerned more with the defense of their own territory and people than with the success of the government formed under US occupation.

Well, it’s not as if the War Party has gotten anything about Iraq right yet. I doubt they’re going to ruin their perfect record in this case.

Saturday on the Weekend Interview Show I’ll be talking with J. Forrest Sharpe of IHS Press about the soon to be released two book set, Neoconned, which includes essays by Justin Raimondo, Pat Buchanan, Samuel Francis, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Thomas Fleming, Eric S. Margolis, Laurence M. Vance, Alexander Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Claes G. Ryn, Karen Kwiatkowski, Sgt. Al Lorenz, Ray McGovern, Gordon Prather, Tom Engelhardt and other Antiwar.com regulars. In the second hour, Jude Wanniski, will discuss his chapter one of Neoconned, The (Bogus) Case Against Saddam.

Update: Show’s over, Archives

Gee, I feel kind of bad about how mean I was to good ol’ Billmon: his gracious, funny, and thoughtful response is here.

I have to say that it was the timing as much as the tone of Billmon’s original post that put me off. After having to read the ceaseless barrage of sexual innuendo coming from the pro-war Right — if it isn’t Steven Plaut, champion of the Kahanists, cackling about Justin Raimondo “godmother of a grand conspiracy theory,” it’s my fellow “libertarian” Tom Palmer, of the Cato Institute, referring to my mysterious “unsavory career moves,” whatever that means — I suppose I was being just a wee bit hypersensitive. I mean, what is wrong with people these days? My defend-the-underdog instinct kicked in.

Be that as it may, Billmon makes some very good points:

“The truth is, Jim/Jeff Guckert/Gannon represents, in one muscle-bound package, just about everything I find repulsive about the modern conservative movement. And while I don’t hold Jim/Jeff’s sex business against him (so to speak), the pseudo-military fetish that was/is his specialty frankly creeps me out…”

Yeah, it creeps me out, too. I was going to mention this in my own column on the Gannon affair, but then started thinking that I could actually devote a whole piece to the psycho-sexual mentality of the War Party — and decided I didn’t want to go there. Anne Norton, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, does go there, to some extent, in her recent book on Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire. Describing the inmates of this particular neocon asylum, she writes:

“Tiny little men with rounded shoulders would lean back in their chairs and declare that Nature had made men superior to women. Larger, softer men, with soft while hands that never held a gun or changed a tire delivered disquisitions on manliness. They were stronger, they were smarter, and Aristotle said so.”

So I agree with Billmon about all that, and, no, I don’t think he “hates gays,” as he avers: it’s just that I can’t help but smile when I read his protestations that he considers “homophobia” a Very Bad Thing, on a par with racism and all the other icky-isms that modern liberals love to hate. Because I can’t help but juxtapose his sincerity to the unmistakable tone of derisory levity that permeated his commentary on the man he persists in calling “Gannon/Guckert.” (Hey, if he says his name is Gannon, who am I to argue: I know Billmon doesn’t believe in property rights, but doesn’t a person own their own name?) I’m smiling because I, like every other gay (male) in the world, knows that, no matter how much we hear anthems to “tolerance” and “diversity” and politically-correct pledges to fight “homophobia” (Szasz help us!), I can see a reflex action common to all non-homosexuals that you might call the Ick Factor. Blue-state baby-boomer liberals are no doubt perfectly sincere in their expressions of liberality, but when they really think about what gay males do, the Ick Reflex kicks in. And that’s okay. I understand. I even empathize. No need to apologize. People are different: they have different tastes.

So I don’t blame Billmon for the Ick Reflex, any more than I blame a cat for running up a tree at the sight of a dog. You’ll have to pardon me, however, if I bark.

I have to say that Billmon’s post is quite funny, and I’m a little … hurt that he accuses me of having no sense of humor. Hey, what about my “Bizarro World” series? Oh well, I guess it’s hard to come off like Jerry Seinfeld when you’re writing about war, as in mass murder. Anyway, I laughed out loud when I read this from Billmon’s post:

“I have no objections, moral or otherwise, to Guckert/Gannon’s sexual preferences, whatever they may be. I also don’t have anything against anal intercourse, although like Gannon (and Jesus, for that matter) I also believe it is better to give than to receive.”
Continue reading “‘Homophobia’ and Gannon-gate”

Does David Horowitz, the ex-Black Panther supporter turned neocon, get up in the morning and immediately start making a list of the lies he’s going to tell that day? Sure seems like it. Just this week, his website published a piece by Steven Plaut that falsely attributes a ridiculous quote to Professor Juan Cole:

“In a New York Times editorial, [Juan] Cole said that he saw the elections in Syria as a model for other Arab countries to follow: ‘The last thing the Arab people need is a red herring like ‘free and open elections’ to distract them from the international Zionist/Neo-Con conspiracy to take their oil.’ Professor Cole then added that President Assad’s ability to gain such a high percentage of the vote ‘all the while maintaining an oligarchic cult of personality oppressive regime mired in nepotism and corruption’ was ‘truly impressive’ and a positive sign of ‘Arab solidarity.'”

As Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker put it, “That quote isn’t just fake — it’s a fake so obvious that a retarded lemur could see through it.” Yeah, but not, apparently, Plaut — or Horowitz.

All lies all the time — that should be the slogan emblazoned on the masthead of the Horowitless website, as evidenced by yet another urban legend he’s spreading to the effect that a student at the University of Northern Colorado was required by some Commie-leftist professor to write an essay about how George W. Bush is a “war criminal.” Hmmm, more leftist indoctrination of our poor little fresh-faced American youth, eh? Not so fast. As Ralph E. Luker points out on the “Cliopatria” blog:

“1) The oppressive leftist professor turns out to be a Republican;

“2) The University has a copy of the original examination and the question wasn’t about President Bush as a ‘war criminal’;

“3) The student wasn’t obliged to answer the question that got twisted into that version by Horowitz;

“4) The student’s answer to the question didn’t fulfill the test’s instructions about the length of the essay.”

Robert Dunkley, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Northern Colorado, identified by Horowitz as the alleged culprit, told Inside Higher Ed “he would have explained himself or his course to Horowitz or his backers, but was never asked. ‘He’s cooked this whole thing up,’ Dunkley said.”

Cooking up a goulash of lies — that’s Horowitz’s job. He’s a real connoisseur of baseless innuendo, the Julia Childs of the poisonous smear. What’s even more outrageous is that, even after the mistake was exposed, Horowitz refuses to retract it or even acknowledge his error, just as Plaut never acknowledged the phony quote attributed to Professor Cole. Instead, he demanded that the exposers retract their statements — and, naturally, Glenn Reynolds complied. The next day, Horowitz came out with a non-apology that conceded almost nothing:

“So while we apologize for not having fully checked and corrected this story, we conclude that our complaint about the exam was justified. What happened in Professor Dunkley’s class at the University of Northern Colorado is not education, it is indoctrination. And that violates the academic freedom of the students who were subjected to it.”

Horowitz hasn’t changed one whit since his Commie days. For him, ideology still trumps reality every time.

The truly sinister aspect of all this is the unwillingness of Dunkley’s accuser to come forward. One of Horowitz’s junior spies, Erin Bergstrom, says that the student insists on preserving her anonymity becasue, you see, “she’s been very intimidated by the whole process.”

The poor little sensitive soul — she wants the “right” to remain in the shadows, while she hurls baseless charges at her professor. What really takes the cake, however, is that Horowitz and his tiny group of campus supporters have launched their campaign to impose neocon-style political correctness by forming a group known as “Students for Academic Freedom.” Everything about Horowitz is a lie — even the name he gives his front organizations. Well, at least he’s consistent.

Also, go here and check out Horowitz’s limp defense of his apparent unwillingness to employ a fact-checker. He writes:

“You ask me to vet everything in detail before I post it or report it. I don’t have the resources to set up what is essentially a grievance machinery to determine whether each and every complaint it valid.”

He’s throwing around smears, but claims he can’t afford to make sure they have even a minimal relation to reality. Luker’s comeback:

“If you would give yourself a salary cut — from the reported $179,000 — to some reasonable level appropriate to your skills, you could hire some staff to check out your blarny before you go trumpeting it.”

Actually, his salary is closer to $180,000. Horowitz hauls in millions every year from big neocon foundations and his deluded supporters, but why would an outfit that exists to promulgate baseless smears employ a fact-checker?

What Horowitz wants — and he’s now going to the various state legislatures to get it — is the neocon version of a Cultural Revolution on campuses nationwide, where professors are pilloried (and fired) for holding and expressing their political views, and everyone is intimidated by anonymous spies. If a more sickening hypocrite and political opportunist exists anywhere on earth, then I’d like to know about it.

“It’s good to have this cleared up,” bloviated Reynolds in his retraction, “so it won’t serve as a lingering distraction.”

Yeah, that’s right Glenn: we wouldn’t want anything to distract us from the main task of targeting innocent people, smearing them, and trying to get them fired.

“We have teams of people that are out looking. They’ve investigated a number of sites. And within the last week or two, they have in fact captured and have in custody two of the mobile trailers that Secretary Powell talked about at the United Nations as being biological weapons laboratories.”

Donald Rumsfeld
Infinity Radio Interview
May 31, 2003

“Is it an embarrassment to people on the other side that we’ve discovered these biological production vans, which the defector told us about?”

Paul Wolfowitz
CNN Interview
May 31, 2003

Now that the Bush’s commission has released it’s “scathing report,” finding that intelligence from “America’s spy agencies” was “dead wrong,” it’s time to take a look back at the character emerging as the favored scapegoat, the infamous “Curveball.”

According to Adam Entous reporting for Reuters, Curveball was “…the ‘pivotal’ source behind the intelligence community’s escalating warnings about Iraq’s biological weapons programs before the invasion.”

Assertions that Iraq was cooking up biological agents in mobile labs to elude international inspectors and Western intelligence services — based almost exclusively on Curveball’s information — became what the report called one of the “most important and alarming” assessments in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate cited by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in justifying the war.

Who is this amazing Curveball, who was able almost singlehandedly to make the Bush Administration believe that Saddam Hussein had mobile chemical weapons factories? As was reported a year ago

Curveball is the brother of a top aide of Ahmad Chalabi, the pro-western Iraqi former exile with links to the Pentagon.

A whole family of “Heroes in Error!”

Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, darling (even now) of the War Party, and opportunistic peddler of whatever lies his sponsors needed to sell the invasion of Iraq. Shouldn’t we peer back through the fog of time and reconstruct just how the Bushies came to put forward such Heroes in Error? Maybe we should look all the way back to the Office of Special Plans, that stovepiping secret intelligence group that operated through VP Cheney’s office:

…what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”

The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”
[…]
The defectors, however, had an audience prepared to believe the worst. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence. In the late nineteen-nineties, for example, he had chaired a commission on ballistic-missile programs that criticized the unwillingness of intelligence analysts “to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.” After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon’s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials.
[…]
Chalabi’s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President’s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. “They’d pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided,” Greg Thielmann told me. “There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi’s sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President.”

A routine settled in: the Pentagon’s defector reports, classified “secret,” would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR analyses of the reports—invariably scathing but also classified—would remain secret.

“It became a personality issue,” a Pentagon consultant said of the Bush Administration’s handling of intelligence. “My fact is better than your fact. The whole thing is a failure of process. Nobody goes to primary sources.” The intelligence community was in full retreat.

In the spring of 2002, the former White House official told me, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz began urging the President to release more than ninety million dollars in federal funds to Chalabi. The 1998 Iraq Liberation Act had authorized ninety-seven million dollars for the Iraqi opposition, but most of the funds had not been expended. The State Department opposed releasing the rest of the money, arguing that Chalabi had failed to account properly for the funds he had already received. “The Vice-President came into a meeting furious that we hadn’t given the money to Chalabi,” the former official recalled. Cheney said, “Here we are, denying him money, when they”—the Iraqi National Congress—“are providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D.s.”

It was “unique intelligence” all right. As Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest write in their dissection of the OSP, “The Lie Factory,”

According to multiple sources, Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC’s own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC’s intelligence “isn’t reliable at all,” according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism. “Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches.”

When we see statements like this: “… the Bush administration relied on bogus intelligence from a mysterious Iraqi chemical engineer code-named ‘Curveball’,” let’s remember how that “intelligence” was created, lest we be mislead by propagandistic lines like this,

…..the presidential commission that investigated intelligence failures in Iraq cast Curveball as the “pivotal” source behind the intelligence community’s escalating warnings about Iraq’s biological weapons programs before the invasion.

The “intelligence community” which used Curveball “intelligence” certainly wasn’t part of this community:

An Iraqi defector nicknamed Curveball who wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had mobile chemical weapons factories was last night at the centre of a bitter row between the CIA and Germany’s intelligence agency.

German officials said that they had warned American colleagues well before the Iraq war that Curveball’s information was not credible – but the warning was ignored.

It was the Iraqi defector’s testimony that led the Bush administration to claim that Saddam had built a fleet of trucks and railway wagons to produce anthrax and other deadly germs.

In his presentation to the UN security council in February last year, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, explicitly used Curveball’s now discredited claims as justification for war. The Iraqis were assembling “mobile production facilities for biological agents”, Mr Powell said, adding that his information came from “a solid source”.

These “killer caravans” allowed Saddam to produce anthrax “on demand”, it was claimed. US officials never had direct access to the defector, and have subsequently claimed that the Germans misled them.

Yesterday, however, German agents told Die Zeit newspaper that they had warned the Bush administration long before last year that there were “problems” with Curveball’s account. “We gave a clear credibility assessment. On our side at least, there were no tricks before Colin Powell’s presentation,” one source told the newspaper.

Who “misled” the “intelligence community?” As Justin Raimondo points out in today’s column, “The system did not just break down all by itself: somebody sabotaged it, and that is pretty clearly the “analysts” who fed on the lies concocted by Chalabi & Co. ”

Thanks to billmon for the quotes.

ADDED BY POPULAR REQUEST:

“We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.”

George W. Bush
Interview, TVP Poland
May 29, 2003