Month: March 2013

The Bush administration’s primary justification for launching the Iraq War is thought, probably correctly, to be an alleged WMD program that did not exist. The coterie of delusional neoconservatives surrounding Bush and Cheney contributed to a systematic process of cherry-picking dubious intelligence and outright manipulation of evidence in order to satisfy a political decision that had already been made to change the regime in Iraq through a war of aggression.

The historical record pretty clearly demonstrates the distortions the administration employed to make the case that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Inspectors who said they didn’t exist were ignored, false stories about aluminum tubes and yellowcake from Africa were peddled assertively, Iraqi defectors that were known liars were used as anonymous sources alleging Saddam’s WMD development, etc.

The plan eventually worked. The administration’s expressed certainty was persuasive to Americans. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Dick Cheney said in a 2002 speech. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” No doubt.

But as central as these false claims about Saddam’s WMDs were to the propaganda campaign for war, I believe what will be most remembered is the claim of an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Significant portions of Americans still believe that Saddam and al-Qaeda were in cahoots and cooperated in the 9/11 attacks. The reason is simple: the administration told them this lie.

An investigation by a committee in the House of Representatives in 2004 identified “237 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq that were made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice. These statements were made in 125 separate appearances, consisting of 40 speeches, 26 press conferences and briefings, 53 interviews, 4 written statements, and 2 congressional testimonies.” According to the committee, at least 61 separate statements “misrepresented Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda.” A Senate investigation in 2006 also covered these lies.

Keeping this lie afloat took some work. The Bush administration, primarily Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, “applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime,” McClatchy reported in 2009.

According to Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Bush’s Secretary of State Powell, “the administration authorized harsh interrogation” in 2002, and “its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.”

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the detainee captured in Afghanistan in November 2001, eventually provided that smoking gun. He claimed knowledge of an Iraq-Qaeda connection because it was tortured out of him. The Bush administration cited it as evidence for the Iraq War’s greatest lie.

Other lies were told to this effect. Two months after the 9/11 attacks, on December 9, 2001, Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press and, when asked by Tim Russert whether “Iraq was involved in September 11,” mentioned a “report that’s been pretty well confirmed, that [9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.”

In fact, the CIA had told Cheney this report was false a day before his Meet the Press appearance. In a briefing that was sent to the White House Situation Room, the CIA concluded that “11 September 2001 hijacker Mohamed Atta did not travel to the Czech Republic on 31 May 2000.” Cheney cited it anyways.

Two years later, on September 14, 2003, Cheney appeared once again on Meet the Press. Russert asked him if he was “surprised” by the fact that “69 percent” of Americans believe Saddam “was involved in the September 11 attacks.”

“I think it’s not surprising that people make that connection,” Cheney said. “With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it.” In reality, it had been conclusively discredited years earlier.

As Paul Pillar, former CIA analyst and National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, wrote in his recent book: “The supposed alliance between Saddam’s regime and al-Qa’ida clearly did not drive the Bush administration’s decision to launch the war [in Iraq] because the administration was receiving no indications that any such alliance existed,” adding that “this fact did not stop the administration from nonetheless promoting publicly the notion of such an alliance.”

By August 2003, after another year that included the most intensive selling of the war, more than two-thirds of Americans thought Saddam had been involved in 9/11. Some of this belief was due to innuendo such as the vice president’s repeated references to a phantom meeting in Prague between an Iraqi and 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. It was due mostly to the administration’s rhetorical drumbeat that repeatedly mentioned Iraq, 9/11, and “war on terror” in the same breath.

Pillar is right: the Saddam-Qaeda connection did not drive the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq. But it did drive the administration’s propaganda campaign to generate public support for the war.

This was absolutely critical to the blank check that the vast majority of Americans gave to Bush and Cheney to go to war. Alleged WMDs, I think, could never have achieved the level of popular support for war crimes against Iraq on its own. The pain and indignation Americans felt after being attacked on 9/11 needed to be exploited for a war of choice as brazen as Iraq to gain support. And the record is clear that the Bush administration fostered this deception, employing torture and citing false intelligence to do so.

The record is clear, but the CIA is still trying to cover it up, as Marcy Wheeler has recently noted.

Many lies were told to justify the Iraq War. But none were as baseless and vital as this one. At the risk of joining the parade of idiots predicting “the judgement of history” on Iraq, I would anticipate the Saddam-Qaeda connection lie as the most important, far surpassing the more popularized WMD claims.

This month is chock-full of mournful anniversaries.

Most prominent today is the initiation of the Bush administration’s bombing campaign and invasion of Iraq in 2003, observed today by Antiwar.com’s very own Justin Raimondo. The anniversary has also been commemorated in writing by Seymour Hersh and Richard Falk, both featured in our Viewpoints section today, and earlier in the month by Eric Margolis, Stephen Zunes, Andrew Bacevich and many more. John Tirman is worth a read as is this great piece by Robert Taylor.

Saturday, March 16th, marked the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre, wherein US soldiers slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. It remains one of the most shocking and memorable war crimes of the conflict, but, as Nick Turse writes at the Daily Beast, there were many others like it that most Americans have yet to hear about. Turse’s new book is a history of those appalling atrocities.

Saturday also marked the ten year anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, who was killed in the Gaza Strip when the Israel Defense Forces ran over her with a bulldozer on its way to demolish a Palestinian home. Rachel’s father wrote a piece for The Hill to commemorate the anniversary and lament how shamefully little has been done to prevent further Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes on Palestinian land.

Less noticed in the world of political media and Op-Ed topics is the two year anniversary of the NATO bombing of Libya, which passed yesterday. The Obama administration and their European counterparts started that war on the basis of dubious humanitarian rationales, claiming former strongman Gadhafi was poised to slaughter unarmed Libyans wholesale. They then used a rather limited United Nations Security Council Resolution for a no-fly zone, circumventing Congress and in violation of the War Powers Resolution, as a springboard to impose regime change on a dispensable dictator who had been Washington’s ally months earlier, but who quickly turned into the embodiment of pure evil once war was decided upon. Really, this was just another example of the US interfering in a civil war for the sake of its own perceived geo-political interests. Libya’s armed rebels were fast heralded as freedom fighters by war advocates, despite the fact that many of them committed horrendous crimes in the course of the war and significant portions of them had ties to al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militants. In countless articles, columns, and blog posts, Antiwar.com refuted the basic justifications for the war and warned of impending consequences. The war did produce extremely negative consequences beyond the human costs of the war itself, including destabilizing the country and the region, planting the seeds for another civil war to the south in Mali, and perhaps most infamously getting weapons in the hands of al-Qaeda-linked extremists who retaliated against covert US military raids by attacking the US consulate in Benghazi and killing four Americans. Libya today remains very unstable, with rebel groups refusing to disarm or cede control to the “government,” which has now begun to aid and abet the very Islamic militant groups that attacked the US consulate.

A sorrowful commemorative month indeed.

A federal appeals court has just ruled that the CIA cannot continue to “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of the drone war, in a court case prompted by a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

ACLU press statement:

“This is an important victory. It requires the government to retire the absurd claim that the CIA’s interest in the targeted killing program is a secret, and it will make it more difficult for the government to deflect questions about the program’s scope and legal basis,” said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, who argued the case before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Appeals Court in September. “It also means that the CIA will have to explain what records it is withholding, and on what grounds it is withholding them.”

The ACLU’s FOIA request, filed in January 2010, seeks to learn when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how and whether the U.S. ensures compliance with international law restricting extrajudicial killings. In September 2011, the district court granted the government’s request to dismiss the case, accepting the CIA’s argument that it could not release any documents because even acknowledging the existence of the program would harm national security. The ACLU filed its appeal brief in the case exactly one year ago, and today the appeals court reversed the lower court’s ruling in a 3-0 vote.

“We hope that this ruling will encourage the Obama administration to fundamentally reconsider the secrecy surrounding the targeted killing program,” Jaffer said. “The program has already been responsible for the deaths of more than 4,000 people in an unknown number of countries. The public surely has a right to know who the government is killing, and why, and in which countries, and on whose orders. The Obama administration, which has repeatedly acknowledged the importance of government transparency, should give the public the information it needs in order to fully evaluate the wisdom and lawfulness of the government’s policies.”

You can read the unanimous 19-page decision here. The crux of the opinion: “It is implausible that the CIA does not possess a single document on the subject of drone strikes.”

Robert Dreyfuss thinks Obama’s recently revealed policy of supporting Iraqi security forces through the CIA so they can fight al-Qaeda affiliates there and cut off the flow of fighters pouring into Syria is nonsensical. “We’re backing the same guys in Syria that we’re fighting in Iraq,” he says.

How is it that the administration is aiding the Syrian rebel fighters on one hand and fighting them on the other?

It’s true that Obama has sent non-lethal aid to the rebels, despite the fact that the great bulk of the fighters who actually matter are jihadists. It’s also true that Obama has made it a policy to coordinate the flow of weapons to these groups from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, and that the so-called “vetting process” meant to direct the aid only to moderate elements of the oppositions is, to put it mildly, ineffective (at least according to US intelligence officials).

But the truth is, Obama has ruled out sending decisive aid, lethal or non-lethal, to Syria’s rebels even in the face of claims that up to 70,000 people have been killed in the conflict. Obama reportedly overruled the suggestions of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey – all of whom advocated arming the rebels. Instead, Obama made policy moves like designating the al-Qaeda in Iraq offshoot in Syria a terrorist organization and pressuring Saudi Arabia not to send heavier arms like anti-aircraft weapons.

The limited aid the US has sent to the Syrian rebels, while totally unacceptable in my opinion, is primarily a pittance for public consumption so that Obama gets to display his disapproval for the Assad regime’s violence. From the beginning, Obama has articulated a desire to avoid getting involved in another quagmire in Syria and avoid bolstering potentially dangerous rebels with links to al-Qaeda. In this sense, the policy of aiding Iraq’s state militias to crack down on the Islamists coming over the border to fight in Syria – while dangerous – is not so illogical.

The strange thing here is that the CIA’s cooperation with Maliki, a Shiite ally of Assad, to crack down on Sunni Islamists fighting to topple the regime in Syria seems conspicuously like a pro-Assad policy – or at least not an anti-Assad policy.

When I posed this paradox to former CIA intelligence officer and Antiwar.com columnist Phil Giraldi, he concurred.

“I think you are right that Obama has come around to the view that regime change is more fraught with dangers than letting Assad remain,” Giraldi said.

As to the logistics of the CIA’s battle against anti-Assad Islamists in Iraq, “how exactly” this will be accomplished “escapes me,” Giraldi explained.

“Also the border is very long and unpoliceable and located mostly in Sunni country so the whole exercise seems like a plan doomed to fail,” he added.

The Obama administration has had a wobbly position on Syria for a long time, and it should be roundly condemned for continuing to allow (and even encourage) its aforementioned allies to aid the fragmented and extremist Syrian rebel forces. And the newly revealed policy of backing Iraqi militias as they do battle – although it could just be an effort to clear the way for increased aid to Syria’s “moderate” opposition – will almost surely backfire.

But as the State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said back in January, even as the US supports the Syrian opposition in some abstract way, it is of utmost importance to “maintain the functions of the state.” Syria may have been floated as a target for regime change by the Bush administration’s most fanciful neoconservatives, but Obama sees the chaos of Sunni jihadists taking control of Syria as a much worse outcome than Assad sticking around a while longer.

CPAC is off to its usual mellow start. TalkingPointsMemo reports:

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), speaking at conservative gathering CPAC, declared that “Vietnam was winnable, but people in Washington decided we would not win it!”

“If you go to war you better mean it,” Gohmert added, blaming America’s failure to go to war with Iran over the capture of its embassy in 1979 for more recent attacks on embassies and consulates.

Gohmert was part of a panel entitled “Too Many American Wars? Should We Fight Anywhere And Can We Afford It?”

Rep. Gohmert was not basing his conclusion on Vietnam on his own combat record, which I could not discover via Google searches. Gohmert was born in 1953 but somehow missed the chance to fight in the jungles of ‘Nam. He did spent a few years as an Army lawyer in the late 1970s/early 1980s. But writing memos isn’t quite the same as engaging in an artillery duel with a North Vietnamese regiment.

Didn’t enough Texans come back in coffins from that damn war?

Here’s a link to Glen Campbell’s wonderful low-key anti-Vietnam war ballad, Galveston