Bush 'tried to lure Saddam into war using UN aircraft'
By Rosemary Bennett and Michael Evans

TimesOnline

PRESIDENT BUSH had plans to lure Saddam Hussein into war by flying an aircraft over Iraq painted in UN colours in the hope he would shoot it down, a book reveals.
Mr Bush told Tony Blair of the extraordinary plan during a meeting in the White House on January 31, 2003, six weeks before the war started, according to an updated version of Lawless World by Philippe Sands, a human rights lawyer. He says the President made it clear that he had already decided to go to war, despite still pressing for a UN resolution.

“The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach,” the book reports Mr Bush telling Mr Blair at the meeting.

If the U2 idea was a serious proposal, it would have made sense only if the spy plane was ordered to fly at an altitude within range of Iraqi missiles. Mr Bush’s reference in the recorded conversation to the U2 being escorted by fighter aircraft indicates that that is what he had in mind.

The U2, America’s most sophisticated aerial reconnaissance aircraft, can operate at 90,000ft, taking high-resolution photographs of targets. At this altitude, the U2 would have been beyond the range of Iraqi surface-to-air missiles.

U2s were made available to the UN weapons inspectors to help them in their search for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But there has never been any suggestion until now that Mr Bush had thought about painting one of them in UN colours to deceive Saddam.

Later in the same meeting the President said it was also possible that a defector could be brought out who would give a public presentation about Saddam’s WMD, and there was a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated.

The book also claims that the President “thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups”.

President Bush also made clear, according to the book which was featured on Channel 4 News, that he would go to war irrespective of whether there was a second UN resolution.

“The US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would ‘twist arms’ and ‘even threaten’. But he had to say that if, ultimately, we failed, military action would follow anyway,” the book said.

The section of the book is based on a memo of the meeting. Mr Blair responded that he was “solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam”. But the Prime Minister said that a second Security Council resolution would provide an insurance policy against the unexpected, and international cover, including with the Arabs.

Mr Sands’ book says that the meeting focused on the need to identify evidence that Saddam had committed a material breach of his obligations under the existing UN Resolution 1441. There was concern that insufficient evidence had been unearthed by the UN inspection team, led by Dr Hans Blix.

That was why other options, such as the aircraft in UN colours, were considered.

Last night Sir Menzies Campbell, acting Liberal Democrat leader, said: “If these allegations are accurate, the Prime Minister and President Bush were determined to go to war with or without a second UN resolution, and Britain was signed up to do so by the end of January 2003.”

He added: “By then it was clear that there was no credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the stated justification for the moves against Saddam Hussein. The fact that consideration was apparently given to using American military aircraft in UN colours to provoke Saddam graphically illustrates the rush to war.”

By now, the Nazis had perfected the art of stealing neighboring territory. They would start by encouraging political unrest inside the area. At the same time, they would wage a propaganda campaign citing real or imagined wrongs committed against local Germans. When neighboring political leaders finally came to see to Hitler to resolve the ongoing crisis, they would be offered help in the form of a German Army occupation to "restore order."

At Hitler's instruction, nationalist Slovaks living in the eastern portion of Czechoslovakia began agitating for a completely independent state, which would take another huge chunk out of Czechoslovakia.

At this point, Goebbels' propaganda machine went into high gear spreading reports of alleged persecution of local Germans there by Czechs. Out of convenience, or perhaps out of laziness, Goebbels' propaganda people used the same fake newspaper stories they had printed six months earlier concerning the Czech "reign of terror" in the Sudetenland.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-czech.htm

Hitler's 'propagandist reason' for starting the war had already been arranged by Himmler and Heydrich at the Fuhrer's request. The plan was of such importance that it was code named Operation Himmler and involved having the SS stage fake attacks by the Polish Army against German troops along the German-Polish border. At the Gleiwitz radio station, a Polish-speaking German working with the SS would grab the microphone and broadcast an inflammatory speech in Polish declaring that the time had come for Poles to fight the Germans. Concentration camp inmates dressed in Polish Army uniforms would be killed by lethal injections then riddled with bullets and left as evidence of the attacks, to be viewed later by members of the press.

Preparations for Operation Himmler were fully underway, with the invasion of Poland now scheduled by Hitler to begin at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 26. As a prelude to the invasion, Goebbels' propaganda machine went into overdrive spinning out stories of alleged atrocities committed by Poles against tens of thousands of ethnic Germans living inside Poland.

For several months now, Nazi journalists had also been trying to prepare the German people for the inevitable war in Europe. They had been personally instructed by Hitler to build enthusiasm for war and to counter civilian pessimism. But the propaganda only had limited success. Most Germans still did not want a war.

…By nightfall on Thursday, a million and a half German soldiers were moving into final position for the invasion of Poland. Operation Himmler was put into effect at 8 p.m. as SS men dressed in Polish Army uniforms staged a series of fake border attacks, including the one at Gleiwitz where they seized the radio microphone and shouted out in Polish, "People of Poland, the time has come for war between Poland and Germany!" Hitler now had his propaganda excuse for launching the war.

… At 10 a.m. that morning Hitler appeared before the Reichstag in Berlin and announced: "This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met with bombs."
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-last.htm

It was now, Hitler announced, his "irrevocable decision" to go to war.
"Our economic situation is such that we cannot hold out more than a few years. Goring can confirm this. We have no other choice. We must act," Hitler said. Thus far, all of Germany's territorial gains had come as a result of "political bluff" but it was now necessary to utilize Germany's "military machine."

"I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war. Never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters but victory."

When Hitler gathered his top generals for three separate pre-war conferences in 1939, they listened in complete silence to the dictates of the Fuhrer, which would bring about the worst catastrophe in the history of humanity.

…On May 23, 1939, the Fuhrer assembled fourteen senior military officers in Berlin including Hermann Goring, Admiral Raeder, Generals Brauchitsch, Halder and Keitel, and explained that Germany needed a war because the Reich's economy was in such dire straits. And fixing Germany's economy would be "impossible without invading other countries or attacking other people's possessions."

For Nazi Germany, the acquisition of Lebensraum had now become an economic necessity. This was due to Hitler's massive rearmament program which was soaking up an amazing 23 percent of Germany's annual Gross National Product. Hitler had ordered German industry to drop everything and rearm the country as fast as possible. As a result, the employment level in the Reich stood at 125 percent, technically, meaning there was a huge labor shortage with many jobs left unfilled, especially in agriculture. This was occurring even though the overall population of the Greater Reich had swollen to 80 million with the acquisitions of Austria and Czechoslovakia.

The lopsided Nazi economy was headed for a crash unless there was an immediate reallocation of labor and raw materials, or, unless fresh supplies of men and materials were acquired from outside the Reich. This is the option Hitler chose and so informed his generals on May 23.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-last.htm

When Governments Deceive and Provoke
Operation Canned Meat and Its Derivatives
By WERTHER
http://www.counterpunch.org/

“Mundus vult decipi” (“the world wants to be deceived”)
Martin Luther (1483-1546)

Item: On the evening of 31 August 1939, members of the S.S. took a concentration camp prisoner, Franciszek Honiok, to a German radio station in Gleiwitz (now Gliwice), on the border with Poland. S.S. operatives then broadcast a message in Polish urging Poles living in Silesia to attack Germans. After administering a lethal injection to Honiok, the operatives shot the corpse to simulate his having been shot while attacking the radio station. The German government invited police officials and the members of the press corps to view Honiok’s corpse as evidence of a Polish attack. As the S.S. referred to concentration camp inmates used for this purpose as “canned goods,” the operation became known to history (once it was revealed during the Nuremberg Tribunal) as “Operation Canned Meat.”

Item: During the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, the Strategic Air Command ordered RB-29s, RB-36s, and RB-47s into Soviet air space, ostensibly to test Soviet air defenses and reconnoiter defense installations. The appearance of those aircraft being identical to their nuclear weapon-equipped stable mates, it raises the question of precisely what the United States government intended, given that the country whose sovereignty was being violated by military aircraft was nuclear armed, declared hostile, and presumed to be paranoid. Stalin was in power at this time.[1]

Item: On 13 March 1962, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer, submitted a document to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. It proposed as part of an anti-Castro program (Operation Mongoose), staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban air force attack on a civilian jetliner, and fabricating a major incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. The attack on the jetliner was an elaborate false-flag operation that involved unmanned drones. [2] The specific plan was dropped; however, covert operations under the rubric of Mongoose continued. These included poisoning the Cuban sugar cane fields.

Item: On 5 August 1964, President Johnson announced in an address to the nation that U.S. naval vessels on routine patrol were attacked on the high seas by North Vietnamese forces. He thereupon ordered bombing attacks on North Vietnam. Subsequently, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (78 Stat. 384), officially recognizing the presumed fact and authorizing use of military force. The North Vietnamese attacks, however, were apparently imaginary. And the ships in question were covering South Vietnamese fast boats on raids into North Vietnamese territorial waters; the operation was known as OPLAN 34-A. Daniel Ellsberg, who was on duty at the Pentagon the night of the incident, claims the U.S. vessels were on a so-called DeSoto mission inside territorial waters to probe North Vietnamese radars.

Item: According to a British government memo seen by Phillipe Sands, a Queen’s Council and professor of international law at University College, London, discussions between the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister prior to the invasion of Iraq included discussion of provocations. The President told the Prime Minister that “the U.S. was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of ‘flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colors.’” [3] The evident intent was to provoke a military reaction, justifying an invasion.

Item: For more than a year, the press has reported, with gauzy and anonymous sourcing, the overflights of U.S. reconnaissance drones within the Islamic Republic of Iran. The apparent hope of the authors of these operations is that the Iranians would turn on their radars. We also hear stories of special operations into that country, courtesy of the irrepressible Seymour Hersh. New York Times reporter James Risen recounts in his book State of War (published January 2006) the intriguing tale of a U.S. attempt to plant a bogus nuclear bomb recipe on the Iranians--a plan that backfired. There is also the tale of a “found” Iranian laptop brimming with nuclear secrets. Why do one’s thoughts turn to Ahmed Chalabi, Michael Ledeen, and Yellowcake? And there is this latest bulletin, an obscure Reuters dispatch, reproduced in full below. [4]

What are we to conclude from this tour d’horizon of history’s dark crevices? We can hardly guess at the implications. Some incidents led to horrifying carnage; some fizzled out; one at least is indeterminate as of this writing. And for every incident like those recounted here, how many others have gone unrecorded?

Looking back on our historical period from the perspective of geological time, some ethereal intelligence might disdainfully surmise that the then-dominant species, being after all merely a belligerent primate, had devised deceitful behavior in order to give rise to incidents allowing him to vent his primitive aggressive impulses. At the same time, he could beat his chest in simian rage about being the aggrieved party.

That is speculation. But man, the naked ape, has occasionally risen above his degraded condition to make more cerebral conclusions than the norm. In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal deposed the perpetrator of Operation Canned Meat, S.S. Sturmbannfuhrer (Major) Alfred Naujocks, who testified to his role in the incident. Hearing of such outrages against the peace, the chief prosecutor at the tribunal, Justice Robert Jackson, was moved to say this:

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

And again this:

“Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law, if it is to serve a useful purpose, must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law.”
Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] In his Air University (and thus quasi-official) 225-page tome, A Need to Know: The Role of Air Force Reconnaissance in War Planning, 1945-1953, author John Thomas Farquhar, Lt. Col., USAF (Ret.) claims that he can find no documentation of such flights (page 162, footnote 18). How odd that a retired SAC pilot, Col. Hal Austin, posted a story on the internet asserting he flew such a mission in an RB-47.

And Walter Boyne, the unofficial bard of the world’s most expensive flying club, states in Air Force Magazine, the journal of the Air Force Association, that more than 200 SAC pilots were killed in shoot-downs over or on the periphery of Soviet air space:


[2] That the United States government was thinking so far ahead, at a period when airplane hijackings were virtually unheard of, may be of interest to scholars on the subject of airline security and may enrich their understanding of the hijacking phenomenon. The JCS document may be viewed here: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf

[3] http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1700881,00.html

[4] Iran shells Kurd positions in Iraq: Kurd official
Fri Apr 21, 2006 7:16 AM ET

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Iranian forces shelled Iranian Kurdish guerrilla positions inside mountainous northern Iraq early on Friday morning to repel an attack, a Kurdish official said.

"This morning Iranian Kurdish fighters infiltrated the border into the Iranian side and the Iranian army bombed the area and repelled them. The shelling hit Iraqi land at Sidakan," said Saadi Pira, an official of the Iraqi Kurdish, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, party.

There was no word on casualties in the shelling of the Iranian Kurdish rebels of the PJAK movement.

W. says he supports more diplomacy, but it’s the diplomacy of sanctimony. He now grudgingly notes that “the violence in Baghdad is still terrible,” but doesn’t seem to grasp the tragic enormity of an occupation that is sliding into civil war and constricting his leverage to deal with all the other crises crackling around the world. The U.N. reported last week that in May and June no less than 5,818 Iraqi civilians were killed.

Although he talked about whether America could be “facile” and “nimble” enough to change with the circumstances in the Middle East, in fundamental ways, he has not changed his attitude at all.

Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe says he conducted four “freewheeling” interviews with the president last week, and concluded: “Bush thinks the new war vindicates his early vision of the region’s struggle: of good versus evil, civilization versus terrorism, freedom versus Islamic fascism. He still believes that when it comes to war and terror, leaders need to decide whose side they are on.”

The president sees Lebanon as a test of macho mettle rather than the latest chapter in a fratricidal free-for-all that’s been going on for centuries. “I view this as the forces of instability probing weakness,” he said. “I think they’re testing resolve.”


The more things get complicated, the more W. feels vindicated in his own simplified vision. The more people try to tell him that it’s not easy, that this is a region of shifting alliances and interests, the less he seems inclined to develop an adroit policy to win people over to our side instead of trying to annihilate them.

Bill Clinton, the Mutable Man par excellence, evolved four times a day; he had a tactical and even recreational attitude toward personal change. But W. prides himself on his changelessness and regards his immutability as the surest sign of his virtue. Facing a map on fire, he sees any inkling of change as the slippery slope to failure.

That’s what’s so frustrating about watching him deal — or not deal — with Iraq and Lebanon. There’s almost nothing to watch.

It’s not even like watching paint dry, since that, too, is a passage from one state to another. It’s like watching dry paint.

All during 1939, Hitler had been spending more and more of his time atop his Berchtesgaden mountain retreat trying to figure things out. Thus far in his career, he had been the master chess player on the European stage, humbling and outmaneuvering all of his opponents, always a step or two ahead of everyone.

But now the game had changed. No longer was it a matter of bluff and dare. It had come down to actual threats of war, upon which rested the fate of millions. Hitler threatened war. Poland threatened war. Britain and France were threatening war....

The great problem for Hitler at this point in his career was that his own bloated ego was fogging up his formerly crystal clear insight into international politics. The Fuhrer-god of Germany was ever so slowly succumbing to the belief that he was infallible, that if he said such-and-such a thing was true, then indeed it must be true. He was suffering from a kind of creeping megalomania and it was clouding his judgment, blinding him to reality.

However, there was nobody left in Germany willing to tell him he was wrong, no one willing to question anything he said, no matter how outlandish it seemed.

When Hitler gathered his top generals for three separate pre-war conferences in 1939, they listened in complete silence to the dictates of the Fuhrer, which would bring about the worst catastrophe in the history of humanity.

On May 23, 1939, the Fuhrer assembled fourteen senior military officers in Berlin including Hermann Goring, Admiral Raeder, Generals Brauchitsch, Halder and Keitel, and explained that Germany needed a war because the Reich's economy was in such dire straits. And fixing Germany's economy would be "impossible without invading other countries or attacking other people's possessions."

For Nazi Germany, the acquisition of Lebensraum had now become an economic necessity. This was due to Hitler's massive rearmament program which was soaking up an amazing 23 percent of Germany's annual Gross National Product. Hitler had ordered German industry to drop everything and rearm the country as fast as possible. As a result, the employment level in the Reich stood at 125 percent, technically, meaning there was a huge labor shortage with many jobs left unfilled, especially in agriculture. This was occurring even though the overall population of the Greater Reich had swollen to 80 million with the acquisitions of Austria and Czechoslovakia....

It was now, Hitler announced, his "irrevocable decision" to go to war.

"Our economic situation is such that we cannot hold out more than a few years. Goring can confirm this. We have no other choice. We must act," Hitler said. Thus far, all of Germany's territorial gains had come as a result of "political bluff" but it was now necessary to utilize Germany's "military machine."

"I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war. Never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters but victory."

And how were his soldiers to behave during this coming war?

"Close your hearts to pity!" the Fuhrer ordered. "Act brutally! Eighty million people must obtain what is their right...The stronger man is right...Be harsh and remorseless! Be steeled against all signs of compassion!"

Hitler's 'propagandist reason' for starting the war had already been arranged by Himmler and Heydrich at the Fuhrer's request. The plan was of such importance that it was code named Operation Himmler and involved having the SS stage fake attacks by the Polish Army against German troops along the German-Polish border....

The History Place.com

31 Similarities Between Hitler and President Bush
by Edward Jayne
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 29, 2004
(revised from an earlier version posted March 29, 2003)

When President Bush decided to invade Iraq, his spokesmen began comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler, the most monstrous figure in modern history. Everybody was therefore shocked when a high German bureaucrat turned the tables by comparing Bush himself with Hitler. As to be expected, she (the bureaucrat) was forced to resign because of her extreme disrespect for an American president. However, the resemblance sticks--there are too many similarities to be ignored, some of which may be listed here.
Like Hitler, President Bush was not elected by a majority, but was forced to engage in political maneuvering in order to gain office.


Like Hitler, Bush began to curtail civil liberties in response to a well-publicized disaster, in Hitler’s case the Reichstag fire, in Bush’s case the 9-11 catastrophe.


Like Hitler, Bush went on to pursue a reckless foreign policy without the mandate of the electorate and despite the opposition of most foreign nations.


Like Hitler, Bush has increased his popularity with conservative voters by mounting an aggressive public relations campaign against foreign enemies. Just as Hitler cited international communism to justify Germany’s military buildup, Bush has used Al Qaeda and the so-called Axis of Evil to justify our current military buildup. Paradoxically none of the nations in this axis--Iraq, Iran and North Korea--have had anything to do with each other.


Like Hitler, Bush has promoted militarism in the midst of economic recession (or depression as it was called during the thirties). First he used war preparations to help subsidize defense industries (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, etc.) and presumably the rest of the economy on a trickle-down basis. Now he turns to the very same corporations to rebuild Iraq, again without competitive bidding and at extravagant profit levels.


Like Hitler, Bush displays great populist enthusiasm in his patriotic speeches, but primarily serves wealthy investors who subsidize his election campaigns and share with him their comfortable lifestyle. As he himself jokes, he treats these individuals at the pinnacle of our economy as his true political “base.”


Like Hitler, Bush envisages our nation’s unique historic destiny almost as a religious cause sanctioned by God. Just as Hitler did for Germany, he takes pride in his “providential” role in spreading his version of Americanism throughout the entire world.


Like Hitler, Bush promotes a future world order that guarantees his own nation’s hegemonic supremacy rather than cooperative harmony under the authority of the United Nations (or League of Nations).


Like Hitler, Bush quickly makes and breaks diplomatic ties, and he offers generous promises that he soon abandons, as in the cases of Mexico, Russia, Afghanistan, and even New York City. The same goes for U.S. domestic programs. Once Bush was elected, many leaders of these programs learned to dread his making any kind of an appearance to praise their success, since this was almost inevitably followed by severe cuts in their budgets.


Like Hitler, Bush scraps international treaties, most notably the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Land Mines, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Kyoto Global Warming Accord, and the International Criminal Court.


Like Hitler, Bush repeats lies often enough that they come to be accepted as the truth. Bush and his spokesmen argued, for example, that they had taken every measure possible to avoid war, than an invasion of Iraq would diminish (not intensify) the terrorist threat against the U.S., that Iraq was linked with Al Qaeda, and that nothing whatsoever had been achieved by U.N. inspectors to warrant the postponement of U.S. invasion plans. All of this was false. They also insisted that Iraq hid numerous weapons it did not possess since the mid-190s, and they refused to acknowledge the absence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq since the early nineties. As perhaps to be expected, they indignantly accused others of deception and evasiveness.


Like Hitler, Bush incessantly shifted his arguments to justify invading Iraq--from Iraq’s WMD threat to the elimination of Saddam Hussein, to his supposed Al Qaeda connection, to the creation of Iraqi democracy in the Middle East as a model for neighboring states, and back again to the WMD threat. As soon as one excuse for the war was challenged, Bush advanced to another, but only to shift back again at another time.


Like Hitler, Bush and his cohorts emphasize the ruthlessness of their enemies in order to justify their own. Just as Hitler cited the threat of communist violence to justify even greater violence on the part of Germany, the bush team justified the invasion of Iraq by emphasizing Hussein’s crimes against humanity over the past twenty-five years. However, these crimes were for the most part committed when Iraq was a client-ally of the U.S. Our government supplied Hussein with illegal weapons (poison gas included), and there were sixty U.S. advisors in Iraq when these weapons were put to use (see NY Times, Aug. 18, 1992). U.S. aid to Iraq was actually doubled afterwards despite disclaimers from Washington that our nation opposed their use. President Reagan’s special envoy Donald Rumsfeld personally informed Hussein of this one hundred percent increment during one of his two trips to Iraq at the time. He also told Hussein not to take U.S. disclaimers seriously.


Like Hitler, Bush takes pride in his status as a “War President,” and his global ambition makes him perhaps the most dangerous president in our nation’s history, a “rogue” chief executive capable of waging any number of illegal preemptive wars. He fully acknowledges his willingness to engage in wars of “choice” as well as wars of necessity. Sooner or later this choice will oblige universal conscription as well as a full-scale war economy.


Like Hitler, Bush continues to pursue war without cutting back on the peacetime economy. Additional to unprecedented low interest rates bestowed by the Federal Reserve, he has actually cut federal taxes twice by substantial amounts, especially for the top one percent of U.S. taxpayers, while conducting an expensive invasion and an even more expensive occupation of a hostile nation. As a result, President Clinton’s $350 billion budget surplus has been reduced to a $450 billion deficit, comprising an unprecedented $800 billion decline in less than four years. At the same time the U.S. dollar has steadily dropped against currencies of both Europe and Japan.


Like Hitler, Bush possesses a war machine much bigger and more effective than the military capabilities of other nations. With the extra financing obliged by the defeat and occupation of Iraq, Bush now relies on a “defense” budget well in excess of the combined military expenditures of the rest of the world. Moreover, the $416 billion defense package passed last week by Congress will probably need to be supplemented before the end of the year.


Like Hitler, bush depends on an axis of collaborative allies, which he describes as a “coalition of the willing,” in order to give the impression of a broad popular alliance. These allies include the U.K. as compared to Mussolini’s Italy, and Spain and Bulgaria, as compared to, well, Spain and Bulgaria, both of which were aligned with Germany during the thirties and World War II. As a result of their cooperation, Prime Minister Blair’s diplomatic reputation has been ruined in England, and a surprising election defeat has produced an unfriendly government in Spain. The Philippines have withdrawn their troops from Iraq to save the life of a hostage, and other defections can be expected in the near future.


Like Hitler, Bush is willing to go to war over the objections of the U.N. (League of Nations). His Iraq invasion was illegal and therefore a war crime as explained by Articles 41 and 42 of the U.N. Charter, which require two votes, not one, by the Security Council before any state takes such an action. First a vote is needed to explore all possibilities short of warfare (in Iraq’s case through the use of U.N. inspectors), and once this has been shown to be fruitless, a second vote is needed to permit military action. U.S. and U.K. delegates at the Security Council prevented this second vote once it was plain they lacked a majority. This was because other nations on the Security Council were satisfied with the findings of U.N. inspectors that no weapons of mass destruction had yet been found. Minus this second vote, the invasion was illegal. Bush also showed in the process that he has no qualms about bribing, bullying, and insulting U.N. members, even tapping their telephone lines. This was done with undecided members of the Security Council as well as the U.N. Secretary General when the U.S.-U.K. resolution was debated preceding the invasion.


Like Hitler, Bush launches unilateral invasions on a supposedly preemptive basis. Just as Hitler convinced the German public to think of Poland as a threat to Germany in 1939 (for example in his Sept. 19 speech), Bush wants Americans to think of Iraq as having been a “potential” threat to our national security--indeed as one of the instigators of the 9-11 attack despite a complete lack of evidence to support this claim.


Like Hitler, Bush depends on a military strategy that features a “shock and awe” blitzkrieg beginning with devastating air strikes, then an invasion led by heavy armored columns.


Like Hitler, Bush is willing to inflict high levels of bloodshed against enemy nations. Between 20,000 and (more probably) 37,000 are now estimated to have been killed, as much as a ro-1 kill ratio compared to the more than 900 Americans killed. In other words, for every U.S. fatality, probably as many as forty Iraqi have died.


Like Hitler, Bush is perfectly willing to sacrifice life as part of his official duty. This would be indicated by the unprecedented number of prisoners executed during his service as governor of Texas. Under no other governor in the history of the United States were so many killed.


Like Hitler, Bush began warfare on a single front (Al Qaeda quartered in Afghanistan), but then expanded it to a second front with Iraq, only to be confronted with North Korea and Iran as potential third and fourth fronts. Much the same thing happened to Hitler when he advanced German military operations from Spain to Poland and France, then was distracted by Yugoslavia before invading the USSR in 1941. Today, bush seems prevented by the excessive costs of the Iraqi debacle from going to war elsewhere if reelected, but not through any lack of desire.


Like Hitler, Bush has no qualms about imposing “regime change” by installing Quisling-style client governments backed by a U.S. military occupation with both political and economic control entirely in the hands of Americans. It is no surprise that Iyad Alawi, Iraq’s current temporary prime minister, was once affiliated with the CIA and has been reliably reported by the Australian press to have executed six hooded prisoners with a handgun to their heads just a day or two before his appointment a couple weeks ago.


Like Hitler, Bush curtails civil liberties in captive nations and depends on detention centers (i.e., concentration camps) such as a Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and any number of secret interrogation centers across the world. Prisoners at the camps go unidentified and have no legal rights as ordinarily guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. They have also been detained indefinitely (for 2 ½ years already at Guantanamo Bay), though there is mounting evidence that many are innocent of what they have been charged--some, for example, having been randomly seized by Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan for an automatic bounty from U.S. commanders. Moreover, many Iraqi prisoners have been tortured, in many instances just short of death. Recent U.S. documents disclose that as many twenty have died while being tortured, and twenty others have died under unusual circumstances yet to be determined.


Like Hitler, Bush uses the threat of enemies abroad to stir the fearful allegiance of the U.S. public. For example, he features public announcements of possible terrorist attacks in order to override embarrassing news coverage or to crowd from headlines positive coverage of Democratic Party activities. He also uses the threat of terrorism to justify extraordinary domestic powers granted by the Patriot Act. Even the books we check out of public libraries can be kept on record by federal agents.


Like Hitler, Bush depends on a propaganda machine to guarantee sympathetic news management. In Hitler’s case news coverage was totally dominated by Goebbels; in Bush’s case reporters have been almost totally “imbedded” by both military spokesmen and wealthy media owners sympathetic with Bush. The most obvious case is the Fox news channel, owned and controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Not surprisingly, recent polls indicate that the majority of Fox viewers still think Hussein played a role in the 9-11 attack.


Like Hitler, Bush increasingly reduces the circle of aides he feels he can trust as his policies keep boomeranging at his own expense. Just as Hitler ended up isolated in his headquarters, with few individuals granted access, Bush is now said to be limiting access primarily to Attorney General Ashcroft (who also talks with God on a regular basis) as well as Karl Rove, the Vice President, Karen Hughes, and a few others. Both Secretary of State Powell and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld are now said to be out of the loop.


Like Hitler, Bush has become obsessed with his vision of conflict between good (U.S. patriotism) and evil (anti-Americanism. Many in contact with the White House are said to be worried that he is beginning to lose touch with reality--perhaps resulting from the use of medication that seriously distorts his judgment. Possibly symptomatic of this concern is the increasing number of disaffected government officials who leak embarrassing documents.


Like Hitler, bush takes pleasure in the mythology of frontier justice. As a youth Hitler read and memorized the western novels of Karl May, and Bush retains into his maturity his fascination with simplistic cowboy values. He also exaggerates a cowboy twang despite his C-average elitist education at Andover, Yale, and Harvard.


Like Hitler, Bush misconstrues Darwinism, in Hitler’s case by treating the Aryan race as being superior on an evolutionary basis, in Bush’s case by rejecting science for fundamentalist creationism.


Of course countless differences may be listed between Hitler and President Bush, most of which are to the credit of Bush. Nevertheless, the resemblances listed here are striking, especially since Bush’s first term in office must be compared with Hitler’s performance as German Chancellor through the year 1937, preceding the chain of events immediately preceding World War II. In any case, George W. Bush seems the worst and most dangerous U.S. president in recent memory (for me since Roosevelt)--if not in the entire history of the United States.

Edward Jayne is a retired English professor with experience as a '60s activist. He can be contacted at: edward.jayne@wmich.edu.

We're In Trouble
Discourse.net
January 11, 2007

We're in big trouble.

Have a look at The Washington Note, whose latest begins like this:

Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.

The President may have started a new secret, informal war against Syria and Iran without the consent of Congress or any broad discussion with the country.

If this is true, we're in very big trouble. Or, if the rumor was sparked by an order 'only' authorizing clandestine operations (or, worse, bombardment) as a form of provocation, this is serious stuff. But even if it's not at all true in any way, we're in pretty big trouble, as the spread of this rumor means we've reached a point in our politics when sober, quite moderate, people like Steve Clemons are starting at shadows.

I can only remember one time that felt like this: when Nixon was in the last weeks of his Presidency, and people -- including the then-Secretary of Defense-- got worried that Nixon might try to start a war to distract the country from his troubles, or even stage some sort of coup. People in DC even began to speculate as to what military forces could be assembled as a counterweight in the event that Nixon, rumored to be drunk and unstable, chose to subvert the Constitution.

According to reports published after Nixon resigned, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger even went as far to tell some of the highest-ranking military officers to inform him if any 'extraordinary orders' went out from the White House and to refrain from carrying out any orders which came from the White House outside the normal military channels. (An action, incidentally, of dubious formal legality on the part of both James Schlesinger and his generals.)

Those were not good times.

Any time there is serious speculation by ordinarily sober people that the President has launched a secret war against one -- or two! -- countries, well, those are not good times either.

I think this is true whoever you think is at fault -- the administration for being Hell-bent for lunacy, or the DC Democrats (or if you prefer the DC Establishment), for being a bunch of strategic cowards. Whenever the level of trust within the governing class has so broken down, we are in for hard times indeed.

And if, as Clemons's article suggests, the White House is launching a new secret war (or two), then we're far worse off than we were in 1974, for who in the modern White House would cast him or herself as our modern James Schlesinger?

Troop Escalation and Iran
Distracting Congress from the Real War Plan
January 10, 2007
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Counterpunch.org

Is the surge an orchestrated distraction from the real war plan?

A good case can be made that it is. The US Congress and media are focused on President Bush's proposal for an increase of 20,000 US troops in Iraq, while Israel and its American neoconservative allies prepare an assault on Iran.

Commentators have expressed puzzlement over President Bush's appointment of a US Navy admiral as commander in charge of the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The appointment makes sense only if the administration's attention has shifted from the insurgencies to an attack on Iran.

The Bush administration has recently doubled its aircraft carrier forces and air power in the Persian Gulf. According to credible news reports, the Israeli air force has been making practice runs in preparation for an attack on Iran.

Recently, Israeli military and political leaders have described Israeli machinations to manipulate the American public and their representatives into supporting or joining an Israeli assault on Iran.

Two US carrier task forces or strike groups will certainly congest the Persian Gulf. On January 9 a US nuclear sub collided with a Japanese tanker in the Persian Gulf. Two carrier groups will have scant room for maneuver. Their purpose is either to provide the means for a hard hit on Iran or to serve as sitting ducks for a new Pearl Harbor that would rally Americans behind the new war.

Whether our ships are hit by Iran in retaliation to an attack from Israel or suffer an orchestrated attack by Israel that is blamed on the Iranians, there are certainly far more US naval forces in the Persian Gulf than prudence demands.

Bush's proposed surge appears to have no real military purpose. The US military opposes it as militarily pointless and as damaging to the US Army and Marine Corps. The surge can only be accomplished by keeping troops deployed after the arrival of their replacements.
Moreover, the increase in numbers that can be achieved in this way are far short of the numbers required to put down the insurgency and civil war.

The only purpose of the surge is to distract Congress while plans are implemented to widen the war.

Weapons inspectors have failed to find a nuclear weapons program in Iran. Most experts say it would be years before Iran could make a weapon even if the Iranian government is actively working on a weapons program. Since the danger, if any, is years away, why is Israel so determined to attack Iran now?

The answer might be that Israel has the chance now. The Bush administration is in its pocket. The White House is working with neoconservatives, not with the American foreign policy community represented by the Iraq Study Group. Neoconservative propagandists are in influential positions in the media. The US Congress is intimidated by AIPAC. The correlation of forces are heavily in Israel's favor.

Part of the Israeli/neoconservative plan has already been achieved with the destruction of civilian infrastructure and spread of sectarian strife in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. If Iran can be taken out with a powerful air attack that might involve nuclear weapons, Syria would be isolated and Hezbollah would be cut off from Iranian supplies.

Israel has two years remaining to use its American resources to achieve its aims in the Middle East. How influential will Israel and the neoconservatives be with the next president in the wake of a US defeat in Iraq and Israeli defeat in Lebanaon? If the US withdraws its troops from Iraq, as the US military and foreign policy community recommend and as polls show the American public wants, the only effect of Bush's Iraq invasion will have been to radicalize Muslims against Israel, the US, and US puppet governments in the Middle East. Extremist elements will tout their victory over the US, and the pressures on Israel to accept a realistic accommodation with Palestinians will be over-powering.

Now is the chance--the only chance--for Israel and the neoconservatives to achieve their goal of bringing Muslims to heel, a goal that they have been writing about and working to achieve for a decade.

This goal requires the war to be widened by whatever deceit and treachery necessary to bring the American public along.

The US Congress must immediately refocus its attention from the surge to Iran, the real target of Bush administration aggression.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.

Flemming Rose and the Straussian Art of Provocation
February 07th 2006
KurtNimmo

As suspected, and claimed on this blog over the weekend, the inflammatory anti-Muslim cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten were a deliberate provocation designed to outrage and incite Muslims and thus engender support in Europe and America for the manufactured “clash of civilizations” engineered by the Straussian neocons. As Christopher Bollyn writes for the American Free Press, the neocon operative behind the cartoon scheme is Flemming Rose, cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, who has “has clear ties to the Zionist Neo-Cons.” Rose “traveled to Philadelphia in October 2004 to visit Daniel Pipes, the Neo-Con ideologue who says the only path to Middle East peace will come through a total Israeli military victory. Rose then penned a positive article about Pipes, who compares ‘militant Islam’ with fascism and communism,” Bollyn reveals.

Daniel Pipes is one of the more virulent and hateful of the Straussian neocons, famous for his racist and xenophobic statement that Muslim immigrants are “brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene,” an attitude straight out of the Nazi school of racial hyperbole (a philosophy embraced by no small number of Jabotinsky Likudites and their fellow travelers among the traitorous Straussian neocons).

Bollyn continues:

“Agents of certain persuasion” are behind the egregious affront to Islam in order to provoke Muslims, Professor Mikael Rothstein of the University of Copenhagen told the BBC. The key “agent” is Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of JP, who commissioned cartoonists to produce the blasphemous images and then published them in Denmark’s leading morning paper last September….

Rose told the international paper owned by The New York Times that “he would not publish a cartoon of Israel’s Ariel Sharon strangling a Palestinian baby, since that could be construed as ‘racist.’”

As Daniel Pipes and his ilk have repeatedly demonstrated, it is not racist to characterize Arabs and Muslims as “brown-skinned peoples” suffering from bad hygiene, although it is a crime to take the apartheid state of Israel to task for murdering Palestinian children. But then, as Lenni Brenner has documented, the followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky—and his political creation, the reactionary Likud Party in Israel—are not only well versed in fascism, but murderous racism as well.

As for the unapologetic stance of the Danes in regard to publishing the cartoons, Bollyn comments:

There is clearly a more sinister reason why the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen refuses to issue a formal apology as demanded by Arab and Muslim governments. The hard-line position taken by Rasmussen, an ally in the “war on terror,” has more to do with advancing the “clash of civilizations” than defending free speech in Europe….

There is a deeper reason behind the publication of the offensive cartoons. Given the unapologetic position taken by the Danish government and the editors it appears very likely that tension with Islamic nations will increase and the international crisis will deepen. This is, after all, exactly what the global planners behind the “clash of civilizations” want.

The completely predictable reaction among Muslims sets the stage for violence and “false-flag” terror attacks as Europeans prepare to host the Olympics in Turin, Italy. The Turin-based La Stampa irresponsibly published the cartoons on Feb. 1, two days after Milan’s Corriere della Sera.

The anti-Islamic cartoon scandal is no laughing matter. If and when a terror attack does occur and the cartoons and angry Muslims are blamed for being the cause, the reason they were published will become clear. Europeans will become increasingly polarized and hostility to Islam will grow.

Of course, as the Straussian neocons prepare the next phase of their total war against Islam master plan—attacking Iran and possibly soon after Syria—tacit support from Europe will be a plus, especially after the false flag Gladio-like terror attacks in Madrid produced undesirable results (the Spanish people rejected José María Aznar, a neocon toady and grandson of a prominent fascist journalist).

So if terror attacks do indeed occur during the Olympics in Turin, we can point an accusatory finger quite naturally in the direction of the Straussian neocons, linked to Operation Gladio terrorism through Michael Ledeen, who is connected to Francesco Pazienza and the P2 Masonic Lodge responsible for the CIA-NATO sponsored Strategy of Tension terrorism campaign in Italy (an Italian criminal court convicted Pazienza in 1985 of political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of criminals and terrorists, among other offenses, in relation to the Gladio bombing of a Bologna train station, killing more than 80 people; see Jeff Wells’ Rigorous Intuition).

“One of P-2’s specialties was the art of provocation,” writes Mark Zepezauer. “Leftist organizations like the Red Brigades were infiltrated, financed and / or created, and the resulting acts of terrorism, like the assassination of Italy’s premier in 1978 and the bombing of the railway station in Bologna in 1980, were blamed on the left. The goal of this ’strategy of tension’ was to convince Italian voters that the left was violent and dangerous—by helping make it so.”

In the same way, the Straussian neocons, taking a page from the P-2 provocation playbook, are attempting to convince Europeans and Americans that Muslims are “violent and dangerous” by “helping make it so,” as Bollyn’s revelations about Flemming Rose’s role in the inflammatory publication of the anti-Muslim cartoons in Jyllands-Posten and other newspapers make obvious.

1984, chapter 1
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

“CASE GREEN WAS THE CODE NAME of the plan for a surprise attack on Czechoslovakia. It had first been drawn up, as we have seen, on June 24, 1937, by Field Marshal von Blomberg, and Hitler had elaborated on it in his lecture to the generals on November 5, admonishing them that "the descent upon the Czechs" would have to be "carried out with lightning speed" and that it might take place "as early as 1938….

Hitler rejected the "idea of strategic attack out of the blue without cause or possibility of justification" because of "hostile world opinion which might lead to a critical situation." He thought a second alternative, "action after a period of diplomatic discussions which gradually lead to a crisis and to war," was "undesirable because Czech (Green) security measures will have been taken." The Fuehrer preferred, at the moment at least, a third alternative: "Lightning action based on an incident (for example, the murder of the German minister in the course of an anti-German demonstration)." Such an "incident," it will be remembered, was at one time planned to justify a German invasion of Austria, when Papen was to have been the victim. (Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster 1960, William L. Shirer, pp. 357) “

“Operations preferably will be launched, either: (a) after a period of increasing diplomatic controversies and tension linked with military preparations, which will be exploited so as to shift the war guilt on the enemy. (B ) by lightning action as the result of a serious incident which will subject Germany to unbearable provocation and which, in the eyes of at least a part of world opinion, affords the moral justification for military measures. Case (B ) is more favorable, both from a military and a political point of view…

It was to be total war, and for the first time in the planning of German soldiers the value of what the directive calls "propaganda warfare" and "economic warfare" is emphasized and their employment woven into the over-all military plan of attack.

Propaganda warfare [emphasis in the original] must on the one hand intimidate the Czechs by means of threats and wear down their power of resistance; on the other hand it must give the national minorities indications as to how to support our military operations and influence the neutrals in our favor.

Economic warfare has the task of employing all available economic resources to hasten the final collapse of the Czechs... In the course of military operations it is important to help to increase the total economic war effort by rapidly collecting information about important factories and setting them going again as soon as possible. For this reason the sparing-as far as military operations permit —of Czech industrial and engineering establishments may be of decisive importance to us. (Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster 1960, William L. Shirer, pp. 362)”

POLITICS-US: Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel
Analysis by Gareth Porter*

Image from Iranian video depicting the Jan. 7 encounter with U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Credit:Press-TV

WASHINGTON, Jan 10 (IPS) - Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to U.S. ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a "battle at sea", new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no U.S. commander was on the verge of firing at the Iranian boats.

The new information that appears to contradict the original version of the incident includes the revelation that U.S. officials spliced the audio recording of an alleged Iranian threat onto to a videotape of the incident. That suggests that the threatening message may not have come in immediately after the initial warning to Iranian boats from a U.S. warship, as appears to do on the video.

Also unraveling the story is testimony from a former U.S. naval officer that non-official chatter is common on the channel used to communicate with the Iranian boats and testimony from the commander of the U.S. 5th fleet that the commanding officers of the U.S. warships involved in the incident never felt the need to warn the Iranians of a possible use of force against them.

Further undermining the U.S. version of the incident is a video released by Iran Thursday showing an Iranian naval officer on a small boat hailing one of three ships.

The Iranian commander is heard to say, "Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat." He then requests the "side numbers" of the U.S. warships. A voice with a U.S. accent replies, "This is coalition warship 73. I am operating in international waters."

The dramatic version of the incident reported by U.S. news media throughout Tuesday and Wednesday suggested that Iranian speedboats, apparently belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard navy, had made moves to attack three U.S. warships entering the Strait and that the U.S. commander had been on the verge of firing at them when they broke off.

Typical of the network coverage was a story by ABC's Jonathan Karl quoting a Pentagon official as saying the Iranian boats "were a heartbeat from being blown up".

Bush administration officials seized on the incident to advance the portrayal of Iran as a threat and to strike a more threatening stance toward Iran. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley declared Wednesday that the incident "almost involved an exchange of fire between our forces and Iranian forces". President George W. Bush declared during his Mideast trip Wednesday that there would be "serious consequences" if Iran attacked U.S. ships and repeated his assertion that Iran is "a threat to world peace".

Central to the depiction of the incident as involving a threat to U.S. warships is a mysterious pair of messages that the sailor who heard them onboard immediately interpreted as saying, "I am coming at you...", and "You will explode after a few minutes." But the voice in the audio clearly said "I am coming to you," and the second message was much less clear.

Furthermore, as the New York Times noted Thursday, the recording carries no ambient noise, such as the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind, which should have been audible if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small Iranian boats.

A veteran U.S. naval officer who had served as a surface warfare officer aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Gulf sent a message to the New York Times on-line column "The Lede" Wednesday pointing out that in the Persian Gulf, the "bridge-to-bridge" radio channel used to communicate between ships "is like a bad CB radio" with many people using it for "hurling racial slurs" and "threats". The former officer wrote that his "first thought" was that the message "might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft".

Pentagon officials admitted to the Times that they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from another source

The five Iran boats involved were hardly in a position to harm the three U.S. warships. Although Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman described the Iranian boats as "highly maneuverable patrol craft" that were "visibly armed," he failed to note that these are tiny boats carrying only a two- or three-man crew and that they are normally armed only with machine guns that could do only surface damage to a U.S. ship.

The only boat that was close enough to be visible to the U.S. ships was unarmed, as an enlarged photo of the boat from the navy video clearly shows.

The U.S. warships were not concerned about the possibility that the Iranian boats were armed with heavier weapons capable of doing serious damage. Asked by a reporter whether any of the vessels had anti-ship missiles or torpedoes, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, Commander of the 5th Fleet, answered that none of them had either of those two weapons.

"I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats," said Cosgriff.

The edited Navy video shows a crewman issuing an initial warning to approaching boats, but the footage of the boats maneuvering provides no visual evidence of Iranian boats "making a run on U.S. ships" as claimed by CBS news Wednesday in its report based on the new video.

Vice Adm. Cosgriff also failed to claim any run toward the U.S. ships following the initial warning. Cosgriff suggested that the Iranian boat's manoeuvres were "unduly provocative" only because of the "aggregate of their manoeuvres, the radio call and the dropping of objects in the water".

He described the objects dropped by the Iranian boat as being "white, box-like objects that floated". That description indicates that the objects were clearly not mines, which would have been dark and would have sunk immediately. Cosgriff indicated that the ships merely "passed by them safely" without bothering to investigate whether they were explosives of some kind.

The apparent absence of concern on the part of the U.S. ships' commanding officers about the floating objects suggests that they recognised that the Iranians were engaging in a symbolic gesture having to do with laying mines.

Cosgriff's answers to reporters' questions indicated that the story promoted earlier by Pentagon officials that one of the U.S . ships came very close to firing at the Iranian boats seriously distorted what actually happened. When Cosgriff was asked whether the crew ever gave warning to the Iranian boats that they "could come under fire", he said the commanding officers "did not believe they needed to fire warning shots".

As for the report circulated by at least one Pentagon official to the media that one of the commanders was "close to firing", Cosgriff explained that "close to" meant that the commander was "working through a series of procedures". He added, "[I]n his mind, he might have been closing in on that point."

Despite Cosgriff's account, which contradicted earlier Pentagon portrayals of the incident as a confrontation, not a single news outlet modified its earlier characterisation of the incident. After the Cosgriff briefing, Associated Press carried a story that said, " U.S. forces were taking steps toward firing on the Iranians to defend themselves, said the U.S. naval commander in the region. But the boats -- believed to be from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's navy -- turned and moved away, officials said."

That was quite different from what Cosgriff actually said.

In its story covering the Cosgriff briefing, Reuters cited "other Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity" as saying that "a U.S. captain was in the process of ordering sailors to open fire when the Iranian boats moved away" -- a story that Cosgriff had specifically denied.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.

“The people were in need of the treatment which Hitler, abetted by Goebbels and Himmler, had become so expert in applying. I had been about in the streets of Berlin, talking with the ordinary people, and that morning noted in my diary: "Everybody against the war. People talking openly. How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?" Despite all my experience in the Third Reich I asked such a naive question! Hitler knew the answer very well. Had he not the week before on his Bavarian mountaintop promised the generals that he would "give a propagandist reason for starting the war" and admonished them not to "mind whether it was plausible or not"? "The victor," he had told them, "will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory." At 9 P.M., as we have seen, all German radio stations broadcast the Fuehrer's Polish peace proposals which, as they were read over the air,seemed so reasonable to this misled correspondent. The fact that Hitler had never presented them to the Poles nor even, except in a vague and unofficial manner, to the British, and then less than twenty-four hours before, was brushed over. In fact, in a lengthy statement explaining to the German people how their government had exhausted every diplomatic means to preserve the peace the Chancellor, no doubt aided by Goebbels, showed that he had lost none of his touch for masterly deceit…

Good propaganda, to be effective, as Hitler and Goebbels had learned from experience, needs more than words. It needs deeds, however much they may have to be fabricated. Having convinced the German people (and of this the writer can testify from personal observation) that the Poles had rejected the Fuehrer's generous peace offer, there remained only the concocting of a deed which would "prove" that not Germany but Poland had attacked first. For this last shady business, it will be remembered, the Germans, at Hitler's direction, had made careful preparation. * For six days Alfred Naujocks, the intellectual S.S. ruffian, had been waiting at Gleiwitz on the Polish border to carry out a simulated Polish attack on the German radio station there. The plan had been revised. S.S. men outfitted in Polish Army uniforms were to do the shooting, and drugged concentration camp inmates were to be left dying as "casualties"-this last delectable part of the operation had, as we have seen, the expressive code name "Canned Goods." There were to be several such faked "Polish attacks" but the principal one was to be on the radio station at Gleiwitz.

At noon on August 31 [Naujocks related in his Nuremberg affidavit] I received from Heydrich the code word for the attack which was to take place at 8 o'clock that evening. Heydrich said: "In order to carry out this attack report to Mueller for Canned Goods." I did this and gave Mueller instructions to deliver the man near the radio station. I received this man and had him laid down at the entrance to the station. He was alive but completely unconscious. I tried to open his eyes. I could not recognize by his eyes that he was alive, only by his breathing. I did not see the gun wounds but a lot of blood was smeared across his face. He was in civilian clothes. We seized the radio station, as ordered, broadcast a speech of three to four minutes over an emergency transmitter,* fired some pistol shots and left.

The "Polish attack" at Gleiwitz was used by Hitler in his speech to the Reichstag the next day and was cited as justification for the Nazi aggression by Ribbentrop, Weizsaecker and other members of the Foreign Office in their propaganda. The New York Times and other newspapers reported it, as well as similar incidents, in their issues of September 1, 1939. It remains only to be added that according to the testimony at Nuremberg of General Lahousen, of the Abwehr, all the S.S. men who wore Polish uniforms in the simulated attacks that evening were, as the General put it, "put out of the way." (Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster 1960, William L. Shirer, pp. 593-595)”

Ren, a lot of the applied foreign policy from the Busheviks comes from stuff like Ralph Peters "Greater Muddle East" project and other pipe-dreams, all based on the background drone of Steyn, Pipes and the Horrorwitz Fundynation heavy-breathing, as well as the basic dellusional idiocy of the "Dear Leader" and the rest of the über-zionist neocons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Peters
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899

He's a strange guy, Peters. He almost sounds good, but I have a feeling, an "Ollie North" type feeling, about him. Amerika über alles...

CentCom Commander Fallon: Attack On Iran ‘Will Not Happen On My Watch’

Earlier this year, the Bush administration deployed a second Navy group carrier into the Persian Gulf. Vice President Cheney referred to the move as an attempt to send a “strong signal” about the administration’s commitment to confronting Iran.

In February, Newsweek reported that the Bush administration was planning to ratchet up the pressure even further by deploying a third carrier group into the Gulf. Hillary Mann, the administration’s former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs, warned that some Bush advisers secretly wanted an excuse to attack Iran. “They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for,” she told Newsweek.

IPS reported yesterday that the administration’s attempt to send the third carrier group was vetoed by the new head of the U.S. Central Command Admiral William Fallon:

Admiral William Fallon, then President George W. Bush’s nominee to head the Central Command (CENTCOM), expressed strong opposition in February to an administration plan to increase the number of carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf from two to three and vowed privately there would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM.

Fallon’s resistance to the proposed deployment of a third aircraft carrier was followed by a shift in the Bush administration’s Iran policy in February and March away from increased military threats and toward diplomatic engagement with Iran. That shift, for which no credible explanation has been offered by administration officials, suggests that Fallon’s resistance to a crucial deployment was a major factor in the intra-administration struggle over policy toward Iran.

One source said Fallon sent a memo that “insisted there was no military requirement for” for an additional carrier. Fallon private conveyed around the time of his confirmation hearing that an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch.” IPS notes, “Fallon’s refusal to support a further naval buildup in the Gulf reflected his firm opposition to an attack on Iran and an apparent readiness to put his career on the line to prevent it.”

While Fallon’s message may have affected the deployment of another Navy carrier, it didn’t stop Vice President Cheney from finding other ways to issue symbolic acts of provocation against Iran. Last week, Cheney stood aboard one of the two carriers currently in the Gulf and warned Iran that the U.S. was prepared to use its naval power to keep Tehran from disrupting off oil routes or “gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.”

“CASE GREEN WAS THE CODE NAME of the plan for a surprise attack on Czechoslovakia. It had first been drawn up, as we have seen, on June 24, 1937, by Field Marshal von Blomberg, and Hitler had elaborated on it in his lecture to the generals on November 5, admonishing them that "the descent upon the Czechs" would have to be "carried out with lightning speed" and that it might take place "as early as 1938….

Hitler rejected the "idea of strategic attack out of the blue without cause or possibility of justification" because of "hostile world opinion which might lead to a critical situation." He thought a second alternative, "action after a period of diplomatic discussions which gradually lead to a crisis and to war," was "undesirable because Czech (Green) security measures will have been taken." The Fuehrer preferred, at the moment at least, a third alternative: "Lightning action based on an incident (for example, the murder of the German minister in the course of an anti-German demonstration)." Such an "incident," it will be remembered, was at one time planned to justify a German invasion of Austria, when Papen was to have been the victim. (Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster 1960, William L. Shirer, pp. 357) “

CentCom Commander Fallon: Attack On Iran ‘Will Not Happen On My Watch’

In February, Newsweek reported that the Bush administration was planning to ratchet up the pressure even further by deploying a third carrier group into the Gulf. Hillary Mann, the administration’s former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs, warned that some Bush advisers secretly wanted an excuse to attack Iran. “They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for,” she told Newsweek.

US says Iran could do more to help end Iraq unrest
March 27, 2008
AFP.com

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Iran could do more to help end violence in Iraq, the US military said on Wednesday, calling on Tehran to use its influence to help end lawlessness in the southern city of Basra.

"There is no question that the government of Iran has significant influence in Basra, in the province and in southeastern Iraq in general," said military spokesman Major General Kevin Bergner.

"We would love to see the government of Iran fulfill its commitments to help improve security and stability (in Basra) ... and reduce the activities of those operating outside the law," Bergner told a news conference in Baghdad.

He was speaking a day after Iraqi security forces launched a massive sweep in the southern oil hub aimed, according to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, at "lawless gangs" that have taken over parts of city.

Bergner said around 2,000 additional troops and police had been moved into Basra to assist in the operation to quell the armed groups, triggering fighting that has left about 50 dead in Basra and Baghdad.

Witnesses have said the troops are moving into areas controlled by the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr but Bergner said the militia is not being targeted in particular.

"The actions are not against (the Mahdi Army). It is the government of Iraq taking responsibility and acting to deal with criminals on the streets."

Iraqi troops moved into the city on Tuesday and "will continue to press into neighbourhoods and districts... that are contested," Bergner said, adding that the US military is not participating beyond playing a liaison role.

He said the operation was aimed at improving security in oil-rich Basra province ahead of provincial elections in October.

"The prime minister's assessement is that without this operation there will not be any hopeful prospect of improving security in Basra," Bergner said.

"As we look forward to the prospect of elections later this fall, the government of Iraq is stepping up its responsibility to set the necessary security conditions that will be important for those elections to be implemented."

In Sadr City, the Mahdi Army bastion in eastern Baghdad, the general said that since Tuesday US and Iraqi forces had been targeting those firing rockets and mortars into the highly fortified Green Zone and surrounding suburbs.

"Much of the indirect fire... has emanated from east Baghdad and Sadr City," he said, using the term the US military employs for rockets and mortars.

"We have a responsibility to work with the Iraqi security forces and interdict the ability of indirect fire cells to continue doing what they are doing... and to enforce the rule of law against the criminal actions of armed groups."

Bergner blamed "Special Groups" for mortar and rocket attacks and said Iraqi and US forces were not targeting the Mahdi Army in particular, but only those members ignoring Sadr's ceasefire pledge "and who are breaking the law."

"We are not targeting individuals because of their political affiliation," Bergner said.

US commanders say Special Groups are made up of disaffected Mahdi Army fighters who have allegedly been trained in Iran by members of the elite Quds Force in the use of sophisticated weaponry, including rockets, mortars and lethal roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators.

Bergner said the Basra operation "reflects the growing ability of the Iraqi government and the security forces."

A year ago, he added, the Iraqi government would not have been able to move so many soldiers across the country to mount a security sweep such as that under way in Basra.

“The people were in need of the treatment which Hitler, abetted by Goebbels and Himmler, had become so expert in applying. I had been about in the streets of Berlin, talking with the ordinary people, and that morning noted in my diary: "Everybody against the war. People talking openly. How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?" Despite all my experience in the Third Reich I asked such a naive question! Hitler knew the answer very well. Had he not the week before on his Bavarian mountaintop promised the generals that he would "give a propagandist reason for starting the war" and admonished them not to "mind whether it was plausible or not"? "The victor," he had told them, "will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory." At 9 P.M., as we have seen, all German radio stations broadcast the Fuehrer's Polish peace proposals which, as they were read over the air,seemed so reasonable to this misled correspondent. The fact that Hitler had never presented them to the Poles nor even, except in a vague and unofficial manner, to the British, and then less than twenty-four hours before, was brushed over. In fact, in a lengthy statement explaining to the German people how their government had exhausted every diplomatic means to preserve the peace the Chancellor, no doubt aided by Goebbels, showed that he had lost none of his touch for masterly deceit…

Good propaganda, to be effective, as Hitler and Goebbels had learned from experience, needs more than words. It needs deeds, however much they may have to be fabricated. Having convinced the German people (and of this the writer can testify from personal observation) that the Poles had rejected the Fuehrer's generous peace offer, there remained only the concocting of a deed which would "prove" that not Germany but Poland had attacked first. For this last shady business, it will be remembered, the Germans, at Hitler's direction, had made careful preparation. * For six days Alfred Naujocks, the intellectual S.S. ruffian, had been waiting at Gleiwitz on the Polish border to carry out a simulated Polish attack on the German radio station there. The plan had been revised. S.S. men outfitted in Polish Army uniforms were to do the shooting, and drugged concentration camp inmates were to be left dying as "casualties"-this last delectable part of the operation had, as we have seen, the expressive code name "Canned Goods." There were to be several such faked "Polish attacks" but the principal one was to be on the radio station at Gleiwitz.

At noon on August 31 [Naujocks related in his Nuremberg affidavit] I received from Heydrich the code word for the attack which was to take place at 8 o'clock that evening. Heydrich said: "In order to carry out this attack report to Mueller for Canned Goods." I did this and gave Mueller instructions to deliver the man near the radio station. I received this man and had him laid down at the entrance to the station. He was alive but completely unconscious. I tried to open his eyes. I could not recognize by his eyes that he was alive, only by his breathing. I did not see the gun wounds but a lot of blood was smeared across his face. He was in civilian clothes. We seized the radio station, as ordered, broadcast a speech of three to four minutes over an emergency transmitter,* fired some pistol shots and left.

The "Polish attack" at Gleiwitz was used by Hitler in his speech to the Reichstag the next day and was cited as justification for the Nazi aggression by Ribbentrop, Weizsaecker and other members of the Foreign Office in their propaganda. The New York Times and other newspapers reported it, as well as similar incidents, in their issues of September 1, 1939. It remains only to be added that according to the testimony at Nuremberg of General Lahousen, of the Abwehr, all the S.S. men who wore Polish uniforms in the simulated attacks that evening were, as the General put it, "put out of the way." (Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster 1960, William L. Shirer, pp. 593-595)”

EXCLUSIVE: To Provoke War, Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them»
by Faiz on Jul 31st, 2008

Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.

In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.

During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

Watch it:

Hersh argued that one of the things the Bush administration learned during the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz was that, “if you get the right incident, the American public will support” it.

“Look, is it high school? Yeah,” Hersh said. “Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.”

Transcript:

HERSH: There was a meeting. Among the items considered and rejected — which is why the New Yorker did not publish it, on grounds that it wasn’t accepted — one of the items was why not…

There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.

And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

So I can understand the argument for not writing something that was rejected — uh maybe. My attitude always towards editors is they’re mice training to be rats.

But the point is jejune, if you know what that means. Silly? Maybe. But potentially very lethal. Because one of the things they learned in the incident was the American public, if you get the right incident, the American public will support bang-bang-kiss-kiss. You know, we’re into it.

…What happened in the Gulf was, in the Straits, in early January, the President was just about to go to the Middle East for a visit. So that was one reason they wanted to gin it up. Get it going.

Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.

UpdateKevin Drum adds:

If this story sounds familiar, that's because it is. In one of David Manning's famous memos describing a prewar meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair, he says that Bush admitted that WMD was unlikely to be found in Iraq and then mused on some possible options for justifying a war anyway:

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

In the end, of course, we didn't do this. We just didn't bother with any pretext at all.

CIA Agent Allegedly Involved in Forged Iraq Letter Ran Previous Operation to Create Pretext for War
Posted by kpete in General Discussion
Wed Aug 06th 2008, 12:41 PM
Jonathan Schwarz:

CIA Agent Allegedly Involved in Forged Iraq Letter Ran Previous Operation to Create Pretext for War

In Ron Suskind’s interview on NPR today (and also in his new book), he names CIA operative John Maguire as one of the people allegedly involved in the Iraq letter forging. This is from Suskind’s NPR appearance:

NPR: Are you saying George Tenet told you, I was given this order to lie, and I fulfilled that?

SUSKIND: There are off the record sources in the book, but there are on the record sources who are right in the thick of this operation: Rob Richer, the head of the Near East Division, just a notch or two below Tenet. Richer turns to Tenet, as remembers it, and says, “Listen, Marine”—Richer’s a former Marine—”you’re not going to like this, but here goes.” Richer then takes it, he turns to John Maguire, who runs Iraq for the CIA, another senior manager. And Richer talks to Maguire, old intelligence hands, and they say, goodness gracious, all right, well, an order’s an order. And it goes down the chain.

This is the description, in Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, of part of a pre-war covert CIA plan named Anabasis and run by John Maguire. It had been authorized by George Bush in February, 2002:

Who needed evidence of weapons of mass destruction? John Maguire, the deputy chief of the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group, and the agency officers working the Anabasis project had their own plan for starting the war, and it had nothing to do with the WMD debate. They also had a small army of Iraqi commandoes—led by a former Iraqi war hero—willing to put the plan into action…

The plan was a core element of the original Anabasis program. These were the CIA-backed commandoes who would seize control of an Iraqi case at Nukhaib, near the Saudi border. Then they would go on the radio, announce a coup was underway, call on military units within Iraq to join them, and request that other nations support their bid to topple Saddam. Saddam, the thinking went, would be compelled to send troops to regain the base. But that would require him to violate the no-fly zone. The United States and Britain would then have a reason to attack Saddam’s forces, and the war would be on. The Bush administration, Maguire later said, “was too wedded” to the WMD argument for war. “The idea was to create an incident in which Saddam lashes out.” If all went as planned, “you’d have a premise for war: we’ve been invited in.”

Suskind: White House Ordered Forged, Backdated Letter After Invasion To Concoct Saddam-9/11 Link»

A new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind claims that, after the Iraq war began, the White House ordered the CIA to forge a “backdated, handwritten letter” from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein, in an attempt to tie Hussein to the 9/11 attacks. Here’s what Suskind reports:

– Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, told U.S. and British officials there was no WMD in Iraq, “intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

– In the fall of 2003, the White House ordered CIA Director George Tenet to forge a “fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq” and that Iraq bought yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help of al Qaeda.

– The letter was commissioned “from the highest reaches of the White House.” “It would have to come from the very top,” Suskind told NPR today.

After the fake letter was released in late 2003, press outlets reported it as evidence of a Saddam/al Qaeda link. “Now, if this is true, that blows the lid off al Qaeda—Saddam,” said Bill O’Reilly at the time.

“The White House plans to push back hard,” Politico reports. Former CIA Director George Tenet today called the charges “ridiculous” and questioned whether Suskind is a “serious journalist.” “There was no such order from the White House to me,” he said. On NBC’s Today Show, Suskind said Tenet simply does not remember the letter — but Tenet’s staff does:

I think this is part of George’s memory issue. … He seems not to remember it. That’s at least what he claims. In this book, instead of going to George, I went to all the people around George, close to George, who remember because they were involved in the thing, and they remember what George says to them.

Watch it:

After a White House meeting, Tenet went back to the CIA and ordered his staff to forge the letter. “Listen Marine, you’re not going to like this, but here goes,” Tenet told Rob Richer, former head of the CIA’s Near East Division, according to Richer.

Suskind also said he spoke with U.S. intelligence officials who stated that Bush was informed unequivocally in January 2003 that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

White House press spokesman Tony Fratto attacked Suskind today, stating that he “makes a living from gutter journalism” and calling the book one of Suskind’s “bizarre conspiracy theories.”

If I Were a Betting Man, I'd Wager that Cheney Was Behind the Anthrax Attacks
THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher
August 9, 2008

You'd have to be a terribly cautious and willfully blind person not to think that the Bush Administration was capable of orchestrating the anthrax attacks. You'd almost have to be a fool.

Years after the anthrax attacks were aimed at Democratic senators who were necessary to pass the "spy on Americans," cynically named "Patriot Act," suddenly the latest "prime suspect" commits suicide without leaving a note or anything, but then the FBI makes claims about how they "got their man" after how many seasons of incompetence in their investigation had passed?

Anyone who doesn't believe that an administration that had the CIA (or perhaps Douglas Feith's "manufactured evidence" Defense Department office) forge and backdate a letter to link Saddam to Osama to help justify the war with Iraq is not capable of using army-produced weapons grade anthrax, out of a Defense Department facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland ... anyone who doesn't believe that an administration that forged Niger uranium documents to falsely link Saddam to a purchase that could facilitate a nuclear program that had been shuttered ... anyone who doesn't believe that an administration that lied about knowing where WMDs were hidden in Iraq (as Rumsfeld and Cheney claimed), when those weapons didn't exist ... well anyone who doesn't believe that such people who believe that they are "masters of the universe" and above the Constitution and the law would be concerned about "collateral damage" in a domestic anthrax attack is naive and incapable of understanding the heart of darkness that lurks within Cheney and his puppet in the White House. (George W. Bush ever in need of finding ways to prove his manhood through being indifferent to the deaths of others.)

BuzzFlash was around, as we have said many a time, since May of 2000.

We reported on the suspicious domestic terrorism anthrax attacks when they occurred, and how odd it appeared that the Bush Administration never appeared concerned about domestic terrorism, even after the attacks. In fact, as Ron Suskind's book reports, the Bush Administration pushed ABC News and others to link the anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein. Suskind reveals much more, including that the WH rejected overtures from Iran to help clamp down on Al Qaeda, who is no friend to them (being a Shiite vs. Sunni match up).

The best analysis on the highly questionable "resolution" of the multi-year Keystone Cops FBI investigation (by design BuzzFlash believes -- how can the Bush Administration investigate itself; it couldn't in the Valerie Plame outing or the Katrina failure, because Bush would have had to find himself guilty) is coming from Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. Greenwald is taking the Ivins suicide and anthrax attacks on with a sense of detail and passion that is unmatched on the Net or in the corporate press.

But BuzzFlash was online when it happened, and we took note of how ineptly the FBI handled the case of domestic terrorism that not only resulted in the deaths of people, but was aimed at senior Democratic senators (and some "liberal" members of the press). There was something worrisome about an anthrax attack that emanated from a Department of Defense facility -- and there still is.

Just a few days ago, it was the anniversary of Bush receiving a briefing in August of 2001 that bin Laden was determined to hijack planes in the United States. Bush blew it off. He told a CIA briefer at his Crawford ranch who tried to tell him about terrorist threats that the guy had covered his arse and could leave Bush's Hollywood set "regular guy" vacation retreat and leave Bush alone.

9/11 happened on Bush's watch, even though he was warned. We pointed out at the time that the least Bush and Rice could have done was raise a security alert and order airports to take special precautions to prevent hijackings, but they did nothing -- absolutely nothing.

One of the most tragic failings of the corporate press was that when confronted with the August briefing and other warnings of Al Qaeda preparing to launch attacks on U.S. soil prior to 9/11 -- including the pleading of Robert Clarke -- Rice and Bush claimed that if they had been warned of intended efforts to fly planes into buildings that they would have taken precautions. The White House "press corps" stenographers nodded and told us that this excuse made sense.

But we pointed out then, so many years ago, that it made no sense whatsoever. The way to try and prevent airplane hijackings that end up in suicide attacks on buildings is the same way you prevent hijackings in general: you stop them at the airport. You can't construct magic shields around buildings. So Bush and Rice were let off by the mainstream media, even though their incompetence (or worse) resulted in no action being taken to stop the hijackings, even though the title of the August briefing was about planned hijackings, as Rice was forced to concede in Congressional testimony.

So, anyone who doesn't believe that anthrax attacks that originated with U.S. government-created, bio-warfare weapons grade anthrax, could have been part of an effort to move Congress and the American people toward war for oil and empire, as well as toward a tsarist level of "unitary executive" authority, well anyone who doesn't believe that the anthrax attacks might have been part of Dick Cheney's "dark shadow" planning is ready to audition for Pollyanna.

Oh, and did we mention the recent Seymour Hersh revelation that Cheney and some White House staff members recently spent some time brainstorming how to provoke Iran into war, including "false flag" operations? We wrote about that in a recent BuzzFlash editor's blog.

We don't generally get into conspiracy theories, because by their very nature they are theories for which factual evidence doesn't exist. If the corroborating details are there, then it isn't a theory; it's fact.

Saying the WH, particularly Cheney, were likely behind the anthrax attacks may still fall into the category of conspiracy theory. But if I were a betting man, I think that you can probably safely move that conspiracy theory into the column of fact.

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

In Anthrax Case, Hindsight
Shifts View of Ivins
Actions to AidProbe AppearNow As Cover-Up
By ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON and SIOBHAN GORMAN
August 9, 2008; Page A2

WASHINGTON -- One night in autumn 2001, as the U.S. reeled from the worst act of bioterrorism in its history, Bruce Ivins was alone in his cluttered Fort Detrick, Md., office, scrubbing phones, walls and furniture.

For colleagues, this was proof of the anthrax scientist's attention to safety. From a distance of seven years, it might be evidence of his guilt.

Like the detective in Agatha Christie's play "Mousetrap" who turned out to be the murderer, Dr. Ivins played a haunting dual role in the anthrax mystery, federal law-enforcement agents say. He was part of the team that examined the poisoned letters. Investigators say he implicated other scientists and submitted incomplete samples to throw them off-track. The Pentagon even adopted t