It is amazing to me that people, especially the M.S.M. are just catching on to the fact that Bush2 is a serial liar, worse than Holden Caufield, where if he says something truthfully it is rare. I doubt it has happened since the Supreme Court elected him in 2000. Cheney might be crazy enough to actually convince himself of his lies. But no matter, they and their kleptocratic, megalomanic fellow oligarchs are profiting handsomely from their war-mongering and so-called incompetence.
These guys are very competent at gerrymandering, playing race or homophobia, fomenting fear, lying, and getting us into wars, like marketing a product.
The game plan for Iran is different than Iraq. It is clear to everyone that the WMD canard is played out. No one believes anyone in the Bush administration about such things. And getting consensus and making an international case takes too long and won't work anyway.
Bush will use our troops in Iraq and the multiple aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf to incite an incident with Iran, quickly following up so we can bomb them and start a war quickly. Facts on the ground style, or should I say, bombs in the ground style. And these guys are chomping at the bit to use some nukes, too.
I envision this starting with a trumped up 'incident'
a-la Gulf of Tonkin affair, which has only recently (
thank you Bamford) come out as, at best, an exaggeration, if not a total fabrication.
This provocation or fabrication to start war is an American military tradition, including the USS Maine incident in 1898 in which our ship sinking in Havana Harbor was blamed on the Spanish, who were roughing up their Cuban colony. Meanwhile, our press, led by W.R. Heart was whipping up Cuban sympathy. I don't think he used nearly as much ink detailing southern oppression, northern poverty, or the sweat shops two miles away.
Seventy-five years later our investigation of the incident concluded that the Spanish had nothing to do with the Maine sinking. It was due to engine room failure or intentional self-sabotage. We are still not sure. But Hearst's tower still has a great view of the Battleship Maine Memorial on Columbus Circle, but it is not considered polite to bring that up inside the offices that publish Popular Mechanics, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Oprah Magazine, Redbook, and Good Housekeeping. The new Hearst Tower is by Norman Vincent Foster, the same architect of Tower Two at the new-to-be World Trade Center, the handsomest tower in the complex' design.
But the heat of the moment, stoked by newsprint and 'incident' worked out well for the coming U.S. Empire: the U.S. took over (officially, economically, covertly-clandestinely, or out and out criminally) the declining Spanish empire's colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Can Empire co-exist with Democracy? Perhaps not, and certainly not with a Presidential rather than a Parliamentary Executive. Our fixed election terms give the executive power to run the military and the government much like a dominant quarterback, just making it to the next down. Term limits just makes the President have to move faster, and Bush already has two wars, both kind of stale from his perspective.
President Polk in 1848 is largely accepted by now of provoking war with Mexico, through a faked incident, to finally get Texas after ten years of diddling in between, and taking over the top half of Mexico including present-day California, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. At the time, nearly half the country didn't buy the warmongering pretexts. Freshman Congressman Lincoln decried it for that reason, although maybe he was really concerned that there were so many southern-type states/territories in the warzone, threatening the balance of power in the nation from industrial/northern to rural/southern.
In history class, we wash the whole thing down with sweet Manifest Destiny elixir. Like the song says, from sea to shining sea, it just makes sense, so obvious that it must be G*d-given, like a new covenant, a new Canaan.
We have Iran surrounded to the west from Iraq and from the northeast in Afghanistan, and from the south in the Gulf. We have the largest military in the world, greater than the rest of the world's forces combined, so we gotta use that stuff. And if we don't use that stuff, then we are stuck with it, and the values or stocks of those firms that Carlyle Group owns go down with the revenues and profits. Same thing for Halliburton and Kellogg Brown and Root.
And, not by coincidence, the hotspot is in the heart of the middle east, the Straits of Hormuz between where all of Iran, Iraq, and Saudi's oil is exported. You don't and didn't see us fighting with North Korea for their WMD, or India's or Pakistan's. The other investments that the Bushes, Cheneys and their cohorts share is in oil.
All this constant instability has tripled the price of oil, even though supply is roughly the same. People think Bush botched Iraq, New Orleans (clearing most of the Democrats out of the one Democratic city in that Republican State), and Afghanistan, where the Taliban are creeping into power again, selling tons of heroin flooding the world market. All that oil and drug money buys the US' biggest export: arms, and it doesn't hurt our other big ones either, entertainment and agriculture. Exxon-Mobil, the great Saudi partner, recently reported quarterly profits of around $10 Billion! That's 2,500 million dollars a month. War with Iran will give Osama or is it Aiyman Zawahiri what they said they wanted a few years ago: a 'fair price for oil, over $100 per barrel.'
But too bad for us, and not just because of $4 per gallon gasoline, inflation for the huge military debts, and the tens of thousands of troops maimed or killed.
Iran is not going to fight us on the battlefields of our choosing at a time that we pick. They will fight the U.S. by acts of terror, such as blowing up any centers with the name "Jewish" in their title, like what happened in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s that killed nearly a hundred people at a recreation center, mostly kids and day-care providers. Or blowing up a ferry, a highly visible way to kill thousands of people while playing out for everyone to see for a long while. Or shooting up a shopping mall, or even driving inside one, Blues Brothers style except with much fewer near-misses. This will slow our economy down, and kill lots of random diverse people, but not nearly as many will be killed by the bombs, fallout, and cancers in Persia and India.
I have often wondered when Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney were going to declare finding the caches of WMD in Iraq. I mean, that is their true incompetence: not successfully planting WMD. The war was going well in 2003, too well. The Iraqi troops seemed to melt away and the Baathists went into their underground networks that they had been developing for many years. This would have been a slam-dunk time to plant and find the weapons.
It was also the time they fired Jay Garner for uniting the Iraqis around owning their own resources, fired the Iraqi Army, and criminalized the Baathists, ensuring an insurgency that would flare in 2004 and gather strength. It was also the time that Garner's replacement, the U.S. Viceroy Paul Bremer was towing the oil industry line, ensuring Iraq's inclusion in OPEC, supporting high energy prices, and partnerships with U.S. and British firms that enable these firms to own half of Iraq's oil reserves without buying them. But it wasn't all bad. He got us four permanent military bases in Iraq, and a billion dollar embassy-compound, bigger than the Vatican City-State, with its own water supply, the biggest 'embassy' in the world. We'll be wired into the middle east with that embassy, and have bases next to Iran and Saudi Arabia.
But what else was going on then? Who was ruining the coming victory parade?
Former Ambassador and previous Gulf War Hero, Joseph Wilson. He just wouldn't let those 16 words from the State of the Union Address, the President's Big Lie die. Six months later, July 2003, he outed himself as going to that luxurious (ha) vacation-spot of Niger, at the behest of the CIA, from the original behest of Dick Cheney, to investigate the claims that Iraq tried to obtain Niger's Yellowcake Uranium, which could be refined for WMD. What he didn't find in Niger was any evidence of this pretext, and he told the CIA this in 2002, several times. And the CIA got this out of some of the President's speeches then after he said it. But it 'accidentally' made it into the SoTUA again. Someone, was it National 'Security' Advisor Condi or CIA Director and later-to-be Freedom Medal winner Tenet? Whatever! Someone fell on their sword months ago, and Wilson's editorial made an issue of it again.
The Bush Administration hates accountability since that leads to the blame game, which wastes their time, opens them up to resignations or prosecutions. They'd rather play the invade, pillage, war-profiteer and energy-profits-gouging game, while we watch dumbfounded our mouths, wallets, and assholes agape.
[In July 2003, was Curveball, Chalabi's alcoholic relative, outed then as cooking up fake mobile weapons labs reports around then, too? Can't remember...]
With no offense to dogs or homosexuals, the Bush Administration started whining like fauntleroy faggot-bitches to the media in a whispering campaign about Joseph Wilson, a hero who saved Americans during the first Gulf War at personal risk, and whom negotiated face to face with Saddam back in those days after his boss April Glaspie kind of screwed things up (or did she?) by somehow green-lighting the Kuwait invasion that we soon very adamantly opposed. They said: 'his wife, you know she works in the CIA, sent him to Niger as a boondoggle junket!' A former Ambassador to Africa going to Niger to look into something that the VP brought up as worth investigating is not that implausible. But if it were a junket, why would he keep bringing it up? Wouldn't that just open him up to a blame game?
His wife, the CIA Operative that traitor Novakula outed, Valerie Plame-Wilson, was just one of many counter-terrorism and WMD experts who had career-limiting incidents during the Bush2 years. While connecting Wilson to charges of nepotism (funny, coming from Cheney who keeps hiring his daughter into State, and Bush2 whose main qualification for the Presidency was his repeat-name of Bush 41 and that they kind of look-alike, with #2 being a bit cuter and tougher-talking, but also more pop-culture-friendly.) and boondoggling would somehow damage his claims -- by using offense as defense. This is the common accepted wisdom of why the Whitehouse and the Cheney Administration were character assassinating Wilson by outing his wife.
But I think think that that is too simple. My sense is that Valerie Plame Wilson had competency in WMD counter-proliferation, and she had a network in Iraq and Iran and probably elsewhere in the Middle East and West Africa, as well as an established cover with fake international energy consultancy 'Brewster Jennings.' This made her suspect enough. She could call Bush2 and Rummy on fake WMD or implanted WMD in Iraq.
But now that her husband blew the whistle, and kept blowing the whistle on the fake Niger Uranium canard, it was clear that these guys were not typical CIA or FBI bureaucrats that could be shut-up by threatening their pensions, firing or demoting them --something that has happened to government employees, including municipal firemen, soldiers, and FBI agents, for not towing the official 9-11 conspiracy story and the subsequent game plans, such as allowing torture, whistle-blowing, or asking questions.
Testimony in the Libby perjury trial indicate that Cheney and the whole crew knew that outing a CIA agent was against Federal law. It was George H.W. Bush who pushed for the law in the first place, while Cheney was deep into policy creation or administration. The Libby trial described how Cheney motioned, gesturing that he was not going to say certain things that could be prosecutable later. Outing Plame-Wilson didn't just destroy her intelligence career, it ruined a cover company that was built up over many years at taxpayer expense, and it unraveled that entire informant network, possibly leading to the torture, killing, or compromising of anyone associated with Brewster Jennings throughout its history in any country it 'did business' in. If I were in charge of one of those countries, I would investigate every citizen or person that had any association with that firm, and I might even try to turn them around and give me useful information.
Why would Cheney and Bush risk all this to silence Joe Wilson? They could just use their old saws like:
- "this is old news;"
- "Blah-blah already fell on his/her sword;"
- "We are at war now, and asking such questions threatens our national security by distracting us from defending the nation," or
- "Are you saying the Saddam Hussein was good, that things aren't better without him? Everyone, especially Clinton, thought he was a threat."
They attacked Wilson and his wife to ruin her ability to threaten the administration's plans to plant WMD in Iraq and possibly into Iran by revealing the truth both through the system via the CIA, through media leaks, and public disclosures in teamwork with her husband, a citizen-hero like Joe Wilson. They needed to be stopped, and to be made an example of.
I think the Whitehouse counted on summer 2003 to be a good time to slime Wilson and quickly neutralize his wife, disposing of them so that the DoD/CIA could plant WMD in Iraq to be found in September after Labor Day. Probably the original plan was to plant fake WMD and they lost it when they realized that the Plame-Wilson team would call them on such an obvious ruse when the fakes were debunked, or if no one on the investigation network could corroborate that real weapons came from anywhere but the U.S.A.'s own stockpiles.
Meanwhile, the Plame Affair didn't shut Joe Wilson up, and journalists and bloggers noted the illegality and ironies of outing his secret-agent counter-wmd wife. The issue festered throughout the summer, and took the Whitehouse's eyes off their prize, not Saddam, but a WMD plant, an intricate, covert operation that could not be discovered by potential enemies -- not just from other nations, but the Bush Administration's enemies from within: honest soldiers and whistleblowers.
[
It is one thing to run lots of confusing military drills on 9/11/01 and populate the radar screens with all sorts of blips, while sending the normal chain of command and pilots away or very far away on various pretexts and drills (in Alaska, the Carolinas, Iceland, or Saudi Arabia). Individuals can chalk up the day to being confusing, awful, sad, and overwhelming -- even
"interesting." But it is a whole other thing to have soldiers lug in real or even faked ordinance into a spot, conceal it, and then months later have other soldiers 'discover' it. You would have to kill the whole first group of soldiers before they blabbed about burying the weapons.
Killing your own troops wholesale for a cover-up is touchy and controversial. The kind of thing that can get conspirators court-martialed and impeached, no matter how complacent a nation is. To wit, check out the scandal of convalescing vets languishing in the crown jewel of VA Hospitals, Walter Reade. And it was on the shoals of the Army that the career of red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy (MAnn Coulter's hero) careened, crashed, and burned out, instead of fading away.]
In an administration characterized by consistent lies and the use of force and fear to foment war, higher oil prices, and increased arms sales, the only thing missing is planted WMD in Iraq. Finding WMD would make the war justified, 'making the world safer from WMD in the hands of an aggressive regime that had once sponsored and harbored terrorists.'
Although many of us are disappointed by the Fitzgerald-Walton punt regarding the Plame-outing, maybe Valerie Plame's sacrifice did serve a higher purpose, causing attention and static, preventing a WMD plant.
***
In late February 2007, Seymour Hersch does it again in The New Yorker. Not only does he meet face to face with Sheikh Nasralla of H'ez B'Allah, but he links all those recycled, actually re-used, Iran-Contra figures to the coming war with Iran. They even had a 'lessons-learned' meeting! The one from from the Nixon era, don't make tapes, was already gotten. Now, they know to run it out of the VP's Office (learned that one from Poppy?), not to involve the military or the CIA, nor to trust their friends (or I guess the obscure Beirut daily that originally broke the story in November 1986).
Another lesson already learned was that these Shi'ite and Sunni schisms, as well as overt anti-Jewishness combined with covert Israeli and Jewish contacts and
co-operation, can be useful, profitable, and a way to thin the heard while providing lots of distractions and smoke, while huge huge profits, thefts, and deals are made. We armed Iran and Iraq in their 8-year war.
What did that Iran-Iraq War kill? A million? Who benefited? Saudi Arabia, Iraq's 'ally' and Israel, Iraq and Iran's enemy, yet Saudis and Israelis sent American DoD arms to Iran. (Powell and Cap Weinberger knew and helped!) Whom did that profit? Oil companies, arms manufacturers, and that shadowy network of arms dealers, bankers, and 'operatives' who have to turn those dollars into other forms of useful and non-traceable currency accepted world-wide, such as drugs...
We are missing twelve Billion dollars in Iraq (that we know about) from three years ago. That's twelve thousand million dollars, shipped over in Hercules Transport planes (the ones that carry tanks), measured in tons of cash, packed on pallets, filling the plane.
This sort of thing is playing out in Iraq now, but it has already been spreading to Lebanon, Iran, and Syria.
Here is the most compelling part of
Hersch' The New Yorker piece (my emphasis added):
"The Bush Administration’s reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress and its dealings with intermediaries with questionable agendas have recalled, for some in Washington, an earlier chapter in history. Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then—notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams—are involved in today’s dealings.
Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.
I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence official that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State. (Negroponte declined to comment.)
The former senior intelligence official also told me that Negroponte did not want a repeat of his experience in the Reagan Administration, when he served as Ambassador to Honduras. “Negroponte said, ‘No way. I’m not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. running operations off the books, with no finding.’ ” (In the case of covert C.I.A. operations, the President must issue a written finding and inform Congress.) Negroponte stayed on as Deputy Secretary of State, he added, because “he believes he can influence the government in a positive way.”
The government consultant said that Negroponte shared the White House’s policy goals but “wanted to do it by the book.” The Pentagon consultant also told me that “there was a sense at the senior-ranks level that he wasn’t fully on board with the more adventurous clandestine initiatives.” It was also true, he said, that Negroponte “had problems with this Rube Goldberg policy contraption for fixing the Middle East.”
The Pentagon consultant added that one difficulty, in terms of oversight, was accounting for covert funds. “There are many, many pots of black money, scattered in many places and used all over the world on a variety of missions,” he said. The budgetary chaos in Iraq, where billions of dollars are unaccounted for, has made it a vehicle for such transactions, according to the former senior intelligence official and the retired four-star general.
“This goes back to Iran-Contra,” a former National Security Council aide told me. “And much of what they’re doing is to keep the agency out of it.” He said that Congress was not being briefed on the full extent of the U.S.-Saudi operations. And, he said, “The C.I.A. is asking, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re concerned, because they think it’s amateur hour.”
The issue of oversight is beginning to get more attention from Congress. Last November, the Congressional Research Service issued a report for Congress on what it depicted as the Administration’s blurring of the line between C.I.A. activities and strictly military ones, which do not have the same reporting requirements. And the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Senator Jay Rockefeller, has scheduled a hearing for March 8th on Defense Department intelligence activities.
Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, a Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, told me, “The Bush Administration has frequently failed to meet its legal obligation to keep the Intelligence Committee fully and currently informed. Time and again, the answer has been ‘Trust us.’ ” Wyden said, “It is hard for me to trust the Administration.” 
"
Another explosive shocker from this piece is that the U.S. is cozying up with the Muslim Brotherhood against the Shi'ites. [The Muslim Brotherhood, an international network, is a forerunner to Al Q'aida. Their splinter group, which assassinated Sadat and attempted to assassinate Mubarak, and whose spiritual leader the Blind Sheikh Abdel Rahman is linked to the first WTC attack (which is linked to the second attack through Bin Al Shibh and his uncle, as well as the foiled plot to bomb the UN and the FBI, this is the group where Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, supposedly Bin Laden's 'Deputy' is from! I think Doc Zawahiri is really in charge, actually, but Bin Laden is better looking, younger, and has a better story -- being from a really rich family and living in caves and hanging with the trainees, so he's put forward as being in charge. He makes a better enemy symbol *and* he's a better leadership-symbol. Who really wants to listen to a Doctor? Also, for years before 9/11/01's attacks UBL was painted merely as the financier of Al Q'Aida, and in the U.S. whomever sign the check runs the show, right? But who is signing the checks behind the check? Is UBL really that cut off from the Saudis? And from his Saudi and Bush (through the Carlyle Group and more) connected family? Not!
Even though support of the Saudi-Pak-ISI-CIA-backed Mujahedins (practically Arabic for 'contra') against the Soviets began at the end of the Carter Administration under Brezhinsky, it was the Reagan Administration that gave them Stingers to shoot the Soviet helicopters and expanded the operation, perhaps even had a blind eye to the poppy and hashish exports (supposedly sealed with 'Support the Contras' stamps). This is where Usama Bin Laden cut his teeth on jihad.
So, this war with Iran, with its international terror network including Hezb'Allah, could be bombing US interests with abandon, like the Argentinian Jewish Center got it with 85, mostly kids, being car bombed.
It would be a logical response for pro-Iranian terrorists to fight this way, asymmetrically. And, of course, Billions of dollars are floating around Iraq, unaccounted for, which means 'black ops' or bad guys doing bad things they don't want taxpayers to know about... And cozying up with Al Q'aida linked groups and networks to weaken the Shi'ites, who happen to live above most of the oil in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and who border northern Israel Lebanon, and live in Syria. Well, we are looking at a lot of warfare, civil war, high gas and arms prices, concentrated power plutocrats in energy and arms and covert ops, and everyone else picking up the pieces of the collateral damage from the terror-attack-blowbacks.
So, back to the Wilsons' problems with the Bush Administration, this outing of CIA Counter-WMD Middle East and Africa specialist, Valerie Plame-Wilson using an energy consultancy cover, seems to really be about getting yet one more knowledgeable/troublesome person out of the Cheney-Bush Junta's way towards profits for them and their cadre.
These are some additional counter-terrorism and counter-wmd personnel whom have had bad luck or problems during the Bush-Cheney era:
- Richard Clarke, Former WhiteHouse Counter-Terror Czar under Clinton (demoted to Cybersecurity after being ignored for first year of Bush2 Admin),
- Linda Franklin, the FBI's Infrastructure Guru then moved to cyber-security like Clarke (shot in the head during the beltway sniper spree of 2002. Her murder was never investigated nor tried. It was pinned on the Beltway Sniper John Allen Muhammad, who, indeed, might have randomly shot her in a Home Depot parking lot.),
- John O'Neill, FBI Counter-Terror Guru, run out of the organization on a pretext/set-up (killed in the WTC Tower 1 collapse about two weeks after he started as Port Authority Chief of Security),
- Colleen Rowley and the FBI Whistleblowers (fired or in career limbo, as their nincompoop superiors like Maltbie and Frasca, who stalled and hobbled the pre-9/11/01 investigations into hijackers at flight schools were promoted),
- Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaffer, the Bronze Star Medal recipient who is a CIA trained Army lieutenant colonel with more than 22 years of experience in the intelligence community, identified Mohammed Atta and three domestic cells involved in 9/11/01's attacks a year before the attacks (first his work was ignored, then destroyed, then he spoke about it with the 9/11 Commission who told him it was important, then they ignored it, not including it in their report six months later, then denied knowing much about it. Shaffer was then investigated by the Army at a cost of $400,000 for $67 in personal phone bills, racked up 25c at a time over 18 months, about ten local calls a day. He was also gagged on national security grounds for discussing previously unclassified information, and his clearance was revoked, severely limiting his intelligence career.)
- Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator found that her associates and her boss was slowing translation processing and 'botching' them. Her boss tried to get her to join a Turkish 'networking' association, even though she was translating Turkish wiretaps for an FBI investigation. Her boss implied that it would be rewarding and that Edmonds' family back in Turkey might be endangered if she doesn't cooperate. Edmonds' work found links to 9/11/01's attacks, links to drug money, and a former House leader, and she re-corrected key translations that were 'missed' or 'botched.' She was one of the few language specialists in Farsi (Iran's main language and spoken in Afghanistan). Edmonds was ignominiously fired, retroactively gagged, and her whistleblower case was shut down (in Plame Trial Judge Reggie Walton's court), using the rarely-invoked State Secrets Privilege. Reggie Walton obviously values secrecy, since his federal disclosure form is completely redacted!
Labels: counter-terrorism, Iran, iran-contra, Iraq, whistleblowers
