Friday, October 28, 2005

Assad on the hot seat

THE CASE is not even filed, let alone being proved or even presented, but the "suspect" has already been tried and convicted as far as the world's superpower is concerned, and nothing would make any difference to the scenario ahead.
That is what we are seeing in the case of Syria, the US and the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, and that is what we saw in the case of Iraq, the US and weapons of mass destruction.
The Syria scenarios are unfolding as pre-scripted, as indeed was the case against Saddam Hussein that led to the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 as the world has learnt through concrete evidence that emerged after the war that is enough to convince the strongest sceptic..
In the next few days, the United Nations Security Council is expected to adopt a resolution setting a deadline for Syria to comply with the world body's demands or face sanctions. A draft resolution in circulation demands that Syria detain officials suspected of plotting the murder of Hariri, freeze their assets and impose a travel ban on them.
The draft resolution, a joint work of the US, Britain and France, threatens “further measures” if Syria fails to co-operate with the UN investigation headed by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who has submitted a report saying he found “converging evidence” of Syrian involvement in the Feb.14 bomb blast that killed Hariri and 20 others in Beirut, and implicated Bashar Al Assad’s brother, Maher, and his brother in-law, Assef Shawkat, chief of military intelligence, in the alleged conspiracy.
Clearly sensing that the trap is closing around Syria regardless of innocence or guilt, President Bashar Al Assad has promised the three countries behind the draft resolution that any Syrian accused will face trial if "proved by concrete evidence" to have had a role in the Hariri killing.
"I have declared that Syria is innocent of this crime, and I am ready to follow up action to bring to trial any Syrian who could be proved by concrete evidence to have had connection with this crime," says the Syrian president's letter, as quoted by news agencies.
Assad also warned against using the Mehlis report as a political tool to pressure Syria. That was a reference to the US accusations that the Syrian government is supporting militant Palestinian factions, intervening in Lebanon and failing to prevent foreign fighters from infiltrating into Iraq.
"Such use of this report will have big, serious repercussions on the already tense situation which our region goes through, at a time we are more in need to have objective and constructive positions that would help the countries of the region to achieve stability," said Assad's letter.
However, Washington has smelt blood and is not having any of that.
"Once again Syria has demonstrated by its policies and its actions that it's out of step with the international community and in this instance specifically, by its failure to correctly read the tea leaves and fully co-operate" with the Mehlis investigation, said State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli.
"That is why you have a Security Council that's meeting to come to some conclusion about what to do about that failure to co-operate," Ereli said. "So it's a little late now for Syria to try to be making up for past failures."
By "full co-operation," the US means unrestrained access for Mehlis to question any Syrian official in or outside Syria as he might deem fit and this includes Bashar Al Assad himself.
Obviously, the US believes it has Syria over a barrel wants to plunge the knife deeper by subjecting top Syrian officials to humiliating questioning and thus to demoralise the Syrian people, and that was what was inherent in the comment by US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. "No person is above the law, and the president (Assad) has had time to talk to the media. If he has time to do that, he has time to talk to Commissioner Mehlis," Bolton said. (Here, one is reminded of the non-availability of President George W Bush to have a meeting with the anti-war mother of an American soldier who was killed in action although she was stationed for more than three weeks in August out his ranch in Texas where he was vacationing. Indeed the circumstances are different, but Bolton's comment was at best contemptuous as if Assad was already in the dock and one just wonders how it would be for him if the target of such comment was his own president).
The very fact that Washington is brushing aside Assad's pledge to try any Syrian found involved in the Hariri killing, the most substantive response from Damascus to the Mehlis report, is indicative of the shape of things to come. It is very much a re-enactment of the obviously pre-determined rejection of all pre-war proposals and offers made by Saddam.
The sanctions that the US would like to see imposed on Syria immediately include travel and financial sanctions on Assad’s family and inner circle, again another avenue for demoralising the Syrian people.
The US has arranged a special meeting of foreign ministers of the Security Council on Monday. Obviously, Washington hopes to convince Russia and China — which have rejected the move for sanctions — into shifting their stand through watering down the language a little.
Moscow has promised to work to prevent sanctions, but it remains to be see how far it would be able to resist direct and indirect American-British-French pressure into accepting the "inevitable."
Mehlis himself has added to the pressure against Syria by "disclosing" that he and his team members faced threats.
“The level of risk, which was already high, will increase further, particularly after the issuance of the report,” he said. “The commission has received a number of threats which were deemed, in the assessment of our security personnel, to be credible.”
Although Mehlis said that the threats came from “unknown groups” and not specifically from any Syrian or Lebanese officials, the implication was there.
Nejib Friji, the UN spokesman in Beirut, has been recalled from Lebanon "for his own safety” and is now working another UN mission.
The US is also trying to project Syria as being isolated although one fails to see the extent of any isolation. Indeed, Washington has suspended all but routine diplomatic contacts with the Syrian government and is keeping a deaf ear to attempts in recent months to resume dialogue on intelligence issues.
The Arabs at large seem to be convinced that Syria is being railroaded into being deprived of its pan-Arab nationalist credentials in order to suit Israeli interests and make concessions and compromises over issues that are central to Syria's integrity, territorial rights and political process.
However, there seems to little the Arabs could to do help ease the situation as the case was indeed with Iraq.


Notwithstanding the detailed findings of Mehlis, there is no "concrete evidence" to support his allegations. Obviously, the German prosecutor hopes to come up with such evidence before Dec.15, when he is expected to present his final report the UN Security Council.
The initial report contains direct quotes from people who were close to Hariri as saying that the assassinated prime minister had received direct threats from Assad himself in the run-up to the amendment in the Lebanese constitution that allowed a three-year extension of the term in office of pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud last year. Obviously, Mehlis wants to question Assad on that point.
When the news of the Hariri assassination broke, few in the Arab World accepted that Syria could have been behind it. Damascus is not deemed that naive to believe that it could get away with the killing. If anything, as events have proved out, Syria suffered the most as a result and this is a factor that no one expects Damascus to have overlooked.
Many in the Middle East subscribe to the theory that Israeli agents penetrated Syrian circles and engineered the killing in such a way that all the fingers pointed to Damascus.
Indeed, there are many ifs and buts in the light of the Mehlis findings that contradict the Israel theory. But the idea that a much more sinister plot was behind the killing was raised immediately after the incident not only by Arabs but also Americans.
Mark Whitney writes on http://www.informationclearinghouse.info:
"One can hardly imagine a greater disaster for poor Syria who has been scrambling to avoid the American bludgeon for the last four years. Few people realise that Syria provided more assistance in the first year of the war on terror after 9-11 than any other nation. That’s of little consequence now, as the US is on a mission to quickly integrate the entire region beneath the American standard and prove that it can be trusted with its continued stewardship of the world economy."
According to Whitney, "to understand who assassinated Rafiq Hariri we don’t need to look any further than the $1.5 billion US embassy currently under construction in Baghdad. The new embassy, the largest of its kind in the world, will facilitate 1,800 employees and serve as the regional nerve centre for American political and economic activity. What does this have to do with al Hariri? 
"It demonstrates that the US is establishing a massive command centre for its future domination of the entire Middle East. This suggests that Lebanon must be entered into the family of client states who accept a subservient role to American military and economic power, and who willingly comply with the requirements of the regional constable, Israel. 
"Hariri’s assassination provides the raison d'être for severing ties with Syria and for transforming Lebanon into a US vassal. This conforms nicely with Israel’s ambition to surround itself with non-threatening states as well as affording access to the vital water resources of Lebanon’s Wazzani River. In other words, the murder of Hariri has created some extremely fortunate opportunities for both Israel and the US; merging seamlessly with their overall objectives in the region."
Bushra Al Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer and political activist, told Aljazeera.net a few days after the killing that the plot against Hariri's life also targeted Syria.
"If we look at the way the assassination has been conducted, it is very sophisticated, I knew Hariri's security measures - no local system could have breached them.
"The question is, who stands to benefit from his death? Syria's enemies. I think Hariri's death is part of the plan to divide the region into tiny helpless sectarian states. This plan has started in Iraq and it will continue to hit all other Arab countries."
There is another school of thought that gained strength in view of the Mehlis findings. It says that criminal activities rather than politics were the prime factor behind the killing.
This school believes that the fear of losing annual earnings of hundreds of millions dollars through clandestine means including smuggling, drugs and money-laundering was behind the assassination; that people in influential position in Syria and not necessarily directly linked to the president were behind the plot and there is no indication that Assad knew of the conspiracy.
The reason for the killing did not involve Syrian-Lebanese politics, although Hariri had turned to be a bitter critic of Syria's military presence in Lebanon at that time (Syria withdrew its forces from Lebanon in April this year under world pressure following the Hariri killing).
The real reason, proponents of this theory say, those who plotted the killing feared that Hariri was bent upon ending the Syrian presence in Lebanon and this would have meant hundreds of millions of dollars in losses through smuggling, fraud, corruption and drug business and money-laundering using Lebanese and Syrian banks. .
The theorists argue that the group had extensive organisation and considerable resources and capabilities. They used the Syrian military intelligence presence in Lebanon to monitor Hariri's movements for months before deciding setting a date for the killing.
The Mehlis report contains the conclusions on the Hariri assassination drawn from testimonies taken from more than 400 witnesses, but it does not offer any material evidence. More importantly, it does not refer directly to the alleged Lebanese-Syrian nexus which operated the smuggling, fraud and money-laundering network.
The report stops short of naming at least five key Syrian personalities involved in the assassination plot, but the names were removed by Mehlis before it was released to the public, reports have said.
According to the report, the five names removed from the report are those of:
—  Maher Al Assad, the younger brother of Bashar Al Assad;
— the president's brother-in-law General Assef Shawqat, who is also chief of Syrian military intelligence;
— Gen. Roustum Ghazali, the head of special external intelligence and former Syrian military intelligence chief in Lebanon;
— Gen. Hassan Khalil, a liaison officer between the various Syrian intelligence bodies;
and Col. Mohsein Hamoud, a former military intelligence officer who served in Lebanon.
Hamoud is said to have identified by Mehlis as the colonel who drove the Mitsubishi Canter bomb car from Syria to Lebanon on Jan. 21.
That was the vehicle rigged with 1,000 kilogrammes of military explosives which blew up as Hariri's convoy, according to Mehlis.
While the report says that Japanese investigators helping him established that the vehicle was stolen from Sagamihara City, Japan, on Oct.12, 2004, there is no indication whether the German prosecutor sought to trace its transfer from Japan to the Middle East. Surely, establishing the ownership of the vehicle based on registration documents could be central to pinpointing individuals supposedly linked to the bomb attack. Why was the avenue not pursued is a question many are asking.
Robert Parry, author of who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, observes (www.consortiumnews.com):
"The UN report contains no details about the Japanese investigation of the theft, nor does it indicate what Japanese police may have discovered about the identity of the thieves or how they may have shipped the van from a suburb of Tokyo to the Middle East in the four months before the Hariri attack.
"Though the investigation of a vehicle theft may have attracted little Japanese police attention a year ago, the van’s apparent role in a major act of international terrorism would seem to justify a redoubling of those efforts now.
"At minimum, the UN investigators might have insisted on including details such as the name of the original owner, the circumstances surrounding the theft, and the identities of car-theft rings in the Sagamihara area. Plus, investigators could have checked on shipments of white Mitsubishi Canter Vans out of Japan to Middle East destinations.
"Since the time frame between the reported theft and the bombing was less than four months, Japanese authorities could have at least narrowed down those possible shipments and Middle East customs services might have records of imported vehicles."
He goes on to say:
"...While Syria and its freewheeling intelligence services may remain prime suspects in the Hariri assassination, the bitter Iraq experience might justify at least the running down of obvious leads that could either strengthen or disprove the case, like the mystery of the white Mitsubishi Canter Van.
"Investigators might get much closer to the truth if they could determine what happened to the van between the moment it disappeared off the streets of a Japanese city and reappeared almost four months later, rolling towards Rafiq Hariri’s motorcade."
Following are some of the highlights of the Mehlis report:
Gen. Mustapha Hamdan, the commander of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s security detail , was the main Lebanese counterpart of the gang.
Gen. Jamil Al Sayyed (head of Lebanese general intelligence) co-operated closely with Hamdan and Gen. Raymond Azar (chief of Lebanese police) in preparing the assassination. He also co-ordinated with Gen. Rustum Ghazali (head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon) and, among others, members of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP-GC) headed by Ahmed Jibril in Lebanon.
Hamdan and Azar provided logistical support, providing money, telephones, cars, walkie-talkies, pagers, weapons, ID-cards etc.
(Contributing to this theory is an argument that the suicide driver assigned to the bomb-rigged Mitsubishi was an Iraqi individual who was led to believe the target was Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi (who happened to be in Beirut prior to the assassination). The explosives used were of the kind used in Iraq so as to misdirect suspicions towards extremist groups.
Following are highlights of the Mehlis report:
The day before the assassination, the head of Hariri's close protection unit, Yehya Al Arab alias Abu Tareq, had a meeting with Ghazali. He was so shaken up by that meeting that he went home, turned off his phone and stayed there for a few hours. The version given by Ghazali of this meeting is not compatible with other testimony.
In November 2004, Hajj, head of the Internal Security Forces, ordered the state security detail around Hariri reduced from 40 to eight guards.
Eight telephone numbers and 10 mobile telephones were used to organise surveillance on Hariri and to carry out the assassination. The lines were put into circulation on Jan.4, 2005 in the northern part of Lebanon, between Terbol and Menyeh and used to observe Hariri’s habits, mostly in Beirut city.
On the day of the assassination, six of the telephones were used in the area between Parliament Square and the St. George Hotel and the axes of Zqaq Al Blat and Al Bachoura — the route of the Hariri convoy.
Cell site records show that cellular telephones utilising these six calling cards were situated so that they covered every possible route linking Parliament to Kuraytem Palace.
The calls --- and the usage of the cards --- terminated a few minutes before the blast. The lines have all been inactive since.
The technical department of Lebanese Military intelligence Service, headed by Col. Ghassan Tufayli, placed important figures, including Hariri, under permanent wiretapping. The transcripts were forwarded on a daily basis to Raymond Azar and to the head of the army, General Michel Suleyman. Tufayli admitted that transcripts were sent to the Lebanese president and to Ghazali.
The CCTV of the HSBC bank, located close to the scene of the explosion, showed a white Mitsubishi Canter van entering the area of the explosion shortly before Hariri’s convoy and moving six times more slowly than other vehicles on the same stretch of road. The car entered the area one minute and 49 seconds before the Hariri convoy.
The weakness of the Lebanese authorities’ initial action and the tampering with evidence during the first crime scene examination have made it difficult to identify the type of explosives used in the blast and track it to source - and thus denied the investigation an important lead to the perpetrators.
It appears that at least one of the three jamming devices in Hariri’s convoy was operational and functioning at the time of the blast. Further investigation may provide information about how the explosion was activated.
Expert teams deduce from the distribution of the so far located parts of the Mitsubishi Canter truck that the vehicle was possibly used as the bomb carrier.
An aboveground explosion is the most feasible possibility — in which case around 1,000 kg would have been used of extra-high explosive. Samples from the crater wall indicate TNT. No sign of the trigger was found.
The physical evidence and the fact that small human remains were found of an unidentified person, but no large body parts such as legs, feet or lower arms, points to a suicide bomber as the most likely cause of the blast. Another only slightly less likely possibility is that of a remotely-controlled device. However, no residues of such a device have been recovered from the crime scene.
A Palestinian, Abu Adass, who claimed responsibility for the murder in the name of a radical organisation on a videotape aired by Al Jazeera TV, was no more than a decoy. He was detained in Syria and forced at gunpoint to record the video tape. The videotape was sent to Beirut on the morning of Feb.14, and handed over to Gen Jamil Al Sayyed (head of Lebanese General Intelligence). A civilian with a criminal record and a security officer placed the tape somewhere in Hamra and notified Ghassan Ben Jeddo, an Al-Jazeera TV reporter.
There is no evidence that Abu Adass belonged to the group Al Nasra Wal-jihad Fee Bilad Al Sham as claimed in the videotape, or even that such a group ever existed.
There are no indications (other than the videotape) that he drove a truck containing the bomb that killed Hariri. The evidence does show that Abu Adass left his home on Jan.18, 2005, and was taken, voluntarily or not, to Syria, where he was most probably killed.
These details all fall too pat into the case being built against Syria, and that is why they are suspect.
According to Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, a key source of information that Mehlis collected was a convicted swindler who has no credibility.

Pressure point

The US has secured an additional point of pressure against Syria.
A report submitted to the UN Security Council by special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen sharply criticises the Hizbollah’s unchanged status in Lebanon as failure to implement Security Council Resolution 1559’s order to disband all militias and armed groups in Lebanon, including the Palestinians.
He challenges the Hizbollah’s claim to be “a legitimate resistance movement” fighting for the liberation of the Shebaa Farms from Israeli occupation in stark contrast to the UN position that Israel has fulfilled all Security Council resolutions and withdrawn all its forces from Lebanese territory. The UN has ruled that Shebaa Farms are Syrian and not Lebanese territory and therefore Hizbollah does not have a raison d'etre to fight for liberating it from occupation.
Hizbollah is part of the new government of Lebanon; for the first time ever, this group holds a ministerial portfolio.
Roed-Larsen says s that despite its readiness for an internal dialogue and the possible transformation of the Hizbollah from an armed militia to a political party — operating as a political party and as an armed military is contradictory. The group's members are carrying of arms and such practice is not compatible with Hizbollah's participation in power and government in a democracy, said the UN envoy.
Disarming Hizbollah and Palestinians is a key Israeli/American objective, and the UN report strengthens moves towards that end.
Beyond that, however, is the implication in the report that Damascus is violating Security Council resolution 1559 which ordered foreign forces to quit Lebanon and the dismantling of militias in the country.
The report implies that Syria as continuing to maintain military intelligence agents in Lebanon and derailing efforts to start decommissioning the Hizballah.
There could be many who clearly see a pattern that aims at placing Syria in a deathlock as the case was with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but no argument or theory could dissuade the US and Israel from pursuing their goal for "taming" Syria into total submission through rendering Damascus "teethless" — in all aspects — or through destabilising that country and leading it into a "regime change" and installation of a US-friendly government in Damascus.
If anyone needed any indicator to the joint effort, then here is one: Reports are plenty in cyberspace that the US is already in consultations with Israel and key European allies over a "successor" to Assad.

Syria being railoaded




PV Vivekanand

CURTAINS go up next week for the next act of the US-Israeli-written script for the Middle East: A United Nations Security Council resolution setting out demands that the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad could not meet if it wishes to survive in power. These would include unfrettered access to Syrian leaders, including the president himself, for the UN commission investigating the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The most serious demand would be that Syria detain "key" suspects implicated in the Hariri assassination, freeze their assets and impose a travel ban on them. The suspects are said to include Bashar Al Assad's brother Maher, brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, and three other people occupying senior positions in the Syrian intelligence network.
Surely, Bashar Al Assad would not be able to meet such a demand, and those making the demand know it well.
What would follow the expected Syrian refusal is, again, very natural: Tough economic, diplomatic and military sanctions against Syria to be followed by military action if needed.
There are many theories and arguments explaining how the UN investigator, German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, reached the preliminary conclusion that he found “converging evidence” of Syrian involvement in the Feb.14 bomb blast that killed Hariri and 20 others in Beirut.
However, none of these theories and arguments would be able to fend off the American-Israeli drive to remove Syria as a hurdle in the US quest for global supremacy and the Israeli drive for regional domination without having to make any compromise over Arab territories it occupied during the 1967 war, mainly the Golan Heights in the Syrian context.
The American case against Syria has many points of pressure: Damascus is not doing enough to prevent the infiltration of foreign fighters into Iraq across its border. It s continuing to support Palestinian groups which carry out "terrorist" attacks against Israelis. It is closely linked with Lebanese militant groups such as Hizbollah and thus is continuing to "meddle" in Lebanon in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for dismantling of all militias and armed groups in Lebanon, including the Palestinians living in refugee camps in the south of the country.
The net picture that emerges from the American charges against Syria closely resembles the case that the US built against Iraq before invading that country and toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003.
From the look of things at this juncture, Syria does not seem to have a way out of the bear trap. It could either meet the US-engineered UN demands that would be raised next week or remain defiant and face destabilisation leading to "regime change."
However, destabilising Syria would mean destabilising the entire region, what with the Iraq embroglio spinning out of American control despite Washington's assertions to the contrary. It is not a winner-takes-all and the loser-gives-up all situation because a destablised region would not mean a docile area conducive to American interests.
The Arab League is perhaps the only natural party which could avert the negative course of events. There is talk about behind-the-scene mediation to avert a "regime change" in Syria, but Washington does not seem to be too keen on it either.
However, an effort has to be made to defuse the situation, and it has to come from the Arab League with support from Europe and others and lead towards a solution that does not further compromise legitimate Arab rights for the sake of protecting and advancing external interests in the region.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Saddam trial - fairness is irrelevant




Irrelevance of the question of fairness and justice

THE DRAMA is unfolding. An ousted Arab head of state was put on trial on Wednesday. There is a surrealistic air to the whole episode. Never before has anything resembling this script taken place anywhere in this world. A toppled Arab head of state has been charged with crimes against humanity and is being tried by a court formed under foreign military occupation and following laws and procedures dictated by a foreign military occupier. The person who succeeded him as president has already ruled that the accused is guilty as charged and deserves to be executed 20 times.
International legal experts have raised serious questions about the legality of the whole process. They point out that laws formulated under foreign military occupation could never be accepted as legitimate.
Surely, no one is forgetting that Saddam Hussein, the toppled Iraqi president, is accused of killing thousands of people in northern and southern Iraq who opposed him. Summary executions, long detentions and torture were his key tools to maintain his grip on power and eliminate dissent, according to his detractors. Among the most serious and specific charge is that he used chemicals to kill up to 5,000 Kurds in the north in the late 80s. Then there are charges related to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Iraqi military's suppression of the Shiite revolt in the south following the US-led war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. .
Then why is Saddam and seven others put on trial at this point in time charged with the killing of 143 people in the mostly Shiite town of Dujail following an assassination attempt against him? What is happening to the rest of the charges, including one that says he ordered the chemical attack on Halabja? Aren't those charges the most horrifying of all? When will those cases be heard by the special tribunal which is trying him?
Why not slap him with the most serious charge of all – of genocide of his people — and get over with whatever process is to be followed before the inevitable death sentence is pronounced against him?
Or will those cases ever come up in court with Saddam in the dock where he will, no doubt, take the grandstand and spill the beans as to who had given him not only the know-how and material to produce the weapons that went into some the crimes of which he is accuse?
That is the question that most people felt like asking on Wednesday. Indeed, there was no answer except an earlier contention by an Iraqi judge that the Dujail case was the easiest to put together as far as evidence-gathering and preparation is concerned, and because documents were already available. However, it sounds hollow, given the seriousness of other charges and cases.
The trial of has begun with all the elements of drama that were expected. The “what-is-your-name” by the judge and the “who-are-you-to-ask” by the defendant were all widely looked forward to by the world. The judge and the defendant played their parts well and there was a lot of adrenaline. While Saddam faces what many see as natural justice and many others see as nothing more than the celebration of an occasion to play “victors’ justice,” the question of the fairness of the trial is likely to be overlooked. Except for those who are to gain from this courtroom drama, others will be wondering which way justice is being guided.
It is only natural if one suspects the fairness of the trial of a former head of state while the country is still under occupation and he is being tried by a special tribunal formed of people who belong to groups that have always wanted him out of power
That is why most people would see Saddam’s trial as a showpiece for the interested parties to claim victory of “their” justice. It is not the question of whether Saddam deserves justice and punishment for the crimes he has done to his people that bothers the fair-minded. What is worrying is the packaging of the whole procedure into a marketable political commodity, aimed at settling old scores for some and justifying an illegal war for others. The trial smacks more of politics and revenge than of justice.
The immediate parallel to the Saddam trial is the trial of former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic by the UN war crimes court at the Hague. Heads of states facing trials over charges of crimes against humanity is a rare phenomenon. Saddam’s only predecessor in this matter is Milosevic. Both are being tried for mass murders and genocide. Evidence is plenty against the defendants. They also share the hatred against the courts that try them. But the glaring difference is that while one is being tried at a world court where international rules and regulations apply, the other is facing a court in his own occupied country that does not even have a proper constitution.
Most would agree that this is not the circumstances under which Saddam should have been made to face justice. But Washington wanted dictate the ground rules. Already the US is claiming that the trial is a victory for democracy and a “momentous step in the building of a new Iraq." For all the victors, the trial that seem to matter more than the verdict, which seems to be predetermined anyway if only because of some of them want to pre-empt the emergence of certain facts linked to their own backing for the accused and complicity in some of the serious crimes attributed to him.
What then is relevance of the question whether Saddam and others who are in the dock with him would get a fair trial?

Friday, October 14, 2005

Not an end in itself

PV Vivekanand

WHEN the US planned and executed the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it thought it had to deal with only one foe — Saddam Hussein — and that removing him from power would mean a grateful people of Iraq who would rally behind American-dictated changes in the country. It would have been a cakewalk, the US thought, given that the people of Iraq were suffering for decades and paying a high price for the misadventures of their regimes and were clamouring for "liberation." Washington was convinced by Saddam's opponents in exile that they wielded so much of popularity, clout and influence in the Iraqi society that it was only a matter of days after the war that the people were pacified and the country could be rebuilt, with everything else, including law and order, smoothly falling into their rightful places.
Now, 30 months after Saddam was ousted, Washington's strategists have found that it was never as easy as that and they have to content with a multitude of groups with contrasting motivations and conflicting agendas.
What the American strategists had failed to grasp or appreciate as a ground reality was that the three major communities of Iraq — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — always harboured hostilities against each other. More fundamentally, the country was bound together in its modern shape by the colonial powers more than 110 years ago and the various components of the Iraqi society had always sought to strain free from the bindings while their regimes had always used whatever methods they deemed fit to keep the country from disintegrating along sectarian lines.
The bindings came off with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, and the various forces at work are seeking to implement their agendas. Gone in the wind are American hopes of an organised course of events leading to the installation of a US-friendly regime in Baghdad that is popular among the people and also subservient enough to serve American and allied interests in the region.
Saturday's referendum on the draft constitution for post-war Iraq holds out the last hope for the US to work out an orderly course of events leading to elections in December, and thus launching "democracy" in the country.
However, it is a double-edged sword. If the referendum produces a yes vote, then all the major Sunni groups — except the Iraqi Islamic Party which has struck a last-minute deal with the Shiites and Kurds — would only intensify their opposition to the US-designed changes in the country. If it produces a no vote, then the Shiites and Kurds would go against the Sunnis with a vengeance. Either way, Saturday's vote is not an end in itself, and, in all probability, it could be yet another turn for the worse for the suffering people of Iraq.

Watershed or an abyss?

PV Vivekanand

IRAQIS vote on a draft constitution on Saturday as part of the American-engineered drive for "democracy" in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. American hopes of pacifying the people of Iraq are pinned on the draft constitution as the catalyst to restoring normalcy to the beleaguered country. However, others warn that provisions for regional autonomy in the draft would hasten the country's descent into a sectarian civil war that could eventually draw in neighbouring states. If anything, the effort at democracy could explode in the face of the US and push Iraq further on the path towards disintegration in view of the historic realities and ethnic divisions of the country into the majority Shiite south, and a Kurdish north and the Sunni-dominated centre where everyone wants part of the stake. It is only a matter of time the remnants of the colonial knots dating back to the days of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire are completely unravelled.
It has been 30 months since the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein. The people of Iraq, who were supposed to have been "liberated" from the Saddam regime, now find themselves caught between the devil and the deep sea.
The insurgency in Iraq — some call it a war of terror, others call it a guerrilla war — against the US military presence in the country is growing steadily, with no sign of any let-up in the daily violence that has claimed tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 2,000 American soldiers in suicide bombings and ambushes.
Both internal and external forces are at play in Iraq. As the crisis is steadily turning worse, the deep hostility and distrust among the country's three major communities have burst forth. The US military has no formula to address the situation, if only because none of the three communities is willing to accept less than what it believes to be its stake in the country.
Shiites account for around 60 per cent of the 25-million population, Sunnis form some 16-18 per cent and Kurds represent around the same number as Sunnis. Sunnis always ruled the country despite their low numerical strength in the population. That situation ended with the invasion and ouster of the Saddam regime, but it has spawned a crisis that is snowballing beyond control.

Uncompromising postures

The positions of the three major communities in Iraq are more or less clear.
The Shiites, who dominate the south of the country, will not let go of their opportunity to gain absolute power by virtue of their majority in the population. They are demanding that the Sunnis and Kurds should recognise the Shiite power in the country and behave accordingly. They are willing to share power but only to the extent that their domination is not challenged.
That posture is not acceptable even to the US since Washington fears the Iranian influence among Iraqi Shiites and believes that a Shiite-dominated regime in Baghdad would only undermine the strategic American goal of containing Iran.
The Kurds are marking time for the realisation of their quest to set up an independent Kurdistan in the north of the country. The current president, Jalal Talabani, is a Kurd, and he is striving to consolidate the newfound Kurdish grip on power in Baghdad, but short of that the Kurds retain the option of independence in the north where they are running an autonomous regime since 1991.
An independent Kurdistan could sustain itself if it includes the oil-rich Kirkuk in the north. At present Kirkuk is out of the Kurdish orbit, but the Kurdish leadership has vowed to include it in their domain.
However, any Kurdish move to set up an independent state will face strong opposition from Turkey, which is mindful that its own Kurdish community could join their kinsmen across the border.
The draft constitution is automatically rejected if two-thirds of voters in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces vote against it on Saturday. This was originally aimed at reassuring the Kurds, who are majority in three northern provinces, that they could effectively veto any charter that did not provide them with significant autonomy.
While the statute guarantees autonomy to the Kurds but it also opens the door for autonomy in nine Shiite-dominated provinces. Thus, with 70 per cent of the country's known reserves of oil and 60 per cent of the population, the Shiites could set up their own state if the crisis continues to worsen.
The Sunnis are in central Iraq have few natural resources compared to the oil and gas industries based in both the north and the south.
In theory, they could reject the constitution since they have overwhelming majorities in two western provinces and a smaller majority in a third, and that is a strong possibility, according to reports.
The Sunnis are angry that they were marginalised in the constitution-drafting process although they had joined it at the risk of assassination by insurgents who have opposed their participation. The Sunnis who participated say that they were given a pledge that a consensus document would be the result, but they were brushed aside in the final phase of the drafting as the Kurds and Shiites made their own deals.
The final blow to the Sunnis came when a provision was included in the draft saying all former officials of the ousted Baathist party would be excluded from the administration of the country. It meant a majority of the Sunni population being kept out.
The Shiite-Kurdish coalition in power says if the draft statute is voted out, then it would be disastrous for the country, but then the Sunnis believe the disaster is already upon them and could not get any worse.
One Sunni group has accepted a deal with the Kurds and Shiites under which the constitution could be reviewed and amended in four months after December's parliamentary elections.
The Iraqi Islamic Party agreed to the compromise with the understanding that the next parliament will set up a commission to consider amendments, which would later have to be approved by parliament and submitted to a referendum.
The compromise is seen to improve the chances that the draft constitution will be passed in Saturday's referendum. At the same time, other major Sunni parties are unlikely to accept the compromise.
Again, there is no guarantee that the Kurds and Shiites would keep their part of the bargain by allowing the Sunnis to make any major changes to the constitution.
There is a school of thought that it would be a good turn of events if the charter is rejected in Saturday's vote.
Their argument is that a rejection of the statute could be a blessing because it may encourage more Sunnis to participate in the political process.
According to Fareed Zakaria, former foreign affairs managing editor and editor of Newsweek International, if the charter is rejected in the vote, then "Sunnis (will) have demonstrated that they have real power. And they'll be re-incorporated. That ...is the good-news scenario."
"The bad-case scenario," he says, "they're not able to defeat it... (Then the Sunnis) retain all the alienation, all the antipathy, and forge ahead not defeating it peacefully, but defeating it the way they're trying now, which is violently and through civil war."

Arab League effort

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa warned on Oct.8 that Iraq was close to civil war. In fact, he stopped short of staying that the country could split into three or more entities if no formula was found to address the ongoing crisis in the country. His warning reflected the growing Arab worries that Iraq is descending into chaos and the course could prove unstoppable with seriously negative repercussions for the whole region.
Musa has sent a team of Arab League officials to Iraq ahead of Saturday's referendum and his own visit there perhaps next month.
There are some who see a behind-the-scene American role in the League's effort. They believe that Washington has reached the conclusion that the US and its allies in Iraq would never be able to pacify the country to a level where a regime — of whatever political nature or ethnic shape — capable of maintaining the territorial integrity of the country could be installed.
Therefore the Bush administration wants the Arab League to pull the American chestnut out of the fire in Iraq.
Musa was seeking to convene a conference for reconciliation among all Iraqi sects. Towards that end, the Arab League team was under instructions to speak little and to listen to all sides, to avoid getting into any sectarian dispute and to maintain good relations with all groups.
But that is not likely to get anywhere any soon because the fundamentals in the draft statute are not conducive to any effort to hold the country together.
Referring to the provisions in the draft that allows "regional autonomy," Musa himself has stated:
"I do not believe in this division between Shiites and Sunni and Muslims and Christians and Arabs and Kurds. I find in this a true recipe for chaos and perhaps a catastrophe in Iraq and around it."
The outcome of the referendum will be key to any realistic Arab move because the League is seeking to forge a consensus on the new Iraqi constitution and to ensure the participation of all Iraqis in the political process. However, the League suffered a setback with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari refused to entertain the proposal for a reconciliation conference.
Probably, Musa himself would take up where the team left off when he visits Iraq.

Insurgency is growing

It is widely accepted — except of course by US President George W Bush and others in his administration — that the insurgency has only grown despite Washington's declarations to the contrary.
The Los Angeles Times reported this week: "The Iraqi insurgency has grown in strength and sophistication. From about 5,000 (Saddam) Hussein loyalists using leftover Iraqi army equipment, it has mushroomed into a disparate yet potent force of up to 20,000 equipped with explosives capable of knocking out even heavily armored military vehicles.
"The surface political process has stumbled forward, but the insurgency came up and kind of stayed that way," the LA Times quoted a US government analyst with "access to classified intelligence" as saying.
A disintegration of Iraq was widely predicted by many Arab leaders and Middle East analysts even before the US-led invasion of that country in March 23. For, such are the elements that had been at play and continue to do so in Iraq today.
Britain, which has first-hand experience in dealing with the Arab World, seems to catch on to the reality. Prime Minister Tony Blair's former special representative in Iraq Sir Jeremy Greenstock said recently: "If Iraq looks as if it's breaking down into a mosaic of different local baronies and militias, which might be a tendency if people look for security anywhere they can find it in society, then I think the coalition will have to think again about its presence."
According to former US Justice Department official John Yoo, the Bush administration was "spending blood and treasure to preserve a country that no longer makes sense as a state.
"The US might get closer to its goals in the Middle East," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "if everyone would jettison the fiction of a unified, single Iraq."



Historic realities

A division on Iraq would only be the manifestation of historic realities and facts on the ground that colonial powers tried to suppress after World War I when the dominant Ottoman Empire collapsed and Britain and France assumed control of the area.
The British bound together the three communities of Iraq into one entity and handed it over to a newly created monarchy while France maintained its control of Syria and Lebanon.
The monarchy was toppled in 1958, and after a disastrous 10-year rule by a semi-socialist, semi-autocrat regime, Sunni Saddam Hussein's pan-Arab Socialist Baathist Party grabbed power.
The only way the Baathists could keep the country together was brutal oppression of whoever challenged their supremacy or entertained the dream of breaking away. Iraq had always been like a high-tension steel coil pressed into a knot but ready to uncoil and spring if the knot was loosened. That is what has happened and the US has no way of recoiling it let alone knotting it.
The very need to keep the three communities knotted explained the ruthlessness of the Saddam regime, which brook no dissent whatsoever. Saddam believed in effective use of sheer police and military power and dispensed his way of justice against dissidents — summary execution, detention, torture and punishment for entire tribes and clans suspected of harbouring anti-regime thoughts.
A good number of Iraqis — they need not be Saddam loyalists or apologists — would agree that the country needed someone as ruthless as Saddam to hold it together as he did because a policy of brutal suppression and zero tolerance of dissent was the only way it could be held together as a single entity.
Saddam's grip on the country was pried loose a little when the US offered protection to the Kurds in the north after the 1991 war over Kuwait and supported their autonomous rule there.
But the US failed to offer similar support for the Shiites in the south because Washington feared the Shiites' loyalty would be towards their co-religionist Iran.
What the US did when it invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam in March/April 2003 was prying open the lid of the bottle that held the genie — in this case three or even more genies each with its own agenda. That was the eventuality that the US failed to foresee when it plotted the invasion of Iraq based on a web of lies and deception in order to serve the American quest for global domination and the Israeli quest for reign as unchallenged regional power and expansion in the Middle East.

The blame game

The US blames the Sunnis and "international jihadists" for the insurgency. Washington also accuses neighbouring Syria and Iran of allowing "foreign fighters" to enter Iraq and fight the US-led coalition forces and Iraqi security forces and stage bombings that kill Iraqi civilians.
According to the US, Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda, said to be headed in Iraq by Jordanian Fadel Al Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab Zarqawi, is orchestrating the "foreign" part of the insurgency.
Waging the guerrilla war are also various Sunni groups, some of which might or might not have ties with Zarqawi.
Indeed, there are many in Iraq and outside who believe that Zarqawi is no longer alive but the US is using his name to suit its own purposes in the country.
In essence, there is no central leadership to the insurgency in Iraq and only common ground for everyone involved in the guerrilla war is the rejection of the US presence in the country.
The Sunnis oppose it because they believe they would not be able to play their rightful role as long as the US remained in Iraq. They might even be counting on support from some of the Arab countries against the Shiites' quest for dominance and power.
Most of them would continue to fight and resist the US-led effort to impose an American-friendly Shiite-led regime on them.
Thrown into the bargain are the Kurds in the north of the country who are marking time for the right opportunity to advance their quest for an independent Kurdistan.
At this point in time, the Kurds and Shiites are tied in an uneasy alliance in an interim government, but the bond would not stand the test of time, given the conflicting agendas of the two communities.
For groups like Al Qaeda, it is a matter of fighting the US and its allies wherever possible. They believe that the US has an anti-Muslim agenda and this needs to be countered everywhere in the world.
There is no dearth of foreign volunteers for the insurgency if only because of what is widely perceived as the anti-Muslim, anti-Arab bias in the US policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Then there are those Iraqis who do not have a political agenda but have been turned against the US because of the loss or summary detention of family members and relatives. They pose a major problem for the US because intelligence would be hard put to identify them as potential assailants.
According to Iraqi intelligence estimates, there are between 20,000 and 30,000 hardcore insurgents in Iraq, with around 10 per cent of them being "foreigners."
These numbers are enough to keep the US military and Iraqi government forces too busy to build an effective security infrastructure in the country because the guerrillas are largely faceless. If the US is driven to such a level of desperation that it undertakes a summary "seek-and-destroy" against suspected Sunni villages, then it would only further undermine any hope of roping in the Sunnis in the effort to pacify the country.

Loyalty questioned

Recent events have established yet another stark reality — the security forces which being trained and prepared for the day where they take control of a democratic Iraq are also spit along sectarian lines.
A senior Iraqi commander, General Hassan Sawadi, who heads law enforcement in Iraq's second-largest city of Basra, has admitted that he could count on loyalty of only one of four of his policemen
The other three owe their allegiance to Shiite militia groups - the Badr Brigade, the Mahdi Army and Hizbollah in Iraq, a new group based in the southern marshlands — which means Iran, according to a United Press International report.
Iraq's National Security Adviser Mowaffaq Al Rubaie has admitted that "Iraqi security forces in general, and the police in particular, in many parts of Iraq, I have to admit, have been penetrated by some of the insurgents, some of the terrorists as well."
The assumption is that up to 50,000 men and women who worked for Saddam's repressive secret police and intelligence net and vanished after his ouster are now part of the Sunni insurgency along with soldiers of the former regime who lost their jobs when the US military disbanded Saddam's army.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was recently reported to have told a visiting US Congressman, "you call them insurgents, but they are the Iraqi army you dismissed against the advice of all your friends."
At least 60 per cent of the Basra police force is made up of Shiite militiamen, who owe their loyalty to their leaders who have their own agenda.
The 12,000-strong Badr Brigade is the armed wing of Iraq's main Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has close ties with Iran where its leaders lived in exile during the Saddam reign.
The Badr Brigade's main rival is the 10,000-man Mahdi Army, which is led by Moqtada Al Sadr, who sprang up as a Shiite leader to be reckoned with after the ouster of Saddam.
President Talabani wants Kurdish and Shiite militiamen to be deployed to fight the Sunni insurgents.
"If we wait for official security forces to be trained and effective enough to wipe out the insurgents, we will have a very long wait while the insurgency grows in strength," he was recently quoted as saying.
But, if the militias are sent to fight the insurgents, it would only hasten the arrival of a full-fledged civil war with volunteers for both sides entering the conflict area in from other countries.

Regional 'regime change'

Complicating the situation is the American drive for "regime change" in Iran and Syria, which are accused of helping fuel the insurgency across the border in Iraq, a charge flatly denied by both.
It is elementary that Tehran and Damascus, being aware of the US goal of "regime change," should not be expected to take whole-hearted action to help Washington pacify Iraq; for, they know too well that the American guns would immediately be trained against them if the US military succeeds in containing the guerrilla war in Iraq. Their strategic interest is to keep the flame of insurgency burning in Iraq tying down Washington's options there, with hopes that it is only a matter of time before they could wear down the US into calling it quits in the country.
The Bush administration had hoped that introducing democracy to the Iraqi people would help restore normalcy in the country since they would see a mechanism at work that benefits them in terms of daily life and spreading to other areas such as national unity and coherence.
However, the lack of American planning of what should be done to protect the interests of the Iraqi on the street undermined that goal from the world go, and today it is too late to correct the mistake.
"The expectation that political progress would bring stability has been fundamental to the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, as well as a central theme of White House rhetoric to convince the American public that its policy in Iraq remains on course, " notes the Los Angeles Times.
"But within the last two months, US analysts with access to classified intelligence have started to challenge this precept, noting a "significant and disturbing disconnect" between apparent advances on the political front and efforts to reduce insurgent attacks.
"Now, with Saturday's constitutional referendum appearing more likely to divide than unify the country, some within the administration have concluded that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgency," said the paper.
The reason is simple: The Sunnis might not be able to muster enough votes to reject the draft constitution, which, if passed in a non-amicable manner, would only fuel their fury and anti-American sentiments. That in turn would translate into increased guerrilla warfare.
Allan Topol, a veteran Washington-based lawyer, comments: "If and when a constitution is agreed upon in Baghdad, it will not mean that a single democratic nation will rise from the ashes of Saddam Hussein's police state. The signs are already crystal clear. Fissure into separate Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish entities is inevitable."
The International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organisation that deals with conflict resolution around the world, also has warned that approval of the draft constitution could make things worse. It has called the US administration's Iraq policy "a case study of pinning too much hope on an electoral process without doing so much of the other work."

US 'options'

Today, the US is unable to figure out its options. It could not quit Iraq because it would be the biggest blow to the American dream of global domination and a deep humiliation of its role as the world's sole superpower.
An American departure at this juncture would only hasten the disintegration of Iraq which could turn out to be another Afghanistan of anarchy and chaos and a constant source of threat to stability of the region and much more a menace to Israel, the very country whose interests the US sought to protect through invading and occupying Iraq.
Of course, the US could stay on with an open-ended mission — as President George W Bush and his advisers and strategists affirm, albeit not in so many words — but it would have to pay a heavy daily price in terms of American casualties.
The guerrilla war would only gain strength and there is no way the US or any other military could contain it using force. It needs fundamental changes in American policies and the Bush administration is far from even contemplating such a thought. Washington is going in the wrong direction, and it has caught not one but dozens of tigers by the tail in Iraq.
Beyond that, however, is the real danger of Iraq breaking apart with major regional repercussions.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal has warned that Iraq is moving "towards disintegration, with a growing danger the country will dissolve into a civil war that will draw its neighbors into a broader regional conflict."
There will be a struggle for natural resources, he said, that will "draw Iraq's neighbours into a wider war."
Prince Saud said his country had warned the Bush administration of the dangers of Iraq's unraveling because of tensions between rival ethnic and religious groups, which he said were never as bad during Saddam's reign as they are today.
"The impression is gradually going towards disintegration. There seems to be no dynamic now that is pulling the country together. All the dynamics there are pushing the [Iraqi] people away from each other," he said.
As a result, Iraq is now a "very threatening" challenge undermining stability throughout the Middle East. "It will draw the countries of the region into conflict. That is the main worry of all the neighbours of Iraq," he said.

Perhaps a way out

Whatever agreements the US manages to engineer among the various Iraqi factions are all destined to be short-term deals. For, in the long run, the various groups at play in Iraq have their own agendas. Fundamentally, the Shiitesa and Kurds have little incentive to remain together as a single entity and country.
The Sunnis might have an interest that the country should not splinter, because the Sunni-dominated areas are not oil rich. If the Shiites and Kurds opt to break away, then what is left in central Iraq for the Sunnis and others would be virtually worthless in terms of oil and natural resources.
At the same time, the Sunnis also want to ensure that they are not left out of the corridors of power and influence.
In terms of both wealth and power, the draft constitution, in its present form, is loaded against the Sunnis.
It could be argued that the deal reached this week could ensure a "yes" for the constitution, but there is no guarantee that the obligations under the compromise would be fulfilled in a manner that satisfies the Sunni community.
The American optimism that endorsement of the draft statute leading to December elections for parliament would help cool the insurgency does not seem to be well-founded. We heard it at the time of the Jan.30 elections to the interim national assembly but what we saw on the ground was an intensification of the insurgency and there is little to indicate that the course of events would be any different this time around.
If anything, things could only worsen.Unless of course the US sets a firm date for withdrawing its forces from Iraq, takes its hands off the governance of the country and let the Arab League and the United Nations work out a fair and just compromise involving all Iraqi communities. Even at that, there is no guarantee of success, but consensus says that such an approach has the best chance, if any at all.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Plame affair turning more sinister

THE "outing" of the wife of a former US ambassador as an undercover operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is emerging as a much more sinister affair than initially thought. It now appears that the Israeli Mossad secret agency manipulated the White House to expose a CIA operation monitoring nuclear devices, fissionable material and delivery systems in Russia. As a result of the exposure, the CIA operation had to be called off, leaving the field clear for Mossad to grab some of the nukes, which, some people say, could be used in a false-flag operation where Arabs or Iranians could be blamed.
That is the conclusion of many "bloggers" on the Internet, some of them top-notch experts in their respective areas and are well-informed.
That Valerie Plame, the woman who was "outed," was involved in much more sensitive work than known until now was revealed by Whitley Strieber, a well-known writer about mysteries and UFOs.
He says that Valerie Plame and many CIA agents were working under the cover of a company called Brewster-Jennings and Associates in several countries, including Russia.
He says that the Russian operation of Brewster-Jennings and Associates involved monitoring "loose nukes, making sure that nothing goes missing, and tracking and locating missing items" across the southern areas of the former Soviet Union where there are numerous nuclear devices, fissionable material and delivery systems that are barely guarded by the locals."
Strieber, who did not attribute his information of any source, says outing Plame meant exposing this company as CIA front and thus destroying and compromising all these agents. "Basically, the most important CIA human intelligence agents are all gone," he writes.
The known essence of the Palme affair so far was that she being identified as a CIA operative was the neconservatives' way of getting back at her husband Wilson.
Wilson had charged that his wife's CIA association had been deliberately exposed by the White House in order to destroy her career in retaliation for his public charge that the Bush administration had lied to the American people about US intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
In an article he wrote in he New York Times on July 7, 2003, Wilson denounced the Bush administration, saying that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear programme was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
Six days later, columnist Rober Novak revealed that Palme was a CIA agent and she was instrumental in sending her husband to Niger to investigate Iraq's nuclear activities. Wilson had reported that charges that Iraq had bought nuclear material from Niger were false, but his report was ignored. President George W Bush himself cited "evidence" that Saddam Hussein had bought nuclear material from Niger, and that was what prompted Wilson to go public with his finding.
An investigation has been launched under special counsel Patrick Fritzgerald into who had "leaked" Palme's identity to Novak.
Strieber says that Palme's immediate superior at the CIA, Jim Pavitt, resigned from the agency in the wake of the outing.
Strieber writes: "Valerie Plame was no small fish. The revelation of her name is, in fact, the most serious intelligence disaster in the history of this country. Only a tiny number of high officials, such as the president, the secretaries of state and defense, and a few high White House officials even have access to the names of the CIA’s 'non-official cover' officers.
"These are seemingly private individuals who are actually key CIA personnel, whose clandestine activities are run via carefully designed covers, companies that are legitimate from top to bottom and are not in any way thought to be CIA-associated, and have survived years of scrutiny from foreign intelligence operations, and are believed by even the best of them to be entirely non-CIA connected.
"The names on the NOC list are among the greatest secrets possessed by our country, and the leaking of this particular name at this particular time could well be the single most traitorous act in our history, because it has blinded us to the actions of Iran as they are in the process of acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them."
According to Strieber, Brewster-Jennings and Associates were primarily active in the US and Saudi Arabia, but also engaged in activities in China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and Syria.
"Two decades of intelligence work in these countries has been compromised or destroyed by this monstrous act," he says. "Worse, we can no longer trust any intelligence being gathered via this critical resource."
Strieber does not refer to Mossad at all. The "connection" is made by
others, given than Bush's close aide Karl Rove and Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby have been identified as those who "leaked" the name of Palme. Suggestions are also plenty that the scandal involves Bush and Cheney, who are alleged to have discussed the issue before the name was "leaked."
For many, it is a foregone conclusion that both Rove and Libby are somehow connected with Israel, and, by inference, Mossad.
A posting on www.libertyforum.org suggests that whoever leaked Palme's name did so to benefit Mossad.
"For years now, and since outing Plame, these Russian nuclear devices and materials have remained unguarded, available for Mossad to grab," says the posting adding that the Israeli agency would use the nukes to stage terrorism and blame it on "Al-Qaeda" or Arabs or Iranians.
"The pending indictments in the Plame outing case are threatening to shed a lot of light on the real purpose of outing Plame and the Mossad operatives and involved in grabbing the Russian nukes," it says.
Another says: "The outing affected far more than just Valerie Plame's career. The seriousness of the outing actualy makes Valerie's career extremely insignificant, since not only was an entire operation exposed, but it also placed the lives of other operatives under serious risk. Whoever outed Valeri must of known this, and I doubt it was done for the reasons stated by Wilson — that's just the cover story for public consumption. This rabbit hole goes very deep."
Strieber's argument, in principle, is the same:
"It cannot be that this was what has been portrayed: the act of a vindictive official intent on ruining Plame’s career because her husband annoyed the administration. It is more than that, it must be. The reason is simple. Everybody who knew her name also knew what she did and how extraordinarily sensitive her work was."
"In the meantime," he says, "we can only wait and pray that a nuclear weapon does not go off somewhere in the world—or even more than one. The worst case nuclear scenario is that a bomb devastates a great western city, and the west is then warned that many other cities are mined with similar weapons, and this is done by a shadowy 'terrorist group'."

Friday, October 07, 2005

Payoff time in Washington




Tom Delay (R-Texas)

THE fall of Tom DeLay, erstwhile leader of the Republican majority in the US House of Representatives, over charges of violating election financing laws coupled with criminal charges linked to money laundering, is a major blow to US President George W Bush.
The DeLay affair has sent tremors through the White House and the Republican establishment in Washington, raising fears that the party's 11-year grip on the House of Representatives could be ended by November 2006's Congressional mid-term elections.
Bush is already in serious trouble. The credibility of his administration has steadily plunged, depressed by revelations after revelations that many of its senior figures had plotted the war against Iraq even before they came to power and they engineered the invasion of Iraq and ouster of Saddam Hussein through lies and deceit.
The anti-war movement is gaining strength throughout the US.
The glaring shortcomings in the way the administration dealt with Hurricane Katrina have drawn such bitter criticism that Bush is the worst president that the US ever saw.
Add to that the controversies that surrounded Bush's nomination of John Bolton as the US ambassador to the UN, John Roberts as Supreme Court justice and Harriet Miers as associate chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Add to that the increasing talk among Americans that pro-Israelis are leading the Bush administration by the nose; and then take note that the first public appearance of DeLay after being indicted and forced to leave his leadership position was at a s dinner hosted by "Stand for Israel," a group of Israel-supporting evangelical Christians and Jews.
On Monday, a Texas grand jury indicted DeLay for alleged involvement in money laundering related to the 2002 Texas election, raising new and more serious allegations than the conspiracy charge lodged against the former House of Representatives majority leader last week.
The surprising new indictments followed by a matter of hours a motion by DeLay's lawyers to quash last week's charge on grounds that the Texas prosecutor in charge of the case lacked authority to bring it. The lawyers alleged that the crime of conspiracy was not covered by the state election law at the time of the alleged violation.
The new indictment accuses DeLay of illegally circumventing the state's law against corporate campaign contributions.
Specifically, DeLay, 58, is accused of conspiring with Jim Ellis of Washington, D.C., and John Colyandro of Austin to convert $190,000 in donations from several corporations into campaign contributions on behalf of seven Republican state House of Representatives candidates.
According to the district attorney's office, that corporate money was sent from Austin to Washington, and then sent back to Texas in the form of contributions to candidates for the state Legislature. Texas law makes it a felony for corporations and labor unions to contribute to political candidates.
If convicted on the money laundering charge, which is a first-degree felony, DeLay would face a sentence of up to five years' probation to life in prison, and a fine of up to $10,000. Conspiracy to commit money laundering is a second-degree felony punishable by to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
By contrast, the original conspiracy indictment carried a sentence of two years in a state jail and a fine of up to $10,000.
Delay is due to appear in a Travis County courtroom in Austin on Oct. 21 to formally hear the charges against him.
But then, the charges are only the tip of an iceberg. Critics accuse DeLay of massive influence peddling and assuming and even exercising political clout equivalent to that of the president itself.
Democratic politicians were quick to condemn both DeLay and the Republican leadership.
"The second criminal indictment of Congressman DeLay is yet another example that Republicans in Congress are plagued by a culture of corruption and cronyism at the expense of the American people," said Jennifer Crider, press secretary to House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.
DeLay's departure as majority leader in the House of Representatives deprives the Republicans of arguably its most powerful figure on Capitol Hill, an unmatched political organiser and enforcer who has done more than anyone to drive Bush's agenda through a divided and partisan Congress.
But not only on Capitol Hill has he ruled the Republican flock with a rod of iron. The 58-year old Texas Congressman has also been a prime architect of his party's so-called "K Street Project," using a combination of carrots and sticks to place Republicans at the head of the lobbying firms and business interest groups who play a central role in shaping legislation here.
Even Democratic opponents who detest him grudgingly admit there has been no more effective majority leader from either party in the last 20 years.
Congressional watchdogs sketch a different legacy: That of a man who repeatedly skirted the edges of ethics and campaign finance rules to consolidate power for his party, eventually pushing the envelope too far.
"DeLay's raw power grab has relied on a complex influence-peddling scheme designed to consolidate his own power and that of his party's while giving corporate interests private access to steer the wheels of government at the expense of citizens," said Joan Claybrook, head of Public Citizen, a watchdog group.
Commentator Rupert Corn wrote in the Independent of London:
"I make no bones about it. I cannot abide DeLay, his ruthless ways and narrow conservative views, all wrapped in the cloth of God. For me, he is emblem of much that is wrong with US politics. Arguably, though, he is the most powerful man in Washington apart from George Bush himself. A colleague once described DeLay as a cross between a concierge and a mafia don: "They can get you anything you want but it will cost you." How delicious it is that he seems to have received his comeuppance - those who live by the sword die by the sword, and all that."

Congressional Republican leaders have replaced DeLay with Missouri Congressman Roy Blunt on a "temporary" basis — on the assumption that the Texan's protestations of innocence are true, and that he will be speedily exonerated.
But Blunt is under a small ethics shadow of his own. Records on file with the Federal Election Commission show that Blunt's political action committee has paid some $88,000 in fees since 2003 to a consultant facing indictment in Texas in the DeLay case.
But for Republicans, the DeLay affair is only the latest in a series of ethics controversies involving major party figures, stretching from Capitol Hill and the lobbying industry into the White House itself.
Known as "The Hammer" for his ruthless style, DeLay helped create the current Republican golden age in Washington. He was a close lieutenant of former speaker Newt Gingrich, who led the party to victory in the 1994 mid-term elections, by seizing on public discontent with an entrenched, corrupt and complacent Democratic majority. The wheel may now be turning full circle.
The host of scandals now threatens to tar the Republicans in exactly the same fashion. Just like Republicans 11 years ago, Democrats scent blood. The DeLay affair, charges Pelosi, is "the latest example that Republicans in Congress are plagued by a culture of corruption." The pile of supporting evidence for that claim is growing almost by the day."
From a Republican perspective, the best hope is that DeLay himself will be sidelined for only a few weeks. At worst, however, he could find himself being handcuffed and photographed as an alleged felon.
Meanwhile Bill Frist, his counterpart in the Senate, is under separate federal probe for possible insider trading, in connection with the sale of shares in his family hospital company, shortly before the stock price fell sharply. Like DeLay, Mr Frist denies any wrongdoing, but the very fact of an investigation is embarrassment enough.
Related trouble is brewing on the lobbying front. Jack Abramoff, a disgraced top Republican lobbyist who once had close ties to DeLay, has been charged with fraud, and may be tempted to incriminate leading party figures as part of a plea bargain with FBI investigators.
The same goes for David Safavian, a former senior White House budget aide who resigned earlier this month — just days before he was indicted for perjury and obstructing the Abramoff probe.
That case has only escaped wider coverage because it has been overshadowed by greater disasters for Bush, in the most troubled spell of his Presidency. They include the seemingly intractable insurgency in Iraq , his inept response to Hurricane Katrina and public disgruntlement at soaring petrol and fuel prices, always an especially sensitive issue for a US leader.
In the meantime the White House is bracing for the conclusion of the investigation by an independent prosecutor into the leak of the name of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative Valerie Plame, which has already seen Karl Rove and other top administration officials testifying before a federal grand jury.
Many say that if the prosecutor does his job, then even Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney could be named as having been instrumental in "outing" Plame in retaliation for her husband's revelation that "evidence" Bush cited to support his charge that Iraq had a nuclear weapons programme was based on a false intelligence report.
It is time for payoff for the Bush administration, but one does not really know in what currency, at least not yet.

Compiled from wire agencies, newspapers and websites

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

'Disgusting and nauseating'






This is said to be a doctored photo of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. A US newspaper published it but then withdrew it explaining that someone had doctored an Associated Press photo to give Rice's eyes a sinister look.




PV Vivekanand

"The government lied, and your kids died" This is the rallying cry of American anti-war movements and critics of the George Bush administration. But you would not find the slogan in the mainstream corporate media of the United States. For most of them, it is business as usual, with Republican President Bush and his people doing a great job of governing the country, fighting off terror threats to national security and stability and challenges to the very way of life in the US.
As far as the mainstream media are concerned, charges that the administration lied and used deceit to lead the country to war against Iraq in order to serve Israeli interests more than those of the US simply happen to be fabricated by the opposition Democrats and others who do not like the Republicans. Indeed, that is what emerges from the behaviour and utterances of Bush and senior officials in his administration. They don't seem to care a hoot about what many Americans have to say about how the country has fallen from its stature as the most respected nation in the world to that of an entity — not withstanding its sole superpower status — run by an autocratic regime that bulldozes its way in whatever direction it deems fit. But then, it is not surprising, given that those in power in the US believes only in military might and global dominance at whatever cost. Everything else is trivial and irrelevant.
It is indeed surprising to this part of the world that Bush himself and his people are blatantly ignoring well-established facts and substantiated allegations that they took the people of America and the rest of the world for a ride in the invasion of Iraq and continuing with a business-as-usual approach despite the death of nearly 1,900 American soldiers and the maiming of thousands of others (not to mention the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis and the untold suffering the people of that country are now living through).
I know at least half a dozen people who simply switch television channels when Bush and some of his close aides appear on screen.
Indeed, we feel like throwing up when we see and hear them belting out statements that have little relevance to the crises the US and the rest of the world face but serve the interests of the neoconservative camp in Washington.
We recognise them as lies, but we are unable to do anything about; it would appear that not even American voters could do anything about. They are stuck with this present administration and many of their elected representatives depend on the neoconservatives for not only their survival but also to make themselves wealthy and politically powerful.
It is disgusting to listen to Bush administration officials talking about the need for democracy and respect for human rights in the Arab World when the images from Abu Ghraib remain vivid in our mental screens (It does not mean that the Arab states are world models for democracy and human rights, but the point being made here has to do with American hypocrisy).
It is nauseating to listen to Bush administration officials talking about the need to fight "terrorist" groups around the world when we know that most of the "terrorists" are America's own direct or indirect creation (It does not mean that anyone is an apologist for "terrorists" and see their actions as just and fair, but we have to see the American administration's statements against the backdrop of fair evidence that someone high up in the Bush administration was deeply involved in the Sept.11 attacks that triggered the US-led war against terror).
It is ridiculing to listen to Bush administration officials talking about the "greatness" of the US when we know that whatever was indeed great about that country has been sacrified at the altar of Israeli interests and the quest for global dominance.
It is indeed alarming to listen to Bush administration officials levelling charges against countries like Syria and Iran when we know that those countries are being set up and framed into position for "regime changes" to suit American and Israeli interests.
It is sickening to listen to Bush administration officials talking about putting Saddam Hussein and others from the ousted regime on trial when we know that the most deserving candidates to be tried on charges of crimes against humanity are right there in Washington and are allowed to continue their crimes with immunity.
What is even more revolting is the realisation that Bush and his people are perfectly aware that they are giving us a pack of lies but they expect us to swallow it whether we like it or not if only because we are not in a position to do otherwise.
However, Bush and his people should not ignore the rising voice of ordinary Americans. The administration and its cronies might be able to shut them off the corporate media, but their voices are indeed being heard loud and clear — the indignant, furious denounciation of the administration's policies — in the Internet.

Here is an outstanding example (http://www.epluribusmedia.org):

10 Bad Reasons for “Staying the Course” in Iraq (and One Good One)
by Jeff Huber

03 October 2005

10. Democracy takes time. America needed 13 years to write its Constitution.
The American Revolution analogy is ludicrous. Britain did not invade the American colonies in order to liberate us, and we did not ask them to stick around for more than a decade to help us form our government.

9. If we leave now, we’ll embolden the terrorists.
They’re not exactly shrinking violets now. The longer we’ve stayed, the bolder they’ve become.

8. Withdrawing will show lack of American resolve.
Getting in a bar fight over a girl shows resolve. Waking up in jail with your nose broken shows how stupid you are.

7. We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.
If we don’t have to fight them over here, why do we spend around $40 billion a year for a Department of Homeland Security?

6. The spread of democracy in the Middle East will enhance America’s security.
"Free" elections in the Middle East have helped Afghanistan become the world’s leading exporter of narcotics and transformed terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah into "legitimate" political parties.

5. We need to support our troops.
I applaud and deeply respect our men and women in uniform for their magnificent service and sacrifice. These are my people, remember? However, comma….

In the first place, we are supporting our troops — to the tune of nearly half a trillion dollars a year.

Second, when we continue to commit those men and women in uniform to a struggle for which there is no military solution, we are abusing them, not supporting them.

Third — and most importantly — America does not exist for the purpose of supporting its military. Our military exists to support America. And if it’s not defending us at home or achieving our national aims overseas, it’s not supporting our country.

4. If we pull out now, we’ll look weak.
We’ve committed our national power to an ill-advised war and are losing. How much weaker can we look?

3. In times of crisis, we need to rally around the president and his policies.
America will not maintain or restore its power and prestige by behaving like a nation of lemmings. There is nothing noble, brave, or patriotic about following the leader over the cliff and into the sea.

2. "They tried to kill my dad."
Thanks to Mr. Bush’s policies and strategies, they’ve succeeded in killing a lot of dads, and moms, and aunts, and uncles, and brothers, and sisters ….
If we cut through the bunker mentality and frame the argument for staying in Iraq to reflect the neocons’ real purpose for the Iraq invasion, it might sound something like this:

1. We set out to establish a military base of operations from which we can control the Middle East and its oil, and we should persist until we "get the job done."
Even though it’s true, the argument’s still specious. Our "besttrained, bestequipped, bestfunded" military can’t get Iraq or Afghanistan under control. How can we possibly expect to lock down the entire Middle East?


+1. We owe something to the Iraqi people.
This is the only rationale that still holds water with me. We need to pay for the pottery we broke. But how much do we need to pay for it, and who exactly is this we we’re referring to, kemosabe?

We the people weren’t the honchos of the Project for a New American Century who made ousting Saddam Hussein the crown jewel of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. We did not cook the intelligence on Iraq. We did not ignore the advice of generals who warned against invading Iraq, then warned against invading with too few troops. And we did not fumble the counterinsurgency effort for two years.

Whatever the price of their bad policies, strategies, and decisions turns out to be, we will be the ones who pay for them. Really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes, remember?

How responsible are we for their deceptions and mistakes, and how much do we want to pay for them?

Tora Bora in Sinai?



PV Vivekanand

It would seem that Israel is steadily building up a case of Al Qaeda preparing to launch anti-Israeli attacks from across the border in Egypt's Sinai. If "leaked" Israeli "intelligence reports" are to be believed then Sinai is being turned into a new Tora Bora of Afghanistan by Al Qaeda, with disgruntled Egyptian bedouins and Palestinians from the Gaza Strip making up the bulk of its supporters in what Israel calls "Al Qaeda Sinai" and "Al Qaeda Palestine." A good faith report on the Israeli claims would read like this:


ISRAELI intelligence reports indicate that Al Qaeda has set up a formidable network in the area and is getting ready to strike at Israeli targets as well as at Jordan and Egypt.
According to intelligence reports, Al Qaeda has set up makeshift camps in the rough terrain and inaccessible peaks of the strategic desert peninsula like the group did in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains during the US-led war there. They are supported in Sinai by rebellious bedouin and Palestinian fighters, and some accounts say that Al Qaeda is better fortified in Sinai than it was in Tora Bora.
Egyptian security forces have failed to pinpoint the Al Qaeda camps let alone dislodge them from the moountain peaks of Egypt, particularly in the area called Jabal Hillal.
Israeli intelligence reports have been warning of Al Qaeda efforts to set up an infrastructure in Sinai area since last October's bomb blasts at Taba's Hilton Hotel followed by another spate of blasts at Egypt's Sharm Al Sheikh resort. Taba is in Egypt, but the area is open to Israelis who used to throng here to frequent the casinos there.
According to Israeli intelligence reports, Al Qaeda now control sroughly one-fifth of Sinai total area (61,000 square kilometres). "Egyptian forces of law and order have learned not to venture into these bastions or into the areas commanded by age-old smuggler clans who currently collaborate with Al Qaeda," says one report. "This leaves about half of the forbidding desert peninsula inaccessible to Egyptian security forces. Today, they can only claim to control the main roads routes fringing the vast desert expanse: from Ras Sudeir down to Sharm Al Sheikh along the Suez Canal and Suez Gulf shores; from the Suez Canal east to El Arish along the Mediterranean shore and from the Sharm el-Sheikh resort center north along the Gulf of Aqaba to Taba and the Israeli port of Eilat (see attached map).
"The spectacular, biblical landscape conceals terrorist bomb traps and roadside devices. Gunmen armed with RPG and anti-tank weapons lurk behind huge rocks in wait for any Egyptian police or security unit daring to step off a main road into one of the dry valleys dissecting the forbidding peaks."
"The paths leading up to peaks – some as tall as 7,500 feet - are barricaded by huge rocks under which explosive snares are concealed. Attempts to move the rocks would set off explosions and start an avalanche. Interspersed among the natural barriers are bomb traps and anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. The caves perforating the slopes are firing positions - some armed with mortars and heavy machine guns."
In view of such fortification, Egyptian securities forces have failed and retreated from their large-scale assaults on the suspected camps.
The only means to dislodge them is through a major aerial bombardment supported by precision landing of troops by helicopters.
However, there are several hurdles to such an assault, according to the Israeli analysis of the situation.
Egypt is not supposed to undertake any air force operations in the Sinai under the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. While Egypt could seek approval and co-ordination for an allout attack against Al Qaeda, the government of Hosni Mubarak is not seen ready to be the target for Muslim anger against it for for collaborating with the Jewish state against Al Qaeda, which is seen by many Arabs and Muslims as the symbol of their anti-Israeli struggle.
Another hurdle is Egypt's lack of information about the arsenal possessed by Al Qaeda, which is believed to have a fairly large number of anti-aircraft short-range missiles that could bring down helicopters.
According to Israeli intelligence, Al Qaeda’ has already set up several channels for smuggling fighters, supplies, arms and weapons into Sinai.
These routes exploit the peninsula’s exceptional geography to run between Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and the Gaza Strip after Israel withdrew from there in August and September.
"That al Qaeda has established a presence in the Gaza Strip is no longer a matter of speculation," says the Israeli intelligence report. "Today, Israeli military intelligence AMAN and the Shin Beit are taking the new manifestation of Al Qaeda-Palestine as an offshoot of Al Qaeda-Sinai with the utmost seriousness.
According to the report, foreign fighters have been detected entering the Gaza Strip, welcomed and integrated in to the logistical infrastructures of Palestinian groups and elements of Hizballah, Hamas and Jihad Islami have been heading out of Gaza into Sinai to join Al Qaeda.

Now, why would Israel go the extent of highlighting such a scenario, which clearly questions the abilities of Egypt's security forces? Obviously, it does not want Egypt to have any particularly strong say in Palestinian security-linked issues, and the best way to do that is to show that Egyptian security forces are impotent against militant groups.
On the other hand, it is also possible that the Israeli-reported scenario is fairly accurate. Then that would raise the spectre of Al Qaeda hitting out at Israelis, "moderate" Palestinians, Jordanians and of course Egyptians.
At this point, we could only watch and see.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Judith Miller no Joan of Arc

PV Vivekanand


SO NOW Judith Miller of the New York Times is made out to be a heroine of the media. She is so highly principled a journalist committed to upholding the ethics of the profession that she had opted to spend 85 days in prison rather than reveal her sources. So much is her integrity that she waited until she received "a direct and uncoerced waiver" from her source before going before a grand jury and giving the name of Lewis Scott Libby, a close aide to Vice-President Dick Cheney, as the person who revealed to her that Valerie Palme was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secret operative.
Well, one could rattle off the names of many who would spend more than 85 days in order to project themselves as models for international journalistic ethics and gain fame, but it subject to debate how many of them would survive a close scrutiny of their journalist record for ethics and unbiased, objective reporting. Of particular importance here is that Miller was in disgrace when she sprang up and went to jail in the name of professional ethics and integrity, now she has emerged to reap the fruit of spending time in jail.
It seems to be a combination of several factors that prompted her to choose to go to jail. It is difficult to cite them in terms of importance and priority since only she would know how she rated them.
From the day Miller opted d to spend time in jail, many commentators declared that her objective was to redeem herself from the disgrace and ostracism she suffered when the New York Times had to apologise for four of her articles that the paper ran in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Her reports spoke about Saddam Hussein's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and painted a picture as if Iraq was threatening the entire Middle Eastern neighbourhood and the US itself with WMDs.
It was easy for the American people — recovering from the trauma of the Sept.11 attacks and repeated warnings of further assaults against them —  to swallow those accounts as accurate.
Those reports also went a considerable way in convincing many sceptics in the US Congress into voting to authorise the Bush administration to wage war on Iraq.
And the NYT had no option but to offer the apology when it was established after the invasion of Iraq and ouster of Saddam that Iraq had no WMDs and the ousted president had destroyed whatever he had at least a decade before the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
It was a serious and unprecedented humiliation for the NYT, and perhaps that was one of the reasons it also tried to redeem itself by taking an open position against a second term for George W Bush in 2004.
How could a "journalistic icon" like Judith Miller make such a mistake? Wasn't she a veteran with decades of experience and followed the code of ethics of the profession to the letter and spirit that it was taken for granted that she would have independently verified the accuracy of the report before firing it off to the NYT foreign desk?
Well, that is where a comment written by Arianna Huffington, editor of the website The Huffington Post and appearing in the Los Angeles Times, has the most relevance.
According to Huffington, "a thorough and comprehensive look at Miller's career reveals repeated examples of egregious reporting, a startling lack of objectivity, too-close-for-comfort relationships with dubious sources … and a penchant for far-from-thorough and far-from-comprehensive coverage."
Startling, isn't it? That is not the way most Americans would have seen Miller, particularly that the NYT itself described her while she was prison as "an intrepid, principled and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has provided our readers with thorough and comprehensive reporting throughout her career."
That was definitely not the way the NYT would have described Miller when it had to eat crow and apologise to the readers for her WMD reports.
In its apology, the paper said a common feature of the "problematic articles" was their dependence at least in part on Iraqi exiles and defectors bent on "regime change".
It said it had found "a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been".
The paper said part of the blame was on editors for failing to challenge reporters.
Well, it had by then been known that Miller's main source was Ahmed Chalabi, who had a vested interest in coercing the US to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. Miller herself admitted that Chalabi was the source for "most of the front-page exclusives on WMD" in the New York Times.
Compare that affirmation with the assessment of David Kay, who led the post-war hunt for WMDs in Iraq. Kay said Chalabi's was brilliance was to provide information to different Western intelligence agencies, which then vied with each other to trumpet the insights of their intelligence, unaware that they were all from the same source.
But for Miller to have depended on Chalabi without verifying the accuracy of his dubious accounts of Iraq's non-existent WMDs was totally out of character for a NYT reporter.
As Huffington observes, "The inescapable fact is that Miller — intentionally or unintentionally — worked hand in glove in helping the White House propaganda machine sell the war in Iraq. And that includes Libby and his boss, Dick Cheney."
Author and commentator Justin Raimundo, who describes Libby as the man at the centre of the neoconservative seat of power in Washington, is more harsh.
"If any one source of government-generated disinformation could be pointed to as vitally important in the campaign to lie us into war with Iraq, then surely Miller – the New York Times reporter whose articles did so much to inflate the claims of Iraqi 'weapons of mass destruction' – deserves some sort of award," says Raimundo. "Thanks to her tireless efforts, there was hardly a tall tale told by Ahmed Chalabi's US-government-funded 'intelligence-gathering' operation that did not make it into the New York Times, often on the front page.
"From the aluminum tubes that had nothing to do with nukes or other 'weapons of mass destruction,' to the secret biolabs in the basements of Saddam's palaces, to the string of nuke factories allegedly working overtime from one end of Iraq to the other, it all turned out to be a tissue of lies."
Raimundo continues on www.antiwar.com: "When the US finally went into Iraq, and the search for those mythical WMD began, General Judy was in the forefront of the posse, personally accompanying the military team sent to conduct search operations – virtually 'hijacking' the mission, according to one officer on the scene – and even wearing a military uniform.
"Her imperious manner while in Iraq with META (the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha) aroused considerable resentment, particularly on account of her brazen attempts to intimidate military personnel by threatening to go to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or his deputy Douglas Feith if things did not go her way. And there is evidence that her relationship with the Pentagon was not all bluff and bluster."
Also punctured this week is Miller's claim that without an "uncoerced waiver" from her source, she would never had revealed the identity of the source who revealed that Palme was a CIA agent.
The Palme episode had to do with what has emerged as neoconservatives' way of getting back at her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who revealed that the Bush administration was depending on lies to justify the war against Iraq.
It was known that Libby was Miller's source when the Washington Post quoted Joseph Tate, Libby's lawyer, as saying that he had informed Miller's lawyer Floyd Abrams a year ago that Libby's waiver "was voluntary and that Miller was free to testify."
However, Miller and Abrams continue to insist that the earlier waiver was indeed coerced regardless of Libby's own affirmation that it was not coerced.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Miller had tried to a year ago to make a deal with the prosecutor investigating the leak of Palme's identity but the prosecutor would not agree then to limit her testimony to Libby.
Obviously, Miller's "connections and sources" go higher than Libby — not that there is not much room for too many up there — and that was she insisted in limiting the scope of her testimony to Libby.
Fitzgerald's investigation also involves President George W. Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove.
What exact role did Miller play in the Palme case, how and why?
Well, one thing is clear: Given that she was directly behind the "convincing" reports that Saddam had WMDs, Wilson's charge hit directly at her credibility or the lack of it. By implication, it meant she had an axe to grind against Wilson. But, she never wrote about Palme or Wilson, and there is no clear indication what she did with the information given to her or whether she was instrumental in others getting the information.
However, the Palme scandal hit Miller when she was already in disgrace following the NYT apology.
As Huffington notes, "Before her transformation into a journalistic Joan of Arc, Miller was in a tailspin, her work discredited, removed from the WMD beat and forced to deal with colleagues who refused to share a byline with her.
"She desperately needed to change the subject and cleanse herself of the stench left by her misleading coverage leading up to the war — coverage that makes the Jayson Blair scandal, by comparison, seem ludicrously insignificant (Jayson Blair was a New York Times reporter who resigned in May 2003 after plagiarising a story about a woman whose son died in Iraq, never talked to two other soldiers' parents he quoted in separate articles)."
Many in this part of the world seem not to have looked closely at Miller's record before glorifying her as the heroine of media freedoms and ethics.
The best story that emerges from her various episodes is that she sought to redeem herself back into grace by going to jail in the name of journalistic ethics. Indeed, she seems to have been at least partly successful, but a quick look at the way she conducted herself throughout the Palme affair would only create more sceptics.