No going near key issues

April 4, 2004

No going near key issues

PV Vivekanand

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is hearing serving and former administration officials on the "facts and causes" of the Sept.11 attacks. The exercise aims at establishing whether the Bush administration failed in taking counter-measures despite having received intelligence warnings that attacks similar to Sept.11-style aerial assaults were possible. However, the hearings are not expected to touch upon the historic and political background,
DEBATE within the US is focused on whether the Bush administration gave "high priority" to fighting terrorism after being warned prior to the Sept.11 attacks and who did what in the corridors of power and policymaking in Washington before and after the attacks.
National Security Adviser Condaleezza Rice, seen as one of the most loyal aides to President George W Bush, has agreed to testify under oath in public before the independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the US. Bush himself and Vice-President Dick Cheney have also agreed to answer the panel's questions but on their own terms and conditions.
Among those who appeared before the commission last month were US Secretary of State Colin Powell, his predecessor in the Clinton administration Madeline Albright, Secretary of defenCe Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, and Clinton defence chief William Cohen; Clinton national security adviser Samuel Berger; and Richard Clarke, a counter-terrorism adviser to both Clinton and Bush, who resigned on the eve of the Iraq war and who has accused Budh of using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for invading and occupying Iraq.
Within the context of the American political system, the panel's hearings are a highly relevant exercise if only because the elected and appointed officials are answerable to the American public. Revelations of the true nature of what took place behind the scenes might or might not lead to heads rolling in Washington, but it would definitely have an impact on Bush's re-election prospects in November.
It is unquesitonably clear that complete details of the panel's findings are never going to be released to the public. The administration will see to that by citing "national security" and "intelligence-specific" reasons. Obviously that would mean that the circumstances that led to the Sept.11 attacks would never be revealed to the people. More importantly, there would never be a public accounting of the policy of the Bush administration — and indeed of its predecessors — that is cited many American, European, Arab and Asian commentators as having set the ground for 9/11.
By no means that assertion implies, explictly or implictly, any justification for the attacks that could never be condoned.
The question here is how relevant is the ongoing panel hearing to the people of the Middle East? Is it going to expose the gross bias in US policy in favour of Israel and help arrive at a just and fair solution to the Palestinian problem?

'The Palestinian link'

Let us take note that it was an American media outlet which reported that Palestinians were dancing of the roottops of Ramallah upon hearing of the Sept.11 attacks (the report was later discounted).
Obviously the idea was to establish some implicit and latent link between the Palestinian problem and the Sept.11 attacks.
Why should it be so? If indeed the US media did feel that there was a Palestinian angle to the attacks, however distant, why was the idea not followed up? Why was there a deliberate attempt not to bring in the Palestinian angle to the forefront of American public attention in the context of Sept.11?
Was it because it would have given focus to an issue that the US administration wants to keep away from American public debate?
Why was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon given top billing in the American media list of foreign leaders sending condolences to Bush over the attacks when others like British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac were equally if not more strong in their expressions of sympathy for the US and pledges to help Washington fight terror?
Well, the answer is rather simple: The powers that pull the media strings in the US were used, wittingly or unwittingly, to highlight Israel as a "fellow victim of terror" and the Palestinians as "terrorists."
Well, if we borrow a leaf from the same exercise, then the next question is:
Will the panel hearings in Washington unveil the shortcomings in US policy — particularly the fact that it was the staunch, unwavering and almost unlimited American support over the decades and the influence of pro-Israelis in the circles of power that matter in Washington that have led to anti-American sentiments among Arabs and Muslims?
Hardly likely, since American foreign policy is not being debated. Nor is the reality that Israel's arrogance and defiance of international law owes itself to the conviction that it would be protected by the Americans no what what and where.

Mysterious Israeli angle

There is a mysterious Israeli angle to 9/11.
On Sept.11, 2001, the Washington Times carried a report which quoted from a paper by the Army School of Advanced Military Studies which said that the he Israeli intelligence service Mossad "has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."
It was reported that nearly 130 Israelis were arrested immediately after the Sept.11 attacks. Some of them had trailed suspected Al Qaeda members in the United States without informing federal authorities and some others had indeed the opportunity of making "friends with them" since they disguised themselves as Palestinians since they could speak fluent Arabic and knew enough to pass off as Palestinians with an axe to grind against the US for its support of Israel.
Some of them lived for a period of time in Hollywood, Florida, where Mohammed Atta, identified by the US as the leader of the 9/11 suicide hijackers, and three others lived for some time before Sept.11.
Were the Israeli in touch with Atta and others? Was it possible that they posed as Palestinians and offered help and information to the hijackers? Their "handlers" could not have but known that the planned attacks would unleash a series of events that would benefit no one but Israel.
The Israeli agents were at work in the US for some time before they were questioned.
Between early 2000 and September 2001, agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had found that dozens of young Israelis falsely claiming to be art students used to visit federal offices, including those of the DEA.
The Israelis claimed to be art students offering artwork for sale and visited the homes of numerous DEA officers and other senior federal officials.
According to reports, agents of the DEA, the US Air Force, Secret Service, the FBI, and US Marshals Service documented some 130 separate incidents of "art student" encounters. Some of the Israelis were observed drawing up the inside of federal buildings and carrying photographs of federal agents. One was discovered with a computer printout that referred to "DEA group."
The Weekly Planet of Tampa, Florida, reported on April 22, 2002 that "DEA agents say that the 60-page document was a draft intended as the base for a 250-page report. The larger report has not been produced because of the volatile nature of suggesting that Israel spies on America's deepest secrets."
The Israelis visited locations not known to the public, including DEA offices not identified as such.
One Israeli was found in possesion banking receipts for nearly $200,000 in withdrawals and deposits over a two-month period.
Mystery surrounds how the US law enforcement agencies dealt with the 126 Israeli agents arrested immediately after the 9/11 attacks. But reports in the Israeli press have said that all of them were released without charges after the Israeli government intervened with the Bush administration.

Focus of debate

The ongoing debate essentially focuses on America's national security, the measures that were in place or should have been in place pre-9/11, and the responsibility of the government functionaries to have ensured the security of American people after they received specific information that attacks were being planned against them.
Seen from the Middle Eastern vantage point, it is like treating the symptoms than addressing the ailment's roots.
Why then is such a pointed direction away from the real issues as seen from the Arab and Muslim point of view and understanding? Aren't the Americans smart enough to realise that there is indeed something wrong in their government's handling of the Middle Eastern conflict?Or are they willing to accept without question the argument that the motivation for the Sept.11 attacks was Arab and Muslim intolerance or even jealousy of the way of American life?
Or that Arabs and Muslims are born terrorists who are going around the world looking for American targets to be hit simply because they hate the US for some inexplicable reason?

Lot to hide


It will be equally interesting to see how Rice, the national security adviser, who says she has nothing to hide from the investigating panel, answers the questions (if they are asked of course): Did the administration ever have the flimsiest of evidence that Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda and therefore had a role in the Sept.11 attacks?
If not, why did the president assert in January 2002 that Iraq posed a threat to the US and was poised to supply biological and chemical weapons to be used in future Sept.11-style attacks against the American people?
The former Bush counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke. has charged that the Bush administration not only failed to act in response to the threat of an impending Al Qaeda attack but also seized upon 9/11 as the pretext for launching the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In response, Rice claimed in an interview that the invasion and occupation of Iraq were part of a “broad war” on terrorism, despite the absence of any evidence that Saddam Hussein had links Al Qaeda or had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.
Rice did confirm Clarke’s charge that, on Sept.12, 2002, Bush ordered a search for a link between the assailants and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.
According to Clarke, he responded to Bush: “Mr. President, we’ve done this before...we’ve been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind, there’s no connection.”
Bush, says Clarke, ordered: “Iraq, Saddam, find out if there’s a connection." The president implied that it was an order that Clarke produce the desired "connection."
Until the White House very magnanimously relented to Rice appearing before the investigating committee, it was argued that the administration’s rejection of the demand that Rice publicly testify is “creating the impression for honest Americans all over the country and people all over the world that the White House has something to hide, that Condi Rice has something to hide,"
Well, the people of the Middle East, particularly the Arabs and Muslims, and indeed a big chunk of the international community, do have to take "impressions." They know the administration has a lot to hide and it is the reality that it was the manipulated US foreign policy that led to 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Limited mandate

Indeed, the mandate of the investigating commission is carefully drafted in order to avoid an expanded mission that would take in Iraq and US foreign policy. The committee is mandated only with investigating “the facts and causes relating to the terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001,” and making “a full and complete accounting of the circumstances surrounding the attacks, and the extent of the United States’ preparedness for, and immediate response to, the attacks.”
Of course the word "causes" could be interpreted as opening the door for questions on American policy towards the Arab and Muslim worlds, but they are highly unlikely to be raised.
The hype has already been created in the US to keep the focus strictly on how the administration handled the threats to security despite warnings.
Rice has played a key role in the administration's failure to be prepared against Sept.11 despite intelligence warnings but also in the administration’s manipulation of the 9/11 disaster to prepare the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
On the first count, according to Clarke, if "Rice had been doing her job ... if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser,” she would have gained critical information from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) regarding the presence of known Al Qaeda operatives in the US and their preparations for using hijacked aircrafat as missiles.
Clarke referred to Nawaf Al Hazmi and Khalid Al Midha — two of the 19 people identified by the US as the 9/11 assailants — whom the CIA had monitored from the time they attended a a meeting in Malaysia until they entered the US. The two stayed with an undercover FBI informant in San Diego.
Had Rice been more aware of her responsibilities, she could have acted and pre-empted 9/11, Clarke argued.
"Scurrilous,” that was Rice described the allegation.

Contradictions

In a flurry of statements and media interviews she gave in order to refute Clarke's charges, Rice has contradicted herself several times.
However, such contradictions were not limited to her counterattack against Clarke last month.
In May 2002, she denied charges that Washington had ignored pre-9/11 evidence of a plot involving the hijacking of airplanes to be used as missiles.
“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use ... a hijacked airplane as a missile," she said.
However, Bush had in fact received an intelligence memo on Aug. 6, 2001 that Al Qaeda was planning a a major attack within the US using hijacked of US aircraft. Rice could not have been unaware of the memo since handling such issues is part and parcel of her job.
In September 1999, the National Intelligence Council had warned that Al Qaeda could hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings in retaliation for US air strikes against targets in Afghanistan.
“Suicide bomber (s) belonging to Al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House,” the report said.
Rice, in a classified testimony behind closed doors before the investigating commission, corrected herself and said she had "mispoken." and said Clarke had himself warned of the possibility of such an attack (this was revealed by one of the commission members who was present during her testimony).
On the second count of Clarke's charges — that the Bush administration immediately sought to turn the 9/11 attacks into an apportunity to go to war against Iraq — Rice said in a public comment: “It was Afghanistan that became the focus of the American response. And Iraq was put aside with the exception of worrying about whether Iraq might try and take advantage of us in some way.”
That assertion clashes head on against a Washington Post report on Jan.12, 2003 that “six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2 1⁄2 page document marked ‘top secret'" that dealt with Afghanistan but “directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.”
In September 2002, CBS News reported that within hours of the Sept.11 attacks, “Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq.”
Both reports, and dozens similar to them in theme, have not been denied by the administration.
Another "whistleblower" was Paul O’Neill, the former treasury secretary in the Bush administration.
In the book “The Price of Loyalty" by Ron Suskind, O'Neill says that Rice had attended a Camp David meeting one week after Sept.11 where Iraq was discussed.
“It was like changing the subject —Iraq is not where bin Laden is and not where there’s trouble,” according to O’Neill. “I was mystified. It’s like a bookbinder accidentally dropping a chapter from one book into the middle of another one. The chapter is coherent in its own way, but it doesn’t seem to fit in this book.”
Indeed, O’Neill says that the Bush administration began high-level discussions of invading and conquering Iraq as soon as Bush entered the White House in January 2001.
According to his account, invasion and occupation of Iraq was decided on long before 91/11 and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were used as a pretext.
O’Neill has affirmed that war against Iraq was a top priority itesm in the agenda of the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush administration on Jan.30, 2001.
“From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out,” he said. “It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this'.”
Obviously, the pro-Israeli hawks in Washington — neoconservatives as they are known — found a way to do it. But, will the Americans -- or anyone else for that matter — will ever know why 9/11 in the first place?

Bin Laden a Bush weapon

March 31, 2004
Bin Laden a Bush weapon
PV Vivekanand



The frenzy in the American hunt for Osama Bin lll and the way Washington is going about it with a no-holds-barred approach clearly indicate that having Bin Laden under American custody — or to establish that he is no more — in time for the presidential elections in November is the top-most priority for President George W Bush. In fact, it could be Bin Laden's fate that would determine whether Bush remains in the White House for another four years.
AMERICAN soldiers are on an unprecedented do-or-die mission thousands of kilometres from home: Catch Osama Bin Laden. However, not many of them might have given it a second thought that their mission is not as much important as averting the "biggest threat" to the national security of their country as ensuring the political future of their president.
It does not need a magic ball to see that George W Bush's chances of re-election in November depend largely on images of Bin Laden in American custody flashed throughout the US similar to those of Saddam Hussein or vivid signs that the Al Qaeda leader — America's number one enemy — continues to elude capture and thump his nose at the mighty US military and intelligence network.
Recent reports had said that Bin Laden had been "cornered" on the wild mountainous frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan and it was only a matter of time that the elusive Al Qaeda leader was caught. The reports were quickly denied, however.
What has not been widely reported was that the mission to capture Bin Ladin or at least produce evidence that he had been "eliminated" is that orders have gone out of the White House: Get Bin Laden at all costs and well ahead of the presidential elections.
US military officers have spoken of a “renewed sense of urgency” that is fuelling the search for Bin Laden.
Pakistan has thrown its military and intelligence weight behind the American soldiers combing the tough and unforgiving terrain on the Pak-Afghan border. It has deployed some 7,000 soldiers on its side of the border to back up the American forces on the Afghan side.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff is definitely under American pressure. Otherwise he would not have authorised a military action that led to the death of nine Pakistanis in a shootout and arrest of some 25 tribals last week near the border in a sweep through three villages. Soldiers conducted house-to-house searches and blew up houses to punish unco-operative villagers who refused to hand over suspects.
Islamabad said the operation was launched after militants had ignored a Feb. 20 deadline to surrender
However, experts, including Pakistani analysts said, Musharraf, who has always remained committed to a longstanding understanding to respect the autonomy of the tribal territories, would not have allowed such action to take place unless without American presure.
Applying such pressure on Musharaff is only a reflection of Washington's anxiety to stage a dramatic capture of Bin Laden and turn it into political capital for Bush in November. Washington could not but be aware that such pressure carries high risk in Pakistan.
It does not an expert Washington watcher to see the connection .
Liaqt Baloch, deputy president of the conservative Islamic party Jamaat-I-Islami of Pakistan, has argued that the military assault is designed to produce an intelligence success ahead of the US elections in November. “There’s a strong link between the activity in the tribal areas and the US election,” he said. “This isn’t anti-terrorism; it’s just a political action to bolster support for Bush in the United States.”
Musharraf himself has hinted at the pressure being applied by Washington by telling religious leaders that Pakistan had to co-operate with the US to avoid becoming a target of the war on terrorism.
It has also not been lost on observers that the US adopted a low-key approach to revelations that Pakistan's AQ Khan had clandestinely sold nuclear know-how to Libya, Iran and North Korea, particularly that the last two are indeed among the "axis of evil" coined by Bush himself.
Given Bush's ardent public drive against "weapons of mass destruction"and nuclear proliferation, it would have been unthinkable for Washingto to have accepted Pakistani explanations and actions following the revelations. But then, Pakistani assistance is vital to the US quest to nab Bin Laden and to have raised an issue with Pakistan in any serious manner over the nuclear embroglio would have seriously set back its hopes of getting the Al Qaeda leader in the run-up to the presidential elections.
Commentators around the world are unanimous that with Saddam Hussein in Amercian custody, catching Bin Laden would be the most significant election boost for Bush.
Indeed, the way in which the Bush administration is throwing everything it has into the "get-Bin-Laden" campaign clearly shows how worried Washington strategists are over the prospect of the Al Qaeda leader remaining elusive when Americans vote in November.
The Pentagon has done a 180-degree turn in strategy. It has pulled out Task Force 121, the elite squad which co-ordinated the capture of Saddam and other bigwigs in pre-war Iraq, and assigned with the new mission of catching Bin Laden.
Task Force 121 it consists of Army Delta Force soldiers and Navy SEALs, transported on helicopters. The unit is credited with last December’s seizure of Saddam. The task force is deploying in strategic locations, practising missions and wait ing for intelligence to provide the locations of targets.
Many of the American soldiers now being sent to Iraq are National Guard members or reservists whereas soldiers with fighting experience are assigned to Afghanistan.
The units in Afghanistan are given everything technically possible to help them reach Bin Laden, including the firepower, intelligence help and plenty of money to woo poor Pakistan and Afghan villagers in the targeted areas.
Heavily bearded Delta Force soldiers and Navy Seals in local dress have been seen in villages close to the border with Pakistan, and Britain is sending in SAS detachments, reports The Independent of London.
It has also been confirmed that Pakistani soliders have sealed off mountain passes and are continuing sweeps in the wild tribal areas of northern and southern Waziristan on the border.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported from from southern Waziristan this week that tribesmen in the area had said that Bin Laden was not in the region.
Southern Waziristan has been cited many times as the most likely hideout of Bin Laden and his supporters.
However, according to the BBC, most tribesmen argue that it would be impossible to remain out of sight in this inhospitable region for long.
South Waziristan, often called Pakistan's Wild West, is a mass of mostly arid mountains and hills, and is difficult to live in. It has a population of about one million, almost all of them Waziris, who are described as one of the most warlike tribes living along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The American and Pakistani operations in pursuit of Bin Laden are given high media exposure, and the security forces make no secret of their presence in the region.
Obviously, they are hoping that increasing military activities and hyped up reports, coupled with misleading and confusing information planted among the tribals in the area , could trigger electronic communications among Bin Laden's supporters and thus give some inkling to his whereabouts.
However, Bin Laden is not believed to have gone near an active mobile phone since the day he managed to evade capture and flee from the Afghan moutains in 2002 after the US forces took control of the country.
He is believed to have a several-layer "security" ring of supporters whose job is to remain alert for any "alien" movement in their designated areas. Word is passed on mouth to mouth and is relayed back and forth and this makes it doubtful whether the US forces' hope that intercepted electronic traffc would lead them to Bin Laden.
It is nothing new. That was the case since the Afghan war. The added element now is the sense of urgency that has been given to efforts to catch Bin Laden, possibly alive so that he could be paraded in front of cameras and give the very lifeline that Bush is seeking in his race for re-election.
Why should Bin Laden be the key to a second term in the White House for Bush?
Well, it is not as much a relief that Bin Laden has been removed as a "security threat" to the US that would count among American voters: It is Bush's image of having achieved "success" in leading the US, and indeed the rest of the world, in the war against terrorism that would be relayed through Bin Laden's capture. Equally importantly, it would help partly do away with the negative fallout of the growing disbelief among Americans that their president was genuinely convinced that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to the US.
Bush did get a lift in rating after the capture of Saddam but it did not last long, but having Bin Laden under US custody would definitely guarantee the president's re-election if only because he would be portrayed as a hero fighting a world full of terrorists hostile to the US posing real and imaginary threats.
The series of revelations of intelligence doctoring under the stewardship of the so-called neo-conservatives in Washington and reports that they had planned the war that toppled Saddam even before Bush entered the White House have done massive damage to the incumbent president's hopes of re-election.
According to the Independent:
"If the Bush administration can metaphorically place the Al Qaeda leader's head on a pole along Saddam Hussein's, it will also have a powerful answer to critics who argue that the Iraq war, far from advancing the campaign against terrorism, was a distraction and diversion of resources from it."
Americans are also questioning whether the "elimination" of Bin Laden would make their country safe.
Even Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet does not believe so. He says the threat posed to the US will remain high, with or without Al Qaeda.
Questions are also raised why the Bush administration has failed to prove that Al Qaeda was behind the Sept.11 attacks, particularly that a German court has ascertained that the plot for the assaults was hatched in Germany and not Afghanistan as Washington had asserted.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which lists Bin Laden as among the 10 most wanted men, makes no reference to the Sept.11 attacks while offering $25 million in reward for his capture.
It says on its website that Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the Aug.7, 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, which killed over 200 people. "In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world," it says.
Obviously, the US does not have material evidence that Bin Laden had plotted the Sept.11 attacks.
These points are being increasingly raised in US and Canadian media.
Noted commentator Eric Margolis writes in the Toronto Sun:
"We are still not even sure Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, as Bush claims. If the Bush administration was so totally wrong about Iraq's secret weapons and links to Al Qaeda, why is its information any more reliable about the shadowy Bin Laden?"
Margolis notes that the main legal evidence cited so far by the US against Al Qaeda comes from a former fugitive member who embezzled its funds. "Interestingly, much of the phony "evidence" about Iraq came from another convicted embezzler, Ahmad Chalabi," writes Margolis, is a syndicated foreign affairs columnist and broadcaster, and author of War at the Top of the World - The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Tibet.
What the Americans — and indeed the rest of the world — know today is that although it applauded the Sept.11 attack, Al Qaida may not have been actively involved in planning or financing the assaults.
However, notes Margolis, there is evidence that Al Qaida was behind bombings of some US targets abroad, like the USS Cole and attacks in East Africa. "The 9/11 plotters were largely from Saudi Arabia and operated from Germany. Yet 9/11 was the pretext the US used to invade Afghanistan," he writes.
Margolis is convinced that "if before November elections Al Qaida finally manages to stage a devastating attack on the US mainland, as its number two, Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, threatens, Bush will face popular outrage and be sliced and diced by Democrats."
"Luckily for the US, what's left of Al Qaida has so far produced more hot air than explosions," he writes. "Hopefully, the alleged dangers from Al Qaida will be no more substantial than Iraq's infamous but non-existent `drones of death,' which, Bush comically warned, were about to fly off Iraqi vessels and shower America with pestilence."
Another source of concern for many is the tight veil of secrecy that the administration has drawn around pre-9/11 intelligence findings and the course of events running to the attacks.
Obviously aware of the scepticism in the air, Bush has finally agreed to answer in private all questions raised by a government commission investigating the Sept.11 attacks, as announced by the White House this week.
Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has accused Bush of "stonewalling" investigations of the Sept.11 attacks. Kerry's allegation is backed by revelations that the administration has not been fully co-operating with the investigating commission.
The 10-member commission had been seeking to question Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney about what the administration knew before the attacks. The two are seen to have been trying to stall the request and put off answering questions.
Bush had agreed to meet privately for an hour with the chairman and vice chairman of the commission, but said it was unnecessary for him to testify publicly. Cheney also has said he would meet with some commissioners.
Bush has now dropped the one-hour limit,
The importance that the Bush administration attaches to capturing Bin Laden was underlined by a visit that Defence Secretary Ronald Rumsfled in late February and the planned visit this week of Secretary of State Colin Powell.
With the drop in Bush’s poll ratings, his the Republican camp is also seeking to show off an apparent victory to keep public attention diverted from the quaqmire that the US has entered both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They want that victory fast and definitie before November.
US military officials say that they plan to intesify the search and the ongoing spring offensive will climax in April or May. They are planning a “hammer-and-anvil” effect to trap Al Qaeda fighters between US forces operating from the Afghan side and Pakistani troops advancing along the north-western Pakistan border.
Will Bin Laden be caught between the hammer and anvil before Nov.5?
Unlike some of his military commanders who have voiced confidence that Bin Laden would be caught soon, Rumsfeld is non-committal: "I don't believe it (capturing Bin Laden) is closer or farther at any given moment."
Indeed, giving the hunt for Bin Laden the high media hype it is given now might prove to be the Bush camp's undoing if the Al Qaeda leader slips through the net.
(with input from wire agencies and website sources).

9/11 inquiry, why the Rice refusal

March 30 2004

Something to conceal


PV Vivekanand



THERE is indeed something disturbing about the unfolding episode in Washington where National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice is refusing to testify under oath before the independent commission investigating the Sept.11 attacks. While it is difficult to be accurate about why one feels unease about the affair, it seems clear that it has more to do with other aspects of Sept.11 than former White House aide Richard Clarke's contentions that the Bush administration had not taken seriously the perceived threat from Al Qaeda.
Whether Clarke is right is an issue of relevance more to the American sense of government responsibility to protect citizens than to any Middle Eastern worry or concern. Indeed, it could to an extent influence the re-election prospects of President George W Bush in November and thus it is indeed of concern to the rest of world.
However, there seems to be more than meets the eye and it has to do with Middle Eastern links — perceived, established, unconfirmed and otherwise — with the Sept.11 attacks. The Arabs and Muslims have paid a heavy price in the aftermath of 9/11 and hence they too have the right know the truth and whether they fell prey to a well-orchestrated operation designed to target them.
It stems from the conviction among many in this part of the world that the assaults presented the right opportunity for the Bush administration to launch efforts to realise its long-sought objectives in the Middle East: Assuming control of Arab oil resources of a size that would allow it to dictate terms in the international oil market and, in the bargain, eliminating a potent threat to the US's "strategic ally" in the Middle East, Israel, and also building a major military presence in the Gulf to facilitate armed intervention whenever it suited American interests.
Again, these "objectives" —  which, at this point in time, the US is one whisker away from fully accomplishing (and it is indeed a thick whisker at that) — are not products of Middle Eastern imagination. Some of the mainstream American media outlets that referred to the existence of decades-old plans to seize Arab oil wells as a strategic need in order to serve American strategic needs. Couple those needs with Israeli interests to see Iraq eliminated as a military power, and bingo!!
And that is why the a growing belief that Rice is more apprehensive about being forced to reveal more sinister aspects of the events before and after the Sept.11 attacks than the administration's purported shortcomings in tackling Al Qaeda before the aerial assaults in New York and Washington.
These include the Iraq angle. Obviously, Rice wants to duck questions whose answers which has the potential of definitely establishing that the Bush administration was preoccupied with its determination to wage war against Iraq and assume absolute control of that country and it could not bother much about Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden at the expense of its plans for Iraq.
It even appeared as if the pro-Israeli hawks in Washington were waiting for something like 9/11 to happen before stampeding the administration into planning the war against Iraq.
The Washington Post has reported that "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a two-and-a-half-page document marked 'top secret' that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq."
CBS News has reported that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq."
Obviously, Rice would not want to be cornered into having to answer questions related to the Iraq angle since it would expose the reality that the Sept.11 attacks was the pretext that the neoconservatives in Washington were waiting for in order to implement their campaign against Iraq and influence the president into approving it.
Most definitely, Rice would not want to be the person whose testimony under oath exposed the real motivations behind the war against Iraq and whose interests were really served through the invasion and occupation of that country. Such revelations would seal the fate against Bush in November elections and Rice would find herself not only out of a job but out of favour with the powers that matter in Washington.
Another angle Rice would not want to touch is perhaps the perceived Israeli links to Sept.11.
The outside world knows little about the fate of the more than 120 Israeli espionage agents — most of them masquerading as arts students — who were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in six to 48 hours after the Sept.11 attacks.
The FBI detained them because many of them were observed earlier in suspicious circumstances and some of them were trying to pass off as Arab Muslims and in contact with Arab and Muslim organisations that the FBI had kept under surveillance.
It is unclear whether the FBI had realised that the Israelis were "double agents," but the agency found it fit to detain them immediately after the 9/11 strikes.
A few American newspapers did report the detentions but have maintained a studious silence about their fate since then.
Reports tucked away in the inside paged of the Israeli press indicate that all of the Israeli "suspects" detained post-Sept.11 have been released without charges after top-level government intervention.
There has been speculation that some of these Israelis had posed as Arabs and Palestinians with an axe to grind against the US for its support for Israel and "penetrated" the cells which carried out the New York and Washington attacks and even offered logistic information that helped them implement their plans.
Some of them were picked up and questioned at length by the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before 9/11.
It is not known what they had revealed and we don't know yet from where the FBI and CIA had gathered enough information to warrant pre-9/11 warnings to the White House that Al Qaeda attack could be imminent.
However, reports clearly show that the warnings might have been based on information provided by some of the Israeli agents picked up and questioned before 9/11.
In the immediate context, Rice is obviously putting up a strong effort to establish that the Bush administration remained focused on Al Qaeda, but she seems to be overdoing it by contradictions.
In May 2002, Rice said: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
But NBC Television and Los Angeles Times reported on Sept.27, 2001 that President Bush t personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama Bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane."
In July 2001, the administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles.
In May 2002, Rice at a press conference that she had called defended the administration from new revelations that the president had been explicitly warned about an Al Qaeda threat to airlines in August 2001. She "suggested that Bush had requested (a CIA) briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer."
But the CIA says that the briefing was its idea and it did not come from the White House, according to the Washington Post.
Above all, Rice is contradicting Bush himself. The president admitted that he "didn't feel the urgency" about terrorism before Sept.11, the Washington Post reported in January 2002. But Rice insisted last week: "The fact of the matter is (that) the administration focused on this before 9/11."
Rice's contradictions are too numerous and she would not be able to escape with broad answers when confronted by questioners who have done their homework. And she knows it too well.
Again, it is a matter to be decided by the Americans whether they should insist that their national security adviser tell them the truth under oath and be held responsible for her claims and counter-claims about the events leading up to attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 of their compatriots.
However, it is not only the Americans who need to know the truth about how 9/11 led to 20/03 — the day the US launched its invasion of Iraq — and whether 9/11 itself was the orchestration of a plot where Al Qaeda was skillfully used as the executing weapon by parties which stood to benefit as a result of the deadliest terror attack in history. The world, particularly the Arabs and Muslims, has been badly affected by Sept.11, and it too has the right to know.

The real reason for Iraq invasion

The following was written by an American
writer/researcher. It appeared in March 2002,
five months after I summarised the same thing
although I did not have the kind of access to quotable
analysts and sources that he has. Anyway, this would
be an eye-opener that I am not a minority of one who
argues that the US plans in the Middle East has much
wider implications than Saddam, weapons, Al Qaeda and
terrorism put together.


The Thirty-Year Itch

Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis,
Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US
control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same
strategists firmly in control of the White House, the
Bush administration is playing out their script for
global dominance.
By Robert Dreyfuss

Oil and Arms: An In-Depth Look
 

If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate
critical to building an American empire, your first
stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert
sands of this region hold two of every three barrels
of oil in the world -- Iraq's reserves alone are
equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the
United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the
past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of
an influential group of Washington foreign-policy
strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its
global dominance, the United States must seize control
of the region and its oil. Born during the energy
crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a
generation of policymakers, this approach is finding
its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration
-- which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a
regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than
any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into
an American protectorate.

In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy
toward Iraq, the key to national security is global
hegemony -- dominance over any and all potential
rivals. To that end, the United States must not only
be able to project its military forces anywhere, at
any time. It must also control key resources, chief
among them oil -- and especially Gulf oil. To the
hawks who now set the tone at the White House and the
Pentagon, the region is crucial not simply for its
share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have
become more important over the years), but because it
would allow the United States to maintain a lock on
the world's energy lifeline and potentially deny
access to its global competitors. The administration
"believes you have to control resources in order to
have access to them," says Chas Freeman, who served as
U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first
President Bush. "They are taken with the idea that the
end of the Cold War left the United States able to
impose its will globally -- and that those who have
the ability to shape events with power have the duty
to do so. It's ideology."

Iraq, in this view, is a strategic prize of
unparalleled importance. Unlike the oil beneath
Alaska's frozen tundra, locked away in the steppes of
central Asia, or buried under stormy seas, Iraq's
crude is readily accessible and, at less than $1.50 a
barrel, some of the cheapest in the world to produce.
Already, over the past several months, Western
companies have been meeting with Iraqi exiles to try
to stake a claim to that bonanza.

But while the companies hope to cash in on an
American-controlled Iraq, the push to remove Saddam
Hussein hasn't been driven by oil executives, many of
whom are worried about the consequences of war. Nor
are Vice President Cheney and President Bush, both
former oilmen, looking at the Gulf simply for the
profits that can be earned there. The administration
is thinking bigger, much bigger, than that.

"Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than
oil as fuel," says Michael Klare, professor of peace
and world security studies at Hampshire College and
author of Resource Wars. "Control over the Persian
Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and
China. It's having our hand on the spigot."
To get a sense of how control of the Gulf's oil
economy has become the focus of Washington's military
strategy, one need only look at the map.
Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United
States has steadily been accumulating military muscle
in the Gulf by building bases, selling weaponry, and
forging military partnerships. Now, it is poised to
consolidate its might in a place that will be a
fulcrum of the world's balance of power for decades to
come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, the Bush
administration can solidify a long-running strategic
design. "It's the Kissinger plan," says James Akins, a
former U.S. diplomat. "I thought it had been killed,
but it's back."

Akins learned a hard lesson about the politics of oil
when he served as a U.S. envoy in Kuwait and Iraq, and
ultimately as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the
oil crisis of 1973 and '74. At his home in Washington,
D.C., shelves filled with Middle Eastern pottery and
other memorabilia cover the walls, souvenirs of his
years in the Foreign Service. Nearly three decades
later, he still gets worked up while recalling his
first encounter with the idea that the United States
should be prepared to occupy Arab oil-producing
countries.

In 1975, while Akins was ambassador in Saudi Arabia,
an article headlined "Seizing Arab Oil" appeared in
Harper's. The author, who used the pseudonym Miles
Ignotus, was identified as "a Washington-based
professor and defense consultant with intimate links
to high-level U.S. policymakers." The article
outlined, as Akins puts it, "how we could solve all
our economic and political problems by taking over the
Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and
Oklahomans to operate them." Simultaneously, a rash of
similar stories appeared in other magazines and
newspapers. "I knew that it had to have been the
result of a deep background briefing," Akins says.
"You don't have eight people coming up with the same
screwy idea at the same time, independently.

"Then I made a fatal mistake," Akins continues. "I
said on television that anyone who would propose that
is either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the
Soviet Union." Soon afterward, he says, he learned
that the background briefing had been conducted by his
boss, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Akins
was fired later that year.

Kissinger has never acknowledged having planted the
seeds for the article. But in an interview with
Business Week that same year, he delivered a thinly
veiled threat to the Saudis, musing about bringing oil
prices down through "massive political warfare against
countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk
their political stability and maybe their security if
they did not cooperate."

In the 1970s, America's military presence in the Gulf
was virtually nil, so the idea of seizing control of
its oil was a pipe dream. Still, starting with the
Miles Ignotus article, and a parallel one by
conservative strategist and Johns Hopkins University
professor Robert W. Tucker in Commentary, the idea
began to gain favor among a feisty group of hardline,
pro-Israeli thinkers, especially the hawkish circle
aligned with Democratic senators Henry Jackson of
Washington and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.

Eventually, this amalgam of strategists came to be
known as "neoconservatives," and they played important
roles in President Reagan's Defense Department and at
think tanks and academic policy centers in the 1980s.
Led by Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's
influential Defense Policy Board, and Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, they now occupy several
dozen key posts in the White House, the Pentagon, and
the State Department. At the top, they are closest to
Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, who have been closely aligned since both men
served in the White House under President Ford in the
mid-1970s. They also clustered around Cheney when he
served as secretary of defense during the Gulf War in
1991.

Throughout those years, and especially after the Gulf
War, U.S. forces have steadily encroached on the Gulf
and the surrounding region, from the Horn of Africa to
Central Asia. In preparing for an invasion and
occupation of Iraq, the administration has been
building on the steps taken by military and policy
planners over the past quarter century.

Step one: The Rapid Deployment Force
In 1973 and '74, and again in 1979, political
upheavals in the Middle East led to huge spikes in oil
prices, which rose fifteenfold over the decade and
focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In January
1980, President Carter effectively declared the Gulf a
zone of U.S. influence, especially against
encroachment from the Soviet Union. "Let our position
be absolutely clear," he said, announcing what came to
be known as the Carter Doctrine. "An attempt by any
outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf
region will be regarded as an assault on the vital
interests of the United States of America, and such an
assault will be repelled by any means necessary,
including military force." To back up this doctrine,
Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an
"over-the-horizon" military unit capable of rushing
several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a crisis.

Step two: The Central Command
In the 1980s, under President Reagan, the United
States began pressing countries in the Gulf for access
to bases and support facilities. The Rapid Deployment
Force was transformed into the Central Command, a new
U.S. military command authority with responsibility
for the Gulf and the surrounding region from eastern
Africa to Afghanistan. Reagan tried to organize a
"strategic consensus" of anti-Soviet allies, including
Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The United States
sold billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudis
in the early '80s, from AWACS surveillance aircraft to
F-15 fighters. And in 1987, at the height of the war
between Iraq and Iran, the U.S. Navy created the Joint
Task Force-Middle East to protect oil tankers plying
the waters of the Gulf, thus expanding a U.S. naval
presence of just three or four warships into a
flotilla of 40-plus aircraft carriers, battleships,
and cruisers.

Step three: The Gulf War
Until 1991, the United States was unable to persuade
the Arab Gulf states to allow a permanent American
presence on their soil. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, while
maintaining its close relationship with the United
States, began to diversify its commercial and military
ties; by the time U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman arrived
there in the late Ô80s, the United States had fallen
to fourth place among arms suppliers to the kingdom.
"The United States was being supplanted even in
commercial terms by the British, the French, even the
Chinese," Freeman notes.

All that changed with the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and
other Gulf states no longer opposed a direct U.S.
military presence, and American troops, construction
squads, arms salesmen, and military assistance teams
rushed in. "The Gulf War put Saudi Arabia back on the
map and revived a relationship that had been severely
attrited," says Freeman.

In the decade after the war, the United States sold
more than $43 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and
military construction projects to Saudi Arabia, and
$16 billion more to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the
United Arab Emirates, according to data compiled by
the Federation of American Scientists. Before
Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military enjoyed the
right to stockpile, or "pre-position," military
supplies only in the comparatively remote Gulf state
of Oman on the Indian Ocean. After the war, nearly
every country in the region began conducting joint
military exercises, hosting U.S. naval units and Air
Force squadrons, and granting the United States
pre-positioning rights. "Our military presence in the
Middle East has increased dramatically," then-Defense
Secretary William Cohen boasted in 1995.

Another boost to the U.S. presence was the unilateral
imposition, in 1991, of no-fly zones in northern and
southern Iraq, enforced mostly by U.S. aircraft from
bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. "There was a massive
buildup, especially around Incirlik in Turkey, to
police the northern no-fly zone, and around [the Saudi
capital of] Riyadh, to police the southern no-fly
zone," says Colin Robinson of the Center for Defense
Information, a Washington think tank. A
billion-dollar, high-tech command center was built by
Saudi Arabia near Riyadh, and over the past two years
the United States has secretly been completing another
one in Qatar. The Saudi facilities "were built with
capacities far beyond the ability of Saudi Arabia to
use them," Robinson says. "And that's exactly what
Qatar is doing now."

Step four: Afghanistan
The war in Afghanistan -- and the open-ended war on
terrorism, which has led to U.S strikes in Yemen,
Pakistan, and elsewhere -- further boosted America's
strength in the region. The administration has won
large increases in the defense budget -- which now
stands at about $400 billion, up from just over $300
billion in 2000 -- and a huge chunk of that budget,
perhaps as much as $60 billion, is slated to support
U.S. forces in and around the Persian Gulf. Military
facilities on the perimeter of the Gulf, from Djibouti
in the Horn of Africa to the island of Diego Garcia in
the Indian Ocean, have been expanded, and a web of
bases and training missions has extended the U.S.
presence deep into central Asia. From Afghanistan to
the landlocked former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan
and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. forces have established
themselves in an area that had long been in Russia's
sphere of influence. Oil-rich in its own right, and
strategically vital, central Asia is now the eastern
link in a nearly continuous chain of U.S. bases,
facilities, and allies stretching from the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea far into the Asian
hinterland.

Step five: Iraq
Removing Saddam Hussein could be the final piece of
the puzzle, cementing an American imperial presence.
It is "highly possible" that the United States will
maintain military bases in Iraq, Robert Kagan, a
leading neoconservative strategist, recently told the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We will probably need a
major concentration of forces in the Middle East over
a long period of time," he said. "When we have
economic problems, it's been caused by disruptions in
our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will
be no disruption in oil supplies."

Kagan, along with William Kristol of the Weekly
Standard, is a founder of the think tank Project for
the New American Century, an assembly of
foreign-policy hawks whose supporters include the
Pentagon's Perle, New Republic publisher Martin
Peretz, and former Central Intelligence Agency
director James Woolsey. Among the group's affiliates
in the Bush administration are Cheney, Rumsfeld, and
Wolfowitz; I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief
of staff; Elliott Abrams, the Middle East director at
the National Security Council; and Zalmay Khalilzad,
the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition
groups. Kagan's group, tied to a web of similar
neoconservative, pro-Israeli organizations, represents
the constellation of thinkers whose ideological
affinity was forged in the Nixon and Ford
administrations.

To Akins, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia,
it's a team that looks all too familiar, seeking to
implement the plan first outlined back in 1975. "It'll
be easier once we have Iraq," he says. "Kuwait, we
already have. Qatar and Bahrain, too. So it's only
Saudi Arabia we're talking about, and the United Arab
Emirates falls into place."

LAST SUMMER, Perle provided a brief glimpse into his
circle's thinking when he invited rand Corporation
strategist Laurent Murawiec to make a presentation to
his Defense Policy Board, a committee of former senior
officials and generals that advises the Pentagon on
big-picture policy ideas. Murawiec's closed-door
briefing provoked a storm of criticism when it was
leaked to the media; he described Saudi Arabia as the
"kernel of evil," suggested that the Saudi royal
family should be replaced or overthrown, and raised
the idea of a U.S. occupation of Saudi oil fields. He
ultimately lost his job when rand decided he was too
controversial.

Murawiec is part of a Washington school of thought
that views virtually all of the nations in the Gulf as
unstable "failed states" and maintains that only the
United States has the power to forcibly reorganize and
rebuild them. In this view, the arms systems and bases
that were put in place to defend the region also
provide a ready-made infrastructure for taking over
countries and their oil fields in the event of a
crisis.

The Defense Department likely has contingency plans to
occupy Saudi Arabia, says Robert E. Ebel, director of
the energy program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank
whose advisers include Kissinger; former Defense
Secretary and CIA director James Schlesinger; and
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security
adviser. "If something happens in Saudi Arabia," Ebel
says, "if the ruling family is ousted, if they decide
to shut off the oil supply, we have to go in."

Two years ago, Ebel, a former mid-level CIA official,
oversaw a CSIS task force that included several
members of Congress as well as representatives from
industry including ExxonMobil, Arco, BP, Shell,
Texaco, and the American Petroleum Institute. Its
report, "The Geopolitics of Energy Into the 21st
Century," concluded that the world will find itself
dependent for many years on unstable oil-producing
nations, around which conflicts and wars are bound to
swirl. "Oil is high-profile stuff," Ebel says. "Oil
fuels military power, national treasuries, and
international politics. It is no longer a commodity to
be bought and sold within the confines of traditional
energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been
transformed into a determinant of well-being, of
national security, and of international power."

As vital as the Persian Gulf is now, its strategic
importance is likely to grow exponentially in the next
20 years. Nearly one out of every three barrels of oil
reserves in the world lie under just two countries:
Saudi Arabia (with 259 billion barrels of proven
reserves) and Iraq (112 billion). Those figures may
understate Iraq's largely unexplored reserves, which
according to U.S. government estimates may hold as
many as 432 billion barrels.

With supplies in many other regions, especially the
United States and the North Sea, nearly exhausted, oil
from Saudi Arabia and Iraq is becoming ever more
critical -- a fact duly noted in the administration's
National Energy Policy, released in 2001 by a White
House task force. By 2020, the Gulf will supply
between 54 percent and 67 percent of the world's
crude, the document said, making the region "vital to
U.S. interests." According to G. Daniel Butler, an
oil-markets analyst at the U.S. Energy Information
Administration (EIA), Saudi Arabia's production
capacity will rise from its current 9.4 million
barrels a day to 22.1 million over the next 17 years.
Iraq, which in 2002 produced a mere 2 million barrels
a day, "could easily be a double-digit producer by
2020," says Butler.

U.S. strategists aren't worried primarily about
America's own oil supplies; for decades, the United
States has worked to diversify its sources of oil,
with Venezuela, Nigeria, Mexico, and other countries
growing in importance. But for Western Europe and
Japan, as well as the developing industrial powers of
eastern Asia, the Gulf is all-important. Whoever
controls it will maintain crucial global leverage for
decades to come.

Today, notes the EIA's Butler, two-thirds of Gulf oil
goes to Western industrial nations. By 2015, according
to a study by the CIA's National Intelligence Council,
three-quarters of the Gulf's oil will go to Asia,
chiefly to China. China's growing dependence on the
Gulf could cause it to develop closer military and
political ties with countries such as Iran and Iraq,
according to the report produced by Ebel's CSIS task
force. "They have different political interests in the
Gulf than we do," Ebel says. "Is it to our advantage
to have another competitor for oil in the Persian
Gulf?"

David Long, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Saudi
Arabia and as chief of the Near East division in the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research
during the Reagan administration, likens the Bush
administration's approach to the philosophy of Admiral
Mahan, the 19th-century military strategist who
advocated the use of naval power to create a global
American empire. "They want to be the world's
enforcer," he says. "It's a worldview, a geopolitical
position. They say, 'We need hegemony in the region.'"


UNTIL THE 1970s, the face of American power in the
Gulf was the U.S. oil industry, led by Exxon, Mobil,
Chevron, Texaco, and Gulf, all of whom competed
fiercely with Britain's BP and Anglo-Dutch Shell. But
in the early '70s, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the other
Gulf states nationalized their oil industries, setting
up state-run companies to run wells, pipelines, and
production facilities. Not only did that enhance the
power of opec, enabling that organization to force a
series of sharp price increases, but it alarmed U.S.
policymakers.

Today, a growing number of Washington strategists are
advocating a direct U.S. challenge to state-owned
petroleum industries in oil-producing countries,
especially the Persian Gulf. Think tanks such as the
American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage
Foundation, and CSIS are conducting discussions about
privatizing Iraq's oil industry. Some of them have put
forward detailed plans outlining how Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, and other nations could be forced to open up
their oil and gas industries to foreign investment.
The Bush administration itself has been careful not to
say much about what might happen to Iraq's oil. But
State Department officials have had preliminary talks
about the oil industry with Iraqi exiles, and there
have been reports that the U.S. military wants to use
at least part of the country's oil revenue to pay for
the cost of military occupation.

"One of the major problems with the Persian Gulf is
that the means of production are in the hands of the
state," Rob Sobhani, an oil-industry consultant, told
an American Enterprise Institute conference last fall
in Washington. Already, he noted, several U.S. oil
companies are studying the possibility of
privatization in the Gulf. Dismantling
government-owned oil companies, Sobhani argued, could
also force political changes in the region. "The
beginning of liberal democracy can be achieved if you
take the means of production out of the hands of the
state," he said, acknowledging that Arabs would resist
that idea. "It's going to take a lot of selling, a lot
of marketing," he concluded.

Just which companies would get to claim Iraq's oil has
been a subject of much debate. After a war, the
contracts that Iraq's state-owned oil company has
signed with European, Russian, and Chinese oil firms
might well be abrogated, leaving the field to U.S. oil
companies. "What they have in mind is
denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to
American oil companies," says Akins. "The American oil
companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of
this war."

The would-be rulers of a post-Saddam Iraq have been
thinking along the same lines. "American oil companies
will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," says Ahmad
Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a
group of aristocrats and wealthy Iraqis who fled the
country when its repressive monarchy was overthrown in
1958. During a visit to Washington last fall, Chalabi
held meetings with at least three major U.S. oil
companies, trying to enlist their support. Similar
meetings between Iraqi exiles and U.S. companies have
also been taking place in Europe.

"Iraqi exiles have approached us, saying, 'You can
have our oil if we can get back in there,'" says R.
Gerald Bailey, who headed Exxon's Middle East
operations until 1997. "All the major American
companies have met with them in Paris, London,
Brussels, all over. They're all jockeying for
position. You can't ignore it, but you've got to do it
on the QT. And you can't wait till it gets too far
along."

But the companies are also anxious about the
consequences of war, according to many experts,
oil-company executives, and former State Department
officials. "The oil companies are caught in the
middle," says Bailey. Executives fear that war could
create havoc in the region, turning Arab states
against the United States and Western oil companies.
On the other hand, should a U.S. invasion of Iraq be
successful, they want to be there when the oil is
divvied up. Says David Long, the former U.S. diplomat,
"It's greed versus fear."

Ibrahim Oweiss, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown
University who coined the term "petrodollar" and has
also been a consultant to Occidental and BP, has been
closely watching the cautious maneuvering by the
companies. "I know that the oil companies are scared
about the outcome of this," he says. "They are not at
all sure this is in the best interests of the oil
industry."

Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle
East Policy Council who has spoken privately to top
Exxon officials, says it's clear that most
oil-industry executives "are afraid" of what a war in
the Persian Gulf could mean in the long term --
especially if tensions in the region spiral out of
control. "They see it as much too risky, and they are
risk averse," she says. "They think it has 'fiasco'
written all over it." What do you think?

A Mother Jones contributing writer, Robert Dreyfuss
was named one of the "best unsung investigative
journalists working in print" last year by the
Columbia Journalism Review.



_____________________________

'Father of the bomb... ' - the deal

pv vivekanand

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the disgraced Pakistani nuclear
scientist who has confessed to having sold nuclear
secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, has been
placed under strict house arrest after failing to
hand over documents and taped statements that
implicate senior Pakistani military officials,
including President Pervez Musharaf, in his nuclear
proliferation activities.
The "evidence" that all Pakistani military leader,
including Mushraf himself, since 1977 knew that
Qadeen Khan had been selling his nuclear know-how in
the black market, is said to be with his daughter
Dina, who smuggled it out of Pakistan.
Obviously, Qadeer Khan, 68, used it as a leverage to
ensure that he would be given to government "pardon"
for his activities -- which netted him tens of
millions of dollars, but now that he has secured a
blanket pardon in return for the evidence, he is said
to be refusing to hand over the documents and taped
conversations and statements.
Reports indicate that Dina, under instructions from
her father, is holding onto the evidence to ward off
any legal action against him. Although he had been
given a pardon, the likelihood remains strong that
legal action could be taken against him.
Qadeer Khan remained under house arrest and tight
restrictions were imposed on his movements over the
weekend in a bid to apply pressure on him for the
evidence.
Musharaf, according to sources in the Gulf and North
America, had wanted to prosecute Qadeer Khan under
pressure from the US, but his plans went wrong when it
emerged that the nuclear scientist had taken out
"insurance" against that eventuality by stashing
evidence that implicates the president and some of his
senior military brass.
Therefore, the pardon was part of a deal that involved
Qadeer Khan pledging that he would hand over the
evidence in return.
According to the sources, the evidence implicates
every military chief of Pakistan since the late 70s in
his nuclear peddling.
The trail since then winds from Pakistan through the
Gulf to Europe and the Far East and to Qadeer Khan's
fat bank accounts, and holdings and investments,
mainly outside Pakistan.
The story so far.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist, worked in the
Netherlands for a Dutch company called Physics Dynamic
Research Laboratory (FDO), which did research for
consortium called URENCO, set up by the British, Dutch
and German governments to provide equipment to enrich
uranium. It was based in the town of Almelo in
Holland.
In his compacity as a metallurgist working for FDO,
Qadeer Khan stole URENCO blueprints for centrifuges
-- metal tubes which spin uranium hexafluoride gas in
order to separate out the uranium 235 which is needed
to make a nuclear reaction and from there to a level
needed for a nuclear bomb.
He was given access to the highly confidential
blueprints because he enjoyed high security clearance
since he was married to a South African-born Dutch
woman and had announced he planned to settle down
permanently in the Netherlands. He was also fluent in
English, German and Dutch.
However, Qadeer Khan left the Netherlands in 1976 when
he was placed under investigatin by Dutch
intelligence.
He established the AQ Khan Research Laboratories near
Islamabad and began to build the bomb. Material for
the project came from European companies.
He also wrote to Frits Veerman, a technical
photographer and fromer colleague at FDO, to secure
some finer details.
Veerman has disclosed how he knew Qadeer Khan had
stolen the Urenco bluepints and also the letter in a
Dutch-language book called Atoomspionage.
It is not yet clearly known when he started his
clandestine dealings with Libya and Iran and North
Korea.
The Iranian government,under threat of sweeping UN
sanctions, disclosed to the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) last year that it was one of the
clandestine clients. Tehran said it had received help
from an external source, and the trail led to a third
party and to Qadeer Khan although the scientist and
the Iranian government are not known to have had any
direct dealing.
The Iranians provided the IAEA with a centrifuge and
the IAEA found that it was contaminated with enriched
uranium. The question immediately came up from where
did Iran got uranium. The Iranians were faced with the
question whether it had processed the fuel itself and
they explained that they got it by accident.
IAEA investigations indicated that Qadeer Khan had
surplus equipment and had also developed new
centrifuges, allowing him to seel old ones. It is
believed it was one of those old ones that ended up
with the Iranians.
Tehran told the IAEA it got the parts through a third
party but, IAED technical analysis found clear signs
that Qadeer Khan was involved in the designs.
The Libyan connection with Qadeer Khan was made by the
Libyan government iself to the US and UK after
undertaking to give up all projects of weapons of mass
destruction.
The reclusive North Korea is not forthcoming with any
revelations. But the South Korean government has said
it had come across evidence that Qadeer Khan was
passing on nuclear technology as well as equipment to
the North.
The US had been pressing Pakistan to take action
against Qadeer Khan for several months but it was the
Libyan connection in January that pulled the plug.
US President George W Bush himself gave the details of
the affair last week. He identified the key figure in
the clandestinen network as BSA Tahir, a Sri Lankan
businessman who was running a computer company in
Dubai . Bush called Tahir, the Pakistani
scientist's"deputy and chief financial officer and
money launderer."
Tahir, using another Dubai-based firm, a British
company in which he was a partner, placed an order
for centrifuge parts with a Malaysian company under
the guise that the parts were for the oil and gas
industry. Tahir's British partner has disowned any
knowledge of the clandestine operation or nything
about the centrifuge order.
The parts were delivered to Dubai and loaded onto a
German ship the BBC China and were sent to Libya in
the late summer of 2003. However, by then the Libyans
had entered too deep into negotiations with the US and
UK on giving up their projects for weapons of mass
destruction. It is believed that the Libyans, as a
sign of their good faith in the negotiations to give
up the projects, gave the tip-off that led to the
seizure of the vessels en route to Libya.
German and Italian authorities intercepted the vessel
and fund that consignment described as "used machinery
parts" listed as the cargo were found to be the
centrifuges manufactured in Malaysia.
The Libyans also showed the Americans and British a
design for a nuclear warhead, which intelligence
agencies believe originated with Qadeer Khan. Tripoli
said it had paid $50 million to Qadeer Khan for the
information he passed on about uranium centrifuges and
Chinese-inspired nuclear warhead designs as well as
equipment.
Successive Pakistani governments/military leaders had
given Qadeer Khan a free hand and this allowed him to
disguise his actions throughout if only because of his
"top-secret work" in the service of the country.
According to Shyam Bhatia, author of "Nuclear Rivals
In the Middle East" (1988), Qadeer Khan claims he was
linked to Mohammed Shahabuddin Ghauri, the 13th
century ruler of Delhi.
Perhaps it is one of the reasons that Pakistan named
its ballistic missiles bought from North Korea as
Ghauri.
Qadeer Khan used to live in astonishing luxury
throughout the last three decades, says Bhatia.
The Pakistani air force had given him the
round-the-clock use of a C-130 transport aircraft to
take him anywhere he wanted to in the world. Bhatia
argues that Qadeer Khan used this plane to fly in
parts of uranium centrifuges and other components to
Pakistan in the intial days before turning the
aircraft as his personal plane.
He even flew antique furniture from Pakistan to
Timbuktu to furnish the Hendrina Khan Hotel, which is
named after his South African-born wife.
When their plans to put Qadeer Khan and several of his
associates on trial went awry with the finding that
his daughter was holding evidence against them,
Pakistani officials, including the intelligence chief,
negotiated with him to apologise unconditionally and
surrender the evidence in exchange for a pardon.
Otherwise, experts argue, they would have put him on
trial.
Relatives of six other scientists who worked with
Qadeer Khan — who also held incommunicado at secret
locations — have accused the government of covering up
the affair.
In any event, the revelations have been startling, and
it remains to be seen whether Qadeer Khan would make a
fresh deal with the government for the evidence his
daughter holds.
However, his life might not be worth much once he
concludes that deal.

No such thing as Pak bomb

THERE is no such as a Pakistani-made nuclear weapon.
Indeed, Pakistan has atomic weapons, but the only
Pakistani component in them is enriched uranium. The
design for the warhead was supplied by China and the
missile delivery system was provided by North Korea.
The disgraced Abdul Qadeer Khan, often described as
the "father of the Pakistani bomb," is not an expert
in nuclear technology, but a metallurgist turned rogue
nuclear trader who sold Chinese technology dating back
to the 60s and linked equipment designed from stolen
blueprints to Iran and Libya.
Khan, 51, is not a nuclear physicist; nor could he
successfully develop a long-range missile system
without outside help. His contribution was at best his
knowledge of metallurgy.
This is not a new theory. It has been heard for
several years. However, it has proved to be true in
the wake of the crisis triggered by revelations that
Khan clandestinely sold nuclear technology and
equipment to the Libyans and Iranians.
The following facts have been established so far from
various sources, named and unnamed.
— Khan, a metallurgy graduate from Europe, stole
blueprints for gas centrifuges from a Dutch company in
the mid-70s and took them to Pakistan.
— He was put in charge of the country's nuclear
programme by the then prime minister Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto and given a free hand and mandate to develop a
nuclear weapon. Successive government, both military
and civilian, continued to give him absolute authority
and confidentiality to accomplish the goal of
acquiring nuclear weapons.
— Khan, with help from the government and military,
secured a 1962 Chinese design for a nuclear warhead.
He also secured Chinese support for building a nuclear
reactor capable of producing 50 megawatts of power
that went operational in the late 80s.
— Simultaneously, he also secured missile componets
from North Korea and assembled them in Pakistan (the
most noted among the missiles is the one called
Ghauri).
— With help from Pakistani nuclear scientists assigned
to him, Khan built up a reserve of enough enriched
uranium — about 350 kilogrammes — from the
Chinese-built reactor to assemble to 15 to 17 nuclear
weapons by 1998. Some accounts have put the amount of
enriched uranium at 600 kilogrammes, enough to build
30 nuclear weapons.
— In May 1998, he carried out six nuclear tests, and
gave the impression to the outside world that Pakistan
not only has nuclear warheads but also the long-range
system to deliver them. One device is said to be
embedded underground ready for test.
— Since then, Khan regularly hosted seminars and
workshops on "vibrations in rapidly rotating
machinery" — which implied centrifuge technology
essential for producing weapons-gade uranium. Those
forums offered him the chance to draw interest from
Iran and Libya with whom he negotiated deals for
selling them gas centrifuges and other equipment which
he had obtained from China and North Korea.
— Khan was caught last year when the International
Atomic Energy Agency focused on Iran's nuclear
programme and Libya volunteered in secret to give up
its programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Centrifuges in Iran's possession were traced to Khan,
and Libya offered information to the US and UK that
its nuclear knowhow and centrifuges came from Khan
through middlemen based in the Gulf and Malaysia.
Since then, Khan has made a public confession that he
had made the deals with Iran and Libya. Conveniently,
the Pakistani government has pardoned but continues to
keep him under detention since he has refused to
surrender "evidence" that the Pakistani government and
military knew about his dubious deals. The evidence is
said to be with his daughter outside Pakistan, and
Khan, fearing for his life after he was caught, is
holding on to the evidence in return for a pledge that
he would not be killed and allowed to leave Pakistan
for a safe haven outside the country.

9/11 probe - Deception again

PV Vivekanand

BY NAMING a hand-picked group of peopled mostly deemed as Republican loyalists to conduct an investigations into "intelligence" failure in Iraq, the Bush administration is seen as trying to conceal the real fact of the affair -- intelligence data was tailored to suit and facilitate the administration's determination to launch war against Iraq.
The argument among American commentators today is that the so-called neoconservatives — read as pro-Israeli hardliners — in Washington were determined to wage on Iraq from the day George Bush entered the White House in 2001.
Such an argument was rife in the Middle East but it has gathered so much strength in Washington today that the administration is accused of creating the right atmosphere and conditions to launch military action against Iraq and went about it ruthlessly, picking and choosing information that suited its purposes and discarding anything that could raise questions about its intentions.
The "independent" investigation has been ordered with the predetermined objective that it would come up with a tailor-made finding exenorating Bush and the hardline neoconservatives around him of the political crime of deliberately waging an unprovoked war based on false and misleading claims that they themselves had created in the first place, argues Barry Grey, writing on the World Socialist Web Site.
That is one of the many salvos against Washington.
"Claims Iraq had nuclear weapons, death rays, vans of death, drones of death, mobile germ labs, poison gas factories, hidden weapons depots, long-ranged missiles, links to Al Qaeda — all were false," says The only thing real: Iraq's oil," says by Eric Margolis, a syndicated foreign affairs columnist and broadcaster, and author of War at the Top of the World - The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Tibet.
The New York Times recently carried an article recalling that US Secretary of State Collin Powell appeared at the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 that the evidence added up to "facts" and "not assertions" that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and that it was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and building a fleet of advanced missiles.
"Powell's testimony, delivered at a moment of high suspense as American forces gathered in the Gulf region, was widely seen as the most powerful and persuasive presentation of the Bush administration's case that Iraq was bristling with horrific weapons. His reputation for caution and care gave it added credibility," said the New York Times.
"A year later, some of the statements made by Powell have been confirmed, but many of his gravest findings have been upended by David A. Kay, who until Jan. 23 was Washington's chief weapons inspector...," notes the paper.
The emerging consensus among American commentators is that
Bush and his people, having failed to tconvince the world that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to Al Qaeda and thus to the Sept.11 attacks, came up with charges that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a security threat to the US and the rest of the world.
Now, having invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam but failing to come up with any proof that he had any weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration is engaged in an effort to exonerate itself by blaming intelligence failure for the pre-war claims.
Bush this week shifted his rationale for the war saying Saddam had the capability to build weapons of mass destruction and he needed to be removed. Saddam having the capability was enough reason for war, he argued.
As a footnote, Bush also asserted that he had done a big favour for the people of Iraq by removing Saddam. Of course, Bush stayed away from recalling that prior to the war he himself had rattled off a list of specific quantities of chemical weapons like nerve gas and biological weapons and cited them as offering a legitimate reason for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam.
The very structure of the investigating panel indicates that the outcome of the inquiry would clear the administration saying that US intelligence agencies "misread" information and reached the conclusion that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and advised senior administration officals accordingly. These officials in turn conveyed the information to people closest to Bush like Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice and Powell, who in turn advised Bush, and the president acted accordingly; and that solves the problem, according to the thinking of those who are orchestrating the exercise now.
Washington describes the investigators as independent. But there is little of any independence about the group.
Retired federal judge Laurence Silberman, who co-chairs the investigating panel, is known as a long-time Republic supporters and has a record of having cleared senior Republican administration officials of any wrongdoing in past cases, points out Grey in an article on World Socialist Web Site under the title "Bush’s Iraq commission and the 'intelligence failure' fraud."
Grey specifically efers to the infamous Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan adminstration years. (The scandal stemmed from a revelation that Reagan had authorised a secret operation to finance and arm, in violation of US law, the contra death squads that killed tens of thousands of people in Nicaragua. Silberman played a key role in sabotaging the investigation by Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh).
Grey argues:
"Bush brought into his administration precisely those extreme militarists such as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who had for the better part of a decade been campaigning for a new war to “finish the job” left undone by the Gulf war of 1991—overthrowing the Baathist regime, occupying Iraq, and seizing control of its oil resources. Both he and Cheney had the closest ties to American oil and energy conglomerates that stood to benefit most immediately and directly from this imperialist enterprise.
"The evidence is, by now, voluminous that Bush and his top advisers came to power with the determination to invade Iraq. What they lacked was a pretext. The terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001, provided them with precisely the casus belli they had been seeking, and they eagerly seized on it, even though they knew Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the hijack-bombings and had no links to Al Qaeda.
"Far from being misled, Bush and his co-conspirators proceeded to concoct a case for waging an unprovoked war, relying on the complicity of the Democratic Party and the media. A central preoccupation of the administration became the fabrication of intelligence."

Suspect timing

The timing of the expected submission of the inquiry panel's report — until after the November elections — is also suspect. No doubt, the timing is set to serve the purpose of concealing the real facts and pre-empt any political fallout from the report, argues Bush opponents.
Most telling is the mandated task of the panel — determining why there was an "intelligence failure" that led to conflicting claims and statements by Bush and his closest aides like Vice-President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and others on Iraq's alleged stocks of weapons of mass destruction.
The whole premise of this assertion sidesteps any investigations into determining whether these false claims were issued with the sole objective of justifying the war and those who made the claims knew that they were based on doctored intelligence reports.
The investigation should have been entrusted with a non-partisan group and ordered to focus on the behind-the-scene conduct of Bush and others around him as they plotted the war against Iraq. Such an inquiry, if conducted in transparency and objectivity, would have revealed the truth of the political conspiracy and disinformation campaign that the administration waged in order to build the case against Saddam.
That anyone in the administration who opposed that approach was booted out was evident in the dismissal of Paul O’Neill as treasury secretary last year. O'Neill has revealed that the Bush administration started discussing means to set the ground for invading and occupying Iraq as soon as Bush assumed office in January 2001. He stated that the overthrow of Saddam was a priority topic at the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush administration and that he had access to documents that clearly indicated that the administration was planning the invasion and occupation of Iraq and exploitation of its oil reserves in the first days after assuming office.
Rumseld himself is said to have advocated seizing the Sept.11 attacks as the pretext for war against Iraq and preparing for invasion and occupation of that country in less than 24 hours after the aerial assaults in New York and Washington. The war on Afghanistan was only the fore-runner of the action against Iraq.
When one speaks about "intelligence failure," the agency that would be faulted should be the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the case of Iraq, the CIA had done its job, but its findings were twisted and used selectively and often out-of-context to serve the purpose of those who were determined to wage war on Iraq.
A honest and objective investigation would reveal that
Rumsfeld and his associates at the Defence Department had set up their own intelligence operation, called the Office of Special Plans.
This operation skirted all intelligence agencies of the US, including the CIA, and created, twisted and filtered information in a manner that a case for war against Iraq was built on dubious grounds.
Apart from discrediting and twisting CIA findings that there was no evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the Office of Special Plans adopted the view that the CIA was undermining the OSP findings.
Laurie Mylroie, who is close to Cheney and other hardliners in Washington, has accused the CIA and the State Department of "systematically" discrediting "critical intelligence about Saddam’s regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction.”
According to Washington insiders, these bent upon discrediting the State Department and the CIA included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Wolfowitz' deputy Douglas Feith and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle.
Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst, has provided an insight to the workings of the Office of Special Plans. He says that the Bush ddministration gave "greatest credence to accounts that presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally that they were wrong. But when they said so, they were not heeded...."
The administration aslo drew heavily on newspaper articles that conformed to the views of administration officials, he says.
"To a great extent OSP personnel ‘cherry-picked’ the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the Administration’s pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest," says Pollack.
A particular example, he says, was the way the OSP accepted every "report" given by the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress (INC) headed by Ahmed Chalabi on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction and rejected reports given by trained intelligence officers because the INC was saying what the OSP "wanted to hear."
In turn, the OSP passed "raw, unverified intelligence straight to the cabinet level as gospel," says Pollack.
Such formal submission of reports was made an integral part of the OSP activities since the senior administration officials who made public statements based wanted to back up themselves.
The Washington Post wrote in June 1003 that Cheney and one of his top aides had tried to pressure the CIA "into producing more categorical and blood-curdling assessments of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capacities" and “sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here.”
The Post went on to say that Iraq analyst at the CIA were under pressure to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent.
Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker magazine in October 2003: “The administration eventually got its way, a former CIA official said. ‘The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assertions. And, they blame George Tenet for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.’”
No doubt these reports will be reviewed as routine by the new investigators, but it is unlikely that the officials will be questioned whether they were aware that the documents were based on doctored intelligence and they were filing it away for a situation where they were asked what their sources were.
The Bush administration is hoping that ordering an "independent" investigation will put to rest questions about the duplicity of its approach to war and the issue would not cast clouds on Bush's re-election chances.
But it might not be the case. In the days, weeks and months ahead, there would be more revelations and political horse-trading in Washington — plus a potential failure of Washington's political efforts in Iraq — that could raise more serious and focused questions about why the war itself. And those questions would refuse to be shelved, given the added ammunition Bush's Democrat rivals have found in their arsenal.
Bill van Auken, leader of the Socialist Equality Party of the US, summarised what many Americans feel today.
He says that the Iraq embroglio was "not a matter of miscalculations or exaggerations by intelligence agents."
"The administration repeatedly claimed that it had irrefutable evidence that Iraq had several hundred tonnes of chemical and biological weapons and was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons," Van Auken points out. "Top officials insisted that they even knew the precise whereabouts of these weapons. Now, with the first anniversary of the war approaching, they are forced to admit that not a single vial of such material is to be found in all of Iraq.
"If no weapons were there, clearly there existed no verified evidence that they were there, something that United Nations inspectors attested to before the war began. The inescapable conclusion is that the government manufactured a pretext for dragging the American people into war. As a result, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. At least 525 US soldiers have lost their lives and thousands more have been wounded.
"This would be the starting point for any genuinely independent investigation. The questions before such a panel would include: Who was responsible for lying to the American people and to the world in order to carry out an illegal war? Whose interests—hidden behind the false claims about WMD—were served by this war? How was the administration allowed to get away with it?"

The in-house battle in Iran

PV Vviekanand

The reformists and conservative hard-liners in Iran
are locked in a bitter battle after the powerful
religious establishment arbitrarily used its powers to
disqualify reform-minded candidates from running in
the next parliamentary elections with an obvious view
to pre-empting them continuing to enjoy a majority in
parliament. The dispute might sound like technical ,
but it is not as much as a political crisis as it is
a fight for survival for both sides, for giving in to
the other means the end for either side and easy
solutions would not be easy.
The uproar in Iran following the rejection of more
than 3,500 people as candidates in next month's
parliamentary elections is not a simple political
crisis. It is a crucial tug-of-war between the
hard-line conservative camp represented by the
powerful Guardians Council and liberal reformists who
seek to steer a fresh political and economic course
for the country away from the path dictated by the
theocrats who control the religious establishment.
Ultimately, the ongoing battle will determine whether
the people of Iran would gain the power to rule their
country or the hard-line conservatives — the
religious establishment — would strengthen their upper
hand in determining what is good and bad for their
people.
The omnipresent element in the equation is the steady
pressure the US has been applying on Tehran after the
invasion and occupation of Iraq. And this has made it
a bitter struggle for survival of both conservatives
and liberal reformists.
The conservatives fear is high that at some point the
American pressure would penetrate the ranks of the
liberal camp and that would signal a dramatic change
in the shape and nature of the county -- meaning the
demise of the superiority of the theocratic camp. They
want to pre-empt not only another liberal majority in
parliament – Majlis — but also cut down the strength
of reformists in the legislative body.
For the liberals, accepting the hard-line-imposed
conditions means nothing but saying good-bye to their
political future.
On the external front, their attempts to present a
more moderate face of Iran have been dealt a severe
blow, particularly that Tehran often boasts about its
regular elections and the country's status as an
"Islamic democracy."
The claims are often compared with the reality that an
unelected body has control over elections and only an
unelected official can overrule that body.
The struggle has been simmering for after it burst
forth when moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected
president in 1997 and set out a liberal agenda which,
he hoped, would address some of the basic economic
woes of his people and advance the country towards
returning to the mainstream world politics.
However, Khatami soon found out that the president's
wings were clipped already since the religious
establishment held all the aces and could veto him at
will; the Guardian Council held powers that superseded
those of the presidency.
Beyond that is the absolute authority of the council
to decide who could seek power in the country through
elections, and it exercised that authority this month
by rejecting 3,533 out of 8,144 prospective candidates
for the Feb.20 elections, including some 80 serving
members of the Majlis.
Several ministers and vice presidents in the
government had submitted their resignations in
protest at the mass disqualification of candidates.
However, they were expected to stay on in their jobs
pending appeals lodged with the Guardians Council.
The council has lifted the ban on 200 candidates, but
that seen as cosmetic. Most of the reformists were
expected to remain banned by the time the council
concluded its review.
The Guardians Council argued that the rejections were
made on the basis of "data collected from reliable
sources and the investigations conducted in
[applicants'] neighbourhoods."
Most of the rejected individuals are connected with
the reformist 2nd of Khordad coalition, which is named
after the date of President Khatami's election on May
23, 1997.
However, the stated reason for disqualifying them
include applicants' alleged drug abuse, links with
banned groups, or lack of Iranian nationality.
Throughout his presidency -- and particularly in his
second term — Khatami had to content with opposition
to his liberal approach from the religious
establishment, which also exercised control over the
judiciary as well as the security forces of the
country.
Any sign of political dissent challenging the absolute
authority of the conservatives was immediately put
down; moves adopted by Khatami to address some of the
basic problems were shot down; reformists pro-reform
journalists who spoke out were jailed; and liberal
activists had to content with threats to their life.
In the 1997 and 2001 elections, Iranians voted
overwhelmingly for liberals and reformists but the
elected candidates, despite their commitment,
seriousness and devotion, could achieve little since
they were restrained by the system itself that favours
the entrenched hard-liners, who, by virtue of the
powers given to them, could override them at any
point and at any time.
The actual executive powers of the Khatami government
is severely curtailed and its options are limited in
exercising what should be the legitimate rights of an
executive authority. It is even more ironic that the
government enjoys a majority in the legislative
assembly but the MPs are helpless in view of the
constitutional bindings under which they have to
function.
It is not as if the hard-liners are short-sighted in
strategy. A recent report in the Washington Post
summarised that the relative relaxation of the strict
dress code and a ban on make-up, and the strict
enforcement of laws against watching satellite
channels, men and women holding hands in public and
similar moves are the hard-liners' way of giving the
people "more of what they want and divert attention
from the reformists' demand for a more powerful
democratic say for the people.
The stand-off is indeed a battle of wits and wills as
much as it is a struggle for survival for both sides.
And an easy way does not look any near.

Hossein Khomeini back in Iran

pv vivekanand

HOSSEIN Khomeini, grandson of the late Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini — founder of the Islamic republic —
has been placed under restrictions in the Iranian holy
city of Qom where he quietly returned after spending
more than six months outside the country calling for
American military intervention against the thecratic
regime in power in Tehran.
Hossein Khomeini, 46, who was last in the US where he
had delivered a series of lectures denouncing the
clerical regime in Tehran, was pressured into
returning to Iran because his wife and family were not
allowed to leave the country to join him, according to
sources.
He had left Iran in July and crossed to Iraq where he
lived for some time before going to the US on a visit
sponsored by the Iranian American community and backed
by the Bush administration, which is seeking "regime
change" in Tehran.
He gave a series interviews to the press and also
spoke at several gatherings in the US saying the
theocratic regime in power in Iran today had betrayed
the founding principles of the Islamic republic as
envisaged by his grandfather and that he favoured
American military intervention in the country if that
was needed to remove the hardliners from the country's
leadership. He favoured the reforms sought by
President Mohammed Khatami, a moderate aligned with
the reformist camp, although he did not fully agree
with Khatami's stated positions.
It was then seen that Washington was trying to use the
Khomeini name to advance its efforts for a regime
change in Iran.
The Tehran government reacted cooly to his criticism.
Spokesmen said Hossein Khomeini was exercising his
right to free speech and the Iranian government had no
comment on him.
However, Iran insiders said the conservative camp of
hardline theocrats seethed in anger at his criticism
and had engineered his return by applying pressure
through his family. "He was told his family would
never be allowed to leave Iran and he would be better
off returning to Qom and confine himself to religous
studies in there," said a source. "At Qom's Hawzah
Al-Ilmiyah, he has been told not to make political
statements or meet foreign visitors," according to the
source.
He returned to Iran in mid-January and since then been
questioned by agents of the conservative camp led by
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who wields supreme powers in
the country.
The hardliners also control the bulk of the security
and intelligence network as well as the judiciary, and
hence their operations do not always come under the
scrutiny of the government.
It was also believed that Hossein Khomeini was adviced
by the US to return home and "work from within" to
bring about changes. His return home comes amid a
bitter struggle between the reformist camp led by
Khatami and the hardliners who want to clip the wings
of the reformists by using their special powers to
deny the reformist a majority in parliament in Feb.20
elections.
Hossein Khomeini is the son of Mustafa Khomeini, who
died of a heart attack in Al Najaf one year before the
1979 Iranian revolution. His uncle Ahmad Khomeini
was killed in 1995, reportedly by the Iranian regime,
after he bitterly criticized the regime's policies.
Hossein Khomeini said in commetns during his stay
outside the country that "Iran needs a democratic
system that does not use religion as a tool to repress
the people and suffocate society." He also called for
the need to "separate religion from the state and to
end the despotic theocracy" in Iran.
He said Iran is on the verge of a popular revolution,
adding: "Freedom is more important than bread. If the
Americans can provide it, then let them come."