Ahmad Fadil Al Khalayleh, also known as Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant blamed for most of the suicide bombings and ambushes against the US-led forces and allies in Iraq, has claimed responsibility for the Oct.9 bombings in Amman, Jordan, that killed nearly 60 people. The attacks showed that Zarqawi, bloated by what he sees as his "success" in Iraq, is seeking to export his brand of extremism to Iraq's neighbours and signal worse days ahead. However, the bombings, whose victims were mainly Arabs and Muslims and included women and children attending a marriage reception, have drawn wide condemnation from Arabs and Muslims. People are shell-shocked and are genuinely angry. The attacks could expose weak links in Zarqawi's ranks and perhaps even lead to the beginning of the end of the dreaded militant. In the meantime, the US faces painful decisions and compromises as options which Washington is unlikely to favour, writes PV Vivekanand.
In October, a letter surfaced purportedly written by Ayman Al Zawahiri, said to be deputy leader of Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda, calling on Zarqawi to adopt a four-phased strategy beginning with concentrating on evicting the US military from Iraq, followed by supporting the creation of an Islamic caliphate there, expanding the "wave of jihad secular countries" neighbouring Iraq and then confronting Israel.
Some viewed the message as genuine while others saw it as a forgery by the Shiites of Iraq who have been targeted by Zarqawi's group.
A message described as coming from Zarqawi in response said the Zawahiri letter was not authentic and asserted that it was doctored by the Americans as a piece of propaganda.
Then came the Amman bombings, which were interpreted by many as Zarqawi having borrowed from Zawahiri the idea of expanding "the wave of jihad" but jumping the gun since that phase was supposed to come only after the Americans left Iraq and an Islamic caliphate was created there.
Either way, going by the theory that Zarqawi was indeed behind the bombings that killed more than 57 people in three hotels in the Jordanian capital, Amman, there is only obvious conclusion: Zarqawi has shot himself in the foot by targeting Arabs and Muslims for his terrorist attacks and that too at a wedding reception attended by women and children. And the gangrene would only grow.
Zarqawi obviously meant to show to the world that he could stage bombings outside Iraq and is expanding his area of operations, and that he could draw on Iraqi supporters to carry out suicide bombings and similar actions anywhere.
However, the bombings have backfired. If anything, Zarqawi has lost his "standing" — if he had any at all — among those who saw him as resisting the mighty US military in Iraq.
The "Al Qaeda in Iraq" website which claimed responsibility for the bombings asserted that the attacks were directed against Israelis, members of Western intelligence agencies and their Shiite accomplices.
It described the targeted hotels as "a backyard for the enemies of religion, the Jews and Crusaders, and a dirty hideout for the nation's apostate traitors, as well as a safe haven for the intelligence services of the infidels, where they plot their conspiracies against Muslims."
The attacks were in response to "the conspiracy against the Sunnis whose blood and honour were shed by Crusaders and the Shiites."
The contradiction between the claim and the results of the bombings is glaring.
A list of the dead included four Americans, but none of them was a member of any active branch of the US military. Most of the dead in Amman were Jordanians and Palestinians and included women and children. An Israeli who died turned out to be of Arab origin.
Two senior Palestinian intelligence officials were killed in the blast — Major-General Bashir Nafeh, head of the Palestinian National Authority's military intelligence, and Colonel Abed Allun, a high-ranking security official.
The vast majority of the victims of the blasts were Sunni Muslims whereas Zarqawi is a Sunni and Al Qaeda in Iraq is described by the Western media as waging terrorist attacks against Shiites.
The bombings drew curses against Zarqawi and calls for revenge from Jordanians.
"He is no longer a true warrior against US occupation. Zarqawi has gone too far. This cannot be justified in any way," was the typical comment of a Jordanian after the bombing. "He is not killing Americans, he is killing Muslims."
Another comment was: "Islam has not sanctioned killing of children. Zarqawi's actions in Iraq are just doing a lot of harm. For him it's an open war against America where nothing is sacred. The suicide bombers kill themselves and don't care about any one."
Yet another was: "By killing Jordanians here in Jordan, civilian Jordanians going to a wedding, they did something that not even a Jew would do."
Thousands of Jordanians took to the streets of Amman in the days that followed the bombings to curse Zarqawi. "Burn in hell Abu Musab Zarqawi," the protesters chanted
It could have been argued to a point that Zarqawi could find supporters and possible recruits from among the Jordanians of Palestinian origin who are frustrated with the failure of efforts to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation. However, the bombings dealt a serious blow to such assumptions.
A target for long
For many in this part of the world, the Amman bombings did not come as a total surprise. Jordan, which has signed a peace treaty with Israel, is closely associated with the US and has been a target for militants for decades. Its Hashemite leadership advocates a negotiated settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict — the Palestinian problem and Israel's occupation of Syria's Golan Heights — as opposed to the hardliners' policy of armed struggle.
Jordan has a history of having suffered militant attacks. It was among the first to be targeted by the so-called Arab Afghans, Arabs who volunteered to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s and returned home when the Red Army withdrew from that country.
Arab Afghans were led by people like Osama Bin Laden, whose mentor was Abdullah Azzam, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin. Azzam was killed in Afghanistan in the late 80s.
More than half of Jordan's five million citizens are of Palestinian origin who were ousted from their homeland when the state of Israel was created in 1948 and again when Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 war.
During the early 90s, the first signs emerged of an organised Arab Afghan movement taking shape in Jordan. Dozens of groups directly or indirectly aligned with Bin Laden and his associates were bust in Jordan since then. Many were given jail sentences, and Zarqawi, who hails from a prominent Jordanian tribe from the East Bank of River Jordan, was one of them although no link was established between Bin Laden and Zarqawi.
Zarqawi spent several years in jail before being released under a general amnesty offered by the late King Hussein.
Jordan's perceived pro-Western policies and its close links with the US as well as most Western European countries had drawn the ire of the militants for whom the US and Europe are bitter enemies.
Several senior Jordanian diplomats were assassinated and many other targeted for killing since the 1970s because of the kingdom's advocacy of moderation and dialogue which did not suit militant thinking.
Exploding bombs in Jordan had another significance: The security and intelligence agencies of the kingdom are considered to be among the most efficient and effective in the Middle East. For the mindset of a militant, it is a big achievement to break through Jordan's net of intelligence and agents, informants and security forces.
'Expanding' network
Zarqawi declared that he was aligning with Bin Laden last year (as opposed to the belief of many until that time that the two were allies since the days of the Afghan conflict) and adopted the name "Al Qaeda of the Two Rivers" (Euphrates and Tigris).
Most of his extremist loyalists were so far seen to be "foreign" militants converging in Iraq to carry out anti-US attacks if only because of their bitter hostility towards American policies and actions towards the Arabs and Muslims, including the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands.
In general terms, intelligence experts say Zarqawi has indeed drawn extremists bent upon "serving the cause of jihad" even if it meant giving up their lives. Now he is seen to be seeking to expand the Iraqi insurgency into a regional conflict and might even be trying to demonstrate his growing independence from Al Qaeda.
By sending four Iraqis, including a husband and wife, to carry out the Amman bombings, Zarqawi could be sending a message that he could draw from Iraqi supporters to carry out suicide bombers.
The woman in the group, Sajidah Mubarak Atrus Al Rishawi, who failed to detonate a belt bomb at Amman's Radisson SAS hotel while her husband exploded himself, is now in Jordanian custody.
Sajidah is an Iraqi from the Al Bu Rishiyyah clan which hails from the Al Tawa region near Ramadi in the Al Anbar province bordering Jordan.
Her motive to undertake the failed suicide bombing is linked to the death of three of her brothers in the hands of the US military in Iraq.
She reportedly insisted during her interrogation by Jordanian intelligence officers that she is fighting "the infidels and apostates from among the Muslims."
Her husband, Ali Husain Al Shamari, had married her only very recently and the couple did not have children.
Intelligence sources believe Shamari married her Sajidah in order to make it legitimate for her to accompany him from Iraq on the suicide mission in Amman.
Jordanian officials say that Sajidah, 35, knows virtually nothing about religion and that she never got beyond sixth grade in school. According to the London-based Al Hayat Arabic daily, Sajidah was asked by her Jordanian interrogators about the turmoil (fitnah) her action would have caused, she asked "what does this word "fitnah" mean?"
She is said to have told the interrogators that all the members of her family were members of Al Qaeda and she used terminology that suggested that she was a full-fledged Al Qaeda extremist.
In addition to her three brothers who were said to have been slain by US soldiers in clashes in the Iraqi town of Falluja and elsewhere in the Al Anbar province of Iraq, she also lost her sister's husband, Nidal Arabiyat.
A Jordanian, Arabiyat was described as a Jordanian explosives expert who was killed in Iraq last year. He had been in Afghanistan in 1999 for explosives training and then came back to join Zarqawi in Iraq in 2003, intelligence information shows.
Sajidah was arrested in the town of Salt, outside Amman, where she had gone in search of the family of her brother-in-law after fleeing the scene of the bombing.
The 'mystery'
Mystery surrounds a report that all Israelis were told to evacuate hotels in Amman shortly before the bombing. The report, which was carried by the Haaretz newspaper, was subsequently "withdrawn."
According to the Haaretz report, a "number of Israelis staying at the Radisson SAS were evacuated before the bombing by Jordanian security forces, apparently due to a specific security alert."
The report was carried in Haartez print editions on Oct.9. On the same day, a few hours after the newspaper was printed and circulated, a report appearing on the paper's Internet edition said:
"There is no truth to reports that Israelis staying at the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman on Wednesday were evacuated by Jordanian security forces before the bombing that took place there."
The original article disappeared from Haaretz' website, but a second article is still available on the website containing the retracted paragraph (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/643691.html)
Several Israeli businessmen were staying at Amman's Radisson SAS hotel.
According to the first report, they were also told to check out of the hotel by the Israeli embassy in Amman and they were escorted back to Israel across the River Jordan by security personnel.
Israel's counter-terror headquarters had, on Wednesday, recommended Israeli citizens not travel in Jordan.
Israeli travel recommendations regarding Jordan were tightened a few months ago, but many Israelis still visit the country, including the ancient city of Petra in the south of the country.
The report that Israelis were evacuated from Jordan shortly before the bombing is a reminiscent of a report after the Sept.11, 2001 attacks in the US that nearly 4,000 Jews who worked at New York's World Trade Towers were told to stay away from work on that day. That report originated with Al Manar television of Lebanon's Hizbollah group and Iran's Kahyan International evening newspaper.
The report was never confirmed. However, it has been confirmed that an Israeli company with offices in New York had received an advance email saying the World Trade Center Towers were targeted for attack.
Similarly, less than two hours after bombings rocked London's transportation system on July 7, the Associated Press reported that former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had received advance warning of the pending attacks. Netanyahu, staying in London at the time, was scheduled to address a conference near the site of one of the blasts, but according to the AP report he cancelled his talk. Hundreds of other media outlets around the world picked up the AP report, which later was retracted.
UAE's call
During a visit he paid to Jordan accompanied Sheikha Fatima Bin Mubarak to express solidarity with Jordanians following the bombings, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces General Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan emphasised that Islamic scholars had a major role to play in the fight against terror.
"There should be a firm stand by Islamic clerics and scholars who live among us against this terrorism. If they do not declare them (terrorists) apostate, the least they could do is to drive them out of the faith," said Sheikh Mohammed. "We should ask ourselves a genuine question and say if there is not going to be a sincere stand against such irreligious and inhuman acts, they will flourish. Personally, I blame the clerics and Islamic scholars who live among us and with us."
"Terrorism," Sheikh Mohammed went on, "came to us in the name of Islam, so there is no point trying to throw it in other direction. We should be the ones who should confront and resist it."
Sheikh Mohammed spoke the mind of people everyone shocked by the wanton killing in Amman when he asked: "What reason or logic justifies the killing of children, women or elderly people (gathered) in a celebration?"
A turning point
Middle Eastern experts believe that the Amman bombings could be a turning point for not only the Arab and regional role in the fight against terror but also for the insurgency in Iraq. Governments have pledged solidarity with Jordan and have also stepped up their anti-terrorism vigil and intelligence agencies have gone into full swing to identify potential risks and suspects. Laws against money-laundering and other terror-related suspect activities are being toughened in several countries and there is an increased awareness of the possibility of spillovers from Iraq.
Political analysts say that the danger would not be removed from the region without finding and implementing a fair and comprehensive solution to the Iraq crisis.
The US, which calls the shots in Iraq and elsewhere, is finding such a solution elusive. There could be several scenarios that could restore stability to Iraq, but all of them would involve compromises that Washington is unlikely or even unable to make, given its geopolitical strategies and objectives inherent in its invasion and occupation of Iraq. That means only one thing: Continued turmoil in the region.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Sunday, November 13, 2005
If it quacks like a duck...
"If it walks like a duck,
and quacks like a duck...."
WASHINGTON'S denials that the US military used a deadly chemical against Iraqi forces during the march towards Baghdad in 2003 and against residents of the Iraqi town of Falluja in 2004 have been challenged by records kept by American soldiers and entries reproduced in military journals as well as a report filed by an "embedded" American journalist. If that was not enough, the Washington Post has carried a report affirming that the chemical was indeed used during the Falluja assault.
The charge that US forces used white phosphorus was levelled in a documentary made and broadcast by Italy's RAI television last week.
The documentary, "Falluja, La strage nascosta” (Falluja, The Concealed Massacre), showed what it said was white phosphorus shells being fired and "melted" bodies of dozens of Iraqis, including women and children. Such "melting," according to medical experts, is caused by white phosphorus. The documentary showed residents of Falluja, a former American solider who was part of the assault against that town and Italian journalist Giuliana Sgregna, who was kidnapped by Iraqis, then nearly killed by US troops following her release, as saying that they had irrefutable proof that white phosphorus was used in the assault.
Immediately after the documentary was broadcast, the US military denied that it used white phosphorus against civilians. It confirmed, however, that US forces had dropped MK 77 firebombs, which the RAI documentary compared with napalm, against "military" targets in Iraq. The US military also said that it used white phosphorus only for "illumination purposes" in military action.
Another US statement asserted that white phosphorus was not a chemical weapon.
All these arguments have been rejected by recorded evidence.
The use of white phosphorus in the assault against Falluja has been affirmed by several sources.
The March 2004 edition of Field Artillery Magazine carried an article entitled "The Fight for Falluja" containing a diary entry by Stephen D, an American soldier.
The entry says: "WP (white phosphorus rounds) proved to be an effective and versatile munitions. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE (high explosives). We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."
The Infantry Magazine of the US military carried a blow-by-blow of a US military operation in Iraq:
"The Iraqis in one observation post attempted to flee but were fixed with white phosphorus fires. As they attempted to flee again, white phosphorus rounds impacted the vehicle and set it on fire. The section continued to fire a mix of high explosive and white phosphorus rounds into the objective area. The section fired more than 80 rounds in support of the mission."
Darrin Mortensen of the North County Times, an "embedded" journalist with the US forces involved in the assault against Falluja, reported in April 2004 that white phosphorus was indeed used. In a long report about the attack on the rebellious town, Mortenson refers to Corporal Nicholas Bogert, 22, of Morris, New York.
"Bogert is a mortar team leader who directed his men to fire round after round of high explosives and white phosphorus charges into the city...., never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused," said the report, which also had a graphic description attacks using white phosphorus.
The Washington Post reported the Falluja assault in late 2004.
It quoted an army captain as saying: "Usually we keep the gloves on. For this operation, we took the gloves off.
"Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water," said the Washington Post. "Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns."
The Post quoted Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, ass saying: "The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."
"A rain of fire descended on the city," said Ahmad Tareq Al Deraji, a biologist and Falluja resident. "People who were exposed to those multicoloured substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds — their bodies burned but their clothes intact."
Medical analysis says: "Exposure to white phosphorus may cause burns and irritation, liver, kidney, heart, lung, or bone damage, and death. Breathing white phosphorus for short periods may cause coughing and irritation of the throat and lungs. Breathing white phosphorus for long periods may cause a condition known as 'phossy jaw' which involves poor wound healing of the mouth and breakdown of the jaw bone. Eating or drinking small amounts of white phosphorus may cause liver, heart, or kidney damage, vomiting, stomach cramps, drowsiness, or death. We do not know what the effects are from eating or drinking very small amounts of white phosphorus-containing substances over long periods of time. Skin contact with burning white phosphorus may burn skin or cause liver, heart, and kidney damage."
Photographs of victims of attacks using white phosphorus clearly show how body parts could "melt" as a result of a white phosphorus attack.
The US State Department issued a denial late last year of what it called "widespread myths" about the use of illegal weapons in Falluja.
"Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Falluja, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters," the US statement said.
The US Defence Department said in Nov.12, 2004 statement:
"The United States categorically denies the use of chemical weapons at anytime in Iraq, which includes the ongoing Falluja operation. Furthermore, the United States does not under any circumstance support or condone the development, production, acquisition, transfer or use of chemical weapons by any country. All chemical weapons currently possessed by the United States have been declared to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and are being destroyed in the United States in accordance with our obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention."
The American argument that white phosphorus is not banned and is not a chemical weapon is countered by scientific findings and simple logic.
The US is not a signatory of an international treaty restricting the use of white phosphorus devices.
Therefore, the United States is not technically in violation of any treaty obligations.
However, in practical terms, the use of white phosphorus could not be human or unlike the use of chemical weapons, given the deadly effect of the material. As the adage goes, "if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you can reasonably be sure it is a duck."
The revelations become all the more ironic against the US accusation against Saddam Hussein that he used chemical weapons against his own people. While there cannot be any justification for Saddam's brutality, the US should be the last to level such accusations when seen in light of its own use of material like white phosphorus and depleted uranium shells in Iraq.
The affair also poses a challenge to American corporate media, which have been vying with each other in recent weeks to convince the public about how sorry they were they did not report the truth that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction.
Their proclamations are derided by many who point out that their claim that they were deceived along with everyone else contradicts the fact that pretty much everyone else knew what was going on.
Surely, the US military's alleged use of white phosphorus against Iraq and Washington's efforts to downplay its implications do pose an opportunity for the corporate media to investigate it and get to the truth.
and quacks like a duck...."
WASHINGTON'S denials that the US military used a deadly chemical against Iraqi forces during the march towards Baghdad in 2003 and against residents of the Iraqi town of Falluja in 2004 have been challenged by records kept by American soldiers and entries reproduced in military journals as well as a report filed by an "embedded" American journalist. If that was not enough, the Washington Post has carried a report affirming that the chemical was indeed used during the Falluja assault.
The charge that US forces used white phosphorus was levelled in a documentary made and broadcast by Italy's RAI television last week.
The documentary, "Falluja, La strage nascosta” (Falluja, The Concealed Massacre), showed what it said was white phosphorus shells being fired and "melted" bodies of dozens of Iraqis, including women and children. Such "melting," according to medical experts, is caused by white phosphorus. The documentary showed residents of Falluja, a former American solider who was part of the assault against that town and Italian journalist Giuliana Sgregna, who was kidnapped by Iraqis, then nearly killed by US troops following her release, as saying that they had irrefutable proof that white phosphorus was used in the assault.
Immediately after the documentary was broadcast, the US military denied that it used white phosphorus against civilians. It confirmed, however, that US forces had dropped MK 77 firebombs, which the RAI documentary compared with napalm, against "military" targets in Iraq. The US military also said that it used white phosphorus only for "illumination purposes" in military action.
Another US statement asserted that white phosphorus was not a chemical weapon.
All these arguments have been rejected by recorded evidence.
The use of white phosphorus in the assault against Falluja has been affirmed by several sources.
The March 2004 edition of Field Artillery Magazine carried an article entitled "The Fight for Falluja" containing a diary entry by Stephen D, an American soldier.
The entry says: "WP (white phosphorus rounds) proved to be an effective and versatile munitions. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE (high explosives). We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."
The Infantry Magazine of the US military carried a blow-by-blow of a US military operation in Iraq:
"The Iraqis in one observation post attempted to flee but were fixed with white phosphorus fires. As they attempted to flee again, white phosphorus rounds impacted the vehicle and set it on fire. The section continued to fire a mix of high explosive and white phosphorus rounds into the objective area. The section fired more than 80 rounds in support of the mission."
Darrin Mortensen of the North County Times, an "embedded" journalist with the US forces involved in the assault against Falluja, reported in April 2004 that white phosphorus was indeed used. In a long report about the attack on the rebellious town, Mortenson refers to Corporal Nicholas Bogert, 22, of Morris, New York.
"Bogert is a mortar team leader who directed his men to fire round after round of high explosives and white phosphorus charges into the city...., never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused," said the report, which also had a graphic description attacks using white phosphorus.
The Washington Post reported the Falluja assault in late 2004.
It quoted an army captain as saying: "Usually we keep the gloves on. For this operation, we took the gloves off.
"Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water," said the Washington Post. "Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns."
The Post quoted Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, ass saying: "The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."
"A rain of fire descended on the city," said Ahmad Tareq Al Deraji, a biologist and Falluja resident. "People who were exposed to those multicoloured substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds — their bodies burned but their clothes intact."
Medical analysis says: "Exposure to white phosphorus may cause burns and irritation, liver, kidney, heart, lung, or bone damage, and death. Breathing white phosphorus for short periods may cause coughing and irritation of the throat and lungs. Breathing white phosphorus for long periods may cause a condition known as 'phossy jaw' which involves poor wound healing of the mouth and breakdown of the jaw bone. Eating or drinking small amounts of white phosphorus may cause liver, heart, or kidney damage, vomiting, stomach cramps, drowsiness, or death. We do not know what the effects are from eating or drinking very small amounts of white phosphorus-containing substances over long periods of time. Skin contact with burning white phosphorus may burn skin or cause liver, heart, and kidney damage."
Photographs of victims of attacks using white phosphorus clearly show how body parts could "melt" as a result of a white phosphorus attack.
The US State Department issued a denial late last year of what it called "widespread myths" about the use of illegal weapons in Falluja.
"Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Falluja, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters," the US statement said.
The US Defence Department said in Nov.12, 2004 statement:
"The United States categorically denies the use of chemical weapons at anytime in Iraq, which includes the ongoing Falluja operation. Furthermore, the United States does not under any circumstance support or condone the development, production, acquisition, transfer or use of chemical weapons by any country. All chemical weapons currently possessed by the United States have been declared to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and are being destroyed in the United States in accordance with our obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention."
The American argument that white phosphorus is not banned and is not a chemical weapon is countered by scientific findings and simple logic.
The US is not a signatory of an international treaty restricting the use of white phosphorus devices.
Therefore, the United States is not technically in violation of any treaty obligations.
However, in practical terms, the use of white phosphorus could not be human or unlike the use of chemical weapons, given the deadly effect of the material. As the adage goes, "if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you can reasonably be sure it is a duck."
The revelations become all the more ironic against the US accusation against Saddam Hussein that he used chemical weapons against his own people. While there cannot be any justification for Saddam's brutality, the US should be the last to level such accusations when seen in light of its own use of material like white phosphorus and depleted uranium shells in Iraq.
The affair also poses a challenge to American corporate media, which have been vying with each other in recent weeks to convince the public about how sorry they were they did not report the truth that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction.
Their proclamations are derided by many who point out that their claim that they were deceived along with everyone else contradicts the fact that pretty much everyone else knew what was going on.
Surely, the US military's alleged use of white phosphorus against Iraq and Washington's efforts to downplay its implications do pose an opportunity for the corporate media to investigate it and get to the truth.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
US spends $44b on intelligence
WASHINGTON: The United States government spends $44 billion a year on its spy agencies, according to a senior official of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The revelation is seen giving ammunition to critics of the Bush administration who have been accusing Washington of misusing intelligence agencies and doctoring intelligence documents related ot the Sept.11, 2001 attack as well as reasons for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The $44 billion amount was seen as an apparent slip by , Mary Margaret Graham, a CIA veteran and deputy director of national intelligence for collection, at an intelligence conference in San Antonio last week.
Journalists who attended the conference was shocked.
Kevin Whitelaw of the News of the World said:
"I thought, 'I can't believe she said that.' The government has spent so much time and energy arguing that it needs to remain classified."
Reports in the last couple of years have estimated the budget at $40 billion but that Graham would say it in public was a surprise, because the government has repeatedly gone to court to keep the current intelligence budget and even past budgets as far back as the 1940s from being disclosed.
Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, said Graham would not comment. Kropf declined to say whether the figure was accurate, or whether her revelation was accidental.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, expressed amused satisfaction that the budget figure had slipped out, according to the New York Times.
"It is ironic," Aftergood told the paper. "We sued the CIA four times for this kind of information and lost. You can't get it through legal channels."
The Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists sued for the budget figure under the Freedom of Information Act in 1997. George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, decided to make public that year's budget, $26.6 billion. The next year Tenet did the same, revealing that the 1998 fiscal year budget was $26.7 billion.
The New York Times quoted d Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence historian, as saying that the debate over whether the intelligence budget should be secret dates to at least the 1970s.
He said. the real reason for secrecy might have less to do with protecting intelligence sources and methods than with protecting the bureaucracy.
"Maybe there's a fear that if the American people knew what was being spent on intelligence, they'd be even more upset at intelligence failures," Johnson said.
The revelation is seen giving ammunition to critics of the Bush administration who have been accusing Washington of misusing intelligence agencies and doctoring intelligence documents related ot the Sept.11, 2001 attack as well as reasons for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The $44 billion amount was seen as an apparent slip by , Mary Margaret Graham, a CIA veteran and deputy director of national intelligence for collection, at an intelligence conference in San Antonio last week.
Journalists who attended the conference was shocked.
Kevin Whitelaw of the News of the World said:
"I thought, 'I can't believe she said that.' The government has spent so much time and energy arguing that it needs to remain classified."
Reports in the last couple of years have estimated the budget at $40 billion but that Graham would say it in public was a surprise, because the government has repeatedly gone to court to keep the current intelligence budget and even past budgets as far back as the 1940s from being disclosed.
Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, said Graham would not comment. Kropf declined to say whether the figure was accurate, or whether her revelation was accidental.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, expressed amused satisfaction that the budget figure had slipped out, according to the New York Times.
"It is ironic," Aftergood told the paper. "We sued the CIA four times for this kind of information and lost. You can't get it through legal channels."
The Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists sued for the budget figure under the Freedom of Information Act in 1997. George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, decided to make public that year's budget, $26.6 billion. The next year Tenet did the same, revealing that the 1998 fiscal year budget was $26.7 billion.
The New York Times quoted d Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence historian, as saying that the debate over whether the intelligence budget should be secret dates to at least the 1970s.
He said. the real reason for secrecy might have less to do with protecting intelligence sources and methods than with protecting the bureaucracy.
"Maybe there's a fear that if the American people knew what was being spent on intelligence, they'd be even more upset at intelligence failures," Johnson said.
Chemicals against Fallujians
ROME: A news programme on Italian satellite TV, RAI News 24, has substantiated the claim that the US military has been exploiting the dual use of white phosporus.
In its siege of Fallujah, the US military used the chemical on the civilian population, it said. The La Repubblica newspaper also carried a similar report on Tuesday.
Critics of the US noted that the US military is now accused of carrying out a massacre using unconventional weapons, a charge identifical to which Saddam Hussein stands accused.
An investigation by RAI News 24, the all-news Italian satellite television channel, has pulled the veil from one of the most carefully concealed mysteries from the front in the entire US military campaign in Iraq.
A US veteran of the Iraq war told RAI New correspondent Sigfrido Ranucci: "I received the order use caution because we had used white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military slag it is called 'Willy Pete.' Phosphorus burns the human body on contact--it even melts it right down to the bone."
RAI News 24's investigative story, Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre, was to be broadcast on RAI-3 on Tuesday.
A copy of the footage posted on the Internet in advance contained not only eye-witness accounts by US military personnel but those from Fallujah residents.
"A rain of fire descended on the city. People who were exposed to those multicolored substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds-their bodies burned but their clothes intact," relates Mohamad Tareq Al Deraji, a biologist and Fallujah resident.
"I gathered accounts of the use of phosphorus and napalm from a few Fallujah refugees whom I met before being kidnapped," says Manifesto reporter Giuliana Sgrena, who was kidnapped in Fallujah last February, in a recorded interview." I wanted to get the story out, but my kidnappers would not permit it."
RAI News 24 also broadcast video and photographs taken in the Iraqi city during and after the November 2004 bombardment which prove that the US military, contrary to statements in a Dec. 9 communiqué from the US Department of State, did not use phosphorus to illuminate enemy positions (which would have been legitimate) but instend dropped white phosphorus indiscriminately and in massive quantities on the city's neighbourhoods.
In the investigative story, produced by Maurizio Torrealta, dramatic footage is shown revealing the effects of the bombardment on civilians, women and children, some of whom were surprised in their sleep.
The investigation will also broadcast documentary proof of the use in Iraq of a new napalm formula called MK77. The use of the incendiary substance on civilians is forbidden by a 1980 UN treaty. The use of chemical weapons is forbidden by a treaty which the US signed in 1997
In its siege of Fallujah, the US military used the chemical on the civilian population, it said. The La Repubblica newspaper also carried a similar report on Tuesday.
Critics of the US noted that the US military is now accused of carrying out a massacre using unconventional weapons, a charge identifical to which Saddam Hussein stands accused.
An investigation by RAI News 24, the all-news Italian satellite television channel, has pulled the veil from one of the most carefully concealed mysteries from the front in the entire US military campaign in Iraq.
A US veteran of the Iraq war told RAI New correspondent Sigfrido Ranucci: "I received the order use caution because we had used white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military slag it is called 'Willy Pete.' Phosphorus burns the human body on contact--it even melts it right down to the bone."
RAI News 24's investigative story, Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre, was to be broadcast on RAI-3 on Tuesday.
A copy of the footage posted on the Internet in advance contained not only eye-witness accounts by US military personnel but those from Fallujah residents.
"A rain of fire descended on the city. People who were exposed to those multicolored substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds-their bodies burned but their clothes intact," relates Mohamad Tareq Al Deraji, a biologist and Fallujah resident.
"I gathered accounts of the use of phosphorus and napalm from a few Fallujah refugees whom I met before being kidnapped," says Manifesto reporter Giuliana Sgrena, who was kidnapped in Fallujah last February, in a recorded interview." I wanted to get the story out, but my kidnappers would not permit it."
RAI News 24 also broadcast video and photographs taken in the Iraqi city during and after the November 2004 bombardment which prove that the US military, contrary to statements in a Dec. 9 communiqué from the US Department of State, did not use phosphorus to illuminate enemy positions (which would have been legitimate) but instend dropped white phosphorus indiscriminately and in massive quantities on the city's neighbourhoods.
In the investigative story, produced by Maurizio Torrealta, dramatic footage is shown revealing the effects of the bombardment on civilians, women and children, some of whom were surprised in their sleep.
The investigation will also broadcast documentary proof of the use in Iraq of a new napalm formula called MK77. The use of the incendiary substance on civilians is forbidden by a 1980 UN treaty. The use of chemical weapons is forbidden by a treaty which the US signed in 1997
Mehlis credibility questioned
SERIOUS questions are being raised about the credibility of the report prepared by UN investigator and German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis on his findings on the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
Critics see Mehlis as closely aligned with the US from the mid-80s when he investigated the 1986 bombing of an East Berlin nightclub, La Belle, frequented by American service personnel. Mehlis determined that Libya was behind the blast while evidence that turned up later indicated that Libya could have been falsely charged.
A former operative of Israel's Mossad secret agency revealed that the key evidence cited by Mehlis — intercepted radio communication between Tripoli, Libya, and purported Libyan agents in Europe — orignated from a trasnmitter planted in Tripoli and operated by Mossad. That revelation came too late to exenorate Libya from the East Berlin blast; two people, said to be Libyan agents, were tried, convicted and sentenced by a German court.
However, the Mossad connection was said to have been known to Mehlis, who critics say deliberately depressed that information in his report about the East Berlin blasts at the behest of the US, which wanted to trap Libya in the case.
As Berlin public prosecutor, Mehlis inadvertently but consistently covered up the dubious involvement of US, Israeli and German intelligence interests in the 1986 tattack; actively built a selective politically-motivated case against suspects without objective material proof; while ignoring and protecting a group of suspects with documented connections to western secret services. This background fundamentally challenges the credibility of his investigation of the Hariri assassination, says by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, executive director of the London-based Institute for Policy Research & Development.
y German public television Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) said in August 1998 that h several leading suspects in the Berlin disco bombing were being protected from prosecution by western intelligence services. These included a group of terrorists led by “Mahmoud” Abu Jaber, a man “particularly involved in the preparation of the La Belle attack.” The group lived in East Berlin and met almost daily with the official suspects who were defendants in the court proceedings. According to Russian and East German intelligence services, the grou
Critics see Mehlis as closely aligned with the US from the mid-80s when he investigated the 1986 bombing of an East Berlin nightclub, La Belle, frequented by American service personnel. Mehlis determined that Libya was behind the blast while evidence that turned up later indicated that Libya could have been falsely charged.
A former operative of Israel's Mossad secret agency revealed that the key evidence cited by Mehlis — intercepted radio communication between Tripoli, Libya, and purported Libyan agents in Europe — orignated from a trasnmitter planted in Tripoli and operated by Mossad. That revelation came too late to exenorate Libya from the East Berlin blast; two people, said to be Libyan agents, were tried, convicted and sentenced by a German court.
However, the Mossad connection was said to have been known to Mehlis, who critics say deliberately depressed that information in his report about the East Berlin blasts at the behest of the US, which wanted to trap Libya in the case.
As Berlin public prosecutor, Mehlis inadvertently but consistently covered up the dubious involvement of US, Israeli and German intelligence interests in the 1986 tattack; actively built a selective politically-motivated case against suspects without objective material proof; while ignoring and protecting a group of suspects with documented connections to western secret services. This background fundamentally challenges the credibility of his investigation of the Hariri assassination, says by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, executive director of the London-based Institute for Policy Research & Development.
y German public television Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) said in August 1998 that h several leading suspects in the Berlin disco bombing were being protected from prosecution by western intelligence services. These included a group of terrorists led by “Mahmoud” Abu Jaber, a man “particularly involved in the preparation of the La Belle attack.” The group lived in East Berlin and met almost daily with the official suspects who were defendants in the court proceedings. According to Russian and East German intelligence services, the grou
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Recycled forgery?
PV Vivekanand
WASHINGTON'S efforts to blame Italian intelligence for forgery of documents showing Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger have fallen apart with a firm assertion from Rome that not only that it had nothing to do with the forgery but also that it had warned the US that the papers were forged.
From what one could judge from reports in newspapers and postings on the Internet, the fake papers originated with American neoconservatives and Pentagon officials, including a confessed spy for Israel, and passed on to Iraqi exiles and Iranians. The circle was completed when the forgeries were landed back in the US and added to the false intelligence information that was used to set the ground for war against Iraq.
More specifically, someone who belongs to the neoconservatives is tentatively identified as the main forgerer and the papers were passed on to Ahmed Chalabi, then an Iraqi in exile, who used Iranians to place them somewhere in the European intelligence circuit and then the forgeries ended up in the US through a former Italian spy.
Establishing that no one linked to the Bush administration had anything to do with the forged documents has assumed great importance in the wake of the indictment against Lewis Scooter Libby, former aide to Vice-President Robert Cheney. Libby faces charges of perjury in connection with the outing of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative whose husband had investigated and found that there was no proof that Saddam Hussein did try to buy uranium from Niger.
Washington needed to convince everyone that it had nothing to do with the forgery. However, in the wake of the fresh revelations, if proper follow-up work is undertaken by the prosecution, the whole Libby and perjury case could take a different direction and could even bring down the Bush administration.
The forged papers were the basis for the investigations conducted by Joseph Wilson, husband of Valerie Plame (who was lated outed as a CIA operative). The International Agency for Atomic Energy (IAEA) had officially confirmed that the documents were forgeries.
However, the Bush administration ignored the investigation's finding that there was no truth ito the allegation. President George W Bush cited it in his state of the union address in early 2003.
Later, it became known that the forged papers were the basis for Bush's assertions and that it had an Italian link, implying that they originated with Italian intelligence.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said last week it had closed a two-year investigation into the origin of the forged documents.
In March 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, agreed not to open a congressional investigation of the matter, but rather asked the FBI to conduct the investigation.
As of September 2004, the FBI had not yet interviewed former Italian spy Rocco Martino, claiming they were awaiting permission from the Italian government to do so. However, Martino is known to have been in New York in August 2004.
The forgeries were the focus of reports carried last week by Italy's La Republicca, which suggested that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had pressured the head of the country's secret service, which is known by its Italian acronym SISMI, into giving the forgeries to the US.
This prompted SISMI director Nicolo Pollari to call a parliamentary committee briefing where he explained that the agency had warned the US months before it invaded Iraq that the documents were fake.
"At about the same time as the State of the Union address, they (SISMI ) said that the dossier doesn't correspond to the truth," Massimo Brutti, a member of the Italian Senate, told journalists after the parliamentary panel was briefed.
Brutti said the warning was given in January 2003, but he did not know whether it was made before or after Bush's speech.
Pollari was reported to have told the briefing that an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino as the disseminator of the forged documents.
Brutti said Pollary identified Martino as a former intelligence informer who had been "kicked out of the agency." He did not say Martino was the forger.
Senator Luigi Malabarba, who also attended Thursday's hearing, said Pollari had told the briefing that Martino was "offering the documents not on behalf of Sismi but on behalf of the French" and that Martino had told prosecutors in Rome that he was in the service of French intelligence.
A senior French intelligence official called Pollari's assertions about France's responsibility "scandalous."
La Repubblica, a strong critic of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, alleged that after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks Pollari was being pressured by Berlusconi to make a strong contribution to the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Berlusconi clearly stated that Italy had not passed any documents on the Niger affair to the United States. He added that La Repubblica's allegations were dangerous for Italy because "if they were believed, we would be considered the instigator" of the Iraq war.
If it was not the Italian intelligence behind the forgeries, then who was?
This is the question that people who claim to have inside information are seeking to answer. They claim that Michael Ledeen, of the American Entreprise Institute, which is described as a neoconservative group, and Pentagon officials Harold Rhode, Larry Franklin, the confessed spy for Israel, and other officials were behind the forgeries. Ledeen is former National Security Council and State Department official.
These officials were eported to have attended a meeting in Italy with Iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi and some unidentified Iranians who were described as representatives of the Tehran government. The meeting took place some time in December 2002.
According to La Republicca: "The story of Italian military intervention in Iraq begins when the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, sponsored by Defence Minister Antonio Martino, debarks in Rome with Pentagon men in tow to meet a handful of 'Iranian exiles.
"Twenty men are gathered around a large table, covered by a maps of Iraq, Iran and Syria. Those who count are Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, Michael Ledeen of the AIE, a SISMI chief accompanied by his assistant..."
The paper quoted Pollari as telling its reporters.
"I can tell you those Iranians were not exactly 'exiles.' The came and went from Tehran with their passports with no difficulty whatsoever as if they were transparent to the eyes of the Pasdaran..."
L a Repubblica also quoted an American intelligence source as saying, "You Italians have always underestimated the work of conversion carried out Ahmed Chalabi, the chairman of Iraqi National Congress."
The paper says two key Chalabi lieutenants, Aras Habib Karim and Francis Brooks, also played a key role and so did the the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiite group SCIRI. Another participant was said to Iranian arms merchant Manoucher Ghorbanifar, but La Repubblica said he was only included in the Rome meetings as a diversionary tactic.
In 2005, Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, expressed the opinion that the documents had been produced in the United States and funnelled through the Italians: "The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein ...." (http://en.wikipedia.org/)
In an interview published April 7, 2005, Cannistraro was asked what he would say if it was asserted that the source of the forgery wasl Ledeen. Cannistraro answered by saying: "You'd be very close."
In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro's business partner and columnist for the "American Conservative" magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed that the forgeries were produced by "a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy."
When Horton said that must be Ledeen, he confirmed it, and added that the ex-CIA officers, "also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing."
Again, the revelations represent yet another nail, if anyone needed one, in the coffin of all American assertions that the Bush administration acted in good faith but was given "faulty" intelligence that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. The picture that emerges clearly shows that the administration was dead bent upon waging war against Iraq and actually built the case for military action based on doctored intelligence reports.
But then, it is not exactly a secret anymore. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted as much, albeit not in so many words, when she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month that "it was always the Bush administration's intent to redesign the Middle East after the Sept. 11 attacks, which exposed a 'deep malignancy growing' in the region, and that the Iraq was part of that plan."
However, that Rice did not say — perhaps she did not know — was that the "intent to redesign the Middle East" actually dates back to the mid-90s when a hardcore core group of neocons authored a report containing recommendations that the removal of Saddam Hussein was paramount not only to the "security" of Israel but also the Jewish state's quest's regional domination.
In the immediate context, the American people and indeed the international community at large are waiting to see how much of truth a Sentate Intelligence Committee report due by Nov.14 would contain and whether it would unveil the reality about the Niger forgery.
WASHINGTON'S efforts to blame Italian intelligence for forgery of documents showing Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger have fallen apart with a firm assertion from Rome that not only that it had nothing to do with the forgery but also that it had warned the US that the papers were forged.
From what one could judge from reports in newspapers and postings on the Internet, the fake papers originated with American neoconservatives and Pentagon officials, including a confessed spy for Israel, and passed on to Iraqi exiles and Iranians. The circle was completed when the forgeries were landed back in the US and added to the false intelligence information that was used to set the ground for war against Iraq.
More specifically, someone who belongs to the neoconservatives is tentatively identified as the main forgerer and the papers were passed on to Ahmed Chalabi, then an Iraqi in exile, who used Iranians to place them somewhere in the European intelligence circuit and then the forgeries ended up in the US through a former Italian spy.
Establishing that no one linked to the Bush administration had anything to do with the forged documents has assumed great importance in the wake of the indictment against Lewis Scooter Libby, former aide to Vice-President Robert Cheney. Libby faces charges of perjury in connection with the outing of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative whose husband had investigated and found that there was no proof that Saddam Hussein did try to buy uranium from Niger.
Washington needed to convince everyone that it had nothing to do with the forgery. However, in the wake of the fresh revelations, if proper follow-up work is undertaken by the prosecution, the whole Libby and perjury case could take a different direction and could even bring down the Bush administration.
The forged papers were the basis for the investigations conducted by Joseph Wilson, husband of Valerie Plame (who was lated outed as a CIA operative). The International Agency for Atomic Energy (IAEA) had officially confirmed that the documents were forgeries.
However, the Bush administration ignored the investigation's finding that there was no truth ito the allegation. President George W Bush cited it in his state of the union address in early 2003.
Later, it became known that the forged papers were the basis for Bush's assertions and that it had an Italian link, implying that they originated with Italian intelligence.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said last week it had closed a two-year investigation into the origin of the forged documents.
In March 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, agreed not to open a congressional investigation of the matter, but rather asked the FBI to conduct the investigation.
As of September 2004, the FBI had not yet interviewed former Italian spy Rocco Martino, claiming they were awaiting permission from the Italian government to do so. However, Martino is known to have been in New York in August 2004.
The forgeries were the focus of reports carried last week by Italy's La Republicca, which suggested that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had pressured the head of the country's secret service, which is known by its Italian acronym SISMI, into giving the forgeries to the US.
This prompted SISMI director Nicolo Pollari to call a parliamentary committee briefing where he explained that the agency had warned the US months before it invaded Iraq that the documents were fake.
"At about the same time as the State of the Union address, they (SISMI ) said that the dossier doesn't correspond to the truth," Massimo Brutti, a member of the Italian Senate, told journalists after the parliamentary panel was briefed.
Brutti said the warning was given in January 2003, but he did not know whether it was made before or after Bush's speech.
Pollari was reported to have told the briefing that an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino as the disseminator of the forged documents.
Brutti said Pollary identified Martino as a former intelligence informer who had been "kicked out of the agency." He did not say Martino was the forger.
Senator Luigi Malabarba, who also attended Thursday's hearing, said Pollari had told the briefing that Martino was "offering the documents not on behalf of Sismi but on behalf of the French" and that Martino had told prosecutors in Rome that he was in the service of French intelligence.
A senior French intelligence official called Pollari's assertions about France's responsibility "scandalous."
La Repubblica, a strong critic of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, alleged that after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks Pollari was being pressured by Berlusconi to make a strong contribution to the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Berlusconi clearly stated that Italy had not passed any documents on the Niger affair to the United States. He added that La Repubblica's allegations were dangerous for Italy because "if they were believed, we would be considered the instigator" of the Iraq war.
If it was not the Italian intelligence behind the forgeries, then who was?
This is the question that people who claim to have inside information are seeking to answer. They claim that Michael Ledeen, of the American Entreprise Institute, which is described as a neoconservative group, and Pentagon officials Harold Rhode, Larry Franklin, the confessed spy for Israel, and other officials were behind the forgeries. Ledeen is former National Security Council and State Department official.
These officials were eported to have attended a meeting in Italy with Iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi and some unidentified Iranians who were described as representatives of the Tehran government. The meeting took place some time in December 2002.
According to La Republicca: "The story of Italian military intervention in Iraq begins when the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, sponsored by Defence Minister Antonio Martino, debarks in Rome with Pentagon men in tow to meet a handful of 'Iranian exiles.
"Twenty men are gathered around a large table, covered by a maps of Iraq, Iran and Syria. Those who count are Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, Michael Ledeen of the AIE, a SISMI chief accompanied by his assistant..."
The paper quoted Pollari as telling its reporters.
"I can tell you those Iranians were not exactly 'exiles.' The came and went from Tehran with their passports with no difficulty whatsoever as if they were transparent to the eyes of the Pasdaran..."
L a Repubblica also quoted an American intelligence source as saying, "You Italians have always underestimated the work of conversion carried out Ahmed Chalabi, the chairman of Iraqi National Congress."
The paper says two key Chalabi lieutenants, Aras Habib Karim and Francis Brooks, also played a key role and so did the the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiite group SCIRI. Another participant was said to Iranian arms merchant Manoucher Ghorbanifar, but La Repubblica said he was only included in the Rome meetings as a diversionary tactic.
In 2005, Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, expressed the opinion that the documents had been produced in the United States and funnelled through the Italians: "The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein ...." (http://en.wikipedia.org/)
In an interview published April 7, 2005, Cannistraro was asked what he would say if it was asserted that the source of the forgery wasl Ledeen. Cannistraro answered by saying: "You'd be very close."
In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro's business partner and columnist for the "American Conservative" magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed that the forgeries were produced by "a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy."
When Horton said that must be Ledeen, he confirmed it, and added that the ex-CIA officers, "also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing."
Again, the revelations represent yet another nail, if anyone needed one, in the coffin of all American assertions that the Bush administration acted in good faith but was given "faulty" intelligence that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. The picture that emerges clearly shows that the administration was dead bent upon waging war against Iraq and actually built the case for military action based on doctored intelligence reports.
But then, it is not exactly a secret anymore. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted as much, albeit not in so many words, when she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month that "it was always the Bush administration's intent to redesign the Middle East after the Sept. 11 attacks, which exposed a 'deep malignancy growing' in the region, and that the Iraq was part of that plan."
However, that Rice did not say — perhaps she did not know — was that the "intent to redesign the Middle East" actually dates back to the mid-90s when a hardcore core group of neocons authored a report containing recommendations that the removal of Saddam Hussein was paramount not only to the "security" of Israel but also the Jewish state's quest's regional domination.
In the immediate context, the American people and indeed the international community at large are waiting to see how much of truth a Sentate Intelligence Committee report due by Nov.14 would contain and whether it would unveil the reality about the Niger forgery.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Bush going nuts?
PRESIDENT George W Bush is increasing throwing tanctrums and could make a major blunder by losing his temper at a public appearance anytime if provoked by pointed questions and implied criticism, his aides fear. They also fear that he might not be able to serve the remaining three years of his second presidential term.
According to reports in the press and websites, Bush, faced with a failed agenda, destroyed credibility, dwindling public support over the Iraq war and other domestic issues, is frequently lapsing into Alzheimer-like periods of incoherent babbling.
His behaviour is said to have split the White House into loyalists and those who believe that his political advisor Karl Rove should resign in order to restore some coherence to the administration. However, that does not address the president's declining mental state and his ability to restore credibility with Congress and the American people, his critics say.
Chief of Staff Andrew Card is said to have told Bush that he would resign if Rove does not quit, and the dispute has erupted at staff meetings, according to reports.
At a recent meeting in the presidential retreat of Camp David, Bush lost his temper to the extent that he walked out of the room telling everyone in the room to "go f..k yourselves," according to Doug Thompson, editor of Capitol Hill Blue and a veteran American journalist.
With every setback, Bush tends to become increasingly “edgy” or “nervous” or “unfocused" and goes from apparent coherent thought one moment to aimless rambles about political enemies and those who are “out to get me," says Thompson.
“It’s worse than the days when Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s began setting in,” Thompson quotes an unamed Republican activist as saying. “You don’t know if he’s going to be coherent from one moment to the next. What scares me is if he lapses into one of those fogs during a public appearance.”
Bush has always had trouble focusing during times of stress, is increasingly distant during meetings, often staring off into space during discussions on the nation’s security and other issues.
Quite often, Andrew Card, the chief of staff, has to step in to speak on behalf of Bush, who is on anti-depressant medication.
Prominent psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank of George Washington University, has suggested that Bush, a one-time alcoholic who claims he quit without any professional help, is back to drinking again.
Newsweek, The Washington Post and the New York Daily News have confirmed our earlier reports about Bush’s temper tantrums.
“Bush usually reserves his celebrated temper for senior aides because he knows they can take it,” according to the Daily News. “Lately, however, some junior staffers also have faced the boss’s wrath.”
“This is not some manager at McDonald’s chewing out the help," the paper quoted a source with close ties to the White House as saying. “This is the president of the United States, and it’s not a pleasant sight.”
“The president has lost his focus, his ability to govern and the trust of the American people,” according to Thompson.. “Those are things that are difficult to recapture when you’re on top of your game and this president has taken one too many blows to the head.”
According to reports in the press and websites, Bush, faced with a failed agenda, destroyed credibility, dwindling public support over the Iraq war and other domestic issues, is frequently lapsing into Alzheimer-like periods of incoherent babbling.
His behaviour is said to have split the White House into loyalists and those who believe that his political advisor Karl Rove should resign in order to restore some coherence to the administration. However, that does not address the president's declining mental state and his ability to restore credibility with Congress and the American people, his critics say.
Chief of Staff Andrew Card is said to have told Bush that he would resign if Rove does not quit, and the dispute has erupted at staff meetings, according to reports.
At a recent meeting in the presidential retreat of Camp David, Bush lost his temper to the extent that he walked out of the room telling everyone in the room to "go f..k yourselves," according to Doug Thompson, editor of Capitol Hill Blue and a veteran American journalist.
With every setback, Bush tends to become increasingly “edgy” or “nervous” or “unfocused" and goes from apparent coherent thought one moment to aimless rambles about political enemies and those who are “out to get me," says Thompson.
“It’s worse than the days when Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s began setting in,” Thompson quotes an unamed Republican activist as saying. “You don’t know if he’s going to be coherent from one moment to the next. What scares me is if he lapses into one of those fogs during a public appearance.”
Bush has always had trouble focusing during times of stress, is increasingly distant during meetings, often staring off into space during discussions on the nation’s security and other issues.
Quite often, Andrew Card, the chief of staff, has to step in to speak on behalf of Bush, who is on anti-depressant medication.
Prominent psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank of George Washington University, has suggested that Bush, a one-time alcoholic who claims he quit without any professional help, is back to drinking again.
Newsweek, The Washington Post and the New York Daily News have confirmed our earlier reports about Bush’s temper tantrums.
“Bush usually reserves his celebrated temper for senior aides because he knows they can take it,” according to the Daily News. “Lately, however, some junior staffers also have faced the boss’s wrath.”
“This is not some manager at McDonald’s chewing out the help," the paper quoted a source with close ties to the White House as saying. “This is the president of the United States, and it’s not a pleasant sight.”
“The president has lost his focus, his ability to govern and the trust of the American people,” according to Thompson.. “Those are things that are difficult to recapture when you’re on top of your game and this president has taken one too many blows to the head.”
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Only the tip of an iceberg
Many Americans are convinced that it is only a matter of time that the deep secrets that went into orchestrating the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq would be unveiled. Many among them also believe that the military action against Iraq was only one item on the neoconvervative agenda of serving Israel's interests through "regime changes" in the Middle East. It started with Iraq and Syria and Iran would soon follow, they say.
Against that backdrop, the indictment of the senior-most aide to US Vice-President Robert Cheney is seen by many as the expected event that would lead to opening up the Pandora's Box of the sinister secrets that went into setting the stage for the war against Iraq in March 2003.
With the Bush administration bogged down in the Iraq crisis and facing mounting criticism on domestic issues and political manoeuvrings, the indictment of Lewis Libby on charges of perjury could be the key to the cupboard of skeletons.
Many have already started describing the case involving Valerie Plame, the undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative who was "outed" by Libby and others, as Bush's Plamegate. Some of them are calling it the "Neocon-gate" if only because they believe the Plame case could lead to "outing" the neoconservatives who have taken the US on a disastrous course of military action that has cost more than 2,000 American and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives.
More significant is the expectation that the Plame affair could even lead to exposing the
the official version of the Sept.11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Suggestions are plenty that someone high up in power in Washington had a direct or indirect role in the assaults, which offered a convenient starting point for implementing the neocon agenda around the world starting with Iraq and the Middle East.
It remains to be seen how strong the Democrats would apply pressure and how far they would be successful in fighting the apparent Republican resistance against a thorough and transparent investigations into the misuse of intelligence information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
For now, the wagon has been kickstarted, and the US Congress has to steer it towards the right destination — the truth and nothing but the truth.
Against that backdrop, the indictment of the senior-most aide to US Vice-President Robert Cheney is seen by many as the expected event that would lead to opening up the Pandora's Box of the sinister secrets that went into setting the stage for the war against Iraq in March 2003.
With the Bush administration bogged down in the Iraq crisis and facing mounting criticism on domestic issues and political manoeuvrings, the indictment of Lewis Libby on charges of perjury could be the key to the cupboard of skeletons.
Many have already started describing the case involving Valerie Plame, the undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative who was "outed" by Libby and others, as Bush's Plamegate. Some of them are calling it the "Neocon-gate" if only because they believe the Plame case could lead to "outing" the neoconservatives who have taken the US on a disastrous course of military action that has cost more than 2,000 American and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives.
More significant is the expectation that the Plame affair could even lead to exposing the
the official version of the Sept.11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Suggestions are plenty that someone high up in power in Washington had a direct or indirect role in the assaults, which offered a convenient starting point for implementing the neocon agenda around the world starting with Iraq and the Middle East.
It remains to be seen how strong the Democrats would apply pressure and how far they would be successful in fighting the apparent Republican resistance against a thorough and transparent investigations into the misuse of intelligence information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
For now, the wagon has been kickstarted, and the US Congress has to steer it towards the right destination — the truth and nothing but the truth.
Simple perjury or high treason?
The Plame affair:
Perjury or treason?
THE INDICTMENT of Irwing Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the senior-most aide to US Vice-President Richard B Cheney, on charges that he committed perjury while answering questions whether he had revealed the identity of an undercover operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the media is seen by many as perhaps the beginning of the end of the administration of President George W Bush. They believe that the Libby affair could take the lid off a tightly closed Pandora's Box which could offer revelations of how, where, when, why and how the Bush administration plotted the invasion and occupation of Iraq as the forerunner of sweeping changes in the Middle East to serve American and Israeli interests. However, there are many ifs and buts over how long it would take to persuade the Republican-dominated US Congress — or whether it could be persuaded at all — to give the green signal for an all-embracing investigation that could even bring out some of the deep secrets of the Sept.11, 2001, attacks, writes PV Vivekanand.
A senior Bush administration official has been indicted for lying before a grand jury. Another has been spared indictment at this point but is under investigation. Questions are raised whether the president and vice-president played a direct role in the unfolding scandal. But there seems to be a deliberate drive to confuse the issues with the hope of concealing the core of the affair and diverting focus away the real issues involved. There is definitely a concerted campaign to label the affair as a matter of a senior official simply committing perjury.
Legal "experts" are being quoted extensively talking about the "legality" of lying, perjury and of obstruction of justice. The corporate media are playing along with the administration's deceptive exercise, and the judge appointed to try the indicted official is a long-term supporter of the ruling party.
For all practical purposes, the whole affair fits neatly into the pattern of deception that the world saw in the US build-up for justifying the war against Iraq and plans to subject Syria and Iran to similar treatment.
However, no such exposure is likely to result from the Libby indictment and trial if it is kept within the current limitations of investigations.
Karl Rove, a long-term associate of President Bush, escaped being indicted last week, but he is under investigation. Again, in technical terms, the allegation involves perjury.
No matter how special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald presents his case under the scope of his present mandate, it is difficult to see the core issue being brought up in court; the reality, according to critics of the Bush administration, being that Libby lied to the grand jury because he wanted to escape from being charged with treason — naming an undercover intelligence operative is treason — and that the whole episode is intrinsically tied to the orchestrated invasion of Iraq and plans for similar action against others.
Libby was a key figure in the administration's planning of the war against Iraq. He led the list of those who hyped reports of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He was the one who wrote the speech that the then secretary of state, Colin Powell, delivered at the United Nations justifying the war in early 2003. After leaving office Powell apologised to having made that speech.
But Libby was not alone. The game was deception involved almost everyone in the chain of command all the way up and down the administration — plus some key figures in the US corporate media. Some of them might not have known what was behind it, but most of them knew they were party to grand-scale deception.
Some of them could have wanted to act against engaging in deception as their conscience could have told them to, but they knew that top administration officials were willing to go to any extent to quash dissent and challenge to their grand designs. Those who orchestrated the deception also wanted to send a loud and clear message to anyone who might be inclined to throw a spanner in their works. They would not have stopped at anything to trample the life of anyone who challenged them no matter what.
That is what the Valerie Plame Wilson affair is all about. Everything else is in the periphery.
That is what the Democrats are insisting and that is also the central theme in the thousands of articles and messages crowding the cyberspace, particularly in the so-called blog domains where people are free to provide information and air their opinions.
The key argument there is that Libby and whoever else was/were involved named Valerie Plame Wilson as an undercover CIA operative to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for exposing that the Bush administration used false claims as real facts to convince the American Congress and people that there was a genuine reason to invade Iraq.
Anti-war activists are absolutely certain that this was deliberate because it has been established that the neoconservative hawks in Washington had planned the invasion of Iraq even before Bush entered the White House in 2001.
A strategy document Cheney commissioned from the Project for a New American Century in September 2000 asserts that "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." But, as the document reflects, the neoconservatives knew the American public would not agree to an attack against Iraq unless there were a "catastrophic and catalysing event — like a new Pearl Harbor." And the "new Pearl Harbor" was indeed the Sept.11, 2001 attacks.
Strong arguments are put up by many American commentators and analysts that someone in the top echelon of the Bush administration played a direct or indirect role in the Sept.11 attacks, which, very conveniently, allowed the government to launch its self-styled war against terror, with Israel being the best beneficiary, what with Saddam Hussein being eliminated as a potential threat to the Jewish state and the US pursuing the goal of regime change in Syria and Iran, two other holdouts against Israeli domination of the Middle East.
It becomes abdunantly clear then that the Bush administration — which has diehard pro-Israelis in key positions — had every interest in neutralising any challenge to its justifications for the invasion of Iraq.
Therefore, Libby's (intended) defence based on "lapse of memory" is nothing but a ruse because leaking of Plame's name was definitely part of the neocons' determination not to allow anyone to stand in their way. What Libby did represented the natural response of a group of people going towards a pre-determined goal and there was nothing unnatural about it that it could be blamed on foggy memory.
Implications
A veteran in politics, Libby could not but be aware that exposing an undercover intelligence operative is undermining national security and compromising vital operations.
In Plame's case, the compromised operation was CIA monitoring of nuclear devices, fissionable material and delivery systems in Russia.
As a result of the exposure, the CIA operations had to be called off, and it is also suggested the Israeli Mossad secret agency grabbed some of the Russian nukes, which could be used in a false-flag operation where Arabs or Iranians could be blamed, accoring to Whitley Strieber, a well-known writer about mysteries and UFOs.
The Russian operation of Brewster-Jennings and Associates involved monitoring "loose nukes, making sure that nothing goes missing, and tracking and locating missing items" across the southern areas of the former Soviet Union where there are numerous nuclear devices, fissionable material and delivery systems that are barely guarded by the locals."
It also had clandestine operations in in China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, and Syria.
It was also reported that at least one CIA agent committed suicide because of the Plame exposure.
Palme's immediate superior at the CIA, Jim Pavitt, resigned from the agency in the wake of the outing.
Strieber writes: "Valerie Plame was no small fish. The revelation of her name is, in fact, the most serious intelligence disaster in the history of this country. Only a tiny number of high officials, such as the president, the secretaries of state and defence, and a few high White House officials even have access to the names of the CIA’s 'non-official cover' officers."
Questions about judge
Concerns are expressed over the purported political links that the judge who will try Libby has with the Republicans.
US District Judge for DC Reggie Walton was appointed to the District of Colombia Superior Court in 1981 by Ronald Reagan. In 1989, he was appointed by George HW Bush as the deputy drug czar under Bill Bennett. Walton was reappointed to the DC Superior Court by the senior Bush.
George W. Bush nominated Walton to the US District Court for DC in 2001.
Walton was the judge who, under pressure from the Justice Department, placed a gag order on former Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and cleared his courtroom of the public and media in Edmonds' hearing in her case against the FBI. Edmonds brought to light important information about how the FBI failed to translate important wiretap intercepts before and after the Sept.11 attacks. (http://www.waynemadsenreport.com).
Getting away with it
With Americans growing increasingly sceptical of the administration's claims, the Democrats have moved in, pressing for results of investigations whether the government mishandled pre-war intelligence or doctored intelligence reports.
According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in June, 52 per cent of Americans now believe the president deliberately distorted intelligence to make a case for war.
The outstanding evidence is the revelation in a secret British memo of July 2002 that Prime Minister Tony Blair and his aides believed that "military action (against Iraq) was now seen as inevitable" and that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,"
An Ipsos Public Affairs poll, commissioned after the memo was published in the British press in April this year, showed that 50 per cent of Americans believed that if Bush lied about his reasons for going to war the US Congress should consider impeaching him.
Writing under the headline "The White House criminal conspiracy," Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor, declares that there is enough ground to charge the Bush administration with "criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States" but it would require expanding the scope of the Plame inquriry.
There are already calls for expanding the Plame case investigation.
Several congressmen have asked Acting Deputy Attorney General Robert McCallum that Fitzgerald's authority be expanded to include an investigation into whether the White House conspired to mislead the country into war. The Plame affair, they say, is just the "tip of the iceberg."
De La Vega declares: "As we now know, it was not a failure of intelligence that led us to war. It was a deliberate distortion of intelligence by the Bush administration. But it is a failure of courage on the part of Congress (with notable exceptions) and the mainstream media that seems to have left us helpless to address this crime." (www.truthout.org).
She goes onto say: "The president's deceit is not only an abuse of power; it is a federal crime. Specifically, it is a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States...
"The Supreme Court has defined the phrase 'conspiracy to defraud the United States' as 'to interfere with, impede or obstruct a lawful government function by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest'.
"Finally, 'fraud' is broadly defined to include half-truths, omissions or misrepresentation; in other words, statements that are intentionally misleading, even if literally true. Fraud also includes making statements with 'reckless indifference' to their truth.
Clash of interests
In the meantime, according to the Washington Post, the Libby case, if it goes to public trial, could pit the former White House aide's interests with that of the president himself.
Cheney has named longtime counsel David Addington as his new chief of staff and John Hannah as national security adviser. Both were questioned in the Libby indictment.
If Libby's case goes to trial, Cheney's new chief of staff David Addington and national security adviser John Hannah as well as many White House officials -- including the vive-president himself -could be forced to testify about how they handled pre-war intelligence, dealt with the media and built the argument for the Iraq war.
Republicans worry that Libby's court fight will force Bush to deal with the prospect of top officials testifying and embarrassing disclosures of how the White House operates and treats critics, according to the Post.
There is a possibility that Libby might make a deal with the prosecutor and close the case without a public trial. If that happens, then gone are chances that the veil be torn away from the game of deception in Washington.
Expanded investigation
Activists have brought into question what they see as the glaring and deliberaste shortcomings of the congressional investigation.
The Roberts panel promised an inquiry into the Plame outing a year ago, but nothing has been done, says Josh Marshall, is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
Marshall questions why Roberts got his fellow panel members to agree to 'split up the Senate’s Iraqi WMD investigation — investigate flawed intelligence before the 2004 election, investigate political manipulation of intelligence and other administration bad acts after the election."
"Like Lucy with her football, once the election was safely past, Sen. Roberts announced that his committee couldn’t make time for the promised second phase of the investigation. 'It’s basically on the back burner,' Roberts said about phase two of the investigation in a speech in Washington last March. 'The bottom line is that (the White House) believed the intelligence, and the intelligence was wrong.' Now more than a year has passed, and nothing."
Marshall sees a deliberate stonewalling of the investigation. He notes that the Plame affair stemmed from a forged document that has been traced to Italy stating that Saddam had bought nuclear material from Niger. Plame's husband Wilson was assigned to investigate and reported back that there was no truth to the allegation. And the blame for the forgery was placed squarely at the door of Italian intelligence.
"What it all amounts to is that the Senate intel panel (headed by Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas) passed up a chance to investigate the Niger forgeries because the FBI was allegedly already on the case," notes Marshall. "But it seems the FBI never got on the case in any serious way — something Sen. Roberts would at least have been in a position to know. It looks very much like another Roberts bait-and-switch, like splitting up the WMD probe so as to push all scrutiny of the White House until after the 2004 election."
Italy's La Republica newspaper reported this week that the key person behind the forgery was icolo Pollari, the head of SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency and that Pollari held a secret meeting in Washington on Sept. 9, 2002, with then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley.
"That’s less than a month before the forgeries appeared in Rome and right about the time the White House was fighting with the CIA over whether President Bush could publicise the Niger uranium claim," notes Marshall.
According to La Republica, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, Pentagon official Lawrence Franklin, who is now facing charges of spying for Israel, and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, held a meeting in Rome attended by top SISMI officials as well as several Iranians.
Ledeen is the neoconservative ideologue and veteran who has both Iranian and Israeli contacts.
Author and commentaror Justin Raimundo describes Ledeen as "the Machiavelli of the neocons, the one who ends his polemics with the exhortation "Faster, please!" – a plea to accelerate the pace of "regime change" throughout the Middle East."
"And he is not just an ideologue, rooting on the sidelines for the 'good guys,' but an active player, as La Repubblica makes all too clear: he played the key role of facilitator of the various factions with a keen interest in 'liberating" Iraq," Raimundo writes on www.antiwar.com.
He also refers to a statement quoted by La Repubblica attributed to an unnamed US intelligence source:
"The meeting called in Rome assembles the representatives of all the teams: Michael A. Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, the colonels of the Iraqi National Congress (headed by Ahmed Chalabi) and in addition, the Iraqi Shi'ites of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and of course, the Guardians of the Revolution. All these actors gathered in Rome. Wouldn't you say that's interesting?"
From top to bottom
A summary of various comments appearing on blogsites would show that at least 23 people, including Bush and Cheney, allegedly played some kind of role in the Plame affair.
These people include:
Karl Rove;
Libby;
Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser;
Stephen Hadley, then deputy to Rice and now her successor;
Andrew Card, White House chief of staff;
Alberto Gonzales, a Bush associate and now attorney general;
Mary Matalin, a Bush associate and consellor to Cheney;
Ari Fleischer, former White House spokesman;
Susan Ralston, special assistant to Bush;
Israel Hernandez, assistant secretary of commerce;
John Hannah, Cheney's national security adviser;
Scott McClellan, white House spokesman;
Dan Bartlett, Bush counsellor;
Claire Buchan, White House spokeswoman;
Catherine Martin, a former aide to Cheney;
Jennifer Millerwise, former Cheney spokeswoman;
David Wurmser; Cheney aide on national security;
Colin Powell;
Karen Hughes, a former White House counsellor;
Adam Levine; a Bush associate;
Bob Joseph, member of the National Security Council;
Cheney; and
Bush.
According to Raimundo, "The Libby indictment is just the beginning. Neocon-gate is big, and getting bigger by the day...."
Congressional moves
The Democrats used the issue to force the majority Republicans in the Senate to hold a closed session this week.
Discussed during the session was charges that intelligence that Bush used in the run-up to the war in Iraq was doctored and that the Republicans were ignoring the issue.
Democratic leader Harry Reid, who is leading calls for Bush and Cheney to apologise for the actions of Libby and Rove and for Rove's resignation, brought the focus on prewar intelligence.
"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions," Reid said before invoking Senate rules that led to the closed session. He said Republicans have repeatedly rebuffed Democratic pleas for a thorough investigation.
Reid demanded that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas would complete the second phase of an investigation of the administration's prewar intelligence. A six-member task force — three members from each party — was appointed to review the Intelligence Committee's work and report to their respective leaders by Nov.14.
Roberts' committee produced a 511-page report in 2004 on flaws in an Iraq intelligence estimate assembled by the country's top analysts in October 2002, and he promised a second phase would look at issues that couldn't be finished in the first year of work.
The committee worked on the second phase of the review, Roberts said, but it has not finished. He blamed Democrats for the delays and said his staff had informed Democratic counterparts on Monday that the committee hoped to complete the second phase next week.
However, critics say, the second phase report is not expected to have any element that would suggest that the administration doctored intelligence reports in order to justify the war.
The questions for which Reid is demanding answers are:
How did the Bush administration assemble its case for war against Iraq?
Who did Bush administration officials listen to and who did they ignore?
How did senior administration officials manipulate or manufacture intelligence presented to the Congress and the American people?
What was the role of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a group of senior White House officials tasked with marketing the war and taking down its critics?
How did the administration co-ordinate its efforts to attack individuals who dared to challenge the administration's assertions?
Why has the administration failed to provide Congress with the documents that will shed light on their misconduct and misstatements?
The right and honest answers to these questions could indeed signal the end of the Bush administration. In order to arrive at point, a bipartisan political will is an absolute in Washington, and that is missing at this point. However, more skeletons could tumble out of the cupboard as Fitzgerald proceeds with his case and there could be a falling out within the Republican camp, and that is the best bet for many in the US and outside who want to get to the bottom of the misadventures of the Bush administration.
Perjury or treason?
THE INDICTMENT of Irwing Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the senior-most aide to US Vice-President Richard B Cheney, on charges that he committed perjury while answering questions whether he had revealed the identity of an undercover operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the media is seen by many as perhaps the beginning of the end of the administration of President George W Bush. They believe that the Libby affair could take the lid off a tightly closed Pandora's Box which could offer revelations of how, where, when, why and how the Bush administration plotted the invasion and occupation of Iraq as the forerunner of sweeping changes in the Middle East to serve American and Israeli interests. However, there are many ifs and buts over how long it would take to persuade the Republican-dominated US Congress — or whether it could be persuaded at all — to give the green signal for an all-embracing investigation that could even bring out some of the deep secrets of the Sept.11, 2001, attacks, writes PV Vivekanand.
A senior Bush administration official has been indicted for lying before a grand jury. Another has been spared indictment at this point but is under investigation. Questions are raised whether the president and vice-president played a direct role in the unfolding scandal. But there seems to be a deliberate drive to confuse the issues with the hope of concealing the core of the affair and diverting focus away the real issues involved. There is definitely a concerted campaign to label the affair as a matter of a senior official simply committing perjury.
Legal "experts" are being quoted extensively talking about the "legality" of lying, perjury and of obstruction of justice. The corporate media are playing along with the administration's deceptive exercise, and the judge appointed to try the indicted official is a long-term supporter of the ruling party.
For all practical purposes, the whole affair fits neatly into the pattern of deception that the world saw in the US build-up for justifying the war against Iraq and plans to subject Syria and Iran to similar treatment.
However, no such exposure is likely to result from the Libby indictment and trial if it is kept within the current limitations of investigations.
Karl Rove, a long-term associate of President Bush, escaped being indicted last week, but he is under investigation. Again, in technical terms, the allegation involves perjury.
No matter how special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald presents his case under the scope of his present mandate, it is difficult to see the core issue being brought up in court; the reality, according to critics of the Bush administration, being that Libby lied to the grand jury because he wanted to escape from being charged with treason — naming an undercover intelligence operative is treason — and that the whole episode is intrinsically tied to the orchestrated invasion of Iraq and plans for similar action against others.
Libby was a key figure in the administration's planning of the war against Iraq. He led the list of those who hyped reports of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He was the one who wrote the speech that the then secretary of state, Colin Powell, delivered at the United Nations justifying the war in early 2003. After leaving office Powell apologised to having made that speech.
But Libby was not alone. The game was deception involved almost everyone in the chain of command all the way up and down the administration — plus some key figures in the US corporate media. Some of them might not have known what was behind it, but most of them knew they were party to grand-scale deception.
Some of them could have wanted to act against engaging in deception as their conscience could have told them to, but they knew that top administration officials were willing to go to any extent to quash dissent and challenge to their grand designs. Those who orchestrated the deception also wanted to send a loud and clear message to anyone who might be inclined to throw a spanner in their works. They would not have stopped at anything to trample the life of anyone who challenged them no matter what.
That is what the Valerie Plame Wilson affair is all about. Everything else is in the periphery.
That is what the Democrats are insisting and that is also the central theme in the thousands of articles and messages crowding the cyberspace, particularly in the so-called blog domains where people are free to provide information and air their opinions.
The key argument there is that Libby and whoever else was/were involved named Valerie Plame Wilson as an undercover CIA operative to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for exposing that the Bush administration used false claims as real facts to convince the American Congress and people that there was a genuine reason to invade Iraq.
Anti-war activists are absolutely certain that this was deliberate because it has been established that the neoconservative hawks in Washington had planned the invasion of Iraq even before Bush entered the White House in 2001.
A strategy document Cheney commissioned from the Project for a New American Century in September 2000 asserts that "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." But, as the document reflects, the neoconservatives knew the American public would not agree to an attack against Iraq unless there were a "catastrophic and catalysing event — like a new Pearl Harbor." And the "new Pearl Harbor" was indeed the Sept.11, 2001 attacks.
Strong arguments are put up by many American commentators and analysts that someone in the top echelon of the Bush administration played a direct or indirect role in the Sept.11 attacks, which, very conveniently, allowed the government to launch its self-styled war against terror, with Israel being the best beneficiary, what with Saddam Hussein being eliminated as a potential threat to the Jewish state and the US pursuing the goal of regime change in Syria and Iran, two other holdouts against Israeli domination of the Middle East.
It becomes abdunantly clear then that the Bush administration — which has diehard pro-Israelis in key positions — had every interest in neutralising any challenge to its justifications for the invasion of Iraq.
Therefore, Libby's (intended) defence based on "lapse of memory" is nothing but a ruse because leaking of Plame's name was definitely part of the neocons' determination not to allow anyone to stand in their way. What Libby did represented the natural response of a group of people going towards a pre-determined goal and there was nothing unnatural about it that it could be blamed on foggy memory.
Implications
A veteran in politics, Libby could not but be aware that exposing an undercover intelligence operative is undermining national security and compromising vital operations.
In Plame's case, the compromised operation was CIA monitoring of nuclear devices, fissionable material and delivery systems in Russia.
As a result of the exposure, the CIA operations had to be called off, and it is also suggested the Israeli Mossad secret agency grabbed some of the Russian nukes, which could be used in a false-flag operation where Arabs or Iranians could be blamed, accoring to Whitley Strieber, a well-known writer about mysteries and UFOs.
The Russian operation of Brewster-Jennings and Associates involved monitoring "loose nukes, making sure that nothing goes missing, and tracking and locating missing items" across the southern areas of the former Soviet Union where there are numerous nuclear devices, fissionable material and delivery systems that are barely guarded by the locals."
It also had clandestine operations in in China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, and Syria.
It was also reported that at least one CIA agent committed suicide because of the Plame exposure.
Palme's immediate superior at the CIA, Jim Pavitt, resigned from the agency in the wake of the outing.
Strieber writes: "Valerie Plame was no small fish. The revelation of her name is, in fact, the most serious intelligence disaster in the history of this country. Only a tiny number of high officials, such as the president, the secretaries of state and defence, and a few high White House officials even have access to the names of the CIA’s 'non-official cover' officers."
Questions about judge
Concerns are expressed over the purported political links that the judge who will try Libby has with the Republicans.
US District Judge for DC Reggie Walton was appointed to the District of Colombia Superior Court in 1981 by Ronald Reagan. In 1989, he was appointed by George HW Bush as the deputy drug czar under Bill Bennett. Walton was reappointed to the DC Superior Court by the senior Bush.
George W. Bush nominated Walton to the US District Court for DC in 2001.
Walton was the judge who, under pressure from the Justice Department, placed a gag order on former Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and cleared his courtroom of the public and media in Edmonds' hearing in her case against the FBI. Edmonds brought to light important information about how the FBI failed to translate important wiretap intercepts before and after the Sept.11 attacks. (http://www.waynemadsenreport.com).
Getting away with it
With Americans growing increasingly sceptical of the administration's claims, the Democrats have moved in, pressing for results of investigations whether the government mishandled pre-war intelligence or doctored intelligence reports.
According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in June, 52 per cent of Americans now believe the president deliberately distorted intelligence to make a case for war.
The outstanding evidence is the revelation in a secret British memo of July 2002 that Prime Minister Tony Blair and his aides believed that "military action (against Iraq) was now seen as inevitable" and that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,"
An Ipsos Public Affairs poll, commissioned after the memo was published in the British press in April this year, showed that 50 per cent of Americans believed that if Bush lied about his reasons for going to war the US Congress should consider impeaching him.
Writing under the headline "The White House criminal conspiracy," Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor, declares that there is enough ground to charge the Bush administration with "criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States" but it would require expanding the scope of the Plame inquriry.
There are already calls for expanding the Plame case investigation.
Several congressmen have asked Acting Deputy Attorney General Robert McCallum that Fitzgerald's authority be expanded to include an investigation into whether the White House conspired to mislead the country into war. The Plame affair, they say, is just the "tip of the iceberg."
De La Vega declares: "As we now know, it was not a failure of intelligence that led us to war. It was a deliberate distortion of intelligence by the Bush administration. But it is a failure of courage on the part of Congress (with notable exceptions) and the mainstream media that seems to have left us helpless to address this crime." (www.truthout.org).
She goes onto say: "The president's deceit is not only an abuse of power; it is a federal crime. Specifically, it is a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States...
"The Supreme Court has defined the phrase 'conspiracy to defraud the United States' as 'to interfere with, impede or obstruct a lawful government function by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest'.
"Finally, 'fraud' is broadly defined to include half-truths, omissions or misrepresentation; in other words, statements that are intentionally misleading, even if literally true. Fraud also includes making statements with 'reckless indifference' to their truth.
Clash of interests
In the meantime, according to the Washington Post, the Libby case, if it goes to public trial, could pit the former White House aide's interests with that of the president himself.
Cheney has named longtime counsel David Addington as his new chief of staff and John Hannah as national security adviser. Both were questioned in the Libby indictment.
If Libby's case goes to trial, Cheney's new chief of staff David Addington and national security adviser John Hannah as well as many White House officials -- including the vive-president himself -could be forced to testify about how they handled pre-war intelligence, dealt with the media and built the argument for the Iraq war.
Republicans worry that Libby's court fight will force Bush to deal with the prospect of top officials testifying and embarrassing disclosures of how the White House operates and treats critics, according to the Post.
There is a possibility that Libby might make a deal with the prosecutor and close the case without a public trial. If that happens, then gone are chances that the veil be torn away from the game of deception in Washington.
Expanded investigation
Activists have brought into question what they see as the glaring and deliberaste shortcomings of the congressional investigation.
The Roberts panel promised an inquiry into the Plame outing a year ago, but nothing has been done, says Josh Marshall, is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
Marshall questions why Roberts got his fellow panel members to agree to 'split up the Senate’s Iraqi WMD investigation — investigate flawed intelligence before the 2004 election, investigate political manipulation of intelligence and other administration bad acts after the election."
"Like Lucy with her football, once the election was safely past, Sen. Roberts announced that his committee couldn’t make time for the promised second phase of the investigation. 'It’s basically on the back burner,' Roberts said about phase two of the investigation in a speech in Washington last March. 'The bottom line is that (the White House) believed the intelligence, and the intelligence was wrong.' Now more than a year has passed, and nothing."
Marshall sees a deliberate stonewalling of the investigation. He notes that the Plame affair stemmed from a forged document that has been traced to Italy stating that Saddam had bought nuclear material from Niger. Plame's husband Wilson was assigned to investigate and reported back that there was no truth to the allegation. And the blame for the forgery was placed squarely at the door of Italian intelligence.
"What it all amounts to is that the Senate intel panel (headed by Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas) passed up a chance to investigate the Niger forgeries because the FBI was allegedly already on the case," notes Marshall. "But it seems the FBI never got on the case in any serious way — something Sen. Roberts would at least have been in a position to know. It looks very much like another Roberts bait-and-switch, like splitting up the WMD probe so as to push all scrutiny of the White House until after the 2004 election."
Italy's La Republica newspaper reported this week that the key person behind the forgery was icolo Pollari, the head of SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency and that Pollari held a secret meeting in Washington on Sept. 9, 2002, with then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley.
"That’s less than a month before the forgeries appeared in Rome and right about the time the White House was fighting with the CIA over whether President Bush could publicise the Niger uranium claim," notes Marshall.
According to La Republica, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, Pentagon official Lawrence Franklin, who is now facing charges of spying for Israel, and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, held a meeting in Rome attended by top SISMI officials as well as several Iranians.
Ledeen is the neoconservative ideologue and veteran who has both Iranian and Israeli contacts.
Author and commentaror Justin Raimundo describes Ledeen as "the Machiavelli of the neocons, the one who ends his polemics with the exhortation "Faster, please!" – a plea to accelerate the pace of "regime change" throughout the Middle East."
"And he is not just an ideologue, rooting on the sidelines for the 'good guys,' but an active player, as La Repubblica makes all too clear: he played the key role of facilitator of the various factions with a keen interest in 'liberating" Iraq," Raimundo writes on www.antiwar.com.
He also refers to a statement quoted by La Repubblica attributed to an unnamed US intelligence source:
"The meeting called in Rome assembles the representatives of all the teams: Michael A. Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, the colonels of the Iraqi National Congress (headed by Ahmed Chalabi) and in addition, the Iraqi Shi'ites of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and of course, the Guardians of the Revolution. All these actors gathered in Rome. Wouldn't you say that's interesting?"
From top to bottom
A summary of various comments appearing on blogsites would show that at least 23 people, including Bush and Cheney, allegedly played some kind of role in the Plame affair.
These people include:
Karl Rove;
Libby;
Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser;
Stephen Hadley, then deputy to Rice and now her successor;
Andrew Card, White House chief of staff;
Alberto Gonzales, a Bush associate and now attorney general;
Mary Matalin, a Bush associate and consellor to Cheney;
Ari Fleischer, former White House spokesman;
Susan Ralston, special assistant to Bush;
Israel Hernandez, assistant secretary of commerce;
John Hannah, Cheney's national security adviser;
Scott McClellan, white House spokesman;
Dan Bartlett, Bush counsellor;
Claire Buchan, White House spokeswoman;
Catherine Martin, a former aide to Cheney;
Jennifer Millerwise, former Cheney spokeswoman;
David Wurmser; Cheney aide on national security;
Colin Powell;
Karen Hughes, a former White House counsellor;
Adam Levine; a Bush associate;
Bob Joseph, member of the National Security Council;
Cheney; and
Bush.
According to Raimundo, "The Libby indictment is just the beginning. Neocon-gate is big, and getting bigger by the day...."
Congressional moves
The Democrats used the issue to force the majority Republicans in the Senate to hold a closed session this week.
Discussed during the session was charges that intelligence that Bush used in the run-up to the war in Iraq was doctored and that the Republicans were ignoring the issue.
Democratic leader Harry Reid, who is leading calls for Bush and Cheney to apologise for the actions of Libby and Rove and for Rove's resignation, brought the focus on prewar intelligence.
"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions," Reid said before invoking Senate rules that led to the closed session. He said Republicans have repeatedly rebuffed Democratic pleas for a thorough investigation.
Reid demanded that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas would complete the second phase of an investigation of the administration's prewar intelligence. A six-member task force — three members from each party — was appointed to review the Intelligence Committee's work and report to their respective leaders by Nov.14.
Roberts' committee produced a 511-page report in 2004 on flaws in an Iraq intelligence estimate assembled by the country's top analysts in October 2002, and he promised a second phase would look at issues that couldn't be finished in the first year of work.
The committee worked on the second phase of the review, Roberts said, but it has not finished. He blamed Democrats for the delays and said his staff had informed Democratic counterparts on Monday that the committee hoped to complete the second phase next week.
However, critics say, the second phase report is not expected to have any element that would suggest that the administration doctored intelligence reports in order to justify the war.
The questions for which Reid is demanding answers are:
How did the Bush administration assemble its case for war against Iraq?
Who did Bush administration officials listen to and who did they ignore?
How did senior administration officials manipulate or manufacture intelligence presented to the Congress and the American people?
What was the role of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a group of senior White House officials tasked with marketing the war and taking down its critics?
How did the administration co-ordinate its efforts to attack individuals who dared to challenge the administration's assertions?
Why has the administration failed to provide Congress with the documents that will shed light on their misconduct and misstatements?
The right and honest answers to these questions could indeed signal the end of the Bush administration. In order to arrive at point, a bipartisan political will is an absolute in Washington, and that is missing at this point. However, more skeletons could tumble out of the cupboard as Fitzgerald proceeds with his case and there could be a falling out within the Republican camp, and that is the best bet for many in the US and outside who want to get to the bottom of the misadventures of the Bush administration.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Assad on the hot seat
THE CASE is not even filed, let alone being proved or even presented, but the "suspect" has already been tried and convicted as far as the world's superpower is concerned, and nothing would make any difference to the scenario ahead.
That is what we are seeing in the case of Syria, the US and the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, and that is what we saw in the case of Iraq, the US and weapons of mass destruction.
The Syria scenarios are unfolding as pre-scripted, as indeed was the case against Saddam Hussein that led to the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 as the world has learnt through concrete evidence that emerged after the war that is enough to convince the strongest sceptic..
In the next few days, the United Nations Security Council is expected to adopt a resolution setting a deadline for Syria to comply with the world body's demands or face sanctions. A draft resolution in circulation demands that Syria detain officials suspected of plotting the murder of Hariri, freeze their assets and impose a travel ban on them.
The draft resolution, a joint work of the US, Britain and France, threatens “further measures” if Syria fails to co-operate with the UN investigation headed by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who has submitted a report saying he found “converging evidence” of Syrian involvement in the Feb.14 bomb blast that killed Hariri and 20 others in Beirut, and implicated Bashar Al Assad’s brother, Maher, and his brother in-law, Assef Shawkat, chief of military intelligence, in the alleged conspiracy.
Clearly sensing that the trap is closing around Syria regardless of innocence or guilt, President Bashar Al Assad has promised the three countries behind the draft resolution that any Syrian accused will face trial if "proved by concrete evidence" to have had a role in the Hariri killing.
"I have declared that Syria is innocent of this crime, and I am ready to follow up action to bring to trial any Syrian who could be proved by concrete evidence to have had connection with this crime," says the Syrian president's letter, as quoted by news agencies.
Assad also warned against using the Mehlis report as a political tool to pressure Syria. That was a reference to the US accusations that the Syrian government is supporting militant Palestinian factions, intervening in Lebanon and failing to prevent foreign fighters from infiltrating into Iraq.
"Such use of this report will have big, serious repercussions on the already tense situation which our region goes through, at a time we are more in need to have objective and constructive positions that would help the countries of the region to achieve stability," said Assad's letter.
However, Washington has smelt blood and is not having any of that.
"Once again Syria has demonstrated by its policies and its actions that it's out of step with the international community and in this instance specifically, by its failure to correctly read the tea leaves and fully co-operate" with the Mehlis investigation, said State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli.
"That is why you have a Security Council that's meeting to come to some conclusion about what to do about that failure to co-operate," Ereli said. "So it's a little late now for Syria to try to be making up for past failures."
By "full co-operation," the US means unrestrained access for Mehlis to question any Syrian official in or outside Syria as he might deem fit and this includes Bashar Al Assad himself.
Obviously, the US believes it has Syria over a barrel wants to plunge the knife deeper by subjecting top Syrian officials to humiliating questioning and thus to demoralise the Syrian people, and that was what was inherent in the comment by US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. "No person is above the law, and the president (Assad) has had time to talk to the media. If he has time to do that, he has time to talk to Commissioner Mehlis," Bolton said. (Here, one is reminded of the non-availability of President George W Bush to have a meeting with the anti-war mother of an American soldier who was killed in action although she was stationed for more than three weeks in August out his ranch in Texas where he was vacationing. Indeed the circumstances are different, but Bolton's comment was at best contemptuous as if Assad was already in the dock and one just wonders how it would be for him if the target of such comment was his own president).
The very fact that Washington is brushing aside Assad's pledge to try any Syrian found involved in the Hariri killing, the most substantive response from Damascus to the Mehlis report, is indicative of the shape of things to come. It is very much a re-enactment of the obviously pre-determined rejection of all pre-war proposals and offers made by Saddam.
The sanctions that the US would like to see imposed on Syria immediately include travel and financial sanctions on Assad’s family and inner circle, again another avenue for demoralising the Syrian people.
The US has arranged a special meeting of foreign ministers of the Security Council on Monday. Obviously, Washington hopes to convince Russia and China — which have rejected the move for sanctions — into shifting their stand through watering down the language a little.
Moscow has promised to work to prevent sanctions, but it remains to be see how far it would be able to resist direct and indirect American-British-French pressure into accepting the "inevitable."
Mehlis himself has added to the pressure against Syria by "disclosing" that he and his team members faced threats.
“The level of risk, which was already high, will increase further, particularly after the issuance of the report,” he said. “The commission has received a number of threats which were deemed, in the assessment of our security personnel, to be credible.”
Although Mehlis said that the threats came from “unknown groups” and not specifically from any Syrian or Lebanese officials, the implication was there.
Nejib Friji, the UN spokesman in Beirut, has been recalled from Lebanon "for his own safety” and is now working another UN mission.
The US is also trying to project Syria as being isolated although one fails to see the extent of any isolation. Indeed, Washington has suspended all but routine diplomatic contacts with the Syrian government and is keeping a deaf ear to attempts in recent months to resume dialogue on intelligence issues.
The Arabs at large seem to be convinced that Syria is being railroaded into being deprived of its pan-Arab nationalist credentials in order to suit Israeli interests and make concessions and compromises over issues that are central to Syria's integrity, territorial rights and political process.
However, there seems to little the Arabs could to do help ease the situation as the case was indeed with Iraq.
Notwithstanding the detailed findings of Mehlis, there is no "concrete evidence" to support his allegations. Obviously, the German prosecutor hopes to come up with such evidence before Dec.15, when he is expected to present his final report the UN Security Council.
The initial report contains direct quotes from people who were close to Hariri as saying that the assassinated prime minister had received direct threats from Assad himself in the run-up to the amendment in the Lebanese constitution that allowed a three-year extension of the term in office of pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud last year. Obviously, Mehlis wants to question Assad on that point.
When the news of the Hariri assassination broke, few in the Arab World accepted that Syria could have been behind it. Damascus is not deemed that naive to believe that it could get away with the killing. If anything, as events have proved out, Syria suffered the most as a result and this is a factor that no one expects Damascus to have overlooked.
Many in the Middle East subscribe to the theory that Israeli agents penetrated Syrian circles and engineered the killing in such a way that all the fingers pointed to Damascus.
Indeed, there are many ifs and buts in the light of the Mehlis findings that contradict the Israel theory. But the idea that a much more sinister plot was behind the killing was raised immediately after the incident not only by Arabs but also Americans.
Mark Whitney writes on http://www.informationclearinghouse.info:
"One can hardly imagine a greater disaster for poor Syria who has been scrambling to avoid the American bludgeon for the last four years. Few people realise that Syria provided more assistance in the first year of the war on terror after 9-11 than any other nation. That’s of little consequence now, as the US is on a mission to quickly integrate the entire region beneath the American standard and prove that it can be trusted with its continued stewardship of the world economy."
According to Whitney, "to understand who assassinated Rafiq Hariri we don’t need to look any further than the $1.5 billion US embassy currently under construction in Baghdad. The new embassy, the largest of its kind in the world, will facilitate 1,800 employees and serve as the regional nerve centre for American political and economic activity. What does this have to do with al Hariri?
"It demonstrates that the US is establishing a massive command centre for its future domination of the entire Middle East. This suggests that Lebanon must be entered into the family of client states who accept a subservient role to American military and economic power, and who willingly comply with the requirements of the regional constable, Israel.
"Hariri’s assassination provides the raison d'être for severing ties with Syria and for transforming Lebanon into a US vassal. This conforms nicely with Israel’s ambition to surround itself with non-threatening states as well as affording access to the vital water resources of Lebanon’s Wazzani River. In other words, the murder of Hariri has created some extremely fortunate opportunities for both Israel and the US; merging seamlessly with their overall objectives in the region."
Bushra Al Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer and political activist, told Aljazeera.net a few days after the killing that the plot against Hariri's life also targeted Syria.
"If we look at the way the assassination has been conducted, it is very sophisticated, I knew Hariri's security measures - no local system could have breached them.
"The question is, who stands to benefit from his death? Syria's enemies. I think Hariri's death is part of the plan to divide the region into tiny helpless sectarian states. This plan has started in Iraq and it will continue to hit all other Arab countries."
There is another school of thought that gained strength in view of the Mehlis findings. It says that criminal activities rather than politics were the prime factor behind the killing.
This school believes that the fear of losing annual earnings of hundreds of millions dollars through clandestine means including smuggling, drugs and money-laundering was behind the assassination; that people in influential position in Syria and not necessarily directly linked to the president were behind the plot and there is no indication that Assad knew of the conspiracy.
The reason for the killing did not involve Syrian-Lebanese politics, although Hariri had turned to be a bitter critic of Syria's military presence in Lebanon at that time (Syria withdrew its forces from Lebanon in April this year under world pressure following the Hariri killing).
The real reason, proponents of this theory say, those who plotted the killing feared that Hariri was bent upon ending the Syrian presence in Lebanon and this would have meant hundreds of millions of dollars in losses through smuggling, fraud, corruption and drug business and money-laundering using Lebanese and Syrian banks. .
The theorists argue that the group had extensive organisation and considerable resources and capabilities. They used the Syrian military intelligence presence in Lebanon to monitor Hariri's movements for months before deciding setting a date for the killing.
The Mehlis report contains the conclusions on the Hariri assassination drawn from testimonies taken from more than 400 witnesses, but it does not offer any material evidence. More importantly, it does not refer directly to the alleged Lebanese-Syrian nexus which operated the smuggling, fraud and money-laundering network.
The report stops short of naming at least five key Syrian personalities involved in the assassination plot, but the names were removed by Mehlis before it was released to the public, reports have said.
According to the report, the five names removed from the report are those of:
— Maher Al Assad, the younger brother of Bashar Al Assad;
— the president's brother-in-law General Assef Shawqat, who is also chief of Syrian military intelligence;
— Gen. Roustum Ghazali, the head of special external intelligence and former Syrian military intelligence chief in Lebanon;
— Gen. Hassan Khalil, a liaison officer between the various Syrian intelligence bodies;
and Col. Mohsein Hamoud, a former military intelligence officer who served in Lebanon.
Hamoud is said to have identified by Mehlis as the colonel who drove the Mitsubishi Canter bomb car from Syria to Lebanon on Jan. 21.
That was the vehicle rigged with 1,000 kilogrammes of military explosives which blew up as Hariri's convoy, according to Mehlis.
While the report says that Japanese investigators helping him established that the vehicle was stolen from Sagamihara City, Japan, on Oct.12, 2004, there is no indication whether the German prosecutor sought to trace its transfer from Japan to the Middle East. Surely, establishing the ownership of the vehicle based on registration documents could be central to pinpointing individuals supposedly linked to the bomb attack. Why was the avenue not pursued is a question many are asking.
Robert Parry, author of who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, observes (www.consortiumnews.com):
"The UN report contains no details about the Japanese investigation of the theft, nor does it indicate what Japanese police may have discovered about the identity of the thieves or how they may have shipped the van from a suburb of Tokyo to the Middle East in the four months before the Hariri attack.
"Though the investigation of a vehicle theft may have attracted little Japanese police attention a year ago, the van’s apparent role in a major act of international terrorism would seem to justify a redoubling of those efforts now.
"At minimum, the UN investigators might have insisted on including details such as the name of the original owner, the circumstances surrounding the theft, and the identities of car-theft rings in the Sagamihara area. Plus, investigators could have checked on shipments of white Mitsubishi Canter Vans out of Japan to Middle East destinations.
"Since the time frame between the reported theft and the bombing was less than four months, Japanese authorities could have at least narrowed down those possible shipments and Middle East customs services might have records of imported vehicles."
He goes on to say:
"...While Syria and its freewheeling intelligence services may remain prime suspects in the Hariri assassination, the bitter Iraq experience might justify at least the running down of obvious leads that could either strengthen or disprove the case, like the mystery of the white Mitsubishi Canter Van.
"Investigators might get much closer to the truth if they could determine what happened to the van between the moment it disappeared off the streets of a Japanese city and reappeared almost four months later, rolling towards Rafiq Hariri’s motorcade."
Following are some of the highlights of the Mehlis report:
Gen. Mustapha Hamdan, the commander of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s security detail , was the main Lebanese counterpart of the gang.
Gen. Jamil Al Sayyed (head of Lebanese general intelligence) co-operated closely with Hamdan and Gen. Raymond Azar (chief of Lebanese police) in preparing the assassination. He also co-ordinated with Gen. Rustum Ghazali (head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon) and, among others, members of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP-GC) headed by Ahmed Jibril in Lebanon.
Hamdan and Azar provided logistical support, providing money, telephones, cars, walkie-talkies, pagers, weapons, ID-cards etc.
(Contributing to this theory is an argument that the suicide driver assigned to the bomb-rigged Mitsubishi was an Iraqi individual who was led to believe the target was Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi (who happened to be in Beirut prior to the assassination). The explosives used were of the kind used in Iraq so as to misdirect suspicions towards extremist groups.
Following are highlights of the Mehlis report:
The day before the assassination, the head of Hariri's close protection unit, Yehya Al Arab alias Abu Tareq, had a meeting with Ghazali. He was so shaken up by that meeting that he went home, turned off his phone and stayed there for a few hours. The version given by Ghazali of this meeting is not compatible with other testimony.
In November 2004, Hajj, head of the Internal Security Forces, ordered the state security detail around Hariri reduced from 40 to eight guards.
Eight telephone numbers and 10 mobile telephones were used to organise surveillance on Hariri and to carry out the assassination. The lines were put into circulation on Jan.4, 2005 in the northern part of Lebanon, between Terbol and Menyeh and used to observe Hariri’s habits, mostly in Beirut city.
On the day of the assassination, six of the telephones were used in the area between Parliament Square and the St. George Hotel and the axes of Zqaq Al Blat and Al Bachoura — the route of the Hariri convoy.
Cell site records show that cellular telephones utilising these six calling cards were situated so that they covered every possible route linking Parliament to Kuraytem Palace.
The calls --- and the usage of the cards --- terminated a few minutes before the blast. The lines have all been inactive since.
The technical department of Lebanese Military intelligence Service, headed by Col. Ghassan Tufayli, placed important figures, including Hariri, under permanent wiretapping. The transcripts were forwarded on a daily basis to Raymond Azar and to the head of the army, General Michel Suleyman. Tufayli admitted that transcripts were sent to the Lebanese president and to Ghazali.
The CCTV of the HSBC bank, located close to the scene of the explosion, showed a white Mitsubishi Canter van entering the area of the explosion shortly before Hariri’s convoy and moving six times more slowly than other vehicles on the same stretch of road. The car entered the area one minute and 49 seconds before the Hariri convoy.
The weakness of the Lebanese authorities’ initial action and the tampering with evidence during the first crime scene examination have made it difficult to identify the type of explosives used in the blast and track it to source - and thus denied the investigation an important lead to the perpetrators.
It appears that at least one of the three jamming devices in Hariri’s convoy was operational and functioning at the time of the blast. Further investigation may provide information about how the explosion was activated.
Expert teams deduce from the distribution of the so far located parts of the Mitsubishi Canter truck that the vehicle was possibly used as the bomb carrier.
An aboveground explosion is the most feasible possibility — in which case around 1,000 kg would have been used of extra-high explosive. Samples from the crater wall indicate TNT. No sign of the trigger was found.
The physical evidence and the fact that small human remains were found of an unidentified person, but no large body parts such as legs, feet or lower arms, points to a suicide bomber as the most likely cause of the blast. Another only slightly less likely possibility is that of a remotely-controlled device. However, no residues of such a device have been recovered from the crime scene.
A Palestinian, Abu Adass, who claimed responsibility for the murder in the name of a radical organisation on a videotape aired by Al Jazeera TV, was no more than a decoy. He was detained in Syria and forced at gunpoint to record the video tape. The videotape was sent to Beirut on the morning of Feb.14, and handed over to Gen Jamil Al Sayyed (head of Lebanese General Intelligence). A civilian with a criminal record and a security officer placed the tape somewhere in Hamra and notified Ghassan Ben Jeddo, an Al-Jazeera TV reporter.
There is no evidence that Abu Adass belonged to the group Al Nasra Wal-jihad Fee Bilad Al Sham as claimed in the videotape, or even that such a group ever existed.
There are no indications (other than the videotape) that he drove a truck containing the bomb that killed Hariri. The evidence does show that Abu Adass left his home on Jan.18, 2005, and was taken, voluntarily or not, to Syria, where he was most probably killed.
These details all fall too pat into the case being built against Syria, and that is why they are suspect.
According to Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, a key source of information that Mehlis collected was a convicted swindler who has no credibility.
Pressure point
The US has secured an additional point of pressure against Syria.
A report submitted to the UN Security Council by special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen sharply criticises the Hizbollah’s unchanged status in Lebanon as failure to implement Security Council Resolution 1559’s order to disband all militias and armed groups in Lebanon, including the Palestinians.
He challenges the Hizbollah’s claim to be “a legitimate resistance movement” fighting for the liberation of the Shebaa Farms from Israeli occupation in stark contrast to the UN position that Israel has fulfilled all Security Council resolutions and withdrawn all its forces from Lebanese territory. The UN has ruled that Shebaa Farms are Syrian and not Lebanese territory and therefore Hizbollah does not have a raison d'etre to fight for liberating it from occupation.
Hizbollah is part of the new government of Lebanon; for the first time ever, this group holds a ministerial portfolio.
Roed-Larsen says s that despite its readiness for an internal dialogue and the possible transformation of the Hizbollah from an armed militia to a political party — operating as a political party and as an armed military is contradictory. The group's members are carrying of arms and such practice is not compatible with Hizbollah's participation in power and government in a democracy, said the UN envoy.
Disarming Hizbollah and Palestinians is a key Israeli/American objective, and the UN report strengthens moves towards that end.
Beyond that, however, is the implication in the report that Damascus is violating Security Council resolution 1559 which ordered foreign forces to quit Lebanon and the dismantling of militias in the country.
The report implies that Syria as continuing to maintain military intelligence agents in Lebanon and derailing efforts to start decommissioning the Hizballah.
There could be many who clearly see a pattern that aims at placing Syria in a deathlock as the case was with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but no argument or theory could dissuade the US and Israel from pursuing their goal for "taming" Syria into total submission through rendering Damascus "teethless" — in all aspects — or through destabilising that country and leading it into a "regime change" and installation of a US-friendly government in Damascus.
If anyone needed any indicator to the joint effort, then here is one: Reports are plenty in cyberspace that the US is already in consultations with Israel and key European allies over a "successor" to Assad.
That is what we are seeing in the case of Syria, the US and the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, and that is what we saw in the case of Iraq, the US and weapons of mass destruction.
The Syria scenarios are unfolding as pre-scripted, as indeed was the case against Saddam Hussein that led to the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 as the world has learnt through concrete evidence that emerged after the war that is enough to convince the strongest sceptic..
In the next few days, the United Nations Security Council is expected to adopt a resolution setting a deadline for Syria to comply with the world body's demands or face sanctions. A draft resolution in circulation demands that Syria detain officials suspected of plotting the murder of Hariri, freeze their assets and impose a travel ban on them.
The draft resolution, a joint work of the US, Britain and France, threatens “further measures” if Syria fails to co-operate with the UN investigation headed by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who has submitted a report saying he found “converging evidence” of Syrian involvement in the Feb.14 bomb blast that killed Hariri and 20 others in Beirut, and implicated Bashar Al Assad’s brother, Maher, and his brother in-law, Assef Shawkat, chief of military intelligence, in the alleged conspiracy.
Clearly sensing that the trap is closing around Syria regardless of innocence or guilt, President Bashar Al Assad has promised the three countries behind the draft resolution that any Syrian accused will face trial if "proved by concrete evidence" to have had a role in the Hariri killing.
"I have declared that Syria is innocent of this crime, and I am ready to follow up action to bring to trial any Syrian who could be proved by concrete evidence to have had connection with this crime," says the Syrian president's letter, as quoted by news agencies.
Assad also warned against using the Mehlis report as a political tool to pressure Syria. That was a reference to the US accusations that the Syrian government is supporting militant Palestinian factions, intervening in Lebanon and failing to prevent foreign fighters from infiltrating into Iraq.
"Such use of this report will have big, serious repercussions on the already tense situation which our region goes through, at a time we are more in need to have objective and constructive positions that would help the countries of the region to achieve stability," said Assad's letter.
However, Washington has smelt blood and is not having any of that.
"Once again Syria has demonstrated by its policies and its actions that it's out of step with the international community and in this instance specifically, by its failure to correctly read the tea leaves and fully co-operate" with the Mehlis investigation, said State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli.
"That is why you have a Security Council that's meeting to come to some conclusion about what to do about that failure to co-operate," Ereli said. "So it's a little late now for Syria to try to be making up for past failures."
By "full co-operation," the US means unrestrained access for Mehlis to question any Syrian official in or outside Syria as he might deem fit and this includes Bashar Al Assad himself.
Obviously, the US believes it has Syria over a barrel wants to plunge the knife deeper by subjecting top Syrian officials to humiliating questioning and thus to demoralise the Syrian people, and that was what was inherent in the comment by US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. "No person is above the law, and the president (Assad) has had time to talk to the media. If he has time to do that, he has time to talk to Commissioner Mehlis," Bolton said. (Here, one is reminded of the non-availability of President George W Bush to have a meeting with the anti-war mother of an American soldier who was killed in action although she was stationed for more than three weeks in August out his ranch in Texas where he was vacationing. Indeed the circumstances are different, but Bolton's comment was at best contemptuous as if Assad was already in the dock and one just wonders how it would be for him if the target of such comment was his own president).
The very fact that Washington is brushing aside Assad's pledge to try any Syrian found involved in the Hariri killing, the most substantive response from Damascus to the Mehlis report, is indicative of the shape of things to come. It is very much a re-enactment of the obviously pre-determined rejection of all pre-war proposals and offers made by Saddam.
The sanctions that the US would like to see imposed on Syria immediately include travel and financial sanctions on Assad’s family and inner circle, again another avenue for demoralising the Syrian people.
The US has arranged a special meeting of foreign ministers of the Security Council on Monday. Obviously, Washington hopes to convince Russia and China — which have rejected the move for sanctions — into shifting their stand through watering down the language a little.
Moscow has promised to work to prevent sanctions, but it remains to be see how far it would be able to resist direct and indirect American-British-French pressure into accepting the "inevitable."
Mehlis himself has added to the pressure against Syria by "disclosing" that he and his team members faced threats.
“The level of risk, which was already high, will increase further, particularly after the issuance of the report,” he said. “The commission has received a number of threats which were deemed, in the assessment of our security personnel, to be credible.”
Although Mehlis said that the threats came from “unknown groups” and not specifically from any Syrian or Lebanese officials, the implication was there.
Nejib Friji, the UN spokesman in Beirut, has been recalled from Lebanon "for his own safety” and is now working another UN mission.
The US is also trying to project Syria as being isolated although one fails to see the extent of any isolation. Indeed, Washington has suspended all but routine diplomatic contacts with the Syrian government and is keeping a deaf ear to attempts in recent months to resume dialogue on intelligence issues.
The Arabs at large seem to be convinced that Syria is being railroaded into being deprived of its pan-Arab nationalist credentials in order to suit Israeli interests and make concessions and compromises over issues that are central to Syria's integrity, territorial rights and political process.
However, there seems to little the Arabs could to do help ease the situation as the case was indeed with Iraq.
Notwithstanding the detailed findings of Mehlis, there is no "concrete evidence" to support his allegations. Obviously, the German prosecutor hopes to come up with such evidence before Dec.15, when he is expected to present his final report the UN Security Council.
The initial report contains direct quotes from people who were close to Hariri as saying that the assassinated prime minister had received direct threats from Assad himself in the run-up to the amendment in the Lebanese constitution that allowed a three-year extension of the term in office of pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud last year. Obviously, Mehlis wants to question Assad on that point.
When the news of the Hariri assassination broke, few in the Arab World accepted that Syria could have been behind it. Damascus is not deemed that naive to believe that it could get away with the killing. If anything, as events have proved out, Syria suffered the most as a result and this is a factor that no one expects Damascus to have overlooked.
Many in the Middle East subscribe to the theory that Israeli agents penetrated Syrian circles and engineered the killing in such a way that all the fingers pointed to Damascus.
Indeed, there are many ifs and buts in the light of the Mehlis findings that contradict the Israel theory. But the idea that a much more sinister plot was behind the killing was raised immediately after the incident not only by Arabs but also Americans.
Mark Whitney writes on http://www.informationclearinghouse.info:
"One can hardly imagine a greater disaster for poor Syria who has been scrambling to avoid the American bludgeon for the last four years. Few people realise that Syria provided more assistance in the first year of the war on terror after 9-11 than any other nation. That’s of little consequence now, as the US is on a mission to quickly integrate the entire region beneath the American standard and prove that it can be trusted with its continued stewardship of the world economy."
According to Whitney, "to understand who assassinated Rafiq Hariri we don’t need to look any further than the $1.5 billion US embassy currently under construction in Baghdad. The new embassy, the largest of its kind in the world, will facilitate 1,800 employees and serve as the regional nerve centre for American political and economic activity. What does this have to do with al Hariri?
"It demonstrates that the US is establishing a massive command centre for its future domination of the entire Middle East. This suggests that Lebanon must be entered into the family of client states who accept a subservient role to American military and economic power, and who willingly comply with the requirements of the regional constable, Israel.
"Hariri’s assassination provides the raison d'être for severing ties with Syria and for transforming Lebanon into a US vassal. This conforms nicely with Israel’s ambition to surround itself with non-threatening states as well as affording access to the vital water resources of Lebanon’s Wazzani River. In other words, the murder of Hariri has created some extremely fortunate opportunities for both Israel and the US; merging seamlessly with their overall objectives in the region."
Bushra Al Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer and political activist, told Aljazeera.net a few days after the killing that the plot against Hariri's life also targeted Syria.
"If we look at the way the assassination has been conducted, it is very sophisticated, I knew Hariri's security measures - no local system could have breached them.
"The question is, who stands to benefit from his death? Syria's enemies. I think Hariri's death is part of the plan to divide the region into tiny helpless sectarian states. This plan has started in Iraq and it will continue to hit all other Arab countries."
There is another school of thought that gained strength in view of the Mehlis findings. It says that criminal activities rather than politics were the prime factor behind the killing.
This school believes that the fear of losing annual earnings of hundreds of millions dollars through clandestine means including smuggling, drugs and money-laundering was behind the assassination; that people in influential position in Syria and not necessarily directly linked to the president were behind the plot and there is no indication that Assad knew of the conspiracy.
The reason for the killing did not involve Syrian-Lebanese politics, although Hariri had turned to be a bitter critic of Syria's military presence in Lebanon at that time (Syria withdrew its forces from Lebanon in April this year under world pressure following the Hariri killing).
The real reason, proponents of this theory say, those who plotted the killing feared that Hariri was bent upon ending the Syrian presence in Lebanon and this would have meant hundreds of millions of dollars in losses through smuggling, fraud, corruption and drug business and money-laundering using Lebanese and Syrian banks. .
The theorists argue that the group had extensive organisation and considerable resources and capabilities. They used the Syrian military intelligence presence in Lebanon to monitor Hariri's movements for months before deciding setting a date for the killing.
The Mehlis report contains the conclusions on the Hariri assassination drawn from testimonies taken from more than 400 witnesses, but it does not offer any material evidence. More importantly, it does not refer directly to the alleged Lebanese-Syrian nexus which operated the smuggling, fraud and money-laundering network.
The report stops short of naming at least five key Syrian personalities involved in the assassination plot, but the names were removed by Mehlis before it was released to the public, reports have said.
According to the report, the five names removed from the report are those of:
— Maher Al Assad, the younger brother of Bashar Al Assad;
— the president's brother-in-law General Assef Shawqat, who is also chief of Syrian military intelligence;
— Gen. Roustum Ghazali, the head of special external intelligence and former Syrian military intelligence chief in Lebanon;
— Gen. Hassan Khalil, a liaison officer between the various Syrian intelligence bodies;
and Col. Mohsein Hamoud, a former military intelligence officer who served in Lebanon.
Hamoud is said to have identified by Mehlis as the colonel who drove the Mitsubishi Canter bomb car from Syria to Lebanon on Jan. 21.
That was the vehicle rigged with 1,000 kilogrammes of military explosives which blew up as Hariri's convoy, according to Mehlis.
While the report says that Japanese investigators helping him established that the vehicle was stolen from Sagamihara City, Japan, on Oct.12, 2004, there is no indication whether the German prosecutor sought to trace its transfer from Japan to the Middle East. Surely, establishing the ownership of the vehicle based on registration documents could be central to pinpointing individuals supposedly linked to the bomb attack. Why was the avenue not pursued is a question many are asking.
Robert Parry, author of who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, observes (www.consortiumnews.com):
"The UN report contains no details about the Japanese investigation of the theft, nor does it indicate what Japanese police may have discovered about the identity of the thieves or how they may have shipped the van from a suburb of Tokyo to the Middle East in the four months before the Hariri attack.
"Though the investigation of a vehicle theft may have attracted little Japanese police attention a year ago, the van’s apparent role in a major act of international terrorism would seem to justify a redoubling of those efforts now.
"At minimum, the UN investigators might have insisted on including details such as the name of the original owner, the circumstances surrounding the theft, and the identities of car-theft rings in the Sagamihara area. Plus, investigators could have checked on shipments of white Mitsubishi Canter Vans out of Japan to Middle East destinations.
"Since the time frame between the reported theft and the bombing was less than four months, Japanese authorities could have at least narrowed down those possible shipments and Middle East customs services might have records of imported vehicles."
He goes on to say:
"...While Syria and its freewheeling intelligence services may remain prime suspects in the Hariri assassination, the bitter Iraq experience might justify at least the running down of obvious leads that could either strengthen or disprove the case, like the mystery of the white Mitsubishi Canter Van.
"Investigators might get much closer to the truth if they could determine what happened to the van between the moment it disappeared off the streets of a Japanese city and reappeared almost four months later, rolling towards Rafiq Hariri’s motorcade."
Following are some of the highlights of the Mehlis report:
Gen. Mustapha Hamdan, the commander of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s security detail , was the main Lebanese counterpart of the gang.
Gen. Jamil Al Sayyed (head of Lebanese general intelligence) co-operated closely with Hamdan and Gen. Raymond Azar (chief of Lebanese police) in preparing the assassination. He also co-ordinated with Gen. Rustum Ghazali (head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon) and, among others, members of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP-GC) headed by Ahmed Jibril in Lebanon.
Hamdan and Azar provided logistical support, providing money, telephones, cars, walkie-talkies, pagers, weapons, ID-cards etc.
(Contributing to this theory is an argument that the suicide driver assigned to the bomb-rigged Mitsubishi was an Iraqi individual who was led to believe the target was Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi (who happened to be in Beirut prior to the assassination). The explosives used were of the kind used in Iraq so as to misdirect suspicions towards extremist groups.
Following are highlights of the Mehlis report:
The day before the assassination, the head of Hariri's close protection unit, Yehya Al Arab alias Abu Tareq, had a meeting with Ghazali. He was so shaken up by that meeting that he went home, turned off his phone and stayed there for a few hours. The version given by Ghazali of this meeting is not compatible with other testimony.
In November 2004, Hajj, head of the Internal Security Forces, ordered the state security detail around Hariri reduced from 40 to eight guards.
Eight telephone numbers and 10 mobile telephones were used to organise surveillance on Hariri and to carry out the assassination. The lines were put into circulation on Jan.4, 2005 in the northern part of Lebanon, between Terbol and Menyeh and used to observe Hariri’s habits, mostly in Beirut city.
On the day of the assassination, six of the telephones were used in the area between Parliament Square and the St. George Hotel and the axes of Zqaq Al Blat and Al Bachoura — the route of the Hariri convoy.
Cell site records show that cellular telephones utilising these six calling cards were situated so that they covered every possible route linking Parliament to Kuraytem Palace.
The calls --- and the usage of the cards --- terminated a few minutes before the blast. The lines have all been inactive since.
The technical department of Lebanese Military intelligence Service, headed by Col. Ghassan Tufayli, placed important figures, including Hariri, under permanent wiretapping. The transcripts were forwarded on a daily basis to Raymond Azar and to the head of the army, General Michel Suleyman. Tufayli admitted that transcripts were sent to the Lebanese president and to Ghazali.
The CCTV of the HSBC bank, located close to the scene of the explosion, showed a white Mitsubishi Canter van entering the area of the explosion shortly before Hariri’s convoy and moving six times more slowly than other vehicles on the same stretch of road. The car entered the area one minute and 49 seconds before the Hariri convoy.
The weakness of the Lebanese authorities’ initial action and the tampering with evidence during the first crime scene examination have made it difficult to identify the type of explosives used in the blast and track it to source - and thus denied the investigation an important lead to the perpetrators.
It appears that at least one of the three jamming devices in Hariri’s convoy was operational and functioning at the time of the blast. Further investigation may provide information about how the explosion was activated.
Expert teams deduce from the distribution of the so far located parts of the Mitsubishi Canter truck that the vehicle was possibly used as the bomb carrier.
An aboveground explosion is the most feasible possibility — in which case around 1,000 kg would have been used of extra-high explosive. Samples from the crater wall indicate TNT. No sign of the trigger was found.
The physical evidence and the fact that small human remains were found of an unidentified person, but no large body parts such as legs, feet or lower arms, points to a suicide bomber as the most likely cause of the blast. Another only slightly less likely possibility is that of a remotely-controlled device. However, no residues of such a device have been recovered from the crime scene.
A Palestinian, Abu Adass, who claimed responsibility for the murder in the name of a radical organisation on a videotape aired by Al Jazeera TV, was no more than a decoy. He was detained in Syria and forced at gunpoint to record the video tape. The videotape was sent to Beirut on the morning of Feb.14, and handed over to Gen Jamil Al Sayyed (head of Lebanese General Intelligence). A civilian with a criminal record and a security officer placed the tape somewhere in Hamra and notified Ghassan Ben Jeddo, an Al-Jazeera TV reporter.
There is no evidence that Abu Adass belonged to the group Al Nasra Wal-jihad Fee Bilad Al Sham as claimed in the videotape, or even that such a group ever existed.
There are no indications (other than the videotape) that he drove a truck containing the bomb that killed Hariri. The evidence does show that Abu Adass left his home on Jan.18, 2005, and was taken, voluntarily or not, to Syria, where he was most probably killed.
These details all fall too pat into the case being built against Syria, and that is why they are suspect.
According to Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, a key source of information that Mehlis collected was a convicted swindler who has no credibility.
Pressure point
The US has secured an additional point of pressure against Syria.
A report submitted to the UN Security Council by special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen sharply criticises the Hizbollah’s unchanged status in Lebanon as failure to implement Security Council Resolution 1559’s order to disband all militias and armed groups in Lebanon, including the Palestinians.
He challenges the Hizbollah’s claim to be “a legitimate resistance movement” fighting for the liberation of the Shebaa Farms from Israeli occupation in stark contrast to the UN position that Israel has fulfilled all Security Council resolutions and withdrawn all its forces from Lebanese territory. The UN has ruled that Shebaa Farms are Syrian and not Lebanese territory and therefore Hizbollah does not have a raison d'etre to fight for liberating it from occupation.
Hizbollah is part of the new government of Lebanon; for the first time ever, this group holds a ministerial portfolio.
Roed-Larsen says s that despite its readiness for an internal dialogue and the possible transformation of the Hizbollah from an armed militia to a political party — operating as a political party and as an armed military is contradictory. The group's members are carrying of arms and such practice is not compatible with Hizbollah's participation in power and government in a democracy, said the UN envoy.
Disarming Hizbollah and Palestinians is a key Israeli/American objective, and the UN report strengthens moves towards that end.
Beyond that, however, is the implication in the report that Damascus is violating Security Council resolution 1559 which ordered foreign forces to quit Lebanon and the dismantling of militias in the country.
The report implies that Syria as continuing to maintain military intelligence agents in Lebanon and derailing efforts to start decommissioning the Hizballah.
There could be many who clearly see a pattern that aims at placing Syria in a deathlock as the case was with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but no argument or theory could dissuade the US and Israel from pursuing their goal for "taming" Syria into total submission through rendering Damascus "teethless" — in all aspects — or through destabilising that country and leading it into a "regime change" and installation of a US-friendly government in Damascus.
If anyone needed any indicator to the joint effort, then here is one: Reports are plenty in cyberspace that the US is already in consultations with Israel and key European allies over a "successor" to Assad.
Syria being railoaded
PV Vivekanand
CURTAINS go up next week for the next act of the US-Israeli-written script for the Middle East: A United Nations Security Council resolution setting out demands that the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad could not meet if it wishes to survive in power. These would include unfrettered access to Syrian leaders, including the president himself, for the UN commission investigating the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The most serious demand would be that Syria detain "key" suspects implicated in the Hariri assassination, freeze their assets and impose a travel ban on them. The suspects are said to include Bashar Al Assad's brother Maher, brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, and three other people occupying senior positions in the Syrian intelligence network.
Surely, Bashar Al Assad would not be able to meet such a demand, and those making the demand know it well.
What would follow the expected Syrian refusal is, again, very natural: Tough economic, diplomatic and military sanctions against Syria to be followed by military action if needed.
There are many theories and arguments explaining how the UN investigator, German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, reached the preliminary conclusion that he found “converging evidence” of Syrian involvement in the Feb.14 bomb blast that killed Hariri and 20 others in Beirut.
However, none of these theories and arguments would be able to fend off the American-Israeli drive to remove Syria as a hurdle in the US quest for global supremacy and the Israeli drive for regional domination without having to make any compromise over Arab territories it occupied during the 1967 war, mainly the Golan Heights in the Syrian context.
The American case against Syria has many points of pressure: Damascus is not doing enough to prevent the infiltration of foreign fighters into Iraq across its border. It s continuing to support Palestinian groups which carry out "terrorist" attacks against Israelis. It is closely linked with Lebanese militant groups such as Hizbollah and thus is continuing to "meddle" in Lebanon in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for dismantling of all militias and armed groups in Lebanon, including the Palestinians living in refugee camps in the south of the country.
The net picture that emerges from the American charges against Syria closely resembles the case that the US built against Iraq before invading that country and toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003.
From the look of things at this juncture, Syria does not seem to have a way out of the bear trap. It could either meet the US-engineered UN demands that would be raised next week or remain defiant and face destabilisation leading to "regime change."
However, destabilising Syria would mean destabilising the entire region, what with the Iraq embroglio spinning out of American control despite Washington's assertions to the contrary. It is not a winner-takes-all and the loser-gives-up all situation because a destablised region would not mean a docile area conducive to American interests.
The Arab League is perhaps the only natural party which could avert the negative course of events. There is talk about behind-the-scene mediation to avert a "regime change" in Syria, but Washington does not seem to be too keen on it either.
However, an effort has to be made to defuse the situation, and it has to come from the Arab League with support from Europe and others and lead towards a solution that does not further compromise legitimate Arab rights for the sake of protecting and advancing external interests in the region.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Saddam trial - fairness is irrelevant
Irrelevance of the question of fairness and justice
THE DRAMA is unfolding. An ousted Arab head of state was put on trial on Wednesday. There is a surrealistic air to the whole episode. Never before has anything resembling this script taken place anywhere in this world. A toppled Arab head of state has been charged with crimes against humanity and is being tried by a court formed under foreign military occupation and following laws and procedures dictated by a foreign military occupier. The person who succeeded him as president has already ruled that the accused is guilty as charged and deserves to be executed 20 times.
International legal experts have raised serious questions about the legality of the whole process. They point out that laws formulated under foreign military occupation could never be accepted as legitimate.
Surely, no one is forgetting that Saddam Hussein, the toppled Iraqi president, is accused of killing thousands of people in northern and southern Iraq who opposed him. Summary executions, long detentions and torture were his key tools to maintain his grip on power and eliminate dissent, according to his detractors. Among the most serious and specific charge is that he used chemicals to kill up to 5,000 Kurds in the north in the late 80s. Then there are charges related to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Iraqi military's suppression of the Shiite revolt in the south following the US-led war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. .
Then why is Saddam and seven others put on trial at this point in time charged with the killing of 143 people in the mostly Shiite town of Dujail following an assassination attempt against him? What is happening to the rest of the charges, including one that says he ordered the chemical attack on Halabja? Aren't those charges the most horrifying of all? When will those cases be heard by the special tribunal which is trying him?
Why not slap him with the most serious charge of all – of genocide of his people — and get over with whatever process is to be followed before the inevitable death sentence is pronounced against him?
Or will those cases ever come up in court with Saddam in the dock where he will, no doubt, take the grandstand and spill the beans as to who had given him not only the know-how and material to produce the weapons that went into some the crimes of which he is accuse?
That is the question that most people felt like asking on Wednesday. Indeed, there was no answer except an earlier contention by an Iraqi judge that the Dujail case was the easiest to put together as far as evidence-gathering and preparation is concerned, and because documents were already available. However, it sounds hollow, given the seriousness of other charges and cases.
The trial of has begun with all the elements of drama that were expected. The “what-is-your-name” by the judge and the “who-are-you-to-ask” by the defendant were all widely looked forward to by the world. The judge and the defendant played their parts well and there was a lot of adrenaline. While Saddam faces what many see as natural justice and many others see as nothing more than the celebration of an occasion to play “victors’ justice,” the question of the fairness of the trial is likely to be overlooked. Except for those who are to gain from this courtroom drama, others will be wondering which way justice is being guided.
It is only natural if one suspects the fairness of the trial of a former head of state while the country is still under occupation and he is being tried by a special tribunal formed of people who belong to groups that have always wanted him out of power
That is why most people would see Saddam’s trial as a showpiece for the interested parties to claim victory of “their” justice. It is not the question of whether Saddam deserves justice and punishment for the crimes he has done to his people that bothers the fair-minded. What is worrying is the packaging of the whole procedure into a marketable political commodity, aimed at settling old scores for some and justifying an illegal war for others. The trial smacks more of politics and revenge than of justice.
The immediate parallel to the Saddam trial is the trial of former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic by the UN war crimes court at the Hague. Heads of states facing trials over charges of crimes against humanity is a rare phenomenon. Saddam’s only predecessor in this matter is Milosevic. Both are being tried for mass murders and genocide. Evidence is plenty against the defendants. They also share the hatred against the courts that try them. But the glaring difference is that while one is being tried at a world court where international rules and regulations apply, the other is facing a court in his own occupied country that does not even have a proper constitution.
Most would agree that this is not the circumstances under which Saddam should have been made to face justice. But Washington wanted dictate the ground rules. Already the US is claiming that the trial is a victory for democracy and a “momentous step in the building of a new Iraq." For all the victors, the trial that seem to matter more than the verdict, which seems to be predetermined anyway if only because of some of them want to pre-empt the emergence of certain facts linked to their own backing for the accused and complicity in some of the serious crimes attributed to him.
What then is relevance of the question whether Saddam and others who are in the dock with him would get a fair trial?
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