Wednesday, October 22, 2003
But the time has come for the sheep-like political correctness which has cowed members of this Senate to come to an end.
The Emperor has no clothes. This entire adventure in Iraq has been based on propaganda and manipulation. Eighty-seven billion dollars is too much to pay for the continuation of a war based on falsehoods.
Taking the nation to war based on misleading rhetoric and hyped intelligence is a travesty and a tragedy. It is the most cynical of all cynical acts. It is dangerous to manipulate the truth. It is dangerous because once having lied, it is difficult to ever be believed again. Having misled the American people and stampeded them to war, this administration must now attempt to sustain a policy predicated on falsehoods - Robert Byrd (D-WVa)
What’s Happening, Iraq: Casualties.
I’m periodically asked about casualties. This comes via the Project on Defense Alternatives which has been investigating hospital and morgue records.
Adding together our estimates of Iraqi noncombatant fatalities (3,750 plus/minus 550) and combatant fatalities (9,200 plus/minus 1,600) yields our estimate for total Iraqi fatalities in the war: 12,950 plus or minus 2,150 (16.5 percent). Rounding this off, our analysis suggests that as few as 11,000 Iraqis may have been killed in the war or as many as 15,000. It is likely that approximately 30 percent of the fatalities were noncombatants -- that is: civilians who did not take up arms.
http://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8.html#5.%20Total%20Iraqi%20fatalities%20in%20the%202003
Secrecy / PR re casualties
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post covers the latest attempt to cloak the harsh realities of the Iraq occupation.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets.
To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases.
In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops," the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning remains.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55816-2003Oct20?language=printer
Typical PR re Iraq:
There are countless examples; this one is not any more dramatic than most, just typical. It comes from the same article in Newsweek (Richard Wolffe, Rod Nordland) cited in the last blog. The article is being cited in NPR reports as well.
Yet reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition’s achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq’s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq’s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/982193.asp
Economic Good News? No, just more deception
You might recall a flurry of budget projections re the budget deficit that raised some eyebrows. During the summer it became clear that the fiscal ’03 year would feature a record-setting deficit. As non-partisan and congressional budget offices predicted deficits close to $400 billion, the Administration “confessed” to a figure of $455 billion. Why would they so assert?
Now, official figures for last year are about $375 billion, and the Administration is claiming that the figure is proof that “the tax cuts are working.” Oh. At least not everyone is buying. Ernest Hollings (D-SC) offered that
We need to find out what kind of shenanigans caused the estimate to be so off, whether OMB deliberately estimated high numbers so everybody could jump for joy this week," Hollings wrote in a letter to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles, R-Okla., requesting hearings on the inaccuracy of the administration's July projection.
Hey, we know their tax cuts have worked. Just ask those who attend public universities, which experienced a 14% increase last year, or those who experienced a similar increase in their health insurance premiums, or …
9/11: The 20th Hijacker
In a several step process, the Government has backed away from this assertion. Previously destined to be a poster boy for Ashcroft et al, he apparently will be absolved, i.e. charged with a lesser offense, now that the FBI has concluded he wasn’t involved in the planning of the attacks.
Latest from Seymour Hersh
Hersh is a treasure, and if you’ve been under-informed about our Iraq intelligence fiasco, this’ll do it. The major point of the rich article is that intelligence pros were so upset with the cooking of intelligence that they purposely allowed the Niger story to survive, thinking the White House would catch it and thus understand the pros’ anger. Yet, Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.
Below are highlights with the link to the full text, from the current New Yorker.
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”
---------------------
It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President’s office.
As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.
“It was an unbelievably closed and small group,” the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. “There’s so much intelligence out there that it’s easy to pick and
---------------------------
Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President’s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. “They got pounded on, day after day,” one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. “Pretty soon you say ‘Fuck it.’” And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.
Not all the senior scientists are in captivity, however. Jafar Dhia Jafar, a British-educated physicist who coördinated Iraq’s efforts to make the bomb in the nineteen-eighties, and who had direct access to Saddam Hussein, fled Iraq in early April, before Baghdad fell, and, with the help of his brother, Hamid, the managing director of a large energy company, made his way to the United Arab Emirates. Jafar has refused to return to Baghdad, but he agreed to be debriefed by C.I.A. and British intelligence agents. There were some twenty meetings, involving as many as fifteen American and British experts. The first meeting, on April 11th, began with an urgent question from a C.I.A. officer: “Does Iraq have a nuclear device? The military really want to know. They are extremely worried.” Jafar’s response, according to the notes of an eyewitness, was to laugh. The notes continued:
Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no W.M.D., period. “The answer was none.” . . . Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the 91 Gulf war, and after the unscom [United Nations] inspection process was set up. . . and the following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]—“give them everything.”
The notes said that Jafar was then asked, “But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?” His answer was clear: “I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.”
Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons:
Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. “No way we could escape the United States.” Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.
Jafar had his own explanation, according to the notes, for one of the enduring mysteries of the U.N. inspection process—the six-thousand-warhead discrepancy between the number of chemical weapons thought to have been manufactured by Iraq before 1991 and the number that were accounted for by the U.N. inspection teams. It was this discrepancy which led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions. Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all.
There are always credibility problems with witnesses from a defeated regime, and anyone involved in the creation or concealment of W.M.D.s. would have a motive to deny it. But a strong endorsement of Jafar’s integrity came from an unusual source—Jacques Baute, of the I.A.E.A., who spent much of the past decade locked in a struggle with Jafar and the other W.M.D. scientists and technicians of Iraq. “I don’t believe anybody,” Baute told me, “but, by and large, what he told us after 1995 was pretty accurate.”
-R
The Emperor has no clothes. This entire adventure in Iraq has been based on propaganda and manipulation. Eighty-seven billion dollars is too much to pay for the continuation of a war based on falsehoods.
Taking the nation to war based on misleading rhetoric and hyped intelligence is a travesty and a tragedy. It is the most cynical of all cynical acts. It is dangerous to manipulate the truth. It is dangerous because once having lied, it is difficult to ever be believed again. Having misled the American people and stampeded them to war, this administration must now attempt to sustain a policy predicated on falsehoods - Robert Byrd (D-WVa)
What’s Happening, Iraq: Casualties.
I’m periodically asked about casualties. This comes via the Project on Defense Alternatives which has been investigating hospital and morgue records.
Adding together our estimates of Iraqi noncombatant fatalities (3,750 plus/minus 550) and combatant fatalities (9,200 plus/minus 1,600) yields our estimate for total Iraqi fatalities in the war: 12,950 plus or minus 2,150 (16.5 percent). Rounding this off, our analysis suggests that as few as 11,000 Iraqis may have been killed in the war or as many as 15,000. It is likely that approximately 30 percent of the fatalities were noncombatants -- that is: civilians who did not take up arms.
http://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8.html#5.%20Total%20Iraqi%20fatalities%20in%20the%202003
Secrecy / PR re casualties
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post covers the latest attempt to cloak the harsh realities of the Iraq occupation.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets.
To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases.
In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops," the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning remains.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55816-2003Oct20?language=printer
Typical PR re Iraq:
There are countless examples; this one is not any more dramatic than most, just typical. It comes from the same article in Newsweek (Richard Wolffe, Rod Nordland) cited in the last blog. The article is being cited in NPR reports as well.
Yet reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition’s achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq’s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq’s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/982193.asp
Economic Good News? No, just more deception
You might recall a flurry of budget projections re the budget deficit that raised some eyebrows. During the summer it became clear that the fiscal ’03 year would feature a record-setting deficit. As non-partisan and congressional budget offices predicted deficits close to $400 billion, the Administration “confessed” to a figure of $455 billion. Why would they so assert?
Now, official figures for last year are about $375 billion, and the Administration is claiming that the figure is proof that “the tax cuts are working.” Oh. At least not everyone is buying. Ernest Hollings (D-SC) offered that
We need to find out what kind of shenanigans caused the estimate to be so off, whether OMB deliberately estimated high numbers so everybody could jump for joy this week," Hollings wrote in a letter to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles, R-Okla., requesting hearings on the inaccuracy of the administration's July projection.
Hey, we know their tax cuts have worked. Just ask those who attend public universities, which experienced a 14% increase last year, or those who experienced a similar increase in their health insurance premiums, or …
9/11: The 20th Hijacker
In a several step process, the Government has backed away from this assertion. Previously destined to be a poster boy for Ashcroft et al, he apparently will be absolved, i.e. charged with a lesser offense, now that the FBI has concluded he wasn’t involved in the planning of the attacks.
Latest from Seymour Hersh
Hersh is a treasure, and if you’ve been under-informed about our Iraq intelligence fiasco, this’ll do it. The major point of the rich article is that intelligence pros were so upset with the cooking of intelligence that they purposely allowed the Niger story to survive, thinking the White House would catch it and thus understand the pros’ anger. Yet, Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.
Below are highlights with the link to the full text, from the current New Yorker.
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”
---------------------
It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President’s office.
As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.
“It was an unbelievably closed and small group,” the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. “There’s so much intelligence out there that it’s easy to pick and
---------------------------
Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President’s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. “They got pounded on, day after day,” one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. “Pretty soon you say ‘Fuck it.’” And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.
Not all the senior scientists are in captivity, however. Jafar Dhia Jafar, a British-educated physicist who coördinated Iraq’s efforts to make the bomb in the nineteen-eighties, and who had direct access to Saddam Hussein, fled Iraq in early April, before Baghdad fell, and, with the help of his brother, Hamid, the managing director of a large energy company, made his way to the United Arab Emirates. Jafar has refused to return to Baghdad, but he agreed to be debriefed by C.I.A. and British intelligence agents. There were some twenty meetings, involving as many as fifteen American and British experts. The first meeting, on April 11th, began with an urgent question from a C.I.A. officer: “Does Iraq have a nuclear device? The military really want to know. They are extremely worried.” Jafar’s response, according to the notes of an eyewitness, was to laugh. The notes continued:
Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no W.M.D., period. “The answer was none.” . . . Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the 91 Gulf war, and after the unscom [United Nations] inspection process was set up. . . and the following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]—“give them everything.”
The notes said that Jafar was then asked, “But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?” His answer was clear: “I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.”
Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons:
Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. “No way we could escape the United States.” Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.
Jafar had his own explanation, according to the notes, for one of the enduring mysteries of the U.N. inspection process—the six-thousand-warhead discrepancy between the number of chemical weapons thought to have been manufactured by Iraq before 1991 and the number that were accounted for by the U.N. inspection teams. It was this discrepancy which led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions. Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all.
There are always credibility problems with witnesses from a defeated regime, and anyone involved in the creation or concealment of W.M.D.s. would have a motive to deny it. But a strong endorsement of Jafar’s integrity came from an unusual source—Jacques Baute, of the I.A.E.A., who spent much of the past decade locked in a struggle with Jafar and the other W.M.D. scientists and technicians of Iraq. “I don’t believe anybody,” Baute told me, “but, by and large, what he told us after 1995 was pretty accurate.”
-R
