[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Anti-Empire Report

[Bill Totten]

Read this or George W Bush will be president the rest of your life

by William Blum

www.killinghope.org (March 03 2008)


How could they have known? It wasn't on Oprah or Fox News

Hillary Clinton and many other members of Congress claim that their
support of the invasion of Iraq was based on faulty intelligence
reports. How could they dispute the research and analysis of all those
experts, so well trained and experienced in their fields?

Well, apart from the fact that American intelligence agencies and their
reports were by no means of one opinion (one well-publicized CIA paper,
for example, predicted all manner of devastating consequences which
could result from an invasion and occupation) ... {1}

Apart from the fact that there were several public statements, including
some on American TV, from Saddam Hussein's deputy prime minister, and
other statements made by Iraqi scientists to American media and to
American intelligence that Iraq no longer had any weapons of mass
destruction ... {2}

Apart from the fact that UN nuclear inspectors had determined before the
war that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program ... {3}

Apart from the fact that Colin Powell, speaking in February 2001 of US
sanctions on Iraq, said: "And frankly they have worked. He [Saddam
Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to
weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power
against his neighbors." {4}

Apart from all that, this question must be asked: What did the millions
of Americans who marched against the war before it began know that all
those members of Congress didn't know? At a minimum, they knew that
nothing the Bush administration had told them came anywhere close to
justifying dropping bombs on the innocent people of Iraq. They also knew
that nothing the Bush administration had told them could be trusted. All
it took to reach this advanced stage of awareness was not being born
yesterday.

As I've written before, the same phenomenon attended the Vietnam War.
The anti-Vietnam War movement burst out of the starting gate back in
August 1964, with hundreds of people demonstrating in New York. Many of
these early dissenters took apart and critically examined the
administration's statements about the war's origin, its current
situation, and its rosy picture of the future. They found continuous
omission, contradiction, and duplicity, became quickly and wholly
cynical, and called for immediate and unconditional withdrawal. This was
a state of intellect and principle it took members of Congress and the
media - and then only a small minority - until the 1970s to reach. And
even then - even today - our political and media elite viewed Vietnam
only as a "mistake"; that is, it was "the wrong way" to fight communism,
not that the United States should not be traveling all over the globe to
spew violence against anything labeled "communism" in the first place.
Essentially, the only thing these "best and brightest" have learned from
Vietnam is that we should not have fought in Vietnam. And I'm afraid
that the present generation of "leaders" will learn very little more
than that we shouldn't have invaded Iraq.


A Mecca of hypocrisy, a Vatican of double standards

On February 21, following a demonstration against the United States role
in Kosovo's declaration of independence, rioters in the Serbian capital
of Belgrade broke into the US Embassy and set fire to an office. The
attack was called "intolerable" by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
{5}, and the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay
Khalilzad, said he would ask the UN Security Council to issue a
unanimous statement "expressing the council's outrage, condemning the
attack, and also reminding the Serb government of its responsibility to
protect diplomatic facilities" {6}.

This is of course standard language for such situations. But what the
media and American officials don't remind us is that in May 1999, during
the US/NATO bombing of Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia, the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade was hit by a US missile, causing considerable damage
and killing three embassy employees. The official Washington story on
this - then, and still now - is that it was a mistake. But this is
almost certainly a lie. According to a joint investigation of The
Observer of London and the Politiken newspaper in Denmark, the embassy
was bombed because it was being used to transmit electronic
communications for the Yugoslav army after the army's regular system was
made inoperable by the bombing. The Observer was told that the embassy
bombing was deliberate by "senior military and intelligence sources in
Europe and the US" as well as being "confirmed in detail by three other
Nato officers - a flight controller operating in Naples, an intelligence
officer monitoring Yugoslav radio traffic from Macedonia and a senior
{NATO} headquarters officer in Brussels" {7}.

Moreover, the New York Times reported at the time that the bombing had
destroyed the embassy's intelligence-gathering nerve center, and two of
the three Chinese killed were intelligence officers. "The highly
sensitive nature of the parts of the embassy that were bombed suggests
why the Chinese ... insist the bombing was no accident ... 'That's
exactly why they don't buy our explanation'", said a Pentagon official
{8}. There were as well several other good reasons not to buy the story {9}.

In April 1986, after the French government refused the use of its air
space to US warplanes headed for a bombing raid on Libya, the planes
were forced to take another, longer route. When they reached Libya they
bombed so close to the French embassy that the building was damaged and
all communication links knocked out. {10}

And in April 2003, the US Ambassador to Russia was summoned to the
Russian Foreign Ministry due to the fact that the residential quarter of
Baghdad where the Russian embassy was located was bombed several times
by the United States during its invasion of Iraq {11}. There had been
reports that Saddam Hussein was hiding in the embassy {12}.

So, we can perhaps chalk up the State Department's affirmations about
the inviolability of embassies as yet another example of US foreign
policy hypocrisy. But I think that there is some satisfaction in that
American foreign policy officials, as morally damaged as they must be,
are not all so stupid that they don't know they're swimming in a sea of
hypocrisy. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2004 that "The State
Department plans to delay the release of a human rights report that was
due out today, partly because of sensitivities over the prison abuse
scandal in Iraq, US officials said. One official ... said the release of
the report, which describes actions taken by the US government to
encourage respect for human rights by other nations, could 'make us look
hypocritical'." {13}

And last year the Washington Post informed us that Chester Crocker,
former Assistant Secretary of State and current member of the State
Department's Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion, noted that "we
have to be able to cope with the argument that the US is inconsistent
and hypocritical in its promotion of democracy around the world. That
may be true." {14}


Like pornography, torture doesn't require a definition.

You know it when you see it. Or feel it. With all the media coverage of
"waterboarding" and all the congressional questioning of government
officials about their views on the subject, I imagine that by now many
people think that waterboarding must be the worst kind of torture that
the United States has engaged in, and that if waterboarding is in fact
not torture then the idiot king is correct when he says: "We don't
torture". This is the way myths are born, so let's try and squash this
particular one while it's still young.

Here in capsule form is a sample of some of the acts carried out in
recent years by American military forces, their contract employees, and
the CIA against detainees in one or another edifice of the sprawling
global prison complex maintained by the United States in occupied Iraq,
occupied Afghanistan, occupied Cuba, and various other secret prisons
occupied by the CIA around the world. It may be torture to read but the
point needs to be made. Lest we forget.

Standing or kneeling or forced into contorted, painful positions for
many hours ... in leg shackles and handcuffs with eyes, ears and mouth
covered, exposed to extremes of heat or cold ... stripped naked, led
around with a dog leash ... deprived of sleep, kicked to keep them awake
for days on end, subjecting them to a 24-hour bombardment of bright
lights or blaring noise ... guards staging races of detainees in short
leg shackles, violently punishing them if they fall ... withholding
painkillers and other medications from the injured ... sensory
deprivation, with all human contact cut off ... made to lie naked on a
sheet of ice ... fake blood smeared on Muslim men when they are about to
pray, telling them that it's menstrual blood.

The Iraqi general "was put headfirst into a sleeping bag, wrapped with
electrical cord and knocked down before the soldiers sat and stood on
him. The cause of death was determined to be suffocation."

Chained to the ceiling, shackled so tightly that the blood flow stops
... shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a
time, left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on
themselves; a detainee found with a pile of hair next to him; he had
apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night
... wrapping a prisoner in an Israeli flag ... use of unmuzzled,
growling dogs to frighten, in at least one instance actually biting and
severely injuring a detainee ... burn marks on their backs ... detainee
left at an Iraqi hospital, comatose, with massive head trauma, burns on
the bottoms of his feet caused by electrocution, bruises on his arms ...
more than a hundred detainees have died during interrogations ...

The death of two captives in Afghanistan: one from "blunt force injuries
to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease"; an autopsy
showed that his legs were so damaged that amputation would have been
necessary; the other captive suffered from a blood clot in the lung that
was exacerbated by a "blunt force injury" ...

Kicks to the groin and legs, shoving or slamming detainees into walls
and tables, forcing water in their mouths until they could not breathe
... He had his hands handcuffed behind him and was suspended by his
wrists - "His arms were so badly stretched I was surprised they didn't
pop out of their sockets" ... forced to masturbate while being
photographed and videotaped ... seven naked Iraqis piled on top of each
other in a pyramid ... detainee punched in the chest so hard he almost
went into cardiac arrest ... forcing naked male detainees to wear
women's underwear.

The report by General Taguba found that between October and December of
2003 there were numerous instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton
criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including breaking
chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees,
threatening male detainees with rape, sodomizing a detainee with a
chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, raping female prisoners ...

Eighteen days naked and alone in a cell, often with his hands and feet
bound together, frequently beaten ... "He locked his arm under mine and
holding the back of my head he beat my head against the doors of the
cells" ... his hands and feet were pushed through the metal bars of the
cell door and then tied together.

Six weeks after his release, he says he has lost the will to live. He is
too ashamed to be seen by his friends and family and has not seen or
spoken to his fiancée. The wedding is off. "I was a man before, but my
manhood was taken away. Since this happened to me, I consider myself
dead. My life feels over."

Iraqi prisoners were forced to crawl through broken glass and wear
women's sanitary products ... two drunken interrogators took a female
Iraqi prisoner from her cell in the middle of the night and stripped her
naked to the waist ... an Iraqi woman in her 70s was harnessed and
ridden like a donkey ... detainees were pressed to denounce Islam, or
force-fed pork and liquor ...

Jamadi died an hour after his arrival at Abu Ghraib in early November
2003; he had been beaten while in CIA custody and then hung by his
wrists, with his arms crossed across his back. US Army guards at the
prison then packed his body in ice and posed with the corpse in mocking
photographs.

"They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees ... and we had
to bark like a dog, and if we didn't do that they started hitting us
hard on our face and chest with no mercy" ... "Do you believe in
anything?" the soldier asked. "I said to him, 'I believe in Allah'. So
he said, 'But I believe in torture and I will torture you'."

Taken out and tied to a post, rubber bullets were fired at them; made to
kneel in the sun until they collapsed ... "They tied my hands to my feet
behind my back. My left hand to my right foot and my right hand to my
left foot. I was lying face down and they were beating me like this" ...
inmates kept in wire cages with concrete floors and no protection from
the elements.

"They actually said: 'You have no rights here'. After a while, we
stopped asking for human rights - we wanted animal rights" ... crosses
shaved into their scalp or body hair ... dislocated his arms, beat his
leg with a bat, crushed his nose, and put an unloaded gun in his mouth
and pulled the trigger ... Six Kuwaiti prisoners said they were severely
beaten, given electric shocks and sodomized by US forces in Afghanistan ...

The Afghan detainee had been captured in Pakistan along with a group of
other Afghans. His connection to al Qaeda or the value of his
intelligence was never established before he died. "He was probably
associated with people who were associated with al Qaeda", one US
government official said ... numerous suicide attempts ...

And here's George W in 2004: "The world is better off without Saddam
Hussein in power. The world is better off because he sits in a prison
cell. Because we acted, torture rooms are closed, rape rooms no longer
exist." {15}

Brian Whitman, spokesman for the US Department of Defense, 2005: "The
United States treats all detainees in their custody with dignity and
respect". {16}

It should be noted that the CIA has been treating (real and alleged)
opponents of American imperialism with similar dignity and respect ever
since the Agency's founding. {17} Police and prisons within the United
States have been torturing for even longer. {18}

Now for the good news: The Bush administration, trying to shore up
support for its military-trial procedures, has cabled US embassies with
instructions that evidence obtained through torture will not be allowed.
But evidence obtained through treatment considered "cruel, inhuman, and
degrading" is to be allowed. {19}

George Bernard Shaw used three concepts to describe the positions of
individuals in Nazi Germany: intelligence, decency, and Naziism. He
argued that if a person was intelligent, and a Nazi, he was not decent.
If he was decent and a Nazi, he was not intelligent. And if he was
decent and intelligent, he was not a Nazi.

I suggest the reader make the obvious substitution: "Bush supporter" in
place of "Nazi".


That oh-so-precious world where words have no meaning

In December, 1989, two days after bombing and invading the defenseless
people of Panama, killing as many as a few thousand, President George H
W Bush declared that his "heart goes out to the families of those who
have died in Panama". {20} When a reporter asked him: "Was it really
worth it to send people to their death for this? To get [Panamanian
leader Manuel] Noriega?", Bush replied: "Every human life is precious,
and yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it". {21}

A year later, preparing for his next crime against humanity, the
invasion of Iraq, Bush, Senior said: "People say to me: 'How many lives?
How many lives can you expend?' Each one is precious". {22}

At the end of 2006, with Bush's son now president, White House spokesman
Scott Stanzel, commenting about American deaths reaching 3,000 in Iraq,
said Bush "believes that every life is precious and grieves for each one
that is lost". {23}

In February 2008, with American deaths about to reach 4,000, and Iraqi
deaths as many as a million or more, George W Bush asserted: "When we
lift our hearts to God, we're all equal in his sight. We're all equally
precious ... In prayer we grow in mercy and compassion ... When we
answer God's call to love a neighbor as ourselves, we enter into a
deeper friendship with our fellow man." {24}

Inspired by such noble - dare I say precious - talk from their leaders,
the American military machine likes to hire like-minded warriors. Here
is Erik Prince, founder of the military contractor Blackwater, whose
employees in Iraq kill people like others flick away a mosquito, in
testimony before Congress: "Every life, whether American or Iraqi, is
precious". {25}


Notes

{1} Central Intelligence Agency, "The Perfect Storm: Planning for
Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq" (August 13 2002).

{2} Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz in August 2002 told Dan
Rather: "We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical
weapons", CBS Evening News (August 20 2002). In December he stated to
Ted Koppel: "The fact is that we don't have weapons of mass destruction.
We don't have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry." ABC Nightline
(December 04 2002). General Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq's secret
weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in
1995, that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and
biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War Washington Post
(March 01 2003, page 15).

{3} Washington Post (July 11 2004).

{4} State Department press release (February 24 2001).

{5} Washington Post (February 22 2008).

{6} Associated Press (February 21 2008).

{7} The Observer (October 17 and November 28 1999).

{8} New York Times (June 25 1999).

{9} See note 7.

{10} Associated Press (April 15 1986), "France Confirms It Denied US
Jets Air Space, Says Embassy Damaged".

{11} Interfax news agency, Moscow (April 02 2003).

{12} CBS News (April 09 2003).

{13} Los Angeles Times (May 05 2004).

{14} Washington Post (April 17 2007), page 2.

{15} White House press release (May 03 2004).

{16} Associated Press (February 10 2005).

{17} See the manuals put out by the CIA from the 1950s to the 1980s on
what they called "interrogation".

{18} See William Blum, Rogue State, chapters 4, 5 and 27 for examples
and sources for the above

{19} Washington Post (February 13 2008), page 3.

{20} New York Times (December 22 1989), page 17

{21} Ibid, page 16

{22} Los Angeles Times (December 01 1990), page 1.

{23} Washington Post (January 01 2007), page 1

{24} National Prayer Breakfast, Washington, DC  (February 07 2008)

{25} Testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government
Reform (October 02 2007)

William Blum is the author of:-

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two
(Common Courage Press, 1995)

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002)

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002)

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common
Courage Press, 2004)


Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at
http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read
at this website.

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