A Win for the Penobscot River

Good environmental news broke today in Veazie, Maine. A final Penobscot River Restoration Agreement was signed by Maine Governor John Baldacci, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, Chief Barry Dana of the Penobscot Nation, a coalition of state and national conservation groups, and PPL Corporation. The ceremony took place at the Veazie Salmon Club Park, located just 1/10 mile from the offices of Deep Blade Journal.


Baldacci speaks at ceremony with Norton and other dignitaries looking on. The Veazie dam is seen in the background.

The agreement will lead within ten years to the removal of dams in Veazie and at Great Works. These structures now cripple the ability of Atlantic salmon to reach natural spawning areas. There also will be a major reconfiguration of a third dam so that both water impoundment and fish passage will be possible above Howland, Maine. The plan is now filed officially with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

The tragedy that befell the fish after the construction in 1834 of a dam at Eddington bend, and later a hydroelectric structure known as the Veazie Dam, is heartbreaking. Maine's first Fisheries Commissioners described the impact of this dam in 1869:

The latter [Veazie Dam] was closed in the winter. When the fish came in the spring they found an impassable barrier across their way; they gathered in multitudes below the dam and strove in vain to surmount it; many returned down the river, and after the usual time for spawning of shad was past they were taken in weirs in the town of Bucksport, loaded with ripe spawn they could no longer contain; a phenomenon which Mr. John C. Homer who has fished with weirs at that point for forty-three years had never observed at any other time. These were doubtless shad whose natural spawning grounds lay far up the river, and who had after long contention given up the attempt to pass the Veazie Dam. A great many shad and alewives lingered about the dam and died there, until the air was loaded with the stench.

This agreement represents a major reversal in public policy trajectory concerning the Penobscot River. Less than ten years ago, the hot topic around here was a gigantic proposal for new dam construction at Basin Mills, just upriver in Orono. And going back to 1985, large corporate interests were hot to install a massive dam at Big Ambejackmockamus Falls on the West Branch. Following defeat of those projects on environmental grounds, a consensus began to build that restoration the Penobscot fishery was a project far more worthy, both economically and environmentally, than megaconstruction of destructive dams. People are sick and tired of repeated fights over these monster proposals.

It is interesting that Secretary Norton took a break from her usual busy day of advocacy for mining and oil drilling interests, owners of motorized trail vehicles, removal of protection for endangered species, and other like-minded pursuits. The press release for today's event from the Department of the Interior may be read here.

It appears that President Bush, after using Maine as his Earth Day backdrop, intends to use this state as a showcase for his environmental concern. No one should be fooled. Though Interior has not been a roadblock in the Penobscot project, this must be considered a rare exception for the Bush administration. It is only through decades of hard work by dedicated people of all political stripes that official Washington in an anti-green administration has been forced to be on board.

For additional background, please see this November 2003 story in Northern Sky News, and the Penobscot Partners website.


Gale Norton, John Baldacci, and Barry Dana chum around at the Penobscot River Restoration signing ceremony in Veazie today.

22nd anniversary

Two years ago I put up a page recognizing one of the most important days of citizen action during the Reagan era. This was the June 12, 1982 march for Nuclear Disarmament and the nuclear weapons Freeze Movement in New York City.

A week of hoopla revisiting Reagan's Cold War policies has given zero, zip, no credit to the massive peace movement of that period two decades ago for helping to set limits on that administration, then dangerously out of control. No one with a mass media presence in current times is about to suggest that Reagan intensified and needlessly lengthened the arms race with the former Soviet Union.

The next few postings and archive readings will examine this important history.

Cutting into Cap the Knife

Maine Public Broadcasting saw fit last week on its MaineWatch television program, prior to the death of Ronald Reagan, to broadcast a fawning interview with Mount Desert Island resident and former Reagan Defense Secretary, Caspar Weinberger. (Practically a neighbor...ah...not quite, there's 80 km and lots o' bucks between here and Mount Desert.)

In his beautiful home overlooking Somes Sound, MPB's Charlotte Renner served Cap some tough fastballs and sliders. I feel it my duty to fully dissemble the amazing assertions Mr. Weinberger volleyed in response for the educated MPB audience. This is especially cogent now that we have entered the 80s zone while the orgy of reverential remembrance of the Gipper proceeds.

Part 1 of 2 covers 70s military "neglect", Saddam's broken promises, Saddam's trechery, stories about weapons, resistance to attack of the empire, Saddam and terrorism, Libya flip-flop; and humiliation, torture, rape, and murder:

WEINBERGER: "We had left our military rather sadly neglected for close to ten years and we had very little military strength."

This is a canard he has been bringing out in interviews and speeches for years. But now he suggests training, flight schools, fuel, and ammunition were at low ebbs. Maybe. But none of the items he cites were central to the actual Reagan armament build-up—hardware he used to say was necessary for "regaining deterrent capability." That was always a myth, like the "missile gap" and the scary but fallacious "Team B" assessments of Soviet "leads" in a multitude of megaweapons.

In reality, the Reagan administration picked up and amplified programs already underway during the Carter years, like intermediate-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, Trident submarines, the highly controversial MX missile; while adding a few of their own like the neutron bomb. The big change, however, in the early Reagan years was to cast aside arms control that might have mitigated the expenditures on these horrible weapons and the threats they supposedly addressed. So my question is, what's he talking about? Were the tens of thousands of troops we kept in far flung places, then as now, hurting for fuel? That's why Reagan doubled the military budget? I don't think so.

WEINBERGER: "The United Nations resolutions were not going to stop Saddam Hussein.... He broke every promise."

Which promises did Iraq break? Can he be specific? Can't be the ones about weapons because they weren't there. Because there were no weapons, the December 2002 declarations Iraq filed in response to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 were in fact true. They said they didn't have any unconventional weapons!

Were there any indications back then that this was true? Yes, lots! According to Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law who defected in 1995 and later was killed by Saddam, Iraq destroyed all unconventional weapons acquired during the era of US support in the early 1990s. Bush, Blair, Powell, and others all cited Kamel as reliable during the run-up to the war—they just failed to tell the truth about what Kamel actually said.

Even though the United States itself was not the subject of UNSCR 1441, it's behind-the-scenes process concerning the inspection regime 1441 restarted revealed its own deep contempt for international law. The language agreed to in UNSCR 1441 on November 8, 2002 is pretty much a fantasy spun by the Lie Factory, also known as the Pentagon Office of Special Plans—save one important concept necessary for the unanimous support this resolution received—war was not to be "automatic".

It passed with comments of most other Security Council nations emphasizing that last point. The United States not only broke this promise inherent in UNSCR 1441—that it would receive from the Security Council definition of "serious consequences" for "material breach" and definite authorization for any violence it would commit in Iraq—it has worn the tatters of international law that it shredded ever since. This specific US betrayal of the Security Council lies at the root of many problems the United States now experiences with respect to international support for the Iraq project and other issues. Mr. Weinberger's pious claims about Saddam and broken promises need a careful examination from the perspective of looking in the mirror.

WEINBERGER: "You can't deal with people like that, you can't negotiate with liars, to put it very bluntly."

This was not yet a problem in the early Reagan administration, whose real Iraq policy can be discerned from a large sampling of documents obtained in 2003 by the National Security Archive through Freedom of Information Act requests. Key documents in these sets reveal certain purposes of diplomatic missions to Iraq conducted by current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then a special envoy for President Reagan and Secretary of State George Schultz. Sensitive oil-related issues arose. According to the National Security Archive's description for an April 16, 1984 cable from the US Interests Section in Baghdad to the State Department:

A major project on which U.S. officials worked closely with Baghdad in the mid-1980s was construction of a pipeline to transfer Iraqi oil to the West via the Jordanian port of Aqaba instead of via the Persian Gulf, which was vulnerable to Iranian attack. U.S. officials took various steps, including negotiating with Israel to guarantee the security of the proposed pipeline which would either cross or come near Israeli territory...."

Mr. Schultz was a former CEO and, in the years from 1975 to 1981, Mr. Weinberger was vice president and general counsel of the Bechtel Group of Companies in California. Current major Iraq contractor Bechtel had a strong interest in that pipeline project. The diplomatic activity between Washington and Baghdad during this period explains the "tilt towards Iraq"—of which Mr. Weinberger was a strong proponent.

WEINBERGER: "So we had the alternative of sitting by, and saying we can't ever do anything like going to war, this would have encouraged [Hussein] to continue on trying to get all kinds of weapons,... as he was doing. Whether we found them or not is basically not nearly as important as the fact that we know he was trying to get them from all over the world....These would be the most lethal weapons in the hands of one of the most brutal dictators.... You could never have any peace in the Mideast as long as he was there because he was always attempting to add to his territory, and bring in Kuwait and all the rest. So I think without question we did not only the right thing, but the only thing that we could do."

Mr. Weinberger is a smart man, simultaneously echoing his old scoldings of the doves, and the words of President Bush. Bush on March 17, 2003, gave the supposed central cause for war, the causus belli, when he said, "Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again -- because we are not dealing with peaceful men.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people."

But Mr. Weinberger wants to substitute just a little modification. The president left "no doubt" that Hussein had the weapons in his possession! Mr. Weinberger (or the president, for that matter) cannot now say that what was really important was that he was trying to get them. It was then clearly stated that the single purpose of the attack was to "disarm" the not-peaceful men of the Iraqi regime.

How would it have sounded if President Bush on March 17, 2003 had instead said, "I'm sending thousands of Americans to fight and die in the taking of Iraq because Saddam Hussein might be trying to get unconventional weapons."?? No one would have taken that seriously. So how can Mr. Weinberger ask us to accept that the invasion somehow was "the right thing" when he disavows the president's actual reason for it in favor of the clever gibberish given the MaineWatch audience?

The aftermath of the attack and a year's worth of occupation of Iraq, including country-wide probing by hand-picked weapons inspectors, has turned up zero. David Kay, Bush's lead guy in the Iraq Survey Group, came up empty in the search for those "most lethal weapons ever devised," and gave us a good view of what "intelligence gathering by this and other governments" was really about.

All of the weapons stories seem to have been just that—stories cooked up by intelligence operatives at the hand of now-discredited and alleged Iranian double agent, Ahmed Chalabi. For example, the supposed mobile bioweapons labs, called "Hell on wheels" and "Winnebagos of Death" in breathlessly inflammatory America news reports—and then presented as incontrovertible facts by Secretary of State and long-time Weinberger colleague General Colin L. Powell before the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003—are now known to be the vaporous machinations of, according to David Kay, an "out-and-out fabricator" codenamed Curveball.

My own interpretation says that it is silliness to think that the administration and US intelligence services somehow were duped into relying on someone named Curveball for weapons-threat information to back the most consequential foreign policy decision a nation can make. No one was duped. The danger Saddam posed to America, or even his neighbors, was zero and I believe the most important policymakers, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice, and Powell knew it—from the very beginning. Curveball simply performed the fabrication of the data that the Pentagon Office of Special Plans required in order to drag the coalition of the willing into the neocolonial adventure in Iraq while scaring the US public into consent. The loss of lives, treasure, and apparently permanent feeding of lives and treasure to the project certainly are the major consequences. Mr. Weinberger should be ashamed of himself for suggesting this basis in lies constitutes a legitimate causus belli.

WEINBERGER: "Vietnam... was the only war we ever entered that we did not intend to win. We were quite content with a containment philosophy. We did win [in Iraq]. Now you've got the aftermath, which is made up of 1500, maybe 2800 supporters of the old Baathist regime, and they have weapons, and they have ammunition dumps that we're slowly eliminating."

This is a very peculiar statement. I wonder if three million dead Vietnamese and 50,000 dead Americans would feel "contained" if they could? But I guess it's handy mythology to help separate the current war or even the next war from the failures of the Vietnam War.
And what is the basis for these numbers concerning the resistance to the occupation of Iraq? Last month, Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies, issued a report entitled Iraq: What is to be Done? This right-leaning pro-war realist casts Mr. Weinberger's absurd assertion in the proper light:

Senior US officials have been in a continuing state of denial about the depth of support for this conflict. They have misused public opinion polls like the Zogby and ABC polls and they have ignored the fact that the ABC poll conducted in February found that roughly two thirds of Sunnis and one third of Shi’ites opposed the US and British invasion and found it to be humiliating to Iraq. Senior US officials have ignored the fact that roughly one-third of Sunnis and two-thirds of Shi'ites support violence against the Coalition and want the Coalition forces to leave Iraq immediately. They talk about a small minority of Iraqis because only a small minority have so far been actively violent — a reality in virtually every insurgent campaign and one that in no way is a measure of support for violence.

If this isn't enough to burst Mr. Weinberger's bubble, consider the fact that recently-named Prime Minister is very much one of those "old Baathists" with ties to the CIA, British intelligence and Saudi intelligence. Baathists too are the Iraqi military people who were asked to calm the situation in Fallujah when the US Marines decided that neither of their only other stark choices—incinerating the place or continuing to get shot up in street-to-street battles—was much to their liking.

RENNER: [People] aren't seeing that terrorism has been changed or that it is even connected to Iraq....

WEINBERGER: "Your're absolutely right, a lot of people do think that and I happen to think it's quite wrong. Iraq was a seat, a harbor of terrorism. It was where many of the terrorists were trained, where they were sponsored. The families of the people who bombed the world trade center and the Pentagon are still getting paid, or were still getting paid, by Saddam Hussein's government...and encouraged by them. So whatever you could do to change regimes, to get a democratic regime that didn't want to go after it's neighbors...and try to conquer the whole Mideast with extraordinary brutality was a change for the better, an improvement, something we needed. But it's part of the war against terrorism. Terrorism is a very different kind of enemy than we've ever fought before. Terrorism doesn't have its own navy and army and air force...."

Good question! But Mr. Weinberger seems to be very confused here. Saddam Hussein never had a thing to do with the families of the 911 hijackers. Most of them were cared for by their sponsors in Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani ISI, a couple of real, honest-to-God "seats of terrorism." These particular al Qaeda sponsors had hatred for Saddam, and the feeling was mutual. It's positive for them that Saddam was removed, although their main objection now is the US occupation.

Saddam apparently did assist Palestinian groups in the West Bank and Gaza, some of whom had members that had carried out attacks against Israel. But that's a far cry from running terrorist training camps. What's he talking about here, Salman Pak? This is a compound outside of Baghdad that the right wing media has continued to hype as being a site where Saddam taught terrorists how to fly airplanes. Nothing of the sort was found there.
So how did the Salman Pak and related stories first emerge? Here's what Jane Mayer says in "The Manipulator", The New Yorker magazine, June 7, 2004:

Another story promoted by Chalabi's organization offered an unsubstantiated link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The I.N.C. [Chalabi's organization, the Iraqi National Congress] disseminated a story that Mohamed Atta, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, had met in Prague in April, 2001, with an Iraqi intelligence agent. In February, 2002, David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair that a defector named Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy said that he had worked at a terrorist camp in Iraq called Salman Pak, where non-Iraqi fundamentalist Arabs were trained to hijack planes and land helicopters on moving trains. He also asserted that Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague. Rose noted the I.N.C. had sponsored Qurairy, and wrote that an aide of Chalabi’s served as the translator for the defector.

On November 12, 2001, the I.N.C. provided another defector, Sabah Khalifa Khodada al-Lami, to the press through a video feed from London. Lami, who was described as a former colonel in Saddam’s Army, claimed that Islamic militants were training at Salman Pak. He also said that the training camp was contaminated by anthrax, an accusation that was made soon after the U.S. began investigating incidents of anthrax poisoning in New York, Florida, and elsewhere. Stories about Lami subsequently appeared in the Washington Times, the Seattle Times, and other papers. Since the overthrow of Saddam, no foreign terrorist-training camps have been found in Iraq.

Perhaps Caspar Weinberger should have been asked where he learned about terrorist training in Iraq, and about his reaction to revelations about how Chalabi-connected information was fabricated or otherwise staged for eagerly jingoistic media.

WEINBERGER: "One of the most encouraging things, if you like, as a result of the war in Iraq, and our victory, is the fact that it brought even people like Qadhafi around, in Libya. I'm not sure how far around he is, but he's making all the right noises. He's giving access to all of his installations to international inspectors, and I think that never would have happened if we hadn't gone into Iraq..."

Well, I guess Mr. Weinberger today would have a much harder time making the case that Colonel Qadhafi is a Soviet stooge, as he did routinely during the Reagan years. Just to remember, back in 1986 President Reagan thought assassination through bombing was justified because Qadhafi was a "subversive" who is "not only an enemy of the United States," but also has a "record of subversion and aggression against the neighboring States in Africa."

Reagan said that Qadhafi's support for an April 5, 1986 bombing at the La Belle discotheque in Berlin, an act that killed two American servicepersons, constituted "monstrous brutality [that] is but the latest act in Colonel Qadhafi 's reign of terror."

Now the subversive is being welcomed back into camp America. What would Reagan think?

The common canard Mr. Weinberger repeats here—that Libya somehow was cowed into opening its weapons labs by the awesome US victory over Iraq—is laughable after the tiniest examination of the facts.. I'll you spare most of the details here, except that Libya's nuclear program, consisting of some discombobulated parts acquired through the Pakistani/A.Q. Kahn network is irrelevant to the rapprochement policy, except from a public relations viewpoint.

All anyone needs to know about the real story was written by Brian Gorman at the Motley Fool financial news website on April 26, just after President Bush lifted the last remaining sanctions against Libya:

Marathon, ConocoPhillips, and Amerada Hess, which operated together in Libya as the Oasis Group, are particularly eager to reclaim their holdings. The group holds a 41% stake in Libya's prize Waha oil field. Before the group departed [when sanctions were imposed in 1986], its production from the field was 400,000 barrels a day.

What has happened here is a dizzying U.S. foreign policy flip-flop that makes no sense unless the quiet, underlying commercial interests are understood. But if Libya today is the flip, where was the flop? Well, consider US Iraq policy in 1986! About the same time that bombs were flying at Qadhafi, the notorious Weinberger-supported "tilt toward Iraq" was in full swing.

On March 21, 1986, the United States refused to support a United Nations Security Council declaration, saying Council members are "profoundly concerned by the unanimous conclusion of the specialists that chemical weapons on many occasions have been used by Iraqi forces against Iranian troops...[and] the members of the Council strongly condemn this continued use of chemical weapons in clear violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 which prohibits the use in war of chemical weapons".

Mr. Weinberger almost certainly could tell us much more about the whole story, but prefers instead to issue comforting bromides about the "encouraging" effects of US might.

Prisoner humiliation, torture, rape, and murder at Abu Ghraib in Iraq (Editorial note: Ms. Renner's use of the term "abuses" just doesn't cover it) were...

WEINBERGER: "terribly damaging,... there were certainly some command deficiencies",... an "unclear chain of command [between military intelligence and military police] is certainly a failure. But the real problem of course is that there were somewhere between six to a dozen extremely rotten apples and they are poisoning and tarnishing the whole barrel. Bear in mind that this is about that ratio, six to ten people committing terrible acts with 135,000 people who aren't. It inevitably gives ammunition to the people who first of all didn't want to go to war at all; and secondly to other Arab nations who were very delighted to see Saddam Hussein go, but also are not very happy with America."

Mr. Weinberger, like President Bush, compounds this deep--and yes, very, very damaging--US hypocrisy through telling of very big lies about official policy towards detainees in the Terror War. President Bush in that same March 17, 2003 address to the nation promised, "In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near."

Even the day that stories about rapes at Abu Ghraib was breaking (April 30), the president had the temerity to stand up and say, "A year ago, I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we'd accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq."

Then Mr. Bush said on May 24, "Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values."

The ludicrous notion expressed both by the President and Mr. Weinberger, that the "real problem" is "bad apples", extends and multiplies my sinking, sickening feeling about how rotten and hated our country has become--and how ineffective I personally have been at stopping our leaders from instituting the secret policies that have led to these atrocities.

Here's how Seymour M. Hersh explains these secret policies in "The Gray Zone: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib", The New Yorker, May 24, 2004:

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

These are intentional, cruel, dehumanizing, pointless aggressions against ordinary Iraqis, 90% of whom the Red Cross says are entirely innocent of any crime or anti-occupation activity. These aggressions are born of the theory that taking and holding the resources of Iraq are far more important than the wellbeing of the people who live there. These are war crimes, pure and simple, and the Nuremberg Principles must apply if they are to have any meaning at all.

At this point, no one should be surprised by the facts about how America's detainees are treated. The atrocities to which the often completely innocent have been subjected in US custody extends far, far beyond the inhuman conditions found at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and have been reported for years. The following samples only scratch the surface of what has been known about the contents of this Pentagon Archipelago.

After the US Terror War went into full swing during the fall of 2001, reports of atrocities began to filter to mainstream human rights groups early in 2002. For example, on April 15, 2002, Amnesty International issued a memorandum that stated, "...the USA has denied or threatens to deny internationally recognized rights of people taken into its custody in Afghanistan and elsewhere, including those transferred to Camp X-Ray in Guantánamo Bay...[people are held] in conditions that may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and that violate other minimum standards relating to detention...." while the USA has, "refused to grant people in its custody access to the courts to challenge the lawfulness of their detention."

Recently Harpers Magazine published riveting accounts of insidious torture given Guantánamo detainees:

"...They injected me. I was unconscious.... We went to a big prison, and there were cages there. They built it like a zoo. Each container housed forty-eight cages. Everyone was in his own cage. There was room to sit but not enough to pray. My joints were damaged. The light was very bright, and it was on all the time."

There are many such detention facilities—from well-known to super-secret—where maltreatment is the norm. In Afghanistan Bagram airbase is the terrible equivalent of Abu Ghraib.

But can we go a step further and recall the Afghan "convoy of death?" No, because most Americans never heard of it. Except for an article called "The War Crimes of Afghanistan" published in Newsweek for August 26, 2002, this major story of US-supported atrocities was never reported in the US.

According to the description for the documentary on this subject called Afghan Massacre, this incident involved the "horrific forced journey undertaken by thousands of prisoners who surrendered to America's Afghan allies after the siege of Konduz.... Bundled into containers, the lucky ones were shot within minutes. The rest suffered an appalling road trip lasting up to four days, clawing at the skin of their fellow prisoners as they licked perspiration and even drank blood from open wounds.... Up to 3,000 now lie buried in a mass grave.... American special forces took control of the operation, re-directed the containers carrying the living and dead into the desert and stood by as survivors were shot and buried."

While American officials and their loyalists issue ad nauseum boilerplate self-approval and self-congratulations, the whole world is watching the flip side of this hypocrisy. Perhaps Mr. Weinberger should have been asked to express what I believe is clear to him, and clear to anyone with a firm grasp of international relations, like I know Mr. Weinberger has--the hypocrisy of US-sponsored detainee torture is a formula for our own security disaster, as our violent treatment of others will one day be repaid in kind.

To be continued...

Ronald Reagan is dead

I am surprisingly moved by the death of Ronald Reagan. Perhaps this is because I understand all too well what his family has experience during his illness with Alzheimer's disease. My heart goes out to them.

I also know exactly what he went through during his years in office when he was absolutely, most definitely affected by the early stages of the disease. I watched my own mother decline, almost in parallel. She had noticeable memory loss by 1985 and she died just 8 weeks ago. The disease is a 20-year process, and President Reagan had all of the early signs. This is not to say he was not functional at the time he left office. It's just that his many lapses and missteps, especially in those couple years, were clearly part of the disease.

To tell truth, I miss him. He could project a warm and comforting manner as he screwed the little people. Yes, he was powerful. But make no mistake, I vehemently opposed nearly every policy of the Reagan administration—especially its brutal proxy wars in Central America and Afghanistan, its promotion of weapons of planetary destruction, and its general lawlessness and thievery that cost much to humankind in lives and treasure.

Paradoxically, I believe that the last great global peace initiatives were accomplished because Reagan was positively influenced by Gorbachev (and maybe Nancy too), so he ended up having a modicum of concern about his historical legacy. Nothing of the magnitude of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty has been accomplished since its ratification in 1988. (Differences over this Treaty drove neocons Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney out of the Reagan government.)

Clinton instituted a moratorium on the underground testing of nuclear weapons in 1993, but he otherwise dropped some pretty ripe fruit Reagan grew for him on the arms control tree. Of course, Reagan's debatable role in the collapse of the Soviet Union during the intervening years of Bush I factors into the global-strategic evolution of the American empire—changing the world in profound ways between 1988 and 1992—leaving "arms control" rather a quaint concept for a power now facing no significant global counterweight. The Republicans controlling the United States Senate were in no mood to ratify a global nuclear test ban in 1999—Clinton's inability to overcome this opposition was a major failure of his administration, by then black-and-blue from the impeachment fight.

The W. Bush administration promotes horrendous Reaganaut concepts in spades, but the Chimperor has none of the flair of the Great Communicator. He just doesn't have the wits to deliver fun punch lines like, "I paid for that microphone", "I am not going to exploit for political purposes, the youth and inexperience of my opponent", or "There you go again."

To sum up the "Reagan" who still lives, these words from a 1986 Noam Chomsky talk seem still to be useful:

When I am referring to 'Reagan', I want it understood that I do not mean the individual Ronald Reagan, who is in fact largely a creation of the public relations industry, and who literally often does not know and is not expected to know what policies are, or what the words on the cue cards mean. That's an interesting fact about American politics, but when I use the term 'Reagan', I am not referring to that individual. Rather, I am referring to the elite groups for whom he serves as a spokesman, or, more important, as a device to ensure public acquiescence—or at least public passivity—with regard to the policies of the groups who have created him as an image to appear before the public.

Mr. Bush, you are no Ronald Reagan.

Blood in the water

President Bush is facing perhaps the first serious challenge to his imperial rule since Al Gore threw in the towel in December 2000. An intense week of activity on so-called sovereignty turnover in Iraq has barely slowed the bulging emergence of the background behind the decade-long public swindles based on the phony intelligence provided by alledged Iranian double agent, Ahmed Chalabi.

Bush finds himself in a pattern requiring repetitive declarations of his intent to "... stay in Iraq to help them on the path to freedom".

His recent speeches have drawn absurdly false parallels—"Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless, surprise attack on the United States. We will not forget that treachery [!], and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy".

Now, following the lead given in a hard-hitting May 26 speech by former Vice President and winner of the popular vote in the year 2000, Al Gore, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet has resigned.

Gore called for just this:

George Tenet should also resign. I want to offer a special word about George Tenet, because he is a personal friend and I know him to be a good and decent man. It is especially painful to call for his resignation, but I have regretfully concluded that it is extremely important that our country have new leadership at the CIA immediately.

Gore's prescience further will be enhanced if the rest of his laundry list of policy catastrophe architects go out the same door right after Tenet, as called for in this additional excerpt of the speech:

It is therefore essential that even as we focus on the fateful choice, the voters must make this November that we simultaneously search for ways to sharply reduce the extraordinary danger that we face with the current leadership team in place. It is for that reason that I am calling today for Republicans as well as Democrats to join me in asking for the immediate resignations of those immediately below George Bush and Dick Cheney who are most responsible for creating the catastrophe that we are facing in Iraq.

We desperately need a national security team with at least minimal competence because the current team is making things worse with each passing day. They are endangering the lives of our soldiers, and sharply increasing the danger faced by American citizens everywhere in the world, including here at home. They are enraging hundreds of millions of people and embittering an entire generation of anti-Americans whose rage is already near the boiling point.

We simply cannot afford to further increase the risk to our country with more blunders by this team. Donald Rumsfeld, as the chief architect of the war plan, should resign today. His deputies Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and his intelligence chief Stephen Cambone should also resign. The nation is especially at risk every single day that Rumsfeld remains as Secretary of Defense.

Condoleezza Rice, who has badly mishandled the coordination of national security policy, should also resign immediately.

There would be a modicum of justice in a spectacle of resignations following Gore's lead. The gauntlet is going down as real policy and intelligence war ramps up. DCI has fallen. Caesar optimistically issues daily fibs about Iraq using coded terms, like "sovereignty" and "freedom", while the daggers hover. Will one of them go in and twist? Will Caesar dodge 'em? An amazing level of media cooperation still graces him, but Caesar for the first time really is straining to control the news agenda.

We paid to fool ourselves

It is a good time for another complete examination of the Chalabi-Curveball phony intelligence story. In March, I posted an extensive review of the entire year of Chalabi's falsehoods, that somehow were routed through the Lie Factory known as the Pentagon Office of Special Plans.

Since then, there has been a much ballyhooed falling out, as the US raided Chalabi's Baghdad residence. Colin Powell has openly questioned his own propaganda efforts, the LA Times has posted a follow-up story ("As suspicion of Chalabi deception intensifies, former administration favorite is believed to have fed disinformation on Hussein's weapons to intelligence agencies in at least eight nations"), and a New Yorker article laid out how "Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war" while receiving oodles of taxpayer money and perks like a Tehran villa, right in the middle of the Axis of Evil, also at US taxpayer expense.

"We paid to fool ourselves", is how one commentator quoted in the New Yorker article put it.

Here is a reproduction of the extensive report I prepared last March 31:

"This is the one that's damning"
Just when you thought that the Bush administration case for invading Iraq could not be discredited any further, another bombshell drops.

Perhaps the most over-hyped unconventional threat used to justify the invasion of Iraq involved alleged mobile bioweapons labs in trucks and trailers that Saddam Hussein was said to be hiding from UNMOVIC inspectors. This bombshell vaporizes any remnant shards of US Secretary of State Colin Powell's propaganda effort before the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003 because the "defector" who delivered the "intelligence" on this supposed threat was "an out-and-out fabricator".

Curveball
The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday March 28 that the administration's handpicked weapons seeker, David Kay, now says that reliance on this source, codenamed "Curveball", for a crucial piece of the case against Iraq was a troubling failure.

"This is the one that's damning", Kay said.

(See this summary of the story or this full wire service version if you do not wish to register at the LA Times.)

Deep Blade's interpretation of this story says that it is silliness to think that the administration and US intelligence services somehow were duped into relying on someone named Curveball for weapons-threat information to back the most consequential foreign policy decision a nation can make. No one was duped—but senior officials knowingly used the false information in order to obtain political consent to take Iraq. And the loss of lives, treasure, and apparently permanent feeding of lives and treasure to the project certainly are the major consequences.

In fact, an amazing aspect of the Curveball story is how questions about credibility were raised all along. German intelligence apparently waved red flags sometime between Powell's February presentation and early spring of last year. Beyond that, the three persons Powell said corroborated Curveball's intelligence all had been debriefed some time ago and found to have no firsthand knowledge. In one of the cases Defense Intelligence had concluded the defector probably was coached by Ahmed Chalabi's exile group, earning him in 2002 a "fabrication notice" on a classified computer network run by US intelligence. And Curveball himself turns out to be the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides!

So Curveball is a sick joke. The danger Saddam posed to America was zero and Deep Blade believes the most important policymakers, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice, and Powell knew it—from the very beginning. Curveball simply performed the fabrication of the data that the Pentagon lie factory known as the Office of Special Plans required in order to drag the coalition of the willing into the colonial adventure in Iraq while scaring the US public into consent.

Pre-invasion lying about the mobile bioweapons labs
So why are the Curveball revelations so damning? We must try to recall how media cooperated with Powell and others in disseminating the scary hype from the lie factory. Suggestions that Iraq was building, using, and hiding mobile bioweapons labs went back more than ten years to the initial inspection process that following the first Gulf War. The LA Times story explains how Curveball appeared through German intelligence after the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi, Ahmed Chalabi, was asked to participate in examining a theoretical question about mobile weapons labs.

Fast forward to November 2002. UNSCR 1441 had passed and the new UN inspection regime was about to engage Iraq. Media stories began to appear about "Hell on Wheels" and "Winnebagos of Death". ABC News was typical when it reported that "Saddam Hussein may still have the means to kill thousands of people hidden among the fleets of motor vehicles across his country".

Powell's UN testimony was the culmination:

One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.

Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.

The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.

Although Iraq's mobile production program began in the mid-1990s, UN inspectors at the time only had vague hints of such programs. Confirmation came later, in the year 2000. The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs....

Emphasis was added above to show how Powell communicated the certainty of his information. There just was not any doubt about the scary amount of "biological poison" Powell assured us that Iraq could produce.

Conscious pre-invasion cherry picking means recent statements are disingenuous
But even at the time, Powell must have at least suspected what he was saying was shaky. On this matter, the March 28 LA Times story reinforces what The Guardian reported in May 2003—Powell expressed "serious doubts about the reliability of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme".

And what is now called "cherry picking" must have been happening, because, as the LA Times story reports, "'CIA files showed that another Iraqi defector, an engineer who had worked with Curveball, specifically denied that they had worked on such facilities', [David] Kay said. Powell did not cite that defector".

This cherry picking—separating and using only that intelligence that seemed to support a major Iraqi threat, no matter how shaky it was known to be—suggests conscious choices were made by Powell and other pro-attack spokespeople to use worthless intelligence only because it advanced the case for an attack.

The sincerity of statements that Powell has been making since the beginning of 2004 about the pre-war case and subsequent failure to find unconventional weapons therefore must be called into question.

For example, Powell said in an interview on ABC's Nightline with Ted Kopple (Jan.07.2004), "...the intelligence community, to this day, stands behind the judgments that were made and that were presented to the world, presented to the Congress and presented to the American people through the national intelligence estimate, and that I presented before the Security Council".

Or more recently in an interview on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos (Mar.14.2004):

And so we may not find the stockpiles. They may not exist any longer. But let's not suggest that somehow we knew this. We went to the United Nations, we went to the world with the best information we had, nothing that was cooked. I spent a great deal of time out at the CIA with Director Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin and all of their experts going over that presentation, and it reflected the view of the intelligence community, the United Kingdom's intelligence community, the intelligence community of many other nations, and it was consistent with reporting from the United Nations over time.

And so we had a solid basis for the information we presented to the President, the intelligence community presented to the President and for the decisions that the President made.

The Curveball story says that these statements by Colin Powell are wholly disingenuous. There was no solid basis, but Powell could not reveal any doubts. In another quote from the LA Times story, David Kay clearly explains the consequences for the rush to war if Powell had told the truth. Kay said, "If Powell had said to the Security Council: 'It's one source, we never actually talked to him, and we don't know his name,' as he's describing this, I think people would have laughed us out of court."

Post-invasion lying about the mobile bioweapons labs
If the truthfulness of the justifications for taking Iraq were highly dubious before the invasion, the unconventional weapons story continued to unfold afterward in an environment where an astonishing program of official propaganda received vigorous media cooperation in its dissemination.

By the time of the chaos immediately following the invasion of Iraq in early April 2003, German intelligence had behind the scenes informed US officials that it had "various problems" with Curveball. At the same time, the reactionary media created a whole program of tantalizing confirmations that the invasion was properly justified because mobile bioweapons trucks were being found. Here, a Fox News story from April 11, 2003 pants that "seven to 15 vehicles are being tested for possibly containing biological or chemical weapons and for serving as mobile weapons labs".

A report called "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants" was released to the public on May 28, 2003 following the discovery of two semi-trailers that seemed to fit the description Powell gave earlier on February 5. The graphics in the report are Powell's from February 5, along with photos claiming to show how the discovered trailers match up.

Then on May 29, 2003 President Bush closed the case in an interview on TVP, Poland:

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.

Right at this time, allegations about "sexing up" of Iraq weapons intelligence exploded in the UK.

But here is how US media was reporting the mobile bioweapons lab story. This CNN item from June 7, 2003 lays out the proper framework for the uncritical American viewer:

The CIA official, who has access to classified materials related to Iraq's alleged biological weapons program, said a key Iraqi intelligence source who had worked on the design of the mobile labs and provided intelligence about the program to the CIA before the war was asked to identify the vehicles from a series of photographs. The Iraqi source identified the correct trucks as the mobile biological weapons laboratories that he had described to U.S. intelligence.

Intelligence provided by that man was cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his presentation of the U.S. case to the United Nations before the invasion of Iraq.

'The guy who designed it identified it' for the CIA, the official said.

'They are designed to look like something else,' he said, so Iraq could deny their function as biological weapons laboratories if they had been uncovered by U.N. inspectors. He said they were built on truck beds so they could be moved from locations likely to be inspected by the United Nations.

Kay said he was aware of a number of theories that the vehicles might have had other uses, 'none of which make any logical sense'.

Kay saw one of the vehicles on a recent trip to Iraq and received reports on the second.

Kay said most of the alternative uses that have been suggested 'didn't pass the laugh test'.

'The silliest one', Kay said, was the suggestion that they had been designed to generate hydrogen for meteorological balloons.

In a complete turnaround from what he rejected in June 2003, Kay now explains that the trailers "were actually designed to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, or perhaps to produce rocket fuel".

The Observer had reported on Sunday June 15, 2003 that "Iraqi mobile labs nothing to do with germ warfare, report finds... The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control".

(Another complete debunking of the mobile bioweapons lab theory was published June 5, 2003 by Traprock Peace Center. But, as author Mark F. McCarty laments, "Once again, the American media are acting as a servile conduit for the Bush administration’s propaganda. Even if subsequent reports completely annihilate the bioweapons lab theory, you can be sure that a sizeable portion of the American public will be left with the impression that these trailers constitute definitive proof that pre-invasion Iraq had an ongoing bioweapons program".)

None of this stopped Powell from maintaining, with only a slight hedge, the fiction of the deadly bioweapons trucks. In this June 27, 2003 interview on NPR's All Things Considered, Powell still shows little doubt about the purpose of the trucks, though by now the whole case of Curveball's prevarications must have been well known to him:

Will we continue to look for more information to reinforce our opinion? Sure, we will. But I am confident with the judgment made by the CIA, and the reason I'm confident of that judgment is, we got this information through defectors and others. And when I presented it to the UN on the 5th of February, all I could show was a cartoon picture of what we thought it looked like based on what people said to us. And guess what? We found something that looked just like that. And nobody has been able to come up with an alternative use for this. But we're still looking at it, but I'm fairly confident of the Director of Central Intelligence's judgment.

By October 2003, Powell is still peddling Curveball, though now the hedges are a little stronger after the null preliminary report given by David Kay. In an oped entitled What Kay Found, Powell on October 7, 2003 introduced the now-famous substitute for real weapons:

"WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002....

The Kay Report also addresses the issue of suspected mobile biological agent laboratories: 'Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant and BW [biological warfare] production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers. That said, nothing . . . rules out their potential use in BW production.' Here Kay's findings are inconclusive. He is continuing to work this issue.

In mid-January 2004, the only official still wanting to talk specifically about bioweapons trailers was Dick Cheney. Cheney said on January 22, 2004 that semi-trailers found in Iraq constitute "conclusive evidence" that Saddam Hussein "did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction".

They took a country and no one will do a thing about it
Oh sure, the inquiries in the US and UK about misuse of the Iraq intelligence are ongoing. But the only punishment Bush, Blair, and their minions that would mean a damn thing—removal of the occupying troops and return of Iraq to its people—seems highly unlikely at this point.

The much ballyhooed "return of sovereignty" to the Iraqi people scheduled for July 1, 2004 appears to be nothing more than a sham process to create a "legalized" puppet government.

It saddens me deeply that I see no immediate way Bush and his band of international criminals can be held accountable for using lies about weapons to take colonial control of Iraq.

France bashers can calm down now

I could never understand why the numbskull reactionary wingnut crowd took so readily to France bashing. A friendly little disagreement over oil is no big deal! As President Bush explains this week, Chirac has always been one of their own...

Bush says he was 'never angry with the French'

PARIS (Reuters) - President Bush said he was never angry with France over its refusal to back the U.S.-led war in Iraq, as both countries sought to play down past tensions ahead of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

"I was never angry with the French. France is a long-term ally," Bush told the weekly Paris Match in an interview due to be published on Thursday. The U.S. president is among 17 heads of state scheduled to attend the commemorations in Normandy on June 6.

Like French President Jacques Chirac, Bush said there was never any falling out between the United States and France, which led opposition to the war that ousted Saddam Hussein.

"Listen, I made a difficult decision and not everybody agreed with that decision. But I understand that," he said in remarks printed in French and translated by Reuters.

"Jacques told me clearly. He did not think the use of force was necessary.
We debated it as friends."

Full story here.