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...