Aggressive aerial bombardment

New Sy Hersh article lays out the next phase


US bombing of Southeast Asia, spring 1970 (from footage in the documentary film Hearts and Minds)

Damn, I wish I had more time to do more on this... Lately there has been an exchange of articles and postings between Alexander Cockburn and Juan Cole. Frankly, I'm troubled by the way Cole -- a writer I usually admire and respect -- has presented his vision for stepped American troop withdrawal from Iraq, first from urban areas. Cockburn has staked the anti-war position with which I agree. Where Juan Cole is coming from, on the other hand, should never be confused with an anti-war position.

The Cole vision in part calls...

...For as long as the elected Iraqi government wanted it, the US would offer the new Iraqi military and security forces close air support in any firefight they have with guerrilla or other rebellious forces . . . . With the agreement of the elected Iraqi government, the US would prevent any guerrilla force from fielding any large number of fighters for set piece battles.

Cockburn viewed this notion of ``close air support'' as tantamount to ``saturation bombing''. Yes.

Now Seymour Hersh is weighing in with astonishing reporting of just how the US administration and the US military are planning -- not necessarily harmoniously -- to provide a stepped up air war as stepped withdrawals of ground forces occur over the next year. See this diary posted at Daily Kos for links and some sharp analysis.

Hersh will report in an upcoming New Yorker article just how the Bush Administration plans to ``...increase the pace of air operations'' with ``more bombing in direct support of Iraqi units''.

The Vietnam parallel is deeply disconcerting.

Hersh (CNN, Nov. 27): ...we can take out troops if we increase air. In other words, the temple of air bombing, bombing's sort of the unknown story right now. We don't know how many bombs are dropped, where. Nobody reports publicly as they did, Wolf, in Vietnam.

Juan Cole now should explain how what he is calling for is any different than what the administration is going to do. Like Alexander Cockburn, I see more potential for civilian death and destruction, that ``nobody reports publicly''. Just like the latter years of the Vietnam War, where tonnage of bombs dropped became the rosy pr while the US ground its way through a disaster wrapped in an illusion.

Friday garden blogging

Snow


White and cold all of a sudden


One tough broccoli plant

Icky week... Everybody has been sick. Then it rained 2.5 inches in 12 hours on Tuesday (more water in the basement) followed by a freeze-up. The interstate was a mess the day our company had to drive up. But the turkey was good.

Shoot the messenger

Bush planned to bomb al-Jazeera in allied Arab country


Horrors of the US invasion (March 22, 2003) -- if the world sees this, there might be an ``insidious'' effect on the war effort (CAUTION! The link leads to extremely disturbing photos of actual results of the US war, many from al-Jazeera.)

The British newspaper Daily Mirror has reported the existence of another damaging Downing Street memo. This one reveals that President Bush wanted to blow up the home offices of popular Arab media channel al-Jazeera in Doha, the capital of Qatar. According to the report, the memo discloses a conversation between Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair on April 16, 2004. There was ``no doubt what Bush wanted to do'', but Blair ``didn't want him to do it'', according to the Mirror's source.

So President Bush did not add the home office to his collection of bombed al-Jazeera facilities. The US previously had hit it's Baghdad office at the Palestine Hotel, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub and injuring a cameraman on April 8, 2003.

US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher at the time said that the US had ``expressed our regret'' for the deaths, but also gave the disputed story that ``there was firing going on in that area and that it's necessary for our forces to return fire''. Boucher also took care to point out how the jounalists in Iraq were doing a ``difficult job under dangerous circumstances''.

A report on the incident released by Reporters Without Borders in January 2004 stated that ``US officials at first lied about what happened and then, in an official statement four months later, exonerated the US Army from any mistake or error of judgement.'' But the report raised more questions than it answered, as it tried to trace the decision to bomb the hotel up the chain of command.

In a another incident, the US bombed the al-Jazeera offices in Kabul, Afghanistan in November 2002.

Deception bought and paid for

Rendon, war seller

Because it illustrates crisply how the CIA & Pentagon procured a campaign of intentional deception of the Congress and the public on pre-war Iraq intelligence, this note fits with the previous post. I thought of adding it there, but that is already too long.

Browsing Steve Clemmons, I came across this post concerning James Bamford's Rolling Stone story on The Man Who Sold the War:

...The illegal arms, according to [Iraqi defector Adnan Ihsan Saeed] al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad. It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

This is another strong reason why President Bush and Vice President Cheney are full of it when they indignantly disavow their clear history of deception with malice aforethought behind the push to invade Iraq and now continue with their bloody, endless war.

Squirming

Cheney is a chickenhawk and an embarrassment.


In friendly confines at the American Enterprise Institute


The Daily Show last Thursday provided an utterly devastating satire of Cheney. Trust me, you've never seen anything like it on TV, the hardest punch I've seen Stewart land in the three years I've been a regular watcher...go here and view ``Weakened Update''.

Though he backed off a bit during today's American Enterprise Institute speech, Vice President Cheney has been on a tear recently against critics of administration policy of endless war. Here was last week's flavor.

Vice President Cheney (Nov. 16):...the suggestion that’s been made by some U.S. senators that the President of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city....We’re going to continue throwing their own words back at them....

American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions and desert temperatures –- conducting raids, training Iraqi forces, countering attacks, seizing weapons, and capturing killers –- and back home a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie....

The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone -– but we’re not going to sit by and let them rewrite history....

Then today:

Vice President Cheney (Nov. 21): Recently my friend and former colleague Jack Murtha called for a complete withdrawal of American forces now serving in Iraq, with a drawdown to begin at once. I disagree with Jack and believe his proposal would not serve the best interests of this nation. But he's a good man, a Marine, a patriot -- and he's taking a clear stand in an entirely legitimate discussion.

Nor is there any problem with debating whether the United States and our allies should have liberated Iraq in the first place. Here, as well, the differing views are very passionately and forcefully stated. But nobody is saying we should not be having this discussion, or that you cannot reexamine a decision made by the President and the Congress some years ago. To the contrary, I believe it is critical that we continue to remind ourselves why this nation took action, and why Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, and why we have a duty to persevere.

What is not legitimate -- and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible -- is the suggestion by some U. S. senators that the President of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence.

Cheney is a jackass. And he is a chickenhawk. He does not get anywhere near the truth that the struggle for American pacification of an unwilling Iraq is devastating along with the Iraqi civilian population, towns, cities, and countryside, the US military itself. He suggests in a backhanded way that critics of the war, and of Bush and Cheney themselves, have an ``insidious'' effect on the war effort. No. It is the policy of fighting an illegal and unethical war that has such an effect on the Iraqi and the American people alike.

Murtha's remarks about the effects of the war on Iraq and the American military itself damningly lay bare the sophistry of Dick Cheney's arguments. Christopher Dickey has an excellent post on Murtha, who has called for American withdrawal from Iraq over a six-month time frame.

Murtha: I have been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals almost every week since the beginning of the War. And what demoralizes them is going to war with not enough troops and equipment to make the transition to peace; the devastation caused by IEDs; being deployed to Iraq when their homes have been ravaged by hurricanes; being on their second or third deployment and leaving their families behind without a network of support.

Remarks by former Special Forces soldier and Vietnam Veteran Stan Goff in Orono, Maine last week reached back to an earlier war and resonate along with Murtha's.

Stan Goff (Nov. 15): I don't think any of us want to get to the point where we can clearly demonstrate that Iraq is Vietnam. We don't need another wall with 58,000 more names on it. We don't need another generation that melts down in the face of this war. And we're already seeing it happen....Some of us who have lived to my age, or maybe even a little older – we were so hopeful that this would never happen again – that we would never do this to another generation of young people.... And we're doing it right now,... you know,... we're doing it right now. We're killing 'em, we're maiming 'em, we're sending 'em home crazy. And we're not doing anything for 'em when they get back. It's the same thing again.

And I don't want to see the end to this occupation be the same as it was in Vietnam, because the price of getting out of Vietnam was too high for everybody involved. Don't need to be three million dead of anybody [as died in the Vietnamese civilian population during the war]. We don't need to see an entire generation wrecked.

One of the reasons – one of the principle reasons – aside from the fact that we were militarily defeated by an anti-occupation force that had made up their minds not to quit until they expelled us. One of the reasons, one of the decisive reasons was that by 1971 the United States military in Vietnam had been destroyed as an effective fighting force. Fifty percent of us were strung out on heroine – in my unit – fifty percent. We were shooting our officers.... It would be immoral to wait until it gets that far again. But that's where, that's inevitably where, it will end up by and by if they continue on the same course that they're on right now. We hear Dick Cheney talking about ``decades'' – plural, decades – is what our commitment is gonna be over there.

That Cheney won't touch these facts about the slow, painful destruction of using the American military for unsuccessful pacification of 25 million Iraqis is telling.

History is lost on the squirming Cheney. Let's look back to the original case for the war. No administration official told the public pre-war that it would be a ``long, hard slog'' that would require ``decades''. Any reasonable person can see the distortion and equivocation evident in voluminous pre-war remarks by Bush, Cheney, and many other administration officials. Then, they spoke of a ``cakewalk'' and greetings of ``liberators''. They had an army of equivocators selling a war that could not have been sold if a picture of the current foreseeable truth of what the war has become properly had been aired.

For example, Cheney addressed the VFW with this unqualified certainty:

Vice President Cheney (Aug. 26, 2002): Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth. [emphasis added]

Or how about this:

President Bush, (March 6, 2003): Saddam Hussein has a long history of reckless aggression and terrible crimes. He possesses weapons of terror. He provides funding and training and safe haven to terrorists -- terrorists who would willingly use weapons of mass destruction against America and other peace-loving countries. Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this country, to our people, and to all free people.

Or how about the unreconstructed Cheney, who as late as January 2004 was still issuing canards about Curveball's phony ``Winnebagoes of Death'':

Vice President Cheney (Jan. 22, 2004): We know, for example, that prior to our going in that he had spent time and effort acquiring mobile biological weapons labs, and we're quite confident he did, in fact, have such a program. We've found a couple of semi trailers at this point which we believe were, in fact, part of that program. Now it's not clear at this stage whether or not he used any of that to produce or whether he was simply getting ready for the next war. That, in my mind, is a serious danger in the hands of a man like Saddam Hussein, and I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction. [emphasis added]

The canard about ``everybody agreed'' on the conclusions from the intelligence was again in full view today in the Vice President's speech:

Vice President Cheney (Nov. 21): They concluded, as the President and I had concluded, and as the previous administration had concluded, that Saddam Hussein was a threat. Available intelligence indicated that the dictator of Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and this judgment was shared by the intelligence agencies of many other nations, according to the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission. All of us understood, as well, that for more than a decade, the U.N. Security Council had demanded that Saddam Hussein make a full accounting of his weapons programs. The burden of proof was entirely on the dictator of Iraq -- not on the U.N. or the United States or anyone else. And he repeatedly refused to comply throughout the course of the decade.

Even if this is all true, the emphasis on urgency and need for preventive action was engendered through false claims about ``nuclear weapons within a year'', and sneak attacks ``in 45 minutes''. In 2002, a minority of politicians could resist these specious arguments. So, yeah, a lot of senators and representatives went along with abdication to Bush on Iraq in October 2002. And the further canard about Security Council ``demands'' and ``accounting'' deserves fuller examination. In the end, the Security Council refused to consider a war resolution. The arguments used to declare the war legal remain on extremely shaky ground, as the Goldsmith memo shows.

So how is it so hard for the indignant chickenhawk to understand that most reasonable people would interpret the very definite language in the pre-war period as deliberate distortion and falsehood -- especially when it becomes clear that there were voluminous pre-war doubts about every major element of the case the administration presented. It is legitimate to say the ``administration purposely misled the American people''. Maybe they told the truth about what the faulty intelligence said, but they completely concealed all of the doubts about it. Absence of doubt is what drove the argument for preventive action. Falsification by omission is falsification.

It is far more accurate to state that widespread doubt existed pre-war about Iraq's possession of WMD than to state that ``everybody agreed'' that Iraq did in fact have weapons that very likely were about to be used. The common anti-war slogan, ``Bush lied and people died'' is a lot closer to the truth than the phony pronouncements of the jackass, chickenhawk Dick Cheney.

Curveball and the ``everybody agreed'' canard

Colin Powell on February 5, 2003 before the United Nations Security Council: ``My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.''

The oft-repeated rightist defense of the Bush administration pre-war public relations campaign against Iraq's nonexistent weapons is that ``everybody agreed, but all were wrong'' about the WMD. The president, Prime Minister Blair, and other officials merely reacted with war due to their sincerely held beliefs that Iraq was some sort of threat. Now that they know war-&-sanctions-battered Iraq was not a threat, there still is no sign they will release their chokehold on the country anytime soon. They are still not forthcoming with the true motivations behind the major underlying policy decisions concerning the war. But that's another matter and I'll address it in a future post.

For now, I want to call attention to a new posting at Booman Tribune by Col. Patrick Lang, a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces. In this posting, Lang lays out and analyzes today's LA Times follow-up story on ``Curveball'' -- the intelligence fabricator on whom Bush administration claims of marauding Iraqi ``Winnebagoes of Death'' (mobile bioweapons labs) were based.

A taste:

CURVEBALL, the Iraqi source of the German intelligence (BND) became an essential element in the campaign of distorted and manipulated information. CURVEBALL was a fraud. The Germans said they did not believe him. DIA said they did not believe him, but the Bush Administration evidently did believe him. Why? They believed because they wanted to believe.

Now just one more quote, this time from President Bush on January 28, 2003 in the State of the Union message:

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them. [emphasis added]

Obviously, they did not ``know'' anything of the sort. The mobile labs never existed, even during the era of US & UK support for the real Iraqi bioweapons program in the 1980s.

My personal opinion is there was intentional pre-war distortion that this fabricated intelligence was solid -- by the president, Secretary Powell, and other officials. The idea was to cherry pick whatever shards of intelligence they could get their hands on (and if necessary, create), and then puff it up into a threat case sufficient to provoke the desired drumbeat response from the Congress, the media, and the public. It worked so well that it's hard to keep count the US soldiers, US Marines, and Iraqi civilians who keep dying as a result of the international crimes that followed.

So it is a rightist canard that there was an ``overwhelming consensus'' of world intelligence services that Saddam had weapons in March 2003. In fact the opposite was true. Warnings were rife in late 2002 and early 2003 about the shakiness of sources on which all of the main claims were based. These were not just minor peripheral nitpicks on an overwhelming consensus, but rather a complete collapse of the essential claims. And it is now known that that the collapse of these claims was evident before the war.

Nonetheless, it was months and months after the invasion before the promotion of the fabricated claims was abandoned. I analyzed this period in a long post written at two different times during the spring of 2004, after the initial LA Times story on Curveball emerged. The president's handpicked weapons inspector, David Kay, a gung-ho believer, recognized the ``damning'' falsehoods behind the case for war earlier than other administration officials, Powell included. (I don't think Cheney has yet renounced the mobile bioweapons labs as the fakes they were). Read that whole post -- ``We paid to fool ourselves'' -- here.

Recommended further reading
Rodger Payne has some excellent posts laying out this history with lots and lots of high-quality references. He examines the president's Veteran's Day shots taken against the anti-war movement. (I had wanted to post on that, but could not find enough time. Rodger does a great job there.) Please see:

(1) The Iraq "threat", Saturday November 19; and
(2) The administration's deceptions, Monday November 14

Friday garden blogging

Long shadows, cold nights


Leaf composter and Dalek, the kitchen composter

Much is going on in this photo. The long shadows at 3:30pm portend an early sunset (4:05pm EST today, I think). The declination of the sun is markedly lower. In the foreground, next year's garlic bed has been prepared with a dozen bulbs. The Brussels sprout plant (Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera) is still standing, but the buds never came in worth crap. However, the volunteer broccoli did come in really well. We did not buy any seedlings. The leaves + grass clippings were chopped fine with the mowers last Sunday, making some excellent compost. A nice bed of the mix went into Dalek to hold the kitchen scraps. Note how green the grass remains. The clippings were perfect for compost -- I guess one advantage of all the rain (2 more inches Tuesday and Wednesday this week). Can you find the kitty?

Global Public Media

I see that the excellent media website for peak oil & gas, Global Public Media, is carrying this week a link to my September 29 talk on peak oil on the front page. There I am, just down a few items from the important Denver Conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas!

Please do peruse the Global Public Media site. It's an essential resource for global energy issues. It has lots of great audio and video archives of the peak oil heavy hitters like Matt Simmons, Richard Heinberg, and James Howard Kunstler.

Meanwhile, I'd like to direct visitors who find their way here to three archive links associated with my September 29 talk:

(1) Original podcast at peacecast.us

(2) Peak oil supporting links (posted 9/29)

(3) Handout from the talk (pdf, 311kb)

Stan Goff

A new podcast featuring Stan Goff is now available at peacecast.us.

Troopship

This is a special posting featuring a first-hand account of life on a World War II troopship written by my late father. It appeared in Now and Then (Vol. 39, No. 4, Wednesday January 30, 1946), a student publication from Saint Paul Academy. My dad taught and coached at this preparatory school in Saint Paul, Minnesota -- now known as Saint Paul Academy and Summit School -- from 1945 through 1949. I present this story in honor of the incredible sacrifices our veterans have made fighting wars for our country. --Eric


Mr. Olson

(Mr. Olson has recently completed three years of service in the army. The following story is a description of his voyage from the U. S. to England before D-Day.—Ed.)

TROOPSHIP
``When your surname is called, answer with your given name and initial. Pass quickly up the gangplank!'', someone barked in the maze of olive drab.

The tide was rapidly coming in and the liner was rising above the pier, making the gangplank a miniature problem in mountain climbing. A wool uniform and boots did not help one to forget that it was August. Here is a partial inventory of the items with which I was to ``pass quickly'', as the announcer so blithely informed us, up that incline: one caliber 45 sub-machine gun, seventeen thirty-round clips for same, field pack complete with entrenching tools, gas-mask, and steel helmet, all draped around the neck and each in a competition to close the normal channels of air. Perched above all, one balanced his duffel bag containing extra uniforms, gas-resistant clothing, more boots and an array of personal effects.

``Is this trip necessary?'' quirked a voice. We made the grade.

Nine thousand men in some nine hundred feet of ship (sardines and neutrons enjoy a tremendous freedom) present many interesting problems. There is, for example, the matter of food. Your card reads, ``Sitting No. 7, Line No. 2''. So, one having inclinations for breakfast, without further dispatch seeks ``Line 2''. It winds from the bow of the ship to the stern, through passageways, down gangways, and around bulkheads. Finally, one finds an emaciated individual who admits that he represents the end of ``Line No. 2''. Your joy is short-lived, however, for he hastens to add that he also comes in the category of ``Sitting No. 1'', You mentally survey the situation and wonder if it’s possible to have six more sittings of breakfast tucked away in the galley. It tried our patience--but we ate.

Recreational facilities were of necessity limited and most of us had degenerated, during the long period of training, into the habit of depending on others for entertainment. Here was a challenge to that rarely practiced faculty of entertaining oneself. Learning the secrets of the ship, the converted luxury liner, America, provided great interest. The radar detector apparatus, the turbines, the signal system, the sea doors, and a host of others were available to the observer. During clear weather one could worm his way among the discussion groups on the main deck and discover anything from the best recipe for ``corn pone'' to a fool-proof solution for all the world’s ills.

We were not in convoy. The ship's speed (twenty-three knots) and constant change of course were her primary protection. Certain disciplines had to be strictly observed. At dusk, when the amplifier announced, ``The smoking lamp is out,'' the ship was in total darkness but for cat's-eyes of light marking the inner passageways and lights in essential areas such as the galleys and engine rooms.

Until one became familiar with the ship, it was judicious to carry blankets and sleep on deck if he expected to remain there after dark--or perhaps spend the night groping in the bowels of the ship for his lodging on ``B-Deck, Compartment 5, Bunk 65''.

Casting objects overboard was a serious offense. Unrestricted disposal of refuse by the men, each article in itself being of little significance, when multiplied by nine thousand would publish on the face of the ocean the size of the ship, its course, and type of cargo.

These random sketches are no attempt to summarize the character of all troopships. They are not a detailed account of the ship in question. Perhaps, they will help you add meaning to the laconic news item: ``U. S. S. West Point arrived at Liverpool with nine thousand troops''.

Friday garden blogging

Leaves down


They all came off early Monday morning.


Tasty surprise--very late broccoli shoots

A brief, windy rainstorm early Monday morning took off all of the leaves in one quick drop. In the garden, surprise broccoli shoots came out during a few milder days. There are still a few carrots left to dig as well. Time to plant next year's garlic....

Note: I have adjusted post times to allow my dad's piece to float to the top.

Torture cover-up

President Bush, in Pananma, November 7, 2005: ``Anything we do to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law,....We do not torture. And therefore we're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible, more possible to do our job.''

Headline, Washington Post, November 5, 2005: ''Cheney Seeks CIA Exemption to Torture Ban'':

Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session....

``It was clear to me there that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field,'' Lawrence Wilkerson, a former colonel who was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff during President Bush's first term, said Thursday.

Wilkerson said the view of Cheney's office was put in ``carefully couched'' terms but that to a soldier in the field it meant sometimes using interrogation techniques that ``were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.'' He said he no longer has access to the paperwork.

What else do we need to know in order to conclude that there is a major cover-up here? They say they don't torture, but they need an exemption so that they can torture??

If such an exemption were to be written into the McCain-sponsored anti-torture language recently passed by the US Senate, that provision would then do exactly the opposite of outlawing ``cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment'' by codifying an approved exception.

Saddam WMD follow up

Response received

Professor McAdams replies that I ``do not seem to seriously challenge the notion that virtually everybody fully believed that Saddam had WMDs,'' and that I ``talk around'' his points.

Okay, I see how I could be more direct.

What I do examine in the previous post is what ``fully believed'' means. When did Saddam have weapons? How did he get them? What shape were they in in 2002-3? Sure, we can find a point in history where everybody thinks Saddam had some weapons. I have a whitepaper posted here that traces Saddam's bioweapons to a UK cow. But the litany of items I cite reveal a great deal of fraud that officials communicated to the public.

I want to show that tracing these frauds is not a product of someone who is ``just completely heedless of any standards of telling the truth or making a plausible argument.''

And I did point out that the Germans certainly did not buy the story told them by Curveball. So there is a counterexample to ``everybody fully believed.'' Again, I certainly could be more direct.

And what about Kamel? The secret UN debriefings that Rangwala and Newsweek's John Barry revealed clearly show something less than ``full belief'' that the weapons were extant. Beyond that, by reading through Rangwala's site, as I recommend, you find a whole lot of just the opposite of ``full belief.''

Furthermore, though I did not reach back to the Clinton years in any detail in my piece, I do challenge Khidir Hamza, ``Saddam's Bombmaker.'' A lot of people were fooled by that guy, including the very knowledgeable and thorough David Albright, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. So it's not surprising that a lot of stories like "Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported", cited by Kagan, were around in 1998.

Everyone thought Saddam had WMD?

Tim Russert: ``George W. Bush said there were. Bill and Hillary Clinton said there were. The Russians, French and Germans, who opposed the war, said there were. Hans Blix of the U.N. said there were.''

This quote from Meet the Press on September 25, 2005 during a gaggle with New York Times columnists illustrates how water for the Bush-absolving notion that ``everybody'' in the pre-Iraq-war period thought that Iraqi WMD were real and a genuine threat to the US and the UK is being carried by mainstream media.

Lately this has become quite an epidemic. Even administration dissident Lawrence Wilkerson -- who Deep Blade discussed here -- re-laid out the winter 2003 case, as cited by Max Boot (in a piece also discussed by Deep Blade here):

Wilkerson said on Oct. 19 that ``the consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming'' that Hussein was building illicit weapons. This view was endorsed by ``the French, the Germans, the Brits.'' The French, of all people, even offered ``proof positive'' that Hussein was buying aluminum tubes ``for centrifuges.'' Wilkerson also recalled seeing satellite photos ``that would lead me to believe that Saddam Hussein, at least on occasion, was giving us disinformation.''

Boot left out the part where Wilkerson said in a series of obviously conflicted and troubled statements concerning Colin Powell's February 5, 2003 appearance before the United Nations Security Council, ``I wasn’t all that convinced by the evidence I’d seen that he had a nuclear program other than the software.''

So the story from many quarters on the right is that we cannot accuse the Bush Administration of lying us into war because it was just common knowledge that what Bush, Cheney, Blair, and other officials said in the war run-up was based on their sincere and widely-shared beliefs.

Some days ago, I heard a prime example of this kind of water carrying on a Wisconsin Public Radio talk program featuring an interview with John C. McAdams, associate professor of political science at Marquette University. (Click here and find the audio links for October 26, 2005)

A caller to the program with Professor McAdams cited a Democracy Now! interview with former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman and asked McAdams to comment about the notion that the Plame investigation is not so much about revealing the name of a CIA operative as it is about the forged documents associated with the vice president's office and the Pentagon Office of Special Plans -- the lie factory, often cited in Deep Blade Journal -- and hence the lies that led to war.

A fair question? Not to the professor, who gave this surprisingly harsh reply,

McAdams: [snickers] People who, who, who use the ``Bush lied'' argument, it seems to me, are, are just completely heedless of any standards of, of, of telling the truth or making a plausible argument... um, you know, Let's make a list of those who believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction: Russian intelligence, French intelligence, British intelligence, Tony Blair, the CIA, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, John Kerry. And somehow we're supposed to believe... ah, oh, oh, and the mainstream media, excellent article by Robert Kagan yesterday in the Washington Post where he talks about how the mainstream media, particularly the New York Times but also the Washington Post in the late 1990s and in 2000, before George Bush took office, were hyping the notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and he has a long list of articles,... [see Kagan quoted below],... [UN chief inspector Hans Blix], who clearly told the United Nations that Saddam had had weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s, was under an obligation to have destroyed them, and to explain to his investigators, to document the destruction, but refused to document the destruction. Were supposed to believe that among all these people, George Bush was the only person who was so brilliant, ah, who was so wonderfully perceptive, that he knew Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction when virtually everyone else who was paying attention did. Remember, the disagreement about going to war between say us and the French was not whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, it was what the appropriate strategy for dealing with that would be. Ah, so, it's, ah simply ahistorical, to make that argument that ``Bush lied'' about weapons of mass destruction. Everybody was making that argument.

McAdams then follows up with a pro forma thrashing of Joseph Wilson, who McAdams says was ``discredited.'' (See previous post on this matter.)

The October 25 piece by Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan that McAdams cites is quite interesting. It expands the view of what media sources beyond New York Times WMD maven Judith Miller were saying about Iraq, and over a much longer time frame:

Many critics outside the Times suggest that Miller's eagerness to publish the Bush administration's line was the primary reason Americans went to war. The Times itself is edging closer to this version of events.

There is a big problem with this simple narrative. It is that the Times, along with The Post and other news organizations, ran many alarming stories about Iraq's weapons programs before the election of George W. Bush. A quick search through the Times archives before 2001 produces such headlines as "Iraq Has Network of Outside Help on Arms, Experts Say"(November 1998), "U.S. Says Iraq Aided Production of Chemical Weapons in Sudan"(August 1998), "Iraq Suspected of Secret Germ War Effort" (February 2000), "Signs of Iraqi Arms Buildup Bedevil U.S. Administration" (February 2000), "Flight Tests Show Iraq Has Resumed a Missile Program" (July 2000). (A somewhat shorter list can be compiled from The Post's archives, including a September 1998 headline: "Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported.") The Times stories were written by Barbara Crossette, Tim Weiner and Steven Lee Myers; Miller shared a byline on one.

Sure, fine, Kagan is on to something here to the extent that he correctly describes what mainstream reporters did throughout pretty much the last decade when reporting on Iraq.

But what McAdams and other rightists do, though, is latch onto this history of mainstream thought as they hurl charges that people interested in getting to the bottom of just how intelligence support for bellicose administration rhetoric during late 2002 and early 2003 was created and disseminated are ``ahistorical.''

I take that personally. When the professor says that very reasonable concern about the forgeries that swirled around vice presidential operatives and the unnecessarily alarmist rhetoric whipping up a public drumbeat for war that emanated from the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP) are ``just completely heedless of any standards of, of, of telling the truth or making a plausible argument,'' I take offense. I have covered these issues here. This blog prides itself on plausible, well-supported arguments. (Please note that Professor McAdams totally failed to address the document forgeries or the Pentagon's rogue intelligence shop, which I believe are key.)

Saying ``Bush lied'' not the truth? Depends on what ``lie'' we are talking about. I will grant that President Bush and other administration spokespeople were careful about not telling outright whoppers in the lead-up to the war. They created fallacies by omitting important details, they created hysteria by drawing worst-case conclusions over shaky intelligence (all of which turned out to be false), and they did outright lie about how much doubt existed concerning these facts about Iraq's weapons.

For example, Vice President Cheney addressed the VFW with this unqualified certainty on August 26, 2002:

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth. [emphasis added]

If there is any one brazen whopper in Cheney's presentation, it is this conveyance of lack of doubt.

Here follows an example of how the president himself omitted facts about the then-known unreliability of the ``Iraqi nuclear engineer'' cited, and twisted even-then-shaky facts into a worst-case near certainty very obviously designed to strike maximum fear into the hearts of a 911-jittery public.

President Bush (October 7, 2002): Before being barred from Iraq in 1998, the International Atomic Energy Agency dismantled extensive nuclear weapons-related facilities, including three uranium enrichment sites. That same year, information from a high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected revealed that despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue.

The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" -- his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America. And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.

These are the ``lies'' we refer to. They are lies if it is considered lying to hide the truth from the public about the extent of doubt, and to draw the most extreme conclusions (ie. we needed to attack, invade, conquer, and permanently occupy and dominate Iraq) from the doubtful data.

Beyond that, the degree to which Cheney's office and OSP actually concocted pre-war Iraq weapons intelligence is not yet known, but it has been my belief for a long time that they in fact did make up a lot of it through clandestine channels. Much of this information was scooped up by Judy Miller and was disseminated exclusively by her (and a few co-authors) on front pages of editions of the New York Times. Alexander Cockburn posted an excellent summary of Miller's role on August 18, 2003. Cockburn just followed the trail of an ``an entire Noah's Ark of scam-artists'' that underbedded Miller's reporting:

We don't have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller's major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam's palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration's propaganda drive towards invasion.

...

December 20, 2001, Headline, "Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites For Chemical and Nuclear Arms".

Miller rolls out a new Iraqi defector, in the ripe tradition of her favorite, Khidir Hamza, the utter fraud who called himself Saddam's Bombmaker.

Story:

"An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.

"The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, gave details of the projects he said he worked on for President Saddam Hussein's government in an extensive interview last week in Bangkok. The interview with Mr. Saeed was arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, the main Iraqi opposition group, which seeks the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.

"If verified, Mr. Saeed's allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction."

Notice the sedate phrase "if verified". It never was verified. But the story served its purpose.

September 7, 2002: Headline: "US says Hussein intensifies quest for a-bomb parts".

This one was by Miller and Michael Gordon, promoting the aluminum tube nonsense: "In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium." All lies of course. Miller and Gordon emphasize "Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals".

Another of Miller's defectors takes a bow:

"Speaking on the condition that neither he nor the country in which he was interviewed be identified, Ahmed al-Shemri, his pseudonym, said Iraq had continued developing, producing and storing chemical agents at many mobile and fixed secret sites throughout the country, many of them underground.

"All of Iraq is one large storage facility," said Mr. Shemri. Asked about his allegations, American officials said they believed these reports were accurate."

A final bit of brazen chicanery from Gordon and Miller:

"Iraq denied the existence of a germ warfare program entirely until 1995, when United Nations inspectors forced Baghdad to acknowledge it had such an effort. Then, after insisting that it had never weaponized bacteria or filled warheads, it again belatedly acknowledged having done so after Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein's brother-in-law, defected to Jordan with evidence about the scale of the germ warfare program."

What Gordon and Miller leave out (or lacked the enterprise or desire to find out) is that Hussein Kamel told UN Inspectors that he had destroyed all Iraq's WMDs, on Saddam Hussein's orders.

September 13, 2002, headline: "White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons".

And on and on...

So then, what of the notion that the French, the Germans, the UK, the UN, Democrats, and so on all ``knew'' Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? ``Everybody'' did not ``know'' Saddam had WMD ready to use. The WMD America helped Saddam to acquire had long-since been destroyed, as the Hussein Kamel debriefing showed eight years earlier (and as was known to the CIA). Most of the rest of the intelligence had collapsed or was collapsing by early 2003, and all of these countries and the UN knew that and warned US officials about it. And the UK? That's funny, Tony Blair's own intel-PR shop had created the famous ``WMD attack in 45 minutes'', and MI6 had cribbed a supposed fresh intelligence assessment on Iraq WMD directly off of the internet from a decade-old graduate student’s paper.

Democrats, except maybe for the likes of no-WMD converts like Henry Waxman or, on the left of the spectrum, Dennis Kucinich, were rather useless, so citing John Kerry as proof of WMD is rather a joke.

It became known that the defectors and suppliers of the intelligence were frauds often turned out by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, like Khidir Hamza, the person who was the basis for 1998 stories like ``Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported''; and ``Curveball'', the defector who formed the basis for scare-mongering stories about ``Winnebagoes of Death'' -- mobile bioweapons labs -- described extensively here in Deep Blade Journal.

The initial LA Times story reporting Curveball stated that

Curveball's story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of U.S. weapons hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that beset much of the prewar intelligence collection and analysis.

Deep Blade Journal has had from the beginning a general editorial position that while a local tyrant, Saddam in no way was a threat that required war during 2003 and beyond. Even so, I could not guarantee in late-2002/early-2003 that Saddam Hussein did not have some unconventional weapons. Instead, my editorial position since the beginning has been to depend honest analysis, the most important of which in the war buildup was that of Glen Rangwala from Cambridge University, ``Claims and evaluations of Iraq's proscribed weapons''.

A brief examination of this document will demonstrate thoroughly that there was no clear agreement that Saddam Hussein was any sort of threat to the US, UK, or even any of his immediate neighbors. It shows truly without doubt that Iraq had already been substantially disarmed.

Were there gaps in accounting? Yes. This is a point with which I must agree with Professor McAdams. But that in no way suggests that war was or is the answer, nor does it absolve the US administration for creating a false premise for the war.

Here is how I put this in March 2003:

Yes, there are officially unresolved issues concerning chemical and biological agents that could be locally very dangerous. And full credence should be given to the possibility that Hussein Kamel correctly reported the destruction of these agents. Above all, there is no way these issues add up to war in the absence of a direct threat from Iraq....a solution short of war has always been possible—lifting of sanctions and permanent in-country inspections coupled with region-wide peace initiatives. We probably will never know if present day Iraq can cooperate with the international community and heal itself from decades of tyrannical rule because the U.S. will not allow it.

Administration officials are now well-rehearsed in delivering lines like, ``Saddam Hussein is a practiced liar, there is no doubt about it. We should take everything he says very skeptically.''

Apparently, the same holds true for Colin Powell and our own administration. Other countries see this clearly as their citizens line up at 80%+ rates against the war. Notwithstanding posturing of the U.S. administration that failure to vote along lines of U.S. will renders the U.N. ``irrelevant,'' the U.S. still faces three likely vetoes of a war resolution from China, France, and Russia; teetering of the Blair government in the U.K. as it desperately seeks cover for war; even withdrawal of support for the U.S. position in third-world countries like Pakistan and Cameroon. These are no small measures of how badly Powell’s diplomatic disaster has turned out.

This is history Professor McAdams and other rightists should review before attacking anti-war analysis with an ``ahistorical'' tag. It seems to me that such attacks serve the administration's program to deflect the highly damaging Plame matter into a spurious discussion of the honesty of Joseph Wilson and others who would question the motives behind the conquest of Iraq.

Document collection: Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 80. The administration's pre-war intelligence papers are available here.

Friday garden blogging

Normal fall


Maple tree finally changing and dropping, one week late


A small patch of warm weather inspired some more broccoli shoots

After weeks of rollicking crazy rainstorms in October, things have settled down the last week. Bangor in October 2005 recorded the single wettest month (ever, of any month) since records have been kept. The previous all-time wettest month was just two years ago in October 2003:

PRECIPITATION (INCHES)
RECORD
MAXIMUM 8.96 2003
MINIMUM 0.99 1986
TOTALS 13.32R

As you can see, the old record month was bested by nearly 5 inches in 2005.

Wingers whitewashing intel scandal

Smears of Joseph Wilson, misrepresentation of 2004 SSCI report par for the course

A quick perusal of Media Matters for America reveals that right wing attack dogs have been unleashed to counter the now very obvious truth that the United States has attacked, invaded, conquered, occupied, dominated, and ravaged Iraq based upon false notions about weapons of mass destruction.

Try this from an oped by the jingoist foreign policy writer Max Boot in the November 2 edition of the LA Times, and discussed on Media Matters:

Pretty much all of the claims that the administration doctored evidence about Iraq have been euthanized, not only by the Senate committee but also by the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission.

Or this exchange involving Fox's kind-hearted rightist radio host Tony Snow, heard on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday (October 28):

SNOW: Yeah, that's right. [laughter] [applause] The wife is the one who arranged for Joe Wilson to go over to Niger. What's interesting is that the people that really smeared Joe Wilson were the people who looked into his charges, the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said, ``You know what, Joe? All that stuff you said in the New York Times, was lies. You're wrong!''

CONNOLLY: No, let me tell you something—

SNOW: No, whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa. Wait a minute.

CONNOLLY: When you guys – when you—

SNOW: [to audience] Read the Senate Intelligence Committee Report. I know it's uncomfortable, because it's a view you don't want to hear. But if you're going to call ``bullshit,'' at least read it, and then get back to me. Sorry, go ahead.

MAHER: Wait a second. I'm sorry, what bullshit are we reading? [laughter]

SNOW: No, they're screaming “bullshit” for me.

MAHER: I know. [to audience] And you shouldn't. And please don't.

SNOW: Yeah, I'm talking about the Senate Intelligence Committee Report—

MAHER: But, but – said what?

SNOW: What they said is that Joe Wilson's account in the New York Times of his trip to Niger, sipping spiced tea and trying to investigate charges of yellow-cake uranium sales on the part of Niger—

MAHER: Yes.

SNOW: --that, basically, his account was misleading. That he did, in fact, find evidence, that the report that he filed with the CIA, later forwarded to the White House, indicated that such sales exist.

MAHER: Well, that I don't know to be true, and I would doubt it is.

SNOW: [overlapping] Well, but-but-but—

MAHER: [overlapping] But also, Valerie—

SNOW: [overlapping] Just read it. I'll send it to you.

Let's see, this whole thing is about the truthfulness of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson? Keeps the eye off of the document forgeries that undergirded the president's January 2003 State of the Union Message.

But what no one seems to call to the attention of Snow, Boot, and others peddling this tripe is that what they are waving comes from a highly partisan addendum of the July 7, 2004 ``Phase I'' Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report tacked onto to the end by committee Chairman Pat Roberts, and fellow Republican whitewashers Orrin Hatch and Kit Bond. On page 452 of the report, the whitewashers write,

Despite our hard and successful work to deliver a unanimous report, however, there were two issues on which the Republicans and Democrats could not agree: 1) whether the Committee should conclude that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's public statements were not based on knowledge he actually possessed, and 2) whether the Committee should conclude that it was the former ambassador's wife who recommended him for his trip to Niger.

Go ahead and take up Snow's challenge to read the Republican ``bullshit'' that follows. Hardly seems like a solid conclusion of the committee that Wilson lied in his NY Times piece of July 2003. Unfortunately neither Maher nor his other guests were prepared to point this out.

Wilson himself addressed these matters in great detail in a letter available here. This link points to one entry in a series of smashing deconstructions of the Republican attacks by Larry Johnson at TPM Cafe. (Johnson is a former CIA and State Department official.)

And the case against the Whitehouse for lying us into war is hardly ``euthanized'', considering that neither the SSCI Phase I report nor the Silbermann-Robb whitewash examine the questions of Whitehouse use of intelligence at all, as Media Matters points out.

The right itself is so full of bullshit on prewar use of the Iraq WMD concept. They just can't get their heads around the fact they were used to push a phony weapons case to falsely anoint an illegal, and predictably failed policy with legality and public acquiescence in late 2002 and early 2003. They can't even say the words, ``Office of Special Plans'' (as did neither SSCI nor Silbermann-Robb).

But if Mr. Snow actually did look into the meat of that SSC report, by the way, he might find plenty of evidence that administration fitted up its case, as explained in a July 2004 piece by former CIA briefer, Ray McGovern:

Although it was clear to us that much of the intelligence on Iraq had been cooked to the recipe of policy, not until the Senate report did we know that the skewing included outright lies. We had heard of "Joe," the nuclear weapons analyst in CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence and Arms Control, and it was abundantly clear that his agenda was to "prove" that the infamous aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were to be used for developing a nuclear weapon. We did not know that he and his CIA associates falsified the data-including rotor testing ironically called "spin tests."

The Senate committee determined that "Joe" deliberately skewed data to fit preconceptions regarding an Iraqi nuclear threat. "Who could have believed that about our intelligence community, that the system could be so dishonest?" wondered the normally soft-spoken David Albright, a widely respected veteran expert on Iraq's work toward developing a nuclear weapon.

Gosh, Tony, you just ought to read that report you're waving around.

And we haven't even begun to discuss the Downing Street memos, that famously report from the bowels of officialdom, that ``intelligence was being fixed around policy.''

To further see why Boot, Snow, and the rest of the Republican flack machine is dealing in little more than childish slurs, check out an excellent span of postings at Talking Points Memo. Go here, and here for many postings giving a very detailed examination of the Republican frauds and chicanery that preceded the war. TPM makes these Republican flacksters look like sophomores whose dogs ate their homework.

Real gulags in use

US uses Soviet-era Eastern Bloc prison ``compound'' in its Terror War

US Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Fox News Sunday, June 12, 2005:

So we have the legend that there is so-called gulag-like treatment and the reality is honey glazed chicken on Sunday, and we give them honey and dates to break the fast on Ramadan.

Wednesday November 2 Dana Priest story in the Washington Post:

The CIA has been interrogating al-Qaida prisoners at a Soviet era compound in eastern Europe as part of a covert jail system set up after the September 11 attacks, according to the Washington Post. The secret facility is part of a network of "black sites" spanning eight countries, the existence and locations of which are known only to a handful of US officials and usually only the president and a few top intelligence officers in the host countries.

...

In late 2002 or early 2003, the CIA brokered deals with other countries to establish black-site prisons. One of these sites -- which sources said they believed to be the CIA's biggest facility now -- became particularly important when the agency realized it would have a growing number of prisoners and a shrinking number of prisons.

Thailand was closed, and sometime in 2004 the CIA decided it had to give up its small site at Guantanamo Bay. The CIA had planned to convert that into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military. The CIA pulled out when U.S. courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees.

Looks like Amnesty International was dead on when it invoked the term ``gulag'' to describe the holes US global police have established to disappear their detainees. Evidence piles high about who are the real ``dissemblers'' in Bush time.