wOrE aNd PiEcE

U.S. report on 9/11 to be 'explosive'
Government errors, Saudi ties to terrorists among highlights
BY FRANK DAVIES, Posted on Thu, Jul. 10, 2003 at The Miami Herald

posted by xi @ 8:51 AM 0 Comments

Rumsfeld Doubles Estimate for Cost of Troops in Iraq
By THOM SHANKER, in The New York Times, July 10, 2003

WASHINGTON, July 9 - Gen. Tommy R. Franks said today that violence and uncertainty in Iraq made it unlikely that troop levels would be reduced "for the foreseeable future," and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld nearly doubled the estimated military costs there to $3.9 billion a month.

"We have about 145,000 troops in there right now," General Franks told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said he had talked to "commanders at every level inside Iraq," and found that the size and structure of those forces were appropriate for the current situation.

Mr. Rumsfeld has never laid out a timetable for bringing American troops home, and has repeatedly pledged that the forces would stay as long as required, but no longer. Even so, the acknowledgement today of the scope of the long-term military commitment to Iraq was the strongest indication to date that the reconstruction effort requires the continued deployment of large numbers of troops - and that the undertaking carries a hefty price tag.

Under intense questioning from Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, Mr. Rumsfeld or his aides telephoned Pentagon financial officers during a break and reported back to the committee that cost estimates for the Iraq campaign had reached $3.9 billion per month, on average from this past January through September.

A Pentagon official said the $3.9 billion figure "is the estimated cost to maintain the current force level in Iraq," which includes expenses for military operations, including fuel, transportation, food, ordnance and personnel, but not reconstruction costs. The $3.9 billion figure is almost double the $2 billion per month estimate issued by administration officials in April. In addition, the cost of operations in Afghanistan are now $900 million to $950 million monthly, Mr. Rumsfeld said.

During a grueling four-hour hearing, committee members alternately complimented the military's war plan but criticized the Pentagon's planning for the postwar stabilization of the nation.

In particular, Mr. Rumsfeld was pressed to detail efforts to reach out to allies - including those like France and Germany who opposed the war - for contributions of troops to replace Americans. General Franks, who stepped down this week from the top job at Central Command, gave no indication that commanders were requesting more troops to combat guerrilla-style attacks. When pressed to predict how long a force comparable to the current one would be needed, he said, "It is for the foreseeable future."

Moments later, Mr. Rumsfeld sought to erase the impression that those comments meant that the American commitment could not shrink more rapidly. "The numbers of U.S. forces could change, while the footprint stayed the same, in the event that we have greater success in bringing in additional coalition forces, in the event we are able to accelerate the Iraqi Army," he said.

With American forces suffering almost daily attacks in Iraq, that statement did not satisfy Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who challenged Mr. Rumsfeld by saying that "we have the world's best-trained soldiers serving as policemen in what seems to be a shooting gallery." Mr. Kennedy said that "the lack of a coherent plan is hindering our efforts at internationalization and aggravating the strain on our troops."

Mr. Rumsfeld said 142,000 military personnel had returned to their home bases, although most of those serve in the Air Force and Navy, leaving the burden in Iraq to American ground forces. The current ground force figure, 145,000, is down from its peak of 151,000. And he announced the withdrawal of one high-profile unit from the war zone, saying all three brigades of the Third Infantry Division, which spearheaded the attack on Baghdad, would leave Iraq by September.

In sketching how Iraqis will help stabilize their nation, General Franks said that 35,000 Iraqi police officers had been hired and that plans called for training a new Iraqi army of 12,000 within one year and 40,000 within three years.

As recently as May, senior allied officials speaking to correspondents in Baghdad said the Bush administration had hoped to shrink the American military presence in Iraq to two divisions, about 30,000 to 40,000 troops, by autumn, with a third multinational division also present.

Answering complaints that American unilateralism had alienated its allies, Mr. Rumsfeld and General Franks said that 19 nations now had forces supporting the Iraq effort, that 19 others had promised troops and that discussions were under way with 11 more. Those allied forces already in Iraq, and those committed, totaled 30,000, they said.

Asked by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee, if he would support having France and Germany take part in the postwar stability force, Mr. Rumsfeld said he would. "We have reached out to NATO," Mr. Rumsfeld said. But he cautioned that "it would be incorrect to say that we expect that international forces will replace all of U.S. forces. We don't anticipate that."

Mr. Rumsfeld refused to issue a concrete schedule for withdrawing American forces. "Nobody knows the answer to that question, how long it will take," he said. "It will take some time." But he said that "when it's done, it's going to have been darn well worth having done."

Senators from both parties - James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, and Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island - pressed Mr. Rumsfeld on whether the Pentagon should consider increasing the number of people in uniform to handle global missions. "It seems to me that we have to be prepared to increase our Army, the number of brigades in our Army, or to activate National Guard divisions, and we have to make that decision soon," Mr. Reed said. Mr. Rumsfeld said there were no plans to expand the military.

Sen. John McCain, Republican of Arizona, asked Mr. Rumsfeld about the threat from Iran, and Mr. Rumsfeld said he had received reports that Iran had relocated some border posts a few miles into Iraqi territory, and he cautioned the government in Tehran against such adventurism.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

posted by xi @ 8:48 AM 0 Comments

Terror To Empire
Date Wednesday, July 09 @ 19:01:22, Topic Articles & Essays
With Democrats fearful and media silent, the Bush Administration has transformed the war against terror into a war for empire. Can Americans stop this madness?
By Stewart Nusbaumer

posted by xi @ 8:45 AM 0 Comments

How Iraq begat Liberia
Jesse Walker, at Reason Online, July 7, 2003

"Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.

"So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.

"[...]"

posted by xi @ 8:43 AM 0 Comments

9-11 Commission Criticizes Bush Administration
VOA News, 09 Jul 2003, 14:25 UTC

posted by xi @ 8:36 AM 0 Comments

Expert: U.S. Knew al-Qaida Might Attack
The Associated Press, Wednesday 09 July 2003

posted by xi @ 8:33 AM 0 Comments

U.S. Report on 9/11 to be 'Explosive'
Government errors, Saudi ties to terrorists among highlights, by Frank Davies, The Miami Herald, Thursday 10 July 2003

posted by xi @ 8:32 AM 0 Comments

U.S. Army Baits Ambushers With Own Troops
By Borzou Daragahi, The Associated Press, Wednesday 09 July 2003

posted by xi @ 8:29 AM 0 Comments

Marking kills on his helmet an American soldier in Baghdad April 11th 2003. Polls indicate that for most Americans the attacks of September 11th justify all of the killing that has taken place in Iraq. Americans believe -- quite falsely -- that Iraq was responsible for those attacks, and the human slaughter is seen as vengeance. To date no connection between the government of Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11th has been offered by U.S. or British government sources. From the Washington Post's Multi Media Photo Essay: "Eyes on the War" (Photo: Christopher Anderson)

posted by xi @ 8:25 AM 0 Comments

Bush and Rice say CIA cleared Bush's State of the Union speech

By Tom Raum, Associated Press, featured in the Boston Globe Online, 7/11/2003 10:21

posted by xi @ 8:16 AM 0 Comments

Mr. Bush, You Are A Liar
By William Rivers Pitt | t r u t h o u t | Perspective | Friday 11 July 2003

"[...]

"It was all a lie. All of it.

"[...]

"They know it, too.

"[...]"

posted by xi @ 6:31 AM 0 Comments

The Pentagon's Plan for Tracking Everything That Moves
Big Brother Gets a Brain, by Noah Shachtman, in The Village Voice, July 9 - 15, 2003

"The cameras are already in place. The computer code is being developed at a dozen or more major companies and universities. And the trial runs have already been planned.

"Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become perhaps the federal government's widest reaching, most invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all under watch. Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and soon.

"[...]"

posted by xi @ 7:58 AM 0 Comments

Satellite Expert Discovers Secret Oil Pipeline to Kuwait
Palm Bay man has eye for detail
Meteorologist's work featured in national weather magazine
By Billy Cox, FLORIDA TODAY, Jun 3, 5:52 PM

"On May 25, while scanning the Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program images pipelined into his desktop from 450 miles in orbit, Hank Brandli skidded at a nighttime photo of Iraq. It looked familiar. But not exactly.

"Brandli retrieved another DMSP image he'd archived from May 3. He compared the two. The most recent photo showed a blazing corridor of light running the length of Kuwait, south to north, all the way to the Iraqi border. The image wasn't there on May 3.

"'It's going right up to Iraq's oil fields,' says the retired Air Force colonel from his home in Palm Bay. 'Maybe I'm full of s---. Maybe all they're doing is building a highway to put in McDonald's and sell hamburgers. But why go that way? I think we're in bed with Kuwait. I think we're pumping oil out of Iraq to pay for this war.'

"[...]"

posted by xi @ 7:54 AM 0 Comments

U.S. changes reason for invading Iraq
By CHRISTINE BOYD, From Thursday's Globe and Mail, POSTED AT 9:04 AM EDT

[...]

The U.S. administration has abruptly revised its explanation for invading Iraq, as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asserted that a changed perspective after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — not fresh evidence of banned weapons — provoked the war.

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder," Mr. Rumsfeld testified yesterday before the Senate armed services committee.

"We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light, through the prism of our experience on 9/11."

It was an about-face from a man who confidently proclaimed in January: "There's no doubt in my mind but that they [the Iraqi government] currently have chemical and biological weapons." (He was seconded in March by Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.")

[...]

posted by xi @ 7:34 AM 0 Comments

A Diplomat's Undiplomatic Truth: They Lied

By Robert Scheer, The Los Angeles Times, Tuesday 08 July 2003

"They may have finally found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible for the Iraq war. Unfortunately, the incriminating evidence wasn't left in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces but rather in Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

"Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson publicly revealed over the weekend that he was the mysterious envoy whom the CIA, under pressure from Cheney, sent to Niger to investigate a document - now known to be a crude forgery - that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for the story, and nobody else has either.

"What is startling in Wilson's account, however, is that the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and the vice president's office were all informed that the Niger-Iraq connection was phony. No one in the chain of command disputed that this 'evidence' of Iraq's revised nuclear weapons program was a hoax.

"Yet, nearly a year after Wilson reported back the facts to Cheney and the U.S. security apparatus, Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, invoked the fraudulent Iraq-Africa uranium connection as a major justification for rushing the nation to war: 'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.' What the president did not say was that the British were relying on their intelligence white paper, which was based on the same false information that Wilson and the U.S. ambassador to Niger had already debunked. 'That information was erroneous, and they knew about it well ahead of both the publication of the British white paper and the president's State of the Union address,' Wilson said Sunday on 'Meet the Press.'

"Although a British Parliament report released Monday exonerated the Blair government of deliberate distortion to justify invading Iraq, it urged the foreign secretary to come clean as to when British officials were first told that the Iraq-Niger allegation was based on forged documents. The report noted: 'It is very odd indeed' that the British government has still not come up with any other evidence to support its contention about an Iraq-Niger connection.

"Nor has the U.S. administration told its public why it ignored the disclaimers from its own intelligence sources. In order to believe that our president was not lying to us, we must believe that this information did not find its way through Cheney's office to the Oval Office.

"In media interviews, Wilson said it was the vice president's questioning that pushed the CIA to try to find a credible Iraqi nuclear threat after that agency had determined there wasn't one. 'I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat,' Wilson wrote in an Op-Ed article in Sunday's New York Times. 'A legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.'

"In a Washington Post interview, Wilson added, 'It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying about?' Those are the carefully chosen words of a 23-year career diplomat who, as the top U.S. official in Baghdad in 1990, was praised by then-President George H.W. Bush for his role as the last American to confront Hussein face to face after the dictator invaded Kuwait. In a cable to Baghdad, the president told Wilson: 'What you are doing day in and day out under the most trying conditions is truly inspiring. Keep fighting the good fight.'

"As Wilson observed wryly, 'I guess he didn't realize that one of these days I would carry that fight against his son's administration.' And that fight remains the good fight. This is not some minor dispute over a footnote to history but rather raises the possibility of one of the most egregious misrepresentations by a U.S. administration. What could be more cynical and impeachable than fabricating a threat of rogue nations or terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons and using that to sell a war?

"'There is no greater threat that we face as a nation,' Wilson told NBC, 'than the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of nonstate actors or international terrorists. And if we've prosecuted a war for reasons other than that, using weapons of mass destruction as cover for that, then I think we've done a great disservice to the weapons-of-mass-destruction threat.'

"The world is outraged at this pattern of lies used to justify the Iraq invasion, but the U.S. public still seems numb to the dangers of government by deceit.

"Indeed, Nixon speechwriter William Safire this week in his column channeled the voice of his former boss to reassure Republicans that the public easily could be conned through the next election.

"Perhaps, and far be it for me to lecture either Safire or a reincarnated Nixon as to the ease of deceiving the electorate, but as we learned from the Nixon disgrace, lies have a way of unraveling, and the truth will out, even if it's after the next election."

© 2003 The Los Angeles Times

posted by xi @ 7:19 AM 0 Comments

President Bush Finally Admits He Misled the Nation During State of the Union Address
Press Release from Rep. Jan Schakowsky, July 8, 2003, posted in TruthOut.

"...

"After months of denials, President Bush has finally admitted that he misled the American public during his State of the Union address when claimed that Iraq attempted to purchase uranium in Africa. That is why we need an independent commission to determine the veracity of the other so-called evidence used to convince the American people that war with Iraq was unavoidable.

"..."

posted by xi @ 5:32 AM 0 Comments

Bloggers Gain Libel Protection (News|National)

"The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers."

2003.07.06 Posted by Billy Shipp at TheExperiment

posted by xi @ 7:41 AM 0 Comments