Iraq War Propaganda

Insourcing Torture

Bob Fertik — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:33:22 -0400

At least according to the Senate narrative, they started discussing torture plans for Abu Zubaydah after February 22, 2002--when DIA first questioned Ibn Sheikh al-Libi's claim of a tie between Iraq and al Qaeda that derived from torture. And they signed the Bybee Memo the day after the second DIA report questioning al-Libi's Iraq-al Qaeda ties.

How to connect these dots? Easy.

By 2/13/02, Bushco had decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein, so he needed justifications that he could sell to Congress and the American people. Obviously 9/11 was the "frame" but it had to be stretched all the way from Afghanistan to Iraq. Bush settled on two major reasons: possession of WMD's (even though they knew Iraq had none left) and ties between Iraq and al Qaeda (even though they knew they were enemies).

For the following year - right up to the invasion on 3/19/03 - Bushco had to wage guerrilla war with the government's intelligence professionals to support these two Big Lies. To win this war, Dick Cheney had to visit the CIA repeatedly to browbeat and bamboozle skeptical professionals.

Cheney outsourced al-Libi to Egypt to be tortured into "confessing" Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, because the CIA had no in-house torture capability. Obviously that plan was not a brilliant success, since the DIA didn't buy the outsourced tortured "confession."

So Cheney decided torture had to be insourced to U.S. "professionals" whose credibility could not be dismissed by CIA or DIA professionals. Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were exactly the kinds of professionals Cheney needed. So after six months of lawyering, browbeating, and bamboozling, they got the green light to torture Abu Zubaydah.

For the entire eight years of Bushco outsourcing, torture was the one and only job that was insourced - all to make sure Bush got his chance to march into Baghdad to prove to his dad he was a Conqueror, not a Deserter.

Evil Without a Name

Bob Fertik — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:55:34 -0400

Most evils have a name. War crimes include torture, genocide, and aggressive war. The seven deadly sins are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride.

But what do you call the evil of horrifically torturing people to manufacture specific false confessions (i.e. lies) to launch a completely unprovoked war of aggression that kills, traumatizes, corrupts, and impoverishes a nation of 25 million people?

There is no word for this evil. But that's exactly what Bush and Cheney did. And there needs to be a word so we all understand it, decide on the appropriate punishment, and make sure it never happens again.

Any suggestions?

Update 1: Keith Olbermann called it "backfill" tonight, but I have no idea why. Backfill is "Material used to refill an excavated area." The only thing that was excavated after 9/11 was our collective brains.

Update 2: Here's Digby:

If the SASC report is correct, then much of the torture regime was devised to justify the invasion of Iraq. It explains why Cheney is out there behaving like he's on methamphetamines. If that's the case, he and Bush and all those who signed off on it are subject not only to prosecution, they are subject to the kind of historical legacy reserved for the worst of the worst. This is as bad as it gets.

Can the Son of Sam Law Be Used Against Condi?

Bob Fertik — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:28:38 -0500

Condi Rice signed a $2.5 million 3-book deal with Crown, a division of Random House.

Rice will combine candid narrative and acute analysis to tell the story of her time in the White House and as America's top diplomat, and her role in protecting American security and shaping foreign policy during the extraordinary period from 2001-2009.

Of course Condi was the National Security Advisor during the campaign of propaganda and lies that defrauded Congress into authorizing the invasion of Iraq. She was one of the most prolific liars, infamously warning Americans "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." At the time, Condi knew full well that Iraq had no nuclear weapons or even a nuclear weapons program.

The unprovoked invasion of Iraq, which was rejected by the United Nations Security Council, was a war crime. The invasion led to further war crimes, including torture and the murder of civilians and journalists. And the American soldiers who were killed or maimed were the victims of Condi's fraud.

In total, the victims of Condi's crimes number in the millions, counting the survivors of those killed. So here's a legal question: can Condi's victims collect damages under the Son of Sam Law, which was specifically written to prevent criminals from profiting from books about their crimes?

The initial obstacle is that Condi has not been charged with any crimes. But that could easily be remedied by a Special Prosecutor or even a local District Attorney using the strategy developed by famed prosecutor Vince Bugliosi.

Will `Tough Guy' Dick Cheney Cop Out as Usual and Take a Pardon?

dlindorff — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:29:33 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Vice President Dick Cheney has cultivated the image of a serious
tough guy, with his grim, scowling vissage, his dismissive "So?"
comments when things go badly, his unrepentant defense of torture,
including waterboarding, and his brash statements confirming that he
approved the interrogation measures that clearly violated US criminal
statutes and the Geneva Conventions.

But it appears we willl in a few days get to discover whether Cheney
really is a tough guy, or whether he is in truth just the same
corpulent, self-centered hypocrite and gutless coward that he was back
in the 1960s when, despite being a vocal backer of the Vietnam War, he
ducked the draft not once but five times by arranging for student and
marriage deferments, which he later defended by saying he had "other
priorities" than serving his country.

If, as most people expect, Cheney is offered a pardon by outgoing
President George Bush for his role in approving the systematic torture
of US captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, for his role in the
outing of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame and the subsequent
coverup of that crime, and for his role in lying about the alleged
threats posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the vice president will be
admitting that he is guilty of those crimes. He will also be taking the
coward's way out, after earlier strutting about and claiming to be in
the right.

It would be vintage Cheney--talking big but hiding from responsibility for his statements and his actions.

If Cheney were for real, he would tell Bush he doesn't want no
stinkin' pardon. He'd say he backed a policy of torture of captives
because they deserved it, because it would save American lives, and
because he had no respect for international law. He would dare the US
government, and other governments around the world that have a policy
of universal jurisdiction, to indict him and put him on trial for his
actions.

But that's not Dick Cheney's way. His way is to duck responsibility and to let lesser people take the heat for him.

We've seen his MO already. This is a guy who would furtively destroy
the career of a dedicated undercover agent, putting not just her, but
all of her in-country contacts in places like Iran at risk for their
lives, and then let a subordinate, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, take the
fall for him. Libby, recall, was convicted of lying about his role in
exposing Plame's identity in a federal trial that included considerable
evidence that it was his boss, Cheney, who was actually behind the
effort. He ended up being convicted and sentenced to prison, though he
was spared being locked up by a presidential clemency order. Cheney
didn't lift a finger to protect Libby, who remains a convicted felon,
unable to return to his practice of law.

If Bush pardons Cheney, and if Cheney accepts that pardon, he will
be admitting that he is a war criminal, willing to let a few
low-ranking soldiers who simply did what he says he wanted them to do
take the heat for him and his criminal actions.

While we're at it, it will also be interesting to see whether Bush,
whose media handlers have also spent the last eight years constucting
an image of him as a swaggering, tough-talkin' Texas cowboy, will grant
himself a broad pardon for his many crimes in office.

My guess is he will do both, confirming that this has been an
administration not of tough guys, but of cowards, hypocrites and
professional buckpassers.

_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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This War Report Has Been Approved by Your Government

dlindorff — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:24:52 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

We Americans got a graphic illustration of the demise of any
independent American corporate news media these past few days as the
coverage on TV and in print was saturated with reports about John
Edwards’ infidelity and, equally important, Russia’s invasion of
Georgia.

In the first case, we had the completely pointless if prurient
airing of Edwards’ sordid extra-marital affair. Pointless because
Edwards at this time is a has-been politician. If there were any point
to the coverage it should have been, as Alex Cockburn pointed out in
his journal Counterpunch,
the abject failure of those same reporters and “news” organizations to
cover the story back last fall, when it might have mattered. Back then,
when the only paper covering the story was the National Enquirer,
Edwards was still a viable candidate for the presidency, or a possible
contender for vice president again. It’s not that his personal sex-life
has any news value in and of itself. The point is that had he won the
nomination, or been picked as a vice presidential running mate, its
inevitable exposure later during the general election would have
destroyed any Democratic presidential chances. And the corporate media
knew back then all about this story. They just weren’t pursuing it (and
the current blitz of stories proves that they weren’t holding back out
of principle!).

Then there’s the Georgia war. I was stunned by the graphic
depictions of Russian brutality in Gori and other cities that were
massively bombed and shelled, with apartment buildings collapsed into
rubble, children killed, and civilians targeted. The New York Times, in
particular, had photographic images of dead Georgian soldiers, of
charred bodies, of hysterical mothers. On NBC News, Russian planes were
shown dropping their loads of bombs on apartments.

We read that President Bush condemned the Russian invasion of another nation and called for an immediate ceasefire. Yet there was not one word of astonishment or challenge from reporters or commentators or editorial writers at this stunningly cynical statement coming from a leader who himself is responsible for the blatantly illegal and much more destructive invasion of another nation. And remember, while Georgia is on Russia’s border, and was at least possibly guilty of oppressing and attacking and perhaps even killing members of the Russian minority in two of its provinces (Georgia bombed the biggest town in the secessionist province of Ossetia, killing perhaps 1000 civilians, before Russia invaded), Iraq is half a world away from America and was minding its own business, not threatening Americans in any way. Russia, thus far, has at most killed a few thousand Georgians. America has, by most accounts killed hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as 1.2 million Iraqis, very few of them combatants.

We watch and read voluminous reports on this relatively small Russian war against its neighbor and former domestic province (Georgia was one of the SSRs in the old USSR), and meanwhile there is almost nothing being reported about the continuing five-year-old war launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. And certainly, over the course of five years we have gotten no visual depiction of that war even approaching the scenes that were on display from the front in Georgia.

Apparently, in the view of our corporate news editors and managers, it is important for Americans to fully witness the bloody horrors of war when that war is being fought by Russia, but we are to be carefully protected from seeing such things when they are being perpetrated by our own centurions. We aren’t even allowed to see the grievous injuries and death being suffered by our own troops.

And, of course, don't feel to good about the quality of the coverage of the Russian/Georgia conflict either. This too is biased. Indeed one reason we are shown all the carnage is that the US government has been backing Georgia, and there is evidence that the US even encouraged the Georgian attacks on ethnic Russians which provoked the invasion. The US also has obligingly airlifted Georgian troops back from Iraq to Georgia.

This is not news. This is propaganda, pure and simple.

American corporate news media broadcasts and articles should include
a disclaimer: “This report was approved by the media managers of the
Bush/Cheney administration.”
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Condi Lies About Suskind Forgery Charge

Bob Fertik — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:28:54 -0400

Ron Suskind's explosive new book has the Busheviks so terrified that they deployed their designated liar, Condi Rice, to lie through her teeth to Karl Rove's personal stenographer, Politico's Mike Allen.

Here's the video link, at least until they scrub it because Condi's lies (in bold) are so obvious:
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=9160921

Mike: Madame Secretary, as you know there's a new book by Ron Suskind which says the White House ordered the CIA to falsify intelligence about Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda. Is it possible the United States government forged a letter from Iraq's intelligence chief to Saddam Hussein?
Condi: the United States government didn't forge a letter. The White House in which I was working and I think...
Mike: they didn't direct...
Condi: the people as I understand it - the people that he quotes as being sources for that have denied it.
Mike: So you think it's impossible...
Condi: The United States, the White House was not going to ask someone to ask someone to forge a letter on something of this importance.
Mike: You believe it did not occur...
Condi: It did not occur. The intelligence might have been wrong, that's now clear, not because people weren't working very hard. But when you have an opaque regime like Saddam Hussein's regime that had used WMD before that had them before, one can understand how the judgment may have been wrong. But the decision to go to war was based on the strategic threat of Saddam Hussein, the fact that we'd been to war against him before, the fact that he still threatened his neighbors, and the fact that we were told that he was reconstituting his weapons of mass destruction.

To prove that Condi is lying, we'll pay $1,000 to anyone who runs this video through lie detector software and gets a reliable result.

It's long past time for Congress to ask Condi these questions under oath and threat of perjury.

Killing the News in Iraq: Justifying the Unjustifiable

dlindorff — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 08:35:14 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Reuters may be “satisfied” with the Pentagon’s investigation
concluding that US troops were “justified” in their slaying of the news
organization’s working journalist Waleed Khaled back in 2005, but the
rest of us shouldn’t be.

Khaled and his driver were killed by US troops when they came on a
firefight involving US troops and Iraqi police who were allegedly under
attack. The Pentagon report into the incident concluded that the two
men came onto the scene, and American forces, seeing Khaled’s videocam
and tripod, thought it was a rocket launcher. They reportedly fired
warning shots. When Khaled’s driver did the logical thing, backing
slowly from the scene, US troops “assumed it was an insurgent tactic”
and fired to “disable” the vehicle, killing the two men.

First of all, let’s note that Khaled is not the only journalist to
have been killed by US forces in Iraq. There has been a pattern that
makes it clear that journalists who step outside the controlled bubble
of the embedded propagandist traveling with the troops are fair game,
which explains why we in America know so little about the reality of
the US assault on the people of Iraq.

But beyond this journalistic issue, what this story tells us,
besides the fact that an innocent reporter and his innocent driver,
just doing their jobs, were murdered by overly aggressive US soldiers
(whose initial response, and that of Pentagon “investigators,” appears
to have been to cover up their actions) is that any innocent parties
who stumble into a battle zone are liable to be slaughtered by US
forces in Iraq.

The only thing that distinguishes this tragic incident from
hundreds of others like it that occur routinely in Iraq is that Khaled
was a journalist employed by a major Western news organization with the
clout and prominence to demand a real, and public, investigation into
the case.

For Iraqis killed under similar circumstances, not only is there no
investigation; there is simply no report of their deaths. As US
commanders have famously and disgustingly said, “We don’t do
bodycounts.”

There is a reason why ordinary Iraqis are almost unanimously
opposed to the neo-colonial “deal” the Bush is trying to force their
puppet regime to approve, granting US forces legal immunity and a free
rein in Iraq to attack and arrest anyone they choose, and to be
protected from arrest by Iraqi authorities for any of their actions in
that country. Iraqis daily see the US behaving like Nazi stormtroopers,
killing their countrymen with impunity, and they want it to stop.

Anyone who thinks that running this kind of brutal occupation is
going to end any way but disastrously is delusional. Imagine if we had
Iraqi troops running around the US blowing up innocent drivers without
fear of any consequence. We’d have an army of vigilantes taking
action—which is just what is happening in Iraq.

The situation in Iraq for ordinary Iraqis has actually been getting
worse, as the Pentagon turns increasingly to aerial bombardment and
even the use of remote-controlled Predator drones, run by video jockeys
back in the US, to conduct its attacks on “suspected insurgents,”
instead of sending ground troops. This approach may reduce US
casualties, but it inevitably increases the number and the percentage
of so-called “collateral damage” deaths of innocent non-combatants.

Khaled’s murder by American troops is a personal tragedy for his
colleagues and his family, but at least it serves to demonstrate, if
anyone is paying attention, the wretched reality of the
Bush/Cheney/Democratic Congress war and occupation of Iraq.

Returning veterans of the war who have joined Iraq Veterans Against
the War IVAW), have been bravely speaking out against this ongoing
horror. They tell of soldiers and marines so brutalized and frustrated
by their repeated deployments to Iraq that all they want to do is
survive and get home. They tell of troops who hate all Iraqis, calling
them “hajjis” and “ragheads,” who are doped up and sent out on patrol
with diminished judgment—a sure recipe for the kind of thing that
happened to Khaled and his driver. One IVAW member, Camilo Mejia, who
refused redeployment and was sentenced to a year in the brig for
desertion, in an excellent book titled “Road from ar Ramadi: The
Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilio Mejia, an Iraq War Memoir”
(Haymarket Books), also writes of how US commanders push their troops
into pointless confrontations at which civilians are often the victims,
because they want to go home with combat badges on their chests.

Just ask yourself for a moment, what should Khaled and his driver
have done, when they came on the scene of the firefight? If they had
simply stopped their car, having already been fired on (and no doubt
not knowing who was doing the firing)? Sitting still was clearly a bad
option. Going forward was suicide. So they did the only logical thing:
they backed up slowly—surely the least threatening option available.
But the US troops saw that action as “a typical insurgent tactic,” and
opened fire on them.

If retreat is seen as an enemy “tactic,” then there is really no
hope for some innocent person caught up in a firefight.

No wonder over a million Iraqis have died in this criminal war, most of them victims of American weaponry!

No wonder Iraqis overwhelmingly want the US out of their country!

No wonder even the puppet regime established by the US is opposed
to the Bush/Cheney effort to establish a permanent occupation, with
legal immunity for US forces, with 58 permanent bases around the
country, and with the US getting control of the air and the right to
bomb at will!

The story of Khaled’s murder—and the fact that the Pentagon can
call it “justified”--should make it crystal clear that the only answer
to the ongoing crisis in Iraq is for the US to leave the country
immediately.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and
columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Time for Congress to Stand Up in Its Own Defense: Impeach Bush and Cheney N

dlindorff — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:24:50 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The last couple of weeks have brought confirmation—as if it were needed—even in the corporate media, that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the gang of thugs and sycophants around them in the White House, engaged in a massive conspiracy to lie the country into a war in Iraq.

The release of a confessional book by former White House press spokesman Scott McClellan and the subsequent release of a long blocked report by the Senate Intelligence Committee make it clear that Bush, Cheney & Company deliberately lied to Congress and the American public back in 2002 and early 2003 about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein (there was none). McClellan also states that Bush and Cheney conspired to “out” CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, as part of a compaign to prevent her husband from exposing a major part of that campaign of lies: the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons.

It would be hard to overstate the extent of or the damage caused by these crimes that are now exposed to the light of day.

Beginning in 2001, making the most cynical use of the tragic killing of nearly 3000 Americans in the 9-11 attacks, Bush and Cheney moved to aggrandize as much power as possible in the executive, and then, to consolidate that power grab, engineered a full-scale war against Iraq, enabling them to claim that any opponent of their dictatorial usurpation of power was a traitor to the nation.

It was all a lie.

Saddam Hussein had no links to Al Qaeda, and he had no nuclear program. He had no weapons of mass destruction. His country was broken, thanks to years of international sanctions and war.

As a result of these lies, we have a country that no longer even remotely resembles what the Founders had intended. The Congress has been shorn of its once exclusive authority to legislate, and even its Constitutional power to investigate the executive branch has been successfully defied. It is now an atrophied relic. The federal judiciary, right up to the Supreme Court, has been packed with administration sycophants and Federalist Society advocates of unfettered executive power.

We also have been saddled with an unwinnable war in the Middle East that has claimed the lives of 4500 Americans, destroyed the lives of another 30,000—or perhaps several hundred thousand, if we add in all those suffering psychological damage, or genetic damage from exposure to depleted uranium weapons. That war has also killed over 1 million innocent Iraqis, including countless chiildren, destroyed their country, bankrupted this nation, and made the US a pariah and a rogue state in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Most Americans long since came to the conclusion that the Bush administration was a gang of idiots. Just watching their handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster unfold was enough to make that clear. But the new reports from McClellan and from the Senate Intelligence Committee should make it clear that this was not just stupidity. The disasters that have befallen this nation, or that it has brought on the rest of the world, over the past eight years have been the result of deliberate lying and deceit and of the conspiratorial policies of a cabal of leaders whose goal from day one was undoing the Constitution and establishing the presidency as a kind of dictatorship.

Most of the corporate media have been unable to bring themselves to state this clearly. They edge around the issue by talking about the White House having been “misleading” or “untruthful.” And little is said about the lasting damage that has been done to the Republic and the Constitution, or about what is to be done about a still bloody war that never should have been fought in the first place.

The answer is clear. Impeachment proceedings should be initiated against both Bush and Cheney. These two arch criminals must not be permitted to leave office with their titles intact. They need to be tossed out in disgrace, and then indicted for war crimes and for crimes like perjury, conspiracy and perhaps treason.

We are already seeing the long-term damage that has been wrought. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee for president, is saying that the president’s use of the National Security Agency to spy, without any court order, on tens or hundreds of thousants, or perhaps millions of Americans, is legal, and would continue under a McCain administration. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said that he would continue Bush’s use of “signing statements” to ignore Congressional legislation that he felt impaired his Constitutional powers as president.

The nation is at a dangerous crossroad. Either Congress reasserts its authority now, via impeachment, drawing a Constitutional line in the stand in defense of Article I of the Constitution—the article that defines the power of Congress as absolute in terms of passing legisation—or it forever surrenders that role, leaving us with what can only be called a dictatorship.

We clearly cannot count on the next president, whoever that may be, to surrender powers usurped by the current one. What leader in history has willingly and voluntarily surrendered authority, after all?

Such power must be wrested back by Congress, and the only way for that to happen is impeachment—a course laid out clearly by the authors of the Constitution for just such a crisis.
____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

What About the Iraqis?

dlindorff — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:59:52 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I found myself listing to a talk radio show on NPR’s Philadelphia affiliate WHYY today, which focused in part on the agonies suffered by families of American troops killed or seriously maimed in Iraq.

Left unsaid—and this I think is the case in nearly all the reporting that gets done on the costs of the Iraq War that are being borne here in the US by relatives of troops—is the terrible reality that we’re talking about the relatives of just 4500 American servicemen and women killed, and perhaps 30,000 seriously wounded (not counting the hundreds of thousands suffering mental damage). Not to diminish that suffering, it needs to be pointed out that by some accounts, well over 1 million Iraqis have died in this illegal, uncalled-for and criminal war.

And most of the dead, contrary to what we are told by the corporate media, are victims of the US military, not Iraqi bombers. The immense firepower of American forces, and the over-use of rockets, pilotless, rocket-firing drones, and aerial bombardment (designed to keep US casualties as low as possible), ensure high levels of civilian casualties (called collateral damage, or on rare occasions “unfortunate mistakes”), and we are unable to obtain accurate numbers because the US “doesn’t do bodycounts.”

Most are also civilians, not combatants. According to one study conducted by the Christian Science Monitor, one of the nation’s most respected daily newspapers, the ratio of civilians killed by US troops vs. enemy fighters killed was an appalling 30:1. As I’ve often noted, with a ratio like that it would be fairer to call any enemy fighters who are killed “collateral damage” in what should be seen as deliberate targeting of civilians.

And a disproportionate number of those civilians are children and young people. This has also been documented by researchers and has been observed anecdotally in hospitals. Children, because they are less aware of what’s going on around them, are less able to defend themselves, and are in general more vulnerable, are the main victims in this kind of brutal urban war fighting.

Now recall that for every Iraqi killed, whether that person is a fighter or a civilian, there is a grieving family, whose loss is every bit as terrible as is the loss suffered by an American family. What you get is perhaps 4-5 million Iraqis, in a nation of 24 million, who are suffering this inconsolable losses.

It is as though 50 million Americans had lost someone in the war.

But that’s just the dead and the relatives of the dead.

For every Iraqi who has been killed, there are surely two or three or more who have been gravely wounded, crippled, or driven mad. Even if we assume that shamefully poor medical care in Iraq assures that half of Iraq’s gravely wounded die instead of surviving with their wounds as our returned casualties do, that would add another two million to the casualties, and another 8 million to the number of impacted family members—for a total of 12 million—almost half of all Iraq!

It is wrong to say much of this tragedy is the fault of Iraqis. Prior to the US invasion, Iraqis were not massacring Iraqis. Across most of Iraq, Shia and Sunni lived side by side. They intermarried easily, with no bad repercussions. Certainly they suffered under the repression of dictator Saddam Hussein, but nothing like what they suffer today.

The reality is that the Bush/Cheney regime tricked the nation into becoming a terrorist aggressor, invading a nation by claiming falsely that it had, or was about to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In the process our military became what it was allegedly trying to find: a weapon of mass destruction that has wreaked devastation upon Iraq as far-reaching and incomprehensibly destructive as any atomic bomb.

I have great sympathy for those Americans who have lost loved ones in, or whose loved ones have returned broken to them from Iraq.

But I do not want us to forget the incomparably greater suffering that has been brought on Iraqis in our names and thanks to our tax dollars and our political naivety and gullibility.

Yes, Senator Jim Webb is right that we owe better treatment to our veterans, who for the most part are victims of the same criminal machinations of our political leaders as are the Iraqis. But we also owe much better to the Iraqis, who are continuing to be killed, maimed and left bereft by our military and by our government’s mad insistence on “staying the course.”

It is way past time that we started thinking about them.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Scott McClellan on Iraq: Was it Propaganda or Lies?

Bob Fertik — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:38:43 -0400

Whatever you think of Scott McClellan, one thing is clear: he's tough.

After days of attacks by Busheviks, McClellan went directly into the lion's den to battle Bill O'Reilly on his home court. And even O'Reilly admitted McClellan held his own.

So now that the dust is settling, what's the bottom line? Did McClellan provide any evidence that Bush committed statutory crimes and/or impeachable offenses?

The broadest charge against Bush is that he lied to Congress and the American people to win support for invading Iraq even though Iraq never attacked us or even threatened us.

McClellan comes close to endorsing that charge, but refuses to cross the line.

As I've detailed in this book, the campaign mentality at times led the president and his chief advisers to spin, hide, shade and exaggerate the truth, obscuring nuances and ignoring the caveats that should have accompanied their arguments. Rather than choosing to be forthright and candid, they chose to sell the war, and in so doing they did a disservice to the American people and to our democracy. However, this is not the same as saying they deliberately misled and lied.

Elsewhere McClellan makes the same point:

An even more fundamental problem was the way his advisers decided to pursue a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people. It was all part of the way the White House operated and Washington functioned, and no one seemed to see any problem with using such an approach on an issue as grave as war. A pro-war campaign might have been more acceptable had it been accompanied by a high level of candor and honesty, but it was not.

McClellan is clear that the war was sold to the American people through a political propaganda campaign. But when does propaganda cross the line that separates truth from lies?

For me, that line is crossed when a someone knows the truth but tells a different story to avoid the adverse consequences of telling the truth. So three conditions must be present: (1) knowing the truth, (2) saying something different from the truth, and (3) having an ulterior motive for not telling the truth.

We know the truth: Saddam had no WMD's in 2002. (A few rightwing dead-enders reject that conclusion and insist Saddam shipped them to Syria just before we invaded, but no one in the Bush administration says that.) What we don't know is whether Bush knew the truth.

O'Reilly pressed McClellan hard on this precise point: did Bush believe Iraq had WMD's? For O'Reilly, if Bush believed what he said, he couldn't have been lying according to the first test. And when McClellan said yes, O'Reilly pronounced Bush innocent.

But McClellan refused to accept O'Reilly's exoneration of Bush. According to McClellan, Bush also knew there were facts that contradicted his belief, but he refused to share those facts with the American people. In McClellan's view, Bush failed to act with "candor and honesty." In McClellan's view, Bush crossed a line by withholding key facts while exaggerating unproved allegations, and should be judged accordingly.

But what judgment does McClellan propose? Should we simply consider him "uncandid" and "dishonest," and frown in his presence? Or should he be held accountability somehow?

Obviously McClellan does not consider "political propaganda" to be an impeachable offfense; by his own admission, it was the heart and soul of what he and the White House did every single day. (He wrote his book to try to reduce the role of raw politics in governing.)

But there has to be a point where "political propaganda" becomes so distant from the truth that it becomes a lie that requires accountability. If not, then Presidents and their aides can tell every manner of lie with full impunity.

In many ways, the contemporary Republican Party was formed out of an adamant rejection of "moral relativism." In foreign policy, they rejected any "moral equivalence" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, even though both were military empires that abused the rights of smaller countries that were deemed essential to their empires. And in domestic policy, they insisted on "personal responsibility" in opposition to loose morals, which they wrongly called "liberal."

And it was "loose morals" that drove them to their irrational hatred of Bill Clinton. Richard Mellon Scaife funded the "Arkansas Project" to find evidence of Clinton's "loose morals" and finally struck paydirt with Paula Jones, who filed a lawsuit accusing Clinton of sexual harassment.

And it was a very short trip from objectionable "loose morals" to actionable lying. Orrin Hatch decided to impeach Bill Clinton after Clinton went on TV and declared, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." According to many observers of southern sexual mores - and to the judge who presided over Clinton's grand jury testimony - Clinton wasn't lying because Clinton didn't give Lewinsky any sexual pleasure, he only took it. But for Hatch, Newt Gingrich, and the entire Republican Party, Clinton's "spin" crossed the line between truth and lies.

On Iraq, George Bush never said Saddam Hussein actually had a nuclear bomb. But he insisted Saddam had the scientists and possibly the materials (uranium from Niger) needed to build a bomb. Thus he deliberately created the impression that Saddam probably had a bomb. And since Saddam hated the U.S., he would probably find a way to use it against the U.S., either directly or through an alliance with Al Qaeda.

Ultimately, Bush's argument for war rested on the probability that Saddam would attack the U.S. with WMD's. If the probability was low, there was little reason for the U.S. to attack him. If the probability was high, then there was good reason to do so.

According to McClellan, Bush knew the probability of Saddam attacking the U.S. with WMD's was acceptably low. (Colin Powell and Condi Rice actually said so months before 9/11.) But Bush told Congress and the American people something different - that the probability was unacceptably high. And according to McClellan, Bush knowingly failed to tell the whole truth and told instead a Big Non-truth for an ulterior reason: because he wanted to "democratize" the Middle East. According to McClellan, if the American people knew Bush's real reason for invading Iraq, they would not have accepted it. So Bush had to launch a propaganda campaign to accomplish his goal.

And therefore by the three-part test I outlined above, Bush lied.

McClellan insists he wants his book to help fix Washington. If he's serious, he should start by drawing a line between acceptable "spin" and unacceptable - and actionable - lies.

I've drawn my line - will McClellan draw his?