Freedom and Democracy is Dying

http://www.prisonplanet.tv/audio/300306walter.mp3

By Evelyn Pringle

30 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org

The war in Iraq is a mistake. No its worse than a mistake. Lets quit pussy-footing around and call it like it is. The war in Iraq is a grand profiteering scheme gone awry and Americans need to take off their blinders and face the truth.

As the cost of the war leaves a deeper black hole of debt for our great-grandchildren, people need to ask themselves whether the hundreds of billions spent thus far have helped anyone other than reconstruction companies and defense contractors. It takes no thought, the answer is no.

And after that, to paraphrase a powerful John Kerry comment from the Viet Nam era, Americans need think about which soldier will be the last to die for this mistake.

Day in and day out, Bush is on TV saying we will not withdraw from Iraq. How much longer will Americans put up with this bumbling idiot?

The rumblings for impeachment are getting louder and for good reason. The British memo released this week on Bush's conversation with Tony Blair in January 2003, not only proves that Bush planned to take the country to war using whatever lies he deemed necessary, it also proves that there was no plan for post-war Iraq.

Bush is throwing good money after bad like a compulsive gambler, as our troops get sucked deeper and deeper into a bloody quagmire. The situation in Iraq has elevated beyond a disaster and all Bush wants to do is sink more tax dollars into the same failed policies that brought us to this point.

Over the past 6 months, we have heard a lot of accusations about "revisionist history" from Bush and his minions in answer to those who dare to question whether there ever was a real threat from Iraq.

However, there is an abundance of evidence that administration officials sought to portray Iraq as a deadly threat to the American people in the run-up to war. But as we now know, there is a great difference between the hand-picked intelligence that was presented to Congress and the American people when compared to what was actually in Iraq.

Americans were fed a fairy tale about fighting a war of liberation that would be short, cheap, and bloodless. The Bush administration was like a pied piper as it lead the nation into the Iraq disaster.

In hindsight, what is particularly troublesome is how naively the nation followed.

Looking back, there were countless examples of provocative rhetoric as they lead the country to war in Iraq. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush coined the phrase "Axis of Evil," while pointing at Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

In October 2002, the White House Press Secretary said regime change in Iraq could be accomplished with "the cost of one bullet."

On March 17, in his final speech to the American people before the invasion, Bush took one last opportunity to bolster his case for war. The centerpiece of his argument was the same message he brought to the UN months before, and the same message he hammered home at every opportunity in the intervening months, namely that Saddam had failed to destroy the WMDs and presented an imminent danger to the American people.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments," he said, "leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

In a public address on March 19, 2003, Bush told the world: "Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."

Three years have passed, and the US has yet to find a single shred of evidence to confirm the official reason that our country was sent to war; namely, that Iraq's WMDs constituted a grave threat to the US.

On January 28, 2003, Bush said in his State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

We now know that the CIA said that claim was false as early as March 2002 and that the International Atomic Energy Agency had also discredited the allegation. But they just went ahead and used it anyways.

On February 5, Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets."

In a radio address on February 8, 2003, Bush told the nation: "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons - the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."

The fact is, after 3 years, we have not found any of these items, nor have we found those thousands of rockets loaded with chemical weapons.

On March 30, 2003, Rumsfeld said in an interview on This Week, of the search for WMDs: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat."

However, Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, and Tikrit on April 14, 2003, and the intelligence Rumsfeld spoke of has not led to any WMDs.

Whether or not intelligence reports were bent, stretched, or fabricated to make Iraq look like an imminent threat, it is clear that the administration's rhetoric played upon the fear of the American people about future terrorism attacks.

But, under close scrutiny, most of the statements had nothing to do with intelligence; the were merely designed to prey on public fear. Through smoke and mirrors, the face of bin Laden was morphed into that of Saddam. Bush himself blurred the image in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union Address when he said:

"Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans - this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."

Not only did the administration warn about more hijackers carrying deadly chemicals, it even went so far as to say that in the time it would take for UN inspectors to find 'smoking gun' evidence of Saddam's illegal weapons, the US was at risk of a nuclear attack.

Condoleeza Rice by the Los Angeles Times, was quoted as saying on September 9, 2002: "We don't want the 'smoking gun' to be a mushroom cloud."

Talk about fabrication, where did the term mushroom cloud come from? What was this statement based on?

On September 26, 2002, just two weeks before Congress voted on a resolution, Bush himself pushed the case that Iraq was plotting to attack the US. After meeting with members of Congress that day, Bush said:

"The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.... The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material, could build one within a year."

These are his words. Bush said Saddam is "seeking a nuclear bomb." Has he ever produced any evidence to back up this allegation? No. And, his rhetoric continued that day in the Rose Garden, where he said:

"The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. And when they have fully materialized it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies. By then the Iraqi dictator would have the means to terrorize and dominate the region. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX - nerve gas - or some day a nuclear weapon to a
terrorist ally."

And yet, 3 years later, we have not seen a shred of evidence to support this claim of grave dangers, chemical weapons, links to al Qaeda, or nuclear weapons.

Four days before a vote on the resolution, on October 7, 2002, Bush ramped up the scare tactics and stated: "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy - the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level
contacts that go back a decade."

Bush then went even further by saying: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

During his speech at the Cincinnati Museum Center, he also elaborated on Iraq's nuclear program and said:

"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.... 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."

This is the kind of outrageous rhetoric that was given to the American people to justify war with Iraq. This is the same kind of hyped fabricated evidence that was given to Congress to sway its vote on October 11, 2002.

And most importantly these are examples of the same kind charges that the Bush administration now tries to say were never made, like we're deluded idiots.

Saddam is no longer in power. But in reality, so what? The Iraqis are worse off. They still don't even have the basic necessities of life like clean water, sanitation provisions, and electricity. They've had to watch family members imprisoned, tortured, and killed for 3 years without Saddam in charge.

And our soldiers are still dying in record numbers. Not a day goes by that there is not another attack on the troops who are saddled with trying to restore order to a country on the brink of anarchy.

Bush told the American people that we were compelled to go to war to secure our country from a grave threat. Are we safer today than we were on March 18, 2003?

For the first time in history, the US went to war because of intelligence reports claiming that a country posed a grave threat to our nation. We should accept nothing less than a full-scale, wide-open Congressional investigation into the issue of pre-war intelligence on the threat from Iraq.

It is in the compelling national interest to examine what we were told about the threat from Iraq to determine once and for all whether the intelligence was faulty or distorted.

The purpose of such an investigation is not to engage in "revisionist history." It is to get at the truth. The American people have valid questions that deserve to be answered.

Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent Media TV and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government. He can be reached at evelyn.pringle@sbcglobal.net

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=72765

Every now and then, amid all the grim stories in our world, you run across one that rings a special bell for you. Frida Berrigan's today is that for me. In fact, consider this week at Tomdispatch as a discordant hymn to the privatization disasters of the Bush administration. Michael Schwartz began it with his account of how the draconian economic privatization program Bush administration officials enacted on prostrate Iraq in 2003 led directly to the catastrophe of the moment in that country. We know as well that, under this administration, the Pentagon has been on its own privatization binge, turning what were once essential military activities over to Halliburton, its subsidiary KBR, and other private firms in a wholesale fashion.

In addition, the Pentagon and the Bush administration have been on another kind of binge, privatizing national (and international) security. From New Orleans to Iraq, rent-a-mercenary companies are having a for-profit field day based on the woes of others. According to P.W. Singer, author of Corporate Warriors, for every hundred U.S. soldiers in our first Gulf War, there was one private "security contractor." This time around, it's closer to one in ten. It has been estimated that there are up to 20,000 guns-for-hire, Iraqi and Western, working in that country, the second largest (if also motliest) force in the "coalition of the willing."

Such private companies are above the law in Iraq, and their trigger-happy hirees don't hesitate to create mayhem. In part because their own casualties can largely be kept private, such companies have done much to reduce the political costs of going to war in the United States, while raising the stakes in Baghdad. In a February 2004 New Yorker article, retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner told journalist Jane Mayer, "When you can hire people to go to war there is none of the grumbling and political friction" associated with mustering a larger public fighting force.

Increasingly this sort of questionable "security" is making itself felt at home as well. The premises of the Homeland Security Department are now guarded by the private security firm, Wackenhut Services, Inc. (hired through a contract with the U.S. Navy). Among other goofs, its personnel reportedly mishandled a potential anthrax attack on Homeland Security headquarters. ("An envelope with suspicious powder was opened last fall at the headquarters. Daniels and other current and former guards said they were shocked when superiors carried it past the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff's window without evacuating people nearby.") Meanwhile, Wackenhut guards at the Energy Department, according to its inspector general, "had thwarted simulated terrorist attacks at a nuclear lab only after they were tipped off to the test; and... had improperly handled the transport of nuclear and conventional weapons." This is what for-profit national security can mean on a small scale.

Now, transfer that thought to the ultimate weaponry -- our nuclear arsenal. Sounds like the sort of nightmare you'd only find in the Wackenhuttiest of dystopian sci-fi novels, but read on and imagine our nuclear future in those same trustworthy privatized hands. Tom

Privatizing the Apocalypse

By Frida Berrigan

Started as the super-secret "Project Y" in 1943, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has long been the keystone institution of the American nuclear-weapons producing complex. It was the birthplace of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Last year, the University of California, which has managed the lab for the Department of Energy since its inception, decided to put Los Alamos on the auction block. In December 2005, construction giant Bechtel won a $553 million yearly management contract to run the sprawling complex, which employs more than 13,000 people and has an estimated $2.2 billion annual budget.

"Privatization" has been in the news ever since George W. Bush became president. His administration has radically reduced the size of government, turning over to private companies critical governmental functions involving prisons, schools, water, welfare, Medicare, and utilities as well as war-fighting, and is always pushing for more of the same. Outside of Washington, the pitfalls of privatization are on permanent display in Iraq, where companies like Halliburton have reaped billions in contracts. Performing jobs once carried out by members of the military -- from base building and mail delivery to food service -- they have bilked the government while undermining the safety of American forces by providing substandard services and products. Halliburton has been joined by a cottage industry of military-support companies responsible for everything from transportation to interrogation. On the war front, private companies are ubiquitous, increasingly indispensable, and largely unregulated -- a lethal combination.

Now, the long arm of privatization is reaching deep into an almost unimaginable place at the heart of the national security apparatus --- the laboratory where scientists learned to harness the power of the atom more than 60 years ago and created weapons of apocalyptic proportions.

Profane Problem or Prolific Profit?

Nuclear weapons are many things to many people -- the sword of Damocles or the guarantor of American global supremacy, the royal path to the apocalypse or atoms for peace. But in each notion, they are treated as idols -- jealously-guarded, shrouded in code, surrounded by sacred secrecy. That is changing.

Private companies have long played a role in the nuclear complex, but it's been a peripheral one. For example, Kaiser-Hill, a remediation company, is cleaning up radioactive waste at Rocky Flats, the Denver, Colorado complex that manufactured nuclear weapons. At Idaho Falls, another company, CH2M, is mopping up the mess left behind after the construction of 52 nuclear reactors. BWX and Honeywell formed a new company along with Bechtel to manage and operate the Pantex Plant in Texas which assembled nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. At least ten different subcontractors are involved in managing the Hanford nuclear complex. But the famed nuclear laboratories, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia -- where the high priests of nuclear physics are free to explore the outer realms of their craft -- have long been above prosaic bottom-line or board-room considerations. Until this year, that is.

At Los Alamos, the University of California has already been replaced by a "limited liability corporation," says Tyler Przybylek of the Department of Energy's Evaluation Board; and, more generally, the writing is on the containment wall. Nuclear laboratories are no longer to be intellectual institutions devoted to science but part of a corporate-business model where research, design, and ultimately the weapons themselves will become products to be marketed. The new dress code will be suits and ties, not lab coats and safety glasses. Under Bechtel, new management will lead to a "tightly structured organization" that will "drive efficiency," predicts John Browne, who directed the lab at Los Alamos from 1997-2003. "If there is a product the government wants," he concludes, "they will necessarily be focused on that. A lot more money will be at stake."

Los Alamos was the first to go. Now, the management contract for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is on the auction block as well.

Bechtel's Boondoggles

Many say strong corporate oversight will correct a legacy of embarrassing missteps at Los Alamos. The keystone of the nuclear complex, it has been dogged by missing classified computer disks, cost overruns on its expensive new projects, and an outspoken cadre of scientists who found their voice on LANL: The Real Story, a blog where once deferential employees blew off steam and exposed lapses in lab management.

The idea is that, under private management, this legacy of money wasted and dreams deferred can do an abrupt u-turn. But the question is: Can Bechtel (or any other private military contractor) usher in a new era of nuclear responsibility? Pete Domenici, Republican Senator and Chairman of the powerful Energy and Water Committee, thinks so. In January, he claimed that "this great lab will thrive under the management team led by Bechtel."

But a look at Bechtel's record might not inspire others to Domenici's confidence. The California-based construction giant has a long history of big projects, big promises, bigger budgets and even bigger failures.

In Boston, Bechtel was put in charge of the "Big Dig," the reconstruction of Interstate 93 beneath the city. In 1985, the price tag for the project was estimated at about $2.5 billion. Now, it is a whopping $14.6 billion (or $1.8 billion a mile), making it the most expensive stretch of highway in the world. Near San Diego, citizens are still paying the bills for cost over-runs at a nuclear power plant where Bechtel installed one of the reactors backwards.

In 2003, Bechtel took this winning track record to Baghdad, where it blew billions in a string of unfinished projects and unfathomable errors. The company reaped tens of millions of dollars in contracts to repair Iraq's schools, for example, but an independent report found that many of the schools Bechtel claimed to have completely refitted, "haven't been touched," and a number of schools remained "in shambles." One "repaired" school was found by inspectors be overflowing with "unflushed sewage."

Bechtel also has a $1.03 billion contract to oversee important aspects of Iraq's infrastructure reconstruction, including water and sewage. Despite many promises, startling numbers of Iraqi families continue to lack access to clean water, according to information gathered by independent journalist Dahr Jamail. The company made providing potable water to southern Iraq one of its top priorities, promising delivery within the first 60 days of the program. One year later, rising epidemics of water-borne illnesses like cholera, kidney stones and diarrhea pointed to the failure of Bechtel's mission.

Outside of its ill-fated reconstruction contracts in Iraq, Bechtel is not known as a large military contractor, but the company has been quietly moving into the nuclear arena. It helped build a missile-defense site in the South Pacific, runs the Nevada Test Site where the United States once performed hundreds of above-and underground nuclear tests. Bechtel is also the "environmental manager" at the Oak Ridge National Lab, which stores highly-enriched uranium, and is carrying out design work at the Yucca Mountain repository where the plan to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste has environmentalists and community activists up in arms.

At Washington State's Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, Bechtel is working on technology to turn nuclear waste into glass. But the estimated costs of building the facility to do that have doubled in one year to about $10 billion while the completion date slipped from 2011 to 2017. Members of Congress have proposed that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission take over management of the project from Bechtel because of its cost overruns and delays.

Proliferation's New Meaning

Given this track record, it's hard to make the case that Bechtel assumes the helm at Los Alamos out of an altruistic, even patriotic, desire to impose clean, lean corporate management on a complacent institution long overfed at the public trough. The question remains: Why this urge to privatize the apocalypse?

To answer that question, you have to begin with the post-Cold War quest of the nuclear laboratories for a new identity and raison d'être. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the loss of the other superpower as a nuclear twin and target, and an international shift in favor of nuclear disarmament sent Los Alamos and the whole U.S. nuclear complex into existential crisis: Who are we? What is our role? What do we do now that nuclear weapons have no obvious role in a world of, at best, medium-sized military enemies? Throughout the Clinton years, these questions multiplied while the nuclear arsenal remained relatively stable. More recently, with a lot of fancy footwork, a few friends in Congress, and the ear of a White House eager to be known for something other than the Long War on global terrorism, the labs finally came up with a winning solution that has Bechtel and other military contractors seeing dollar signs.

They found their salvation in a few lines of the Nuclear Posture Review, released in January 2002, where the Bush administration asserted: "The need is clear for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will be able, if directed, to design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements; and maintain readiness to resume underground testing if required."

There's gold in that there sentence. During the Cold War, spending on nuclear weapons averaged $4.2 billion a year (in current dollars). Almost two decades after the "nuclear animosity" between the two great superpowers ended, the United States is spending one-and-a-half times the Cold War average on nuclear weapons. In 2001, the weapons-activities budget of the Department of Energy, which oversees the nuclear weapons complex through its "semi-autonomous" National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), totaled $5.19 billion; and a "revitalized nuclear weapons complex," ready to "design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads," means a more than billion-dollar jump in spending to $6.4 billion by fiscal year 2006.

And that's just the beginning. The NNSA's five-year "National Security Plan" calls for annual increases to reach $7.76 billion by 2009. David Hobson, Republican congressional representative from Ohio, calls this kind of budgeting "the ultimate white-collar welfare," saying that the weapons complex can be "viewed as a jobs program for PhDs."

He's right. That's a lot of money for a few labs and a few thousand scientists. And private military contractors large and small are all over it.

Entering Acronym Land

To justify this huge jump in spending, the nuclear laboratories have cooked up plans for an alphabet soup of projects as part of the SSMP, scientists are pushing -- to mention just a few of the acronyms on the table right now -- ASCC, MESA, the RRWP, the ICFHY campaign and the RNEP.

In the interest of not putting everyone to sleep, we can take a closer look at just a few of the Bush administration's proliferating nuclear projects. Under the umbrella of Stockpile Stewardship Management (SSMP), scientists are working to safeguard the stockpile of nuclear weapons and materials so it is not ravaged by time and neglect. The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program (RRWP) will exchange existing warheads for more "reliable" (read: more powerful) ones. There are plans underway to develop the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) and other "useable" new nuclear weapons supposedly to meet new threats by new enemies -- "rogue states" like Iran -- in future preemptive anti-proliferation wars. Under each of these programs are many other acronym-heavy, cash-rich programs that seem to lead nowhere -- except toward further nuclear proliferation.

The Inertial Confinement Fusion and High Yield Campaign is just one of the more outlandish and expensive of these projects. It proposes using lasers to replicate what happens inside an actual nuclear explosion in weapons labs. Sounds simple enough, right? The Nuclear Ignition Facility -- where the lasers will do their work -- is the single largest project in the NNSA budget and, according to analyst Christopher Paine, "quite possibly the most expensive experimental facility ever built." The Department of Energy projects $3.5 billion in costs for this alone, but the independent environmental group, the National Resources Defense Council, puts the figure higher yet -- at $5.32 billion -- and that money will be spent before anyone can even demonstrate that the system works.

The Age of Nuclear Terror?

Do nuclear weapons have a role in the "Age of Terror" -- other than as potential weapons for terrorist groups? In a new and ever-shifting environment of emerging regional powers and wars that transcend national boundaries, the Bush administration is taking a have-it-both-ways approach: It is pushing aggressive non-proliferation policies for chosen enemy nations and embracing a policy of accelerated nuclear proliferation for itself. How much harder will it be in the future to dissuade other powers from building nuclear weapons when the American nuclear industry and its weapons labs have switched even more fully into private mode and the profit-motive is increasingly at stake in global nuclear planning? These and many other questions unfortunately remain unasked. Yet, a new era of nuclear weapons for profit threatens to turn Armageddon into a paying operation.

During the height of the Cold War, when competition between the nuclear laboratories seemed to rival the superpower stand-off, a Lawrence Livermore scientist posted a sign that read: "Remember, the Soviets are the Competition, Los Alamos is the Enemy."

In a new era of potential corporate antagonism over apocalyptic weaponry, will there be a sign at the Bechtel-run nuclear lab emblazoned with: "Remember, the Terrorists are the Competition, Lockheed Martin is the Enemy"?

Frida Berrigan (berrigaf@newschool.edu) is a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center. Her primary research areas with the project include nuclear-weapons policy, war profiteering and corporate crimes, weapons sales to areas of conflict, and military-training programs. She is the author of a number of Institute reports, most recently Weapons at War 2005: Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict.

Copyright 2006 Frida Berrigan

by Ron Paul

Watch Ron Paul's speech on video.

Before the US House of Representatives,
March 28, 2006

The top Neo-Con of the twentieth century was Woodrow Wilson. His supposed idealism, symbolized in the slogan “Make the world safe for democracy,” resulted in untold destruction and death across the world for many decades. His deceit and manipulation of the pre-war intelligence from Europe dragged America into an unnecessary conflict that cost the world and us dearly. Without the disastrous Versailles Treaty, World War II could have been averted – and the rise to power of Communists around the world might have been halted.

We seem to never learn from our past mistakes. Today’s neo-cons are as idealistically misled and aggressive in remaking the Middle East as the Wilsonian do-gooders. Even given the horrendous costs of the Iraq War and the unintended consequences that plague us today, the neo-cons are eager to expand their regime-change policy to Iran by force.

The obvious shortcomings of our regime change and occupation of Afghanistan are now readily apparent. The Taliban was ousted from power, but they have regrouped and threaten the delicate stability that now exists in that country. Opium drug production is once again a major operation, with drugs lords controlling a huge area of the country outside Kabul. And now the real nature of the government we created has been revealed in the case of Abdul Rahman, the Muslim who faced a possible death sentence from the Karzai administration for converting to Christianity. Even now that Mr. Rahman is free due to western pressure, his life remains in danger.

Our bombs and guns haven’t changed the fact that the new puppet Afghan government still follows Sharia law. The same loyalty to Sharia exists in Iraq, where we’re trying so hard to stabilize things. And all this is done in the name of spreading democracy.

The sad fact is that even under the despicable rule of Saddam Hussein, Christians were safer in Iraq than they are today. Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister was a practicing Christian. Today thousands of Christians have fled Iraq following our occupation, to countries like Jordan and Syria. Those Christians who have remained in Iraq fear for their lives every day. That should tell us something about the shortcomings of a policy that presumes to make the world safe for democracy.

The Muslim world is not fooled by our talk about spreading democracy and values. The evidence is too overwhelming that we do not hesitate to support dictators and install puppet governments when it serves our interests. When democratic elections result in the elevation of a leader or party not to our liking, we do not hesitate for a minute to undermine that government. This hypocrisy is rarely recognized by the American people. It’s much more comfortable to believe in slogans, to believe that we’re defending our goodness and spreading true liberty. We accept this and believe strongly in the cause, strongly enough to sacrifice many of our sons and daughters, and stupendous amounts of money, to spread our ideals through force.

Pointing out the lack of success is taboo. It seems of little concern to many members of Congress that we lack both the moral right and constitutional authority to impose our will on other nations.

The toughest task is analyzing what we do from their perspective. We should try harder to place ourselves in the shoes of those who live in the Arab countries where our efforts currently are concentrated. We are outraged by a Muslim country that would even consider the death penalty for a Christian convert. But many Muslims see all that we do as a reflection of Western Christianity, which to them includes Europe and America. They see everything in terms of religion.

When our bombs and sanctions kill hundreds of thousands of their citizens, they see it as an attack on their religion by Christians. To them our actions represent a crusade to change their culture and their political systems. They do not see us as having noble intentions. Cynicism and realism tell them we’re involved in the Middle East to secure the oil we need.

Our occupation and influence in the holy lands of the Middle East will always be suspect. This includes all the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Naïvely believing otherwise will guarantee continuing hostilities in Iraq. Our meddling will remain an incitement for radicals to strike us here at home in future terrorist attacks. All the intelligence gathering in the world will serve little purpose if we don’t come to understand exactly why they hate us – despite the good intentions that many Americans hold dear.

March 30, 2006

Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.

Ron Paul Archives

By David Kronke, TV Critic

Eric Haney, a retired command sergeant major of the U.S. Army, was a founding member of Delta Force, the military's elite covert counter-terrorist unit. He culled his experiences for "Inside Delta Force" (Delta; $14), a memoir rich with harrowing stories, though in an interview, Haney declines with a shrug to estimate the number of times he was almost killed. (Perhaps the most high-profile incident that almost claimed his life was the 1980 failed rescue of the hostages in Iran.) Today, he's doing nothing nearly as dangerous: He serves as an executive producer and technical adviser for "The Unit," CBS' new hit drama based on his book, developed by playwright David Mamet. Even up against "American Idol," "The Unit" shows muscle, drawing 18 million viewers in its first two airings.

Since he has devoted his life to protecting his country in some of the world's most dangerous hot spots, you might assume Haney is sympathetic to the Bush administration's current plight in Iraq (the laudatory cover blurb on his book comes from none other than Fox's News' Bill O'Reilly). But he's also someone with close ties to the Pentagon, so he's privy to information denied the rest of us.

We recently spoke to Haney, an amiable, soft-spoken Southern gentleman, on the set of "The Unit."

Q: What's your assessment of the war in Iraq?

A: Utter debacle. But it had to be from the very first. The reasons were wrong. The reasons of this administration for taking this nation to war were not what they stated. (Army Gen.) Tommy Franks was brow-beaten and ... pursued warfare that he knew strategically was wrong in the long term. That's why he retired immediately afterward. His own staff could tell him what was going to happen afterward.

We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies.

Q: What is the cost to our country?

A: For the first thing, our credibility is utterly zero. So we destroyed whatever credibility we had. ... And I say "we," because the American public went along with this. They voted for a second Bush administration out of fear, so fear is what they're going to have from now on.

Our military is completely consumed, so were there a real threat - thankfully, there is no real threat to the U.S. in the world, but were there one, we couldn't confront it. Right now, that may not be a bad thing, because that keeps Bush from trying something with Iran or with Venezuela.

The harm that has been done is irreparable. There are more than 2,000 American kids that have been killed. Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed - which no one in the U.S. really cares about those people, do they? I never hear anybody lament that fact. It has been a horror, and this administration has worked overtime to divert the American public's attention from it. Their lies are coming home to roost now, and it's gonna fall apart. But somebody's gonna have to clear up the aftermath and the harm that it's done just to what America stands for. It may be two or three generations in repairing.

Q: What do you make of the torture debate? Cheney ...

A: (Interrupting) That's Cheney's pursuit. The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It's about vengeance, it's about revenge, or it's about cover-up. You don't gain intelligence that way. Everyone in the world knows that. It's worse than small-minded, and look what it does.

I've argued this on Bill O'Reilly and other Fox News shows. I ask, who would you want to pay to be a torturer? Do you want someone that the American public pays to torture? He's an employee of yours. It's worse than ridiculous. It's criminal; it's utterly criminal. This administration has been masters of diverting attention away from real issues and debating the silly. Debating what constitutes torture: Mistreatment of helpless people in your power is torture, period. And (I'm saying this as) a man who has been involved in the most pointed of our activities. I know it, and all of my mates know it. You don't do it. It's an act of cowardice. I hear apologists for torture say, "Well, they do it to us." Which is a ludicrous argument. ... The Saddam Husseins of the world are not our teachers. Christ almighty, we wrote a Constitution saying what's legal and what we believed in. Now we're going to throw it away.

Q: As someone who repeatedly put your life on the line, did some of the most hair-raising things to protect your country, and to see your country behave this way, that must be ...

A: It's pretty galling. But ultimately I believe in the good and the decency of the American people, and they're starting to see what's happening and the lies that have been told. We're seeing this current house of cards start to flutter away. The American people come around. They always do.

Public opinion polls show the majority don't want Canadian troops enforcing US dominance. A recent poll found that approximately 62 percent of Canadians think that our military intervention in Afghanistan is wrong, especially without any serious debate in the House of Commons or the news media. You can almost hear the establishment hit the alarm button. What is to be done?

The answer appears so quickly it is startling. Enter our prestigious press. On the same fine cold morning of March 3, both The (Conservative) Globe and Mail and the (Liberal) Toronto Star ran similar editorials - "We have to stay in Afghanistan." They also both carried interviews with our new policy maker General Hillier.

Nobody is fooled by the Karzai government when poppy growing is the #1 industry in the country.

It seems there is no difference of opinion between Conservatives and Liberals. They believe that we have to stay in Afghanistan even if it takes 10 years and countless lives - mostly Afghanis, but also our own Canadian soldiers. Their message is simple: Get used to it, Canada!

Canadians knew instinctively that there is no winning in Afghanistan. How do you win a population over by bombs, terror, torture and illegal occupation? History has shown that path never works. It only creates more hatred and animosity. You don't need to be a university professor to understand that. Nobody is fooled by our government calling the Karzei government legitimate, when the real agendas are protecting the warlords and poppy-growing, and the continuing oppression of women, peasants and workers.

This is the new colonialism. It takes boots on the ground to establish. The USA wants our boots as well as NATO because they don't have enough boots to occupy all the ground they so cravenly desire.

General Hillier states in the Toronto Star that Canada sees, "[an] opportunity to shape a region, an area, a country in the way that we see it right to be shaped, in other words, in accordance with our interests and with our values."

It would be hubris for a General to boast that we will shape a country as if it was a piece of clay, except that he is speaking for our political leaders. After WWII we would have not tolerated such a colonial mentality. Since then, after the West has undermined one democracy after another in the developing world. It has also supported and financed groups such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda, to help prevent local governments from adopting measures such as nationalizing strategic industries in order to establish free education, and free medicare.

Let's be frank. A thousand editorials in the Star or Globe won't change the perception of the majority of people in Canada or Afghanistan. The only duty that the Canadian Government is carrying out is the duty to protect the colonial interest of the US and by extension our own privileged position.

The question is: when will there be political leaders in this country who will catch up to the good sense of the Canadian people? Our so-called free press has become pamphleteers for our military involvement. Our elites will try hard to change those public opinion poll numbers. People may start to believe the propaganda if the opposing point of view remains silent. If you believe in peace and justice, now more than ever you have a responsibility to stand with those ordinary Canadians who object to the role Canada is playing in Afghanistan.

Peter Leibovitch is a Hamilton, Ontario, industrial mechanic; a union activist who was part of the Steelworker negotiating team dealing with the Stelco bankruptcy; a peace activist; and the host of the radio show Unusual Sources, on CFMU 93.3 and the Internet. This article has appeared on Straight Goods.

ACTivist Magazine - www.activistmagazine.com/

Great interview... watch the video. Finally a journalist who's not a lap dog.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/03/26.html#a7669

Click below to watch video.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12499.htm

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The George W Bush administration failed to enter into negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program in May 2003 because neo-conservatives who advocated destabilization and regime change were able to block any serious diplomatic engagement with Tehran, according to former administration officials.

The same neo-conservative veto power also prevented the administration from adopting any official policy statement on Iran, those same officials said.

Lawrence Wilkerson, then chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell, said the failure to adopt a formal Iran policy in 2002-03 was the result of obstruction by a "secret cabal" of neo-conservatives in the administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney.

"The secret cabal got what it wanted: no negotiations with Tehran," Wilkerson wrote in an e-mail to Inter Press Service (IPS). The Iranian negotiating offer, transmitted to the State Department in early May 2003 by the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, acknowledged that Iran would have to address US concerns about its nuclear program, although it made no specific concession in advance of the talks, according to Flynt Leverett, then the National Security Council's senior director for Middle East Affairs.

Iran's offer also raised the possibility of cutting off Iran's support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad and converting Hezbollah into a purely socio-political organization, according to Leverett. That was an explicit response to Powell's demand in late March that Iran "end its support for terrorism".

In return, Leverett recalls, the Iranians wanted the US to address security questions, the lifting of economic sanctions and normalization of relations, including support for Iran's integration into the global economic order.

Leverett also recalls that the Iranian offer was drafted with the blessing of all the major political players in the Iranian regime, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini.

Realists, led by Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were inclined to respond positively to the Iranian offer. Nevertheless, within a few days of its receipt, the State Department had rebuked the Swiss ambassador for having passed on the offer.

Exactly how the decision was made is not known. "As with many of these issues of national security decision-making, there are no fingerprints," Wilkerson told IPS. "But I would guess Dick Cheney with the blessing of George W Bush."

As Wilkerson observes, however, the mysterious death of what became known among Iran specialists as Iran's "grand bargain" initiative was a result of the administration's inability to agree on a policy toward Tehran.

A draft National Security Policy Directive (NSPD) on Iran calling for diplomatic engagement had been in the process of interagency coordination for more than a year, according to a source who asked to remain unidentified.

But it was impossible to get formal agreement on the NSPD, the source recalled, because officials in Cheney's office and in under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans wanted a policy of regime change and kept trying to amend it.

Opponents of the neo-conservative policy line blame Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, for the failure of the administration to override the extremists in the administration. The statutory policymaker process on Iran, Wilkerson told IPS in an e-mail, was "managed by a national security adviser incapable of standing up to the cabal ..."

In the absence of an Iran policy, the two contending camps struggled in 2003 over a proposal by realists in the administration to reopen the Geneva channel with Iran that had been used successfully on Afghanistan in 2001-02. They believed Iran could be helpful in stabilizing post-conflict Iraq, because the Iraqi Shi'ite militants whom they expected to return from Iran after Saddam Hussein's overthrow owed some degree of allegiance to Iran.

The neo-conservatives tried to block those meetings on tactical policy grounds, according to Leverett. "They were saying we didn't want to engage with Iran because we didn't want to owe them," he recalled.

Nevertheless, US ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad (now envoy in Iraq) was authorized to begin meeting secretly in Geneva with Iranian officials to discuss Iraq. The neo-conservatives then tried to sandbag the talks by introducing a demand for full information on any high-ranking al-Qaeda cadres who might be detained by the Iranians.

Iran regarded that information as a bargaining chip to be given up only for a quid pro quo from Washington. The Bush administration, however, had adopted a policy in early 2002 of refusing to share any information with Iran on al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations.

On May 3, 2003, as the Iranian "grand bargain" proposal was on its way to Washington, Tehran's representative in Geneva, Javad Zarif, offered a compromise on the issue, according to Leverett: if the US gave Iran the names of the cadres of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) who were being held by US forces in Iraq, Iran would give the US the names of the al-Qaeda operatives they had detained.

The MEK had carried out armed attacks against Iran from Iraqi territory during the Hussein regime and had been named a terrorist organization by the US. But it had capitulated to US forces after the invasion, and the neo-conservatives now saw the MEK as a potential asset in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime.

The MEK had already become a key element in the alternative draft NSPD drawn up by neo-conservatives in the administration.

The indictment of Iran analyst Larry Franklin on Feith's staff last year revealed that, by February 2003, Franklin had begun sharing a draft NSPD that he knew would be to the liking of the Israeli Embassy.

(Franklin eventually pleaded guilty to passing classified information to two employees of an influential pro-Israel lobbying group and was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison.)

Reflecting the substance of that draft policy, ABC News reported on May 30, 2003, that the Pentagon was calling for the destabilization of the Iranian government by "using all available points of pressure on the Iranian regime, including backing armed Iranian dissidents and employing the services of the Mujahideen-e Khalq ..."

Nevertheless, Bush apparently initially saw nothing wrong with trading information on MEK, despite arguments that MEK should not be repatriated to Iran. "I have it on good authority," Leverett told IPS, "that Bush's initial reaction was, 'But we say there is no such thing as a good terrorist.'" Nevertheless, Bush finally rejected the Iranian proposal.

By the end of May, the neo-conservatives had succeeded in closing down the Geneva channel for good. They had hoped to push through their own NSPD on Iran, but according to the Franklin indictment, Franklin told an Israeli Embassy officer in October that work on the NSPD had been stopped.

But the damage had been done. With no direct diplomatic contact between Iran and the US, the neo-conservatives had a clear path to raising tensions and building political support for regarding Iran as the primary enemy of the United States.

Gareth Porter is a historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published last June.