|
"It is well that war is
so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
Robert E. Lee,
General of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Battle of
Fredricksburg, December 13, 1862. [Smithsonian]
At 2:40 P.M. that
day, with dust and smoke filling the operations center as he was
trying to figure out what happened, Rumsfeld raised with his staff
the possibility of going after Iraq as a response to the terrorist
attacks, according to an aide's notes. Saddam Hussein is S.H.
in these notes, and UBL is Usama Bin Laden. The notes show
that Rumsfeld had mused about whether to "hit S.H. @ same time - not
only UBL" and asked the Pentagon lawyer to talk to Paul Wolfowitz
about the Iraq "connection with UBL." The next day in the
inner circle of Bush's war cabinet, Rumsfeld asked if the terrorist
attacks did not present an "opportunity" to launch against
Iraq.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's
response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according
to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, pages
24-25. [Woodward, p. 24-25]
Veterans possess a reverence for the
serious consequences of war that the rest of us cannot fathom.
General Lee's solemn warning stands in stark
contrast to Secretary Rumsfeld's push to use
the 9/11 attacks as a justification
for invading Iraq. On
the day after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld said that the
tragedy presented an "opportunity" to attack Iraq. [Woodward, p. 25]
After four more days of
Iraq invasion talk, Secretary of State Colin
Powell, the only Bush Cabinet member with combat experience, met
with General Hugh Shelton. "What the hell! What are
these guys thinking about?" Powell asked Shelton. "Can't you
get these guys back in the box?" [Slate's
"Condensed Bob Woodward"; Woodward, p. 25]
Diplomats
and Military Commanders for Change, a group of 27 retired U.S.
diplomats and military officers, including both Democrats and
Republicans, recently stated:
|
We all believe that
current administration policies have failed in the primary
responsibilities of preserving national security and
providing world leadership . . . We need a change . . .
Never in the two and a quarter centuries of our history has
the United States been so isolated among the nations, so
broadly feared and distrusted. [DMCC] |
A
majority of American voters also side with Diplomats and
Military Commanders for Change over the Bush
administration:
"Do you think the invasion of Iraq, and recent events
in Iraq, have made the United States much more respected, somewhat
more respected, somewhat less respected, or much less respected
around the world?"
|
More
respected |
 33% |
| Less
respected |
 62% |
| Unsure |
 5% |
|
|
The Harris Poll. June 8-15, 2004. N=991 adults
nationwide. MoE ± 3. |
"Do you think the war in Iraq has or has not damaged the
United States' image in the rest of the world?"
|
Has |
 76% |
| Has
not |
 23% |
| No opinion |
 1% |
|
|
ABC News/Washington Post. June 17-20,
2004. N=1,201 adults nationwide. MoE ±
3. |
RESPONSIBLE MILITARY POWER
ARCHIVE
Ways to Help the
Troops | Miscellaneous Articles
| Iraqi Prisoner Torture | Iraq
WMD Evidence | The Costs of the Iraq
War | CIA Leak
Probe
Ways
to Help the Troops
Military Exchange Prepaid Phone Cards [DoD
Military Exchange]
Send books to soldiers [Books To
Soldiers]
List of soldiers' charities [Operation Truth]
Miscellaneous Articles
Pentagon: North Korea
may be preparing for nuclear test [CNN]
Pentagon
analyst arrested, charged with passing classified info [ABC]
U.S. seizes
letter to Zarqawi [Centcom.mil] [PDF] [Translation]
International security
expert discusses North Korean missile test [CNN]
Official report
on Sgrena incident released, then taken offline [The Memory Hole]
NCTC releases data cut from State Department report [CNN]; [PDF of
report]
U.S. captures Zarqawi's laptop with "My
Pictures" folder [Christian Science
Monitor]
State Department cuts data from terror report
[Reuters]; [PDF of
report]
Bolton nomination interviews with former intel
officers [Senate.gov]; [BitTorrent link]
British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw complained to Powell about Bolton [Newsweek]
Former US
Ambassador contacts Senate about dealings
with Bolton [Newsweek]
Moussaoui
pleads guilty [CNN]; Case marked
by bizarre behavior [Findlaw]
Sen.
Chuck Hagel "troubled" by Bolton allegations [CNN]
World reacts
with skepticism to Wolfowitz World Bank nod [MSNBC]
Bush challenges Putin on
Russia's anti-democratic policies [Associated
Press]
Popular Mechanics takes on 9/11 conspiracy
theories [Popular
Mechanics]
What does the Kurds' success at the
polls mean for Iraq's future? [Time]
World reacts to Iraq's
vote [Christian Science
Monitor]
New York Times' in-depth
multimedia feature on Iraq elections [New York
Times]
Nashville's Kurds vote in Iraq elections
[Nashville
Tennessean]
Pentagon confirms
clandestine intelligence-gathering unit [CNN]
Seymour Hersh: U.S. planning for possible
attack on Iran [New Yorker]
Iraqi Prisoner
Torture
Archived
6/2/05:
Bush approves demotion of Gen. Karpinski in
prison scandal [USA Today]
White House official confirms NYT report on rendition of
terror suspects [CNN]
Palm Beach Post releases clips from "Ramadi Madness" DVD
[Palm Beach
Post]
ACLU files lawsuit against Rumsfeld
for overseas torture [USA Today]
Rumsfeld offered to resign twice during Abu Ghraib
scandal [CNN]
Archived 7/15/04:
CBS Poll shows vast majority believe
Iraqi prisoner torture was not justified
"Which comes closer to your opinion? (1) What happened
to the Iraqi prisoners was justified because the U.S. is at war with
Iraq and that is what can happen to prisoners of war. OR, (2) What
happened to the Iraqi prisoners was NOT justified because U.S.
soldiers should be held to a higher
standard?"
|
Justified |
 12% |
| Not
Justified |
 81% |
| Don't know |
 7% |
|
|
CBS News Poll. May 20-23, 2004. N=1,113 adults nationwide.
MoE ±
3. |
Archived 7/13/04 (originally posted
6/24/04):
Trent Lott doesn't speak for the
Southerners I know
I'm a North Carolinian attending law school
in New York City. Whenever people here ask me about politics
in the South, I always explain that it's a complicated place, and
that most of the negative stereotypes that New Yorkers have about it
are probably exaggerated and unfair.
And then, like clockwork, Trent Lott does his best
to prove me wrong, opening his mouth and saying something that makes
us Southerners sound like some kind of sweet tea-drinking
Taliban. Last month, Lott defended the "really
rough" torture of Iraqi prisoners on a Jackson,
Mississippi TV station:
| "Hey,
nothing wrong with holding a dog up there, unless the dog
ate him, scared him with a dog," Lott said. When WAPT news
anchorman Brad McMullan noted that a prisoner died at Abu
Ghraib, apparently after a beating, Lott responded, "This is
not Sunday school; this is interrogation; this is rough
stuff."
Some of the prisoners "should not have
been prisoners in the first place, probably should have been
killed," he added. [Washington
Post] |
An
article in the New Yorker, the publication that broke the Iraqi
prisoner abuse story, shows the photo in question. The caption
reads: "An Iraqi prisoner and American military dog handlers. Other
photographs show the Iraqi on the ground, bleeding." [New
Yorker]
Trent Lott doesn't represent my family
and friends in the South. Everyone I know falls within
the 81% of Americans who think the treatment of prisoners in
Abu Ghraib was not justified. [see poll]
If you're Southern and you'd
like to express how you feel about Mr. Lott's comments,
please email me at info@outragedmoderates.org with "Southern"
in the subject.
Archived 6/27/04:
CIA puts "enhanced
interrogation techniques" on hold
The "enhanced
interrogation techniques," as the CIA calls them, include
feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries
. . .
"Everything's on hold," said a former senior CIA
official aware of the agency's decision. "The whole thing
has been stopped until we sort out whether we are sure we're
on legal ground." A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the
issue.
CIA interrogations will continue but without the
suspended techniques, which include feigning suffocation,
"stress positions," light and noise bombardment, sleep
deprivation, and making captives think they are being
interrogated by another government. [Washington
Post] |
Archived 6/24/04:
US
loses support for court immunity
"International anger over the Abu
Ghraib prison scandal yesterday forced the US to abandon an attempt
at the United Nations to renew immunity for its forces from
prosecution by the International Criminal Court."
[Financial Times]
Archived 6/22/04:
Bush claimed the right to
waive Geneva Convention; Rumsfeld okayed naked interrogations and
the threat of dog
attacks
Memos released by the White House
show that President Bush said:
"I accept the legal conclusion of the
attorney general and the Department of Justice that I have the
authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the
United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that
authority at this time"
Rumsfeld approved: "use of 20-hour interrogations," "removal of
all comfort items, including religious items," "removal of
clothing," "using detainees' individual phobias such as fear of dogs
to induce stress." [AP]
An excerpt of this memo is available through
our Download For Democracy
campaign.
Archived 6/20/04:
White House lawyers
discussed "water-boarding" and "mock
burials"
| Yoo's
August 2002 memo was prompted by CIA questions about what to
do with a top Qaeda captive, Abu Zubaydah, who had turned
uncooperative. And it was drafted after White House meetings
convened by George W. Bush's chief counsel, Alberto
Gonzales, along with Defense Department general counsel
William Haynes and David Addington, Vice President Dick
Cheney's counsel, who discussed specific interrogation
techniques, says a source familiar with the discussions.
Among the methods they found acceptable: "water-boarding,"
or dripping water into a wet cloth over a suspect's face,
which can feel like drowning; and threatening to bring in
more-brutal interrogators from other nations. [Newsweek] |
Iraq
WMD Evidence
Archive
6/2/05:
Blair under fire over Iraq memo
[Reuters]; [PDF of memo]; [GIFs leaked to Ch.
4]
Commission on Intel Capabilites WMD report released
[outragedmoderates.org]
Archived 8/13/04:
Senate
Intelligence Committee leaders question reliance on source
known as "Curveball"; ask if Pentagon withheld info from
CIA
One facet of the Senate Intelligence Committee's
scathing report on pre-war
intelligence involves a questionable intelligence source
with an all-too-appropriate name. Yesterday, the chairman and
vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sens. Pat
Roberts (R-Kansas) and Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia), questioned
the Bush administration's reliance on a source codenamed
"Curveball." [CNN]
"Curveball really provided 98 percent of the
assessment as to whether or not the Iraqis had a biological
weapon," Roberts said.
"Yet the DIA, the Defense
Intelligence Agency, knew of his background. He has a very
troubled background." [CNN] |
In addition, the
internal structure of the Pentagon's pre-war intelligence
apparatus was called into question. Rockefeller said of
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith's Office of
Special Plans:
| "There's always the
question whether or not he was running a secret intelligence
operation that bypassed the entire intelligence community.
And the law says you've got to inform the intelligence
community of anything that you're doing." [CNN] |
This secrecy would be consistent with the
Office of Special Plans' approach to other Pentagon
divisions and the State Department, according to a 2003 Detroit
Free Press article:
|
Responsibility for preparing for
post-Hussein Iraq lay with senior officials who supervised
the Office of Special Plans, a highly secretive group of
analysts and consultants within the Pentagon's Near
East/South Asia bureau.
Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski,
who retired from the Near East bureau on July 1, said she
and her colleagues were allowed little contact with the
Office of Special Plans and were often told by the officials
who ran it to ignore the State Department's concerns and
views.
"We almost disemboweled State,"
Kwiatkowski said. [Detroit Free
Press] |
The Senate
Intelligence Committee report is available through the Download For Democracy P2P campaign.
Archived 7/13/04
(originally posted 6/29/04):
Were Bush's Iraq War plans finalized
before November 2002?
Yesterday's post showed that Halliburton
subsidiary KBR was given the task order to create a Contingency
Support Plan on November 11, 2002, four months before the U.S.
invaded Iraq. If Department of Defense was already working out
the details on how to put out the post-invasion fires by then,
when did it finish its plans for the invasion itself?
Here's a very abbreviated
review of the Bush Administration's planning for War in
Iraq up between September 11, 2001, and November,
2002:
September 11-12,
2001:
In notes to his aides
written at 2:40 pm on September 11, 2001, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld said: "Judge whether [info is] good enough hit [to]
S.H. [meaning Saddam Hussein] at same time, not just U.B.L. [Osama
Bin Laden] . . . Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related
and not." [CBS
News]
The day after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld said that the
tragedy presented an "opportunity" to attack Iraq. [Woodward, p.25]
September 20, 2001:
According to Vanity
Fair, President Bush first asked British Prime Minister to support
an invasion of Iraq at a private dinner at the White House, just
nine days after the September 11 attacks. Blair reportedly
told Bush not to get distracted from dealing with Al Qaeda. [The
Observer]
January 29, 2002:
In his State of the Union Address,
President Bush linked Iraq, Iran and North Korea, calling them an
"axis of evil." [CNN] When pressed for any
evidence of coordination between the three countries that warranted
a comparison to the World War II axis of powers, White
House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer explained that the phrase was
"more rhetorical than historical." [Slate] It should be noted
that "axis" has a specific meaning in the political context,
even when it is not being used in direct reference to World War II:
Merriam-Webster defines it as a "partnership" or
"alliance." [Merriam-Webster]
Spring 2002:
Word began to come from Bush
administration officials that the decision to invade Iraq had
already been made. On February 13, 2002, an unnamed
Bush official told the Philadelphia Inquirer: "This is not an
argument about whether to get rid of Saddam Hussein. That debate is
over. This is . . . how you do it." [Philadelphia
Inquirer] In
the same article, another Bush administration official
described Vice President Cheney's planned March 2002 trip to meet
with Middle Eastern heads of state: "He's not going to beg for
support . . . He's going to inform them that the President's
decision has been made and will be carried out, and if they want
some input into how and when it's carried out, now's the time for
them to speak up." [Philadelphia
Inquirer]
An unnamed former White House official
later told the New Yorker that, by March 2002, it was
understood by many in the Bush administration that the
President had decided to invade Iraq. In that
article, Seymour Hersh wrote that:
| The undeclared decision had a
devastating impact on the continuing struggle against
terrorism. The Bush administration took
many intelligence operations that had been aimed at al-Qaeda
and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected
them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives
were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism
intelligence programs were curtailed. [The New
Yorker] |
September
2002:
White House chief of staff Andrew Card
was asked why, if the Iraq threat was as immediate as the
Bush administration claimed it was, we weren't going ahead and
invading them. Card responded that "from a marketing point of
view, you don't introduce new products in August." [CNN]
Archived 7/13/04 (originally posted 6/21/04):
Cheney
cites long-discredited "Prague Meeting"
report
After the 9/11 Commission's statement
that there was "no credible evidence" of an Al Qaeda-Iraq link,
Vice President Cheney told the CNBC network that there was
"overwhelming" evidence of such a link. [Seattle
Post-Intelligencer]
Unbelievably, in the CNBC
interview, Cheney cited the long-discredited
allegation that a 9/11 hijacker and an Iraqi official met in
Prague in 2000: "We had one report which is a famous report on the
Czech intelligence service and we've never been able to confirm or
to knock it down . . . All we have is that one report from the
Czechs." [DrudgeReport]
Well, here's what the Czechs have to
say about that report:
- In July 2002, the head of Czech
foreign intelligence said any alleged meetings
"had not been proven or verified." [Prague
Post]
- In October 2002,
Czech intelligence officials said that they had "no
confidence" in the initial report of a meeting:
"Quite simply, we think
the source for this story may have invented the meeting that he
reported. We can find no corroborative evidence for
the meeting and the source has real credibility
problems." [UPI]
Tom Clancy calls Iraq a
"mistake" due to lack of
provocation
Tom Clancy, creator
of dozens of successful military novels, military
movies, and
military video games, believes that the
Iraq War a "mistake" due to lack of suitable
provocation.
In an interview with the Associated
Press, Clancy discussed a discussion he had with head neocon
Richard Perle on the war in Iraq:
|
In discussing the Iraq war, both Clancy and Zinni singled
out the Department of Defense for criticism. Clancy recalled
a prewar encounter in Washington during which he "almost
came to blows" with Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser at the
time and a longtime advocate of the invasion.
"He was saying how (Secretary of State) Colin Powell was
being a wuss because he was overly concerned with the lives
of the troops," Clancy said. "And I said, 'Look ..., he's
supposed to think that way!' And Perle didn't agree with me
on that. People like that worry me." [CNN] |
Archived 6/23/04:
9/11 Commission: "No credible evidence"
of Al Qaeda-Iraq Link
Last week, the independent 9/11
Commission issued a statement titled "Overview of the
Enemy," stating that it had found "no credible
evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the
United States," and no "collaborative relationship" between Al
Qaeda and Iraq. [911
Commission: Staff Statement 16]
Here's some commentary on the 9/11 Commission's statement:
"9/11 panel could be a threat to Bush" [Seattle Times]
"President George W. Bush:
Credibility Gap" [St. Louis Post Dispatch]
"9/11 Panel's
Findings Vault Bush Credibility To Campaign Forefront" [Wash. Post]
"Panel's findings suggest
flawed justifications for Iraq war" [ |
