Closing The Circle

Over the weekend, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi died in a Libyan prison. Al-Libi may be the most important contributor to the war in Iraq that nobody knows about. Seized at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2001, al-Libi was rendered to Egypt and tortured by local forces there. Andy Worthington continues:

In Egypt, he came up with the false allegation about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used by President Bush in a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, just days before Congress voted on a resolution authorizing the President to go to war against Iraq, in which, referring to the supposed threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, Bush said, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”

Four months later, on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell made the same claim in his notorious speech to the UN Security Council, in an attempt to drum up support for the invasion. “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda,” Powell said, adding, “Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.” As a Newsweek report in 2007 explained, Powell did not identify al-Libi by name, but CIA officials — and a Senate Intelligence Committee report — later confirmed that he was referring to al-Libi.

Al-Libi recanted his story in February 2004, when he was returned to the CIA’s custody, and explained, as Newsweek described it, that he told his debriefers that “he initially told his interrogators that he ‘knew nothing’ about ties between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden and he ‘had difficulty even coming up with a story’ about a relationship between the two.” The Newsweek report explained that “his answers displeased his interrogators — who then apparently subjected him to the mock burial. As al-Libi recounted, he was stuffed into a box less than 20 inches high. When the box was opened 17 hours later, al-Libi said he was given one final opportunity to ‘tell the truth.’ He was knocked to the floor and ‘punched for 15 minutes.’ It was only then that, al-Libi said, he made up the story about Iraqi weapons training.”

Al-Libi's false confession, offered for no other reason than to stop torture, mirrors exactly the claim in the Senate Armed Services Committee report that torture was employed at least in part to extract intelligence on the al Qaeda/Iraq link. The intelligence services knew by early 2002 that al-Libi was lying, but they used his information anyway, and since it worked out so well for them, they wanted more information like this. This coda to al-Libi's life (nobody was even sure where he was being held) brings up a few new questions, but really brings back this remembrance of how torture and Iraq have been inextricably linked. As a TPM reader put it yesterday:

Several interesting things just connected in my mind. Saw Jon Stewart show a clip of Cheney saying that Bush "basically approved" of the interrogation program. His answer was as woozy as it gets. Then on the replay of Hardball, watched Lawrence O'Donnell answer Chris Matthew's musings on a Cheney prosection by suggesting it would be for "usurping" Bush on the issue.

Really, where the torture scandal could break open is the exact nexus of who actually authorized the program and Cheney's frantic efforts to get information linking Saddam Hussein to the Iraq war. Wherever Iraq touches the torture question is going to be the flashpoint--it undercuts the "ticking time bomb" rationale for the program. Its also where politicals are going to have their deepest interactions with the program. That's where people need to look. Somebody needs to superimpose the timeline of the Iraq run-up over what we know about the timeline of the torture program. Anywhere Cheney, Iraq and torture meet is going to be radioactive.

Bmaz has more, and the Washington Post even manages to report on al-Libi today, specifically naming him as a "detainee who provided bogus information that was cited by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war." This is the great unmentioned part of the conservative project to justify torture if it saved lives. The purpose of the torture, given the al-Libi example, was to destroy lives by drumming up bogus reasoning to go to war in Iraq.

...Jeff Kaye has many more questions about this. This is a key point:

Human Right Watch researcher Heba Morayef told Reuters in London that she saw Fakhiri on April 27 during a visit to the Libyan capital's main Abu Salim jail.

She said Fakhiri appeared for just two minutes in a prison courtyard. He look well, but was unwilling to speak to the Rights Watch team, she said. "Where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons?" she quoted him as saying.

According to Kaye, al-Libi actually said "Where were you when I was being tortured at Guantanamo?"

How Dare YOU, Sir!

There's a new cottage industry in Washington, and that's defending George Bush's legacy on talk shows. The Bush Legacy Project never really got off the ground because the participants have to run such a con to even try to defend this guy, their pleadings look ridiculous. And here is Ari Fleischer:

FLEISCHER: It was in part because of Iraq and large part because of the economy that Barack Obama won. Having said that, I also think Barack Obama should say thank you every day that he inherited a world without Saddam Hussein in it. The one thing people are going to remember the most is that he kept us safe. […]

But after September 11th, having been being hit once, how could we take a chance that Saddam Hussein might not strike again? We got a report saying al Qaeda is determined to attack the United States. Well, that’s not a surprise. Of course, they are. It doesn’t say where, it doesn’t say when, it doesn’t say how. So, if you get a report like that, what do you do?

It's the old conflate-Saddam-with-9/11 backflip one-and-a-half with a twist! What's the score? Ooh, a 4.5 with the Finnish judge, that's going to hurt him. And a 0 from the American people.

But this is the even better part:

Matthews: We were attacked on your watch. If you start getting into who was attacked when, we suffered the worst domestic calamity in history on your watch.

Fleischer: Chris, how dare you!

How DARE you bring up factual events!

Well, Fleischer clearly failed in that effort. How about Bush Legacy Project Manager, 43 himself?

Former President George W. Bush’s first post-presidency speech will take place on St. Patrick’s Day — March 17 — in Calgary, Alberta. Although organizers have declined to say if Bush will be paid, he once boasted that he hoped to make “ridiculous” money on the lecture circuit once he leaves office.

But instead of greeting Bush with open arms and (potentially) wads of cash, activists and human rights lawyers in Canada are hoping their government will greet him with handcuffs — or at the very least — bar him entry in to the country. In fact, Vancouver Lawyer Gail Davidson said the government has an obligation under the law to ban Bush from entering Canada because of his role in supporting torture:

"Davidson says that because Bush has been “credibly accused” of supporting torture in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Canada has a legal obligation to deny him entry under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The law says foreign nationals who have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity, including torture, are “inadmissible” to Canada. “The test isn’t whether the person’s been convicted, but whether there’s reasonable grounds to think that they have been involved,” says Davidson."

Oops. I guess directing and authorizing torture does get in the way of spinning all your successes.

(by the way, Stephen Harper is not going to arrest George Bush. But I'm sure he'll get the hero's welcome he deserves in Calgary.)

AK-Sen: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

To Ted Stevens, being convicted on seven counts of making false statements means that you haven't been convicted of anything.

"I've not been convicted yet," Stevens said Thursday in a meeting with the editorial board of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. "There's not a black mark by my name yet, until the appeal is over and I am finally convicted, if that happens. If that happens, of course I'll do what's right for Alaska and for the Senate. ... I don't anticipate it happening, and until it happens I do not have a black mark."

Stevens reiterated that position during a televised debate late Thursday night, declaring early in the give-and-take with Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, "I have not been convicted of anything."

Here's the deal. You can appeal, but as of right now, you actually have been convicted. The part where the jury came into the courtroom and found you guilty? That was part of the whole conviction thing.

In other news, apparently Saddam caused 9/11. But it's a secret!

MODERATOR: Knowing what you know now, do you think that the country of Iraq and Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 attack on the United States?

STEVENS: I know more than you think I know, and I believe they did.

BEGICH: I don’t believe they did.

At least he's not only deeply in denial about his own conviction.

Support Mark Begich.

...The Anchorage Daily News, which has been a great paper on the Palin/Troopergate affair, endorsed Begich today.

Party Of Hate

Another "lone wacko" says exactly the same thing at a McCain-Palin rally as the other "lone wacko." Funny how it seems so coordinated, like it's an expected response to fearmongering and incitement.

There were no incendiary outbursts from the crowd about Mr. Obama during Mrs. Palin's speech, as there have been during other recent McCain-Palin rallies.

However, someone did shout out, "Kill him!" during Republican congressional candidate Chris Hackett's remarks before Mrs. Palin took the stage.

The outburst came during a round of booing from the crowd after Mr. Hackett said Mr. Obama should come to Pennsylvania and learn what the state's values are.

I think we have to be clear where this is all going. We've seen this kind of hate before in America - it's a part of our legacy. And by running their campaign in this way, McCain and Palin aren't making it more likely they will win - the attacks are simply driving up their unfavorables. They are making it more likely that their supporters will be angry and resentful and hold the grudge long after Election Day - and more likely that they will take matters into their own hands.

Color of Change and Brave New Films put this together to show the accumulation of these remarks, and words can become action without much effort.



I mean, I suppose I could go ahead and mention that the guy running McCain's transition team lobbied for Saddam Hussein, and that means John McCain himself murdered our troops and gassed the Kurds. And if I were Barack Obama I could run an entire campaign based on that, suggesting that McCain was a risk because he's associated with radical figures. And he bombed the South Africa rugby team (man, I thought I kept up on all these Obama rumors and even I missed that one).

But that would be horrible for America, you see. It would debase the office to which I was trying to ascend. It would make it impossible for my supporters to accept my opponent if he were to win. It would debilitate the country.

There's nothing wrong with a politics of contrast on the issues; in fact, it's vital. The politics that tries to win through scare tactics and causing riots, for all intents and purposes, is beneath contempt.

(on a related note, what got into Campbell Brown?

...I guess Keith Olbermann was thinking the same thing tonight.

Rogue's Gallery

Ron Suskind's revelation of document forgery to cover up the case for war with Iraq caused quite a stir yesterday. Today he writes in the Huffington Post about the whole sordid tale - it's quite unbelievable.

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization."

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

This is all well-sourced in the book, Suskind claims, and nobody has impeached his credibility to this point in his other best-sellers. So the benefit of the doubt is definitely on his side.

And then what you have a picture of is your government, to which you pay tax dollars, forging evidence for a nonexistent al Qaeda-Iraq link, using wanted criminals as intelligence assets, paying them off to the tune of $5 million dollars in hush money, and laundering propaganda through dicey media sources. This is a government out of control, with nothing but contempt for the rule of law and American values.

Somehow, this Administration isn't involved in the 2008 Presidential race. Despite this track record. That's a big mistake.

Things We Never Hear About Iraq

I mentioned yesterday that Nouri al-Maliki's relative died in a US airstrike, in an incident that is straining relations between the US and Iraq at a time when the status of forces agreement is being negotiated. This is getting almost no coverage in the American media, and really that's not an isolated circumstance.

For instance, Spencer Ackerman has uncovered a security assessment from an Iraqi contractor that is wildly different with the official "We're winning!" line that we're fed from the military and the conservative noise machine:

The following charts appeared in GardaWorld's June 30 intelligence briefing for its clients and were obtained by The Washington Independent. On page 2 of the briefing, GardaWorld prints two charts tracing the trajectory of security both Iraq-wide and in Baghdad specifically. Take a look at the Iraq-wide chart:



As you can see, the incident level spikes and ebbs, but responsible statisticians will see -- as signified by the black bar -- that the daily incident frequency is basically flat since October 1. If anything, it's ticked up somewhat, from about 50 daily security incidents in October to about 70 through the winter and coming in at around 60 presently.

Then there's the very long Pentagon study finally admitting that the war planning was botched at best, nonexistent at worst, and commanders who requested more troops were totally rebuffed (but remember, Bush always listens to the commanders on the ground).

We probably won't hear too much about this, either. From Reuters:

The Iraqi government sued dozens of companies, including oil giant Chevron Corp., for more than $10 billion on Monday, saying they paid kickbacks to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's government under the U.N. oil-for-food program.

The civil lawsuit, filed in U.S. federal court in Manhattan, seeks to recover damages from companies investigated by a U.N.-commissioned inquiry, claiming they cheated the Iraqi people out of benefits of the $67 billion U.N. program.

What's hilarious about oil-for-food is that the only individuals who have been indicted thus far in the probe are two American oilmen, also implicated in this lawsuit. For all the talk of the dreaded UN, it was the multinationals bribing Saddam all along.

It's amazing what you can find out about Iraq if you dig on the Internet for hours and hours instead of passively consuming broadcast media. Must be why everyone's so well-informed...

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

This won't come as news to anyone in the blogosphere, but the result of reviewing 600,000 Iraqi documents found that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Period.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

The Iraq-Al Qaeda link was cultivated through hundreds of the 935 false statements the Bush Administration made in the run-up to war. Without it, there would be no pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq, no case made to the public that both wars represented the same fight against terrorism.

Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had "bulletproof" evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam's secular dictatorship.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.

As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. "The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims," he said.

Where did all this now-discredited "evidence" come from? From whom was this bogus "intelligence" gathered? From those suspects who were tortured by the CIA.

Intelligence failures had much to do with the atrocity of September 11, but those had nothing to do with a lack of torture. Let me be clear on one crucial point: it is the terrorists whom we won over with humane methods in the 1990s who continue to provide the most reliable intelligence we have in the fight against al-Qaeda. And it is the testimony of terrorists we tortured after 9/11 who have provided the most unreliable information, such as stories about a close connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. I never regret that the FBI didn't abuse its detainees. Had we done so, we would have had much less reliable intelligence, and we would have been morally debased. By instituting a policy of torture in the years following 9/11, we have recruited thousands to al-Qaeda's side. It has been a tragic waste.

It is not just that torture is a dehumanizing and a debasing act, a recruiting poster for our enemies, and something that makes our own troops less safe. It's that the information extracted as a result is completely unreliable. But of course that's the point. Bogus intelligence making the President's case for war is, to the Administration, the best intelligence money can buy.

L'Etat, C'est Moi

Another day, another novel legal imterpretation to evade Congression input:

The Bush administration yesterday advanced a new argument for why it does not require congressional approval to strike a long-term security agreement with Iraq, stating that Congress had already endorsed such an initiative through its 2002 resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein.

The 2002 measure, along with the congressional resolution passed one week after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks authorizing military action "to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States," permits indefinite combat operations in Iraq, according to a statement by the State Department's Bureau of Legislative Affairs.

Of course an authorization to use force against Saddam Hussein still applies! Haven't you ever seen Dawn of the Dead?

They're really grasping at any straw they can, and considering that Congress has failed to hold them accountable for this whatsoever, they'll probably get away with it. And by the way, this is not just about Iraq; this is about making sure that any other potential war doesn't need Congressional oversight or authorization, either. If they need an October surprise to win the election, they don't want to have to mess with any pesky "laws" in order to make it happen. So the precedent of using the 2002 AUMF is also about a pretext to use the September 20, 2001 AUMF for Afghanistan to strike any "terrorist" anywhere in the world. And we know who comes up with the definition of a terrorist.

(Of course, it's also a problem to allow a status of forces agreement to pass without Congressional authorization, as it makes it very difficult for the next President to unentangle an Iraq commitment.)

Happy Loss Of Colin Powell's Honor Day

It's Super Tuesday, but it's also an ignominious milestone, the date where Colin Powell traded his own dignity for the clucking approval of the very serious foreign policy neoconservancy. The date where he held up a tiny vial of anthrax and showed a bunch of shadowy aerial photographs and mixed them up into a big stew of deception and misinformation. The date where all the serious people shook their heads and said "Well, if Colin Powell's on board, then it must be true. The date, in many ways, when those who desire global hegemony, endless empire, hijacked our government for good.

At the time that Powell was at the UN, five years ago today, Iraqi scientists knew that there were no WMD, no nuclear weapons, no programs that could even hope to threaten the United States.

When Saad Tawfiq watched Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations on February 5 2003 he shed bitter tears as he realised he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

As one of Saddam Hussein's most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 -- and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was the then US secretary of state -- Tawfiq's television was able to received international news through a link pirated from Saddam's spies next door -- waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

"When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital Amman [...]

"I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: 'They know you have a programme,' and I was saying: 'There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing'," Tawfiq said.

"She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: 'No, no, no...' I kept swearing on the grave of my mother."

According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes in 1995, after his brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.

"I was Saddam's scientist," Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. "In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid something you were killed!"

Now, five years later, we're caught in very difficult foreign policy messes on two fronts, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rationale for these wars, to fight Al Qaeda and radical extremism, has completely failed, as Al Qaeda seeks WMD and remains as great a threat to the country as at any time since 2001.

We have just utter incompetence at the highest levels of our foreign policy, and a concerted effort to cover up those mistakes. But Colin Powell's error was out in broad daylight, for everyone to see and regret. It was a day that drove a stake through the heart of this country.

Whatever Happened To "We Don't Torture"?

John Negroponte, the King of All Salvadoran Death Squads, spills the beans and says the obvious.

Negroponte: I get concerned that we're too retrospective and tend to look in the rearview mirror too often at things that happened four or even six years ago. We've taken steps to address the issue of interrogations, for instance, and waterboarding has not been used in years. It wasn't used when I was director of national intelligence, nor even for a few years before that. We've also taken significant steps to improve Guantanamo. People will tell you now that it is a world-class detention facility. But if you want to highlight and accent the negative, you can resurface these issues constantly to keep them alive. I would rather focus on what we need to do going forward.

It's an interesting new legal argument. Not guilty by reason of "yeah, we're guilty, but we fixed it!" I'll have to consult the Court to see if that holds.

By the way, if you want to know how to responsibly engage in interrogation, you can give this a read.

Piro says no coercive interrogation techniques, like sleep deprivation, heat, cold, loud noises, or water boarding were ever used. "It's against FBI policy, first. And wouldn't have really benefited us with someone like Saddam," Piro says.

Why not?

"I think Saddam clearly had demonstrated over his legacy that he would not respond to threats, to any type of fear-based approach," Piro explains.

"So how do you crack a guy like that?" Pelley asks.

"Time," Piro says.

(This interrogation eventually revealed that Saddam didn't have WMD, was wary of Osama bin Laden and viewed him as a threat. Clearly that was the WRONG kind of intelligence. Maybe they didn't do enough zip-bam Jack Bauer work on him so they got the wrong answers.)

Negroponte simply revealed what everyone already knew, and it's not like our country's been averse to coddling dictators and torturers for years. But there's something different in reading a public official say, in the most nonchalant matter possible, "Yeah, we tortured, so?" It's really wounding. It's one thing to know that your country has betrayed its supposed ideals. It's quite another to have that betrayal confirmed in the most putrid manner possible.

...I cross-posted this at Digby's, and to respect her position of neutrality I didn't add this. But in the aftermath of this confirmation of using a tactic that dates back to the Spanish Inquisition, it's instructive to take a look at this endorsement from 85 Guantanamo lawyers, for Barack Obama.

We are at a critical point in the Presidential campaign, and as lawyers who have been deeply involved in the Guantanamo litigation to preserve the important right to habeas corpus, we are writing to urge you to support Senator Obama.

The Administration's Guantanamo policies have undercut our values at home and stained our reputation around the world. All of us are lawyers who have worked on the Guantanamo habeas corpus litigation for many years, some of us since early 2002, and we were all deeply involved in opposing the Administration’s attempt to overturn the Supreme Court's Rasul decision by stripping the courts of jurisdiction to hear the Guantanamo cases. We have talked with Senator Obama about why the Guantanamo litigation is so significant, and we have worked closely with Senator Obama in the fight to preserve habeas corpus.

Some politicians are all talk and no action. But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue. When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration's efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration's bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us. Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo. He has understood that our strength as a nation stems from our commitment to our core values, and that we are strong enough to protect both our security and those values. Senator Obama demonstrated real leadership then and since, continuing to raise Guantanamo and habeas corpus in his speeches and in the debates.

It's not that I think that Hillary Clinton somehow would not be committed to closing Guantanamo and reversing the evil practice of denying habeas corpus, but you can read something into the emphasis upon which these leading candidates place on it. These lawyers are a trusted source. And Obama clearly has a real concern about the denial of Constitutional rights and the slippery slope where that can lead.

151,000

NPR was trying to spin this as somehow a LOW number of Iraqi civilian casualties in the last three and a half years, because it comes in lower than the Lancet study. But it remains 150,000 human lives, dead, senselessly, for an unnecessary war of choice. And that only goes up to June 2006, and the authors of the study admitted they were unable to reach certain areas that were "too violent."

Not to mention the 3,900-plus soldiers, including 9 in the last two days. And the numbers of wounded are incalculable.

All to remove a dictator who wasn't nearly as efficient at killing Iraqis.

Remembering To Forget

Hey, remember when the oil for food scandal was simply the gravest episode of corruption in world history? Remember how it discredited the UN and proved that our allies in Old Europe were working with our enemies? Remember when the very serious Paul Volcker was brought in to investigate, and how this was the lead story on wanker cable news shows like Brit Hume's for about a year? Remember when that lightweight Norm Coleman made the scandal his personal crusade and accused George Galloway of getting more in kickbacks than Zaire's Mobutu? Remember when every documented incident of defense contractors stealing billions from the US Treasury as a result of the war was met with cries of "Oil for food, oil for food"?

Well, now that it's completely out of the wingnut spotlight, not only does it turn out that the only guy who's been actually convicted of fraud in this scandal is a Texas oilman, but the latest two companies to be investigated are pharmaceuticals.

GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca have been asked to hand over papers as part of a probe into bribes allegedly paid to Saddam Hussein's former Iraq regime.

The Serious Fraud Office is examining allegations of bribes paid to secure lucrative contracts in breach of Iraq's 1996 to 2003 oil-for-food programme.

The programme, established in the wake of UN sanctions, allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy humanitarian provisions.

I eagerly await the 24-hour news channels to cover this with all the vigor of a missing girl in Aruba.

(Also, Chevron knew about illegal payments too, and they acknowledged their executives did nothing to stop it, including this member of the board of directors named Condoleezza Rice).

President Serial Liar

We learned a couple things today that are in direct opposition to one another, at least theoretically. One is that the President still believed Saddam had WMD as late as April of 2006, though he dare not say it in public for fear of sounding like a nutjob (as if that's stopped him). The other thing we learned is that, actually, Bush knew Saddam didn't have WMD BEFORE he went to war with Iraq.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

The evidence came from the former Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, who disclosed that Saddam didn't have WMD. But it didn't matter. The policy was already in motion and if you disagreed you hated America.

These two seemingly contrasting statements can easily both be true. Bush was told Saddam has no WMD in 2002; he refuses to believe it, invades the country claiming that the WMD are there somewhere, and spends three long years clinging to that belief because the last thing he can admit to himself is that he was wrong.

But the point is that the CIA had the intel. And it was hidden from key players, in particular Colin Powell and the senior military leaders who were still out in the field in hazmat suits expecting to be hit with chemical or biological agents. The whole war was a fiction, a complete, inescapable fiction, right down to the current assertion by the President that we're kicking ass over there.

There's not a jail big enough for this gang of miscreants.

UPDATE: This is encouraging and I hope Senator Kerry is being straight about it.

update: A lot of you are asking about what we can do about it. That’s the right question. I can't guarantee success, but we're closer than we've ever been. The media swirl around this debate doesn't capture the dynamics I see in Congress. Republicans are much more nervous about this, and there's far less Democratic disunity than the media storyline portrays. I'm talking to my colleagues every day (I just got out of a caucus meeting), and the Bush-advanced fallacy that the escalation is working just isn't a big part of our discussions. I think we hammered that reality home pretty hard yesterday at the Foreign Relations Committee with some important validation from Sen. Lugar.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are not confident at all. Their party is being driven over the cliff by the President’s stubborn insistence on sticking to this failed policy. And they know it. No one wants to consign themselves to a permanent minority, but that's what's happening. They're not unified at all on this.

Contrasted with Carl Levin's wishy-washy statements, I'm not so sure. Perhaps the idea is to give the Republicans the room they need to come over to the other side. But I fear that we'll end up with some nonbinding suggestion to withdraw 50 troops at a time of the President's choosing but only if he feels like it and this isn't a demand it's more a suggestion please PLEASE DON'T CALL ME UNPATRIOTIC!!!!!

Chutzpah

I'll say this for Richard Perle, in the words of Dabney Coleman in Dragnet, he has balls as big as church bells.

In this op-ed defending himself and attacking George Tenet, Perle claims he didn't tell the President to go after Saddam right after 9-11, and as proof he cites a letter he wrote 10 days after 9-11 that said:

"any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

My head just spun off it's neck, pardon me while I retrieve it.

Is it worse that Perle might actually believe that he didn't advise the President to attack Saddam Hussein, he only advised the President to "remove Saddam Hussein from power"; or is it worse that Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post editorial staff took a look at that logic and said, "Looks good to me, fire up the printing press!"

That Which Is Less Discussed

I was listening to David Sirota on Thom Hartmann for a little bit today, and Sirota made a great point, that what the media chooses NOT to report is often as much proof of subjectivity as what they choose to put on the front page. It's the sin of omission, and it's amazing how regular that sin is employed to protect the rich and confuse their motives.

For example, take the case of George Tenet. He's out there pushing a book which claims that there was no substantive debate leading up to the war in Iraq, that the architects of the war were ready to go in within days of 9-11, and that it was wrong to scapegoat the intelligence for what essentially was a political failure of unnecessarily hyping WMDs. To the extent that Tenet's motives for writing the book are discussed, and his willingness to come forward now instead of during the run-up to war when it would have counted, we hear about collecting a fat payday from his publisher, or his weak kowtowing to power, or maybe that setting the record straight is valuable. What we don't hear too much about is the fact that the war itself was financially profitable for him.

While the swirl of publicity around his book has focused on his long debated role in allowing flawed intelligence to launch the war in Iraq, nobody is talking about his lucrative connection to that conflict ever since he resigned from the CIA in June 2004. In fact, Tenet has been earning substantial income by working for corporations that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq as well as the broader war on terror.

Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company recently acquired two of the CIA's hottest contractors for its growing intelligence outsourcing business. At the Analysis Corp. (TAC), a government contractor run by one of Tenet's closest former advisors at the CIA, Tenet is a member of an advisory board that is helping TAC expand its thriving business designing the problematic terrorist watch lists used by the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department.

Tenet is also a director of Guidance Software, which makes forensic software used by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence to search computer hard drives and laptops for evidence used in the prosecution and tracking of suspected terrorists. And Tenet is the only American director on the board of QinetiQ, the British defense research firm that was privatized in 2003 and was, until recently, controlled by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund. Fueled with Carlyle money, QinetiQ acquired four U.S. companies in recent years, including an intelligence contractor, Analex Inc.

This never gets discussed on any of the talk shows on which Tenet has appeared. But surely he knew that he could board the defense/intelligence merry go-round after he left the CIA and reap untold fortunes.

Here's another example. A couple years back we heard a whole lot of chatter about this "UN oil-for-food" scandal, where Saddam Hussein was gaming the international community by bribing people and doing business outside the system to enrich his government's coffers. It was obvious then that the biggest malefactors in that scandal were corporations who ignored the UN guidelines and did business with the dictator while allowing him to get kickbacks worth up to $1.8 billion dollars. That was less remarked upon, even to this day:

Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein on oil it bought from Iraq as part of a defunct United Nations program, according to investigators.

The admission is part of a settlement being negotiated with United States prosecutors and includes fines totaling $25 million to $30 million, according to the investigators, who declined to be identified because the settlement was not yet public.

The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal.

At the time, who sat on the board of directors for Chevron? The same person that has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.

According to the Volcker report, surcharges on Iraqi oil exports were introduced in August 2000 by the Iraqi state oil company, the State Oil Marketing Organization. At the time, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, was a member of Chevron’s board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.

Ms. Rice resigned from Chevron’s board on Jan. 16, 2001, after being named national security advisor by President Bush.

These are the types of things that don't make the headlines. They would inform the public about decisions that are made affecting their lives and the lives of their families. But they're never at the top of the page. You hear about Fred Thompson but not that he's a career lobbyist. You hear about Condi Rice but not that she was on the board that allowed Saddam Hussein to enrich himself. You hear about George Tenet but not that he's making a mint off the Iraq war. You hear about the surge but not about the covert action that the US and the Saudis are sponsoring inside Iran, a cooperative effort against Shiite power maintained by the same strain of Wahhabist Sunnis that attacked us on 9-11.

These sins of omissions are debilitating to the public interest of making decisions about our future. Fortunately there's the Internet, so these sins are harder to hide these days. But as long as conglomerates run the traditional news, this is going to happen. And it's also a powerful argument for ensuring a free and open Internet that cannot be restricted for content of ability to pay off wealthy telecom companies.