Discontented Soul

Memo proves leadership knew Saddam was not a threat
by Molly Ivins
Published on Wednesday, May 11, 2005 by Working for Change

...I cannot let this astounding Downing Street memo go unmentioned.
On May 1, the Sunday Times of London printed a secret memo that went to the defence secretary, foreign secretary, attorney general and other high officials. It is the minutes of their meeting on Iraq with Tony Blair. The memo was written by Matthew Rycroft, a Downing Street foreign policy aide. It has been confirmed as legitimate and is dated July 23, 2002. I suppose the correct cliché is "smoking gun."
"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. (There it is.) The NSC (National Security Council) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."...

© 2005 Working Assets Online

Before criticizing biases of others, we should acknowledge our own
by Geov Parrish
Published on Monday, May 9, 2005 by Working for Change

In the 66-line opening paragraph of an article in the new June 2005 issue of Atlantic Monthly, author William Lancewiesche chooses to begin his profile of Ziad al-Khasawneh, the Jordanian lawyer who is lead attorney for Saddam Hussein's defense, by listing at length some of the things Ziad believes...

It's a subtle form of authorial license; without ever actually saying so, Lancewiesche manages to get his readers to not take this guy especially seriously. Ziad is a nut...
[I]t is an entirely American conceit, and not a very productive one, to dismiss people who have lurid fantasies about the excesses of American imperial power. For starters, some of those fantasies are plausible. It's part of our nationalism that we dismiss out of hand unflattering accounts of our actions by somebody else.
Even if they weren't plausible, it's important, in a war that ought to be more about winning hearts and minds than battlefield success, to understand how Americans' actions are viewed by others. And to take those views, and the people who hold them, seriously. It helps nobody to use such views as the pretext for a thinly veiled sneer.
But more importantly, we should take seriously people who hold myths about American power because we do the same thing...
To broaden things out a bit, Americans are remarkably ill-informed about the rest of the world, period. We cannot find countries on a map unless we've invaded them, and sometimes not even then. Among the major countries of the world, perhaps only the Chinese are so profoundly xenophobic and ignorant of what happens outside their country's borders...
These are the myths we comfort ourselves with, to demonize an "other" we don't well understand. It is the same process, and at times every bit as sensational and absurd, as what the Arab street often believes about Israel and America. Or what the Chinese or Koreans believe about Japan, or what Indians and Pakistanis believe of each other. Nationalists believe, by definition, that theirs is a uniquely virtuous people. And, by extension, that others don't measure up. Certainly Americans fall into that belief as often as anyone else...

And maybe, just maybe, rather than snickering at someone else's blinders, we could be working at removing our own.

US Policy Continues to Fan the Embers of Terrorism
by David Benjamin
Published on Monday, May 9, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

A novelty that distinguishes European technical conferences from those held in the United States is that, often, Old World participants will recklessly drift away from the solipsist drone of high-tech shoptalk to discuss "horizontal" topics like culture, war and peace, foreign policy and the decay of the ozone layer. It's positively surreal!
For example, one day here during Malcolm Penn's International Electronics Forum, a genial German semiconductor engineer named Walter Roessger casually remarked that "the greatest pollution in the world is... poverty!"
Echoing numerous political scientists, Roessger challenged the American neoconservative faith that today's terrorism can be best fought with military conquest, followed by the force-feeding of "democratic values" to the natives. Roessger expressed the hardly original insight that most terrorists spring from a subculture of destitute outcasts who possess just enough education and media savvy to appreciate -- and resent -- the preening wealth and arrogant power of their heavily armed mentors...
Roessger suggested that America can't bring itself to respond constructively to the current threat because the trauma of September 11, 2001 was unique. It left behind a ravenous hunger for vengeance -- exacerbated by President George W. Bush's visceral resort to emotionally loaded (and indefinable) words like "evil."
To Europeans, there is dual irony in 9/11, an event frequently characterized as the "first ever" foreign attack on American soil. Europeans, by contrast, have vast experience with alien terror -- centuries of barbarian conquest, plagues and pogroms, the Inquisition, periodic genocide outbreaks, etc. Just in the past century, Europe has endured blitzkriegs, carpet bombings, massacres of entire villages and ghettos, and the industrialization of mass murder, an innovation that lent an entirely new meaning to the word "holocaust."
The other irony Europeans see is this: while foreigners traditionally tend not to export terror to the USA, Americans compensate by terrorizing one another willy-nilly. From 1861-65, for instance, Americans staged the bloodiest race war in world history. America was long the world leader in lynching, and continues to indulge a morbid affection for gas chambers, electric chairs and lethal injections. When it comes to inventing new terms for terrorist behavior, America has coined at least three that will live forever in infamy: "drive-by shooting," "going postal" and "high school killing spree."
So, Europeans wonder why one of history's bloodiest nations can't seem to get over the bloodshed of Sept. 11. The problem is not -- it seems -- the sheer, sickening number of deaths, nor even the tragic randomness and innocence of the victims, but a sense of violation, by intruders. "They can't do this to us!" comes the indignant cry. "Who do they think they are?" America is like the wife-beater who assaults a stranger for jostling his wife. We don't object to violence; we just prefer to keep it in the family.
Roessger's point, however, is that meeting violence with violence is the recipe for more violence. The real wellspring of terrorism is not ideology or religion, nor even the charisma of a fanatical leader. Terrorism incubates among poor people with no hope of overcoming their poverty, but who can see, smell and taste the prosperity of the privileged and mighty. They are close, and yet so far...
The United States, says Roessger, fails to appreciate the lessons of its own economic genius. It has co-opted terrorist threats everywhere on earth, including among its own seething minorities, by lending aid and fueling prosperity -- with measures that range from the Marshall Plan to Head Start.
As long as today's U.S. leaders define the enemy as a mythical "axis of evil" rather than the all too palpable yoke of poverty, Americans will live in impotent terror of what James Baldwin prophetically termed "the fire next time."

America's Shame, Two Years on from "Mission Accomplished"
by Robert Fisk
Published on Monday, May 9, 2005 by the lndependent/UK

Two years after "Mission Accomplished", whatever moral stature the United States could claim at the end of its invasion of Iraq has long ago been squandered in the torture and abuse and deaths at Abu Ghraib. That the symbol of Saddam Hussein's brutality should have been turned by his own enemies into the symbol of their own brutality is a singularly ironic epitaph for the whole Iraq adventure. We have all been contaminated by the cruelty of the interrogators and the guards and prison commanders.
But this is not only about Abu Ghraib. There are clear and proven connections now between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the cruelty at the American's Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Curiously, General Janis Karpinski, the only senior US officer facing charges over Abu Ghraib, admitted to me a year earlier when I visited the prison that she had been at Guantanamo Bay, but that at Abu Ghraib she was not permitted to attend interrogations - which seems very odd.
A vast quantity of evidence has now been built up on the system which the Americans have created for mistreating and torturing prisoners. I have interviewed a Palestinian who gave me compelling evidence of anal rape with wooden poles at Bagram - by Americans, not by Afghans.
Many of the stories now coming out of Guantanamo - the sexual humiliation of Muslim prisoners, their shackling to seats in which they defecate and urinate, the use of pornography to make Muslim prisoners feel impure, the female interrogators who wear little clothing (or, in one case, pretended to smear menstrual blood on a prisoner's face) - are increasingly proved true. Iraqis whom I have questioned at great length over many hours, speak with candor of terrifying beatings from military and civilian interrogators, not just in Abu Ghraib but in US bases elsewhere in Iraq.
At the American camp outside Fallujah, prisoners are beaten with full plastic water bottles which break, cutting the skin. At Abu Ghraib, prison dogs have been used to frighten and to bite prisoners.
How did this culture of filth start in America's "war on terror"? The institutionalized injustice which we have witnessed across the world, the vile American "renditions" in which prisoners are freighted to countries where they can be roasted, electrified or, in Uzbekistan, cooked alive in fat? As Bob Herbert wrote in The New York Times, what seemed mind-boggling when the first pictures emerged from Abu Ghraib is now routine, typical of the abuse that has "permeated the Bush administration's operations".
Amnesty, in a chilling 200-page document in October, traced the permeation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's memos into the prisoner interrogation system and the weasel-worded authorization of torture. In August [2003], for example, only a few months after Bush spoke under the "Mission Accomplished" banner, a Pentagon report stated that "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign, [the US law prohibiting torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander- in-Chief authority." What does that mean other than permission from Bush to torture?
A 2004 Pentagon report uses words designed to allow interrogators to use cruelty without fear of court actions: "Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent [to be guilty of torture] even though the defendant did not act in good faith."
The man who directly institutionalized cruel sessions of interrogation in Abu Ghraib was Major-General Geoffrey Miller, the Guantanamo commander who flew to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize the confinement operation" there. There followed the increased use of painful shackling and the frequent forcible stripping of prisoners. Maj-Gen Miller's report following his visit in 2003 spoke of the need for a detention guard force at Abu Ghraib that "sets the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of the internees/detainees". According to Gen Karpinski, Maj-Gen Miller said the prisoners "are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe they're more than a dog, then you've lost control of them".
The trail of prisons that now lies across Iraq is a shameful symbol not only of our cruelty but of our failure to create the circumstances in which a new Iraq might take shape. You may hold elections and create a government, but when this military sickness is allowed to spread, the whole purpose of democracy is overturned. The "new" Iraq will learn from these interrogation centers how they should treat prisoners and, inevitably, the "new" Iraqis will take over Abu Ghraib and return it to the status it had under Saddam and the whole purpose of the invasion (or at least the official version) will be lost.
With an insurgency growing ever more vicious and uncontrollable, the emptiness of Mr Bush's silly boast is plain. The real mission, it seems, was to institutionalize the cruelty of Western armies, staining us forever with the depravity of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Bagram - not to mention the secret prisons which even the Red Cross cannot visit and wherein who knows what vileness is conducted. What, I wonder, is our next "mission"?...