Peace and Justice Post

Of course, these days Memorial Day gets larded with politics and pseudo-patriotism. It’s nauseating to watch a bunch of actors, entertainers and politicians who never heard a gun fired in anger put on a maudlin performance as if they really gave a rat’s toenail for the dead.

The fact is, war is started by old men who never go near the war, and wars are always fought by the young. The king of Belgium once noted that it takes 20 years of peace to produce a man and 20 seconds of war to destroy him. Think about that. All that a young human being is – intelligence, health, youth, education, knowledge, potential accomplishments – reduced to a bloody pile of broken bones and guts in an instant. They are strangers killing and being killed by strangers.

War is mass murder, and no doubt part of the degradation of the human species is the fact that starting with the War Between the States, the human toll of war has increased exponentially. It’s ironic that wars take the healthiest and bravest, while the unhealthy and the cowardly manage to evade them.

Look at all the draft dodgers of the Vietnam Era who suddenly became war hawks as soon as they were too old to go. I’ve said it before: If I had children of war age, I would do everything in my power to dissuade them from joining the military.

The present war is a bad war. It is not being fought to protect freedom, let alone the American people. Poor Cindy Sheehan, who bravely protested the war, finally gave up. She felt betrayed by the Democrats, by the antiwar movement, but the saddest thing of all, she said, was that she finally faced the fact her son died for nothing.

And sad as it is to say, it’s true. The politicians and some of the media chicken hawks like to fork the fertilizer talking about sacrifices for freedom (sacrifices most of them studiously avoid ever making), but it’s just fertilizer.

Why did we go to war in Iraq? Because the president hated Saddam Hussein; because the Israeli lobby wanted us to; because the crazy neoconservatives had the insane idea that the Middle East could be democratized at the point of a gun; because oil companies and other corporations lusted for profit.

Missing is any threat to the safety and freedom of the United States, a threat no Iraqi ever made or ever had the capability of carrying out. So, if you don’t want to say the kids are dying for nothing, you can say they are dying for Halliburton, for ExxonMobil, for the president’s ego, for a cockamamie theory of a bunch of academics, for Israel, for money or for oil. What you cannot truthfully say is that they are dying for freedom.

The “global war on terror” is just a bad metaphor that doesn’t have any connection to reality. How long are the American people going to allow liars to lull them into sacrificing the most precious treasure the country has – its youth – in a futile, lie-ridden, corruption-pocked war?

In my dreams, I see the American people rising like a roaring lion and ripping the guilty politicians out of their offices, but that is only a dream. The kind of people with the courage to do that lie moldering in millions of graves around the world.

Fidel Castro Ruz

Background: More than 600,000 people have lost their lives in Iraq and more than 2 million have been forced to emigrate since the American invasion began…

Source: Global Research.Ca

by Robert Parry

Global Research, April 23, 2007

consortiumnews.com

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George W. Bush likes to present the “war on terror” as a clear-cut moral crusade in which evildoers who kill innocent civilians must be brought harshly to justice, along with the leaders of countries that harbor terrorists. There are no grays, only blacks and whites.

But evenhanded justice is not the true core principle of the Bush Doctrine. The real consistency is hypocrisy: violence which Bush favors – no matter how wanton the slaughter of innocents – is justifiable, while violence that goes against Bush’s interests – even an insurgency against a foreign military occupation – must be punished without remorse as “terrorism.”

In other words, if Bush hates the perpetrators, they are locked up indefinitely without charge and, at his discretion, can be subjected to “alternative interrogation techniques,” what most of the world considers torture. The rule of law is out the window. Wild West hangin’ justice is in. Even the ancient fair trial right of habeas corpus is discarded.

However, when the killers of civilians are on Bush’s side, they get the full panoply of legal protections – and every benefit of the doubt. Under this Bush double standard, therefore, right-wing Cuban terrorists Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, though implicated in a string of murderous attacks on civilians, get the see-no-evil treatment.

On April 19, the 79-year-old Posada was released on bail from federal custody for an immigration violation and allowed to fly to Miami where he will live at home while his case winds its way through the U.S. courts. Bosch, too, has been allowed to live out his golden years in south Florida with the help and protection of the Bush family.

But the evidence in U.S. government files is overwhelming that Posada and Bosch were the architects of the 1976 mid-air bombing of a civilian Cubana airliner, killing 73 people, including young members of the Cuban national fencing team.

Since the conspiracy was hatched in Caracas, Venezuela, where Posada worked as a Venezuelan intelligence officer, the Venezuelan government has sought Posada’s extradition. However, when a Posada friend testified at Posada’s immigration hearing that Venezuela practices torture, Bush administration lawyers let the unverified claim go unchallenged, leading the judge to forbid Posada’s deportation there.

So, the Bush administration, which has subjected its own terrorism suspects to such practices as painful stress positions and simulated drowning by “water-boarding,” wasn’t willing to take the chance that Posada might be abused in Venezuela, even though there was no real evidence that he would be.

Justifying Terrorism

The Bush administration also took no note a year ago when Bosch publicly justified the 1976 mid-air bombing. The stunning TV interview of Bosch by reporter Juan Manuel Cao on Miami’s Channel 41 was cited in articles on the Internet by José Pertierra, a lawyer for the Venezuelan government. But Bosch’s comments caused him no further difficulty. [For Pertierra’s story, see Counterpunch, April 11, 2006]

“Did you down that plane in 1976?” Cao asked Bosch.

“If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself,” Bosch answered, “and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other.”

But when Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded, “In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

“But don’t you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?” Cao asked.

“Who was on board that plane?” Bosch responded. “Four members of the Communist Party, five North Koreans, five Guyanese.” [Officials tallies actually put the Guyanese dead at 11.]

Bosch added, “Four members of the Communist Party, chico! Who was there? Our enemies…”

“And the fencers?” Cao asked about Cuba’s amateur fencing team that had just won gold, silver and bronze medals at a youth fencing competition in Caracas. “The young people on board?”

Bosch replied, “I was in Caracas. I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. … She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant.

“We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny.” [The comment about Santo Domingo was an apparent reference to a strategy meeting by a right-wing terrorist organization, CORU, which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1976.]

“If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn’t you think it difficult?” Cao asked.

“No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba,” Bosch answered.

In an article about Bosch’s remarks, lawyer Pertierra said the answers “give us a glimpse into the mind of the kind of terrorist that the United States government harbors and protects in Miami; terrorists that for the last 47 years have waged a bloody and ruthless war against the Cuban people.”

CIA Files

Beyond Bosch’s incriminating statements, the evidence of his and Posada’s guilt is overwhelming. Declassified U.S. documents show that soon after the Cubana Airlines plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the bombing.

But in fall 1976, Bush’s boss, President Gerald Ford, was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Still, inside the U.S. government, the facts were known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in anti-communist Cuban extremists Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP.

The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”

On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor during which Bosch requested cash from the Venezuelan government in exchange for assurances that Cuban exiles wouldn’t demonstrate during Andres Perez’s planned trip to the United Nations.

“A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said.

“Following the 6 October Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

The CIA report was sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as to the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies, according to markings on the cable.

In South America, police began rounding up suspects. Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack.

A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.

Posada and Bosch were charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the men denied the accusations. The case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez.

Lost Interest

After the Reagan-Bush administration took power in Washington in 1981, the momentum for fully unraveling the mysteries of anti-communist terrorist plots dissipated. The Cold War trumped any concern about right-wing terrorism.

In 1985, Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison, reportedly with the help of Cuban exiles. In his autobiography, Posada thanked Miami-based Cuban activist Jorge Mas Canosa for providing the $25,000 that was used to bribe guards who allowed Posada to walk out of prison.

Another Cuban exile who aided Posada was former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who was close to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and who was overseeing secret supply shipments to the Nicaraguan contra rebels, a pet project of President Ronald Reagan.

After fleeing Venezuela, Posada joined Rodriguez in Central America and was assigned the job of paymaster for pilots in the White House-run contra-supply operation. When one of the contra-supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua in October 1986, Posada was responsible for alerting U.S. officials to the crisis and then shutting down the operation’s safe houses in El Salvador.

Even after the exposure of Posada’s role in the contra-supply operation, the U.S. government made no effort to bring the accused terrorist to justice.

By the late 1980s, Orlando Bosch also was out of Venezuela’s jails and back in Miami. But Bosch, who had been implicated in about 30 violent attacks, was facing possible deportation by U.S. officials who warned that Washington couldn’t credibly lecture other countries about terrorism while protecting a terrorist like Bosch.

But Bosch got lucky. Jeb Bush, then an aspiring Florida politician, led a lobbying drive to prevent the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from expelling Bosch. In 1990, the lobbying paid dividends when Jeb’s dad, President George H.W. Bush, blocked proceedings against Bosch, letting the unapologetic terrorist stay in the United States.

In 1992, also during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, the FBI interviewed Posada about the Iran-Contra scandal for 6 ½ hours at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras.

Posada filled in some blanks about the role of Bush’s vice presidential office in the secret contra operation. According to a 31-page summary of the FBI interview, Posada said Bush’s national security adviser, Donald Gregg, was in frequent contact with Felix Rodriguez.

“Posada … recalls that Rodriguez was always calling Gregg,” the FBI summary said. “Posada knows this because he’s the one who paid Rodriguez’ phone bill.” After the interview, the FBI agents let Posada walk out of the embassy to freedom. [For details, see Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]

More Attacks

Posada soon returned to his anti-Castro plotting.

In 1994, Posada set out to kill Castro during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Posada and five cohorts reached Cartagena, but the plan flopped when security cordons prevented the would-be assassins from getting a clean shot at Castro, according to a Miami Herald account. [Miami Herald, June 7, 1998]

The Herald also described Posada’s role in a lethal 1997 bombing campaign against popular hotels and restaurants inside Cuba that killed an Italian tourist. The story cited documentary evidence that Posada arranged payments to conspirators from accounts in the United States.

“This afternoon you will receive via Western Union four transfers of $800 each … from New Jersey,” said one fax signed by SOLO, a Posada alias.

Posada landed back in jail in 2000 after Cuban intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate Castro by planting a bomb at a meeting the Cuban leader planned with university students in Panama.

Panamanian authorities arrested Posada and other alleged co-conspirators in November 2000. In April 2004, they were sentenced to eight or nine years in prison for endangering public safety.

Four months after the sentencing, however, lame-duck Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso – who lives in Key Biscayne, Florida, and has close ties to the Cuban-American community and to George W. Bush’s administration – pardoned the convicts.

Despite press reports saying Moscoso had been in contact with U.S. officials about the pardons, the State Department denied that it pressured Moscoso to release the Cuban exiles. After the pardons and just two months before Election 2004, three of Posada’s co-conspirators – Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez – arrived in Miami to a hero’s welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters.

While the terrorists celebrated, U.S. authorities watched the men – also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida – alight on U.S. soil. As Washington Post writer Marcela Sanchez noted in a September 2004 article about the Panamanian pardons, “there is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11 (2001), fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on U.S. streets.” [Washington Post, Sept. 3, 2004]

Posada Arrives

Posada reportedly sneaked into the United States in early 2005 and his presence was an open secret in Miami for weeks before U.S. authorities did anything. The New York Times summed up Bush’s dilemma if Posada decided to seek U.S. asylum.

“A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists,” the Times wrote. “But to turn Mr. Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother, Jeb.” [NYT, May 9, 2005]

Only after Posada called a news conference to announce his presence was the Bush administration shamed into arresting him. But even then, the administration balked at sending Posada back to Venezuela where the government of Hugo Chavez – unlike some of its predecessors – was eager to prosecute.

At a U.S. immigration hearing in 2005, Posada’s defense attorney called as a witness a Posada friend who alleged that Venezuela’s government practices torture. Bush administration lawyers didn’t challenge the claim, leading the immigration judge to bar Posada’s deportation to Venezuela.

Venezuela’s Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez accused the Bush administration of applying “a cynical double standard” in the “war on terror.”

“The United States presents itself as a leader against terrorism, invades countries, restricts the civil rights of Americans in order to fight terrorism, but when it is about its own terrorists, it denies that they be tried,” Alvarez said.

As for the claim that Venezuela practices torture, Alvarez said, “There isn’t a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela.” Alvarez added that the claim was particularly ironic given widespread press accounts that the Bush administration has abused prisoners at the U.S. military base in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Posada-Bosch cases point to one unavoidable and unpleasant conclusion: that the Bush family regards terrorism – defined as killing civilians for a political reason – as justified or at least tolerable in cases when their interests match those of the terrorists.

Terrorism is only a moral evil to the Bushes when the violence against civilians clashes with the Bush family’s interests.

This blatant hypocrisy often has been aided and abetted by the U.S. news media, which intuitively understands the double standard and acts accordingly. The U.S. press corps downplays or ignores cases in which terrorism has connections to U.S. government officials – and especially to the Bush family.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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Congress backs Iraq funding bill

The new budget does not set a timetable for US troop withdrawal

Both houses of the US Congress have passed a bill allocating $100bn of new funding for the Iraq war. The House of Representatives voted in favour of the bill, and the Senate approved it shortly afterwards.

Earlier President George W Bush praised the bill, a compromise measure between Republicans and Democrats which has no timetable for a US troop withdrawal.

Hours after the votes, the US military reported that five of its soldiers had been killed in attacks across Iraq.

Correspondents say the death toll for US troops in May – currently at least 85 – looks like being one of the highest since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Senate voted to send the legislation to the president by 80 votes to 14, after the House gave its approval by a margin of 280 to 142.

The deal ended months of wrangling over demands by Democrats, who control Congress, for checks on Iraq funding.

Democrats had wanted timetables for withdrawal built into any funding bill, but those conditions prompted Mr Bush to veto earlier legislation.

The days of blank checks and green lights… are over Harry Reid Senate majority leader

Without a two-thirds majority in Congress, the Democrats were unable to overturn any threat of a further presidential veto and eventually agreed to a compromise deal.

“This is like a fig leaf, this is a token, this is a small step forward, instead we should have a giant step forward into a new direction,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Democrats did manage to secure cash for domestic issues, including a $2.10 rise in the minimum wage, and insisted the new budget was not a victory for the White House.

“The days of blank cheques and green lights for his failed policy are over,” Senate majority leader Harry Reid said.

‘Critical’ summer

Speaking at the White House ahead of the vote, Mr Bush praised the negotiated compromise, saying the bill reflected “a consensus”.

Among the terms of the new deal are requirements that the Iraqi government demonstrate progress on specific issues to be assured of continuing US support.

Those “benchmarks” were included after pressure from Democrats, but can be over-ruled by the president.

We are going to expect heavy fighting in the next weeks and months and we can expect American and Iraqi casualties US President George W Bush

“By voting for this bill, members of both parties can show our troops and the Iraqis and the enemy that our country will support our servicemen and women in harm’s way,” the president said.

He also told reporters that the coming weeks and months in Iraq would be vital for the new US security strategy in Iraq.

“This summer is going to be critical time for the new strategy,” he said.

The last of the 30,000 US troop reinforcements would arrive in Baghdad by the middle of June, Mr Bush predicted, saying he expected heavy fighting to continue in Iraq during this time.

“We are going to expect heavy fighting in the next weeks and months and we can expect American and Iraqi casualties,” he said, pledging to stay on the offensive.

Meanwhile, a CBS News/New York Times opinion poll suggests that a record number of Americans are pessimistic about the outcome of the war in Iraq and now believe it was a mistake.

Seventy-six per cent of those polled said they thought the war was going badly, up ten points in one month, while 61% of those polled said the US should have stayed out of Iraq.

And six in 10 wanted a timetable for US troops to withdraw from Iraq – an issue that was dropped from the bill passed by Congress.

by Felicity Arbuthnot

Global Research, May 20, 2007

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As Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Baghdad on Saturday, for an ‘unexpected’ visit, to bid the Iraqi people he has helped decimate, farewell, he was welcomed by mortar rounds which fell in the ‘International Zone’, the illegally squatted palace of former President Saddam Hussein. Just: ‘usual business..’ said his spokesman airily. Hope Blair and his entourage brought a spare pair of trousers, Whitehall’s mandarins are not known for towering courage in the face of adversity, more for fiction writing, aka ‘dodgy dossiers’. A bad tempered Blair, delusional as ever, talked of ‘signs of progress on security.’

‘ I have no regrets about removing Saddam …’, said the man, the corpse of whose premiership will for ever lie in Mesopotamia’s sands, with the possible million souls he and his Washington masters have sent – and continue to send – to their graves – and that is only since March 2003. No mention of the weapons of mass destruction he assured the world, threatened the very existence of the West and could be launched ‘in forty five minutes.’

‘Removing Saddam’, whose leadership and government’s sovereignty was guaranteed by the UN? No shame for sharing responsibility for the lynching of Iraq’s President and colleagues, whose remaining legitimate government have been held, for over four years? No regrets about committing Nuremberg’s ‘supreme crime’, a war of aggression? Turning the country into a radioactive wasteland from use of uranium weapons? Denying water, electricity, medicines and medical equipment (in contravention of the Geneva Convention) schooling, even gasoline in this possibly largest oil producer on earth? ‘No regrets’ at the ongoing deaths of at least one hundred people a day, the destruction of an entire civil society, sado masochistic and other war crimes committed by his troops in the south; their uncounted Pinochet style disappeared? Nearly one sixth of the country internally and externally displaced, most, like the Palestinians, without valid passports, credentials (all changed after the invasion, most Iraqis too frightened to approach the relevant Ministries imposed by the US and UK.) ‘No regrets’? And in front of the world’s media. If the lawyers at the International Criminal Court in the Hague have not got all they need now, they should consider a career move.

‘The future of Iraq should be determined by Iraqis …’ said Blair, standing next to honoury Iranian ‘Prime Minister’ Nuri al Maliki and Iraq’s non Arab, Kurdish ‘President’, Jalal Talabani, who wants the best of all worlds, independence for Kurdistan and the retention of his rule there and the top job in Iraq. Iraqis complain that in all the Ministries now – if they dare approach them (and indeed in Embassies abroad) they need to field a bank of Farsi (Persian) speakers and those who only speak Kurdish, before finding someone who speaks Arabic. ‘We need to take advantage of the possible momentum in Iraqi politics …’ said another Blair spokesman. ‘Momentum’? What stratosphere is planet Whitehall on?

‘He builds palaces while his people starve’, was the Blair-Bush mantra during the embargo years. Now the British and Americans are the illicit residents of Iraq’s palaces, remaining state buildings, bases (another war crime) as the people for whom, they, as the occupying force, are responsible, starve, flee and die in hospitals decimated by liberation, whose facilities are non existent and over half of whose doctors have been killed or fled for their lives, under what some careful analysts call ‘black ops’ operations to set Iraqi against Iraqi by the US and UK. Iraqis did not fight each other before the invasion, so what changed? Divide and rule?

Blair (more trousers?) was welcomed by further ordnance as he stood in a base where the British troops, seemingly, cower, in Basra -‘ the war is lost and the troops in retreat’, a correspondent commented of the British last week – an area now ruled too dangerous for Britain’s Prince Harry to deploy with his troops. In Basra, Blair seemed especially dismissive of Iraqis. When an Iraqi journalist asked him about Iraq’s future he replied tetchily that the ‘authoritative voice’ of Iraq was ‘President’ Talabani and the question should be addressed to him as ‘ the authentic voice of Iraq’ . He clearly had not read the day’s Guardian either, where in extensive coverage of the south in general and Basra in particular, their correspondent was greeted by an Iraqi General with a handshake and : ‘ Welcome to Tehran’, referring to the near total Iranian influence in everything under British watch and largely facilitated by their errors. The troops themselves watched Blair with stony faces. ‘It is important that neighboring countries understand and respect’ (Iraq’s sovereignty) said Blair, the man from far away who slavishly followed his Master’s Washington follies.

As Blair arrived to the Baghdad bang, the airways were awash with former President Carter’s scathing assessment of the Blair years. His : ‘Support for Bush had been a major tragedy for the world’, he had been ‘loyal, blind and subservient.’ Iraq’s invasion had been ‘unjustified, unnecessary … a tragedy for the Iraqi, American and British people.’

That tragedy, the depth of which Blair could never comprehend, is encapsulated by Layla Anwar, an Iraqi blogger, who wrote of a friend who said this week: ‘I wake up in the morning and death sits next to me. I have my tea and she has one too. I walk and she accompanies me. I go to sleep at night and she is in my bed. I see death, I hear death, I smell death … she is everywhere. When she will pick me up, is only a question of time.’

Blair will return to the UK to some pretty scathing press, from the comment left by a reader on the Sunday Herald : ‘ Blair, just go will you, you murdering, lying filth’, to former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who told BBC Radio 4, the same day : ‘Nothing can be done about Iraq except to put a sack over his head.’

The Messianic Blair, who joined George Bush’s ‘crusade’, trespassed in Iraq’s palaces, is involved in a global goodbye tour which will last forty days, the time, for believers, Christ wandered alone in the wilderness.

Speculations as to his future are myriad. However, in the recent Channel 4, soaringly spirit lifting docudrama ‘ The Trial of Tony Blair ‘, his tenure in Downing Street ended with him heading in an armored police van for Heathrow Airport and for trial at the Hague. Now he has admitted his guilt to the world, fittingly in Baghdad, here’s hoping.

Global Research, May 23, 2007

ABC News

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Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:

ABC News, May 22, 2007. The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.

“I can’t confirm or deny whether such a program exists or whether the president signed it, but it would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime,” said Bruce Riedel, a recently retired CIA senior official who dealt with Iran and other countries in the region.

A National Security Council spokesperson, Gordon Johndroe, said, “The White House does not comment on intelligence matters.” A CIA spokesperson said, “As a matter of course, we do not comment on allegations of covert activity.”

The sources say the CIA developed the covert plan over the last year and received approval from White House officials and other officials in the intelligence community.

Officials say the covert plan is designed to pressure Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment program and end aid to insurgents in Iraq.

“There are some channels where the United States government may want to do things without its hand showing, and legally, therefore, the administration would, if it’s doing that, need an intelligence finding and would need to tell the Congress,” said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official.

Current and former intelligence officials say the approval of the covert action means the Bush administration, for the time being, has decided not to pursue a military option against Iran.

“Vice President Cheney helped to lead the side favoring a military strike,” said former CIA official Riedel, “but I think they have come to the conclusion that a military strike has more downsides than upsides.”

The covert action plan comes as U.S. officials have confirmed Iran had dramatically increased its ability to produce nuclear weapons material, at a pace that experts said would give them the ability to build a nuclear bomb in two years.

Riedel says economic pressure on Iran may be the most effective tool available to the CIA, particularly in going after secret accounts used to fund the nuclear program.

“The kind of dealings that the Iranian Revolution Guards are going to do, in terms of purchasing nuclear and missile components, are likely to be extremely secret, and you’re going to have to work very, very hard to find them, and that’s exactly the kind of thing the CIA’s nonproliferation center and others would be expert at trying to look into,” Riedel said.

Under the law, the CIA needs an official presidential finding to carry out such covert actions. The CIA is permitted to mount covert “collection” operations without a presidential finding.

“Presidential findings” are kept secret but reported to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and other key congressional leaders.

The “nonlethal” aspect of the presidential finding means CIA officers may not use deadly force in carrying out the secret operations against Iran.

Still, some fear that even a nonlethal covert CIA program carries great risks.

“I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups within Iran,” said Vali Nasr, adjunct senior fellow for Mideast studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“And this covert action is now being escalated by the new U.S. directive, and that can very quickly lead to Iranian retaliation and a cycle of escalation can follow,” Nasr said.

Other “lethal” findings have authorized CIA covert actions against al Qaeda, terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Also briefed on the CIA proposal, according to intelligence sources, were National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams.

“The entire plan has been blessed by Abrams, in particular,” said one intelligence source familiar with the plan. “And Hadley had to put his chop on it.”

Abrams’ last involvement with attempting to destabilize a foreign government led to criminal charges.

He pleaded guilty in October 1991 to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress about the Reagan administration’s ill-fated efforts to destabilize the Nicaraguan Sandinista government in Central America, known as the Iran-Contra affair. Abrams was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush in December 1992.

In June 2001, Abrams was named by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to head the National Security Council’s office for democracy, human rights and international operations. On Feb. 2, 2005, National Security Advisor Hadley appointed Abrams deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, one of the nation’s most senior national security positions.

As earlier reported on the Blotter on ABCNews.com, the United States has supported and encouraged an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, that has conducted deadly raids inside Iran from bases on the rugged Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan “tri-border region.”

U.S. officials deny any “direct funding” of Jundullah groups but say the leader of Jundullah was in regular contact with U.S. officials.

American intelligence sources say Jundullah has received money and weapons through the Afghanistan and Pakistan military and Pakistan’s intelligence service. Pakistan has officially denied any connection.

A report broadcast on Iranian TV last Sunday said Iranian authorities had captured 10 men crossing the border with $500,000 in cash along with “maps of sensitive areas” and “modern spy equipment.”

A senior Pakistani official told ABCNews.com the 10 men were members of Jundullah.

The leader of the Jundullah group, according to the Pakistani official, has been recruiting and training “hundreds of men” for “unspecified missions” across the border in Iran.

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David R. Hoffman

Whenever I see images of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Katherine Harris and other minions of, or apologists for, the corrupt, inept, mendacious and venal Bush dictatorship, I am immediately reminded of this line from John Carpenter’s classic horror movie Halloween: “What is living behind [their] eyes is purely and simply evil.”

Yet in America there is a great reluctance to use the term “evil” when describing the cabal of thugs, hypocrites and war criminals who stole the White House in 2000 and 2004. Although singer/activist Harry Belafonte courageously proclaimed a few years ago that the Bush dictatorship was “possessed of evil,” it wasn’t until recently that others in positions of prominence began to acknowledge the veracity of Belafonte’s statement. A recent episode of the animated comedy Family Guy, for example, showed cartoon portraits of an inanely grinning Bush shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and, ultimately, the “Super Devil” (a being more evil than Satan).

Prior to this, most of the statements concerning the inherent evil of the Bush dictatorship came from foreign sources: Russian President Vladimir Putin indirectly suggested that Bush’s foreign policy was analogous to Hitler’s Third Reich; Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez compared Bush to Satan; and the Mayan Indians felt compelled to “spiritually cleanse” a sacred site after Bush visited it earlier this year.

But even though more Americans feel emboldened to criticize the Bush dictatorship, there is still a reluctance to acknowledge and denounce its evil. This reluctance often affects some of the dictatorship’s most outspoken critics: Former American President, and Nobel Laureate, Jimmy Carter recently retreated from his clearly accurate assertion that the Bush dictatorship has been the worst administration in United States history, claiming his words were “careless or misinterpreted.” And syndicated columnist Gwynne Dyer rejected the notion that Bush and/or his minions possessed the evil required to orchestrate the attacks of 9/11, even stressing that Dick Cheney was morally incapable of sanctioning the murders of over three thousand Americans simply to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq.

I disagree. While the Bush dictatorship is the domicile for many monsters cloaked in human attire, Cheney is arguably the monster most likely to promote mass murder for the sake of war profiteering. His very character endorses this reality. He possesses the attributes of many mass murderers—a sadist who often kills defenseless animals in “caged hunts” (where they have no means of escape), and a coward who, during the Vietnam war, obtained deferment after deferment to avoid facing an adversary capable of shooting back, only to become a vociferous warmonger once the prospect of being drafted into military service no longer confronted him.

But even if one does not subscribe to the theory that character presages deeds, the Bush dictatorship still cannot be absolved from culpability in the 9/11 attacks. In the legal realm, crimes can be committed through act or omission. It is undisputed that Bush, shortly after his coup of 2000, planned to invade Iraq. It is also undisputed that several warnings about the possibility of airline hijackings, some provided by foreign governments, were forwarded to the Bush dictatorship.

What most likely occurred was that Bush and his minions were aware of the planned attacks, but underestimated their magnitude, believing any hijacking would be of the “traditional” variety: An American aircraft would be forced to fly to an unplanned destination, followed by a lengthy standoff between the hijackers and the Bush dictatorship. Allowing a hijacking to occur would give Bush the opportunity to blame Iraq, and incite the American media and public into a jingoistic frenzy.

So the question becomes, “Why are Americans so willing to acknowledge the presence of evil when it comes to foreign governments, but so unwilling to acknowledge the presence of evil within their own government?”

One explanation may be the “arrogance syndrome.” Americans want to believe they are somehow more “civilized,” and therefore less gullible, than other nations of the world. Unfortunately this belief simply makes them more susceptible to being led into unjust and illegal wars. Also, since many Americans possess short-term memories as selective as the one possessed by Alberto Gonzales (America’s corrupt attorney-general, who recently answered “I cannot recall” over seventy times during his testimony before Congress), they can be duped into supporting such wars time and again.

Although most corporate-controlled media now refer to the illegal invasion of Iraq as an “unpopular war,” just a few years ago these same media were salivating at the ratings and profit potential this war would bring. Reporters and entertainers who criticized, or even questioned, the motives for war or other policies of George W. Bush were fired from their jobs and oftentimes blacklisted. Pro-war rallies drew record numbers of people, and these rallies frequently treated war criminals like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld as deities.

Another reason why evil is rarely acknowledged in America is simply because too many powerful people profit from it. Sadly, this has been the case throughout history.

A recent movie, Amazing Grace, recounted how British politician and abolitionist William Wilberforce often invoked the tenets of Christianity during his campaign against the slave trade in the early 1800s. This compelled many so-called Christians to embrace the film as a paradigm of how good can triumph over evil.

Forgotten in this zeal, however, is the sad reality that many Americans used (and in the case of racism continue to use) the Christian faith to justify bigotry and slavery. American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, in his book The Life of an American Slave, describes how a preacher/slaveholder often justified the whipping of his slaves by stating, “He who honors his master must wear his stripes.”

Today it is America’s military-industrial complex that profits from economic slavery and the exploitation of the poor and middle-class, who fight and die in wars waged by the rich and powerful. And as long as those in power can reward their cronies with lucrative rebuilding contracts, as long as war can be used to divert attention from government criminality and corruption (as demonstrated by the father of George W. Bush, who invaded Panama to divert attention from the “Savings and Loan” scandal that cost taxpayers billions of dollars), and as long as war can be used to increase the ratings and profit potential of the corrupt corporate-controlled media there will be little incentive to denounce evil in America.

A third reason for the failure of Americans to acknowledge evil in their own country is the uncanny ability of human beings to rationalize anything. When I was in law practice, I often noticed that there was little difference between “law breakers” and “law makers.” Both demonstrated an enormous capacity to rationalize their actions, no matter how much those actions defied morality or common sense.

The incentive to rationalize is particularly prominent in today’s “sound bite” culture. Corporate-controlled media incessantly select the most “controversial” statements for repeated airplay, often taking them out of context. Meanwhile complex topics, if they are covered at all, are covered only superficially; therefore laypeople often do not have the political or historical background necessary to develop well-informed viewpoints, and thus erect their opinions on tenuous foundations that are frequently devoid of facts.

For example, a recent editorial on the CNN website argued that Americans would be remiss if they failed to honestly debate Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s contention that American foreign policy, particularly its proclivity to dominate or overthrow foreign governments for the sake of corporate profits, played a role in the build-up to the 9/11 attacks.

But it is unlikely that such a debate will ever transpire, particularly since former New York Mayor turned presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has already demonstrated that he will continue to exploit the emotions surrounding 9/11 for his own self-aggrandizement, just as he has opportunistically done in the past.

The final explanation for why the existence of evil in America is often ignored is because the terms “good and evil” often take one into the realm of religion. When science and logic fails, faith often prevails.

But faith can be a positive force or negative force. Since it cannot be disproved, a person does not require logic or science to acquire faith. But without such logic or science, people can often be deceived into believing concepts that have no factual basis at all. Hating another person because of his/her skin color, for example, is as illogical as hating one flower because it’s red and loving another because it’s yellow, particularly since neither possessed the ability to choose what color it would be. Yet racism is alive and well in America.

This is why charlatans often exploit the faith of others. If a situation has a positive outcome, they can claim it was because of the “strength of their faith,” and if a situation has a negative outcome, they can claim it was because their followers “didn’t believe deeply enough.”

It was this type of faith that made many Americans embrace the lies of the Bush dictatorship, naively believing that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, and that war against Iraq would only be used as “a last resort.”

This exploitation of faith has been the modus operandi of the Bush dictatorship and its apologists—strategically designed to conceal their ineptitude, arrogance, dishonesty and evil. It has been so effective that many so-called “Christian” colleges and universities have invited members and supporters of the Bush dictatorship, including Bush himself, to be guest or commencement speakers.

Since I began this essay with a quotation from a movie, I will end it with one as well. In Bryan Singer’s remarkable film The Usual Suspects, a character named Verbal Kint remarks, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Sadly, this trick will continue to be effective as long as Americans refuse to acknowledge that their nation is being controlled by people who are “purely and simply evil.”

David R. Hoffman, Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru