Britain’s Iraq Dossier Discredited

"UK War Dossier a Sham, Say Experts" -- Michael White and Brian Whitaker in The Guardian, 2/7/03:

Downing Street was last night plunged into acute international embarrassment after it emerged that large parts of the British government's latest dossier on Iraq - allegedly based on "intelligence material" - were taken from published academic articles, some of them several years old.

Amid charges of "scandalous" plagiarism on the night when Tony Blair attempted to rally support for the US-led campaign against Saddam Hussein, Whitehall's dismay was compounded by the knowledge that the disputed document was singled out for praise by the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN security council on Wednesday. . . .

Dismissing the gathering controversy as the latest example of media obsession with spin, officials insisted it in no way undermines the underlying truth of the dossier, whose contents had been re-checked with British intelligence sources. "The important thing is that it is accurate," said one source.

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Powell’s UN Presentation

"Powell Presents Evidence to the U.N. in the Case against Iraq" -- PBS NewsHour, 2/5/03:

Calling U.N. resolution 1441 Iraq's "one last chance" to come into compliance or face "serious consequences," Powell methodically presented U.S. intelligence information on Iraq's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs as well as suspected links between Saddam Hussein's government and the al-Qaida terrorist network. . . .

Satellite photos of an Iraqi biological weapons facility and a ballistic missile site, recently declassified specifically for Powell's presentation, were used to show how Iraq has either hidden or moved weapons stockpiles or production sites to evade inspectors. One of the images showed 15 munitions bunkers of which four housed active chemical agents, according to Powell. . . .

On biological weapons, Powell held a mock vial of anthrax to illustrate the lack of evidence that Iraq destroyed the suspected 25,000 liters of anthrax that past U.N. inspectors estimate the Iraqis could have produced.

Using the testimony of four Iraqi defectors, Powell showed illustrations of "mobile production facilities" for biological agents, reportedly housed in 18 trucks that crisscross Iraq in order to evade detection. . . .

"We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear-weapons program," Powell said. "On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons."

After the list of claims against Iraqi weapons programs, Powell moved on to Iraq's alleged connections to terrorism and the al-Qaida terrorist network.

"[W]hat I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder," Powell said.

Powell accused Iraq of harboring Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the head of a "deadly terrorist network" and an "associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants." . . .

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Le Carré on War Buildup

John Le Carré's 1/15/03 article, "The United States of America Has Gone Mad," in the London Times:

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.

The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world's poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.

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Gulf War I Casualties

Demographer Beth Osborne Daponte's estimates of Iraqi deaths during the Gulf War: 118,000 civilians, 40,000 soldiers. (Osborne was fired by the US Commerce Department when she released these numbers in 1992, and official estimates were lower -- but the American Statistical Association backs her numbers.) (BusinessWeek, 2/6/03)

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The Mayberry Machiavellis

"Why Are These Men Laughing?" -- Ron Suskind in Esquire, January 2003 (reproduced at ronsuskind.com):

They heard that I was writing about Karl Rove, seeking to contextualize his role as a senior adviser in the Bush White House, and they began calling, some anonymously, some not, saying that they wanted to help and leaving phone numbers. The calls from members of the White House staff were solemn, serious. Their concern was not only about politics, they said, not simply about Karl pulling the president further to the right. It went deeper; it was about this administration's ability to focus on the substance of governing?issues like the economy and social security and education and health care?as opposed to its clear political acumen, its ability to win and enhance power. And so it seemed that each time I made an inquiry about Karl Rove, I received in return a top-to-bottom critique of the White House's basic functions, so profound is Rove's influence.

I made these inquiries in part because last spring, when I spoke to White House chief of staff Andrew Card, he sounded an alarm about the unfettered rise of Rove in the wake of senior adviser Karen Hughes's resignation: "I'll need designees, people trusted by the president that I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl. . . . They are going to have to really step up, but it won't be easy. Karl is a formidable adversary."

One senior White House official told me that he'd be summarily fired if it were known we were talking. "But many of us feel it's our duty -- our obligation as Americans -- to get the word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It's just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know nothing. It's depressing. Domestic Policy Council meetings are a farce. This leaves shoot-from-the-hip political calculations -- mostly from Karl's shop -- to triumph by default. No one balances Karl. Forget it. That was Andy's cry for help." . . .

President George W. Bush called John DiIulio "one of the most influential social entrepreneurs in America" when he appointed the University of Pennsylvania professor, author, historian, and domestic-affairs expert to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He was the Bush administration's big brain, controversial but deeply respected by Republicans and Democrats, academicians and policy players. The appointment was rightfully hailed: DiIulio provided gravity to national policy debates and launched the most innovative of President Bush's campaign ideas -- the faith-based initiative, which he managed until this past February, the last four months from Philadelphia.

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

In a seven-page letter sent a few weeks after our first conversation, DiIulio, who still considers himself a passionate supporter of the president, offers a detailed account and critique of the time he spent in the Bush White House.

"I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions," he writes. "There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue." . . .

Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ's famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported. Rove's assistant, Susan Ralston, said he'd be just a minute. She's very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove's modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.

Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around -- curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events -- but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. "Come on in." . . .

William Kristol, among the most respected of the conservative commentators -- a man embraced by the Right but still on dinner-party guest lists for the center and Left -- is untouchable. He is willing to speak.

"Karl and I aren't really friends. I have sort of a vague and indirect relationship with him. But we talk pretty regularly. He has always been fair and straight and honest with me, despite the stories that others have about him." He pauses, as though encountering one of those beware falling rocks signs. "I believe Karl is Bush. They're not separate, each of them freestanding, with distinct agendas, as some people say. Karl thinks X. Bush thinks X. Clearly, it's a very complicated relationship." He goes on to say that he thinks Bush is a "canny manager" who creates competing teams and plays them against one another. As for those who sometimes disagree with that point, he says, "There is criticism of Karl from the friends of the former President Bush who don't approve of the way the current President Bush is doing his job in every case." Kristol notes that "the kid is what he is, and he's different from the father, some differences that I feel good about," but that gray men around "41" who don't approve of "43" have trouble criticizing the son to the father "and ascribe everything to Karl's malign influence." In that, Rove is at the center of the most portentous father-son conversation of modern times. Sources close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted.

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Antiwar Stalinists

The antiwar Left is a bunch of Stalinists -- Michael Kelly, "Marching with Stalinists," Washington Post, 1/22/03:

The debate is over. The left has hardened itself around the core value of a furious, permanent, reactionary opposition to the devil-state America, which stands as the paramount evil of the world and the paramount threat to the world, and whose aims must be thwarted even at the cost of supporting fascists and tyrants. . . .

The left marches with the Stalinists. The left marches with those who would maintain in power the leading oppressors of humanity in the world. It marches with, stands with and cheers on people like the speaker at the Washington rally who declared that "the real terrorists have always been the United Snakes of America." It marches with people like the former Black Panther Charles Baron, who said in Washington, "if you're looking for an axis of evil then look in the belly of this beast."

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