Iraq, Vietnam all over again?

In Permanent bases in Iraq? Tom Engelhardt suggests we interpret Iraq as Vietnam.  Iraq is a worsening situation, where it's hard to see any face-saving exit from the country and where the population is increasingly rising up against the American presence.  Plus, at home there's a growing anger over this war.  I don't know what's taken the American people so long, the war is clearly illegal and immoral.

Engelhardt's main point of discussion is to contrast the plan for troop reductions with a fact "on the ground".  Namely the presence of the permanent bases that have been constructed, which cost several billion dollars.  An army engineer tasked with facilities development described them in an engineering magazine article with "staggering" cost.  If the plan is to withdraw, then why spend billions of dollars on bases?

One of the bases has finally been discussed in the mainstream press as having a "small town feel".  It has all the comforts of home, extensive telecom and other infrastructure, etc.  And in the London Telegraph is another covering the still-under-construction al-Asad airbase.  Apparently each of these bases cover 15-20 square miles of land.  There are at least four of these bases in Iraq and the fact we're stating this as "at least" is a symptom of the secrecy.

CNN.com - Libby: My 'superiors' authorized leaks - Feb 9, 2006

Libby: My 'superiors' authorized leaks Prosecutor says Libby shared classified intelligence with media: Summary is, Scooter Libby, VP Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, has apparently testified that he leaked Valerie Plame's identity under orders from his superiors. While the article tries to be vague about who they are, well, doesn't a "chief of staff" generally work directly for the person whom they are the chief of their staff? So isn't the superior for the Vice President's chief of staff, then, the vice president?

Cool Tool: 1491

Cool Tool: 1491 -- What happened to the native peoples of this land after Europeans arrived can only be described as genocide and ethnic cleansing. There were advanced civilizations, cities, culture, everything. All wiped out because of the arrival of Europeans. Some of it was accidental, due to diseases the Europeans carried for which the native peoples did not have biological immunity. But in many cases it was ruthless cold-blooded murder.

1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Amazon.com

1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom Nissley

A 1491 Timeline

Europe and Asia	Dates	The Americas
	25000-35000 B.C.	Time of paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats.
Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer.	6000
	5000	In what many scientists regard as humankind's first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species.
First cities established in Sumer.	4000
	3000	The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structures
Great Pyramid at Giza	2650
	32	First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the most important mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s)
	800-840 A.D.	Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy war
Vikings briefly establish first European settlements in North America.	1000	Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.* Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000.
Black Death devastates Europe.	1347-1351
	1398	Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on Earth.
The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.	1492	The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.
Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew.	1493
Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage.	1519	Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox** Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire.
	1525-1533	The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro.
	1617	Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors.
English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth.	1620

*Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire. **Courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, 1547-77).

Guardian Unlimited | Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons

What is the reason for the Iraq war? Was it an altruistic exercise in helping a poor oppressed people join the community of enlightened Democacry countries? Naw, because if it were then why doesn't the U.S. launch similar wars on other oppressive countries? There's a bigger picture going on and it's more than a coincidence that the plan by the Project for a New American Century to reshape the world begins in the heart of the Middle East, where the oil is. And, at the same time, there is a game afoot to bring oil from Central Asia to market, with the chosen U.S. path being a pipeline built through Afghanistan. And why did we go to war in Afghanistan? If it was about Osama, then why have we let Osama and the other leaders get away?

That's what is implied from this article: Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons Iraq has shown the hubris of a geostrategy that welds the philosophy of the Leviathan to military and technological power (Richard Drayton, Wednesday December 28, 2005, The Guardian)

He starts out with an observation about technology.

Ex-hippies talked of a wired age of Aquarius. The fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of the internet, we were told, had ushered in Adam Smith's dream of overflowing abundance, expanding liberty and perpetual peace. Fukuyama speculated that history was over, leaving us just to hoard and spend. Technology meant a new paradigm of constant growth without inflation or recession.

I remember that was the dream floating about during the .COM bubble in the late 90's. But, this kind of thinking is in denial of a real problem. The driving force of the expansion of technology is not technology, it is oil and natural gas. The energy used to drive the technological marvels are these fossil fuels whose use is destroying our environment and which are becoming scarcer by the day.

The public has been misled to believe the technology will keep flowing forever. But that promise is based (today) on fossil fuels.

The problem with that picture is it appears the oil is running out. There is a model put together decades ago which describes the availability of oil. The model shows an unnavoidable fact, that at some point in the future the production capacity of oil will "peak" and after that oil will inexorably decline. There are many indications we are at or near the peak, today.

The rest of the article goes into describing megalomaniacs who have the capabilities to act out their megalomania. The writings of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) show them to be megalomaniacs. The PNAC is a think-tank whose founding members are today holding positions of high power in Washington DC (that is, Cheney, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Jeb Bush, etc). In the mid-90's the PNAC published a series of position papers describing the need of America to assert global dominance, ensuring a Pax Americana. The justification was that "we" are the worlds sole remaining superpower, and that we had to use our strength to take the moral high ground and that it was our duty to reshape the world in our image.

According to this article these people learned certain strategies from the classics of literature:

or the American imperial strategists invested deeply in the belief that through spreading terror they could take power. Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the recently indicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, learned from Leo Strauss that a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise. They read Le Bon and Freud on the relationship of crowds to authority. But most of all they loved Hobbes's Leviathan. While Hobbes saw authority as free men's chosen solution to the imperfections of anarchy, his 21st century heirs seek to create the fear that led to submission. And technology would make it possible and beautiful.

The technology that is supposed to free us all, is also these peoples weapon used to dominate us all.

The vision they've had, and which Rumsfield has been busily implementing in the Defense Department, is that high technology weaponry can be used to create battlefields with few soldiers. Hence we have unmanned aircraft doing both surveillance and firing weapons, we have a rise in robotic tanks, we have a global satellite system delivering GPS positioning coordinates and others spying on everybody's activities. The next time you're in the back yard making love with your sweetie, think about the Pentagon watching you.

But their vision missed something which Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated. Satellites in the sky can't stop the acts of individuals. In Afghanistan the leaders made their escape so they could make new plots in the future. In Iraq the U.S. forces have been hobbled by the improvised explosive device (IED) in ways that satellites cannot see or prevent.

CNN.com - Officials: Muslim sites subject to secret monitoring for radiation - Dec 24, 2005

I suppose "people" are a little sensitive right now to warrantless searches by government law enforcement people. We're in the midst of the snoopgate scandal, in which the Bush administration has admitted to spying on Americans. And, in which, the Echelon system has been implicated in being used in snoopgate by the NSA to vacuum up all communications for analysis by the NSA.

It's in this context we learn: Officials: Muslim sites subject to secret monitoring for radiation (From Kevin Bohn and Jeanne Meserve, CNN, Saturday, December 24, 2005)

This is about the FBI and/or other agencies monitoring radiation levels at specific places inside the U.S. A major target are mosques and other muslim-connected places. While the article says some non-muslim sites were also monitored, the article shows outrage from muslim spokespersons basically complaining of racial targeting.

One thing the article discusses is the warrantless nature of this monitoring. Technically a warrant isn't required because radiation can be monitored from a distance. And, for that matter, other government agencies do warrantless monitoring like this all the time. For example the FCC regularly monitors for illegal radio stations, simply by listening on the radio and using radio direction finder equipment to narrow down the broadcast location.

The program is part of the "dirty bomb" meme that's been running around for a long time. You know this one ... in the confusion shortly after September 11, 2001, someone was accused of a dirty bomb plot. A dirty bomb is a regular chemical explosive device that's been laced with radioactive material. The idea is to spread the radioactive material over a large area through the explosion. But ever since that accusation one of the scares which are repeatedly reinforced in the public mind is this dirty bomb meme.

One possibility I see here is to make monitoring equipment ubiquitous. Rather than this being a special arrangement, suppose all the street lights had equipment mounted on them to monitor air pollution, temperature, rain, radiation, various chemicals, etc. The equipment would need to transmit the data "home" to a data collection repository. That would provide a very interesting set of data not just for law enforcement, but also environmental monitoring and climatology.

Already there are a slew of video cameras being installed by governments. Why not add to them other kinds of monitoring?

CNN.com - Officials: Muslim sites subject to secret monitoring for radiation - Dec 24, 2005

I suppose "people" are a little sensitive right now to warrantless searches by government law enforcement people. We're in the midst of the snoopgate scandal, in which the Bush administration has admitted to spying on Americans. And, in which, the Echelon system has been implicated in being used in snoopgate by the NSA to vacuum up all communications for analysis by the NSA.

It's in this context we learn: Officials: Muslim sites subject to secret monitoring for radiation (From Kevin Bohn and Jeanne Meserve, CNN, Saturday, December 24, 2005)

This is about the FBI and/or other agencies monitoring radiation levels at specific places inside the U.S. A major target are mosques and other muslim-connected places. While the article says some non-muslim sites were also monitored, the article shows outrage from muslim spokespersons basically complaining of racial targeting.

One thing the article discusses is the warrantless nature of this monitoring. Technically a warrant isn't required because radiation can be monitored from a distance. And, for that matter, other government agencies do warrantless monitoring like this all the time. For example the FCC regularly monitors for illegal radio stations, simply by listening on the radio and using radio direction finder equipment to narrow down the broadcast location.

The program is part of the "dirty bomb" meme that's been running around for a long time. You know this one ... in the confusion shortly after September 11, 2001, someone was accused of a dirty bomb plot. A dirty bomb is a regular chemical explosive device that's been laced with radioactive material. The idea is to spread the radioactive material over a large area through the explosion. But ever since that accusation one of the scares which are repeatedly reinforced in the public mind is this dirty bomb meme.

One possibility I see here is to make monitoring equipment ubiquitous. Rather than this being a special arrangement, suppose all the street lights had equipment mounted on them to monitor air pollution, temperature, rain, radiation, various chemicals, etc. The equipment would need to transmit the data "home" to a data collection repository. That would provide a very interesting set of data not just for law enforcement, but also environmental monitoring and climatology.

Already there are a slew of video cameras being installed by governments. Why not add to them other kinds of monitoring?

Bush/Blair planned Iraq invasion in July 2002

It was obvious to me all through 2002 that Bush had already made up his mind to invade Iraq. He kept claiming no plan was set, and that merely he was doing hardball negotiations with Saddam Hussein. But it always looked to me as if he was predetermined to invade, and was simply building a case to the public. It became especially obvious once materials, equipment, and troops started being moved into the area.

Yet, Bush has so far gotten away with this and the other lies that were told to justify the war.

Iraq leak puts pressure on Blair (Sunday, May 1, 2005 CNN.COM)

The secret Downing Street memo (The Sunday Times - Britain, May 01, 2005)

At issue is a British document leaked during the recent elections in the U.K. The document concerns IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY.

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. The NSC had no patience with the UN 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.

...The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

To decode this a little ...

"C" is most likely Sir Richard Dearlove, Britain's "spy chief" who had just returned from visiting the U.S. for talks.

We have him clearly reporting that the U.S. leadership, in July 2002, was already planning to invade Iraq. While the evidence was recognized to be slim, they were planning a public relations campaign to cause the public to ignore the slim evidence and support the war anyway.

Britains Attorney General pointed out the only legal route to launching an invasion of Iraq is to get UN Security Council approval. And that using the UN Security Council Resolution number 1205 provided slim grounds. But that the U.S. leadership was unwilling to go to the UN Security Council.

See here for resolution 1205: http://www.un.org/Docs/scres/1998/scres98.htm

Related blog posts:

The British Election and the Iraq War

Proof: How America was deceived.

Proof Bush Fixed The Facts

Iraqgate?

Iraq: The Fix was on in July, 2002

The thin barrier to nuclear war

One thing about having massively descructive weapons like the nuclear arsenal is how clearly it shows us the fragility of no-war, and the thin line that when crossed leads to total destruction. Within each of us there is hatred, anger, that when triggered the right way turns us into a raving animal.

Cuban missile crisis just one of at least 4 other crises(By Mark McDonald Knight Ridder Newspapers; Posted on Thu, Dec. 16, 2004; Knight-Ridder)

At the surface the story is simple. The world nearly had nuclear war on its hands in October 1962 over the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world powers of the time, the U.S.A. and Soviet Union, mutually stared down the barrel of nuclear war and ended up not pulling the trigger. However the article says this isn't the only time, that at least four other times there were momentary crisis (lasting about 10-20 minutes each) which had those same two powers at the brink of nuclear war.

Man who saved America now living quiet life in Russia (By Mark McDonald Knight Ridder Newspapers; Posted on Thu, Dec. 16, 2004) That article is the personal story of one of the near attacks.

It's in the nature of human beings, really, this war thing. The spiritual teachings talk of "duality". That the truth is that the world and all within it are one thing, one identity, but that in our humanness we believe we are somehow separate from the unity of everything. That is the duality, the separation between unitive consciousness and the consciousness that says I am distinct from you. It is the latter duality consciousness that is the root of war and conflict.

With a weapon such as a nuclear bomb, the conflict is really brought into our faces. That duality consciousness can, at any time, within a 10-20 minute period of time, cause nuclear war to begin. And we all know how nuclear war ends, with millions of people dead immediately and life killing radiation circling the globe for decades raining (literally) death upon the survivors.

Let us all pray that our leaders have the wisdom to use well the power we entrust to them.

Powell may be lying, or not

Following the release of claims that Iran has yet more secret uranium enrichment facilities than have previously been disclosed - Colin Powell (at this point still U.S. Secretary of State) was quoted as saying he'd seen similar "intelligence" and that he believed the report. Despite it coming from an Iranian dissident group which the U.S. lists as a terrorist group.

This CNN article documents a little firestorm around his comments:


Source of Powell's Iran intelligence under scrutiny

Friday, November 19, 2004 Posted: 4:15 PM EST (2115 GMT) CNN.COM

"This allegation is timed to coincide with the next meeting of the board of governors of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]," Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Hussein Moussavian, said. "And every time just before the meeting there are these kind of allegations either from the United States or terrorist groups. And every time these allegations have proven to be false."

Now, this is much as I said a couple days ago. Curious timing this is. The denial is a little hollow, though, coming from an Iranian. Just as Powell's claim of having seen evidence is a little hollow, given his past performance at truthfulness (can you say 26 lies in the U.N. Security Council presentation in Feb 2003 to justify the Iraq invasion?).

So what we're left with is some he-said-he-said games and we can't really trust any of the speakers. Powell lied to the U.N. already, the dissident group is on the State Department terrorist list, and the Iranians may simply be covering their ass with public denials. What's the truth?

This is the problem with having lied in the past, Secretary Powell. We don't trust you any longer. If you hadn't lied to the U.N. then you would still have credibility and your claim today would hold water. While you will be gone soon, your designated successor has even less credibility.

Iran negotiations proceeding, having success

'Progress' at Iran nuclear talks (BBC)

The EU and various european countries are continuing their negotiations with Iran. The sword over their head is that if the negotiations fail, the EU will agree with U.S. to "refer" the Iran situation to the UN Security Council.

China is involved, having recently veto'd something that came to the UN Security Council. China is also in deep cahoots on a business level with Iran, being a big customer of Iran's oil. Iran is offering China that Iran would be their "gateway" to the Middle East, whatever that means. And the payback is obviously that China would do something to cover for them in the UN.

Iran Reaches Preliminary Nuclear Accord With Europe, IRNA Says


(Bloomberg) Nov. 7

"All four delegations are supposed to go to their capitals and if the capitals agree with the agreement, it will be officially announced in the next few days," Hossein Mousavian, the head of the Iran's delegation in the French capital told state television, IRNA reported.

Iran reached preliminary nuclear agreement with EU

11/7/2004 7:00:00 PM GMT (aljazeera.com)

Iran asks Bush to “change behavior

NY Times analyzes the Al Qaqaa videotape

Earlier I noted that the Minneapolis ABC affiliate had broadcast video of soldiers in Al Qaqaa going through bunkers looking at the weapons. The NY Times has now analyzed the video, verifying that it showed the HMX explosives everybody is concerned about. Plus, it showed the UN "seal" which the inspectors had left behind.

Meaning, the U.S. soldiers shown on the videotape broke in, breaking the UN seal, the seal that was supposed to keep the site safe. They probably didn't know what they were doing. And, for that matter, the UN seal shown is a spindly thing that probably wasn't clearly marked as to what it was, so the soldiers probably didn't think much of it.

See here:

Video Shows G.I.'s at Weapon Cache


By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: October 29, 2004
(NY Times)

The article gives a good timeline of the events.:

The agency said that when it left Iraq in mid-March, only days before the war began, the only bunkers bearing its seals at the huge complex contained the explosive known as HMX, which the agency had monitored because it could be used in a nuclear weapons program.

In mid-march the explosives were seen there, and sealed by the UN inspectors. The seal pictured in the article isn't very much, but it would show if the building had been entered because one would be unable to enter without breaking the seal.

Yesterday evening, the Pentagon released a satellite image of the complex taken just two days after the inspectors left, showing a few trucks parked in front of some bunkers. It is not clear they are the bunkers with the high explosives.

The Iraqi's had some activity at Al Qaqaa, but it's unclear what it was they were doing. There was apparently other weaponry on the site and the simplest conclusion is they were retrieving that in preparation for the invasion they knew the U.S. was about to launch.

The videotape , taken by KSTP-TV, an ABC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul, shows troops breaking into a bunker and opening boxes and examining barrels. ...
The ABC crew said the video was taken on April 18.

The videotape verifies the explosives were there, on site, after the invasion. This disproves the administration's claim/excuse that the Iraqi government removed the HMX before the invasion, because it was still there afterward.

Then they headed north to Baghdad, and the site was apparently left unguarded. By the time special weapons teams returned to Al Qaqaa in May, the explosives were apparently gone.

Then in mid-May the U.S. special weapons team went to the scene, and the explosives were gone. Because of the videotape we know they must have disappeared between April 19 and mid-May. And we know looters were active at this site just as they were all over the country.

As the article says, the timing is critical. This issue has become key in the presidential race, with the Bush side disclaiming responsibility saying that not all the facts are in. Well, it is clear to me that enough facts are in. And that you, Mr. President, are caught redhanded in criminal negligence.

And it wasn't just Al Qaqaa, but lots of ammo-dumps

The looting of Iraq's arsenal
The same month Al Qaqaa was being stripped of high explosives, I warned my military intelligence unit of another weapons facility that was being cleaned out. But nothing was done.

By David DeBatto [Salon.com]

David DeBatto was a military intelligence officer who was in charge of Camp Anaconda just after the invasion. He tells the story that initially the locals were happy we were there, and were very helpful in providing intelligence.

Some of that intelligence was that nearby Camp Anaconda was a large (5 square mile) ammunition dump that was totally unguarded, and being systematically looted. He kept writing reports to his superiors of the dump, and at times the superiors would say "We'll take care of this" but nothing ever happened. He also tells of even other ammo-dumps that his colleagues knew about and also reported to their superiors, and that none of these ammo-dumps were guarded and that they were all systematically looted.

And, of course, that ammunition is today being used against U.S. forces. If these ammunition dumps had been secured, and the ammunition destroyed, then the fighting now would be less severe, yes?

We're talking about the whole gamut of weaponry from small arms ammunition, to guns, heavy machine guns, mortars, rockets, rocket propelled grenades, missles (including surface-to-air) and at Al Qaqaa there is the 350,000 tons of ultra-high-explosives. That has dual use in both conventional and nuclear use.

Like I said, criminal negligence. And negligence that has directly contributed to the deaths of over a thousand U.S. soldiers, and tens of thousands of Iraqi's.

See also: NY Times analyzes the Al Qaqaa videotape

The now-missing explosives were seen during invasion

The ultra-high explosives that has been the subject this week were in fact seen by the invading U.S. forces, and filmed by one of the embedded news crews. They just released the tape.

EXCLUSIVE:
5 EYEWITNESS NEWS video may be linked to missing explosives in Iraq Apologies for the hype, but this is a local TV station in Minneapolis and it was their news crew apparently who did the filming. story here

The filming was done on April 18, 2003 according to the news report. While they don't have a positive identification that what they filmed is the now-missing explosive, the description makes it likely.

So far as I'm concerned, it's just another nail in the coffin of the credibility (or lack thereof) of the Bush administration.

Except... what about this statement by a U.S. State department official?


Russia tied to Iraq's missing arms

(By Bill Gertz; THE WASHINGTON TIMES; Published October 28, 2004)

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."

...and...

Al-Qaqaa, a known Iraqi weapons site, was monitored closely, Mr. Shaw said.
"That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Mr. Shaw said. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."

er... okay.... so what about the news crew that apparantly filmed the explosives on April 18? If this was such an important site, then why is there news article after news article quoting military commanders saying they drove by the Al Qaqaa but didn't have orders to check the place out or secure it?

Such as ...

No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says



By JIM DWYER and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: October 27, 2004
(NY Times)

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.

Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.

"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already."

And this...

4 Iraqis Tell of Looting at Munitions Site in '03


By JAMES GLANZ and JIM DWYER

Published: October 28, 2004
(NY Times)

The Iraqis described an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters. But some looting was clearly indiscriminate, with people grabbing anything they could find and later heaving unwanted items off the trucks.

...The mechanic, Ahmed Saleh Mezher, said employees asked the Americans to protect the site but were told this was not the soldiers' responsibility.

... But the accounts make clear that what set off much if not all of the looting was the arrival and swift departure of American troops, who did not secure the site after inducing the Iraqi forces to abandon it.

"The looting started after the collapse of the regime," said Wathiq al-Dulaimi, a regional security chief, who was based nearby in Latifiya. But once it had begun, he said, the booty streamed toward Baghdad.

...Mr. Mezher, the mechanic, said it took the looters about two weeks to disassemble heavy machinery at the site and carry that off after the smaller items were gone.

Like I said, the Bush administration is suffering from a lack of credibility. They have for a long time.

Missing high-explosives ("nuke-stuff")

This is an update to the More missing 'nuke-stuff' story. In summary, the Iraqi's had 400 tons of ultra-high explosives that the weapons inspectors knew about. These explosives can be used in nuclear bombs, or as conventional explosives, and are extremely highly explosive. Unfortunately the stuff went missing after the invasion, over a year and a half ago, and just now we're learning that this stuff was missing.

At first the story was "during the invasion, our troops looked but didn't find anything under U.N. seal". Now a different story is emerging. Negligence.

Spokesman for military unit at Al-Qaqaa says there was no search for explosives Wednesday October 27, 2004
By KIMBERLY HEFLING
Associated Press Writer

First, this establishes that the explosives were there at the time of the invasion:

The explosives at Al-Qaqaa had been housed in storage bunkers at the facility. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003. The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time on March 15, 2003 and reported that the seals were not broken therefore, the weapons were still there at the time. The team then pulled out of the country in advance of the invasion.

The invasion happened a little later in March, 2003

Next, what happened when U.S. troops arrived on the scene? And, remember, they were in the middle of an invasion actively fighting with hostile troops.

When troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa installation south of Baghdad a day or so after other coalition troops seized the capital on April 9, 2003, there were already looters throughout the facility, Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit, told The Associated Press.

The soldiers "secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area," Wellman wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area."

"Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions, as they (high-explosive weapons) were everywhere in Iraq," he wrote.

The 101st Airborne was at least the second military unit to arrive at Al-Qaqaa after the U.S.-led invasion began. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The Washington Post that the 3rd Infantry Division reached the site around April 3, fought with Iraq forces and occupied the site. It left after two days for Baghdad, the Post reported Wednesday.

This material was specifically mentioned to U.S. forces by the IAEA as something to guard carefully. How could it be there was no orders to find and secure this material? Why, negligence, that's how.

Criminal negligence.

And the people responsible? It was U.S. troops, so ultimately it is the Commander In Chief who is responsible, yes?

And what is he responsible for? As he and his cronies has warned, Iraq had materials which if given to "the terrorists" could cause great harm in the world. This explosive is one such example. Of course most countries in the world have materials of this sort, because every country is charged with defending its own borders against attack, etc. By invading Iraq and disbanding its military, the U.S.A. took on the role of defending Iraq. Who knows where this explosive material went, and that's the problem. It could well have gone to "the terrorists" who may be planning some heinous act with this stuff. It was U.S. responsibility to control this, and we failed. Our President failed us.

More missing "nuke-stuff"

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
nytimes (registration required)

This story is about more missing stuff that could be used to make nuclear weapons. In this case it is an ultra-high-explosive known as HMX, stored at a huge ammo-dump in Iraq. HMX is used in both conventional and nuclear weapons, in nuclear weapons it helps ignite nuclear reactions.

The presence of the explosive in Iraq was well known, and had been under IAEA seal before the invasion. The IAEA warned the U.S.A. to guard that material, but the military did not. This is one of the dual-use materials which GW Bush had cited as justification for the invasion, and therefore it is strange-seeming that it was not carefully guarded.

Instead:

Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, a senior official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology wrote that the stockpile disappeared after early April 2003 because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

Of course, this just makes one wonder why the IAEA waited until last month to say anything.

In any case, this is to my eye yet another failing of the administrations war effort. At the time of the invasion there was rampant looting - such as the dissappearance of historical artifacts from the Iraqi museums documenting the history in the area we view as the cradle of modern civilization. But we now know it wasn't just art museums that were looted, but military storage areas (e.g. the yellowcake Iraq did have was looted since the war). And just what did the invaders rush to protect first? It was the oil ministry.

By invading the country we took responsibility for that country. We failed miserably.

Israel May Have Iran in Its Sights

Israel May Have Iran in Its Sights By Laura King Times Staff Writer

story.news.yahoo.com/news?...20041022/ts_latimes/israelmayhaveiraninitssights

Oh, lovely. Israel is worried that an Iran owning nuclear weapons is going to threaten their existance. And they are ready to preemptively attack Iran.

Israel did, after all, preemptively attack Iraq for the same reason.

Today, if Israel were to attack Iran, I can't see anything good coming from it as it would only incite the situation even further.

Iran Considers EU's "Last Chance" Nuclear Offer

Iran Considers EU's 'Last Chance' Nuclear Offer By Louis Charbonneau

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?...20041021/wl_nm/nuclear_iran_dc

Part of the nightmarish neocon fantasy dream ( Background material to the second gulf war ) is that the Project for a New American Century has been planning for 10+ years a megalomaniacal takeover of the middle east. They would start with Iraq, then go for either Syria or Iran. In their wake they would install moderate democracies, which would then shift the Middle East to be more complacent to the western powers.

While GW Bush has had us detoured in the Iraq folly, several acts have been happening in the sidelines. One in particular is the "nuclear weapon" question concerning Iran. Are they developing nuclear weapons or not? Does Iran have the right to invoke their sovereignty to resist inspections? What right does the world have to control the spread of nuclear weapons?

In my opinion nuclear weapons are so heinous that the world must act together to control their spread.

At the same time the background material haunts my thinking about the Iran issue. Are the neocons (who are largely in control of the decision making in this administration) being truthful in pressuring Iran about nuclear weapons? Are they making stuff up, again? Or is there a real danger?

A problem with being caught at a lie (the "case" for war ) is that it ruins your reputation. Everything you say later is tainted by the lie, and people have a harder time believing you.

For example, why is Pakistan not being pressured in the same way that Korea and Iran are? Pakistan, after all, was caught red-handed with the head guy of their nuclear weapons development program outright selling nuclear technology on the world market. Why are we coddling Pakistan, then? Would it be the oil pipeline that Michael Moore discusses in Farenheit 9/11? (that is, Uzbekistan has oil but can't get it to the sea, and there's been an oil pipeline proposal working the system for years to route the pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than through Russia or Iran, and remind me again why we invaded Afghanistan and then gave up on the hunt for enemy#1 Osama bin Laden?)

In any case, what we have here is Iran being offered a deal. Scrap the reactors that you, Iran, are building, which have dual purpose. (The reactors they're building can be used to make weapons grade plutonium) Instead we, the west, will build you some other reactors that don't have dual-use capability.

From an anti-proliferation standpoint this is great. Especially if it remove the neocon's justification for invading Iran. The last thing we need is to create yet another war in the Middle East, we can barely fight the ones we're prosecuting right now.

Here's the core of the issue:

President Mohammad Khatami (news - web sites) said on Wednesday if Iran was guaranteed the right to develop peaceful nuclear technology, Tehran would "present everything necessary to prove that Iran will not produce an atomic bomb. But we will not give up our rights."

Influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani reinforced the message on Thursday as the talks were beginning, saying: "We have announced our stance repeatedly. It is irreversible."

Some diplomats say Iranian officials have never clearly explained why their oil-rich state needs nuclear energy or why they are so intent on producing nuclear fuel -- years before any Iranian atomic power facilities would be in need of such fuel.

Khatami said on Wednesday: "We cannot rely on other countries to supply our nuclear fuel as they can stop it anytime due to political pressures."

Weapon Proliferation: MANPAD

Obviously when someone goes to war, they need weapons. Humans are tool-creating and tool-using animals, and so when we go to war we think of the tools required to perform the war. Hence, weapons are the tools we use in war.

One type of weapon, man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), is of particular interest. They are relatively portable, relatively easy to train soldiers in their use, and very successful in bringing down aircraft. They are often called "shoulder-launched missiles".

In Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror Richard Clarke details how the U.S. coordinated shipping Stinger Missiles to the Mujahadeen fighting in Afghanistan against the Russian invasion. The U.S. could not put its own soldiers into Afghanistan, likely Russia would have taken that as a direct agression which would have turned their invasion in Afghanistan into a direct world-wide confrontation between the worlds super-powers. Instead the U.S. was supporting the Mujahadeen, and arranged for weapons shipments and training. The transfer point for this activity was Pakistan, and U.S. forces were working in Pakistan, fully in cooperation with the Pakistan Intelligence services, to safeguard the training and arming of the Mujahadeen.

It turns out that the leader of the Mujahadeen, chosen from the elite of the Saudi families, was one Osama bin Laden, who has since become infamous for other activities. The result of this activity by the U.S. to arm and train the Mujahadeen was to demonstrate to those fighters that they can fight, attack, and repulse a world super-power. The turning point in the Afghanistan invasion was the mid-1980's. As Clarke said, the Russians were winning and consolidating their control over Afghanistan, which alarmed the U.S. planners. This is what caused the U.S. to take the step of arming the Mujahadeen with Stinger missiles. Over the next few years the Mujahadeen were successful in routing the Russians, causing their withdrawal from Afghanistan, and shortly afterward the U.S.S.R. collapsed.

Obviously these are potent weapons indeed.

Fast forward to 2004, and we (the U.S.) finds MANPAD style weapons being used in Iraq against American forces. It just so happens that the Mujahadeen the U.S. had armed and trained morphed in the intervening years into the Taliban and al Qaeda. While the Taliban and al Qaeda had no contact or cooperation with the former Iraq government, they are active in Iraq today for exactly the same reason they were active in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Namely, the Arab/Islamic homeland has been invaded by outsiders (then it was Russia, today it is the U.S.) and they are fighting off that invasion. In addition the toppling of the former Iraqi government by the U.S. created a power vacuum, which al Qaeda no doubt wants to fill.

This is rich in Irony. The people we trained with those weapons, fight off our then enemy, contributing to the then enemy's collapse, and now those same people are using the same type of weapons to fight us off.

On June 3, 2004 the GAO released a report giving recommendations on the "proliferation" of these MANPAD weapons.

The U.S. has been selling the Stinger missiles to foreign governments, and then failing to adequately control what happens to them afterward. Legally the U.S. is to monitor the weapons, inventorying them every year, presumably to prevent those weapons from being resold. Just as obviously the forces in Iraq fighting the U.S. have these weapons, and are getting them from somewhere. The report talks of a black market.

Of concern also is their use against commercial aircraft. In 2002 a MANPAD was fired at a commercial jet leaving Kenya for Israel, but it missed.

MSNBC report, June 4, 2004: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5137264/

GAO Report: Nonproliferation: Improvements Needed in Countering Threat for Man-Portable Air Defense Systems. GAO-04-519, May 13. Highlights

NY Times mea culpa for publishing misleading falsehoods about Iraq's WMD

[May 24, 2004] The NY Times has issued a mea culpa saying that some of their reporting leading to the Iraq War was dubious. Uh, duh, they were repeating the lies of the Administration.

However there is a Salon.COM article [salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/27/times/index.html] claiming that the principle NY Times reporter on this beat, Judith Miller, was apparently actively cooperating with the White House to get their lies published. She was working closely with the same liar, Ahmed Chalabi and his cronies, as was the Administration, so when Chalabi or one of his cronies might have told her some lie, he will have already told that lie to sources at the White House or DoD whom she could then call to get the confirmation required to publish.

For example, the issue of the Aluminum Tubes supposedly to be used to build centrifuges.

If the double-agent spy business had a trophy to hold up and show neophyte spooks what happens when their craft is perfectly executed, it would be a story by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on a Sunday morning in September 2002. The front-page frightener was titled "Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts." Miller and Gordon wrote that an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes, to be used as centrifuges, was evidence Hussein was building a uranium gas separator to develop nuclear material. The story quoted national security advisor Condoleezza Rice invoking the image of "mushroom clouds over America."...The story had an enormous impact, one amplified when Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney all did appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows, citing the first-rate journalism of the liberal New York Times. No single story did more to advance the political cause of the neoconservatives driving the Bush administration to invade Iraq....But Miller's story was wrong. ...It turned out that the aluminum tubes were covered with an anodized coating, which would have been machined off to make them usable in a centrifuge. But that change in the thickness of the tube wall would have rendered the tubes useless for a centrifuge, according to a number of nuclear scientists who spoke publicly after Miller's story. Aluminum, which has not been used in uranium gas separators since the 1950s, has been replaced by steel. The tubes, in fact, were almost certainly intended for use as rocket bodies. Hussein's multiple-launch rocket systems had rusted on their pads and he had ordered the tubes from Italy. "Medusa 81," the Italian rocket model name, was stamped on the sides of the tubes, and in a factory north of Baghdad, American intelligence officers later discovered boxes of rocket fins and motors awaiting the arrival of the tubes of terror.

It's Official - No WMD Found

To readers of the other sections of these reports on the war in Iraq, it should not be surprising to learn of an interim report stating that no Weapons of Mass Destruction had been found. This week the leader of the inspection team, David Kay, made just that report to Congress.

[Oct 2, 2003; CNN; cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/10/02/kay.report/] Text of David Kay's unclassified statement ... The text of his testimony to congress.

There's too much in his testimony to adequately quote and stay within fair use. So I'll summarize, and point out at the offset that the following articles in the press are not reporting the full story.

First, as is obvious, no existing and immediately usable WMD's (chemical, biological or nuclear) were found in Iraq. If they had existed, perhaps the defenders would have used them during the U.S. invasion.

Next, as to programs to produce such weapons. He gives a number of excuses such as the massive looting after the invasion (true) and the small size of the things being searched for (also true). What's interesting is their discovery of a range of programs previously undeclared to the U.N. and which, at the least, were preserving the skeleton of WMD programs.

• A clandestine network of laboratories run by the IIS (secret service).
• A prison laboratory complex "possibly" used for biological weapons testing on the prisoners.
• Preserved "reference strains" of biological agents, from which weapons could be regrown later.
• Plans for missiles with 1000km range, well beyond the allowed 150km under the UN sanctions. Further, talks with North Korea about supplying missiles to Iraq.
• Unmanned aircraft (UAV) with ranges well beyond the allowed maximum.

Everything discussed was more ambition than in a stage of producing results.

[Oct 3, 2003; The Independant (London); news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=449413] 1,200 weapons inspectors spent 90 days in Iraq. The exercise cost $300m. And the number of weapons found? 0 Five months after the end of the war in Iraq, a CIA adviser has admitted that his 1,200-strong team of inspectors has discovered none of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

"We have not yet found stocks of weapons," David Kay, the head of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group ... 90 days after the arrival of his group in Iraq. Mr Kay insisted that lines of inquiry on which the group were working might yet yield concrete proof. He hoped to "draw a line" under his work in six to nine months. In the report he argued that the bulkiest material that inspectors were searching for could be hidden in spaces little larger than a two-car garage. ...

He said: "Much evidence is irretrievably lost." He also blamed the slow progress on the way Iraq had arranged its WMD activities, the widespread destruction of materials and documents before the war, and looting of suspect sites afterwards.

[Oct 3, 2003; The Independant (London); news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=449410] 'We found nothing, despite Saddam's ambitions' The interim report of America's chief weapons inspector is a damning blow to those who argued the case for war against Iraq based on the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime.

... While there was some evidence that Iraq had retained the template of a weapons programme, in all the areas in which the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) has been looking ? biological, chemical and nuclear ? Mr Kay conceded that his staff had found nothing that proved Saddam ever actually possessed such weapons. He also admitted that the pre-war intelligence on Iraq had proved to be in sharp contrast to the reality on the ground.

... Mr Kay said: "We have not yet found stocks of weapons but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapons stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone." He laid out six reasons for his team's failure to find proof of WMD, ranging from "WMD personnel" crossing borders before and after the conflict, to the relatively small size of any such weapons in contrast to Saddam's conventional weapons.

In regard to biological weapons (BW), Mr Kay claimed his team had uncovered "significant information" pointing towards the development of "BW-applicable organisms". Yet he said the team was still working to ascertain what these represented. The report said teams have discovered a network of clandestine laboratories and found live botulinum toxin ? which could be used to make biological weapons ? at an Iraqi scientist's home.

[Oct 2, 2003; Financial Times; http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer] Iraq team finds no illegal weapons "We have not found at this point actual weapons," David Kay said after briefing members of Congress on his three-month investigation. "We have found substantial evidence of an intent of senior level Iraqi officials, including Saddam, to continue production at some future point in time of weapons of mass destruction."

Saddam Hussein's regime held high-level talks about gaining long-range missile technology from North Korea as recently as October 2000, Mr Kay's interim report states.

The Iraq Survey Group, the US-led team looking for Iraq's WMD, said Iraq and North Korea discussed missile technology, probably related to North Korea's long-range No Dong missile. The missile has a range of 1,300km, which would have provided Baghdad with strike power beyond the 150km limit set by the United Nations.

Nothing found, unsurprisingly. But they were in talks with North Korea? Hmmm... Not good, especially given that North Korea is currently heading towards nuclear weapon ownership given the U.S. distraction with Iraq.

[Oct 3, 2003; The Independant (London); news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=449407] Survey chief led calls to oust Iraqi dictator When the Bush administration was searching for someone to lead the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the name of David Kay quickly surfaced. He seemed the perfect candidate. He had experience in Iraq and, best of all, he was completely in tune with White House thinking.

... What appealed to the White House was not just Mr Kay's experience, but his distrust of the Saddam Hussein regime. And he had long given up on the UN inspection body, Unscom. Even in 1994, after he had left the IAEA, Mr Kay was making arguments the Bush administration used to justify the war

"There is no ultimate success that involves Unscom. It's got to be a change of regime. It's got to be a change of Saddam," Mr Kay wrote at the time.

It should not be surprising that the person selected to head the inspection team turns out to be biased against Saddam Hussein's regime. On the other hand, that just serves to emphasize the result, that no WMD's have been found.