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SEPTEMBER 18, 2003 UPDATE

                             BUSH’S “WONDERLAND”

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!”
“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

Lewis Carroll
“Through the Looking-Glass” (1872)

                Hopefully, TPJ readers had the opportunity to see VP Chaney on Meet the Press this weekend.  It was a “sterling” performance.  For readers who missed the interview this link is the transcript of the session. – Meet the Press  In essence, Cheney so blatantly distorted the facts regarding the events of 9-11 that the distortions became patently obvious.  

                Bush and Rumsfeld have been falling over themselves for the past four days aggressively denying that they have any proof that Saddam was directly involved in the 9-11.  Rumsfeld admitted on Tuesday that Saddam was not involved in the terrorist attacks. – Chicago Tribune  On Wednesday, Bush told reporters that Saddam had no connection to the 9-11 attack. – Washington Post   Rumsfeld and Bush were quick to assert that Saddam did have a “connection” to al-Qaida.

                Of course, Bush and Rumsfeld’s  “admissions” come after 70% of Americans already believe that Saddam was involved in the attack.

                 The Minnesota Star Tribune delivered a blistering editorial on Cheney’s performance: -- Star Tribune

Dick Cheney is not a public relations man for the Bush administration, not a spinmeister nor a political operative. He's the vice president of the United States, and when he speaks in public, which he rarely does, he owes the American public the truth.

In his appearance on "Meet the Press" Sunday, Cheney fell woefully short of truth. On the subject of Iraq, the same can be said for President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. But Cheney is the latest example of administration mendacity, and therefore a good place to start in holding the administration accountable. The list:

• Cheney repeated the mantra that the nation ignored the terrorism threat before Sept. 11. In fact, President Bill Clinton and his counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, took the threat very seriously, especially after the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000. By December, Clarke had prepared plans for a military operation to attack Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, go after terrorist financing and work with police officials around the world to take down the terrorist network.

Because Clinton was to leave office in a few weeks, he decided against handing Bush a war in progress as he worked to put a new administration together.

Instead, Clarke briefed national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Cheney and others. He emphasized that time was short and action was urgent. The Bush administration sat on the report for months and months. The first high-level discussion took place on Sept. 4, 2001, just a week before the attacks. The actions taken by the Bush administration following Sept. 11 closely parallel actions recommended in Clarke's nine-month-old plan. Who ignored the threat?

• Cheney said that "we don't know" if there is a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. He's right only in the sense that "we don't know" if the sun will come up tomorrow. But all the evidence available says it will -- and that Iraq was not involved in Sept. 11.

Cheney offered stuff, but it wasn't evidence. He said that one of those involved in planning the attack, an Iraqi-American, had returned to Iraq after the attack and had been protected, perhaps even supported, by Saddam Hussein. That proves exactly nothing about Iraq's links to the attack itself.

Cheney also cited a supposed meeting in Prague between hijacker Mohamed Atta and a senior Iraqi intelligence officer -- but the FBI concluded that Atta was in Florida at the time of the supposed meeting. The CIA always doubted the story. And according to a New York Times article on Oct. 21, 2002, Czech President Vaclav Havel "quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports" of such a meeting.

Moreover, the United States now has in custody the agent accused of meeting with Atta. Even though he must know how much he would benefit by simply saying, "Yes, I met Atta in Prague," there has been no announcement by the administration trumpeting that vindication of its belief in an Iraq-Sept. 11 link.

• In trying to make that link, Cheney baldly asserted that Iraq is the "geographic base" for those who struck the United States on Sept. 11. No, that would be Afghanistan.

• On weapons of mass destruction, Cheney made a number of statements that were misleading or simply false. For example, he said the United States knew Iraq had "500 tons of uranium." Well, yes, and so did the U.N. inspectors. What Cheney didn't say is that the uranium was low-grade waste from nuclear energy plants, and could not have been useful for weapons without sophisticated processing that Iraq was incapable of performing.

Cheney also said, "To suggest that there is no evidence [in Iraq] that [Saddam] had aspirations to acquire nuclear weapons, I don't think is valid." It's probably not valid; Saddam wanted nuclear weapons. But Cheney is changing the subject: The argument before the war wasn't Saddam's aspirations; it was Saddam's active program to build nuclear weapons.

Cheney also said "a gentleman" has come forward "with full designs for a process centrifuge system to enrich uranium and the key parts that you need to build such a system." That would be scientist Mahdi Obeidi, who had buried the centrifuge pieces in his back yard -- in 1991. Obeidi insisted that Iraq hadn't restarted its nuclear weapons program after the end of the first Gulf War. The centrifuge pieces might have signaled a potential future threat, but they actually disprove Cheney's prewar assertion that Iraq had, indeed, "reconstituted" its nuclear-weapons program.

Cheney also said he put great store in the ongoing search for Saddam's WMD program: "We've got a very good man now in charge of the operation, David Kay, who used to run UNSCOM [the U.N. inspection effort]." In fact, Kay did not run UNSCOM; for one year he was the chief inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency's team in Iraq.

But it's funny Cheney should mention Kay. Last summer, the leader of the 1,400-person team searching for WMD expressed great confidence that they would find what they were looking for. He said he wouldn't publicize discoveries piecemeal but would submit a comprehensive report in mid-September. Apparently he has submitted the report to George Tenet at the CIA. The question now is whether it will ever be made public; several reports in the press have suggested that Kay has come up way short. In five months, 1,400 experts haven't found the WMD locations that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said before the war were well-known to the United States.

Cheney also said that an investigation by the British had "revalidated the British claim that Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa -- what was in the State of the Union speech." The British investigation did nothing of the kind. A parliamentary investigative committee said the documents on the uranium are being reinvestigated, but that, based on the existence of those documents, the Blair government made a "reasonable" assertion and had not tried to deliberately mislead the British people.

To explore every phony statement in the vice president's "Meet the Press" interview would take far more space than is available. This merely points out some of the most egregious examples. Opponents of the war are fond of saying that "Bush lied and our soldiers died." In fact, they'd have reason to assert that "Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz lied and our soldiers died." It's past time the principals behind this mismanaged war were called to account for their deliberate misstatements.

The LA Times produced a scathing editorial entitled “Chaney in Wonderland.” – LA Times

                Joseph Wilson is equally scathing in this analysis of Bush’s tactics: [JOSEPH WILSON was deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from 1988 to 1991. In July, he called into question the Bush administration's assertions about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa by revealing that he had been asked by the U.S. government to look into such claims -- and had reported in early 2002 that they were unfounded. He is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C.] – The Mercury News

During the gulf war in 1991, when I was in charge of the American Embassy in Baghdad, I placed a copy of Lewis Carroll's ``Alice in Wonderland'' on my office coffee table. I thought it conveyed far better than words ever could the weird world that was Iraq at that time, a world in which nothing was what it seemed: The several hundred Western hostages Saddam Hussein took during Desert Shield were not really hostages but ``guests.'' Kuwait was not invaded, but ``liberated.''

It is clearly time to dust the book off and again display it prominently, only this time because our own government has dragged the country down a rabbit hole, all the while trying to convince the American people that life in newly liberated Iraq is not as distorted as it seems.

. . .  President Bush's speech last Sunday was just the latest example of the administration's concerted efforts to misrepresent reality -- and rewrite history -- to mask its mistakes. The president said Iraq is now the center of our battle against terrorism. But we did not go to Iraq to fight Al-Qaida, which remains perhaps our deadliest foe, and we will not defeat it there.

By trying to justify the current fight in Iraq as a fight against terrorism, the administration has done two frightening things. It has tried to divert attention from Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for the wave of terrorist attacks against American interests from New York and Washington to Yemen, and who reappeared in rugged terrain in a video broadcast last week. And the policy advanced by the speech is a major step toward creating a dangerous, self-fulfilling prophecy and reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts on the ground.

. . .  The president told us in his seminal speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that Iraq ``possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons . . . is seeking nuclear weapons . . . has given shelter and support to terrorism, and practices terror against its own people.''

He dismissed the concerns raised by critics of his approach as follows: ``Some worry that a change of leadership in Iraq could create instability and make the situation worse. The situation could hardly get worse, for world security and for the people of Iraq. The lives of Iraqi citizens would improve dramatically if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power.''

Now we know that even if we find chemical or biological weapons, the threat that they posed to our national security was, to be charitable, exaggerated.

. . .  Indeed, in the most telling revision of the justification for going to war, the State Department's undersecretary for arms control, John Bolton, recently said that whether Saddam's government actually possessed weapons of mass destruction ``isn't really the issue. The issue, I think, has been the capability that Iraq sought to have . . . WMD programs.''

In other words, we're now supposed to believe that we went to war not because Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction threatened us, but because he had scientists on his payroll.

. . .  The truth is, the administration has never leveled with the American people on the war with Iraq.

. . .  One way the administration stopped the debate was to oversell its intelligence. I know, because I was in the middle of the efforts to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium ``yellowcake'' -- a form of lightly processed ore -- from Africa.

At the request of the administration I traveled to the West African nation of Niger in February 2002 to check out the allegation. I reported that such a sale was highly unlikely, but my conclusions -- as well as the same conclusions from our ambassador on the scene and from a four-star Marine Corps general -- were ignored by the White House.

Instead, the president relied upon an unsubstantiated reference in a British white paper to underpin his argument in the State of the Union address that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons programs. How many times did we hear the president, vice president and others speak of the looming threat of an Iraqi mushroom cloud?

. . .  Recent administration statements, including the president's speech, suggest that it still prefers to live in a fantasy world.

                Bush’s administration being compared to Alice in Wonderland and accused of living in a  “fantasy world.”  Stark changes are coming for Bush – and rightfully so.

                On Wednesday, two more stories emerged giving even more credence to the “fantasy.”  First, “A senior official in Iraq's new science ministry says the country never revived its nuclear program after U.N. inspectors dismantled it in the 1990's.  Abbas Balasem, an official of the new U.S.-backed administration in Baghdad, said Tuesday Iraqi scientists had no way to re-start the program because the inspectors took away all the necessary resources.” – VOA News  (England)  Second, “Former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix believes that Iraq destroyed most of its weapons of mass destruction 10 years ago, but kept up the appearance that it had them to deter a military attack.  In an interview with an Australian radio station broadcast Wednesday, Blix said it was unlikely that the U.S and British teams now searching for weapons in Iraq would find more than some "documents of interest." – Las Vegas Sun

                But the fantasy is not over – the Bush administration has America too deep into the “rabbit hole.” Undersecretary of State John Bolton . . . told a House International Relations subcommittee . . . that Syria and Libya had weapons of mass destruction programs that must be "rolled back" and eliminated.  . . . Bolton said diplomacy is the administration's preferred approach but that "every tool in our nonproliferation toolbox" was an option. Bolton refused to rule out "regime change" as an administration option in Syria.  . . .  Bolton, in his prepared remarks, reiterated past testimony that Syria continues to test chemical munitions, is developing an offensive biological weapons capability and has a nuclear research and development program. He did not address Libyan weapons, but the CIA has said Libya's government is seeking to acquire chemical and biological weapons.” – Newsday  

“I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,” said cunning old Fury:
“I’ll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.”

Lewis Carroll
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

_____________________________________________

SEPTEMBER 16, 2003 UPDATE

                               OBFUSCATING FABRICATIONS OF  WAR

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might each us!
But passion and party blind our eyes,
and the light which experience gives is a lantern,
on the stern,
which shines only on the waves behind us.

 -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1831)

                TPJ continues to research and publish relevant articles exposing Bush’s fabrications that led to war in Iraq. Junkie’s wife, Ms. Cathy, recently asked, why is TPJ printing so many stories on Bush’s fabrications – every one knows about that by now?

                Ms. Cathy enjoys excellent company in her sentiments.  “Democrats in Congress have abandoned their efforts to investigate the White House's use of questionable intelligence information about Iraq's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, saying the issue has been "eclipsed" by President Bush's request for $87 billion from Congress to continue funding the war.  David Helfert, a spokesman for Congressman David Obey, D-Wisconsin, who criticized the White House for relying too heavily on murky intelligence to get support for the war, said Friday that Congressional Democrats would no longer pursue hearings on the intelligence matter.

                ‘We're past that,’ Helfert said, referring to the intelligence issue. ‘Those questions were eclipsed by the supplemental request by President Bush for $87 billion’ to fund the Iraq war. ‘Congress is focusing on asking questions about the $87 billion, what it will be used for and whether it's worth it. It would be a good characterization to say that the intelligence questions on Iraq and how the President came to believe that it had weapons of mass destruction are no longer an issue.’” – Anti War   

                Public opinion polls suggest otherwise. “Overall, the public's perception of the Bush administration's handling of terrorism is still positive, though it has slipped in the last year.

                Just over half, 55 percent, in the poll said the Bush administration is doing a good job dealing with the war on terrorism, while 44 percent said it has not done such a good job. That's down from 73 percent who said a year ago that the Bush administration had done a good job.

                President Bush personally scores higher on that measure, with two-thirds saying they approve of the way he has handled the campaign against terror, down from 79 percent in April but still very strong.  . . .  

                The number who say the war was worth fighting has slipped to just over half, 54 percent, down from 70 percent in late April. And people were about evenly split on his handling of the situation in Iraq, down from 56 percent approval in August.” – Yahoo

                Even though support for the war is falling, it is astounding that after several months of incessant revelations that Bush and Prime Minister Blair fabricated the reasons for war a majority of the public still perceives that the war is worth fighting.  The fact that our Democrat leadership would abandon investigations designed to expose the truth, even before they began; is inconceivable and irresponsible policy.

                Bush’s administration is actively obfuscating the fabricated reasons for war and creating new justifications for war.  They are going to incredible lengths to accomplish this two fold strategy. 

                First, no meaningful weapons of mass destruction have been found.  In the first days after the war, every “find” was labeled a WMD and touted to the world as proof that Saddam had weapons.  Recall Colin Powell’s “mobile chemical labs” that months later turned out to be nothing more than labs to make helium for artillery balloons?  TPJ – Fabricating War (Lie #10)  and TPJ – WMD – OOPS – AGAIN  

                When nuclear and chemical weapons did not materialize – and they still have not – the neocons panicked. TPJ – Simper Fi – Where Are The Dems?  In July, senior Republicans in the Senate began to “leak” that revelations about Saddam’s WMD would be forthcoming: -- TPJ – WMD FOUND?

“The Bush administration and the U.S. intelligence community have had some success in finding Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, Sen. Pat Roberts said Thursday. Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on a telephone conference call that he couldn't go into detail because the news is classified. ‘It's classified information now - I am urging the administration and the intelligence community to make at least portions of that public,’ Roberts said. ‘We've had some success; I'm sorry I can't go into detail about that.’ Roberts, R-Kan., traveled this week to Iraq and the Middle East with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.” – AP   

                At the same time that Bush was promising to deliver proof of Saddam’s WMD’s, neocons started explaining that it was sufficient to justify the war that Saddam had scientists who “could” have developed WMD’s even if there were no WMD.  TPJ – Necons In Retreat? 

                In July, the US designated David Kay to head a team of 1,400 experts to scour Iraq to find the WMD.  Kay is supposed to release a report of his findings.  The ending is an incredible story:

The Times [England] reports the decision by Britain and America to delay the report's release comes after efforts by the Iraq Survey Group, a team of 1,400 scientists, military and intelligence experts, to search Iraq for the past four months to uncover evidence of chemical or biological weapons ended in failure.

In July, David Kay, the survey group's leader, suggested that he had seen enough evidence to convince himself that Saddam Hussein had had a program to produce weapons of mass destruction. He expected to find "strong" evidence of missile delivery systems and "probably" evidence of biological weapons.

But last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had met with Kay, and that the onetime weapons inspector had not informed him of any finds.

The United States and Britain invaded Iraq because they believed Saddam's regime was developing nuclear arms as well as chemical and biological weapons. So far, no weapons of mass destruction have turned up in Iraq, nor has any solid new evidence for them been reported by Washington or London.

Last week, in a confidential report obtained by The Associated Press, the International Atomic Energy Agency chief said U.N. inspectors found Iraq's nuclear program in disarray and unlikely to be able to support an active effort to build weapons.

Mohammed ElBaradei reiterated that his experts uncovered no signs of a nuclear weapons program before they withdrew from Iraq just before the war began in March.

"In the areas of uranium acquisition, concentration and centrifuge enrichment, extensive field investigation and document analysis revealed no evidence that Iraq had resumed such activities," ElBaradei said in the report, made available to the AP by a diplomat.

"No indication of post-1991 weaponization activities was uncovered in Iraq," he said.

Former weapons inspectors now say, five months after the U.S. invasion, that what the U.S. alleged were "unaccountable" stockpiles may have been no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq destroyed banned chemical and biological weapons years ago.  – CBS (emphasis added.)

The Washington Post reports:

A scheduled update on any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is being delayed and the entire report may not be published, The Sunday Times of London reported.

There was no immediate response from U.S. officials, but the report that originated with British officials said the Anglo-American team of 1,400 scientists, military and intelligence experts has very little to report.

Their progress report on any biological, chemical and nuclear devices expected Monday will be delayed, the newspaper said, and the final report to be given the Central Intelligence Agency may not be made public. – Washington Post (emphasis added.)

In short, Bush’s minions have scoured Iraq and found nothing!

                Bush is now turning the war in Iraq from disarmament of Saddam’s WMD that did not exist to terrorism – Saddam and al-Qaida.  Anonymous sources are again planting stories.  Consider the most recent:

The Bush administration has evidence of some prewar Iraqi contacts and training with al-Qaida, based on prisoner interrogations, defector statements and documents collected in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no proof of joint terror operations, according to U.S. officials.

. . . The officials, all of whom spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said there was credible evidence of more than a half-dozen high-level contacts between Iraqi intelligence agencies and leaders of bin Laden's organization but no direct evidence of Iraqi government sponsorship of al-Qaida attacks.

"There is nothing yet that remotely resembles state sponsorship by Iraq," one recently retired intelligence officer said.

Nearly a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials told the AP that the strongest account of collaboration between Iraqis and al-Qaida comes from the captured leader of one of al-Qaida's Afghan training camps. He claimed that bin Laden turned to Iraq for technical help on chemical weapons because bin Laden was concerned that al-Qaida lacked the expertise.

The captive has told interrogators that an al-Qaida militant known as Abdallah al-Iraqi shuttled between Afghanistan and Iraq from 1997 and 2002 looking to acquire poisons, officials said.

The captive also claims two al-Qaida associates were offered training by Saddam's government in chemical and biological poisons starting in late 2000, officials said.  – Arizona Daily Sun

                Is the majority of Americans who still believe that the war “is worth it” correct?  Far from it!  “America is losing the war on terrorism, despite of or possibly because of victory in Iraq, says a former U.S. diplomat who has accused the Bush administration of "manipulating intelligence" about Iraq's weapons stores to justify war. ‘The war in Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism,’ said Joseph C. Wilson, noting coalition troops have found no evidence of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq or proof linking Saddam Hussein with al-Qaida. ‘The great irony of a video image of 'Osama bin-forgotten' appearing on national TV last night shouldn't be lost on anyone.’  What the invasion has done, said Wilson . . .  is ‘coalesce into a white hot rage the amorphous envy and jealousy’ that many Arab and other underdeveloped countries have long had of America. ‘What a wonderful recruiting tool for international terrorists,’ he said.”

                Bush’s war in Iraq failed to eliminate weapons of mass destruction that did not even exist, is promoting the very war on terrorism in which we are engaged, draining our resources to the expense of our schools and health care, and indenturing our future to a national debt that threatens the quality of our society for generations to come.

            The Dems should demand investigations to cast light on Bush’s fabrications leading to war – as a light on the bow of our ship of state and a lesson never to be forgotten.  WHERE ARE THE DEMS?