U.S. government historian ordered to suppress findings on Vietnam war start

The NYT has a very significant article today, in which reporter Scott Shane reveals that,

    The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian’s work say.
    The historian’s conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.
    The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.

    Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.
    Mr. Hanyok’s findings were published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and starting in 2002 he and other government historians argued that it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal discussions of the matter.
    Matthew M. Aid, an independent historian who has discussed Mr. Hanyok’s Tonkin Gulf research with current and former N.S.A. and C.I.A. officials who have read it, said he had decided to speak publicly about the findings because he believed they should have been released long ago.
    “This material is relevant to debates we as Americans are having about the war in Iraq and intelligence reform,” said Mr. Aid… “To keep it classified simply because it might embarrass the agency is wrong.”

(Shane wrote that Aid’s description of Hanyok’s findings was confirmed by the intelligence official he had already referred to, ” who spoke on condition of anonymity.”)
As a citizen here in the US, I demand to see Robert Hanyok’s study. Both it and all the intelligence reports that it analyzed were completely funded by US taxpayers. And as Matthew Aid argues, in light of the controversy about the current administration’s deliberate misuse of so-called “intelligence information” in its (successful) attempt to build the case for starting a war against Iraq, we citizens and taxpayers need to be as clear as we can be about exactly how our government’s various “intelligence” organs work, and in particular how they can be misused and abused in such circumstances.
It seems, however, that what Hanyok has written about in his still-unpublished study is something significantly different from what the participants in the more recent “yellow cake”, “aluminimum tubes”, and “Muhammad Atta” disinformation conspiracies were doing…
Shane writes that his two sources (Aid and the anonymous intel official) both said that,

    Mr. Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of detective work in N.S.A.’s archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials discovered the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so that they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.

Actually, this account does not tell us anything about the motivation of those involved in the cover-up (as opposed to that of the people who made the original, apparently “honest”, mistake.) The main motivations of the cover-uppers could have been professional pride– as in, not wanting their particular analysis unit to have been caught making what looks like a fairly elementary mistake in translation– or they might well have been more heinous. Evidently, we need to see the whole timeline, and those original documents, in order to make a judgment on that.
Regardless of their motivations, the cover-uppers certainly helped catapult the US Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. (Wikipedia has a fairly good description of the whole episode here. However, their intro there still says of the false intel information that, “According to the Pentagon Papers and various researchers, the attacks were virtually fabricated by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration.” We need to see Hanyok’s work to get more clarity on whether it was a “fabrication” or the cover-up of an– originally perhaps honest– mistake.)
NYT reporter Shane writes that, “Many historians believe that even without the Tonkin Gulf episode, Johnson might have found a reason to escalate military action against North Vietnam.” But he quotes then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as telling him in an interview last week that:

    “I think it’s wrong to believe that Johnson wanted war… But we thought we had evidence that North Vietnam was escalating.”
    Mr. McNamara, 89, said he had never been told that the intelligence might have been altered to shore up the scant evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.
    “That really is surprising to me,” said Mr. McNamara, who Mr. Hanyok found had unknowingly used the altered intercepts in 1964 and 1968 in testimony before Congress. “I think they ought to make all the material public, period.”

So Bob McNamara comes across as, in some ways, the Colin Powell of his day.
Regarding the present-day “cover-up”– or perhaps more accurately, official suppression– of the truth behind the Gulf of Tonkin allegations, Shane quotes his anonymous intel official (who may well be Hanyok himself?) as saying that:

    N.S.A. historians began pushing for public release in 2002, after Mr. Hanyok included his Tonkin Gulf findings in a 400-page, in-house history of the agency and Vietnam called “Spartans in Darkness.” Though superiors initially expressed support for releasing it, the idea lost momentum as Iraq intelligence was being called into question, the official said.
    Mr. Aid said he had heard from other intelligence officials the same explanation for the delay in releasing the report, though neither he nor the intelligence official knew how high up in the agency the issue was discussed. A spokesman for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was the agency’s. director until last summer and is now the principal deputy director of national intelligence, referred questions to Mr. Weber, the N.S.A. spokesman, who said he had no further information.

Right. “No further information.”
So back in 1964, someone, or some “midlevel” ones, at the NSA engaged knowingly in a cover-up about the truth of an alleged North Vietnamese “escalation” in the Gulf of Tonkin, and 55,000 US servicemen and some 1.5 million Vietnamese died as a result. In 2002-2003, some highly placed individuals in the Bush administration engaged apparently knowingly in a cover-up about the “truth” of the Niger yellow-cake (and possibly other WMD- and terrorism-related) allegations about Saddam’s Iraq… So far, the casualty toll is 2,000 US service-members, some 30,000-80,000 Iraqis, and quite possibly the existence of the state of Iraq and the stability of the Gulf region for several decades to come…
Yes, you can see why some high-ups in today’s NSA wouldn’t necessarily want the truth about 1964 to come out now. But if we want to cling to the notion that our country is a democracy, the whole truth must be told– about both of these very troubled periods.

Birthday reflections

It’s my birthday. I’m 53. Thanks to the excellent medical care that I’ve had access to throughout my life, I’ve survived the birthing and raising of three children, all of whom are now fine adults whom I admire and love tremendously. I had a great education (not least, because it was one that taught me that continuing to educate onself and stay open to new insights from all kinds of quarters is a continuing responsibility.) I survived six years of living in a war zone– something that involved a lot of luck as well as some local smarts– and have ended up as someone with a voice in the global discourse.
I have a wonderfully supportive spouse; am part of a very supportive and enriching faith community, the Charlottesville Friends Meeting; live in a peaceable and intellectually stimulating town here; have easy access to the internet and to great libraries; and can get together with my kids very easily.
I am so blessed. Very few female people in history– or even today– have the advantages that I’ve been given. Yet every person on the planet deserves to have them!
… For a long time in my youth there, I chafed hard against my father, James Cobban, who had to try to raise my three elder sisters and me on his own after our mother died when I was eight. (Later, his sister, my Aunty Katy, came to help finish the job. I was pretty wild and alienated by then and no doubt tried her sorely.) Later, though, I came to realize that I’d inherited from JM a distinct concern for social justice; it was just that each of us just manifested this concern in different ways. Yes, I still remember when I was 14 or so, him coming home with a little booklet titled, “Why not apartheid?”
Basically, though, he was concerned about social justice issues. He just thought about them in ways different than I did. I’m so glad he lived long enough that, after I’d reached my late thirties, we started to build a really close relationship. We still disagreed on many things, but not nearly as much as before; and anyway, we’d found ways to talk about our disagreements. (He died in 1999.)
From him, I think I also inherited– in the osmotic way that such things can be inherited– a strong sense of social obligation… So if I’m 53 today, I can probably hope for another 35 years or so of strong social activism. We have several very inspiring people in our Quaker meeting and elsehwere in our community here who are strong social activists well into their eighties.
I guess I’m feeling a little unclear, today, on what direction this future activism should or will take. Maybe it would even go via a more quietist period, if I need to go deeper into myself and do some introspection? I don’t know. Anyway, being part of a good Quaker community gives me lots of resources to find out how to go forward. I can simply pray/reflect/ ponder on the question on my own. (Or perhaps, in Buddhist style, work harder at not pondering on it?) I can listen more closely for the leadings of the spirit. Or I can ask the folks in the Meeting to form a clearness committee to help me in my discernment.
In the end, though, knowing I have all these resources available for discernment makes the uncertainty I’m in right now much easier to bear. So instead of spending today sitting around angst-ridden and uncertain I can spend it giving true appreciation to my blessings. Plus, it’s a beautiful day. This afternoon I’ll go for a run along my usual route, checking out how the amazing fall colors of the trees along the route have all developed during the five days I was in New York. There will be normal, non-war things happening all along the way, and I as a woman will be quite safe running along the sidewalks on my own. Later, Bill the spouse and Tarek the son will be taking me out to dinner at one of our favorite local eateries…
Meantime, I actually have a ton of other stuff to blog about today, so maybe that should be my birthday treat to myself. To work, Helena!

Libby indicted; administration battered

I work hard at not being a vengeful person, but I can’t help being really delighted with the news that Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, has been indicted on no fewer than five charges related to the Valerie Plame affair.
As spelled out by AP, the grand jusy in the “Plamegate” investigation has charged Libby

    with one count of obstruction of justice, two of perjury and two false statement counts. If convicted on all five, he could face as much as 30 years in prison and $1.25 million in fines.
    …In each of the counts, the basic allegation against Libby is that he lied to investigators or [Special prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald’s grand jury about his conversations with reporters. He is not accused of purposely revealing the identity of a covert officer, the potential charge that Fitzgerald was initially appointed to investigate.
    Fitzgerald said in a statement, “When citizens testify before grand juries they are required to tell the truth. Without the truth, our criminal justice system cannot serve our nation or its citizens. The requirement to tell the truth applies equally to all citizens, including persons who hold high positions in government.”
    Any trial would dig into the secret deliberations of Bush and his team as they built the case for war against Iraq.

Excellent! To quote a famous phrase: “bring it on!”
I think this is just about the best possible outcome from the Fitzgerald investigation one could reasonably imagine. While some people had hoped there would be an indictment of Bush’s vice-chief of staff Karl Rove, and while I myself recently speculated that it would be interesting to see if Cheney would be indicted, still, keeping the focus on Libby– while Rove, Cheney, and many others must also feel that the trial will put them significantly off-balance– is not a bad outcome at all.
I didn’t see Fitzgerald’s presentation to the media. My spouse, who did, said he was extremely articulate, forthright, well-prepared, and persuasive. In the US system of justice, Fitzgerald, as a “Special prosecutor” with wide-ranging powers of sub-poena etc cannot issue indictements in his own name. (And since he was investigating allegations of governmental malfeasance, he couldn’t do so in the name of the US government.) So he has to run his preliminary findings by the special (“grand”) jury, which has been empanelled for that purpose; and it is the grand jury that issues the indictment (the criminal charges) in the name of– I believe– “the American people.”
So now, there will most likely be atrial– uness Libby pleads guilty to the charges. I don’t know what scope Fitzgerald has to offer a plea-bargain to Libby, whereby Libby might plead guilty to some of the lesser charges in return for having the other ones dropped, and therefore no need for a trial. Such plea bargains are fairly common in the US criminal-justice system.
I, however, think that the country and the world deserve to have a trial, in which all the evidence about the concoction of the whole “Niger yellow-cake” excuse for invading Iraq would be fully aired.
Also, though Fitz has now dismissed the grand jury that considered (and endorsed) the Libby indictments, he has said his pursuit of pre-trial investigations has not finished, and that if necessary he will empanel another grand jury to consider future charges.
That AP story I read– sorry I don’t have a link as I’m on a crappy slow connection here in New York– said:

    Rove’s lawyer said he was told by special prosecutor Fitzgerald’s office that investigators would continue their probe into the aide’s conduct. Fitzgerald’s office said Rove would not be indicted Friday, said people close to the Republican strategist, speaking only on condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy. Rove is deputy White House chief of staff.
    The lack of an indictment against Rove was a mixed outcome for the administration. It keeps in place the president’s top adviser, the architect of his political machine whose fingerprints can be found on virtually every policy that emerges from the White House.
    But leaving Rove in legal jeopardy keeps Bush and his team working on problems like the Iraq war, a Supreme Court vacancy and slumping poll ratings beneath a dark cloud of uncertainty.
    Rove, who testified four times before the CIA leaks grand jury, has stepped back from some of his political duties such as speaking at fundraisers but is said to be otherwise immersed in his sweeping portfolio as deputy White House chief of staff…

Usual caveat here: Where is the Democratic Party leadership??? But apart from that, I just feel overjoyed that the fabrication of this portion of the evidence for launching the ghastly, illegal war against Iraq now has a chance of being fulling investigated and made fully public.

Ahmadinejad’s toxic fallout

Recently elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday in a speech to youthful organizers of the country’s annual “Jerusalem Day” observances that, “Israel must be wiped off the map.” This is hateful, potentially genocidal speech that tells us a lot more about Ahmadinejad’s crass inexperience in world affairs than it does about any ability his country might have to actually “wipe” Israel off the map.
His country has no such ability. In good part because of the extremely large and capable nuclear-weapons arsenal that Israel commands, that would certainly deter any attempt that a rational leader of another state might make to eliminate it from the face of the earth.
So no-one needs to over-react to Ahmadinejad’s statement by engaging in counter-bellicosity. Indeed, a colleague recalled this morning that back in 1982, when Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini was still routinely calling for Israel’s elimination, and calling Israel “a tumor”, etc., Shimon Peres and other Israeli leaders were lobbying Washington to boost Iran’s defenses, and in 1982, Sharon proudly announced on NBC that Israel would continue to sell arms to Iran– in spite of a US ban on such sales. (Then a couple of years later, the Israelis and their various agents in Washington persuaded Ollie North and John Poindexter to get involved in the whole “arms for hostages” farce with Teheran… Tangled webs, eh?)
… Well, times have changed. Yesterday Peres (now a Vice-Premier) called for Iran to be expelled from the United Nations, though it seems unlikely that call will gather much momentum.
I am sure, though, that for many Israeli citizens, Ahmadinejad’s bellicosity seemed particularly threatening, on a day in which a Palestinian suicide bomber killed five Israeli civilians in a vegetable market in Hadera. The five were: Michael Koifman, 68; Perahiya Makhlouf, 53; Sabiha Nissim, 66; Jamil Muhammed Qa’adan, 48; and Yaakov Rahmani, 68. (Demographically, a fairly representative portion of the late-middle-age segment of Israeli society: one Palestinian Israeli and four Jewish Israelis, two or more of them apparently with Mizrachi links.)
Those killings were in direct contravention of all the provisions of international humanitarian law. IHL lays on all who take up arms (“combatants”) a positive duty to avoid causing harm to noncombatants– no matter how “just” the cause is that the combatant thinks he or she is fighting for. (And let’s face it, not many people lay their lives on the line for a cause they recognize to be unjust: nearly all combatants think they are fighting for a “just” cause. The vast bulk of IHL does not speak to that issue of just-ness; but it does lay down strict limits on how the cause can be fought for.)
Anyhway, my sincere condolences to the families of the slain Israelis. May they somehow find comfort in their bereavement.
At a broad political level, meanwhile, it’s evident that hateful, inciting rhetoric like that used by Ahmadinejad has the potential to have the following very harmful effects:

    (1) Stirring up militants in the Palestinian community and elsewhere who will likely become more convinced not only that their use of illegal forms of violence against Israeli noncombatants is justified, but also that perhaps it can lead to a situation in which the state power of a major Middle Eastern state might also be put at the disposal of their militancy;
    (2) Aggravating the general level of fearfulness in an already fear-traumatized Israeli society, whose members will likely become even more supportive of hardline measures against the Palestinians, if they see Palestinian political activism of all kinds as somehow linked to Ahmadinejad’s campaign of hate;
    (3) Increasing the acceptability of the argument that Israel “needs” to keep a robust nuclear arsenal because it faces an “existential” threat from outside;
    (4) Increasing the willingness of leading states in the Security Council to act harshly against Iran on a number of different issues.

Given all these disastrous kinds of fallout that one can expect from Ahmadinejad’s statement, I have to hope that there are cooler heads within the Iranian ruling apparatus who will finds ways to (1) persuade him to moderate the thrust and tone of his rhetoric; (2) ensure that Iran’s military capabilities are under solid and responsible command and control; and (3) reassure all other states that Iran does indeed intend to be a responsible and constructive member of the international community.

At 2,000 U.S. dead

Today, the MSM reported the death
of the 2,000th US soldier in Iraq.

Given that the 1,000th such death occurred on September 7, 2004, nearly 18
months into war, it is clear that the pace at which these deaths are being
inflicted is increasing.

Over at Today in Iraq, new poster Whisker has a somber
roll-call
of the names of all the US dead.  Check it out.

After reading that, I spent a few minutes at
this site
, and clicked on a couple of the tributes there.

I mourn all the victims of this war… Iraqi, US, other nationals…  Each
one who died– woman, car-bomb victim, aid worker, child, insurgent, journalist,
man, diplomat, professional soldier– was an individual with his or her own
dreams, hopes, and fears; and with family members who loved them, and who have been left behind to
mourn.  I think that’s the first thing to remember.  A long
time after remembering that, we can get into issues of politics, responsibility,
and culpability. The vast majority of those who died were noncombatants

God comfort the bereaved, the great numbers of maimed and wounded, and all the prisoners in this war.

Bring the troops home.

“Yellow-cake” from Niger: the Italian angle

Nur al-cubicle, a gifted linguist as well as dedicated blogger, has a lengthy post up that translates for us non-Italian-speaking lowlifes the first half of a lengthy piece in La Repubbblica on the gang of slimeballs in Italy (and Luxemburg) who put together the two stories on the yellow-cake from Niger and the aluminum tubes that, between them, played such a big part in helping the Bush-Cheney administration jerk the world into war.
Fabulous work (once again), Nur!
Nur gives a full translation of the first half of the Repubblica piece. A quick version of the second half can be found here. And yes, it does indeed mention that veteran sleaze-bag from the neo-con, extremist pro-Israeli camp, Michael Ledeen.

Iraq referendum results: no surprise

And so now, fully nine days after Condoleezza Rice “called” the Oct. 15th Iraqi referendum, the Independent Iraqi Electoral Commission has come out with its final tally.
Surprise, surprise! The Constitution has been adopted. The No voters did manage to get more than 2/3 of the vote in two provinces. But they failed to meet that required benchmark in any other province, including in Ninevah, though they got 55.08% of the tallied votes there. (Check the province-by-province results here.)
The US-dictated “TAL” document that last year laid out a complex system of procedures for a supposed “handover” of power in Iraq fto a legitimate Iraqi administration decreed that a two-thirds No vote in three or more provinces would be required to send the Constitution-drafters back to their drawing boards.
How much of a difference– in Iraq— does the “passage” of the “constitution” actually make. Back on October 2 I wrote:

    Let’s be clear, whether this draft constitution is accepted or rejected on October 15, the following will happen:
    1.There will be an election for a new National Assembly on December 15. (The only question is over whether this will be a “post-constitutional” assembly, or yet another “transitional” assembly.)
    2. One or more of Iraq’s three major population groups will be majorly pissed off, and inter-group tensions– having been exacerbated by the very framing and holding of the referendum itself–can be guaranteed to continue.
    3. There will remain many fundamental details of the constitution to be decided, and
    4. The Kurds will continue their march toward secession/ independence, whether with more or less speed.

All of the above still stands.
But a lot of what goes on in Iraq these days (and for several years past, too) isn’t primarily “about” Iraq, at all. The poor benighted Iraqis are just the bit players in a much broader, more arrogant drama being played out on the world stage by small groups of people in and around Washington DC. Take this piece of “instant commentary”, by “lawyer and novelist” Alan Topol, that appeared recently in the pages of the staunchly rightwing Washington Times:

    The recent Iraqi vote on the constitutional referendum represents a huge victory for the beleaguered Bush administration. Most important, it may pave the way for bringing home U.S. troops from Iraq next year. It is now possible that there may be a light at the end of the tunnel.
    With congressional elections taking place in November 2006, the administration would like nothing better than to begin a significant troop withdrawal before that date. The Oct. 15 vote, which leaves the Iraqi constitution intact and approved, assists in that process because it permits the administration to argue that Iraq now has a viable government…

Did I say “instant” commentary? Well it was better than instant– it was “before the fact”! Just like Condi Rice’s and the President’s crowings about the referendum results, last week…
(Check some Iraqi and international reaction to today’s announcement, here.)
And so, while Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald gets closer and closer to the center of power in DC, the Bushies remain desperate to prove that their their whole imperial adventure in Iraq has had some good results, however short-lived they might prove to be…

Continue reading “Iraq referendum results: no surprise”

Cheney as Agnew?

NYT today:

    I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

There had already been several indications that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had Libby and top George W. Bush aide Karl Rove in his sights… Now, might Cheney make three?
The NYT reporters write that Fitz “is expected to decide whether to bring charges in the case by Friday.” So I guess we’ll know soon enough.
From what these reporters’ sources have told them, there so far seems only a small possibility that a threat of imminent indictment might force Cheney to follow the example that Spiro Agnew set in 1973–also, in October– and become only the third vice-president in the history of this republic to resign from office.
But who knows? Thus far, Fitzgerald’s staff has done a good job of holding their cards remarkably close to their chests. (There is no indication that this latest leak to the NYT people came from them.) So we did not know about this new twist in the case until now. What more might we learn in three days’ time?
Anyway, the newly disclosed information about the Cheney-Libby conversation, certainly seem to make matters harder for Libby. The reporters write:

    Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.
    The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV.
    … The notes help explain the legal difficulties facing Mr. Libby. Lawyers in the case said Mr. Libby testified to the grand jury that he had first heard from journalists that Ms. Wilson may have had a role in dispatching her husband on a C.I.A.-sponsored mission to Africa in 2002 in search of evidence that Iraq had acquired nuclear material there for its weapons program.
    But the notes, now in Mr. Fitzgerald’s possession, also indicate that Mr. Libby first heard about Ms. Wilson – who is also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame – from Mr. Cheney. That apparent discrepancy in his testimony suggests why prosecutors are weighing false statement charges against him in what they interpret as an effort by Mr. Libby to protect Mr. Cheney from scrutiny, the lawyers said.
    It is not clear why Mr. Libby would have suggested to the grand jury that he might have learned about Ms. Wilson from journalists if he was aware that Mr. Fitzgerald had obtained the notes of the conversation with Mr. Cheney or might do so. At the beginning of the investigation, Mr. Bush pledged the White House’s full cooperation and instructed aides to provide Mr. Fitzgerald with any information he sought.

We do, however, all need to understand that the serious erosion/implosion of the pro-war “cabal” that is the heart of the Bush administration is not necessarily unmitigated good news for the anti-war, pro-sanity strand in US public life. For the following two reasons:

    (1) The Democratic Party leaders are still nowhere in terms of being out there, advocating a compelling alternative to the cabalists’ view of the world (or even, apparently, able to any significant political profit from the cabalists’ escalating discomfiture, at all.)
    (2) There are numerous “wag the dog” scenarios being feverishly discussed around Washington right now. Ludicrous those each of these scenarios might appear on its own merits– Syria? Iran??– the fact that there are no adults (from either party) on the scene in Washington DC means we need to be very concerned indeed that even the most childish and incendiary scenarios may get played out over the weeks ahead as a desperate attempt at a “wag the dog” diversion…

Time for calm. Time for maturity. Time to subject to radical re-examination not just the possibly criminal past activities of the cabalists, but also the whole philosophy of US global hegemony that has underlain both their actions and also, I fear, far too much of the thinking of the rest of the US “political elite”, of whatever political party or none…
Human equality now!
Addendum 4 p.m.: Check out Nur al-Cubicle’s excellent work on an Italian angle on this story! Hat-tip to Dubhalatch for the tip-off there.)

Newsflash! US/UK troops unloved in Iraq!

The Daily Telegraph has been shown the results of a poll that the British Ministry of Defence recently (and secretly) commissioned in Iraq, which showed that:

    • Forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified – rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province;
    • 82 per cent are “strongly opposed” to the presence of coalition troops;
    • less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;
    • 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation;
    • 43 per cent of Iraqis believe conditions for peace and stability have worsened;
    • 72 per cent do not have confidence in the multi-national forces…

The poll was conducted nationwide in August, by an Iraqi university research team that was kept unaware of the identity of the body that commissioned it. (I’m wondering about ethical concerns here? Might the university people who organized it now have been put in some jeopardy by the revelation that they were working for the British MOD?)
The D. Tel. article, by Sean Rayment, also notes:

    The results come as it was disclosed yesterday that Lt Col Nick Henderson, the commanding officer of the Coldstream Guards in Basra, in charge of security for the region, has resigned from the Army. He recently voiced concerns over a lack of armoured vehicles for his men, another of whom was killed in a bomb attack in Basra last week.
    The secret poll appears to contradict claims made by Gen Sir Mike Jackson, the Chief of the General Staff, who only days ago congratulated British soldiers for “supporting the Iraqi people in building a new and better Iraq”.

Indeed it does.
Rayment wrote:

    Andrew Robathan, a former member of the SAS and the Tory shadow defence minister, said last night that the poll clearly showed a complete failure of Government policy.
    He said: “This clearly states that the Government’s hearts-and-minds policy has been disastrous. The coalition is now part of the problem and not the solution.
    “I am not advocating a pull-out but if British soldiers are putting their lives on the line for a cause which is not supported by the Iraqi people then we have to ask the question, ‘what are we doing there?’ ”

So they don’t really have a robust opposition party in the UK, either, at this point.
Still, at least Robathan seems prepared to raise much tougher questions of the party in power in Westminster than the leaders of the Democratic Party are yet prepared to raise in Washington…

The journalist’s nightmare: how it ended for Rory

Yesterday, the Guardian had a tautly written first-person account by Rory Carroll, of what happened during and at the end of his recent kidnaping in Iraq.
Carroll was seized in Sadr City on Wednesday afternoon, and at first feared that– even if his immediate kidnapers were Shiites– they might “sell” him to the highest bidder. Initial utterances from his driver magnified that fear. (Seemed like the driver knew how to terrify Rory.)
But he ended up in an oubliette in the family home of a thirty-something guy with connections to Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army, which wanted to swap him with a Sadrist who was being held by the British. Rory is Irish; and he doesn’t make clear– quite likely, he didn’t even know– whether any such swap took place.
At some point in the second night in the oubliette, he was bundled into the trunk (boot) of another car and taken to the office of — guess who?– Ahmad Chalabi, who had negotiated his release.
A great outcome! Al-hamdu lillah ala salamtak, Rory. And a few moments of quiet to remember the lives of the 73 media workers who’ve been killed in US-occupied Iraq in the line of duty.