United States News Digest
Cheney's Days Are Numbered As Iraq Coverup Unravels
Following Vice President Dick Cheney's Oct. 10 diatribe at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, where he continued to lie about the reasons for the Iraq war, and threatened anyone who criticizes the war policy, the leading U.S. news magazines, the National Press Club, and CBS-TV's prime time news magazine, 60 Minutes, came out this week with major exposes of Cheney, for taking over U.S. foreign policy from the President, and leading it into disaster. Cheney's tenuous situation, amid an Iraq quagmire, and a criminal investigation of the White House, is described in this week's EIR InDepth. In addition, excerpts from several of these articles and events follow:
* On Oct. 11the day after Cheney's Heritage Foundation speechTime magazine blasted Cheney in a viewpoint piece by Joe Klein, headlined "Dick Cheney, Hard-Liner in Chief: Turf wars, temper tantrums, mysterious leakshas Bush lost control of his own government?" Klein cited members of the Reagan and "Bush 41" Administrations, who blamed Cheney for President Bush's failure to take charge. Klein wrote, "his intransigence is responsible for both the CIA's fury and the Pentagon's leadership arrogance.... The failures of American intelligence have been a Cheney obsessionwhich is why Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel recently suggested that if the President really wants to know who the White House leakers are, he should 'sit down' with his Vice President." Klein concluded, "Cheney is tough, discreet, secure in his judgmentsbut he has been wrong too often, and now Bush must decide what he wants to do about that."
* Former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who came forward with his exposure of Cheney's lies on the Niger "yellow-cake," was given the first Ron Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling, at the National Press Club on Oct. 15. Wilson shared the honors with former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who received the Ridenhour Courage Award, for his release of the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s.
The Ridenhour prizes, which have just been initiated, are named for the soldier in Vietnam who exposed the 1968 massacre of villagers in My Lai by U.S. troops. Ridenhour died in 1998, but the Nation magazine foundation and the Fertel Foundation decided to name a prize in his honor.
Ellsberg compared the persecution of Wilson, and his wife to Watergate, said he hoped the result for the Bush Administration would be similar. Wilson, for his part, waxed most emotional on the issue of the exposure of his wife, Valerie Plame, who attended the event with him, on condition that she would not be photographed.
* On Oct. 15 the CBS "Sixty Minutes II" program delivered the latest blow to Cheney and the Administration's Iraq war disinformation campaign, with an interview with Greg Thielmann, who was, up until early this year, the director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs at the State Department.
Thielmann's appearance was advertised days in advance, and the purpose of his interview, according to a well-placed U.S. intelligence source, was to rally the career State Department foreign service corps against Dick Cheney and the neocons in the Administration, to buttress what is already underway among top career CIA officers, following the Valerie Plame leak.
Thielmann discredited all of the WMD allegations that Powell made in his UN Security Council presentation of Feb. 5, 2003particularly the allegations about Saddam's nuclear weapons program. Both the aluminum tubes and the charges that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa, were soundly disproved by Thielmann, as well as by Houston Wood, an Oak Ridge National Labs expert on nuclear weapons, and Steven Allison, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq. The intelligence professionals and scientists interviewed on Sixty Minutes II also trashed Powell's use of satellite photos, which purported to prove that Iraq had mobile chemical and biological weapons labs. The so-called decontamination trucks that Powell showed in his UN presentation turned out to be fire trucks!
The Iraqi "scientist" Adnan Sayeed Haideiri, who was introduced to the U.S. government by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, claimed that he was a civil engineer who had visited numerous top secret weapons labs in Iraq. UN physicist David Albright, also interviewed by Sixty Minutes II, reviewed transcripts of the Haideiri debriefings, and revealed that Haideiri knew nothing about chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Yet he was so highly valued by the Bush Administration that he was placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. The show revealed that Haideir turned out to be an epoxy painter!
Thielmann summed up the matter at the close of the CBS segment: "There's plenty of blame to go around. The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community, and most of the blame to the senior administration officials," he said. On Powell, Thielmann told Sixty Minutes II, sadly, "I think my conclusion now is that it's probably one of the low points in his long, distinguished service to the nation."
* "The Feds will want to interview I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, an aggressive consumer of intelligence regarded by some CIA analysts as an intimidating figure," wrote veteran reporters Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff in the Oct. 13 issue of Newsweek. In a lengthy analysis of the Wilson leak, they suggest that the leak came from someone in the White House national-security apparatus, and that this points in the direction of Cheney's staff.
"If the trail of the leaker does lead back into Cheney's office, the irony will be too delicious for the press to ignore," Thomas and Isikoff say, emphasizing the fact that Cheney has been the most outspoken foe against leaks in the Administration, and the Vice President's office is known for its secrecy. After 9/11, when someone leaked transcripts of Al Qaeda discussions picked up by the NSA, Cheney called the heads of both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and chewed them out over the disclosures.
Chickenhawks Still Run Iraq War Trying to Dump Sanchez
The Washington Post's Thomas Ricks was provided a leak that a troop withdrawal plan for is "in the works," but that Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the overall commander of the Iraq war, is going to be "eased out." Sanchez has only been in position for four months, but the Pentagon chickenhawks are known to be angered by his outspokenness that the U.S. is facing "insurgency" in Iraq. Sanchez's assessment confirmed to be accurate by top military sources who have been consulted by EIW contradicts the Pentagon and White House spin, that the killings of 103 U.S. troops in combat since "the end of major combat" announced by Bush, are solely due to "foreign terrorists," and Saddam Hussein loyalists.
Despite the headline, touting a "withdrawal plan," Ricks' Oct. 20 story shows that it is actually a continuing occupation plan, because there will still be 100,000 troops there by the end of 2004, and by the "middle of 2005," it will be down to 50,000 troops. This is the "best-case scenario," according to unnamed defense experts, with Iraqi trained police and military taking over successfully. Ricks also reports that "There is deep worry in the Army that if Iraqi security forces cannot shoulder more of the burden, the Army will have to maintain its current troop levels beyond the spring, which could create a personnel exodus that would threaten the viability of the all-volunteer force."
Senator Byrd Announces "The Emperor Has No Clothes"
Joining Sen. Ted Kennedy (see Editorial, this week), in sounding an alarm signal to Democrats, on Oct. 17, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) told the Senate, that "the Emperor has no clothes," and there was no way he was going to support a U.S. Iraq policy based, provably, on lies. Nor was he going to stand idly by, while those who expose the nakedness of the emperor are attacked. "Those who have noticed the elephant in the room, that is, the fact that this war was based on falsehoods, have had our patriotism questioned. Those who have spoken aloud the thought shared by hundreds of thousands of military families across this country, that our troops should return quickly and safely from the dangers half a world away, have been accused of cowardice.... The right to ask questions, debate and dissent is under attack."
He noted that, throughout the Senate debate on the $87 billion Halliburton Relief Fund bill, he made numerous attempts to divert funds in the bill to better use, "but, at every turn, my efforts were thwarted by the vapid argument that we must all support the requests of the Commander in Chief."
After attacking the Cheney-Bush Administration's lies about the Iraq war, Byrd concluded his speech with the now-famous quote from Hermann Goering, wherein he told an interviewer that it is easy to lead the people into war, no matter the form of government. "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
Republican Ron Paul Defends Constitution Against Cheney's PNAC Empire Plan
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), after the House vote passing the $87 billion Halliburton Relief Act, delivered a speech on the floor of the House denouncing President Bush's "interventionist" foreign policy. He identified the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) as the source of that policy, and noted that "within weeks" of the 9/11 attacks, the neo-conservative bastion, PNAC "saw this as an opportunity to bring forth their suggestions that they had made many years ago, and they have been agitating for over 10 years, and that is to go into Iraq, and they saw this as an opportunity." Paul noted that he had long been convinced that Saddam Hussein was not a threat to U.S. security, and that 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq, and that events since the invasion "have proven that assumption correct." Paul further argued that, under the Constitution, the war-making power lies exclusively with the Congress, and that the Congress does not have the right to surrender that authority to the President by a majority vote.
In the same context, he also warned that the Syria Accountability Act, which he also voted against, "was more or less the first major step in the direction of war against Syria," which is exactly what PNAC wants.
Paul concluded his remarks quoting extensively from the founding document of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, calling for an end to the move towards empire. Finally, he warned that the pursuit of empire will inevitably lead towards the debasement of the currency, and the interventionist policy will come to an end "when we can no longer afford it." Paul said that the Empire policy will fail, not because of his speech, but because such an unjust, and incompetent policy would destroy itself.
New Scandal In Iraq Casualty Coverup
Sick and wounded American soldiers are being held in squalor, at Fort Stewart, Georgia, according to UPI investigative journalist Mark Benjamin. He writes: "The National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers' living conditions are so substandard, and the medical care so poor, that many of them believe the Army is trying push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments. One document shown to UPI states that no more doctor appointments are available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 Veterans Day."
Benjamin quotes several soldiers, who report the lack of facilities, the impossibility of getting diagnosis or care. One said, he felt that he was being "treated like a third-class citizen." Benjamin continues: "One month after President Bush greeted soldiers at Fort Stewart home of the famed Third Infantry Division as heroes on their return from Iraq, approximately 600 sick or injured members of the Army Reserves and National Guard are warehoused in rows of spare, steamy and dark cement barracks in a sandy field, waiting for doctors to treat their wounds or illnesses.
"The Reserve and National Guard soldiers are on what the Army calls 'medical hold,' while the Army decides how sick or disabled they are and what benefits if any they should get as a result."
Some reported waiting six hours a day, or weeks or months, to get treatment! "The soldiers said professional active-duty personnel are getting better treatment, while troops who serve in the National Guard or Army Reserve are left to wallow in medical hold." The troops there say about 40% of those in "medical hold" were in Iraq. Many complain of strange new diseases, "like heart and lung problems," but are told they had a "pre-existing condition."
The conditions for the wounded and sick are terrible: "Most soldiers in medical hold at Fort Stewart stay in rows of rectangular, gray, single-story cinder block barracks without bathrooms or air conditioning. They are dark and sweltering in the southern Georgia heat and humidity. Around 60 soldiers cram in the bunk beds in each barrack.
"Soldiers make their way by walking or using crutches through the sandy dirt to a communal bathroom, where they have propped office partitions between otherwise open toilets for privacy. A row of leaky sinks sits on an opposite wall. The latrine smells of urine and is full of bugs, because many windows have no screens. Showering is in a communal, cinder block room. Soldiers say they have to buy their own toilet paper."
Arabs Won't Vote For Bush This Time Around
"If Bush got 50% of the Arab American vote, last time, he'll be lucky to get 5% next year," was the comment of an attendee at the American Arab Institute's Presidential candidates' forum in Michigan on Oct. 17. The AAI, headed by Arab American James Zogby, did not invite Lyndon LaRouche, who is the second candidate only of the nine currently active Democrats, to be certified for Federal matching funds. At the same forum, Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, was booed over his stand on Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and for his support for the Iraq war.
Former Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Mark Racicot, representing President Bush's re-election campaign, received cold welcome from the AAI. Racicot was listened to in silence, and he was criticized for his response to questions on the Administration's Middle East policy and on the USA Patriot Act.
Also getting rough treatment was Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman, although that's not surprising given his impeccable Likudnik credentials. Lieberman was booed and heckled, when he defended Israel's apartheid "security wall" and reiterated his attack on Howard Dean for suggesting a more "even-handed" approach to Israel and the Palestinians.
|