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March 16, 2006
OT 06-22
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Mother Jones: Heroes in Error
How a fake general, a pliant media, and a master manipulator helped lead the United States into war.
Unfortunately, the story was an elaborate scam. The purported general had indeed met with American intelligence agents in Turkey, but unbeknownst to Hedges the agents had dismissed his claims out of hand. What the reporters also didn’t know, and what has never before been reported, is that it now appears that the man himself was a fake. According to an ex-INC official, the Ghurairy who met with the Times and PBS was actually a former Iraqi sergeant, then living in Turkey and known by the code name Abu Zainab. The real Lt. General Ghurairy, it seems, had never left Iraq.
…
Chalabi had been a source for Bergman since 1991, when, following the Gulf War, the CIA hired the Rendon Group, a public relations firm, to unite Saddam’s surviving enemies with the aim of destabilizing his regime. As part of that project, the Rendon Group created the INC. Led by Chalabi, an Iraqi expatriate who’d recently fled Jordan after being convicted of fraud, the INC was given millions of dollars to set up a large network of defectors and exiles, who, in addition to providing intelligence to the CIA, were charged with disseminating anti-Saddam propaganda in Iraq and to the Western media. With the help of Rendon, the INC began placing stories in the British press about Saddam’s atrocities. The aim was for the stories to then be picked up by the American media, thereby bypassing U.S. laws that prevented government funding of domestic propaganda.
Uncle Chutzpah and His Willing Executioners on the Dire Iran Threat: With Twelve Principles of War Propaganda in Ongoing Service
A very good essay by Ed Herman.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 16 2006 9:41 utc | 2
Still wondering why NATO is in Afghanistan?
Scientists Find Big Afghan Oil Resources
Two geological basins in northern
Afghanistan hold 18 times the oil and triple the natural gas resources previously thought, scientists said Tuesday as part of a U.S. assessment aimed at enticing energy development in the war-torn country.
Nearly 1.6 billion barrels of oil, mostly in the Afghan-Tajik Basin, and about 15.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, mainly in the Amu Darya Basin, could be tapped, said the
U.S. Geological Survey and Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines and Industry.
…
The $2 million assessment, paid for by the independent U.S. Trade and Development Agency, was nearly four years in the making, said Daniel Stein, the agency’s regional director for Europe and Eurasia. The total area assessed was only about one-sixth of the two basins’ 200,000 square miles that lie within Afghanistan.
Does anybody believe this was not known or highly suspected before the invasion of Afghanistan?
One of the most alarming points made in the documentary that caused audience members to cringe was the suggestion of a required radio frequency identification chip (RFID) in every citizen’s skin. The reality of this chip’s existence and enforcement was presented by the chip’s manufacturers and by the government, which intends to begin requiring RFIDs for every American by May of 2008. If enforced, checkpoints across the nation that hark back to the times of a Nazi Regime would require citizens to “present their papers,” or chips for any authority who asks. In addition, an ID chip would be planted in every product consumers purchase for product-tracking purposes and to provide the government with detailed information about every citizen’s whereabouts. Whether you buy Twinkies or condoms, the government will know when, where, and how many you bought. Furthermore, even the cash a consumer uses to purchase chipped goods would have chips implanted between the papers, so that the flow of cash currency we now consider to be liquid would be tracked similarly to your credit card purchases. Therefore, products and services that the government would like to deny individuals, such as cigarettes for someone with a strict life-insurance policy, would be denied to the individual at the point-of-purchase. More in-depth coverage of RFIDs is explained in Mike Ruppert’s book, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. In the film, Congressman Ron Paul (R.-TX) describes a police state as a place where the people are unable to take action without the government’s permission and emphasizes that RFID chips are the next step towards a police state in America.
Posted by: Argh | Mar 16 2006 11:05 utc | 4
Think the whole Terry Schaivo issue is dead? Think again.
Posted by: Joe F | Mar 16 2006 14:13 utc | 7
b – Was re-reading a 20-page emergency planning document we’ve being asked to make current and implement for a local startup planning agency,
and finally just started laughing. 20-pages of
crap, org charts, flow charts, emergency levels I, II and III. Then looking at videos from the
Katrina disaster, now $40B downwind and still at
least $60B more before the overlapping planning
groups and Federal agencies even get a grip.
So on your links, I can only say this. Apply
Occum’s Razor, with a freshly-sharpened blade.
Always … always defer to utter bureaucratic
incompetence in your analysis of world politics,
and … we might as well say it, to capitalism.
Was listening to Squawk Box, while I tried to
figure out how to pancake this 20-page piece
of shyte down to 4-pages, some investment bank
clown saying, ‘just because indexes are at all-
time highs, interest rates are climbing and
market reports falling, ‘smart investors’ can
still make a killing by buying into selloffs,
and holding blue chips’. Oh, my aching Pravda.
Here is American Soviet, in a nut(case) shell:
http://tinyurl.com/qpyaq “Dropping like flies.”
Posted by: PingPing | Mar 16 2006 15:18 utc | 9
Mission Hospice
Let’s do an MOA experiment, and see if our blog community can be counted on, where the need is:
Meeting Point, Kitgum, Uganda
Uganda has been in civil war between clashing militias for years, and is also suffering from severe malnutrition and AIDS crises as a result of the civil unrest. For the past 15 years, a community group called Meeting Point, founded by Ugandan Ketty Opaka, has provided refugee and orphan relief.
Ketty and her Meeting Point organization were honoured by Harvard University, along with other
founders of grassroots organizations around the globe, who flew her to Cambridge in 2005 so that
Ketty could spread the word about her success. She is truly a remarkable woman.
Efforts to expand the Meeting Point office into a new building are already underway. They intend
to build a day-care facility alongside the office, then expand their water supply and water treatment to allow more refugees and orphans to use the center. Solar power would be a welcome addition, to allow evening reading and activities.
A larger solar power implementation, with a new well bore, providing pumped water for a drip irrigation system, would allow Meeting Point to maintain sustainability with surrounding orchards and fields.
US aid donors and sponsors with interest in design and construction of simple building structures using local materials, in water well development and basic water treatment, in solar power lights and pumps, and in drip irrigation systems are encouraged to make contact.
The beneficiary group is 100% Acholi, because of the homogenous make up of northern Uganda. They are primarily Christian, both Catholic and Protestant, although there is a small Muslim population and most hold animist beliefs as well. The primary occupation of all the beneficiaries is either subsistence farming or running small kiosks. However, due to the on-going armed conflict, few are able to farm their lands. Many have only small plots of land in the town, which yields little for large families. The income of the beneficiaries is extremely low, approximately one dollar per day.
The Acholi community is rich in its traditions and resources, although the two-decade long war in the north has slowly eroded many of the community’s strengths. One of the remarkable strengths of this community is the kinship ties of the extended family, which care for the most vulnerable in the family. This includes HIV/AIDS patients and orphans, although this has come after tremendous work and sensitization from Meeting Point.
Contact is: Chris Blattman
Posted by: Meeting Point | Mar 16 2006 16:30 utc | 10
A good, long blog post (via Today in Iraq):
We’ve Done It Before, So Why All The Shock? The War on Iraq in the context of the Forces that Shape US Foreign Policy
Many people seem to forget, or perhaps never knew, that the United States, like other advanced capitalist countries, has been aggressively expansionist from the beginning. From the moment of its founding, it has been driven to extend its domain on behalf of the dominant economic group and has used force to do so. The logic of the US slave system drove the United States to annex Texas and wage war on Mexico. Later, the logic of capitalism drove the US state to acquire the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii and Samoa as colonies and semi-colonies and dependencies, and to intervene militarily over and over again in Latin America to establish an effective suzerainty over the Western hemisphere. The same logic demanded wars be fought in the post WWII period, on north Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, as the weakening of Japan, Germany, Britain, and later the collapse of the Soviet Union, opened up space for the US to pursue profit-making opportunities for its corporations on a worldwide basis. (I use corporation throughout in its broadest sense, to include manufacturing, service, resource-extractive and financial corporations.) Countries that stood in the way, that nationalized assets owned by US corporations and closed their doors to further exploitation by US economic interests, were attacked, if not militarily, then in other ways. The same logic is behind aggression, by threat of military intervention, economic blockade, and the financing of internal subversion, carried out today against Cuba, north Korea, Belarus, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Iran – all countries which rank at the very top of the list of states considered by Washington to be economically “unfree” (that is, that block, limit or place conditions on US investment and exports.)
Nearly three years after “Mission Accomplished”:
Largest Iraq Air Assault Since ’03 Begins
U.S. forces, joined by Iraqi troops, on Thursday launched the largest airborne assault since the U.S.-led invasion, targeting insurgent strongholds north of the capital, the military said.
The military said the operation was aimed at clearing “a suspected insurgent operating area” northeast of Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, and was expected to continue over several days.
“More than 1,500 Iraqi and Coalition troops, over 200 tactical vehicles, and more than 50 aircraft participated in the operation,” the military statement said of the attack designed to “clear a suspected insurgent operating area northeast of Samarra,” 60 miles north of Baghdad.
b,
keep in mind that Iraq has no real armed forces, just a glorified police force that will continue to rely on the US for support and logistics. As the level of direct US involvement on the ground decreases, the level of support will increase.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 16 2006 19:19 utc | 13
As a Saudi prince pledges £1.6bn to halt plunge in stock market, the Senate raises US debt ceiling, as same Senate probes contractors over unpaid taxes, but if YOU (dear serf) miss a payment, you get reamed! You are in the US.. a country in which corporations gained legal personhood BEFORE Blacks, poor Whites, and Natives…
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 16 2006 20:15 utc | 14
watching bits and pieces of news about Operation Swarmer I keep getting flashbacks from “Apocalypse Now”. Does this picture do the same for anybody else?
Posted by: dan of steele | Mar 17 2006 6:41 utc | 15
watching bits and pieces of news about Operation Swarmer I keep getting flashbacks from “Apocalypse Now”. Does this picture do the same for anybody else?
“I love the smell of napalm. It smells like… victory”
Yes the pic does. But unfortunately there is no Colonel Kurtz…
Posted by: Chris Danson | Mar 18 2006 13:23 utc | 16
In “Apocalypse Now” there were actually people shooting back.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 18 2006 18:31 utc | 17
NYT: Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees
In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq’s most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.
…
For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.
…
Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: capture or kill Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. “Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee,” one official said.
Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit’s operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk. These stations were often nestled within the alleys of a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could land to drop off or pick up detainees.
At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.
In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein’s bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.