Mohsen Bilal, Syria's ambassador to Spain, told Reuters: "If Israel attacks Syria one, two and three times, of course the people of Syria and the government of Syria and the army will react to defend ourselves."

"If Israel continues to attack us ... of course we shall react to the attacks in spite of the fact that we are fighting for peace."

Israel today dismissed the threat, saying that it did not seek an escalation of tensions with Syria.

"This sort of statement is intended mainly for the Arab world, to give the impression Syria is steadfast in the fight against Israel," a senior Israeli security source said.

"Israel does not seek an escalation with Syria, and indeed has taken precautions to prevent that. We will act in self defence if necessary, but not if Damascus receives our message that it must stop supporting terror," the source said.

Mr Bilal's comments appeared to contradict the words of the Syrian president, Bashar Assad, who yesterday told the pan-Arab newspaper, Al-Hayat, that his government would not allow the attack to provoke a war between Syria and its rival, Israel.

"This attack was an attempt by the Israeli government to extract itself from its internal crisis by trying to terrorise Syria and drag it and the region into other wars," he said, adding that his regime would not yield to Israeli and US demands that it expel Palestinian groups from Syria.

The Israeli attack has put Mr Assad in a difficult position domestically. He is seeking a face-saving exit to avoid criticism that his army of more than 300,000 is unable to retaliate for Sunday's airstrike.

The strike hit what Israel maintained was a training camp for Islamic Jihad militants, about 15 miles from Damascus. Villagers said the camp belonged to Palestinian militants but had been abandoned years ago.

The attack came in response to the previous day's suicide bombing in Haifa, northern Israel, that killed at least 19 people. The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack.

Following the Israeli airstrike, the first attack deep into Syrian territory since the 1973 war, Syria presented a motion to the UN security council calling on the world body to condemn Israel, but the council postponed a vote.

The United States warned it would veto any motion that did not also condemn the suicide bombing, and later defended Israel's action against Syria.

The US president, George Bush, drew a parallel between Israel's actions and the US war on terrorism, saying that "we would be doing the same thing ... but we're also mindful when we make decisions, as the [Israeli] prime minister should be, that he fully understands the consequences of any decision".

Apparently bolstered by this, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, yesterday said that he would not hesitate to attack Palestinian militants in neighbouring countries.

"Israel will not be deterred from protecting its citizens and will strike its enemies in every place and in every way," he said. "At the same time, we will not miss any opening and opportunity to reach an agreement with our neighbours and peace."

The US has also demanded that Syria expel alleged Palestinian militants living in the country. Mr Assad has responded by maintaining that the Palestinians are "officials" and not leaders of Palestinian militant groups.

"We have refused their expulsion for many reasons," he said. "Those people have not violated Syrian laws or harmed Syrian interests and they are not, above all, terrorists."

Washington maintains the Damascus-based leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad directs, finances and provides information to its counterparts in the Palestinian territories.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030818&s=abramsky

The Drug War Goes Up in Smoke

by Sasha Abramsky
August 18, 2003
The Nation


The war on terror may be too new to declare victory or defeat.
But this nation has been fighting a war on drugs for more than
a quarter-century, ever since New York Governor Nelson
Rockefeller mandated harsh drug sentencing in 1973--and it may
be time to announce that this is one war we've lost. More than
a million people are serving time in our prisons and jails for
nonviolent offenses, most drug- related, at a cost to the
public of some $9.4 billion a year. Many billions more are
spent by the states and the federal government on drug
interdiction, drug-law enforcement and drug prosecutions. Harsh
laws that require lengthy minimum sentences for the possession
of even small amounts of drugs have created a boom in the
incarceration of women, tearing mothers away from their
children. Much of the country's costly foreign-policy
commitments--especially in Latin America and the Caribbean--are
determined by drug-war priorities. And yet drug use has
actually soared, with twice as many teenagers reporting illegal
drug use in 2000 as in 1992.

The idea of putting more and more Americans in prison, a great
number of them for crimes related to drug addiction, grew out
of "broken windows" social theories developed by criminologists
such as James Q. Wilson in the 1970s. Wilson and his acolytes
believed that unless police and the courts aggressively cracked
down on crime, the social compact would degenerate into
anarchy. They argued that even nonviolent offenses, such as
breaking windows or possessing small amounts of marijuana,
contributed to an anything-goes climate in which more serious
crimes would proliferate. By the 1980s, these theories had
entered the political mainstream, allowing Presidents Reagan,
Bush, Clinton and now George W. Bush to score political points
by denouncing addicts and appearing tough on crime all at the
same time. Though politicians may have embraced this framework
because it sold well to voters, its implications for the
nation's health have been extreme. The drug war exiled
addiction from the realm of public health, placing it almost
exclusively in the hands of law enforcement and the courts.

At the philosophical core of this war on drugs, as fought by
the likes of Bush Sr.'s drug czar, Bill Bennett, are twin
ideas: Drug use is a moral wrong in itself, and drug use makes
people more likely to commit a host of other crimes, from
prostitution to burglary to murder. To fight drugs, the drug
warriors have insisted, it isn't enough to go after the
narco-kingpins; government agencies and courts must disrupt the
drug supply-and-demand by prosecuting, and imprisoning,
increasing numbers of low-level street dealers, even users
themselves.

In the past few years, however, these policies have come under
attack from surprising quarters. Opponents range from public
health activists to libertarian-minded political figures such
as former Secretary of State George Shultz. On the one hand,
the critics have argued, these policies have failed to make
progress toward a drug-free America. On the other, the war has
proved to be too expensive to sustain. In an era of shrinking
state resources, legislators have come to understand that
budgets cannot be balanced, and needed social programs cannot
be maintained, unless the country's bloated prison system is
shrunk back down to a more realistic size. These two concerns
have converged to create a window of opportunity for
drug-policy reformers to push their case where it matters most:
in the states.

Winter is hesitatingly giving way to spring, and New Mexico's
former Governor Gary Johnson is tending to a broken leg in
preparation for an expedition to climb Mount Everest. His
daredevil athleticism is a marker of the same temperament that
allowed Johnson, a Republican, to become the only governor ever
to publicly support drug legalization while in office. The
significant progress he made on drug-policy reform during his
eight-year tenure helped to turn the tide for state reform
movements across the country. "Johnson was a huge advocate,"
says Jerry Montoya, who runs a county needle-exchange program
in the state, "ahead of federal policy in terms of thinking, in
terms of philosophy."

In 2002, the last year of Johnson's tenure, state legislators
voted to limit the ability of state police to seize the assets
of those accused of drug-related crimes; to return a certain
degree of case-by-case discretion to judges trying nonviolent
drug cases; and to waive the federal ban on welfare benefits
for former drug offenders who have completed their sentences.

During his tenure, Johnson, a fiscal conservative, made enemies
of liberals through his hostility to tax-and-spend policies and
his fondness for privatizing government functions--including
prisons. He frequently vetoed the creation of new government
programs, using, in his words, "an iron fist" on the state
budget. But he made enemies of conservatives as well, primarily
over his outspoken views on drug policy. He combatively
declared the war on drugs "a miserable failure" and ambitiously
investigated alternatives, including legalization.

Although he abstains now even from caffeine, sugar and alcohol,
Johnson admits that he once inhaled--quite often. "I didn't
hide it," he says. "Growing up [in the 1960s], I smoked
marijuana regularly in college and a little bit after college.
And I experimented with other drugs." This experience, combined
with a strong libertarian streak, allowed him to be an
iconoclastic thinker on drug policy. "If we legalized all drugs
tomorrow, we'd be better than we are now regarding death,
disease and crime reduction," he says. "There'd be more money
into education; and more money into treatment for those who
want or need treatment. At present rates, I'm going to see, in
my life, 80 million Americans arrested for illegal drugs. The
human cost of what we're doing is untold."

Johnson concluded that policies such as distributing clean
needles to addicts and opening up regulated heroin-maintenance
programs would do more to manage addiction than simply sending
the police out to round up addicts; he also concluded that
legalizing some categories of drugs and carefully regulating
their sale would remove a huge pool of money from
organized-crime cartels, boost government tax revenues and free
up large amounts of money to be invested in drug education and
health centers.

Retired Judge Woody Smith, who served on the bench in
Albuquerque in the 1980s and '90s before joining a Johnson task
force on drug law reform, says, "He believes our approach [to
the war on drugs] was wrong, from a personal liberty standpoint
and a pragmatic standpoint." Smith, too, was eventually
persuaded that the country's approach to drugs needs to be
drastically overhauled. "Legalization and regulation are the
only answer," he says now. "It's not a perfect solution, but
it's a hell of a lot better than what we're doing now."

This evolution of thinking in New Mexico has spread across the
country in recent years. Increasingly impatient with the costly
combination of policing and prosecution, voters, along with a
growing number of state and local elected officials, have
abandoned their support for incarceration-based antidrug
strategies and have forced significant policy shifts. From
conservative states like Louisiana to traditionally progressive
states like Michigan, from small states like New Mexico and
Kansas to large states like California, all the big questions
are up for debate: Should marijuana be decriminalized, at least
for those with pressing medical needs? Should mandatory minimum
sentences for low-level drug offenders be abandoned? Should
prison terms for crimes of addiction be replaced by mandated
treatment? Should governments fund needle exchanges and other
harm-reduction programs for drug users as a way of controlling
epidemics? Increasingly, at the local level, the answers are
yes, yes, yes and yes.

In 1996 voters in Arizona passed Proposition 200, transferring
thousands of drug offenders into treatment programs. In
California, a similar initiative passed in 2000, Proposition
36, channeled tens of thousands of addicts into treatment--and
reduced the number of inmates imprisoned on drug-possession
charges from almost 20,000 at the time of the law's passage to
just over 15,000 in June 2002.

In 1998 Michigan repealed its notorious "650-lifer" laws, which
decreed a mandatory life sentence for those caught in
possession of more than 650 grams of certain narcotics. Then,
last Christmas, Governor John Engler signed legislation rolling
back the state's tough mandatory-minimum drug sentences and its
equally tough "lifetime probation," which had been imposed on
many drug offenders following their release from prison.

Early this year North Dakota repealed its one-year
mandatory-minimum sentence for those convicted on a first-time
drug-possession charge, as did Connecticut in 2001. Indiana and
Louisiana have repealed some of their statutory sentences, and
Louisiana has restored parole and probation options for inmates
convicted of a host of nonviolent offenses.

In Kansas a sentencing commission has proposed major reforms of
the state's mandatory sentencing codes coupled with an
expansion of treatment provisions. Despite opposition from
conservative legislators, these recommendations were accepted
in late March. "It's definitely a change of philosophy
regarding how you deal with drug offenders," says Barbara
Tombs, executive director of the Kansas Sentencing Commission.
"With the state budget cuts and [many] drug treatment programs
in prisons being eliminated, there is an urgent need to look at
alternatives to incarceration for drug prisoners."

At the same time, a clutch of states, including California,
Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Alaska and Nevada, have adopted
medical marijuana legislation, legalizing the drug's use for
specific medical conditions such as AIDS wasting, and a similar
measure in Colorado was invalidated on a technicality.

Taken as a whole, these reforms represent the biggest change to
state drug policies in more than a generation.

But while state legislatures have opened up the financial and
moral debates about drug policy at the local level, the federal
government is having none of it. The most recent Bureau of
Justice Statistics data show that the number of people charged
with drug offenses in federal courts rose sharply, from 11,854
in 1984 to 29,306 in 1999. During roughly the same period, the
amount of time a federal drug prisoner could expect to serve in
prison more than doubled, from thirty months to sixty-six
months.

On many issues, from gun ownership to environmental regulation,
the Bush team has backed the conservative cause of states'
rights. But the Administration has blocked even mild attempts
at state drug-law reform and has challenged state reformers
over issues such as medical marijuana and needle exchange. The
Justice Department has fought medical marijuana laws in court
and launched a massive PR campaign against pot use. It has even
pursued federal prosecution of those who legally distribute
medical marijuana under state laws. Attorney General John
Ashcroft is "willing to push even the smallest cases," says
David Fratello, political director of the Campaign for New Drug
Policies. "We're seeing a new level of pettiness and
aggression."

Clinton's drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was criticized by
drug policy reformers for his refusal to discuss legalization
initiatives and his zeal for militarizing the drug wars
overseas. But these advocates find Bush's czar, John Walters,
to be even worse. Under Walters's reign, the Office of National
Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has encouraged state prosecutors to
go after medical marijuana providers, especially in California,
and has driven underground virtually every medical-marijuana
buyers' club in the country. It has held press conferences
against citizens' reform initiatives. And it has sponsored
extravagant advertising campaigns in state and local papers and
on television stations--with $180 million earmarked for
antimarijuana ads alone--that demonize teen drug use by linking
it to terrorism.

Walters has also put pressure on state legislators, declaring
that many drug-law reforms would contravene federal laws. In
the fall 2002 elections, he traversed the country, stopping in
Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Ohio, campaigning against medical
marijuana efforts and meeting with newspaper editors to push
his case. The House version of the ONDCP Reauthorization Act
originally included a provision that would have brought such
politicking to a new level, allowing the White House to spend
almost $1 billion in public money on ads attacking state and
local ballot measures that promote drug-law reform.
Interestingly, a Republican-led House committee removed that
provision before approving the bill.

Yet in many ways Walters may be fighting yesterday's war on
drugs. States like California, with its extensive system of
medical-marijuana buyers' clubs, and New Mexico, with its
public support for needle exchange, are beginning to shape up
as the vanguard of a whole new approach to drug addiction.

In the poorest barrios of Albuquerque, teams of workers with
Youth Development, Inc. (YDI) take their vans from one
addict-client to another. Late into the night, they visit
shooting galleries, ordinary private homes and the cardboard
shelters constructed in alleyways by some of the city's
homeless. At each, they reclaim dirty needles, fill in forms
identifying the numbers returned, give out an equivalent number
of clean needles, provide bottles of needle- cleaning solutions
and also offer their clients HIV tests.

This was once a fairly undergound operation. But now groups
like YDI operate across the state with strong support and
funding from New Mexico's Department of Health. All told, they
distribute hundreds of thousands of clean needles per month to
almost 7,000 card-carrying clients--and retrieve hundreds of
thousands of dirty needles.

New Mexico's harm-reduction approach seems to be bearing fruit.
A study from 1997 found that while the majority of the state's
injection-drug users had been exposed to hepatitis
C--suggesting that considerable needle-sharing was taking
place--less than 1 percent of injection-drug users tested
positive for HIV. Health experts saw a brief window of
opportunity in which to create workable needle-exchange
programs that could prevent HIV from spreading, as hepatitis C
already had. So far, the programs appear to have worked: In a
state with one of the largest per capita injection-drug-using
populations in the country (New Mexico recorded 11.6 heroin
deaths per 100,000 between 1993 and 1995, compared with a
national average of 5.4 deaths per 100,000), the
needle-exchange program has kept HIV to a bare minimum within
the close-knit community of users. Department of Health experts
estimate that even today, that number is around 11 percent--a
low rate, compared with data from the federal Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention showing that 27 percent of
injection-drug users are HIV-positive in cities like Boston,
Miami and Washington.

"My whole attitude about drugs and drug users has changed,"
says Rosie Clifford, a nurse who works in a public health
center in the hardscrabble community of Los Lunas, twenty miles
south of Albuquerque. "I used to be very conservative, very law
and order. But even if you're really conservative, and you look
at needle exchange, you ought to see it as a good way to stop
the further spread of HIV and hepatitis and any blood-borne
disease."

Danny, a twentysomething heroin addict, has been a client of
YDI since 1999 and speaks with gratitude about the group's
services. "I don't have to worry about used needles, about
diseases," he says.  "There was a time if I needed a new
syringe I'd have to buy it for five bucks, and you don't know
if it's new or not." YDI has provided Danny with health
information, and, if he needs it, the group will arrange for a
doctor to visit him at home.

Elsewhere in the state, in Rio Arriba County, near the nuclear
laboratories of Los Alamos, public health workers are
distributing not only needles but Narcan, an injected
medication that can reverse the effects of a heroin overdose.
So far, they believe they have saved about a dozen lives by
training addicts in its use.

Many of the communities in this beautiful mountainous region
are desperately poor. Often the roads are dusty and unpaved,
dotted with impromptu altars set up in memory of those killed
in car accidents-- or murdered in battles over drugs and drug
money. Heroin and methamphetamine addiction is so widespread
here that in some houses, three generations of users share
drugs with one another. Yet, while the police in many parts of
the country routinely arrest users--and even level
paraphernalia charges against addicts bringing dirty needles
into exchange programs--in the town of Española, police chief
Richard Guillen allows harm-reduction coordinators into his
jail and encourages his officers to coax addicts to seek
treatment.

Guillen believes that the old approach to drug addiction has
failed: "All we're doing is interdiction at the federal level,"
he says, "and we haven't been successful in reducing demand."
By contrast, he says, his local police have recognized that "an
addiction to drugs is just like any other illness. Let's try to
get them treatment, counseling. Without treatment, all we have
is a revolving door."

In the 1980s and early '90s, faced with a growing crack
epidemic and the attendant media reports of out-of-control drug
gangs and waves of violent crime, the public threw its support
behind extremely coercive antidrug policies. Then the crime
rates began falling and, gradually, public attitudes began to
soften. High-profile research projections and a growing cadre
of advocacy groups--many, like the Lindesmith Center and the
Drug Policy Foundation, funded by billionaire philanthropist
George Soros--encouraged this shift in attitudes by suggesting
that treatment was more effective than prison at lowering both
addiction and crime. The advocacy groups drafted model reform
legislation and promoted ballot initiatives like those that
have diverted nonviolent drug offenders away from prisons in
Arizona and California. The researchers produced numerous
studies showing that it costs far less to place an addict in
treatment than in prison--and that treatment has a higher
success rate in breaking the addiction cycle. A survey
conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2001 found that fully
73 percent of Americans favored permitting medical marijuana
prescriptions; 47 percent favored rolling back
mandatory-minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders; and
52 percent believed drug use should be treated as a disease
rather than a crime. Faced with this grassroots shift, local
elected officials, too, began to re-examine the beliefs and
theories underlying America's antidrug strategy.

Ever since recession hit two years ago, these changes in
thinking have been bolstered by fiscal realities. While the
Bush Administration may think it can fight a war on terror and
run an occupation of Iraq while also cutting taxes and
continuing the drug-war imprisonment boom, states are dealing
with a more bitter reality. The Administration may want to
devote resources to shutting down medical-marijuana buyers'
clubs set up legally under new state laws, but states are no
longer so enthusiastic. They are realizing that their budgets,
buffeted by declining tax revenues, simply can't support major
domestic-security spending and, at the same time, continued
high expenditures on drug-war policing and mass incarceration.
With drug treatment cheaper than incarceration and increasingly
viable in the court of public opinion, drug-law reform is
gaining ground despite federal intransigence. More and more
elected officials are beginning to conclude that it's time to
bring home the troops in the war on drugs as we know it.
"Treatment instead of incarceration across the whole country
has become a political safe ground," former Governor Johnson
says. "It could not have been said safely prior to three years
ago. Now it's totally safe."



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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0801-07.htm

Published on Friday, August 1, 2003 by the Seattle Times

Bush's High Crimes Against the Nation
by Walter Williams


George W. Bush has knowingly deceived the American people on
the two overriding policy issues of his presidency — the
invasion of Iraq and the deep tax cuts.

Other presidents have lied. Only Bush has repeatedly duped
Congress and the public to thwart their exercise of informed
consent.

He is the first president to use propaganda as the main weapon
in selling his policies. Bush's unprecedented pattern of
deception may constitute an impeachable offense.

To date, only the deception in Iraq has brought forth the "I"
word. The case for impeachment is materially strengthened,
however, when Iraq is combined with Bush's 2001 and 2003
propaganda campaigns to convince the public that tax filers
with lower levels of income benefited more from his tax cuts
than the nation's richest families.

Hoodwinking the public that Saddam posed a perilous immediate
danger to the United States is Bush's greatest treachery. New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman observed: "If that claim was
fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst
scandal in American history."

John Dean, counsel to the president during Watergate, wrote in
mid-June: "Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national
security intelligence data, if proven, could be a 'high crime'
under the Constitution's impeachment clause."

Before the U.S. invasion, the strong consensus based on
intelligence community information held that there were only
negligible Iraqi ties with al-Qaida, no nuclear weapons program
of any consequence, and limited chemical and biological weapons
programs at most.

Lacking hard facts, as evidenced by his now much-discussed
deception in his State of the Union address that Iraq sought to
buy uranium in Africa, Bush mixed misinformation, distorted
allegations and unsubstantiated rumors to persuade the public
of the imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein.

The experience with the massive tax cuts for families and
individuals in both 2001 and 2003 makes patently clear how Bush
used the same unscrupulous tactics over time. Moreover, the
level of the deception is staggering, as indicated by Bush's
2003 proposal to eliminate taxes on taxable corporate
dividends.

Joel Friedman and Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities pointed out: "The group with incomes over $1
million — which consists of about 226,000 tax filers in 2003 —
would receive roughly as much in benefits as the 127 million
tax filers with income below $140,000. Stated another way, the
top 0.2 percent of tax filers would receive nearly as much from
the tax cut as the bottom 95 percent of filers combined."

Claiming that the 127 million tax filers with incomes of under
$140,000 are the big winners when 226,000 of the richest tax
filers benefit nearly as much is surely world-class policy
deception.

But is it a high crime that warrants impeachment, as was the
case with Watergate?

Republican operatives breaking into the Democratic Party's
national committee headquarters and President Nixon's covering
it up clearly constituted crimes. Bush's propaganda campaign to
hide how much the tax cuts benefited the rich is more likely to
be viewed by the public as the stuff of politics in which
politicians make inflated claims about the importance of a
proposed policy and its likely benefits and ignore potential
problems.

In actuality, the president's purposeful duping of the public
on the nation's most critical policy issues strikes at the
heart of American constitutional democracy when it robs the
electorate of informed consent. This fraudulent act makes a
mockery of Abraham Lincoln's immortal words in the Gettysburg
Address, "that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the Earth."

Deeming presidential deception a high crime under the
impeachment clause can open a Pandora's box of problems. Yet,
President Bush's actions appear to be a far more serious
assault on the Constitution than Watergate. I hold that
interpreting Bush's pattern of deception on his most important
policy proposals as a high crime against the nation is a
necessary step in rescuing American democracy.

Walter Williams is a professor emeritus at the Evans School of
Public Affairs, University of Washington, and author of the
forthcoming book, "Reaganism and the Death of Representative
Democracy."

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company

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http://www.ippn.org/article.php?ID=fh93.html

Dump Bush-Build Independent Politics

By Ted Glick

"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate
agitation, are those who want crops without plowing up the
ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want
the ocean without the awful roar of its water. This struggle
may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be
both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never
will."

-Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857

It's a fact: there is a broadly-based, if loosely-connected,
independent progressive movement in this country. It is by no
means as coherent as it needs to become, but my assessment is
that there are hundreds of thousands of people around the
country who see themselves as activists for social change who
are clear that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are
the answer for the deep crises we are facing today.

Many of these people are members of the Green Party, or the
Labor Party, or one of several local or state "third parties"
around the country-the Progressive Party in Vermont, the United
Citizens Party in South Carolina, Progressive Dane in
Wisconsin, the Peace and Freedom Party in California, the
Mountain Party in West Virginia, the Green-Rainbow Party in
Massachusetts, the Working Families Party in New York, or
others.

Probably more independent activists are not members of one of
these parties, for various reasons. But these people tend to
vote for independents on election day and to speak up in
opposition to the corrupt and depressing reality of our
corporate-dominated, two-party political system.

Just about all of us, I would guess, participated in the
historic, world-wide, pre-war peace movement late last year and
early this year. That movement brought out upwards of a couple
of million people in this country to at least one street
demonstration over that period of time.

Now, two months after that war was supposedly ended-or, more
accurately, that "battle" in the planned on-going war-the Bush
Administration is facing serious problems. They are contending
with growing insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Their
lies about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" have been
exposed and could blow up in their faces. Combined with a
sputtering economy and massive federal indebtedness two years
after a multi-trillion dollar surplus, there are ample grounds
to expect Bush's poll numbers to continue to slide.

We in the independent progressive movement can help this
process along. We can build a significantly stronger mass
popular movement over the next 16 months leading up to the
November 4, 2004 election.

What should be the major objectives for our movement over that
period of time? In my view, there are three: 1) replacing Bush
with a Democrat (since we're not yet strong or organized enough
to replace him with a Green or an independent), 2) seeing the
Republicans lose control of at least one house of Congress, and
3) contributing to these objectives in a way which maintains
our political independence, keeps the Green Party out there
nationally as a visible political player, and strengthens our
unity and organization.

It is critical that we not get absorbed into the Democratic
Party. We need to function independent of it because we cannot
depend upon that big money-dominated institution, left to its
own devices, to accomplish either or both of those first two
objectives. We also need to function independently because we
all know that whoever is in office come January 20, 2005, we
need a strong and more unified independent progressive movement
to press for genuine, positive, fundamental change.

Here are some proposals for how we can best accomplish these
three objectives:

BUTTON-WEARING: We should all be wearing anti-Bush buttons-Dump
Bush in '04; Bush Must Go; Dump Bush-Build Independent
Politics; Bush Must Go-The People Yes!; other creative
slogans--everywhere we go, as much as possible. This is a small
but very important way that movements are built. We should
carry a few extra with us and recruit others to buy and wear
them. WE NEED MASS VISIBILITY OF ANTI-BUSH SENTIMENT!

BUMPER-STICKERING: Same thing as with buttons. Let's get them
up not just on the back bumpers of our cars but on poles,
walls, wherever people will see them.

TRUTH SQUADS WHEREVER BUSH GOES: When Bush, or others from his
campaign, are speaking publicly we should be there, in the
largest numbers we can mobilize, as loudly and visibly as
possible.

REGISTER THE "SLEEPING GIANT": The "sleeping giant" for our
movement is those potential voters-50% of them--who are so
turned off that they don't come out and vote. We need to carry
voter registration forms and do organized voter registration in
low-income communities and among youth, two major disaffected
groups. We need to agitate about the importance of this
upcoming election and the need for people to come out and vote
for anybody but Bush and for progressive candidates in other
races.

POPULAR EDUCATION: We need to be about using language and
putting together educational materials that are accessible and
understandable by masses of people. What about the organizing
of people's theatre groups to put together short skits and
perform them in parks, on the street, wherever there are
people? What about dump-Bush concerts where voter registration
and sign-ups for grassroots organizing are prominently pushed?
We need to think creatively and think popularly. This is not
the time for small-group, leftist discussions on ideological
fine points.

PUMP UP AUGUST 29th, 2004: Coming out of United for Peace and
Justice's national conference three weeks ago, it looks as if
this could become a day that "The World Says No to Bush" the
way February 15th was a day the world said no to war. There
will be a massive demonstration on this day in New York City as
the Republican Convention is about to begin, and there is
already interest from groups in other countries in the idea of
this being an international day of protest.

DEFEND THE VOTE: The so-called "Help America Vote Act" requires
every state to computerize, centralize and purge voter roles
before 2004. This opens up the possibility of more Jeb
Bush/Katherine Harris-type purges of black or other
non-Republican voters in Republican-controlled states. There is
also growing concern about electronic voting machines with no
paper trail to guard against tampering or illegal programming.
We need to stay on top of these issues in our various states.

LOCAL UNITY-BUILDING: We must consciously work in our
localities to counter hostility between Greens or other third
partyites and rank-and-file progressive Democrats, people who
are in general agreement on issues but who may disagree
tactically over what to do as far as electoral politics. It is
one thing to have dialogue and debates; this is already
happening. But we need to find ways to maintain connections and
to find common projects to work on-such as voter registration,
watchdogging local election boards to counter possible
skullduggery, and agitation around issues, including issues
related to clean and democratic elections.

LOOK TO SUPPORT ONE ANOTHER'S ACTIONS: One of the positive
aspects of the pre-Iraq war peace movement was the minimal
amount of public antagonism between the three major coalitions,
UFPJ, ANSWER and Win Without War. This politically mature
approach needs to be continued and, if possible, built upon,
such as through open dialogue about differences in politics and
strategy, at the same time that events initiated by one
group-such as a projected UFPJ People's Convention next
spring-are supported by others.

A SAFE-STATES GREEN PARTY PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: I've written
about this in a past column. The Greens should run a
Presidential candidate and put him or her on the ballot in as
many states as possible. But the tactics of that campaign
should be about concentrating and focusing resources in those
30-35 or so states where it is known well in advance of
election day whether Bush or the Democrat is going to win that
state's electoral votes.

16 months. That's how much time we've got to accomplish these
three goals. This is more than enough time if we apply our
collective energies, intelligence and dedication in a way
commensurate with both the urgency and the promise of this
coming period.

"Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave until we take
The longest stride of soul (we humans) ever took. Affairs are
now soul size."

-Christopher Fry

Ted Glick is the National Coordinator of the Independent
Progressive Politics Network (www.ippn.org), although these
ideas are solely his. He can be reached at
futurehopeTG@..., or at P.O. Box 1132, Bloomfield, N.J.
07003.

__________________________________
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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0730-06.htm

The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism
Bring 'em On!
by Steve Perry

Published on Wednesday, July 30, 2003 by the Minneapolis City
Pages


1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11
onward.

Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly
maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously,
that diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the
opportunity to prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and
concise evidence to the contrary comes from the president's own
mouth. According to Time's March 31 road-to-war story, Bush
popped in on national security adviser Condi Rice one day in
March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN sanctions against
Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W peremptorily
waved his hand and told her, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him
out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for
international development, recently lent further credence to
the anecdote. She told the London Guardian that Bush and Blair
made a secret pact a few months afterward, in the summer of
2002, to invade Iraq in either February or March of this year.

Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld
aide at 2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes
indicate that Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge
whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not
only UBL [Usama bin Laden].... Go massive. Sweep it all up.
Things related and not."

Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading
intellectual light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq.
He reportedly told Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the
record that he believes Saddam was connected not only to bin
Laden and 9/11, but the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on
September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the
forefront a radical plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War
world that had been taking shape since the closing days of the
first Bush presidency. Back then a small claque of planners,
led by Wolfowitz, generated a draft document known as Defense
Planning Guidance, which envisioned a U.S. that took advantage
of its lone-superpower status to consolidate American control
of the world both militarily and economically, to the point
where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge
the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we now call
"preemptive" wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.

After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times,
subsequent drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the
basic idea never changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true
believers--Richard Perle, William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld--formed an organization called Project for the New
American Century to carry their cause forward. And though they
all flocked around the Bush administration from the start, W
never really embraced their plan until the events of September
11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.

2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that
Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat
to the U.S., a belief supported by available intelligence
evidence.

Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that weapons of mass
destruction were not really the main reason for invading Iraq:
"The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the
main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for
bureaucratic reasons.... [T]here were many other important
factors as well." Right. But they did not come under the
heading of self-defense.

We now know how the Bushmen gathered their prewar intelligence:
They set out to patch together their case for invading Iraq and
ignored everything that contradicted it. In the end, this
required that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. set aside the
findings of analysts from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence
Agency (the Pentagon's own spy bureau) and stake their claim
largely on the basis of isolated, anecdotal testimony from
handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed Chalabi.) But the
administration did not just listen to the defectors; it
promoted their claims in the press as a means of enlisting
public opinion. The only reason so many Americans thought there
was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place
was that the Bushmen trotted out Iraqi defectors making these
sorts of claims to every major media outlet that would listen.

Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman, the recently retired
head of the State Department's intelligence office: "I believe
the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to
the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This
administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude--we
know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those
answers." Elsewhere he has been quoted as saying, "The
principal reasons that Americans did not understand the nature
of the Iraqi threat in my view was the failure of senior
administration officials to speak honestly about what the
intelligence showed."

3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.

Lies and distortions tend to beget more lies and distortions,
and here is W's most notorious case in point: Once the
administration decided to issue a damage-controlling (they
hoped) mea culpa in the matter of African uranium, they were
obliged to couch it in another, more perilous lie: that the
administration, and quite likely Bush himself, thought the
uranium claim was true when he made it. But former acting
ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York
Times on July 6 that exploded the claim. Wilson, who traveled
to Niger in 2002 to investigate the uranium claims at the
behest of the CIA and Dick Cheney's office and found them to be
groundless, describes what followed this way: "Although I did
not file a written report, there should be at least four
documents in U.S. government archives confirming my mission.
The documents should include the ambassador's report of my
debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy
staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer
from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may
have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these
reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that
this is standard operating procedure."

4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.

The very next sentence of Bush's State of the Union address was
just as egregious a lie as the uranium claim, though a bit
cagier in its formulation. "Our intelligence sources tell us
that [Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum
tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." This is
altogether false in its implication (that this is the likeliest
use for these materials) and may be untrue in its literal sense
as well. As the London Independent summed it up recently, "The
U.S. persistently alleged that Baghdad tried to buy
high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in gas
centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
Equally persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency
said the tubes were being used for artillery rockets. The head
of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, told the UN Security Council
in January that the tubes were not even suitable for
centrifuges." [emphasis added]

5) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding.

Or Iran, or.... "They shipped them out!" was a rallying cry for
the administration in the first few nervous weeks of finding no
WMDs, but not a bit of supporting evidence has emerged.

6) The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar
intelligence errors or distortions regarding Iraq.

Don't be misled by the news that CIA director George Tenet has
taken the fall for Bush's falsehoods in the State of the
Uranium address. As the journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote
shortly before the war, "Even as it prepares for war against
Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its
war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is
bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce
intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ...
Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to
be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured
to justify the push for war."

In short, Tenet fell on his sword when he vetted Bush's State
of the Union yarns. And now he has had to get up and fall on it
again.

7) An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated that
Iraq could be as little as six months from making nuclear
weapons.

Alas: The claim had to be retracted when the IAEA pointed out
that no such report existed.

8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the
plotting of 9/11.

One of the most audacious and well-traveled of the Bushmen's
fibs, this one hangs by two of the slenderest evidentiary
threads imaginable: first, anecdotal testimony by isolated,
handpicked Iraqi defectors that there was an al Qaeda training
camp in Iraq, a claim CIA analysts did not corroborate and that
postwar U.S. military inspectors conceded did not exist; and
second, old intelligence accounts of a 1991 meeting in Baghdad
between a bin Laden emissary and officers from Saddam's
intelligence service, which did not lead to any subsequent
contact that U.S. or UK spies have ever managed to turn up.
According to former State Department intelligence chief Gregory
Thielman, the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies well in
advance of the war was that "there was no significant pattern
of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist
operation."

9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.

Democracy is the last thing the U.S. can afford in Iraq, as
anyone who has paid attention to the state of Arab popular
sentiment already realizes. Representative government in Iraq
would mean the rapid expulsion of U.S. interests. Rather, the
U.S. wants westernized, secular leadership regimes that will
stay in pocket and work to neutralize the politically ambitious
anti-Western religious sects popping up everywhere. If a little
brutality and graft are required to do the job, it has never
troubled the U.S. in the past. Ironically, these standards
describe someone more or less like Saddam Hussein. Judging from
the state of civil affairs in Iraq now, the Bush administration
will no doubt be looking for a strongman again, if and when
they are finally compelled to install anyone at all.

10) Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress are a
homegrown Iraqi political force, not a U.S.-sponsored front.

Chalabi is a more important bit player in the Iraq war than
most people realize, and not because he was the U.S.'s failed
choice to lead a post-Saddam government. It was Chalabi and his
INC that funneled compliant defectors to the Bush
administration, where they attested to everything the Bushmen
wanted to believe about Saddam and Iraq (meaning, mainly, al
Qaeda connections and WMD programs). The administration
proceeded to take their dubious word over that of the combined
intelligence of the CIA and DIA, which indicated that Saddam
was not in the business of sponsoring foreign terrorism and
posed no imminent threat to anyone.

Naturally Chalabi is despised nowadays round the halls of
Langley, but it wasn't always so. The CIA built the Iraqi
National Congress and installed Chalabi at the helm back in the
days following Gulf War I, when the thought was to topple
Saddam by whipping up and sponsoring an internal opposition. It
didn't work; from the start Iraqis have disliked and distrusted
Chalabi. Moreover, his erratic and duplicitous ways have
alienated practically everyone in the U.S. foreign policy
establishment as well--except for Rumsfeld's Department of
Defense, and therefore the White House.

11) The United States is waging a war on terror.

Practically any school child could recite the terms of the Bush
Doctrine, and may have to before the Ashcroft Justice
Department is finished: The global war on terror is about
confronting terrorist groups and the nations that harbor them.
The United States does not make deals with terrorists or
nations where they find safe lodging.

Leave aside the blind eye that the U.S. has always cast toward
Israel's actions in the territories. How are the Bushmen doing
elsewhere vis-à-vis their announced principles? We can start
with their fabrications and manipulations of Iraqi WMD
evidence--which, in the eyes of weapons inspectors, the UN
Security Council, American intelligence analysts, and the world
at large, did not pose any imminent threat.

The events of recent months have underscored a couple more
gaping violations of W's cardinal anti-terror rules. In April
the Pentagon made a cooperation pact with the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an anti-Iranian terrorist group based
in Iraq. Prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution, American
intelligence blamed it for the death of several U.S. nationals
in Iran.

Most glaring of all is the Bush administration's remarkable
treatment of Saudi Arabia. Consider: Eleven of the nineteen
September 11 hijackers were Saudis. The ruling House of Saud
has longstanding and well-known ties to al Qaeda and other
terrorist outfits, which it funds (read protection money) to
keep them from making mischief at home. The May issue of
Atlantic Monthly had a nice piece on the House of Saud that
recounts these connections.

Yet the Bush government has never said boo regarding the Saudis
and international terrorism. In fact, when terror bombers
struck Riyadh in May, hitting compounds that housed American
workers as well, Colin Powell went out of his way to avoid
tarring the House of Saud: "Terrorism strikes everywhere and
everyone. It is a threat to the civilized world. We will commit
ourselves again to redouble our efforts to work closely with
our Saudi friends and friends all around the world to go after
al Qaeda." Later it was alleged that the Riyadh bombers
purchased some of their ordnance from the Saudi National Guard,
but neither Powell nor anyone else saw fit to revise their
statements about "our Saudi friends."

Why do the Bushmen give a pass to the Saudi terror hotbed?
Because the House of Saud controls a lot of oil, and they are
still (however tenuously) on our side. And that, not terrorism,
is what matters most in Bush's foreign policy calculus.

While the bomb craters in Riyadh were still smoking, W held a
meeting with Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Speaking publicly afterward, he outlined a deal for U.S.
military aid to the Philippines in exchange for greater
"cooperation" in getting American hands round the throats of
Filipino terrorists. He mentioned in particular the U.S.'s
longtime nemesis Abu Sayyaf--and he also singled out the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front, a small faction based on Mindanao,
the southernmost big island in the Philippine chain.

Of course it's by purest coincidence that Mindanao is the
location of Asia's richest oil reserves.

12) The U.S. has made progress against world terrorist
elements, in particular by crippling al Qaeda.

A resurgent al Qaeda has been making international news since
around the time of the Saudi Arabia bombings in May. The best
coverage by far is that of Asia Times correspondent Syed Saleem
Shahzad. According to Shahzad's detailed accounts, al Qaeda has
reorganized itself along leaner, more diffuse lines,
effectively dissolving itself into a coalition of localized
units that mean to strike frequently, on a small scale, and in
multiple locales around the world. Since claiming
responsibility for the May Riyadh bombings, alleged al Qaeda
communiqués have also claimed credit for some of the strikes at
U.S. troops in Iraq.

13) The Bush administration has made Americans safer from
terror on U.S. soil.

Like the Pentagon "plan" for occupying postwar Iraq, the
Department of Homeland Security is mainly a Bush administration
PR dirigible untethered to anything of substance. It's a
scandal waiting to happen, and the only good news for W is that
it's near the back of a fairly long line of scandals waiting to
happen.

On May 26 the trade magazine Federal Computer Week published a
report on DHS's first 100 days. At that point the nerve center
of Bush's domestic war on terror had only recently gotten
e-mail service. As for the larger matter of creating a
functioning organizational grid and, more important, a software
architecture plan for integrating the enormous mass of data
that DHS is supposed to process--nada. In the nearly two years
since the administration announced its intention to create a
cabinet-level homeland security office, nothing meaningful has
been accomplished. And there are no funds to implement a
network plan if they had one. According to the magazine,
"Robert David Steele, an author and former intelligence
officer, points out that there are at least 30 separate
intelligence systems [theoretically feeding into DHS] and no
money to connect them to one another or make them
interoperable. 'There is nothing in the president's homeland
security program that makes America safer,' he said."

14) The Bush administration has nothing to hide concerning the
events of September 11, 2001, or the intelligence evidence
collected prior to that day.

First Dick Cheney personally intervened to scuttle a broad
congressional investigation of the day's events and their
origins. And for the past several months the administration has
fought a quiet rear-guard action culminating in last week's
delayed release of Congress's more modest 9/11 report. The
White House even went so far as to classify after the fact
materials that had already been presented in public hearing.

What were they trying to keep under wraps? The Saudi
connection, mostly, and though 27 pages of the details have
been excised from the public report, there is still plenty of
evidence lurking in its extensively massaged text. (When you
see the phrase "foreign nation" substituted in brackets, it's
nearly always Saudi Arabia.) The report documents repeated
signs that there was a major attack in the works with extensive
help from Saudi nationals and apparently also at least one
member of the government. It also suggests that is one reason
intel operatives didn't chase the story harder: Saudi Arabia
was by policy fiat a "friendly" nation and therefore no threat.
The report does not explore the administration's response to
the intelligence briefings it got; its purview is strictly the
performance of intelligence agencies. All other questions now
fall to the independent 9/11 commission, whose work is
presently being slowed by the White House's foot-dragging in
turning over evidence.

15) U.S. air defenses functioned according to protocols on
September 11, 2001.

Old questions abound here. The central mystery, of how U.S. air
defenses could have responded so poorly on that day, is fairly
easy to grasp. A cursory look at that morning's timeline of
events is enough. In very short strokes:

8:13 Flight 11 disobeys air traffic instructions and turns off
its transponder.

8:40 NORAD command center claims first notification of likely
Flight 11 hijacking.

8:42 Flight 175 veers off course and shuts down its
transponder.

8:43 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 175
hijacking.

8:46 Flight 11 hits the World Trade Center north tower.

8:46 Flight 77 goes off course.

9:03 Flight 175 hits the WTC south tower.

9:16 Flight 93 goes off course.

9:16 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 93
hijacking.

9:24 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 77
hijacking.

9:37 Flight 77 hits the Pentagon.

10:06 Flight 93 crashes in a Pennsylvania field.

The open secret here is that stateside U.S. air defenses had
been reduced to paltry levels since the end of the Cold War.
According to a report by Paul Thompson published at the
endlessly informative Center for Cooperative Research website
(www.cooperativeresearch.org), "[O]nly two air force bases in
the Northeast region... were formally part of NORAD's defensive
system. One was Otis Air National Guard Base, on
Massachusetts's Cape Cod peninsula and about 188 miles east of
New York City. The other was Langley Air Force Base near
Norfolk, Virginia, and about 129 miles south of Washington.
During the Cold War, the U.S. had literally thousands of
fighters on alert. But as the Cold War wound down, this number
was reduced until it reached only 14 fighters in the
continental U.S. by 9/11."

But even an underpowered air defense system on slow-response
status (15 minutes, officially, on 9/11) does not explain the
magnitude of NORAD's apparent failures that day. Start with the
discrepancy in the times at which NORAD commanders claim to
have learned of the various hijackings. By 8:43 a.m., NORAD had
been notified of two probable hijackings in the previous five
minutes. If there was such a thing as a system-wide air defense
crisis plan, it should have kicked in at that moment. Three
minutes later, at 8:46, Flight 11 crashed into the first WTC
tower. By then alerts should have been going out to all
regional air traffic centers of apparent coordinated hijackings
in progress. Yet when Flight 77, which eventually crashed into
the Pentagon, was hijacked three minutes later, at 8:46, NORAD
claims not to have learned of it until 9:24, 38 minutes after
the fact and just 13 minutes before it crashed into the
Pentagon.

The professed lag in reacting to the hijacking of Flight 93 is
just as striking. NORAD acknowledged learning of the hijacking
at 9:16, yet the Pentagon's position is that it had not yet
intercepted the plane when it crashed in a Pennsylvania field
just minutes away from Washington, D.C. at 10:06, a full 50
minutes later.

In fact, there are a couple of other circumstantial details of
the crash, discussed mostly in Pennsylvania newspapers and
barely noted in national wire stories, that suggest Flight 93
may have been shot down after all. First, officials never
disputed reports that there was a secondary debris field six
miles from the main crash site, and a few press accounts said
that it included one of the plane's engines. A secondary debris
field points to an explosion on board, from one of two probable
causes--a terrorist bomb carried on board or an Air Force
missile. And no investigation has ever intimated that any of
the four terror crews were toting explosives. They kept to
simple tools like the box cutters, for ease in passing
security. Second, a handful of eyewitnesses in the rural area
around the crash site did report seeing low-flying U.S.
military jets around the time of the crash.

Which only raises another question. Shooting down Flight 93
would have been incontestably the right thing to do under the
circumstances. More than that, it would have constituted the
only evidence of anything NORAD and the Pentagon had done right
that whole morning. So why deny it? Conversely, if fighter jets
really were not on the scene when 93 crashed, why weren't they?
How could that possibly be?

16) The Bush administration had a plan for restoring essential
services and rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure after the
shooting war ended.

The question of what the U.S. would do to rebuild Iraq was
raised before the shooting started. I remember reading a press
briefing in which a Pentagon official boasted that at the time,
the American reconstruction team had already spent three weeks
planning the postwar world! The Pentagon's first word was that
the essentials of rebuilding the country would take about $10
billion and three months; this stood in fairly stark contrast
to UN estimates that an aggressive rebuilding program could
cost up to $100 billion a year for a minimum of three years.

After the shooting stopped it was evident the U.S. had no plan
for keeping order in the streets, much less commencing to
rebuild. (They are upgrading certain oil facilities, but that's
another matter.) There are two ways to read this. The popular
version is that it proves what bumblers Bush and his crew
really are. And it's certainly true that where the details of
their grand designs are concerned, the administration tends to
have postures rather than plans. But this ignores the strategic
advantages the U.S. stands to reap by leaving Iraqi domestic
affairs in a chronic state of (managed, they hope) chaos. Most
important, it provides an excuse for the continued presence of
a large U.S. force, which ensures that America will call the
shots in putting Iraqi oil back on the world market and seeing
to it that the Iraqis don't fall in with the wrong sort of oil
company partners. A long military occupation is also a
practical means of accomplishing something the U.S. cannot do
officially, which is to maintain air bases in Iraq
indefinitely. (This became necessary after the U.S. agreed to
vacate its bases in Saudi Arabia earlier this year to try to
defuse anti-U.S. political tensions there.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to pay for whatever rebuilding it
gets around to doing with the proceeds of Iraqi oil sales, an
enormous cash box the U.S. will oversee for the good of the
Iraqi people.

In other words, "no plan" may have been the plan the Bushmen
were intent on pursuing all along.

17) The U.S. has made a good-faith effort at peacekeeping in
Iraq during the postwar period.

"Some [looters] shot big grins at American soldiers and Marines
or put down their prizes to offer a thumbs-up or a quick finger
across the throat and a whispered word--Saddam--before grabbing
their loot and vanishing."

--Robert Fisk, London Independent, 4/11/03

Despite the many clashes between U.S. troops and Iraqis in the
three months since the heavy artillery fell silent, the postwar
performance of U.S. forces has been more remarkable for the
things they have not done--their failure to intervene in civil
chaos or to begin reestablishing basic civil procedures. It
isn't the soldiers' fault. Traditionally an occupation force is
headed up by military police units schooled to interact with
the natives and oversee the restoration of goods and services.
But Rumsfeld has repeatedly declined advice to rotate out the
combat troops sooner rather than later and replace some of them
with an MP force. Lately this has been a source of escalating
criticism within military ranks.

18) Despite vocal international opposition, the U.S. was backed
by most of the world, as evidenced by the 40-plus-member
Coalition of the Willing.

When the whole world opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the
outcry was so loud that it briefly pierced the slumber of the
American public, which poured out its angst in poll numbers
that bespoke little taste for a war without the UN's blessing.
So it became necessary to assure the folks at home that the
whole world was in fact for the invasion. Thus was born the
Coalition of the Willing, consisting of the U.S. and UK, with
Australia caddying--and 40-some additional co-champions of
U.S.-style democracy in the Middle East, whose ranks included
such titans of diplomacy and pillars of representative
government as Angola, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Eritrea, and
Micronesia. If the American public noticed the ruse, all was
nonetheless forgotten when Baghdad fell. Everybody loves a
winner.

19) This war was notable for its protection of civilians.

This from the Herald of Scotland, May 23: "American guns,
bombs, and missiles killed more civilians in the recent war in
Iraq than in any conflict since Vietnam, according to
preliminary assessments carried out by the UN, international
aid agencies, and independent study groups. Despite U.S. boasts
this was the fastest, most clinical campaign in military
history, a first snapshot of 'collateral damage' indicates that
between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi non-combatants died in the
course of the hi-tech blitzkrieg."

20) The looting of archaeological and historic sites in Baghdad
was unanticipated.

General Jay Garner himself, then the head man for postwar Iraq,
told the Washington Times that he had put the Iraqi National
Museum second on a list of sites requiring protection after the
fall of the Saddam government, and he had no idea why the
recommendation was ignored. It's also a matter of record that
the administration had met in January with a group of U.S.
scholars concerned with the preservation of Iraq's fabulous
Sumerian antiquities. So the war planners were aware of the
riches at stake. According to Scotland's Sunday Herald, the
Pentagon took at least one other meeting as well: "[A]
coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling
itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met
with U.S. Defense and State department officials prior to the
start of military action to offer its assistance.... The group
is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who
favor a relaxation of Iraq's tight restrictions on the
ownership and export of antiquities.... [Archaeological
Institute of America] president Patty Gerstenblith said: 'The
ACCP's agenda is to encourage the collecting of antiquities
through weakening the laws of archaeologically rich nations and
eliminate national ownership of antiquities to allow for easier
export.'"

21) Saddam was planning to provide WMD to terrorist groups.

This is very concisely debunked in Walter Pincus's July 21
Washington Post story, so I'll quote him: "'Iraq could decide
on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to
a terrorist group or individual terrorists,' President Bush
said in Cincinnati on October 7.... But declassified portions
of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released
Friday by the White House show that at the time of the
president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that
possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began
circulating October 2, shows the intelligence services were
much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda
terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his
government was collapsing after a military attack by the United
States."

22) Saddam was capable of launching a chemical or biological
attack in 45 minutes.

Again the WashPost wraps it up nicely: "The 45-minute claim is
at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent
suicide on Friday of a British weapons scientist who had
questioned the government's use of the allegation. The
scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British
parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the
45-minute claim was added to Britain's public 'dossier' on Iraq
in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime Minister
Tony Blair--and against the wishes of British intelligence,
which said the charge was from a single source and was
considered unreliable."

23) The Bush administration is seeking to create a viable
Palestinian state.

The interests of the U.S. toward the Palestinians have not
changed--not yet, at least. Israel's "security needs" are still
the U.S.'s sturdiest pretext for its military role in policing
the Middle East and arming its Israeli proxies. But the U.S.'s
immediate needs have tilted since the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq. Now the Bushmen need a fig leaf--to confuse, if not
exactly cover, their designs, and to give shaky pro-U.S.
governments in the region some scrap to hold out to their own
restive peoples. Bush's roadmap has scared the hell out of the
Israeli right, but they have little reason to worry. Press
reports in the U.S. and Israel have repeatedly telegraphed the
assurance that Bush won't try to push Ariel Sharon any further
than he's comfortable going.

24) People detained by the U.S. after 9/11 were legitimate
terror suspects.

Quite the contrary, as disclosed officially in last month's
critical report on U.S. detainees from the Justice Department's
own Office of Inspector General. A summary analysis of
post-9/11 detentions posted at the UC-Davis website states,
"None of the 1,200 foreigners arrested and detained in secret
after September 11 was charged with an act of terrorism.
Instead, after periods of detention that ranged from weeks to
months, most were deported for violating immigration laws. The
government said that 752 of 1,200 foreigners arrested after
September 11 were in custody in May 2002, but only 81 were
still in custody in September 2002."

25) The U.S. is obeying the Geneva conventions in its treatment
of terror-related suspects, prisoners, and detainees.

The entire mumbo-jumbo about "unlawful combatants" was
conceived to skirt the Geneva conventions on treatment of
prisoners by making them out to be something other than POWs.
Here is the actual wording of Donald Rumsfeld's pledge,
freighted with enough qualifiers to make it absolutely
meaningless: "We have indicated that we do plan to, for the
most part, treat them in a manner that is reasonably consistent
with the Geneva conventions to the extent they are
appropriate." Meanwhile the administration has treated its
prisoners--many of whom, as we are now seeing confirmed in
legal hearings, have no plausible connection to terrorist
enterprises--in a manner that blatantly violates several key
Geneva provisions regarding humane treatment and housing.

26) Shots rang out from the Palestine hotel, directed at U.S.
soldiers, just before a U.S. tank fired on the hotel, killing
two journalists.

Eyewitnesses to the April 8 attack uniformly denied any gunfire
from the hotel. And just two hours prior to firing on the
hotel, U.S. forces had bombed the Baghdad offices of
Al-Jazeera, killing a Jordanian reporter. Taken together, and
considering the timing, they were deemed a warning to
unembedded journalists covering the fall of Baghdad around
them. The day's events seem to have been an extreme instance of
a more surreptitious pattern of hostility demonstrated by U.S.
and UK forces toward foreign journalists and those non-attached
Western reporters who moved around the country at will. (One of
them, Terry Lloyd of Britain's ITN, was shot to death by UK
troops at a checkpoint in late March under circumstances the
British government has refused to disclose.)

Some days after firing on the Palestine Hotel, the U.S. sent in
a commando unit to raid select floors of the hotel that were
known to be occupied by journalists, and the news gatherers
were held on the floor at gunpoint while their rooms were
searched. A Centcom spokesman later explained cryptically that
intelligence reports suggested there were people "not friendly
to the U.S." staying at the hotel. Allied forces also bombed
the headquarters of Abu Dhabi TV, injuring several.

27) U.S. troops "rescued" Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi
hospital.

If I had wanted to run up the tally of administration lies, the
Lynch episode alone could be parsed into several more.
Officials claimed that Lynch and her comrades were taken after
a firefight in which Lynch battled back bravely. Later they
announced with great fanfare that U.S. Special Forces had
rescued Lynch from her captors. They reported that she had been
shot and stabbed. Later yet, they reported that the
recuperating Lynch had no memory of the events.

Bit by bit it all proved false. Lynch's injuries occurred when
the vehicle she was riding in crashed. She did not fire on
anybody and she was not shot or stabbed. The Iraqi soldiers who
had been holding her had abandoned the hospital where she was
staying the night before U.S. troops came to get her--a
development her "rescuers" were aware of. In fact her doctor
had tried to return her to the Americans the previous evening
after the Iraqi soldiers left. But he was forced to turn back
when U.S. troops fired on the approaching ambulance. As for
Lynch's amnesia, her family has told reporters her memory is
perfectly fine.

28) The populace of Baghdad and of Iraq generally turned out en
masse to greet U.S. troops as liberators.

There were indeed scattered expressions of thanks when U.S.
divisions rolled in, but they were neither as extensive nor as
enthusiastic as Bush image-makers pretended. Within a day or
two of the Saddam government's fall, the scene in the Baghdad
streets turned to wholesale ransacking and vandalism. Within
the week, large-scale protests of the U.S. occupation had
already begun occurring in every major Iraqi city.

29) A spontaneous crowd of cheering Iraqis showed up in a
Baghdad square to celebrate the toppling of Saddam's statue.

A long-distance shot of the same scene that was widely posted
on the internet shows that the teeming mob consisted of only
one or two hundred souls, contrary to the impression given by
all the close-up TV news shots of what appeared to be a massive
gathering. It was later reported that members of Ahmed
Chalabi's local entourage made up most of the throng.

30) No major figure in the Bush administration said that the
Iraqi populace would turn out en masse to welcome the U.S.
military as liberators.

When confronted with--oh, call them reality deficits--one habit
of the Bushmen is to deny that they made erroneous or
misleading statements to begin with, secure in the knowledge
that the media will rarely muster the energy to look it up and
call them on it. They did it when their bold prewar WMD
predictions failed to pan out (We never said it would be easy!
No, they only implied it), and they did it when the "jubilant
Iraqis" who took to the streets after the fall of Saddam turned
out to be anything but (We never promised they would welcome us
with open arms!).

But they did. March 16, Dick Cheney, Meet the Press: The Iraqis
are desperate "to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will
welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do
that.... [T]he vast majority of them would turn on [Saddam] in
a minute if, in fact, they thought they could do so safely").

31) The U.S. achieved its stated objectives in Afghanistan, and
vanquished the Taliban.

According to accounts in the Asia Times of Hong Kong, the U.S.
held a secret meeting earlier this year with Taliban leaders
and Pakistani intelligence officials to offer a deal to the
Taliban for inclusion in the Afghan government. (Main
condition: Dump Mullah Omar.) As Michael Tomasky commented in
The American Prospect, "The first thing you may be wondering:
Why is there a possible role for the Taliban in a future
government? Isn't that fellow Hamid Karzai running things, and
isn't it all going basically okay? As it turns out, not really
and not at all.... The reality... is an escalating guerilla war
in which 'small hit-and-run attacks are a daily feature in most
parts of the country, while face-to-face skirmishes are common
in the former Taliban stronghold around Kandahar in the
south.'"

32) Careful science demonstrates that depleted uranium is no
big risk to the population.

Pure nonsense. While the government has trotted out expert
after expert to debunk the dangers of depleted uranium, DU has
been implicated in health troubles experienced both by Iraqis
and by U.S. and allied soldiers in the first Gulf War.
Unexploded DU shells are not a grave danger, but detonated ones
release particles that eventually find their way into air,
soil, water, and food.

While we're on the subject, the BBC reported a couple of months
ago that recent tests of Afghani civilians have turned up with
unusually high concentrations of non-depleted uranium isotopes
in their urine. International monitors have called it almost
conclusive evidence that the U.S. used a new kind of
uranium-laced bomb in the Afghan war.

33) The looting of Iraqi nuclear facilities presented no big
risk to the population.

Commanders on the scene, and Rumsfeld back in Washington,
immediately assured everyone that the looting of a facility
where raw uranium powder (so-called "yellowcake") and several
other radioactive isotopes were stored was no serious danger to
the populace--yet the looting of the facility came to light in
part because, as the Washington Times noted, "U.S. and British
newspaper reports have suggested that residents of the area
were suffering from severe ill health after tipping out
yellowcake powder from barrels and using them to store food."

34) U.S. troops were under attack when they fired upon a crowd
of civilian protesters in Mosul.

April 15: U.S. troops fire into a crowd of protesters when it
grows angry at the pro-Western speech being given by the town's
new mayor, Mashaan al-Juburi. Seven are killed and dozens
injured. Eyewitness accounts say the soldiers spirit Juburi
away as he is pelted with objects by the crowd, then take
sniper positions and begin firing on the crowd.

35) U.S. troops were under attack when they fired upon two
separate crowds of civilian protesters in Fallujah.

April 28: American troops fire into a crowd of demonstrators
gathered on Saddam's birthday, killing 13 and injuring 75. U.S.
commanders claim the troops had come under fire, but
eyewitnesses contradict the account, saying the troops started
shooting after they were spooked by warning shots fired over
the crowd by one of the Americans' own Humvees. Two days later
U.S. soldiers fired on another crowd in Fallujah, killing three
more.

36) The Iraqis fighting occupation forces consist almost
entirely of "Saddam supporters" or "Ba'ath remnants."

This has been the subject of considerable spin on the Bushmen's
part in the past month, since they launched Operation
Sidewinder to capture or kill remaining opponents of the U.S.
occupation. It's true that the most fierce (but by no means
all) of the recent guerrilla opposition has been concentrated
in the Sunni-dominated areas that were Saddam's stronghold, and
there is no question that Saddam partisans are numerous there.
But, perhaps for that reason, many other guerrilla fighters
have flocked there to wage jihad, both from within and without
Iraq. Around the time of the U.S. invasion, some 10,000 or so
foreign fighters had crossed into Iraq, and I've seen no
informed estimate of how many more may have joined them since.

(No room here, but if you check the online version of this
story, there's a footnote regarding one less-than-obvious
reason former Republican Guard personnel may be fighting mad at
this point.)

37) The bidding process for Iraq rebuilding contracts displayed
no favoritism toward Bush and Cheney's oil/gas cronies.

Most notoriously, Dick Cheney's former energy-sector employer,
Halliburton, was all over the press dispatches about the first
round of rebuilding contracts. So much so that they were
eventually obliged to bow out of the running for a $1 billion
reconstruction contract for the sake of their own PR profile.
But Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown Root still received
the first major plum in the form of a $7 billion contract to
tend to oil field fires and (the real purpose) to do any
retooling necessary to get the oil pumping at a decent rate, a
deal that allows them a cool $500 million in profit. The fact
that Dick Cheney's office is still fighting tooth and nail to
block any disclosure of the individuals and companies with whom
his energy task force consulted tells everything you need to
know.

38) "We found the WMDs!"

There have been at least half a dozen junctures at which the
Bushmen have breathlessly informed the press that allied troops
had found the WMD smoking gun, including the president himself,
who on June 1 told reporters, "For those who say we haven't
found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons,
they're wrong, we found them."

Shouldn't these quickly falsified statements be counted as
errors rather than lies? Under the circumstances, no. First,
there is just too voluminous a record of the administration
going on the media offensive to tout lines they know to be
flimsy. This appears to be more of same. Second, if the great
genius Karl Rove and the rest of the Bushmen have demonstrated
that they understand anything about the propaganda potential of
the historical moment they've inherited, they surely understand
that repetition is everything. Get your message out regularly,
and even if it's false a good many people will believe it.

Finally, we don't have to speculate about whether the
administration would really plant bogus WMD evidence in the
American media, because they have already done it, most visibly
in the case of Judith Miller of the New York Times and the
Iraqi defector "scientist" she wrote about at the military's
behest on April 21. Miller did not even get to speak with the
purported scientist, but she graciously passed on several
things American commanders claimed he said: that Iraq only
destroyed its chemical weapons days before the war, that WMD
materiel had been shipped to Syria, and that Iraq had ties to
al Qaeda. As Slate media critic Jack Shafer told WNYC Radio's
On the Media program, "When you... look at [her story], you
find that it's gas, it's air. There's no way to judge the value
of her information, because it comes from an unnamed source
that won't let her verify any aspect of it. And if you dig into
the story... you'll find out that the only thing that Miller
has independently observed is a man that the military says is
the scientist, wearing a baseball cap, pointing at mounds in
the dirt."

39) "The Iraqi people are now free."

So says the current U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer,
in a recent New York Times op-ed. He failed to add that
disagreeing can get you shot or arrested under the terms of the
Pentagon's latest plan for pacifying Iraq, Operation Sidewinder
(see #36), a military op launched last month to wipe out all
remaining Ba'athists and Saddam partisans--meaning, in
practice, anyone who resists the U.S. occupation too zealously.

40) God told Bush to invade Iraq.

Not long after the September 11 attacks, neoconservative high
priest Norman Podhoretz wrote: "One hears that Bush, who
entered the White House without a clear sense of what he wanted
to do there, now feels there was a purpose behind his election
all along; as a born-again Christian, it is said, he believes
he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from
the world."

No, he really believes it, or so he would like us to think. The
Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Israeli
newspaper Ha'aretz that Bush made the following pronouncement
during a recent meeting between the two: "God told me to strike
at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to
strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve
the problem in the Middle East."

Oddly, it never got much play back home.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This was truly a collaborative effort from start to finish. It
began with the notion of running a week-long marathon of Bush
administration lies at my online Bush Wars column
(bushwarsblog.com). Along the way my e-mail box delivered more
research assistance than I've ever received on any single
story. I need to thank Jeff St. Clair and the Counterpunch
website (counterpunch.org), which featured the Lies marathon in
addition to posting valuable reportage and essays every day; I
also received lots of lies entries and documentary links from
BW readers Rob Johnson, Ted Dibble, and Donna Johnson, as well
as my colleagues Mark Gisleson, Elaine Cassel, Sally Ryan, Mike
Mosedale, and Paul Demko. Dave Marsh provided valuable editing
suggestions.

I also found loads of valuable information through Cursor and
Buzzflash, the two best news links pages on the internet, and
through research projects on the Bushmen posted at Cooperative
Research (cooperativeresearch.org), Whiskey Bar (billmon.org),
and tvnewslies.org.

But the heart of the effort was all the readers of Bush Wars
who sent along ideas and links that advanced the project. Many
thanks to Estella Bloomberg, Vince Bradley, Angela Bradshaw,
Gary Burns, Elaine Cole, George Dobosh, Deborah Eddy, David
Erickson, Casey Finne, Douglas Gault, Jean T. Gordon, Doug
Henwood, George Hunsinger, Peter Lee, Eric Martin, Michael
McFadden, George McLaughlin, Eric T. Olson, Doug Payne, Alan W.
Peck, Dennis Perrin, Charles Prendergast, Publius, Michele
Quinn, Ernesto Resnik, Ed Rickert, Maritza Silverio, Marshall
Smith, Robert David Steele, Ed Thornhill, Christopher Veal, and
Jennifer Vogel. And my apologies to anyone else whose e-mails I
didn't manage to save.

Editor's note: In the interest of relative brevity I've stinted
on citing and quoting sources in some of the items below. You
can find links to news stories that elaborate on each of these
items at my online Bush Wars column.

__________________________________
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The World Was Not Enough

By Christian Parenti
7.28.03


The role of intellectuals and ideas in the project of empire
has once again come to the fore. Witness the triumphs of
William Kristol, Robert Kagan and others associated with the
Project for the New American Century, who in many ways scripted
the Iraq war long before it happened. The basic scaffolding of
modern empire requires ideas, after all, just as much as it
requires violence and treasure.

Thus it is worth consulting Neil Smith’s new book on Isaiah
Bowman, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude
to Globalization. This volume marks something of a turn for
Smith, whose first book, Uneven Development, focused on Marxist
geographic theory. His second book, the widely read and
perfectly timed New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the
Revanchist City, applied such theory to gentrification in a
series of international case studies. In American Empire we get
something totally different: a richly detailed, very empirical
political biography. (In the interest of full disclosure I
should mention that I know Smith fairly well.)

Not often addressed by historians, Isaiah Bowman was in fact an
important player in the intellectual entourages of both Woodrow
Wilson and FDR. He helped draw up the modern border of Europe,
helped shape America’s non-committal policy toward Jewish
refugees from Nazism, and ran Johns Hopkins University and the
Council of Foreign Relations. In all these capacities, he
sought to harness ideas to the larger project of American
commercial and political power on a global scale. Smith’s
detailed and well-crafted book is simultaneously the story of
Bowman, the story of geography as a discipline, and the story
of American imperial thinking from World War I to the onset of
the Cold War.

Fittingly, Bowman’s tale begins on the land. Born in 1878 and
raised on a poor farm in Michigan, Bowman was acutely aware of
the enduring frontier character of his natal terrain. By age
19, the bookish farm boy had taken a job as a country
schoolteacher. This coincided with America’s “splendid little
war” in Cuba and the Philippines. To do his part, Bowman formed
a volunteer militia but was never called up. By dint of hard
work and study, he soon made his way to Michigan State and from
there to Harvard. This bastion of WASP erudition and social
power transformed Bowman from a provincial into a real scholar
and properly connected elite. At Harvard the young man studied
geography, a discipline that was then a quasi-hard science, a
stepchild of geology dominated, as Terry Eagleton recently put
it, by “maps and chaps.” Bowman’s impact on geography—he later
taught it at Yale—was to help steer the discipline toward a
more social footing, but it would be many more decades before
geography became the highly theoretical, political, and
star-studded field we’ve seen in recent years.

As part of his geographical fieldwork, Bowman participated in
several South American expeditions mapping and “discovering”
places, in particular very high places in Peru. He was part of
the famous Machu Picchu expedition of 1911 led by the
self-aggrandizing Hiram Bingham, who later became governor of
Connecticut and a U.S. senator. The “discovery” of the ancient
Inca city was actually a rather simple publicity stunt by rich,
white adventurers. Local people had never really “lost” the
fabled city; indeed, some Quechua still lived on and around the
ruins.

Like the gentlemen geographers he emulated, Bowman was steeped
in racism. While on expedition in Peru he once commandeered
pack animals, “hijacked” several Quechua porters at gunpoint,
and even beat another who was reluctant to work. But this sort
of thing, like empire more generally, was justified in Bowman’s
worldview by the noble and anesthetizing pursuit of scientific
knowledge. It was an intellectualizing escape clause that
Bowman would use throughout his life.

In reality, Bowman’s life and thought was progressively less
scientific and evermore pragmatically political. As a young
man, his interests were by today’s definitions rather
geological: He studied with William Morris Davis and was
interested in the role of water in creating landscape; his
explorations in Peru involved mapping rivers. Later, Bowman
became interested in settlement patterns; his assumption was
that “the character of the physical features” of the earth “has
been a prominent factor in the life of a race.” Bowman believed
more or less that space created race, and that the interaction
of racial national groups with the physical landscape was the
essence of politics. Connected to this notion—which leaned
heavily on the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who first
coined the term Lebensraum—was the idea that politics was about
controlling people and territory.

Yet later in life, Bowman would articulate a form of American
control that left direct territorial control aside for the sake
of economic conquest. So it is fitting that Bowman’s early
southern “conquests” took a symbolic form of cartography. He
drew maps of territory, seizing it symbolically rather than
actually, but helping to open it to external economic and
indirect political control all the same. It was this flexible,
informal style of governance that was increasingly defining
America’s international power in the era when Bowman was at the
height of his powers in government.

For Smith this is a key point. “American globalism”—by which he
means American capitalist expansion coupled with U.S. military
and diplomatic power projection—never duplicated the cumbersome
European form of direct territorial control. Save for a few
actual colonies like Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the
United States has always preferred the low overhead and
“plausible denial” offered by an informal, arm’s length empire
of client states. The importance of Bowman in all this was that
as official geographer No. 1, it was he who most clearly
articulated a liberal academic justification for American
Lebensraum as economic conquest. The easiest way forward for
American elites was to stick to the heart of the matter:
capital accumulation and the conquest of markets.

As an expert on settlement patterns, Bowman got his first truly
big break when Woodrow Wilson called upon him to join the
American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
There the American geographer helped lead a massive study,
called The Economic and Social History of the World War, better
known simply as the “Inquiry,” whose whole purpose was to
formulate the basis of a “scientific peace.” Toward that end
Bowman created “scientific” yet rather generous borders for
Poland, which—along with being based on much closer study of
economic, cultural, and topographical regions—created a healthy
bulwark against the young Bolshevik state to the east. In Paris
Bowman was also instrumental in building closer ties between
the U.S. and U.K. delegations. After the war, these links
deepened, and as head of the newly created Council of Foreign
Relations (CFR) one of Bowman’s many projects was to cement
postwar Anglo-American cooperation. In many ways this
development augured the passing of the baton of global hegemony
across the Atlantic from England to America.

Under Bowman’s lead, the CFR became a hothouse of American
imperial imagination and a “contact bazaar.” By the 1970s the
CFR was dismissed by conservatives as too liberal, but during
Bowman’s tenure the CFR was a virtual private adjunct to the
State Department. Every secretary of state who held office
between 1921 and 1944 made speeches of “historic significance”
before the CFR, and many of its members graduated from its
private and highly secretive seminars into direct government
service. It was around this time in 1935 that Bowman also
became president of John Hopkins University, a post he would
hold until 1948.

Smith describes this period of Bowman’s career as marked by
forward thinking liberalism. By today’s bellicose Rumsfeldian
standards, Bowman and the rest of his ilk were downright
sissies: They believed in diplomacy, and for a while even had a
modus vivendi with the Soviet Union. Bowman even expressed an
amoral, technocratic concern about the disruptive impacts of
U.S. foreign investment in Latin America. But in some ways,
this phase in his thought strikes one as simple Realpolitik in
the face of socialism and a faltering global economy. He was,
in short, a careful international planner, but his guiding
vision was still U.S. economic domination—not as colonial ruler
but as “resource trustee,” guarding the wealth and development
of the tropics.

Bowman’s moment of greatest political influence was also his
absolute moral nadir. Like most WASPs, Bowman at first greeted
Hitler as a “windbag” but one that might actually be useful in
putting down the red tide of socialism. Bowman even rejoiced
during the 1942 Nazi counter-offensive, when Operation
Barbarossa looked like it would take down the Soviet Union by
liquidating millions of Russians. But all this became truly
deranged when Bowman was put in charge of “Project M,” in which
the question of Jewish refugee resettlement was to be
“scientifically” managed. Again Bowman was tapped because of
his expertise on settlement patterns and “frontier belts.” But
nothing useful or concrete ever came of Bowman’s reams of data
and maps, much of which remained classified until 1960.

In the face of clear Nazi genocide, Bowman, like many other
beltway elites, twiddled his thumbs while the Jews were
slaughtered. In this regard Bowman hid behind the academic
pettifogging of “Project M”: Refugee settlement required lots
of planning, thin population distribution, lots of capital and
suitable rural or frontier zones to absorb the deracinated
populations. Instead of urging Roosevelt to absorb refugees
from Nazi terror, Bowman suggested elaborate, expensive,
developmentalist policies that sought to link refugee flows to
the needs of capital by settling out-of-the-way areas like
rural Venezuela or Argentina.

Behind Bowman’s studied lack of concern for the victims of
Nazism was a deep-seated anti-Semitism. It seems he felt
threatened by Jews, or at least by too many of them in one
urban place where they might exert influence on the levers of
capital and political power. As for the creation of a Jewish
state, Bowman opposed the idea as it was developing in
Palestine, not so much out of anti-Semitism but rather because
he feared the Zionist project would require massive America
subsidies and military support (which indeed it did, and does).
Ultimately, Bowman’s work on “Project M” calls to question the
whole political edifice of scholarly detachment and the moral
compartmentalization it promulgates.


For Smith, the guiding thread in Bowman’s work was that he
“envisaged a global supervisory role for the United States.” At
the end of World War II, this was best advanced through an
American-dominated United Nations, which would create a
diplomatic check on Soviet power and structure the inevitable
decolonization movements on the horizon. But this effort turned
out to be something of a failure, at least from an imperialist
point of view, because the United Nations always had too much
autonomy and too many states, and was not an effective enough
tool of the United States. While this is true, Smith may go too
far when he says the United Nations “frustrated” American
global ambition. In the Cold War, America never ruled just as
it pleased, but neither was it denied a role as the leading
global power, from the Bretton Woods financial framework to
nuclear proliferation to the crushing of Third World
insurgencies in Guatemala and Iran.

At home Bowman embraced the Cold War with red-phobic zeal,
denouncing Marxism in the universities and turning harshly on
the Soviet Union, which he saw as the only real check on
American power. Ultimately, Bowman was both a visionary who
provided academic services and imperial imagination to American
rulers and a craven egghead who wasted vast sums of government
wealth on unread and unused geographical studies.

But what strikes one most is Bowman’s opportunism: He was to
the right of Roosevelt but subtly changed positions so as to
always be in favor. He spent his life in the cloistered comfort
of Ivy League universities and the inner sanctums of the
executive branch. He was a stone-cold racist and anti-Semite
who let Jews burn and talked of brown people in the global
south as “smaller peoples” in need of control and guidance. One
of his last acts of accommodation just before his retirement
and early death was to passively allow a Hopkins colleague and
social acquaintance, Owen Lattimore, to be red-baited by
McCarthy and driven out of a job. It was the perfect, politely
brutal end to Bowman’s career, which is to say his life.

Christian Parenti is the author of The Soft Cage: Surveillance
in America, to be published in September by Basic Books.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0711-01.htm

Published on Friday, July 11, 2003 by TomPaine.com

All Spin All The Time
by Russ Baker


Viva Nihilism! It must be great working in the Bush White
House. Zero accountability. It's All Spin, All the Time.
Nothing matters but politics, hence no unfounded claim requires
correction or apology. Unless, of course, they are pushed to
the end of the plank, as they were recently with the tale about
Niger and nuclear materials.

Take those elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction. Despite the
failure of the concentrated might of the U.S.
military-intelligence complex to find anything that might
qualify in the remotest possible way, the administration labels
critics "revisionist historians" and imperturbedly moves on.
The initial assertions and touted "discoveries" usually get
more attention than does the sound of a balloon deflating.
That's why polls find a sizable chunk of the American public
still under the impression that WMD have been found.

Whatever Saddam's interest in WMD, the administration didn't
know what he had and didn't have solid evidence to make the
claims it did -- much less to launch a war over them. For those
amateur "revisionist historians" out there, here is a partial,
unscientific reconstruction of the claims that fizzled.

THE CLAIM:

"Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bombmaking and poisons
and deadly gases... [which] could allow the Iraqi regime to
attack America without leaving any fingerprints." - President
Bush, Oct. 7, 2002.

THE FACTS:

The alleged Al Qaeda training camp, which Colin Powell
described to the United Nations in February, is later revealed
to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied warplanes.
By late June, Michael Chandler, the head of the U.N. team
monitoring global efforts to counter Al Qaeda tells Agence
France Press: "We have never had information presented to us --
even though we've asked questions -- which would indicate that
there is a direct link."

THE SPIN:

State Dept. spokesman Richard Boucher responds: "Secretary
Powell provided clear and convincing evidence of the links
between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

THE CLAIM:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,"
Bush declares in the State of the Union address.

THE FACTS:

In March, Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), tells the U.N.
Security Council that the documents substantiating the claim of
alleged Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Niger were fakes (and
bad ones at that) and that "these specific allegations are
unfounded." The unnamed ex-ambassador whom the CIA sent to
check out the story tells The New Republic: "They knew the
Niger story was a flat-out lie."

THE SPIN:

Pass the buck, finally 'fessing up in a White House statement
delivered on July 7 that Bush should not have used the uranium
allegations in his address.

THE CLAIM:

U.S. officials present evidence suggesting that Iraq tried to
buy aluminum tubes for use in centrifuges for the uranium
enrichment process.

THE FACTS:

IAEA's ElBaradei later reports that extensive investigation
"failed to uncover any evidence" that Iraq intended to use the
tubes for any project other than the reverse engineering of
rockets.

THE SPIN:

Powell releases a contradictory interpretation of the tubes,
then the matter disappears.

THE CLAIM:

In early April, the Pentagon "confirms" discovery of a
biological and chemical weapons storage site near the town of
Hindiyah, complete with suspected sarin and tabun nerve agents.

THE FACTS:

Fourteen barrels of liquids are reassessed to be pesticide.

THE SPIN:

Silence.

THE CLAIM:

In early April, a white powder found at a site near Najaf is
described as possible chemical agents, and presented as a
likely "smoking gun."

THE FACTS:

The powder is an explosive.

THE SPIN:

Silence.

THE CLAIM:

"Biological laboratories described by our Secretary of State to
the whole world that were not supposed to be there, that are a
direct violation of the U.N. resolutions, have been
discovered," Bush tells reporters, on May 29, referring to
trailers the administration says are mobile labs.

THE FACTS:

For weeks, numerous independent experts express serious doubts
about the trailers' purposes; a classified State Department
intelligence memo cited by The New York Times also cautions
about premature conclusions.

THE SPIN:

"The experts have spoken and the judgment of the experts is
very clear on this matter," says Fleischer. Colin Powell splits
hairs in backing the White House: State experts "weren't saying
it was not a mobile lab, they just were not quite up in that
curve of confidence that the rest of the intelligence community
was at..."

THE CLAIM:

"We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear
weapons." - Vice President Cheney, March 16, 2003 on Meet the
Press.

THE FACTS:

After the fighting, an Iraqi nuclear scientist cuts a deal for
refuge with the United States. Buried in his garden are
documents and parts of a gas centrifuge, which could be used to
enrich uranium for bombmaking. But the process of enriching
uranium would require hundreds or thousands of precisely
machined centrifuges, working together perfectly.

THE SPIN:

The administration declares this evidence that Bush and Cheney
were correct in saying that Saddam had never given up hope
[italics added] of building nuclear weapons. From "possession"
to "hope" in one easy spin.

THE CLAIM:

In his State of the Union address, Bush claimed Iraq had the
capacity to produce 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 25,000
liters of anthrax and 500 tons of sarin, mustard gas and VX
nerve agent. He said Iraq also had 30,000 munitions capable of
delivering chemical weapons, plus several mobile biological
weapons laboratories and an active nuclear weapons development
program.

THE FACTS:

Despite coalition troops combing the country, and vast reward
monies offered, none of this arsenal has been uncovered.

THE SPIN:

The administration "remains confident" that something
substantial will be found.

New York-based Russ Baker is an award-winning journalist who
covers politics and media.

Copyright TOMPAINE.com

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