Final Part:
The US War And Occupation Of Iraq
The Murder Of A Society

By Bill Van Auken

Higher Education

Estimates of the number of university professors killed since 2003 range between 250 and 1,000. These educators have been targeted by Islamist militias because they are seen as proponents of secularism and a national identity that cuts across religious-ethnic divides.

Attacks on universities have also driven away students. The first two months of this year saw two bombing attacks on Al Mustansiriya University that claimed a total of 111 lives.

The entire higher educational system - once considered one of the best in the region - is in a state of collapse. Classes are being taught by untrained graduate students and undergraduates.

“Violence and lack of resources have undermined the education sector in Iraq,” Professor Fua’ad Abdel-Razak of Baghdad University told the IRIN news agency. “No student will graduate this year with sufficient competence to perform his or her job, and pupils will end the year with less than 60 percent of the knowledge that was supposed to be imparted to them.”

He added that medical graduates in particular are leaving the university without the knowledge or confidence to provide care. “There is a really huge difference between now and the times of Saddam Hussein, when medical graduates left college with the competence to treat any patient,” he said.

Mass Poverty

At the base of society, the Iraqi economy has ground to a halt. The official unemployment rate is reported by the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs to be 48 percent. However, when one adds the hundreds of thousands of former employees of now closed state enterprises, who still receive 40 percent of their old salaries, the figure climbs to 70 percent.

The inflation rate for 2006 climbed to 50 percent, the second highest in the world. Increased prices for basic necessities, including food, have dramatically affected the living standards for the vast majority of Iraqis. Within the space of just the last two years, the price of fuel has increased five-fold.

The report released in April by the UN aid mission in Iraq found that 54 percent of the population is barely surviving on less than US$1 a day, while 15 percent must endure extreme poverty, with less than 50 US cents a day. The Iraqi regime’s Central Statistical Bureau echoed these findings, saying that 43 percent of Iraqis suffer from “absolute poverty,” lacking the necessary food, clothing or shelter to survive.

The International Monetary Fund has estimated the country’s per capita Gross Domestic Product at $1,687, less than half the figure reported 25 years ago. Even oil production - the principal concern of the American occupiers - has yet to be restored to the severely depressed pre-invasion levels, with sabotage curtailing operations and much of what is produced apparently being stolen.

On top of the armed violence and sabotage, decisions imposed by the US occupation authorities have deepened the economic crisis and the agony it has created for millions of Iraqis. Driven by the profit interests of US-based corporations and the right-wing ideology of the US administration, the occupation regime headed by L. Paul Bremer launched the wholesale privatization and shutdown of 192 state-owned enterprises that employed half a million Iraqis.

The Washington Post noted recently that among these enterprises - all decreed hopelessly outmoded and inefficient by Bremer - was “a bus and truck factory south of Baghdad that had a modern assembly line, talented managers and skilled employees.” It added, “All but 75 of 10,000 employees had been laid off,” as the Iraqi government, previously its sole customer, has been barred from buying the vehicles.

Clearly, the aim was to eradicate the national economy, sell off whatever profitable sectors existed to US transnationals and, above all, clear the way for the US oil companies to seize control of the Iraqi oilfields.

Bremer also decreed an end to all tariffs aimed at protecting Iraqi agriculture, ostensibly for the purpose of making imported goods cheaper. The effect - and it is hard to believe that it was unintended - was to bankrupt Iraq’s small farms, where production was already hampered by continuous military attacks. Now, as the occupation enters its fifth year, the Iraqi agricultural sector has collapsed and the country is totally dependent upon imported food, which sells at prices that are beyond the reach of much of the population.

Finally, the US colonial administrator implemented a “flat tax” - the dream of the Republican right in the US itself -and issued decrees allowing foreign corporations to repatriate all profits and giving them equal rights with domestic producers in the Iraqi economy.

US War Crimes

Both Democrats and Republicans in Washington now find it politically expedient to place the blame for the catastrophe in Iraq on the Iraqi people themselves. They claim that US troops are caught in a sectarian civil war and complain that the Iraqi government has failed to act decisively in quelling the violence and transforming political, economic and social conditions.

This is all self-serving and hypocritical nonsense. First of all, the sectarian violence that exists in Iraq is entirely the responsibility of Washington - legally, politically and morally. The US is an occupying power and, under the Geneva Conventions, is obliged to guarantee the security of the occupied population. But thousands of Iraqis are killed or wounded and tens of thousands driven from their homes every week.

More fundamentally, the eruption of sectarian violence was directly stimulated by US policy. Like colonial conquerors before it, Washington sought to dominate Iraq with a policy of divide and rule. Having destroyed every national institution in the country, it sought to reconstitute political life along ethno-religious lines, giving a weight to the division between Sunnis and Shia that had never before existed in Iraq.

The US occupation authorities handed out political positions in the emerging Iraqi puppet regime along strictly sectarian lines. Tensions between Sunnis and Shia were whipped up and the Iraqi security forces were handed over to the militias of Shia religious parties.

Now, the US occupation has reached the point of trying to erect walls around Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, separating populations along ethnic lines in a practice that echoes brutal colonial counterinsurgency wars in a number of countries and, indeed, recalls the Nazis’ creation of the Warsaw ghetto.

Before the US invasion, Sunnis and Shia lived side-by-side in Baghdad and other cities, without friction and little concern over the religious background of their neighbors. Fully a third of marriages in Iraq were between the two communities. Now this ethno-religious identity is a matter of life and death for millions, forcing them to flee their homes and condemning them to summary executions at the hands of militias.

As for the demands that the Iraqi government meet “benchmarks,” this is strictly for political show. The fact remains that the regime headed by Nouri al-Maliki inside the US-controlled Green Zone is a largely powerless puppet, with the US continuing to exercise effective control over the country.

This reality was underscored last week with the release of a report by the leading British think tank, Chatham House, describing the Iraqi government as “largely irrelevant in terms of ordering social, economic and political life.” It added, in what is unquestionably a major understatement, that the country is on the “verge of becoming a failed state.”

River Tigris

Among the most emblematic of the horrific stories coming out of Iraq is the transformation of the River Tigris, cited in the Bible as a tributary of the river flowing from the Garden of Eden and the historic lifeline of civilization in the region from ancient times. It has been turned into a stagnant and fetid waterway, hopelessly polluted by raw sewage, chemicals and toxic military waste produced by the US war and occupation.

While before the war the river supported fishermen, now it is virtually dead, with boats banned from the water and subject to hostile fire. Much of the river’s banks have also been turned into military no-go zones.

The river has also become a dump for corpses, which are pulled daily from the water, most of them bearing the marks of horrible torture. The IRIN news agency quoted an Iraqi Interior Ministry officer as saying that since January 2006, over 800 bodies have been pulled from one area of the river alone, where iron nets had been put in place to catch water lilies and garbage.

The impact of four years of US occupation upon the consciousness of the Iraqi people found at least partial reflection in the recent poll carried out in March by US, British and German news agencies. It found that fully 78 percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of US troops—up from 65 percent in 2005 - and 51 percent, a majority, support armed attacks on US military forces, compared to only 17 percent in 2004.

Such a dramatic shift in public opinion is explicable only from the standpoint of the magnitude of the crimes that have been carried out against the Iraqi people, who have been subjected to a bloodbath and seen their society reduced to rubble.

These are world historic crimes, and those responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American troops - and for the systematic destruction of an entire society - remain unpunished and occupy the leading positions of power within the US.

The Nuremberg Precedent

The government in Washington - both the Republican White House and the Democratic Congress - continues to embrace the doctrine of “preemptive war,” i.e., unprovoked aggression, as a principal instrument of US foreign policy. Both the US president and leading figures in the ostensible opposition party - the Democrats - regularly threaten to reprise this policy in an even more catastrophic form in a war against Iran.

A thorough criminal investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the Iraq war is an urgent political task confronting the American people. It is indispensable both for preventing new and even bloodier wars of aggression and for halting and reversing the unprecedented attacks on basic democratic rights within the US itself.

The handful of prosecutions that have been brought against junior enlisted personnel responsible for such horrors as the gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in Mahmoudiya and the slaughter of her entire family, or the massacre perpetrated by Marines in Haditha, only underscores the reality that those who bear the ultimate responsibility not only for these individual atrocities but for the rape of an entire country enjoy continued impunity.

The premeditated destruction of an entire society carried out on the basis of lies and in pursuit of the financial and geo-strategic interests of America’s ruling elite constitutes a war crime of historic proportions, punishable under the same statutes and on the basis of the same principles as those used to condemn leading figures of Germany’s Third Reich at Nuremberg.

Those responsible for launching the war in Iraq consist not merely of the right-wing Republican cabal grouped around Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. They include also the Democrats who enabled this war, the heads of US energy conglomerates and finance houses that hoped to profit from it and the chiefs of the media monopolies that promoted it. All of these layers, constituting the political establishment and financial aristocracy of the United States, are guilty of the same fundamental crime for which the Nazis were prosecuted nearly 60 years ago: the plotting and waging of a war of aggression. It is from this principal crime that all the multiple crimes and horrors inflicted upon the Iraqi people have flowed.

For these crimes to go unpunished and those responsible to continue acting with impunity would have fatal implications for the political, social and indeed moral life of the US and indeed the world. It would only render the next round of war crimes and atrocities that much easier and more inevitable.

The struggle against the war in Iraq must be waged on the basis of the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops, the implementation of a massive program of humanitarian and economic aid to the Iraqi people, and the prosecution of all those responsible for this war before an independent and international tribunal.

The six months since the US midterm elections have amply confirmed that none of these demands can be realized through the existing political parties or government institutions. As this is published, congressional Democrats, who gained the leadership of Congress as a result of the massive vote against the war last November, are holding closed-door meetings with their Republican counterparts and White House officials to work out a bill that will provide tens of billions of additional dollars to continue the bloodbath in Iraq. Behind their ever more transparent posturing as opponents of the war, the Democrats have made it clear that they remain committed to the imperialist aims of the 2003 invasion and are determined to maintain tens of thousands of US troops in Iraq to realize those aims.

Ending the war and holding the war conspirators accountable - to prevent further and even more catastrophic acts of aggression - can be achieved only by means of a direct political struggle against both parties of war: the Democrats and Republicans Workers, students and young people must fight for the building of an independent mass political movement of the working class based upon a socialist program that is directed against the American financial oligarchy in whose interests the war is being waged.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/iraq-m22.shtml

Part Two:
The US War And Occupation Of Iraq
The Murder Of A Society

By Bill Van Auken

Children

Iraq’s Ministry of Health estimates that fully half of the country’s children suffer from some form of malnutrition. According to a recent study by UNICEF, 10 percent of Iraqi children under five are acutely malnourished, while another 20 percent are chronically malnourished.

With the heat of Iraq’s summer coming on, medical authorities fear a sharp rise in child deaths from dehydration, cholera and infections, and they warn that the shattered Iraqi medical system is virtually powerless to stop it.

The desperate plight of Iraqi children and their families was summed up by one Iraqi mother. “Last year I lost my daughter and my mother because of dehydration,” Zahra Muhammad, 35, told the UN news agency IRIN. She said that the family had been forced from their home last May.

“We couldn’t afford cooling systems in our tent. My daughter was only four years old and couldn’t stand the hard living conditions in addition to the very hot weather,” she continued. “I have two more children and they are already sick because of malnutrition. The doctors have told me that without proper cooling and drinkable water, I should expect serious consequences in the coming months. If I lose another child for lack of electricity and clean water, then I would prefer to die with them.”

As many as 260,000 children have died since the March 2003 invasion, according to one estimate reported by the British daily The Independent in January.

For those children who do live to see their fifth birthday, Iraq has become a hostile and often deadly environment.

Less than a third of Iraq’s children now attend school, compared to 100 percent attendance before the March 2003 invasion. The principal reason students are staying out of the classrooms is fear of the endemic violence that makes a trip to school a deadly risk their families are unwilling to take.

At the same time, the relentless killing has left countless thousands of Iraqi children orphans, who have become a new and tragic fixture of life in Baghdad and other major cities, sleeping and begging in the streets. As the UN’s IRIN news agency reports: “Thousands of homeless children throughout Iraq...survive by begging, stealing or scavenging garbage for food. Only four years ago, the vast majority of these children were living at home with their families.”

The desperate conditions confronting Iraqi children led a group of 100 prominent British physicians to address an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair in January expressing their extreme concern over the impact of the occupation. “We are concerned that children are dying in Iraq for want of medical treatment. Sick or injured children, who could otherwise be treated by simple means, are left to die in their hundreds because they do not have access to basic medications or other resources. Children who have lost hands, feet and limbs are left without prostheses. Children with grave psychological distress are left untreated.”

There are fears that this last issue - the wholesale traumatization of an entire young generation - may have the most far-reaching and devastating effect upon Iraqi society. “Children in Iraq are seriously suffering psychologically with all the insecurity,” the Association of Psychologists of Iraq declared. Based on a survey of 1,000 school children, it found that 92 percent had learning impediments caused by the climate of violence and fear. “The only things they have on their minds are guns, bullets, death and a fear of the US occupation,” Maruan Abdullah, spokesman for the association told reporters.

The hellish conditions that have been imposed upon Iraqi children constitute a war crime. As the occupying power, the United States is enjoined by the Geneva Conventions to ensure “preferential measures in regards to food, medical care and protection” in favor of children under 15 years, expectant mothers, and mothers of children under seven, and to “maintain all institutions devoted to the care and education of children.”

Women

The US war and occupation have driven Iraqi women back generations, condemning millions to statutory second-class citizenship and nightmarish conditions in which they are virtually prisoners in their homes.

This development is closely bound up with the record rise in infant mortality and is just as vital an indicator of social progress - or retrogression. It was Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist, who wrote 155 years ago, in a passage cited by Marx and Engels: “Social progress and changes of a period are accompanied by the progress of women towards freedom, while the decay of the social system brings with it a reduction of the freedoms enjoyed by women.” He concluded: “Extension of the rights of women is the basic principle of all social progress.”

A report released in April by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) on human rights in the country recorded 40 cases of “honor killings” of women over a three-month period in the governorates of Erbit, Duhok, Sulaimaniya and Salahuddin. These women were murdered by their own family members, in some cases burned alive, for alleged “immoral” conduct.

A report by the Iraqi news agency Awena indicates that this hideous practice is even more widespread. Basing itself on data obtained from the Duhok criminal court and the Duchok Azadi Hospital, Awena reported last January that in this governorate there were 289 burning cases resulting in 46 deaths of women in 2005, and 366 burning cases resulting in 66 deaths in 2006. Meanwhile, the Emergency Management Center in Erbil cited 576 burning cases resulting in 358 deaths in that governorate since 2003.

Also in Erbil, the UN report found that the number of reported rapes quadrupled between 2003 and 2006.

The Iraqi constitution, drafted under US supervision, declares Islam the official state religion and establishes that no law may be enacted that “contradicts the immutable rulings of Islam.” This principal sets the stage for the overturning of Iraq’s more liberal civil laws governing divorce, family property and child custody, substituting in their place sharia law, which denies women most rights.

Already, these principles are being imposed in the streets by armed militias of the Islamist parties, which have killed women for daring to hold professional positions as professors or doctors or to play a visible directing role in a business. Vigilantes have also forced the use of Islamic dress, including the hijab, or veil, backed by the threat of violence. Such groups in some areas have also demanded that women not leave their houses after midday, not drive automobiles or walk outside without a male relative.

A report issued by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq on the fourth anniversary of the US invasion declared: “Women of Iraq have gradually let go of most of their 20th century gains and privileges in the last 4 years of occupation. Iraq turned from a modern country of educated and working women into a divided land of Islamic and ethnic warlords who compete in canceling women from the social realm. Millions of women’s destinies are wasted between the destructive US war machine and different kinds of Islamic rule which have turned women into helpless black objects of no will or worth.”

The report cited growing violence against women, including gang rapes of female detainees and assaults on women by militias of other sects as an instrument of sectarian warfare. Kidnappings of women have also become rampant. A report issued by the group in March of last year found that the crime, virtually unknown under the regime of Saddam Hussein, claimed 2,000 female victims in the first three years after the US invasion, many of whom were raped or tortured. Such incidents, together with all other forms of violence, have escalated markedly over the last year.

Four women are on Iraq’s death row, waiting to be hanged, two of them imprisoned together with their young children.

Minorities

Also a telling sign of the social disintegration in Iraq is the status of minorities. A report issued this month by Minority Rights Group International warns that minority communities in Iraq are being systematically eradicated. It ranks Iraq as the second-worst country in the world in terms of the threat posed to minorities - better only than Somalia and worse than Darfur.

The report, entitled “Assimilation, Exodus, Eradication: Iraq’s Minority Communities Since 2003,” tracks the situation confronting Iraq’s Armenian and Chaldo-Assyrian Christians, Bahais, Faili Kurds, Jews, Mandaeans, Palestinians, Shabaks, Turkomans and Yazidis, who together make up 10 percent of the country’s total population.

“Iraq continues to see targeted killings of people from minority groups, including Christians, Yezidis and Mandaeans. Other minority groups in Iraq face daily violence, torture and political assimilation, which has led to an exodus of these communities from the country,” the report states. Last year, Iraq ranked the worst in the world. Its decline to the second worst is a reflection of the marked deterioration of the situation in Somalia, where a US-engineered intervention has unleashed rampant violence.

Some of Iraq’s minorities predate the Arabs in terms of their presence in the country, which dates back to ancient Mesopotamia. Now, victims of violence and intimidation, they are disappearing from Iraq, many killed and the rest fleeing into exile.

The report’s authors blame the US occupation for this disaster. They write: “Following the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the coalition authorities established an Iraqi Governing Council in which membership was strictly apportioned along ethnic and sectarian lines. Political patronage ensured that whole ministries became dominated by officials from the minister’s own sect or group, and sectarian politics quickly became the defining feature of the new Iraqi state.” As a result, minority populations were excluded and subsequently repressed.

Doctors

The murderous violence in Iraq and the flight of millions of refugees have decimated the ranks of key professions who are indispensable for the maintenance of society.

The British non-governmental organization Medact, citing the official figures of the Iraqi Medical Association, reported in March of last year that 18,000 of Iraq’s 34,000 doctors have left the country. Another 2,000 have been murdered and at least 250 have been reported kidnapped.

In his article on the exodus of refugees from Iraq in the May 13 New York Times Magazine, Nir Rosen interviewed one such doctor, a family medicine specialist, who had fled to Damascus with her five children.

She left after her husband, a thoracic surgeon and a medical school professor, was dragged from his car by armed men, abducted and later found murdered. She told Rosen that when she asked the Iraqi police to investigate, they said, “He is a doctor, he has a degree and he is a Sunni, so he couldn’t stay in Iraq. That’s why he was killed.” Both the police and the Ministry of Health are controlled by Shiite Islamist factions. She was subsequently ordered by letter to leave her neighborhood.

The lack of trained medical staff, together with the shortage of basic supplies and the overwhelming burden of mass casualties, has left Iraq’s healthcare system in a shambles.

In an article published last October in the British Medical Journal, three doctors from the Diwaniyah College of Medicine in Iraq estimated that nearly half of the hundreds of thousands who have been killed since the 2003 US invasion could have survived if they had received adequate medical care.

“The reality is we cannot provide any treatment for many of the victims,” they wrote. “Emergency departments are staffed by doctors who do not have the proper experience or skills to manage emergency cases. Medical staff...admit that more than half of those killed could have been saved if trained and experienced staff were available.”

The article added: “Our experience has taught us that poor emergency medicine services are more disastrous than the disaster itself. But despite the daily violence that is crushing Iraq, the international medical community is doing little more than looking on.”

It is not just the international medical community. The state of the Iraqi healthcare system constitutes a US war crime. The Fourth Geneva Convention demands that an occupying power “[e]nsure the effective operation of medical services, including hospitals and public health programs, with special focus on preventing the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics, and allow medical personnel to carry out their duties.”

The Geneva Conventions also require that an occupying power guarantee the neutrality of hospitals, protecting them from attack and ensuring that all are able to seek medical care. Yet US occupation troops have repeatedly attacked hospitals. Moreover, militias have been given free rein in the medical facilities, often dragging away patients of other sects for execution.

The killing and kidnapping of doctors and their wholesale flight from the country are phenomena common to virtually every profession in Iraq. The Iraq Index, maintained by the Brookings Institution in Washington, estimates that 40 percent of Iraq’s “professional class,” including doctors, professors, pharmacists and other university-trained personnel, have left the country since 2003. – [to be continued]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/irq2-m21.shtml

Part One:
The US War And Occupation Of Iraq
- The Murder Of A Society

By Bill Van Auken

While official politics and the media in the United States are focused largely on competing plans for salvaging the American occupation from the debacle it confronts in Iraq, little serious consideration is given to the historic catastrophe that has been inflicted upon Iraqi society itself.

Although no definitive figures can be given on the total number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the US war and occupation - including those killed in the invasion and subsequent armed violence and those whose lives have been cut short by disease and hunger, particularly among the young and old - every serious estimate places the excess death toll between several hundred thousands and one million human beings.

Iraq, once among the most advanced countries of the region, has been reduced, in terms of basic economic and social indices, to the level of the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

What is involved is the systematic destruction of an entire society through the unleashing of violence and criminality on a scale not seen since Hitler’s armies ravaged Europe in the Second World War.

American society itself is suffering deadly consequences from this war. The number of US soldiers killed in Iraq has topped 3,400, with every indication that the casualty rate is climbing as the Bush administration’s “surge” sends combat troops into the densely populated and overwhelmingly hostile neighborhoods of Baghdad.

Another 30,000 American military personnel have been wounded or injured, many of them grievously. Undoubtedly, hundreds of thousands more will suffer the psychological effects of having participated in a dirty colonial war.

The war’s daily drain on the US economy is estimated at over $300 million, with predictions that its total cost could top $2 trillion.

There is an even greater cost, however, in terms of the damage done by this criminal war to the political, social and, indeed, moral health of American society. The Iraq war - all of the tired propaganda about the “war on terrorism,” the struggle for “democracy” and the “liberation” of the Iraqi people notwithstanding - is a failed attempt by America’s financial elite to further enrich itself and secure its continued global hegemony through the naked theft of Iraq’s oil wealth.

Every section of the US political and corporate establishment, all branches and levels of government, both major political parties, and the mass media are all implicated in massive war crimes. Criminality on such a grand scale cannot go unpunished without grave implications for the future of the American people and, indeed, all of humanity.

Taken together, US operations in Iraq have amounted to sociocide - the deliberate and systematic murder of an entire society.

A series of recent reports have pointed to the scale of death, destruction and oppression that have been wrought by the US occupation, now in its fifth year.

Slaughter

First, as a telling indicator of the violence that the US occupation has unleashed against the Iraqi people, there is the report released by the Pentagon earlier this month on the mental state of American occupation troops. The document presents a chilling portrait of an army suffering from growing demoralization and mental and emotional dysfunction, which find expression, in part, in callous indifference, if not outright hatred, towards Iraq’s civilian population.

The survey found that a majority of troops believed that Iraqi civilians have no right to be treated “with dignity and respect,” and that approximately 10 percent of them admitted to having inflicted gratuitous violence on Iraqis in the form of beatings or destruction of personal property.

Perhaps the most significant finding was that 14 percent of US soldiers and Marines said they were directly responsible for the death of an “enemy combatant.” Given that some 170,000 US troops are currently in Iraq - and over 650,000 have been deployed there at one time or another since 2003 - this would indicate a massive death toll inflicted directly by US forces.

Many of these troops, of course, are in Iraq for second and third tours of duty, and the data does not account for incidents in which more than one person is killed, much less air strikes or artillery bombardments that can claim scores of victims. Nor does it include those killed by the tens of thousands of armed mercenary contractors, who are answerable neither to Iraqi law nor the military code of justice.

A further indication of the universal character of the deadly violence that has been inflicted upon the country came in the poll conducted earlier this year by ABC News, USA Today, the BBC and ARD German television, which found that fully 53 percent of Iraqis reported having a close friend or immediate relative either killed or wounded.

Along with the rising death toll has come a marked increase in the number of disappeared, which has far outstripped the horrors that this word came to symbolize in the worst years of dictatorship in countries like Argentina and Chile. Iraqi human rights organizations estimate that 15,000 or more Iraqis are missing, with between 40 and 60 more people joining the ranks of the disappeared daily - in other words, as many as 20,000 people on an annual basis.

Many, no doubt, have been exterminated by death squads, while others have joined the country’s burgeoning population of detainees, who are imprisoned without charges and subject to unlimited periods of pre-trial detention and often torture.

The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights reported in March that the regime was holding nearly 38,000 detainees and prisoners, while the US military admits to 19,000 detainees jailed in its two main detention camps - Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca. This total amounts to nearly six times the number of prisoners held by the Saddam Hussein regime before the US invasion to “liberate” the Iraqi people. No doubt, it will rise substantially as the US military’s “surge” continues to sweep up large numbers of Iraqi civilians.

Displacement

In addition to the hundreds of thousands of deaths that the occupation has inflicted upon the Iraqi population, an equally telling indicator of its catastrophic implications for Iraqi society is the massive population of refugees and internally displaced persons.

It is estimated that 2 million Iraqis have fled their homeland, the vast majority of them seeking refuge in Syria and Jordan. Another 1.9 million Iraqis have been reduced to the status of displaced persons inside the country.

In sum, fully 15 percent of the country’s population has been driven from their homes. The United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that between 40,000 and 50,000 more Iraqis are being displaced every week, many of them forced to sleep in tents or out in the open with no means of support.

“We left Baghdad because the situation is very difficult. We were threatened with death and they took our houses and also our shops,” a man who recently came with his family to Syria told UNHCR. “You see what the situation is there - just destruction and death.”

The United States, which unleashed this destruction and death, has since 2003 admitted only 701 Iraqi refugees. Syria is currently hosting some 1.2 million. Washington has sought to obscure this massive refugee crisis - let alone take any responsibility for it - because it is such a damning indictment of the social catastrophe it has created in Iraq.

The vast flow of internal refugees has created increasingly desperate and volatile conditions in the country’s south, where an estimated 700,000 have fled, joining some 200,000 locally displaced people within Najaf, Kerbala and Basra provinces. Local governments and relief agencies are overwhelmed, unable to provide this vast population with housing, food or medical care. The central government in Baghdad has proven unable and unwilling to provide basic support.

“There are dozens of families arriving every day at camps for the displaced, causing a lack of essential needs such as food and health care,” Ali Fakhouri, a spokesman for the Najaf provincial council told IRIN, the news agency of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in March. “The past two months were the worst for those families. For security reasons, the delivery of aid has decreased considerably and because of a lack of medicines in the region’s hospitals and inaccessibility to hospitals, children are more vulnerable to diseases. Diarrhea is common among children in the displaced groups in the south.”

Infant mortality

Perhaps most startling of the recent reports is that issued by the children’s advocacy group Save the Children documenting worldwide trends in infant mortality rates, universally accepted as one of the most fundamental indices of social progress.

According to this report, Iraq recorded a staggering 150 percent increase in the rate of infant deaths between 1990 and 2005. In raw figures, 122,000 Iraqi children died in 2005, half of them newborn babies. The rate was 125 deaths of children under five for every 1,000 live births, compared to 50 in 1990. According to the Iraqi health ministry, conditions have only worsened since, with the ratio climbing to 130 deaths for every 1,000 births in 2006.

The years selected by Save the Children in conducting its international survey had particular relevance for Iraq, beginning in 1990 with the initiation of the punishing US-backed economic sanctions and ending in 2005, two years after the invasion. As with most of the essential indices of social devastation in Iraq, the infant mortality figures reflect both the country’s relentless economic strangulation - punctuated by periodic military attacks - over the course of more than a decade, and the violent destruction of the invasion and occupation which followed.

The vast rise in infant mortality in Iraq is unprecedented. Even sub-Saharan African countries that have suffered the worst ravages of AIDS have not approached such a terrible retrogression.

No doubt a significant share of these infant deaths can be attributed to US military operations. Virtually every air strike and bombardment carried out against populated areas claims children among their victims.

Far more important, however, is the overall disintegration of Iraq’s water, electricity and sewage systems, as well as its healthcare network, which together have created conditions in which the principal killers of children - diarrhea, malnutrition and preventable diseases like typhoid and hepatitis - go unchecked and untreated.

The United Nations has reported a stunning 70 percent increase in diarrhea among Iraqi children just since January 2006, with the highest rates in Anbar province, a center of resistance to the occupation that has been continuously under siege by US forces. Fully 60 percent of the people in the province have access only to polluted river water for drinking.

Less than a third of the population nationwide has access to clean drinking water, and just 19 percent have a functioning sewage system. Both the water and sewage systems were damaged heavily by US bombardments in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion. After toppling the Iraqi government, US forces did nothing to stop looters from stripping water treatment and pumping stations of essential equipment. “Reconstruction” here, as elsewhere, has proven catastrophically inadequate.

On average, Iraqis receive only eight hours of electricity a day, with even worse conditions in Baghdad, where most of the capital’s seven million people get only six hours or less of service daily. – [to be continued]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/iraq-m19.shtml

Iraqi Infant Mortality
Soars By 150 Percent
Bill Van Auken

The infant mortality rate in Iraq has increased by a shocking 150 percent since 1990 - the highest such increase recorded for any country in the world -according to an annual report issued by the child advocacy group, Save the Children.

According to the report, in 2005, the last year for which reliable data is available, one in eight Iraqi children - 122,000 in all - died before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of these deaths were recorded among new-born infants, with pneumonia and diarrhea claiming the greatest toll among Iraqi babies.

The infant mortality rate has long been considered one of the key measures of societal progress and wellbeing. The astounding figures recorded in Iraq are an accurate reflection of the social devastation wrought both by the US invasion of 2003 and more than a decade of US-backed economic sanctions that preceded it.

"Conservative estimates place increases in infant mortality following the 2003 invasion of Iraq at 37 percent," according to the Save the Children report. The implications of such a change - in the space of just two years - are staggering. Given the steady escalation of the armed conflict in Iraq and the continued deterioration of social conditions for masses of people in the country, the rate of increase in infant and child deaths was no doubt even greater over the course of 2006.

The report blamed the horrific decline in infant and child health since the invasion on the steadily worsening living conditions for the Iraqi population as a whole, including "electricity shortages, insufficient clean water, deteriorating health services and soaring inflation."

This overall destruction of basic social infrastructure unleashed by the US invasion and occupation has been translated into a horrendous decline in child health. "Only 35 percent of Iraqi children are fully immunized, and more than one-fifth (21 percent) are severely or moderately stunted" as a result of malnutrition, the study found.

Destruction

The statistics compiled by Save the Children indicate that in 1990 the mortality rate for children under five in Iraq stood at 50 for every 1,000 live births - among the best outcomes reported for the entire Arab world at the time. In 2005, the figure was 125 per 1,000 live births - roughly equivalent to the figures recorded in countries like Malawi, Mauritania, Uganda and Haiti.

While some countries - all with one exception in Africa - have higher death rates than Iraq, none came even near the rate of increase in infant mortality recorded by the US-occupied country (Botswana came closest, with a 107 percent rise, while still recording a slightly lower rate of 120 deaths per 1,000 live births).

The destruction of the conditions and very lives of Iraqi children began well before US troops invaded the country in 2003. The 1990-1991 Gulf War saw more than 90,000 tons of US bombs and missiles dropped on Iraq, smashing much of its essential infrastructure, including power plants and water and sanitation systems and creating the conditions for a public health disaster.

The war was followed by a decade of punishing sanctions that deprived Iraqi children and the population as a whole of essential medical supplies and adequate nutrition. Even chlorine, needed to purify water, was embargoed, depriving infants and small children of a clean water supply and condemning many to death.

It was during this period that the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that an additional half a million Iraqi children had died between 1991 and 1998 as a result of the sanctions.

In 1998, the coordinator of United Nation humanitarian operations in Iraq, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest calling the sanctions a form of "genocide" and "a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq." Halliday said at the time, "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."

500,000 Children

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, confronted in a television interview with the UN estimate of 500,000 children having died as a result of the US-backed sanctions, famously answered, "We think the price is worth it."

The rise in infant mortality rates represents the starkest manifestation of the murderous impact that US aggression upon Iraq and its children over a protracted period. But there are many other indications that for those who survive, conditions of life have become increasingly unbearable.

According to figures reported by the Iraqi government, some 900,000 children have been left orphans by the carnage that has swept Iraq since the US invasion of 2003. It is estimated that at the present levels of violence, some 400 children are left orphaned every day in the country.

The Iraqi Ministry of Education, meanwhile, estimates that barely 30 percent the country’s 3.5 million elementary school children are attending classes, a sharp decline from 75 percent last year. A study sponsored by the World Health Organization in the Iraqi city of Mosul, found fully 30 percent of school children surveyed suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.

Afghanistan

Significantly, the other country that is presently occupied by the US military and remains the scene of a bitter counterinsurgency war – Afghanistan - ranks as the second worst in the world in terms of its infant mortality rate, with 257 deaths for every 1,000 live births. In other words, more than one out of four Afghan children dies before the age of five. On average, every Afghan mother sees two of her children die as infants, while one in six women die in childbirth.

According to the Save the Children study, 40 percent of Afghan children are malnourished and less than half have access to safe water. The report also notes that, while "1 child in 100,000 in the United States dies of pneumonia each year, roughly 1 in 15" dies of the disease in Afghanistan.

On a world scale, Save the Children reports, "Every year, more than 10 million children die before they reach the age of 5, most from preventable causes and almost all in poor countries." It adds that while infant global infant mortality rates had improved in previous decades, "rates of progress are slowing and in many countries, child death rates are getting worse."

The organization insists that available and low-cost solutions could easily prevent 6 million of these deaths annually. These include, "skilled care at childbirth, breastfeeding, measles immunization, oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea and medical care for pneumonia." But for many of the most impoverished countries, and for many others in the most oppressed layers of society elsewhere, these elementary forms of health care and education are not provided.

www.wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/iraq-m09.shtml

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6540

“U.S., UK Must Admit Defeat And Leave Iraq”
[www.tehrantimes.com]

Iraqi resistance fighters have a right to oppose the occupation and to force foreign troops out of their country, a former British army commander said.

General Sir Michael Rose, who commanded UN forces in Bosnia, urged the U.S. and its allies to "admit defeat" and stop fighting "a hopeless war" in Iraq, according to the BBC's Newsnight program.

More than 140 British troops and about 3,300 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. When asked whether he believes Iraqi fighters have a "right" to drive U.S. occupation forces out of Iraq, Sir Michael said: "Yes, I do."

"As Lord Chatham said, when he was speaking on the British presence in North America, he said 'if I was an American, as I am an Englishman, as long as one Englishman remained on American native soil, I would never, never, never lay down my arms," he told Newsnight.

Iraqi fighters feel the same way, he added.

Sir Michael also said it was time for foreign troops to leave Iraq and go back home. "It is the soldiers who have been telling me from the frontline that the war they have been fighting is a hopeless war, that they cannot possibly win it and the sooner we start talking politics and not military solutions, the sooner they will come home and their lives will be preserved." Asked if that meant admitting defeat, the general replied: "Of course we have to admit defeat. The British admitted defeat in North America and the catastrophes that were predicted at the time never happened.”

"The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened. The same thing will occur after we leave Iraq," he added.

Sir Michael has written a book comparing the resistance fighters' tactics with those of George Washington's irregular forces in the American War of Independence.

Last year, he called for British Prime Minister Tony Blair to be impeached for going to war on "false pretences".

A two-day conference of world and regional powers aimed at stabilizing Iraq ended on Friday.

Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, had joined ministers from the G8 nations and the EU at the conference in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

More than $30bn in aid and debt relief was pledged by donors on the first day of the summit.

According to the Iraqi finance minister, Egypt agreed to write off about $800m owed to it by Iraq while Slovenia, Bulgaria and Poland would cancel 80% of Iraq's debts.

The UK and European Union each pledged $200m in grants.

The participants also signed a five-year agreement offering financial aid but requiring Iraq to push towards political reform and reconciliation.

Already-strained troops are being put in great mental health problems by the military due to the repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, a Pentagon panel said Thursday, warning of an overburdened state of the military's health care system.

The 14-member task force issued an urgent warning, saying more than a third of U.S. troops and veterans already suffer from problems that include traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

It found that 38 percent of soldiers and 31 percent of Marines report psychological concerns.

Among members of the National Guard, the figures have reached 49 percent, with the numbers expected to grow because of repeated deployments.

The figures are likely to rise as the war in Iraq escalates, and that current staffing and budget levels won't be enough to meet the need, the group said in a preliminary report.

The task force also characterized current Pentagon policies as overly conservative and out-of-date. "The system of care for psychological health that has evolved in recent decades is not sufficient to meet the needs of today's forces and their beneficiaries, and will not be sufficient to meet the needs in the future." (Source: Aljazeera.com)

http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=5/6/2007&Cat=4&Num=3

Final Part:
The Pivotal Import Of Yellowcake
False Flags And "Big Time" Evil

[forgingnewparadigms.blogspot.com]
Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Never forget that the CIA repeatedly warned the [US] President not to use that information in his speeches, yet he and Cheney stubbornly and knowingly used easily proven forgeries as a linchpin of the lies used to sell the Iraq war!

Why were they so hell-bent on feeding already proven lies to the American public? Lies that were prepared before 9:11 and before Bush and Cheney were [s]elected. Are we to believe that Bush and Cheney are so clueless about the content of the speeches they practice repeatedly before giving them that it is somehow legitimate to blame others (Tenet, et al) for the lies they used to sell the wars they blatantly planned long before they were [s]elected to office?

Why do you think Cheney (aka 'Big Time") was so preoccupied with discrediting Joe Wilson? Why do you think Tenet referred to the outing of Valerie Plame as a “Big Time Wrong"?

There's much more to hide than a mere "intelligence failure" and a fake letter. Their attempts to prevent inquiries into the 9:11 attacks, coupled with the way those buildings collapsed, even though the fires were never hot enough to melt steel girders, along with a host of other glaring irregularities and near impossibilities, points to some very heinous deceptions.

Never forget that we were also lied to about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to justify the Vietnam war, the cause of the Spanish American War, and the facts about Pearl Harbor. What's one more noble sacrifice in the causes of freedom, democracy, and military-industrial profiteering?

Now even more "Big Time" lies, that will shake this world to its foundations, are being exposed. For example, follow the Medals of Freedom handed out by Little W.

The previous Pope received one as an excuse for Bush to complain, in person, that the Vatican wasn't being aggressive enough in helping him during the 2004 election.

Shortly thereafter, there were news stories about Bush's brain-dead requests for the Vatican's help. That was another impeachable offense never picked up by our so-called free press.

It is a treasonous act to conspire with a foreign potentate (the Pope) to manipulate the US election process.

Notice how the Vatican pretends to oppose the Iraq war while secretly supporting Bush and the Neo-cons? Notice how they pretend to oppose Freemasonry while belonging to the Neo-facist P2 lodge? Connect the dots.

And never forget that the Bin Laden's are very close associates of the Bushes, and were given a special pass to leave the country while all other flights were grounded after the 9:11 attacks.

How dumb can the American public remain and for how long? How many unlikely coincidences must occur before more people connect the dots to discern the patterns in the noise?

The Neo-cons and their supporters are now beginning to face the Truth and Justice they purposely denied the peoples of both East and West.

There are very few remaining on both sides of this so-called War on Terror, (aka the Neo-Crusades) who aren't aware of the great greed, duplicity, and Machiavellian character of the Bush-Cheney crew and their cohorts.

Now Iraq and the War on Terror are about to do for the USA and the Vatican what Afghanistan did for the Soviet Union.

And make no mistake about it, the ultimate driving force behind this latest convulsion of great evil has been the Vatican and its secret society cohorts.

The "yellow cake" lies that helped start this war have been traced back to Rome and the P2 lodge.

The time is long overdue to connect the dots and deliver long-overdue Truth and Justice to the Vatican, conspiring world leaders, and their criminal associations and organizations.

Be prepared for things to accelerate out of their control very soon...

posted by Seven Star Hand at 11:11 PM
http://forgingnewparadigms.blogspot.com/

Malaysia Urges US
To Leave Iraq
And Make Amends

NUSA DUA (Bali), May 3 (Bernama) -- Malaysia wants the United States to leave Iraq and stop being the world's "policeman in all and every sense of the word", the 116th Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) meeting was told today.

This was conveyed by Malaysian Member of Parliament Datuk Dr Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar at the IPU's First Standing Committee on Peace and International Security.

He said that the nations involved in the prolonged Iraq war must admit their mistakes and seriously make amends.

"I know that it's not easy to be humble when you're victorious. I know too that it's not easy to be humble when your weaponry could annihilate the world 10 times over. But leave Iraq you must," he said.

Speaking on the fifth day of the IPU meeting here, he said the world knew that what was happening in Iraq was a manufactured war to control the country's resources and riches.

This could only result in mistrust and hatred in the hearts of the Iraqis who resented the colonisation of their homeland, he said.

Dr Wan Junaidi said that once the war started, no convention or rules could prevent those with the military might from carrying out violent acts, citing the harsh treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay detention centres.

He pointed out that when pushed into a corner with their families and properties gone, those without any means to fight back would have nothing to lose by resorting to terrorism.

Terrorism, he said, was an ideology that could never be defeated by military might and that the aggrieved people could only be won over by capturing their hearts and minds through dialogues and discussions among equals.

Dr Wan Junaidi said Malaysia wanted the IPU, which comprises more than 140 parliaments in the world, to ensure that the right to life, liberty and happiness belongs to every citizen of the world and not just the people of any one country.

-- BERNAMA
http://www.bernama.com

Part One:

The Pivotal Import Of Yellowcake
False Flags And "Big Time" Evil

[forgingnewparadigms.blogspot.com]
Tuesday, May 01, 2007

The combination of George Tenet's book, At the Center of the Storm, Eisner & Royce's The Italian Letter and the books and research of many others in recent years now provides enough of a foundation for everyone to finally discern that 9:11 was a "false flag" operation against both the American public and the Muslim world.

Likewise, the uncanny synchronicity of Al Qaeda's videos and other activities perfectly timed to reinforce and support the Bush-Cheney administration's political needs coupled with the actions of the Bush administration actually serving to strengthen Al Qaeda's position, now makes perfect sense.

The apparent mistakes and chaos that have characterized the Iraq war, the easily prevented resurgence of the Taliban, and permitting Bin Laden to escape Tora Bora to a safe haven in Pakistan all fit the same pattern.

It's hard to maintain a state of continuous war if you allow your made-to-order enemies to be defeated too early. It is likewise hard to remain a "war president" if your wars end too soon!

The letterhead used to forge the "Yellowcake letter" that was then used to help "sell" the Iraq war was stolen in Rome on 1/1/2001, more than nine months before 9:11 and before Little W. became president.

Consequently, the use of the "Yellow-Cake Lie" was obviously discussed and planned before then! The import of this fact is that the Niger embassy in Rome was burglarized, before Bush became president, to lay the groundwork for the web of deception used to sell the Iraq War, after 9:11.

More importantly, it is highly unlikely that the Iraq war could ever have been sold to the American public, without something like 9:11 happening first.

Any excuses of other uses for the stolen letterhead are laughable since the letterhead burglary would have been pointless, without 9:11. This evidences foreknowledge of those attacks, a full nine months before they occurred, among other things!

It is well known that Neo-con think tanks were advocating war with Iraq and Iran during the Clinton years, long before Little W. was [s]elected.

Years later, this administration has yet to tell the truth to the American public about far too many things, even though lie after lie have been exposed.

Consequently, the fact that 9:11 was also used as a prime reason for the Iraq war and is likewise mired in a web of deception and misdirection, leaves little doubt that the two events were part of the same deception.

Regardless of the many disingenuous denials, the Bush-Cheney administration, Neo-cons, and their supporters were openly pushing for war with Iraq long before 9:11.

They also quickly blamed Iraq and publicly called for war with them in the hours following the 9:11 attacks; even though the hijackers were mostly Saudis and Bin Laden was based in Afghanistan.

[Google : "Yellow Cake" "False Flag" P2. Also Google Panorama Burba Yellow cake Berlusconi and do a little more digging from those results.]

Most people don't understand that Berlusconi was also involved in this deception, which helps explain his coziness with the Neo-cons and Bush-Cheney administration, as well as the Italian participation in the Iraq War, though it was paltry, mostly symbolic, and against overwhelming Italian anti-war opinion.

The forged "Yellowcake Letter" affair pulls together actors from Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Vatican Bank scandal, which means the P2 Masonic lodge in Rome, where the Niger embassy letterhead was stolen.

Since Cheney and the Neo-cons were actively planning the war in Iraq before Little W was [s]elected, and the stolen Niger embassy letterhead was used as a pivotal component of the "sales job" for the war, Cheney and cohorts were undeniably linked to that deception, before 9:11, and before January 1, 2001.

[to continue in the final part to be published tomorrow.]

posted by Seven Star Hand at 11:11 PM
http://forgingnewparadigms.blogspot.com

Final Part:
Ex-CIA Director Tenet
Admits Lies Told On War

By Bill Van Auken

For all of his claims that he has been made a scapegoat, Tenet’s own memoir confirms the indisputable fact that he shares major culpability for preparing the criminal war against Iraq.

He accepts blame for the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) issued in 2002, which sought to make the case for war with Iraq by deliberately exaggerating and even falsifying Iraq’s alleged WMD capabilities.

Tenet describes the 2002 NIE as “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure,” and expressed regrets that the document was not “more nuanced.”

But it was this document - far more than any “slam dunk” comment at the White House - that served as the foundation for the drumbeat of warnings from Bush, Cheney and Rice about the imminent threat of Iraqi attacks and even “mushroom clouds” if Iraq was not invaded.

It likewise was the justification given by congressional Democrats for voting for the resolution authorizing Bush to launch a war of aggression.

False Charges

As for the lack of “nuance,” this is precisely what Tenet himself had demanded. As USA Today reported in February 2004, the CIA director “pushed [those who drafted the NIE] to avoid wishy-washy conclusions.”

Thrown into the document were false charges that Iraq had resumed its nuclear program, had imported aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment and was seeking “yellowcake” in Africa.

Tenet then had a declassified version of the NIE issued, which eliminated all dissenting views from intelligence professionals who challenged the phony charges against Iraq.

Yet, while he was director of the CIA, Tenet repeatedly went to Capitol Hill to make the Bush administration’s fabricated case of an Iraqi-Al-Qaeda connection.

And in his book, he acknowledges that in October 2002, at Rice’s request, he called up a New York Times reporter covering the congressional debate on impending war to falsely claim that nothing that the CIA had learned contradicted the Bush administration’s claims.

Partisan

“In retrospect,” he writes. “I shouldn’t have talked to...the reporter at Condi’s request. By making public comments in the middle of a contentious public debate, I gave the impression that I was a partisan player.”

This is precisely what he was, and a valuable one at that, given both his supposedly “above politics” post as CIA director and his personal past as a Democrat.

In another significant statement, Tenet confirms that the administration essentially looked the other way during the summer of 2001, when intelligence reports about impending Al Qaeda terrorist attacks within the United States should have set off alarm bells.

He describes a meeting on July 10, 2001 at the White House, where he gave Rice a briefing in which he warned of “multiple, spectacular attacks against the United States.”

Terrorism

He said he told her: “We believe these attacks are imminent. Mass casualties are likely.” He also claims he urged preemptive strikes inside Afghanistan.

In his book, he states that Rice essentially discounted the warning, delegating it to lower-ranking functionaries.

Rice responded on CBS “Face the Nation” Sunday, declaring, “Well, it’s very interesting because that’s not what George told the 9/11 Commission at the time. He said that he felt that we had gotten it.”

It is true that Tenet told a different story to the 9/11 Commission, but it is his current version that rings true. The shift only underscores the whitewash character of the 9/11 report, which portrayed the Bush administration as giving sporadic and insufficient attention to terrorism, rather than deliberately turning its back on the probable Al Qaeda strike, in order to obtain the necessary pretext for military action.

Suspicion

Tenet’s book only provides more grounds for suspicion that elements within the US government deliberately prevented the foiling of the terrorist plot, because such an attack was needed to provide a pretext for long-planned military interventions in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia.

One other aspect of Tenet’s book and TV appearance has been less noted in the media, but clearly bears examination. That is his vigorous defense of “enhanced interrogation techniques” - i.e., torture - which he claimed was more effective than any other terrorism-related intelligence activities.

“I know that this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together, have been able to tell us,” he said on “60 Minutes.”

Here is an apt yardstick for measuring the moral stature of the advocates of “freedom” and “democracy” in the White House, Pentagon, State Department and CIA.

Tenet adamantly defends the systematic use of kidnapping, illegal detention and torture - as well as systematic lying to the American people to engineer an illegal war. His outrage is sparked only when his fellow war criminals turned on him and threw him to the wolves, in order to buy time to continue and deepen the military aggression in Iraq.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/tene-m01.shtml

Part One:
Ex-CIA Director Tenet
Admits Lies Told On War

By Bill Van Auken

With the publication of his new memoir, At the Center of the Storm, released Monday, and in an appearance on the CBS television new program “60 Minutes”, former CIA director George Tenet has become the latest former official to admit publicly that the Bush administration launched its war against Iraq based upon false pretenses and manipulated intelligence.

Tenet’s CBS interview was a display of moral cowardice and self-righteousness. The former CIA director hailed the day-to-day work of the organization of spies, torturers and assassins that he headed for seven years, passed over the horrific death toll in the Iraq war with mild tut-tutting, and reserved his real passion for complaints about backstabbing against himself by former partners in crime like Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice.

It made for a degrading spectacle, with Tenet sounding like nothing so much as third-rate Mafia hitman whining about how the big shots had sold him out after all his loyal service.

Nonetheless, the former CIA director’s comments have an objective significance. One of the inner circle of war conspirators has now testified publicly that the Bush administration had decided on war with Iraq from its inception, and seized on the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for the action.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Tenet writes in his memoir, according to advance press reports.

Strategy

Rather than discussing whether or not to invade Iraq, Tenet says, the highest circles in the Bush administration were preoccupied with how to sell the war to the American public, using the deaths of 3,000 people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to justify killing tens and hundreds of thousands more people in Iraq who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

The marketing strategy adopted by the administration had two components: claiming that Saddam Hussein had vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and claiming that Hussein had active, ongoing ties to Al Qaeda, to make its convoluted and preposterous argument that there was a real danger that the Iraqi leader would supply WMD for a terrorist attack on the United States.

Both legs of this construct were false, as Tenet now admits, although he claimed that only the second, the Iraq-Al Qaeda “connection” was deliberately fabricated. He writes in the memoir, “Let me say it again. CIA found absolutely no linkage between Saddam and 9/11.”

As for the Saddam WMD claim, Tenet clings to the “we were all mistaken” mantra that the Bush administration has employed ever since its failure to find any shred of such weapons in post-invasion Iraq.

Pretext

But he confirms the role of Cheney and other officials in deliberately exaggerating the WMD issue and seizing on it as a pretext for war.

Tenet’s main complaint in his “60 Minutes” interview, as well as in the book, was over the supposed distortion of his use of the words “slam dunk” in relation to evidence of the existence of Iraqi WMD.

The ex-CIA director admits that he used the basketball metaphor, but claims it was not an affirmation that Iraq actually had such weapons, but rather expressed his certainty that the administration could use WMD as an effective argument to stampede the American people into war.

“We can put a better case together for a public case. That’s what I meant,” Tenet told “60 Minutes.”

Afterwards, the ex-CIA director complained, administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, falsely twisted his words into a supposed confirmation by the CIA that the Iraqi threat was real, and therefore going to war justified.

Slam Dunk

“The hardest part of all this has been just listening to this for almost three years, listening to the vice president go on ‘Meet the Press’ on the fifth year of 9/11 and say, ‘Well, George Tenet said slam dunk,’ as if he needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to go to war with Iraq,” said Tenet.

Tenet claims that what was merely a passing comment on his part became turned into a main line of defense for the administration’s decision to go to war.

He casts himself as a scapegoat, claiming that the false allegations had injured his “reputation” and “personal honor.”

Tenet refers to the December 2002 Oval Office session in which he made his “slam dunk” remark as “essentially a marketing meeting.”

This cynical language was typical of the administration in the run-up to the war of aggression against Iraq. In September 2002, then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card told the New York Times in relation to the war buildup, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

Target

Tenet writes in his book: “I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context. If I had simply said, ‘I’m sure we can do better,’ I wouldn’t be writing this chapter - or maybe even this book.”

In other words, if only he had avoided trying to impress the president with sports jargon and his name had not been bandied about on television talk shows, Tenet would presumably be enjoying his retirement. What can one say? This, after playing a central role in promoting a war that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and more than 3,300 American troops.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who as former national security adviser is one of the main targets of Tenet’s ire, appeared on talk shows Sunday morning to counter Tenet’s charges. She called his claim in the memoir that the administration had plans for war on Iraq pre-dating 9/11, “Flat out wrong.”

Probed on the question of whether there was a debate on the “imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Rice responded with a reaffirmation of the administration’s doctrine of preventive war of aggression.

Imminence, she proclaimed is not a question of “if somebody is going to strike tomorrow.” Rather, she insisted, “It’s whether you believe you’re in a stronger position today to deal with the threat, or whether you’re going to be in a stronger position tomorrow.”

Based upon this same logic, the US could launch unprovoked wars against Iran, Russia, China or any other perceived current or future enemy.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/tene-m01.shtml

Israel:
1000 Missiles Raid
Would Hit Iran

[Persian Journal – April 29, 2007]

Iran's disputed nuclear programme could be severely hit by firing 1,000 cruise missiles in a 10-day attack, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was quoted as saying on Saturday. Asked in an interview with Germany's Focus magazine whether military action would be an option if Iran continued to defy the United Nations, Olmert said:

"Nobody is ruling it out. It is impossible perhaps to destroy the entire nuclear programme but it would be possible to damage it in such a way that it would be set back years," Olmert said.

"It would take 10 days and would involve the firing of 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles."

Meanwhile, Olmert's spokeswoman, Miri Eisin, said the prime minister had spoken to the author of the Focus article, but she said Olmert did not make the comments that were attributed to him. Eisin said the meeting was not an interview and was conducted for background purposes, on the understanding it would not be used.

"The prime minister did not say these things," Eisin said.

Ulrich Schmidla, a foreign affairs editor at Focus magazine, said he would try to contact the reporter who conducted the interview, who was a regular contributor.

Iran says it is developing nuclear technology for power generation, but the West fears it is trying to build a bomb and two sets of UN sanctions have been imposed on Tehran. European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana urged Washington on Friday to speak directly to Iran over its nuclear programme and said he was sure Tehran was ready for such talks.

Focus quoted Olmert as saying UN sanctions should be given a chance to work before military action was considered.

"We must give the (UN) process time to take effect," he said. "We have no intention of attacking Iran at the moment."

Olmert said he doubted whether Iran's nuclear programme was as far advanced as Tehran said. "I don't think that Iran is about to cross the nuclear technology threshold as its leaders claim," he said. "We still have time to stop them."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has proclaimed Iran's ability to enrich on an "industrial scale", but UN inspectors say it remains at test level. Iran would face further sanctions if it has not stopped enrichment by a new Security Council deadline of May 24.

www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_21708.shtml
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6469