War on Iraq

CIA admits it has secret prisons in Eastern Europe

American Gulag, War on Afghanistan, War on Iraq
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Current CIA director Porter Goss admitted in the Washington Post yesterday that the CIA does indeed have a secret prison system outside the USA, including on locations in Eastern Europe:

Goss did not deny the existence — reported earlier this month by The Washington Post — of a secret CIA prison system overseas that has included sites in Eastern Europe. Asked why the United States needed secret prisons, Goss said: “We’re fighting a war on terror. We’re doing quite well in it. Inevitably, we are going to have to capture some terrorists, and inevitably, they are going to have to have some due process, and inevitably, that is going to happen, and it’s going to be done lawfully and under all of the law and order and protections of due process that this country affords.”

In the same article, Condi Rice is also quoted, displaying the same historical insight and intelligence that made her Secretary of State:

In an interview published today in USA Today, Rice indicated she intends to remind Europeans that “we are fighting a war on terror” and that the United States must take certain actions “in order to protect not just ourselves but to protect others.”

She added: “We haven’t ever fought a war like this before. We’ve never fought a war before . . . where you can’t allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them, because if they commit the crime, then thousands of innocent people die.”

Meanwhile, the European Union is less than happy with this situation, as it is hinted that one of the countries in which these prisons are located is a memberstate (Poland) and one is a candidate member state (Romania). So unhappy in fact, it’s threatening sanctions against any memberstate involved in this:

Franco Frattini, the European commissioner for justice and home affairs, warned that any countries found to be allowing the CIA to operate the detention centres – part of a global secret gulag used to hold al-Qa’ida suspects and other “ghost detainees” – could have its voting rights suspended.

It’s uncertain how real these threats are, but Romania at the very least could see itself stuck outside the EU for considerably longer than otherwise would’ve been the case. Smartarses can of course wonder what exactly the difference is between these CIA prisons and something like Belmarsh Prison… Poland could at least strike back by demanding inquiries into which EU countries participated in extraordinary rendition.

Meanwhile, closer at home, all the furore about how exactly the US is treating its detainees has caused problems for the Dutch government. Dutch forces are still active in Afghanistan as part of the peace force there and the Netherlands has been asked to extend its mission for at least another two years, to form part of a stablisation force in the province of Uruzgan, not the most safe of provinces. Already wary of becoming embroiled in internal Afghan conflicts, which may lead to numerous Dutch casualties and resulting political fallout, parliament has also become wary of the American treatment of Afghani prisoners.

And not just parliament. The minister of Foreign Affairs, who had earlier said he thought the war on Iraq was a “mistake”, also has his doubts about this. Granted, for many parliamentaries the risk of Dutch casualties will be the main reason to vote against extending the Dutch mission in Afghanistan, but at the very least the concern about American treatment of prisoners will make a good excuse to refuse.

War lies: we were mislead into the war

War Lies
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Compare and contrast, Democratic senator John Edwards, recently acknowledging his fuckup in voting for the war on Iraq:

Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told — and what many of us believed and argued — was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.

It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. It has been hard to say these words because those who didn’t make a mistake — the men and women of our armed forces and their families — have performed heroically and paid a dear price.

With Democratic senator Robert Byrd, in his speech explaining why he voted against the war:

So where does Iraq enter the equation? No one in the Administration has been able to produce
any solid evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attack. Iraq had biological and chemical
weapons long before September 11. We knew it then, and we know it now. Iraq has been an enemy
of the United States for more than a decade. If Saddam Hussein is such an imminent threat to the
United States, why hasn’t he attacked us already? The fact that Osama bin Laden attacked the
United States does not, de facto, mean that Saddam Hussein is now in a lock and load position and
is readying an attack on the United States. In truth, there is nothing in the deluge of Administration
rhetoric over Iraq that is of such moment that it would preclude the Senate from setting its own timetable and taking the time for a thorough and informed discussion of this crucial issue.

As I’ve said before, it’s simply not true that, as John Edwards wants us to believe, everybody though Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. The evidence presented for it was so flimsy anybody willing to look at it clearly could see that it was untrue even if, like me, they had to rely on newspaper reports rather than intelligence briefs. It’s just pathetic to suggest that as a US senator John Edwards could not have known this intelligence to be flawed; if he was mislead it was because he wanted to be mislead. Senator Byrd in his speech before the vote, which as you know was taken just before the 2002 elections, said that “Democrats favor fast approval of a resolution so they can change the subject to domestic economic problems.”

Which explains why the war issue was never raised during the 2004 presidential elections. Most of the
Democratic Party establishment wanted the war as badly as Bush did, for a mixture of reasons: they wanted to get back to “normal” politics, didn’t want to be seen as weak on defence, perhaps thought that Bush could genuinely pull it off, or similar dumb reasons. Now that it has blown up in their faces they’re trying to reposition themselves as skeptical of the war, but without great conviction.

So now we have the sorry spectacle of an opposition party unable or unwilling to actually provide opposition on the most important issue of the day, a party hopelessly compromised by its past support for this issue. Is it any wonder the Democrats can’t gain any traction against Bush?

War Lies: Saddam had ties with Al Queda

War on Iraq
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Apart from the lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, the most used lies to be used in the runup to the Iraq War where the lies about Saddam Hussein’s ties with Al-Queda. Though these were all disproved fairly quickly, these are still being used now by mislead Bush supporters and the Bush administration both. Even at the time it seemed clear to me that people like Cheny and Rumsfeld were lying rather than just using flawed intelligence and now new revelations prove that I was right:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the “President’s Daily Brief,” a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

[…]

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee’s ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won’t say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

You might object that later evidence may have validated Bush and co, but the article makes clear this is not the case. Which means that a prevelant postwar lie, that Bush and Blair were not lying to get their war, but were just mislead by faulty intelligence –in other words, the war is the fault of the CIA and MI5, not Bush and Blair — is wrong. Even at this early stage Bush knew that there were no ties between Saddam and Al-Queda, but his administration still chose to trumpet those non-existing ties as reasons to go to war. That is his responsibility, not the intelligence services. In fact, the article makes clear that the Bush partisans set up their own intelligence handling group to provide the intelligence they wanted, rather than the truth:

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

[…]

The Pentagon unit also routinely second-guessed the CIA’s highly classified assessments. Regarding one report titled “Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship,” one of the Naval Reserve officers wrote: “The report provides evidence from numerous intelligence sources over the course of a decade on interactions between Iraq and al-Qaida. In this regard, the report is excellent. Then in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only-and CIA’s interpretation ought to be ignored.”

War lies: it’s not about the oil

War on Iraq
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It’s about the oil:

Iraqis face the dire prospect of losing up to $200bn (£116bn) of the wealth of their country if an American-inspired plan to hand over development of its oil reserves to US and British multinationals comes into force next year. A report produced by American and British pressure groups warns Iraq will be caught in an “old colonial trap” if it allows foreign companies to take a share of its vast energy reserves. The report is certain to reawaken fears that the real purpose of the 2003 war on Iraq was to ensure its oil came under Western control.

[…]

Earlier this year a BBC Newsnight report claimed to have uncovered documents showing the Bush administration made plans to secure Iraqi oil even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Based on its analysis of PSAs in seven countries, it said multinationals would seek rates of return on their investment from 42 to 162 per cent, far in excess of typical 12 per cent rates.

Taking an assumption of $40 a barrel, below the current price of almost $60, and a likely contract term of 25 to 40 years, it said that Iraq stood to lose between £74bn and $194bn. Andrew Simms, the NEF’s policy director, said: “Over the last century, Britain and the US left a global trail of conflict, social upheaval and environmental damage as they sought to capture and control a disproportionate share of the world’s oil reserves. Now it seems they are determined to increase their ecological debts at Iraq’s expense. Instead of a new beginning, Iraq is caught in a very old colonial trap.”

I always said it, so this comes as no surprise to me. From the beginning, the Iraq war has been an excuse for corporate plundering; we all knew Iraq would not have been invaded if it didn’t have oil. In the past three years I’ve talked to a lot of people about the war and the overwhelming majority of people, regardless of their political stance, was convinced this war was fought for oil. So why was this such a controversial point before the war? Too many anti-war activists seemed reluctant at the time to draw attnetion to this point, especially the socalled moderates, probably out of fear of being called a hippy or “radical”. Heck, Henry Farrell still thinks it’s crackpot to think Bush knew before the war that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.

It is doubtful that this plan would be legal, even if implemented by the socalled independent Iraqi government rather than the US occupier, but the article also ignores that sooner or later the Americans will leave and the insurgency will take control of the country, at which point any such agreement will be null and void.

War lies: “German intelligence agree on Iraqi WMDs”

War Lies
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The greatest lies told about the war on Iraq are of course the lies about Saddam Hussein’s ties with Al Quida and his massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, lies that even at the time were hard to swallow and today only persist in hardcore Bushian circles and in the delusion bunker that is the Bush White House itself.

To cover up these lies in the aftermath of the invasion, once it became clear just how big those lies were and how little truth was in them, a new lie had to be invented. People like Tony Blair could no longer pretend to believe the prewar reports and instead resorted to a meta lie: “we misunderestimated the amounts of WMDs Iraq had, but everybody did” and “not just American and British intelligence was faulty, but the German and French intelligence services said the same things”.

The first charge is so much self serving nonsense. From the start, many if not most of the people against the war were sceptical about Saddam’s stash of WMDs — I know I was. And we had the support of people like Scott Ritter, the ex-weapons inspector who before the war made it clear these allegations were nonsense. The second claim is harder to reject, as funnily enough most intelligence services are reticent to talk about their work; you never know what information these services have that we do not. It makes it therefore easy for Blair to claim that they supported him before the war, that “we were all fooled” and that nobody is
to blame for this faulty intelligence.

Not anymore. The various investigations into the workings of MI5 and such in the wake of the death of Dr. David Kelly had already made much nonsense of Blair’s claims, but the final nail in the coffin might come from this report by the LA Times which shows that the CIA deliberately misrepresented German intelligence on Iraqi WMDs:

BERLIN — The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Five senior officials from Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball’s information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball’s accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball’s German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.

“This was not substantial evidence,” said a senior German intelligence official. “We made clear we could not verify the things he said.”

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. “He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy,” said a BND official who supervised the case. “He is not a completely normal person,” agreed a BND analyst.

Worse, those within the CIA who questioned this intelligence were ignored and punished for their views:

An investigation by The Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations, as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was worse than official reports have disclosed.

The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball’s account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq’s biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball’s account even though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.

one of the victims of the Iraq war
One of the victims that need not have died if these people had done their job before the war.

Which leaves one important question: why did the German intelligence services or those CIA people who questioned Curveball not come forward before the war, when it might have done some good? You might also ask why the LA Times couldn’t have mounted this investigation then, come to think of it. Some 100,000 Iraqi people might still be alive if either party had deigned to blow the whistle earlier.