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CounterPunch
February
15, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
Condition
Orange as a Way of Life; Colin Powell and the Great "Intelligence"
Fraud; Recipes from the Donner Party; One More Look at Lerner;
Return to Blackhawk Down
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Here we are in Condition Orange and hysteria has
set in. We're at the point when rumors careen round like balls
on a pool table. Late Friday night a San Francisco lawyer with
a New York pal in a company that makes backdrops and scenery
for TV companies reported his pal's tidings that the TV networks
had ordered special "Iraqi" set backdrops, to be delivered
in time for use on Monday. Virtual war: "This is Christiane
Amanpour, live in..."
The day Ashcroft and Ridge announced
the entire nation had joined New York at Level Orange, four fugitive
Cubans from the military made landfall on the Homeland, passing
undetected by southern Florida's vast flotillas of Coast Guard
and Navy vessels, plus Fat Albert, the blimp panopticon tethered
above the lower Keys. The four tied up their 32-foot fiber-glass
cigarette boat (sporting the Cuban flag and containing two AK-47s,
8 loaded magazines and a GPS finder tuned to the coordinates
of the US Coastguard station) on the southern shore of Key West,
at the Hyatt Resort dock. Then, clad in their Cuban army fatigues
(one had a Chinese made handgun strapped to his hip) they wondered
about, marveling at the serene emptiness of the evening streets,
looking for a police station where they could turn themselves
in. Had they been Terrorists there were plenty of rewarding targets
within a strolling distance, including a major surveillance center
for the Caribbean and Latin America, run by US Southern Command,
also a US Navy base, plus of course Key West's extensive literary
colony.
The Great
"Intelligence Fraud"
Events do rush by us in a blur, I know,
but let's not abandon Secretary of State Colin Powell's Feb 5
speech to the UN in the graveyard of history without one last
backward glance. It was, after all, billed by the President as
a conclusive intelligence briefing on exactly how Saddam Hussein
has been concealing his weapons of mass destruction, and how
he's hand in-glove with Al Qaeda.
Now, when the Commander in Chief states
publicly that his Secretary of State will deliver the goods,
we can be safe in assuming that he's been assured that yes, the
US intelligence "community" has indeed got the goods.
But barely more than a week after Powell's speech it now looks
as though its major claims were at best speculative, and at worst
outright distortions, some of them derided in advance by UN Chief
Inspector Hans Blix.
There was the supposed transporter of
biotoxins that turned out to be a truck from the Baghdad health
department; the sinisterly enlarged test ramp for long distance
missiles that was nothing of the sort; the suspect facility that
had recently been cleared by the UN inspection teams; the strange
eavesdropped conversations that could as well have been Iraqi
officers discussing how to hide stills for making bootleg whiskey.
The promoter of the Iraq/Al Qaeda link, Abu Musab Zarqawi turns
out to be an imaginative liar trying to get a prison sentence
commuted and the terror cell, Ansar-al Islam, a bunch of Islamic
fundamentalists violently opposed to Saddam and operating out
of Kurdish territory.
(A few days later Powell cited Osama
bin Laden's latest tape as confirming that Saddam and Al Qaeda
are in cahoots. Actually it's mostly a vivid account, which has
the ring of truth, of how he and his men in their Tora Bora foxholes
survived ferocious US bombing with minimal casualties. Bin Laden
concludes by urging all Muslims "to pull up your pant legs
for jihad" against the forces of darkness. Of Saddam and
the Ba'ath he says, "the Socialists are infidels wherever
they are, either in Baghdad or Aden. Such war which may take
place these days is similar to the war between Muslims and Romans
when the interests of the Muslims came along with the interests
of the Persians who both fought against the Romans.")
And of course there was the British intelligence
report, sent by Tony Blair to Powell who commended it in his
UN speech as particularly "fine". The report turned
out to be a series of plagiarisms from old articles from Jane's,
and from a paper on Iraqi politics written by a student called
Ibrahim al Marashi, at the Monterey Institute for International
Studies.
The Marashi plagiarism represents an
intrusive parable on how "intelligence" reports actually
get put together, to fulfill a political agenda. From some enterprising
work by freelance reporter Kenneth Raposa who worked on the Iraqi
Dossier story for the Boston Globe, it emerges that Marashi himself
comes from a Shi'a family in Baltimore, Md. He's never visited
Iraq and is keen to see Saddam toppled by US invasion.
Marashi's essay was published in the
Middle East Review of International Affairs in Sept 2002, a scholarly
magazine run by the GLORIA Center (acronym for Global Research
in International Affairs Center) in Herzliya, Israel. Its director
is Barry Rubin, who has also been a senior fellow at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy -- an Israel policy think tank.
Rubin is part of the coterie--which includes Daniel Pipes, Michael
Ledeen, and the arch conspirator Richard Perle--who have been
pressing for a US attack on Iraq.
Marashi told Raposa that the documents
on which he had based his paper had been given him by Kenaan
Makiya, a well-known Iraqi exile, and proponent of invasion,
much favored by Powell's own State Department. Makiya claims
to have some 4 million pages of documents seized from northern
Iraq after
Operation Desert Storm.
So here we have a politically-inspired
document, spliced together by a Shi'a student, published by an
Israeli-based think-tank hot for war, swiped off the web by Blair's
harried minions and served up to Powell as a masterpiece of British
intelligence collection from MI6.
Quite aside from the welcome damage done
to Powell's credibility and to the war party in general, the
Marashi saga vividly reminds us of just how much rubbish has
been served up to the American people in the guise of reliable
"intelligence". Remember how back amid the build-up
to the last Iraqi war, the Pentagon invoked satellite photos
of 265,000 Iraqi troops massed to invade Saudi Arabia.
Jean Heller, a journalist from the St
Petersburg Times in Florida persuaded her newspaper to buy two
photos at $1,600 each from the Russian commercial satellite,
the Soyuz Karta. No troops showed up on the photos. "You
could see the planes sitting wing tip to wing tip in Riyadh airport,"
Ms Heller says, "but there wasn't was any sign of a quarter
of a million Iraqi troops sitting in the middle of the desert."
The ridicule now being showered on Powell's
Iraq Dossier won't slow up the production of these ridiculous
documents or hinder the endless flourishing of supposedly conclusive
satellite photography or communications intercepts. If war does
come, we can be sure there will be repetitions of the "misinterpretations"
and "tragic errors" of the 1991 onslaught.
When my brother Patrick drove from Amman
to Baghdad back at the end of the 1991 onslaught he passed the
hulks of oil tankers bombed to bits under the claim they were
mobile SCUD launchers. The single biggest atrocity of that war
was the US bombing of the Almariya shelter in Baghdad. The Pentagon
claimed it was a top secret military command center. It wasn't.
Absent its intended occupants, university professors and technocrats,
ordinary Iraqi mothers and children had taken shelter there.
Just another intelligence screw-up, with several hundred dead
mothers and kids as the price.
And yes, we are in the wake of the greatest
intelligence failure in American history, for which not one intelligence
head rolled. Instead they gave the CIA even more money, and yes,
it's grateful chief George Tenet sitting beside Powell in the
UN Security Council. He should have been too ashamed to show
his face in public.
Lerner:
Worse Than A Mere "Flake"
From John Garcia, of the University of
Iowa and Davis, Ca., comes this forceful commentary on Lerner:
"Your jabs at Lerner are well-aimed, but they're heavy on
his ego and too light on his actual racist "vision".
You would be more forceful if you would mention these points:
1. During his KPFA interview on February
11, Lerner set about describing the acts of anti-Semitism displayed
by the anti-war rally organizers in SF (here he blurs the distinction
between ANSWER and the other organizers), and -- this as an utterly
shocking racist slip -- he enumerated among these "anti-Semitic"
acts the fact that the volunteers who toted around the buckets
for donations WORE PALESTINIAN KAFFIYEHS.
"Leave aside the reality that there
were dozens of volunteers, many of them walk-ups from the rally
itself, only a few of which wore the kaffiyeh. The key point
is we have him saying on tape that wearing one is anti-Semitic!
If you haven't heard the interview, you really must acquire the
tape. It comes about half way through the broadcast of the KPFA
evening news (6-7pm).
"2.Lerner has repeatedly called
for Israel's induction into NATO or some other mutual defense
treaty with the United States. I've seen this in several Tikkun
bulletins. Does this Dalai Lama of fairness ask for anything
similar for the future Palestinian state?
"3. Lerner constantly asks for "reparations" for
Palestinians. That is, they get cash payouts in return for dropping
their claim to their homeland, to be instead herded into their
discontiguous "state" wholly dominated by a NATO neighbor
armed to the teeth. This is his vision of peace and reconciliation?
Lerner plays a key role in the US branch of the Zionist movement.
He is the lenient liberal who supplies a conceptual haven for
Jews troubled by their conscience. But his "vision"
tallies out to the same morally depleted two-state solution championed
by Bush and Sharon. I find that he is much more dangerous than
merely a "flake" as Alex called him."
Is Jah God
in Kansas? More on Misreadings
"I thought you might enjoy a misreading
from my own experience, which begs the question of whether or
not I am a vegetarian," writes CounterPuncher Daniel Summaria,
who describes a visit to Sausalito, back in the years when he
was in the Navy and stationed in SF.
"At the time I was loath to be seen
in public with the military issue eye glasses which were all
I could, at the time, afford. As I literally stumbled into the
bookstore, I noticed across the room a large display table heaped
with large coffee-table type books surmounted by a large sign
which read (I thought): THE DONNER PARTY COOK BOOK. Surely, I
thought, this is indeed a culture in which anything can be sold
if the packaging is right. But upon close inspection (one and
a half feet) I saw more clearly that the display featured The
DINNER Party Cookbook."
I see the Donner Party Cookbook as a
nice little booklet, with vegetarian recipes for wild mushrooms,
grilled pinecones and the like, and then just a few blank pages
at the end.
Also Turning his attention to Michael
Lerner, Summaria remarks, "What really pissed me off about
Michael Lerner back during the Bush Sr attack on Iran was Lerner's
accusation that Barbara Lubin (Middle East Childrens' Alliance)
was a 'self-hating Jew'. After that, no ad hominem seems to me
below the belt. Besides, my family is Italian American, and where
I grew up neither tact nor modesty was ever considered much of
a virtue. Why my tax dollars should help religious fanatics from
Detroit to Brooklyn build fortified luxury condos on stolen land
baffles me. Plus one cannot help but wonder how much of US aid
to Israel actually hits the ground there, versus the coffers
of US arms manufacturers and the Swiss bank accounts of Israeli
government officials on the take in the form of kickbacks and
other perks. If Iran-Contra taught us anything, anything at all,
it is that the Israel government is at least as corrupt as our
own."
Another CounterPuncher supports our position
that Lerner should be allowed to speak at all venues he requests,
just so long as he is forbidden to use the word "meaning",
as in "politics of meaning", the phrase that caused
Hillary Clinton briefly to patronize Lerner as a spiritual adviser
before she realized that Lerner's lust for self promotion was
as keen as her husband's coarse appetites. As noted earlier CounterPunch's
position is that Lerner should always be allowed to speak at
whatever length he demands, on the ground that the amount of
a fool he makes himself is in direct proportion to the time allowed
him to open his mouth in public.
Black Hawk
Down: Who Wrote What?
Here's a note from Mark Bowden setting
the record straight on what he did and did not write, re the
conduct of US forces in Somalia:
"In 1997, when the abridged, serialized
version of my book "Black Hawk Down" was running in
The Philadelphia Inquirer, a British reporter named Dowden wrote
an article (in the Guardian, I think) about my stories. Dowden
put his own spin on my reporting, announcing that I had revealed
that American soldiers had committed atrocities in Mogadishu.
The stories had \reported that soldiers on the ground and in
the air had fired into crowds, crowds that included women and
children, so Dowden was certainly entitled to his own interpretation
of those facts. He went a little further, however, by inventing
scenes to buttress his version and attributing them to my story.
"In 1999, a much fuller version
of the serial was published as a book, and in 2001, a feature
film was released by the same name. That was when some journalists
began telling the story (repeated in your column) that I had
reported evidence of atrocities in Mogadishu back in 1993 when
it happened, and that I had left these details out of my book
-- or been forced to leave them out, or some such bullshit.
" The truth is, I did not report
anything about the battle in 1993, as your column and others
have reported. The first and only writing I have done on the
subject as the serial in the Inquirer in 1997. Far from leaving
things out when the serial became a book, I actually expanded
greatly (by about three times) on what I had written in the serial.
Happily, no one has to take my word for these things. The book
is available everywhere, and the serial is still posted in its
entirety on the internet (www.blackhawkdown.com).
I suppose someone skilled enough at these things could even find
Dowden's report."
Yesterday's
Features
CounterPunch News Service
Slow
Lerner: It May Not Help Kids in Iraq, But It Sure Got Michael
Lerner Airtime
Andrew Murray
Tony
Blair Versus the British People
Ben Tripp
President
A**hole
Peggy Thomson
My
Close Encounter with Saddam
Gary Leupp
Meet Mr. Blowback:
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, CIA Op and Homicidal Thug
Saul Landau
Bush and Corporate Fraud
Adam Engel
A Civilian Occupation:
The Politics of Israeli Architecture
Anthony Gancarski
Jacksonville in Crisis
Rick Giombetti
Specific Threats to Democracy
Jean-David Levitte
A Warning on Iraq from France:
Make War the Last Option
Ian Gurney
Whose Side is Bush On?
Maria Engqvist
Did
the FARC Shoot Down a US Military Plane in Colombia?
Ron Jacobs
This Madness Must Cease
Josh Frank
Call to Washington:
Stonewall Bush
Website of the Day
Rock
Out Against War
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