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Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair dissect HRC in her White House years and conclude their series on the woman who may be the next president. PLUS Eva Liddell on the man who really set the course of the Bush presidency PLUS Andy Worthington on the battle for the rights of the Guantanamo detainees PLUS Debbie Nathan on what the border crackdown has done to the women crossing the Rio Grande. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now
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How the Press Led the USA Into the Iraq War  Buy End Times Now! Today's Stories September 8 / 9, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn September 7, 2007 Robert
Fantina John
Ross James
Brooks Russell
Mokhiber Joshua
Frank John
Walsh Mark
Brenner Mike
Ferner Website
of the Day
September 6, 2007 Kathleen
and Bill Christison Allan
J. Lichtman Norman
Solomon Yifat
Susskind Catherine
Fenton Laura
Santina Farzana
Versey Yves
Engler Kelly
Overton Michael
Simmons Website
of the Day
September 5, 2007 Stan
Goff Michael
Dickinson Matthew
Abraham Patrick
Cockburn Dave
Lindorff Paul
Craig Roberts Clifton
Ross Elizabeth
Schulte Joseph
Grosso Ben
Terrall Website
of the Day
September 4, 2007 Jean
Bricmont Patrick
Cockburn Ron
Jacobs Tom
Kerr Gary
Leupp Sonja
Karkar Heather
Gray Fidel
Castro Jackie
Corr Sunsara
Taylor Website
of the Day
September 3, 2007 Patrick
Cockburn Eamon
McCann Joshua
Frank Chris
Floyd Marjorie
Cohn Walter
Brasch Matt
Reichel Website
of the Day
September 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Andy
Worthington Saul
Landau David
Keen Patrick
Cockburn Diana
Johnstone George
Longstreth, MD Linda
M. Woolf Ralph
Nader Fred
Gardner Ben
Tripp David
Michael Green Missy
Comley Beattie Michael
Dickinson Paul
Krassner Ron
Jacobs Poets'
Basement
August 31, 2007 Jeff
Gibbs Paul
Craig Roberts Ray
McGovern Robert
Weissman Matt
Vidal Robin
Mittenthal Chris
Kutalik Richard
Forno Binoy
Kampmark Dave
Zirin Website
of the Day
August 30, 2007 Gary
Leupp John
Ross Anthony
DiMaggio Jordan
Flaherty Michael
Donnelly Russell
Mokhiber Dennis
Brutus William
S. Lind Martha
Rosenberg Jeff
Leys / Brian Terrell Website
of the Day
Patrick
Cockburn Winslow
T. Wheeler David
Rosen Dave
Zirin Paul
Craig Roberts Diane
Farsetta Ben
Davis Alan
Farago Jenna
Orkin Don
Monkerud Richard
Nasser Website
of the Day
August 28, 2007 Uri
Avnery Bill
Quigley Joshua
Frank China
Hand Firmin
DeBrabander Charles
Peña Andy
Worthington Ramzy
Baroud Anthony
Papa Ashley
Smith Website
of the Day
Jorge
Mariscal Bill
Christison Manuel
Garcia, Jr. Anthony
DiMaggio Bruce
A. Roth John
Walsh Dave
Lindorff Ron
Jacobs Binoy
Kampmark Russell
D. Hoffman Website
of the Day
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Weekend
Edition A Vietnam FlashbackPetraeus, the Westmoreland of IraqBy RAY McGOVERN The killing in Hawijah, Iraq of 18-year old Corporal Jeremy Shank of Jackson, Missouri (population 12,000) merited an article in the Southeast Missourian. Cpl. Shank was killed on Sept. 6, 2006 and I was in that part of Missouri when his body came home for burial. According to the Pentagon, Shank was on a "dismounted security patrol when he encountered enemy forces using small arms." Cpl. Shank's death came two years after President George W. Bush greeted then-Prime Minister Iyad Allawi at the White House, proudly announcing "months of steady progress" toward a free Iraq, despite persistent violence in some parts of the country. His death came two weeks after national security adviser Stephen Hadley acknowledged that the mid-2006 upsurge in violence meant that the new challenge in Iraq "isn't about insurgency, isn't about terror; it's about sectarian violence." Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki underscored the point, "The most important element in the security plan is to curb the religious violence." So what was the mission of Cpl. Shank while on security patrol, and who were the "enemy forces" he encountered? Was his mission to prevent Iraqi religious fanatics from killing each other? On Sept. 7, 2006, the day after Shank was killed, President Bush in effect mocked Jeremy Shank's death by drawing the familiar but bogus connection to 9/11:
Not for children, grandchildren of Jeremy Shank.
At the First Baptist Church in Jackson, Rev. Carter Frey eulogized Shank as one of those who "put themselves in harm's way and paid the ultimate sacrifice so you and I can have freedom to live in this country." That was a stretch-a staple of FOX and other "news," but, still, a stretch. And I have been asking myself in the year since how many young men and women like Jeremy Shank have been, and will be killed trying to stop Shia and Sunni from killing one another. A few weeks after Shank's death, President Bush described "our job" as being "to prevent the full-scale civil war from happening." Was/is that the mission? And is it worth what is so facilely called the "ultimate sacrifice," or the penultimate one-tens of thousand veterans trying to adjust to life without arm or leg? Is it quite correct to say they put themselves in harm's way? Or was it their commander in chief who put them in harm's way? Is it truly possible that he remains determined to keep treating our young men and women as disposable soldiers for the rest of his term? And will those in Congress who are supposed to represent those young men and women go along with that? Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was entirely correct when she insisted in a recent op-ed that the "threshold question in any war is: What are we fighting for? Our troops, especially, deserve a convincing answer." The sacrifices of Shank and his family and others and their families are being mocked by glib sloganeering.
Today is Sept. 7, 2007, a year and a day since Cpl. Shank was killed. In a few weeks we will know where the small-town Shanks of America stand in the priorities of members of the House and Senate. As far as the president is concerned...well, he does not seem to be very concerned at all. They should simply smile appreciatively as he presents them with a rubber turkey, and then populate the backdrop for photo-ops. More unconscionable still, those Shanks clearly sit low on the priority lists of those senior generals who command them-generals like the sainted David Petraeus, smart enough to know the war cannot be won, but not courageous enough to come out and say it. The Shanks are merely what we used to call "warm bodies" to throw into the fight. For many of us with some gray in our hair, we've seen it all before-and, ironically enough, exactly 40 years ago. What Gen. David Petraeus has set in motion, or at least condoned, is the massaging of data to justify what his boss, President Bush, wants to do in Iraq; namely, to keep enough troops "in the fight" in order to stave off definitive defeat before he and Vice President Dick Cheney leave office in January 2009. That's what the "surge" is all about, and Petraeus is smart enough to know that only too well. Like his apparent role model, Colin Powell, he can bear four stars on his shoulder, but he must also bear on his conscience thousands of dead and wounded Shanks as a result of his eagerness to play in the Bush/Cheney charade. A more precise counterpart to Gen. Petraeus is the late Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of our forces in Vietnam. The argument over whether or not the "surge" is working brings back un-fond memories of the deliberate smoke-and-mirrors approach Westmoreland forced on intelligence analysts in Saigon-and Washington-including deliberate falsification of the numbers on enemy strength. It would be tempting to sift through the ample grist of the week and cite, for example, the demonstrable failure of the surge to meet its stated aim; the key judgment of the latest National Intelligence Estimate that the current government in Baghdad "will become more precarious over the next six to twelve months;" the conclusion of a blue-ribbon group of retired generals that it is necessary to rebuild the Iraqi police from scratch; the amply justified fear on the part of analysts in the General Accountability Office and the intelligence community that the Army will continue to do all it can to water down their assessments; and, not least, the controversy over the various methodologies being used to track the security situation in Iraq, including such basics as what incidents to count and how to categorize them. I shall resist the temptation. Rather, I believe it will be much more instructive to show that this kind of thing has happened before within the lifetimes of half of us; that it was an unconscionable performance on the part of Gen. Westmoreland and his Pentagon bosses, and that thousands more Shanks-not to mention Vietnamese-died as a direct result of the dishonesty.
My flashback was occasioned by press reports yesterday that senior Army officers in Baghdad were trashing the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate and the GAO analysis on grounds that they employed "flawed counting methodology used by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency." Speaking of flawed counting methodology, someone has inserted into the president's mouth the claim that:
Finally, some good news! But wait. As a homework assignment, I invite readers to look up what has been said previously about how many al-Qaeda fighters may be in Iraq. Then do some arithmetic and try to calculate how many of them may now have been killed more than once.
It was exactly forty years ago that my CIA analyst colleague Sam Adams was sent to Saigon to have it out with the Army intelligence unit there. After several months of exhaustive analysis, Sam had connected a whole bunch of dots, so to speak, and concluded that there were more than twice as many Vietnamese Communists under arms as the Army had on its books. Bewildered at first, Adams quickly learned that Westmoreland had instructed his intelligence staff to falsify intelligence on enemy strength, keeping the numbers low enough to promote the illusion of progress in the war. After a prolonged knock-down-drag-out fight, then-CIA director Richard Helms decided to acquiesce in the Army's arbitrary exclusion from its enemy aggregate total paramilitary and other armed elements numbering up to 300,000. These categories had been included in previous estimates because they were a key part of the combat force of the Communists. The Adams/CIA best estimate was total Communist strength of 500,000. The doctored estimate went to the president and his advisers in November 1967, just two months before the country-wide Communist offensive at Tet in late January/early February 1968 proved -at great cost-that Adams figures were far more accurate than the Army's. Years later, when Adams and CBS exposed this travesty, Westmoreland sued, giving Adams his day in court-literally. Subpoenaed documents and the testimony of Westmoreland's own former staff in Saigon established the accuracy of Adams' charges, and Westmoreland withdrew his suit. Right up until his premature death at age 55, Sam Adams could not dispel the remorse he felt at not having gone public with his findings. He believed that, had he done so, the entire left half of the Vietnam memorial would not be there, because there would be no names to carve into the granite for the last few lingering years of the war.
More recently, Daniel Ellsberg expressed great regret that he did not disclose earlier deceptions, as well as those witnessed during 1967-68 when the administration of Lyndon Johnson worked up plans to expand the ground war into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam-right up to the Chinese border, perhaps even beyond. Early in 1967, Westmoreland addressed a joint session of Congress and congratulated himself on the "great progress" being made in the war. What Congress did not know, but Ellsberg did, is that the war was going poorly, and that Westmoreland was on the verge of getting President Johnson to agree to sending 206,000 more troops for a widening of the war that threatened to bring China in as an active combatant. Leaks to the New York Times put the kibosh on those plans. One patriotic truth teller leaked the 206,000 figure, which the Times published on March 10, 1968. Emboldened by that, Ellsberg himself told the Times about the suppression of the accurate 500,000 count of Vietnamese Communists under arms, the Donnybrook between CIA analysts and their fettered counterparts in Saigon, and other information about the games Westmoreland was playing. The Times used those materials for major stories on March 19, 20, and 21. On the 22nd, President Johnson announced that Westmoreland would be leaving Vietnam to become chief of staff of the Army, and the general was told there would be no change in strategy to expand the war. Things like that can happen quickly. On March 25, 1968, Johnson complained to a small gathering of confidants:
Moral to the story: patriotic truth telling can prevent wider wars. Please take heed, those of you privy to plans for expanding the war in Iraq into Iran or elsewhere.
There will be lots of spin in Washington these next few weeks, and "hope" will be the byword. In his August 28 speech on Iraq, the president set the tone:
Bush goes on to mention that Gen. Petraeus will be heard from shortly. Indeed, over the past several weeks, the president has been punctuating virtually every other public sentence with "Gen. Petraeus" or "David." It is as though Bush is expecting what might be called a "Petraeus ex machina" to extricate himself from the deep hole Cheney and he have dug together. The spinning will only succeed if Congress is blinded by the nine rows of campaign medals and ribbons on Petraeus' chest, forgets about the Shanks in our Army and Marines, and allows itself to be taken in by the new Westmoreland. Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990 and Robert Gates' branch chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com A shorter version of this article
has appeared
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CounterPunch Books of the Crossroads: HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy  Click Here to Buy! Click Here for Dates & Venues Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz  Click Here to Buy! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal  Click Here to Order! How They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism           The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn    Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont               CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed       Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh                   |
