Just Think - News Archive

Fanning the flames of dissent
By Jim Spencer
Denver Post Columnist
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

The 38 people packed into Holly Bennett's Denver home Monday night were not your run-of-the-mill revolutionaries. They were lawyers, computer experts, business owners,

physicians.

Like old friends at a party, they filled Bennett's dining room table with chips, cheese, deviled eggs and bottles of wine. Thing was, most of these people had never laid eyes on each other.

Instead, they shared a bond. They are committed to changing this country's leadership because of disgust with the policies of the president of the United States. They gathered, like tens of thousands of others did across the country, at house parties organized by an Internet-based political movement called MoveOn.org. They met to discuss Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" and listen to Moore speak via a worldwide computer hookup where grassroots met cyberspace.

Seen by millions in its first week of release, "Fahrenheit 9/11" insinuates that George W. Bush stole the 2000 presidential election when Republican officials purposely removed blacks from Florida's voter rolls. Most pointedly, though, Moore's documentary proposes that Bush did not invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein aided the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction aimed at us. Moore suggests that the president sent Americans to be killed and maimed to control Iraqi oil and impose U.S. will on the Middle East.

Bush and his supporters decry Moore as a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Their problem is that the president's own conspiracy theories are at least as questionable as the filmmaker's.

"The core issue is the lie on which this war is based," David Cahn, a 45-year-old Denver urologist, told the folks in Bennett's house. "We were told we were going to war because of an imminent threat."

The Bush administration's promotion of that misconception, said 36-year-old Marine veteran Mark Randol, represents a breach of faith that overwhelms anything Michael Moore put forward.

"It's not necessarily a conspiracy," Randol said. "But the reasoning (Bush) gave in Congress for going to war was false. I would say he lied."

Those lies, Randol believes, betrayed every American whom Bush sent into combat. Randol served in the first Persian Gulf War. Republican by nature, he voted for Ronald Reagan, Bush's father and Bob Dole.

"We can't pull out of Iraq (immediately)," he said, reflecting a sentiment shared by what seemed a majority of those at Bennett's house. "We have to take responsibility for what we've done. I don't have a quick and easy answer."

Except for a change of administration.

That was the hope that led Bennett and her husband, John Lebsack, to open their house to a bunch of strangers. It's not just the war in Iraq, Bennett said; it's Bush's attacks on constitutional rights that the Supreme Court must now restore. It's the holier-than-you smugness of religious conservatives to whom Bush caters.

Amen, said Debra Taylor. The 51-year-old programmer/analyst once voted for Reagan. She first met Bennett on Monday. But they both understand the vilification of anyone who opposes the president's agenda.

"A co-worker in Texas told me how we have a Supreme Court justice promoting sex for 12-year-old girls," Taylor said. "I asked her where she heard that. She said in church. Thirty days later, my own sister in Arkansas, who goes to a Baptist church, said, 'You know, we have a Supreme Court justice promoting sex for 12-year-old girls."'

At Holly Bennett's on Monday night, silly charges of immorality played as well as contrived terrorist connections.

"I don't think the Republican Party of my parents is the Republican Party of today," Taylor said. "I'm here because I so desperately disagree with George Bush's politics."

She spoke for everyone in the room.

And, she hopes, a majority of voters in November.

Wed Jun 23, 9:13 AM ET
AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A book by an anonymous CIA (news - web sites) official titled "Imperial Hubris," describes Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) as two "failed half-wars" that have played into the enemy's hands and complicated the war on terrorism, reports said.

The 309-page book was written by a still serving Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) officer who from 1996 to 1999 headed a special office to track Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) and who, in the book, is identified only as Anonymous, said the New York Times which obtained a copy of the book.

In a highly unusual move allowing the publication of a book on a politically explosive topic, the CIA vetted the book to ensure it included no classified information, and a CIA official asked the daily not to reveal the identity of its author -- a former CIA official identified him -- because he could become a target of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, the daily said.

In criticism directed both at US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) and his predecessor Bill Clinton (news - web sites), the author of the book says US leaders "refuse to accept the obvious".

"We are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency -- not criminality or terrorism -- and our policy and procedures have failed to make more than a modest dent in enemy forces," he said.

He said the threat from radical Islam is rooted in opposition not to American values, but to policies and actions, particularly in the Islamic world.

The book denounces the US occupation of Iraq as "an avaricious, premeditated unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat," and said it would fuel the anti-American sentiments on which bin Laden and his followers draw.

"There is nothing that bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq," the author writes.

In warning that the United States is losing the war on terrorism, Anonymous writes: "In the period since 11 September, the United States has dealt lethal blows to Al Qaeda's leadership and -- if official claims are true -- have captured 3,000 Al Qaeda foot soldiers.

"At the same time, we have waged two failed half-wars and, in doing so, left Afghanistan and Iraq seething with anti-U.S. sentiment, fertile grounds for the expansion of Al Qaeda and kindred groups."

Anonymous said he has "a pressing certainty that Al Qaeda will attack the continental United States again, that its next strike will be more damaging than that of 11 September 2001, and could include use of weapons of mass destruction."

CIA restricts one-third of U.S. Senate WMD report
By Tabassum Zakaria
Wednesday June 16, 9:58 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA has decided that about one-third of a U.S. Senate report criticizing prewar intelligence on Iraq contains secret information that should not be released to the public, intelligence sources said on Tuesday.

After reviewing the roughly 400 pages for classified data, the intelligence agency returned the report to the Senate Intelligence Committee with brackets around 30 percent to 40 percent of the contents to signal the information was secret, intelligence sources said.

The report examines the intelligence on Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion last year, including estimates that Baghdad had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

President George W. Bush justified his decision to go to war by citing a threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. No large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons have been found.

A closed-door Senate Intelligence Committee meeting on Tuesday to discuss the report and the CIA's redactions ended without any decisions on how the panel would move forward toward making it public.

"We're going to try to vote on Thursday to approve the report. There have been no decisions in regard to the redactions," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, said.

Members of the committee disagreed over some of the proposed conclusions, which also raised questions over when the report would be publicly released.

Roberts said it was unlikely the report would be released next week -- "not the way things are now." He would not identify the contentious issues.

The committee has several options to deal with the CIA's redactions. It could reword the passages that the agency identified as containing classified information, or take the unprecedented action of ignoring the intelligence agency's views and put out the full report as originally written.

The latter option was considered unlikely because the committee would not want to be seen as releasing classified information. "It's always an option, but probably as a last resort," Sen. Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, said.

The CIA tried to preserve as much of the report in its original format as possible, but some sections contained information that revealed sources, operational techniques and intelligence collection methods, one intelligence official said on condition of anonymity.

"I think they (CIA) went way overboard. Clearly what they are doing is taking the heart of the report out of it," Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said.

Asked how critical the report was of the CIA and its director, George Tenet, who is leaving next month, Durbin replied: "I think it's very honest and there are parts of it that are very critical."

The report was expected to be highly critical of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but less critical of the intelligence on terrorism, government sources say. It was expected to specifically criticize Tenet in some instances.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Bill Cheney, chief economist with MFC Global Investment Management, said a "measured," quarter-point rate increase by the Fed is "pretty much guaranteed" at the end of the month.

The central bank will not move too precipitously, he said, because the job market remains slack, with more than 8 million people still looking for work.

Just as manufacturing led the economy into recession with big job losses in 2001, this year's job revival is being fed by a robust comeback in manufacturing. The once-battered, but now booming, sector last month scored its biggest job gain — 32,000 — since 1998.

House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland said May's job gains were "good news for workers."

But he added, "Let's remember that during the Clinton administration, the economy averaged 239,000 jobs gained every single month for eight straight years. ... There really is no comparison."

The president first insinuates that the mission is accomplished on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln where he gave a speech beneath a huge banner that proclaimed, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED".

The White House then tried to backtrack and say that they had not put the banner up (yeah, every aircraft carrier I've ever been on always had huge mission accomplished banners sitting around for a special occassion).

Well, that doesn't explain this:

President Talks to Troops in Qatar
Camp As Sayliyah, Qatar
June 5, 2003

"America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished."

Iraq War Planned Two Days After 9-11- Wolfowitz
Tuesday, 3 June 2003, 12:52 pm
Article: Jason Leopold

Wolfowitz Admits Iraq War Planned Two Days After 9-11

By Jason Leopold
While the hawks in the Bush administration attempt to justify the logic behind a pre-emptive strike against Iraq now that its become clear the country’s alleged weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found, the true reasons for going to war are finally coming to light.

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush said intelligence reports from the CIA and the FBI indicated that Saddam Hussein “had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent,” which put the United States in imminent danger of possibly being attacked sometime in the future.

Two months later, despite no concrete evidence from intelligence officials or United Nations inspectors that these weapons existed, Bush authorized the use of military force to decimate the country and destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Now it appears the weapons of mass destruction will never be found and many critics of the war are starting to wonder aloud whether the community was duped by the Bush administration.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, both of who spent a better part of the past decade advocating the use of military force against Iraq, put the issue to rest once and for all.

Judging by recent interviews Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz gave to a handful of media outlets during the past week, the short answer is yes, the public was mislead into believing Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz admit that the war with Iraq was planned two days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

On September13, 2001, during a meeting at Camp David with President Bush, Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration, Wolfowitz said he discussed with President Bush the prospects of launching an attack against Iraq, for no apparent reason other than a “gut feeling” Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, and there was a debate “about what place if any Iraq should have in a counter terrorist strategy.”

“On the surface of the debate it at least appeared to be about not whether but when,” Wolfowitz said during the May 9 Interview with Vanity Fair's Sam Tannenhaus, a transcript of which is posted on the Department of Defense website and is archived on Scoop. “There seemed to be a kind of agreement that yes it should be, but the disagreement was whether it should be in the immediate response or whether you should concentrate simply on Afghanistan first.”

Wolfowitz said it was clear that because Saddam Hussein “praised” the terrorist attacks on 9-11 that besides Afghanistan, Iraq went to the top of the list of countries the United States expected to launch an attack against in the near future.

“To the extent it was a debate about tactics and timing, the President clearly came down on the side of Afghanistan first. To the extent it was a debate about strategy and what the larger goal was, it is at least clear with 20/20 hindsight that the President came down on the side of the larger goal.”

In an interview with WABC-TV last week, Rumsfeld took it a step further saying United States policy advocated regime change in Iraq since the 1990s and that was also a reason behind the war in Iraq.

“If you go back and look at the debate in the Congress and the debate in the United Nations, what we said was the President said that this is a dangerous regime, the policy of the United States government has been regime change since the mid to late 1990s … and that regime has now been changed. That is a very good thing,” Rumsfeld said during the interview, a transcript of which can be found in Scoop's World News wire.

Rumfeld’s response is only partly true. He and Wolfowitz, along with Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration, wrote to President Clinton in 1998 urging regime change in Iraq but Clinton rebuffed them saying his administration was focusing on dismantling al-Qaeda cells.

In the bigger picture, Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein, who ruled the country with an iron fist, torturing and murdering any citizen who spoke against his regime. But that’s beside the point. The issue is the Bush administration lied to the world and launched an unjustifiable war.

And it’s just the beginning of a so-called two front war the U.S. is planning against other “outlaw” regimes. The administration is ratcheting up the rhetoric on Iran by making similar allegations that this country too poses a threat to national security by harboring al-Qaeda terrorists and building a nuclear arms arsenal.

Serious disagreements exist between the State Department and the Bush administration on how to deal with Iran, with the State Department pushing for an open dialogue and the Bush administration pushing for a new regime.

In a half a dozen interviews last week, Rumsfeld refused to respond to questions about whether the U.S. will use military force to overthrow Iran’s governing body.

“That’s (military force) up to the President but the fact is that to the extent that Iran attempts to influence what’s taking place in Iraq and tries to make Iraq into their image, we will have to stop it. And to the extent they have people from their Revolutionary Guard in they’re attempting to do that, why we’ll have to find them and capture them or kill them,” Rumsfeld said in an interview last week with WCBS-TV.

Wolfowitz, however, is more direct in how to deal with Iran. Responding to the question of whether military force will be used to weed out the clerics running the country, Wolfowitz said in an interview with CNN International Saturday “you know, I think you know, we never rule out that kind of thing.”