RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events "It's not about oil or Iraq..."

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whomod said:
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A few conservative voices rise up from the lock-step:
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"a symbol of the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy and thought, and with too little regard for the American soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the boastfulness of the civilian leadership." - Mark Helprin The Wall Street Journal 5/17/04
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"Well, that's right, he did drive us into a ditch," "Or not into a ditch, we've had a slight --we've slightly veered off the road"
- William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, on the Daily Show comparing President George W. Bush's prosecution of the war in Iraq to a driver who ended up in a ditch.
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"I supported the war and now I feel foolish."
- CNN's Tucker Carlson to the New York Times
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[the president had squandered the trust of the American people]. "After the [weapons of mass destruction] intelligence debacle and the Abu Ghraib disgrace, he [Bush] has run out of that capital. He has to tell us how we will win, what we are doing, how it all holds together, why the infrastructure repair is still in disarray and how a political solution is possible. I'm not sure any more that this president has the skills or competence to pull it off."
- Andrew Sullivan: 5/19/04 on his web blog
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"There has been poor strategic thinking in this. There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to "stay the course": the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure.
In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption."
- Retired General Anthony Zinni
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"We need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts, a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy, by force if necessary. Liberty cannot be laid down like so much Astroturf. Law and order must come first." - Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), conservative chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
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And then you have the zealotry and arrogance of people like.....:
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[what happened at the prison] "is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation. You ever heard of needing to blow some steam off?" - Rush Limbaugh
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Where do you stand??
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Can't wait to hear all these conservative voices who dare to question our Iraq policy, being dismissed as "hate filled Liberals".
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So I guess Republicans are also getting weary of the neocons constant "You must support Bush or you love terrorists and hate America" rhetoric. Truly though, I didn't think it was going to work forever.
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I guess Rove and the Republican hate machine will have to think up some new tactics to silence all criticism.

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These out-of-context Whomod "conservative quotes" have been click-and-dragged from a liberal spin-site near you.

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whomod said:
I'm half expecting for Rumsfeld to ban all video recording equipment and anyone who is in possesion of a camera will be deemed a "terrorist". Can't spin a lie if inconveniences like proof surface only a few days later.

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Mobile phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Britain's The Business newspaper reported yeterday.

Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

"Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.

Disturbing new photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse, which the US government had reportedly tried to keep hidden, were published in Friday's Washington Post newspaper.

The photos emerged along with details of testimony from inmates at Abu Ghraib who said they were sexually molested by female soldiers, beaten, sodomised and forced to eat food from toilets.

AFP

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...Or are these guys just incredibly predictable... You decide. And truly, I was just joking. I was actually expecting Dave or someone to call that bit "liberal paranoia".


There's an Iranian spy in the house. Right behind the 1st lady even!!! Quick call the secret service!!!! How did he get there???!!!!
A few more fables and his work is done. I guess the Iran/Iraq war is now officially over, eh?

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On the front page of this weekend's edition of the Tablet, England's oldest Catholic newspaper, there is this: "The American President, George W. Bush, will be asked by the Pope at their Vatican meeting on 4 June to stop basing his policies in the Middle East on the use of force, a leading curial cardinal said this week." According to Cardinal Pio Laghi, former papal nuncio to the U.S. and a frequent messenger between the Vatican and the White House, the pontiff wants a multilateral peacekeeping force in Iraq, "one that is not under those who organized the war."

According to the cardinal, the pope intends to remind Bush that "the end never justifies the means, respect for life must always be honored and that struggle against terrorism does not justify giving up the principles of the state of law."

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that in the forthcoming issue of Inside the Vatican magazine, Cardinal James Francis Stafford, a senior American prelate serving in the Roman curia, will denounce the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers and intelligence agents. "Is this what American democracy is producing? Men and women who, just below the surface, are barbarians?" asks Stafford, who enjoys a close relationship with the pope.

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** FLORIDA COURT RULING SAYS MEDIA CAN LEGALLY LIE **

On February 14, a Florida Appeals Court ruled that there is absolutely nothing illegal in a major media organisation lying, concealing or distorting information. The court reversed the US$425,000 jury verdict of 2000 that was in favour of journalist Jane Akre, who charged she was pressured by Fox Television management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false information.

On August 18, 2000, a six person jury was unanimous in its conclusion that Akre was indeed fired for threatening to report the station's pressure to broadcast what jurors decided was "a false, distorted or slanted" story about the widespread use of Monsanto's rBGH, a genetically engineered growth hormone given to dairy cows. The court did not dispute the heart of Akre's claim, that Fox pressured her to broadcast a false story to protect the broadcaster from having to defend the truth in court as well as suffer the ire of irate advertisers.

Fox argued from the first, and failed on three separate occasions, in front of three different judges, to have the case tossed out on the grounds there there is no hard, fast and written rule against deliberate distortion of the news. The attorneys for Fox, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, argued that the First Amendment gives broadcasters the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves.

The Court of Appeals, in its six page written decision, held that the Federal Communications Commission's position against news distortion is only a "policy", not a promulgated law, rule or regulation.

Fox aired a report after the ruling was handed down, saying that it was "totally vindicated" by the verdict.

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whomod said:
I'm like fucking Nostradomus!

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PenWing said:

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whomod said:
I'm like fucking Nostradomus!

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What's that like? Fucking a dead guy, I mean?


Sorry, that was too easy. Anyway, it was fairly obvious that was where Rumsfeld was heading. I don't understand why President Bush continues to stand by him. He's going to bring the entire administration down with him if President Bush doesn't fire him quickly, before something else goes wrong.

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the G-man said:
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This one's actually pretty good. It brings up some interesting points.
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Maybe the prison abuses are nothing so much as a symptom of an America this is increasingly crass and increasingly willing to consider debasement as entertainment.

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The Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency found that Halliburton's system of billing the government for billions of dollars in contracts was "inadequate in part," failing to follow the company's internal procedures or even to determine whether subcontractors had performed work.

At the same time, four former Halliburton employees issued signed statements charging that the company had routinely wasted money. Among other things, they said the company had paid $45 apiece for cases of soda and $100 per bag of laundry, and had abandoned nearly new, $85,000 trucks in the desert for lack of spare parts.

"There was this whole thought process that we can spend whatever we want to because the government won't crack down in the first year of a war," said Marie deYoung, a former logistics officer with the company.

One of them, deYoung, said she had tried to renegotiate for lower prices several times but was repeatedly rebuffed by higher-ups, who showed no interest in bringing down costs. In one instance, deYoung said, Halliburton was paying up to $1.2 million a month for a laundry service that did so little work that the laundry wound up costing $100 per bag.

Two other former Halliburton employees who worked as convoy drivers gave Waxman's office statements saying that when the trucks, which cost $85,000, broke down, the vehicles were either burned by the side of the road or abandoned. Both men said they were later fired in an unrelated dispute.

"As someone who has been in trucking for 13 years, I do not understand how a company could ditch a brand-new truck because they didn't have a spare tire," James Warren wrote. "No trucker I know would have been that careless with his own truck."

Pentagon, Ex-Workers Hit Halliburton on Oversight, Costs

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I think though that if you happen to bring stuff like this up, you're not thanked for ensuring our money isn't wasted stupidly but rather, you're attacked for "Bush hatin'" or making "baseless unproven allegations" or something.

It's literally like pigs at the trough at the moment. And only about half of our country gives a rats arse. The other half is trying to convince itself that all the lies it hears are actually the "proven, trustworthy, facts"

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), one of Halliburton's biggest critics in Congress, had planned to introduce the whistle-blower testimony at a hearing today by the House Government Reform Committee, but was blocked by Rep. Thomas M. Davis (R-Va.), the panel's chairman.

Wonder why?

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the whistle-blowers worked directly for Halliburton, and one for a major Halliburton subcontractor. The head of the Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis (R-Va.), refused to allow them to testify in a hearing Tuesday about Iraq and contracting.

David Wilson, a convoy commander for Halliburton, and James Warren, a Halliburton truck driver, stated that new $85,000 Halliburton trucks in Kuwait were "torched" if they got a flat tire. According to Wilson, the company "removed all the spare tires in Kuwait," presumably so the entire truck would have to be replaced after a blowout. In addition, they said, they were instructed not to change the oil on trucks. Warren claims that after he expressed his concerns to Randy Harl, the head of a Halliburton subsidiary, he was fired. Marie deYoung, who worked in the subcontracts department of Halliburton, said the company paid for a laundry service that was so inefficient it cost $100 a bag.

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As for Halliburton, which has Iraq contracts worth up to a total of $18.2 billion, Pentagon auditors believe the company has been billing taxpayers for millions of meals never served to U.S. troops. The auditors have recommended that the government withhold nearly $200 million in payments until the dispute is settled.

In a related development, the Army recently renegotiated a contract Halliburton had with a Kuwaiti company to provide meals. By contracting directly with the Kuwaiti company, the Army cut 40% off the cost.

"Halliburton is a company whose business base expanded extremely rapidly" after it won contracts for work in Iraq, said Bill Reed, the head of the audit agency. "They were not adequately prepared to keep pace." (hey, I thought they were the best qualified,hence 'o bid contracts' -whomod)

The findings by unbiased sources add fuel to Democrats' efforts to draw attention to Halliburton, which was run by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), one of Halliburton's fiercest critics, demanded that the committee probe more deeply into the links between Halliburton and Cheney.

Investigators testified that there had been no evidence that Cheney influenced the award of any contract to his former company, but Waxman said more investigation was necessary.

He cited recent revelations that a Pentagon political appointee had informed Cheney's chief of staff about a decision that led to a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, winning a $7-billion contract to restore Iraq's oil infrastructure.

"Halliburton is gouging the taxpayer, and the Bush administration doesn't seem to care," Waxman said.

But Halliburton officials defended their actions in Iraq, saying they strongly disagreed with the auditors' contention on overbilling for meals.

"We expected there would be attempts before the end of June to deflect attention from the progress being made in Iraq, but we didn't think so much of it would originate here at home," Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said in a statement. "It is one thing to learn through experience, as we have, that war is difficult, but another to find that critics are using the war for purely political purposes."

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So Halliburton is pissed that the dread liberal is calling them into account for ripping off America and calls it "using the war for political purpouses??!!! Even though the GAO is an impartial source and also concurs with Democrats claims??!

This constant defense of crooks will be the downfall of many I hope.

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June 17, 2004

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ

Rumsfeld, Tenet Linked to Secret Detention of a Prisoner

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in October ordered a suspected terrorist captured in Iraq to be held in secret, a Pentagon official said Wednesday in what administration officials acknowledged was one of two violations of international law.

The unidentified detainee, believed to be a leader of the outlawed Ansar al Islam group, was held without being given a prisoner number, and the International Committee of the Red Cross was not told about him, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

The Pentagon acted at the request of CIA Director George J. Tenet, Whitman said. A U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged Tenet's role.

The Los Angeles Times reported May 5 that the CIA may have had a role in hiding "ghost detainees" — prisoners for whom there was no paperwork and who were being held without charges.

This case appears to be the first involving Rumsfeld and Tenet directly.

The secret detention of the prisoner was first reported in the June 21 issue of U.S. News & World Report, and Rumsfeld's involvement was reported Wednesday by NBC News.

CIA officials captured the man in July and spirited him out of Iraq. He was returned in October after the Justice Department issued a legal opinion stating that the international law embodied in the Geneva Convention forbade removing a prisoner of war from the nation in which he was captured, U.S. and intelligence officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Tenet then asked Rumsfeld to take the prisoner into U.S. military custody at an undisclosed location, Pentagon spokesman Whitman said. He was kept in solitary confinement, away from other prisoners.

At Tenet's request, Rumsfeld wrote a memo ordering Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, not to assign the detainee a serial number and added words to the effect, an unidentified U.S. official said, of "do not acknowledge that we are detaining him to any international organization" — an apparent reference to the Red Cross.

Sanchez, head of Joint Task Force 7, the military command in Baghdad directing the war, complied with Rumsfeld's order "in violation of international law," the official added.

"This is a direct, clear order to not acknowledge him," the official said. "And then, despite numerous attempts by JTF7 through the chain of command, he goes unacknowledged for eight months."

Writing in the conclusion of his report on his lengthy investigation in February of prisoner abuse, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba called efforts to hide prisoners from the Red Cross "deceptive" and a "violation of international law." Military officials in Baghdad asked Pentagon lawyers on at least two occasions how to handle the detainee and received no answer, the U.S. official said.

The issue finally worked its way back up the chain of command last month, Whitman said. The detainee will be given a serial number, will become available to the Red Cross and will be kept among other prisoners "if appropriate," Whitman said.

The intelligence official emphasized that the man was considered an immediate threat to the security of soldiers and civilians. "This was not some random Iraqi," the official said. "This was an individual who was a member of Ansar al Islam and has admitted that he was planning and coordinating attacks against U.S. and coalition officials inside Iraq and also outside of Iraq. This was an admitted terrorist who was committed to killing Americans and coalition forces."

Whitman said detainees may be held for short periods without the Red Cross or other organizations being notified, but intelligence and administration officials acknowledge that an eight-month period would violate the Geneva Convention.

"This is something that should have been determined much quicker than it was," a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. "People in the building didn't get to the right level or the right people that would get it resolved."

The Bush administration has tied Ansar al Islam, a Kurdish Islamic extremist group, to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network, describing it as among the most dangerous insurgent groups operating in Iraq.

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Is it too late to sign up for the International War Crimes court??

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Spy Work in Iraq Riddled by Failures

Thu Jun 17, 7:55 AM ET

By Bob Drogin Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq , whose alarming reports of Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons were rushed to the White House shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by the CIA and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.

The CIA's reliance on the two Iraqis, who were recruited by Britain's MI6 in late 2002 and thought to have access to Hussein's inner circle, is the latest example to come to light of the failures in human intelligence gathering in Iraq. U.S. agencies were also beset by broader, more systemic problems that included failures in analyzing communications intercepts and spy satellite images, the officials interviewed by The Times said.

U.S. experts, for example, still have not been able to determine the meaning of three secretly taped conversations that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell played to the United Nations (news - web sites) Security Council in February 2003 in making the case for war. Investigators have been unable to identify who was speaking on the tapes or precisely what they were talking about.

U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short, half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S. intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not there.

"We inspected a lot of chicken farms," said a former inspector who asked not to be identified because he now works with U.S. intelligence. His U.N. team printed "Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team" on 20 gray T-shirts to mark the futile hunt.

The problems the U.S. experienced in gathering and analyzing intelligence mirrored difficulties experienced by other Western intelligence agencies. Investigations of intelligence agencies in at least four countries have found the misjudgments of Iraq's weapons were founded on circumstantial evidence, unverified secondhand accounts, false assumptions, old intelligence and shoddy tradecraft.

Senate Report Due

In Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to issue a verdict on what most experts describe as a sweeping intelligence failure by U.S. agencies.

Officials said the committee's still-secret report, based on interviews with 200 intelligence analysts and officials, details major mistakes and misjudgments in collection and analysis by the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon 's Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

Officials portray the 400-page report as an unparalleled effort to gauge how America's $40-billion-a-year intelligence system performed against a critical target during the Clinton and Bush administrations, including the post-Hussein period.

"We can see what worked and what didn't," said a senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report remains classified. "Mostly, it didn't."

Officials said the report criticizes the Pentagon's creation of an independent intelligence "cell" called the Office of Special Plans to review raw intelligence about Baghdad's alleged ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, and to funnel its analysis to the White House without going through normal channels.

It also reviews the CIA's insistence before the war that Iraq's attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes — using websites and faxes — was proof that Iraq was seeking to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Evidence found since the war confirms that, as Iraqi officials had insisted, the tubes were designed for conventional artillery rockets.

The CIA and the committee are negotiating how much of the report to release to the public.

But independent of the report, current and former intelligence officials, plus outside experts, have detailed extensive problems in accumulating and analyzing data.

Most important, they say, was the fact that the CIA was unable to recruit a spy in or close to Hussein's inner circle before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. The lack of access was especially glaring because U.S. intelligence had made Iraq a priority target since the 1980s.

"We had zilch in terms of direct sources," said David Kay, who led the search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq last year as special advisor to CIA director George J. Tenet.

CIA leaders refused to accept Kay's stark assessment when he returned from Iraq last December that most prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons were wrong. Kay was assigned a tiny office far from the executive suites, without a working computer or secure telephone.

"I heard about meetings after the fact," Kay recalled. "It was like a bad novel."

After several weeks of isolation, Kay quit and went public with his concerns.

U.N. inspectors who scoured Iraq for four months before the war and U.S.-led teams who have investigated for the last 15 months have found no arsenals of poison gases or germ weapons and no resurgent nuclear program, contrary to CIA predictions.

The CIA's record in Iraq was never strong. The agency not only failed to predict Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, but then could not evacuate its operatives from Baghdad. Poland's spy service ultimately got them out under cover of a Polish industrial project in Iraq, officials said.

Discredited Claims

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the CIA and other Western spy services infiltrated U.N. teams sent to disarm Iraq, and used the cover to spy on the regime. MI6, in particular, recruited low-level informants from Iraq's military, intelligence, security service and secret police.

(which was a charge Sadaam had made against the Inspection teams. We WERE using inspectors to spy on them and infilitrate his government for non-WMD related objectives. And it was because of this spying that the inspectors weren't allowed to do their job and we eventually went to war with them.

Republicans blew it off and pretended that this was a red herring and was proof that Saddam was hiding WMD's. And some have suggested (like the proven correct Scott Ritter) that one of the reasons we put spies on the inspection teams was to get them kicked out so we'd go to war, which was what many conservatives wanted in the first place. Thanks guys. - whomod)

"All were given code names starting with 'black,' as in 'Black Star' and 'Black Horse,' " recalled Scott Ritter, who served as the U.N. inspectors' liaison to intelligence agencies. "They were very good. We could send questions in. They had real access."

Some of the MI6 informants came from the Iraqi National Accord, a London-based exile group run by Iyad Allawi, now Iraq's interim prime minister. In 1995, the CIA station chief in London took over the INA account from British intelligence. And in June 1996, the CIA backed an attempted INA coup in Baghdad that ended in mass arrests and executions.

Most remaining Western spying networks and collection efforts were crippled in December 1998, when U.N. teams were ordered out of Iraq. At that point, the CIA and other groups increasingly turned to defectors presented by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, another London-based exile group that was working to overthrow the Baghdad regime.

A stream of defectors were debriefed at safe houses outside London, a German castle east of Berlin, a Thai resort south of Bangkok, a Dutch government office in The Hague and elsewhere.

The Times first reported in March that an INC defector code-named "Curveball," who defected to Germany after 1998, was the chief source of now-discredited claims by the Bush administration that Iraq had modified trucks and railway cars to produce lethal germ agents.

Classified CIA reports after 2000 similarly cited details about Iraq's supposed germ weapons factories from another defector, codenamed "Red River." His account, which previously has not been disclosed, is also now viewed as inaccurate and possibly fabricated, intelligence officials said.

Information from other defectors turned out to be equally inaccurate.

Gary Dillion, who headed the Iraq action team at the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1997 to 1999, interviewed about six Iraqi defectors who had been vetted by U.S., British or other intelligence authorities. All insisted that Iraq was secretly rebuilding a nuclear weapons program.

"In no instance did we get anything that was credible," Dillion said. "There were some very wild stories. One gentleman told me that Saddam was hiding thin sheets of plutonium under … the roof of a mosque."

Political 'Hangers-On'

Help seemed to arrive in late 2002, as the Bush administration prepared for war, when MI6 recruited two Iraqi spies in Baghdad and gave them specially encrypted satellite phones to protect secret communications, officials said. In a Feb. 5 speech at Georgetown University defending the CIA's prewar performance, Tenet paid tribute to the two spies, who he said had been "characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable."

The first source, Tenet said, had "direct access to Saddam and his inner circle." According to Tenet, the source said that the Baghdad regime "was aggressively and covertly developing" a nuclear weapon and "stockpiling chemical weapons," and that equipment to produce pesticides "had been diverted to chemical weapons production."

The second source, Tenet said, had "access to senior Iraqi officials" and "believed" that Iraq was producing chemical and biological weapons and had "an elaborate plan" to deceive U.N. weapons inspectors. "Now, did this information make any difference in my thinking? You bet it did," Tenet said.

The reports "solidified and reinforced" the CIA's earlier judgments about the growing danger from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, he said. "I conveyed this view to our nation's leaders," he added.

Tenet, however, did not disclose in the Georgetown speech that both spies are now viewed as highly suspect and that no evidence has been found to support their major claims.

"It's all fallen apart," said a former CIA official, who asked not to be identified because the case remains classified. "Neither one had direct knowledge. They were describing what they had heard. They claimed to have knowledge, but they didn't. They were hangers-on in the corridors of power, not insiders."

A senior CIA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it is "unresolved at this point as to whether their information was true."

The CIA official said the two spies may have "believed things that might well not have been true. The question" is whether other Iraqi officials were attempting to deceive the spies, or to mislead Washington in hopes of deterring a U.S. attack.

The official confirmed that the CIA never interviewed either spy, although agency operatives were listening when one was debriefed outside Iraq.

"We knew for a fact that's what he was saying," said a senior U.S. official. "The other guy was reported to us by a reliable foreign service. We had to take their word for it."

High-Tech Intelligence

America's high-tech collection of communications intelligence and imagery from satellites and sensors is also under fire.

Experts say the NSA's powerful eavesdropping equipment netted hints of illicit activities in intercepted e-mails, telephone calls and military messages. In many cases, however, intelligence analysts were unable to identify who was talking to whom, or even about what, according to officials.

Powell played three such tapes to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. He said all were recent electronic intercepts of officers or commanders of Iraq's elite Republican Guard. Citing U.S. intelligence analysis, he argued that they proved Iraq's army was hiding banned weapons.

"We tried to figure those out and never got anywhere," Kay, the former head of U.S. weapons hunters in Iraq, said of the tapes. "We really had no idea who it was, or the location. All we knew is someone was hiding something somewhere and saying, 'Don't talk about it.' "

Corruption under Hussein's rule added to the challenge of unraveling Iraqi subterfuge. The regime's efforts to circumvent U.N. trade sanctions spawned such rampant smuggling and corruption that normal commercial transactions and government dealings often were conducted under a cloak of secrecy and suspicion.

Other frustrating intelligence came from the constellation of U.S. spy satellites and other high-altitude surveillance systems.

Between March and May 2002, for example, senior CIA officials paid close attention to a stream of photos of heavily guarded truck convoys in Iraq's western desert, officials said. Similar trucks had hauled chemical weapons in the 1980s. But the orbiting satellites couldn't track the convoys, and their cargo and destination were never identified.

Other pictures, from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, also caused concern. Before the war, U.S. photo analysts repeatedly spotted what they thought were "Samarra" trucks, Japanese-built vehicles used to decontaminate people or equipment from chemical exposure. They said the trucks were a clear "signature" that chemical weapons were produced or stored nearby.

But U.N. and, later, U.S. weapons hunters who searched the suspect sites never found a Samarra truck. They instead found water tankers and other fire suppression vehicles.

"It's scandalous," said Sharon Squassoni, an intelligence expert at the Congressional Research Service. "The satellite analysts couldn't tell the trucks were red."

Foreign Complications

The CIA's reliance on foreign spy services was problematic on several fronts. In recent months, parliamentary inquiries in Britain, Australia, Denmark and Israel have publicly identified problems similar to those that beset the CIA.

The reports show the spy services all relied on sketchy, speculative evidence and, in some cases, exaggerated or misrepresented their findings. They thus reinforced collective misjudgments.

In Israel, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee concluded in March that the Mossad intelligence agency and Israeli military intelligence "magnified" the Iraqi threat as the war approached. Over a period of months, official estimates of the number of Iraqi ballistic missiles able to hit Israel inexplicably surged "from several to tens" and finally to between 50 and 100.

The Knesset committee blamed, in part, Israel's exchange of secrets with other spy services, "particularly with those of the U.S., with whom the cooperation very much tightened as the war approached."

The result "was a vicious cycle of sorts, in the form of reciprocal feedback that at times was more damaging than beneficial," the committee found. In some cases, unconfirmed data were passed to Washington, then relayed back in another form, creating the impression of "validation by a reliable source."

Layers of secrecy within the CIA compounded the problem.

"We have found cases in which a single source has different source descriptions, increasing the potential for an analyst to believe [there was] a corroborating source," Jami A. Miscik, deputy director of intelligence, said in a speech to CIA analysts in February.

In other cases, analysts weren't told that information came from secondary sources "about whom we know little," Miscik said.

Several mysteries remain concerning the prewar intelligence.

Still unexplained is Britain's claim, cited by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech, that Baghdad recently had sought to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger. Some experts speculate that British intelligence misinterpreted or misrepresented Iraq's rejection of an unsolicited and perhaps bogus offer. U.S. officials said a document found in the basement of Iraq's intelligence headquarters, for example, showed Baghdad had received a similar offer for uranium, cobalt and other minerals from a Congolese businessman in Nairobi, Kenya. A note attached to the document shows that an Iraqi official declined the deal.

David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector, said Iraqi officials told him they received numerous such offers in the late 1990s.

"They said not a week goes by when they don't get an offer for nuclear weapons, uranium, red mercury, or something," he said. "Everything was sent back to Baghdad, where the general policy was to turn it down. It could be fundamentalists, it could be a scam, it could be an intelligence dangle. They didn't turn everything down. But their general reaction was, 'Forget it.' "

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June 20, 2004

THE WORLD
2 Allies Aided Bin Laden, Say Panel Members

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan let terrorists flourish before 9/11, apparently in return for protection from attacks by Al Qaeda.

By Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writer


WASHINGTON — Pakistan and Saudi Arabia helped set the stage for the Sept. 11 attacks by cutting deals with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden that allowed his Al Qaeda terrorist network to flourish, according to several senior members of the Sept. 11 commission and U.S. counter-terrorism officials.

The financial aid to the Taliban and other assistance by two of the most important allies of the United States in its war on terrorism date at least to 1996, and appear to have shielded them from Al Qaeda attacks within their own borders until long after the 2001 strikes, those commission members and officials said in interviews.

"That does appear to have been the arrangement," said one senior member of the commission staff involved in investigating those relationships.

The officials said that by not cracking down on Bin Laden, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia significantly undermined efforts to combat terrorism worldwide, giving the Saudi exile the haven he needed to train tens of thousands of soldiers. They believe that the governments' funding of his Taliban protectors enabled Bin Laden to withstand international pressure and expand his operation into a global network that could carry out the Sept. 11 attacks.

Saudi Arabia provided funds and equipment to the Taliban and probably directly to Bin Laden, and didn't interfere with Al Qaeda's efforts to raise money, recruit and train operatives, and establish cells throughout the kingdom, commission and U.S. officials said. Pakistan provided even more direct assistance, its military and intelligence agencies often coordinating efforts with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, they said.

Such efforts allowed Al Qaeda's network of cells to burrow deeply into the social and religious fabric of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, enabling the organization to survive the U.S.-led demolition of its headquarters in Afghanistan in 2001, to regroup and to launch new waves of attacks — including the kidnapping and beheading of an American engineer in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, last week.



Only after Pakistan and Saudi Arabia launched comprehensive efforts to take out their domestic Al Qaeda cells — as late as last year, in the case of Saudi Arabia — did the two nations become victims of terrorist attacks. And officials in both countries acknowledge that Al Qaeda's fundraising, recruiting and training structure is now so firmly rooted that it will be extremely difficult to eliminate.

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Rumors of Collusion

For years, there have been unsubstantiated allegations that the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia intentionally ignored Bin Laden's efforts in their countries or even cut deals with him, either out of sympathy with his efforts or to protect themselves from attack. That claim is made in a lawsuit by the families of Sept. 11 victims against Saudi Arabia.

Both governments have strenuously denied this, and did so again Saturday.

"President [Pervez] Musharraf has been taking serious steps against extremism from the day he took power in October of 1999," including trying to purge the government of Al Qaeda sympathizers, said Talat Waseem, a spokeswoman for the Pakistani government.

A senior Saudi official acknowledged that Sept. 11 commission investigators and members asked about such matters during two visits to Saudi Arabia and in interviews with Prince Turki al Faisal, the longtime intelligence minister who is now ambassador to Britain.

"This whole notion of us buying off Bin Laden is nonsense," said the Saudi official, who declined to be identified. "It's nuts. Do you trust a thug and a murderer like Bin Laden? You can't."

But commission investigators have come to believe that these allegations are credible, based on their exhaustive review of all of the classified intelligence data known to the U.S. government. The commission's 80 staffers also conducted thousands of interviews in the United States and abroad, and had access to the interrogations of Al Qaeda's most senior operatives in U.S. custody, including accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

"There's no question the Taliban was getting money from the Saudis … and there's no question they got much more than that from the Pakistani government," said former Sen. Bob Kerrey, one of the congressionally appointed commission's 10 members. "Their motive is a secondary issue for us."

Kerrey said the commission officials believed that the Saudi government had a mutually beneficial relationship with the Taliban that bought Riyadh safety from attack.

"Whether there was quid pro quo with the Saudis, we don't know. But certainly the Pakistanis believed that there was. They benefited enormously from their relationship with the Taliban and Al Qaeda."

Kerrey said the findings were based almost entirely on information known to officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, most of it as early as 1997 — just months after Bin Laden moved his operations from Sudan to Afghanistan.

Now, the bipartisan commission is wrestling with how to characterize such politically sensitive information in its final report, and even whether to include it. Some commission members also believe that U.S. officials didn't do enough to force Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to sever their ties with Bin Laden and the Taliban.

"All we're doing is looking at classified documents from our own government, not from some magical source," Kerrey said. "So we knew what was going on, but we did nothing."

From 1998 through 2000, Clinton administration officials pressured Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to help force the Taliban to surrender Bin Laden, and to crack down on the growing presence of Al Qaeda in the two countries.

Both governments refused to sever diplomatic relations with the Taliban or to help investigate Al Qaeda's growing empire, officials said.


The Clinton administration also learned that Taliban efforts to extort cash from Saudi Arabia "may have paid off," a commission report states.

More recently, several commission members noted, leaders of both countries, Pakistan's Musharraf in particular, have taken steps to counter Al Qaeda at great political and physical risk.

The Saudi royal family also has declared war on Al Qaeda, although commission members noted that it did so only after it came under attack May 12, 2003, in a trio of suicide bombings in Riyadh that killed at least 34 people, including the militants.

But a second commission member argued that the Saudi and Pakistani governments played important roles in the growth of Al Qaeda. "The origins of that are very important to us," he said.

As such, the findings could renew the debate over whether Saudi Arabia has been as close an ally of the United States as the kingdom claims, or whether it has clandestinely tried for years to appease both Washington and Bin Laden. They could raise additional questions about the United States' alliances with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in its war on terrorism, particularly because many U.S. officials believe that both governments have been slow to purge their ranks of pro-Al Qaeda, pro-Taliban elements.

The commission staff alluded to its findings, but only briefly, in a report issued last week during a hearing on the origins of Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 plot.

That report said that it had no convincing evidence the Saudi government had directly supported the Sept. 11 attacks but that Riyadh had engaged in "very limited oversight" of the religious and charitable entities that have long been accused of being key financial backers of Al Qaeda.

Pakistan, the report said, "significantly facilitated" the Taliban's ability to provide Bin Laden a haven despite international sanctions against Al Qaeda, including the freezing of its assets and prohibitions on travel.

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Report Is Tip of Iceberg

In interviews with The Times, the senior commission members said their investigation had uncovered more extensive evidence than the report suggested.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, commission investigators believe that Riyadh made overtures to Bin Laden soon after his arrival in Afghanistan in May 1996.

At the time, Saudi officials feared that Bin Laden was responsible for two recent terrorist attacks in the kingdom, including the killing of 19 U.S. servicemen at the Khobar Towers residential complex in Dhahran. The Saudi leaders were desperate to avoid further attacks and to silence Bin Laden, a vocal critic of the monarchy since it revoked his citizenship in 1994.

A formal delegation of Saudi officials met with top Taliban leaders, including Mullah Mohammed Omar, and asked that a message be conveyed to "their guest," Bin Laden.

"They said, 'Don't attack us. Make sure he's not a problem for us and recognition will follow.' And that's just what they did," according to the senior commission staff member.

Shortly afterward, Saudi Arabia became one of only three countries to formally recognize the Taliban as the rightful government in Afghanistan. The others were Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

More Saudi delegations followed, including several in 1998 led by Prince Turki at the request of the United States. U.S. officials wanted him to negotiate the surrender of Bin Laden. But Richard Clarke, the former Bush and Clinton counter-terrorism czar, and a second senior Clinton administration official said U.S. officials suspected that Turki merely ensured that Saudi Arabia would remain out of Al Qaeda's crosshairs.

Pakistanis, meanwhile, were in with the Taliban and Al Qaeda "up to their eyeballs," said the senior commission staff member.

He said Bin Laden, for instance, negotiated his 1996 move to Afghanistan with Pakistan's powerful military-intelligence leadership, which held considerable influence over the various warlords struggling for control of Afghanistan at the time.

"He wouldn't go back there without Pakistan's approval and support, and had to comply with their rules and regulations," the official said. He said Pakistan opened its airspace to Bin Laden and his flying flotilla of operatives.

Pakistani intelligence officers also allegedly brought Bin Laden to meet Mullah Omar soon after his arrival in Afghanistan, and then helped forge an alliance between the men that enabled the Taliban to trample competing factions and take over much of Afghanistan.

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, also was instrumental in helping Al Qaeda set up an infrastructure in its own country and in Afghanistan, and the two outfits jointly operated training camps along the border where militants were taught guerrilla warfare, the official said.

"It started day one," the official said of Pakistan's involvement. "They controlled the Taliban; they controlled the border."

Officials from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia acknowledge that there were significant interactions between their military and intelligence agencies and the Taliban while the Afghan regime provided Al Qaeda with sanctuary from 1996 through the post-Sept. 11 military campaign. But they said they consisted of routine diplomatic matters.

Bin Laden has had personal relationships with top intelligence officials from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia dating to the early 1980s, when they became involved in the decade-long war that expelled the Soviet occupying army from Afghanistan.

The U.S. and Saudi governments spent billions of dollars each on that effort, funneling the money and supplies through Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies to the Afghan mujahedin, including Bin Laden.

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• Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome.
  
• Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer.
  
• Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.)
  
• In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time.
  
• After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait.
  
• Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country.
  
• In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam.
  
• In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge.
  
• Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war.
  
• On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)
  

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In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge.

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JQ said:

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In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge.

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I seem to remember hearing Saddam Hussein issued us his condolences.

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JQ said:
Saddam's regime did not "openly celebrate" 9/11.

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JQ said:

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In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge.

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I seem to remember hearing Saddam Hussein issued us his condolences.

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Halliburton Questioned on $1.8 Billion Iraq Work -WSJ

Wed Aug 11, 5:07 AM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pentagon auditors have concluded that Halliburton Co. failed to adequately account for more than $1.8 billion of work in Iraq and Kuwait, the Wall Street Journal said on Wednesday, citing a Pentagon report.

The amount represents 43 percent of the $4.18 billion that Houston-based Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root unit has billed the Pentagon to feed and house troops in the region, the newspaper said.

It said the findings in the 60-page Pentagon audit report, dated Aug. 4 but not publicly released are likely to increase pressure on the U.S. government to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars of payments to Halliburton.

This, it said, potentially threatens the services that KBR provides U.S. troops and other personnel in Iraq and Kuwait.

Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 to 2000.

No one at Halliburton was immediately available to comment on the report. But the newspaper said KBR officials dispute the report's conclusions.

The officials say they have worked within the same Defense Department system for more than 10 years without problems, and believe differences can be resolved without the withholding of large payments, the newspaper said.

In a June securities filing Halliburton said a move by the Pentagon to withhold substantial payments or demand refunds could "materially and adversely affect our liquidity."

KBR filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last December under the weight of asbestos claims.

According to the newspaper Halliburton has until Sunday, after two prior extensions, to provide Army officials with all necessary cost information for its logistical work in Iraq and other locales.

This could lead to the withholding of as much as $600 million of payments, though KBR officials are confident the Army will again extend the deadline, and the Army is considering doing so, it said.

Halliburton shares closed on Tuesday at $29.83 on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Republicans Criticize Bush 'Mistakes' on Iraq

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Leading members of President Bush's Republican Party on Sunday criticized mistakes and "incompetence" in his Iraq policy and called for an urgent ground offensive to retake insurgent sanctuaries........

After the CIA report was disclosed on Thursday, Kerry accused the president of living in a "fantasy world of spin" about Iraq and of not telling the truth about the growing chaos.

McCain said Bush had been "perhaps not as straight as maybe we'd like to see."

Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, speaking on ABC, accused the administration of delaying an offensive out of concern it would hurt Bush's bid to win reelection on Nov. 2.

"The only thing I can figure as to why they're not doing it with a sense of urgency is that they don't want to do it before the election and they want to make it seem like everything is status quo," Biden said.

Kerry and other Democrats have said Bush plans to call up more part-time National Guard and Reserve troops after the November election to compensate for thinning ranks in the full-time military due to Iraq. The Bush campaign denied this.

Biden said disappointment with Bush's policies was bipartisan. "Dick Lugar, Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel, John McCain -- we are all on the same page. It is us and the administration. This has been incompetence so far," he said. (additional reporting by Sue Pleming)

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"I think that anybody that thinks you can hold elections in the Sunni Triangle by the end of January is really smoking something." - Francis Fukuyama

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"We've got to be honest with ourselves. The worst thing we can do is hold ourselves hostage to some grand illusion that we're winning. Right now, we're not winning. Things are getting worse."

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...Because they just figured we'll win the war and then they'll have freedom. And we know how wonderful freedom is. We'll just sprinkle that freedom dust over the Iraqis and then it will be over, which is so silly.....

Now, what did those three countries (Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran) that actually helped do the deed all have in common? They're all theocracies. Because this is really all about religion. It's so ironic that George Bush, who's so religious doesn't get it that they [don't simply]'hate us for our freedom'.. if we just give them freedom.. -- religion is more important to them than freedom. It's much more important to them that their sister never walked down the street in a miniskirt than it is all the freedom in the world. Their freedom is in the next life. - Bill Maher

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McCain, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," cited as mistakes the toleration of looting after the successful U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and failures to secure Iraq's borders or prevent insurgents from establishing strongholds within the country.


He said a ground offensive was urgently needed to retake areas held by insurgents

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the G-man said:
If you read the entire article, you see that McCain's chief complaint was, in effect, that the President hasnt been violent enough:

McCain, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," cited as mistakes the toleration of looting after the successful U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and failures to secure Iraq's borders or prevent insurgents from establishing strongholds within the country.


He said a ground offensive was urgently needed to retake areas held by insurgents

In other words, McCain wants less tolerance for insurgency and more ground troops.

Hardly the sort of thing whomod, or Kerry, advocates.

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wannabuyamonkey said:


I agree with McCain and if it weren't for people demanding more sensitivity then we'd get what Mccain wants and apperantly what Whomod wants now too.

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Incredible.

Iraq is in chaos, despite all the bullshit Bush incessantly spouts to the contrary, and yet somehow it's Kerry's fault because you want to continue to misinterpret his 'sensetivity' comment????

Why can't you just admit that Bush is playing politics with our soldiers lives and waiting to actually make descisive moves till after Nov. when the increased death counts that such a move would have, won't have an impact on the election any longer.

Regardless, I think it was made crystal clear who's in charge of Iraq a few weeks ago. One lone cleric after going abroad for treatment, almost instantly stops an insurgency upon his return. One that the U.S. and our puppet government were unable to do anything about for weeks. The leader of that insurgency of course was allowed to walk free and fully armed to kill our soldiers again anoither day.

But of course that's good according to Bush because otherwise, these Iraqi's would have somehow boarded airplanes and boats and come to the U.S. to kill us. "Better to fight them there than in the streets of America".

Someone should explain to Bush the difference between religious and nationalist Iraqi insurgents and Al Queda terrorists. Of course someone should have done that one year, several billion dollars, and a few thousand troops ago.

But really, you and I both know that it serves Bush to constantly blur the lines and muddy the waters to the point where many Americans can't differentiate between Iraq and the war on terrorism. And seeing as how thanks to the war, Iraq is only a few steps removed from being run by Islamic clerics and Ayatollahs, Bush may be correct about Iraq being a threat in the war on Islamic terror. But of course only thanks to his stupidity.

You gotta give Bush some credit though. Just a few weeks ago, he admitted that he just barely learned that terrorism was a TACTIC. So he's definately learning. A few hundred dead G.I.'s at a time.