Tag Archives ⇒ iraq

The Bean Defense

July 15, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Read­ers might remem­ber the field day I had a few weeks ago when US occu­py­ing forces announced they had uncov­ered a cache of beans. They claimed Sad­dam Hus­sein had stock­piled a few hun­dred bags of cas­tor beans to use to make a bio­log­i­cal agent called ricin. In my postUS: Iraqis Planned Oper­a­tion Fart and Stink I point­ed out that the sup­posed weapons worked on the well-documented prin­ci­ple that beans can pro­duce gas and indi­ges­tion – ricin just works espe­cial­ly well and con­cen­trates the effect enough to kill some­one in a par­tic­u­lar­ly messy way.

What I did­n’t do was Google ricin and Iraq. Today I did and found this fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle that I missed at the time. U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Col­in Pow­ell claimed an Iraq/ricin con­nec­tion before the House Inter­na­tion­al Rela­tions Com­mit­tee back in ear­ly February:

“The ricin that is bounc­ing around Europe now orig­i­nat­ed in Iraq — not in the part of Iraq that is under Sad­dam Hus­sein’s con­trol, but his secu­ri­ty forces know all about it,” Pow­ell said.

Euro­pean intel­li­gence sources quick­ly dis­cred­it­ed this claim, point­ing out that it was obvi­ous the Euro­pean ricin was home-made and not Iraqi. The French were “stunned” that Pow­ell would make such a obviously-wrong state­ment, and the British flat­ly stat­ed they were “clear” that that ricin found in Lon­don was­n’t pro­duced in Iraq.

Here we have anoth­er instance of a senior US offi­cial claim­ing an easily-disprovable claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruc­tion, just weeks after the now-infamous Niger/Iraq forgery appeared in the Pres­i­den­t’s State of the Union address. Pow­ell and oth­ers in the U.S. have trot­ted out the ricin threat repeat­ed­ly yet it’s hard to make a weapon out of the stuff. It’s real­ly only ever been used for a ridicu­lous James Bond-like assas­i­na­tion in 1991, when a Bul­gar­i­an agent is sup­posed to have killed a dis­si­dent in Lon­don using a ricin-filled pel­let fired from an umbrel­la tip (one is remind­ed of Austin Pow­er’s Dr. Evil: “I’m going to place him in an eas­i­ly escapable sit­u­a­tion involv­ing an over­ly elab­o­rate and exot­ic death”). As one site points out The cur­rent wis­dom among bio­log­i­cal defense experts is that ricin is more like­ly to be used as a tool in assas­si­na­tions than as a weapon of mass destruction.

There is a clear pat­tern of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion delib­er­ate­ly mis-interpreting Iraqi threats to make the case for war. These are pur­pose­ful decep­tions with only the thinnest escape clause to wig­gle through when the lies are exposed. Col­in Pow­ell isn’t stu­pid enough to make this kind of repeat­ed mis­take and a year of dis­proven ricin alerts is a mark against the Admin­is­tra­tion’s integrity.

 

Lots of Blame-Shifting on the Niger/Iraq Forgery

July 11, 2003
· Martin Kelley

The CIA asked Britain to drop it’s Iraq claim while Pres­i­dent Bush said that the CIA “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intel­li­gence ser­vices.”
    Remem­ber that Bush’s State of the Union address did­n’t claim that the US believed that Iraq was buy­ing nuclear mate­r­i­al from Niger or oth­er African coun­tries. It said that British intel­li­gence thought Iraq was. Shift­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for the claim gave the Bush team the wig­gle room to include an alle­ga­tion they knew was prob­a­bly not true. It’s the tri­umph of pol­i­tics over truth.
    As I’ve writ­ten before, there is a polit­i­cal bril­lance to the Bush Pres­i­den­cy. The Admin­is­tra­tion knows that it can sway large por­tions of the Amer­i­can pub­lic just by mak­ing claims. It does­n’t mat­ter if the claims are wrong –even obvi­ous­ly wrong– as long as they feed into some deep psy­chic nar­ra­tive. It’s been awhile since we saw a Pres­i­dent that could bul­ly through real­i­ty as long as the sto­ry sound­ed good. Ronald Rea­gan, the ex-actor, was good at it but I’m sus­pect­ing our cur­rent Pres­i­dent is even bet­ter. The ques­tion is whether enough peo­ple will start insist­ing on the truth and demand inves­ti­ga­tions into the lies. There were no weapons of mass destruc­tion in Iraq and Pres­i­dent Bush knew it. The Amer­i­can peo­ple would not have gone to war if we had known that Iraq was­n’t a threat and this too Pres­i­dent Bush knew.

Shameless fundraising plug

July 2, 2003
· Martin Kelley

I’ve run up a lot of Non​vi​o​lence​.Org expens­es over Iraq War II – the flood of vis­i­tors have eat­en up the band­width. Help keep the site going by buy­ing a fundrais­ing t‑shirt, only $22 while sup­plies last!

It’s hard not to make the connection

June 21, 2003
· Martin Kelley

In Iraq, U.S. sol­diers are blar­ing the sound­tract to ‘Apoc­a­lypse Now’ to psych them­selves up to war:

“With Wag­n­er’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ still ring­ing in their ears and the clat­ter of heli­copters over­head, sol­diers rammed vehi­cles into met­al gates and hun­dreds of troops raid­ed hous­es in the west­ern city of Ramadi”

Mean­while in my home­town of Philadel­phia four teenagers lis­tened to the Bea­t­les’ ‘Hel­ter Skel­ter’ over forty times before attack­ing and beat­ing to death one of their friends.
   Hor­rif­ic as both sto­ries are, what strikes me is the choice of music. ‘Hel­ter Skel­ter’ and most of the music on ‘Apoc­alpse Now’ were writ­ten in the late 1960 and ear­ly 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today’s teenagers pick­ing the music of their par­ents to plan their attacks? Can’t you kill to Radio­head or Linkin Park? Could­n’t the Philly kids have shown some home­town pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seri­ous­ly, there have been some topsy-turvy gen­er­a­tional sur­pris­es in the sup­port and oppo­si­tion to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?

It’s hard not to make the connection.

June 21, 2003
· Martin Kelley

In Iraq, U.S. sol­diers are blar­ing the sound­tract to ‘Apoc­a­lypse Now’ to psych them­selves up to war:

“With Wag­n­er’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ still ring­ing in their ears and the clat­ter of heli­copters over­head, sol­diers rammed vehi­cles into met­al gates and hun­dreds of troops raid­ed hous­es in the west­ern city of Ramadi”

Mean­while in my home­town of Philadel­phia four teenagers lis­tened to the Bea­t­les’ ‘Hel­ter Skel­ter’ over forty times before attack­ing and beat­ing to death one of their friends.

Hor­rif­ic as both sto­ries are, what strikes me is the choice of music. ‘Hel­ter Skel­ter’ and most of the music on ‘Apoc­alpse Now’ were writ­ten in the late 1960 and ear­ly 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today’s teenagers pick­ing the music of their par­ents to plan their attacks? Can’t you kill to Radio­head or Linkin Park? Could­n’t the Philly kids have shown some home­town pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seri­ous­ly, there have been some topsy-turvy gen­er­a­tional sur­pris­es in the sup­port and oppo­si­tion to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?

Michael Kinsley: Did it matter if Iraq didn’t have WMD?

June 20, 2003
· Martin Kelley

By now, WMD have tak­en on a myth­ic role in which fact does­n’t play much of a part. The phrase itself – ‘weapons of mass destruc­tion’ – is more like an incan­ta­tion than a descrip­tion of any­thing in particular.”

Here’s a nos­tal­gic list­ing of Bush Admin­is­tra­tion quotes assur­ing us WMDs exist­ed. (Thanks toStuffed­Dog for the link)

North Korean nukes and cowboy politics

June 16, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Yes­ter­day North Korea claimed that it has processed enough plu­to­ni­um to make six nuclear weapons. I’ve often argued that wars don’t begin when the shoot­ing actu­al­ly begins, that we need to look at the mil­i­taris­tic deci­sions made years before to see how they plant­ed the seeds for war. After the First World War, the vic­to­ri­ous allies con­struct­ed a peace treaty designed to humil­i­ate Ger­many and keep its econ­o­my stag­nant. With the onslaught of the Great Depres­sion, the coun­try was ripe for a mad dem­a­gogue like Hitler to take over with talk of a Greater Germany.

In his Jan­u­ary 2002 State of the Union address, Pres­i­dent Bush’s team added North Korea to the “axis of evil” that need­ed to be chal­lenged. By all accounts it was a last minute addi­tion. The speech­writ­ing team nev­er both­ered to con­sult with the State Depart­men­t’s East Asia experts. In all like­li­hood North Korea was added so that the evil three coun­tries would­n’t all be Mus­lim (the oth­er two were Iraq and Iran) and the “War on Ter­ror” would­n’t be seen as a war against Islam.

North Korea saw a bull­dog pres­i­dent in the White House and judged that its best chance to stay safe was to make a U.S. attack too dan­ger­ous to con­tem­plate. It’s a sound strat­e­gy, real­ly only a vari­a­tion on the Cold War’s “Mutu­al­ly Assured Destruc­tion” doc­trine. When faced with a hos­tile and militaristically-strong coun­try that wants to over­throw your gov­ern­ment, you make your­self too dan­ger­ous to take on. Let’s call it the Rat­tlesnake Defense.

Mil­i­tarism rein­forces itself when coun­tries beef up their mil­i­taries to stave off the mil­i­taries of oth­er coun­tries. With North Korea going nuclear, pres­sure will now build on South Korea, Chi­na and Japan to defend them­selves against pos­si­ble threat. We might be in for a new East Asian arms race, per­haps an East Asian Cold War. Being a paci­fist means stop­ping not only the cur­rent war but the next one and the one after that. In the 1980s activists were speak­ing out against the bru­tal regime of Sad­dam Hus­sein, an Amer­i­can friend who was gassing his own peo­ple. Now we need to speak out against the cow­boy pol­i­tics that is feed­ing insta­bil­i­ty on the Kore­an Penin­su­la, to pre­vent the hor­ror and mass death that a Sec­ond Kore­an War would unleash.

Who Lied About Weapons of Mass Destruction?

May 31, 2003
· Martin Kelley

It’s time to state the obvi­ous: there weren’t any “weapons of mass destruc­tion” in Iraq. The stat­ed ratio­nale for this war was “sim­ply wrong” (see below). Either U.S. Intel­li­gence agen­cies made the biggest mis­take of the new cen­tu­ry or there’s been sys­tem­at­ic, pre­med­i­tat­ed lying at the high­est lev­els of the U.S. gov­ern­ment. Mid-level intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary com­man­ders are start­ing to duck and weave to avoid the fall­out: U.S. Insid­ers Say Iraq Intel Delib­er­ate­ly Skewed and Did Iraq real­ly have weapons of mass destruc­tion? and Was the Intel­li­gence Cooked?

Pres­i­dent Bush and his insid­ers will sure­ly con­tin­ue to deny the obvi­ous and bul­ly on with more lies and mis­for­ma­tion. Will the Amer­i­can pub­lic stop believ­ing? Or have we entered a phase in Amer­i­can his­to­ry in which the Big Lie can jus­ti­fy out­right impe­ri­al­ism and per­pet­u­al war? Post­ed 5/31/2003