Some DSM Context/Amunition

[G_j]

connecting a few dots, but many more are not included here, such as quotes from Woodward's or Hans Blix's books.

``````````

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2134 /

News > June 2, 2005

The Real Memogate

By Solomon Hughes

<snip>
This is the latest in a flood of leaks undermining the war's justification, including the 2003 revelations by British weapons inspector David Kelly that the Iraqi mobile bio-war labs highlighted by Colin Powell were really military weather balloon inflators, and by intelligence translator Katherine Gun, who revealed that GCHQ, Britain's surveillance center, was spying on delegations to the U.N. Security Council at the request of the U. S. National Security Agency in an attempt to win U.N. support for invasion.

In September 2004, other secret documents revealing shared war planning were passed to the Telegraph. A March 2002 memo to Blair from his top aide, Sir David Manning, reported that he dined with Condoleezza Rice, and told her that Blair "would not budge in support for regime change" at a time when Blair was about to "visit the ranch" for talks with Bush.

In a March 2002 memo, U.K. ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer recounts to David Manning another dinner date--this time with Paul Wolfowitz. The after-dinner conversation shows that the plan for war was fixed and only the "selling" of the issue remained: "We backed regime change but the plan had to be clever it would be a tough sell for us domestically and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe."

<snip>
==========

http://www.independent-media.tv/itemprint.cfm?fmedia_id=6490&fcategory_desc=Under%20Reported

How Many More Have to Come Forward?
By: Andrew Limburg
Independent Media TV


<snip>
Here are some more excerpts from the 60 Minutes Interview:"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to 60 Minutes reporter, Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

Later Clarke speaks of pressure put on him by President Bush to connect Iraq to the 9/11 attacks. Clarke continues, "The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

<snip>

========

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842

Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
Gen. says White House pushed Saddam link without evidence

FAIR Press Release (6/20/03)

Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.

But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.

Here is a transcript of the exchange:

CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."

RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"

CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But--I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence."
<snip>

============
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1120959,00.html

Bush decided to remove Saddam 'on day one'

Former aide says US president made up his mind to go to war with Iraq long before 9/11, then ordered his staff to find an excuse

Julian Borger in Washington
Monday January 12, 2004
The Guardian

In the Bush White House, Paul O'Neill was the bespectacled swot in a class of ideological bullies who eventually kicked him out for raising too many uncomfortable questions. Now, 13 months later at a critical moment for the president, the nerd is having his revenge.

Mr O'Neill's account of his two years as Treasury secretary, told in a book published tomorrow and in a series of interviews over the weekend, is a startling tale of an administration nominally led by a disengaged figurehead president but driven by a "praetorian guard" of hardline rightwingers led by vice president Dick Cheney, ready to bend circumstances and facts to fit their political agenda.

According to the former aluminium mogul and longstanding Republican moderate who was fired from the US Treasury in December 2002, the administration came to office determined to oust Saddam and used the September 11 attacks as a convenient justification.

As Mr O'Neill, who sat in countless national security council meetings, describes the mood: "It was all about finding a way to do it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this'."

..more..
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/11874574.htm

Posted on Sat, Jun. 11, 2005

U.K. memo said to question postwar plan

Associated Press


WASHINGTON - A staff paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair eight months before the invasion of Iraq concluded that U.S. military officials were not planning adequately for a postwar occupation, The Washington Post reported.

"A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise," authorities of the briefing memo wrote, according to the Post. "As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."

The eight-page memo was written in advance of a July 23, 2002, meeting at Blair's Downing Street offices, the Post said in Sunday editions.
It said the memo and other internal British government documents were originally obtained by Michael Smith of the London Sunday Times and that excerpts made available to Post were confirmed as authentic by British sources who sought anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
<snip>

=============================
Six other UK "memos" have been floating around the net since September 2004. The memos date from March 2002, and contain information on the strategy to legitimize a war on Iraq, which was already decided upon.
See the Daily Telegraph story at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/18/nwar118.xml

and the analysis (and copies of these memos) at

http://cryptome.org/leaks-brief.htm

These memos are the same ones that the Washington Post describes as "other internal British government documents" in today's story:
That memo and other internal British government documents were originally obtained by Michael Smith, who writes for the London Sunday Times. Excerpts were made available to The Washington Post, and the material was confirmed as authentic by British sources who sought anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter.

The memos, amongst other things, confirm that the UK was putting forward a plan to create a pretext for war by tricking Saddam into refusing inspections by UN weapons inspectors:

"I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN Security Council Resolutions and the critical importance of the Middle East peace plan. If all this could be accomplished skilfully, we were fairly confident that a number of countries could come on board."

(UK Ambassador to Washington, Christopher Meyer. reporting his March 17 meeting with Wolfowitz)
+++++++++++++++++===
edit to add some info on the OSP and observations by Karen Kwiatkowski

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

The Lie Factory

Late last year, a special Mother Jones investigation detailed how, only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest

January/February 2004 Issue

It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war. ..more..

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/31/clarke/index_np.html

That audacious Richard Clarke
The Bush-Cheney campaign is riding a rickety horse to November: Their approach to war on terror.
Editor's note: This column first appeared as the March 29 edition of 'Without Reservation', Karen Kwiatkowski's biweekly column for MilitaryWeek.com.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Karen Kwiatkowski

-------------

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Kwiatkowski-Pentagon-Kinght-Ridder31jul03.htm

Career Officer Does Eye-Opening Stint Inside Pentagon
KAREN KWIATKOWSKI / Ohio Beacon Journal 31jul03

[Just Me]

1. They were plotting a pretext for their war of aggression,...

,...the day they took over our government.

Thanks, G_j, for pasting the pieces together.

[lawladyprof]

4. They were doing so long before that

At one of the 2000 debates (the townhall meeting), * was listing the benefits of his tax cuts for married couples and families with children. A single woman asked him what benefit single people would receive and he responded that American soldiers would be deployed around the world to defend them.

I thought it a very odd response (so it's * so what else is new?) because presumably American troops were already stationed abroad and anyway US soldiers defend not just single people but married couples and families with children. I remember thinking to myself--what does Bush know/plan? It was just disquieting at the time, and I have thought of it often since then.

[Just Me]

9. Whoah.

Had it been me, I would've been knocked down by that statement.

Of course, we all know the PNAC plan had been formally signed by 1998 and there has been evidence that Bush had been talking about regime change in Iraq before he was even campaigning for president.

BushCO & the neoCONs are unabashedly corrupt. They are clearly Machiavellian in so many ways and have utilized propaganda so polished it would make Goebbels blush.

[AuntiBush]

2. Kicked! You might want to change the title to draw more attention here.

This details "it" out, very well.

[CATagious]

3. Rumsfeld's note needs to be added to the list:

"With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL" – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.

Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not." "

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/september11/main520830.shtml

By putting all the individual pieces of evidence together, it is plainly obvious that the administration had always had intentions of invading Iraq. I don't even think it is debatable!

[G_j]

8. Richard Clarke on Rumsfeld:

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to 60 Minutes reporter, Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it."

[evermind]

5. Nice collection - thank you! (n/t)

[Karenina]

6. Indeed!

:kick:

[CATagious]

7. Kick!! nt

[BigBearJohn]

10. Highly Recommended