Come now, Bush, it was no mistake

[Octafish]

Smirko the Clown comments on his "biggest mistake" in an interview with Charlie Gibson:



Source: http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerindex (scroll around or somethin' to find it)

Excellent observations on the remark from journalist Linda S. Heard:

Come now, Bush, it was no mistake

By Linda S. Heard
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Commentary
Dec 11, 2008, 00:19

George W. Bush has publicly experienced an “Oops! I made a mistake” moment. During an interview conducted at Camp David by ABC’s Charlie Gibson, the US president admitted that the flawed intelligence concerning Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction was the “biggest regret of the presidency.” When he was asked whether he would have gone to war if he had known the truth he was coy. “This is a do-over that I can’t do,” he answered.

No doubt O.J. Simpson, who has recently been sentenced for forcibly trying to retrieve property that used to belong to him, knows how he feels. “I did not know that I was doing anything illegal,” he told the judge. “So I am sorry.” Sorry didn’t cut it for Simpson, who is facing up to 33 years jail time. Bush, whose mistake cost the lives of something like a million innocent souls, is likely to get off scot-free.

If Bush had made a genuine “mistake,” I might be able to dredge up a modicum of sympathy. After all, it can’t be easy to go through life knowing that an error of judgment had led to bloodshed, at least not for most of us ordinary mortals who would lose sleep if we ran over a dog let alone a human being. However, I do not believe he made an innocent mistake. There is too much circumstantial evidence to the contrary.

Let’s first revisit the notorious Project for a New American Century (PNAC) paper entitled Rebuilding America’s Defences -- a blueprint for a global Pax Americana penned in September 2000 and signed by individuals who were later appointed senior figures in Bush’s cabinet. On Iraq, the document has this to say: “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussain.”

CONTINUED...

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4115.shtml

I, for one, do not want to see Bush and the rest of his warmongering cronies get off scot-free. I would also like to see a full investigation of the run-up to war in the U.S., just like some Tories in Parliament want for the U.K.

[Dangerously Amused]

1. Insightful and well written. K&R. Thanks!

[Octafish]

4. The War Card - Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War

http://projects.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/?gclid=COHzwrmHuZcCFRMvHgodBiDHTA

Thanks for reading and giving a damn, Dangerously Amused. Who knows? If enough people turn off the Fox and open their eyes, we might get Congress to investigate these warmongers and traitors.

[tomp]

13. ...enabled by democrats. nt

[onethatcares]

16. congress? investigate? warmongers? what planet do you live on?

for cripes sake the only real congress person talking about this vucking war and ending it is Dennis Kucinich and he's been shot down, laughed at and put in a corner more times than I can count.

What we have is a class of people that for some reason or other, believe that they are the "ruling class". They've forgotten thier roots, forgotten their constituents, their ideals and who the hell elected them. They are in it for the bucks, the illinois gov is just a minor player in a very big scam on all of us people that believe the United States of America stands as one nation under gaud with liberty and justice for all of us.

It is time to change the landscape by effecting change thru the ballot box.

[formercia]

2. Pox Americana is more like it.

If we only knew......

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0904jbfrwm.htm

The American Empire:
Pax Americana or Pox Americana?
by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney




On June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C., in which he declared that the peace that the United States sought was “not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” His remarks were a response to criticisms of the United States advanced in a recently published Soviet text on military strategy. Kennedy dismissed the charge that “American imperialist circles” were “preparing to unleash different kinds of wars” including “preventative war.” The Soviet text, he pointed out, had stated, “The political aims of American imperialists were and still are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries and, after the latter are transformed into obedient tools, to unify them in various military-political blocs and groups directed against the socialist countries. The main aim of all this is to achieve world domination.” In Kennedy’s words, these were “wholly baseless and incredible claims,” the work of Marxist “propagandists.” “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”*

Despite such high level denials, the notion of a “Pax Americana” enforced by American arms was to become the preferred designation for those attempting to justify what was portrayed as a benevolent American Empire. Thus, in his widely read book, Pax Americana, first published in 1967 during the Vietnam War, Ronald Steel wrote of “the benevolent imperialism of Pax Americana” characterized by “empire-building for noble ends rather than for such base motives as profit and influence.” A chapter of Steel’s book on foreign aid as an “element of imperialism” was entitled “The White Man’s Burden,” hearkening back to Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated poem calling on the United States to exercise an imperialist role in the Philippines following the Spanish-American War of 1898.* Such explicit imperial views, largely suppressed in the United States after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, have now resurfaced in a post–Cold War world marked by U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and by a permanent U.S.-led “War on Terrorism.” Once again we hear establishment calls for the “defense of Pax Americana” and even renewals of the old cry to take up “the White Man’s burden.”

Kennedy had depicted the global military expansion of the United States as an attempt to contain Communism. Today the Cold War is over. The Soviet Union is no more. Yet at the beginning of the 21st century the United States is viewed more than ever by the world population as an imperialist power, enforcing its will unilaterally by force of arms. Since the fall of the Soviet Union we have seen the largest military interventions by the United States in Europe since the Second World War. The U.S. war machine has waged full-scale conventional wars in the Middle East. The United States now has military bases in locales such as Central Asia that were previously beyond the reach of the American Empire. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Washington made it clear that it was conducting a preventive war in light of the potential threat represented by weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the United States. The fact that there was no evidence of the existence of such weapons prior to the war did not seem to matter because a declaration by the administration that such weapons existed was deemed sufficient. Nor did it seem to matter after the war that no such weapons were found since once the invasion had taken place the new reality on the ground in Iraq dictated all. In this way imperialism provided its own justification.

--snip--

[Octafish]

5. Lie by Lie

Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline

I love my country. I hate what my country's leaders have done. It wasn't always that way. President Kennedy understood how a real Pax Americana could work to save humanity and our planet. All bad that the crazy baldheads got their way.

Thank you for standing up to them, formercia.

[formercia]

6. It was a long, hard road.

Looking back at it, there was no other choice. To do otherwise would have amounted to complicity.

My heart goes out to those who fought back and are not here to see the changes.

[Octafish]

8. Remember Jack Colhoun?

A great journalist, Colhoun stuff appeared in The Guardian (New York) and Covert Action Quarterly. We can still find his work in ConsortiumNews.com. He absolutely pegged Poppy and the BFEE:

The Family That Preys Together

From Issue No. 41, Covert Action Quarterly , Summer, 1992
by Jack Colhoun

GEORGE JR.'S BCCI CONNECTION

"This is an incredible deal, unbelievable for this small company," energy analyst Charles Strain told Forbes magazine, describing the oil production sharing agreement the Harken Energy Corporation signed in January 1990 with Bahrain.

Under the terms of the deal, Harken was given the exclusive right to explore for gas and oil off the shores of the Gulf island nation. If gas or oil were found in waters near two of the world's largest gas and oil fields, Harken would have exclusive marketing and transportation rights for the energy resources. Truly an "incredible deal" for a company that had never drilled an offshore well.

Strain failed to point out, however, the one fact that puts the Harken deal in focus: George Bush, Jr., the eldest son of George and Barbara Bush of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, is a member of Harken's board of directors, a consultant, and a stockholder in the Texas-based company. In light of this connection, the deal makes more sense. The involvement of Junior-George Walker Bush's childhood nickname-with Harken is a walking conflict of interest. His relationship to President Bush, rather than any business acumen, made him a valuable asset for Harken, the Republican Party benefactors, Middle East oil sheikhs and covert operators who played a part in Harken's Bahrain deal.

In fact, Junior's track record as an oilman is pretty dismal. He began his career in Midland, Texas, in the mid-1970s when he founded Arbusto Energy, Inc. When oil prices dropped in the early 1980s, Arbusto fell upon hard times. Junior was only rescued from business failure when his company was purchased by Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation, a small oil firm owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. As part of the September 1984 deal, Bush became Spectrum 7's president and was given a 13.6 percent share in the company's stock. Oil prices stayed low and within two years, Spectrum 7 was in trouble.

In the six months before Spectrum 7 was acquired by Harken in 1986, it had lost $400,000. In the buyout deal, George "Jr." and his partners were given more than $2 million worth of Harken stock for the 180-well operation. Made a director and hired as a "consultant" to Harken, Junior received another $600,000 of Harken stock, and has been paid between $42,000 and $120,000 a year since 1986.

Junior's value to Harken soon became apparent when the company needed an infusion of cash in the spring of 1987. Junior and other Harken officials met with Jackson Stephens, head of Stephens, Inc., a large investment bank in Little Rock, Arkansas (Stephens made a $100,000 contribution to the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 and gave another $100,000 to the Bush dinner committee in 1990.)

In 1987, Stephens made arrangements with Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to provide $25 million to Harken in return for a stock interest in Harken. As part of the Stephens-brokered deal, Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi real estate tycoon and financier, joined Harken's board as a major investor. *5 Stephens, UBS, and Bakhsh each have ties to the scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

It was Stephens who suggested in the late 1970s that BCCI purchase what became First American Bankshares in Washington, D.C. BCCI later acquired First American's predecessor, Financial General Bankshares. At the time of the Harken investment, UBS was a joint-venture partner with BCCI in a bank in Geneva, Switzerland. Bakhsh has been an investment partner in Saudi Arabia with Gaith Pharoan, identified by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board as a "front man" for BCCI's secret acquisitions of U.S. banks.

CONTINUED...

http://www.williambowles.info/bush/preys.htm

I know that's old news to you, my Friend. Let me add how, recently, I was surprised to discover how many people have heard about the things we've been talking about on DU. I went to the local Subway and the nice kid behind the counter was telling me about Prescott and the NAZIs.

Heh heh heh.

[formercia]

9. The word gets around

I was visiting one of my Fundie friends about a Year ago. As we were sitting in his Den with an End of Times Cable program in the background, the subject came up. It really surprised me to hear this former-Marine-Right-wing-Fundamentalist-Republican bad mouth Junior and B* Gang the way he did.

It made me feel good and he didn't even get it from me.

On edit: I forgot to mention that he is related to Junior, although a distant one.

[mod mom]

10. Jackson Stephens-funded BCCI, Walmart, Harken both Bushs and Bill Clinton:

There has always been something incongruous about Stephens Inc. Despite the Little rock firm's attempts to portray itself as a small- city operation that closes for the duck season and got fabulously lucky on a couple of down-home deals like Wal-Mart, it was, at the incinerator's inception, the ninth-largest investment bank in the country. Since it is not headquartered in New York, its dealings are local news, little noticed by the national press, even when they have national implications. And, as a source close to the company once remarked, "The farther you get from Arkansas, the better it looks."

Stephens Inc. was founded by Witt Stephens, a state legislator's son who parlayed a Depression-era belt-buckle, Bible, and municipal-bond business into an immense personal fortune. After his retirement in 1973, the company was run by his shy younger brother, Jackson (a classmate of Jimmy Carter's at the Naval Academy). Witt Stephens and Stephens Inc. did much to create the economic paradox that is modern Arkansas: a desperately poor state with a scant 2.3 million inhabitants that is nonetheless home to a number of wealthy companies. Without the financial assistance of the Stephens brothers, Sam Walton might have ended his days as the most innovative merchant in Bentonville. Stephens money was also important to the fortunes of enterprises as various as Tyson Foods and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the television producer and reigning First Friend. Stephens Inc. is an important client of the Rose law firm, whose chairman, C. Joseph Giroir, made Hillary Rodham Clinton a partner. And back in 1977, Stephens assisted BCCI's infiltration of the American banking system by brokering the latter's purchase of National Bank of Georgia stock held by Bert Lance, former President Jimmy Carter's friend and disgraced budget director.

Jackson Stephens (who turned over the reins to his son, Warren, in the late eighties) and his firm were both substantial contributors to the campaigns of Presidents Reagan and Bush (to the tune of at least $100,000 in 1980 and 1989), but they have been closer still to Bill Clinton (whom Witt Stephens had been known to call "that boy").

On two occasions, once when Clinton was running for reelection in Arkansas in 1990 and again in March 1992, when his battered presidential campaign was broke, the Stephens family saved Clinton's bacon with an infusion of money. Indeed, it may not be too much to say that their Worthen Bank's emergency $3.5 million line of credit saved the presidential campaign from extinction. --L.J.D.

-snip

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1993/11/davis.html





Who is the octopussy that might be lurking in the Ohio River Valley? Perhaps we should start by asking shy Arkansas billionaire Jackson T. Stephens. After all, Stephens introduced BCCI from Pakistan to the United States and the WTI waste incinerator to East Liverpool, Ohio. Stephens would be a good sketch artist because he's seen some monstrous scandals in his day. Stephens' family firm is the largest privately owned investment bank outside Wall Street. In September 1977, President Jimmy Carter's Budget Director Burt Lance was forced to resign amid allegations about his bank dealings with Stephens (Stephens and Carter were classmates at the Naval Academy). In 1978, Stephens, Lance and BCCI were charged with violating U.S. security laws. The charges were dropped after the defendants promised not to violate security laws in the future, even though they admitted no guilt.

The New York Post reported in February 1992 that it was Stephens who enabled BCCI to gain a foothold in the U.S. and helped the fraud-plagued bank secretly acquire U.S. banks. In Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin's book, False Profits, perhaps the best account of the BCCI scandal, the authors outlined how opium revenue from Afghanistan Mujahedin fighting the Soviets ended up in the accounts of BCCI, founded by Agha Hasan Abedi. The Post reported that Stephens allegedly introduced Abedi to Lance shortly after Lance resigned.

In 1991, Lance testified that he urged Abedi to acquire a Washington bank holding company, but he denied any knowledge of BCCI's subsequent secret ownership of First American Bankshares. The Post reported that Securities and Exchange Commission documents from 1977 substantiate that the idea originated with Stephens.

During Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential run, Stephens and his son Warren boasted of raising more than $100,000 for the campaign. The Stephens family also owned a 38 percent share in Worthen National Bank that extended a crucial $2 million line of credit to Clinton in January 1992.

-snip

http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/wti/bob.html



Waste Technologies Industry, Inc. (WTI)


WTI has also gained significant political support, as one of the original partners in the corporation was Jackson Stephens. Stephens, an Arkansas investor, was known as a significant contributor to Reagan, Bush, and Clinton campaigns.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

The EPA has been accused of having bias in favor of WTI and carrying out decision-making activities without required public participation. The agency also violated rules established in RCRA during the WTI permit application process. EPA admitted such wrong-doing at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee's subcommitteeon Administrative Law and Government Relations, as well as the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/mcormick.html#Key%20Actors




Ask Hillary About This Tonight. I Dare You.
by Zwoof

Thu Jan 31, 2008 at 03:40:46 AM PST


While I was writing the original piece on the history of this foul project, a new ruling from the Ohio EPA allowed this incinerator, located 1,100 feet from an elementary school, to accept even more hazardous waste (anthrax, radioactive waste, infectious medical waste and mixed hazardous waste from Hurricane Katrina) than the original permit that was shrouded in corruption and approved by the Clinton Administration
Clinton and Al Gore promised the residents of East Liverpool, Ohio that they would not allow this incinerator originally approved by Bush '41 to operate. However, a Clinton EPA appointee, recommended by his classmate Hillary Clinton, approved the permit.

-snip

The Politicians,Contributers and Conflicts
Jackson Stephans seems to have had a knack for picking winners.

Stephens staked Sam Walton when he started Wal-Mart in 1970, financed Tyson Food'stakeover of Holly Farms in 1988 and bankrolled Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the television producer and Former First Friend.

Jackson Stephens hired the Rose Law Firm where Hillary Rodham Clinton was a partner.

In 1979, she became the first woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm, hired by managing partner C. Joseph Goroir, Jr,.

Stephens later hired Goroir as director of his Worthen Bank in Little Rock.

-snip
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/31/21045/9822/688/446786

[Octafish]

11. BCCI - Bank of the CIA

Mr. Colhoun pegs one of the things the late Mr. Stephens helped launch:

http://web.archive.org/web/20001117161900/http://www.alternatives.com/library/pol/polintel/cova0008.txt

(Please grab ASAP -- I dunno how long the Wayback holds on to articles 'n' stuff.)

[Art_from_Ark]

21. Just for the record,

Wal-Mart was started in 1962, not 1970.

[mod mom]

22. 1970 was when JS underwrote the initial public offering for Wal-Mart Stores. nt

[leveymg]

26. Someone needs to write a book about the Stephens family, and their role at East meets West

Or, how the Germans, the Saudis, and the Chinese created America's two most powerful political dynasties, and how they destroyed America.

I keep on coming back to these haunting images by the late Mark Lombardi:

[Karenina]

27. Prescott's EPIC FAIL--->Poppy--->Pretzldent

Prescott Bush. See: Smedley Darlington Butler





It is NOT OVER YET, kiddiekins. Not by a long shot.

Know Your BFEE.

[mod mom]

28. Here is a good article on Mark Lombardi for those who do not have knowledge of his contribution:

-snip

Jackson Stephens rivals Bath in his role as conduit between high-level factions. A Little Rock, Arkansas tycoon who attended the U.S. Naval Academy with Jimmy Carter and staked Sam Walton to found Wal-Mart in 1970, Stephens was owner of the notoriously toxic WTI Incinerator in East Liverpool, OH, and a munificent contributor to the campaign warchests of both Bill Clinton and George Bush, Sr. He was also embroiled in the BCCI affair through his association with BCCI satellite Union Bank of Switzerland—UBS, in turn, contributed $25 million to the moribund Harken Energy Corp.

http://www.wburg.com/0202/arts/lombardi.html

[mod mom]

3. We must not give up in our push to seek justice for his victims. He is a war criminal along

with the war profiteering mad men he suroounded himself with. There will forever be a stain on this country until true justice is served.

[Octafish]

7. Australia Bolts Iraq Over Bush's Lies

Like people, some countries are smarter than others.

Australia Bolts Iraq Over Bush's Lies

by Ray McGovern
ConsortiumNews.com
June 4, 2008

Matilda is waltzing home from Iraq, and the Australians are lucky but chastened.

Lucky for having lost not one soldier in combat of the 2,000 sent to join the "coalition of the willing" attack on Iraq in March 2003.

Chastened because Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is now pulling no punches in decrying the subservience of his predecessor, John Howard, to Washington.

Announcing the withdrawal of the 550 Australian troops still in Iraq on Monday, Rudd echoed recent charges by former White House spokesman Scott McClellan about the Bush administration's "shading" of intelligence to "justify" an unnecessary war.

Rudd told Parliament he was most concerned by "the manner in which the decision to go to war was made; the abuse of intelligence information, a failure to disclose to the Australian people the qualified nature of that intelligence"; and the government's silence on "the prewar warning that an attack on Iraq would increase the terrorist threat, not decrease it."

Rudd added:

"This government does not believe that our alliance with the United States mandates automatic compliance with every element of the United States' foreign policy."

Stung by Rudd's candor, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino fell back on the canard that "the entire world" agreed on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. As President Lyndon Johnson would have put it, that dog won't hunt.

If all agreed, why then was President George W. Bush unable to secure the approval of the UN Security Council, without which an armed attack on another country is illegal under international and U.S. law?

Among "coalition of the willing" leaders not named Bush, only the faith-based former British Prime Minister Tony Blair hangs on pathetically to the notion that "everyone" believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs.

This is particularly odd since Blair acknowledges the authenticity of the (in)famous Downing Street Memos. Perhaps his conversion to Catholicism will prompt him to confess that he lied – a reality long beyond dispute.

The Downing Street Truth

As some will recall, Blair sent his intelligence chief off to Washington in summer 2002 to confer with his opposite number, and Bush intimate, CIA Director George Tenet.

In the spring of 2005, a patriotic truth-teller leaked to British media the minutes of a summit meeting of UK national security officials convened on July 23, 2002, at 10 Downing Street. (The minutes, which became known as the Downing Street Memos, were composed that same day by one of those officials and sent to the other participants.)

The minutes revealed that at CIA headquarters on July 20, 2002, Tenet informed his British counterpart that President Bush had decided to attack Iraq for regime change; that the war would be justified by the "conjunction" of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism; and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

So we did not really need Scott McClellan's recent revelations to understand that the intelligence was "fixed," even though our country's fawning corporate media (FCM) made a Herculean effort to suppress this key evidence – in part by ignoring and disparaging the Downing Street Memos when they surfaced three years ago.

Among the saddest aspects of this whole affair, at least for those who have been in the intelligence profession, is that no one within the U.S. intelligence establishment saw fit to go public and disclose the deception that was being used to "justify" a war of aggression. No one.

The only seasoned officials with the courage to speak out were three Foreign Service officers – Brady Kiesling, Ann Wright, and John H. Brown – each of whom resigned before the war since it was clear to them, even without access to the most sensitive intelligence, that the war could not be justified.

As for intelligence officials outside the United States, there were several profiles in courage.

Katharine Gun, a translator in the British equivalent of our National Security Agency, did successfully leak a very damaging Jan. 31, 2003, memorandum from NSA revealing that the U.S. and UK were pulling out all stops to sell the war, even intercepting messages to UN delegations in New York and elsewhere.

It was all part of a last-ditch attempt to pressure nonaligned members of the UN Security Council into acquiescing to the U.S./UK desire to strike Iraq. Gun thought she might succeed in slowing or even stopping an attack on Iraq, if the world learned the lengths to which Bush and Blair were going to have their war.

Gun's explosive document, carried by the London Observer on March 2, 2003 – just two and a half weeks before the attack on Iraq – was suppressed or trivialized by the FCM in the United States.

(Gun, who acknowledged leaking the document, was fired and charged under the Official Secrets Act. But the case collapsed when the British government balked at providing evidence that might have disclosed some government law experts had concluded that the Iraq invasion was illegal. Gun is now a member of VIPS/West.)

And after the war began, Danish Army Intelligence Major Frank Grevil gave the Danish media documents showing that Danish intelligence had reported to its government that the U.S. public rationale for war was not supported by authentic intelligence.

Grevil (another VIPS member) was sentenced to four months in prison for his efforts to tell the truth.

Andrew Wilkie: Rising to the Challenge

Until he quit nine days before the attack on Iraq, Andrew Wilkie was a senior analyst in Australia's premier intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA).

Of all the Australian, British, and American all-source intelligence analysts with direct knowledge of how intelligence was abused in the run-up to the war, Wilkie was the only one to resign in protest and speak truth to power.

Those who dismiss such efforts as an exercise in futility should know that on Oct. 7, 2003, the Australian Senate, in a rare move, censured then-Prime Minister Howard for misleading the public in justifying sending Australian troops off to war.

The Senate statement of censure noted that Howard had produced no evidence to justify his claims in March 2003 that Iraq had stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and it castigated him for suppressing Australian intelligence warnings that war with Iraq would increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks.

One senator accused Howard of "unprecedented deceit."

Ask the American FCM why they ignored that story.

Thanks to Wilkie's courage and determination , many Australians were able to come to an early understanding that the reasons adduced for war on Iraq were cooked in Washington and served up by Australian leaders all too willing to give unquestioning support to the Bush administration.

Those Australian leaders are now being held accountable.

VIPS invited Andrew Wilkie to Washington in July 2003 to speak at a briefing arranged by Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) in the House Rayburn Building. There were 14 TV cameras in that room, but not one minute of TV coverage that afternoon or evening.

After his presentation, we strongly encouraged Wilkie to keep throwing light on this dark chapter of history; he was pleased to join VIPS/East.

We expressed our hope that U.S. intelligence analysts who also watched the deceit close-up would soon join him in speaking out. With a wan smile, Wilkie shook his head and pointed to the cost, including the character assassination to which he had already been subjected at the hands of his government.

One VIPS Testifies

On Aug. 22, 2003, Wilkie had an opportunity not yet afforded any VIPS of the American, British, or Danish chapters. He laid out his case before parliament in Canberra, testifying that the attack on Iraq had little to do with WMDs or terrorism. One particularly telling part of his testimony:

"Please remember the government was also receiving detailed assessments on the U.S. in which it was made very clear the U.S. was intent on invading Iraq for more important reasons than WMDs and terrorism. Hence all this talk about WMDs and terrorism was hollow. Much more likely is the proposition the government deliberately exaggerated the Iraq WMDs threat so as to stay in step with the U.S."

In the wake of Wilkie's testimony, Australian pundits became more critical of the Howard government and its persistent refusal to acknowledge that, as one journalist put it, they were "conned by master manipulators masquerading as purveyors of objective intelligence."

Sounds a little like Scott McClellan, no? But, thanks to the FCM, most Americans hear it for the first time only five years later.

The candor of Wilkie's Aug. 22, 2003, testimony to the Australian parliament helps to dispel the myths and canards still wafting around about – among other things – how "the entire world" believed Saddam Hussein was a dangerous threat.

Accordingly, we include some of the more telling Wilkie excerpts below. (Emphasis added in bold.)

Opening Remarks to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD)
Aug. 22, 2003
Andrew Wilkie

Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting me to appear before the Committee.

You would be well aware that I resigned from the Office of National Assessments, before the Iraq war, because I assessed that invading Iraq would not be the most sensible and ethical way to resolve the Iraq issue. I chose resignation, specifically, because compromise or seeking to create change from within ONA were not realistic options.

At the time I resigned I put on the public record three fundamental concerns. Firstly, that Iraq did not pose a serious enough security threat to justify a war. Secondly, that too many things could go wrong. And, thirdly, that war was still totally unnecessary because options short of war were yet to be exhausted.

My first concern is especially relevant today. It was based on my assessment that Iraq's conventional armed forces were weak, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program was disjointed and contained, and that there was no hard evidence of any active cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Now the government has claimed repeatedly I was not close enough to the Iraq issue to know what I'm talking about. Such statements have misled the public and have been exceptionally hurtful to me.

I was a senior analyst with a top-secret positive vet security clearance. I'd been awarded a superior rating in my last performance appraisal, and not long before I resigned I'd been informed by the deputy director-general that thought was being given to my being promoted.

Because of my military background (I had been a regular army infantry lieutenant colonel), I was required to be familiar with war-related issues … and was on standby to cover Iraq once the war began….

Now, in fairness to Australian and allied intelligence agencies, Iraq was a tough target. From time to time there were shortages of human intelligence on the country. At other times the preponderance of anti-Saddam sources desperate for U.S. intervention ensured a flood of disinformation. Collecting technical intelligence was equally challenging.

A problem for Australian agencies was their reliance on allies. We had virtually no influence on foreign intelligence collection planning, and the raw intelligence seldom arrived with adequate notes on sources or reliability. More problematic was the way in which Australia's tiny agencies needed to rely on the sometimes weak and skewed views contained in the assessments prepared in Washington.

A few problems were inevitable. For instance, intelligence gaps were sometimes back-filled with the disinformation. Worst-case sometimes took primacy over most-likely. The threat was sometimes overestimated as a result of the fairy tales coming out of the U.S. And sometimes government pressure, as well as politically correct intelligence officers themselves, resulted in its own bias.

But, overall, Australian agencies did, I believe, an acceptable job reporting on the existence of, the capacity and willingness to use, and immediacy of the threat, posed by Iraq. Assessments were okay, not least because they were always heavily qualified to reflect the ambiguous intelligence picture.

How then to explain the big gap between the government's prewar claims about Iraq possessing a massive arsenal of WMDs and cooperating actively with al-Qaeda and the reality that no arsenal of weapons or evidence of substantive links have yet been found?

Well, most often the government deliberately skewed the truth by taking the ambiguity out of the issue. Key intelligence assessment qualifications like "probably," "could," and "uncorroborated evidence suggests" were frequently dropped. Much more useful words like "massive" and "mammoth" were included, even though such words had not been offered to the government by the intelligence agencies. Before we knew it, the government had created a mythical Iraq, one where every factory was up to no good and weaponization was continuing apace.

Equally misleading was the way in which the government misrepresented the truth. For example, when the government spoke of Iraq having form , it cited pre-1991 Gulf War examples, like the use of chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds. Mind you, the government needed to be creative, because 12 years of sanctions, inspections, and air strikes had virtually disarmed modern Iraq….

The government even went so far as to fabricate the truth. The claims about Iraq cooperating actively with al-Qaeda were obviously nonsense. As was the government's reference to Iraq seeking uranium in Africa, despite the fact that ONA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade all knew the Niger story was fraudulent. This was critical information. It beggars belief that ONA knew it was discredited but didn't advise the prime minister, Defense knew but didn't tell the defense minister, and Foreign Affairs knew but didn't tell the foreign minister. …

In closing, I wish to make it clear that I do not apologize for, or withdraw from, my accusation that the Howard government misled the Australian public over Iraq, both through its own public statements as well as through its endorsement of Allied statements.

The government lied every time it said or implied that I was not senior enough or appropriately placed in ONA to know what I was talking about. And the government lied every time it skewed, misrepresented, used selectively, and fabricated the Iraq story.

But these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. For instance, the government lied when the prime minister's office told the media I was mentally unstable. The government lied when it associated Iraq with the Bali bombing. And the government lied every time it linked Iraq to the War on Terror.

The prime minister and the foreign minister in particular have a lot to answer for. After all, they were the chief cheerleaders for the invasion of another country, without UN endorsement, for reasons that have now been discredited.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and, for 27 years, a CIA analyst. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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SOURCE:

http://consortiumnews.com/2008/060308b.html

MODS: ConsortiumNews has granted DU permission to reprint their articles in full. Thanx!

I'm so glad to be on the same planet as you, mod mom. Thank you for caring about justice, my Friend.

[opihimoimoi]

12. OJ and W need better acting coaches...their deciet shines through like lazer beams through steel

Both are NPDs

[Greyhound]

14. More than circumstantial evidence, we have published, first-hand, eyewitness

accounts of his determination, even before 9/11, to invade Iraq.

[hootinholler]

15. What bullshit he spews

He damned well know the 'intelligence' was forged, literally in some cases.

I would love to figure out how to get paid to track these guys down and haul them into court. the 21st Century of the Nazi hunter, the Bush hunter.

-Hoot

[Solly Mack]

17. Yeah..yeah.."mistakes were made"

and the pretending continues...

[rcsl1998]

18. So He Didn't Want A 9/11 'Do-Over' ???

[roody]

19. This man is sober????

I did not watch the video.

[glitch]

20. Bush's mistakes always benefit his family and their cronies. Funny that.

Not funny ha ha. Thanks for posting K & R.

[lonestarnot]

23. Will he have to send people out for everything for the rest of his life?

[mod mom]

24. Let's hope someone has the sense to bring this criminal to justice. Why should

he not face the fate of many other tyrants with a one way trip (all expense paid) to the Hague?

[slipslidingaway]

25. Agree 100% n/t