Abu Ghraib scandal points to conspiracy at the highest levels Portsmouth Herald News

Abu Ghraib scandal points to conspiracy at the highest levels

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You can’t have a one-person conspiracy."
A moment of clarity voiced by Col. James L. Pohl as he declared a mistrial in the case of Pfc. Lynndie R. England, the poster child for the American military’s abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

England, a learning-impaired Army private who was impregnated by her superior officer in Iraq, had filed a guilty plea and faced up to 30 months in prison.

England is the female soldier seen holding a leash tied around the neck of a naked Iraqi prisoner and many other photos that sparked international outcry.

But when England’s superior officer and the father of her child, Charles A. Graner Jr., took the stand Wednesday, he told Judge Pohl that England was acting under orders from him and he was also following orders. Pohl said he could not allow England to plead guilty if she did not commit a crime as Graner testified.

While England is responsible for her actions, she is not solely responsible and that extremely important fact emerged this past week when the judge declared a mistrial.

Given the Alice in Wonderland manner in which these cases have gone forward, we had fully expected England to be thrown in jail. After all, everyone, including President Bush, had characterized her and the other soldiers involved in the prisoner-abuse scandal as demented individuals acting for their own sick amusement.

But Judge Pohl’s actions show someone in the military justice system is still seeking justice.

"You can’t have a one-person conspiracy," Pohl said.

The conspiracy starts with now-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales writing a memo that appears to endorse torture, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his staff looking for loopholes to long-standing international laws regarding the treatment of prisoners.

The Army has busted one general, Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski. Karpinski is the Lynndie England of the top brass. According to The Washington Post, Karpinski was commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and oversaw prison facilities in Iraq at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Investigations, however, have cleared Karpinski of any connection to the prison scandal and, in fact, a large part of her demotion, according to The New York Times, has to do with her failure to report she was caught shoplifting a $22 bottle of perfume at MacDill Air Force Base.

Karpinski, unlike England, recognizes and has publicly stated she is being made a scapegoat for the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The propaganda machine has kicked into high gear now. England’s civilian lawyer has stepped down and the Army has indicated it intends to file new charges against England after it completes another investigation.

We thank Judge Pohl for this moment of clarity and we ask our readers to consider: Do you really think Lynndie England knew enough about Iraqi culture to know stripping male prisoners naked would be such a wounding humiliation?

Do you really think she, by herself, had the power and authority to leash prisoners or stack them naked in a pyramid?

And what does it say about us as American citizens that we nearly allowed her to take the heat for decisions made at the top levels of the Bush administration?

What lessons should our soldiers take away from this? Are they to be sent to the nastiest battle zones on Earth, follow orders from their superiors only to be held up later as depraved individuals acting on their own?

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal has stained America in the eyes of the world and none of the actions taken since the photos were first released has in any way restored confidence at home or abroad.

May 8, 2005
'Great Crime' at Abu Ghraib Enrages and Inspires an Artist
By JUAN FORERO
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, May 7 - Fernando Botero, Latin America's best-known living artist, shocked the art world last year when he broke sharply from his usual depictions of small town life to reveal new works that depicted Colombia's war in horrific detail.

Now, Mr. Botero, 73, who lives in Paris and New York, has taken on an even more explosive topic: the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Forty-eight paintings and sketches - of naked prisoners attacked by dogs, dangling from ropes, beaten by guards, in a mangled heap of bodies - will be exhibited in Rome at the Palazzo Venezia museum on June 16.

"These works are a result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world," Mr. Botero said by telephone from his Paris studio.

"I began to do some very fluid drawings, and then I began to paint and the results are 50 works inspired by this great crime."

Mr. Botero said the paintings and sketches, done in oils, pencil and charcoal and part of a 170-piece traveling exhibition, would also be shown at the Würth Museum in Germany in October and at the Pinacoteca in Athens next year before returning to Germany. The exhibition was first made public last month, when Diners, a Colombian magazine, published photographs of the works.

Mr. Botero's work had, until recently, not been known for making political statements. Instead, for 50 years, his paintings had been associated with the placid, pastoral scenes of the small-town Colombia of his childhood, featuring ordinary people, aristocrats, military officers and nuns, all of them extravagantly corpulent.

But last year, his paintings of Colombia's long guerrilla war, full of blood, agony and senseless violence, became a big draw in European galleries, surprising followers astonished by Mr. Botero's bold departure in substance, if not style. Mr. Botero explained that he had decided he could not stay silent over a conflict he called absurd.

Now, he said, his indignation over war and brutality may turn up increasingly in his work.

"I rethought my idea of what to paint and that permitted me to do the war in Colombia, and now there's this," he said. "And if there's something else that compels me in the future, then I will do it."

Mr. Botero, citing the Impressionists and the many works of a favorite of his, Velásquez, said he had once thought that art should be inoffensive, since "it doesn't have the capacity to change anything."

But with time, and his growing outrage, Mr. Botero said he had become more cognizant that art could and should make a statement.

He pointed to the most famous antiwar painting of the 20th century, Picasso's masterpiece that depicted the German bombing of Guernica, Spain. Had Picasso not produced "Guernica," Mr. Botero said, the town would have been another footnote in the Spanish Civil War.

He said he read about Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker, then followed European news accounts. Calling himself an admirer of the United States - one of his sons lives in Miami - Mr. Botero said he became incensed because he expected better of the American government.

His new paintings and sketches - conceived not from photographs or specific acts of torture but rather from his reading of news reports - depict gruesome scenes of prison abuse. One inmate hangs from the ceiling, a rope around his ankle. Another work shows a soldier beating a prisoner with a baton, while yet another portrays a soldier urinating on an inmate. In many of the works, inmates simply scream in pain.

Mr. Botero said the works being exhibited, and those he has continued to create on Abu Ghraib, were not for sale because it would not be proper to profit from such events.

In Europe, where sentiment against the Iraq war is strong and Mr. Botero's work is well received, news of the paintings and sketches has already generated interest. In Germany, museums in Hanover and Baden Baden want to stage exhibitions exclusively of Mr. Botero's works on Abu Ghraib.

No exhibitions in the United States are planned, though Mr. Botero said he would like nothing more.

His previous works are on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and many others.

"If any museum wants to show works of torture, well, I would be delighted," Mr. Botero said. "The museum that decides to show it would have to be conscious that many people would be repulsed and be against it."


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/internat...agewanted=print

Beating around the Bush
May 9, 2005

The US military went into Iraq with no clear idea of the rules of engagement, writes Michael Gawenda.

During a nationally televised press conference 11 days ago, George Bush was asked about the CIA's "rendition" policy, through which people suspected of being involved in terrorist organisations are flown for interrogation to countries known to regularly torture detainees.

Not even the most enthusiastic supporters of rendition deny that the most horrific forms of torture are commonplace in some of these places. No one knows how many people have been picked up by the CIA in the US, Europe and parts of Asia and flown to places such as Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan for interrogation, but it seems there have been hundreds. And the renditions continue, despite widespread criticism from civil liberties and human rights groups, as well as members of Congress.

Bush was asked about rendition at the press conference and he paused before he answered the question. He said the US did not condone torture and that he had made that clear a number of times.

Then he said this: "But no one should doubt that we are determined to do what has to be done to protect the American people. As President, I have no higher duty."

About the same time, Specialist Lynndie England pleaded guilty at her court martial at Fort Hood army base in Texas to seven counts of mistreating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.

Specialist England - equivalent in rank to a private - is a 23-year-old single mother from a small town in rural West Virginia, where she grew up in a trailer park.

Having joined the army reserve to earn enough money to put herself through college - she had always wanted to be a meteorologist - she ended up in Iraq at the beginning of 2003 as part of a reserve military police unit assigned to Abu Ghraib, the infamous Baghdad jail where Saddam Hussein had his opponents tortured and executed.

Less than a year later, she was perhaps the best-known American soldier in Iraq, known around the world because of a series of photographs taken by fellow soldiers at Abu Ghraib during a late-night "visit" to the prison's cell blocks.

Most of the photographs feature England. One that has been published in newspapers and magazines and flashed on television screens countless times features England holding a leash attached to a dog collar around the neck of a naked and prone Iraqi prisoner.

There are other photos, of course, and in most of the ones featuring England it is her smile that shocks the most, because the smile is a disturbing mystery: what was she smiling about?

Last week a military judge said he was not convinced that England knew that what she did in Abu Ghraib was wrong and threw out her guilty plea.

One wonders, if she heard it, what England made of Bush's statement that he is determined to do what has to be done to protect the American people. Did she think, "That's what I was doing"? During her hearing, England said she had initially resisted taking part in the abuse but her resistance crumbled in the face of peer group pressure.

"I could have said no," she said. "I knew it was wrong."

In one of the photographs, England, smiling, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, points at a naked prisoner's genitals. She said she particularly didn't want to do that. "I said 'no, no way'. But they [the other soldiers] were being very persistent, bugging me, so I said, 'OK, whatever'."

Seven soldiers have been convicted of abusing prisoners as a result of that night at Abu Ghraib. The ringleader, Charles Graner, who was a corporal at the time but has since been demoted to private, was sentenced to 10 years' jail by a military jury in January for the abuse he inflicted on the Iraqi prisoners. Another soldier is still to face a court martial.

Graner, a former prison guard in the US, had argued at his trial that he was obeying orders, that he had been told by military intelligence officers to "soften up" the prisoners before they were interrogated. Graner, however, could not name a single officer who gave him such an order.

It was Graner who derailed England's guilty plea last week when he testified that he had ordered her to hold the leash attached to the naked Iraqi detainee because he thought that was the best way to subdue him. England, he said, was just obeying his orders.

England has a five-month-old baby fathered by Graner. The photographs taken that night at Abu Ghraib included pornographic photos of England and Graner and of some of the other soldiers allegedly involved in the abuse. These photographs have not been released.

There seems to be little doubt that the small group of soldiers involved in this infamous episode of abuse were not acting on direct orders from their superiors. They were under-trained, low-level "grunts" who threatened and beat and sexually humiliated detainees on their own initiative. They were having fun.

But subsequent investigations by the Pentagon have revealed widespread abuse of prisoners in Iraqi and Afghan jails as well as at Guantanamo Bay. More than two dozen detainees have died as a result of injuries inflicted on them in detention.

So far, the US military has issued either criminal or administrative charges against 125 soldiers and officers involved in 350 documented cases of abuse in jails in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, not a single army officer has been convicted of a criminal offence, though a number have been demoted and reprimanded. Only one general has paid any sort of price for the behaviour of the soldiers under their command: Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, a reserve army officer in charge of the military police guarding the jails in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, was demoted to colonel last week and relieved of her command. Her military career is over.

Karpinski knew her career was likely to be over at least a year ago when she told Newsweek magazine that Abu Ghraib, in August 2003, was full to overflowing with detainees. Thousands were being "processed" every month. Insurgents had just bombed the United Nations compound in Baghdad. Abu Ghraib was under mortar attack every night. There were raging gun battles between insurgents and soldiers in the guard towers.

"There was extraordinary pressure being put on military intelligence from every angle to get better information," she said. There was pressure, she said, to find Saddam and the missing weapons of mass destruction.

The pressure was extraordinary from the time that the Bush Administration decided in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to Taliban and other fighters captured in Afghanistan and shipped to Guantanamo Bay.

The so-called war on terrorism required different rules and according to memos to Bush, in part prepared by Alberto Gonzales, then special counsel to the president and now the US Attorney-General, "rough" interrogation of alleged terrorists or "illegal combatants" was not torture unless it led to life-threatening injuries and "organ failure".

At the same time, with Bush, the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, arguing that the invasion of Iraq was part of the war on terrorism and that there were direct links between Saddam and al-Qaeda, the military had no clear idea of the rules of engagement in Iraq, despite Rumsfeld's decision that Iraq was covered by the Geneva Conventions.

Suspected terrorists, "illegal combatants" and insurgents in Iraq: it was not clear what rules applied to which group. What group was subject to "rendition"? To "tough interrogation"? To the Geneva Conventions?

Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials were pushing the military in Iraq for more and better intelligence on the growing insurgency, which some military intelligence officers, it seems, took to mean that the Geneva Conventions, in certain circumstances, could be ignored.

The army, after what it said was an exhaustive inquiry during which it called more than 80 witnesses, has now cleared all the senior generals in charge of US forces in Iraq at the time the documented abuses, based on the Pentagon's 20 inquiries, took place. Among those cleared was the army's top officer in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, who was found in one Pentagon investigation to have failed to properly supervise the soldiers under his command, and to have authorised interrogation methods that contravened the Geneva Conventions.

As far as the US military is concerned, it has completed its investigations into the abuse of prisoners, but even Republicans on the armed services committee say there will be further hearings to review the Pentagon investigations and that senior Bush Administration officials will be called to answer allegations that the environment they created led to the abuse of detainees.

The army is soon to release a new interrogation manual that specifically prohibits some of the techniques used in Iraq and Afghanistan, though some critics say these techniques were implicitly prohibited in the current manual.

Meanwhile, Lynndie England will face a new court martial some time in July, not necessarily, according to army officials, on the same charges to which she had pleaded guilty.

Clutching her baby to her chest, dressed in her army uniform as she left the court after her guilty plea was dismissed, she looked a forlorn and pathetic figure. She was not smiling.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Beating-a...l?oneclick=true

Victimizer and Victim

By Richard Cohen
Post
Friday, May 6, 2005; A23



Lynndie England, "the pointer,'' as some have called her, the one holding the leashed Iraqi prisoner, the soldier with the smirk, pointing at the genitals of the naked men -- that Lynndie England -- has admitted her wrongdoing and, before the military judge ruled otherwise, pleaded guilty to seven counts of mistreating prisoners. She said she was talked into it. For what it's worth, I believe her.

For the moment, her fate is up in the air. The judge says he won't have it both ways -- England admitting she knew what she did was wrong, her more experienced superior at the time contradicting her by saying she thought she was abusing and humiliating prisoners for legitimate training purposes. The judge threw out the conspiracy count to which England had already pleaded guilty. "You can't have a one-person conspiracy," the judge said. About that he is surely right.

So England continues to be an odd, unlikely puppet on the strings of fate. For a while, there was no more famous face in all the world than this Army reservist's. She was some sort of anti-Statue of Liberty, the female personification of what some people insisted America had become. There she was holding the dog leash or posing with the pathetic nude men or climbing on them with her alleged lover and ringleader, then-Cpl. Charles Graner Jr., since busted to private and serving a 10-year sentence in a military jail. It was Graner who gave England the alibi she apparently did not want: She was, really and truly, only following orders.

There is no end to the sadness of Lynndie England. There is no excusing what she did, but explaining is a different matter. She is that rare genuine article, the cliche, the stereotype that turns out upon investigation to be true. She lived with her family in a trailer in West Virginia. She's only a high school graduate. She married when she was 19 -- on a lark, she told her friends, and then for only two years.

She joined the Army Reserve not, as the flag-wavers would like it, for patriotic reasons but for college money (she wanted to be a meteorologist and chase storms). She had an affair or something with Graner in Iraq and has a baby by him. He apparently encouraged her to abuse prisoners. He also married another woman.

A psychologist from her home area testified that England had been a blue baby, born also with a malformation of the tongue that gave her a speech impediment. Apparently, she often chose not to talk at all. She had a learning disability as well. And you can see -- can't you? -- what no one will testify to: She's homely -- and that matters for a woman in America. She posed for pornographic pictures with Graner. The discipline of the Army apparently meant she no longer had to have any herself. This is why fascism can be so (sexually) exciting.

In 1995 Bernhard Schlink, a German law professor and novelist, published "The Reader'' -- a powerful and erotic tale of a relationship between a teenage boy and the illiterate woman he reads to. The two have an affair, and it is only years later that the man discovers his former lover was a guard at Auschwitz. It was a job she fell into, something she could do and not have to reveal that she could not read. She was a victim, pathetic, but she was also a beast. To understand is not necessarily to forgive. In the end, she could not even forgive herself.

It is the same with Lynndie England. She is the sort of woman who gets used by others, most often men. Powerless everywhere in life except on her end of the leash, she just had to come night after night to the section of Abu Ghraib where Graner held sway. She was admonished for this -- her real work was suffering -- but Graner drew her. She knew that what she was doing was wrong -- "I could have said no,'' she told the military court. "I knew it was wrong.'' But in all likelihood, only theoretically could she have said no. Some women always say yes.

How sad, how ironic, that this wee woman should have become the personification of supposed American arrogance. Like all those convicted for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, she is one of America's little people -- not an officer, not even regular Army, but one of a collection of nobodies just trying to get somewhere better. Lynndie England was one of them, and she is suffering for that -- officially for abusing prisoners, actually for being a loser. Whatever the outcome of her trial, the sentence will be life.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0501682_pf.html

Lets see if we can get up to date with the so-called "smoking gun" leaked memo. If you find info, please post it in this thread.

Here's what I understand. One memo regarding findings by the British Government's Attorney General about the legality of the war was apparently forged but based on true info.

The second leaked document, the smoking gun memo is legit and much more potentially damaging to Bush (impeachment?) & Blair. It appears to demonstrate that intelligence facts were created & distorted to lead both the U.S. & the UK into war with Iraq.



http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/nati...-13717044c.html

Good overview on Truthout:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/050705X.shtml

Greg Palast: Impeachment Time - Facts Were Fixed:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0505/S00089.htm

The memo itself:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html

Why is media still hanging back on this?

From the NPR Ombudsman:

http://www.npr.org/yourturn/ombudsman/2003/030321.html

From MediaMatters about letters to the Washington Post about their lack of coverage:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200505090005

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...=0&#entry282356

Pisses me off -- I'll tell you that! (The lack of media coverage, especially).

You're in Canada, right? Have you seen anything about this in Candian press? If you find something, will you post it here?

Hey, would any of our CGCSers who live outside the US look out for articles about the smoking gun memo & post them here? Netherlands...Australia, Canada, Italy...

Some coverage about the Conyers letter:

I saw this on CNN!
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/05/11/britain.war.memo/index.html
but i highly doubt that it will go any place
this is dead in the water issue.
no back bone to support it and no will in the democratic party to fight.
oh well
so they sit and get fat and kiss ass while people die!
now thats what i call a good polotical party!
the new name for the democratic party should be the know nothing party? or maybe the batered wife party! or even better! the do nothing know notihng slug party!

Shah, may I respectfully ask what you're going to do about it? Did your US Rep sign Mr. Conyers letter? Have you contacted your state senators?

I don't think passivity is the problem with Democratic Party leaders. We are too cynical & passive ourselves sometimes. We have to expect things to happen. We have to push.

Do everything you can do to keep this topic on front burner, this is impeachable material. Write to your senators and reps on this.

Not a single word in any media in Canada yet. We used to get the BBC news, but that was with our "introductory" cable TV offer. Three months later, they cut half our channels.

I don't care as long as I can get channels that carry "Law and Order".

well i'm new to NJ so i wrote to my old democratic leader from ny.
I think some of you may know her!
well wrote a little note via email and got back a nice little not saying
"yes we are looking into the problem"
man and i voted for her when i use to live in NY!
maybe i should contact my NJ rep!
but doubt that this will go any further.
you see they won't stand up
they are affraid of being called anti troops anti freedom bla bla bla
you get the picture.
the only way they will stand up is if we shame them to stand up!
because they know and we know that we are going to vote for them.
all we can do is shame them into acting

It may be that the foreign press will be more forthcoming than our own.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wo...ack=3&cset=true

Why didn't the investigation by Lord Hutton reveal this? His report exonerated the Blair Admin of deliberate dishonesty. Has Lord Hutton responded to this memo?

Because the investigation by Lawd Hutton was a whitewash.

Letter to the Editor (Sac Bee)

Buried Iraq war news
I applaud The Bee for publishing the May 6 article "Bush chose war early, memos says," describing the British memo that clearly shows President Bush committed to war in Iraq eight months prior to invasion, and long before the war was "sold" to the American public. But what were the editors thinking in burying it on page A10?This is proof that the administration manipulated and fabricated evidence used to sway public opinion to favor an action that has resulted in more than 1,500 American dead, more than 10,000 American wounded and approximately 100,000 Iraqi dead. In addition, this unnecessary expedition has shoved the United States to the brink of bankruptcy, and led to extreme legislation that curtails the civil rights of every American citizen.

Maybe we could push this story to Page 9 tomorrow or maybe Page 8 or, here, let's get really crazy: How about the front page?

- Mike Bayless, Sacramento

http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/lett...-13701705c.html

The LA Times story has made it to the back pages of the Boston Globe on page A-16.

I don't think it made it to the online version

Ready to write a similar LTE? Do you live in the Boston area?

It was just brought up on Crossfire. It was mentioned, it finally made it to the Washington Post on page 8.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1201857_pf.html

I found it. It's on page 18. I found it on the most emailed list.

British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War
Blair Was Told of White House's Determination to Use Military Against Hussein

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 13, 2005; A18



Seven months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of British foreign intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush wanted to topple Saddam Hussein by military action and warned that in Washington intelligence was "being fixed around the policy," according to notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting with Blair at No. 10 Downing Street.

"Military action was now seen as inevitable," said the notes, summarizing a report by Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, British intelligence, who had just returned from consultations in Washington along with other senior British officials. Dearlove went on, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

"The case was thin," summarized the notes taken by a British national security aide at the meeting. "Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

The notes were first disclosed last week by the Sunday Times of London, triggering criticism of Blair on the eve of the May 5 British parliamentary elections that he had decided to support an invasion of Iraq well before informing the public of his views.

The notes of the Blair meeting, attended by the prime minister's senior national security team, also disclose for the first time that Britain's intelligence boss believed that Bush had decided to go to war in mid-2002, and that he believed U.S. policymakers were trying to use the limited intelligence they had to make the Iraqi leader appear to be a bigger threat than was supported by known facts.

Although critics of the Iraq war have accused Bush and his top aides of misusing what has since been shown as limited intelligence in the prewar period, Bush's critics have been unsuccessful in getting an investigation of that matter.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has dropped its previous plan to review how U.S. policymakers used Iraq intelligence, and the president's commission on intelligence did not look into the subject because it was not authorized to do so by its charter, Laurence H. Silberman, the co-chairman, told reporters last month.

The British Butler Commission, which last year reviewed that country's intelligence performance on Iraq, also studied how that material was used by the Blair government. The panel concluded that Blair's speeches and a published dossier on Iraq used language that left "the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence than was the case," according to the Butler report.

It described the July 23 meeting as coming at a "key stage" in preparation for taking action against Iraq but described it primarily as a session at which Blair favored reengagement of U.N. inspectors against a background of intelligence that Hussein would not accept them unless "the threat of military action were real."

During the July 2002 time frame, Bush was working to build support in the United States for a war against Hussein, while a U.S. base in Qatar was being expanded and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was trying to get Turkey to assist in potential military action against the Iraqi leader.

A spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington said he would not comment on the substance of the document.

Blair's senior advisers at the July 2002 session decided they would prepare an "ultimatum" for Iraq to permit U.N. inspectors to return, despite being told that Bush's National Security Council, then headed by Condoleezza Rice, "had no patience with the U.N. route," according to the notes. "The prime minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the U.N. inspectors."

Although Dearlove reported that the NSC had "no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record," the Blair team soon set in motion preparation of the public dossier on Iraq, which was published in late September 2002.

Another piece of the British memo has relevance now, as the United States battles an insurgency that some say was exacerbated by faulty planning for the post-invasion period. "There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action," the notes say, without attributing that directly to Dearlove.

The "U.S. has already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime," the British defense secretary reported, according to the notes. Although no final decision had been made, "he thought the most likely timing in U.S. minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the U.S. congressional elections."

As it finally worked out, the Bush administration's public campaign for supporting a possible invasion of Iraq began the next month, in late August, with speeches by Vice President Cheney, followed by a late October vote in Congress to grant the president authority to use force if necessary. Later in October, the British and the Americans introduced their resolution on Iraq in the U.N. Security Council and it passed in early November, shortly after the Nov. 2 elections.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

thats right america push it back to the back of the paper!
if no one sees is and no one reads it, it never happend!
and our boy kind will be free of such thoughts of going to jail
and having his name thrashed in the history books along with his dady's name and nixon!

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=ce51393d0458f443

Startling revelations over possible UK-U.S. conspiracy

The U.S. and British governments have been startled by the publication of minutes of a meeting involving the highest levels of government in the U.K. which revealed the two countries were engaged in a virtual conspiracy.

The meeting took place on July 23 2002 and was attended among others by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, and Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith.

According to minutes taken by Matthew Rycroft, of the foreign ministry, the attendees of the meeting were briefed on talks between the two governments in Washington where the Bush administration outlined an objective of removing Saddam Hussein, despite him not being a threat nor of having an advanced WMD capability. The British officials were told the U.S. would go to war on the basis of the war on terrorism and WMD, and that the intelligence and facts were "being fixed."

The highly sensitive document was circulated after the meeting to those in attendance with a remark at the top saying 'This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.'

The minutes revealed the NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action, the minutes also disclosed.

The U.S. saw war as inevitable with the main task coming up with the justification. The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the UK delegation the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime.

The meeting discussed working up an ultimatum to Saddam to let the UN weapons inspectors back in to help with "the legal justification for the use of force." Prime Minister Blair said at the meeting it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. If the political context were right, people would support regime change, the minutes said.

The damning document points to the highest levels of two governments conspiring to launch an invasion on a sovereign country without any basis and conspiring to "fix" a case that would justify it.

Surprisingly the leaking of the document last week has seen little to no media coverage. A story on it covered the front page of The Times of London on May 1st. There has been no denial of the authenticity of the contents of the document yet there has been a virtual moratorium on media coverage since it became public knowledge.

This has not stopped members of the U.S. Congress who wrote last week to President Bush seeking an explanation on a number of issues covered at the British meeting. Among these was the claim that "intelligence and facts were being fixed." The 89 Democrats who were signatories to the letter also wanted to know how Bush was inevitably going to go to war and yet at the time had not asked Congress for approval. Rep. John Conyers, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told CNN the memo "raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of your own administration..."

"While various individuals have asserted this to be the case before, including Paul O'Neill, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and Richard Clarke, a former National Security Council official, they have been previously dismissed by your administration," the letter said.

But, the letter said, when the document was leaked Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman called it "nothing new."

Perhaps the Congress should also write to the Silberman-Robb Commission which reported last month on WMD intelligence before the war, saying, "After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons."

Perhaps it should write too to the proprietors and editors of major U.S. news media to enquire as to whether coverage of certain events is being "fixed around the policy."

In the interests of full disclosure see below the document referred to in this story, in its entirety:

That's challenging for me. I do live in the Boston area, but like to keep a low profile because of work. I will probably start with a letter to the Globe ombudsmen and my senators/reps. Then I'll give it a week and see after that.

WTG!

So, we have a delay in reporting and then it's buried in the newspaper's hinterlands. This stinks.

Here's a blog post about the Wa Po article:


Better Late Than Never

In a well-reported but poorly headlined article buried on page A18, Walter Pincus writes about the Downing Street Memo in today's Washington Post. To the uninitiated, this memo, from July 23, 2002, reveals that British Intelligence reported to Tony Blair that after meetings in Washington, it was clear Bush had already decided by mid-2002 to a) go to war and deceive Congress and the American people to do it.

Yesterday, I wrote about how this revelation, combined with the evidence collected in the Bolton investigation, will force Democrats to abandon the Bush-approved narrative of "intelligence failure" and shift to the narrative of pre-meditated intelligence fabrication.

Will the Washington Post live up to its Watergate standards? The circumstantial evidence so far is not good. First, Bob Woodward, who is now a senior editor at the Post, has a lot of access to lose if he shifts from court chronicler to court nemesis. Second, the Post already sat on the story for 12 days, waiting until CNN ran the story (yesterday) and Bolton's nomination passed out of committee. Of course, this is a huge story, the kind that makes careers.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050513/..._than_never.php

this just proves you can't lie to and fool ALL the people ALL the time, there aren't ANY MEMOS, or ANY OTHER MATERIAL (anywhere on the globe) that will stay secret, indefinitely . To damn bad this wasn't exposed before November, maybe we wouldn't be stuck with this lying pig for another 4 years

*I think of Whoopi's one woman show and this tune plays in my head,
"Every move you make
every vow you break.........I'll be watching You.....GEORGE!'

just a side note that Al Franken was hilarious on Bill Maher's Real Time tonight, he looked incredulous at the camera, and said I can't understand how Jeff Gannon can be compared to Monica Lewinski, that would mean someone in the white House was.........it just doesn't make any sense He also mentioned a "scandal" involving Santorum then repeatedly said,,,,,,,,,,,no I can't talk about that, but mentioned a man and a dog

450 feared killed in Uzbek clashes CNN

450 feared killed in Uzbek clashes CNN

http://www.tomdispatch.com/

Tomgram: Mark Danner on the British Smoking-Gun Memo

In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable proof of the way in which the Bush administration made its decision to invade Iraq -- without significant consultation, reasonable intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore ways to avoid war -- and well before seeking a Congressional or United Nations mandate of any sort.

By July, as the British officials reported, the decision to invade was already in the bag. The only real questions -- other than those involving war planning -- were how to organize the intelligence in such a way as to promote the war to come and how to finesse Congress (and the UN). While people often speak of the "road to war," in the case of the invasion of Iraq, as this document makes clear, a more accurate phrase might be "the bum's rush to war." The Review is also publishing an accompanying piece on the secret memo and what to make of it by their regular Iraq correspondent, Mark Danner, and its editors have been kind enough to allow Tomdispatch to distribute the piece early on-line.

That the Review is the first publication here to print the document is not only an honorable (and important) act, but a measure of the failure of major American papers to offer attention where it is clearly due. After all, whole government investigations have, in the past, gone in search of "smoking guns." In fact, the Bush administration spent much time searching fruitlessly for its own "smoking gun" of WMD in Iraq -- and this process was considered of front-page importance in our major papers and on the TV news. That a "smoking gun" document about the nature of the war in the making has appeared in this fashion, not in Kyrgyzstan but in England; that no one in the British or American governments has even bothered to dispute its provenance or accuracy; and that, with a few honorable exceptions like columnist Molly Ivins, that gun was allowed to lie on the ground smoking for days, hardly commented upon (except on the political internet, of course), tells us much about our present moment. Should you want to consider the miserable coverage in this country, check out FAIR's commentary on the matter.

Congressman John Conyers has just sent a letter, signed by eighty-nine Democratic congressional representatives, to the President demanding some answers to the document's revelations. And articles by good reporters in major papers finally did start to appear late this week -- but those of John Daniszewski at the Los Angeles Times and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post were typically tucked away on inside pages (meant for political news jockeys), and they had a distinctly just-the-facts-maam, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary feel to them.

But shouldn't it be a front-page story that, as Danner points out below, all the subsequent arguments we've had to endure about the state of, and accuracy of American intelligence on Iraq, were actually beside the point? After all, as the smoking-gun memo makes perfectly clear, the decision to go to war was made before the intelligence -- good, bad, or indifferent -- was even seriously put into play. As the secret memo also makes clear, administration officials, and the President himself, had already rolled the dice and placed their bet -- on the existence of WMD in Iraq as an excuse for the war they so desperately wanted. (Their Iraqi exile sources had, of course, assured them that it was so and, as the Brits reported in July 2002, they were already wondering, "For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one [of an invasion].") After all, it seemed so logical. Saddam had used such weapons in the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq War and against Kurds in Iraq. American troops and UN inspectors had found such weaponry in profusion after our first Gulf War. So why not now as well?

Recently, Ted Rall, considering press response to a more modest smoking-gun incident -- the covered up friendly-fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan whose revelation was reported rather reluctantly on the inside pages of papers -- wrote tellingly: "For journalists supposedly dedicated to uncovering the truth and informing the public, this is exactly the opposite of how things ought to be. Corrections and exposés should always run bigger, longer and more often than initial, discredited stories." Dream on, as we smoking-gunsters like to say.

The least commented upon aspect of the smoking-gun memo has been its military side. It is, in significant part, a military document, reflecting how much serious thinking and planning at the highest levels in the U.S. and Britain had already gone into the question of how to have a war by July 2002. The question of how technically to launch the "military action" -- whether by a "generated start" or a "running start" -- was, for instance, front and center. Also addressed was the mundane but crucial issue (for the Pentagon) of where, around Iraq, to base forces. "The US," reads the memo, "saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either [the generated or running start] option." Diego Garcia is the British-controlled Indian Ocean Island that was already a stationary American "aircraft carrier" and from which, 8 months later, B-2s would fly on Baghdad.

Straw at odds with US over brutality of terror war ally Telegraph.co.uk

Straw at odds with US over brutality of terror war ally Telegraph.co.uk

It's now in the NY Times. Krugman writes:

Why are the Democrats silent on this issue? Snuffysmith posted this in another topic, which people could read if they would get their a*ses out of Online Cafe!

Interesting that Krugman sees the smoking gun memo as helpful in terms of showing how deeply the problem of the Iraq war runs.

Gunfire continues in Uzbekistan USA Today

Gunfire continues in Uzbekistan USA Today

Slaughter in Uzbekistan Washington Post

Slaughter in Uzbekistan Washington Post

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/05/16/iraq.memo/index.html



And this article can also be found on this thread:

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...showtopic=29388

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationw...1,5984426.story

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-32.htm

I'm heartened by this article. This thing is just percolating along - when will it come to a boil? Especially interesting are the concluding paragraphs re: Bob Graham.

There is a growing "Impeach Bush" movement stemming from the 'smoking gun' memo that is nicely summarized by Xicanopwr on this thread:

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...showtopic=29393

Note to Rox - Good one!