Inhofe Again Equates Iraq With 9/11

Since Jan. 10, 2007, when George W. Bush announced his troop “surge,” more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died in the Iraq War – about a quarter of the total war dead – but now an even higher cost may loom ahead, the indefinite continuation of the conflict under President John McCain.

Commercial Media Let McCain Get Away with Claims that the "Surge" has Worked

By Robert Parry, Consortium News
Posted on September 10, 2008

McCain is falsely clinging to his support of more troops in Iraq as the reason for decreasing violence. And the media is buying it.

Despite strong evidence to the contrary, it has become established conventional wisdom among mainstream Washington journalists that the "surge" was the singular reason for the recent decline in Iraq's violence. It's also agreed that McCain deserves great credit for pushing the "surge" idea early.

Barack Obama has been repeatedly chastised -- even badgered -- for opposing the "surge." His attempts to refocus the debate more broadly on the wisdom of invading Iraq in the first place are rudely rejected by Big Media interviewers.

The latest example came during an ABC News "This Week" interview on Sept. 7 when George Stephanopoulos demanded of Obama: "How do you escape the logic that ... John McCain was right about the surge?"

When Obama responded that he didn't understand "why people are so focused on what has happened in the last year and a half and not on the previous five," Stephanopoulos cut him off, saying "Granted, you think you made the right decision about going in, but about the surge?"

In other words, the big-name journalists don't want a discussion about the decision to illegally invade Iraq under false pretenses in 2003 (presumably because they almost all were cheering the invasion on), but instead they want the debate to center entirely on their latest false assumption, that the "surge" has virtually won the war.

In reality, the "surge" of about 30,000 additional troops sent to Iraq appears to have been only one factor and -- according to military officials interviewed for Bob Woodward's new book, The War Within -- possibly a secondary one in explaining the drop-off in the violence that had made Iraq a living hell.

As Woodward writes, "In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge."

Woodward, whose book draws heavily from Pentagon insiders, reported that the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two important factors.

A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continuing success.

But there have been previous glimpses of classified U.S. programs that combine high-tech means of identifying insurgents -- such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones -- with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspects. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush's Global Dirty War" and "Iraq's Laboratory of Repression."]

Successful Repression

As we've reported previously, other brutal factors -- that the Washington press corps almost never mentions -- help explain the decline in violence:

• Vicious ethnic cleansing has succeeded in separating Sunnis and Shiites to such a degree that there are fewer targets to kill. Several million Iraqis are estimated to be refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own.
• Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas have made "death-squad" raids more difficult but alshave "cantonized" much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they seek food or travel to work.
• During the "surge," U.S. forces expanded a policy of rounding up so-called "military age males" and locking up tens of thousands in prison.
• Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years, has slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and has intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.
• With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.

But this dark side of the "successful surge" is excluded from the U.S. political debate. As during the pre-invasion period, the Washington press corps acts more like Bush's propagandists than anything close to skeptical journalists.

The only time they get tough in interviews is with Obama, demanding that he get in line with the rest of Washington's conventional wisdom and hail the media's old favorite, John McCain, for his courage and wisdom.

In playing this role, the U.S. press is again playing into Bush's hands and his desire to make sure that outright defeat in Iraq won't occur on his watch -- and that he will leave behind a successor who is committed to the neoconservative strategy of open-ended warfare against Muslim militants.

That is what appears increasingly likely as McCain surges up to -- and in some polls moves decisively ahead of -- Obama.

Domestic Images

As Woodward's book makes clear, Bush always understood the importance of controlling American perceptions about the Iraq War, even when that required lying to the public.

Not only did Bush insist in 2006 that the war was being won when he knew differently -- and he said he was listening to his commanders when, in reality, he was overruling their judgments -- he talked privately about the need to control the Iraq War images to influence the voters back home.

"The U.S. presence helps to keep the lid on," Bush told the top regional commander, Gen. John Abizaid, in explaining the reasoning for a troop buildup, and "also helps here at home, since for many the measure of success is reduction in violence." [Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2008]

In that assessment, Bush was politically prescient.

When the catastrophic levels of violence finally declined to the simply terrible, Bush's partisans -- especially the many well-placed neoconservative opinion leaders -- began baiting anyone who had doubted the "surge," much as they had hectored anyone who doubted the wisdom of invading Iraq in 2003.

The conventional wisdom about the "successful surge" has transformed Campaign 2008, throwing Obama onto the defensive in interview after interview, while virtually no journalist presses McCain about his judgment to make a rapid pivot out of Afghanistan in early 2002 toward Iraq.

Arguably, McCain's advocacy for this premature pivot -- while Afghanistan was still in a fragile state and top al-Qaeda leaders were finding new safe haven in northwest Pakistan -- was the biggest strategic blunder in modern American military history.

It has locked the United States into two open-ended wars with costs likely to soar into the trillions of dollars, while the security situation in Afghanistan deteriorates and nuclear-armed Pakistan slides toward instability.

But the political commentators place none of the blame on John McCain.

No Drawdown

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the supposedly "successful surge" apparently does not mean the United States can withdraw significant numbers of troops in the foreseeable future. President Bush has decided to leave U.S. troop levels in Iraq at about where they are now.

That means the number of American soldiers on the ground in Iraq at the end of January 2009 may well be about the same -- or even slightly higher -- than when the "surge" was announced two years earlier.

However, the likeliest long-term outcome for the United States in Iraq appears to be that eventually the U.S. occupation forces will be told to leave by an increasingly nationalistic Iraqi government, a kind of thanks for all the help but don't let the door hit you on the way out.

The odds then would be that any post-U.S.-occupied Iraq would remain divided by bitter sectarianism as the country has been for centuries and that any democratic institutions would be fragile at best. The likeliest regional winner would be Iran, which has seen its Shiite allies gain the upper hand over the old Sunni power structure.

A possible alternative outcome, of course, would be a unilateral decision by Washington to refuse to leave.

That may be what the victorious neoconservatives in a McCain administration would want, but that would come at an even higher price in blood and treasure. It also would mean that the few remnants of the old American Republic would be wiped away by the arrival of a new American Empire.

Yet, the U.S. news media, which mostly has cheered on the Iraq War from its "shock and awe" beginning through today's "successful surge," has no time to assess the future cost of the Iraq War in lives, money and American principles. That staggering price tag is simply not in the media's frame of reference.

Instead, it's all about hailing McCain and bashing Obama.

Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Inhofe Again Equates Iraq With 9/11

Not content to look like an idiot last week by smearing Barack Obama's patriotism while at the Republican National Convention, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is at it again this week -- but this time he's going back to that old GOP standby of implying that what we're doing in Iraq has anything whatsoever to do with the attacks we suffered on September 11.

In a statement released yesterday, Inhofe patted Team Bush on the back for being willing to bring home a mere 8,000 troops from Iraq over the next six months and applauded their claim that they will actually begin paying a shred of attention to the true al Qaeda stronghold in Afghanistan.

He also took the time to once again link 9/11 and Iraq when discussing Bush's meager troop reduction.

“Seven years ago this week, America felt the brutal acts of terror on our nation’s soil,” Inhofe said. “As we reflect and remember that horrific day this week, we can be encouraged that clear security gains have been made in the War on Terror. In particular, I appreciate the strong leadership of President Bush to keep our nation safe. Today’s announcements recognize the significant progress that’s been made and a plan for the road ahead in Afghanistan that stands as an important step in winning the War on Terror."

The fact that the "brutal acts" Inhofe talks about from 9/11 have nothing to do with Bush's actions in Iraq, never seems to stop Republicans from bringing the two together, does it?

He also used the opportunity to take a cheap shot at Democrats, who have been trying for years to get our troops home with their families and out of harm's way in the Republican war-for-nothing.

“Importantly, the ability for our troops to come home victors while leaving behind an increasingly stable democratic nation would never have been possible if the ‘cut-and-run’ crowd in Congress had been successful in their many attempts to set arbitrary withdrawal timelines and divert funds from our troops in combat," said Inhofe.

He wrapped it up with a ludicrous statement about supporting the troops, despite the many times he and his Republican colleagues have voted against bringing them home and caring for our newest Veterans once they return.

"As always, I will be fighting to ensure our troops have the best equipment, that they are cared for while deployed and at home, that their families are cared for, and that we continue to improve care for our wounded warriors and their families"

Funny guy.

If you want to donate to a very worthy cause -- like ushering Inhofe out of the Senate -- please visit the Act Blue page of his Democratic opponent in November, Andrew Rice and, if you can, throw in a few bucks to help unseat this disgrace to the U.S. Senate.

The Cover-ups of John McCain - WMD Intelligence Failures

Posted by AzBluemeanie:

Our local yokel political reporters in Arizona and/or the editors of their newspapers continue to refuse to publish any investigative news reporting that is remotely critical of "Saint" John McCain. They prefer to report the same crapola you get from the talking heads on network and cable news and talk radio all day who will only discuss the "horse race" and opinion polls which agree with their own opinion and narrative of the campaign, entirely devoid of any substantive discussion of important issues. The corporate news media has entirely failed its constitutionally prescribed role as the publics watchdog over the government.

Thankfully, there is still excellent political reporting being done by independent reporters. A recent example of good journalism is the 3-part investigative report by researcher and writer Mark G. Levey. I will provide a link to each of his reports and snippets from each report in a series.

John McCain was a patron of Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress (and a fugitive from justice in Europe) whom Neoconservatives like McCain supported and thereby lent his credibility. Chalabi and his protege "Curveball" provided U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense with falsified information that the Neoconservatives relied upon to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Part 1 of the investigative report by Mark G. Levey explores "McCain's Role in the WMD Cover-up, John McCain and Charlie Black's War, How a senator and a lobbyist led the deception campaign that tricked the U.S." Read the full report here Election Fraud News & The Money party. Snippets from the report:

"Who’s responsible for the “intelligence failure” that plunged the U.S. into the Iraq War? As much as anyone else, that distinction is shared by two Americans who discovered and nurtured Ahmad Chalabi and “Curveball”, and pushed their fortunes in Washington.

"One of those men is currently the presumptive Republican candidate for President of the United States, and the other is his chief political fixer.

This is the story about how they did it, and then shifted the spotlight of intelligence failure, political scandal, and criminal conspiracy off themselves.

* * *

Iraq War: Made in the USA

The conventional telling of the Iraq War story starts and stops with a motley group of exiled Iraqi businessmen, dissident scientists and professional conmen associated with the Iraqi National Congress (INC).

Most Americans instantly recognize only two names in connection with the Iraq WMD “intelligence failure”: Ahmad Chalabi, the group’s leader and “Curveball”, an engineer who claimed to have been working inside Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons programs at the time of his defection to Germany in 1998.

The INC exiles are often portrayed as masters of deception who by their own home-made ingenuity cooked up the raw intelligence that tricked much of the Washington establishment. We are expected to believe that, they alone, made Senators and spies believe – incorrectly -- that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, and “mushroom clouds” would soon be seen over American cities.

* * *

The truth is, the Iraq “intelligence failure” was more than anything else a case of deliberate and willful self-deception and bullying by a group of powerful Washington insiders – led by Vice President Dick Cheney, along with John McCain on Capitol Hill, and Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon -- who wanted to demonstrate that they, rather than the professional military and CIA, knew best how to start, fight, and (they thought) quickly and easily win wars in the Middle East.

* * *

Ranking GOP Senators and Congressmen, along with their aides and allies in the network of conservative Republican dominated think-tanks and lobbying shops were instrumental in creating INC, and keeping it generously funded during the 1990s until the disaster in Iraq was fully realized in 2005.

* * *

In 1997, after a failed uprising and incompetent coup attempt launched by Chalabi’s orders, against the advice of U.S. officials, the CIA cut-off INC As Robert Baer, who was the CIA officer on the ground in Iraq, Chalabi essentially sacrificed the Kurdish resistance in defiance of Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake.

The response of the Washington political establishment was passage in 1998 of the Iraq Liberation Act, which mandated even greater spending on INC and six other opposition groups. During hearings on the Iraq Liberation Act, a parade of ranking U.S. military and intelligence officers led by Gen, Anthony Zinni clearly warned Congress of the dangers and futility of the plan to overthrow Saddam’s government by “regime change”.

Leading the charge on Capitol Hill was Senator McCain, along with his colleague, Joseph Lieberman, both vociferous advocates of regime change, focusing from an early date on the danger they described about Iraq’ arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

* * *

That's the political background against which one may understand, why, from Day One, the incoming Bush-Cheney White House was obsessed with invading Iraq.

* * *

Where Cheney and others could not find sufficient justification in intelligence findings to sell Congress and the UN on invading a sovereign country – a legal nicety that still could not be ignored, even after 9/11 – these officials were quite happy to have evidence manufactured for them by Chalabi’s network, and to loot the U.S. Treasury to pay for it. Those intelligence officers who questioned the construction within the Pentagon and CIA of elaborate stovepipes and “cells” generating falsified data were pushed aside, and those career officers, such as CIA officer Valerie Plame and Lt. Col. Karen Kwaitowski at DIA, who visibly resisted, had their programs and careers destroyed.

But, the story about the INC-OSP-OVP pipeline has been often told. What still needs to be examined – what avert their eyes from – is the part played by key Members of Congress, including John McCain, in laying the groundwork and funding the Iraq intelligence deception.

John McCain was certainly at the center of this. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, he was Chairman or Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Commerce Committee, as well as a sitting Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He used his particular credibility and influence with the U.S. military to sell a fraudulent intelligence product.

* * *

Among public office holders, the chief sponsors for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress in the years leading up to the 2003 invasion was a group of GOP leaders and Congressional Committee heads, including Tent Lott, Newt Gingrich, and John McCain.

In October, 1998, after the CIA cut its funding of Chalabi’s group because it was producing unreliable intelligence and a series of disastrous failed rebellions inside Iraq, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, handing the INC $97 million to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The funding attached to this Bill, which John McCain co-sponsored, was based on little more than a vaguely defined plan to carry out “regime change”, a plan that Chalabi scratched out with a group of neoconservatives working at Washington and Jerusalem think-tanks.

* * *

McCain, among others in Congress, repeated without reservation that Saddam Hussein threatened the American heartland with WMD. McCain read the classified version of the October 2002 CIA NIE on Iraq, yet never even hinted at the fact that U.S. intelligence was far from unanimous that Iraq had mobile bioweapons trailers and uranium enrichment facilities claimed by the Bush Administration.

* * *

Furthermore, John McCain betrayed the special trust that many Americans had in him. McCain had a practically unique claim to military expertise combined with a sense of moral certainty about him that many, especially in the military, found unusually compelling. He often repeated in terms of Puritan clarity that the invasion of Iraq was a necessary and just war to “disarm” Saddam, a message that worked like a charm. [John McCain authored a New York Times op/ed on March 12, 2003, a week before the invasion, entitled The Right War for the Right Reasons - New York Times ]

* * *

McCain Sponsored INC Disinformation Unit that Replaced CIA Iraq Intelligence Gathering

How did it come to be that McCain and the rest were seemingly so oblivious to the facts on the ground in Iraq? Much of this melts down to the fact that GOP lawmakers simply refused to believe what they were being told by American intelligence officers and international arms inspectors. They wanted a much more aggressive policy there. The response by McCain and others in Congress was to create an alternative intelligence gathering organization, one that would deliver an alternative reality in Iraq to the one being described by the CIA and IAEA.

* * *

[T]he INC produced vast quantities of flawed “product”, raw intelligence and disinformation which it distributed to “US government recipients”, such as William Luti at the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP) and John Hannah, Vice President Cheney’s special assistant for national security. Another recipient of INC materials was news media, including Judith Miller at the New York Times, who long before developed a close working relationship with Chalabi. On December 20, 2001, Judith Miller published a front-page story in the Times about an Iraqi engineer who claimed to have direct knowledge of twenty secret chemical-, biological-, and nuclear-weapons sites in Iraq. That source was, of course. Chalabi’s protégé, Code-name “Curveball”, and this launched the second Iraq War.

* * *

McCain fully embraced the delusion about cheap and easy Middle East wars, and was a co-sponsor of the Act that led to the creation of a false intelligence factory funded by the U.S. Congress to replace CIA Iraq reporting.

Even after the Iraq WMD deception and failed occupation became clear, McCain has refused to acknowledge that he had been wrong all along about Iraq.

* * *

McCain’s Success at Keeping His image clean is owed to Good PR and Charlie Black.

Five years, 4,000 US dead, and $600 billion later, John McCain continues to trade on his image as a maverick, a sophisticated military thinker and crusading fiscal conservative. In great part, he owes that lingering mirage to another key figure in this story, a powerful GOP strategist, and head of one of Washington’s wealthiest lobbying firm, BKSH Associates, a man with the appropriate name, Charlie Black. By one estimate, Black’s clients have paid him some $100 million for his peculiar talents in engineering wars, and keeping political events on track until they pay off with no-bid contracts.

To grasp the mutually profitable Peter-paid-Paul relationship between John McCain and Charlie Black, read this 2003 account of the role of lobbyists in drumming up federal contracts for “rebuilding” Iraq Lobbyists hustle for reconstruction business in Baghdad (8/7/03) -- www.GovernmentExecutive.com (by Peter H. Stone, originally published in the National Journal).

* * *

By day, Charlie Black represents the corporations that profit from the Iraq War, while by night he clean up after John McCain’s indiscretions that might mar his presidential election effort. Yes, Virginia, Washington is a very small town, and the revolving door is golden. In addition to deserving his own share of the credit for cultivating the careers of the men who started the Iraq War, Black is also one of its biggest profiteers, receiving tens of millions to lobby for a host of companies that have swollen their bottom lines with massive military and intelligence contracts during the era of kleptocratic one-party rule, the period of Bush-Cheney-McCain-Delay-Hastert GOP dominion over America.

* * *

CONCLUSION

John McCain was very much one of Chalabi’s key mentors in Congress, and along with Joe Lieberman, a vocal purveyor of false information about nonexistent Iraqi WMD. And, it was Congress, as well as the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA, that was responsible for the Iraq WMD deception.

* * *

The presumptive Republican nominee for President has been a knowing part of an espionage and deception operation that led to the deaths of 4,000 Americans in Iraq. John McCain is a security risk."