[News] The Anti-Empire Report - William Blum
Anti-Imperialist News
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Fri Mar 14 11:31:10 EDT 2008
The Anti-Empire Report
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16855
March 14, 2008 By William Blum
How could they have known? It wasn't on Oprah or Fox News.
Hillary Clinton and many other members of
Congress claim that their support of the invasion
of Iraq was based on faulty intelligence reports.
How could they dispute the research and analysis
of all those experts, so well trained and experienced in their fields?
Well, apart from the fact that American
intelligence agencies and their reports were by
no means of one opinion (one well-publicized CIA
paper, for example, predicted all manner of
devastating consequences which could result from
an invasion and occupation) ... [1]
Apart from the fact that there were several
public statements, including some on American TV,
from Saddam Hussein's deputy prime minister, and
other statements made by Iraqi scientists to
American media and to American intelligence that
Iraq no longer had any weapons of mass destruction ... [2]
Apart from the fact that UN nuclear inspectors
had determined before the war that Iraq did not
have a nuclear weapons program ... [3]
Apart from the fact that Colin Powell, speaking
in February 2001 of US sanctions on Iraq, said:
"And frankly they have worked. He [Saddam
Hussein] has not developed any significant
capability with respect to weapons of mass
destruction. He is unable to project conventional
power against his neighbors."[4]
Apart from all that, this question must be asked:
What did the millions of Americans who marched
against the war before it began know that all
those members of Congress didn't know? At a
minimum, they knew that nothing the Bush
administration had told them came anywhere close
to justifying dropping bombs on the innocent
people of Iraq. They also knew that nothing the
Bush administration had told them could be
trusted. All it took to reach this advanced stage
of awareness was not being born yesterday.
As I've written before, the same phenomenon
attended the Vietnam War. The anti-Vietnam War
movement burst out of the starting gate back in
August 1964, with hundreds of people
demonstrating in New York. Many of these early
dissenters took apart and critically examined the
administration's statements about the war's
origin, its current situation, and its rosy
picture of the future. They found continuous
omission, contradiction, and duplicity, became
quickly and wholly cynical, and called for
immediate and unconditional withdrawal. This was
a state of intellect and principle it took
members of Congress and the media -- and then
only a small minority -- until the 1970s to
reach. And even then -- even today -- our
political and media elite viewed Vietnam only as
a "mistake"; i.e., it was "the wrong way" to
fight communism, not that the United States
should not be traveling all over the globe to
spew violence against anything labeled
"communism" in the first place. Essentially, the
only thing these "best and brightest" have
learned from Vietnam is that we should not have
fought in Vietnam. And I'm afraid that the
present generation of "leaders" will learn very
little more than that we shouldn't have invaded Iraq.
A Mecca of hypocrisy, a Vatican of double standards
On February 21, following a demonstration against
the United States role in Kosovo's declaration of
independence, rioters in the Serbian capital of
Belgrade broke into the US Embassy and set fire
to an office. The attack was called "intolerable"
by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,[5] and
the American Ambassador to the United Nations,
Zalmay Khalilzad, said he would ask the UN
Security Council to issue a unanimous statement
"expressing the council's outrage, condemning the
attack, and also reminding the Serb government of
its responsibility to protect diplomatic facilities."[6]
This is of course standard language for such
situations. But what the media and American
officials don't remind us is that in May 1999,
during the US/NATO bombing of Serbia, then part
of Yugoslavia, the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade
was hit by a US missile, causing considerable
damage and killing three embassy employees. The
official Washington story on this -- then, and
still now -- is that it was a mistake. But this
is almost certainly a lie. According to a joint
investigation of The Observer of London and the
Politiken newspaper in Denmark, the embassy was
bombed because it was being used to transmit
electronic communications for the Yugoslav army
after the army's regular system was made
inoperable by the bombing. The Observer was told
that the embassy bombing was deliberate by
"senior military and intelligence sources in
Europe and the US" as well as being "confirmed in
detail by three other Nato officers -- a flight
controller operating in Naples, an intelligence
officer monitoring Yugoslav radio traffic from
Macedonia and a senior [NATO] headquarters officer in Brussels."[7]
Moreover, the New York Times reported at the time
that the bombing had destroyed the embassy's
intelligence-gathering nerve center, and two of
the three Chinese killed were intelligence
officers. "The highly sensitive nature of the
parts of the embassy that were bombed suggests
why the Chinese ... insist the bombing was no
accident. ... 'That's exactly why they don't buy
our explanation'," said a Pentagon official.[8]
There were as well several other good reasons not to buy the story.[9]
In April 1986, after the French government
refused the use of its air space to US warplanes
headed for a bombing raid on Libya, the planes
were forced to take another, longer route. When
they reached Libya they bombed so close to the
French embassy that the building was damaged and
all communication links knocked out.[10]
And in April 2003, the US Ambassador to Russia
was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry due
to the fact that the residential quarter of
Baghdad where the Russian embassy was located was
bombed several times by the United States during
its invasion of Iraq.[11] There had been reports
that Saddam Hussein was hiding in the embassy.[12]
So, we can perhaps chalk up the State
Department's affirmations about the inviolability
of embassies as yet another example of US foreign
policy hypocrisy. But I think that there is some
satisfaction in that American foreign policy
officials, as morally damaged as they must be,
are not all so stupid that they don't know
they're swimming in a sea of hypocrisy. The Los
Angeles Times reported in 2004 that "The State
Department plans to delay the release of a human
rights report that was due out today, partly
because of sensitivities over the prison abuse
scandal in Iraq, U.S. officials said. One
official ... said the release of the report,
which describes actions taken by the U.S.
government to encourage respect for human rights
by other nations, could 'make us look hypocritical'."[13]
And last year the Washington Post informed us
that Chester Crocker, former Assistant Secretary
of State and current member of the State
Department's Advisory Committee on Democracy
Promotion, noted that "we have to be able to cope
with the argument that the U.S. is inconsistent
and hypocritical in its promotion of democracy
around the world. That may be true."[14]
Like pornography, torture doesn't require a
definition. You know it when you see it. Or feel it.
With all the media coverage of "waterboarding"
and all the congressional questioning of
government officials about their views on the
subject, I imagine that by now many people think
that waterboarding must be the worst kind of
torture that the United States has engaged in,
and that if waterboarding is in fact not torture
then the idiot king is correct when he says: "We
don't torture." This is the way myths are born,
so let's try and squash this particular one while it's still young.
Here in capsule form is a sample of some of the
acts carried out in recent years by American
military forces, their contract employees, and
the CIA against detainees in one or another
edifice of the sprawling global prison complex
maintained by the United States in occupied Iraq,
occupied Afghanistan, occupied Cuba, and various
other secret prisons occupied by the CIA around
the world. It may be torture to read but the
point needs to be made. Lest we forget.
Standing or kneeling or forced into contorted,
painful positions for many hours ... in leg
shackles and handcuffs with eyes, ears and mouth
covered, exposed to extremes of heat or cold ...
stripped naked, led around with a dog leash ...
deprived of sleep, kicked to keep them awake for
days on end, subjecting them to a 24-hour
bombardment of bright lights or blaring noise ...
guards staging races of detainees in short leg
shackles, violently punishing them if they fall
... withholding painkillers and other medications
from the injured ... sensory deprivation, with
all human contact cut off ... made to lie naked
on a sheet of ice ... fake blood smeared on
Muslim men when they are about to pray, telling
them that it's menstrual blood.
The Iraqi general "was put headfirst into a
sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord and
knocked down before the soldiers sat and stood on
him. The cause of death was determined to be suffocation."
Chained to the ceiling, shackled so tightly that
the blood flow stops ... shackled to the floor in
fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time,
left without food and water, and allowed to
defecate on themselves; a detainee found with a
pile of hair next to him; he had apparently been
literally pulling his own hair out throughout the
night ... wrapping a prisoner in an Israeli flag
... use of unmuzzled, growling dogs to frighten,
in at least one instance actually biting and
severely injuring a detainee ... burn marks on
their backs ... detainee left at an Iraqi
hospital, comatose, with massive head trauma,
burns on the bottoms of his feet caused by
electrocution, bruises on his arms ... more than
a hundred detainees have died during interrogations ...
The death of two captives in Afghanistan: one
from "blunt force injuries to lower extremities
complicating coronary artery disease"; an autopsy
showed that his legs were so damaged that
amputation would have been necessary; the other
captive suffered from a blood clot in the lung
that was exacerbated by a "blunt force injury" ...
Kicks to the groin and legs, shoving or slamming
detainees into walls and tables, forcing water in
their mouths until they could not breathe ... He
had his hands handcuffed behind him and was
suspended by his wrists -- "His arms were so
badly stretched I was surprised they didn't pop
out of their sockets." ... forced to masturbate
while being photographed and videotaped ... seven
naked Iraqis piled on top of each other in a
pyramid ... detainee punched in the chest so hard
he almost went into cardiac arrest ... forcing
naked male detainees to wear women's underwear.
The report by General Taguba found that between
October and December of 2003 there were numerous
instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton
criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq,
including breaking chemical lights and pouring
the phosphoric liquid on detainees, threatening
male detainees with rape, sodomizing a detainee
with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, raping female prisoners ...
Eighteen days naked and alone in a cell, often
with his hands and feet bound together,
frequently beaten ... "He locked his arm under
mine and holding the back of my head he beat my
head against the doors of the cells" ... his
hands and feet were pushed through the metal bars
of the cell door and then tied together.
Six weeks after his release, he says he has lost
the will to live. He is too ashamed to be seen by
his friends and family and has not seen or spoken
to his fiancée. The wedding is off. "I was a man
before, but my manhood was taken away. Since this
happened to me, I consider myself dead. My life feels over."
Iraqi prisoners were forced to crawl through
broken glass and wear women's sanitary products
... two drunken interrogators took a female Iraqi
prisoner from her cell in the middle of the night
and stripped her naked to the waist ... an Iraqi
woman in her 70s was harnessed and ridden like a
donkey ... detainees were pressed to denounce
Islam, or force-fed pork and liquor ...
Jamadi died an hour after his arrival at Abu
Ghraib in early November 2003; he had been beaten
while in CIA custody and then hung by his wrists,
with his arms crossed across his back. US Army
guards at the prison then packed his body in ice
and posed with the corpse in mocking photographs.
"They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands
and knees ... and we had to bark like a dog, and
if we didn't do that they started hitting us hard
on our face and chest with no mercy." ... "Do you
believe in anything?" the soldier asked. "I said
to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, 'But I
believe in torture and I will torture you'."
Taken out and tied to a post, rubber bullets were
fired at them; made to kneel in the sun until
they collapsed ... "They tied my hands to my feet
behind my back. My left hand to my right foot and
my right hand to my left foot. I was lying face
down and they were beating me like this" ...
inmates kept in wire cages with concrete floors
and no protection from the elements.
"They actually said: 'You have no rights here'.
After a while, we stopped asking for human rights
-- we wanted animal rights" ... crosses shaved
into their scalp or body hair ... dislocated his
arms, beat his leg with a bat, crushed his nose,
and put an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled
the trigger ... Six Kuwaiti prisoners said they
were severely beaten, given electric shocks and
sodomized by US forces in Afghanistan ...
The Afghan detainee had been captured in Pakistan
along with a group of other Afghans. His
connection to al Qaeda or the value of his
intelligence was never established before he
died. "He was probably associated with people who
were associated with al Qaeda," one US government
official said. ... numerous suicide attempts ...
And here's George W. in 2004: "The world is
better off without Saddam Hussein in power. The
world is better off because he sits in a prison
cell. Because we acted, torture rooms are closed,
rape rooms no longer exist."[15]
Bryan Whitman, spokesman for the US Department of
Defense, 2005: "The United States treats all
detainees in their custody with dignity and respect."[16]
It should be noted that the CIA has been treating
(real and alleged) opponents of American
imperialism with similar dignity and respect ever
since the Agency's founding.[17] Police and
prisons within the United States have been torturing for even longer.[18]
Now for the good news: The Bush administration,
trying to shore up support for its military-trial
procedures, has cabled US embassies with
instructions that evidence obtained through
torture will not be allowed. But evidence
obtained through treatment considered "cruel,
inhuman, and degrading" is to be allowed.[19]
George Bernard Shaw used three concepts to
describe the positions of individuals in Nazi
Germany: intelligence, decency, and Naziism. He
argued that if a person was intelligent, and a
Nazi, he was not decent. If he was decent and a
Nazi, he was not intelligent. And if he was
decent and intelligent, he was not a Nazi.
I suggest the reader make the obvious
substitution: "Bush supporter" in place of "Nazi".
That oh-so-precious world where words have no meaning
In December, 1989, two days after bombing and
invading the defenseless people of Panama,
killing as many as a few thousand, President
George H.W. Bush declared that his "heart goes
out to the families of those who have died in
Panama".[20] When a reporter asked him: "Was it
really worth it to send people to their death for
this? To get [Panamanian leader Manuel]
Noriega?", Bush replied: "Every human life is
precious, and yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it."[21]
A year later, preparing for his next crime
against humanity, the invasion of Iraq, Bush, Sr.
said: "People say to me: 'How many lives? How
many lives can you expend?' Each one is precious."[22]
At the end of 2006, with Bush's son now
president, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel,
commenting about American deaths reaching 3,000
in Iraq, said Bush "believes that every life is
precious and grieves for each one that is lost."[23]
In February 2008, with American deaths about to
reach 4,000, and Iraqi deaths as many as a
million or more, George W. Bush asserted: "When
we lift our hearts to God, we're all equal in his
sight. We're all equally precious. ... In prayer
we grow in mercy and compassion. ... When we
answer God's call to love a neighbor as
ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow man."[24]
Inspired by such noble -- dare I say precious --
talk from their leaders, the American military
machine likes to hire like-minded warriors. Here
is Erik Prince, founder of the military
contractor Blackwater, whose employees in Iraq
kill people like others flick away a mosquito, in
testimony before Congress: "Every life, whether
American or Iraqi, is precious."[25]
NOTES
[1] Central Intelligence Agency, "The Perfect
Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq," August 13, 2002
[2] Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz in
August 2002 told Dan Rather: "We do not possess
any nuclear or biological or chemical
weapons."(CBS Evening News, August 20, 2002) In
December he stated to Ted Koppel: "The fact is
that we don't have weapons of mass destruction.
We don't have chemical, biological, or nuclear
weaponry."(ABC Nightline, December 4,
2002) Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of
Iraq's secret weapons program, and a son-in-law
of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995, that Iraq
had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical
and biological weapons soon after the Persian
Gulf War.(Washington Post, March 1, 2003, page 15)
[3] Washington Post, July 11, 2004
[4] State Department press release, February 24, 2001
[5] Washington Post, February 22, 2008
[6] Associated Press, February 21, 2008
[7] The Observer October 17 and November 28, 1999
[8] New York Times, June 25, 1999
[9] see note 7
[10] Associated Press, April 15, 1986, "France
Confirms It Denied U.S. Jets Air Space, Says Embassy Damaged"
[11] Interfax news agency (Moscow), April 2, 2003
[12] CBS News, April 9, 2003
[13] Los Angeles Times, May 5, 2004
[14] Washington Post, April 17, 2007, p.2
[15] White House press release, May 3, 2004
[16] Associated Press, February 10, 2005
[17] See the manuals put out by the CIA from the
1950s to the 80s on what they called "interrogation".
[18] See William Blum, Rogue State, chapters 4, 5
and 27 for examples and sources for the above
[19] Washington Post, February 13, 2008, p.3
[20] New York Times, December 22, 1989, p.17
[21] Ibid., p.16
[22] Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1990, p.1.
[23] Washington Post, January 1, 2007, p.1
[24] National Prayer Breakfast, Washington, DC, February 7, 2008
[25] Testimony before the House Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform, October 2, 2007
William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US
Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only
Superpower West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed
copies purchased, at <www.killinghope.org >
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977
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