A rchive Date
[ 18-06-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Ottawa/Michael_Harris/2004/06/18/503640.html
Building a house of lies
By MICHAEL HARRIS -- For the Ottawa Sun
Fri, June 18, 2004
Michael Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, opens next week in Ottawa, but the truth is already out.
Canada is not the only country about to have a national election where what is usually seen as an individual character trait will be the essential issue; Basic honesty.
With this week's report of the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, even President Bush's most flag-draped, unreflective admirer has to admit that from beginning to end, a large majority of Americans were misled into supporting the now-disastrous invasion of Iraq.
The latest falsehood in President Bush's case for war is the issue of a connection between Saddam Hussein and the authors of 9/11, al-Qaida.
The bipartisan committee found that there was no credible evidence to support the view that such a link existed. As it turns out, not only was Saddam Hussein not involved in the 9/11 attacks, neither did Iraq respond to requests from al-Qaida to set up training camps in his country. Like Iraq's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, the White House's much-trumpeted "collaborative effort" between Hussein and al-Qaida simply did not exist.
This should not come as news to President Bush. The president was immediately informed in the wake of the 2001 attacks by his then anti-terrorist czar Richard A. Clarke that al-Qaida, not Iraq was behind 9/11. Spurning that expert advice, Bush ordered Clarke and others to look for an Iraq connection to the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.
Even former CIA director George Tenet corrected Vice-President Dick Cheney when he said that Saddam had "long established ties with al-Qaida", reporting that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi did not in fact work for Hussein. Despite that correction from the head of the CIA, both the president and the vice-president continued to assert what their own intelligence experts and agencies were expressly, though privately, denying.
And the dishonesty continues, aided and abetted by an administration-friendly media that refuses to report that the emperor has no clothes. With the transfer of "sovereignty" to the "Iraqis" just days away, the country is in near total chaos, edging toward what many believe is an inevitable civil war. Terror attacks in the Occupied Territories and Israel derail a civil settlement of that tragedy; in Iraq, they hasten it.
President Bush touts the transfer of "power" to the Iraqis as a triumph of democracy and freedom. Meanwhile, there have been no free elections and the man installed by the UN as the designated prime minister of Iraq, Iyad Allawi, is an ex-CIA operative who once used car bombs and other explosive devices to sabotage Iraqi government facilities in the 1990s.
After the "transfer" there will still be 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq who will retain the right to call their own shots. No wonder that former U.S. ambassador Edward Peck recently told me in an interview that "Whatever is being transferred in Iraq on June 30, it is not sovereignty."
It is actually an extension of the phony media campaign to justify, legitimize, and deem a success one of the worst foreign policy blunders -- or most deplorable secret agendas -- in American history. Last month, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad commissioned a poll to see how many Iraqis saw American forces as liberators, as Vice-President Dick Cheney confidently predicted they would before the invasion; just 2% saw U.S. forces in that light.
There is every reason for the Iraqis to remain skeptical. They have seen a brutal dictator deposed and those who toppled him move into his palaces. They have seen fellow citizens tortured in the Abu Ghraib prison by American soldiers, just as they once saw them tortured by Saddam's henchmen. And just as Saddam Hussein once violated international law, they are now finding out that the Americans can also be ruthless at the highest levels of the chain of command.
This week, it came to light that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered military officials in Iraq to hold a terror suspect without listing him on the prisoners' rolls, expressly to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from learning of his existence. The practice of keeping these so-called "ghost detainees" was, according to U.S. Maj.-Gen. Antonio Taguba, "deceptive, contrary to army doctrine, and in violation of international law." It also prevented the Red Cross from visiting this particular ghost detainee to assess his physical condition.
Given Brig.-Gen. Janis Karpinski's recent statements to the BBC, the Iraqis and the rest of the world have every reason to be concerned about the fate of ghost detainees and regular prisoners in Iraq. The general said that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was "ordered from the top," and that she personally was told by Maj.-Gen. Geoffrey Miller that the prisoners were "like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog you have lost control of them."
So how did the U.S. military come to so resemble the tyrant it had deposed? The corruption was measured out in legal and political coffee spoons. The Washington Post recently published a Justice Department memo bearing the signature of Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, which argued that torturing suspected al-Qaida captives "may be justified." For 50 pages, it made the case for torture, including the notion that international law forbidding such practices "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations." Bybee even said that if certain "interrogation methods" broke Section 2340A of the U.S. Torture Convention, necessity or self-defence could provide justification that would eliminate any criminal liability.
That is how Henry VIII once got a divorce that would otherwise have been illegal. King George was so pleased by Bybee's advice that he elevated him just a few months later to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a scant notch below the Supreme Court.
How far will willing subjects go to please the monarch? All the way to silly math, it appears. President Bush likes to tell the world that his war on terror is going well, and that the world is a safer, less violent place since he deposed Saddam Hussein. And that is the message the U.S. State Department also delivered in its PGT (Patterns of Global Terrorism) 2003 report -- that terrorism worldwide was down by a whopping 45%.
According to the report, put out under the auspices of Ambassador Cofer Black, the U.S. co-ordinator for counter-terrorism, there were 190 incidents of global terrorism in 2003 in which 307 people were killed. The truth? In two states in India alone, Jammu and Kashmir, there were 477 attacks on civilians in 2003 with a total of 658 deaths. Once more, a red-faced Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had to admit that the PGT was often erroneous and contained internal totalling errors that even a third-grader could have found. "It's a very big mistake. And we are not very happy about this big mistake."
And they wonder why Michael Moore movies are so popular.
Author, broadcaster and investigative journalist Michael Harris can be heard Monday to Thursday, 1-3 p.m. on 580 CFRA.
Letters to the editor should be sent to oped@ott.sunpub.com Home Page
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