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June
10, 2003
WeaponsGate:
The
Coming Downfall of Lying Regimes?
By WAYNE MADSEN
You wouldn't know if from listening to the leading
Democratic candidates for President, but "Weaponsgate"
may ultimately bring about the downfall of the Bush regime and
its allies in London, Canberra, and elsewhere. The neo-conservatives
may have also finally stirred something in the Fourth Estate,
which has suddenly begun challenging the lying echo chambers
in the White House and Number 10 Downing Street.
The arrogance displayed by the Bush regime,
somewhat surprising since it gained power through a fraudulent
election process, is what may result in its eventual undoing.
Bush may or may not ever realize how he was ill served by the
neo-con blight that took root within his administration, particularly
within the Department of Defense. But the historians and scholars,
who will look back on what turned the tide for a supposedly "popular"
war president, will point to the self-described "cabal"
whose lies brought about a credibility gap unseen in the United
States since the days of Watergate. In fact, Bush's "Weaponsgate"
will be viewed as a more serious scandal than Watergate because
1) U.S. and allied military personnel were killed and injured
as a result of the caper; 2) Innocent Iraqi civilians, including
women and children, died in a needless  military adventure; and 3) the political
effects of the scandal extended far beyond U.S. shores to the
United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, and other countries.
Other effects of Weaponsgate are already
apparent. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the majordomo of
the neo-cons within the Pentagon, cannot find anyone to take
the place of outgoing Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki.
Generals Tommy Franks and Shinseki's vice chief, General John
"Jack" Keane, want no part of the job. After winning
a lightning war against Iraq, Franks suddenly announced his retirement.
He and Keane witnessed how Rumsfeld and his coterie of advisers
and consultants, who never once lifted a weapon in the defense
of their country, constantly ignored and publicly abused Shinseki.
Army Secretar y and retired General Tom White resigned after
a number of clashes with Rumsfeld and his cabal. The Commander
of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James
Conway, said he was surprised that he encountered no chemical
weapons in Iraq.
Perhaps Conway was surprised because
that is what the neo-cons wanted him and his fellow Marines to
believe. Conway and his troops were merely additional victims
of "Weaponsgate." Paul Wolfowitz, a chief neo-con cabalist,
let the cat out of the bag in Singapore when he said that everyone
could agree on a cause of war being Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
That would be the common denominator in justifying an attack,
whether or not such weapons could ever be found. Wolfowitz also
stated that Iraq's swimming on a "sea of oil" was the
reason it had to be attacked and not, for example, North Korea.
The fact that weapons of mass destruction are actually possessed
by North Korea, a country lacking any significant natural resources,
is of no concern to the neo-cons. Oil was and is the bottom line
in Iraq. Sometimes, even the liars trip up and actually tell
the truth. But only in a world where the neo-cons have enjoyed
a stranglehold on the corporate media can Wolfowitz's supporters
claim he was misquoted and the UK's Guardian be forced to print
a clarification, one step short of a retraction. Congenital liars
like Wolfowitz should never be given the benefit of the doubt
on any issue..
Bush's Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer,
who has had his own problem with recognizing the truth, was obviously
concerned how the history books will treat him. He decided to
leave his post mid-term rather than face the music over his repeated
distortions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a casus
belli. Other Bush administration officials, political and career,
have also jumped off what appears to be a rapidly sinking ship
of state. They include Richard Haass, who as the director for
policy planning, was number three at the State Department; Christine
Todd Whitman, Environmental Protection Agency administrator;
Rand Beers, the senior National Security Council director for
counter-terrorism; Charlotte Beers, the State Department chief
for International Public Diplomacy (who was said to have resigned
for -- get this bit of Soviet-style spin -- "health reasons"),
and State Department career Foreign Service officers John H.
Brown, John Brady Kiesling, and Mary A. Wright.
Then there was the sudden firing of retired
General Jay Garner as U.S. viceroy of Iraq. He was "outed"
as having past associations with the neo-cons, especially the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). But when
Garner started to show some independence in Baghdad, especially
with regard to handing over some power to Iraqis, he was quickly
sacked and replaced by Paul Bremer, a former Heritage Foundation
flunky  and Kissinger Associates director
who was obviously more in tune with the ideological bent of the
neo-cons. In a Pentagon where the civilian neo-cons don't trust
the uniformed flag rank officers, Garner likely became a threat,
a potential Trojan horse who had to be replaced by someone whose
loyalty was beyond question.
The most dramatic revolt against George
W. Bush and Tony Blair can be seen from the high-level leaks
of classified information from the top levels of American and
British intelligence. Just consider that the United States has
never experienced such repeated leaks of classified information
since the years of the spies in the 1980s, a time when a number
of intelligence employees were caught selling U.S. secrets to
the Russians and Israelis. Yet, the current leaks are not acts
of treason, but acts of unbridled patriotism.
The leaks from the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA), CIA, State Department, and other agencies are testimony
to the deep divisions within the Bush administration over the
phony war on Iraq. Intelligence agencies that are often at odds
with one another over policy have united like never before in
blowing the whistle on the neo-con agenda. The Bush administration
lied flat out over the Iraqi WMDs and Iraq's links to Al Qaeda.
It's just that simple. Career intelligence officers, who know
the penalties for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information,
are showing more courage than most of the Democrats in Congress
who seem more fearful of the neo-cons and their supporters than
in exposing "Weaponsgate."
The most recent classified disclosure
was a DIA report on chemical weapons that concluded that there
"was no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing
or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether Iraq has or will establish
its chemical agent production facilities."
On June 8, the Bush administration paraded
its usual shills, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, before the
Sunday talking head shows. Rice and Powell said they based their
claims that Iraq had WMDs on an October 1, 2002 national intelligence
"white paper." But that paper stated that Iraq had
a capability to produce chemical weapons within its chemical
industry, not that it was producing such weapons. Hans Blix recently
said the so-called intelligence passed to him by the Bush regime
was useless for his own UN weapons inspection team in its search
for WMDs in Iraq. It now appears that all the so-called U.S.
and British "intelligence" was nothing more than a
collection of neo-con propaganda and disinformation. In the face
of incessantly probing questions on CBS's "Face the Nation,"
Rice, in her school marm-like best, could only keep repeating
that "there are still bad people in Iraq." Bad people?
Is this the best terminology we can get from a PhD in International
Studies? Or is that the phraseology she uses in explaining foreign
policy matters to Bush? The latter explanation seems more likely.
Last March, a classified State Department
report, prepared by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and
titled "Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes,"
countered neo-con claims that a democracy in Iraq would foster
democracy throughout the Middle East. The report, dated February
26, 2003, concluded that democracy would be difficult to achieve
in Iraq, electoral democracy in Iraq would be exploited by anti-American
elements, and that the idea that other Middle East nations would
be transformed into democracies is not credible. So far, all
those predictions have come true. Iraq is currently an American
protectorate lacking even fundamental human services, anti-American
Shi'as in the south are increasingly venting their anger at U.S.
occupiers, and far from extending democracy throughout the Middle
East, Mauritania's Arab pro-American government barely survived
a military coup attempt by Islamist and pro-Iraqi elements in
the counry's armed forces. So much for the Middle East "domino
theory" concocted by Richard Perle and his American Enterprise
Institute clones and parroted by Bush in a speech before the
right-wing "think tank" the same day the State Department
prepared its opposite report.
In another slap at the neo-cons, who
have supported the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi,
the CIA leaked a classified report about their favorite Iraqi.
The report, which surfaced in April 2003, concluded that Chalabi
had little popular support among the Iraqi people. No wonder
then that it is Chalabi who appears to be the source for all
the bogus intelligence about Iraqi WMDs, Saddam Hussein's links
to Al Qaeda, Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, and other
false flag intelligence. Chalabi, who is as big a liar as his
neo-con friends, hoped to lull American intelligence into believing
him over seasoned Middle East intelligence hands. No one but
Rumsfeld; former CIA Director James Woolsey (who has taken hundreds
of thousands of consulting dollars from Chalabi over the years);
Wolfowitz; Doug Feith; America's new monitor for the Middle East
peace road map, John Wolf; and their comrades were taken in by
Chalabi, a wanted scofflaw from justice in Jordan.
One day the names Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Feith, Woolsey, and Chalabi will become as familiar to students
of "Weaponsgate" as the names Haldeman, Ehrlichman,
Liddy, Mitchell, and Stans are familiar to those who study Watergate.
And in a very interesting nexus between the two scandals, Richard
Nixon's former counselor John W. Dean has written that Bush's
lying about the reasons for the United States to go to war is
an impeachable offense.
For those who are looking for the straw
that broke the camel's back in "Weaponsgate" they need
not look any farther than Number 10 Downing Street. The troubles
that Tony Blair are now experiencing may be a harbinger for things
to come in Washington. Blair is in deep trouble and he knows
it. After returning from the G-8 summit in Evian, France, Blair
was reported by The Obsever to be running around Number 10 in
a pathetic panic. In a moment of temporary insanity, which must
have been precious to people who loathe Blair, the toothy Prime
Minister was pacing about his residence and yelling that people
needed to get a grip on what was happening. One of Blair's aides
had to comfort Blair and convince him that his advisers were
on his side. Blair must have had thoughts of John Major getting
ready stick it to Margaret Thatcher or of Brutus getting ready
to plunge a knife into the back of Julius Caesar. Blair's political
opponents within his own Labor party had seized on his government's
use of a "dodgy dossier" on Iraqi WMDs to support the
attack on Iraq as an example of Blair's deceit. The dossier,
titled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception
and Intimidation," was based on a 12-year-old PhD thesis
culled from the Internet and the bogus Chalabi documents about
Nigerien uranium.
The revolt against Blair should serve
as a warning for Bush. Just consider what is happening in Britain.
Blair has been abandoned by some of his most senior government
officials, including former Leader of the House of Commons Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook and former International Development Minister
Clare Short, in addition to a number of lesser Cabinet officials.
Over 70 of Blair's Labor members of the House of Commons are
in open revolt against his duplicity. No wonder Godric Smith,
Blair's official spokesman, announced his resignation the same
day that Ari Fleischer was announcing his departure in Washington.
The wheels are coming off the transatlantic neo-con wagon. New
Labor and the "Compassionate Conservative" Republican
Party have been shown to be total ruses. Their war policies and
global domination goals have been thoroughly exposed as neo-fascist
manifestations of the teachings of neo-con philosopher Leo Strauss.
But Blair faces an even more serious
revolt from his intelligence officials. Blair's use of bogus
intelligence to claim that Britain had only a 45-minute warning
prior to an Iraqi chem-bio attack reportedly resulted in the
threatened resignations of the heads of MI-6 and MI-5, Sir Richard
Dearlove and Eliza Manningham-Buller, respectively, And there
was the leak of a January 31, 2003 Top Secret memo from the National
Security Agency to its Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ) counterpart, which asked for British help in electronically
snooping on members and non-members of the UN Security Council
to determine their stance on America's anti-Iraq UN resolution.
That memo was reportedly leaked with a wink and an nod from the
highest levels of British intelligence.
The public row in Britain has forced
Alastair Campbell, Blair's own Karl Rove-like spinmeister, to
apologize to the British Security Services for combining their
intelligence material with the bogus material it used in developing
the Iraqi WMDs dossier. However, some of Blair's advisers seem
willing to go down with their Prime Minister faster than the
deck hands on the Titanic. Blair's new House of Commons leader
John Reid, a former member of the British Communist Party, ranted
that "rogue elements" within the intelligence services
were leaking classified information to bring down the government.
Reid also stated that for all anyone knew, the leaks were coming
from some "man in a pub." Such are the cynical words
from a government on the brink of collapse.
Blair is not the only "Coalition
of the Willing" partner beginning to get nervous. Australian
Prime Minister John Howard is distancing himself from the forged
and phony intelligence on Iraqi WMDs, claiming his intelligence
services took at face value what was presented by the Americans
and British. Denmark, which has very little tolerance for lying
Prime Ministers, is opening up an parliamentary investigation
of why Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen lied about the Iraqi
WMDs. Bush's allies in Spain and Italy face similar inquiries.
Blair, who appears to be heading for an ignoble British-style
heave-ho, is sticking to the lie but with an interesting caveat.
At a June 10 news conference, Blair restated the canard, "There
is not a shred of evidence that we have doctored or manipulated
intelligence." But then he added, "that would be absolutely
gross if we did so." Blair may be entering the typical "let's
look for a scapegoat" phase. He won't be successful. The
intelligence services won't let him get away with it. He and
his supporters will have to pay the price for lying to the British
people. Barring a miracle, Blair's days in office appear to be
numbered.
And what of Bush saying the United States
will help its friends and punish its foes? Well, it seems that
Mr. Bush cannot be trusted to take care of his friends. Iceland
was one of the country's that signed up to Bush's so-called "coalition."
How has Bush repaid the North Atlantic nation? By writing a letter
to Iceland's Prime Minister stating that the United States will,
after 46 years of providing for the NATO nation's defense, pull
its military forces from the soon-to-be defenseless island state.
The Icelandic Prime Minister, like his
colleagues in Denmark, Australia, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the
Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, has found out the hard way
of what price is paid for aligning with a dishonest and illegal
regime. They will suffer the consequences. However, the leaders
of France, Germany, Canada, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, Ireland,
Belgium, South Africa, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, and the other
countries who withstood constant berating from Washington and
the American ambassadors accredited to them, can take heart in
the fact that they were correct all along. They will reap the
electoral benefits of their stance while they see their pro-American
colleagues take the consequential and inevitable electoral fall.
Wayne Madsen
is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist.
He wrote the introduction to Forbidden
Truth. He is the co-author, with John Stanton, of the
forthcoming book, "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of
George Bush II."
Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
The Terrible Truth
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species
Joanne
Mariner
Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers
Steven
Sherman
A Different Theory of Everything
Ron Jacobs
Sports, Politics and the 60s
M.
Shahid Alam
Pauperizing the Periphery
Amelia
Peltz
If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost
Shelton
Hull
Another Powell, Another Capitulation
Binoy Kampmark
Nuclear Deterrence and North Korea
Ben
Tripp
A Fish Story
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Where is the Outrage?
Robin
Philpot
Congo Distortions
Julie Hilden
Murder and the Matrix
Laura
Flanders
An Interview with Isabel Allende
David Lindorff
The Last Byline
Adam
Engel
Talk Dirty Scary Monsters
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod
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