The U.S. Conspired with the U.K. , & Australia, all LIES...
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LIES in Australia:
The ONA is an elite agency that advises the prime minister. Mr Wilkie said: "I will go so far as to say ... the exaggeration was occurring in there [Mr Howard's office]." He said the government had been "prepared to deliberately exaggerate the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and terrorism threat so as to stay in step" with the US.
Australian case for Iraq war was 'fabricated' By Kathy Marks
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Here is a small timeline of confidential skullduggery dug up and broadcast by Greg Palasts own team for BBC Television and Harper's on the secret plans to seize Iraq's assets and oil.
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February 2001 - Only one month after the first Bush-Cheney inauguration, the State Department's Pam Quanrud organizes a secret confab in California to make plans for the invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam. US oil industry advisor Falah Aljibury and others are asked to interview would-be replacements for a new US-installed dictator.
On BBC Television's Newsnight, Aljibury himself explained,
"It is an invasion, but it will act like a coup. The original plan was to liberate Iraq from the Saddamists and from the regime."
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March 2001 - Vice-President Dick Cheney meets with oil company executives and reviews oil field maps of Iraq. Cheney refuses to release the names of those attending or their purpose. Harper's has since learned their plan and purpose -- see below.
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October/November 2001 - An easy military victory in Afghanistan emboldens then-Dep. Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to convince the Administration to junk the State Department "coup" plan in favor of an invasion and occupation that could remake the economy of Iraq. An elaborate plan, ultimately summarized in a 101-page document, scopes out the "sale of all state enterprises" -- that is, most of the nation's assets, "… especially in the oil and supporting industries."
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2002 - Grover Norquist and other corporate lobbyists meet secretly with Defense, State and Treasury officials to ensure the invasion plans for Iraq include plans for protecting "property rights." The result was a pre-invasion scheme to sell off Iraq's oil fields, banks, electric systems, and even change the country's copyright laws to the benefit of the lobbyists' clients. Occupation chief Paul Bremer would later order these giveaways into Iraq law.
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Fall 2002 - Philip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, is brought in by the Pentagon to plan the management of Iraq's oil fields. He works directly with Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. "There were plans," says Carroll, "maybe even too many plans" -- but none disclosed to the public nor even the US Congress.
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January 2003 - Robert Ebel, former CIA oil analyst, is sent, BBC learns, to London to meet with Fadhil Chalabi to plan terms for taking over Iraq's oil.
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March 2003 - What White House spokesman Ari Fleisher calls "Operations Iraqi Liberation" (OIL) begins. (Invasion is re-christened "OIF" -- Operation Iraqi Freedom.)
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March 2003 - Defense Department is told in confidence by US Energy Information Administrator Guy Caruso that Iraq's fields are incapable of a massive increase in output. Despite this intelligence, Dep. Secretary Wolfowitz testifies to Congress that invasion will be a free ride. He swears, "There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money. …We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon," a deliberate fabrication promoted by the Administration, an insider told BBC, as "part of the sales pitch" for war.
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May 2003 - General Jay Garner, appointed by Bush as viceroy over Iraq, is fired by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The general revealed in an interview for BBC that he resisted White House plans to sell off Iraq's oil and national assets.
"That's just one fight you don't want to take on," Garner told me. But apparently, the White House wanted that fight.
The general also disclosed that these invade-and-grab plans were developed long before the US asserted that Saddam still held WDM:
"All I can tell you is the plans were pretty elaborate; they didn't start them in 2002, they were started in 2001."
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November/December 2003 - Secrecy and misinformation continues even after the invasion. The oil industry objects to the State Department plans for Iraq's oil fields and drafts for the Administration a 323-page plan, "Options for [the] Iraqi Oil Industry." Per the industry plan, the US forces Iraq to create an OPEC-friendly state oil company that supports the OPEC cartel's extortionate price for petroleum.
- gregpalast.com
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True LIES in the USA:
John Pilger has uncovered video footage of Powell in Cairo on February 24, 2001 saying,
"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 neighbours."
Two months later, Rice reportedly said, "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
Global Free Press (thanks to Nico Haupt)article on John Pilgers TV documentary
"BREAKING THE SILENCE"
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"The administration made up official-sounding numbers: 500 tons of sarin gas, 38,000 liters of botulinum (more than twice the amount accepted in school lunch programs), 25,000 liters of anthrax, and a quart jug of spider juice.
They probably felt like these numbers were safe enough: nobody knows how much a liter is. Colin Powell could be seen
before the United Nations waving around a vial of white powder, presumably a sample gotten from either the CIA or
Marion Berry; it looked like he meant what he said.
They made up exact numbers of warheads and delivery Systems
and boxes of thumb tacks to be strewn in America's streets. They even gave us a timeline: we had 45 minutes from green
light to deployment on all these nasty items in the Iraqi arsenal. We're talking about specific numbers.
All of them completely and utterly made up."
Ben Tripp: CIA Fu
"It was not bad intelligence" that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, "It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war" that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner's research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant "stories of strategic influence" that were known to be false.
Colonel Sam Gardiner - retired USAir Force Officer
"How they lied us into War"
"... it emerged that the only first-hand intelligence source on Saddam Hussein's alleged mobile bioweapons labs was a politically motivated Iraqi defector now dismissed as an "out-and-out fabricator".
The mobile labs, since exposed by weapons inspectors to be hydrogen production facilities at best and phantoms at worst, were one of the centrepieces of US Secretary of State Colin Powell's prewar address to the United Nations.
As recently as January, Vice-President Dick Cheney still held out the possibility that discovery of the labs would provide "conclusive" proof that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
According to a detailed investigation in the Los Angeles Times, however, the sole source claiming to have seen mobile bioweapons labs with his own eyes was the brother of one of the top aides to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress who recently boasted how the erroneous information provided by his group achieved his long-cherished goal of toppling Saddam. ..."
U.S. Fields A Curveball On Mobile Bioweapons Labs
Powell Admits Case Against Iraq Built On Flawed Intelligence
but you can bet... WMD will be planted
anyway ...if they don't get found out !!!
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Fury over Pentagon cell that briefed White House on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links
A Senior Pentagon policy maker created an unofficial "Iraqi intelligence cell" in the summer of 2002 to circumvent the CIA and secretly brief the White House on links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'eda, according to the Senate intelligence committee.
The allegations about Douglas Feith, the number three at the Department of Defence, are made in a supplementary annexe of the committee's review of the intelligence leading to war in Iraq, released on Friday.
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Feith - pronounced 'THEIF'
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According to dramatic testimony contained in the annexe, Mr Feith's cell undermined the credibility of CIA judgments on Iraq's alleged al-Qa'eda links within the highest levels of the Bush administration.
The cell appears to have been set up by Mr Feith as an adjunct to the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation established in the wake of 9/11 with the authority of Paul Wolfowitz. Its focus quickly became the al-Qa'eda-Saddam link.
On occasion, without informing the then head of the CIA, George Tenet, the group gave counter-briefings in the White House. Sen Jay Rockefeller, the most senior Democrat on the committee, said that Mr Feith's cell may even have undertaken "unlawful" intelligence-gathering initiatives.
Telegraph
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Although it was clear to us that much of the intelligence on Iraq had been cooked to the recipe of policy, not until the Senate report did we know that the skewing included outright lies.
We had heard of "Joe,' the nuclear weapons analyst in CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence and Arms Control, and it was abundantly clear that his agenda was to "prove' that the infamous aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were to be used for developing a nuclear weapon. We did not know that he and his CIA associates deliberately falsified the data including rotor testing ironically called "spin tests.'
The Corruption of Intelligence
By Ray McGovern
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13 July 2004 :
Doubts on Informant Deleted in Senate Text
In the classified version of the report, the officials said, nearly three pages are devoted to questioning the credibility of the defector, who was one of four human sources cited last year by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a speech to the United Nations as having provided crucial information about Iraq's mobile laboratories. But in the public version of the report, released Friday, all but one paragraph in those pages is blacked out.
The defector, known to the Central Intelligence Agency as Red River, failed a polygraph examination, the American officials said. But they said crucial information about the source had been deleted from the report in deference to British intelligence, which originally relayed the information provided by the defector to the United States and has maintained a continuing relationship with him.
On the mobile laboratories, the public version of the report includes a detailed indictment of the American agencies' reliance on one central source, known as Curveball, who was introduced to German intelligence by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and some information about a second source, who was introduced to the Defense Intelligence Agency by the I.N.C. and eventually labeled a fabricator by the D.I.A.
truthout
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April 3, 2005 : Curveball: An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi
An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq.
According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq's alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as 'crazy' by his intelligence handlers and a 'congenital liar' by his friends.
The defector, given the code-name Curveball by the CIA, has emerged as the central figure in the corruption of US intelligence estimates on Iraq. Despite considerable doubts over Curveball's credibility, his claims were included in the administration's case for war without caveat.
According to the report, the failure of US spy agencies to scrutinise his claims are the 'primary reason' that they 'fundamentally misjudged the status of Iraq's [biological weapons] programs'. The catalogue of failures and the gullibility of US intelligence make for darkly comic reading, even by the standards of failure detailed in previous investigations. Of all the disproven pre-war weapons claims, from aluminium centrifuge tubes to yellow cake uranium from Niger, none points to greater levels of incompetence than those found within the misadventures of Curveball.
The Americans never had direct access to Curveball - he was controlled by the German intelligence services who passed his reports on to the Defence Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's spy agency.
Between January 2000 and September 2001, Curveball offered 100 reports, among them the claims of mobile biological weapons labs that were central in the US evidence of an illicit weapons programme, but subsequently turned out to be trucks equipped with machinery to make helium for weather balloons. -
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Neocons, fascists & Masons ALL...
Ledeen [Neo-con],
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In 1980 [Ledeen] entered into a collaboration with Francesco Pazienza, an agent of the Italian secret service (SISMI) and a member of Rome's extreme right-wing Masonic Lodge, P2 (Propaganda Due), headed by the fascist Licio Gelli. In an Italian criminal court in 1985, Pazienza was judged guilty of political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of criminals and terrorists, among other offenses. Indeed, according to the findings of the court, Pazienza falsified information about the Bologna bombing in order to divert attention away from the real (right-wing) terrorists who had staged the attack.
[Herman and O'Sullivan's The "Terrorism" Industry]
see secret wars
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Neo-con Ledeens manipulation in amassing dubious Iraq intel
Vince Cannistaro -
'When we're talking about acquiring information on Iraq. It isn't that anyone had a good source on Iraq - there weren't any good sources. The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.'
When the former CIA head of counter-terrorism was asked if a Michael Ledeen had been the one who produced the Iraq documents he said 'You'd be very close.'
This is consistent with the theory that the documents are the work of Iraqi dissidents associated with Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.
The documents would have flowed from Chalabi to Ledeen to SISME, and thus would have been laundered to make them appear as legitimate products discovered by a legitimate intelligence agency. - aljazeera
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Richard Perle:
Thank God for the death of the UN
Its abject failure gave us only anarchy. The world needs order
Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with him. Well, not the whole UN. The "good works" part will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions. -
more at
The Guardian
Perle - nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness" for the staunch anti-Soviet views he articulated as assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration - is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute - a bastion of neoconservatives - as well as the Defense Policy Board.
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| Neocons - a fellowship or a cabal?
Debunking A Myth
"I think the strongest piece to lay to rest [the cabal myth] is to list the [neocons] who are not Jews," said Nathan Diament, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Public Affairs of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the nation's largest Orthodox umbrella organization.
Cheney, for instance, is a neocon and a Methodist.
Rumsfeld and National Security Director Condeleeza Rice - neither of whom are Jewish - all hold dear to a strong neoconservative agenda when acting on the world stage. But when talk of neocon plots is thrown about, they are often excluded or simply described as pawns of their subordinates.
The late New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan - vehemently pro-Israel while serving as Richard Nixon's ambassador to the United Nations in the 1970s - flirted with neoconservative ideology during his political career, but was seldom accused of having treasonous intentions.
Neocon Frank Gaffney Jr., president of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy and National Review contributing editor, is often assumed to be Jewish because he's so pro-Israel. He is not.
Railing against what he sees as anti-Jewish and anti-conservative bias in the so-called liberal media, Rush Limbaugh, the king of conservative talk radio, has accused the media of speaking in a "code language" when it comes to neocons.
"A case in point is their use of the term 'neoconservative,'" Limbaugh said in a recent broadcast. "Whether they choose to hyphenate the label or not, it's a pejorative code word for 'Jews.'
"That's right, they use it as a way to say guys like Bill Kristol, Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, John Podhoretz and others are just trying to support Israel at the USA's expense," Limbaugh said.
Noted one prominent Washington Jewish neocon, "It happens to be a bunch of people who have a certain world view, in the Republican Party, mainly centered around foreign policy issues. They're just doing the same thing other folks do, but maybe the [Jewish] history [of neoconservatism] lends itself to conspirators."
Irving Kristol, often called the godfather of neocons, is frequently quoted as defining a neoconservative as a "liberal who has been mugged by reality."
That reality, most neocons readily admit, is that the neoconservative movement originated among a crowd of once-liberal New York Jews, some of them radical, who had begun to question the Democratic Party's leftist tendencies.
As Podhoretz once explained, they loathed communism, believed in welfare to a point, were relatively friendly toward organized labor and enthusiastically supported Israel.
But today's neoconservatives - it should be noted the term has been used as a pejorative since its inception, even though some neocons wear it as a badge of honor - don't believe they're solely, or even predominantly, responsible for the current administration's backing of Israel.
Shoshana Bryen is the director of special projects at the Washington, D.C.-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and married to Stephen Bryen, who served as an assistant deputy secretary of defense under Perle. Both he and JINSA are often named in the rambling neocon conspiracy theories littering cyberspace.
But his wife believes only those who are already anti-Semitic - "inclined toward the Jews-control-the-world theory" - are likely to believe in a neocon cabal.
- Debunking The 'Neocon' Conspiracy Theory
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Description of Straw Man [X=NEOCONS] [Y=JEWS]
The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern:
Person A has position X.
Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
Person B attacks position Y.
Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.
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Oil for food shenanigans...
Just who reaped illegal profits in the United Nation's Oil-for-Food program with Iraq? A number of congressional committees are pursuing that question, and the circle of suspects keeps widening, from Houston to Moscow.
Caught in the net of suspicion: A British member of parliament, a former French interior minister, several Russian political figures, and a Texas-based oil company.
The Oil-for-Food program began in 1996 to relieve the suffering of ordinary Iraqis from the economic sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War. It allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy food and medicine only, with all transactions monitored by the U.N.
But after the 2003 Iraq War, documents came to light in Iraq suggesting serious fraud had occurred: Specifically, that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had imposed surcharges on the oil sales and pocketed the money himself with the complicity of private companies and individuals and that the U.N. had failed to stop it.
Last February a U.N. investigation led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker found the oil procurement part of the program indeed had been riddled with fraud. He found even some U.N. officials involved were themselves tainted by conflicts of interest.
But who were the private parties who profited from this alleged scheme? Over the past week, a Senate subcommittee has issued several reports naming names of companies and individuals who allegedly got valuable vouchers, known as "allocations," to sell Iraqi oil in return for kickbacks to Saddam Hussein.
- OIL-FOR-FOOD PROBE
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Revelations about the U.N. Oil for Food Program get uglier and uglier.
The Oil for Food Program was the product of the first Persian Gulf War. Stringent conditions were imposed on Baghdad after its army was driven from Kuwait. Failure to comply with the terms of the peace treaty drew international sanctions that exacted a harsh price on ordinary Iraqis. Shrewd manipulation by the Iraqi government turned international opinion against the allied powers, which were blamed for the hardships. To ease the pain, the U.N. authorized the Oil for Food Program in 1995. It went into effect a year later and was shut down late last year. During its lifetime, Iraq exported $69.5 billion of oil; those revenues were used to buy humanitarian supplies.
There were always suspicions that the program was not working as intended. Ordinary Iraqis continued to suffer -- malnutrition and disease were rife -- while Saddam Hussein continued to build ornate and grandiose palaces. After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last year, the occupation authorities found evidence of how the program might have been abused. A number of investigations are now under way to ascertain exactly what happened.
The most important has been launched by the U.N. itself and is headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, the former government in Baghdad collected more than $5 billion (and perhaps as much as $10 billion) in illegal revenues through the program by imposing surcharges on oil sales and collecting kickbacks on purchases of goods. Another U.S. agency has concluded that half the contracts it examined were overpriced by at least 5 percent. Reportedly, individuals and companies were favored with vouchers that entitled them to buy Iraqi oil; they were rewarded for their willingness to participate in the illegal schemes or for their support of Iraq's efforts to lift the sanctions.
Mr. Volcker recently released a list of all 4,734 companies that traded in the program, although he cautioned that it merely names the companies that officially acquired oil without commenting on the legality of their action. Under the program, some 248 oil companies bought $64.2 billion in oil from Iraq, while 3,545 companies sold $32.9 billion in humanitarian supplies to Iraq. Russian, French, Swiss, British and Turkish firms bought about half the Iraqi oil. Companies from Russia, France and Egypt were the main suppliers of goods.
Mr. Volcker left individual names off his list, but a list compiled by Mr. Charles Duelfer, the man heading up the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, fills in the blanks. Among them are the U.N. official who administered the program as well as politically connected individuals in Russia and France. The inclusion of Mr. Benon Savon, the U.N. diplomat who oversaw the program, has fueled charges of negligence and misconduct against the U.N. He denies any involvement. -
BNN
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Benon Sevan, the official accused of improperly receiving lucrative rights to purchase oil from Saddam Hussein's government while he was running the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, discouraged his staff from probing allegations of corruption and helped block efforts by the U.N. anti-corruption unit to assess where the program was vulnerable to abuse, according to senior U.N. officials.
Sevan said that such an assessment would prove too costly and that U.N. member governments bore primary responsibility for policing the program, according to senior U.N. officials and other former program members. He did initiate reviews of possible overcharging on some program contracts, reviews on which the U.N. Security Council took no action.
The disclosures, drawn from interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.N. officials and diplomats, follow a report last month by the top U.S. weapons inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, that Hussein personally approved the allocation of vouchers to Sevan, among about 270 other officials and businessmen, to sell millions of barrels of Iraqi crude at a profit of 10 cents to 35 cents a barrel.
New view of abuse
Evidence that Hussein used the program to raise illicit billions and erode economic sanctions emerged over years, drawing strong criticism of the United Nations from U.S. legislators and conservative groups. The new disclosures provide a view into how the United Nations limited scrutiny of the program from within.
China, France, Russia, Syria and other governments, which represented companies competing for billions of dollars' worth of business, stalled measures aimed at ending corruption, U.S. Ambassador Patrick F. Kennedy, who tracked the program for more than three years, told a House subcommittee last month.
- more - U.N. official blocked oil-for-food probe
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Kofi Annans son took $300,000
Kojo Annan, the son of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, received at least $US300,000 ($385,000) from a Swiss company that was awarded a contract from the UN oil-for-food program in Iraq, almost double the amount previously disclosed.
The London-based Financial Times and the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24 said the payments "were arranged in ways that obscured where the money came from or whom it went to".
The two papers, which conducted a joint investigation, also reported that the Secretary-General met executives of the company Cotecna Inspection SA twice before the oil-for-food contract was awarded in December 1998 and once afterwards.
The Australian
Benefitting from Tyranny, or helping to build it?
While Kofi Annan was ignoring Zimbabwe crisis, his son was building Harare's airport
Mugabe runs the ZANU-PF, a regime that Condoleeza Rice labels an outpost of tyranny.
Why Kojo Annan's business activities in Zimbabwe have not surfaced in the ongoing probe of the Oil-For-Food Program should surely raise concern about both the integrity and sincerity of the investigation.
It's a global village as far as Kojo's business agenda is concerned.
First came West Africa where Annan's youngest son was working for the Swiss-based Cotecna with ties to the Oil-For-Food Program. While the world was led to believe that Annan Junior came off the Cotecna payroll in 1999, he continued to cash Cotnecna's cheques until 2004.
Morocco came next when it was revealed that Kojo Annan and Hani Yamani, bona fide Saudi national were negotiating the sale of $60 million worth of oil to a Moroccan company. Yamani is the businessman son of the powerful Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, former Saudi oil minister and OPEC founder.
In Zimbabwe, Kojo Annan and his friend and business confrere Yamani were in bed with Leo Mugabe, nephew of President Robert Mugabe.
Present for key meetings, Kojo Annan was flown to Morroco to close the big oil deal, which for reasons unknown was ultimately abandoned by Yamani.
Canada Free Press
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| UN pays itself cash from oil for food program?
UN to transfer $200 mln to Iraq development fund
24 Jun 2005 16:44:22 GMT Source: Reuters
UNITED NATIONS, June 24 (Reuters) - The Security Council decided on Friday to transfer $200 million from an account for U.N. weapons inspectors to a Development Fund for Iraq and another $20 million to pay some of the country's dues owed to the United Nations.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan had recommended the transfer from an escrow account that still has monies from the now-defunct oil-for-food program. The account was set up to fund the remaining weapons inspectors and their extensive data base on Iraq's past nuclear, chemical, biological and long-range missile programs and materials.
Iraq has been lobbying for months for the Security Council to have all money remaining in the oil-for-food accounts transferred to the Development Fund and to help pay its arrears in dues to the United Nations.
The staff of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Agency, known as UNMOVIC, has not been allowed to return to Iraq by the United States since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. It is now studying satellite images to determine the extent of widespread looting of Iraqi weapons sites sealed by its inspectors before the war.
But UNMOVIC's $12 million annual budget is paid for with Iraqi oil money, and the council has come under pressure from the new Baghdad government to close down the agency so the money can be used for other purposes.
The UNMOVIC account, according to U.N. officials, still has some $100 million so the transfer is not expected to affect the work of the remaining 50 professional staff from 24 countries. There are also 20 to 30 support staff in New York plus small offices in Baghdad and Cyprus to maintain and guard inspection equipment.
The United States earlier this year began talks to wind up UNMOVIC's work by September with Anne Patterson, the acting U.S. ambassador, telling reporters, "There is a broad consensus to look at the mandate pretty quickly."
But other council members believe the United Nations first has to decide on where to place some of the weapons experts and to address a 1991 resolution that says U.N. inspectors have to formally certify that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction. - By Evelyn Leopold
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PSYOPS as ABUSE
Ahmed Chalabi & The Rendon Group
IRAQ: This war brought to you by Rendon Group
"Word got around the department that I was a good Arabic translator who did a great Saddam imitation," recalls the Harvard grad student. "Eventually, someone phoned me, asking if I wanted to help change the course of Iraq policy."
So twice a week, for US$3,000 a month, the Iraqi student says, under condition of anonymity, that he took a taxi from his campus apartment to a Boston-area recording studio rented by the Rendon Group, a DC-based public relations firm with close ties to the US government. His job: translate and dub spoofed Saddam Hussein speeches and tongue-in-cheek newscasts for broadcast throughout Iraq.
"I never got a straight answer on whether the Iraqi resistance, the CIA or policy makers on the Hill were actually the ones calling the shots," says the student, "but ultimately I realized that the guys doing spin were very well and completely cut loose." And that's how Baghdad's best-known opposition radio personality was born six years ago - during the Clinton administration. It was one of many disinformation schemes cooked up by the Rendon Group, which has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations fighting the psy-op war in the Middle East.
"The point was to discredit Saddam, but the stuff was complete slapstick," the student says. "We did skits where Saddam would get mixed up in his own lies, or where [Saddam's son] Qusay would stumble over his own delusions of grandeur." Transmissions were once a week from stations in northern Iraq and Kuwait. "The only thing that was even remotely funny," says the student, "were the mockeries of the royal guard and the government's clumsy attempts to deceive arms inspectors."
The Saddam impersonator says he left Rendon not long ago out of frustration with what he calls the lack of expertise and oversight in the project. It was doubly frustrating, he says, because he despises Saddam, although he adds that he never has been involved with any political party or opposition group. "No one in-house spoke a word of Arabic," he says. "They thought I was mocking Saddam, but for all they knew I could have been lambasting the US government." The scripts, he adds, were often ill conceived. "Who in Iraq is going to think it's funny to poke fun at Saddam's mustache," the student notes, "when the vast majority of Iraqi men themselves have mustaches?"
There were other basic problems, too. Some of the announcers hired for the radio broadcasts, he says, were Egyptians and Jordanians, whose Arabic accents couldn't be understood by Iraqis. "Friends in Baghdad said that the radio broadcasts were a complete mumble," the student says. One CIA agent familiar with the project calls the project's problem a lack of "due diligence", and adds that "the scripts were put together by 23-year-olds with connections to the Democratic National Committee."
[snip]
The firm is tight-lipped, however, about its current projects. A spokesperson refuses to say whether Rendon is doing any work in preparation for the potential upcoming invasion of Iraq. But a current Rendon Arabic translator commented, "All I can say is that nothing has changed - the work is still an expensive waste of time, mostly with taxpayer funds." However, Rendon may just prove to be one step ahead of the game. If Saddam is toppled, a Rendon creation is standing by to try to take his place. The Iraqi National Congress (INC), a disparate coalition of Iraqi dissidents touted by the US government as the best hope for an anti-Saddam coup, has gotten the go-ahead from US officials to arm and train a military force for invasion. The INC is one of the few names you'll hear if reporters bother to press government officials on what would come after Saddam.
At the helm of the INC is Ahmed Chalabi, a US-trained mathematician who fled from Jordan in 1989 in the trunk of a car after the collapse of a bank he owned. He was subsequently charged and sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison for embezzlement. Back home in Iraq, he's referred to by some as the so-called limousine insurgent and is said to hold little actual standing with the Iraqi public. Shuttling between London and DC, Chalabi hasn't been in Iraq for over years, and draws "more support on the Potomac than the Euphrates," says Iraq specialist Andrew Parasiliti of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC.
"Were it not for Rendon," a State Department official remarked, "the Chalabi group wouldn't even be on the map."
With funding first from the CIA throughout the 1990s and more recently the Pentagon, Rendon managed the INC's every move, an INC spokesperson acknowledges, even choosing its name, coordinating its annual strategy conferences, and orchestrating its meetings with diplomatic heavy hitters, such as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. Not that the Rendon Group was the first purveyor of psy-op tactics for promoting US foreign policy in the region. In fact, some of the most impressive spin maneuvers and disinformation campaigns occurred during the Gulf War in 1991, the lessons of which are particularly pertinent as the US again gears up. -
By Ian Urbina
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The unholy trinity of electronic snooping: Bolton, Negroponte and Hayden
The three key participants who have emerged as orchestrating the misuse of NSA and other U.S. intelligence resources to conduct surveillance of those who opposed neoconservative plans to invade Iraq and ratchet up tensions with North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, the Palestinian Authority headed by the late Yasir Arafat, and the former government of Haiti are Bolton; NSA's director and the new Deputy Director for National Intelligence General Michael V. Hayden; and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Iraq and current National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Hayden served alongside Condoleezza Rice in the National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush.
In the lead up to the Iraq War, Negroponte, Bolton, and Hayden, as well as other leading neoconservatives in the Pentagon and White House, directed an e-mail and telephone surveillance campaign against UN Security Council delegates to determine the voting intentions of wavering countries on the council's resolution authorizing military action against Iraq. The targeted delegations were Angola, Cameroon, Chile, China, France, Mexico, Guinea, Pakistan, and Russia.
A January 31, 2003, Quick Response Capability memo sent by Frank Koza, the chief of the Regional Targets group within NSA's National Security Operations Center (NSOC), to NSA's counterparts in the Echelon communications intelligence monitoring tasking system-Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-authorized a "surge" telephone and e-mail intercept operation on the offices and homes of government officials of UN Security Council members and "non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms." The latter included UN officials such as Secretary General Kofi Annan, Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohammed El Baradei, and Pope John Paul II (who was lobbying African and Latin American Security Council members against the U.S. Security Council war resolution).
Negroponte and Bolton received intercept data from Hayden's staff at NSA. Secret Security Council negotiations to reach a compromise with Iraq and seek more time for UN weapons inspectors were scuttled when Negroponte and Bolton were made privy to private telephone conversations of UN delegates, including the Mexican and Chilean ambassadors.
Leading neoconservatives working for Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were kept apprised of the sensitive surge surveillance operations. It was only due to the leak of the Koza memo by Katharine Gun, a Mandarin Chinese linguist working for NSA's British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), that the surveillance directed against the UN Security Council members and non-members became public. Criminal charges against Gun were later dropped by Britain's Labor government, which was clearly embarrassed over revelations that it took part in the NSA's snooping of the UN. The U.S.-led UN surveillance program was later confirmed by former British International Development Secretary Clare Short. -
Wayne Madsen
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George Galloway versus the Neocons...
At a time when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is being investigated for its role in an espionage case involving Larry Franklin, a Pentagon and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official indicted for passing top secret classified information to two AIPAC officials and possibly the government of Israel, a senator who is bought and paid for by AIPAC-Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota-has decided to change the subject and point to newly elected Respect Party Member of Parliament George Galloway as receiving oil funds from Saddam Hussein.
The charges against Galloway and other politicians around the world were originally based on documents secured from the rubble of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry and proffered by the corrupt Ahmad Chalabi-the man who pressured the Bush administration to use discredited "intelligence" about Saddam's mobile chemical and biological weapons laboratories from an alcoholic, congenital liar and mentally unbalanced cousin of one of his associates, an individual code-named "Curveball."
Coleman, with pro-AIPAC Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, is using the Senate Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations to rehash charges that foreign and even U.S. officials financially benefited from the United Nations' Oil for Food program. These charges, which later were proven false, first surfaced in the neoconservative controlled London-based Daily Telegraph, owned by the Hollinger Corporation, a company that had financial ties to arch-neoconservative Richard Perle. The charges by both the Daily Telegraph and now Coleman's committee are based on documents as bogus as the Niger yellowcake documents and those proffered by Curveball and Chalabi about Iraq's fantasized weapons of mass destruction. Galloway successfully sued the Telegraph for libel over its baseless Oil for Food allegations against him. - Wayne Madsen
Gorgeous George sticks it to the poohbahs live on US TV!!!
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Those Bush - oil - Saddam connections...
The U.S. oil companies involved in the sanctions busting have long-standing connections to the Bush family and their largest corporate benefactors.
The Democratic minority report stated, "From 2000 to 2002, Bayoil (USA), Inc., and its affiliates, operating out of Houston, Texas, became one of the largest importers of Iraqi oil into the United States." The report also states, "Samir Vincent, an Iraq-born American, obtained Iraqi oil allocations through his company Phoenix International LLC (McLean, Virginia), and sold them to Chevron Products Company, a division of Chevron USA, Inc."
Federal authorities later indicted Vincent for his role in the oil-for-food scheme. Vincent pleaded guilty. Vincent was a close confidante of 1996 Republican Vice Presidential candidate Jack Kemp, who had opposed the Iraqi sanctions. Newsweek magazine reported that in October 2004, the FBI interviewed Kemp about his relationship with Vincent.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat on the board of Chevron before she joined the Bush White House as National Security Adviser. The company named one of its oil supertankers the SS Condoleezza Rice.
Bayoil is incorporated in the Bahamas with affiliates in Switzerland and Luxembourg. A Chilean-Italian named Augusto Giangrandi, a resident of Florida, served as chairman of Bayoil. Although Bayoil principals David Chalmers, Jr., Briton John Irving, and Ludmil Dionissiev, a Bulgarian citizen and permanent resident of Houston, were indicted, Giangrandi was not touched.
Giangrandi has a history that goes back to the Iran-Iraq war when Donald Rumsfeld was helping to arm Saddam and when the Reagan-Bush administration was violating UN arms sanctions imposed against both warring parties. During the war, Iraq bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cluster bombs and other weapons from Carlos Cardoen, a Chilean arms manufacturer who was close to Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. In 1983, Cardoen hired Giangrandi, then a resident of Florida, to ship zirconium from the United States to Iraq. Zirconium is used in the manufacture of cluster bombs. Giangrandi falsely stated in his expert license application that the zirconium would be used for mining explosives in Chile. Giangrandi also owned Cosmos of Livorno, Italy, the manufacturer of mini-submarines and served as president of Swisstech, Cardoen's marketing unit.
According to a 1995 deposition by Howard Teicher, a Reagan National Security Council official, Cardoen was working for the CIA to illegally ship military hardware to Saddam. Giangrandi's operation was part of a much larger criminal conspiracy involving agricultural loans guaranteed by the Department of Agriculture's Commodity Credit Corporation and funded by Italy's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). The failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) (also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International) had connections to both BNL and Ahmad Chalabi's Petra Bank. In 1992, The Wall Street Journal reported that George W. Bush and Jeb Bush had been named as potential witnesses in the class action lawsuit brought about the clients of BCCI who had been defrauded in the bank's collapse. During the time, George W. was involved in various failed oil companies in Houston and Jeb, operating from a base in Miami, was involved in suspicious real estate deals.
There was another Florida connection to the illegal arms shipments to Iraq. Iraqi arms dealer Ishan Barbouti worked with Iran-contra felon Richard Secord to secretly ship large amounts of cyanide from Product Ingredient Technologies, a food-flavoring factory in Florida, to Iraq for use in Saddam's nerve gas production during the 1980s. All of these transactions involving Bayoil's Giangrandi, Cardoen, Secord, and Barbouti, were known to President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker.
Between 1990 and 1991, three journalists who were investigating various aspects of Cardoen's secretive arms trading activities were found dead in suspicious circumstances. They were freelance writer Danny Casolaro, found dead from wrist slashes in a bathtub in a Martinsburg, West Virginia, hotel; Lawrence Ng, a stringer for the Financial Times, found shot to death in the bathtub of his apartment in Guatemala City; and Jonathan Moyle, a British aviation journalist found hanging in the closet of his hotel room in Santiago, Chile. Moyle had uncovered details of Cardoen's role in the Bush 41 deal to illegally ship weapons to Iraq. - Wayne Madsen
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Sarkis Soghanalian, the international arms dealer who bought billions in weapons for Saddam Hussein, says he was approached at a Newark airport luncheon meeting in the early '80s by a representative of then Texas oil entrepreneur George W. Bush, who was seeking to do business in Iraq.
[snip]
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It's widely known that prior to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations maintained friendly ties with Hussein, but there has never before been any indication that the current president was seeking business deals with him. In the '80s, the younger Bush managed a series of struggling Texas-based oil companies, one of which, Harken Energy, did secure a major oil deal in Bahrain that caused a public furor, since it appeared to have been awarded to earn favor with the Bush administration. Bush's storefront start-up Arbusto (later renamed Bush Exploration) was in deep trouble in the '83-'84 period when Soghanalian says the approach occurred.
The Soghanalian overture is only one of several Bush business intertwinings with the dark side, starting way back in 1974, when he was 28 years old. Like the Soghanalian adventure, each of these tales has CIA ties, which touch virtually every Bush business venture until 1990. -
Bush's Courting of Saddam - Village Voice
"I came over here last time to visit my family for Christmas, they said I had a $3 million [fraud] in this and that. That wasn't the case. The case was [the] Peruvian deal. They didn't come and tell me, "you shipped weapons to Peru and this and that." And the $3 million charge was dropped. Why was it dropped? Because I was helping the secret service. ... I'm chasing people doing wrong on behalf of the U.S. government. And chasing them around and with the knowledge of the U.S. government. But what am I doing wrong? "
The U.S. government relies on your knowledge?
"Correct."
For what?
"Based on the experience they have with me, that I can produce the intelligence information they need, which is in their own interest and not to my interest."
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Soghanalian - Gallery of international arms dealers
Saddam, the CIA and the Bushfraud enterprise
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Update 2005: Bush sidestepped the Senate
and appointed Key Hawk John Bolton as
U.S ambassador to the UN
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Annan welcomes Bolton as U.S. ambassador to U.N.
Tuesday, August 2, 2005 at 07:07 JST
NEW YORK - U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said Monday he welcomes the appointment of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, saying, "We look forward to working with him as I do with the other 190 ambassadors."
"It's the president's prerogative," Annan said at a news conference at U.N. headquarters when asked about U.S. President George W. Bush's recess appointment, sidestepping Senate confirmation until the end of 2006. (Kyodo News)
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