Neocons
[Page repaired 06:30 PDT, July 3, 2019]
Neocon John Bolton ~ Ethan Miller/Getty Images via Business InsiderBusiness Insider ~ Words from Neocon, John Bolton:
We know where
your kids live!
Neoconservatism (commonly shortened to neocon when labelling its adherents) is a political movement born in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist foreign policy of the Democratic Party, and the growing New Left and Counterculture, in particular the Vietnam protests. Some also began to question their liberal beliefs regarding domestic policies such as the Great Society. Many of its adherents became politically famous during the Republican presidential administrations of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s as neoconservatives peaked in influence during the administration of George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" -- his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." George W. Bush, Neocon Chickenhawk- October 7, 2002
The Project for the New American Century
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. that focused on United States foreign policy. ~ Wikipedia
January 26, 1998
The Honorable William J. Clinton
President of the United States
Washington, DC
Dear Mr. President:
We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.
The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.
Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.
We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.
We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.
Sincerely,
Elliott Abrams ~ Pardoned Criminal
Pleaded guilty October 7, 1991, to two misdemeanor charges of withholding information from Congress about secret government efforts to support the Nicaraguan contra rebels during a ban on such aid. U.S. District Chief Judge Aubrey E. Robinson, Jr., sentenced Abrams November 15, 1991, to two years probation and 100 hours community service. Abrams was pardoned December 24, 1992.
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/summpros.htm
Richard L. Armitage ~ Plame Leaker
A conspicuous exception was former deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage, whose office would only say, "We're not commenting." He was one of a handful of top officials who had access to the information. He is an old source and friend of Woodward's, and he fits Novak's description of his source as "not a partisan gunslinger." Woodward has indicated that he knows the identity of Novak's source, which further suggests his source and Novak's were one and the same.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10117465/site/newsweek/
William J. Bennett ~ Congressional Racist
Bill Bennett Tells 1.25 Million Listeners,
Abort Every Black Baby to Stop Crime
109TH CONGRESS - H. RES. 473 - 1ST SESSION
Condemning the racist remarks of William Bennett.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES - SEPTEMBER 29, 2005
Mr. RUSH submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
RESOLUTION
Condemning the racist remarks of William Bennett.
Whereas William J. Bennett hosts a radio program, "Morning in America"', which airs on approximately 115 radio stations with an estimated weekly audience of 1.25 million listeners;
Whereas on September 28th, 2005, Mr. Bennett said on his radio program, "But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.''; and
Whereas Mr. Bennett's remarks are outrageous and blatantly racist: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives condemns the comments made by William Bennett on his radio program, "Morning in America'', as outrageous racism of the most bigoted and ignorant kind; and condemns all manifestations and expressions of racism and ethnic intolerance.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hr109-473
[Ed. Note: Bennett's comment also suggests support for Abortion and since most of these people listed here work for, or have worked for Bush and the Republican Party, is it fair to ask if this is a secret agenda ?]
Jeffrey Bergner
Despite claims to the contrary, Iran is not seeking a peaceful nuclear energy program. Iran has no need of such a program, and its actions to date are not consistent with that end. Iran is seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability, and there is nothing the European trio can offer it to compensate for the perceived security benefits nuclear weapons would bring.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/301fkrie.asp
John Bolton ~ Who Is Larry Franklin?
From:
Arrest of Pentagon Official May Help Unravel Neo-Conservative Cabal
by Jeffery Steinberg and Nancy Spannaus
Pentagon Iran desk officer and neo-con patsy Larry Franklin was arrested on May 4, on charges that he passed classified information based upon secret Pentagon documents to two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) officials in June 2003, at a restaurant in Arlington, Va. The two AIPAC officials, who were not named in the complaint, were Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who were both fired by AIPAC in recent weeks.
A number of senior intelligence sources, reached for comment on the Franklin charges, all had the same essential reading: The FBI has a prima facie case against Franklin. In FBI raids on his home, Federal agents confiscated 83 classified documents, which he was not authorized to have there. The case is cut and dried, and a charge of mishandling classified documents carries a ten-year Federal jail sentence. Franklin is being squeezed to provide prosecutors with a complete picture on the AIPAC/Israel espionage operation, including Pentagon officials who were part of the effort. These include, but are not limited to: Doug Feith, William Luti, Harold Rhode, and Abram Shulsky.
In addition, one source emphasized the importance of Franklin's December 2001 trip to Rome, accompanied by Rhode and Michael Ledeen. The trip centered around a meeting with former Iran-Contra swindler Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom Ledeen sought to reactivate as a Pentagon channel to the Iranian government, and as a source on activities inside Iraq and Afghanistan. The Rome trip coincided with the surfacing of the forged Niger government documents, falsely charging that Saddam Hussein was seeking large quantities of yellow cake uranium from the African nation.
Franklin was arrested on a criminal complaint, even as a grand jury continues to consider his case. He is widely considered to be providing information to prosecutors. A closer look at his associations with the neo-con crowd shows that by targetting him, FBI officials might be able to unravel a whole skein of wrongdoing, which could help bring down the inner circle linked to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Preparing To Hit Iran?
The investigation of Franklin, and his dealings with the AIPAC officials, first was made public in August 2004, in the immediate wake of a major propaganda barrage promoting pre-emptive military action against Iran. As head of the Iran desk at the Pentagon, Franklin had access to classified documents related to that area; according to the criminal complaint, he allegedly disclosed Top Secret information related to potential attacks upon U.S. forces in Iraq, to the two individuals, neither of whom had the security clearance to receive that information. At the time, Lyndon LaRouche estimated that patriotic sections of the U.S. intelligence community were acting to defuse a potential Israeli "breakaway ally" hit against Iran.
It was not only AIPAC officials with whom Franklin was in touch. He is reported to have also had meetings with Naor Gilan, until recently an Iran specialist at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. And, according to both the New York Times and Associated Press on May 5, FBI officials recently questioned a former senior Mossad official about his ties to Franklin. The official was Uzi Arad, a former senior official with the Israeli intelligence agency. Arad is reported to have told the FBI that he had met Franklin twice, and received an academic paper from him.
Arad is no garden variety Mossad agent. He held senior posts from 1975 to 1999, and served as the Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After the FBI probe of Franklin was announced Aug. 29, 2004, Azad was one of the Israelis who jumped to defend Israel against the allegations that Franklin had passed them classified documents, saying that at worst the analyst (Franklin) "crossed the line" by inappropriately disseminating sensitive material. "That is not espionage," he said.
Azad is also notable for the fact that, in a speech at the Jerusalem Institute for Contemporary Affairs on March 26, 2003 (five days into the Iraq War), he called on the United States and Israel to take military action against Iran as well. The luncheon meeting which Franklin had with the AIPAC officials, at which he allegedly passed them classified information, occurred on June 26, 2003.
Who Is Larry Franklin?
Sources in the military and intelligence community have provided this news service with a profile of the suspected Israeli mole: Larry Franklin is a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst, who shifted from Cold War Soviet studies, to a specialty in Iran-Iraq. A protégé of DIA Sovietologist Winnifred Joshua, Franklin also studied at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he was reportedly picked up by Paul Wolfowitz, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense, and an individual who has been probed for passing U.S. secrets to Israel since 1978, according to a February 2004 study by Stephen Green, which catalogued long-standing espionage allegations against, and investigations into Wolfowitz, Feith, Michael Ledeen, Stephen Bryen, and Richard Perle.
In the Summer of 2001, Franklin was transferred from DIA to the Pentagon's policy office under Feith, where he took charge of the Iran desk in the Near East South Asia (NESA) section, and later worked for the Office of Special Plans (OSP), the Iraq war-planning unit under Feith and NESA head William Luti. Luti had been a military aide to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and had been in the Office of Vice President Cheney at the start of the "Bush 43" Administration. According to Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (USAF, ret.), who served in NESA from June 2002 to March 2003, Luti bragged at staff meetings, that he was reporting directly to "Scooter," which, she learned, was a reference to Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
As an Air Force Reserve officer, Franklin had served several tours of duty at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, where, according to one military source, he had gotten in trouble for unauthorized contacts with Israeli intelligence officials. According to one news account, the current FBI probe into Franklin's activities was triggered by a June 2002 leak in the New York Times, which detailed American war plans against Iraq. While on the NESA Iran desk, Franklin was also reportedly the subject of a probe into his mishandling of classified documents; however, a serious probe into that incident was blocked by the intervention of Luti and Feith, according to a confidential Pentagon source.
Franklin, according to an eyewitness, was part of a neo-con inner circle that met frequently, behind closed doors, in the office of Doug Feith. The group included Feith, Luti, OSP official Abram Shulsky, Office of Net Assessment Mideast specialist Harold Rhode, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and Michael Maloof. As a group, they worked closely with Wolfowitz and with Libby, whose own ties to the Israeli Mafiya and Israeli intelligence run deep: Libby was the former attorney for Israeli "Mafia" boss Marc Rich.
Franklin, Rhode, and Ledeen
In the Summer of 2003, it was revealed that Larry Franklin had been part of a Pentagon team, composed also of Rhode and self-professed "universal fascist" Michael Ledeen, which had travelled to Rome, in December 2001, to open unauthorized channels to the Iranian government, through a widely discredited Iran-Contra figure, Manucher Ghorbanifar. According to one news account of the trip, the troika sabotaged talks then under way between the State Department and the Iranian government, involving the turning over to the United States of five top al-Qaeda figures, who were in custody in Iran.
Virtually every member of the neo-con grouping has been under investigation for espionage, fabrication of intelligence, and other treachery against the United States. Sources, for example, have identified Rhode, a longtime protégé of British intelligence's Dr. Bernard Lewis, and a close collaborator of Ledeen, as the target of a separate espionage probe, involving his passing of U.S. national security secrets to Israel, while he was in Baghdad as part of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). While in Baghdad, Rhode practically lived out of the home and office of Iraqi National Congress (INC) head Ahmed Chalabi.
Ledeen is also, according to law enforcement sources, a target of inquiry, concerning his suspected role in passing forged Niger government documents to the Italian intelligence service, SISMI. The forged documents purported to "prove" that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, to build a nuclear bomb. Vice President Cheney and other Bush Administration officials used the threat of Iraq's alleged imminent possession of a nuclear bomb, as a bludgeon to force Congressional approval of the Iraq War. When President Bush cited alleged Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium "yellow cake" from an African state in his Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address, the whole issue blew up, leading to the ongoing Federal criminal probe.
Although both the State Department and CIA had cautioned that the Niger yellow cake story was dubious, Bush and Cheney went ahead with their shrill allegations. Then-International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei revealed in early March 2003, that the Niger documents were shoddy forgeries. According to several former U.S. intelligence officials, one prime suspect in the document forgeries scam was Chalabi's INC. Ledeen, a longtime Chalabi booster, has also long been a paid "consultant" to SISMI. A September 2004 Washington Monthly article reports that when Ledeen, Franklin, and Rhode met in December 2001 with Iranian government officials in Rome, the head of SISMI and Italy's Minister of Defense also attended the meetings.
A Bolton Angle? May 13, 2005
While the issue of Pentagon illegal activity with Israel, in order to provoke a war against Iran, or Syria, is still a live one, so is the matter of the Niger "yellow cake" concoction, a story which has never been solved, and which is intimately connected with the still live investigation of what is known as the Plame leak.
It was December 2001, after the Ledeen, Franklin, Rhode trip to Rome, that fraudulent documents surfaced, alleging that Iraq was negotiating for yellow cake from Niger. In the Spring of 2002, reportedly on the recommendation of Vice President Cheney, former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson was sent to investigate the charges, and returned a report saying that the claim was false. In the Summer of 2003, Wilson was subjected to an attempt to discredit him in the media, including through the disclosure of the identity of his wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. The disclosure of Plame's identity was a violation of Federal law, but, as yet, the Administration has not "solved" the case. A Federal Special Prosecutor is still pursuing the case of the leak, which many sources report to have originated from the vicinity of Cheney's office.
On the strength of Wilson's report, and other analysis, the CIA and the State Department removed the Niger report from their intelligence estimates of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Yet, in December 2002, Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton played a key role in putting this false information in a widely circulated State Department Fact Sheet on "Omissions From the Iraqi Declaration of the United Nations Security Council."
In a March 1, 2005 letter to the chairman of the National Security Subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) asked for a committee investigation into State Department efforts to conceal the role of Bolton in the creation of the Fact Sheet, and in insisting that the Niger reference be kept in the Fact Sheet, despite objections from both State Department intelligence and CIA officials.
This inquiry has relevance not only to Bolton's potential connection to an espionage network, but to his persistent role in "fixing" intelligence which he and his neo-con friends did not like. It was this cooking of intelligence which provided the justification for pushing the United States into war against Iraq, in pursuit of WMD which were not there, and which the neo-con circles around Dick Cheney continue to carry out in pursuit of the new wars they have on their agenda.
Source ~ Orginal Source ~ (PDF)
His job is to keep a hawk eye on dovish Colin Powell. And he's helped turn Bush foreign policy into an ideological hammer [continue reading]. By Nicholas Thompson
Paula Dobriansky
Then there are the sisters Dobriansky. Larisa Dobriansky, currently the deputy assistant secretary for national energy policy at the Department of Energy—in which capacity she’s charged with managing the department’s Office of Climate Change Policy—was previously a lobbyist with the firm Akin Gump, where she worked on climate change for ExxonMobil. Her sister, Paula Dobriansky, currently serves as undersecretary for global affairs in the State Department. In that role, Paula Dobriansky recently headed the U.S. delegation to a United Nations meeting on the Kyoto Protocol in Buenos Aires, where she charged that “science tells us that we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.”
Indeed, the rhetoric of scientific uncertainty has been Paula Dobriansky’s stock-in-trade. At a November 2003 panel sponsored by the AEI, she declared, “the extent to which the man-made portion of greenhouse gases is causing temperatures to rise is still unknown, as are the long-term effects of this trend. Predicting what will happen 50 or 100 years in the future is difficult.”
Given Paula Dobriansky’s approach to climate change, it will come as little surprise that memos uncovered by Greenpeace show that in 2001, within months of being confirmed by the Senate, Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol and the Global Climate Coalition. For her meeting with the latter group, one of Dobriansky’s prepared talking points was “POTUS [President Bush in Secret Service parlance] rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you.” The documents also show that Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil executives to discuss climate policy just days after September 11, 2001. A State Department official confirmed that these meetings took place, but adds that Dobriansky “meets with pro-Kyoto groups as well.”
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/some_like_it_hot.html
Francis Fukuyama
Thus, in the view of the early Bush administration, the planet would come to be dominated more and more by the "universal homogenous state," a mixture of "liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic." The arid banality of that definition is matched by Fukuyama's dazzled tribute to "the spectacular abundance of advanced liberal economies and the infintely diverse consumer culture." Fukuyama, it turns out, is a resident of the privileged enclave for imperial functionaries that is northeast Virginia, and so has little understanding of the scope of US domestic poverty and immiseration: "This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent years. But the root causes of economic inequality have less to do with the underlying legal and social strcutures of our society, which remain fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions. Thus black poverty in the United States, for example, is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the 'legacy of slavery and racism' which persisted long after the formal abolition fo slavery." For Fukuyama, writing at a moment when American class divisions were more pronounced that at any time in human memory, "the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisoned by Marx." As a purveyor of official doctrine for the Bush regime, Fukuyama is bound to ignore twenty years of increasing poverty and declining standards of living for all Americans which has caused an even greater retrogression for the black population; there is no way that this can be chalked up to the heritage of slavery.
Robert Kagan
"Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty."
Think about what the world will look like the day after the bombing ends. Mr. Hussein will still be in power -- if five weeks of heavy bombing in 1991 failed to knock him out, five days of bombing won't either. Can the air attacks insure that he will never be able to use weapons of mass destruction again? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Even our smart bombs cannot reliably hit and destroy every weapons and storage site in Iraq, for the simple reason that we do not know where all the sites are. After the bombing stops, Mr. Hussein will still be able to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. Pentagon officials admit this. [Bombing Iraq Isn't Enough, William Kristol & Robert Kagan, The New York Times, January 30, 1998
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraq-013098.htm
Zalmay Khalilzad
Washington's Neocon in Baghdad? Zalmay Khalilzad Nominated as U.S. Ambassador
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/07/1343234
William Kristol ~ Intentionally Left Blank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kristol
Richard Perle
“This will be the short war I and others predicted… I don’t believe it will be months. I believed all along that it will be a quick war, and I continue to believe that.”
"The President of the United States, on issue after issue, has reflected the thinking of neoconservatives."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Perle
Peter W. Rodman
FBI agents Sunday and Monday questioned senior officials in the Department of Defense as part of an investigation into allegations that a Pentagon analyst passed on classified documents to an Israeli lobbying group, which may have then passed them on to the government of Israel. The documents in question were papers on the US's stance towards Iran.
The Washington Post reports that Douglas Feith, undersecretary for policy for Defense, and Peter Rodman, assistant secretary for international security affairs, are among those whom the FBI interviewed about the contacts between Lawrence Franklin, a lower-level Pentagon analyst, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and an Israeli diplomat. The Post notes that Mr. Franklin, a Catholic, first came to the attention of the FBI more than a year ago when he appeared at a lunch between an AIPAC official and an Israeli diplomat. The FBI's counterintelligence unit was monitoring the meeting as part of another investigation that it has refused to comment on, although one FBI official said it is part of a broader investigation. [Ed. Note: "Part of a broader investigation," hummm... wonder what that is about.]
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0831/dailyUpdate.html
Donald Rumsfeld ~ Shaking hands with ...BFF... Saddam Hussein
++ Rumsfeld Hated Vietnam Veterans, called them STUPID for serving their country, and said they should have avoided military service like the chickenhawk, George W Bush!
Between 1983 and 1992--the Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle era--the U.S. gave Iraq innumerable weapons, and issued about $2 billion in loans, most of which were used to buy even more weapons; the U.S. never expected full repayment. In addition, U.S. corporations provided Iraq with the means to manufacture chemical and biological weapons. The "point man" the Reagan administration sent to solidify U.S.-Iraqi relations--and who had personal knowledge that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran, and who helped remove the "terrorist" label against Iraq--was . . . Donald Rumsfeld.
WHO GASSED WHO?
MASS GRAVES
UPDATED 201308.30
Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America
Helped Saddam as He Gassed IranThe U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history -- and still gave him a hand.
BY SHANE HARRIS AND MATTHEW M. AID, | AUGUST 26, 2013, Article Source ~ Dahbud's Page Source
The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America's military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned.
In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.
The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq's favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration's long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn't disclose.
U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein's government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture.
"The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn't have to. We already knew," he told Foreign Policy.
According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983. At the time, Iran was publicly alleging that illegal chemical attacks were carried out on its forces, and was building a case to present to the United Nations. But it lacked the evidence implicating Iraq, much of which was contained in top secret reports and memoranda sent to the most senior intelligence officials in the U.S. government. The CIA declined to comment for this story.
In contrast to today's wrenching debate over whether the United States should intervene to stop alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government, the United States applied a cold calculus three decades ago to Hussein's widespread use of chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people. The Reagan administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if they might turn the tide of the war. And even if they were discovered, the CIA wagered that international outrage and condemnation would be muted.
In the documents, the CIA said that Iran might not discover persuasive evidence of the weapons' use -- even though the agency possessed it. Also, the agency noted that the Soviet Union had previously used chemical agents in Afghanistan and suffered few repercussions.
It has been previously reported that the United States provided tactical intelligence to Iraq at the same time that officials suspected Hussein would use chemical weapons. But the CIA documents, which sat almost entirely unnoticed in a trove of declassified material at the National Archives in College Park, Md., combined with exclusive interviews with former intelligence officials, reveal new details about the depth of the United States' knowledge of how and when Iraq employed the deadly agents. They show that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.
Top CIA officials, including the Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, a close friend of President Ronald Reagan, were told about the location of Iraqi chemical weapons assembly plants; that Iraq was desperately trying to make enough mustard agent to keep up with frontline demand from its forces; that Iraq was about to buy equipment from Italy to help speed up production of chemical-packed artillery rounds and bombs; and that Iraq could also use nerve agents on Iranian troops and possibly civilians.
Officials were also warned that Iran might launch retaliatory attacks against U.S. interests in the Middle East, including terrorist strikes, if it believed the United States was complicit in Iraq's chemical warfare campaign.
"As Iraqi attacks continue and intensify the chances increase that Iranian forces will acquire a shell containing mustard agent with Iraqi markings," the CIA reported in a top secret document in November 1983. "Tehran would take such evidence to the U.N. and charge U.S. complicity in violating international law."
At the time, the military attaché's office was following Iraqi preparations for the offensive using satellite reconnaissance imagery, Francona told Foreign Policy. According to a former CIA official, the images showed Iraqi movements of chemical materials to artillery batteries opposite Iranian positions prior to each offensive.
Francona, an experienced Middle East hand and Arabic linguist who served in the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, said he first became aware of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran in 1984, while serving as air attaché in Amman, Jordan. The information he saw clearly showed that the Iraqis had used Tabun nerve agent (also known as "GA") against Iranian forces in southern Iraq.
The declassified CIA documents show that Casey and other top officials were repeatedly informed about Iraq's chemical attacks and its plans for launching more. "If the Iraqis produce or acquire large new supplies of mustard agent, they almost certainly would use it against Iranian troops and towns near the border," the CIA said in a top secret document.
But it was the express policy of Reagan to ensure an Iraqi victory in the war, whatever the cost.
The CIA noted in one document that the use of nerve agent "could have a significant impact on Iran's human wave tactics, forcing Iran to give up that strategy." Those tactics, which involved Iranian forces swarming against conventionally armed Iraqi positions, had proved decisive in some battles. In March 1984, the CIA reported that Iraq had "begun using nerve agents on the Al Basrah front and likely will be able to employ it in militarily significant quantities by late this fall."
The use of chemical weapons in war is banned under the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which states that parties "will exert every effort to induce other States to accede to the" agreement. Iraq never ratified the protocol; the United States did in 1975. The Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the production and use of such arms, wasn't passed until 1997, years after the incidents in question.
The initial wave of Iraqi attacks, in 1983, used mustard agent. While generally not fatal, mustard causes severe blistering of the skin and mucus membranes, which can lead to potentially fatal infections, and can cause blindness and upper respiratory disease, while increasing the risk of cancer. The United States wasn't yet providing battlefield intelligence to Iraq when mustard was used. But it also did nothing to assist Iran in its attempts to bring proof of illegal Iraqi chemical attacks to light. Nor did the administration inform the United Nations. The CIA determined that Iran had the capability to bomb the weapons assembly facilities, if only it could find them. The CIA believed it knew the locations.
Hard evidence of the Iraqi chemical attacks came to light in 1984. But that did little to deter Hussein from using the lethal agents, including in strikes against his own people. For as much as the CIA knew about Hussein's use of chemical weapons, officials resisted providing Iraq with intelligence throughout much of the war. The Defense Department had proposed an intelligence-sharing program with the Iraqis in 1986. But according to Francona, it was nixed because the CIA and the State Department viewed Saddam Hussein as "anathema" and his officials as "thugs."
The situation changed in 1987. CIA reconnaissance satellites picked up clear indications that the Iranians were concentrating large numbers of troops and equipment east of the city of Basrah, according to Francona, who was then serving with the Defense Intelligence Agency. What concerned DIA analysts the most was that the satellite imagery showed that the Iranians had discovered a gaping hole in the Iraqi lines southeast of Basrah. The seam had opened up at the junction between the Iraqi III Corps, deployed east of the city, and the Iraqi VII Corps, which was deployed to the southeast of the city in and around the hotly contested Fao Peninsula.
The satellites detected Iranian engineering and bridging units being secretly moved to deployment areas opposite the gap in the Iraqi lines, indicating that this was going to be where the main force of the annual Iranian spring offensive was going to fall, Francona said.
In late 1987, the DIA analysts in Francona's shop in Washington wrote a Top Secret Codeword report partially entitled "At The Gates of Basrah," warning that the Iranian 1988 spring offensive was going to be bigger than all previous spring offensives, and this offensive stood a very good chance of breaking through the Iraqi lines and capturing Basrah. The report warned that if Basrah fell, the Iraqi military would collapse and Iran would win the war.
President Reagan read the report and, according to Francona, wrote a note in the margin addressed to Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci: "An Iranian victory is unacceptable."
Subsequently, a decision was made at the top level of the U.S. government (almost certainly requiring the approval of the National Security Council and the CIA). The DIA was authorized to give the Iraqi intelligence services as much detailed information as was available about the deployments and movements of all Iranian combat units. That included satellite imagery and perhaps some sanitized electronic intelligence. There was a particular focus on the area east of the city of Basrah where the DIA was convinced the next big Iranian offensive would come. The agency also provided data on the locations of key Iranian logistics facilities, and the strength and capabilities of the Iranian air force and air defense system. Francona described much of the information as "targeting packages" suitable for use by the Iraqi air force to destroy these targets.
The sarin attacks then followed.
The nerve agent causes dizziness, respiratory distress, and muscle convulsions, and can lead to death. CIA analysts could not precisely determine the Iranian casualty figures because they lacked access to Iranian officials and documents. But the agency gauged the number of dead as somewhere between "hundreds" and "thousands" in each of the four cases where chemical weapons were used prior to a military offensive. According to the CIA, two-thirds of all chemical weapons ever used by Iraq during its war with Iran were fired or dropped in the last 18 months of the war.
By 1988, U.S. intelligence was flowing freely to Hussein's military. That March, Iraq launched a nerve gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq.
A month later, the Iraqis used aerial bombs and artillery shells filled with sarin against Iranian troop concentrations on the Fao Peninsula southeast of Basrah, helping the Iraqi forces win a major victory and recapture the entire peninsula. The success of the Fao Peninsula offensive also prevented the Iranians from launching their much-anticipated offensive to capture Basrah. According to Francona, Washington was very pleased with the result because the Iranians never got a chance to launch their offensive.
The level of insight into Iraq's chemical weapons program stands in marked contrast to the flawed assessments, provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies about Iraq's program prior to the United States' invasion in 2003. Back then, American intelligence had better access to the region and could send officials out to assess the damage.
Francona visited the Fao Peninsula shortly after it had been captured by the Iraqis. He found the battlefield littered with hundreds of used injectors once filled with atropine, the drug commonly used to treat sarin's lethal effects. Francona scooped up a few of the injectors and brought them back to Baghdad -- proof that the Iraqis had used sarin on the Fao Peninsula.
In the ensuing months, Francona reported, the Iraqis used sarin in massive quantities three more times in conjunction with massed artillery fire and smoke to disguise the use of nerve agents. Each offensive was hugely successful, in large part because of the increasingly sophisticated use of mass quantities of nerve agents. The last of these attacks, called the Blessed Ramadan Offensive, was launched by the Iraqis in April 1988 and involved the largest use of sarin nerve agent employed by the Iraqis to date. For a quarter-century, no chemical attack came close to the scale of Saddam's unconventional assaults. Until, perhaps, the strikes last week outside of Damascus.
Situation report on the Iran-Iraq war, noting that each side is preparing for chemical weapons attacks (July 29, 1982)
Iran-Iraq Situation Report by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
Top secret memo documenting chemical weapons use by Iraq, and discussing Iran's likely reactions (Nov. 4, 1983)
Iran's Likely Reaction to Iraqi Use of Chemical Weapons by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
Memo to the director of Central Intelligence predicting that Iraq will use nerve agents against Iran (Feb. 24, 1984)
Memo Predicts Use of Nerve Agents by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
CIA predicts "widespread use of mustard agents" and use of nerve agents by late summer (March 13, 1984)
CIA Predicts Widespread Use of Mustard Agents and Use of Nerve Agent by Late Summer by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
CIA confirms Iraq used nerve agent (March 23, 1984)
CIA Confirms Iraq Used Nerve Agent by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
CIA considers the consequences for chemical weapons proliferation now that Iraq has used mustard and nerve agent (Sept. 6, 1984)
Note on Chemical Weapons Proliferation and Posisble Consequences by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
Intelligence assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons program (January 1985)
Intelligence Assessment of Iraqi Chemical Weapons Program by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
William Schneider, Jr.
William Schneider on CNN’s “American Morning” program today highlighted a talk given by former CIA Director James Woolsey’s, about “World War IV” (He counts the Cold War as number III). He says it will be between most of the Middle East and the so-called Western World. Speaking of the undesirable regimes in that area, he said (I paraphrase), “All these countries are going to feel threatened about our formula of democracy creeping in to their area. I say, ‘Good. We want them to feel threatened.’” Schneider then placed Woolsey as being closely allied with Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, and others, and made the connection that many others have, that 9-11 was seized as an opportunity to carry out their pre-existing goals. He challenged Bush’s public assertion that this was not a clash of civilizations, pointing to the enormous global opposition to the U.S. and Britain’s Western aggression.
http://pnac.info/index.php/2003/hints-of-pnac-on-cnn-world-war-iv/
Vin Weber
THE WELLSTONE MEMORIAL - Republicans, no longer able to say anything bad about the late Paul Wellstone, were reduced to criticizing his mass memorial service, in which thousands of people cheered Walter Mondale, booed Trent Lott, and were exhorted by one of the speakers to go out there and win the election.
Question 4 (Listen with Real Audio)
CARL: "What a complete, total, absolute sham."That's former Republican House member Vin Weber giving the GOP take on a service that turned into a political rally. Republicans are so angry about this televised event that they're asking for equal air time to counter the free publicity that it gave to Democrats. What service?
http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/archquiz/2002/021102.html
Paul Wolfowitz
"General Shinseki's estimate is wildly off the mark. I am reasonably certain that [the Iraqi people] will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
R. James Woolsey
THE IRAQ CONNECTION - Blood Bath - http://radiobergen.org/terrorism/iraq.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._James_Woolsey
Robert B. Zoellick
Trade Hypocrisy: The Problem with Robert Zoellick
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/1220hypocrisy.htm
President justifies war to parents of dead by Ron Hutcheson
Bipartisan Women & Baby Killers
It was widely known before the Iraq war over 50% of the Iraqi population were children under the age of 15, & the war began with this act of sheer cowardice by a Republican, War Criminal, Administration, with Democrat Support.
1,455,590 innocent Iraqi’s were murdered in order to eliminate one (1) man by Republicans & Democrats based on ??? an outright lie ??? sent to Mr. Bill on January 26, 1998 by NEOCONS.
Voted for Illegal War
H J RES 114 - YEA & NAY - 10 Oct 2002 - 3:05 PM
To Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against IraqSenate, YEA = 77 / NAY = 23
House of Representatives, YEA = 296 / NAY = 133
[Click to see who voted Yea or Nay]
Legality of the Iraq War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War
ALSO
It is alleged most of the above politicians did not read
the Patriot Act before making it law.
Goodbye Yellowcake Road _Steve Bell_ / Scooter Is Guilty!
Libby Lied,
Troops DiedThe Scooter Libby verdict is inextricably linked to Iraq: his lies were an attempt to cover up the disingenuous case for war.
Sidney Blumenthal, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 6 March 2007 22.00 GMT, Article history
The conviction of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, on criminal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury brings only a partial conclusion to the sordid political tragedy that is the Bush presidency. Yet the judgment on this matter goes to the heart of the administration. The means and the ends of Bush's White House have received a verdict from the bar of justice.
Foreign policy was and is the principal way of consolidating unchecked executive power. In the run-up to the Iraq war, professional standards, even within the military and intelligence agencies, were subordinated to political goals. Only information that fit the preconceived case was permitted. Those who advanced facts or raised skeptical questions about sketchy information were seen as deliberate enemies causing damage from within. From the beginning, the White House indulged in unrestrained attacks on such professionals. Revealing the facts, especially about the politically-driven method of skewing policy, was treated as a crime against the state.
For questioning the undermanned battle plan for the invasion of Iraq, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki was publicly humiliated by neoconservative Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and then cashiered. For disclosing negligence on terrorism before the Setempber 11 attacks, counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was accused by then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice of acting purely out of motives of personal greed to promote his recently published memoir. For exposing the absence of rational policymaking in economics as well as foreign policy, Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill was threatened with an investigation for allegedly abusing classified material. Once he was intimidated into silence, the probe was dropped.
In the aftermath of former ambassador Joseph Wilson's revelation that the most explosive reason given for war against Iraq - that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger to fuel nuclear weapons - had no apparent basis in fact, the Bush White House revved into high gear against the critic. Wilson, however, was even more dangerous than the others because he was a witness to the false rationale for the war.
As Libby's defense counsel insisted, Scooter was merely one of many in the White House assailing Wilson's integrity. Others, including Bush's political strategist Karl Rove, were involved. To a degree, the smear campaign was for a time successful, fueled by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee and elements of the Washington press corps. But the trial exhibits - documents entered by the special prosecutor - knocked down every single one of their falsehoods.
Libby's defenders argued that there was no underlying crime. He was not charged with revealing the identity of Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife, as a covert CIA agent, which was a charge raised by the White House gang in an effort to prove she sent Wilson on his Niger mission - another of the lies spread about him.
But Libby committed his crimes to cover-up the role of his boss and to protect his own position in the attack on Wilson. At base, then, the reasons for war were the scandal.
Libby was no mere factotum. He was a central member of the neoconservative cast of characters, who began as a protégé of Wolfowitz and was elevated to the role of Cheney's indispensable man.
Libby's conviction not only indelibly stains neoconservatism. It is a damning condemnation of the Bush White House belief that the ends justify the means and its aggrandizement of absolute power. Ultimately, this is a verdict that can never be erased from the history of the Bush presidency.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/mar/06/scooterlibby1 ~ Trump Pardons Famous Victim of “Special Counsel Gone Amok”
I would
move heaven and earth to protect my husb...
...errr, President Bush!
As I was saying... Isn't Democracy wonderful? _Martin Rowson_ by BalzBEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: I believe the title was,
"Bin Laden Determined
to Attack Inside the
United States."
and They Knew In Advance of the 9/11 Attack!
via GTA Neocon City