- Note - Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative
reporter. He was also the Operations Officer at Naval Facility Coos Head,
Oregon from 1980 to 1982 and assisted the FBI and NIS in the investigation
as a temporary special agent.
-
- You wouldn't know it from listening to the leading Democratic
candidates for president, but "Weaponsgate" may ultimately bring
about the downfall of the Bush regime and its allies in London, Canberra,
and elsewhere. The neoconservatives may have also finally stirred something
in the Fourth Estate, which has suddenly begun challenging the lying echo
chambers in the White House and Number 10 Downing Street.
-
- The arrogance displayed by the Bush regime, somewhat
surprising since it gained power through a fraudulent election process,
is what may result in its eventual undoing. Bush may or may not ever realize
how he was ill served by the neocon blight that took root within his administration,
particularly within the Department of Defense. But the historians and scholars,
who will look back on what turned the tide for a supposedly "popular"
war president, will point to the self- described "cabal" whose
lies brought about a credibility gap unseen in the United States since
the days of Watergate.
-
- In fact, Bush's "Weaponsgate" will be viewed
as a more serious than Watergate because 1) U.S. and allied military personnel
were killed and injured as a result of the caper; 2) Innocent Iraqi civilians,
including women and children, died in a needless military adventure; and
3) the political effects of the scandal extended far beyond U.S. shores
to the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, and other countries.
-
- Other effects of Weaponsgate are already apparent. Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the majordomo of the neocons within the Pentagon,
cannot find anyone to take the place of outgoing Army Chief of Staff General
Eric Shinseki. General Tommy Franks and Shinseki's vice chief, General
John "Jack" Keane, want no part of the job. After winning a lightning
war against Iraq, Franks suddenly announced his retirement. He and Keane
witnessed how Rumsfeld and his coterie of advisers and consultants, who
never once lifted a weapon in the defense of their country, constantly
ignored and publicly abused Shinseki. Army Secretary and retired General
Tom White resigned after a number of clashes with Rumsfeld and his cabal.
The Commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, Lt. Gen.
James Conway, said he was surprised that he encountered no chemical weapons
in Iraq.
-
- Perhaps Conway was surprised because that is what the
neocons wanted him and his fellow Marines to believe. Conway and his fellow
troops were merely additional victims of "Weaponsgate." Paul
Wolfowitz, a chief neocon cabalist, let the cat out of the bag in Singapore
when he said that everyone could agree on a cause of war being Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction. That would be the common denominator in justifying
an attack, whether or not such weapons could ever be found. Wolfowitz also
stated that Iraq's swimming on a "sea of oil" was the reason
its had to be attacked and not, for example, North Korea.
-
- The fact that weapons of mass destruction are actually
possessed by North Korea, a country lacking any significant natural resources,
is of no concern to the neocons. Oil was and is the bottom line in Iraq.
Sometimes, even the liars trip up and actually tell the truth. But only
in a world where the neocons have enjoyed a stranglehold on the corporate
media can Wolfowitz's supporters claim he was misquoted and the UK's Guardian
be forced to print a clarification, one step short of a retraction. Congenital
liars like Wolfowitz should never be given the benefit of the doubt on
any issue..
-
- Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, who has had his
own problem with recognizing the truth, was obviously concerned how the
history books will treat him. He decided to leave his post mid-term rather
than face the music over his repeated distortions about Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction as a cassus belli.
-
- Other Bush administration officials, political and career,
have also jumped off what appears to be a rapidly sinking ship of state.
They include Richard Haass, who as the director for policy planning, was
number three at the State Department; Christine Todd Whitman, Environmental
Protection Agency administrator; Rand Beers, the senior National Security
Council director for counter-terrorism; and State Department career Foreign
Service officers John H. Brown, John Brady Kiesling, and Mary A. Wright.
-
- Then there was the sudden firing of retired General Jay
Garner as U.S. viceroy of Iraq. He was "outed" as having past
associations with the neocons, especially the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA). But when Garner started to show some independence
in Baghdad, especially with regard to handing over some power to Iraqis,
he was quickly sacked and replaced by Paul Bremer, a former Heritage Foundation
flunky and Kissinger Associates director who was obviously more in tune
with the ideological bent of the neocons. In a Pentagon where the civilian
neocons don't trust the uniformed flag rank officers, Garner likely became
a threat, a potential Trojan horse who had to be replaced by someone whose
loyalty was beyond question.
-
- The most dramatic revolt against George W. Bush and Tony
Blair can be seen from the high-level leaks of classified information from
the top levels of American and British intelligence. Just consider that
the United States has never experienced such repeated leaks of classified
information since the years of the spies in the 1980s, a time when a number
of intelligence employees were caught selling U.S. secrets to the Russians
and Israelis. Yet, the current leaks are not acts of treason, but acts
of unbridled patriotism.
-
- The leaks from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA),
CIA, State Department, and other agencies are testimony to the deep divisions
within the Bush administration over the phony war on Iraq. Intelligence
agencies that are often at odds with one another over policy have united
like never before in blowing the whistle on the neocon agenda. The Bush
administration lied flat out over the Iraqi WMD and Iraq's links to al
Qaeda. It's just that simple. Career intelligence officers, who know the
penalties for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, are
showing more courage than most of the Democrats in Congress who seem more
fearful of the neocons and their supporters than in exposing "Weaponsgate."
-
- The most recent classified disclosure was a DIA report
on chemical weapons that concluded that there was "no reliable information
on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether
Iraq has or will establish its chemical agent production facilities."
-
- On June 8, the Bush administration paraded its usual
shills, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, before the Sunday talking head
shows. Rice and Powell said they based their claims that Iraq had WMD on
an October 1, 2002, national intelligence "white paper." But
that paper stated that Iraq had a capability to produce chemical weapons
within its chemical industry, not that it was producing such weapons. Hans
Blix recently said the so-called intelligence passed to him by the Bush
regime was useless for his own UN weapons inspection team in its search
for WMD in Iraq. It now appears that all the so-called U.S. and British
"intelligence" was nothing more than a collection of neocon propaganda
and disinformation.
-
- Last March, a classified State Department report, prepared
by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and titled "Iraq, the Middle
East and Change: No Dominoes," countered neocon claims that a democracy
in Iraq would foster democracy throughout the Middle East. The report,
dated February 26, 2003, concluded that democracy would be difficult to
achieve in Iraq, electoral democracy in Iraq would be exploited by anti-American
elements, and that the idea that other Middle East nations would be transformed
into democracies is not credible.
-
- So far, all those predictions have come true. Iraq is
currently an American protectorate lacking even fundamental human services,
anti- American Shi'as in the south are increasingly venting their anger
at U.S. occupiers, and far from extending democracy throughout the Middle
East, Mauritania's Arab pro-American government barely survived a military
coup attempt by Islamist and pro-Iraqi elements in the counry's armed forces.
So much for the Middle East "domino theory" concocted by Richard
Perle and his American Enterprise Institute clones and parroted by Bush
in a speech before the right- wing "think tank" the same day
the State Department prepared its opposite report.
-
- In another slap at the neocons, who have supported the
Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi, the CIA leaked a classified report
about their favorite Iraqi. The report, which surfaced in April 2003, concluded
that Chalabi had little popular support among the Iraqi people. No wonder
then that it is Chalabi who appears to be the source for all the bogus
intelligence about Iraqi WMD, Saddam Hussein's links to al Qaeda, Iraqi
purchases of uranium from Niger, and other false flag intelligence. Chalabi,
who is as big a liar as his neocon friends, hoped to lull American intelligence
into believing him over seasoned Middle East intelligence hands. No one
but Rumsfeld; former CIA Director James Woolsey (who has taken hundreds
of thousands of consulting dollars from Chalabi over the years); Wolfowitz;
Doug Feith; America's new monitor for the Middle East peace road map, John
Wolf; and their comrades were taken in by Chalabi, a wanted scofflaw from
justice in Jordan.
-
- One day the names Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Woolsey,
and Chalabi will become as familiar to students of "Weaponsgate"
as the names Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Liddy, Mitchell, and Stans are familiar
to those who study Watergate. And in a very interesting nexus between the
two scandals, Richard Nixon's former counselor John W. Dean has written
that Bush's lying about the reasons for the United States to go to war
is an impeachable offense.
-
- For those who are looking for the straw that broke the
camel's back in "Weaponsgate" they need not look any farther
than Number 10 Downing Street. The troubles that Tony Blair is now experiencing
may be a harbinger for things to come in Washington. Blair is in deep trouble
and he knows it. After returning from the G-8 summit in Evian, France,
Blair was reported by The Obsever to be running around Number 10 in a pathetic
panic. In a moment of temporary insanity, which must have been precious
to people who loathe Blair, the toothy Prime Minister was pacing about
his residence and yelling that people needed to get a grip on what was
happening. One of Blair's aides had to comfort Blair and convince him that
his advisers were on his side.
-
- Blair must have had thoughts of John Major getting ready
stick it to Margaret Thatcher or of Brutus getting ready to plunge a knife
into the back of Julius Caesar. Blair's political opponents within his
own Labor party had seized on his government's use of a "dodgy dossier"
on Iraqi WMD to support the attack on Iraq as an example of Blair's deceit.
The dossier, titled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception
and Intimidation," was based on a 12-year-old PhD thesis culled from
the Internet and the bogus Chalabi documents about Nigerien uranium.
-
- The revolt against Blair should serve as a warning for
Bush. Just consider what is happening in Britain. Blair has been abandoned
by some of his most senior government officials, including former Leader
of the House of Commons Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and former International
Development Minister Clare Short, in addition to a number of lesser Cabinet
officials. Over 70 of Blair's Labor members of the House of Commons are
in open revolt against his duplicity. No wonder Godric Smith, Blair's official
spokesman, announced his resignation the same day that Ari Fleischer was
announcing his departure in Washington.
-
- The wheels are coming off the transatlantic neocon wagon.
New Labor and the "Compassionate Conservative" Republican Party
have been shown to be total ruses. Their war policies and global domination
goals have been thoroughly exposed as neo-fascist manifestations of the
teachings of neocon philosopher Leo Strauss. But Blair faces an even more
serious revolt from his intelligence officials. Blair's use of bogus intelligence
to claim that Britain had only a 45-minute warning prior to an Iraqi chem-bio
attack reportedly resulted in the threatened resignations of the heads
of MI- 6 and MI-5, Sir Richard Dearlove and Eliza Manningham-Buller, respectively,
And there was the leak of a January 31, 2003, Top Secret memo from the
National Security Agency to its Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ) counterpart, which asked for British help in electronically snooping
on members and non-members of the UN Security Council to determine their
stance on America's anti- Iraq UN resolution. That memo was reportedly
leaked with a wink and a nod from the highest levels of British intelligence.
-
- The public row in Britain has forced Alastair Campbell,
Blair's own Karl Rove-like spinmeister, to apologize to the British Security
Services for combining their intelligence material with the bogus material
it used in developing the Iraqi WMD dossier. However, some of Blair's advisers
seem willing to go down with their prime minister faster than the deck
hands on the Titanic. Blair's new House of Commons leader John Reid, a
former member of the British Communist Party, ranted that "rogue elements"
within the intelligence services were leaking classified information to
bring down the government. Reid also stated that for all anyone knew, the
leaks were coming from some "man in a pub." Such are the cynical
words from a government on the brink of collapse.
-
- Blair is not the only "Coalition of the Willing"
partner beginning to get nervous. Australian Prime Minister John Howard
is distancing himself from the forged and phony intelligence on Iraqi WMD,
claiming his intelligence services took at face value what was presented
by the Americans and British. Denmark, which has very little tolerance
for lying prime ministers, is opening up a parliamentary investigation
of why Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen lied about the Iraqi WMD. Bush's
allies in Spain and Italy face similar inquiries.
-
- And what of Bush saying the United States will help its
friends and punish its foes? Well, it seems that Mr. Bush cannot be trusted
to take care of his friends. Iceland was one of the countries that signed
up to Bush's so-called "coalition." How has Bush repaid the North
Atlantic nation? By writing a letter to Iceland's prime minister stating
that the United States will, after 46 years of providing for the NATO nation's
defense, pull its military forces from the soon-to-be defenseless island
state.
-
- The Icelandic prime minister, like his colleagues in
Denmark, Australia, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United
Kingdom, has found out the hard way of what price is paid for aligning
with a dishonest and illegal regime. They will suffer the consequences.
However, the leaders of France, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland,
Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, and the other countries who withstood
constant berating from Washington and the American ambassadors accredited
to them, can take heart in the fact that they were correct all along.
-
- They will reap the electoral benefits of their stance
while they see their pro-American colleagues take the consequential and
inevitable electoral fall.
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