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Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

I.

Democratic Party circles are in raptures over Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama. One can see the heavily-blinkered logic behind their elation; now that our national politics has been reduced to a petty squabble over spoils among shifting factions in the imperial court, a nod from a consummate courtier like Powell is indeed a glittering prize for an ambitious prince.

But out in the real world, where the operations of imperial power have left smoking trails of murder and ruin across the globe, the “endorsement” of a man who played an indispensable role in the slaughter of more than a million innocent people in a war of Hitlerian aggression should be regarded as a thing of shame, and vociferously rejected by anyone with a scintilla of honor or morality.

In fact, it is not too much of a stretch to say that Colin Powell is more responsible for the mass murder spree in Iraq than any other person except George W. Bush, who gave the actual order for the hit. For it was Powell who “made the sale” for the Bush Faction’s deceitful warmongering campaign, with his infamous February 2003 presentation to the UN, laying out the false evidence about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. After that farrago of artfully delivered lies, the American Establishment — urged on by the fawning, bloodthirsty commentariat — lined up solidly behind the war. After all, if Colin Powell — so “reasonable,” so “honorable,” so “honest” and “bipartisan” — stood foursquare behind the Bush case for war, then it must be ironclad.

This was, again, the logic of courtiers, with little connection to reality. Powell’s reputation as a wise, moderate, impartial statesman — the very thing that made him the most effective shill for the war crime in Iraq — was itself almost entirely a fiction. By the time he made his shameless UN appearance, Powell had already spent almost four decades as a bagman — and frontman — for some of the most vicious and ugly elements in American politics and government. From the My Lai massacre to Iran-Contra, from Washington’s long and murderous collusion with Saddam to its long and murderous campaigns to remove him, Powell has been instrumental in perpetrating or covering up atrocities and abominations on a gigantic scale. [For details, see Robert Parry's investigation, "The Truth About Colin Powell."]

Since his departure from the Administration — after staying on long enough to see Bush reconfirmed in power — Powell and his legion of apologists have peddled the myth that he was “stabbed in the back” in his UN presentation: given a false bill of goods with assurances they were true, misled and manipulated by incompetent intelligence analysts and Machiavellian White House insiders, etc., etc. Such stories may help Powell sleep better at night, and they have certainly helped rehabilitate his fictional reputation to the extent that his endorsement is once more considered a worthy prize. But they suffer from one small defect: they are blatantly false.

Powell knew — knew beyond a shadow of a doubt — that he was offering rank lies, cooked intelligence and dubious assertion to the world at his UN presentation before the war. Earlier this year, Jonathan Schwarz provided a devastating demolition of Powell’s UN testimony, showing how it was belied at almost every point by the actual intelligence reports — which Powell had read before the presentation. Powell knew the case for war against Iraq was riddled with holes — holes patched with outright fabrications and the knowing manipulation of data. He presented it anyway; he made the sale. And a million innocent human beings have die for it.

II.

But Powell was selling aggression against Iraq long before his UN fan-dance in February 2003. In fact, he was the mouthpiece that the Administration used in May 2002 — even before the White House began to “roll out the product” of a concentrated warmongering campaign — to signal Washington’s firm intent to invade Iraq even if UN inspectors went into the country and found no weapons of mass destruction. The cat of war crime was out of the bag — and out in open — in the spring of 2002, and it was Powell who untied the strings.

Here’s what I wrote on May 17, 2002, in The Moscow Times:
Quietly, without fanfare, in a bland statement issued by its most “moderate” front man, the Bush Regime crossed another moral Rubicon last week, carrying the once-great republic they have usurped deeper into the blood-soaked mire of international criminality.

The move — committing the United States of America to a policy of Hitlerian military aggression — was little noted at the time. A quick soundbite, maybe, on a couple of the more wonky TV news shows; a brief quote buried somewhere in the thick gray sludge of the “serious” papers. The Regime guaranteed its poison pill would go down sugarcoated by picking Secretary of State Colin Powell as its mouthpiece.

It was a masterstroke of propaganda, really. The former general has long been regarded by the “serious” media on both sides of the Atlantic as a “moderate” maverick on Bush’s hard-right team. Liberal commentators praise Powell as a “restraining influence” on more bellicose insiders like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and a wise, guiding hand for a president unschooled in the subtleties of world diplomacy.

It’s all a sham, of course. Powell is nothing more than a lifelong bagman for powerful interests. His willingness to play ball, to look the other way, has made him a convenient tool for the some of the most violent and undemocratic forces ever to pollute American society.

His first job on the Inside was an attempted whitewash of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam; it didn’t quite work, but he won points for his obfuscatory efforts and went on to a plum job in the crime-ridden Nixon White House. Then came Iran-Contra, the criminal conspiracy of drug-running and terrorism operated directly out of the Reagan-Bush White House. Powell illicitly sent missiles to the terrorist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, then helped with the ensuing cover-up. For this service, he was made head of the entire U.S. military.

He then directed the illegal American aggression against Panama, when President George H.W. Bush killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent civilians in a hissy fit against his old CIA employee Manuel Noriega. Powell, like Bush, had long known Noriega was a murderous drug dealer, but they found him useful, and plied him with plaudits and cash — until Bush needed to prove his tough-guy cojones to Reaganite critics in the Republican Party….

So what better man to announce George W. Bush’s adoption of Adolf Hitler’s moral code? Powell sat down with the media sycophants on ABC’s “This Week” and calmly — moderately — laid out the new doctrine. The subject, of course, was Iraq. The UN was working on a deal that would allow international inspectors back into the country to verify that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction.

These inspections were vital because, as George W. never ceases to remind us, Saddam Hussein is so evil that he “gassed his own people.” …But Junior always omits the inconvenient fact that one year [the attack], Daddy Bush signed an executive order mandating closer U.S. ties to Saddam’s regime. Daddy Bush showered Saddam with endless financial credits and mountains of “dual-use technology” — which the dictator duly used to develop his WMDs — right up until the day before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Needless to say, Powell, as head of Daddy’s military, was complicit in this lunatic operation and raised no demur, “moderate” or otherwise.

Flash forward to the present day. Junior Bush is now in the White House. For months, he has threatened military action against Iraq if Hussein fails to verify the destruction of his WMD capacity. (At the same time, of course, Junior undercuts international treaties that would require monitoring of his own biochemical warfare facilities. There’s a good reason for that: the Regime is now preparing to develop offensive biochemical weapons, in contravention of international and U.S. law, the Village Voice reports.)

The world braces for another conflagration in the Mesopotamian sands. But then Saddam blinks. He starts talking with the UN. He renounces aggression. He tries to make up with Kuwait. Sooner or later, the inspectors will go back in — no cause for war now, right?

Wrong, Powell told the sycophants last week. The “moderate” secretary said that even if UN inspectors go in and verify compliance, the Bush Regime still “reserves its options” to do anything necessary, including military invasion, to effect a “regime change.” Bush himself has already acknowledged that nuclear force is among those “options.”

So there it is. The United States now openly claims the right to launch an all-out attack on any nation in the world whose regime it doesn’t like — even if that nation is not engaged in active military aggression or terrorism — and even if the mere threat of aggression has been defused by UN monitoring.

No provocation necessary. No legality required. Just a thuggish elite raining death on the world, for profit and power, sowing hatred for the once-great nation they have hijacked — and ensuring more death and terror for its people.

This then is the bloodstained hand that Barack Obama has clasped so warmly, so triumphantly, on his march to power. As for Powell, he has proven himself once more the ultimate courtier. In the latest intramural tussle in the imperial court, his keen and practiced eye has picked out the coming man — and so he has jettisoned the faction he has served for so long, and latched on to the winning side yet again. (As he did previously for a while with Bill Clinton.) And why not? Powell has always been a faithful servant of America’s militarist empire — no matter who its temporary manager might be.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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The vote by the House of Representatives to defeat the Wall Street bailout plan is the first act of political courage that the Congress of the United States has mounted in the last seven years. The fact that it was due largely to right-wing Republicans afraid of going down with the sinking ship of the witless leader they have followed blindly throughout his reign is a delicious irony — but the whys and wherefores of the vote are not important. What matters is that one of America’s moribund institutions has flickered to life long enough to derail a disastrous action that would have shoved the nation even deeper into the pit of corruption and ruin where it has been mired for so long.

The New York Times called the House vote "a catastrophic political defeat for President Bush, who had put the full weight of the White House behind the measure." But this is manifestly untrue. As everyone but the nation’s media — and the Democratic Party — knows, George W. Bush has no "political weight" to use, or lose. Yes, he still retains the authoritarian powers that the spineless Democrats have given him with scarcely a whimper of protest (and often with boundless enthusiasm); but as a political force — i.e., someone whose opinions and statements can sway popular opinion — he has been a dead and rotting carcass for a long time. He is the most unpopular president in American history; and I can report from first-hand, eyewitness knowledge that he is thoroughly despised by some of the most rock-ribbed, Bible-believing, flag-waving, down-home, John Wayne-loving Heartland types that you can imagine. Even his own party — a party fashioned in his own image, the Frankensteinian melding of willfully ignorant religious primitivism and rapaciously greedy crony capitalism that he has embodied in his twerpish person — kept him away from their convention this year.

Nothing — absolutely nothing — could be politically safer than opposing George W. Bush. And yet the entire Democratic leadership, Barack Obama included, lined up to support a cockamamie plan proposed by this scorned and shriveled figure, a plan that was transparently nothing more than an audacious raid on the Treasury by Big Money hoods and yet another authoritarian power grab by a gang of murderous, torturing, warmongering toadies. This was the plan and these were the people that the Democrats decided to fight for.

What’s more, the Democrats stood shoulder to shoulder with the president on what is apparently the only issue that can now stir Americans to genuine anger and widespread protest: a direct threat to their bank accounts. Wars of aggression like the Nazis used to wage; elaborate tortures like the KGB used to practice; concentration camps, lawbreaking leaders, diminishment of liberty, the slaughter of a million innocent people in a land destroyed by an illegal and pointless invasion — all of that stuff is pretty much OK, easily swallowable, worth no more than a shrug or perhaps a frowny "tsk tsk" before going on to the sports pages or flipping over to another channel. But put out an open ploy to steal their money and give it to the filthy rich — and baby, it’s pitchfork time! Yet here, as the public face of just such a ploy, is where the Democrats chose to make their stand.

So Monday’s rejection of the bailout plan is not a catastrophic political defeat for George W. Bush; he has no political standing, no political future. But it is a vast and humiliating defeat for the Democratic leadership, across the board, who, as Democrat Lloyd Dogget of Texas said

“never seriously considered any alternative” to the administration’s plan, and had only barely modified what they were given. He criticized the plan for handing over sweeping new powers to an administration that he said was to blame for allowing the crisis to develop in the first place.

Now the Democratic elites have had their collective head handed to them on a platter. It is a dish most richly deserved. And although it is almost possible to believe that they will learn anything from this episode, there is now a chance — a chance — that we can at least have a discussion of alternatives to the Bush scheme.

I still believe it is unlikely any genuinely effective program — one that could manage and mitigate the now-unavoidable effects of the Wall Street/Washington-induced disaster — will ever get enacted. After all, the Democrats are largely owned by the same corrupt and greedy elites now seeking a handout. And it seems reasonable to assume that the Bipartisan Bailout Bunch will eventually find some kind of sugar to tempt away the two dozen votes they need for their next "compromise" on the Bush-Paulson plan.

Then again, who knows? There are obviously a lot of very powerful and privileged people sweating more bullets tonight than they have sweated in many and many a year. They have roused the drowsy beast of popular anger at last, and no one can say what might happen next. Probably nothing — or rather, more of the same, in some form or another. But still, it is good to see the icy beads of panic dotting the brows of elites who have inflicted and/or countenanced so much death, destruction, terror and degradation in the past few years. Today they have suffered a very rare defeat in the relentless, remorseless class war they have been waging against us for decades. And that is something to celebrate — at least for one night.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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I.

Karl Rove has resigned, and for the moment that seems like good news — although given the history and M.O. of the Bush gang, it will probably lead to something worse in one way or another. For example, look how much better things are now that Don Rumsfeld has gone! We’ve progressed from his last-days, panicky memos about curtailing the war (while spinning it as a victory) to a full-bore, wide-open escalation of the conflict which the chief surger, Gen. David Petraeus, tells us could last for 10 more years. Or for another, even more glaring example, look how things improved at the Justice Department after John Ashcroft was replaced by Alberto Gonzales. Colin Powell was a weak and pathetic bagman, whoring his media-inflated prestige to sell a war he didn’t believe in — but aren’t things so much better with Condi Rice in charge at State?

No, if there’s one rule of thumb that consistently applies to the Bush Gang, it’s this: every move they make — whether by choice or forced by events — makes matters worse. So while we all wait for the other shoe to drop on Rove’s resignation — i.e., the real reason behind his sudden bug-out — the Bush Gang will doubtless be putting the boot in somewhere else.

II.

But of course, for all the media oxygen it has consumed — and will continue to consume — Rove’s departure is small potatoes. Despite his vaunted "genius" for political skulduggery, in the end Rove too is a drab factotum, a bagman, a greasy cog in a vast machine that will keep grinding on, killing and corrupting, without him. (Assuming that Rove is actually stepping away from the machine, which is most unlikely.) Stories of far greater significance than the slinking exit of a dirt-smeared toady have appeared in the last two days — items far more revelatory of the hellish world that the porcine minion has helped make on behalf of his masters.

The boiling core of this hell is Iraq. Stories breaking while Rove and Bush were puddling up on the White House lawn revealed a new abyss of criminality in the war crime that the tearful tyrant and his henchman have engendered: the Mafia running guns to Bush’s favored extremist factions in Iraq. As the Guardian reports, Italian anti-Mafia police, tracking down a drug deal, instead came across shipment of 105,000 AK-47s procured by the underworld for their paying client: the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The Ministry said the guns were intended for its security forces — i.e., extremist sectarian militias in government drag. The Pentagon denied knowledge of the Mafia guns, but the middleman for the deal was a Dubai company with "scores of supply and service contracts for the U.S. occupation," the Guardian reported. The company, "citing the names of ‘friends’ in top U.S. military ranks in Iraq," said it had written approval from the Pentagon authorizing it "to do all kinds of business."

On the same day, Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey wrote of how thousands of American weapons ostensibly intended for Iraqi security forces have been flooding the Middle East, often ending up in the hands of extremist groups — or violent loners. As Dickey notes, this influx of deadly weapons on the streets is tied to last week’s revelations about the vast arsenal of weapons that have disappeared from American training programs for Iraqi forces:

At least three U.S. government agencies are now investigating the massive "disappearance" and diversion of weapons Washington intended for Iraqi government forces that instead have spread to militants and organized gangs across the region. The potential size of the traffic is stunning. A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office last month showed that since 2004, some 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols, bought with U.S. money for Iraqi security forces, have gone missing.

And looming behind all of these deals and disappearances involving small arms is a far more deadly and far-reaching dereliction of duty: the scarcely-reported failure of the U.S. military to secure the vast dumps of weapons and explosives left behind by Saddam’s army in 2003. As David Gardner reminds us in the Financial Times:

This discovery [the missing 190,000 weapons] might be considered the mother of all known unknowns, were it not that in March this year the GAO published a drily damning report on the coalition’s failure to secure scores upon scores of arms dumps abandoned by the Iraqi army after the 2003 invasion — and that by October last year it had still failed to secure this giant toolbox that keeps the daily slaughter going in Iraq.

All of this sounds like rank incompetence: "Whoa, we didn’t even notice that Interior Ministry deal with the Mob! Goodness me, we just plumb forgot to track those 190,000 AK-47s! Golly gee, we were just too busy to get around to those arms dumps. Been meaning to do it forever, but something always came up."

But it isn’t incompetence. Certainly, the decision not to find and secure the weapons dumps was a matter of deliberate policy. The decision not to track the vast store of American arms being given to Iraqi security forces was also deliberate policy — perhaps devised by the general in charge of arming and training Iraqi security forces at the time: one David Petraeus. And the arms trafficking with the underworld by factions in the Bush-installed Iraqi government is almost certainly deliberate policy as well, either with the direct connivance of Washington, or else with the usual wink and a nod and a looking-away.

The Mafia arms deal is one of those glimpses we get from time to time into how the world really works, in the finely meshed intertwining between the underworld and the "upperworld" — "respectable" Establishment society, "legitimate" governments led by "honorable" officials. The BCCI affair in the 1980s was another such glimpse. BCCI was an international bank that fronted for what the U.S. Senate later called "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history." Backed by Establishment grandees and national governments around the world, BCCI "laundered money on a global scale, intimidated witnesses and law officers, engaged in extortion and blackmail. It supplied the financing for illegal arms trafficking and global terrorism. It financed and facilitated income tax evasion, smuggling and prostitution," as journalist Christopher Bryon, who first exposed the operation, put it.

The George Bushes, father and son, were hip deep in BCCI sleaze. Bush I used the bank to secretly fund Saddam Hussein’s war machine — then intervened to quash federal investigations of the scam. George II was bailed out of one of his many business failures with a $25 million honeypot from a BCCI bank, brokered by the mysterious money-man Jackson Stephens, who in the 1992 presidential election had the signal distinction of being a top contributor to both Bush I and Bill Clinton. Bill has since been "adopted" by the elder George as an honorary son. And why not? When he took office, Clinton killed off the ongoing probes into his predecessor’s entanglements with BCCI, and even killed a lot of Iraqis over an almost certainly bogus attempt on his future "dad’s" life. (For more on the cozy Bush-Clinton connection, see A Tale of Two Houses. For more on the Bushes and BCCI, see Scar Tissue.)

The chaotic nexus where organized crime, terrorism, drug-running, covert ops and government policy churn and thrash together is where the business of the world gets done. It fuels the machine serviced by tools like Rove, the machine that has brought so much death and anguish to Iraq — and is slowly devouring the entrails of America as well.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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An American strike on Iran is coming closer. It probably won’t take place in the next few weeks, because Bush is on vacation and will not want to be disturbed. And it probably won’t take the form that many have expected (including this writer). But Bush himself has raised the ante in recent days, warning of vague punishments for alleged Iranian misdeeds — and unleashing an outright lie that Iran has openly "proclaimed its desire for nuclear weapons," when of course the very opposite is true. And now McClatchy Newspapers brings fresh confirmation that the decider behind the Decider — Dick Cheney — is calling for airstrikes against Iran. Indeed, it seems Cheney has already chosen the casus belli for such an attack — a provocation that we will doubtless see occurring any day now.

For some time, it has been thought — with good reason — that the coming Bush-Cheney attack on Iran would be aimed at the country’s rudimentary nuclear power facilities. And it’s true the old "mushroom cloud in American cities" ploy continues to be the Administration’s best propaganda gambit in demonizing Iran and instilling fear of this demon in the public, as Bush demonstrated with his Goebbelsian lie this week. But even a ruthless, authoritarian "Unitary Executive" regime faces some political restraints on its brutal ambitions, as we noted here yesterday. It cannot act on its most radical plans until the PR ground has been properly prepared. (Even a supreme despot like Hitler was forced by public opposition to cancel his "Action T4" program of murdering the "inferior stock" of mentally and physically disabled people in Germany.) And the fact remains that it would be difficult to move even the docile American public to any great support for a sudden, massive assault on Iran’s nuclear sites, when even the White House has to admit that Iran does not have nuclear weapons yet.

Recall that in the mendacious warmongering for the Iraq invasion, Bush and Cheney repeatedly insisted that Saddam Hussein did possess a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, as Cheney himself declared outright on national television just before the attack: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." [Which would have been quite a feat in itself, seeing as how Saddam never had any nuclear weapons to "reconstitute."] To sell the war to the American people, they had to sell the idea of Iraq actually possessing WMD. They have not been able to do that with Iran.

At least not yet. But Bush’s lie about Iran’s "open desire" for nuclear weapons is probably the beginning of a broader push to establish a fantasy scenario of a nuclear-armed Iran. If he is allowed to get away with an utterly false and easily disproven assertion about Tehran’s open desire to build a bomb — and he has gotten away with it, completely, as Arthur Sibler notes — then what’s to stop him from moving on to the next level, and declaring that Iran now possesses nuclear weapons? The Administration could simply assert that its secret intelligence sources have confirmed the existence of an Iranian nuke, despite the insistence of the International Atomic Energy Agency that it is not so.

There is ample precedent for this — in the very interview with Cheney cited above. Speaking to the ever-obliging Tim Russert in March 2003, Cheney flatly rejected the IAEA’s declaration that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program at the time of the invasion. Here’s the exchange:

Russert: And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said he does not have a nuclear program, we disagree?

Cheney: I disagree, yes. And you’ll find the CIA, for example, and other key parts of our intelligence community disagree. [CF: Those "key parts" included the "Office of Special Plans" set up by Cheney to cherry-pick intelligence data and stovepipe the admitted lies of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress straight into the White House.]…. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq’s concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don’t have any reason to believe they’re any more valid this time than they’ve been in the past.

The Bush Regime already has a long track record of attacking and undermining the IAEA, and any other international body that hampers its agenda. There is absolutely nothing to prevent Cheney sidling up to his pal Timmy once again and declaring that "we disagree" with the IAEA’s position on Iran’s nuclear program: "they’ve got a bomb, we know it, and we will not wait on events when the American people are in danger."

So in the long run, for the kind of "regime change" operation that the Bush Administration and its bloodthirsty sycophant on the Right (and in the Center) have in mind, the nuclear fantasy is still the trump card. But as we know, the Bushists have opened a second propaganda front: the repeated, unproven charges that the Iranian government is directly involved in supplying deadly weapons and training fighters to kill Americans in Iraq. The New York Times’ Michael Gordon — like Russert, one of the most reliable conduits of Bush Regime spin in the "respectable" corporate media — was hammering away at this theme again just a few days ago, stressing the Pentagon spin that the more sophisticated bombs shredding Americans in Iraq could only have come from Iran — when factories to produce such weapons have been found in Iraq, where native insurgents were making them, as Atrios pointed out — while further noting that the same Bushists who once claimed that Iraqis were capable of making the most advanced weapons on earth now say the grubby Arabs are too primitive to put together a roadside bomb without help from the wily Persians.

The latest Gordon servicing of his Pentagon spinners is one more fusilade in the Bushists’ relentless drang nach Osten. In addition to advancing the demonization required for the larger strategy of violent regime change in Iran, it also aids what is now emerging as an important tactical move: a smaller-scale strike "at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps," McClatchy reports. This is what Cheney is now calling for, putting red, bloody meat on the bones of Bush’s vaguely menacing statements. From McClatchy:

"President Bush charged Thursday that Iran continues to arm and train insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and he threatened action if that continues. At a news conference Thursday, Bush said Iran had been warned of unspecified consequences if it continued its alleged support for anti-American forces in Iraq. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had conveyed the warning in meetings with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad, the president said. Bush wasn’t specific, and a State Department official refused to elaborate on the warning.

"Behind the scenes, however, the president’s top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran’s support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy."

And as we noted above, Cheney is already drawing up plausible scenarios to "justify" this act of aggression:

"Cheney, who’s long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran’s complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said."

I think we can expect to see the "capture" of a truckload of people identified as fighters, carrying weapons — perhaps some of those 190,000 weapons conveniently misplaced by the Pentagon in Iraq —coming over from Iran very soon. (Can you say "Gleiwitz radio station"?) Or some similar incident to "confirm" direct Quds involvement in killing American soldiers.

A smaller-scale "punitive" raid on Quds bases in Iran would almost certainly be acceptable to the American public. After all, the United States has launched such raids repeatedly over the years, all over the world, under Democrats and Republicans, with widespread public support. From Reagan’s bold strike on Moamar Gadafy’s two-year-old daughter to Bill Clinton’s brave destruction of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (not to mention his continual bombardment of Iraq throughout his term) to Bush’s noble bombing of refugees in Somalia this year, the American people have always stood ready to applaud (or ignore) quick punches at countries with which they are not at war. (We’re leaving out here the larger-scale "incursions" and "pre-dawn vertical insertions" like Panama, Somalia (in the "Black Hawk Down" days), Grenada, Haiti, etc. — all of which were pretty acceptable too, come to think of it. As was the aggression in Iraq, of course, in its early days.)

Naturally, such a strike would provoke a reaction from Iran — or rather, it would allow the Administration to frame any untoward incident or attack on American positions anywhere in the world as a "reaction from Iran." (It’s not likely that the indeed wily Persians would launch some crude, obvious counterstroke to such a raid, thus falling into the Administration’s trap.) The initial, small-scale raid would then itself become a justification for further action against Iran: "Did you see that bombing in the Green Zone yesterday? Of course it was the Iranians! It was obviously a revenge attack for the Quds raid. Now we have to retaliate for the tragic loss of our personnel in this cowardly terrorist action." And so on and so on, ratcheting up the level of military response — and public support — with each new iteration of the cycle.

Thus a small-scale raid would actually be a masterstroke in the Administration’s psy-ops scheme to build support for a larger action to destroy the Iranian regime. The McClatchy story, like the recent FISA fiasco, is another reminder that the Bush Administration has not lost its ability to advance its agenda and steer the country into more and more sinister actions, even in the face of poor poll ratings and innumerable scandals. As long as they control the levers of power, without any genuine institutional opposition, they will continue to manipulate events to their liking, relying on their tried-and-tested fearmongering techniques (with the mighty assistance of the corporate media) to drag the American people along with them — either as open supporters or as dazed and confused bystanders, vaguely dissatisfied but unwilling to rise up and cast down the criminals and their accomplices.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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Just in case you haven’t noticed before, the United States of America has become a presidential tyranny. We’ve been clanging this bell here (and elsewhere) since late September 2001, and have seen it confirmed over and over through the years — with torture edicts, domestic spying, rendition, secret prisons, indefinite detention of uncharged, untried captives, etc. — and most recently and most baldly with the “Military Commissions Act,” which enshrined the principle of arbitrary presidential power in law and gutted the ancient privilege of habeas corpus. This was rubberstamped by the Republican-led Congress last year — and is still standing strong under the Democratic-led Congress.

But now the Bush Regime has taken an even more brazen step into the light with its frankly fascist doctrine of the “Unitary Executive.” As the Washington Post reports, the Administration’s legal perverts are getting ready to claim — openly, officially — that the president’s arbitrary will transcends every law in the land, every section of the Constitution. All he need do is arbitrarily assert “executive privilege” over any operation of government whatsoever to remove it beyond the reach of any legal action, Congressional inquiry — or criminal investigation. As Atrios notes, Bush has already arrogated to himself the “right” to interpret the law, through the “signing statements” he attaches to the bills he signs, declaring that he will obey only those strictures of the law that he sees fit. Now, the Administration is declaring that Bush need not be bound even by those laws he does deign to acknowledge. As the Post reports:

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege…

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, “whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.” But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege…

Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration’s stance “astonishing.”

“That’s a breathtakingly broad view of the president’s role in this system of separation of powers,” Rozell said. “What this statement is saying is the president’s claim of executive privilege trumps all.”

This new authoritarian claim grows out of the Congressional investigation of the illegal politicization of the Justice Department — and the many instances of perjury that the investigation has produced, as Bush’s legal perverts twisted, squirmed and lied outright under oath. Bush is frantically seeking to keep his top perverts — such as Harriet Miers, the loyal factotum who wiped the dribble from Junior’s jim-jams and handed him the state papers he didn’t read (i.e., “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.,” etc.) — from testifying before Congress about the White House machinations to fire U.S. attorneys for failing to file bogus cases against targeted enemies of the Leader. The slimy trail of this scheme leads straight to Bush’s main minder, Karl Rove. Bush has already demonstrated that he is prepared to sacrifice anything — including the nation’s chief undercover operation against the spread of nuclear weapons — to shield his porcine puppeteer. So the new assertion of authoritarian power — yet another slashing knife attack on the dying body of the Constitutional Republic — is small potatoes for this thug.

Yet the assertion, when it comes, will be an important step forward in the revolutionary remaking of the American state that the Bush Regime launched with its judicial coup in 2000. For note well, this “breathtaking” assertion — that Bush can stop any investigation of government wrongdoing simply by claiming “executive privilege” — is not based on Bush’s role as “commander-in-chief in wartime,” which has been the perverted basis of previous edicts licensing torture, rendition, indefinite detention, unrestricted domestic eavesdropping and the whole sinister schmeer of Bush’s Terror War policies. Even this false “justification” — “stern but temporary measures taken as a military necessity while the nation is in peril” — is missing in the new assertion. The new power is seen as a permanent right of the head of the executive branch: an entirely new structural role for the president, who clearly stands above legislative oversight, judicial restraint and the laws of the land.

There is nothing “temporary” about this claim. (Of course, in practice, there is nothing “temporary” about Bush’s authoritarian “Commander” powers either, since he claims the “war” which justifies them will go on for decades, perhaps generations; but theoretically at least, these “wartime” powers have a time limit.) Bush is saying that any action taken by the federal government can be cloaked by “executive privilege” as a matter of course, not as a wartime exigency. The Regime has once again — and very deliberately — provoked a constitutional crisis of the highest order. They are very clear about what they are doing. They are overthrowing the laws, traditions and constitutional structures that have maintained the American republic — imperfectly but steadily — for more than 200 years. (As John Gray notes in his new book, Black Mass, the basic structure of the American system has undergone almost no fundamental change since the adoption of the Constitution, unlike the systems of almost every other state around the globe, including such bastions of tradition like the UK; indeed, says Gray, with the possible exception of Switzerland, the United States could claim to be the oldest government in the world.)

The Bush-Cheney regime wants to change all that — and has been changing it, from the very beginning. They believe that the time for democracy and the rule of law has passed. Constitutional government and legal accountability are “quaint notions” that can no longer be indulged by a massive state with “responsibilities” for managing the affairs of the entire world — and a myriad of “enemies” challenging this benign domination. Only a Leader-state — run by a small, secretive cadre of dedicated elites able to operate beyond any restraints of law or outside supervision or public consent — is supple enough to deal with the duties and challenges faced by the “world’s only hyperpower.” This is their vision of government. It is a radical transformation, in both substance and structure, from what we have known before. It is authoritarian. It is arbitrary. It is ruthless, corrupt, brutal and vile, but because it is clothed in modern garb, in business suits, PR-packaged, slick and airbrushed, we don’t see it for the barbaric throwback that it is. As I wrote in November 2001:

It won’t come with jackboots and book burnings, with mass rallies and fevered harangues. It won’t come with “black helicopters” or tanks on the street. It won’t come like a storm — but like a break in the weather, that sudden change of season you might feel when the wind shifts on an October evening: everything is the same, but everything has changed. Something has gone, departed from the world, and a new reality has taken its place.

To be sure, there will be factional conflicts among this elite, and a degree of free debate will be permitted, within limits; but no one outside the privileged circle will be allowed to govern or influence state policy. Dissidents will be marginalized — usually by “the people” themselves. Deprived of historical knowledge by an impoverished educational system designed to produce complacent consumers, not thoughtful citizens, and left ignorant of current events by a media devoted solely to profit, many will internalize the force-fed values of the ruling elite, and act accordingly. There will be little need for overt methods of control.

The rulers will often act in secret; for reasons of “national security,” the people will not be permitted to know what goes on in their name. Actions once unthinkable will be accepted as routine: government by executive fiat, the murder of “enemies” selected by the leader, undeclared war, torture, mass detentions without charge, the looting of the national treasury, the creation of huge new “security structures” targeted at the populace. In time, all this will come to seem “normal,” as the chill of autumn feels normal when summer is gone.

We are already living in that new reality. And the Democratic-led Congress has shown no sign of recognizing the seriousness of the situation. They refuse to assert the powers given to them by the Constitution for redress of executive tyranny. Not only have they taken impeachment “off the table” (while keeping war — even nuclear war — against Iran “on the table”), but even in the impasse over the subpoenas for Bush’s legal perverts, they are refusing to use the legal powers they possess to compel obedience to the law. As the Post notes:

Under long-established procedures and laws, the House and Senate can each pursue two kinds of criminal contempt proceedings, and the Senate also has a civil contempt option. The first, called statutory contempt, has been the avenue most frequently pursued in modern times, and is the one that requires a referral to the U.S. attorney in the District.

Both chambers also have an “inherent contempt” power, allowing either body to hold its own trials and even jail those found in defiance of Congress. Although widely used during the 19th century, the power has not been invoked since 1934 and Democratic lawmakers have not displayed an appetite for reviving the practice.

No, these Democrats definitely have no appetite for concrete action — as opposed to pointless stunts like their all-nighter over their “anti-war” measure that would actually guarantee the long-term presence of a substantial American force in Iraq — which was of course one of the chief aims of Bush’s invasion in the first place. (Sean O’Neill makes quick work of this ludicrous carnival here.) Their most likely response to this latest authoritarian power grab will be weeks of hand-wringing fulmination followed by months, if not years, of court action, as the matter winds its way slowly to the waiting arms of a Supreme Court dominated by Bushist apparatchiks. Meanwhile, the authoritarian regime will roll on, growing ever more entrenched, more emboldened and more radical. By the time this particular manifestation of the Bush tyranny is adjudicated, we will almost certainly be hip-deep in war with Iran — or under martial law following another terrorist attack (of whatever provenance) — or perhaps both.

And if you think this prognostication is too grim, too unlikely, or too exaggerated, then you have been sleepwalking through the last six years.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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As you may know — unless you rely on the corporate media for your news, of course — yesterday the U.S. Senate unanimously declared that Iran was committing acts of war against the United States: a 97-0 vote to give George W. Bush a clear and unmistakable casus belli for attacking Iran whenever Dick Cheney tells him to.

The bipartisan Senate resolution — the brainchild (or rather the bilechild) of Fightin’ Joe Lieberman — affirmed as official fact all of the specious, unproven, ever-changing allegations of direct Iranian involvement in attacks on the American forces now occupying Iraq. The Senators appear to have relied heavily on the recent New York Times story by Michael Gordon that stovepiped unchallenged Pentagon spin directly onto the paper’s front page. As Firedoglake points out, John McCain cited the heavily criticized story on the Senate floor as he cast his vote.

It goes without saying that all of this is a nightmarish replay of the run-up to the war of aggression against Iraq: The NYT funneling false flag stories from Bush insiders. Warmongers citing the NYT stories as "proof" justifying any and all action to "defend the Homeland." Credulous and craven Democratic politicians swallowing the Bush line hook and sinker.

To be sure, stout-hearted Dem tribunes like Dick Durbin insisted that their support for declaring that Iran is "committing acts of war" against the United States should not be taken as an "authorization of military action." This is shaky-knees mendacity at its finest. Having officially affirmed that Iran is waging war on American forces, how, pray tell, can you then deny the president when he asks (if he asks) for authorization to "defend our troops"? Answer: you can’t. And you know it.

This vote is the clearest signal yet that there will be no real opposition to a Bush Administration attack on Iran. This is yet another blank check from these slavish, ignorant goons; Bush can cash it anytime. This is, in fact, the post-surge "Plan B" that’s been mooted lately in the Beltway. As you recall, there was much throwing about of brains on the subject of reviving the "Iraq Study Group" plan when the "surge" (or to call it by its right name, the "punitive escalation") inevitably fails. Bush put the kibosh on that this week ("Him not gonna do nothin’ that Daddy’s friends tell him to do! Him a big boy, him the decider!"), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a fall-back position — or rather, a spring-forward position: an attack on Iran, to rally the nation behind the "war leader" and reshuffle the deck in Iraq.

Of course, the United States is already at war with Iran. We are directing covert ops and terrorist attacks inside Iran, with the help of groups that our own government has declared terrorist renegades. We are kidnapping Iranian officials in Iraq and holding them hostage. We have a bristling naval armada on Iran’s doorstep, put there for the express purpose of threatening Tehran with military action. The U.S. Congress has overwhelmingly passed measures calling for the overthrow of the Iranian government. And now the U.S. Senate has unanimously declared that Iran is waging war on America, and has given official notice that this will not be tolerated. It is only a very small step to move from this war in all but name to the full monty of an overt military assault.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: there is madness at work here. There is no other word for it. As I noted a few years ago:

Homo sapiens is the only species that dreams of its own total demise. Our brief history of conscious thought is replete with vivid scenarios of the end of life on earth….Religion has produced most of these — giddy, voluptuous nightmares of universal extinction, usually by fire, at divine order. A favored remnant is always saved in such tales, of course, but only after being transformed into some different, higher order of being. The gross human body — that bleeding, fouling, endlessly replicating sack of earth — is gleefully consigned to eternal oblivion.

It seems that some ineradicable nihilism pervades us, like a virus, now dormant, now flaring: something in us that wants to die, to be done with the long, overhanging doom of mortality — and to take the world with us. Our grandiose visions of the future seem to hide, at their core, a secret, desperate anxiety about the profound meaninglessness of existence — an anxiety that often disguises itself in elaborate fantasies of the afterlife, in dreams of "dominance" for one’s "own kind" (nation, tribe, faith, race, ideology, etc.), or in the eroticizing of death, war and destruction.

Instincts for preservation, sentiments of affection, the drive for pleasure — from the most basic bodily urges to the most sublime creations and apprehensions of the intellect — act as counterweights to this dark virus, of course. They provide for most of us, most of the time, enough fragments of meaning — or at least sufficient distraction — to get on with things, without too much resort to world-engulfing visions or the extremes of nihilistic anxiety.

On the individual level, the calibration of these competing impulses can be intricate, subtle, ever-shifting, because the individual mind is so complex and all-encompassing, yet also so enclosed, so unlockably private as well: an infinitely supple tool for managing the conflicts and contradictions of reality. But on the broader level — species, nation, group — human consciousness is, of necessity, a far more blunt and brutal instrument.

There, our brain-fevers and anxieties rage more virulently, lacking the counterweights of individual feeling and the quick, intimate responsiveness of the private mind. In the group-mind, the fantasies that root in the muddy fear of meaninglessness can emerge full-blown. Thought and discourse are reduced to broad strokes, slogans, codes and incantations, with little correspondence to reality. Awareness of this tendency can mitigate some of its effects; but the group-mind’s fundamental falsity and irreality almost invariably infects the thoughts and actions of group leaders — and eventually many of the group members as well.

Thus we can sometimes say, not entirely metaphorically, that nations "go mad," hurtling themselves toward ruin, embracing self-destruction, lusting for violence and death, sick with nihilism — although this sickness is always painted in the colors of patriotic fervor or religious zeal, or both…

Now draw these dangerous streams together, and you have a portrait of the blunt and brutal group-mind at work in the leadership of the world’s most powerful nation. The folly, fantasy and death-fetish of the Bush Regime — long evident to anyone who cared to see — were finally "revealed" in the mainstream media recently by the quasi-official Establishment oracle, Bob Woodward. His latest insider portrait, Plan of Attack, offers — in the usual, easily-gummed pabulum form — a few tastes of the bitter truth behind the Regime’s mad, ruinous war crime in Iraq.

The corrosive nihilism at the heart of the enterprise ate through the gaudily-painted surface most tellingly in a single anecdote. Woodward asks George W. Bush how he thinks history will regard his adventure in Iraq. Bush, gazing out the window, shrugs and waves the question away. "History, we don’t know," he says. "We’ll all be dead." No fine, faith-filled talk here about God and Jesus and the immortal soul responsible for its actions throughout all eternity — the kind of zealous patter Bush favors in public statements. This was just the cold, rotten, meaningless core of his grand vision: "We’ll all be dead." So who cares? Après moi, le deluge.

Who would have thought the floodwaters of this death vision would have risen so high again so soon? Yet here they are again, beating against the gates.

UPDATE: Jonathan Schwarz points out that all of the Senate’s Democratic candidates for president voted for Lieberman’s Iran War amendment: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and Joe Biden. Just in case you were expecting a saner foreign policy after the 2008 election.

UPDATE II: Meanwhile, George Milhouse Bush wants to make one thing perfectly clear: even in the highly unlikely (if not totally impossible) event that the Senate grows a rudimentary spine and tries to place the slightest obstacle in the way of a military attack on Iran, the Commander Guy will peremptorily veto it and instigate the mass murder anyway.

Spencer Ackerman at TPM Cafe found this gem of arrogant defiance in "a little-noticed letter from the White House to Carl Levin (D-MI), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee." The main subject of the letter was a similar vow to veto any restrictions on Bush’s ability to continue his war crime in Iraq. The passage concerning Iran might seem redundant now, after the Senate’s vote on Lieberman’s "Persia delenda est!" measure, which puts a gun in Bush’s hand and screams for him to pull the trigger, but the President is obviously taking no chances.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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As Glenn Greenwald, among others, has pointed out, the new Bushist line is that everyone killed by American forces in Iraq is "al Qaeda" — a transparent falsehood belied by the Pentagon’s own assessments but now mindlessly adopted by almost every corporate media venue, with the honorable exception (as always) of McClatchy Newspapers. Of course, the Invader-in-Chief and his multitude of bootlickers in traditional media and the blogosphere have always vastly inflated the numbers and importance of those elements in Iraq that are associated with al Qaeda in some way, however tenuous. Indeed, we know, again from the Pentagon itself, that the exaggeration of al Qaeda’s influence in Iraq has been part of a deliberate, well-funded "psy-ops" scheme. (See "Hubub in Hibhib: The Timely Death of al-Zarqawi.") But now they have decided to dispense with the subtleties of psy-ops and simply repeat "al Qaeda" with every breath, in an effort to demonize all resistance (both in Iraq and at home, both violent and non-violent) to Bush’s murderous boondoggle.

But while this deceit is peddled for domestic consumption — avidly gobbled up and regurgitated by the bootlickers, and spreading the intended misinformation among casual consumers of the news (i.e., the vast majority of Americans) — Iraqis have to deal with the brutal reality of the war. And they know that everyone killed there by the invading forces is not "al Qaeda." They know that many Iraqis being killed by the Anglo-American coalition are innocent civilians. And they are increasingly embittered at the American slander of their dead.

This slander is being applied even to those Iraqis who have taken up arms against the very "al Qaeda" terrorists that the American military is purportedly protecting them from, Iraqis who are cooperating with the American-backed government and its American-trained military and security forces. The BBC reports about an horrific massacre of Iraqi civilians last week — an air attack with missiles and gunships that literally ripped to shreds the bodies of village guards who had just returned from a raid with Iraqi government forces on a suspected terrorist hideout. These men were then accused of being "al Qaeda gunmen" in Pentagon press releases trumpeting this magnificent feat of arms — accusations then duly (not to mention dully) parroted in the press.

But the people in the village of al-Khalis tell a different story. (And for all the bootlickers out there who have fully entered into the spirit of the sectarian bloodbath unleashed by Bush and resolutely reject any contradiction of Pentagon propaganda by Sunni victims, al-Khalis is a largely Shiite village, on the side of the American-backed Iraqi government.) The BBC, which acknowledges that it too simply repeated the Pentagon line in its first reports on the "triumph," has gone back to the village to dig up the truth — and to do what the Bush Regime never does, and what the American press does only with the most extreme rarity: give names to the "collateral damage" of Bush’s aggression.

Village Disputes Story of Deadly Attack (BBC):

Excerpts: A group of villagers in Iraq is bitterly disputing the US account of a deadly air attack on 22 June, in the latest example of the confusion surrounding the reporting of combat incidents there.

On 22 June the US military announced that its attack helicopters, armed with missiles, engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen who had been trying to infiltrate the village of al-Khalis, north of Baquba, where operation "Arrowhead Ripper" had been under way for the previous three days. The item was duly carried by international news agencies and received widespread coverage, including on the BBC News website.

But villagers in largely-Shia al-Khalis say that those who died had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. They say they were local village guards trying to protect the township from exactly the kind of attack by insurgents the US military says it foiled…

They say that of 16 guards, 11 were killed and five others injured — two of them seriously — when US helicopters fired rockets at them and then strafed them with heavy machinegun fire. Minutes before the attack, they had been co-operating with an Iraqi police unit raiding a suspected insurgent hideout, the villagers said.

They added that the guards, lightly armed with the AK47 assault rifles that are a feature of practically every home in Iraq, were essentially a local neighbourhood watch paid by the village to monitor the dangerous insurgent-ridden area to the immediate south-west at Arab Shawkeh and Hibhib, where the al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed a year ago.

The BBC then quotes the American command’s version of the incident:

"Coalition Forces attack helicopters engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen southwest of Khalis, Friday. Iraqi police were conducting security operations in and around the village when Coalition attack helicopters from the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade and ground forces from 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, observed more than 15 armed men attempting to circumvent the IPs and infiltrate the village. The attack helicopters, armed with missiles, engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen and destroyed the vehicle they were using."

This, say the villagers of al-Khalis, is simply a lie. Here is the account they gave to the BBC when it followed up on the story:

At around 2am on Friday morning, the village guards were at their usual base in an unfinished building on the edge of the Hayy al-Junoud quarter about 1.2 miles south-west of al-Khalis village centre. They were surprised when a convoy of Iraqi police suddenly turned up, headed by the commander of the Khalis emergency squad, Col Hussein Kadhim.

The police told them they were about to raid a suspect house in nearby al-Akrad Street and asked for the village mukhtar (headman) to accompany them. The Mukhtar of Hayy al-Junoud, Jassem Khalil, and his brothers Abbas and Ali, went with the police. Some of the other guards, about half altogether, also offered to go along. The raid turned out to be a false alarm — there was nothing suspicious at the house in question.

But as the police and guards began to return, the police received an urgent radio message from the Joint Operations Centre saying that US helicopters were about to raid the area. The police disappeared immediately. But before the guards could even get to their own car, they were hit by a rocket strike by American helicopters which suddenly appeared overhead. So too were the remainder of the guards, still at their base in the unfinished building nearby.

The rocket attacks were followed by a prolonged period of strafing by heavy machinegun fire from the helicopters. "It was like a battlefront, but with the fire going only in one direction," said a local witness. "There was no return fire".

…When frightened villagers ventured out at first light, they found 11 of the village guards dead, some of their bodies cut into small pieces by the munitions used against them. All but two of those killed were Shia and they have been buried at Najaf. The other two who were from the local minority Sunni community.

So here we have a local guard, an admirable example of Shia-Sunni cooperation, working with the Iraqi government against suspected insurgents, ground into mulch by American bullets then denounced by American brass as killers and terrorists. Thus yet another village has been turned against the blind and brutal occupation; thus many more seeds of revenge and bitterness have been planted.

Is this part of the much-ballyhooed "counterinsurgency doctrine" crafted by the sainted General Petraeus to win hearts and minds, to teach peace to the conquered? Or just the inevitable product of a war of aggression, an action conceived in deceit and callous inhumanity?

The BBC goes on to ask a few more pertinent questions:

If the villagers’ account is true, the incident would raise many questions, including: On what basis did the US helicopters launch their attack that night? How many other coalition reports of successes against "al-Qaeda fighters" are based on similar mistakes, especially when powerful remote weaponry is used?

The incident also highlights the problems the news media face in verifying such combat incidents in remote areas where communications are disrupted, where direct independent access is impossible because of the many lethal dangers they would face, and where only the official military version of events is available.

Ah yes, it’s the best of all possible worlds for dirty warriors like George Bush and Dick Cheney: a bloodbath "where only the official military version of events is available." But as we all know, "murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ." And the names of the slaughtered in al-Khalis cry out with bitter eloquence their silent condemnation.

Jassem Khalil, the Mukhtar of Hayy al-Junoud
Abbas Khalil, his brother
Ali Khalil, his other brother
Kamal Hadi, their cousin
Shaker Adnan
Abdul Wahhab Ibrahim
Mohammad al-Zubaie
Abbas Muzhir Fadhel
Jamal Hussein Alwan
Abdul Hussein Abdullah
Ali Jawad Kadhem

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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Court Says Military Cannot Hold ‘Enemy Combatant’ (AP and NYT)

The Bush administration cannot use new anti-terrorism laws to keep U.S. residents locked up indefinitely without charging them, a divided federal appeals court said Monday. The ruling was a harsh rebuke of one of the central tools the administration believes it has to combat terror.

u201CTo sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote, u201Ceven if the President calls them u2018enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country.u201D

u201CWe refuse to recognize a claim to power,u201D Judge Motz added, u201Cthat would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic.u201D

In the 2-1 decision, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel found that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn’t strip Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident, of his constitutional rights to challenge his accusers in court. It ruled the government must allow al-Marri to be released from military detention.

Now we’ve got something going on. Now there’s a little something to play for. This ruling draws a clear line in the sand on one of George W. Bush’s most egregious abuses of the illegitimate power he was given (by the courts) in 2000: his self-proclaimed, arbitrary, unchecked right to designate anyone he pleases an “enemy combatant” and keep them locked up indefinitely in military detention.

Now it seems certain that the case will reach the Supreme Court, and we will have a clear-cut answer at last: Are we still a semblance of a Republic, where our liberties are inalienable — or is our freedom simply the “gift” of an autocrat (elected or otherwise), who can bestow it or take it away at his own will?

Bush tried to enshrine this bogus, banana-republic power into law last year, with the ludicrous and sinister Military Commissions Act (MCA) that breezed through Congress with the full-throated “jawohls” of the rubber-stamp Republicans and the mildest, most token opposition from the Democrats. In usual Bushist fashion, the law was weasel-worded in such a way as to leave huge, deliberate ambiguities in its meaning. Thus Democrats and the few “moderate” Republicans could say that it was intended only for suspect foreigners (as if it were OK to lock up anyone in the world indefinitely on the unchallengeable say-so of whatever moral idiot manages to slither down the greasy path to the White House). But Bushist cognoscenti — especially those in the courts — could use the same language to uphold the Dear Leader’s dictatorial powers.

But Bush has run into a spot of bother lately with a few of his judicial appointees — such as Judge Reggie Walton, who handed down a stiff sentence to Scooter Libby — that honorable and respected public servant who tried to flim-flam the FBI about his role in crippling the nation’s ability to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. (Walton also had some choice words for the Establishment types who intervened on behalf of poor, poor, poor little Scooter.) And now the 4th District, where the Administration has tried to steer all of the cases involving its tyrannical usurpations, has betrayed the Master as well. For the appeals panel clearly saw — and openly named — the true intentions of the MCA, as SCOTUSblog notes:

The Circuit Court found the government’s claim of “inherent” presidential authority to order military detention of civilians to be “breathtaking,” and was broad enough even to allow detention of U.S. citizens.

And so the judges confirmed what we have been saying here for months: that the MCA was indeed designed to codify full-blown dictatorial powers for the president — the most open attempt yet to kill off the Republic and bury its body in the Crawford scrub brush. Whatever its obfuscatory language, the intent of the bill was crystal clear, a clarity the judges noted today — but which the Democratic leadership has still not recognized even now, having refused so far to use their new majority powers to strike down the MCA: something they could have done during their first week in office.

Now comes the scary part: the ascent of the case to the Supreme Court. For although Bush has let a few honest conservative jurists slip into the system — largely by accident or through inattention, no doubt — he has taken special pains in placing rock-ribbed loyalists on the Supreme Court, even elevating one of them, the dim time-server John Roberts, to the role of Chief Justice. It is almost certain that Roberts and his fellow Bush creation, Samuel Alito, will vote for the Boss when the case comes before them. Likewise, the ludicrous and sinister Clarence Thomas — a creation of Bush I, who obviously took cynical delight in foisting this resentful, underqualified, ideological hack on the nation, especially as a replacement for an historical figure like Thurgood Marshall — will toe the family line, as he did in rewarding Little Georgie the presidency in 2000. The irony is that the case may hinge on the genuinely disturbed mind of Antonin Scalia, who has occasionally shown an independent bent on these Constitutional questions.

The Marri case has been shaky from the beginning. I first wrote about it in July 2003 (“Troubled Sleep: Getting Used to the American Gulag“):

A few days after the Faris “triumph,” (the kidnapping — by Bush agents — of U.S. citizen Iyman Faris) the Regime took things a step further, actually removing a terror suspect from the judicial system and plunging him into the limbo-land of military custody. Illinois graduate student Ali al-Marri had been imprisoned since December 2001, after Ashcroft told his agents to round up “anyone with a Muslim-sounding name,” the Village Voice reports. Held for months on minor charges, al-Marri, a Qatari national, was finally accused of being a “sleeper agent”…

But al-Marri maintained his innocence, refusing to “cooperate” with Ashcroft’s agents. So the Commander himself intervened, declaring the miscreant an “enemy combatant” — although federal agents admitted he’d neither taken up arms against America nor planned any terrorist attacks, Knight-Ridder reports. Even so, he’s now at the mercy of Bush’s khaki kangaroo court.

Marri, like Jose Padilla, was obviously being used as a test case
to establish the Bushists’ “right” to seize anyone it wanted to and
subject to them to whatever treatment they wanted to dish out. But
today’s court ruling struck explicitly at these claimed powers. As
SCOTUSblog notes:

The key part of the ruling on presidential powers declared: “Even assuming the truth of the government’s allegations [against al-Marri], the President lacks the power to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain al-Marri….[W]e have found no authority for holding that the evidence offered by the Government affords a basis for treating al-Marri as an enemy combatant, or as anything other than a civilian….The President’s constitutional powers do not allow him to order the military to seize and detain indefinitely al-Marri without criminal process any more than they permit the President to order the military to seize and detain, without criminal process, other terrorists within the United States, like the Unabomber or the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing.”

“In light of al-Marri’s due process rights under our Constitution and Congress’s express prohibition in the Patriot Act on the indefinite detention of those civilians arrested as ‘terrorist aliens’ within this country,” the majority said, “we can only conclude that in the case at hand, the President claims a power that far exceeds that granted him by the Constitution.”

“The President claims a power that far exceeds that granted him by
the Constitution.” This has been one of the overarching themes of
this blog, and of my journalism in general, since I wrote my first
column on this subject (“Panic
Attack: A Blank Check for Tyranny“) on September 21, 2001 — just
ten days after the 9/11 attacks. Everything that we have seen unfold
over the past six years — the
outrageous abuses of authority, the lawlessness, the gulag, the
torture, the instigation of a monstrous war of aggression — was seeded
in the “enabling act” that Congress granted to Bush four days after
the attack. That legislation — again, deliberately weasel-worded in
such an ambiguous manner that Democrats could claim that it limited
the president’s response to the attacks while the Bushists — and
some courts as well — have used it as, well, a blank check for
tyranny.

Although today’s ruling is most welcome, it is a tragedy that we have come to this point at all: that a federal court has been forced to consider the “question” of whether a president has the arbitrary power to stick people in military dungeons without charges for as long as he likes. Why should this even be a question, a matter for debate? And bear in mind, as we have noted here before, these cases involving the incarceration of Bush’s Terror War captives still do not address the even more sinister power that the Bush Administration has claimed, and acted upon: the arbitrary power to kill anyone it arbitrarily declares an enemy of the state. Bush has even devolved this authority to lower-ranking agents in the field, giving them, literally, a license to kill.

We have supp’d full with horrors, and there are more to come. But the appeals court ruling is still a draught of clean water — some relief from the witch’s brew we’ve been forced to drink for so long.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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Let us exercise compassionate conservatism toward Christopher Hitchens — by compassionately refusing to read his embarrassing outpourings, thereby conserving ourselves for more important tasks.

You know, it has long been fashionable to criticize Christopher Hitchens for his appalling adherence to the gangsters of the Bush Regime, whom he for many years painted in the kind of bold, heroic tones we’ve not seen since the heyday of Socialist Realism. And while Hitchens is now trying to get back to where he once belonged to some extent — washing his hands of a war whose failure he now blames largely on the anti-war left and instead shooting a few fish in the barrel of religious absurdities to regain his "contrarian" cred — he has remained a much-reviled figure in quarters where once he was fted as a prince. (Indeed, no less than Gore Vidal anointed Hitchens as his successor — but that was many years ago, and as we’ve seen, the indefatigable octogenarian shows no sign of needing a successor.)

But I think it’s time to give over the rancor surrounding Hitchens. Let us exercise compassionate conservatism toward him — by compassionately refusing to read his embarrassing outpourings, thereby conserving our eyesight and senses for more important tasks. I came to this conclusion after reading his piece in The Guardian in late May, a florid — paean, I suppose he would call it — to the literary festival in the small Welsh border village of Hay-on-Wye:

Shall I soon forget the time that the whispering limo came to pick me up, at about midnight from a dinner at the Amis/Fonseca house, and disgorged a driver who said: "It’s time"? Through the flickering night we went, darting through an antique township or so, and crossing the Severn or the Bristol Channel at some point, until having been shown to a room in some stone-built hotel, I fell asleep only to wake to the sounds of bleating sheep. To this very day, I think of Hay-on-Wye as a place standing at some slight angle to the rest of the known universe: perhaps a sort of Brigadoon that isn’t really there for the rest of the twelvemonth…

A "twelvemonth" is what everybody in Britain calls a "year," by the way. They talk fancy like that over here. Also, all the limousines in Britain whisper, when they don’t actually purr. Just so you know. The article continues:

Led away from the tent and towards the well-stocked Green Room, I was at first astonished to find myself meeting friends I had not seen for 30 years, and then alarmed when shown to a lavatory that seemed half Lilliput and half Brobdingnag. (It turned out to be the bathroom of an infants’ school, which was some balm to my already disordered senses.) As I took my leave, I was asked if I would like to come back, and replied that I would be willing to risk the trip if I could be assured that it didn’t involve some kind of dream-state. Some fairy gold was then pressed into my hand, and I went back to Washington DC and the reign of the banal.

Yes, no doubt when it was all very banal back in DC when "Paul Wolfowitz and myself [needed] to go and convince the President to go to war." For what is a few hundred thousand dead innocents when one can be transported once a year to that magical Brigadoon of tiny toilets and dream states?

They tell me that all this is now available on some digital system, but I don’t trust myself to check. Talking on stage with Martin Amis about his Welsh nanny? Dreamt it. Debating with Stephen Fry about faith? Come on. Discussing brain surgery with Ian McEwan, in front of a gigantic audience? What am I, some kind of name-dropper?

With heroic forbearance, we’ll skip over that last remark, and move on to the amusing anecdote that closes the piece:

On the Evelyn Waugh centennial, after doing a Vile Bodies/Black Mischief/Scoop panel with Stephen Fry and Lord Deedes — exhausting enough in itself — I was handed a late invitation to dinner at Madresfield Court, the country house said to have inspired Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. It was made plain to me that a proper dinner jacket was a strict requirement. I murmured to [Hay director Peter Florence] that I had not a rag of formal dress to my name. With half an hour to go, he murmured in turn into a cellphone. From every quarter of the compass, there came the cummerbund, the shoes, the trousers and the rest of the kit.

Really, should we not let Hitchens wander happily in his fairy land, where whispering limos whisk him off to country houses and cummerbunds magically appear? In fact, let’s encourage him to stay there — then maybe he and his good friend Wolfie won’t talk the president into any more invasions.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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Glenn Greenwald catches Bush’s “intelligence czar,” Mike McConnell, in howlingly flagrant lies in a Washington Post op-ed about the need to “update” the secret FISA court’s powers over government surveillance. Greenwald does a masterful job of demolition — but in the end, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. All he does is go back to Bush’s own public statements after the FISA system was, er, updated in October 2001, and show how the Dear Leader himself contradicts every statement McConnell makes in his new piece. Greenwald writes with his usual passion and flair; but it’s a job that any first-year journalism student could have done — and a job that Post editorial honcho Fred Hiatt should have done. For McConnell was not simply voicing opinions, or giving his interpretation of events; he was stating as fact things that were demonstrably false — falsehoods that could have been detected through a quick check of the Post’s own files. It is precisely as if Hiatt gave editorial space to someone claiming that Saddam Hussein had ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Photo by James Bovard.

Well, the strange political proclivities of Mr. Hiatt are well known, and too banal to merit any serious attention. The man treats anything out of the mouths of the powerful as holy — and uneditable — writ, although it’s true that he also publishes the occasional “dissenting” piece. After all, Post readers like to flatter themselves that they are big-picture people, seeing “all sides” of an issue and making their weighty judgments accordingly. They like to spice up the unrelenting flood of servile gruel that Hiatt dishes out with a bit of contrarian horseradish now and then.

What is most important about the McConnell piece — as Greenwald notes — is that it underscores, yet again, that the Bush Faction tells knowing lies in pushing its agenda, and always has. It’s not a question of “spin,” of “putting the best face on things,” or being “clearer than truth,” in Dean Acheson’s sinister Cold War phrase — gilding the lily, exaggerating for effect. Nor, conversely, is it a case of self-deception, of “true believers” unable to take off their blinders, of “idealists” unwilling to bend their dreams to mucky reality, or even of fourth-rate dullards too stupid to see the filth and ruin caused by their own cretinous policies. They are not just spinning, they are not deceiving themselves, they are not too stupid to know what’s going on.

They are lying — lying deliberately — lying brazenly and cynically, as in McConnell’s case. They are lying because their causes are evil and cannot be spoken of openly: aggressive war for loot and domination; the callous rape and despoiling of their own nation for the profit and power of their wealthy cronies; the construction of a global gulag of secret prisons, eternal captives, carefully refined and officially approved torture; the deliberate, systematic destruction of the Constitutional system of government in favor of arbitrary, militarized tyranny; the deliberate, systematic sowing of division and rancor and hatred and fear among the people, to keep them disunited, weak, scattered, unable to resist the depredations of a small, criminal elite. If these be your gods, then of course you must lie to do them service.

[The Post had another story revealing the Bush policy of deliberate mendacity this week, a Walter Pincus piece buried in the grey sludge of the inside pages: yet another confirmation that the Bush Administration knew full well beforehand the kind of unbridled hell that their planned war of aggression against Iraq would unleash. They knew — months before the invasion — that it would result in a guerrilla insurgency, in violent and vicious sectarian conflict, in increased terrorism, in regional instability and a vast exacerbation of radical, extremist, politicized Islam. They knew all this because their own intelligence agencies told them, in at least two major assessments delivered in January 2003. ]

McConnell’s lies are more important for what they represent than for their substance. The latter is simply just one more attempt to throw dust in the public’s eyes about “regulating” surveillance while the Bush Administration continues to do what it has obviously been doing for almost six years: spying on whomever they please, whenever they please, and for their own purposes, unrelated to any attempt to “protect” the American people from the terrorism that the Bushists themselves have so assiduously and deliberately cultivated. We know all this already; there needs no spook come from the Beltway to tell us that. But McConnell’s lies do represent an escalation — a “surge” — in the brazenness of the criminal gang’s deceptions. They are becoming so transparent that it seems obvious that the Bush Faction no longer cares if they are caught out in their lies or not. (See the oathsworn Congressional testimony of Attorney General Alberto “Intensive Care” Gonzales for another recent example of this.)

Perhaps this is because they have taken the measure of the Democratic “opposition” and now realize that no one is going to seriously hinder them in the pursuit of their sinister agenda. Oh, they may have to toss a few bodies overboard — Gonzales himself is probably being fitted for a winding sheet even as we speak — but it is now obvious that the leaders of the criminal organization are not going to be held legally accountable for their high crimes. They are not going to be impeached — although the many causes for impeachment cry out to the heavens. They are not going to be tried; they are not going to be jailed. They are not going to suffer the slightest inconvenience. They can see already that they will retire to lives of staggering wealth and privilege.

II.

The cowardice of the Democrats is one possible reason why the Bushists’ lies are growing more open, more cynical. (And let us not lay the flattering unction to ourselves that this is because the Bush Faction is getting more desperate. It would be very nice to think so, but as noted above, they already know nothing bad is going to happen to them personally; so what would they be desperate about?) But there is one other possible reason for their brazenness: because they know that something is brewing, something is coming that will wipe away the memory of their present lies — or else make it more dangerous to point them out. Juan Cole detects some tantalizing hints in the notable absence of many of Iraq’s main political players from the scene: Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the most powerful Shiite party, has left Iraq, going first to the United States and now to Iran for cancer treatment. Mahdi Army leader Moqtada al-Sadr is still in hiding. And now Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, is going to a fat farm in the United States for three weeks to try to lose some weight. That’s right; Iraq’s head of state has left his nation in the midst of a life-and-death struggle in order to drop a few pounds in a pricey Stateside resort.

That’s the story, anyway — but as we noted above, the lies are getting more threadbare all the time. Says the cautious Cole: “I’m tempted to speculate that something is in the works such that someone thinks it desirable that Talabani be out of country, since the idea that Mam Jalal suddenly decided he needed to go to a fat farm in Minnesota strikes me as far-fetched.” Meanwhile, the ever-incandescent Arthur Silber points us to this piece by Alain Gresh in Le Monde Diplomatique, on the surging military and terrorist operations by the United States and its proxies in Iran:

Silently, furtively, sheltered from cameras, the war on Iran has begun. Numerous sources confirm that the United States has intensified its aid to several armed movements with an ethnic base — Azeris, Baluchis, Arabs, Kurds: minorities that together represent about 40 percent of the Iranian population — with the objective of destabilizing the Islamic Republic. In this context, ABC television revealed in the beginning of April that the Baluchi group, Jound Al-Islam (“The soldiers of Islam”) which had just led an attack against the Guardians of the Revolution (about twenty dead) had enjoyed secret American assistance. A report by the Century Foundation reveals that American commandos have been operating in the interior of Iran itself since the summer of 2004.

As Gresh notes, this covert effort was begun after the Bush Faction rejected out of hand an offer by the moderate-led Iranian government of Mohammad Khatami in 2003. I wrote about this a year ago, following up on yet another buried Washington Post story, which

revealed that documentary proof has now emerged confirming the fact that in the spring of 2003, the Bush Regime — flush with its illusory “victory” in Iraq — spurned a wide-ranging peace feeler from Iran which offered “full cooperation” on every issue that the Bushists claim to be concerned about in regard to Tehran: “nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.”

The offer was made through the Swiss Embassy, which has served as the conduit for communication between Washington and Tehran since America’s Peacock patsy, the Shah of Iran, was overthrown in 1979. The 2003 proposal included “full cooperation on nuclear safeguards, ‘decisive action,’ against terrorists, coordination in Iraq, ending ‘material support’ for Palestinian militias and accepting the Saudi initiative for a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [which called for all Muslim states to recognize Israel],” the Post reports. The unprecedented initiative was approved by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and then-President Mohammad Khatami — the moderate whose attempts at dialogue were mocked and undercut at every turn by the Bush Regime, helping to discredit the entire reformist movement in Iran and leading to Khatami’s replacement by the militant hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In other words, everything that George W. Bush says he wants from the Iranians now, he could have had for the asking — three years ago. What then can we conclude from the rejection of this extraordinary initiative? The answer is obvious: that the Bush Faction is not really interested in curbing nuclear proliferation or defusing the powder keg of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the regional and global terror that it spawns.

But no one heard of that offer until three years after it was made. (And with the Post burying the story on page 16, not many have heard of it even now.) Instead, we have been told lie after lie about Iranian intransigence, and how Bush is tirelessly pursuing “all diplomatic options” in a wise, statesmanlike bid to avoid being drawn into an unwanted war by the evil mullahs.

How soon then before we find out at last how transparent these lies have been as well? Is this the big thing brewing, a strike on Iran, a new and even more horrible war certain to provoke even more horrible responses, even on American soil — thus solidifying the tyranny of the Bush Faction, sweeping away all the “petty carping” about the law and the Constitution as the Leader does “whatever it takes” to keep us safe? [Just by the by, Bush also signed an order recently giving himself the sole power to constitute the entire federal government in the event of a broad range of "national emergencies."]

As Cole noted in his piece on Talabani, these are just speculations. But consider: every single lie told by the Bush Faction has masked a reality more sinister than most American citizens could have imagined. “Compassionate conservatism” really was a cynical scam for ruthless corporate predation, callous disregard and a savage, ideological assault on the very notion of a “common good” — all exemplified in the Katrina disaster. The Bushists really did lie about “weapons of mass destruction” and al Qaeda ties in order to launch a war of aggression against Iraq. Bush really did lie, knowingly and repeatedly and publicly, about the mass surveillance he is conducting upon the American people, as Greenwald has shown so clearly.

Thus we are fully justified in asking this question: What sinister reality lies in wait behind the relentless barrage of lies about Iran? The answer to that question seems transparently clear — and unfathomably evil.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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Whew! Thank God that’s over!

The mighty wind you hear coming from Washington today is the huge sigh of relief from Democratic leaders, glad that they can now drop all the political posturing about ending the war in Iraq and get back on board with the imperial program. With the crushing defeat yesterday of what was purported to be a bill to “end” the war, Senate Majority Leader Harry “Give ‘Em Mild Heck” Reid moved quickly to give the Dear Leader all the money he needs to keep feeding the Babylonian inferno with the dead bodies of Iraqi citizens and American soldiers.

In fact, the bill in question, the Feingold Plan, would not have actually ended the illegal occupation of Iraq — God forbid! However, it would have curtailed the extent of the war crime to some degree — withdrawing “combat forces” but keeping troops in Iraq for “counterterrorism” (and aren’t we constantly told that all the Iraqi insurgents are “terrorists”?) and “training Iraqi forces” and protecting the fortress embassy being constructed in the heart of Baghdad. But even this slight slackening of the garrote would not have taken effect until April 2008 — or after 10 more months of savage “surging” by Bush and his sectarian death-squadding allies. (Such as this kind of thing.)

In any case, it was well known that the bill was dead on arrival and had no chance of passing; that’s precisely why the Democratic leaders put it up for consideration. It was a PR exercise to give political cover to those Democrats whose ambitions have forced them to at least nod toward the “consent of the governed,” as clearly expressed in the anti-war vote last year. But now that the stunt is over, it’s back to bipartisan business. As the New York Times reports:

After the vote, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader and a co-sponsor of the Feingold plan, said he was committed to delivering legislation acceptable to Mr. Bush by the end of next week. He conceded that the compromise was likely to disappoint war opponents who had pushed Congress to set a pull-out date…

In the end, the only proposal to pass the Senate [with overwhelming Democratic support] was a resolution by Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, senior Republican on the Appropriations Committee, which urged Congress to provide about $95 billion sought by the president for the war before Memorial Day.

Of course, those “war opponents” who will be “disappointed” that the Democrats failed to pass the Feingold “mild curtailment of the slaughter” bill include the majority of citizens in the United States who now oppose the war and want to see it brought to an end, according to all polls. This why they voted the Democrats into power in last year’s election — to do something about stopping the war.

It was a vain hope, of course. The Democrats (with a handful of honorable exceptions) had already displayed their preternatural spinelessness throughout the Bush imperium, culminating in their failure last fall to mount a proper, furious, public, frenzied — if doomed — resistance to the “Military Commissions Act,” the anti-Magna Carta measure that transformed the United States into a banana republic run by a tyrannical “Unitary Executive” and his military junta. (The essence of the bill allows the unchallengeable Commander-in-Chief to declare anyone on earth an “enemy combatant” and keep them chained up indefinitely, with only one legal recourse allowed: a military tribunal, set up by the Commander, for those captives he decides to put to the question. As for the rest, they can rot forever at his pleasure.)

The Democrats, afraid of looking “soft” on terrorism, put up only the most token, tepid defense of the Constitutional Republic and let the MCA sail through, all the while telling their supporters with a wink: “This is just tactical. Wait till we win back Congress in November, then we’ll get rid of this law.” Yet the mephitic measure remains on the books, in full force — five months after the Democrats were sworn in.

It was therefore the height of folly — or the depths of desperation — to believe that these Democrats would do anything substantial to upset the imperial apple-cart that Bush has set rolling through the Middle East and Central Asia. They are too cowardly, too co-opted, too corrupt and too comfortable to challenge the long-standing, bipartisan policies of loot and domination that have burdened us with a vast empire of more than 730 military bases on every continent, and endless, churning wars — overt and covert, direct and proxy — all over the world.

After all, the Democratic leaders are among the elite who have profited most handsomely from the imperial arrogance that has bankrupted the national treasury, distorted the economy, perverted our society and left Americans more at threat than ever before. (Arthur Silber has much more on the bipartisan imperium in his “Dominion” series.) The Democratic Establishmentarians, like their Republican counterparts, are wealthy, well fed, well wadded and secure behind their phalanxes of state and private security. The actual effects of their policies — the death, grief, ruin, hardship, suffering and fear they inflict on ordinary people, at home and abroad — never touch the elite. They hear the cries as from a great distance, they see the destruction as through a glass, darkly. And so it will go on, and on, and on. The Democrats — especially these Democrats — are not going to stop it.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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These are days of troubled sleep. As in a dream, you walk familiar streets, living out your ordinary life — going to work, having love affairs, watching sports, getting the car fixed, worrying about bills, fighting a toothache, taking kids to school, listening to music — and everything seems as it was before, as it always was; you seem to be what you always were: a free person in a free country. Then some discordant noise reaches your mind; you stir, you open your eyes, and you remember: that’s not how it is here anymore.

For citizens in the world’s two “leading democracies,” the United States and Britain, these rude awakenings come at regular intervals now, piercing through the incessant roar of static from the media engines of sell and spin. A story catches your eye — usually something buried beneath the “big news” of the day — and once again you’re tumbled from your private concerns into a dreadful realization of where history has taken you: into a strange hybrid world of unfree freedom, where you can say what you want, do what you want — unless those in power arbitrarily decide that you can’t. In 99 cases out of 100, they’ll leave you alone (as long as you’re white and look non-threatening; if not, that ratio drops considerably). But this liberty is illusory; it no longer has a physical reality, or even a statutory one. It is now a “gift” of the authorities, one which they can bestow — or revoke — according to their own, ever-shifting needs and desires.

The idea of arbitrary power beyond all check of law or outside supervision is the sum total of the so-called “Unitary Executive” theory of the Bush Administration, which has put this radical and barbaric idea into practice. It is also undergirds the “crown prerogative” of British governance, where the ancient immunities of the sovereign (“The king can do no wrong” — or as that proto-unitary executive Richard Nixon once put it: “If the president does it, it’s not illegal”) have “devolved” upon the prime minister as head of the government. In neither of these endlessly self-celebrating democracies is the consent of the governed or the rule of law the basis for the exercise of power. Otherwise, the leaders of these countries — the dual lame ducks Bush and Blair — could not have launched an illegal war or maintained this criminal enterprise year after blood-soaked year. And many of their exercises of arbitrary power have been in aid of masking the true nature of this war.

Thus we come to the latest shaking of our troubled sleep. While the media world gaped and gabbed about Tony Blair’s long-belated announcement of his long-overdue retirement yesterday, a more revealing story was buried beneath the fold or in the back pages — except in the dogged Independent, which put it on the front page:

Two jailed for trying to leak details of Blair’s talks with Bush

Tony Blair’s ill-fated war with Iraq claimed two more victims yesterday when a civil servant and an MP’s researcher were convicted of disclosing details of a secret conversation between the Prime Minister and President George Bush. Last night, MPs, lawyers and civil rights groups described the prosecution as a “farce” and accused the Government of misusing the Official Secrets Act to cover up political embarrassment over the war.

David Keogh, 50, a Cabinet Office communications officer, was today jailed for six months. He passed on an “extremely sensitive memo” to Leo O’Connor, 44, a political researcher who worked for an anti-war Labour MP, Anthony Clarke. O’Connor was today sentenced to three months in jail after an Old Bailey jury found them guilty yesterday of breaching Britain’s secrecy laws.

Their trial was carried out under extraordinary secrecy, clamped down even tighter than Britain’s continuing series of terror plot trials. The judge wouldn’t even allow the press to report Keogh’s response “when he was asked in open court what preyed on his mind when he first saw the document,” the Guardian reports. What’s more, the British press were also forbidden from referring to stories they had previously published about the memo when it first came to light and reports of its contents were being freely discussed. The attorney general — Blair’s old friend Peter Goldsmith, the same legal eagle who infamously reversed his stand on the illegality of the Iraq invasion after a talking to from the Beltway boys, and who most recently quashed a years-long probe into a sex-car-cash bribery scheme between the Saudi royals and the UK’s top arms merchant — draped a retroactive veil of secrecy over the case — much like the one the Bush gang has used on fired FBI truth-teller Sibel Edmonds after she threatened to expose a nest of high-level treason and corruption. The only thing the British press could tell the British people about the trial yesterday — beyond the sentences handed down — was the reaction Keogh had given to the police when he was first arrested in 2005. He told them that what he had seen in the memo convinced him that “Bush was a madman.”

But what was this document whose very existence posed such a dire threat to the life of the nation that its contents could not even be hinted at in public? It was a four-page record of a White House meeting between George W. Bush and Tony Blair on April 16, 2004. It is known in the trade as the “al-Jazeera Bombing Memo” because in those early news reports — after Keogh had leaked the document in May 2004 to O’Connor, in the hopes that it would be brought before the people’s representatives in Parliament — at least one part of its contents became widely known; to wit, that Bush had proposed to Blair that they bomb the headquarters of the independent Arabic news agency al-Jazeera in Qatar, as well as agency offices elsewhere.

The context of this criminal proposal is important. In April 2004, the grand Babylonian Conquest was turning into a nightmare. The tortures at Abu Ghraib had just been exposed. (Outrages which, as we now know, were just the barest tip of a massive iceberg: the vast gulag of secret prisons, “disappeared” captives, and “strenuous interrogation techniques” specifically approved by Bush and Rumsfeld.) But beyond that scandal — which was being successfully fobbed off with the “bad apple” defense, and would never be in an issue in the coming presidential election — there was also, more glaringly, the ongoing bloodfest in Fallujah: the Guernica of the Iraq War.

The attack was launched in retaliation for the killing of four American mercenaries from the politically-wired firm of Blackwater on March 31, 2004 — another PR hit for the “Mission Accomplished” team in the White House. Fallujah — a once quiet city whose citizens had rebelled against Saddam Hussein — had been turned into a hotbed of unrest over the course of the previous year by a heavy-handed American occupation, which included several civilian deaths after occupation troops fired into crowds exercising what they believed was their liberated right to protest. Anger and insurgency took hold in the city, leading to the “Black Hawk Down” style despoliation of the dead mercenaries a year later.

Against the advice of military commanders on the scene, Bush ordered the “pacification” of the city a few days later. But the L’il Commander’s attack turned into yet another PR nightmare, spreading death and destruction through civilian areas, causing hundreds of deaths, launching airstrikes into residential areas, closing the city’s main hospitals while thousands were suffering — and failing to dislodge the insurgents who were the ostensible target of the operation. (There were two other main targets, of course: the American people, who were meant to be seduced by the man-musk of the War Leader, and the Iraqi people, who were meant to be terrorized into submission by the shock-and-awe of Fallujah’s decimation.)

In addition to the lack of progress on the battleground, Bush was beset by the presence of al-Jazeera correspondents in the city. The agency — headquartered in Qatar, a staunch U.S. ally — was a rare independent voice in the Arab world, reporting from all sides and offering a platform for all sides, including Israeli and American officials. It was, in fact, the very kind of thing that Bush claimed he wanted to instill in the Middle East through his invasion of Iraq. But of course, this was just another lie. Al-Jazeera’s independence proved inconvenient for the Bushists, who in both Iraq and Afghanistan had sought to impose the greatest degree of message control (and “psy-ops” spin) ever seen in an American war. For both the Bushists and the Blairites, truth was not the first casualty of war; it was a deadly enemy — an enemy combatant, in fact, to be rendered, disappeared, tortured, killed, like any other gulag captive.

So it was no surprise at all that Bush and Blair would be discussing al-Jazeera during that fretful confab in April 2004. Nor is it any surprise that Bush’s answer to the “problem” of an independent Arab news agency would be to kill the ragheads where they stand. He had already demonstrated that wanton violence and mass murder was his preferred option for dealing with problems in the Middle East.

The contents of the controversial memo were actually well-known after it came to light — and before Blair’s buddy Goldsmith lowered the boom. The Daily Mirror, for example, had this report in November 2005:

President Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a “Top Secret” No 10 memo reveals. But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash…The attack would have led to a massacre of innocents on the territory of a key ally, enraged the Middle East and almost certainly have sparked bloody retaliation.

A source said last night: “The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush. He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem. There’s no doubt what Bush wanted to do — and no doubt Blair didn’t want him to do it.”

A Government official suggested that the Bush threat had been “humorous, not serious”. But another source declared: “Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men.”

Al-Jazeera’s HQ is in the business district of Qatar’s capital, Doha. Its single-storey buildings would have made an easy target for bombers. As it is sited away from residential areas, and more than 10 miles from the US’s desert base in Qatar, there would have been no danger of “collateral damage”.

Dozens of al-Jazeera staff at the HQ are not, as many believe, Islamic fanatics. Instead, most are respected and highly trained technicians and journalists. To have wiped them out would have been equivalent to bombing the BBC in London and the most spectacular foreign policy disaster since the Iraq War itself.

The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors. In 2001 the station’s Kabul office was knocked out by two “smart” bombs. In 2003, al-Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a US missile strike on the station’s Baghdad centre. The memo, which also included details of troop deployments, turned up in May last year at the Northampton constituency office of then Labour MP Tony Clarke.

This is the kind of thing that filled British papers for weeks. But now, in the brave new world of unfree freedom that Bush and Blair have bestowed upon their subjects, Britons can no longer mention any of this in public. Indeed, the judge in the Keogh case reinforced Goldsmith’s earlier ban with a new gag order, decreeing “that allegations already in the public domain could not be repeated if there was any suggestion they related to the contents of the document,” the Guardian reports. Anyone who does so can be jailed for contempt. Yes, jailed for repeating in public what has already been published.

During the trial, Blair’s top foreign policy wonk, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, offered this notable justification for jailing faithful government servants whose consciences had been shocked into action by the discovery of a plot for mass murder by the “leader of the free world”:

In evidence at the trial, Sir Nigel Sheinwald…said private talks between world leaders must remain confidential however illegal or morally abhorrent aspects of their discussions might be.

Quite right, too. After all, if a memo of, say, a summit meeting between Hitler and Mussolini had come to light in, say, 1938, detailing how Hitler had told Mussolini that he was going to, say, kill a few million Jews just as soon as he could lay his hands on them, then obviously such confidences between statesmen should be respected — and any civil servant who tried to warn the world about this “madman” should obviously be prosecuted.

Blair — who in his lachrymose and self-pitying resignation speech yesterday again reiterated his pride in standing “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Bush in the slaughter of more than 600,000 innocent human beings in Iraq — obviously talked his pal down from his murderous rage at al-Jazeera, which is now so respectable that it appears on American cable TV systems. But there was no such consideration for the people of Fallujah. Bush soon called off the attack as the bad PR mounted, but promised that the city would be “pacified” in the end — after the election. And so it was, without demur from Blair. Just days after Bush had procured office again in November 2004, a second assault — even more savage than the first, was launched, destroying the city with bombs, shells and chemical fire.

It is entirely typical of our strange days that the arbitrary, draconian power that now characterizes the Anglo-American “democracies” would be used here in an attempt to suppress a political embarrassment — the revelation of a barbaric idea that never came to fruition — while the actual physical slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people is openly and unashamedly embraced — even championed as an act of moral courage, as in Blair’s unctuous parting bromide, “Hand on my heart, I did what I thought was right.”

So did Pol Pot. So did Stalin. So did Osama bin Laden. So does every madman who vaunts himself beyond the law, and kills in the name of a “higher cause.”

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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Are you confused by the ever-shifting terminology employed by the Masters of War and their frequent banquet buddies, the Media Mavens, when conveying the overarching geostrategic sociopolitical complexities of the Dear Leader’s liberation of Iraq? Well, fear not, befuddled reader; your humble correspondent is here to help, with this handy-dandy update of The Newspeak Lexicon.

Today’s phrase is: “Political Progress.” This sinuous and supple little passage has greased many a clumsy reality over the transom of public discourse, allowing both purveyors and consumers of conventional wisdom to ignore the incontinent, pustulous, blood-smeared elephant of aggressive war standing there stinking up the well-appointed drawing rooms of the American Establishment.

You may recall — although it would of course be more patriotic of you not to recall anything that came before today’s party line — that “political progress” in Iraq once meant the carrying out of some semblance of free elections among those political factions allowed by the liberators to exercise their freedom. This was duly done a few years ago — or rather, it was forced upon the occupying liberators by the reactionary Shiite mullah, Ayatollah Sistani. This purple-fingered election, we were told, represented “political progress.”

But then the occupying liberators decided that they really didn’t like the outcome of this completely free and unfettered election. So they deposed the prime minister chosen by the winning political bloc and put someone else in his place. This cumbersome colonial machination, we were told, now represented “political progress.” We were cooking with gas now. Things would really start looking up now.

However, the conquered land continued to slide deeper and deeper into the quagmire of violence, brutality, corruption and murder that is the inevitable product of the “supreme international crime” of aggressive war. Not to worry, though; the new government and the occupying liberators then proceeded to divvy up state ministries between various armed and vicious sectarian militias, and spent billions training and arming security forces that were immediately riddled by the sectarian militias. The resulting outbreak of mass sectarian murder and the destruction of the very fabric of Iraq’s multi-ethnic society, we were told, now represented “political progress,” to wit: “As the Iraqi security forces [the militia-riddled instruments of terror and murder] stand up, we will stand down.”

This definition of “political progress” had a pretty long run — until the levels of horror and terror in Iraq reached such a pitch of intensity that even the purveyors and consumers of conventional wisdom back in the Homeland began to notice that something wasn’t quite right. It was at this point that the notion of “benchmarks” took hold in the CW world, and became embedded in the slightly differing plans for “political progress” offered by the Baker Group of bejowled worthies, and the “surge” fanatics in the White House, and the Democratic “opposition.” In one of those quirky coincidences in which history abounds, there was one key benchmark that all three of these Establishment factions agreed upon: the passage of an “oil law” granting foreign companies feasting rights to Iraq’s staggeringly rich energy resources. And so the approval of part of this commonly held benchmark oil law by the Iraqi Council of Ministers earlier this year, we were told, now represented “political progress.”

But alack the day, the Iraqi parliament has decided to knock off for a couple of months this summer, taking a long, Bush-like hiatus that will almost certainly leave the oil law in limbo. And even if the completely sovereign and absolutely free Iraqi legislators freely decide to respond to American “concerns” and cancel their vacation, there is little hope that the impasse over the oil law will be resolved any time soon — especially given the fact that the law is rejected by vast swathes of the Iraqi people. (Not that the Bush Faction has ever been concerned with the consent of the governed, of course.) So where does that leave us for “political progress” now?

Thankfully, the New York Times is on the case. In a prominent story there today, we learn that “political progress” in Iraq now consists of one of the major parties in the government deciding not to quit. Yet. Yes, the simmering threat by the main Sunni block led by Iraqi VP Tariq al-Hashimi to walk out of the government to prevent the incipient division of the country into sectarian enclaves (a move mightily assisted by the occupying liberators’ new scheme of walling off Baghdadis into ethnic ghettos), has apparently been “eased” by a meeting between al-Hashimi and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Times assured us. This cozy confab “helped move the political process” forward and, as the Times’ headline tells us, now represents “political progress” in Iraq.

So there you are. We have American casualties swelling with the still-rising wave of the Bush-McCain-Romney-Giuliani-Lieberman surge, with even more deaths expected as the escalation crests. We have American soldiers flung into the brutal service of the Bush Regime’s criminal enterprise becoming more brutalized and criminalized themselves — with thousands of troops admitting that they have beaten or despoiled innocent civilians, and tens of thousands embracing the torture of prisoners and rejecting the very notion that the people they have come to “liberate” should be treated with dignity and respect, according to the Pentagon’s own examination of the fraying mental health of its forces. We have Iraqi citizens cowering in fear of the American-trained “security” forces of their own government. We have the ghetto-building campaign by the occupying liberators sealing whole quadrants of Baghdad into open-air prisons whose inhabitants are left to the tender mercies of the violent sectarians locked in with them, creating “mini-Islamic republics,” as one Iraqi government official admitted to The Independent. We have literally millions of Iraqis fleeing their homes, eating the bitter bread of exile in foreign lands or else on the run from ethnic cleansing inside Iraq — one of the greatest population displacements since World War II. We have a never-ending hellstorm of death and chaos, lies and looting, incompetence and arrogance — and unfathomable, unendurable human suffering — all of it spawned by the illegal, immoral and unnecessary war of aggression launched at the order of George W. Bush, and championed or countenanced for years by the “great and the good” of American society.

But the fact that one of the political factions licensed by the conquerors has decided not to leave the government for the time being means that “political progress” is being made in Iraq. So says the supreme arbiter of conventional wisdom in the American press.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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A few days ago we were — how to put it? — uncivil to New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, taking him to task over his story about Somalia, in which he told readers of the “world’s leading newspaper” that the little tussle they were having over there was mostly the fault of a bunch of greedy gangsters with inborn anarchic tendencies who didn’t want to pay taxes. Mr. Gettleman’s story, we suggested, with unpardonable rudeness, was not really a work of journalism but more of propaganda piece, aiming to whitewash the Bush Administration’s crucial — and armed — role in instigating the brutal war of aggression that has brought fresh ruin and death to that long-broken land.

We now wish to apologize most wholeheartedly to Mr. Gettleman for our splenitive and rash outpouring. It was wrong of us to imply that he had poisoned the public discourse with the artful distortions and compelling mendacities that adorned his piece. We reacted so strongly because we feared that his peculiar take on the situation — greedy darkies getting what’s coming to them — would become the “conventional wisdom” about Somalia in the American media world, thus blinding the American people once again to the vast crimes being committed in their name by the buccaneers of the Beltway.

But it turns out that Mr. Gettleman’s manly effort on behalf of Little Caesar and Big-Time Dick was quickly effaced by the sterling work of one Chris Tomlinson of the Associated Press. In a story that appeared last Friday — and soon permeated every media market in America, and many foreign ones as well — Mr. Tomlinson delivered a much bolder pre-emptive strike against any unpatriotic malcontent who might question the president’s wise policy in Somalia. Indeed, Mr. Tomlinson’s long and much-reprinted piece was so servile and accommodating that it makes Mr. Gettleman look like the second coming of I.F. Stone.

Eschewing the psychological nuance that characterized Mr. Gettleman’s insightful analysis (such as his discovery of the “raw antigovernment defiance” that will prevent “many Somalis” from ever accepting any government, much less the beneficent hegemony of President Bush’s proxies, the dictator of Ethiopia and his Somali warlord allies), Mr. Tomlinson cuts right to the chase, brandishing the Bush Administration’s most potent weapon: raw fear, produced by the constant evocation of 9/11 and the world-encircling dastards of al Qaeda.

Right out of the gate, in the second paragraph, Tomlinson asserts — without any qualification or attribution whatsoever — that those resisting the American-backed invasion of their country by are “threatening to turn the country back into a haven for al-Qaeda.” (9/11! 9/11!) Just two paragraphs later, he provides this description of the Islamic Courts council that had brought Somalia its first measure of peace and stability in 15 years before its overthrow by Ethiopian tanks and American bombs:

…Islamic radicals who grabbed power for six months last year, filling Somalia’s power vacuum with a strict religious government. Like the Taliban who once ruled Afghanistan and hosted Osama bin Laden, the Somali movement, the Council of Islamic Courts, harbors al-Qaeda terrorists, U.S. officials say.

Just like the Taliban! Osama bin Laden! 9/11! 9/11! At least this paragraph offers one of Tomlinson’s rare uses of a source — albeit unnamed ones — to back up his bald assertions. But the import is clear: the Islamic Courts council is the same thing as the Taliban and al Qaeda, and thus the invasion of Somalia is entirely justified as part of the noble War on Terror that President Bush is waging to keep Americans safe.

Nowhere does Tomlinson offer even a pro forma mention of the Islamic Courts’ constant denials of any involvement with al Qaeda. Nor does he mention — doubtless because, in his sweet ignorance, he does not know — that the Courts themselves were comprised of various factions of varying degrees of religious fervor, from moderates to more hard-core fundamentalists. They were never simply a monolithic bloc of Taliban-style fanatics. You’d have to look to Mr. Bush’s longtime family friends, the Saudi royals, for that kind of thing; their kingdom is by far the most repressive religious regime on the face of the earth — and also a haven for not a few al-Qaeda supporters, including some very highly placed and quite wealthy ones.

In fact, Tomlinson’s constant assertions of an inextricable link between the deposed Islamic Courts and al Qaeda rests on the word of those fountains of unerring truth — “intelligence officials” in the service of the Bush Administration. These charges are in turn based on the alleged presence in Somalia of a bare handful of individuals with alleged ties to alleged al Qaeda-associated enterprises. Tomlinson breathlessly relates that a whole ten “al Qaeda operatives remain in Somalia,” and are “at least partially responsible for the growing violence in the capital.” Who knew that these wily al Qaeda operators were somehow able to sneak into the tanks and artillery batteries of the American-trained Ethiopian army, which has been the source of most of the “violence in the capital” in the last month, when more than 1,400 people were killed, most of them civilians? Gadzooks, is there nothing these evil masterminds can’t do?

There is more — much more — in this vein. Tomlinson notes that those opposing the invasion are said to possess some shoulder-fired anti-aircraft guns. Now, you and I might think these weapons would be used by the “insurgents” to attack those who have invaded their country. (And indeed, their only reported use has been to shoot down an Ethiopian cargo plane supplying the invaders and an Ethiopian military helicopter.) But Tomlinson is mainlining the Bush juice now, and so simply says flat out — again without even the fig leaf of an unnamed “intelligence official” — and that these weapons “could be used against civilian aircraft throughout the region.” Al Qaeda! Airplanes! 9/11! 9/11!

But yes, it’s true that shoulder-fired missiles could be used against civilian aircraft in the region. And the Chinese could give a nuclear bomb to the Ku Klux Klan. Germany could invade Poland tomorrow. All kinds of things could happen in this crazy world. But normally, in a “news” story, one offers some kind of evidence for this kind of assertion.

But this is not a story designed to provide readers with the news of what is happening in Somalia. It is designed to convey — without a single dissenting viewpoint — the official line of the Bush Administration regarding the murderous proxy war that it has greenlighted in Somalia. There is no mention of the American air strikes against fleeing refugees in the early days of the war — an ostensible attempt to kill alleged al Qaeda operatives that instead murdered dozens of innocent civilians. There is no mention of the “rendition” of refugees — including innocent American citizens — into Ethiopia’s torture chambers. There is no mention of the years, and millions of dollars, that the Bush administration has spent in arming and training the repressive Ethiopian military. There is no mention of the complexities of the political situation in Somalia, just constant invocations of “Taliban” and “al Qaeda” to evoke a Pavlovian response of fear — and unquestioning acquiescence to the Terror War policies of the Bush Administration. After all, who could possibly oppose a righteous operation to keep Somalia from “turning back into a haven for al Qaeda”?

The reality, of course, is that deposing the Islamic Courts council — which had reached out to the West, seeking recognition and cooperation — and plunging Somalia back into anarchy virtually guarantees that it will indeed become a haven for terrorism, just as in Bush’s other “regime change” operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But then, the Terror War has never been about curtailing the terrorist threat against Americans. This is blatantly obvious, as every aspect of the “War” has only exacerbated terrorism and anti-American feeling around the world. The Terror War is about securing even more loot and power for elite factions in the American Establishment (and selected foreign cronies). Somalia’s oil and its strategic location make it a prime target for the Terror Warriors; hence the invasion and the blood-soaked occupation.

But these truths must remain forever hidden from the American people. And here Tomlinson’s story has been marvelously effective. The ubiquitous AP wire serves countless papers and television stations, large and small, across the length and breadth of the land, and around the world as well. Even a cursory Googling of the story’s appearances in print shows the tremendous reach of Tomlinson’s piece:

Casper, Wyoming. White Rock, South Dakota. Wilmington, North Carolina. Fort Wayne, Indiana. State College, Pennsylvania. Gainesville, Florida. Seattle, Washington. Twin Falls, Idaho. Sacramento, California. Baltimore, Maryland. Houston, Texas. Atlantic City, New Jersey. Albany, New York. Los Angeles. Las Vegas. Denver. The Federal News Radio. Newsday. Fox News. The Guardian. Pravda. The Scotsman.

On and on it goes. This conglomeration of fear, fantasy, manipulation and omission is now the picture of the situation in Somalia for millions of Americans: a propaganda coup for the Bush Administration, yet another “mission accomplished.”

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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The New York Times has finally deigned to bestow prominent notice on the Bush Administration’s third on-going "regime change" operation, its blood-soaked proxy war in Somalia. But it should come as no surprise that today’s front page piece by Jeffrey Gettleman (People Who Feed Off Anarchy in Somalia Are Quick to Fuel It) is riddled with the same kind of slavish spin, artful omissions and outright lies that the paper produced in those glorious Judy Miller days of yore before the invasion of Iraq. One can only hope that Gettleman submits an invoice to the White House, to get his rightful due for this remarkable piece of government propaganda. For the story is permeated with the Bushist ethos: blame the victims, bury the truth, and smear all those who oppose the Leader’s will.

The theme of Gettleman’s piece is that resistance to the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia is being led by a bunch of greedy gangsters grown fat on the anarchy that has plagued the land for more than 15 years. What’s more, this chaotic gangsterism is evidently a national trait of Somalis, who are possessed of a "raw antigovernment defiance" that is solely responsible for the collapse of the nation, and is making it hard even for the entirely benevolent Bush Administration to do anything for them. For as Gettleman ominously notes, "many Somalis…will never go along with any program." Obviously then, the only way to tame these savages is by brute force — such as the artillery and tank fire that the Ethiopian invaders and their native warlord allies are raining down on residential areas in Mogadishu even as we speak, killing at least 350 people in the last week — and 29 civilians just yesterday, as the BBC reports, but which Gettleman politely declines to mention in his piece.

This is classic Establishment thinking here: the reduction of complex human societies to a few unruly character traits, supposedly unique and endemic faults that the poor creatures can’t control but which pose a danger to civilization, thus justifying massive military action to bring them to heel — for their own good, of course. Gettleman is stalwart in this regard. He ignores the direct and quite open American military involvement in the invasion: the U.S. training, arming and funding of the Ethiopian military, the deployment of U.S. Special Forces in the invasion, the airstrikes launched by U.S. planes on fleeing refugees, and the role of U.S. intelligence agents in arresting and "rendering" Somali refugees to the torture chambers of the Ethiopian dictatorship — all of which has been thoroughly documented by reputable mainstream newspapers in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Aside from one passing reference, in the 27th paragraph, of "covert American help" in the invasion, the only other mention he makes of any American involvement in Somalia is the Bush Administration’s "pledge of $100 million to rebuild the country." Just another noble mission, in other words, another act of purest altruism from the "shining city on the hill."

Of course, there are greedy gangsters in Somalia — just as there are in every single human society on earth. (Even the "shining city" itself is not noticeably lacking in this regard.) So it’s not very hard for Gettleman — or rather, the local stringers he employs in Mogadishu — to dig up some nefarious figures to illustrate his chosen theme.

Take Maxamuud Nuur Muradeeste, for example, "a squatter landlord who makes a few hundred dollars a year renting out rooms in the former Ministry of Minerals and Water." Muradeeste says he would allow "insurgents" (i.e., those resisting the armed conquest of their nation by foreign invaders) to store guns at his place. Obviously a prime candidate for a set of Gitmo pajamas.

Or what about the equally sinister Omar Hussein Ahmed, a Mogadishu olive oil exporter? In addition to sharing a name with anti-Bush terrorists like Saddam and Obama, Ahmed "and a group of fellow traders recently bought missiles to shoot at government soldiers." And why would they do this? "’Taxes are annoying,’ he explained."

And then there’s…well, that’s it. These are the people who Gettleman says are "fueling" the insurgency because the Ethiopian-installed government "poses the biggest threat yet to the gravy days of anarchy." A gangster who makes "a few hundred dollars a year" renting rooms in a long-abandoned government building. (Perhaps Gettleman could ask Dick Cheney’s employers at Halliburton if they would consider a few hundred dollars of revenue a year to be "gravy.") And an olive oil producer who doesn’t want to pay taxes. (Actually, Gettleman’s first capsule description of Somalia’s gangsters sounds exactly like Bush’s corporate cronies: "They do not pay taxes, their businesses are totally unregulated, and they have skills that are not necessarily geared toward a peaceful society." So what’s not to like about these guys?)

But this would not be a classic NYT piece if its nakedly ideological framework was not subverted by the nuggets of fact buried deep beneath the sludge-like prose. And so it proves in this case. Although olive oil trader Ahmed first appears as a missile-toting gangster who just doesn’t want to pay taxes — one of the "many Somalis" whose "raw antigovernment defiance" compels them to "resist any program" or government — far, far down in the story we learn that he and his fellow traders had actually accepted the imposed new government at first, but were driven into opposition by the Bush-backed warlords’ own greed:

For many Abgal [tribal members], an influential subclan of the Hawiye, the last straw came in mid-March when the government raised port taxes by 300 percent. Mr. Ahmed, the olive oil exporter and an Abgal, said that after that, there was a mass Abgal defection to the insurgency. "The government is trying to destroy business as we know it," he said.

The new "government" is led by clan leaders and warlords whose power and profits had been curtailed by the Islamic Courts government that took power in Somalia last year and brought the nation its first measure of peace and relative security in 15 years. So when they sought to recoup their losses with draconian tax hikes, many Somalis went into rebellion, including the "gangster" Ahmed. This is presented as some kind of wild, anarchic, even terroristic action. But what would good ole God-fearin’ American businessmen do if Washington suddenly raised their taxes by 300 percent?

And Gettleman’s own portrayal of the deposed Islamic Courts system gives the lie to his earlier depiction of Somalis’ inborn anarchy and gangsterism:

Many in the business community became fed up with paying protection fees to the warlords and their countless middle-men. Business leaders then backed a grass-roots Islamist movement that drove the warlords out of Mogadishu last summer and brought peace to the city for the first time in 15 years. The Islamists seemed to be the perfect solution for the businessmen. They delivered stability, which was good for most business, but they did not confiscate property or levy heavy taxes. They called themselves an administration, not a government. “Our best days were under them,” said Abdi Ali Jama, who owns an electrical supply shop in Mogadishu.

So it seems that Somalis — even Somali businessmen — can be governed, as long as people are treated fairly. It seems that stability and peace can be achieved in Somalia — if it rises from the grass roots and is not imposed by foreign fighters shelling neighborhoods and American bombers attacking refugees. But you can only discern this by looking at Gettleman’s piece upside down, and discarding the heavy scaffolding of spin he has erected around it.

And now we come to the heart of darkness in Gettleman’s story. For it is not enough for him, and the "Western security officials" who are his sources, simply to lampoon Somalis as a bunch of shiftless, lazy, quarrelsome darkies in the traditional Establishment fashion. No, Gettleman goes beyond this to concoct a completely false account of how this new front in Bush’s "War on Terror" was launched. Here, he invokes the eternal cry of every aggressor from time out of mind: "They made us do it." It’s what Hitler said when he invaded Poland. It’s what Saddam said when he invaded Kuwait. It’s what Bush said when he invaded Iraq. And it’s obviously the Bushist party line now:

But then a radical wing took over, and the Islamists declared war on Ethiopia, which commands one of the mightiest armies in Africa. The Ethiopians, with covert American help, crushed the Islamist army in December and bolstered the authority of Somalia’s transitional government in the capital.

"The Islamists declared war on Ethiopia." This, of course, is a blatant and outright lie. (Although perhaps Gettleman, taking dictation from his "Western security officials" — and apparently unable to access, say, the BBC on his computer — doesn’t actually know the truth. In any case, he obviously can’t be bothered to find out.) The truth is that Ethiopia sent a 100-strong column of trucks and armored cars across the border into Somalia on July 20 of last year to bolster the Bush-backed warlords who were trying to overthrow the Islamist Courts government, which had taken over Mogadishu a month before. It was the day after this armed incursion into Somalian territory that the Islamist Courts declared a jihad "against Ethiopians in Somalia," not a "war against Ethiopia."

Let’s walk through that sequence of events once again: Ethiopia makes an armed incursion into Somalia. The Somalian government declares that the Ethiopian troops should be driven out of Somalia. (Yes, I know that if Mexico sent an armed column into Texas to join up with a Chinese-backed group trying to overthrow the government of the United States, George W. Bush would react with Zen-like calm and seek a peaceful solution through diplomacy, negotiation and compromise, and that’s what the Islamic Courts guys should have done in this case. But you can’t expect such heathenish savages to respond with the enlightenment and good will that has always marked conflict resolution among the Christian nations of the West.)

Somehow from this sequence Gettleman manages to convey to readers exactly what the Bush Administration wants them to think: the Muslim terrorists started it, and now they’re getting what’s coming to them. And if you see any pictures on CNN or somewhere of innocent people being killed in the crossfire, well, that’s just because a bunch of greedy gangsters and al Qaeders are causing trouble.

And this is the "news" about Somalia that the New York Times believes is "fit to print": lies and spin about yet another war of aggression being fought at America’s behest, with American money, troops, arms and bombs.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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In the self-plugging department, I should note that one of my Moscow Times columns from last year has been nominated for a science fiction prize, of all things: the "Sidewise Award for Alternate History," which will be awarded at the North American Science Fiction Conference in St. Louis later this year. I don’t know who submitted the piece for consideration, but whoever you are, many thanks. A couple of passages use the language of some of our present-day imperial apologists, with suitable changes for the far-future setting. The story is below. It was originally posted here.

HISTORY LESSONS

BERLIN, May 12, 2153 — Within the ivy-covered walls of Farben University, a great battle is now raging. But although the Reich’s ancient capital has seen its share of warfare down through the centuries, today’s combatants have no swords, no guns, no bio-disrupters — just words and pictures, marshalled on either side of a fierce debate that has split the staid academic world in two, and is beginning to spill over into national politics as well. It all revolves around a simple question: Was the German Empire a good thing or a bad thing?

At one time, the answer would have seemed clear. In the three decades since the last "Reich Protectorate" gained its independence (Ukraine, 2122), the liberal consensus among German historians has been that the Empire founded more than 200 years ago by Adolf Hitler was largely a malign development: "a system, born in aggression and atrocity, that inflicted terrible suffering on the conquered lands for generations, and warped German society itself with its arrogance, brutality and corruption," as Germany’s leading historian, Yuri Vinogradov, put it in his landmark 2128 work, Reich and Reality. That book set the tone for a flood of hard-hitting probes into Reich history that left almost no nationalist myth intact.

But in recent years, a group of conservative historians — dubbed the "Revisionists" — have sternly challenged this view. Led by the young Danzig firebrand, Gregor Metzger, the Revisionists argue that the achievements of the Empire — and the "Leader-State system" that was replaced by parliamentary democracy in 2120 — have been denigrated by, in Metzger’s words, "liberal apologists picking at old scabs."

"Everyone knows there were blots on the Empire’s record," Metzger says. "No one today would countenance, say, the early Reich’s treatment of the Jews or the excesses in putting down the Muslim Rebellions in the Caucasus, etc. But neither should we look back and impose our modern values on the people of those times. Rather, we should try to understand them in their own context — and appreciate their many accomplishments."

These accomplishments, say the Revisionists, include: the eradication of Communism in Europe; the establishment of a continent-wide free market for goods, labor and capital; the creation of a common legal system and government institutions now used by most of the old colonies; and the planting of large settler communities throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia that have evolved into thriving cities and "carried the values of Western Civilization deep into benighted and lawless lands," as Metzger writes in his best-selling new book, The End of Shame: German Power in Perspective.

The Revisionists’ work has been taken up by conservative politicians seeking to roll back many of the democratic reforms and cultural freedoms instituted by what they scornfully call "the new Weimar Republic." Citing Metzger and others, they are advancing a "national greatness agenda" to foster pride in the Homeland, restore "traditional moral values" to society, and reassert German dominance in world affairs. The centrist government, put on the defensive by these attacks, has increasingly adopted more nationalist rhetoric, and last month cancelled a long-planned exhibition at the National Museum on "Hitler’s Tainted Legacy," calling it "too biased."

Much of the academic debate turns on interpretations of the Speer Era (1947—81). After Hitler’s death from cancer in 1947, Armaments Minister Albert Speer took power with the backing of intelligence chief Wilhelm Canaris in a brief but bloody coup against the Nazi old guard. He then negotiated an armistice, and the battle lines of the deadlocked armies became the boundaries of the new world order, leaving Germany in control of Europe from the Pyrenees to the Urals.

To the Revisionists, Speer and Canaris are heroes — pragmatic moderates who curbed the Regime’s ugliest aspects while preserving its vast territorial gains and consolidating its power. "Although Leader Hitler’s dream of a civilizing German empire in the East was somewhat skewed by his unfortunate adherence to the American pseudo-science of eugenics, it was still a noble vision," Metzger says. "Leader Speer purged this vision of its dross and made it the foundation of our modern world."

For the liberals, that is precisely the problem. "After the coup, Speer could have restored democracy," says Vinogradov. "He could have withdrawn from the conquered lands. He could have made reparations to Hitler’s victims and confronted the nation’s guilt. Instead he chose to assume Hitler’s mantle, the semi-divine aura of the ‘Leader,’ exalting power above the law. Centuries of crime and tyranny flowed from that fatal choice. Yes, he closed the death-camps — but prosecuted no one for these atrocities. He accelerated the land-theft of the settlements, and drafted millions into forced labor to make up for the loss of native Germans to the colonies. Why pretend this was somehow noble or glorious? We should simply tell the truth about it."

Vinogradov is himself a product of the forced labor policy. When the Soviet state collapsed after Stalin’s retreat to the Urals, European Russia was savagely reduced, and its territory parceled out to other Reich protectorates. Asian Russia degenerated into decades of anarchy and warlordism, and is now under the dominion of the Falun Gong regime in China. Moscow was razed to the ground in 1944 and never rebuilt; its carefully preserved ruins are still a popular attraction for German tourists. Vinogradov’s ancestors, native Muscovites, were shipped to Germany to work in the fields.

The Revisionists say the "scab-picking" over the past is irrelevant in the modern world. "What’s done is done," says Metzger. "The Romans have already conquered Carthage. Britain has already built its imperial wealth on slavery and colonial rule. The Americans have already slaughtered the Indians and chained the slaves. We can’t unring the bell. Nor should we want to. What matters are the long-term benefits to civilization we have accrued from those who came before us, whatever their mistakes or misdeeds might have been. Which of these benefits would you give up to rectify some ancient historical wrong?"

Metzger, tipped by many as the likely replacement for Vinogradov when he retires as head of the Farben history faculty next year, can’t resist a slight personal dig at his venerable rival.

"One wonders if Herr Professor Vinogradov would enjoy the same kind of prosperity — and freedom to criticize — he possesses today if the Communist evil had not been destroyed, at great sacrifice, by German power," Metzger says. "While one sincerely regrets the injuries to the professor’s forbears, I think that, on balance, we can say that the liberation of the East from Stalinist tyranny was a boon for all humanity."

Vinogradov shrugs off these "shallow" arguments. "The point of historical research is not to dispossess the present, but to disillusion it: to strip away self-serving myth and fatal ignorance, in order to see more clearly how we got here, and what it really cost, and how these costs shape — and distort — our responses to reality. Otherwise, we are blind — easy prey for the abusers of power and their murderous deceptions."

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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LONDON — Bob Dylan tore through his set here last night (April 15) with a fire and spirit that matched anything from his iconic heyday — and gave the lie, once again, to the tired charge that he has abandoned songs of dissent against the evils of our time.

From the very first note, Dylan was in marvelous voice — full, strong, supple, projecting with more power than I’d heard from him on stage since the first time I saw him in concert almost 30 years ago. It was truly uncanny. For many years, going back to the late 1980s, one of the chief attractions of seeing Dylan live has been observing how artfully he used the "bare, ruin’d choir" of his voice, making the husk work to the advantage of the songs. The last time I saw him live, in 2005, his chief vocal weapons were a raspy whisper and a graveled bark. But whether he’s injected himself with sheep glands or sold his soul to the devil, something has brought his voice back to an astonishing degree.

His engagement with the material too was at new levels of intensity. Past Dylan concerts have often been a matter of rolling through a few valleys of somewhat perfunctorily rendered songs to gather strength for the stunning high points that invariably dotted each concert. And it often took a couple of songs for Dylan to really warm up. But last night, from the very beginning, Dylan was switched on, all guns blazing, leading his five-piece band first on guitar then on a rollicking skating-rink organ. The first dozen songs were a relentless display of excellence, with scarcely a breath between them. If there was a slight falling-off toward the end, it was only because Dylan seemed to have finally outrun his band, who were unable to reach the last bit of the mountaintop that Dylan crested with ease.

For more than 40 years, Dylan has been excoriated in some quarters for "abandoning protest," for "turning his back" on the world to write love songs and surreal rhapsodies. This is chiefly because he ceased long ago to write new "finger-pointing" songs torn from the day’s headlines (with the notable exception of "Hurricane" in the mid-70s). But besides the fact that Dylan has never completely stopped performing some of these topical songs — the searing 1964 ballad of racism and injustice, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," has been a mainstay of his 21st century concerts, for example — protest, dissent and social commentary are laced throughout his work, in every period, often with a depth that gives them lasting power and applicability beyond the circumstances of their creation.

And the songs Dylan chose to sing last night — from a vast repertoire drawn from five decades — provided a very telling, very specific commentary on these "modern times." Now, while it’s highly unlikely that the opening lines of the opening song of the concert —

"Cat’s in the well, the wolf is looking down;
He’s got his big bushy tail dragging all over the ground —"

were an allusion to the recent woman troubles of war crime accomplice Paul Wolfowitz, there was no mistaking the contemporary resonance of the lines that followed soon after:

"Cat’s in the well, and grief is showing its face:
The world’s being slaughtered, and it’s such a bloody disgrace."

In earlier concerts on this tour, Dylan has been playing "John Brown," a tale about a soldier coming back horribly disfigured from "a good, old-fashioned war," and "Masters of War," which he has called his "song about the military-industrial complex." Although he didn’t play these two songs in London last night, images of pointless war, murderous lies, repressive zealotry, rapacious corruption, the abandonment of the poor and downtrodden — in short, the whole panoply of the Bush Imperium — abounded throughout the night.

It was there in undisguised form in "It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)," the early, stark acoustic ballad that Dylan has now turned into a full-bore, hard-rock cannonade, as he snarled out from beneath his wide-brimmed white hat this prescient condemnation of the Religious Right that he had penned more than 40 years ago:

"Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
Money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony."

Or in a high-octane version of "Highway 61 Revisited," even faster and more raw than the original 1965 version, which mirrors the mendacity and hucksterism that led to the feast of blood in Iraq:

"The roving gambler he was very bored
Trying to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
Said I never did engage in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61."

Of course, the song also mirrors the similar "Gulf of Tonkin" deceptions that led to America’s full-blown involvement in Viet Nam. Which is why Dylan’s departure from strict topicality in the mid-Sixties resulted not in a lessening but a deepening of his artistic dissent: it recognized the depressingly constant patterns of human behavior that lie beneath the specific machination of states, institutions and people seeking power. Leaders who lie, war profiteers on the make, cranks and con-men who gamble with other people’s lives — such things aren’t confined to a single era, a single party, or a single nation.

This is also made explicit in yet another powerful song that Dylan presented last night: "Blind Willie McTell," which addresses the role of slavery and racism in the creation of American culture — including Dylan’s own art, his "white minstrelry" that borrows — or steals (with "love and theft") — so heavily from forms originated by America’s slaves and their descendants. The song, delivered in a thunderous version, expands from evocations of the specific milieu that gave rise to bluesman McTell and his music to a broader vision of the underlying moral decay of a "world gone wrong":

"Well, God is in His heaven
And we all want what’s His
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is."

But the heart of the concert was a luminous rendition of "Chimes of Freedom," Dylan’s visionary, near-hallucinatory expression of universal compassion. It’s a song that might have been written by Prince Myshkin in the midst of an epileptic euphoria, when an intense apprehension of cosmic harmony and balance fills the sufferer — just before he falls into a painful seizure. In this song, Dylan turns from the perpetrators of human failing and abuses of power to embrace their victims. Again, the lines, though written decades ago, call up pictures from the present-day, with its refugees fleeing Bush’s Terror War, the prisons overflowing, and the poor, the mad, the lost, the damaged being thrown aside and left behind in ever-growing numbers:

"Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
And for each and every underdog soldier in the night
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing…

"In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden while the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin’ rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning…

"Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing."

Dylan sang the song with a tender force and intensity, as if he had just written it and wanted to convey this fresh vision to his listeners. This remarkable performance was just one of a clutch of slower songs that also glowed with tenderness, wisdom and, at times, playful humor, including three from his 2006 "Modern Times" album: "Spirit on the Water," "When the Deal Goes Down," and "Nettie Moore." (There were also revved-up versions of MT’s "Rollin’ and Tumblin’" and "When the Levee Breaks" on offer.) Indeed, "Spirit on the Water" roused probably the biggest cheer of the night for Dylan’s self-mocking lines:

"You think I’m over the hill
You think I’m past my prime
Let me see what you got
We could have a whoppin’ good time."

And so it was. Despite the seriousness of many of the songs, a whoppin’ good time was had by all in the filled-up Wembley Arena. One of the two encore songs, the new "Thunder on the Mountain," was perhaps a perfect encapsulation of the evening, as it seemed to gather up themes from across Dylan’s decades of work — mind-bending rhymes ("Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons-of-bitches/I’ll recruit my army from the orph-an-ages"), borrowed blues lines, surreal imagery, folksy images, love lyrics, self-mockery and, yes, dissent:

"Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes.
I’ll say this, I don’t give a damn about your dreams."

A better judgement on the modern times of the Bush Imperium is hard to imagine. Nor are we likely to see a more relevant, more powerful singer — of any age — for many moons to come.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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The Bush-McCain "surge" is working so well that now the very heart of the American-installed, American-protected Iraqi government has been struck by a bomb, killing at least two legislators, as the Washington Post, AP and the Guardian report.

The Green Zone blast came just hours after another bombing crippled one of Baghdad’s main bridges, killing several people and further choking off movement within the city. But then, that too is part of the Bush-McCain surge plan, whose ultimate goal is to turn Baghdad into a "community prison," restricting the free movement of Iraqis in their own capital. As Robert Fisk reports in a major story in the Independent (entirely overlooked by the American corporate media):

Faced with an ever-more ruthless insurgency in Baghdad — despite President George Bush’s "surge" in troops — US forces in the city are now planning a massive and highly controversial counter-insurgency operation that will seal off vast areas of the city, enclosing whole neighbourhoods with barricades and allowing only Iraqis with newly issued ID cards to enter. The campaign of "gated communities" — whose genesis was in the Vietnam War — will involve up to 30 of the city’s 89 official districts and will be the most ambitious counter-insurgency programme yet mounted by the US in Iraq.

But the imprisonment of Iraqis within Baghdad — a practice that has been carried out on a smaller scale elsewhere, including the wrapping of whole towns in barbed wire — is not the only goal of the Bush-McCain plan, Fisk notes:

But the campaign has far wider military ambitions than the pacification of Baghdad. It now appears that the US military intends to place as many as five mechanised brigades — comprising about 40,000 men — south and east of Baghdad, at least three of them positioned between the capital and the Iranian border. This would present Iran with a powerful — and potentially aggressive — American military force close to its border in the event of a US or Israeli military strike against its nuclear facilities later this year.

The draconian plan to "enclose" vast quadrants of the ancient city goes far beyond the stated policies of the Bush-McCain surge, Fisk reports:

So far, the Baghdad campaign has involved only the creation of a few US positions within several civilian areas of the city but the new project will involve joint American and Iraqi "support bases" in nine of the 30 districts to be "gated" off. From these bases — in fortified buildings — US-Iraqi forces will supposedly clear militias from civilian streets which will then be walled off and the occupants issued with ID cards. Only the occupants will be allowed into these "gated communities" and there will be continuous patrolling by US-Iraqi forces. There are likely to be pass systems, "visitor" registration and restrictions on movement outside the "gated communities." Civilians may find themselves inside a "controlled population" prison.

In theory, US forces can then concentrate on providing physical reconstruction in what the military like to call a "secure environment." But insurgents are not foreigners, despite the presence of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. They come from the same population centres that will be "gated" and will, if undiscovered, hold ID cards themselves; they will be "enclosed" with everyone else.

A former US officer in Vietnam who has a deep knowledge of General Petraeus’s plans is sceptical of the possible results. "The first loyalty of any Sunni who is in the Iraqi army is to the insurgency," he said. "Any Shia’s first loyalty is to the head of his political party and its militia. Any Kurd in the Iraqi army, his first loyalty is to either Barzani or Talabani. There is no independent Iraqi army. These people really have no choice. They are trying to save their families from starvation and reprisal. At one time they may have believed in a unified Iraq. At one time they may have been secular. But the violence and brutality that started with the American invasion has burnt those liberal ideas out of people … Every American who is embedded in an Iraqi unit is in constant mortal danger."

The plan’s failure will be profound, another senior officer told Fisk:

"Once the additional troops are in place the insurrectionists will cut the lines of communication from Kuwait to the greatest extent they are able," he told The Independent. "They will do the same inside Baghdad, forcing more use of helicopters. The helicopters will be vulnerable coming into the patrol bases, and the enemy will destroy as many as they can. The second part of their plan will be to attempt to destroy one of the patrol bases. They will begin that process by utilising their people inside the ‘gated communities’ to help them enter. They will choose bases where the Iraqi troops either will not fight or will actually support them.

"The American reaction will be to use massive firepower, which will destroy the neighbourhood that is being ‘protected’."

But of course, in this, as in every other aspect of the Bush war crime in Iraq, "failure" is a highly relative term. If the stated aim of the Bush-McCain surge were genuine — providing security to the Iraqi people in order to speed reconstruction efforts and aid the nurturing of a non-sectarian democracy — then yes, it is howlingly obvious that the plan to turn Baghdad into a gigantic, open-air concentration camp is doomed to fail. It will simply radicalize more Iraqis, kill more civilians and spike the body count of American soldiers to new heights. But as we have stated here for more than five years — even before the inevitable invasion was launched — nothing that the Bush-led action does in Iraq has anything to do with the welfare of the Iraqi people, or of American soldiers for that matters. They are simply careening around from pillar to post, trying to ride the wild beast of war they have unleashed toward their ultimate goal: strategic and economic domination of the world’s oil heartlands, and the never-ending expansion of an authoritarian militarist-corporatist state in America.

Their main difficulty comes from trying to accomplish this task without stirring up the rubes back home too much. That’s why they have not — yet — adopted the most extreme measures advocated by their cowardly cheerleaders in the armchair warrior brigade, the "more rubble, less trouble" gang so ably exposed recently by Glenn Greenwald. (I know I’ve already mentioned Glenn Reynolds’ genocidal phrase earlier today, but it bears repeating how openly savage and murderous these wretched bootlickers really are.) Most Americans don’t like to think of themselves as genocidal maniacs (instapunditniks excluded, of course); they like to see their country as the "shining city on the hill," a literally holy land incapable of any evil action whatsoever. Thus every plot and ploy in Bush’s thorough-going rapine in Iraq must be portrayed as an act of altruism and idealism, false rhetoric, outright lies and the incessant, obsessive manipulation and/or repression of images and information. The Bushists must constantly calibrate what the political market will bear, and so they do operate within some constraints.

Unfortunately, the last few years have shown that the American political market — the electorate, the citizenry — will bear a great deal without really lashing out against the criminals in power. Torture, murder, rape, the destruction of whole cities, the ongoing aerial bombardment of civilian centers, the death of more than 600,000 innocent civilians — none of this has provoked throne-shaking outrage in the American people. The fact that the mild rebuke they delivered in the November 2006 elections has not only been openly scorned and rejected by Bush but largely ignored by the supposedly empowered Democratic opposition (with its "non-binding resolutions" and demands that Iraqis meet the all-important "benchmark" of an oil law that gives the nation’s resources to Western corporations) has not produced any large-scale reaction. Of course, there is some hope to be found in the growing numbers of municipalities and state legislatures calling for an end to the war and/or the impeachment of the gangsters who led us into it. But the fact that Bush has been able to launch a major escalation of the war — raising troop levels and press-ganging soldiers into even-longer tours of duty — after losing the election is yet another indication of how much scope for evil that Bush retains, despite his plummeting popularity.

And so, while he cannot reduce Baghdad to Glenn Reynolds’ longed-for rubble — at least not yet — he can push forward with this new tightening of the screws on his captive colony. When this inevitably fails in its ostensible mission, they will lurch on to something else, another scheme to keep the rubes off-balance for a few months longer, then repeat the cycle again and again. Why? Because the whole point of Bush’s strategy is to prolong the American military presence in Iraq. This is why American soldiers were sent there — to stay there. And they will stay there — no matter how many bombs go off in the Green Zone, no matter how much horrific blowback is generated by the Bush-McCain surge — until the American people make the political costs too high for any politician to bear. And this includes the Democrats, whose vaunted "anti-war" plans so far have all called for retaining some kind of military presence in Iraq, and the handover of the nation’s oil to the West. As the man said, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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When a Bush-backed “regime change” is in high gear, you can bet that war crimes are not far behind. And so it has proved in Somalia, where a senior European Union security official has told the organization that the American-trained and American-funded Ethiopian invaders and their Somali allies “may have committed war crimes and that donor countries could be considered complicit if they do nothing to stop them,” the Independent reports.

The official’s message to the EU’s Somalia delegation detailed:

“the exact statutes that were violated. They included intentionally directing attacks against civilians and ordering the displacement of civilians for reasons related to the conflict,” the Independent notes. “‘In regard to the abovementioned potential violations of international law there arise urgent questions of responsibility and potential complicity in the commission of war crimes by the European Commission and its partners,’ the e-mail said. The European Commission has been a major financial backer of the Somali government and the African Union peacekeeping mission, which is currently made up of only Ugandan troops…The United States is also a major financial supporter of the Somali government and the peacekeepers, pledging more than $120 million.”

That figure dwarfs the $20 million that the EU is laying out for bankrolling the new government installed by Bush and the Ethiopian dictatorship. And of course, the $120 million for “peacekeeping” doled out by Washington does not include the untold millions in secret dosh to supply the Ethiopian military with training, equipment and intelligence support. Nor does it cover the cost of the U.S. Special Ops forces that have been operating in Somalia and surrounding states in the wake of the invasion. Nor the cost of the many bombing raids that Bush has ordered in support of the Ethiopian dictatorship’s assault, raids which have killed scores of civilians in supposed attempts to assassinate alleged al Qaeda allies from thousands of feet in the air.

Nor does this $120 million “peacekeeping” largess cover the cost of the rendition operation that the Bush gang has been running, grabbing Somalians fleeing for their lives from Bush’s regime change operation and “rendering” them back to Ethiopia’s notorious dungeons, where they are beaten, starved and abused — while CIA and FBI officials drop by the hellholes for “interrogation sessions” with the captives, as the Associated Press reported this week in an almost universally ignored in-depth investigation: U.S. Agents Visit Secret Ethiopian Jails:

CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaida militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.

Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families…

One Western diplomat in Nairobi, who agreed to speak to AP only if not quoted to avoid angering U.S. officials, said he sees the United States as playing a guiding role in the operation. John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counter-terrorism, went further. He said in an e-mail that the United States has acted as “ringleader” in what he labeled a “decentralized, outsourced Guantanamo.”

We wrote here recently about a U.S. citizen who was “rendered” to the Ethiopians for the crime of refusing to confess to American agents that he was an al Qaeda agent. Amir Mohamed Meshal, 24, remains in Ethiopian custody, while Bush officials claim they are powerless to get him out. It appears they have no leverage at all with the Ethiopian government, despite providing the dictatorship with millions in military aid, shielding it from international heat over its draconian abuses — and even allowing it to score $20 million in military equipment from North Korea, despite the Bush Administration’s supposedly “zero-tolerance” sanctions against the Korean regime, as the New York Times reports. (It seems killing darkie Muslims in Africa takes priority over nuclear non-proliferation for the Bushists.) No, the Bush Administration has no influence whatsoever over Ethiopia; there’s just no way in hell they could convince Addis Ababa to hand over an American citizen with no criminal charges against him.

So while Bush’s “War on Terror” proxies go about the Master’s business by shooting and forcibly uprooting civilians, the mass exodus of refugees continues, with more than 124,000 people fleeing Mogadishu alone since February, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports. Some 11,000 have been forced from their homes since the beginning of this month. These are refugees not from the invasion itself — which was another quickie “mission accomplished” job — but from the “peace” that Bush and his proxies have visited upon the land, an occupation that is bidding fair to become a smaller-scale version of the four-alarm FUBAR that Bush has wrought in Iraq.

The attack overturned Somalia’s “Islamic Courts” government, which had brought a measure of security and stability to the ravaged nation after 15 years of murderous anarchy. But because the Horn of Africa is considered a linchpin of the Bush gang’s “New American Century” plans for military and economic domination of the region’s oil supplies and distribution, Somalia became a target of “the path of action,” the Mussolinian tag that Bush has given to America’s official national security strategy.

Also — and this is perhaps the most important thing for the lily-livered bullies of the Bush Faction — Somalia was “doable.” This, as you recall, was the battle cry of chickenhawk Paul Wolfowitz immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when he urged his master to hit Iraq right away. As Bob Woodward relates in his hagiographic Bush at War (Woodward had not yet bitten the royal hand that fed him), Wolfowitz told the Bush inner circle that while “attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain … Iraq was a brittle oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable.” That is to say, Howlin’ Wolf, George the Deserter and Dick “Other Priorities” Cheney all knew that Iraq was a broken-backed country that was no threat to anyone and could not strike back, as a state, with a standing army, if attacked. You could go to war against Iraq — even fight a long “counterinsurgency” struggle if you had to — and still keep the malls full, the corporate welfare flowing, the rubes gulled with reality shows and propaganda pageants, and “the base” stoked with bloody-eyed hatred of “Islmaofascists” and their “dhimmicrat” allies, etc. etc. Like Iraq, Somalia was “doable”; so it’s been “done.”

But also like Iraq, the aftermath of this latest Terror War rape is unlikely to follow the Bushist script. As we noted last week, yet another whirlwind of blowback will be reaped from these rotten seeds. Yet another generation will be raised in violence and despair, will be taught — by the “guiding lights of world civilization” — that the true meaning of life is the power that flows from the barrel of a gun, from a bomb, from the blood of innocent people. This is the lesson that the “War on Terror” is teaching and confirming around the world, day after day after day. This is the real “New American Century” that Bush and his cohorts — and his simpering apologists — are trying to construct.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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"Irony is dead" was a phrase you used to hear a lot in the days right after 9/11. It wasn’t true, of course; genuine irony is more necessary — and more inescapable — than ever during a time of tragedy, when reality forces itself more strongly to the surface, exposing all of its fissures and inconsistencies. What the phrase actually meant was "sneering sarcasm is dead." (Which wasn’t true either, although for a time such sarcasm could only be applied safely, in print, to anyone who dissented slightly from the Leader-worship that saturated the media. Christopher "I’m with Dave Horowitz" Hitchens’ famous "It no longer matters what they think" piece comes to mind here.)

No, irony — bitter, wrenching, wounding irony — is ever-present in tragedy. A stark reminder of this cropped up last week in a little-noticed story in USA Today about the efforts of the U.S. military in Iraq to stop the rash of helicopter downings by the insurgents. It’s a straight-forward piece of embedded reporting, simply relating the statements of some American military officers about a change in tactics. Interesting, factual, nothing controversial about it at all.

The bitter irony comes in the phrase that the Pentagon has adopted for the aerial corridors they’ve laid out to escape insurgent attacks on the helicopters: "No-Fly Zones."

Although the period before George W. Bush began the mass murder of more than 600,000 innocent people in Iraq now seems so far away — a page from ancient history, like the defeat of the "world’s only superpower" by a small band of ruthless, fanatical insurgents now being celebrated in the hit film "300" — just a few years ago the phrase "No-Fly Zone" stood as a symbol of all-conquering American power. After George Herbert Walker Bush instigated then betrayed the post-Gulf War rebellions of the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, the U.S. and little tail-waggy Britain set up the "No-Fly Zones" to deny Saddam Hussein access to some two-thirds of Iraqi airspace. (With one exception, of course: George H.W. Bush did allow Saddam to use his helicopter gunships to kill the rebellious Shiites during the post-war uprising.) For 12 years, the Anglo-American air forces controlled Iraq’s skies, bombing targets in (and out of) the zones with impunity.

In those heady days — the same period when the CIA was sponsoring terrorist attacks against civilians in Iraq, carried out by former Baathist tough guy Iyad Allawi, later shoehorned into office as a post-Saddam prime minister, and reportedly being groomed for another shot at the saddle if Bush and the boys decide to do a Diem on Nouri al-Maliki — "No-Fly Zone" was one of those tough-guy jargon phrases beloved of TV talkers, along the lines of "Shock and Awe" or "pre-dawn vertical insertion," the strangely kinky Reaganite tag for the invasion of Grenada. It stood for the unstoppable imposition of American military might — anytime, anywhere, any which way but loose.

But now the phrase is the sad and bloodsoaked emblem of a wretched defeat, a pointless and unnecessary gutting of American power. It now denotes those areas where American aircraft are forbidden to fly, lest they be shot down by Iraqis — the precise opposite of the No-Fly Zones of yore.

A full four years into the war, and just shy of that mark since "Mission Accomplished" was proclaimed, the occupying power has been forced to deny its own pilots access to larger and larger swathes of Iraqi airspace — even as the use of helicopters for troop transport and supply is growing, due to the increasingly unsafe conditions on the ground. It is the Iraqis who are now imposing "No-Fly Zones" on the "world’s only superpower."

This reversal of fortune is bitter irony indeed, as the besieger becomes the besieged, and the yawning chasm between the American elite’s dreams of domination and their ability to achieve them grows wider and wider. The Bush Gang’s ever-more frantic attempts to bridge this gap — throwing more American cannon fodder into the pit, incarcerating more Iraqis, doling out more pork to war profiteers, launching one new regime change war against Somalia while inching closer to another one against Iran — will only bring more needless ruin, bloodshed and terror.

Irony is not dead; but people are. And more will die today, still more tomorrow, and more in the days and weeks and months of senseless war to come.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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Yesterday we wrote of the plight of a U.S. citizen who had fled the fighting during the Bush-backed invasion of Somalia only to find himself “renditioned” into the sinister prisons of the Ethiopian invaders — despite the fact that U.S. officials declared that there were no charges against him. (See the second half of that post.)

Now The Independent reports that Amir Meshal — the 24-year-old New Jersey man renditioned by U.S. officials because he refused to confess to being an al Qaeda agent — is not alone in being subjected to the lawless procedure so beloved by the defenders of civilization. (For an early example of this, which also involved Somalia, see Render Unto Caesar.)

Anger at US ‘rendition’ of refugees who fled Somalia (Independent)

Excerpts: At least 150 people arrested in Kenya after fleeing violence in Somalia have been secretly flown to Somalia and Ethiopia, where they are being held incommunicado in underground prisons, human rights groups say…

Several of the suspects are understood to be held in underground prisons at Mogadishu airport where they are held shackled to the wall. Most have since been sent on to two detention facilities in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia has been accused of routinely torturing political prisoners. A further 50 or 60 people accused of belonging to Ethiopian rebel groups fighting alongside Somalia’s Union of Islamic Courts were sent directly to Ethiopia….

The suspects deported from Kenya were interrogated beforehand by American FBI officials in Kenyan prisons, where they were accused of having links with al-Qa’ida. “This is extraordinary rendition,” said Maini Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Human Rights Commission. “Britain and America are involved in interrogating suspects.”

Following the US-backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian troops, thousands of Somalis have tried to escape the violence by crossing the long, porous border with Kenya. Many of those caught on the Kenya-Somalia border were accused of belonging to the Islamic Courts and refused entry.

At least 150 of those who managed to get through were detained by Kenyan police, including 17 women and 12 children, one a baby of seven months. Many needed medical attention but did not receive it, including a pregnant Tunisian woman who had a bullet lodged in her back.

All were held in Kenyan prisons for several weeks without access to lawyers and family members. As well as being interrogated by the FBI, human rights groups in Nairobi also claimed British officials were involved.

“The Americans had direct access to the prisoners, one on one,” said Al-Amin Kimathi of the Muslim Human Rights Forum, adding that US diplomatic vehicles carried the suspects from Nairobi police stations to be questioned. “Senior Kenyan police officers told us they had nothing to do with the operation,” said Mr Kimathi. “It was out of their hands.”

The US has claimed that Somalia’s Islamic Courts, which controlled much of the country until December, was run by an al-Qa’ida cell. Ethiopian troops, backed by US intelligence and logistical support, overpowered the Islamic Courts within a few days of fighting at the end of last year.

This latter claim is baseless. It is simply a reflection of the Bush gang’s primitive tactic of labeling any inconvenient Muslim group or individual as “al Qaeda,” which then “justifies” any action taken against them: military invasion, assassination, rendition, indefinite detention, torture.

It’s clear that no nation on earth will be allowed to organize its own society as it wishes, or work out its own internal conflicts, if the American elite decides they have some financial or strategic interest in the matter. The only nations immune to this power-mad interventionist philosophy are those who can strike back hard enough to upset the elite’s apple cart. And thus we have Bush’s “war on terror” — which is, as we’ve often noted, simply an escalation of the long-running, bipartisan foreign policy of the “National Security State” that has ruled America for 60 years.

This year marks the anniversary of this coup d’tat: the 1947 “National Security Act.” Writing on the 50th anniversary of this supplanting of the Republic, Gore Vidal wrote:

Fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only IF he first “scared the hell out of the American people” that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues…we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine…”

Obviously, the situation that Vidal describes didn’t begin with the illegal implantation of the Bush Regime by the rightwing faction of the Supreme Court (two of whom had family members profiting from the Bush campaign) in December 2000. It has gone on for decades, under “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans. But it has reached a new pitch of intensity, audacity and recklessness today.

Somalia might seem an odd choice for “the path of action” — the Hitlerian phrase that Bush incorporated into the official “National Security Strategy of the United States” in formalizing the doctrine of “preventive” — i.e., aggressive — war. (It was also then that he declared that his version of corrupt crony capitalism to be the “single sustainable model of national success.”) But as “blaqfather,” a commentor on the previous points out, before Somalia collapsed into anarchy in 1991, it was being actively explored by major oil companies: “A World Bank and U.N. survey that year of eight northeastern African countries’ petroleum potential ranked Somalia second only to Sudan as the top prospective commercial producer. Northern Somalia lay within a regional oil window reaching south across the Gulf of Aden, the geologists said.” So Somalia’s affairs are not entirely without interest to a Washington regime populated by professional oilmen.

What’s more, Somalia’s geographic location gives it heightened importance in the Bush Regime’s strategy to control the Horn of Africa and dominate the continent’s ever-more-vital oil supplies. The Pentagon recently set up its first-ever “African Command,” adding it to the string of regions under the command of a military proconsul. (Bush has also created the first such satrapy covering the United States itself, which has never before been the subject — the target? — of a military “command.”)

And finally, Somalia was “doable.” You can crush it without cost, squash it like a fly, and not only do it on the cheap — with Ethiopian troops and local warlords serving as your proxies — you can do it without notice. The entire Somalian campaign — and America’s very extensive involvement in it — has passed virtually unremarked in the U.S. media, and plays no part at all on the national political scene. It is simply a non-event, something happening far away to a bunch of darkies — Muslim darkies, on top of that — so who cares? It’s not even worth a joke by Leno or Letterman.

But “doability” is a major factor in the “War on Terror” strategy. The Bush gang thought Iraq was “doable,” as the BBC’s John Simpson noted in 2006:

It was a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq, three years ago. I was interviewing the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, in the ballroom of a big hotel in Cairo…he described to me all the disasters he was certain would follow the invasion. The US and British troops would be bogged down in Iraq for years. There would be civil war between Sunnis and Shias. The real beneficiary would be the government in Iran.

“And what do the Americans say when you tell them this,” I asked? “They don’t even listen,” he said.

… I asked him why he thought the US was determined to invade Iraq.

He said he had put the same question to Vice-President Dick Cheney. Mr. Cheney had replied: “Because it’s doable.”

The Bushists were wrong about Iraq, of course, because they are stupid, arrogant, third-rate characters, blinded by their greed and by the ignorant prejudices that boil up in their “guts,” which Bush cites so often as his guide. But Cheney’s remark is a perfect expression of their approach, which is the way of the coward and the bully, who only beat up people who can’t hit back.

That is doubtless the only thing delaying the attack on Iran for which they have openly prepared: they’re trying to figure out, with their crabbed little minds, if they can get away with it with all their apple carts intact. Anyone not blinded by greed or drunk on imperial arrogance knows that such an attack will be a costly, ghastly moral horror and a vast strategic mistake. But then, that was also the case with the attack on Iraq, which millions of people across the world marched against, in an outpouring for peace never seen before in human history. But the Bushists — and their drunken sycophants in the American political and media establishments — were still stupid enough to pull the trigger. And although some of those Establishment figures have sobered up a bit since then, why should we think that the Bushists themselves — who rejected the wan Establishment attempts to rein in the Iraq war and instead “surged” into an escalation — are any smarter now?

Meanwhile, they have slaked their constant craving for “regime change” with this little “do-able” appetizer in Somalia. And they have gotten away with it.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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This week saw the mysterious death of yet another journalist in Moscow. This time it was Kommersant columnist Ivan Safronov, a former colonel who wrote about Russia’s ever-murky military affairs, as the Moscow Times reports. Safronov, who occasionally ran afoul of the "security organs" when digging up dirt on Russia’s military-industrial complex (much akin to its American counterpart centered in the north Virginia badlands formerly known as Hell’s Bottom but now called the Pentagon), apparently committed suicide by jumping out of a fifth-floor window, head first, with his hat and coat on. And if you believe that "official" explanation, we have some beachfront property in Nizhny Novgorod we’d like to sell you.

The Western media is emphasizing the fact that Safronov joins a list of some dozen other Russian journalists who have died under mysterious circumstances during the presidency of Vladimir Putin (including real journalists like Anna Politkovskaya and shadowland operatives like Alexander Litvinenko). Although this number is but a fraction of the death toll of journalists in George W. Bush’s satrapy of Iraq, it is of course a disturbing figure.

But let’s not pretend that this kind of thing began under Putin’s reign, with its Bush-like concern for stifling dissent and concentrating power in the name of national security. Scribal life was also cheap during the merry misrule of that unquenchable favorite of Western governments, Boris Yeltsin. (In fact, everyone’s life was pretty cheap in those glorious, gangterish days of yore. And as for anti-democratic draconia, Putin has yet to do anything remotely as radically authoritarian as shelling the democratically elected Duma with tanks and muscling through a dubious (and probably bogus) referendum granting himself and future presidents the wide-ranging powers that Putin now employs with considerably greater skill than his drunken mentor.)

During my first stint at the Moscow Times in 1994, another reporter who made a specialty of investigating the rampant corruption in Yeltsin’s armed forces was blown up in his office at Moskovsky Komsomolets, just across the street from our building. Dmitry Kholodov was killed when he opened a package that an informant had told him contained evidence of military malfeasance. There followed a great outpouring of crocodile tears from Yeltsin and the top military brass implicated in many of Kholodov’s stories. His killing was officially upgraded from ordinary murder to a case of "terrorism," to be given the highest attention by every investigative tool at the state’s command. Years later, in 2004, six army officers were finally tried for the murder — and acquitted. Kholodov’s killing remains officially unsolved. But at least they didn’t say he blew himself up on purpose.

Kholodov was just one of the several journalists who met their final deadline with Uncle Borya in the Kremlin. This is a particular hazard of those who delve into military matters, like Safronov. The Russian military, like its American counterpart, is a vast, amorphous, many-headed hydra, with numerous secret units, criminal enterprises and rogue operators, all of them well-armed and many of them trained in the blackest covert arts. One needn’t automatically assume that presidential orders (or knowledge) are required to instigate the murder of a reporter disturbing some well-feathered military nest somewhere.

On the other hand, the window -drop "suicide" does have a well-established official pedigree — and not just in Russia. When I first read of Safronov’s death, I immediately thought of a similar case involving the death of an American scientist who had uncovered Nazi-style medical experiments on prisoners and tests of LSD and other mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting targets. He too "committed suicide" by somehow hurtling himself through a glass window from a hotel room, while in the company of a CIA handler. The government cover-up of his death continued for decades, and was assisted, years after the death, by the knowing deception of two top presidential aides: Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.

I wrote about the case of Frank Olson for CounterPunch in 2002. The story traces "the thin red cord that weaves in and out of the shifting facades of reason and respectability that mask the brutal machinery of power. At certain rare moments the thread flashes into sight, emerging from the chaotic jumble of unbearable truth and life-giving illusion that makes up human reality." One emergence was the Frank Olson case, which had been kept alive by his son, Eric [shown in a childhood photo with Frank below], who for half a century tried to find out what happened to his father on that fatal night in 1953. As I wrote then:

Frank’s son, Eric, believes he knows the answer now: his father was murdered to keep the thread from sight, to "protect" the American people from the knowledge that their own government had taken up and extended Nazi experiments on mind control, psychological torture and chemical warfare — and that it was conducting these experiments as the Nazis did, on unwilling subjects, on captives and "expendables," even to the point of "termination."

Frank Olson was a CIA scientist at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the Army’s biological weapons research center. Ostensibly he was a civilian employee of the Army; his family didn’t know his true employer. Olson worked on methods of spreading anthrax and other toxins; some of his colleagues were involved in mind control drugs and torture techniques. But his life within the charmed circle of the American intelligence elite would unravel with dizzying speed in just a few months in 1953.

It began in the summer of that year, when Olson made several trips to Europe, to investigate secret American-British research centers in Germany. There he found the CIA was testing "truth serums" and other torture drugs on "expendables," including captured Russian agents. He told a British colleague that he had witnessed "horrors" there — horrors which called into starkest question his own work on biochemical weapons. He came home a changed man, troubled, morose. He told his wife he wanted to leave government service.

But it was too late: the brutal machinery was already grinding. His British colleague told his own superiors about Olson’s concerns; they in turn informed the CIA that Olson was now a "security risk." Not long after his return, Olson given LSD by one of his colleagues — slipped into his drink as part of a covert "field experiment." A few days later, he was flown to New York, ostensibly for psychiatric treatment at the hands of a CIA doctor — who prescribed whiskey and pills. Then he was taken to a CIA magician — yes, a magician — who apparently tried to hypnotize him for interrogation.

Finally he checked into a cheap hotel — with a CIA handler, Robert Lashbrook, in tow. Olson called his wife, told her he was feeling better and would be home the next day. But that night, he was found dead on the street, 10 floors below. The handler said that Olson had apparently thrown himself through the closed window in a suicidal fit. The government told the family it was simply a tragic suicide. They didn’t mention the LSD — or the fact that Olson worked for the CIA.

It would take Eric Olson 49 years to piece together as much of the truth as we are ever likely to know about what happened that night. But first would come a false dawn, a cruel trick played on the family by cynical operators in Ford Administration, who used a screen of half-truth and deliberate falsehood to divert the Olsons — and the nation — from the darkest tangles of the thread. Two of those operators would work the thread — play upon it, thrive on it, hold hard to its damp crimson stain — to rise from the obscurity of White House functionaries to positions of colossal, world-shaking power:

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

(The complete story, with annotations, can be found here: The Secret Sharers: The CIA, the Bush Gang, and the Killing of Frank Olson.)

So let us lay not that flattering unction to our souls, that such mysterious deaths and defenestrations occur only in the mephitic air of Putin’s Moscow. Inconvenient people — especially those persistent enough to be a bother but not powerful or connected enough to protect themselves from reprisal — are removed from the scene, one way or another, all the time. Gangsters do it; terrorists do it; and so do agents of the state, "rogue" or otherwise.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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Scott Ritter is back, telling the same truths he’s been telling for almost a decade, about the rank deception and violent aggression that has driven the bipartisan American effort to conquer and plunder Iraq. (It Doesn’t Matter If Hillary Apologizes for Her Iraq War Vote, AlterNet.) Ritter has been forced into this Sisyphean labor because these self-evident truths — lying in plain sight for many years — are still ruthlessly suppressed by the corporate media and forever removed from the public "debate" over U.S. policy.

The need for this reiteration is even more urgent now, as the early architects of the war crime in Iraq are now "surging" toward power in the White House once again — the Clinton machine. If they shimmy back to the top of the greasy pole, they will simply do what they did before: put a little lipstick on the great stonking pig of American militarism, dressing up the brutal drive for global dominance with earnest, pursed-lipped liberal rhetoric. That’s what happened in the last Clinton administration; that’s what will happen in the next Clinton administration.

Ritter knows this; Ritter was there. In the piece excerpted below, he tells — once again — of his direct, eyewitness experience of the deception and aggression practiced by the Clinton White House toward Iraq, practices that were, in miniature, the precise model of the depredations of his successor.

The House of Clinton and the House of Bush are deeply intertwined, in their policies, their philosophies, their politics, even their personal lives: witness the extraordinary "adoption" of Bill Clinton as a surrogate son by the elder George Bush and his wife. This rapprochement is usually attributed to the respect and friendliness that Clinton showed Bush during their goodwill trip to aid the tsunami victims, and perhaps this did spark a more personal affection between the men. But their relationship began much earlier, in a mysterious circumstance that still cries out for further explication: the fact that during their contest for the presidency in 1992, both Clinton and Bush shared the same major Arkansas financier Jackson Stephens. (More on this fascinating minence grise here.)

After his narrow victory, Clinton then proceeded to shut down the still on-going investigations into the corruption and crimes of his predecessor. Iran-Contra, BCCI, and especially Bush’s massive, secret and often illegal efforts to arm Saddam Hussein and supply him with material for chemical weapons — all of these probes were cut off, starved or shunted aside by the Clinton Administration. (For more, see Robert Parry on "The Clintons’ Real Trouble With the Truth.")

Also thwarted were probes into the "October Surprise" — the 1980 negotiations between the Reagan campaign camp, including Bush, with the Iranians who were holding American hostages. Direct intelligence from several credible sources emerged in the early 1990s about those meetings, in which Bush was almost certainly a personal participant, where the Reagan-Bush team secretly agreed to free up frozen Iranian assets and supply the extremist regime with military hardware in exchange for Tehran holding onto the hostages until after Jimmy Carter was defeated. These negotiations were, of course, high treason, a capital crime. The Clinton Administration helped quash these investigations too. Is it any wonder that the old man feels such affection for Big Bill? (For an overview of the Reagan-Bush machinations with the mullahs, see Speak, Memory; for an in-depth look, see the remarkable series by Robert Parry, The October Surprise Mystery.)

So now we face the distinct possibility of the continued rule of these intertwined Houses for the next four or even eight years, which would give us almost a quarter-century of Clinton-Bush corruption, deception, aggression and incompetence. Ritter is right to speak out, to remind us once again of the role that the Clinton Machine played in dragging us into the hell of our present day.

It Doesn’t Matter If Hillary Apologizes for Her Iraq War Vote (Scott Ritter, Alternet)

Excerpts: (In her 2002 vote authorizing Bush to use military force against Iraq, Hillary Clinton cited "Operation Desert Fox," the blitzkrieg of airstrikes launched against Iraq by Bill Clinton in 1998.) Hillary would have done well to leave out that last part, the one where her husband, the former President of the United States, used military force as part of a 72-hour bombing campaign ostensibly deemed as a punitive strike in defense of disarmament, but in actuality proved to be a blatant attempt at regime change which used the hyped-up threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as an excuse for action. Sound familiar? While many Americans today condemn the Bush administration for misleading them with false claims of unsubstantiated threats which resulted in the ongoing debacle we face today in Iraq (count Hillary among this crowd), few have reflected back on the day when the man from Hope, Arkansas sat in the Oval Office and initiated the policies of economic sanctions—based containment and regime change which President Bush later brought to fruition when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003…

From January 1993 until my resignation from the United Nations in August 1998, I witnessed first hand the duplicitous Iraq policies of the administration of Bill Clinton, the implementation of which saw a President lie to the American people about a threat he knew was hyped, lie to Congress about his support of a disarmament process his administration wanted nothing to do with, and lie to the world about American intent, which turned its back on the very multilateral embrace of diplomacy as reflected in the resolutions of the Security Council Hillary Clinton so piously refers to in her speech, and instead pursued a policy defined by the unilateral interests of the Clinton administration to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

I personally witnessed the Director of the CIA under Bill Clinton, James Woolsey, fabricate a case for the continued existence of Iraqi ballistic missiles in November 1993 after I had provided a detailed briefing which articulated the UN inspector’s findings that Iraq’s missile program had been fundamentally disarmed. I led the UN inspector’s investigation into the defection of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, in August 1995, and saw how the Clinton administration twisted his words to make a case for the continued existence of a nuclear program the weapons inspectors knew to be nothing more than scrap and old paper. I was in Baghdad at the head of an inspection team in the summer of 1996 as the Clinton administration used the inspection process as a vehicle for a covert action program run by the CIA intending to assassinate Saddam Hussein….

I sat in the office of then—US Ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, as the United States cut a deal with then—United Nations Special Commission Executive Chairman Richard Butler, where the timing and actions of an inspection team led by myself (a decision which was personally approved by Bill Clinton) would be closely linked to a massive US aerial bombardment of Iraq triggered by my inspection. I was supposed to facilitate a war by prompting Iraqi non-compliance. Instead, I did my job and facilitated an inspection that pushed the world closer to a recognition that Iraq was complying with its disarmament obligation. As a reward, I was shunned from the inspection process by the Clinton administration…

"So it is with conviction," Hillary said at the moment of her vote (on AUMF in 2002), "that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our Nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our President and we say to him — use these powers wisely and as a last resort. And it is a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein — this is your last chance — disarm or be disarmed."

It turned out Saddam was in fact already disarmed. And it turned out that Hillary’s husband, President Bill Clinton, knew this when he ordered the bombing of Iraq in 1998. Hillary can try to twist and turn the facts as she defends the words she spoke when casting her fateful vote in favor of a war with Iraq. But no amount of re-writing history can shield her from the failed policies of her very own husband, policies she embraced willingly and wholeheartedly when endorsing war.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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Florida Bill Would Make It Legal To Falsify Court Records (Winter Patriot)

Our friend and colleague Winter Patriot unearths a disturbing new innovation in law enforcement now being pushed down in JebWorld: giving public officials the authority to create phony documents and plant them in public record. This includes court documents and other official papers, all created out of whole cloth in "covert ops" kept secret from other agencies and from — surely it goes without saying — that worthless gaggle of teeming rabble known as "the people."

This astounding proposal — in a bill now being dangled like so much dripping red meat before the rightwing Florida legislature, ever ready to embrace any authoritarian notion that comes along, including "shoot to kill if you’re feeling paranoid" laws — would "convey authority to falsify any public record to prosecutors, judges, mayors, sheriffs, coroners and other public officers," the Miami Herald reports.

Now, if you read a story like this about, say, Iran or China or Venezuela or Zimbabwe, you would probably exclaim, "My god! They’re trying to construct a police state! Give government the power to falsify documents, and they will be able to rig up a case against anyone they please — false confessions, false witness statements, false previous convictions, the works! No matter what excuse is offered for such draconian authority, the risk of its wanton abuse is far too great for any government that pretends to popular legitimacy. Only a tyrant, or a would-be tyrant — or a bunch of authoritarian bootlickers — would ever call for such a law!"

And you would be right. But of course, it’s OK to give this authority to politicos and prosecutors in America, because we are descended directly from the angels in heaven — unlike all those other mud people around the world with their greed, ambition, spite, jealousy, lust, fear, extremism and other pathetic human failings that could tempt them to abuse such powers. Right?

Really, this kind of thing not only boggles the mind — it beggars the imagination of even the most cynical observer of the virulent authoritarianism that is now coursing through the natural gates and alleys of our body politic, covering the Republic, most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust. Is there no encroachment of liberty that these people won’t countenance?

They now want to use the ordinary court and police services of our communities to run clandestine operations against our own population. ("But only against criminals and terrorists!" they say. Yes, and Stalin’s security organs only targeted "criminals and terrorists," too, just like the Gestapo. It’s the age-old argument of the apologists for power: "If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear.") This move would also, in true Bushist fashion, call into the question the validity of any public record. As the ACLU’s Randall Marshall puts it: "How would we ever be able to trust anything in the judicial record knowing that something could be intentionally falsified with a judicial seal of approval?"

How indeed? But then, such confusion is precisely the point. Those who seek to further their agendas through crime and covert operations are well-served by covering reality with squiddish murk. If there is no way of discerning the real truth, if all official records (and scientific findings and first-hand reporting and expert analysis, etc., etc.) are "tainted" somehow by an ineradicable ambiguity, then the depredations of the criminals and covertniks can never be nailed down.

The prisons of the America are already filled with people jailed on manufactured and manipulated evidence, false testimony, strong-armed confessions and other hugger-mugger by officials. Are we now to give legal sanction to these rogue practices? Well, why not? After all, in JebWorld, in GeorgeWorld — just as in AdolfWorld and JosefWorld — "If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear." Right? Right?

The illustration above is from The Good Citizen’s Alphabet, by Bertrand Russell, with illustrations by Franciszka Themerson. You can see a slideshow of this fine piece of work at DesignObserver. I found it via a post from Nitpicker, who used an equally apposite page from the book.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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I. Paint it Black

Imagine a city torn by sectarian strife. Competing death squads roam the streets; terrorists stage horrific attacks. Local authority is distrusted and weak; local populations protect the extremists in theirmidst, out of loyalty or fear. A bristling military occupation exacerbates tensions at every turn, while offering prime targets for bombs and snipers. And behind the scenes, in a shadow world of double-cross and double-bluff, covert units of the occupying power run agents on both sides of the civil war, countenancing — and sometimes directing — assassinations, terrorist strikes, torture sessions, and ethnic cleansing.

Is this a portrait of Belfast during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland? Or a picture of Baghdad today? It is both; and in both cases, one of Britain’s most secret — and most criminally compromised — military units has plied its trade in the darkness, “turning” and controlling terrorist killers in a dangerous bid to wring actionable intelligence from blood and betrayal. And America’s covert soldiers are right there with them, working side-by-side with their British comrades in the aptly named “Task Force Black,” the UK’s Sunday Telegraph reports.

Last week, the right-wing, pro-war paper published an early valentine to the “Joint Support Group,” the covert unit whose bland name belies its dramatic role at the center of the Anglo-American “dirty war” in Iraq. In gushing, lavish, uncritical prose that could have been (and perhaps was) scripted by the unit itself, the Telegraph lauded the team of secret warriors as “one of the Coalition’s most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror,” running “dozens of Iraqi double-agents,” including “members of terrorist groups.”

What the story fails to mention is the fact that in its Ulster incarnation, the JSG — then known as the Force Research Unit (FRU) — actively colluded in the murder of at least 15 civilians by Loyalist deaths squads, and an untold number of victims killed, maimed and tortured by the many Irish Republican Army double-agents controlled by the unit. What’s more, the man who commanded the FRU during the height of its depredations — Lt. Col. Gordon Kerr — is in Baghdad now, heading the hugger-mugger Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), a large counter-terrorism force made up of unnamed “existing assets” from the glory days in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

This despite the fact that a 10-year, $100 million investigation by Britain’s top police officer, Lord Stevens, confirmed in 2003 that the Kerr-led FRU “sanctioned killings” through “institutionalized collusion” with both Protestant and Catholic militias during the 1980s and 1990s. Stevens sent dossiers of evidence against Kerr and 20 other security apparatchiks to the Blair government’s Director of Public Prosecutions, in the expectation that the fiery Scotsman and the others would be put on trial.

But instead prosecuting Kerr, Blair promoted him: first to a plum assignment as British military attach in Beijing — effectively the number two man in all of UK military intelligence, as Scotland’s Sunday Herald notes — then with the SRR posting to Baghdad, where Kerr and his former FRU mates now apply the “methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles,” as the Telegraph breathlessly relates.

The Telegraph puff piece is naturally coy about revealing these methods, beyond the fact that, as in Ireland, the JSG uses “a variety of inducements ranging from blackmail to bribes” to turn Iraqi terrorists into Coalition agents. So to get a better idea of the techniques employed by the group in Baghdad, we must return to those “mean streets of Ulster” and the unit’s reign of terror and collusion there, which has been thoroughly documented not only by the exhaustive Stevens inquiries, but also in a remarkable series of investigative reports by the Sunday Herald’s Neil Mackay, and in extensive stories by the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and others.

We will also see how the operations of the JSG and “Task Force Black” dovetail with U.S. efforts to apply the lessons of its own dirty wars — such as the “Salvador Option” — to Iraq, as well as long-running Bush Administration initiatives to arm and fund “friendly” militias while infiltrating terrorist groups in order to “provoke them into action.” It is indeed a picture painted in black, a glimpse at the dark muck that lies beneath the high-flown rhetoric about freedom and civilization forever issuing from the lips of the war leaders.

II. Whacking for the Peelers

Gregory Burns had a problem. He was one of Gordon Kerr’s FRU informers planted deep inside the IRA, along with two of his friends, Johnny Dignam and Aidan Starrs. But as Mackay noted in a February 2003 story, the already-partnered Burns had acquired a girlfriend on the side, Margaret Perry, 26, a “civilian” Catholic with no paramilitary ties. Forbidden fruit is sweet, of course — but pillow talk is dangerous for an inside man. “Burns didn’t keep his mouth shut and [Perry] found out he was working for British intelligence,” an FRU officer told Mackay. “He tried to convince her he was a double-agent the IRA had planted in the [British] army — but she didn’t buy it.”

Burns called his FRU handlers and asked to come in from the cold. He’d been compromised, he said, and now he and his friends needed to get out, with new identities, relocation, good jobs — the usual payoff for trusted agents when the jig was up. But Kerr refused: “He said [Burns] should silence Perry,” the FRU man told Mackay. Burns, panicking at thought of the IRA’s horrific retributions against informers, insisted: he would have to kill the woman if they didn’t bring him in, he told Kerr. Again Kerr refused.

And so Burns arranged a meeting with his lover, to “talk over” the situation. His friends, Aidan and Johnny, volunteered to drive her there: “On the way, they pulled into a forest, beat her to death and buried her in a shallow grave,” Mackay notes. Two years later, when her body was found, the IRA put two and two together — and slowly tortured Burns and his two friends to death, after first extracting copious amounts of information about British intelligence operations in Ireland.

‘In Kerr’s eyes, Burns just wasn’t important enough to resettle,” the FRU source told the Sunday Herald. “So we ended up with four unnecessary deaths and the compromising of British army intelligence officers, which ultimately put soldiers’ lives at risk. To Kerr, it was always a matter of the ends justifying the means.”

Then again, Kerr could well afford to sacrifice a few informers here and there to the wrath of the IRA’s dreaded “security unit” — because his own prize double agent was the head of that security unit. Codenamed “Stakeknife,” Kerr’s man presided over, and sometimes administered, the grisly torture-murders of up to 50 men during his tenure in the IRA’s upper ranks. The victims included other British double agents who were sacrificed in order to protect Stakeknife’s cover, as the Guardian and many other UK papers reported when the agent’s work was revealed in 2003. (“Stakeknife” was later identified in the press as Alfredo Scappaticci — an Irishman despite the Italian name, although he continues to deny the charge.)

The FRU also “knowingly allowed soldiers, [police] officers and civilians to die at the hands of IRA bombers in order to protect republican double agents,” the Sunday Herald’s investigations found. As Mackay reports: “FRU sources said around seven police and army personnel died as a result of military intelligence allowing IRA bombs to be placed during Kerr’s time in command of the FRU. They estimate that three civilians also died this way, with casualties in the hundreds.”

But some of the worst excesses came from the FRU’s handling of operatives on the other side, in the fiercely pro-British Protestant militia the Ulster Defense Association (UDA). Here, among the Loyalists, Kerr’s top double agent was Brian Nelson, who became head of intelligence for the UDA. As John Ware put it in the Guardian: “Kerr regarded Nelson as his jewel in the crown… For the next three years [from 1987], Nelson colluded with murder gangs to shoot IRA suspects. Month after month, armed and masked men crashed into homes. Sometimes they got the wrong address or shot the wrong person.”

Such as Gerald Slane, a 27-year-old Belfast man shot down in front of his three children. A gun had been found dumped on his property; this, and his Catholicism, was enough to get him assassinated at the order of Kerr’s man Nelson. Afterwards, it was found that Slane had no IRA connections.

Another “wrong person” killed by the FRU’s agents was the Belfast attorney Pat Finucane, who was shot 14 times in front of his wife and children. Finucane was a civil rights activist who had defended both Catholics and Protestants, but was considered an IRA sympathizer by Loyalists — and a thorn in the side by British authorities. He was killed at Nelson’s order by a fellow FRU informer in the UDA, Ken Barrett, who was convicted of the murder but freed last year after as part of an amnesty program in the Northern Ireland peace process. Barrett was unapologetic about his FRU “wetwork” on Finucane. “The peelers [authorities] wanted him whacked,” he told a BBC documentary team after his release. “We whacked him and that is the end of the story.”

Kerr gave Nelson packages of intelligence files to help facilitate the assassination of UDA targets, including at least four “civilians” with no IRA ties, the Stevens inquiry found. The FRU also obtained “restriction orders” from other British security and military units in Northern Ireland, whereby they would pull their forces from an area when Kerr’s UDA agents were going to make a hit there, allowing the killers to get in and get out without hindrance, investigator Nick Davies reports.

Yet the FRU was wary of sharing its own intelligence with other security services — which was the ostensible reason for running the double-agents in the first place. Instead, Kerr engaged in fierce turf wars with other agencies, while “stovepiping” much of his intelligence to the top circles of the UK government, including the cabinet-level Intelligence Committee chaired by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, when Nelson was finally exposed and brought to trial on five counts of conspiracy to commit murder, Kerr testified in his behalf, noting for the court that Nelson’s intelligence “product and his reporting was passed through the intelligence community and at a high level, and from that point of view he has to be considered a very important agent.”

As one FRU man told Mackay: “Under Kerr’s command…the mindset was one of ‘the right people would be allowed to live and wrong people should die.’”

This is the “mindset” now operating in the heart of the Green Zone in Baghdad, where the JSG is carrying out — we are told in glowing terms — precisely the same mission it had in Ulster. a unit which has allowed its agents to torture, murder and commit acts of terrorism, including actions that killed local civilians and the soldiers and intelligence operatives of their own country.

III. The White House Green Light

Of course, Kerr and his Baghdad black-op crew are not alone in the double-dealing world of Iraqi counterinsurgency. The Pentagon’s ever-expanding secret armies are deeply enmeshed in such efforts as well. As Sy Hersh has reported (“The Coming Wars,” New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2005), after his re-election in 2004, George W. Bush signed a series of secret presidential directives that authorized the Pentagon to run virtually unrestricted covert operations, including a reprise of the American-backed, American-trained death squads employed by authoritarian regimes in Central and South America during the Reagan Administration, where so many of the Bush faction cut their teeth — and made their bones.

“Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?u201D a former high-level intelligence official said to Hersh. “We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A Pentagon insider added: “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.” Another role model for the expanded dirty war cited by Pentagon sources, said Hersh, was Britain’s brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups to confuse and discredit the insurgency, and killed thousands of innocent civilians in quashing the uprising.

Bush’s formal greenlighting of the death-squad option built upon an already securely-established base, part of a larger effort to turn the world into a “global free-fire zone” for covert operatives, as one top Pentagon official told Hersh. For example, in November 2002 a Pentagon plan to infiltrate terrorist groups and “stimulate” them into action was uncovered by William Arkin, then writing for the Los Angeles Times. The new unit, the “Proactive, Pre-emptive Operations Group,” was described in the Pentagon documents as “a super-Intelligence Support Activity” that brings “together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception.”

Later, in August 2004, then deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz appeared before Congress to ask for $500 million to arm and train non-governmental “local militias” to serve as U.S. proxies for “counter-insurgency and “counterterrorist” operations in “ungoverned areas” and hot spots around the world, Agence France Presse (and virtually no one else) reported at the time. These hired paramilitaries were to be employed in what Wolfowitz called an “arc of crisis” that just happened to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America.

By then, the Bush Administration had already begun laying the groundwork for an expanded covert war in the hot spot of Iraq. In November 2003, it created a “commando squad” drawn from the sectarian militias of five major Iraqi factions, as the Washington Post reported that year. Armed, funded and trained by the American occupation forces, and supplied with a “state-of-the-art command, control and communications center” from the Pentagon, the new Iraqi commandos were loosed on the then-nascent Iraqi insurgency — despite the very prescient fears of some U.S. officials “that various Sunni or Shiite factions could eventually use the service to secretly undermine their political competitors,” as the Post noted.

And indeed, in early 2005 — not long after Bush’s directives loosed the “Salvador Option” on Iraq — the tide of death-squad activity began its long and bloody rise to the tsunami-like levels we see today. Ironically, the first big spike of mass torture-murders, chiefly in Sunni areas at the time, coincided with “Operation Lightning,” a much ballyhooed effort by American and Iraqi forces to “secure” Baghdad. The operation featured a mass influx of extra troops into the capital; dividing the city into manageable sectors, then working through them one by one; imposing hundreds of checkpoints to lock down all insurgent movements; and establishing a 24-hour presence of security and military forces in troubled neighborhoods, the Associated Press reported in May 2005. In other words, it was almost exactly the same plan now being offered as Bush’s “New Way Forward,” the controversial “surge.”

But the “Lightning” fizzled in a matter of weeks, and the death squads grew even bolder. Brazen daylight raids by “men dressed in uniforms” of Iraqi police or Iraqi commandos or other Iraqi security agencies swept up dozens of victims at a time. For months, U.S. “advisers” to Iraqi security agencies — including veterans of the original “Salvador Option” — insisted that these were Sunni insurgents in stolen threads, although many of the victims were Sunni civilians. Later, the line was changed: the chief culprits were now “rogue elements” of the various sectarian militias that had “infiltrated” Iraq’s institutions.

But as investigative reporter Max Fuller has pointed out in his detailed examination of information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents, the vast majority of atrocities then attributed to “rogue” Shiite and Sunni militias were in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and “special forces,” trained by Americans, “advised” by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets. As Fuller puts it: “If there are militias in the Ministry of Interior, you can be sure that they are militias that stand to attention whenever a U.S. colonel enters the room.” And perhaps a British lieutenant colonel as well

With the Anglo-American coalition so deeply embedded in dirty war — infiltrating terrorist groups, “stimulating” them into action,” protecting “crown jewel” double-agents no matter what the cost, “riding with the bad boys,” greenlighting the “Salvador Option” — it is simply impossible to determine the genuine origin of almost any particular terrorist outrage or death squad atrocity in Iraq. All of these operations take place in the shadow world, where terrorists are sometimes government operatives and vice versa, and where security agencies and terrorist groups interpenetrate in murky thickets of collusion and duplicity. This moral chaos leaves “a kind of blot/To mark the full-fraught man and best indued/With some suspicion,” as Shakespeare’s Henry V says.

What’s more, the “intelligence” churned out by this system is inevitably tainted by the self-interest, mixed motives, fear and criminality of those who provide it. The ineffectiveness of this approach can be seen in the ever-increasing, many-sided civil war that is tearing Iraq apart. If these covert operations really are intended to quell the violence, they clearly have had the opposite effect. If they have some other intention, the pious defenders of civilization — who approve these activities with promotions, green lights and unlimited budgets — aren’t telling.

This article originally appeared on Truthout.org.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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I. Rashomon in Babylon

It has been cast as a ferocious battle against a mighty opponent: a fanatical "apocalyptic cult" storming the holy city of Najaf with hundreds of warriors led by a self-proclaimed Islamic Messiah, their frenzy quelled only at the last moment by a massive intervention of American firepower. But as with so much else in the blood-soaked annals of the Bush Administration’s disastrous Babylonian Conquest, it appears this neat story masks a far grimmer, grubbier truth: a mass slaughter of civilians, caught in the toxic fog of hair-trigger tension, sectarian hatred and violent political ambition unleashed by the U.S. invasion.

The January 28 clash in Najaf was, the New York Times proclaimed, the greatest one-day battle in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Some 200—400 "cultists" were killed by Iraqi troops and the American air and ground forces that came to their rescue when the apocalyptics — whose ranks included Baathists and al Qaeda terrorists — nearly overran the Iraqi government troops, according to the NYT and other Western media.

The "bizarre" and "extraordinary" attack by the obscure but massively armed "Soldiers of Heaven" Shiite splinter group was an attempt to kill the leading clerics in the sacred city, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of millions of Iraqi Shiites, we were told. This massacre would supposedly usher in the reign of the Mahdi, the Islamic Messiah-figure which many Shiites believe is coming to redeem — and judge — the world. For hours on end, the outgunned and ill-trained Iraqi government soldiers held off the swarming zealots until American planes began bombing raids on the cult’s entrenched positions in the groves outside Najaf and U.S. troops marched in to bolster the flagging locals.

It was indeed a rousing tale of carnage, courage and fearsome zeal, fit for one of Mel Gibson’s cinematic bloodbaths. Yet in the days following the attack, it has became increasingly apparent that the story being presented in the Western media — based largely on accounts from Iraqi government officials and the Pentagon — has about as much historical accuracy as Gibson’s ersatz epics.

So what happened in Najaf? It is of course hard to see anything clearly through the natural confusions of a nation in chaos and the deliberate manipulations of the powerful and their sycophants, but there are independent Iraqi sources — non-sectarian, non-aligned, democratic — who have been providing eyewitness accounts and analyses of stories in the wide-ranging Iraqi press, which is almost entirely ignored by the Western media. One of these, the blog "Healing Iraq" — written by "Zayed," an Iraqi professional who spent his childhood in Britain — has led the way in unpacking the Najaf firestorm. (Patrick Cockburn, one of the most knowledgeable and insightful reporters covering Iraq, drew heavily on Zayed’s work in a brief report for The Independent which came out as this story was going to press.)

To be fair, it’s no wonder that Western accounts of the fighting were confused, as they relied on the "bizarre" and "extraordinary" — and wildly varying — accounts from officials of the Bush-backed Iraqi government. For example, one of the primary sources for the New York Times’ story of the battle — which no Western reporters were allowed to witness — was Abdul Hussein Abtan, the deputy governor of Najaf province, and a member of one of the Iranian-backed, armed sectarian factions that George W. Bush has empowered in Baghdad, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). During a press conference aired on Al-Iraqiya television, Abted first claimed that the "foreign-funded" cult was led by a Lebanese, then later said its leader was an Iraqi. As Zayed notes, none of the journalists present questioned the contradiction.

In his latest report, Zayed details the bewildering array of versions offered up by factions connected with the Iraqi government. It was followers of controversial cleric Motqada al-Sadr who first identified the Najaf "attackers" as members of the cult. The Sadrists, buttressed by spokesmen in the Iraqi Health Ministry, which they control, also asserted that the group was planning to kidnap, not kill, Sistani, Sadr and other top Shiite clerics. It was also the Sadrists who claimed that the attackers were working with al Qaeda and Saddam loyalists, "and that they received logistical and monetary backing from Saudi Arabia." They said the sect’s leader was an Iraqi named Dhiaa’ Abdul Zahra Kadhim.

Meanwhile, SCIRI members, buttressed by the Najaf provincial government, which they control, said that more than 1,000 terrorists were killed in the battle, and that some 200 "brainwashed women and children" were detained and "removed to another place," presumably for deprogramming. SCIRI officials differed on the number of terrorists captured in the battle; one said 50, another said 16, yet another said "hundreds" were detained. It was SCIRI that advanced the notion that the attack aimed to kill the clerics, not capture them. Various SCIRI officials said the cult’s leader was a) the aforesaid unnamed Lebanese national; b) Dhiaa’ Abdul Zahra Kadhim, as in the Sadrist account; c) a renegade Sadrist named Ahmed Kadhim Al-Gar’awi Al-Basri; d) another renegade Sadrist named Ahmed Hassan al-Yamani; e) a self-proclaimed messiah named Ali bin Ali bin Abi Talib.

A SCIRI member of the Najaf governing council also claimed that "the leader of this group had links with the former regime elements since 1993. Some of the gunmen brought their families with them in order to make it easier to enter the city," Associated Press reports. An Iraqi army officer, sectarian affiliation unknown, added that Lebanese, Egyptians and Sudanese were taken prisoner in the battle — though none of these foreign fighters have yet been produced. And just for good measure, Najaf’s SCIRI governor, As’ad Abu Gilel, said the attackers were Sunni insurgents, planning to attack Shiite pilgrims on their way to mark the festival of Ashura in Najaf.

U.S. military officials originally picked various items from this dizzying smorgasbord of spin in cobbling together their own version of the battle, although in general they hewed more closely to the SCIRI line. But that’s not surprising, given the fact that this violent, extremist Shiite faction, whose death-dealing militia is deeply embedded in the Iraqi security forces, is currently in high favor with the Bush White House.

However, by mid-week, the Pentagon suddenly reversed course and came out with a whole new account, one cited by Bush himself, as the Washington Post reported. Now the battle was depicted as an exemplary pre-emptive strike by an "aggressive" and "impressive" Iraqi military, acting on good intelligence that the cult intended to storm Najaf and kill the leading clerics because they refused to recognize the claim of the cult’s leader (now known as Samer Abu Kamar, by the way) to be the Mahdi.

Far from having to rescue the hapless Iraqis, American forces were simply there in a supporting role, providing "backup ground troops along with helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft support" in an attack on the cult’s positions in the palm groves and farms of rural Zarqa, not far from Najaf, the Post said. Bush — that seasoned veteran of combat — had this reaction to the battle: "The Iraqis are beginning to show me something." And indeed, a spokesman for Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki — who has been publicly warned by Bush officials that he will be removed from the sovereign government of Iraq by the Americans if he doesn’t help Bush’s "surge" plan by cracking down on the Shiite militias that back him — pointed to the battle as proof that Maliki can deliver the goods.

Thus, in just three days time, the battle for Najaf morphed from an eruption of yet another level of sectarian strife threatening to overwhelm the tottering Iraqi government into a bravura display of the wonder-working power of Bush’s "New Way Forward." Yet the only certainty that could really be gleaned from the official accounts ricocheting around the Western media was that when the smoke finally cleared from the palms and the fields, the ground was littered with scores of burnt and mangled corpses.

II. Under the Crazy Quilt

But the independent Iraqi sources paint an entirely different picture. Although here too there is much uncertainty — and thickets of impenetrable Shiite factionalism and secular political maneuvering — these accounts converge in a basic narrative that is far more coherent, and more grounded on actual reporting from the area, than the crazy quilt that Iraqi and American government officials, and the U.S. media, have thrown over the battle.

Based on accounts from Healing Iraq, the respected daily Azzaman (also here), on-scene reporting from Inter Press Service, and stories from other Iraqi papers and other media outlets translated by various websites, here is an outline of what seems to have happened on January 28.

In the early morning hours, a convoy of some 200 members of the al-Hatami tribe were making their way to Najaf for Ashura, the highly emotional commemoration of the martyrdom of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, at the hands of Caliph Yazid I in 680. This was the instigation of the centuries-long split between Shiites — minority adherents of Hussein and his father, Ali (Mohammad’s cousin and son-in-law), whom Shiites believe were the Prophet’s rightful heirs as leaders of the Muslim community — and Sunnis, the majority who believe that the early line of non-hereditary caliphs forged the true path of orthodox Islam.

The al-Hatamis are Shiites, but have dissented from the Shiite factions now running the Iraqi government: SCIRI, Maliki’s Dawa Party, Motqada al-Sadr’s party and others. Together with an allied tribe, the al-Khazalis, based near Najaf, the al-Hatamis have opposed the American occupation and the Iraqi government from the beginning, albeit peacefully so far. They also reject the spiritual leadership of both Ayatollah Sistani and his younger rival, Sadr, and any ties with Iran. They would not necessarily be the most welcome guests in the SCIRI-controlled province or in Sistani’s hometown of Najaf, where tensions were already high as authorities braced for expected terrorist attacks on the multitude of pilgrims descending on the city.

Most of the men in the al-Hatami procession were armed — as most men are in Iraq, especially when traveling by night. At an Iraqi army checkpoint on the road between Diwaniya and Najaf, there was some kind of altercation. Whether by design or perhaps more likely through a misunderstanding of the sort that has left countless Iraqis dead at government and Coalition checkpoints, the Iraqi troops opened fire on the car carrying the tribe’s elderly chief, Haj al-Hatemi and his wife, who were riding because they were too frail to join the others in the march. Seeing their chief cut down, the al-Hatamis retaliated with gunfire. They were driven back into the palm groves near Zarqa as Iraqi forces gave pursuit.

At this point, the al-Khazalis intervened, coming to support their tribal allies while reportedly trying to negotiate with the Iraqi forces to end the shooting. But the government forces had already called for heavy reinforcements. Within minutes, Iraqi ministers in Baghdad were claiming that Najaf was under attack by al Qaeda terrorists. Muaffaq al-Rubaii, the Iraqi National Security Adviser who is, curiously enough, paid by the Americans and not the Iraqis, said that hundreds of "foreign fighters" had been killed and that the Shiite splinter group Jund As-Sama was behind the attack, aiming to kill the clerics of Najaf.

There was indeed a cult group living in the palm groves of Zarqa. They were apparently part of the Mahdawiya, "a very small fringe Shia movement with scattered followers in major urban centres in the south," led by Sayyid Ahmed al-Hassan, who once followed Motqada al-Sadr’s father (a revered Shiite cleric murdered by Saddam) but now claims to be the Al-Yemanni, a forerunner of the coming Shiite messiah, as Healing Iraq notes. This cult too opposes the occupation — as well as the Iraqi and Iranian governments, which al-Hassan considers apostates.

The movement has only a few hundred followers. And indeed, the Washington Post’s latest report — relaying the Pentagon’s admiration for the Iraqi Army’s derring-do — now says that only some 700 cultist were encamped at Zarqa, instead of the 5,000 or more cited in earlier reports. Oddly enough, the cult’s offices in Najaf had been raided by the Scorpion Brigade of the SCIRI-controlled Interior Ministry only days before the battle. As Zayed reports, "the same happened to [the cult's] offices in Basra, Amara and Karbala, days ago. Al-Hassan himself was placed under house arrest in Tannumah, Basra, by the Iraqi government some months ago."

Despite repeated attempts by the tribesmen, or at least some of them, to halt the fighting, the Iraqis quickly called in American air support and troops. American planes dropped leaflets on the grove, calling on all "terrorists" to surrender. Then the bombing began. According to tribal leaders, at least 120 Hatamis and more than 30 Khazalis were killed in the attack. They provided lists with the names and occupations of the dead. Local Iraqi hospitals reported women and children among the dead and wounded.

Meanwhile, from eyewitness accounts of reporters from Western papers who were at last allowed into the area, it is apparent that U.S. and Iraqi forces also devastated the cult’s compound. One reporter for the Post saw at least 10 ambulances carting away the dead from the area. He was also shown a video of what Iraqi officials said were the cult’s entrenchments and its large arsenal, including anti-aircraft guns, mortars, and rocket-propelled guns.

But although the outline of the incident is beginning to arise from the murk, much is still unclear. Did the cult launch an attack on the Iraqi forces that had driven the tribespeople into the grove, sparking a vicious firefight that required U.S. bombs and troops to put down? Or, as the Pentagon now claims, was the assault on the cult compound a carefully planned, already scheduled strike by crack Iraqi troops? Did the tribes blunder into the middle of this operation? Is that why the guards at the checkpoint were so quick on the trigger?

Many such questions still remain. However, it is now obvious that the original stories fed to the media about the attack were untrue — and that almost all of them were deliberate untruths, not just the usual "fog of war" uncertainties. Indeed, there was no uncertainty at all in the ever-shifting official claims; each variant was offered up as an undeniable assertion of fact.

It is also now apparent that the battle — however it originated, either through the escalation of a shooting incident or by the deliberate design of Iraqi and American forces — is being used by both Baghdad and Washington as a vindication of their disastrous policies. Bush gets to tout a "victory" by Iraqi forces (not against the real insurgents, true, but any port in a PR storm will do); while Maliki gets to pretend that he is even-handedly cracking down on Shiite militias — not by touching the death squads of his political supporters, which operate with impunity outside and inside the government, but with blunderbuss assaults on tiny fringe groups and recalcitrant tribes that, conveniently enough, oppose his collaboration with both the Americans and the Iranians.

The incident in Najaf will soon be forgotten, drowned out by the Administration’s beating of war drums against Iran. But in its cynical deceptions and its murderous chaos, it is yet another microcosm of the overarching hell that Bush has made of Iraq.

This article originally appeared on Truthout.org.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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The recent revelations about the virulent spread of death squads ravaging Iraq have only confirmed for many people the lethal incompetence of the Bush Regime, whose brutal bungling appears to have unleashed the demon of sectarian strife in the conquered land. The general reaction, even among some war supporters, has been bitter derision: "Jeez, these bozos couldn’t boil an egg without causing collateral damage."

But what if the truth is even more sinister? What if this murderous chaos is not the fruit of rank incompetence but instead the desired product of carefully crafted, efficiently managed White House policy?

Investigative journalist Max Fuller marshals a convincing case for this dread conclusion in a remarkable work of synthesis drawn from information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents. Piling fact on damning fact, he shows that the vast majority of atrocities now attributed to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias are in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by Americans, "advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets, Global Research reports.

We first reported here in June 2003 that the U.S. was already hiring Saddam’s security muscle for "special ops" against the nascent insurgency and re-opening his torture haven, Abu Ghraib. Meanwhile, powerful Shiite militias — including Talibanic religious extremists armed and trained by Iran — were loosed upon the land. As direct "Coalition" rule gave way to various "interim" and "elected" Iraqi governments, these violent gangs were formally incorporated into the Iraqi Interior Ministry, where the supposedly inimical Sunni and Shiite units often share officers and divvy up territories.

Bush helpfully supplied these savage gangs — who are killing dozens of people each week, Knight-Ridder reports — with American advisers who made their "counter-insurgency" bones forming right-wing death squads in Colombia and El Salvador. Indeed, Bush insiders have openly bragged of "riding with the bad boys" and exercising the "Salvador option," lauding the Reagan-backed counter-insurgency program that slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians, Newsweek reports. Bush has also provided a "state-of-the-art command, control and communications center" to coordinate the operation of his Iraqi "commandos," as the Pentagon’s own news site, DefendAmerica, reports. The Iraqi people can go without electricity, fuel and medicine, but by God, Bush’s "bad boys" will roll in clover as they carry out their murders and mutilations.

For months, stories from the Shiite south and Sunni center have reported the same phenomenon: people being summarily seized by large groups of armed men wearing police commando uniforms, packing high-priced Glocks, using sophisticated radios and driving Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. The captives are taken off and never seen again — unless they turn up with a load of other corpses days or weeks later, bearing marks of the gruesome tortures they suffered before the ritual shot in the head. Needless to say, these mass murders under police aegis are rarely investigated by the police.

Earlier this year, one enterprising Knight-Ridder reporter, Yasser Salihee, actually found several eyewitnesses willing to testify to the involvement of the U.S.-backed commandos in 12 such murders. The offer was shrugged off by the Interior Ministry’s spokesman — an American "adviser" and veteran bones-maker from the Colombian ops. In the end, it didn’t matter; Salihee was shot dead by a U.S. sniper at a checkpoint a few days afterwards.

The Bushists may have been forced to ditch their idiotic fantasies of "cakewalking" into a compliant satrapy, but they have by no means abandoned their chief goals in the war: milking Iraq dry and planting a permanent military "footprint" on the nation’s neck. If direct control through a plausible puppet is no longer possible, then fomenting bloody chaos and sectarian strife is the best way to weaken the state. The Bushists are happy to make common cause with thugs and zealots in order to prevent the establishment of a strong national government that might balk at the ongoing "privatizations" that have continued apace behind the smokescreen of violence, and the planned opening of Iraq’s oil reserves to select foreign investors — a potential transfer of some $200 billion of Iraqi people’s wealth into the hands of a few Bush cronies, the Independent reports.

The violence is already dividing the county into more rigid sectarian enclaves, the New York Times reports, as Shiites flee Sunni commandos and Sunnis flee Shiite militias in the grim tag-team of their joint endeavor. It’s all grist for the Bushist mill: an atomized, terrorized, internally riven society is much easier to manipulate. And of course, a steady stream of bloodshed provides a justification for maintaining a substantial American military presence, even as politic plans for partial "withdrawal" are bandied about.

There’s nothing new in this; Bush is simply following a well-thumbed playbook. For example, in 1953 the CIA bankrolled Islamic fundamentalists and secular goon squads to destabilize the democratic government of Iran — which selfishly wanted to control its own oil — and pave the way for the puppet Shah, as the agency’s own histories recount. In 1971, CIA officials admitted carrying out more than 21,000 "extra-judicial killings" in its "Phoenix" counter-insurgency operation in Vietnam. (The true number of victims is certainly much higher.) In 1979, the CIA began sponsoring the most violent Islamic extremist groups in Afghanistan — supplying money, arms, even jihad primers for schoolchildren — to destabilize the secular, Soviet-allied government and provoke the Kremlin into a costly intervention, as Robert Dreyfus details in his new book, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. Later, Saudi magnate Osama bin Laden — whose family firm helped kick-start George W. Bush’s business career — joined the operation, and his men were sent to America for "anti-Soviet" terrorist training, as Greg Palast reports. And of course, these examples only scratch the scorched-earth surface of America’s double-dealings in this deathly shadow world.

This bi-partisan policy has been remarkably consistent for more than half a century: to augment the wealth and power of the elite, American leaders have supported — or created — vicious gangs of killers and cranks to foment unrest, eliminate opponents and terrorize whole nations into submission. The resulting carnage in the target countries — and inevitable blowback against ordinary Americans — means nothing to these Great Gamesters; it’s merely the price of doing business. Bush’s "incompetence" is just a mask for stone-cold calculation.

This is an extended version of a column appearing in the Dec. 2 edition of The Moscow Times.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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A few weeks ago, I was asked to write a piece about the 3,000th American military casualty in Iraq. For various reasons of scheduling, time pressures, etc., the piece never ran. But I thought I’d offer it here — even though that grim milestone is now receding in the distance as we surge toward ever-greater levels of pointless death. This is a somewhat revised version of the original, which was written on Jan. 4, because at that time the details of Bush’s new "Operation Cannon Fodder" had not yet been revealed.

I. The Spider’s Nest

At some point in the last week of December, the toll of American military dead in Iraq passed 3,000. These shades are the "strange fruit" of 9/11: unnecessary, unfated deaths seeded in that earlier cataclysm, which has been so ruthlessly and cynically exploited by the Bush Administration.

The day after 9/11, I had a deadline to write a column. Although much was still obscure in those early hours of aftermath — chiefly, where and how the inevitable stroke of revenge would fall — one thing at least seemed clear. "Blood will have blood," I wrote; "that’s certain. But blood will not end it. For murder is fertile: it breeds more death, like a spider laden with a thousand eggs."

Although the Bush Administration struck a reluctant, glancing blow at Afghanistan in response to the attacks — essentially lending American air power, a few troops, and bags of bribes to one faction of warlords, druglords and sectarian extremists in the long-running, many-sided Afghan civil war — Iraq was the nest in which most of the eggs of 9/11 were hatched. We now know that in the earliest moments, when the dead were still burning beneath the rubble of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon wall, Donald Rumsfeld was frantically urging his minions to find some way to tie the attack to Saddam Hussein. "Best info fast," he scribbled in one of the celebrated "snowflakes" of carping and command that he constantly showered upon his underlings. "Judge whether good enough to hit S.H. at the same time. Not only [Osama bin Laden]. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

We also know that this admonition was followed to the letter in the months ahead: "things related and not" — especially "not" — were indeed swept up, then packaged into the most relentless and mendacious warmongering campaign in American history. Without the deliberate manipulation and exaggeration of the fear and confusion generated by the 9/11 attacks, not a single American soldier would have perished in Iraq. Not a single lament would have been drawn from their loved ones. Nor would more than 20,000 of their comrades have been maimed, nor many thousands more stricken with the invisible wounds of emotional torment, psychological dislocation, broken marriages, broken homes, broken lives.

None of the 3,000 — whose numbers are growing every day — had to die. No genuine national interest compelled the war that has consumed them. Although polls show that a majority of U.S. soldiers in Iraq believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 — a demonstrable lie in which they have obviously been deliberately schooled in order to keep their blood up for battle — the fact is that the war was planned long before the 2001 attacks. Its architects laid out their vision clearly in a September 2000 document called "Rebuilding America’s Defenses," in which the imposition of an American military footprint in Iraq was termed a strategic imperative that "transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." In other words, not only were 9/11 and the "War on Terror" and "weapons of mass destruction" irrelevant to the invasion, so was Saddam Hussein. It didn’t matter whether he was there or not. And this "transcendent" imperative was just part of a far-reaching plan of massive military expansion — and aggressive military action — to achieve "full spectrum dominance" over global affairs in the coming century

However, these architects — who, under the umbrella of the "Project for the New American Century" and other related pressure groups, included Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Scooter Libby, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, William Kristol, Thomas Donnelly and others — recognized that their wholesale militarization of American policy and society would be a tough sell to voters who might wistfully prefer the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness to global empire. Thus the September 2000 document acknowledged that the "revolutionary" changes it envisaged could take decades to bring about — unless, of course, the nation was struck by what PNAC called "some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor." (For more detail on the report and its history, see Dark Passage: PNAC’s Blueprint for Empire. Sarah Meyer offers an even more in-depth, heavily-sourced examination in Rebuilding America’s Defenses — A Biopsy on Imperialism.)

September 11 gave them their wished-for "new Pearl Harbor." Within days, George W. Bush — the second-place candidate installed in office by the Supreme Court’s self-declared extra-special, one-time-only ruling in favor of his campaign, which employed one Justice’s wife and another Justice’s son — was invoking 9/11 to justify "a new kind of conflict" that would require massive military expansion and aggressive military action all over the world. Within days, Cheney was citing the attacks to justify what he called going over to "the dark side, if you will" — an early indication of the lawless system of secret prisons, torture, rendition, "extrajudicial killing," warrantless surveillance and other arbitrary actions of unfettered executive power that were to come. Bush summed up the grim future that his administration was furiously constructing from the PNAC blueprint in an August 2002 speech: "There’s no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland."

With these long-term plans at last kicking into high gear, it was only a matter of "fixing the intelligence around the policy" of invading and occupying Iraq, as the process was aptly described in the "Downing Street Memos" — the official UK papers that documented Bush and Tony Blair’s knowing collusion in "manufacturing consent" for the war. Thus did these two self-proclaimed Christian leaders of the world’s most advanced democracies betray their own soldiers to needless death. Thus did they knowingly, willingly, with full cognizance of their legal, political and moral responsibilities for the action, set in train the murderous engine of aggression that has killed more than half a million innocent Iraqi civilians — the vast horde of wasted lives beside which the American losses, as grievous as they are, pale in comparison.

[The Iraqi civilian death count is based on studies published in The Lancet, one of the world's most respected medical journals. Although, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, the scientific model used in the Lancet for calibrating mass death rates is exactly the same procedure accepted by the U.S. government and the American media for counting victims in Rwanda, Bosnia, the Congo and other conflict areas, once again we meet with an extra-special, one-time-only exemption for George W. Bush: both the Administration and the media have consistently rejected the Lancet numbers for Iraq as "unsound" or "questionable." They are neither, of course, but as with the votes in Florida, so with the dead in Iraq: the true accounting must be discredited.]

II. Blood on the Tracks

These plans for "unipolar domination" of the world through military aggression, geopolitical extortion (play ball with our corrupt crony capitalism — what Bush calls the "single sustainable model of national success" — or you’ll get it in the neck) and war profiteering on an unprecedented scale had their origins in the waning days of the first Bush Administration, in the Pentagon offices of then—Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. They were refined during the years of the Clinton interregnum not only at PNAC, a relative latecomer to the militarist talking shops, but also in such groups as the Hudson Institute, the Center for Security Policy and, especially, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Now Bush has drawn on AEI "scholar" Frederick Kagan to fashion his genuinely demented plan for a major escalation of the Iraq War: the famous "surge" that has dominated the shoptalk of the Beltway in the past month — the same month in which American soldiers were dying in near-record numbers while Bush cleared brush on his fake ranch. (The spread was purchased as a campaign prop in 1999 but is invariably referred to by media sycophants as his "beloved" homestead, as if he’d spent years of his life communing with the soil there, rather than the odd month now and then on vacation). While he dithered — consulting with his "brain trust" on the best way to ignore the suggestions of the Iraq Study Group and the clearly expressed will of the American people to bring the American occupation of Iraq to an end — more than 100 U.S. soldiers were shot to death or blown to pieces. An almost equivalent number of Iraqi civilians were murdered every day during December by the death squads of the factions brought to power by Bush and their sectarian opponents in the nationalist insurgency that arose in response to his invasion.

What the Kagan plan called for — and what Bush accepted in a slightly diluted form (which, of course, the Kagan quickly and cravenly embraced — is a re-invasion of Baghdad, with thousands of additional U.S. troops thrown into savage urban warfare in "critical Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods." (The latter of which are now practically non-existent, thanks to the virulent "ethnic cleansing" in the city by Bush-backed Shia militias and their Sunni counterparts). In the unintentionally revealing language that permeates so much of the war-porn generated by the well-fed, stay-at-home armchair generals of PNAC, AEI and the White House, Kagan — a young, portly academic with no expertise whatsoever in the Middle East — writes in the Washington Post that "the only ‘surge’ option that makes any sense is both long and large."

The mass-murdering blandishments that Kagan poured in Bush’s ear demanded that already-overstrained American ground forces "accept longer tours for several years," as he stated in his AEI report, "Choosing Victory." The citizen-soldiers in National Guard units will also have to "accept increased deployments during this period," it seems. Meanwhile, Kagan will no doubt continue to discuss the finer points of "counterinsurgency" and "clearing neighborhoods" with congenial colleagues at Washington’s finest restaurants — while also insisting, as he does in "Choosing Victory," that "the president must issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this age."

In this plan — and the version of it Bush adopted for his "New Way Forward" — we see the hideous obscenity of the whole criminal enterprise laid bare. The bloodlust of physical cowards like Bush and Cheney and Kagan — their overpowering need to see other people kill and die — is now reaching genuinely irrational proportions. The war in Iraq was launched solely to serve the political ambitions, personal fortunes and radical ideologies of a small group of American elitists (and the delusions of grandeur of its little handmaiden in the UK). It had no larger strategic benefit or moral purpose, despite all the ever-shifting rhetoric to the contrary. It has not enhanced American security. It has not given the Iraqis a better life. It has not spread freedom and democracy throughout the Middle East. It was not designed to do these things. But neither has it accomplished its true aim, as clearly defined by PNAC and others, of establishing a solid American military presence in Iraq as a launching pad for further expansion of the "single sustainable model of national success" and the juicy contracts that would follow.

Every single person killed as a result of Bush’s war — Iraqi and American, British and Italian, Polish and Japanese, soldier and civilian — has died in vain. The fantasy war of "sweets and roses" was lost from the very beginning (although a less wretchedly inept occupation might have mitigated at least some of the depredations spawned by every war of conquest). The real war of the "unipolar dominationists" is also clearly lost. There is no way clear to any realistic scenario where American troops remain in Iraq as the "invited guests" of a stable, supine client government in Baghdad. Any expansion of the war at this point — any continuance of the war in any form whatsoever — is thus nothing more than an exercise in wanton slaughter to "save face" for the defeated elitists and allow them to offload the inevitable Gtterdmmerung onto their successors in office.

This is the significance of 3,000th U.S. military death in Iraq. It is, literally, a milestone, a marker in the sand on a long and bloody trail whose end is still nowhere in sight.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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That there will be war with Iran is now virtually guaranteed. The Bush Administration set out a clear casus belli over the weekend in two stories — masterworks of warmongering propaganda — appearing in two major bastions of the "liberal media." The argument for this new war — buttressed with "facts" that as usual went unchallenged by the corporate scribes — is actually stronger and cleaner than the collection of conflicting mendacities that led to the invasion of Iraq. It is vain to hope that the Democrats, who have themselves demonized Iran with such ferocity, will stand against the call for the new war when it comes, in the terms now being established by the Administration.

The war drum sounded on Saturday morning in the New York Times — in the person of that ever-reliable conduit of dubious intel, reporter Michael Gordon, who played a key role in disseminating White House falsehoods in the run-up to assault on Iraq, but who, unlike his colleague in collusion, Judith Miller, has paid no professional price for uncritically conveying the lies of war-machinators to the American public. In the course of a report telling us how George W. Bush personally ordered American forces to put the squeeze on "Iranian networks" in Iraq, Gordon and co-writer David Sanger passed along the word from Condi Rice that Iran is directly involved in the "increasing lethality" of insurgent attacks on U.S. soldiers.

This report in the NYT — the agenda-setter for the national corporate media — provides the highest- level "confirmation" of a Friday report by CBS that relayed — again, uncritically — specific numbers of American dead and wounded from what "U.S. military figures" said were Iranian-supplied weapons:

"According to U.S. military figures, 198 American and British soldiers have been killed, and more than 600 wounded by advanced explosive devices manufactured in Iran and smuggled in through the southern marshes and along the Tigris River."

You can’t get any plainer than that. According to the Pentagon and the U.S. Secretary of State, Iran has already killed 198 American and British soldiers and wounded more than 600. What president would be denied approval — either beforehand or after the fact — for military action against a country that was actively slaughtering American troops in combat? This goes far beyond the potential "threat" from Saddam Hussein that Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq. If even the possibility of an attack by an unfriendly country is regarded by the Bush Faction as legitimate grounds for a military assault, how much moreso is the actual killing of Americans by a foreign power?

Make no mistake: this is the marker that has now been put down; this is the card that’s been laid on the table. The Bush Administration has openly accused Iran of killing American soldiers in Iraq. Again, this is a charge far more resonant, far more effective as a pretext for war than anything offered during the successful stampede to invade Iraq. Even a president as weakened and isolated as Bush is at the moment would be able to get support for an attack on a state that was "killing our soldiers in the field."

And once again the Bush Faction’s masterful use of the corporate media — which many thought had utterly deserted them after the November electoral debacle — is shown in how the two most prominent members of what is laughingly known as "the liberal media" are being used to establish the casus belli against Iran: the New York Times and CBS. Despite their reputations of speaking truth to power — reputations not always (but mostly) undeserved — both media mavens obligingly delivered the Regime’s propaganda payload in reports that offer nary a demur or a nano-second of skepticism about the claims being offered.

Yet as Kurt Nimmo reminds us, the "sophisticated improvised explosive devices" that are causing the "increasingly lethality" in Iraq mentioned by Rice are in fact based on Anglo-American technology deployed by the UK security services during its dirty war with the IRA. In the mass infiltration of terrorist cells by the UK "security organs" — so reminiscent of Don Rumsfeld’s plan, now implemented, of "fomenting terrorism" by infiltrating American agents into violent groups and goading them into action — the IED technology fell into the IRA’s hands, which then provided it to groups around the world. What’s more, as Nimmo notes, all of this was reported in October 2005 by the UK’s Independent on Sunday, which wrote:

"…soldiers, who were targeted by insurgents as they traveled through [Iraq], died after being attacked with bombs triggered by infra-red beams. The bombs were developed by the IRA using technology passed on by the security services in a botched ‘sting’ operation more than a decade ago…. This contradicts the British government’s claims that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is helping Shia insurgents to make the devices.

"The Independent on Sunday can also reveal that the bombs and the firing devices used to kill the soldiers, as well as two private security guards, were initially created by the UK security services as part of a counter-terrorism strategy at the height of the troubles in the early 1990s. According to security sources, the technology for the bombs used in the attacks, which were developed using technology from photographic flash units, was employed by the IRA some 15 years ago after Irish terrorists were given advice by British agents."

Nimmo goes on to note that:

"In fact, the devices were made in America. ‘In late 1993 and early 1994, I went to America with officers from MI5, the FRU and RUC special branch. They had already sourced the transmitters and receivers in New York following liaison with their counterparts in the FBI,’ Kevin Fulton, who infiltrated the IRA in the Newry area while being handled by the Force Research Unit, told [Ireland's] Sunday Tribune in June, 2002. Fulton’s trip was confirmed by the FBI, according to Matthew Teague, writing for the Atlantic. The Independent on Sunday ‘has also spoken to a republican who was a senior IRA member in the early 1990s. He confirmed that Mr. Fulton had introduced the IRA to the new technology and that the IRA shared this with ‘like-minded organizations abroad.’"

Now, it may well be that Iran has made a pact with the Sunni insurgents in Iraq to supply them with high-powered IEDs — at the same time that Iranian-backed Shiite parties and militias (a.k.a. the Bush-installed Iraqi government) are carrying out mass ethnic cleansing operations against Sunni strongholds. Maybe the Sunni insurgents promised not to use any of the Iranian weapons against the Shiites who are destroying them. And hey, maybe the Iranian-connected, Shiite-led Iraqi government is fully on board with this deal by its Tehran mentors to supply deadly weapons to the Shiites’ deadliest foes in order to kill the Shiites’ main protectors, the Americans. This at any rate is the scenario you have to swallow in order to find the Bush Regime’s assertions credible. (And in a remarkable and telling instance of projection, the usual unnamed Bush officials also told the credulous clerk Gordon that "Iran is engaged in a policy of ‘managed chaos’ in Iraq" — a phrase that pretty much sums up the entire four years of the Bush rapine in Iraq.)

In any case, the sophisticated asymmetrical weaponry being used against Americans in Iraq need not have come from Iran; it has been around for a long time, and originated in the heart of the "Coalition" itself: yet another piece of deadly blowback from the dirty wars of the security organs that have done so much to shape the hell that afflicts us all today. But the media amnesia that has already sunk the Independent’s revelations full fathom five — and the unquestioning, uncritical retailing of unconfirmed assertions by an Administration of proven liars clearly bent on more war — means we are being plunged blindly once again into monstrous, blood-soaked folly.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

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So here’s the plan from George W. Bush:

1. We’re going to send some more troops, but not enough to make any kind of substantial difference in the disposal of forces on the ground.
2. The Iraqis are going to run their own military units now, but Americans will "back them up" in an escalation of horrific urban warfare against both Sunni and Shiite militias, in crowded civilian neighborhoods. (Just to show where the true balance of these forces will lie, the Americans are committing 20,000 additional troops; the Iraqis have pledged to scrape up 8,000 more somewhere. It looks like the "support" tail will still be wagging the attack dog.)
3. The Iraqis have been given a set of "benchmarks" they have to meet — including the all-important oil law — or else…or else…something or other will happen. (There is a "Plan B" should this new plan fail, Bush officials told the New York Times — but they won’t say what it is. No doubt it’s resting on the same shelf where Richard Nixon kept his "secret plan" for victory in Vietnam back in 1968.)
4. In any case, should the new plan fail, it was all Nouri al-Maliki’s idea anyway.
5. And by the way, Iran is "materially helping" the insurgents kill Americans, so we will be fully justified in launching the military action against them that we are now preparing. (This is the real Plan B, of course; as we noted earlier, the Democrats are already gung-ho for a beat-down of Iran. When the new plan for Iraq goes FUBAR — as go FUBAR it must — the trigger will be pulled on Tehran.)
6. But the main thing is — a lot more Americans and Iraqis are about to die. And if you don’t like it, you can lump it.

And that’s it. That’s the much ballyhooed, eagerly anticipated "New Way Forward." The New York Times dutifully called the plan "a major tactical shift in war," although it is of course nothing of the kind. It is the same "plan" with the same vague goals as all the others: "Iraqis taking control, insurgents being defeated, reconstruction winning hearts and minds, democratic unity forming among all of Iraq’s sects, tribes, clans and factions." In what way does any of this constitute a "major shift" of any kind from the rhetoric we’ve heard before? The only major difference is that the Bush Regime is now becoming more open about its insistence that the oil law — which was largely designed in Washington — be put in place. They are obviously growing more anxious on this point, as well they should, seeing how it’s one of the primary objectives of this entire bloodsoaked enterprise.

The Times does note that Bush was more candid in a pre-speech confab with Congressional leaders. There he made clear that the democratically chosen prime minister of the absolutely sovereign democratic Iraqi government will be summarily removed by the President of the United States if he doesn’t produce results. But goodness gracious granny me — as old Don Rumsfeld might say — isn’t that the sort of authority that is usually exercised upon, well, a colony, not a sovereign state? Can Mr. Bush possibly be implying that the people of Iraq will not be allowed to choose their own leaders, if said leaders are not pleasing to Washington? Can it be that we have perhaps been somehow misinformed as to the true nature of the "American experiment in Iraq," as the NYT demurely describes four years of carnage and chaos?

But Bush’s candor with the Congressionals didn’t stop with his threat to strongarm Maliki out of office. He also revealed the "magical thinking" that has long been the hallmark of his strategic vision: the endearingly child-like trait of squeezing his eyes shut tight and making a wish that his dreams will come true. When the legislators asked Bush why he thought that this continuation and exacerbation of the same tactics that have failed repeatedly and spectacularly over the past four years will now suddenly be crowned with victory, Bush clenched him little fists and stamped him little feet and said: "Because it has to."

So there you have it. The plan which is no plan but the same plan that has already failed will succeed "because it has to." Never mind that according to the highly-praised "counterinsurgency manual" written by Lt. Gen. David Petraeus — the very man now charged with carrying out this "major shift in tactics" — the new plan cannot possibly succeed. As Josh Marshall notes (in an analysis of a Fred Kaplan piece in Slate):

..Look at what the manual says. Counter-insurgency operations require at least 20 combat troops per 1000 people in a given area. And look closely. That’s not just military personnel, but combat troops.

Kaplan runs through the numbers. But the key points are that you’d need 120,000 combat troops to mount real counter-insurgency operations just in Baghdad. We currently have 70,000 combat troops in the whole country. So concentrate all US combat personnel in Iraq into Baghdad. Then add 20,000 more ‘surge’ combat troops. That leaves you 30,000 short of the number the Army thinks you’d need just in Baghdad…

What this all amounts to is that 20,000 or even 50,000 new combat troops don’t even get you close to what the Army says you need to do what President Bush says he’s now going to try to do. To get that many troops into the country you’d need to put this country on a serious war-footing and begin drawing troops down from deployments around the globe. All of which, just isn’t going to happen, setting aside for the moment of what should happen. And that tells you this whole thing is just a joke at the expense of the American public and our troops on the ground in Iraq.

But forget all that. Even though the commanding general’s own doctrines guarantee another murderous failure, Bush’s new "plan" will succeed "because it has to." He’s closed his eyes, you see; he’s made his wish. Now the fairies will make it come true.

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.