The Start of the “Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy”
From The Washington Post:
After about the 200th e-mail from a stranger demanding that I cease my personal coverup of something called the Downing Street Memo, I decided to read it. It’s all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq the year before he did so. The whole “weapons of mass destruction” concern was phony from the start, and the drama about inspections was just kabuki: going through the motions.
Although it is flattering to be thought personally responsible for allowing a proven war criminal to remain in office, in the end I don’t buy the fuss. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it, as an encouraging sign of the revival of the left. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the widely shared self-discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it.
It takes, in short, what Hillary Clinton once called a vast conspiracy. The right has enjoyed one for years…
I’ll admit right off that I shrugged off the Downing Street Memo. It didn’t seem to say anything that wasn’t talked about long before. Bush doesn’t like Saddam! Wow. One can only wonder what mysteries DSM2 will shed light on. Does Bush like milk on his dry cereal? It was clear for a long time that GW was going after Saddam, and don’t get me wrong here, I thought it was about time! Mr. Kinsley does a nice job looking over the memo and wondering why anything in it was a surprise. I couldn’t agree more.
June 13, 2005 - 07:46 PM on June 13th, 2005
When your a rich black queer like MICHEAL JACKSON you can get away with anything i mean he is a freak who like Ted Kennedy can get away with crime becuase he is wealthy and infuenchial just like O.J Simpson as well:eek:
June 13, 2005 - 09:29 PM on June 13th, 2005
Snowy – Please don’t feed the trolls. Let’s try to stay on topic please.
June 14, 2005 - 07:43 AM on June 14th, 2005
astroknight,
Don’t bother trying to change Snowy Egret. He has been like this for a long time.
June 14, 2005 - 05:27 PM on June 14th, 2005
2:
Snowy was replying to my comment that contained the announcement jacko was acquitted and the link, but apparently somebody else didn’t like that and erased it.
June 15, 2005 - 07:09 AM on June 15th, 2005
4 – Yes, that would have been me because your post had absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand.
June 15, 2005 - 12:33 PM on June 15th, 2005
George W Bush is a phuking liar and war criminal!
June 15, 2005 - 12:36 PM on June 15th, 2005
… you forgot “complete idiot! “
June 22, 2005 - 06:58 PM on June 22nd, 2005
Fixed Is Fixed
Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2005-06-22 13:49. Evidence
TomPaine.com
Ray McGovern
June 22, 2005
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He now works at Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour.
With last week’s hearings on the Downing Street memos concluded, much work lies ahead. Now, the information in the Downing Street memos needs to be collated carefully with evidence from the mainstream media, on the Internet, and from other sources regarding what was going on in top policymaking circles in Washington in the preparations for the invasion of Iraq.
All this can be expected to take some time.
Those who have read the most recent British cabinet documents know that they show senior U.K. lawyers and diplomats desperately trying to place a veneer of legality on Prime Minister Tony Blair’s promise to President George W. Bush that Britain would join the United States in launching an unprovoked attack on Iraq.
The new memos provide a wealth of information supplementing what has already been revealed”like the relatively unsung example of Elizabeth Wilmshurst, then-deputy legal adviser to the British Foreign Office. Wilmshurst kept insisting that the attack could not be squared with international law, and said it would start “a war of aggression.”When her superiors caved in to Blair, Wilmshurst did the honorable thing. She resigned.
But as the word on the memos is getting out and the case is being carefully formulated, the Downing Street memos and the media coverage they are receiving are already giving the Bush administration fits as they try to slow down a train that has already left the station. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s early decision that it would be a fool’s errand to challenge the authenticity of the papers has prevented the White House from labeling them spurious. Thus, the administration has concluded that smoke, rather than denial, is what is indicated.
In their opening salvo, Bush supporters have chosen to target their smoke against the most damning sentence in the many official Downing Street memos; the 11 words with which the head of British intelligence unwittingly gave away the game:
“But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.â€
So, while the evidence is being analyzed and timelines are being developed, it is important to muster what might be called an ad-hoc “smokescreen patrol”to identify and dispel the smoke being blown by Bush administration and its surrogates.
Woolsey’s Tour de Force
Enter Washington insider and neoconservative favorite James Woolsey, the former director of Central Intelligence, who just a few days after 9/11 called publicly for war on Iraq. Rhodes Scholar Woolsey told MSNBC’s “Hardball”Tuesday night that he is not clear on British usage of the word “fixed.”Woolsey argued that what Blair was told by the U.K.’s intelligence chief does not mean that Washington was “cooking the books.”Since there is no basis for that allegation, says Woolsey, “We ought to back off a bit.â€
An objective “source description”for intelligence reporting from Woolsey would have to include the following: “Source was assigned by then-chair of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle to facilitate reports like the since-disproved story of a meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, as well as the other unfortunate ones about Iraqi mobile laboratories for producing biological weapons. Source’s political views may cloud his objectivity.â€
Not surprisingly, other pundits have joined the Woolsey smoke machine. On June 19, Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler opined that “maybe ‘fixed’ means something different in British-speak.”And Christopher Hitchens, in an article posted on Slate the same day Woolsey went on “Hardball,”wrote: “Never mind for now that the English employ the word “fix”in a slightly different way”a better term might have been ‘organized.’â€
Michael Smith, the Sunday Times reporter who broke the story thinks he knows what “fixed”means. On June 16, he told The Washington Post:
There are a number of people asking about ‘fixed’ and its meaning. This is a real joke. I do not know anyone in the UK who took it to mean anything other than fixed, as in fixed a race, fixed an election, fixed the intelligence. If you fix something, you make it the way you want it. The intelligence was fixed:the head of MI-6 has just been to Washington. He has just talked with George Tenet. He said the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. That translates in clearer terms as the intelligence was being cooked to match what the administration wanted it to say to justify invading Iraq.
I contacted a number of British friends who are close observers of the political scene, to get their opinion. Here is one recent e-mail reply:
Nobody that I have come across here in London interprets the term ‘fixed’ in this context as other than cooked/manipulated/selected. Fixed refers to trickery-as in ‘the fix is in.’ What Woolsey & Co. may think:that is completely irrelevant. It is what we British think that counts. The memo was written to be read by us British, not by Woolsey. It appears that he and his “neoconservative”friends are getting a bit desperate. He would probably be one of the people to go to jail at the end of this, given the key role he has played.
Or, from VIPS colleague Col. Patrick Lang, USA (ret.), former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s human intelligence section, who tends to be more succinct: “Fixed is fixed, man.â€
The Washington Post’s Getler did offer a constructive suggestion; namely, that Blair produce the former intelligence chief and the drafter of the minutes of July 23, 2002, for a news conference or open parliamentary session and let reporters or legislators pursue clarification. Given the seriousness of the issue and the documentary nature of the evidence, my own suggestion would be to subpoena testimony from George Tenet and other senior U.S. officials whose views were reported to Blair”and the sooner the better.
Comment by bLuEdUdE ” 6/22/2005 @ 6:48 pm | Edit This
June 22, 2005 - 06:59 PM on June 22nd, 2005
Why George Went To War
Russ Baker
June 20, 2005
Investigative reporter and essayist Russ Baker (www.russbaker.com )is a longtime contributor to TomPaine.com. He is currently involved with launching a nonprofit organization dedicated to revitalizing investigative journalism. He can be reached at russ@russbaker.com.
The Downing Street memos have brought into focus an essential question: on what basis did President George W. Bush decide to invade Iraq? The memos are a government-level confirmation of what has been long believed by so many: that the administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq and was simply looking for justification, valid or not.
Despite such mounting evidence, Bush resolutely maintains total denial. In fact, when a British reporter asked the president recently about the Downing Street documents, Bush painted himself as a reluctant warrior. “Both of us didn’t want to use our military,” he said, answering for himself and British Prime Minister Blair. “Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It’s the last option.”
Yet there’s evidence that Bush not only deliberately relied on false intelligence to justify an attack, but that he would have willingly used any excuse at all to invade Iraq. And that he was obsessed with the notion well before 9/11″indeed, even before he became president in early 2001.
In interviews I conducted last fall, a well-known journalist, biographer and Bush family friend who worked for a time with Bush on a ghostwritten memoir said that an Iraq war was always on Bush’s brain.
“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said, ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He went on, ‘If I have a chance to invade:, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”
Bush apparently accepted a view that Herskowitz, with his long experience of writing books with top Republicans, says was a common sentiment: that no president could be considered truly successful without one military “win” under his belt. Leading Republicans had long been enthralled by the effect of the minuscule Falklands War on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s popularity, and ridiculed Democrats such as Jimmy Carter who were reluctant to use American force. Indeed, both Reagan and Bush’s father successfully prosecuted limited invasions (Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War) without miring the United States in endless conflicts.
Herskowitz’s revelations illuminate Bush’s personal motivation for invading Iraq and, more importantly, his general inclination to use war to advance his domestic political ends. Furthermore, they establish that this thinking predated 9/11, predated his election to the presidency and predated his appointment of leading neoconservatives who had their own, separate, more complex geopolitical rationale for supporting an invasion.
Conversations With Bush The Candidate
Herskowitz”a longtime Houston newspaper columnist”has ghostwritten or co-authored autobiographies of a broad spectrum of famous people, including Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, Mickey Mantle, Dan Rather and Nixon cabinet secretary John B. Connally. Bush’s 1999 comments to Herskowitz were made over the course of as many as 20 sessions together. Eventually, campaign staffers”expressing concern about things Bush had told the author that were included in the manuscript”pulled the project, and Bush campaign officials came to Herskowitz’s house and took his original tapes and notes. Bush communications director Karen Hughes then assumed responsibility for the project, which was published in highly sanitized form as A Charge to Keep.
The revelations about Bush’s attitude toward Iraq emerged during two taped sessions I held with Herskowitz. These conversations covered a variety of matters, including the journalist’s continued closeness with the Bush family and fondness for Bush Senior”who clearly trusted Herskowitz enough to arrange for him to pen a subsequent authorized biography of Bush’s grandfather, written and published in 2003.
I conducted those interviews last fall and published an article based on them during the final heated days of the 2004 campaign. Herskowitz’s taped insights were verified to the satisfaction of editors at the Houston Chronicle, yet the story failed to gain broad mainstream coverage, primarily because news organization executives expressed concern about introducing such potent news so close to the election. Editors told me they worried about a huge backlash from the White House and charges of an “October Surprise.”
Debating The Timeline For War
But today, as public doubts over the Iraq invasion grow, and with the Downing Street papers adding substance to those doubts, the Herskowitz interviews assume singular importance by providing profound insight into what motivated Bush”personally”in the days and weeks following 9/11. Those interviews introduce us to a George W. Bush, who, until 9/11, had no means for becoming “a great president”"because he had no easy path to war. Once handed the national tragedy of 9/11, Bush realized that the Afghanistan campaign and the covert war against terrorist organizations would not satisfy his ambitions for greatness. Thus, Bush shifted focus from Al Qaeda, perpetrator of the attacks on New York and Washington. Instead, he concentrated on ensuring his place in American history by going after a globally reviled and easily targeted state run by a ruthless dictator.
The Herskowitz interviews add an important dimension to our understanding of this presidency, especially in combination with further evidence that Bush’s focus on Iraq was motivated by something other than credible intelligence. In their published accounts of the period between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion, former White House Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke and journalist Bob Woodward both describe a president single-mindedly obsessed with Iraq. The first anecdote takes place the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, in the Situation Room of the White House. The witness is Richard Clarke, and the situation is captured in his book, Against All Enemies.
On September 12th, I left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room, was the President. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. “Look,” he told us, “I know you have a lot to do and all:but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way:”
I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. “But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this.”
“I know, I know, but:see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred:” :
“Look into Iraq, Saddam,” the President said testily and left us. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty stared after him with her mouth hanging open.
Similarly, Bob Woodward, in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview about his book, Bush At War, captures a moment, on November 21, 2001, where the president expresses an acute sense of urgency that it is time to secretly plan the war with Iraq. Again, we know there was nothing in the way of credible intelligence to precipitate the president’s actions.
Woodward: “President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, ‘What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.’”
Wallace (voiceover): Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam”and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.
Woodward: “Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the necessary preparations in Kuwait specifically to make war possible.”
Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, “a great president.” Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush’s decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.
Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.