The West Has Bloodied Hands

Margolis is one of the very few journalists left in the world entitled to use that term. The rest are whores and corrupt capitalist bitches, if you believe anything that comes out of their putrid, ignorant, lying mouths then you're an idiot.

by Eric Margolis

Who was the first high government official to authorize use of mustard gas against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq?

If your answer was Saddam Hussein's cousin, the notorious "Chemical Ali" -- aka Ali Hassan al-Majid -- you're wrong.

The correct answer: Sainted Winston Churchill. As colonial secretary and secretary for war and air, he authorized the RAF in the 1920s to routinely use mustard gas against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq and against Pashtun tribes on British India's northwest frontier.

Iraq's U.S.-installed regime has just announced al-Majid, one of Saddam's most brutal henchmen, will stand trial next week for war crimes.

Al-Majid is accused of ordering the 1988 gassing of Kurds at Halabja that killed over 5,000 civilians. He led the bloody suppression of Iraq's Shias, killing tens of thousands. These were the same Shias whom former U.S. president George Bush called to rebel against Saddam's regime, then sat back and did nothing while they were crushed.

The Halabja atrocity remains murky. The CIA's former Iraq desk chief claims Kurds who died at Halabja were killed by cyanide gas, not nerve gas, as is generally believed.

At the time, Iraq and Iran were locked in the ferocious last battles of their eight-year war. Halabja was caught between the two armies that were exchanging salvos of regular and chemical munitions. Only Iran had cyanide gas. If the CIA official is correct, the Kurds were accidentally killed by Iran, not Iraq.

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FBI painting ugly picture

by Eric Margolis

The dots in Washington are connecting. It's not a pretty sight.

Last week the results of a controversial two-year FBI investigation were leaked to the media.

The story is potentially a huge scandal and may indicate a furious power struggle between neocon supporters of Israel's far right Likud Party, who dominated the Pentagon and National Security Council, and the CIA and the state department.

The FBI is focusing on the Pentagon's policy department, a mini state department within defence that plays a key role in U.S. Mideast policy. It is headed by a neocon activist, defence undersecretary Douglas Feith, who has longtime links to Likud.

The Pentagon's chief Iran analyst, Larry Franklin, who works for Feith's deputy, William Luti, is under FBI investigation for allegedly passing top secret presidential policy papers on Iran to two senior members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC, one of Washington's most powerful lobbies, allegedly passed them to Israel's spy service. Israel is alarmed by Iran's nuclear developments.

AIPAC and Israel deny spying. The Pentagon says that Franklin is the only member of the department suspected of wrongdoing. Israel insists it ceased espionage in the U.S. after its agent, Jonathan Pollard, was jailed in 1987. Pollard's controller in the U.S. government, known to the FBI as "Mr. X," has never been caught.

Still, the current investigation is one indication of growing concerns that U.S. national security and foreign policy have been gravely compromised, or even hijacked, by a small but powerful group of Bush administration neocons. The concern is that this group, with the aid of Vice-President Dick Cheney, helped to engineer the Iraq war at least in part to destroy an enemy of Israel.

While only Franklin is under investigation, he works for Feith's office. Feith reports to deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, another strong supporter of Israel.

Cheney and Wolfowitz were among the prime architects of the Iraq war.

In 1996, Feith and neocon Israel supporter Richard Perle were among the authors of the policy plan, "A Clean Break," for Israel's then Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, calling for Greater Israel. As well, it called for a much more aggressive policy on Iraq and Syria and for ending peace talks with the Palestinians.

Feith ran the Pentagon's Office for Special Plans (OSP), which relied for much of its information about Iraq on the likes of the notorious Ahmad Chalabi.

Feith, Wolfowitz and Perle were key backers of Chalabi, a convicted swindler, planning to make him a key leader of Iraq. Chalabi's carefully crafted falsehoods and exaggerations about Iraq provided the White House with much of its pretext for war.

The rock just turned over by the FBI also reveals other familiar denizens. Welcome back Iranian con-man and arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, a key figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal that nearly brought down the Reagan administration.

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Iran: The Next Big Lie

by Eric Margolis

Did Iran help al-Qaida to stage the Sept 11 attacks on the United States? Perhaps, suggested the US 9/11 commission which claimed Iran allowed 8 al-Qaida future airplane hijackers to pass through Iran from Afghanistan between 7 and 11 months before the attacks on America.

Unnamed senior Bush Administration officials also claim Iran proposed collaborating with al-Qaida in 2000, but was rejected by Osama bin Laden. `Maybe we attacked the wrong country,’ one of the dimmer lights in Congress ruefully observed.

There has been no evidence produced that Iran knew of the 9/11 attacks or assisted them. But never mind Iran. The Bush Administration still has not published the White Paper promised by Colin Powell in late 2001 proving Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida were behind 9/11. What we have seen is a faked tape of bin Laden, a lot of faked documents produced by the Afghan communists who run the so-called Northern Alliance, and more fakery from the Chalabi group in Iraq.

Why would Iran, knowing it was in Bush’s gunsights, join in a monstrous terrorist attack that, if linked to Tehran, could have brought US nuclear retaliation? Iranians are a very clever, sophisticated people, and certainly not suicidal.

This column has long predicted the Bush Administration would orchestrate a pre-election crisis over Iran designed to whip up patriotic fervor in the US and distract public and media attention from the Iraq fiasco. Bush’s strategic mentor, Israel’s PM Ariel Sharon, called on the US `to march on Tehran the day after it takes Baghdad.’

The growing clamor over Iran’s nuclear intentions, with rumblings about Fall US-Israeli air strikes against Iran’s reactors, are part of this manufactured crisis.

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The era of strategic deception

by Eric Margolis

Having presided over the two worst intelligence disasters since Pearl Harbor -- 9/11 and the misbegotten invasion of Iraq -- the Bush Administration and its apologists are now whining, "Okay, we were wrong about Iraq's weapons and supposed threat, but so was everybody else. Besides, it was all the CIA's fault."

No way. The Iraq weapons fiasco was absolutely not caused by an "intelligence failure," as the White House and the recent Senate whitewash claim.

U.S. national security and CIA were corrupted and blinded by extremist ideology, cowardice, and careerism.

Nor was everyone wrong about Iraq.

Scores of Mideast professionals, this writer included, insisted from Day 1 that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, posed no threat to the U.S., and had no link to al-Qaida.

Meanwhile, in 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney thundered that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.

A month later, Secretary of State Colin Powell proclaimed "no doubt he (Saddam) has chemical weapons."

Shortly after, President George W. Bush assured the UN that Iraq had biological weapons.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice warned a "mushroom cloud" threatened America.

Britain's glib prime minister, Tony Blair, made similar ludicrous claims.

Many veteran CIA officers dismissed these alarms as politically-motivated propaganda.

The U.S. state department, air force, and French intelligence challenged claims Iraq had threatening offensive weapons systems.

Many senior Pentagon military officers opposed invading Iraq.

But the word went out: Now hear this. If you value your job and pension, do not, repeat, do not contradict the boss. The president is hell-bent on invading Iraq. Make it so.

Cheney repeatedly demanded evidence be found of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaida.

Oblivious to all facts, he keeps warning Iraq still threatens the U.S. He is increasingly out of touch with reality and may need professional calming.

Former CIA director George Tenet, a political aparatchik, not an intelligence professional, undermined his agency by pandering to all of Bush and Cheney's prejudices.

Careerism and hand-licking took precedence over professionalism. Those with dissenting views were ignored or shunted aside.

This column has long reported smouldering anger among veteran CIA officers over Bush's deeply flawed policies towards Iraq and the Muslim world.

In late 2001, I was shocked and horrified to hear a distinguished member of the CIA's founding families actually claim a "fifth column" had taken control of Iraq policy and was driving the U.S. to war.

But even the compliant CIA failed to satisfy Bush and Cheney's growing demands for more damning "evidence".

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American fib factory

"Fib factory" is generous, "nest of lying cocksucking vipers" is more accurate...

by Eric Margolis

The White House's Iraq fib factory went into overdrive last week, ballyhooing claims that the new "caretaker government" the UN had supposedly just installed in Baghdad was "fully sovereign" and "totally independent."

We would like to believe American president George Bush. But this latest claim comes from the same truth-deficient people who concocted Iraq's imminent threat to destroy the U.S. with nuclear and germ weapons, Saddam Hussein's vans and drones of death, Saddam's tryst with Osama bin Laden, and a slew of other preposterous whoppers that would have made the Nazis' propagandist, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, blush deep crimson.

The latest U.S.-authored regime change in Iraq was a political charade designed to soothe uneasy American voters who are increasingly alarmed by the aimlessness, mounting casualties and $186-billion US cost -- as much as the Vietnam War at its height-- of the Iraq misadventure.

The White House dreads the oncoming national uproar when the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq hits 1,000. It desperately needs to show some light at the end of the Iraq tunnel before November's elections.

So it arm-twisted the UN's weak secretary general, Kofi Annan, into allowing his organization to be crudely misused to legitimize continuing U.S.-British occupation of Iraq by supposedly selecting candidates for the new "sovereign" regime.

In the end, Washington chose its own men and simply ignored the UN after it provided the required fig leaf.

The result: Iraq's new regime, installed under the guns of U.S. tanks, makes the former Soviet Union's Eastern European satellite states look like paragons of unfettered independence.

Off-the-shelf CIA "asset" Iyad Allawi was made strongman/prime minister -- just like Afghanistan's U.S.-installed figurehead Hamid Karzai, another CIA stock item. Iraq's defence and interior ministries will also be run by other U.S. "assets." Some 160 senior American "advisers" will supervise all key ministries, notably defence, police, finance, communications and a new, CIA-trained secret police.

All the U.S. billions presently funding Iraq, and overall control of oil revenues, will be managed by a special U.S. "advisory and monitoring board."

France once ran its nominally independent West African colonies in a similar manner.

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Modern 'Dreyfus Affair' is unworthy of America

by Eric Margolis

Hatred of Muslims has become the anti-Semitism of our era. The latest example of this ugly fact is the vicious prosecution by the U.S. military of a Muslim army chaplain, Capt. James Yee.

I call this disgraceful and shameful case America's Dreyfus Affair.

In 1894, a French army officer, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was wrongfully convicted of spying on the basis of forged documents. Though evidence pointed to another officer, anti-Semites in the French Army framed Dreyfus. He was given a life sentence on Devil's Island, a brutal, malarial penal colony in the Caribbean off French Guiana.

Four years later, the great French writer Emile Zola published J'accuse (I accuse), his famous newspaper expose of the Dreyfus Affair in which he demolished the case against the persecuted officer and showed how hatred of Jews had led to this outrage.

Fast forward to 2003. Capt. Yee, a native of New Jersey, West Point graduate, convert to Islam and one of the few Muslim chaplains in the U.S. armed forces, was arrested for espionage. Yee had been chaplain at the Bush administration's very own version of Devil's Island, the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp, ministering to the 660 Muslim prisoners held there in cages.

Two Muslim-Americans working at Guantanamo as interpreters for the military, Ahmed Mehalba and Ahmad al-Halabi, were arrested on suspicions of passing information to Syria and possessing classified documents. U.S. Army Reserve officers at Guantanamo somehow believed they had uncovered a nefarious Syrian spy ring.

Capt. Yee had once visited Syria for religious studies. He had dinner at Guantanamo with al-Halabi and Mehalba. So he, too, was arrested and charged with espionage - a capital offence.

Spying charges have since been dropped against Halabi, but he and Mehalba still face other flimsy charges.

Capt. Yee was charged with spying and thrown into solitary confinement in a naval prison for 2 1/2 months, where he was chained hand and foot. Jailers refused to tell him the direction in which Mecca lay so he could properly pray. He was denied family visits and repeatedly threatened with execution.

Capt. Yee was finally released to face a court martial at Ft. Benning, Ga., which is ongoing.

The military's case against him has steadily crumbled. Not a shred of evidence has emerged of spying or foreign contacts.

After espionage charges were dropped, Yee was accused of the minor infraction of mishandling classified documents. But military prosecutors didn't even know which of the supposedly classified documents Yee had were actually classified. Most were apparently hand-written notes on his religious ministering.

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America - The Real Danger Lies Within

There are a few newsies left who tell it like it is, Margolis is one of them.

by Eric Margolis

The year 2003 dramatically and dolefully illustrated Lord Acton's famous dictum that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

An almighty United States, unrestrained by any rival, international body, or world opinion, bestrode the globe, a belligerent colossus determined to monopolize global oil reserves and use its vast military power to crush lesser nations or malefactors that disturbed the Pax Americana.

For America's hard right - a curious farrago of Armageddon-seeking southern Protestants; neo-conservative supporters of Israel's right-wing Likud party; and the military-industrial-petroleum complex - the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy of world domination, and utter contempt for international laws and old allies, marks a new era of national greatness. President George Bush, who vowed his foreign policy would be "humble" and "compassionate," has turned out to be the most radical president in modern U.S. history.

But for those Americans whose primary loyalty was to their country, rather than to religious cultism, foreign nations, or financial profit, the rapid emergence of the U. S. as an imperial power waging two hugely expensive colonial wars in Asia was a disaster, both for America's democratic system and for the rest of the world.

Bush's vow to bring "democracy" to the Mideast rang as hollow as pious assurances by 19th century European colonialists they were gobbling up Africa and Asia to bring the blessings of Christianity and civilization to benighted savages. Pillaging resources, not enlightenment, were - and remain - the true colonial motivation.

Bush's claims to hold the mandate of heaven to wage global warfare against the nebulous forces of "terrorism" sounded as dangerous and nonsensical as old Chairman Leonid Brezhnev's drunken claims it was the Soviet Union's "sacred internationalist duty" to launch military adventures anywhere on Earth where socialism was threatened.

Columnist Georgie Anne Gayer put it perfectly when she recently wrote that whereas America used to lead the world as champion of democracy, personal freedom and human rights, today, under Bush, it instead seeks to dominate the world through raw military and monetary power.

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Who's really in charge at the White House?

Eisenhower tried to warn us about this in the final speech of his presidency, looks like nobody listened to him... Either that or it was even too late back then, given the stuff that's come out about WHO financed Herr Hitler it seems to point to this self-same military industrial complex. I bet they sleep really soundly in their expensive beds knowing that they are responsible for virtually all the misery and suffering that exists in the world.

by Eric Margolis

As I walked along the elegant Quai d'Orsay, past France's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Talleyrand's wonderfully cynical bon mot about Napoleon's murder of the Duc d'Enghien kept coming back to me: "Worse than a crime, it was a blunder."

Napoleon's foreign minister could just as well have been speaking of Iraq.

France repeatedly warned the Bush administration against invading Iraq. DGSE, the French intelligence service, had highly placed agents within Saddam Hussein's regime and informed the U.S. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, posed no threat and would, if invaded, turn into a second Lebanon or West Bank.

Warnings by France and other European powers were sneeringly dismissed by the war's principal architects, among them U.S. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, whose strategy was based in large part on disinformation from shady defectors and self-serving sources.

Pro-invasion Americans hurled insults at France for impeding Washington's rush to war.

Totally wrong about Iraq, Wolfowitz and fellow neo-cons are now punishing those who were totally right.

France, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Greece, and China - and maybe or maybe not Canada - were blacklisted from $18.6 billion US of "reconstruction" contracts in Iraq.

The laughable reason: "To protect the essential security interests of the United States." Albania and Uzbekistan are approved vendors.

"Reconstruction" is a euphemism for repairing massive damage inflicted on Iraq, formerly the Arab world's most developed nation, by a decade of crushing American-led sanctions and bombing.

French diplomats at the Quai d'Orsay are asking whatever happened to Colin Powell, who is supposed to head U.S. foreign policy? Wolfowitz seems to be running foreign as well as defence policy now. The hapless Powell has been demoted to messenger.

Banning staunch allies like France and Germany from rebuilding Iraq is not only foolishly vindictive and ham-handed, it is downright stupid, a condition now epidemic at the Pentagon's highest civilian echelons.

America's affronted allies, facing domestic outrage over this insult, must now take overt or covert counter-action, worsening U.S.-European relations.

Ironically, the spiteful ban undermines intense U.S. efforts to draw Europe into the Iraq mess.

All this could have been done quietly.

Instead, Wolfowitz created an unnecessary trans-Atlantic fracas that again shows the alarming diplomatic ineptitude and political crassness of the Bush administration. Embarrassingly, the American blacklist was issued just as Bush was calling European leaders, trying to get them to forgive Iraq's huge debts. The president was left red-faced. Many wondered who really was running the administration.

The exclusion of some of America's oldest friends from Iraq underlines the point that the U.S. invasion was really motivated by big oil and big business, rather than the faux war on terrorism or Baghdad's non-existent unconventional weapons.

Few people realize how important the occupation of oil-rich Iraq is to America's military-industrial-petroleum complex, a major financial backer of Bush and the Republican party. Defence spending, spurred by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, will reach $3.1 trillion US over the next two years - the same amount, in constant dollars, the U.S. spent on World War II!

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Dubious intelligence

CIA enraged by cynical White House end-run around its sources

by Eric Margolis

For the Bush administration, which has wrapped itself in faux patriotism, accusations that it revealed the identity of a serving CIA agent are a huge political embarrassment and another blow to its sinking credibility.

Last July, former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV contradicted President George Bush's assertions that Iraq had imported uranium ore from Niger.

Wilson said his investigations in Niger found the whole story was a fake, based on forged documents.

Bush nevertheless suggested Iraq was importing uranium in his keynote state of the union address.

Wilson's patriotic act ruined his career and made him the target of a vicious smear campaign.

At least six journalists were told by administration sources that Wilson's wife was an active CIA officer. Journalist Robert Novak cited her name in his column.

Revealing names of CIA agents is a federal crime. There is speculation that the source of the story came from within the office of Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's powerful chief of staff.

(Bush's press secretary has said "absolutely nothing brought to our attention suggests any White House involvement and that includes the vice-president's office." Scott McClellan added that if it turns out any administration officials were involved in the leak, they'll be fired.)

In any event, Libby and Pentagon civilian allies, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, all played key roles in the buildup to the war with Iraq. They brought intensive pressure on the CIA to produce proof of hidden weapons and links between Iraq and al-Qaida.

Behind the scandal over identifying Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, a far more important battle is raging.

The Bush administration plans to spend $1 billion in the fruitless search for unconventional weapons in Iraq.

The non-existence of these weapons, which were the main excuse for the invasion, has badly damaged the White House; eroded the power of Cheney's men Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle -- who jestingly called themselves "the cabal" -- and humiliated the hapless Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Now "the cabal" and some politicians blame the CIA for the failure to find Iraq's non-existent weapons and alleged links to al-Qaida.

But the CIA is fighting back through leaks, accusing the administration of distorting, corrupting and politicizing the conduct of national security.

The CIA does deserve sharp criticism over Iraq. It had a shocking lack of reliable human intelligence there, forcing the agency to rely heavily on dubious defectors and foreign intelligence, rather than its own resources.

Ironically, France had excellent intelligence in Iraq and rightly warned Bush his war would lead to disaster. Bush was too busy listening to the neo-conservatives' hyped intelligence to heed France's excellent and reliable advice.

So far, CIA chief George Tenet has refused public comment over the attacks, but agency sources report him furious with the White House and its neo-conservative Pentagon allies. CIA staffers are waiting for Tenet to go public and take on the neo-cons who are trying to blame the agency for the fiasco they created.

When White House hawks such as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney and the Pentagon cabal found the CIA was not providing damning evidence on Iraq they needed to promote war, they created a special intelligence unit.

It cherry-picked bits and pieces of negative data about Iraq, trumpeted lurid claims by Iraqi defectors, then passed them on to the White House.

Iraqi exiles were used as a primary conduit for the disinformation, and were provided with funding and political support. The New York Times repeatedly parroted the Iraqi defectors' distortions.

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Terms of engagement

Herewith, definitions to keep on top of current events

by Eric Margolis

It's very difficult keeping up with Mideast news due to the Orwellian newspeak coming from Washington.
So here's a handy list of key terms, translated into simple English.

Liberation - Invasion.

Coalition - The U.S. and British invaders, plus some troops from rent-a-nations like Romania and Poland. In the past, "the coalition" would have been called imperial forces and mercenary auxiliaries.

Dictator - A ruler you don't like, or who does not cooperate.

Statesman - A cooperative dictator.

Stability - when things go the way Uncle Sam likes, ie., the status quo.

Instability - when things don't go the way Unc Sam wants, ie., when trouble-makers try to change the status quo.

Iraq reconstruction - a process whereby big firms that contribute to the president's re-election campaign obtain contracts to rebuild the damage caused by U.S. bombing.

Freeing Iraq's oil assets - Washington's seizure and sale of Iraqi oil, which in no way can be compared to Cuba's seizure and sale of U.S.-owned property, a dastardly crime.

Mideast democracy - regimes that hold rigged elections and obey Washington's orders.

Free trade - pouring goods and services into the newly "liberated" country, and buying up its key industrial assets at fire-sale prices.

Terrorism - violent acts by dangerous fanatics and malcontents who refuse to accept the downtrodden status assigned to them by Washington.

Anti-terrorism - State terrorism.

Uranium - a yellowish mineral from Niger that causes red faces in the White House.

Iraq Administrator - A pro-consul or gaulieter, disguised as a minor suburban bureaucrat.

Drones of death - Iraqi remotely piloted aircraft that the White House claimed were poised to fly off Iraqi ships lurking in the North Atlantic and shower fiendish germs on a sleeping America - which turn out to be two model airplanes, only one of which could fly. See "vans of death."

Vans of death - Claimed by Washington to be Iraqi mobile germ warfare laboratories, but turn out, on inspection, to be British-supplied trucks for inflating weather balloons.

Weapons of Mass Destruction - Nasty weapons, existing or non-existing, that the other side has. When your side has them, they become invisible.

Torture - a foul act committed by your enemies. When your side does it, it's called intensive interrogation in Guantanamo.

Homeland security - bolting the barn door after the horse has escaped by rounding up Muslims and denying them due process of law.

French - Insubordinate ingrates and depraved chain-smokers who had the nerve to try to block the jolly little war in Iraq, and now sneer, "we told you so."

Germans - Untrustworthy. Just when you order them to be warlike again, they go soft. Wait until they see the next dozen WWII epics from Hollywood.

Canadians - A bunch of pot-smoking, pinko, wimp nancy boys who marry their best friends and refuse to obey orders from the Great White Father in Washington.

Islam - An evil faith that promotes violence and hatred, as proven by the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who learned about the agents of the devil while encountering them in motel rooms.

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Bush deserves to be impeached

by Eric Margolis

"Worse than a crime, it was a blunder," was how the cynical Talleyrand famously described Napoleon's murder of the Duke d'Enghien.

The same may be said of President George Bush's attempts to murder the leader of a sovereign nation, Saddam Hussein, and his foolhardy eagerness to invade Iraq.

Thanks to Bush's blundering, nearly 50% of U.S. Army combat units are now stuck in a spreading guerrilla war in Iraq , costing $4 billion US monthly, that is becoming the biggest, most expensive, and bloodiest foreign mess since Vietnam. This when the U.S. is threatening military action against North Korea.

As the furor in Washington grows over Bush's admission of now-discredited claims about Iraqi uranium imports from Africa in his keynote state of the union address, administration officials are viciously blaming one another.

George Tenet, the CIA's meek director, became the fall guy for the uranium fiasco, though he repeatedly warned the White House its claims were unsubstantiated.

Blame rightly belongs to Bush himself, and to his woefully inadequate national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Either they knew the uranium story was false, or they were unfit for high office.

For one thing, uranium ore is no more threatening than cake mix.

To weaponize it, ore must be laboriously transformed into uranium hexafluoride gas, then separated and enriched in huge, highly visible plants, equipped with "cascades" of thousands of high-speed centrifuges.

The U.S. knew there were no such nuclear plants in Iraq. French intelligence warned it the Niger story was bogus.

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Heart of darkness

Africa has too many miseries for America alone to address

by Eric Margolis

Illustrating the maxim that all politics are local, American politicians used to lavish attention during election years on "the three I's" - Israel, Ireland and Italy. Today, Israel remains in first place, but thanks to demographic changes, Africa and Mexico have replaced Ireland and Italy.

Last week, President George Bush, who is campaigning for re-election, voyaged to Africa on a self-described mission to promote democracy and combat AIDS, terrorism and poverty. Before leaving, Bush, whose strong suit is not geography, proclaimed, "Africa is a nation with a lot of diseases."

Bush's African trip may win away a few black votes from the Democrats. Bill Clinton made a similar pre-election media safari, but Bush's trip was aimed more at some of his missionary minded, Bible Belt core supporters, riled up by their preachers' dire warnings that Islam is devouring sub-Saharan Africa.

The trip was also about securing new, non-Mideastern oil supplies for America's insatiable appetite for energy and opening up the world's last big, untapped market to U.S. business.

Bush's promise of $15 billion US to combat AIDS in Africa was a laudable, desperately needed effort that may help counteract the negative worldwide image of the U.S. that Bush has fostered.

But when the Great White Father from Washington has returned home, Africa's problems will continue to fester. Liberia, the focus of attention today, is an egregious example. The West African state was founded in 1847 by freed American slaves. The ex-slaves, in a telling comment on human nature, promptly enslaved local tribes, formed a dynasty and turned the country into a plantation. The "American" oligarchy was overthrown in a bloody 1980 coup by an illiterate, syphilitic soldier, Master Sgt. Samuel K. Doe.

Before Doe, the decrepit capital, Monrovia (named after James Monroe, U.S. president from 1817-25), had a whiff of civilization. The demented Doe brought in fellow tribesmen from the Stone Age interior, turning Liberia into an even scarier, more wretched place than Idi Amin's Uganda or Papa Doc's Haiti.

President Ronald Reagan received Doe at the White House, unfortunately referring to him as "My very good friend, Chairman Mo."

Doe was overthrown in 1990 by rebels led by former U.S. resident Charles Taylor, and forced, while being videotaped, to eat his ears and other body parts, then killed.

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U.S. falling into bin Laden's trap

Bogged down in a guerrilla war, Iraq may be George Bush's Little Big Horn

by Eric Margolis

Here in Canada's "make love, not war" capital, I am reminded of a French reader who asked me last week, "Why was Bill Clinton impeached for making love, while George Bush goes unpunished for making a war over fake weapons?"

Excellent question, monsieur.

Asked on TV this week about steadily mounting attacks on U.S. occupation forces in Iraq, President Bush narrowed his eyes, and hunched forward aggressively - thrilling his ardent fans from Biloxi to Paducah - and growled, "Bring 'em on!" - a call to battle worthy of the famously dimwitted American general, George Armstrong Custer who, like Bush, knew what he knew and didn't need advice.

Listening to such adolescent boasting from a man who never heard a shot fired in anger outside of downtown Washington, D.C. made me gag. Bush, let's recall, dodged real military service during the Vietnam war by making occasional appearances at the Texas Air National Guard. Watching him play John Wayne at Iwo Jima for the benefit of his adoring core voters, some of whom believe Elvis is still alive, made me realize how much American politics has been debased by the double whammy of catch-me-if-you can Bill Clinton and truth-deprived George Bush.

I know a real Marine when I see one. My father served in the Pacific in the renowned 5th Marine Amphibious Division, and fought at hellish Iwo Jima.

I mention these points because I am appalled watching Bush and his neo-conservative handlers pursue an imperial war in Iraq that will kill or wound growing numbers of American GIs and turn Iraq into the ugly twin of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. Decent, honest, good-natured American soldiers are now being turned into a colonial occupation army. All colonial wars - Algeria, Chechnya, Kashmir, Aceh, Palestine - are similar. Occupying forces in these dirty wars become brutalized, sadistic and cynical. Look back at Vietnam.

I shudder watching American GIs kicking down doors of civilian homes in the dead of night, threatening screaming children with their weapons, hooding suspects, firing into crowds of demonstrators, and calling air strikes on villages.

As night follows day, this nasty war will lead, as all colonial wars do, to torture, masked informers, reprisals against civilians, secret executions. That's what happened in Indochina. Just last week, Amnesty International sharply rebuked the U.S. for brutalizing and humiliating captives.

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When the U.S. says jump, it wants Pakistan to jump

by Eric Margolis

Pakistan's military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf, was granted the honour last week of an audience at Camp David with the Great White Father. U.S. President George Bush, who three years ago couldn't even name Pakistan's leader, hailed Musharraf as a "statesman" and "friend of freedom."

Gen. Musharraf was offered a conditional $3 billion US aid package, provided: a) Congress, which hates Pakistan, approves; b) Musharraf continues to arrest Islamic militants and support the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan; c) makes no trouble with India over Kashmir; d) doesn't supply nuclear technology to North Korea.

On the last item, the same Washington "experts" who assured us Iraq was bristling with deadly weapons that could annihilate the U.S. and U.K. "in 45 minutes" now claim Pakistan aided North Korea. Pakistan denies this questionable allegation.

In a startling public insult to a "friend and ally," Bush refused Musharraf's request to release F-16 fighters bought by Pakistan in 1989. Pro-Israel members of Congress blocked delivery of the aircraft to punish Pakistan for its nuclear program. Ironically, Pakistan's inability to acquire modern warplanes to counter India's state-of-the-art French Mirage 2000s and Russian MiG-29s and SU-30s compelled Islamabad to rely ever more heavily on its nuclear forces to deter hostile India, whose powerful military seriously outnumbers and outguns Pakistan.

I've felt a certain sympathy for Gen. Musharraf, who overthrew Pakistan's inept prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, in a 1999 coup. When I interviewed Musharraf in 2000, he was truly struggling to reform Pakistan's squalid, corrupt politics. Then came 9/11. The Bush administration put a gun to Musharraf's head, ordering him to ditch Pakistan's Afghan ally, the Taliban, open Pak bases to U.S. forces, arrest anti-American militants and fire the capable nationalist officers - and close friends - who put him into power, Generals Aziz and Mahmoud.

Obey, Washington warned Islamabad, or we will foreclose your loans, impose trade sanctions, cut off spare parts, and give India a green light to go after you. Tough Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan's last military ruler, would have stood up to American bullying. Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto would have cleverly managed to somehow finesse Washington's threats. But Musharraf, with a near-bankrupt nation, and faced with what he viewed as a Hobson's choice between obedience and ruin, caved in to Washington's demands and became, overnight, its compliant servitor.

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Iran's in the crosshairs of Bush's bombsight

by Eric Margolis

President George Bush, who assured Americans on March 17 there was "no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," now warns Iran is working on nuclear weapons.

Bush seems determined to press his crusade against Muslim nations. But another important reason impels him on. He is running a political Ponzi scheme: diverting the public from the Enron and stock market swindles by invading Afghanistan, then covering that mess by invading Iraq, and now trying to cover up the growing Iraq disaster by fanning a new crisis with Iran.

Soon after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called for the U.S. Army to march on Tehran, his American neo-conservative supporters launched a get-Iran campaign, featuring the identical propaganda they used to fan war fever against Iraq: weapons of mass destruction; threats to the U.S.; terrorism and human rights violations. Some imaginative neo-cons even claim Saddam's unfindable weapons were moved to Iran.

The Bush administration, which openly seeks to overthrow the Tehran regime and funds anti-government groups, applauded last week's student protests in Iran. No mention, however, was made of students beaten and jailed in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states for protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

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Bush and Blair have some 'splainin' to do

by Eric Margolis

When I lived in Jamaica, many moons ago, there occurred a bizarre national panic known as "the three-wheeled coffin."

According to a storm of rumours, a black, three-wheeled coffin, with three black crows on top, was moving along Jamaica's roads.

Villages emptied in terror at reports the coffin was nearing. The three-wheeled coffin was never found. The panic subsided.

North Americans and Britons have just experienced their own version of the three-wheeled coffin - a national panic attack called Iraq.

It's becoming increasingly clear the Bush and Blair governments deceived their citizens over Iraq, concocted false information and misled Congress and Parliament.

Both administrations face a rising storm of criticism and demands for full-scale inquiries.

This column has been contacted by a number of retired intelligence officers, both individuals and groups, backing up assertions made here two weeks ago that a cabal of neo-conservatives in President George Bush's administration distorted or faked information that formed the basis of claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that imminently threatened the U.S. and all mankind.

According to MI6 (British intelligence) officers and British press reports, Tony Blair's government was fed this same tainted information and even sent orders to MI6 to make it "sexier."

Former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, who resigned to protest the Bush-Blair war on Iraq, calls the intelligence reports used to justify the aggression "wrong" and "forged."

President Bush cited a crudely forged document about uranium sales from Niger to Iraq in his state of the union address.

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This road map leads nowhere

Bush's plan fudges on too many problems to have a chance to succeed

by Eric Margolis

Call me cynical, but the latest flurry of summit meetings on the proposed road-map for Mideast peace looks like another dead end.

I have been steeped in Mideast affairs since the early 1950s, when my late mother, Nexhmie Zaimi, was one of the first female American journalists to cover the Arab world, interviewing Egyptian presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, Jordan's King Hussein and Iraq's strongman, Nuri as-Said. She began reporting the plight of 750,000 Palestinian refugees driven from their homes by the newly created state of Israel.

Few Americans had ever heard of Palestinians. They were told Israel was "a land without people for a people without land." My mother's newspaper articles and lectures brought her constant death threats and attacks on our New York home. The newspapers for whom she wrote were pressured by major advertisers to drop her columns. A courageous, outspoken woman, she continued public speaking until she was finally silenced by threats to throw acid into my face.

Fifty years later, after living in Egypt and a lifetime travelling across the Arab world and Israel, I am an ingrained pessimist. I would like nothing better than to see an end to Palestinian's suffering, and see Israelis secure and living in productive peace with Palestinians, their spiritual first cousins.

But President George Bush's "vision" for Mideast peace, backed by Europe, Russia, the UN, and the PLO, and accepted by Israel with undisclosed key reservations, appears unlikely to succeed because it fudges so many major problems.

Under the plan, the U.S.-installed and financed Palestinian government of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas must first end attacks on Israelis and shut down the extremist movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad, then renounce the right of return of 1.5 million Arab refugees. The democratically elected PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, is to be sidelined. Then Israel will consider withdrawing troops from some areas, and accept within three years the "concept" of a provisional state of Palestine with provisional borders. The most thorny issues - Jerusalem, water rights, final borders, Arab and Jewish refugees - will be decided "in the future."

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Oh, what a tangled web Bush weaves

by Eric Margolis

U.S. President George Bush justified his invasion of Iraq by claiming Baghdad was behind 9/11 and threatened America with weapons of mass destruction.

To Washington's profound embarrassment, U.S. forces in Iraq have so far failed to find any unconventional weapons or any links between Iraq and al-Qaida. Most Americans don't seem to care their government launched a war of unprovoked aggression based on fabricated evidence and untruths, or that the president and secretary of state repeatedly misinformed and misled the nation.

But now Democrats are accusing Bush of trumping up a war against a nasty but unthreatening Iraq, while failing to combat terrorism, evidenced by last week's bloody terror attacks in Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

The White House is trying to deflect rising criticism of its Iraq policy by blaming the Central Intelligence Agency for supplying erroneous information, a ploy originated by former president John F. Kennedy after his Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. But the CIA was not wrong. The agency repeatedly warned the Bush administration, both privately, through leaks and openly, that Iraq was not a threat, did not possess significant offensive weapons systems, and was unlikely to greet American and British invaders as "liberators."

Where the CIA went wrong was predicting heavy urban fighting in Iraq. In fact, most pre-war military estimates were mistaken. For example, this column predicted a U.S. victory within two weeks. However, the war lasted for three weeks due to unexpected Iraqi resistance that wrong-footed the U.S. offensive.

Most defence analysts, this writer included, foresaw heavy urban combat. But there was only limited city fighting. What happened to Iraq's Republican Guard divisions around Baghdad remains a mystery: they simply vanished or were blown to bits. Guard commanders may have been bought off or gave up when Saddam Hussein went into hiding or was allowed to flee the country - thanks, it is rumoured, to a Saudi-brokered deal.

But the CIA was correct in warning the White House and Pentagon that Iraq would turn into a tar-baby for the U.S. This is precisely what is now happening. Iraq is in chaos and near-anarchy. U.S. occupation forces have so far been unable to form even a puppet regime, as was done in Afghanistan.

The initial American-appointed ruler of Iraq, Jay Garner, a retired general who looked more like a building contractor than an imperial viceroy, has been relieved, along with a State Department lady who was bizarrely named mayor of Baghdad. A neo-conservative diplomat has been brought in to run Iraq.

Meanwhile, U.S. firms, led by Texas oil giant Halliburton, VP Dick Cheney's old firm, are fighting like hungry vultures to get a slice of Iraq's petro-wealth.

But America now risks a colonial morass in Iraq that may cost even more than the profits it may make from "liberating" Iraq's oil.

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The French won't fight?

Hundreds of thousands of war dead expose the lie

by Eric Margolis

Something keeps drawing me back to this most evil and sinister battlefield on Earth, a mere 18 x 10 km, where during 10 hellish months of 1916, 1.4 million French and German soldiers were killed or gravely wounded.

Each year, it is my custom to greet spring in France's exquisite countryside, exploring battlefields and forts of the two world wars. But this, my sixth journey to Verdun, holds particular personal meaning.

Decades of travel, covering many wars, reading the history of man's folly, have made me a cosmopolitan who detests borders and earnestly believes mankind's worst evils are nationalism and religious fanaticism. Still, there are four countries I hold particularly dear and to which I feel respectful (as opposed to hormonal) patriotism, respect, and loyalty - Canada, France, Switzerland and the United States (in alphabetical, not emotional order).

Quixotic as it may sound, while at Verdun, as a U.S. Army veteran, I apologized to France's fallen soldiers for the slander and disgraceful lies hurled at their memory by American know-nothings and pro-Israel neo-con pundits who poured venom on the French for not agreeing to President George Bush's imperial oil war against Iraq.

Insults such as "defeat monkeys" ... "surrender specialists" ... "never won a war" ... "always saved by Americans"... "in war, like an accordion, useless and noisy" ... "cowards ..." were hurled at France by American commentators. The Internet overflowed with anti-French jokes and lists of French military defeats.

I invite all those flag-waving, fire-breathing American couch patriots who called the French cowards to visit Verdun. The air here still stinks of death and only deformed, stunted bushes grow on its poisoned soil. In the towering grey stone ossuary repose bone pieces of 135,000 men.

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Newest U.S. colony ruled by air power

America now controls the Mideast's second largest oil producer

by Eric Margolis

Tony Blair's popularity has risen with the end of the Iraq invasion. Britons, like Americans, enjoy jolly little wars in which large numbers of heathen savages are mowed down by western military technology at minimal cost to imperial troops. Add Britain's most recent invasion of Iraq to her list of 19th century colonial "little wars," like the Zulu, Ashanti, Afridi wars and, of course, the more famous campaign against Sudan's Dervishes, and their "fiendish" leader, the Khalifa, a 19th-century version of Osama bin Laden.

In spite of Blair's modestly resurgent popularity, a thunderstorm of questions is coming from parliament, media and the public over Bush/Blair claims that Iraq had to be urgently invaded because it posed, in Bush's words, "an imminent threat to the U.S. and the world," and, as Blair claimed, "Iraq possesses huge quantities of weapons of mass destruction." British intelligence claimed Iraq contained thousands of tons of biological weapons and poison gas, thousands more tons of precursor materials, nuclear weapons fabrication equipment, medium-ranged missiles, 500 km-ranged drones equipped to spray germs, etc., etc

Embarrassed by their failure to so far find a shred of evidence, never mind a "smoking gun," to justify an entirely illegal invasion of a sovereign nation, violating international law and the UN Charter, London and Washington still insist evidence will be found. "We sold it to them; it's got to be there," some London wags are saying.

If it is, it had better be a mammoth underground trove worthy of a James Bond super-villain, not just a few rusty old cans of chemicals left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, when the U.S. and Britain were among Saddam Hussein's principal suppliers of germ and gas weapons.

Don't for a minute believe Pentagon leaks about an "unnamed Iraqi scientist" who says he knows where all the nasties are buried and, what's more, ties Saddam to Al-Qaida. American fans of Rush Limbaugh may swallow this pap; most Brits are too cynical and worldly to accept such crude propaganda; many Brits and Europeans believe the U.S./UK will eventually plant fake evidence.

What's one more fabrication in a war of lies?

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