If you were looking for a fine example of ridiculousness today, look no further than the words of Stephen Mull, the US State Department’s acting assistant secretary for political-military affairs.

Yesterday, Mull made the following comment with regards to those nations currently participating at a conference in Dublin where representatives from more than 100 nations are working to craft a treaty to ban the use, production, stockpile, and sale of Cluster Bombs…

“This would have very grave implications. With one stroke, any country that signs the convention as it is now and ratifies it, in effect would make it impossible for the United States or any of our other allies who rely on these weapons to participate in these humanitarian exercises.”

So, for example, were Brazil to sign the treaty and a massive natural disaster were to devastate part of that country, Mull is basically saying that the United States would not offer humanitarian assistance because of Brazil’s stance on the United States’ refusal to stop producing, using, selling, and stockpiling Cluster Bomb munitions.

Even more – Canada is also represented at the conference and is one of the key nations, along with France and Germany, expected to play a role in swaying the UK’s position on the treaty.

So what if a part of this nation were devastated by a natural disaster? What if my hometown were to be rocked by the long awaited earthquake that we’ve been expecting for basically my entire lifetime? Canada is America’s foremost trading partner, not to mention the fact that after Katrina hit, members of my hometown’s emergency response team were there and helping people before their American counterparts even showed up. So much so, in fact, that various neighbourhoods were awash in Canadian flags as a show of gratitude.

What then, Mr. Mull? Are we on our own because we dared to stand with others and say that the use, production, stockpile, and sale of one of the most despicable conventional weapons in the world should be banned?

Given FEMA’s reposnse to Katrina, and the Bush Administration’s mishandling of the disaster, what of the outpouring of support from other countries, even those the United States government considers enemies, such as Cuba and Venezuela? Do you not think that by taking such a ridiculous position that further isolating the United States from those that, in times of disaster, are willing to forego ideological differences to lend their support is a good idea?

Arrogance knows no bounds, it seems. And all over a bloody bomb.

If you’re labouring under the misconception that the Bush Administration is going to leave office without first confronting the Iranians, it’s time to start paying serious attention.

The propaganda machine is in full swing, led by a new report by the State Department that labels Iran the most active sponsor of terrorism. If you can believe it, the Sudanese government actually ranked lower despite the fact that it has been complicit in supporting the Janjiweed who have been responsible for a genocidal campaign in Darfur.

Falling conveniently in line with the State Department’s release, the United States has deployed a second US carrier group to the Gulf with the specific purpose of “developing new options for attacking Iran” - a directive issued directly by The Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is justifying the move as a response to what the United States now believes is official Iranian policy – “killing American servicemen and -women inside Iraq”. Michael Hayden, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, recently asserted at a lecture at Kansas State University…

“It is my opinion, it is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to highest level of that government, to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq.”

It would seem that it is more than Mr. Hayden’s opinion, and a very crucial question has to be asked – why is the director of the CIA making such claims during a lecture? This is the same man whose agency provides the White House with a daily brief, which means that Hayden’s position has not only been presented the President, but also obviously adopted. If it hadn’t been, the White House would have condemned his assertion during that lecture, which it hasn’t, meaning that Hayden’s mentioning of it is being used as a tool with regards to circulating policy in the press without it coming directly from the President’s mouth.

Added to all of this, rather conveniently, is also another Pentagon assertion that the Iranians are directly aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan, a claim that was originally made last year and denounced by both the Iranians and the Afghan government. It should also be noted that it was made around the same time as US allegations that the Iranians were also supporting Sunni extremists in Iraq, which were quickly attacked by various analysts as being utterly preposterous given the massive, and historic, ideological differences between the two. Not surprisingly, the promotion of that information was tracked back to the office of the Vice President.

On the nuclear front, the Israelis are playing their part, with Israeli Transportation Minister, Shaul Mofaz, claiming yesterday that Iran will likely possess the ability to produce a nuclear weapon before the end of 2008. His source? Israeli intelligence, of course. Ironically, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refused to comment on Mofaz’s claim, which is interesting being that his office is in direct control of the Israeli intelligence apparatus and has far more insight than that of the office of the Transportation Minister.

So what does all of this add up to? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Fishermen call it baiting a hook; the intelligence community refers to it as Psy-Ops. And if you think it’s the Iranians that are the target with regards to psychological initiatives employing the media as their primary conduit, think again. It is, in fact, the American people being targeted.

The question is, have the people of the United States learned their lesson?

Iraq was invaded because they supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction, or, at the very least, were in the process of obtaining them.

After that justification fell through, the toppling of the regime of Saddam Hussein took its place, and human rights, liberty, and democracy became the bugle call.

After Hussein’s capture, and the continued occupation of the country to combat the insurgency, al-Qaeda was used as the primary justification despite the fact that their numbers in Iraq, which didn’t exist prior to the occupation, constituted less than 5% of the insurgency itself.

And so here we find ourselves, five years after the fact, with the Iranians having become the new justification. Like Hussein’s regime prior to the invasion, the Iranians are being accused of attempting to secure a nuclear weapon. Their intended target? Israel. The consensus, of course, is that were they to acquire one they would use it, that it would not be seen as the acquisition of a deterrent, but rather an offensive weapon.

In my next entry, although I have covered the subject before, I will delve into the reality of why that line of thought is based on nothing more than the desire to militarily confront Iran, not the Iranian regime’s desire to actually engage in a nuclear exchange.

Despite the fact that it’s being investigated for the conduct of its employees, specifically regarding the Nisour Square massacre in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed, and tax violations, the US State Department has extended Blackwater USA’s contract in Iraq for another year.

If that’s not enough to enrage your average American, perhaps the fact that, according to a Congressional estimate, Blackwater has received some $1.25 billion dollars in federal contracts since 2000 is. That is, if the average American even hears about it.

Blackwater is, for all intents and purposes, the State Department’s de facto military arm in Iraq. Like all US personnel in Iraq, Blackwater employees enjoy legal immunity and cannot be held or tried by Iraqi authorities in conjunction with crimes perpetrated against Iraqis in their own country. Despite a host of first hand accounts provided by witnesses regarding the Nisour Square massacre that completely contradict Blackwater’s versions of events that day, the company has not seriously been held accountable for what occurred. In fact, Iraqi demands that the company be removed from the country altogether have been completely ignored.

The hypocrisy is overwhelming when one looks at past precedents regarding war crimes that the United States has itself prosecuted. In the five years that the United States has occupied Iraq, not one single instance of criminality has been legally treated as a war crime. Murder, rape, and abuse – yes. But none of them have ever been termed war crimes, including what transpired at Abu Ghraib. That’s what happens when you have the luxury of investigating your own and deny the nation in which such crimes are committed any legal recourse whatsoever.

Removed from a situation, so much so that it has become an informational inconvenience, not to mention social taboo with regards to conversation, how do societies at war deal with the realities of war given the distance from which they are viewed?

With regards to fighting abroad, this reality provides those promoting conflicts abroad with the ability to use disingenuous justifications and rhetoric to not merely defend their purpose, but to casually address the failures produced by them. Besides those fighting in Iraq, what experience does the average American have with regards to what has, and is, transpiring there? How many Americans realize that the same problems that have plagued many parts of the country, such as intermittent power and other major deficiencies in Iraq’s civic infrastructure, have not been seriously address five years after the invasion of the country? How many Americans realize that their soldiers, and those private contractors in the employ of The State Department, are immune from prosecution for war crimes by the very government that the current administration has promoted as a democratic body steeped in the rule of law? Not even the International Criminal Court has any power over the prosecution of war crimes committed by US personnel.

Given that, and the remove at which we view the war, how entirely out of touch are we with regards to the temperament of Iraqis when it comes to such realities? That in their own country, members of an occupying force cannot be tried for crimes by Iraqi courts, nor tried by an internationally recognized body? Iraqi courts were sufficient enough to try Saddam Hussein and other members of his regime, but they are deemed insufficient to try US Marines guilty of raping and killing a teenaged girl, as well as members of her family. Likewise, Iraqi courts have no jurisdiction over private contractors, and cannot prosecute them for crimes committed against civilians either.

One fact that must never be overlooked, no matter how unpopular or tired this subject might be, is that Iraq is an occupied nation. It is home to well in excess of 100,000 foreign troops and countless private contractors. This reality does not reinforce the deliverance of stability whatsoever, but merely the presence of a military force that remains to ensure the survival of a government hastily put into place to ensure that American domestic perceptions of the operation as a whole were justified.

During the last five years, the occupation has led to the emergence of Jihadi groups in Iraq that were not present prior to the invasion, not to mention using methods of literal separation in an attempt to quell sectarian violence through the use of concrete walls surrounding neighbourhoods in locations such as Baghdad. Such methods helped curb violence for a time, something that, again, was used domestically to promote the success of ‘the Surge’, despite the fact that it did nothing to actually address the root of the problem itself. To claim that with the creation of a more stable security situation that such root problems can be address is a fallacy being that were those walls not to exist, the very same level of violence would no doubt resume.

The words of Donald Rumsfeld should, in truth, haunt Americans for decades to come. That pre-war planning was more than adequate and that all measures were taken during it to prepare for a variety of outcomes. Rumsfeld represented a community belief within the administration that the invasion would be both cost effective and that the occupation to follow would be short lived. This perception was sold to the American public, with continual excuses being provided in the aftermath of the invasion to justify why the Pentagon’s initial preparations were not adequate. This leads back to the remove at which we experience the war and the flexibility that that provides those that initiated it to continually excuse their complicity in what has since become a disastrous venture.

The removal of Saddam Hussein can no longer be provided as a justification for the invasion. While his regime was brutal, it was no more so than many others that, to this day, remain in power and continue to be the cause of various regional instabilities. Claims regarding his desire to amass weapons of mass destruction were blatantly false, with only the remnants of chemical weapon caches from the Iran-Iraq having ever been found. Given that, it should not be overlooked who supported him during that period, providing detailed satellite coverage of Iranian troop movements so that the use of chemical weapons would be devastatingly accurate – the CIA. Likewise, the use of the example of Halabja is not relevant with regards to US military justifications, as after the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja, the Reagan White House issued the weakest of statements, vetoed a Congressional bill that would have immediately stopped military support to Hussein’s regime, and then continued to fund it.

Following the Gulf War, the sanctions implemented against Iraq would take a devastating toll on the Iraqi population, killing in excess of 1 million people. At the time, the United Nations was deemed a viable vehicle with which to impede Hussein. But when it refused to support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration declared it to be as ineffectual as The League Of Nations, and unilaterally proceeded with military operations. Mere weeks later, President Bush declared combat operations at an end. Five years, and 4,000 US deaths later, his declaration has not only been proven false, but exposed the reality that an altogether arrogant and undereducated cabal within the administration planned a major military action that completely failed to take into account any of Iraq’s social realities.

No matter your view of the war, that is one aspect of it that cannot be argued away. That pre-war planning was, in effect, almost non-existent, that it completely failed to take into account a myriad of cultural and historical factors, not to mention the military requirements that were necessary to realistically implement the operation itself. It was, in essence, no different than the belief that a bridge made of steel and concrete could be held together with scotch tape.

By now it has become more than evident that the trauma caused by 9/11 was used by a group of individuals to enact one of the most devastating foreign policy doctrines in US history and that Iraq provided the perfect context with which to enact it with regards to the Middle East. Given that claims that Hussein’s regime had ties to al-Qaeda, or was involved in the attacks of September 11th have, since day one, been entirely false, the hegemonic realities of the invasion and occupation are abundantly clear. And yet, given our otherworldly distance from the realities of the conflict, we remain apathetically comfortable with not seriously confronting that fact.

Over the last five years, 4,000 American families have paid the price for the abuse of their trust. Driving around New York City it is not uncommon to see stickers on the backs of vehicles that read never forget with an image of the twin towers in the background. The irony, of course, is that 4,000 Americans, and countless innocent Iraqis, have died since 2003 because of a handful of politicians and pundits that, without hesitation, took advantage of the corruption of patriotism. Thus, if there is anything that the people of this nation should never forget, it is that.

After recognizing the independence of Kosovo, what is the obvious second step?

Arming it. After all, ‘world peace’ demands no less. And who better to do that than the world’s foremost purveyor of arms…

“President George W. Bush authorized Wednesday supplying Kosovo with weapons, signaling the establishment of government-to-government relations after recognizing its independence, the White House said.

In a memo to the State Department made public by the White House, Bush said: “I hereby find that the furnishing of defense articles and defense services to Kosovo will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace.”

I mean, God forbid NATO and the UN pull out of Kosovo as if it were some decimated Central African nation leaving its people to fend for themselves.

KBR gang rape victim Jamie Leigh Jones has testified before a House Judiciary Committee about her ordeal. There is also evidence that others have endured the same thing.

A statement by Chairman Conyers…

A statement by Sheila Jackson Lee…

A statement by Anthony Weiner…

Representative Bobby Scott’s questions at the hearing…

As we’re all aware, Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Neither does the tooth fairy, Frosty the Snowman, the Boogieman, the Easter Bunny, and, of course, Black Sites, nor the illegal seizure and transport of foreign nationals by the United States, a practice known as Rendition.

Were one to ask Maher Arar, he would certainly tell you that Rendition is a very real practice, having been a victim of it. US intelligence leaned on the RCMP, the RCMP offered up a lamb, Arar was seized at JFK, flown to Washington and then to Jordan where he was driven to the Syrian border and handed over to the Syrian authorities who then, over the course of a year, held him in prison and tortured him in an attempt to extract information regarding a subject he knew nothing about – al-Qaeda.

Of course, the inquiry into Arar’s Rendition resulted in the sacking of the head of the RCMP, an apology from the government, and a financial settlement. But thus far US courts have rejected Arar’s attempts to hold the government that was actually responsible for the Rendition accountable.

No real surprise there.

Unfortunately, Canada is not alone in complicity when it comes to aiding and abetting the practice of Rendition. Others have willfully allowed planes Rendering detainees to use their airspace and even land within their borders, fully aware of their cargo and purpose…

“The secret flight plans of American military planes have revealed for the first time how European countries helped send prisoners, including British citizens, to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Despite widespread criticism of alleged human rights abuses and torture at the US base in Cuba, a Sunday Times investigation has shown that at least five European countries gave the United States permission to fly nearly 700 terrorist suspects across their territory.

Three years ago, The Sunday Times published flight logs of CIA civilian jets in Europe, setting off a controversy over the whether countries across the continent have been secretly involved in America’s rendition of terrorist suspects to countries that carry out torture.

The row is now set to be reignited. Inquiries by Ana Gomes, a Portuguese member of the European parliament, have uncovered not only more CIA flight logs but also more sensitive military flight plans, which until now have remained a closely guarded secret.

The logs show how most prisoners changed planes at a Turkish military airbase and flew across Greek, Italian and Portuguese airspace. Others reached Cuba after touching down in Spain, whose governing socialist party once expressed indignation at conditions in Guantanamo.

The flight logs show that three Britons - Shafiq Rasul, Jamal Udeen and Asif Iqbal - were flown across Europe to Cuba on January 14, 2002. Moazzam Begg, another Briton, was taken by the same route to Guantanamo on February 2, 2003; and Binyam Mohamed, a British resident whose release the British government is now trying to negotiate, arrived in Cuba after crossing Europe in a special flight in September 2004.

According to the flight plans, the first 23 prisoners to arrive at Guantanamo - including another British citizen, Feroz Abbasi, then 21, and an Australian, David Hicks - had arrived at the American naval base in Cuba after flying from the Moron airbase in Spain.

Abbasi has claimed in a statement that prisoners were abused within hours of arriving. “We were made to sit on our heels, one foot over the other, supported by one foot’s toes alone, for hours. Some of us were old, weak, fatigued, and injured - they were the ones to drop first in the searing Caribbean heat.”

Described by the Pentagon as the “worst of the worst” from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the images of prisoners such as Abbasi dressed in orange jumpsuits, their heads shaved and shackled by their wrists and ankles, shocked the world. Within a day, Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, announced that the Geneva conventions would not apply to what were now called “enemy combatants”.

Last week, Europe’s leading watchdog on human rights alleged that European countries had breached the international convention against torture by giving the US secret permission to use its airspace.

Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, said: “What happened at Guantanamo was torture and it is illegal to provide facilities or anything to make this torture possible. Under the law, European governments should have intervened and should not have given permission to let these flights happen.”

Gomes added: “It’s clear to me that Guantanamo could not have been created without the involvement of European countries.”

Methods used at Guantanamo Bay, condemned by Britain’s Court of Appeal as a legal “black hole” and as a “monstrous failure of justice” by one law lord, have included the prolonged use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and use of stress positions. “These are methods that have been declared as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights,” Hammarberg said.

The military flight plans show that all key flights arriving in Guantanamo had come across European airspace either through Spain or the Incirlik airbase in southeastern Turkey. The Sunday Times compared the military flight plans against a database compiled by Reprieve, the British-based charity that represents Guantanamo prisoners, of when prisoners first weighed in at the camp.

The investigation, cross-checked against other Pentagon documents, shows for the first time which prisoner arrived on which flight at Guantanamo, and by what route. At least 170 other prisoners flew over Spanish territory, more than 700 crossed Portuguese space, and more than 680 were transshipped at Incirlik. Most flights also crossed Greek and Italian airspace, according to a source in European air traffic control.

On February 2 2003, for example, a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster plane took off from Incirlik with 27 prisoners on board for Cuba. The same day, prisoner number 558 weighed in at 136lb (62kg) at the camp. He can be named as Moazzam Begg, now 39, from Birmingham, who was released in January 2005, and has never been charged with a crime.

Interviewed by phone last week, Begg recalled: “Inside the plane there was a chain around our waist, and it connected to cuffs around my wrists, which were tied in the back, and to my ankles. We were seated but it was so painful not being able to speak, to hear, to breathe properly, to look, to turn left or right, to move your hands, stretch your legs, or anything.” At the time flights were landing in Spain and crossing Spanish airspace, socialist leaders there were expressing “indignation” over conditions in Guantanamo. Now the socialists are in government after winning an election in March 2004 just after the Madrid train bombings and they are being asked to defend Spain’s continued collaboration with American operations. Under international law, government and military planes can cross another country’s territory only with diplomatic permission.

In a statement to the European parliament on the visits of CIA planes to Spain, the foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has testified: “Our territory may have been used not to commit crimes on it, but as a stopover on the way to committing crime in another country.”

Spain, it has now emerged, had a specific agreement with the US to allow flights and visits to Spanish airbases for American planes.

In Portugal, the foreign minister Luis Amado has said flights across his country’s airspace took place “under the aegis of the UN and Nato and that Portugal naturally follows the principle of good faith in the relations with its allies”. Nato’s role in Guantanamo stems from a secret agreement made in Brussels on October 4 2001 by all Nato members, including Britain. Although never made public, Lord Robertson, the former British defence secretary who was later Nato’s secretary-general, explained that day that Nato had agreed to provide “blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other allies’ aircraft for military flights related to operations against terrorism”.

Today, Nato is more coy about its role in helping send prisoners to Guantanamo.

In a letter to Gomes, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the current secretary-general, said no Nato planes had “flown to or from Guantanamo Bay” and that Nato “as an organisation has no involvement or co-ordinating role in providing clearance or overflight rights for other flights”. Turkey, meanwhile, has declared that its agencies had “reached no findings regarding any unacknowledged deprivation of liberty conducted by foreign agencies within the territory of the republic of Turkey or any transport by aircraft or otherwise of the persons deprived of their liberty”.

In London, Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve, said, with America threatening that Guantanamo prisoners faced the death penalty, European governments had made “pious statements” that they would never send prisoners to the US without obtaining assurances they would not be executed.

Stafford Smith added: “Some European governments, it’s now clear, systematically assisted in clandestine flights and illegal prisoner transfers to Guantanamo Bay. We need a full investigation and Europeans need to face their responsibility for these crimes.”

If Guantanamo is, as the United States has repeatedly claimed, filled with some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world, and they have overwhelming proof of culpability, then why not try them based on the evidence that they have in a wholly transparent fashion? What does the US have to lose by refusing to engage in such a process compared to the military kangaroo court that has been fashioned to deal with it? Of course, given the legal ambiguity of the status given those detained, to undertake truly transparent proceedings would, of course, thrust to the forefront the afore mentioned ambiguity that has been employed by the United States regarding the classification of those being detained. Serious questions would have to be confronted regarding the Geneva Conventions, access to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent, and, most importantly, the legal classification of detainees as it applies to either international law or the laws of the United States itself.

How long will the detainees at Guantanamo be held? If an individual has been interned there for years, what actionable intelligence could they still possess now? And if they possess none, or have run their course as a mole within the population in exchange for God knows what, then they either have to be tried for a crime or released. That’s how the law works, especially as it applies to a nation founded on the rule of law that is holding them beyond the law.

Of course, there are other options to consider. That some of the individuals that were held, and endured God knows what, were flipped because they were told they would spend the rest of their lives as prisoners if they didn’t. Thus, they could be shuttled off to various locations around the world in an attempt to have them infiltrate various known radical elements within certain communities. Then again, who’s to say they wouldn’t simply disappear given the chance? Perhaps threats were made against their families, maybe members of their families are also being detained – the truth is that the possibilities are endless. But one thing that remains constant is the fact that there are hundreds of individuals being held incommunicado and outside of the strictures of any truly recognized legal platform. US Combatant Status Review Tribunals do not apply, no matter the justifications given by the US government, because the rights afforded those that face them are overwhelmingly limited, not to mention the fact that such proceedings, that are without legal precedent both internationally and under US law, are considered matters of national security and thus entirely suspect to the influence of policy objectives.

Home. Finally.

Unpacked, doing laundry, walked the dogs, clean bed linens. Put Leopard on my iMac, went and got some milk, packed the fridge full of left over beer, water, and Coke from the tour.

A few things of interest. According to the FBI investigation into the Nisour Square massacre…

“Federal agents investigating the Sept. 16 episode in which Blackwater security personnel shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians have found that at least 14 of the shootings were unjustified and violated deadly-force rules in effect for security contractors in Iraq, according to civilian and military officials briefed on the case.

The F.B.I. investigation into the shootings in Baghdad is still under way, but the findings, which indicate that the company’s employees recklessly used lethal force, are already under review by the Justice Department.

Prosecutors have yet to decide whether to seek indictments, and some officials have expressed pessimism that adequate criminal laws exist to enable them to charge any Blackwater employee with criminal wrongdoing. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. declined to discuss the matter.

The case could be one of the first thorny issues to be decided by Michael B. Mukasey, who was sworn in as attorney general last week. He may be faced with a decision to turn down a prosecution on legal grounds at a time when a furor has erupted in Congress about the administration’s failure to hold security contractors accountable for their misdeeds.”

I’m going to hold with my initial opinion – I don’t think anyone involved in the incident that day will be brought to justice. Then again, given the sensitive nature of the subject and the Iraqi government’s position on the legal status of foreign contractors, it can’t be entirely ruled out. But it should be noted that if legal action is taken, the State Department will also be scrutinized, something that I simply can’t see happening.

Also of interest is an article in today’s Jerusalem Post…

“The newly formed Genocide Prevention Task Force indicated Tuesday night that it will not be examining whether Israel has committed genocide in the West Bank and Gaza despite earlier statements that it would be addressing the subject.

The task force of prominent former US officials was announced at a press conference earlier Tuesday and will be working over the next year to help the American government best respond to and prevent genocide.

Though one of the co-chairs, former US Defense Secretary William Cohen, originally said that the situation in the West Bank and Gaza would be considered, the task force later clarified that such an inquiry would be beyond the scope of the panel.

“Its task is not to determine which situations, past or present, including the West Bank and Gaza, constitute genocide, but to develop policy recommendations that enable the United States to prevent future genocides from occurring,” Cohen, along with co-chair Madeleine Albright, said in a statement issued Tuesday night.”

Never you mind the present. It’s the future of genocide we’re interested in.

To be frank, US threats that it will cut aid to Pakistan over recent occurrences there are nothing but lip service. The fact of the matter is that for the last six years they’ve done business with the very same military regime that they’re now appearing to condemn. When it comes to democratic reform, the yammering of the Secretary of State is about as far as it’s actually going to go unless the United States is faced with a government that is either considered hostile or of little consequence to their interests…

“In a rare criticism of General Musharraf, the US Government last night described the declaration as “regrettable” and said it was opposed to anything that would impede Pakistan’s return to democracy.

But Defence Secretary Robert Gates said he did not anticipate it would upset military co-operation between Islamabad and Washington.”

Without the support of the Pakistani military, primarily the ISI, the chances of a coup occurring are slim to none - that is, if the United States worked with the military to institute a new military ruler. And while there have been grumblings of discontent within the ranks, the influence of the ISI in particular can never be discounted with regards to the survival of their own position of power within the political infrastructure of the country. To think that someone such as Mrs. Bhutto doesn’t realize that would be far fetched. And with that realization comes the conclusion that were the military to support anyone, and elections were held, promises would ultimately have to be kept to those that openly lent their support for the purposes of transparency. And that, despite outward appearances, would not produce a democratic Pakistan. Just one with a different government that is indebted to the same ghost power as the last, the same ghost power that continues to play both sides in Pakistan and, perhaps, even beyond.

Updated: This piece by Tariq Ali is a must read…

“For anyone marinated in the history of Pakistan yesterday’s decision by the military to impose a state of emergency comes as no surprise. Martial law in this country has become an antibiotic: in order to obtain the same results one has to keep doubling the doses. This was a coup within a coup.

General Pervez Musharraf ruled the country with a civilian façade, but his power base was limited to the army. And it was the army Chief of Staff who declared the emergency, suspended the 1973 constitution, took all non-government TV channels off the air, jammed the mobile phone networks, surrounded the Supreme Court with paramilitary units, dismissed the Chief Justice, arrested the president of the bar association and inaugurated yet another shabby period in the country’s history.

Why? They feared that a Supreme Court judgment due next week might make it impossible for Musharraf to contest the elections. The decision to suspend the constitution was taken a few weeks ago. According to good sources, contrary to what her official spokesman has been saying (”she was shocked”), Benazir Bhutto was informed and chose to leave the country before it happened. (Whether her “dramatic return” was also pre-arranged remains to be seen.) Intoxicated by the incense of power, she might now discover that it remains as elusive as ever. If she ultimately supports the latest turn it will be an act of political suicide. If she decides to dump the general (she accused him last night of breaking his promises), she will be betraying the confidence of the US state department, which pushed her this way.

The two institutions targeted by the emergency are the judiciary and the broadcasters, many of whose correspondents supply information that politicians never give. Geo TV continued to air outside the country. Hamid Mir, one of its sharpest journalists, said yesterday he believed the US embassy had green-lighted the coup because they regarded the Chief Justice as a nuisance and “a Taliban sympathiser”.

The regime has been confronted with a severe crisis of legitimacy that came to a head earlier this year when Musharraf’s decision to suspend the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Hussain Chaudhry, provoked a six-month long mass movement that forced a government retreat. Some of Chaudhry’s judgments had challenged the government on key issues such as “disappeared prisoners”, harassment of women and rushed privatisations. It was feared that he might declare a uniformed president illegal.

The struggle to demand a separation of powers between the state and the judiciary, which has always been weak, was of critical importance. Pakistan’s judges have usually been acquiescent. Those who resisted military leaders were soon bullied out of it, so the decision of this chief justice to fight back was surprising, but extremely important and won him enormous respect. Global media coverage of Pakistan suggests a country of generals, corrupt politicians and bearded lunatics. The struggle to reinstate the Chief Justice presented a different snapshot of the country.

The Supreme Court’s declaration that the new dispensation was “illegal and unconstitutional” was heroic, and, by contrast, the hurriedly sworn in new Chief Justice will be seen for what he is: a stooge of the men in uniform. If the constitution remains suspended for more than three months then Musharraf may be pushed aside by the army and a new strongman installed. Or it could be that the aim was limited to cleansing the Supreme Court and controlling the media. In which case a rigged January election becomes a certainty.”

When all is said and done, it will probably be impossible to know just how many Iraqis will have perished during the war. There are estimates that widely vary, ones that I am sure many of you are already familiar with, so I won’t waste time running through them. But the truth of the matter is that Iraqi deaths have been overwhelmingly significant, as has been the displacement of Iraqis, be it within Iraq itself or as refuges in other countries – the number being in the millions.

Despite a recent drop in deaths, the US death toll in Iraq this year is only three shy of 2004’s total, 850, the war’s worst year. The number of deaths is largely due to US troops operating within Iraqi communities and thus being far easier to attack, unlike previous years when deaths were largely caused during concentrated operations.

I wanted to use these realizations as preface, because if you didn’t happen to catch 60 Minutes the other night, and their report on Curveball, the Iraqi source that supplied intelligence to the Americans through the Germans prior to the 2003 invasion regarding Iraqi’s chemical and biological capabilities, then those numbers should be foremost in your mind as you read the rest of this entry.

If you have studied pre-war intelligence, then you know that the information provided by Rafid Ahmed Alwan, known as Curveball, was entirely baseless. In fact, the information that he provided the Germans, that was subsequently passed to the CIA, and which would ultimately be included in then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s report to the United Nations, was actually discounted prior to the invasion by the UN. But no one was in the mood to listen at the time…

“Prominently displayed were models of the mobile trucks Curve Ball had sketched to the Germans. The most damning evidence in the speech had come from a source no American had interviewed. Just three days later, U.N. inspectors in Iraq visited a suspected WMD location — Djerf al Nadaf, Curve Ball’s secret site. And what did they find there? A wall — the very wall that had appeared on the overhead imagery back in 2001. Curve Ball had claimed the mobile bio-weapons trucks entered through doors at one end of a warehouse.

“When the inspectors examined the facility, they found that this was an impossibility,” explains Jim Corcoran, whose job it was to relay intelligence to the inspectors in Iraq.

Corcoran learned the wall blocked any entrance to the warehouse. As for Curve Ball’s hidden doors at the other end that would allow the trucks to exit?

“Again, there was a wall there, no doors. And outside there was a stone fence that would have made it impossible for this to have occurred,” Corcoran says.

Corcoran knew Djerf al Nadaf was of great importance, so he sent inspectors back 20 days later to take samples, to see if any traces of biological agents were there. “They proved negative,” Corcoran tells Simon. “There was nothing there.”

But the inspectors’ findings in Iraq made no impact; the war began three weeks later.”

Countless Iraqi dead, over 4,000 American lives lost, and a region thrust into chaos with the United States now targeting Iran and having to walk on egg shells to try and placate the Turks who have threatened to invade Northern Iraq to confront the PKK – and that’s not even beginning to cover the damage caused within Iraq itself since 2003.

Thus, one has to ask – why was a source relied upon that had never even been interviewed by US intelligence? Why did those at the highest levels of the US intelligence community accept that information on blind faith? And why were the UN’s findings ignored?

I have written in the past about the politicization of the CIA post 9/11, just as I have written about the fact that it is common knowledge that, immediately following the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon focused a great deal of its energies on ‘the Iraq factor’. Soon after, the CIA would also be dragged into that sphere, something that caused a great deal of confusion and strife within the ranks of its senior field personnel. And yet, despite the fact that no evidence of a connection would ever be found, that lemon was sold to the American people, who, in turn, backed the government’s lust for war.

As it stands now, despite such truths, many Americans still actually labour under the misconception that the regime of Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. How many, do you think, will ever address the realities regarding Curveball and the fact that the lies of a single con artist were used as one of the primary justifications for war?

“As for the biological accident that supposedly killed 12 people at Djerf al Nadaf in 1998? It never happened. Rafid Alwan wasn’t even in Iraq when he said it happened. He had left the country, first traveling to Jordan, then Egypt, then Libya, before making his way to Morocco. From there, Alwan’s trail ran cold, until he showed up in Germany and became Curve Ball. The case finally ended in Munich in March 2004, when the Germans allowed a CIA officer to interrogate Curve Ball.

“And the key thing, I think, was the wall. He showed him pictures of the wall,” Drumheller remembers.

What did Curve Ball say?

“‘You doctored these pictures.’ And he said, ‘No, we didn’t.’ He said, we didn’t doctor them,” Drumheller says.

The wall had been built in 1997. Curve Ball didn’t know it existed because he had already left Djerf al Nadaf.

“Curve Ball was caught,” Simon remarks.

“And Curve Ball said, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna say anything else,’” Drumheller says.

The CIA finally acknowledged Curve Ball was a fraud. But why did he do it?

Former CIA insider Tyler Drumheller has an idea. “It was a guy trying to get his Green Card, essentially, in Germany, playing the system for what it was worth. It just shows sort of the law of unintended consequences,” he says.

Rafid Alwan got what he wanted. He is thought to be living in Germany today, most likely under a new name, after pulling off one of the deadliest con jobs of our time.”

Ultimately, who should be held responsible? Obviously Rafid Alwan is somewhat responsible, but only to the extent that he was a convenient liar. In life we have the ability to ponder and examine what is presented us, which means that those that chose to act on his information without first employing due diligence, or even bothering to listen to those that had, are the ones truly responsible. Be it at the Pentagon, the CIA, or in the Oval Office – responsibility rests with those that the people of the United States placed their faith in to properly do their jobs, not conveniently employ false information to help bolster a radical and unprecedented foreign policy doctrine.

In the end, that is precisely what occurred. And both Iraqis and Americans have paid the price for it with their lives. Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and a host of others have not, nor will they ever, face justice for their crimes. That being the case, it’s time to start asking serious questions, such as – who is really in control of government, and what role does the citizenry really play anymore beyond that of lemmings that check boxes on a ballot after being inundated by an ever increasing politically bias media?