Part Two:

Part One:

Serious crimes have been committed. The evidence is public knowledge. They include launching a war of aggression, conspiracy to defraud Congress, and conspiracy to commit torture. And yet, today, none of the high government officials responsible for committing these crimes have been prosecuted. AlternateFocus investigates why.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports: Few of the tales of graft and theft that emerged from the Iraq War—U.S. troops being sold $45 six-packs of soda or entire pallets of vacuum-sealed U.S. currency disappearing into the night—can match that of James McCormick, whose exploits were so preposterous they would seem purely comic if it weren’t for their lethal consequences. The ADE 651, and similar devices sold by McCormick over the decade or so he spent in the explosives-detection business, owe their existence to Wade Quattlebaum, president of Quadro in Harleyville, S.C. At the beginning of the 1990s, Quattlebaum—a sometime car dealer, commercial diver, and treasure hunter whose formal education ended in high school—began promoting a new detection technology he called the Quadro Tracker Positive Molecular Locator, which he claimed could help law enforcement agencies find everything from contraband to missing persons. Quattlebaum said he originally invented the device to find lost balls on the golf course but had since refined it to locate marijuana, cocaine, heroin, gunpowder, and dynamite by detecting the individual “molecular frequency” of each substance.

The Tracker consisted of a handheld unit, with an antenna mounted on a plastic handgrip, and a belt-mounted box slightly smaller than a VHS cassette, built to contain “carbo-crystallized” software cards programmed, Quattlebaum said, with the specific frequency of whatever the user wished to find. No batteries were necessary. The Tracker was powered by the static electricity created by the operator’s own body; when it found what it was looking for, the antenna automatically turned to point at its quarry. Prices for the device varied from $395 for a basic model to $8,000 for one capable of locating individual human beings, which required a Polaroid photograph of the person to be loaded into the programming box. Quadro’s golf ball-finding variant, the Gopher, was available by mail order for just $69.

That Quattlebaum’s gizmo operated independently of any known scientific principles didn’t hurt sales. By the end of 1995, distributors across the U.S. had sold about 1,000 Quadro Trackers to customers including police departments in Georgia and Illinois and school districts in Kansas and Florida. When Ronald Kelly, the agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s office in Beaumont, Tex., learned that a local narcotics task force had bought one, he attended a demonstration in which a Tracker was used to find a brick of cocaine. He wasn’t impressed. “I paid reasonable attention in eighth grade science,” Kelly says now. “I pronounced this bulls—.” [Continue reading…]

Serious crimes have been committed. The evidence is public knowledge. They include launching a war of aggression, conspiracy to defraud Congress, and conspiracy to commit torture. And yet, today, none of the high government officials responsible for committing these crimes have been prosecuted. AlternateFocus investigates why.

Riverbend writes: April 9, 2013 marks ten years since the fall of Baghdad. Ten years since the invasion. Since the lives of millions of Iraqis changed forever. It’s difficult to believe. It feels like only yesterday I was sharing day to day activities with the world. I feel obliged today to put my thoughts down on the blog once again, probably for the last time.

In 2003, we were counting our lives in days and weeks. Would we make it to next month? Would we make it through the summer? Some of us did and many of us didn’t.

Back in 2003, one year seemed like a lifetime ahead. The idiots said, “Things will improve immediately.” The optimists were giving our occupiers a year, or two… The realists said, “Things won’t improve for at least five years.” And the pessimists? The pessimists said, “It will take ten years. It will take a decade.”

Looking back at the last ten years, what have our occupiers and their Iraqi governments given us in ten years? What have our puppets achieved in this last decade? What have we learned?

We learned a lot.

We learned that while life is not fair, death is even less fair- it takes the good people. Even in death you can be unlucky. Lucky ones die a ‘normal’ death… A familiar death of cancer, or a heart-attack, or stroke. Unlucky ones have to be collected in bits and pieces. Their families trying to bury what can be salvaged and scraped off of streets that have seen so much blood, it is a wonder they are not red.

We learned that you can be floating on a sea of oil, but your people can be destitute. Your city can be an open sewer; your women and children can be eating out of trash dumps and begging for money in foreign lands. [Continue reading…]

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: ‘So many’, wrote TS Eliot, reflecting on the waste land left by the First World War. “I had not thought death had undone so many.”

This notion is unlikely to cross the minds of those surveying the devastation left by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The most frequently quoted fatality figure – about 115,000 Iraqis killed – is shocking. But compared to major conflicts of the past century, it is a relatively modest toll. The 1916 battle of the Somme alone killed three times as many. More than that were killed by a single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War.

Former British prime minster Tony Blair, and then-US vice president Dick Cheney, were perhaps conscious of this when they expressed “no regrets” on the 10th anniversary of the war last month.

That the perpetrators of an aggressive war should accept the lowest costs for their folly is unsurprising. What is less explicable is why so many supposed critics of the war are crediting the same estimate. Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Centre for American Progress’s Iraq War Ledger use it as their main source.

This is particularly puzzling when there are two peer-reviewed epidemiological surveys that give a far more comprehensive accounting of the war’s human cost. A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Survey published in the Lancet, and the Iraq Public Health Survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gave figures of 655,000 and 400,000 excess deaths respectively. (Both were concluded in June 2006, a month before the violence peaked, suggesting the actual toll is even higher).

It is odder still that when epidemiological surveys have come to be accepted as the standard method for estimating conflict fatalities – the method has been used without controversy in Congo, Bosnia and Darfur – an exception is made in the case of Iraq. [Continue reading…]

Chris Hedges writes: The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks” — who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens — did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.

These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again. [Continue reading…]

A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole. [Continue reading…]

Der Spiegel reports: Kirkuk is a multiethnic city thousands of years old and claimed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen alike. American occupiers already viewed it as the predetermined breaking point of the new Iraq. They predicted that the various groups in the “Mesopotamian Jerusalem” would begin attacking each other after US troops had withdrawn.

The first oil in Iraq was discovered in Kirkuk in 1927. Since the 1930s, gas flares have been burning day and night on the city’s outskirts, serving as a reminder of the riches that whoever controls the region has access to. An American colonel once said that this city could plunge the entire country into ruin.

It’s looking that way at the moment, but not, as was once predicted, because of the city’s residents. In Kirkuk, where the local television station broadcasts in four languages, Muslims and Christians, Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen coexist more peacefully than they did years ago.

Although the parties are still at odds over voter registration problems, residents are increasingly indifferent to the issue. “We just want to live normally,” says Murah Salah, a Turkmen mechanic. “We want to have jobs, electricity, security, a functioning garbage-collection service and,” he adds with a smile, “to be able to drive out to barbecues on the weekend!”

He is referring to the sort of outing that’s taking place on a large meadow outside the city today. Mohammed Hilmi and his family are picnicking directly next to the Salah family. Yes, things have improved, he says. “In the past, people sat on their blankets, far apart from each other, and no one spoke with anyone else. Those days are now gone.”

Delwar Abdul Aziz, a Kurdish pharmacist, says: “After Saddam, we just needed time to become normal again. There was deep-seated fear and mistrust. Now people trust each other again. The attacks are certainly a problem, but the terrorists are definitely not from here.”

Defusing Kirkuk ‘s Conflict

Neither Kurds nor Arabs nor Turkmen alone control Kirkuk and its population of 900,000. But that circumstance has probably kept things relatively stable in the city, which has put coexistence to the test for centuries, and which, in addition to the three main ethnic groups, is home to religious groups like the Yazidis, Kakai and Assyrian Christians. Jews are the only religious group to have left Kirkuk, in the 1950s.

When competing groups are forced to hammer out compromises, the result is checks and balances. Perhaps another reason for the city’s stability is that the Kirkukis got rid of their corrupt governor two years ago and elected a new one, whose nickname is the “Bulldozer.”

Najmuddin Karim, a Kurdish neurosurgeon who lived in the United States for 35 years, has fired corrupt officials, built roads, bridges and a new market, and created a few thousand temporary administrative jobs. Now that Karim is in office, electricity is available for 20 instead of four hours a day, and there are even streetlights, in Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen neighborhoods alike.

Although Karim hasn’t managed to end the conflict over Kirkuk, he has defused it. “We must treat everyone as a citizen, something we failed to do in the past,” says Karim, who is in his mid-60s. “Of course I would like to see Kirkuk become part of the Kurdish region. But it won’t work if the Sunnis and Turkmen don’t agree!” [Continue reading…]

Paul Savoy writes: Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, it is astonishing in a nation dedicated to the rule of law that every aspect of the war has been debated except the relevant law.

To be sure, a vast array of articles, books and films have documented how pre-war intelligence was “manipulated” or “misrepresented” or “twisted” or “cherry-picked” or “fixed around the policy,” and how the Bush Administration’s inadequate planning produced a “fiasco,” a “blunder,” and a “disaster” — terms used to convey the sinister nature and catastrophic effect of White House miscalculations without actually accusing anyone of anything so incriminating as a felony.

Two notable exceptions are former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” which encountered a virtual boycott by the major news media when published in 2008, and “United States v. George W. Bush et al.,” by Elizabeth de la Vega, a former Assistant U.S Attorney who meticulously presents the case for criminal fraud under a little-known federal statute that does not require monetary loss by the victim as a condition for conviction. Both books rest their case on proof of deliberate deception by the President and members of his war cabinet — not an easy hurdle to overcome in a criminal trial, which requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Contrary to common belief, however, an American president can be found guilty of criminal conduct without proof of the corrupt state of mind of the deliberate liar or the malignant motives of Nazis on trial at Nuremberg. The criminal mind also encompasses the all-too-common consciousness of human beings acting carelessly in deciding to kill other human beings, however justified their conduct may seem in their own eyes.

On the tenth anniversary of the invasion, the only truly serious question about the war is whether President George W. Bush and those who participated in the decision to invade Iraq did anything illegal or unconstitutional or criminal.

To raise such a question about a war initiated by own’s own country is always “a vocation of agony,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. said of the war in Vietnam when he finally chose in 1967 to break his silence about the conflict. Whatever the reasons for avoiding the Iraq question, whether it is President Obama’s understandable fear of further polarizing a sorely divided nation, or out of respect for the 4,422 Americans who gave their lives fighting for what they believed was a just cause, or because the legal issues are too big or too difficult, we must finally say about Iraq what Dr. King said about Vietnam. “We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” [Continue reading…]

Andrew Bacevich writes: [Albert] Wohlstetter’s perspective (which became yours) emphasized five distinct propositions. Call them the Wohlstetter Precepts.

First, liberal internationalism, with its optimistic expectation that the world will embrace a set of common norms to achieve peace, is an illusion. Of course virtually every president since Franklin Roosevelt has paid lip service to that illusion, and doing so during the Cold War may even have served a certain purpose. But to indulge it further constitutes sheer folly.

Second, the system that replaces liberal internationalism must address the ever-present (and growing) danger posed by catastrophic surprise. Remember Pearl Harbor. Now imagine something orders of magnitude worse — for instance, a nuclear attack from out of the blue.

Third, the key to averting or at least minimizing surprise is to act preventively. If shrewdly conceived and skillfully executed, action holds some possibility of safety, whereas inaction reduces that possibility to near zero. Eliminate the threat before it materializes. In statecraft, that defines the standard of excellence.

Fourth, the ultimate in preventive action is dominion. The best insurance against unpleasant surprises is to achieve unquestioned supremacy.

Lastly, by transforming the very nature of war, information technology — an arena in which the United States has historically enjoyed a clear edge — brings outright supremacy within reach. Of all the products of Albert Wohlstetter’s fertile brain, this one impressed you most. The potential implications were dazzling. According to Mao, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Wohlstetter went further. Given the right sort of gun — preferably one that fires very fast and very accurately — so, too, does world order.

With the passing of the Cold War, global hegemony seemed America’s for the taking. What others saw as an option you, Paul, saw as something much more: an obligation that the nation needed to seize, for its own good as well as for the world’s. Not long before we both showed up at SAIS, your first effort to codify supremacy and preventive action as a basis for strategy had ended in embarrassing failure. I refer here to the famous (or infamous) Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm by the Pentagon policy shop you then directed. Before this classified document was fully vetted by the White House, it was leaked to the New York Times, which made it front-page news. The draft DPG announced that it had become the “first objective” of U.S. policy “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” With an eye toward “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role,” the United States would maintain unquestioned military superiority and, if necessary, employ force unilaterally. As window dressing, allies might be nice, but the United States no longer considered them necessary.

Unfortunately, you and the team assigned to draft the DPG had miscalculated the administration’s support for your thinking. This was not the moment to be unfurling grandiose ambitions expressed in indelicate language. In the ensuing hue and cry, President George H. W. Bush disavowed the document. Your reputation took a hit. But you were undeterred.

The election of George W. Bush as president permitted you to escape from academe. You’d done yeoman work tutoring candidate Bush in how the world works, and he repaid the debt by appointing you to serve as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy atop the Pentagon hierarchy. You took office as Osama bin Laden was conspiring to attack. Alas, neither Rumsfeld nor you nor anyone else in a position of real authority anticipated what was to occur. America’s vaunted defense establishment had left the country defenseless. Yet instead of seeing this as evidence of gross incompetence requiring the officials responsible to resign, you took it as an affirmation. For proof that averting surprise through preventive military action was now priority number one, Americans needed to look no further than the damage inflicted by nineteen thugs armed with box cutters.

You immediately saw the events of 9/11 as a second and more promising opening to assert U.S. supremacy. When riding high a decade earlier, many Americans had thought it either unseemly or unnecessary to lord it over others. Now, with the populace angry and frightened, the idea was likely to prove an easier sell. Although none of the hijackers were Iraqi, within days of 9/11 you were promoting military action against Iraq. Critics have chalked this up to your supposed obsession with Saddam. The criticism is misplaced. The scale of your ambitions was vastly greater.

In an instant, you grasped that the attacks provided a fresh opportunity to implement Wohlstetter’s Precepts, and Iraq offered a made-to-order venue. “We cannot wait to act until the threat is imminent,” you said in 2002. Toppling Saddam Hussein would validate the alternative to waiting. In Iraq the United States would demonstrate the efficacy of preventive war. [Continue reading…]

Richard Clarke writes: On Tuesday, at this 10th anniversary of the American Invasion of Iraq, we would do well to remind ourselves about some painful facts.

Keeping those facts in our collective memory may make it easier for us as a nation to prevent future mistakes. So, let us recall five unfortunate facts about the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

First, the leaders of the Bush administration were intent on invading from the beginning of their time in the White House. When the 9-11 attacks occurred, Bush Cabinet members immediately discussed how that tragedy could be used to justify an invasion.

Bush himself asked me to try to pin the blame for 9-11 on Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney propagated a myth that a hijacker had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, even though we knew at the time Cheney said it that the report was false and that the hijacker was in Virginia at the time of the alleged meeting.

Second, the Bush-Cheney team settled on the excuse for invading that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction. They trotted out to Congress, the American people and the United Nations a series of fabricated intelligence reports.

Iraq was allegedly buying “yellow cake” uranium from Niger. The documentary proof used turns out to have been a forgery. Iraq had mobile biological-weapons labs. The eyewitness has been shown to be a liar. Iraq was allegedly training al-Qaida. The only evidence of that were the ravings of a terrorist under extreme torture.

The proof that these and other fabricated intelligence reports were erroneous was available well before we invaded.

Third, the mismanagement of the war cost thousands of American lives and more than 100,000 Iraqi lives and disfigured, dismembered or traumatized tens of thousands of Americans. The financial and human cost of those casualties will be felt for decades. [Continue reading…]

Sami Ramadani writes: It has always been painful for me to write about Iraq and Baghdad, the land of my birth and the city of my childhood. They say that time is a great healer, but, along with most Iraqis, I feel the pain even more deeply today. But this time the tears for what has already happened are mixed with a crippling fear that worse is yet to come: an all-out civil war. Ten years on from the shock and awe of the 2003 Bush and Blair war – which followed 13 years of murderous sanctions, and 35 years of Saddamist dictatorship – my tormented land, once a cradle of civilisation, is staring into the abyss.

Wanton imperialist intervention and dictatorial rule have together been responsible for the deaths of more than a million people since 1991. And yet, according to both Tony Blair and the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the “price is worth it“. Blair, whom most Iraqis regard as a war criminal, is given VIP treatment by a culpable media. Iraqis listen in disbelief when he says: “I feel responsibility but no regret for removing Saddam Hussein.” (As if Saddam and his henchmen were simply whisked away, leaving the people to build a democratic state). It enrages us to see Blair build a business empire, capitalising on his role in piling up more Iraqi skulls than even Saddam managed.

As an exile, I was painfully aware of Saddam’s crimes, which for me started with the disappearance from Baghdad’s medical college of my dearest school friend, Hazim. The Iraqi people are fully aware, too, that Saddam committed all his major crimes while an ally of western powers. On the eve of the 2003 invasion I wrote this for the Guardian: “In Iraq, the US record speaks for itself: it backed Saddam’s party, the Ba’ath, to capture power in 1963, murdering thousands of socialists, communists and democrats; it backed the Ba’ath party in 1968 when Saddam was installed as vice-president; it helped him and the Shah of Iran in 1975 to crush the Kurdish nationalist movement; it increased its support for Saddam in 1979…helping him launch his war of aggression against Iran in 1980; it backed him throughout the horrific eight years of war (1980 to 1988), in which a million Iranians and Iraqis were slaughtered, in the full knowledge that he was using chemical weapons and gassing Kurds and Marsh Arabs; it encouraged him in 1990 to invade Kuwait…; it backed him in 1991 when Bush [senior] suddenly stopped the war, exactly 24 hours after the start of the great March uprising that engulfed the south and Iraqi Kurdistan…; and it backed him as the ‘lesser evil’ from March 1991 to September 11 2001 under the umbrella of murderous sanctions and the policy of “containment”.” [Continue reading…]

Andrew J. Bacevich writes: Judgments rendered by history tend to be tentative, incomplete and reversible. More than occasionally, they arrive seasoned with irony. This is especially true when it comes to war, where battlefield outcomes thought to be conclusive often prove anything but.

Rather than yielding peace, victory frequently serves as a prelude to more war. Once opened, wounds fester. Things begun stubbornly refuse to end. As the renowned strategic analyst F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, “The victor belongs to the spoils.”

Next year marks the centennial of the conflict once known as the Great War. Germany lost that war. Whether France and Britain can be said to have won in any meaningful sense is another matter. Besides planting the seeds for an even more horrific bloodletting just two decades later, the fighting of 1914-1918 served chiefly to provide expansion-minded British politicians with a pretext for carving up the Ottoman Empire. It proved a fateful move.

What London wanted from this new Middle East that it nonchalantly cut and pasted was profit and submission; what it got was resentment and resistance, yielding a host of intractable problems that in due time it bequeathed to Washington. In effect, victory in 1918 expanded Britain’s imperial domain only to accelerate its demise, with the United States naively assuming the mantle of imperial responsibility (euphemistically termed “leadership”). Thank you, Perfidious Albion.

Many another storied triumph has contained its own poison pill. More recent examples include the Six Day War, which saddled Israel with a large, restive minority that it can neither pacify nor assimilate; the ouster of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, giving rise to the Taliban; and Operation Desert Storm, after which the garrisoning of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia helped light the long fuse that would eventually detonate on Sept. 11, 2001.

Think you’ve won? Wait until all the returns are in.

With the passage of time, near-term military results matter less than long-term political consequences. [Continue reading…]

Martin Bright reports: Ten years ago, a young Mandarin specialist at GCHQ, the government’s surveillance centre in Cheltenham, did something extraordinary. Katharine Gun, a shy and studious 28-year-old who spent her days listening in to obscure Chinese intercepts, decided to tell the world about a secret plan by the US government to spy on the United Nations.

She had received an email in her inbox asking her and her colleagues to help in a vast intelligence “surge” designed to secure a UN resolution to send troops into Iraq. She was horrified and leaked the email to the Observer. As a result of the story the paper published 10 years ago this weekend, she was arrested, lost her job and faced trial under the Official Secrets Act.

The memo from Frank Koza, chief of staff at the “regional targets” section of the National Security Agency, GCHQ’s sister organisation in the US, remains shocking in its implications for British sovereignty. Koza was in effect issuing a direct order to the employees of a UK security agency to gather “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises”. This included a particular focus on the “swing nations” on the security council, Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, “as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters”.

The story went around the world and the leak electrified the international debate during the weeks of diplomatic deadlock. Most directly, it bolstered opposition to the US position from Chilean and Mexican diplomats weary of American “dirty tricks”. The same countries demanded immediate answers from the British government about its involvement in the spying. With the operation blown, the chances of George W Bush and Tony Blair getting the consensus for a direct UN mandate for war were now near zero.

For the Observer too, it was a story full of risks. The paper had taken the controversial decision to back intervention in Iraq. Yet here was a story that had the capacity to derail the war altogether. It remains entirely to the credit of Roger Alton, at the time the paper’s editor, that he stuck with the story, despite its potential implications.

Gun had hoped the leak would prick the conscience of the British public, large sections of which were already taking to the streets in opposition to the war. Surely, she thought, when people realised that the UK was being asked to collaborate in an operation to find out personal information that could be used to blackmail UN delegates, they would be outraged and the UK government would halt its slide into war. She failed.

A decade on, sitting in a cafe in Cheltenham, not far from GCHQ, I asked her if she still stood by what she had done. “Still no regrets,” she said. “But the more I think about what happened, the more angry and frustrated I get about the fact that nobody acted on intelligence. The more we find out that in fact the million-person march was a real cause of worry for Downing Street and for Blair personally, it makes you think we were so close and yet so far.” [Continue reading…]

Ten years after Colin Powell lied to the UN Security Council to help start the war on Iraq, Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame recount some of the events that led to war, but the final line of their commentary is perhaps all they needed to say:

We did not do nearly enough to prevent this tragedy perpetrated on Iraq, on the world, and on ourselves.

On January 28, 2003, President Bush said: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Joe Wilson knew at that time that Bush was lying, but he waited until July 6, 2003 before speaking out.

When Valerie Plame heard Powell lying to the UNSC she kept quiet. She didn’t want to lose her job at the CIA.

How many other careerists around Washington are there, who when their consciences told them to speak out, decided to put their material and professional interests first and remain silent — even when as a consequence, hundreds of thousands of people ended up losing their lives?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: In late August, at a leadership summit in Johannesburg, anti-apartheid hero Archbishop Desmond Tutu refused to share a platform with Tony Blair. Citing Blair’s role in the immoral invasion of Iraq, he suggested that the former British prime minister belonged in the dock at The Hague, not on the international speakers’ circuit. Blair accused the Archbishop of repeating a “canard” and invoked the authority of “independent analysis” to assert that his mistake was honest and that he had been misled by bad intelligence.

If true, this should absolve him of moral responsibility for the war. One can make a reasonable argument that one’s honest mistakes or good intentions release one from moral culpability for the unintended consequences of one’s actions. But do they also exempt one from remorse?

In Sophocles’ immortal work, when Oedipus, the king of Thebes, discovers that the man he once killed in self-defence was his father and that the woman he married and sired four children with is his mother, the consciousness of his own innocence does little to ameliorate his guilt. Fate as an excuse offers little solace when the consequences of one’s actions are so terrible. Oedipus puts out his own eyes.

Tony Blair on the other hand has used an impenetrable wall of humbug to insulate himself from remorse and preserved his eyes for Mammon. With his government pedigree as a calling card and his prodigious capacity for bullshit as a resource, he trots the globe, selling snake-oil for exorbitant sums.

He has divested himself of guilt by adopting the logic of dreams which Freud (as noted by Slavoj Zizek) illustrated with a joke about a man who is accused by his neighbour of returning a damaged kettle. His defence: “In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place, it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all.”

In the first place, Blair genuinely believed Iraq posed an imminent threat; in the second place, Saddam was a tyrant who needed removing regardless of the WMDs; and in the third place, Iraq is so much better off than before the invasion.

By choosing one, Blair might have convinced some; by marshalling all three, he has indicted himself. Blair piles on less out of stupidity than necessity. Obfuscation is necessary because none of Blair’s arguments stand up to scrutiny. [Continue reading…]