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bottom line regarding "war on terror"

 There appears to be plenty of "circumstantial evidence" to convict the Bush administration of foreknowledge and complicity in 9/11. Anybody travelling internationally among the "traveller" circuit in 2001 would have heard warnings like "don't fly in the US in september."  Multiple international intelligence agencies provided corroboration, including Mossad. Meanwhile, back at the ranch... Colin Powell, asked in August 2001 on CNN where the next theater of action would be in the world, answers "Afghanistan."

There's plenty of information available to the public to corroborate the notion of "foreknowledge" —  not among "crazy conspiracy theorists" but in the mainstream press:

Ashcroft Flying High: Attorney General Travels By Private Jet At Taxpayer Expense

WASHINGTON, July 26, 2001 — (CBS) Fishing rod in hand, Attorney
General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday
afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was
traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial
airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat
assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel
only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 2 — A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.

The account by the spokesman,
Sean McCormack, came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told
reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific
meeting on July 10, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet
that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security
adviser at the time, said it was “incomprehensible” to suggest she had
ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr.
McCormack also said records showed that the Sept. 11 commission had
been informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence
officials and members of the commission confirmed on Monday. [...]

Mr.
McCormack said the records showed that far from ignoring Mr. Tenet’s
warnings, Ms. Rice acted on the intelligence and requested that Mr.
Tenet make the same presentation to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general.

But Mr. Ashcroft said by telephone on Monday evening that he never received a briefing that summer from Mr. Tenet.

“Frankly,
I’m disappointed that I didn’t get that kind of briefing,” he said.
“I’m surprised he didn’t think it was important enough to come by and
tell me.”

Government investigations have shown that Mr. Ashcroft
was briefed by other C.I.A. officials in the weeks before the Sept. 11
attacks.

And finally, consider the 2001 Anthrax mailings that turned out to be an "inside job" from Ft. Detrick army biodefense labs. The Bruce Ivins anthrax case along with the convenient death of the prime suspect creates a "lone gunman"-style coverup to questions about why the Whitehouse went on Cipro a month before Bruce Ivins began mailing his anthrax letters. Out of the many Biological Weapons the US provided to Saddam Hussein, how did the Whitehouse know to take Cipro against Anthrax. Or did they already know that Dr. Bruce Ivins Anthrax vaccine was associated with Gulf War Syndrome?

Jun 7, 2002

Contact: Press Office 202-646-5188

FBI & BUSH ADMINISTRATION SUED OVER ANTHRAX DOCUMENTS Judicial Watch Wants to Know Why White House Went on Cipro Beginning September 11th What Was Known and When? (Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that it has filed lawsuits against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), the Center for Disease Control (“CDC”), the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (“USAMRIID”) and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) for those agencies’ failures to produce documents concerning the terrorist anthrax attacks of October 2001, under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”). Judicial Watch has additional anthrax-related FOIA requests pending with the White House and other government agencies that will see legal action in the next two weeks. Judicial Watch represents hundreds of postal workers from the Brentwood Postal Facility in Washington, DC. Until the Brentwood facility was finally condemned by the CDC, Brentwood postal workers handled all of the mail for Washington, DC, including the “official mail” that contained the anthrax-laden envelopes addressed to Senators Daschle and Leahy. While Capitol Hill workers received prompt medical care, Brentwood postal workers were ordered by USPS officials to continue working in the contaminated facility. Two Brentwood workers died from inhalation anthrax, and dozens more are suffering from a variety of ailments related to the anthrax attacks. A variety of legal actions are being planned for the disparate treatment and reckless endangerment the Brentwood postal workers faced. In October 2001, press reports revealed that White House staff had been on a regimen of the powerful antibiotic Cipro since the September 11th terrorist attacks. Judicial Watch is aggressively pursuing the disclosure of the facts and the decision for White House staff, and President Bush as well, to begin taking Cipro nearly a month before anthrax was detected on Capitol Hill. “The American people deserve a full accounting from the Bush administration, the FBI , and other agencies concerning the anthrax attacks. The FBI’s investigation seems to have dead-ended, and frankly, that is not very reassuring given their performance with the September 11th hijackers,” stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman. “One doesn’t simply start taking a powerful antibiotic for no good reason. The American people are entitled to know what the White House staffers knew nine months ago, “ he added.

 Fortunately, beginning in 2006, people started asking the obvious questions in public that they were afraid to ask previously  —  as they'd be beaten down for "not supporting the troops" or "being unamerican" in prior years when people became blindly fascistic

Maybe it's dawning on people that we've been living under a fascist administratiion that is lying about everything...

• http://www.attytood.com/2006/10/how_john_ashcroft_saved_his_ow.html
• http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/10/04/some-questions/

As to the reasons why all these big lies... you have to go back to the lies-of-the-father HW Bush. We have to get the real scoop on what the USA has been doing in Iraq since HW Bush was CIA chief. At the recent Republican National Convention, Bush Sr. was the visibly-proud-parent, fulfilling father Prescott Bush's wishes -- a famous WWII "nazi appeaser" who long supported Hitler's anti-communist and eugenic viewpoints. The
recent RNC convention was like watching fascism on parade -- the
"country before self" "nation above all" imagery and rhetoric are truly
frightening if you look at the human toll on the Iraqi population and
US population (read below).

 The recent Republican National Convention included propaganda on the HW Bush legacy from the Gulf War: "He built one of the largest coalitions in history to rebut the aggression of Saddam in Operation Desert Storm. And in doing so, he erased all ghosts of Vietnam." Of this same war effort http://libcom.org/history/1991-the-south-iraq-and-kurdistan-uprisings states "With the hope of exorcising the spectre (sic) of Vietnam, the Bush regime prepared for all-out war." That article is an interesting class-struggle (aka socialist/communist) perspective on the situation that the USA has created in Iraq. Which,
despite it's Vietnam-ghostbusting hopes, has become, Vietnam II:
postcolonial French issues replaced by the postcolonial British; the
threat of pan-communism
replaced with the potential for Iraqi US oil interests to be
nationalized-away by a government it doesn't control.

The aforementioned article begins:

The Gulf War was not ended by the military victory of America and the Allies. It was ended by the mass desertion and mutiny of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. So overwhelming was the refusal to fight for the Iraqi state on the part of its conscripted army that, contrary to all predictions, not one Allied soldier was killed by hostile fire in the final ground offensive to recapture Kuwait. Indeed the sheer scale of this mutiny is perhaps unprecedented in modern military history.

But these mutinous troops did not simply flee back to Iraq. On their return many of them turned their guns against the Iraqi state, sparking a simultaneous uprising in both Southern Iraq and in Kurdistan to the North. Only the central region of Iraq surrounding Baghdad remained firmly in the state's hands in the weeks following the end of the war.

From the very start the Western media has grossly misrepresented these uprisings. The uprising in the South, centred on Basra, was portrayed as a Shia Muslim revolt. The insurrection in the North was reported as an exclusively Kurdish Nationalist uprising which demanded little more than an autonomous Kurdish region within Iraq.

The truth is that the uprisings in both the North and South of Iraq were working class insurrections.

I wish the democrats would figure out a way to play out the reality
of what *actually* happened in Iraq against the caricature of fascism
that the republican party has become, partly as a way of perpetuating
the lies of warmongers that have brought the USA to it's knees militarily, financially, and as a nation. Because below, as far as I can tell, is "the real deal" as to what we've done in Iraq. Continuing the above article:

Faced with these workers' uprisings the various capitalist interests in the region had to suspend hostilities and unite to suppress them. It is well known that the West, led by the USA, have long backed Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. They supported him in the war against Iran.

In supporting Saddam the Western ruling class also recognised that the Ba'athist Party, as a mass-based quasi-fascist party, was the onlyforce in Iraq capable and ruthless enough to repress the oil producing proletariat.

However, Saddam's ultimate strategy for maintaining social peace in Iraq was for a permanent war drive and militarisation of society. But such a strategy could only lead to further economic ruin and the intensification of class antagonisms. In the Spring of 1990 this contradiction was becoming blatant. The Iraqi economy was shattered after eight years of war with Iran. Oil production, the main source of hard currency, was restricted while oil prices were relatively low. The only options for redeeming wartime promises of prosperity in peace were a rise in the price of oil or more war. The former choice was blocked by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Saddam's bold leap to resolve this impasse was to annex Kuwait and its rich oil fields.

This gave America the opportunity to reassert its political hegemony, not only in the Middle East, but also in the world as a whole. With the hope of exorcising the spectre of Vietnam, the Bush regime prepared for all-out war. The Bush administration hoped for a quick and decisive victory that would evict Iraq from Kuwait but at the same time leave the Iraqi regime intact. However, to mobilise the home front for war, Bush had to equate Saddam with Hitler and so became increasingly committed publicly to toppling the Iraqi leader.

With this commitment the American government now sought to impose such a military defeat on the Ba'athist Party would be obliged to replace Saddam with someone else. Indeed the Bush regime openly invited the ruling circles in Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein with the approach of the ground war in March. However, the mass desertion of Iraqi conscripts and the subsequent uprisings in Iraq robbed the American government of such a convenient victory. Instead they faced the prospect of the uprising turning into a full scale proletarian revolution, with all the dire consequences this would have for the accumulation of capital in the Middle East.

The last thing the American government wanted was to be drawn into a prolonged military occupation of Iraq in order to suppress the uprisings. It was far more efficient to back the existing state. But there was no time to insist on the removal of Saddam Hussein. They could ill afford the disruption this would cause. Hence, almost overnight, Bush's hostility to the butcher of Baghdad evaporated. The two rival butchers went into partnership.

Their first task was to crush the uprising in the South which was being swelled by the huge columns of deserters streaming north from Kuwait. Even though these fleeing Iraqi conscripts posed no military threat to Allied troops, or to the objective of "liberating" Kuwait, the war was prolonged long enough for them to be carpet bombed on the road to Basra by the RAF and the USAF. This cold blooded massacre served no other purpose than to preserve the Iraqi state from mutinous armed deserters.

Following this massacre the Allied ground forces, having swept through southern Iraq to encircle Kuwait, stopped short of Basra and gave free rein to the Republican Guards - the elite troops loyal to the Iraqi regime - to crush the insurgents (see mass graves of Shiite rebels, right). All proposals to inflict a decisive defeat on the Republican Guards or to proceed towards Baghdad to topple Saddam were quickly forgotten. In the ceasefire negotiations the Allied forces insisted on the grounding of all fixed wing aircraft but the use of helicopters vital for counter-insurgency was permitted for "administrative purposes". This "concession" proved important once the uprising in the South was put down and the Iraqi state's attention turned to the advancing insurrection in the North.

Whereas the uprising in the Basra region was crushed almost as it began, the Northern uprising had more time to develop. It began in Raniah and spread to Sulaimania and Kut and at its height threatened to spread beyond Kurdistan to the capital. The original aim of the uprising was expressed in the slogan: "We will celebrate our New Year with the Arabs in Baghdad!" The defeat of this rebellion owed as much to the Kurdish nationalists as to the Western powers and the Iraqi state.

...

The war in the Gulf was brought to an end by the refusal of the Iraqi working class to fight and by the subsequent uprisings in Iraq. But such proletarian actions were crushed by the combined efforts of the various international and national capitalist forces. Once again, nationalism has served as the stumbling block for working class insurrection. While it is important to stress that Middle East politics is not dominated by Islamic fundamentalism and Arab Nationalism, as it is usually portrayed in the mainstream press, but rests on class conflict, it must be said that the immediate prospects for the development of working class struggle in Iraq are now bleak.

The war not only resulted in the defeat of the Iraqi working class but also revealed the state of defeat of the working class in the USA, and, to a lesser degree, Europe. The western anti-war movement never developed into a mass working class opposition to the war. It remained dominated by a pacifist orientation that "opposed" the war in terms of an alternative national interest: "Peace is Patriotic". While it expressed abhorrence of the Allies' mass murder it opposed doing anything to stop it that might bring it into confrontation with the state. Instead it concentrated on futile symbolic protest that simply fostered the sense of helplessness in the face of the state's war machine.

http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-death.htm

Posted by Niels P. Mayer in Politics at 20080908 Comments[1]