Terrorist-like attacks are wrecking the infra-structure of Baghdad and the weak control the US and her allies have there. This morning, another explosion rocked Baghdad. And again, the explosion came from a car bomb parked outside of a five-story Mount Lebanon hotel in Baghdad that houses foreigners. Twenty-seven were killed, forty-one injured; and a 20 foot crater was all that was left. The AP reported this afternoon:
Army Col. Ralph Baker of the 1st Armored Division estimated that the bomb contained 1,000 pounds of explosives. He said the bomb was a mix of plastic explosives and artillery shells. That was the same mixture of explosives used in the Aug. 19 suicide attack on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, which killed 22 people.
The first reports out of Baghdad stated that two US soldiers were there and were trying to pull bodies out of the wreckage but they had to stop because of angry crowds that came in. "The explosion occurred behind Firdaus Square, where a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was felled April 9 with the help of U.S. Marines who had just entered the center of the Iraqi capital."
The explosion is near the Palestine Hotel, which houses foreign contractors and journalists.
Baghdad seems a chaotic mess. The lack of control, the lack of a rebuilding strategy, the lack of international support (due to an arrogant, bullying, deceptive, and lying administration) has helped transform Baghdad into civil turmoil and a hotbed of terrorism.
This explosion will no doubt heighten pressure on the Administration, already consumed with keeping the Allies involved after Sunday's coup in Spain, which was sparked by 3/11 and the deception of their former leader. Bush and his administration, likewise, are under fire here.
On The Administration's Lies
The latest CBS/NYTimes poll says only four of ten believe Bush and company didn’t lie about the reasons to go to Iraq.
My favorite quote regarding this comes from Hans Blix, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector, in an interview on the 15: "[T]he Bush administration convinced itself of the existence of banned weapons based on dubious findings before invading Iraq and was not interested in hearing evidence to the contrary.....They wanted to come to the conclusion that there were weapons…Like the former days of the witch hunt, they are convinced that they exist, and if you see a black cat, well, that's evidence of the witch."
Iraq Investigation Committee Members Have Ties to Bush & Co
Is there anyone out there who thinks the president’s committee to investigate the claims legitmizing the war will be fair?
Other than informing us that this committee has not even met, after five weeks since being appointed, consider the latest news revealed by TIME Magazine about the committee members ties to the White House:
A TIME examination of the panel members' backgrounds reveals a web of sticky connections to the Bush team and, in one case, an alleged lack of investigative curiosity. The nine-member panel is co-chaired by a Democrat, former Senator Charles Robb, and includes at least one proven maverick, Senator John McCain, who was put there, according to an official, to provide "instant credibility." But retired U.S. appellate court Judge Laurence Silberman, the panel co-chair, is a Nixon-era friend of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's and Vice President Dick Cheney's. Panel member Henry Rowen, a Hoover Institution scholar and former Rand Corp. president, worked under Cheney at the Pentagon during the first Gulf War. In September 1990, with Cheney's backing, Rowen cooked up Operation Scorpion, a secret plan to invade Iraq from the west, go all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam. (The plan went nowhere.) Another panel member, former CIA deputy director William Studeman, now with Northrop Grumman, contributed $250 to candidate Bush's campaign in 2000. His wife gave the Bush re-election committee $500 just a week before her husband was named to the panel last month.
Panel member Charles Vest, president of M.I.T., has been accused by a colleague of being slow to investigate allegations of fraud at a lab that does missile-defense work for the Pentagon. Ted Postol, an M.I.T. professor of technology and national security, says Vest was told in 2001 about allegations that officials at the school's Lincoln Laboratory misled federal investigators about the failure of a key test of the U.S. missile-defense system - a top Bush priority. Postol claims that Vest "did not take action," even though he "knew there were potential criminal violations and scientific fraud." A spokesman for M.I.T., which received $726 million in federal work in 2003, said any suggestion that Vest ignored the claims is "categorically untrue."
Former CIA Analyst Reveals Damning Facts
David MacMichael, a former CIA analyst, talks openly about the information gathering and cherry-picking scheme instigated from the get-go of this Administration, plus gives excellent commentary about the Iraq debacle in his TomPaine article titled "Untruth and Consequences." Consider these paragraphs:
[F]ormer Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill declares in his recent book that the decision to invade Iraq was presented as a given at the new administration's very first cabinet meeting.....
Bush and the ardent supporters for war, especially in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney and in the Defense Department of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, recruited long-time proponents of use of American military power in the Middle East like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Abraham Shulsky and Michael Malouf, to bypass the CIA, DIA and State Department's INR whose professional analysts were skeptical about Iraq's allegedly hostile capabilities and intentions.....
[T]his cabal of war seekers "cherry picked" the intelligence reporting and presented, without caveat, even the shakiest and most suspect evidence to make the argument for war. Importantly,...this group relied heavily on reports from an Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), headed by Ahmed Chalabi and heavily funded by the Department of Defense, despite the fact that the CIA had long since concluded that INC reporting was untrustworthy. Further, they insist that these so-called neocons were encouraged and abetted by Cheney, Rumsfeld and the White House itself.
A Paradigm of Neocon's Ethics
A final, and not unimportant, concern about the neocons is their adherence to the Machiavellian teachings of the late University of Chicago philosopher Lewis Strauss. Nicolo Machiavelli, mentor to the Renaissance Italian Borgias, taught that the successful prince must and should lie and mislead. This philosophy echoed that of Plato who taught that statesmen had to use "noble lies" to lead the ignorant masses for their own good.
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At least one important figure in this controversy about crooks and liars is Ahmad Chalabi himself. By most standards, as a fugitive from Jordan where he was convicted of massive bank fraud, he is a crook. As for lying in the matter under consideration here, he is unabashed.
In an interview with London's Daily Telegraph on Feb.19, Chalabi triumphantly admitted that he had knowingly provided false information about Iraq's weapons and its ties to terrorists (not to mention his rosy predictions of U.S. troops being welcomed as liberators) to his gullible patrons in the Pentagon and, for that matter, in the mainstream U.S. press. "We are," he said, "heroes in error. As far as we are concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."
What We Know
MacMichael summarizes what we know about the buildup to war. I have placed them in an easy to read list:
- Exile Iraqis and other agenda-driven people told lies to ideologically driven individuals in the Bush administration all too eager to use them to press their case for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
- The White House dismissed the objections of professional intelligence officers in the CIA and elsewhere probably because it had already decided to invade Iraq.
- Key administration officials chose to use the suspect evidence to persuade most members of Congress to, let us say, suspend their critical faculties, and vote to authorize the president to use the armed forces of the United States to invade Iraq.
- Most of the United States media reported this false information as truth.
The Effects
MacMichael concurs with my theory that the effects of the lies and deceptiveness at many levels and on different continents have created a devastating crisis in Iraq and throughout the world. I leave with his concluding paragraph:
As a result of decisions based on these lies, to date more than 560 members of the United States armed forces have died in Iraq and several thousand others have been injured, many of them disabled for life. A hundred or more other non-U.S. members of the invading force have been killed, and many thousands of Iraqis, military and civilian, are also dead. And we know that Iraq, battered and impoverished, teeters on the brink of civil war.
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