Greg Palast: Bush Didn't Bungle Iraq

For those of you unfamiliar with Greg Palast.............get familiar. He is an investigative reporter, an American expatriot who writes for Britain's "The Observer" and "The Guardian". He lives and writes in Britain because no major American newspaper will employ him these days, not because he has ever written anything untrue or has ever been unprofessional in any way. On the contrary. He is greatly respected among the ranks of American and foreign journalists. He is unemployable in the U.S. simply because he asks the pertinent questions that so embarrass our emasculaed corporate news media, and then baldly states the truth, unvarnished, and with no holds barred.

The article below is a good example of Palast. If you'd like to check him out further, you can do it here. If you go to his web page, and you have a few spare bucks, order a copy of his dvd called "Bush Family Fortunes" or hi brilliant book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy". If you don't have the bucks, keep an eye open for the dvd playing on "Free Speech TV".

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Bush Didn't Bungle Iraq, You Fools

THE MISSION WAS INDEED ACCOMPLISHED
The Guardian
Monday, March 20, 2006
by Greg Palast

Get off it. All the carping, belly-aching and complaining about George Bush's incompetence in Iraq, from both the Left and now the Right, is just dead wrong. On the third anniversary of the tanks rolling over Iraq's border, most of the 59 million Homer Simpsons who voted for Bush are beginning to doubt if his mission was accomplished.

Palast returns to the pages of the Guardian today with this column.

Catch his commentaries weekly at CommentIsFree.Guardian.co.uk

But don't kid yourself -- Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney, accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you've forgotten what their real mission was, let me remind

you of White House spokesman Ari Fleisher's original announcement, three years ago, launching of what he called, "Operation Iraqi Liberation."

O.I.L.

How droll of them, how cute.

Then, Karl Rove made the giggling boys in the White House change it to "OIF" -- Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the 101st Airborne wasn't sent to Basra to get its hands on Iraq's OIF.

"It's about oil," Robert Ebel told me. Who is Ebel? Formerly the CIA's top oil analyst, he was sent by the Pentagon, about a month before the invasion, to a secret confab in London with Saddam's former oil minister to finalize the plans for "liberating" Iraq's oil industry. In London, Bush's emissary Ebel also instructed Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the man the Pentagon would choose as post-OIF oil minister for Iraq, on the correct method of disposing Iraq's crude.

And what did the USA want Iraq to do with Iraq's oil? The answer will surprise many of you: and it is uglier, more twisted, devilish and devious than anything imagined by the most conspiracy-addicted blogger. The answer can be found in a 323-page plan for Iraq's oil secretly drafted by the State Department. Our team got a hold of a copy; how, doesn't matter. The key thing is what's inside this thick Bush diktat: a directive to Iraqis to maintain a state oil company that will "enhance its relationship with OPEC."

Enhance its relationship with OPEC??? How strange: the government of the United States ordering Iraq to support the very OPEC oil cartel which is strangling our nation with outrageously high prices for crude. Specifically, the system ordered up by the Bush cabal would keep a lid on Iraq's oil production -- limiting Iraq's oil pumping to the tight quota set by Saudi Arabia and the OPEC cartel.

There you have it. Yes, Bush went in for the oil -- not to get more of Iraq's oil, but to prevent Iraq producing too much of it. You must keep in mind who paid for George's ranch and Dick's bunker: Big Oil. And Big Oil -- and their buck-buddies, the Saudis -- don't make money from pumping more oil, but from pumping less of it. The lower the supply, the higher the price. It's Economics 101.

The oil industry is run by a cartel, OPEC, and what economists call an "oligopoly" -- a tiny handful of operators who make more money when there's less oil, not more of it. So, every time the "insurgents" blow up a pipeline in Basra, every time Mad Mahmoud in Tehran threatens to cut supply, the price of oil leaps. And Dick and George just love it. Dick and George didn't want more oil from Iraq, they wanted less.

I know some of you, no matter what I write, insist that our President and his Veep are on the hunt for more crude so you can cheaply fill your family Hummer; that somehow, these two oil-patch babies are concerned that the price of gas in the USA is bumping up to $3 a gallon. Not so, gentle souls. Three bucks a gallon in the States (and a quid a litre in Britain) means colossal profits for Big Oil, and that makes Dick's ticker go pitty-pat with joy.

The top oily-gopolists, the five largest oil companies, pulled in $113 billion in profit in 2005 -- compared to a piddly $34 billion in 2002 before Operation Iraqi Liberation. In other words, it's been a good war for Big Oil. As per Plan Bush, Bahr Al-Ulum became Iraq's occupation oil minister; the conquered nation "enhanced its relationship with OPEC;" and the price of oil, from Clinton peace-time to Bush war-time, shot up 317%.

In other words, on the third anniversary of invasion, we can say the attack and occupation is, indeed, a Mission Accomplished. However, it wasn't America's mission, nor the Iraqis'. It was a Mission Accomplished for OPEC and Big Oil.

On June 6, Penguin Dutton will release Greg Palast's new book, "Armed Madhouse: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War".

Order it here today. View his investigative reports for Harper's Magazine and BBC television's Newsnight at www.GregPalast.com.

http://www.commentisfree.guardian.co.uk

Crashing WatergateGate

Here's a fresh one from Ross Baker via TomPaine.com. I've simply pasted the entire article here.

This article puts me in mind of two extraordinary quotes from two extraordinary Americans:

"A little rebellion now and then...is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." - Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), Letter to James Madison, 1787

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress." - Mark Twain

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Crashing WatergateGate
Russ Baker
May 08, 2006

Investigative reporter and essayist Russ Baker is a longtime contributor to TomPaine.com. He is also the founder of the Real News Project , a new not-for-profit investigative journalism outlet. He can be reached at russ@russbaker.com.

We knew this was big back in March, when a court sent ex-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif.—convicted of taking $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors—off to serve eight years in prison, the most severe sentence ever handed out to a member of Congress. From then on, the sleaze chain has been metastasizing. More members of the House might be implicated—and even top CIA officials. Now it is being described as the largest federal corruption scandal in a century. With stories of prostitutes and all-night poker games at the Watergate hotel, it is one scandal that truly is deserving of the "-gate" suffix that has become such a dreary journalistic cliché.

No matter how big the affair grows, though, it is likely to follow in the path of so many of its predecessors—distracting public attention from a larger and more important reality: Today, “the largest corruption scandal in a century” is not WatergateGate—it is the everyday performance of the U.S. government. The worst sleaze in Washington is mainly legal, as the old saying goes; and that includes the sorry state of the entire intelligence apparatus—beyond whether the #3 CIA official improperly participated in those late-night, high-stakes card games.

Too many in the media treat a juicy mess like the Cunningham Affair as a shocking aberration. Consider the wording in a New York Times article on Sunday, which described “a growing suspicion among some lawmakers that corrupt practices may have influenced decision-making in Congress and at executive-branch agencies.”

Who would have thought? Don’t the editors read their own paper? It’s been clear for some time that corruption in the Bush administration has exceeded a Washington standard that already was pretty tawdry. Some of the stories are known already, especially to TomPaine.com readers: White House procurement chief taken out in handcuffs in connection with a sprawling lobbying corruption investigation; the vice president’s chief of staff indicted for perjury; the unseemly setup between Bush’s first FEMA director and Brownie, the incompetent neophyte who replaced him.

But many of the larger misdeeds have gone unreported, in part because—technically illegal or not—they represent business as usual in Republican Washington today. Virtually every federal agency is now captive to the corporate interests it is supposed to regulate. The reach of corporate influence has even compromised the science agencies on whose fact-finding and truth-telling crucial questions of national safety and even survival depend.

And then there is Congress. A quick comparison of committee activity and floor votes with campaign finance reports tells the story. Never mind the now-controversial “earmarks,” in which legislators secretly slip goodies at the last minute into larger bill packages. The real scandal is going on in plain sight. The entities that give the most get the most—and the goodies keep on coming. That outfits like Halliburton can survive a never-ending series of contracting horror shows with their federal contacts intact says a lot about Congress’s willful abrogation of fiduciary duty on behalf of the taxpayer.

The main mistake Randy Cunningham made was accepting the goodies while he was still in Congress. There is no crime involved in doing the exact same favors for government contractors, and later joining the company’s board or getting hired as a highly-paid lobbyist, or getting payback on a more indirect basis. That’s the deal all over town, and some of the most “well-respected” names in America have such arrangements—and not all of them are Republicans. The whole thing stinks, but what to do about it? That’s the rub.

Speaking of a rub, besides the careless greed, in the Cunningham Caper we are blessed by the emergence of a sexual angle worthy of a British tabloid, with the congressman alleged to have enjoyed the favors of big-league prostitutes in return for military contracts. Sexual peccadilloes always get the public’s attention in a way that other misdeeds, like accepting bribes from defense contractors, cannot. That Cunningham and his buddies may have preferred presumably-discreet professional company over out-of-wedlock friends of the Gennifer Flowers ilk, makes perfect sense in an atmosphere where holier-than-thou sanctimony cannot bear scrutiny. That might take the story to a new level, since these sins would have been committed by the staunchest defenders of the "sanctity of marriage."

Those who care about the ever more brazen sellout of the public interest over the last five years have no choice but to take these revelations in whatever garb they come—and if they’re scantily clad, so be it. Meanwhile, consorting with prostitutes—the thing that will get perhaps get the most attention—is the one thing that matters least to the future of our body politic.
With this new WatergateGate, we must at all costs beware the Woodward Fallacy—that sanitation is a substitute for politics and ideas. It is the conceit of the reigning elite. But in fact we can get rid of Cunningham and his cronies and the rot will continue, unless change goes much deeper to the root

OK....So I'm Back.....With Ramsey Clark

Well................I'm baaack!

Spooky, huh?

I don't really know how well I'll be able to keep up with this...........doing 5 shows in a row for CATS and trying to work certainly slows down my blogging life.........but I'm gonna give it a shot.

This one came in today, and I couldn't resist. I've decided to include the entire thing here.

For those of you who may have suspected that my blogging absences might have added up to capitulation of some sort, it's good to make an appearance with something like this.....

Here's one from Ransey Clark:

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What’s At Stake?

A message from Ramsey Clark

George W. Bush and his principal officials are the greatest threat to world peace, to human rights, to economic justice, to the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law that the American people and the world at large face today. His personal, unilateral war of aggression has wrecked Iraq, taken 250,000 lives or more, created tensions worldwide and significantly isolated the United States, costing us international friendships, trust, respect and alliances. War of aggression was judged to be “the Supreme International Crime” by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Proclaiming himself the “Decider,” President Bush insists he decides what is right. He threatens North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Sudan, Venezuela, and most critically at the moment, Iran. The threats themselves violate international law and the U.N. Charter. His threats are made real by his personal record of false claims followed by arbitrary acts including the criminal aggression against and occupation of Iraq with its painful consequences just beginning for Iraq and the world. The additional U.S. military costs approach a trillion dollars and the occupation stretches the limits of U.S. military capacity. Yet he has ordered detailed plans for attacks on Iran that he could order to be executed as early as this summer. He may believe some radical action can save his presidency.

Iran has more than three times the population of Iraq. It was not debilitated by the Gulf War which cost Iraq more than 150,000 lives and destroyed its basic infrastructure. Thirteen years of sanctions, from Hiroshima Day, August 6, 1990 to “Mission Accomplished” Day “ending” the war of aggression against Iraq announced from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln by President Bush on May 1, 2003, cost Iraq 1 million lives, half children under the age of five. Iraq suffered near total isolation. Without international commerce, or the ability to rebuild, Iraq’s economy was devastated. It suffered physically and psychologically from frequent punitive bombings by U.S. aircraft throughout the sanctions period. Iran’s economy and power fueled by its oil, grew steadily through all these years.

Nothing could unify Iran like a military strike against it by the U.S. Few acts could better convince Muslims worldwide that George Bush is on a crusade against them. Iran with its long border with Iraq could radically alter political alignments and the level of conflict in Iraq and serve as an open conduit for fighters from many nations. Violence could spread from Egypt to neighboring Pakistan and beyond.

The Geneva Conventions prohibit assaults on “inherently dangerous” facilities, which would threaten civilian populations. Nuclear power plants are the prime example. Iran has a right to develop such plants. The Shah had ambitious plans 30 years ago, well financed and advanced, to construct nuclear plants across Iran to replace depleting oil reserves. Iran is six years or more away from the ability to build nuclear warheads if that is its purpose. The U.S. could incinerate Iran with a single launch from its worldwide land, sea and air nuclear missile capacity in place and alert today. Iran knows this. Surely it is better to seek to stop threatening and start seeking better relations and understanding with Iran and other nations that may be hostile.

Aside from the criminal nature of an attack on Iran, further aggressions by George Bush could put the United States in a rapid decline in international standing, economically and military on the defense, globally and at home.

This is only to suggest what might happen if George Bush remains President. The immediate question is whether We, the People of the United States of America, believe the future of our country is a spectator sport, or whether we will be players.

Will we let George Bush decide the fate of the nation? Have his judgment and actions been acceptable?

With thirty-two months remaining in his Presidency, George Bush can inflict greater, even devastating injury on our people and the poor of the rest of the planet. He has squandered the largest federal surplus in history and created the largest national debt with his determination to be a War President and his ambition to enrich the rich.

He continues increasing military expenditures including the unlawful development of a new generation of nuclear weapons and a “Star Wars” shield for the U.S., insuring an arms race and increasing the probability of war.

His threats against other governments have strengthened opposition to the U.S. throughout the Muslim world, Latin American, former Soviet Union bloc countries, China, Africa and even West Europe.
President Bush’s tax cuts and “Free Trade” pressures have accelerated the concentration of wealth in oligarchies at home and abroad and further impoverished the poor. Nearly 1/3 of his tax cuts have gone to the top one percent of the population. When his estate tax cuts take hold the top one percent of the population will receive 40% of his tax cuts.

The number of billionaires is increasing rapidly while incomes of workers and the poor decline and organized labor continue to decline. And tax cuts combined with increased military expenditures and increasing deficits in balance of payments which make the U.S. the largest debtor nation are compelling cuts in federal expenditures for health care, education, social security, Medicare, humanitarian foreign aid and other needed programs for the poor. The real income of college graduates fell more than 5% from 2000 to 2004 under President Bush, eroding the middle class while concentrating wealth in the few. The richest ten percent of the population received more than half of all his tax cuts benefits.

But the concentration of wealth is accelerating most rapidly in the top 1/100th of one percent, about 30,000 individuals. The rise in income of these very rich has been astronomical. Just look at the growing number of billionaires and the bonuses and stock options of corporate CEO’s.

President Bush’s contempt for human rights and civil liberties is unprecedented in the American Presidency. He is not only above international law, he is above the Bill of Rights. He can arrest and detain people worldwide, including U.S. citizens, as enemy combatants. He condones torture. He wiretaps U.S. citizens and foreigners alike without court approval. Proclamations concerning his Presidential powers by his Attorneys General, Ashcroft and Gonzales, have stunned the international community. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo now symbolize U.S. regard for human dignity. Yet George Bush proclaims himself the champion of freedom and democracy!
Katrina is only one measure of the incompetence and indifference of the Bush Administration. Secretary of State Rice has acknowledged thousands of mistakes in Iraq without acknowledging the greatest mistake: the unilateral criminal invasion and occupation.

President Bush adheres ideologically to the belief that global warming is not caused in major part by the ever increasing human consumption of oil and other hydrocarbons.

He believes he can bully the world into accepting his way and the American people into accepting his decisions as right. For him, his ideology is truth. He professed to believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Because Iraq was "evil," and the U.S. is free and democratic, he believes Iraq should be controlled by the U.S. Iran is racing to develop nuclear weapons in his view, because of its dangerous hatred for freedom and democracy and must be stopped by force now. His truth translated into force has done more to damage freedom and democracy at home and abroad than all the “evil empires” he threatens. For him, his tax cuts, free trade policies and deficits benefited the poor and lower income groups most, if not in dollars, because his ideology holds that when the oligarchy rule, all will fare better.

The imperative need is action now. We cannot risk delay.
If the American people fail to impeach George Bush and his principal officials for his war of aggression, the world can only see the American people as either powerless, or supportive of it. If he is charged only, or primarily, with misleading, or lying to the American people, the world can only believe the American people will accept mass murder if it is not lied about.

Why should any other nation refrain from Wars of Aggression against oil rich states and others unable to defend themselves if they believe they can win and get away with it, while the U.S. proceeds with impunity with its threats and attacks?

Impeachment is essential to the integrity of constitutional government. It is the most urgent duty of the American people. We have the power to cause impeachment, if we have the will. Do your part now! Participate and contribute to the Constitutional Crusade to Impeach George Bush. Click here to make a donation.

Ramsey Clark

May 3, 2006