ANDY McSMITH
Blair seeks new powers to attack rogue states
Tue Jul 15 02:21:06 2003
208.152.73.33


Tony Blair

Britain seeks new powers to attack rogue states
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3512374&thesection=news&thesubsection=world

13.07.2003
12.00pm - By ANDY McSMITH and JO DILLON

LONDON - British Prime Minister Tony Blair is appealing to the heads of Western governments to agree a new world order that would justify the war in Iraq even if Saddam Hussein's elusive weapons of mass destruction are never found.

It would also give Western powers the authority to attack any other sovereign country whose ruler is judged to be inflicting unnecessary suffering on his own people.

A Downing Street document, circulated among foreign heads of state who are in London for a summit, has provoked a fierce row between Mr Blair and the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder.

Mr Blair has involved British troops in five conflicts overseas in his six years in office, and appears to be willing to take part in many more.

The document echoes his well-known views on "rights and responsibilities" by saying that even for self-governing nation states "the right to sovereignty brings associated responsibilities to protect citizens".

This phrase is immediately followed by a paragraph which appears to give the world's democracies carte blanche to send troops anywhere there is civil unrest or a tyrant who refuses to mend his ways.

It says: "Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect."A political row with the German Chancellor will add to Mr Blair's difficulties at a time when the American and British intelligence services have fallen out with each other over the question of whether Saddam was seeking to construct a nuclear bomb before he was overthrown.

In Washington, the US government has withdrawn the claim that Iraqi agents were in Niger trying to buy uranium.

The head of the CIA, George Tenet, has accepted the blame for allowing this claim to be included in President George Bush's State of the Nation speech, in which it was attributed to British intelligence.

The former foreign secretary Robin Cook has challenged Mr Blair to publish any evidence Britain has to back up the uranium story.

He told The Independent on Sunday: "The longer they delay coming up with it, the greater the suspicion will become that they don't really believe it themselves.

"There is one simple question the Government must answer when the Commons meets on Monday: why did their evidence not convince the CIA? If it was not good enough to be in the President's address, it was not good enough to go in the Prime Minister's dossier.

"A month ago I gave Tony Blair the opportunity to admit that in good faith he had got it wrong when he warned of the uranium deal.

Now that President Bush has made just that admission it looks as if Tony Blair would have been wise to get his in first."But Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, insisted yesterday the information did not come from British intelligence but from some other, unnamed country, and that it was accurate.

In a letter to the chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, Donald Anderson, Mr Straw said: "UK officials were confident that the dossier's statement was based on reliable intelligence which we had not shared with the US."This public disagreement with the CIA, coupled with anger in Britain over the fate of British suspects held at the US base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, forms an awkward background for Mr Blair's visit to Washington on Thursday, when he will meet President Bush.

Dr Hans Blix, the former head of the UN weapons inspection team in Iraq, has told the IoS that he believes the British government "over-interpreted" the available intelligence about Iraq's weapons.

Dr Blix was particularly scathing about the claim made in a British government dossier, released last September, that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons "deployable within 45 minutes".

"I think that was a fundamental mistake.

I don't know how they calculated this figure of 45 minutes.

That seems pretty far off the mark to me," Dr Blix said.

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell, said: "Day by day the case for an independent scrutiny of the lead-up to the war against Iraq becomes irresistible.

Only full disclosure can restore the reputation of this Government."The failure to find the weapons is damaging public trust in the Prime Minister and his relations with the Labour Party, with many backbench MPs who supported the decision to go to war in March now saying they might have changed their minds if they had known that the weapons might never be found.

The former international development secretary Clare Short, who resigned after the war, will urge the Prime Minister in an interview broadcast on GMTV today to resign before things get "nastier".

This brought a strong rebuke yesterday from the Home Secretary, David Blunkett.

He said: "Clare Short is being typically self-indulgent.

It is important to get behind the Prime Minister and focus on the things that matter to people, like decent opportunities and economic prosperity.

I do not understand why people would plot to try to change the most successful leader in the Labour Party's history."There was also support for the Prime Minister from his old ally, Bill Clinton.

At a London conference organised by Mr Blair's ally Peter Mandelson and attended by Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and hundreds of Labour Party supporters, the former US president urged the left to stop attacking the Prime Minister or risk the renaissance of conservatism.

"If we want to prevail we will have to learn how to make our case better," he said.

"We're living in a new world in which we will be swallowed whole if we do not, and all the evidence of the good we have done will be lost if we give in to inter-party squabbles on the left and lay down in the face of attacks from the right."
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To justify his war of aggression against Iraq he had to Lie and lie BIG.
What's with Congress??? The British Parliament is kicking Tony Blair out!!! He was only small potatoes, Bush's pet poodle!!
The press is giving him another pass!! The Uranium thing was only one of Bush's lies!!! How about the Bin Laden connection?? Drones that could strike the U.S. mainland!!! The hundreds of Missiles saddam had?? Chemical and Biological weapons??? What happened to Iraq's Nuclear program???
Lets change his residence from the White House to Leavenworth???
Peace
Tom

Liar! Liar! Speech on Fire!
http://www.theangryliberal.com/07-13-03.htm

On Tuesday, the White House finally came clean and admitted what everybody else already knew: George W. Bush lied about Iraq's alleged attempt to purchase uranium from the African nation of Niger in order to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. Here's what the White House statement said about Bush's inclusion of this lie in his 2003 State of the Union message:

Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23777-2003Jul7.html

The problem with this statement is that the White House did know then all that they know now. In February of 2002, almost a full year before the 2003 State of the Union message, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson went to Niger to investigate the alleged uranium purchase attempt. This was done at the request of the CIA, which was to report Wilson's findings directly to the office of the Vice President. After more than a week in Niger, Wilson concluded the following:

It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?storyID=333570

Wilson subsequently reported his findings to the CIA and the State Department. Despite this, Bush repeated the discredited charge in the 2003 State of the Union Address.

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html

nd when commenting on Bush's inclusion of this charge in his State of the Union message, Wilson said this:

If the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?storyID=333570

And when commenting on Bush's inclusion of this charge in his State of the Union message, Wilson said this:

If the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.

Remember, folks, this is a former ambassador speaking. Diplomats do not have the phrase "Goddamned Liar" in their vocabularies. But I do.

Now we hear that CIA Director, George Tenet, has decided to fall on the sword for Bush:

First, CIA approved the president's State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. And third, the president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound.

Good ol' George Tenet. At least somebody connected with this speech is man enough to take the blame. The basic problem here is the following: Tenet didn't write the speech. Tenet is taking the blame only for the approval process. So which one of Bush's people put this lie in the speech in the first place? And why isn't that guy/gal's head on a post in front of the White House as a warning to others who might want to use propaganda to start a war?

But the misstatements don't stop at a single one. The very next line in the State of the Union Message was as follows:

Our intelligence sources tell us that (Hussein) has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

Really, George? In a paper released by the Institute for Science and International Security three months before the State of the Union Message, this conclusion was drawn:

Based on the available information, the intercepted aluminum tubing could have been intended for use in a centrifuge. It is far harder to confirm the Administration's view that the tubes were specifically intended for use in a centrifuge. The earlier shipment does not appear to be specific to centrifuges, as initially claimed by the Administration. The more recent shipment is hard to assess with the available information, but even the detection of efforts to make an outer casing of a centrifuge provides limited insight into Iraq's gas centrifuge efforts.

By themselves, these attempted procurements are not evidence that Iraq is in possession of or close to possessing nuclear weapons. They also do not provide evidence that Iraq has an operating centrifuge plant or when such a plant could be operational.

Next, we have this line from the speech:

Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.

And in today's Washington Times, we learn that two former Bush administration intelligence officials and a United Nations terrorism committee agree that this is a lie. In the article, former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann had this to say:

There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation.

So, who's fault is it that the aluminum tubing and Al Qaeda lines appeared in the speech? Do we blame George Tenet again? Inserting these sorts of blatantly misleading statements into Bush's biggest speech of the year in order to deliberately trick the American public into supporting a war is lying on a scale that Bill Clinton never dreamed of. This is exactly the kind of tactic that Joseph Goebbels would have employed, had he been in charge of writing this speech.

Here's what I think happened: Republicans have learned in the last decade or so that lies are useful tools in the short term. The procedure works like this: Sling a lie into the news cycle or onto the Internet . Let it get repeated by Rush Limbaugh, the creeps at Faux News, and all of those weasels who sit in the cubicles around you at work, forwarding all of those anti-Clinton email messages. Then, by the time the truth does get out, America has moved on to some other story and a new email message. The Bush people, knowing that the Iraq story was very fluid and that America would soon be caught up in the thrill of watching the shooting on CNN, decided to toss this pile of manure onto the Capitol floor and hope that the war would provide sufficient distraction before it started to stink. Perhaps a quick and successful transition in Iraq from a brutal dictatorship to self-rule would be so compelling that nobody would care that the case for war was built on distortions, omissions, and outright lies.

Unfortunately for Bush, as Americans continued to die after he declared an end to hostilities (didn't word get out to the Iraqis?), the cost and scope of the American commitment began to spiral out of control, and not one single weapon of mass destruction turned up, that speech started to smell funny after all. People were beginning to wonder if there was really a need for tens of thousands of human beings to die in the cause of ousting Saddam Hussein. Knowing that the story wasn't going away, George W. Bush summoned all of his courage and pointed the finger at somebody else. It's the CIA's fault! We peppered our case for war with questionable and inaccurate intelligence and nobody at the CIA stopped us!

Does this scenario sound familiar? Bush always said he would run the government like a business. Unfortunately, the business he chose to emulate was Enron. Who can forget the top brass at that doomed corporation laying the blame for the shady bookkeeping at the feet of Enron's accounting firm, Arthur Anderson? After all, the accountants approved everything on the books, right? Never mind that the accountants serve at the pleasure of the corporations that employ them. Never mind that while the accountants are ultimately responsible for overseeing the books, refusing to play ball with unscrupulous corporations would likely cost them those accounts. Such is the relationship between George W. Bush and the CIA. It is also why Bush is continuing to express full support in the CIA and Tenet. Let's face it. If Bush really was mislead by the CIA in a matter that led us to war, he would be furious. His continued praise shows that the CIA was doing what the Bush administration expected of it by allowing this crap to remain in the speech.

One of the problems with starting an unnecessary war is that it may well interfere with a necessary war. Listen closely. That distant humming sound you hear emanates from a nuclear reprocessing plant in North Korea. Whereas the case for war with Iraq was a monumental sham, the case for some sort of intervention in North Korea is undisputed. North Korea admits to having an illegal nuclear weapons program. It publicly threatens the United States on a regular basis. It is considered an enormous threat by its neighbors. Intervention is an absolute necessity here. While the preferred tactic in this case is non-military, the threat of the use of force is a very useful tool. Thanks to George W. Bush's massive waste of military power and tax dollars in Iraq, the North Koreans know they have little to fear from the United States. So North Korea's nuclear weapons program continues while Bush hits the campaign trail and pretends that he has the threats to America contained. And hit the campaign trail, he