Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Unnatural Acts: No Place for Mercy in Bush's Babylon

Originally published in The Moscow Times, April 13, 2004.

After months of bad press, here at last was an act of genuine humanitarianism by U.S. troops in Iraq that could have been trumpeted to the skies: a unit of National Guard troops – part-time citizen-soldiers from Oregon – rescuing a group of prisoners from sadistic torture by the security forces of the newly "sovereign" Iraqi government. Yet the incident was buried by American brass, who repudiated their own soldiers – and backed the Iraqi torturers.

It happened on June 29 – the first full day of Iraqi "sovereignty" -- when a Guardsman on routine patrol in an observation tower near a Baghdad prison saw Iraqi guards beating bound and blindfolded prisoners with metal rods, The Oregonian reported last week. The soldier called in the atrocity, and men from his unit were ordered into the prison. There they found dozens of prisoners – including children – bloodied, bruised, shot, starving, crammed into concrete pens, lying in their own filth. Torture implements were scattered through the compound, said the paper: "rods, rubber hoses, electrical wires and bottles of chemicals."

The Guard troops – many of whom said they'd been shamed by the American atrocities at Abu Ghraib – disarmed the Iraqi security men and began giving first aid, water and food to the prisoners. They questioned the mysterious Iraqi civilian in charge – an "obese man" in swank mufti. He told them there'd been no torture at all – and anyway, these prisoners were just street scum: "thieves, users of marijuana and other types of bad people," according to the written account of the incident provided by eyewitness Captain Jarrell Southall and corroborated by the other soldiers.

There was no claim that the prisoners were insurgents or terrorists. Most of them had been rounded up in the poorest sections of Baghdad during broad, brutal "security sweeps" ordered by Iyad Allawi, the former terrorist chieftain and Baathist Party enforcer now serving as the unelected overseer of the Bush Regime's Iraqi plantation. (In this, the prisoners doubtless shared the fate of their brethren in Abu Ghraib, where the Red Cross says that 70-90 percent of the thousands of captives taken by the Americans were innocent of wrongdoing.)

Having stopped the torture, the Oregon soldiers asked for further orders: what should they do now? The request was relayed up far up the chain of command, and the answer came back from on high: Go away – and give the prisoners back to the men who were torturing them. Give back the weapons, give back the torture tools, stop helping the prisoners, mind your own business.

And that was it. The American troops, outraged but obedient, withdrew. The prisoners – the wounded men, the bleeding children – were bound up again and shoved back into the stinking pits. Why? It's simple. Because the Iraqi security goons were doing exactly what George W. Bush wanted them to do.

One year ago this month, we noted here that Bush had begun hiring agents of Saddam's murderous security service, the Mukhabarat – "an instrument renowned across the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation, rape and imprisonment," as the Washington Post described it then. Top Bush officials confirmed they were secretly putting dozens, perhaps hundreds of Saddam's most vicious killers and rapists on the U.S. payroll, the Post reported.

We must admit to shockingly childish naivet̩ in that earlier column. Although the Eye did voice some mild criticism of Bush's Mukhabarat embrace ("a monstrous copulation of rapacious conquerors with bloodthirsty scum," was the demure phrase), at the time we assumed Bush was simply looking for local proxies to do his dirty work, so American soldiers wouldn't have to. Now, of course, we all know that Bush and his top legal advisors had already spent months concocting devious "justifications" for a systematic torture regimen to be used by U.S. forces throughout a global gulag of hidey holes, secret prisons, holding pens and concentration camps. The Abu Ghraib crimes that so shamed the Oregon soldiers are just one small chunk of a giant dungheap that is very slowly but surely oozing into view Рand creeping up toward its Oval originators.

So Bush obviously didn't want the Mukhabarat as a proxy for the dirty work; he was glad – even eager – to have Americans taint themselves with such evil. Saddam's men were not substitutes but reinforcements, allies, comrades-in-arms in the noble crusade to put a more pliable strongman on Iraq's throne. Of course, the American military presence in Iraq – planned years ago by Bushist cadres – is wildly unpopular among the conquered. Thus for Bush's great work of looting and dominance to continue, the Iraqi people must be beaten down – with metal rods, if necessary.

And that's what it's all about: loot. Bush's own auditors confessed last month that at least $8.8 billion in Iraqi oil money controlled by the Americans is now unaccounted for, Colonel David Hackworth reports in DefenseWatch. This secret siphon – doubtless sloshing into offshore accounts around the world, as Hackworth notes – is on top of the tens of billions in tax dollars openly pumped to Bush's corporate cronies and campaign donors.

But that's just the short-end money. Getting a stranglehold on world oil supplies through the strategic Iraqi bottleneck – the ultimate object of the whole blood-soaked exercise – will be worth trillions as reserves begin running out in the coming decades. For Bush is not just thinking of himself, you see; no, he's fighting to secure the future for generations of corrupt elitists yet unborn.

And for that, he needs terrorists, torturers, ruthless goons – not a bunch of Oregon boy scouts gumming up the works with acts of mercy.

Chris Floyd

The Pentagon Archipelago: Trapped in a Net of State Terrorism

Original version published in The Moscow Times, March 19, 2004

This is the story of three innocent men, held in brutal captivity for more than two years; three innocent men, stripped, blinded, beaten, tortured, caged and silenced, all in the name of freedom and civilization; three innocent men, ground into the dust by an implacable power that defends its "enduring moral values" with the boot in the groin, the gun to the head – and the abetting of atrocity and murder.

It's the story of three Britons released this month from the U.S. concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – 26 months after they began their progress through the guts of the Pentagon Archipelago, the chain of American detention camps and "interrogation centers" that now encircle the earth. In a remarkable interview with David Rose of The Observer – a pro-war UK paper – Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal from the middle England town of Tipton told the tale of their ordeal in the Bush Regime's legal purgatory.

(But first – who says these guys are innocent? They're Muslims, ain't they? They were captured by God's own soldiers in the devil land of Afghanistan, weren't they? As President Bush's new campaign ads have reminded us, every Ayrab-looking swarthian out there is a card-carrying terrorist minion of Osama bin Kerry unless proven otherwise by the proper authorities. So who exactly has cleared these men of all charges? Well, let's see: the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, MI5, MI6, London's Metropolitan Police, and the governments of the United States and Great Britain. Will that do?)


The three men, lifelong friends in their early twenties, went to Pakistan in September 2001 for Iqbal's wedding. The following month, as Afghanistan's civil war flared under the shadow of the impending American attack, the friends joined Muslim relief efforts in war-ravaged Afghan villages. As avowed moderates, they were under constant threat from the Taliban – the virulent extremists who'd been armed, funded and sustained in power by U.S. ally Pakistan and the Bush Family's business partners in Saudi Arabia.


When American bombs started falling, the friends tried to flee the country. But they were trapped in Kunduz with thousands of refugees when the city fell to U.S.-backed warlord Rashid Dostum, a former Soviet collaborator turned jihadnik. Known for his macabre punishments – he liked to see his victims torn apart by tanks – Dostum fell upon the surrendered masses with his wonted fury. Thousands died on a death march through the mountains to Shebargan, where Dostum linked up with U.S. Special Forces. There, the captives, including the Tipton men, were packed by the hundreds into metal truck trailers, where they were left for days to suffocate and die. Fires were lit under some of the trailers, roasting those trapped inside. Of the 35,000 who left Kunduz, only 4,500 remained alive.

The survivors were crammed into Shebargan's open-air prison, where they continued to die in droves – as U.S. forces watched coolly from the perimeter. Finally, the three friends were sent to an American camp in Kandahar, where, hooded and chained, they were "processed": stripped, rectally probed, beaten, forced to kneel for hours, naked, their necks pressed to the floor by a guard's boot. Then came the first "interrogation": again kneeling, chained, with beatings and kicking followed by questioning – as an agent stood on the back of their legs, pressing a pistol to their heads. This routine went on for weeks. The only relief came when British spies appeared for a session: "Don't worry, they won't beat you while we're here," the jolly James Bonds would say. At night, there were head counts every hour to prevent the prisoners from sleeping, and periodic shakedowns of their tents, which were open at all times to the winter weather.

Months later, for reasons unexplained – perhaps a false confession beaten out of someone else down the line, throwing out names of "accomplices" to sate the voracious interrogators – the Tipton men were frog-marched onto a plane bound for Cuba, triple-chained and beaten along the way, beaten and kicked upon their arrival. Then began the long, dazed, limbo-life of Guantanamo. Endless interrogations: each man was grilled at least 200 times, sometimes for 12 hours at a stretch, always kneeling, chained to the floor. Constant punishments: for "backtalk," or seeking privacy for their bowel movements, or arranging their utensils incorrectly. And always, over and over, the farcical accusations that could have easily been disproved with five minutes of investigation.

But their captors weren't interested in the truth; they wanted "results." Finally, after two years of relentless physical and psychological pressure – including the ever-present threat of a military tribunal and execution without appeal – the friends cracked and signed false confessions to the most ludicrous charge of all: that they were top bin Laden lieutenants, pictured with him in a video from August 2000, despite the existence of documentary evidence – witnesses, pay stubs, school records – that proved they were in England at the time. But before their show trial could begin, British intelligence belatedly examined the charge and confirmed the alibis of all three men.

Now they're free, as the Regime flushes the most embarrassing cases out of the system before the Supreme Court rules on the "legality" of the Bush gulag this summer. The treatment of these three innocent men, chained and beaten for two years, is not just a crime, but also – like that other crime, the invasion of Iraq – an enormous waste of time and resources in the "war on terrorism." We saw the grim fruit of this waste in Madrid on March 11.

But of course, the Pentagon Archipelago wasn't designed to fight terrorism; it's designed to advance terrorism – state terrorism. Its purpose is to establish the principle of arbitrary rule – in the name of "military necessity" – above the rule of law, in America and around the world. It's part of an overarching system of terror – aggressive war, assassination, indefinite detention, torture – employed to achieve the Regime's openly-stated ideological goal: "full spectrum dominance" of global politics and resources, particularly energy resources. Al Qaeda has the same goal, and uses the same methods, albeit on a smaller, "asymmetrical" scale.

Now we are all at the mercy of these entwined terrorist factions – both led by fundamentalist sons of two financially linked elitist clans. We will see more Guantanamos, more Madrids, before this long, dark night is over.


Chris Floyd

Ground Zero: The Anatomy of an Honest Mistake

Original version published in The Moscow Times, Jan. 30, 2004.

A man in Lawrence, Kansas, walks into a day-care center. He has a gun in his pocket but nobody sees it. He goes up to the second floor, where the preschool kids are having their afternoon snack of cookies and juice.

He pulls out the gun and shoots a little boy in the head, leaving his face a gob of bone-flecked goo. Then he fires into the chest of the girl in the next chair; she dies still clutching the stuffed rabbit she brings with her every day. Another boy is hit while running for the door. The man is using special bullets, tipped with depleted uranium; the shot explodes the boy's shoulder in a spray of red mist and sends his gangly body hurtling down the concrete stairwell.

A day-care worker grabs the man, tries to wrestle him down. He turns, jams the gun barrel against her womb and fires. She dies, eviscerated, clinging to his shoulders. The other children have run away screaming, except for one little girl who's fallen in the slick of blood. She tries to scramble to her feet, slips again, can't find her footing, claws at the floor in a wild panic. The man fires into her back, obliterating her spine, the heavy bullet drilling through the polished wood below.

The room is filled with smoke and the sharp tang of freshly gutted meat. The man takes a desultory look around, shrugs his shoulders, then sits down on the snack table. When the police come and ask him why he did it, he answers forthrightly, without a shred of guilt or unease, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:

"Somebody said the guy who runs this place might attack me someday. I had questions that needed to be answered: did he have a gun or a knife – or nothing? We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary."

The cops roll their eyes – another nutball. "So," says an officer, humoring him, "did he have any weapons?"

The killer shakes his head. "Nah, don't look like it. But he could have had some. What's the difference? – Say, you fellas aren't going to lock me up, are you? It was an honest mistake. I just got bad advice, that's all. "

This fable is the precise moral equivalent of the Bush Regime's murderous misadventure in Iraq. Last week, the Regime's own duly-appointed, CIA-paid weapons hunter, David Kay, finally coughed up a dinosaur-sized bone and admitted, openly, publicly, what the sane world has long known: that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war – and in fact hadn't had any since George Bush Senior stopped supplying Saddam Hussein with the money and material to make them many years ago.

The existence of Iraqi WMD and the dire threat it posed to America and the world was the publicly stated cause for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The utter falsity of this claim has now been established beyond rational dispute. Likewise, it is impossible for a rational person to believe that, in the absence of any real weapons, a substantial body of credible "evidence" for this phantom stockpile could have been amassed by the Anglo-American intelligence services. You can't have real evidence of something that isn't there.

Thus we come to this unavoidable conclusion: the Bush Regime launched a war of aggression on the basis of evidence that had to be, by its very nature, insubstantial, insufficient, false. That's the only kind of evidence they could have had. What does this mean? It means they have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of children – blown them to pieces, shot them, crushed them, terrorized them, rendered them into hunks of rotting meat – in an act of moral insanity no different from that of a nutball in Lawrence, Kansas, shooting up a day-care center to "protect" himself from imaginary threats.

And they've reacted to the consequences of their crime with the same kind of moral nullity. Colin Powell – the "moderate" Bushist – simply shrugged his shoulders at Kay's revelations. "We had questions that needed to be answered," he said, while flying to Moscow to tell the Russians they must resolve all their problems peacefully, within the strict rule of law. "What was it [Saddam had]?" mused Powell. "One hundred tons, 500 tons or zero tons" of WMD? "Was it so many liters of anthrax, 10 times that amount, or nothing?"

Nothing, as it turns out. All those children – each one of them an individual human being, each one a unique and irreplaceable vessel of consciousness, a single coalescence of the blind, churning forces of nature into a starpoint of awareness, brief but incandescent, worthy beyond measure, and every bit as valuable as any mother's tow-headed darling in Lawrence, Kansas or Crawford, Texas – killed, eliminated, snuffed out…for nothing. For zero.

Yet Powell dismissed these pointless killings, echoing George W. Bush's Solomonic declaration on the question of existing weapons versus hypothetical ones as a basis of war: "What's the difference?" Powell said the decision to kill the children was "based on the best intelligence we had at the time" – intelligence which, as we've seen, could not possibly have been substantial or convincing. But who cares? We heard rumors. "We had questions." We killed children. We found nothing. We're not guilty. It was bad advice, an honest mistake.

That's all they have left as a public defense: the ravings of a man who killed for no reason, who sits in the ghoulish mire he's created and calls himself good.

Chris Floyd

Brothers in Arms: The Osamic Vision of George W. Bush

The original version of this was published September 27, 2002, in the Moscow Times.

Last week, we explored the extremist texts underlying the Bush Regime's maniacal foreign policy: the PNAC plans for global dominance. On the very day that column was published, George W. Bush made these dreams the official "National Security Strategy" of the United States.

In many ways, this bellicose document represents the final twinning of Bush and his shadow, Osama bin Laden. There has always been a remarkable symmetry between these two sons of privilege: pampered, high-living wastrels in their youths, each coasting on his father's name and money, then turning to a grim fundamentalism with simplistic creeds that overpowered their humanity.

Both believe you must strike your perceived enemies, without provocation, before they strike you. Both accept that innocent people will die in these "pre-emptive attacks," but consider it an acceptable price to pay for combating "evil." Both utterly reject the way of peace – unless it's the peace of the conqueror, the bold warrior who serves God with the sword: "The only path to safety is the path of action." (Which man said that? Hint: he doesn't live in a cave.) Finally, both believe there is only one acceptable vision of reality, and both are willing – no, eager – to impose that vision by force.

Now, this dark fraternity finds "legitimate" expression in the new security strategy. Bush begins with a grandiose flourish, proclaiming that, in all of Creation, there is but "a single sustainable model for national success." That model, needless to say, turns out to be the rarefied world of the American elite at the turn of the 21st century, where the wealthy must never be encumbered in any way by restrictions of law, regulation, popular will, morality or common sense. Air, earth, water and sky must be laid bare to exploitation by the powerful, whose investments are guaranteed by the military might of the state.

Bush not only recommends this model to others, he insists they follow it, or else they'll be ranged with those who "reject basic human values and hate the United States" – an act of apostasy that makes them targets for "the path of action." In any case, no country, friend or foe, will be allowed to pursue even the "hope of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States," says Bush. How will they be dissuaded from such a foolish course? Simple – by "the unparalleled strength of the United States armed forces and their forward presence" throughout the globe.

Naturally, this bristling military occupation of the earth will not be carried out for "unilateral advantage," but only to advance "human freedom." What is freedom? Here is Bush's definition, with some slight exegesis.

Freedom, Bush says, means people can "say what they think" – unless of course they criticize the Regime and its allies too harshly or demonstrate against the president or speak with a strange accent in a Georgia restaurant, in which case they will be denounced as terrorists, fired from their jobs, arrested for stepping out of officially circumscribed "free speech zones," or chased down the Florida highways by Jeb Bush's stormtroopers, all of which happened recently in the heartland of the "single sustainable model."

Freedom, Bush says, means people can "choose who will govern them" – unless of course they choose the wrong person, as the American people did in 2000, in which case a better leader will be appointed for them.

Freedom, Bush says, means people can "worship as they please" – unless of course, they worship a god who calls for the wrong kind of holy war, or a god who enjoys the sacrament of ganja, or a god who denounces the rich, demanding that we give everything to the poor and live in common, or a god who promotes polygamy or blesses homosexual marriage or does anything that offends the sensibilities or threatens the privileges of the Single Sustainables.

Freedom, Bush says, means people can "educate their children, male and female" – unless, of course, you want to educate them about sex or evolution or the history of all the crimes that governments have committed in their name.

Freedom, Bush says, means people can "own property" – if they can afford it, that is, or unless some rich wastrel wants to, say, build a baseball stadium on it, or drill for oil under it, or put a military base on it, in which case it will be taken away.

Freedom, Bush says, means people can "enjoy the benefits of their labor" – unless, of course, they have unionized in order to procure these benefits, in which case they can be fired or beaten or killed, as happens every day in countries employing the "single sustainable model."

"These values of freedom," Bush says, "are right and true for every person, in every society" – except, of course, when they are not, and always exempting those countries (such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Colombia, etc. etc.) that repress and/or murder their own people but don't interfere unduly with the profits of the Bush family and the other Sustainables.

Tellingly, Bush's list of basic freedoms contains no right of privacy, no inviolability of person, no right to information about government actions, no right of redress for wrongs inflicted by the powerful, nor a host of other freedoms once considered essential to the liberty of an independent citizen.

No, what we have here is simply a candy-coated model for a militarized world, a fanatical ideology enforced by the ever-looming threat of punishment and death.

What we have here is bin Laden writ large.

Chris Floyd

Team Spirit: Bush's B-Siders Replay Their Greatest Hits

Originally published in the Moscow Times on Feb. 4, 2004.

The confession by the Bush Administration's chief arms investigator that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war has sent a thunderbolt of puzzlement through the pundits and politicians of the Anglo-American elite. "How could the intelligence reports have been so wrong?" they cry, wringing their hands in consternation. "Independent" commissions filled with Establishment worthies are now in the offing, as the architects of the war – and their media sycophants – pledge to resolve this disturbing mystery.

But of course there is no "mystery." Anyone with a passing acquaintance of recent history knows exactly how, and why, the intelligence data concerning Iraq's nonexistent WMD came to be used as a justification for military aggression. Indeed, this history is so open, so transparent and so widely available – in news reports, unclassified government documents, think-tank publications, etc. – that a cynic might suspect that these government-appointed "investigations" are actually designed to obscure the already evident truth.

It began in 1976, when CIA Director George Bush established a new intelligence analysis unit called "Team B." Championed by top Ford White House officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush unit was packed with hardcore ideologues – including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle – bent on "proving" a predetermined conclusion: that regular CIA assessments of the Soviet Union were "too soft," ignoring the "imminent threat" of Soviet aggression and the Kremlin's ever-increasing political and economic might.

At every turn, the B-teamers cooked and distorted intelligence data to fit their agenda. Scare stories were regularly leaked to credulous journalists to whip up public fear; legislators were plied with "top-secret" briefings to win Congressional support for massive increases in military spending. During the Reagan-Bush years, the B-Teamers and their acolytes spread throughout the corridors of power, where they launched covert operations and proxy wars around the world, always citing "credible evidence" of "imminent threats" – such as Ronald Reagan's famous warning that tiny Nicaragua, then besieged by a U.S.-backed terrorist army, could invade the sacred American heartland of Texas "in a matter of hours."

As it turned out, even the "softest" CIA assessments vastly underestimated the weakness and instability of the Soviet regime. Team B's wildly inflated perversions of reality were exposed as perhaps the most incompetent, ignorant – and costly – intelligence failures in U.S. history. For in addition to the lives and money wasted fighting phantom threats "to America's very survival," the now thoroughly B-Teamed CIA armed and funded a horde of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, schooling them in "asymmetric warfare" and terrorist operations. No doubt the B-Teamer's ideologically blinded "intelligence" told them that the Western-hating jihadists would never turn this training against their American paymasters.

The end of the Soviet Union found Team B still entrenched in the White House. In 1992, Bush, now president, directed Cheney, now Pentagon chief, and his deputy, Wolfowitz, to draw up a plan for America's strategic future. Despite the collapse of the Communist enemy, the plan called for – what else? – massive increases in military spending and a more aggressive, unilateral "pre-emptive" posture against perceived threats to American interests, with "vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf Oil" listed as the first priority, the New York Times reports. The objective, openly stated, was American dominance over global economic and political development in all spheres.

The Cheney-Wolfowitz plan was then refined by the B-Teamers during the Clinton interregnum in such groups as the Project for the New American Century, whose activities have been well-detailed in these pages. When George W. Bush took office, he restored Team B to glory and enshrined PNAC's plan as the official national security strategy of the United States, adding a new imperative to establish "the single sustainable model of national success" – Bush-Enron crony capitalism – in every land. After Sept. 11 Rumsfeld created a new "Team B" at the Pentagon: the Office of Special Plans, packed with hard-line ideologues bent on "proving" a predetermined conclusion: that regular CIA assessments of Iraq were "too soft," ignoring the "imminent threat" of Saddam's aggression and his vast arsenal of WMD, The New Yorker reports.

At every turn, the OSP cooked and distorted intelligence data to fit their agenda. Scare stories were regularly leaked to credulous journalists to whip up public fear; legislators were plied with "top-secret" briefings to win Congressional support for the invasion. Rumor, hearsay, and forgeries were "stovepiped" directly to the White House, bypassing professional analysts. Anything that contradicted the Bush Regime's ideological delusions was ruthlessly pruned away. Anything that flattered their desire for war – no matter how specious, how false – was eagerly embraced.

So there's no mystery in the current situation. It's how "Team Bush" has always operated. They pervert intelligence to suit their needs – and their greeds. When they're proved wrong – at a horrendous cost in blood and money – they never admit it, never apologize. They simply break out the whitewash, blame someone else – usually the very intelligence services they've suborned – and lumber on in their brutal quest for dominance: ignorant, incompetent and untouchable to the end.

Annotations for "Inside Joke"

Annotations for "Inside Joke," June 17, 2005:

Arms Control and Proliferation:
Profile of Robert G. Joseph
International Relations Center, June 2005
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/joseph/joseph.php

The Nuclear Posture Review: Reading Between the Lines
Common Dreams, Jan. 17, 2002
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0117-10.htm

Bolton's Broken World
Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2005
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks13jun13,0,536183.story

The U.S. Removes the Nuclear Brakes
Haaretz, May 26, 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=580533

Gonzales and Torture:
Gonzales: A Record of Injustice
American Progress, November 2004
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=246536

A Secret Re-Writing of Military Law
New York Times, Oct. 24, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/10/24/MNG339FC401.DTL

Apologia Pro Tormento
Discourse.net, June 9, 2004
http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/apologia_pro_tormento_analyzing_the_first_56_pages_of_the_walker_working_group_report_aka_the_torture_memo.html

Loyal to a Fault?
Slate.com, Nov. 11, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109495/

Memo Offered Justification for Torture
Washington Post, June 8, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23373-2004Jun7?language=printer

Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner RightsNew York Times, May 21, 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0521-06.htm

2001 Memo Reveals Push for Broader Presidential Powers
Newsweek, Dec. 18, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6732484/site/newsweek/

Gonzales Excludes CIA from Rules on Prisoners
New York Times, Jan. 20, 2005
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7765.htm

The Most Dangerous Lawyer in America
The Village Voice, Jan. 26, 2005
http://villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000693.php

Two Amigos And Their Gulag Archipelago
TomPaine.com, May 12, 2005
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050512/two_amigos_and_their_gulag_archipelago.php

Some Held at Guantanamo Are Minors, Lawyers Say
New York Times, June 13, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/politics/13gitmo.html?ei=5090&en=9dd1b075e5c81c00&ex=1276315200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

War and Lies:
The Downing Street Memo and Related Documents
AfterDowningStreet.com
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/

Illegally Financing the WMD Hoax
Media Monitors, May 27, 2005
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/15207/

The Secret's Out – Now What?
Antiwar.com, June 15, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=6308

Ministers Were Told of Need for Gulf War 'Excuse'
The Sunday Times (London), June 12, 1005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650822,00.html

The Smoking Bullet in the Smoking Gun
Common Dreams, June 2, 2005
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0602-25.htm

[US-UK] Bombing Raids Tried to Goad Saddam Into War
The Sunday Times, May 29, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1632566,00.html

The Lies That Led to War
Salon.com, May 19, 2005
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8891.htm

Bush Wanted to Invade Iraq if Elected in 2000, Says Family Biographer
Guerilla News, Oct. 27, 2004
http://russbaker.com/Guerrilla%20News%20Network%20-%20Bush.htm

British Military Chief Reveals New Legal Fears Over Iraq War
The Observer, May 1, 2005
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5183693-102279,00.html

MI6 Chief Told PM: Americans 'Fixed' Case for War
The Sunday Times, March 20, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1533385,00.html

Ground Zero: The Anatomy of an Honest Mistake
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 30, 2004
http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/2005/02/ground-zero-anatomy-of-honest-mistake.html

The Culture of Life:
CIA Kills in Pakistani Shadows
International Herald Tribune, May 16, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/16/news/pakistan.php

CIA Takes on Major Military Role: 'We're Killing People!
Boston Globe, Jan. 20, 2002
http://www.rense.com/general19/kill.htm

Bush's Death Squads
Ratical.org, Jan. 31, 2002
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/linkscopy/Jaccuse.html

Bush Has Widened Authority of CIA to Kill TerroristsNew York Times, Dec. 15, 2002
http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorintelligence/bushwidened.html

Special Ops Get OK to Initiate Its Own Missions,
Washington Times, Jan. 8, 2003
http://dynamic.washtimes.com/twt-print.cfm?ArticleID=20030108-12935202

Our Designated KillersVillage Voice, Feb. 14, 2003
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0308/hentoff.php

A U.S. License to Kill
Village Voice, Feb. 21, 2003
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0309/hentoff.php

U.S. General From Abu Ghraib Scandal Promoted
Stars and Stripes, March 15, 2005
http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=27754

Fighting Terrorism:
Former Bush Official Questions Government 9/11 Story
The Washington Times, June 13, 2005
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050613-102755-6408r.htm

Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Empire Burlesque, Aug. 27, 2004
http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/2005/03/cry-havoc-bushs-own-personal-janjaweed.html

US Wants to Build Network of Friendly Militias to Fight Terrorism
AFP, August 15, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040811/pl_afp/us_attacks_militias_040811091028

Pentagon Plan for Global Anti-Terror Army
Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 11, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/smh23.html

Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism
Empire Burlesque, Nov. 1, 2002
http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/04/into-dark-pentagon-plan-to-foment.html

Darkness Visible: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism is Now in Operation
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 25, 2005
http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/04/darkness-visible-pentagon-plan-to.html

Compassionate Conservatism:
Retirement's Unravelling Safety Net
Washington Post, June 14, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051400515_pf.html

Millions Are Dying Because of American Policies
Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2005
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-sachs12jun12,0,1301992,print.story

The G8 Rescue Plan: A Truckload of Nonsense
The Guardian, June 14, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5214948-103390,00.html

Body Blow: Bush's Worldwide War Against Women
Empire Burlesque, Oct. 3, 2003
http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/03/body-blow-bushs-worldwide-war-on-women.html

Tax Breaks for Rich Murderers
London Review of Books, June 2, 2005
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n11/runc01_.html

Virginity or Death!
CBSnews.com, May 19, 2005
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/19/opinion/printable696613.shtml

The Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind
New York Times, June 5, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/05/news/class.php

Promoting Democracy:

US Opposed Calls at Nato to Probe Uzbek Killings
Washington Post, June 13, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/13/AR2005061301550_pf.html

Catering to Kazakhstan's Kleptocracy
Antiwar.com, June 8, 2005
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6256

U.S. Helps Pakistan Torture U.S. Citizens
Human Rights Watch, May 24, 2005
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/printer_21134.shtml

Police in Azerbaijan Beat Protestors Demanding Liberty Before Pipeline Opening
Washington Post, May 22, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/21/AR2005052100542_pf.html

Reports Cite US and Egypt on Torture
Reuters, May 10, 2005
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200505/s1364930.htm

Bush Family History:
Heir to the Holocaust: Prescott Bush, $1.5 Million and Auschwitz
Clamor Magazine, May/June 2002
http://www.clamormagazine.org/features/issue14.3_feature.html

Bush and the NazisNewsweek Poland, May 29, 2003
http://newsweek.redakcja.pl/archiwum/artykul.asp?Watek=7159&WatekStr=1&Artykul=4903

Bush-Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951: Federal Documents
New Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 7, 2003
http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi_2