BBC

El Panorama pregunta porqué el ejército británico en Iraq utilizó las técnicas de la interrogación que fueron prohibidas sobre hace 30 años.

Panorama: ¿En de quién órdenes? BBC uno 8.30pm el lunes 25 de febrero de 2008

En 1972 que las técnicas - el hooding, las posiciones de la tensión, ruido constante, privación del sueño y el ser hambriento del alimento y del agua - fueron prohibidas por el gobierno del brezo que lo dijo nunca serían utilizadas otra vez. Su reintroducción en 2003, es oficial u oficioso, habría podido tener consecuencias serias. Ahora los abogados están lanzando las demandas para la remuneración a nombre de los iraquíes que alegan el maltratamiento. El ministerio de la defensa (MOD) ahora gobierna específicamente el estado que las cinco técnicas deben nunca ser utilizadas. Sin embargo, inmediatamente después que la invasión de Iraq en 2003 soldados británicos atestiguó a presos iraquíes encapuchados y hechos para estar parados por horas sin el alimento o para dormir.

El Procurador General de la República es responsable de fijar las reglas bajo las cuales el ejército británico funciona. Señor Goldsmith llevó a cabo esta posición durante la guerra de Iraq y la ocupación que resultaba.

Cuando le preguntamos cómo era que la interdicción había sido evadida, él dijo Panorama:

“No hay cuestión de cualquier persona en mi oficina, aún menos yo, aconsejándome que fuera legítima interrogar mientras que hooding o con la privación del sueño o cualquiera de esas técnicas. Parada completa.”

Cuando estaba preguntado porqué sucedía a pesar de esto, él dijo:

“Pienso el ministerio de la defensa es probablemente el departamento responsable para entender con el ejército qué ocurrió realmente, para aprender las lecciones de él para cerciorarse de que nunca sucede otra vez.”

En respuesta a las alegaciones del abuso del preso en Iraq que fue más allá de las cinco técnicas e incluyó golpeos y en el caso del trabajador Baha Mousa, muerte, el jefe de entonces del hotel del personal de la defensa, el general sir Michael Jackson comisionó un informe.

Los resultados de general de brigada Roberto Aitken fueron publicados el mes pasado y dichos que el abuso no era extenso.

Panorama dicho Jackson del general sir Michael:

“Roberto Aitken hace el punto en su informe que él necesitaría otra mirada en porqué esa declaración por el gobierno del brezo aparece haber entrado un calabozo… No sé la respuesta a ésa.”

Jackson continuó:

“There was no evidence whatsoever on any endemic behaviour of that nature.”

Allegations

The programme goes on to weigh the evidence from the Battle of Danny Boy, that is at the centre of the latest legal challenge.

Iraqi prisoners have made serious allegations of abuse against the British Army that the MoD is now re- investigating despite previous inquiries that found nobody to be at fault.

Iraqi prisoners captured by the army on 14 May 2004 and taken back to Camp Abu Naji claim other prisoners taken alive with them off the battlefield were killed that night by the British in Camp Abu Naji.

Iraqi medical staff who received the bodies returned by the army the next day say some of the bodies show signs of torture.

They claim that there is evidence that people died later in Camp Abu Naji and not in the battlefield.

Battlefield injuries

The MoD deny the allegations.

They say the injuries are consistent with modern battlefield injuries and that the claims of deaths at the camp may have arisen from an unusual decision to remove bodies from the battlefield and take them to the base. A full statement from the MoD is available above.

Panorama has spent over a year talking to battlefield survivors, medical staff, and Iraqi former prisoners in Iraq, Turkey and Jordan.

The programme critically examines claims made by lawyers who are representing the Iraqis in their action against the British Government and who held a press conference last Friday.

Panorama has seen no proof that prisoners died at the hands of their captors and concludes that the case being brought by solicitors Phil Shiner and Martyn Day represents the most extreme interpretation of a troubling but confusing incident. They are asking for the bodies to be disinterred and evidence to be handed to Scotland Yard.

General Sir Michael Jackson, speaking generally and not about this incident specifically, says that the army’s best defence is the law:

“I would look… what are the facts? If they make an allegation the allegation gets investigated, people don’t always say truthfully as they might such things as I’m afraid some of the court cases revealed but I would say that any allegation of ill treatment should be investigated and the due process of law must take place.”

Whatever the outcome of any potential court case it maybe that bringing back the five techniques - banned as inhuman in 1972 - would appear to have made the army’s position more difficult.

Panorama: On Whose Orders? BBC One 8.30pm on Monday 25 February.

Up to 10,000 Turkish troops launch an incursion which threatens to destabilise the country’s only peaceful region

By Patrick Cockburn

A new crisis has exploded in Iraq after Turkish troops, supported by attack planes and Cobra helicopters, yesterday launched a major ground offensive into Iraqi Kurdistan.

The invading Turkish soldiers are in pursuit of Kurdish guerrillas hiding in the mountains. They are seeking to destroy the camps of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) along the border between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. “Thousands of troops have crossed the border and thousands more are waiting at the border to join them if necessary,” said a Turkish military source.

“There are severe clashes,” said Ahmed Danees, the head of foreign relations for the PKK. “Two Turkish soldiers have been killed and eight wounded. There are no PKK casualties.” Turkish television said that the number of Turkish troops involved was between 3,000 and 10,000, and they had moved 16 miles inside Iraq.

But the escalating Turkish attacks are destabilising the Kurdish region of Iraq which is the one peaceful part of the country and has visibly benefited from the US invasion.

The Iraqi Kurds are America’s closest allies in Iraq and the only Iraqi community to support fully the US occupation. The president of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, said recently he felt let down by the failure of the Iraqi government in Baghdad to stop Turkish bombing raids on Iraqi territory.

The incursion is embarrassing for the US, which tried to avert it, because the American military provides intelligence to the Turkish armed forces about the location of the camps of Turkish Kurd fighters. Immediately before the operation began, the Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, called President George Bush to warn him.

The US and the Iraqi government are eager to play down the extent of the invasion. Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a US spokesman for Iraq, said: “We understand [it] is an operation of limited duration to specifically target PKK terrorists in that region.” The Iraqi Foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, claimed that only a few hundred Turkish troops were in Iraq.

But since last year Turkey has succeeded, by making limited incursions into Kurdistan, in establishing a de facto right to intervene militarily in Kurdistan whenever it feels like it.

Many Iraqi Kurdish leaders are convinced that a hidden aim of the Turkish attack is to undermine the Kurdish region, which enjoys autonomous rights close to statehood. Ankara has always seen the semi-independence of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Kurds’ claim to the oil city of Kirkuk, as providing a dangerous example for Kurds in Turkey who are also demanding autonomy.

Many Turkish companies carrying out construction contracts in the region have already left. And businesses that remain are frightened that Ankara will close Iraqi Kurdistan’s lifeline over the Harbour Bridge into Turkey.

During the 1990s the Turkish army carried out repeated attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan with the tacit permission of Saddam Hussein, but this is the first significant offensive since the US invasion of 2003. “A land operation is a whole new level,” said the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza, adding that the incursion was “not the greatest news”.

The Turkish army is unlikely to do much damage to the PKK, which has some 2,500 fighters hidden in a mountainous area that has few roads, with snow drifts making tracks impassable.

The Turkish ground offensive was preceded by bombing. “We were certain yesterday after this bombing that a military operation would take place and we got ready for it,” said Mr Danees, adding that bombing and artillery had destroyed three bridges on the Iraq-Turkish border as well as a PKK cemetery.

Another reason why Turkey has launched its offensive now has as much to do with Turkish internal politics as it does with any threat posed by the PKK. The PKK launched a military struggle on behalf of the Kurdish minority in eastern Turkey in 1984 which lasted until the PKK’s leader Abdullah Ocalan was seized in Kenya in 1999 and later put on trial in Turkey. The PKK has been losing support ever since among the Turkish Kurds, but at the end of last year it escalated guerrilla attacks, killing some 40 Turkish soldiers.

Limited though the PKK’s military activity has been, the Turkish army has used it to bolster its waning political strength. For its part, the mildly Islamic government of Mr Erdogan is frightened of being outflanked by jingoistic nationalists supporting the military. Mr Erdogan has pointed out that previous Turkish army incursions into Kurdistan in the 1990s all failed to dislodge the PKK.

The area which the Turkish army has entered in Iraqi Kurdistan is mostly desolate, with broken terrain in which bands of guerrillas can take refuge. The PKK says it has left its former bases and broken up into small units. The main bases of the PKK are along Iraq’s border with Iran, notably in the Kandil mountains, to the south of where the Turkish troops entered. At this time of year the villagers, many of them herders and shepherds, leave their houses and live in the towns in the plain below the mountains until the snow melts.

The New Statesman 

In July 2003, in the week following the death of David Kelly, a reader contacted the New Statesman and suggested that the media were missing the obvious. The Commons foreign affairs committee had just cleared the government of “sexing up” the September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - a claim, first made by Andrew Gilligan on the BBC’s Today programme, for which Dr Kelly may or may not have been the source.

Our caller pointed out that although the Commons committee had said it was satisfied the “first” draft dossier, produced on 10 September for a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), was the unspun work of intelligence, it had missed the true significance of a meeting the day before, chaired by Alastair Campbell.

Our caller was Chris Ames, whose name will for ever be etched on the memory of all those in government, particularly in the Foreign Office, who have resisted making public what has become known as the Williams draft (after John Williams, the Foreign Office press officer who wrote it). Using the Freedom of Information Act, Ames has doggedly pursued the evidence that he believed would show that the September dossier was the work not of intelligence experts, but of spin doctors whose intention was to “sex up” the known intelligence.

From denying that the document existed, to seeking to have it withheld because publication threatened government confidentiality, to claiming that the Williams draft was an uncommissioned activity by a bored press officer (who just happened to come up with conclusions similar to those of the JIC), the government has ducked and dived and done its utmost to obstruct Ames in his pursuit of the truth.

Now, almost five years after he first contacted us, Ames’s efforts have borne fruit. On 18 February, just two days before the deadline set by the Information Tribunal, the Foreign Office released the Williams draft.

Interpretations of its contents will differ, but on many counts the document speaks for itself. From it we learn that the draft was, without question, intended as part of a process of producing a dossier that would persuade the British people and parliament of the case for war. And, importantly, it shows us how much of the final dossier was the work of a spin doctor. Let’s not forget that the Blair government lied repeatedly about this. The draft also reveals the extent to which Williams reworded and rewrote - and occasionally invented - intelligence assessments that were later presented to the public as the work of intelligence experts and “judgements of the JIC”.

We have also learned how raw intelligence was pumped up to make a strongly worded “executive summary”. Thus, a draft report from the JIC which claimed that Iraq had “sought to develop” mobile facilities to produce a biological agent becomes, in Williams’s draft, “has developed transportable laboratories”. The strengthened Williams version fed into the 10 September dossier (still being claimed as the unspun work of intelligence) and the final document. Williams does not attempt to disguise the fact that his task is to produce a document which will persuade. Judge for yourself whether the following is driven by spin or intelligence:

The bombs that fell on Halabja that Friday morning were equipped with (what chemical?). (what does the chemical do to the body - how does it kill? Sorry to be grisly, but this will have real impact on real people, not journalists who take it as read).

As our political editor, Martin Bright, argues on page 10, the release of the Williams draft leaves no room for doubt that the Blair government set out to deceive us. Cynics may shrug. Governments lie. But the consequences of this deception have been catastrophic and tragic. The roll-call of victims runs into tens of thousands and includes that early casualty in July 2003, the government scientist whose suicide started an angry debate over whether the case for war had been “sexed up”.

Thanks to Chris Ames, we at last have an unequivocal answer. And it shames all those involved in the process.

The saints stop marching in

You can’t get to heaven,” went the old song, “in a limousine,/ ‘Cause the Lord don’t sell no gasoline.” Perhaps not, but under the last pope some felt that transport to the upper echelons of heaven was a little too swift. So many saints were created by John Paul II that it did seem as though he was running some form of celestial limo service, or “saint factory”, as others put it: 482 people were canonised and 1,338 beatified (the first stage to sainthood) by the pontiff - more than all his predecessors put together since the current procedures were laid down in 1588.

So news that Benedict XVI is to tighten the rules is to be welcomed by those who take such matters seriously. It may also be a relief, however, that the new rigour is not to be applied retrospectively. It is just possible that not all the “miracles” performed by or attributed to some saints would withstand modern scientific scrutiny.

What, say, are we to make of the Belgian shrine to the 11th-century St Godeliva? Drinking from her well is said to have a powerful, yet curiously specific, effect on sore throats. Or the 15th-century St Francis of Paola? Fame of his miracles spread in his own lifetime, yet they were occasionally of a rather prosaic nature. One involved setting a pot of broad beans boiling: handy if you’d run out of kindling, no doubt, but surely a power more appropriate to a domestic goddess than a holy man. What next - St Nigella? Not under the new rules, thank goodness.

Up to 20 Iraqi civilians may have been executed by British troops in southern Iraq, it has been claimed.

Lawyers published a dossier of evidence from men taken captive after a gun battle near the southern Iraqi town of Majat-al-Kabir in May 2004, which also suggested prisoners were tortured and mutilated by UK military.

The allegations were first reported within weeks of the incident, known as the Battle of Danny Boy after a checkpoint where it took place, but lawyers for five Iraqis have issued detailed witness statements, photographs of corpses and death certificates of the men who died.

The claims - which the Ministry of Defence (MoD) strongly denies - are among the most serious yet levelled against British soldiers who served in Iraq.

Solicitor Phil Shiner said of the dossier: “We would be very surprised if it did not shock the nation.”

However, a spokesman for the BBC’s Panorama programme, which has spent a year examining the claims, said the evidence did not prove Iraqis had died at the hands of British captors, but that prisoners may have been “mistreated”.

Lawyers Mr Shiner and Martyn Day suggested that prisoners captured after the three-hour gun battle may have been taken to a British base at Abu Naji and killed.

Detailed witness statements from the five men - Hussein Jabbari Ali, Hussain Fadhil Abass, Atiyah Sayid Abdelreza, Madhi Jassim Abdullah and Ahmad Jabber Ahmood - described what they heard while in detention, when they were cuffed and forced to wear blacked-out goggles.

The statements described how they heard other men screaming, moaning in pain and choking and also the sound of gunfire.

The lawyers are bringing a damages claim in the UK courts, and say the five witnesses are labourers who have lived all their lives in Majar and had “absolutely nothing” to do with the insurgent Mehdi army, which engaged British troops at the Battle of Danny Boy.

The Irish Times

Four million Iraqis are struggling to feed themselves, and 40 per cent of the country’s 27 million people have no safe water, the UN said today.

Iraq has annual economic growth of around 7 per cent, according to UN estimates, and a national budget of €33 billion, buoyed by oil exports of 1.6 million barrels per day.

But insurgency and sectarian attacks have displaced more than two million people and left nearly twice as many hungry.

“Four million Iraqis cannot guarantee they’re going to have food on their table tomorrow,” the United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq, David Shearer, said as he unveiled a €182 million appeal to donor governments for 2008.

The United Nations says the number of displaced people has roughly doubled since 2006 to nearly 2.5 million. High unemployment has left many others unable to feed themselves.

The Iraqi government said it would for the first time give €27.5 million from its own coffers to the aid appeal.

Matthew Weaver and agencies | guardian.co.uk

The planned reduction in the number of US troops in Iraq is to be put on hold, the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, indicated today.

Under a plan set out by General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, Washington had planned to withdraw five of the 20 brigades in the country by July.

More recently, however, Petraeus called for “period of evaluation” to assess the impact of such a move – a proposal that has now been backed by Gates.

“A brief period of consolidation and evaluation probably does make sense,” the defence secretary said, adding that the length of the evaluation was “one of the things we are still thinking about”.

His caution contrasted with remarks he made to troops in Baghdad yesterday.

“What a difference you made – al-Qaida routed, insurgents co-opted, levels of violence of all kinds dramatically reduced,” he told them.

“The situation in Iraq continues to remain fragile, but the Iraqi people now have an opportunity to forge a better, more secure, more prosperous future.”

Last year, the US president, George Bush, ordered five additional army brigades to Iraq as part of a “surge” in troop numbers.

One of those brigades left in December. The other four are due to withdraw by July, leaving 15 brigades – around 130,000 troops — the same number as pre surge levels.

Yesterday, Gates said Iraq’s political leaders faced hard choices about how to stabilise the country, but praised them for showing recent signs of progress towards reconciliation.

“They seem to have become energised over the last few weeks,” he added.

He said he would ask Iraqi politicians to assess the prospects for other measures including a law that would spell out power-sharing between the provinces and the national government.

Yesterday, insurgent attacks killed at least 50 people across northern Iraq.

Today, Reuters reported that two car bombs had exploded in southern Baghdad, killing at least two people and wounding five others.

MATT TAIBBI | Rolling Stone

Elected to end the war, Democrats have surrendered to Bush on Iraq and betrayed the peace movement for their own political ends

Quietly, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been inspiring Democrats everywhere with their rolling bitchfest, congressional superduo Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome political collapses since Neville Chamberlain. At long last, the Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the Iraq War, just one year after being swept into power with a firm mandate to end it.

Solidifying his reputation as one of the biggest pussies in U.S. political history, Reid explained his decision to refocus his party’s energies on topics other than ending the war by saying he just couldn’t fit Iraq into his busy schedule. “We have the presidential election,” Reid said recently. “Our time is really squeezed.”

There was much public shedding of tears among the Democratic leadership, as Reid, Pelosi and other congressional heavyweights expressed deep sadness that their valiant charge up the hill of change had been thwarted by circumstances beyond their control — that, as much as they would love to continue trying to end the catastrophic Iraq deal, they would now have to wait until, oh, 2009 to try again. “We’ll have a new president,” said Pelosi. “And I do think at that time we’ll take a fresh look at it.”

Pelosi seemed especially broken up about having to surrender on Iraq, sounding like an NFL coach in a postgame presser, trying with a straight face to explain why he punted on first-and-goal. “We just didn’t have any plays we liked down there,” said the coach of the 0-15 Dems. “Sometimes you just have to play the field-position game….”

In reality, though, Pelosi and the Democrats were actually engaged in some serious point-shaving. Working behind the scenes, the Democrats have systematically taken over the anti-war movement, packing the nation’s leading group with party consultants more interested in attacking the GOP than ending the war. “Our focus is on the Republicans,” one Democratic apparatchik in charge of the anti-war coalition declared. “How can we juice up attacks on them?”

The story of how the Democrats finally betrayed the voters who handed them both houses of Congress a year ago is a depressing preview of what’s to come if they win the White House. And if we don’t pay attention to this sorry tale now, while there’s still time to change our minds about whom to nominate, we might be stuck with this same bunch of spineless creeps for four more years. With no one but ourselves to blame.

The controversy over the Democratic “strategy” to end the war basically comes down to whom you believe. According to the Reid-Pelosi version of history, the Democrats tried hard to force President Bush’s hand by repeatedly attempting to tie funding for the war to a scheduled withdrawal. Last spring they tried to get him to eat a timeline and failed to get the votes to override a presidential veto. Then they retreated and gave Bush his money, with the aim of trying again after the summer to convince a sufficient number of Republicans to cross the aisle in support of a timeline.

But in September, Gen. David Petraeus reported that Bush’s “surge” in Iraq was working, giving Republicans who might otherwise have flipped sufficient cover to continue supporting the war. The Democrats had no choice, the legend goes, but to wait until 2009, in the hopes that things would be different under a Democratic president.

Democrats insist that the reason they can’t cut off the money for the war, despite their majority in both houses, is purely political. “George Bush would be on TV every five minutes saying that the Democrats betrayed the troops,” says Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Then he glumly adds another reason. “Also, it just wasn’t going to happen.”

Why it “just wasn’t going to happen” is the controversy. In and around the halls of Congress, the notion that the Democrats made a sincere effort to end the war meets with, at best, derisive laughter. Though few congressional aides would think of saying so on the record, in private many dismiss their party’s lame anti-war effort as an absurd dog-and-pony show, a calculated attempt to score political points without ever being serious about bringing the troops home.

“Yeah, the amount of expletives that flew in our office alone was unbelievable,” says an aide to one staunchly anti-war House member. “It was all about the public show. Reid and Pelosi would say they were taking this tough stand against Bush, but if you actually looked at what they were sending to a vote, it was like Swiss cheese. Full of holes.”

In the House, some seventy Democrats joined the Out of Iraq caucus and repeatedly butted heads with Reid and Pelosi, arguing passionately for tougher measures to end the war. The fight left some caucus members bitter about the party’s failure. Rep. Barbara Lee of California was one of the first to submit an amendment to cut off funding unless it was tied to an immediate withdrawal. “I couldn’t even get it through the Rules Committee in the spring,” Lee says.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a fellow caucus member, says Democrats should have refused from the beginning to approve any funding that wasn’t tied to a withdrawal. “If we’d been bold the minute we got control of the House — and that’s why we got the majority, because the people of this country wanted us out of Iraq — if we’d been bold, even if we lost the votes, we would have gained our voice.”

An honest attempt to end the war, say Democrats like Woolsey and Lee, would have involved forcing Bush to execute his veto and allowing the Republicans to filibuster all they wanted. Force a showdown, in other words, and use any means necessary to get the bloodshed ended.

“Can you imagine Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert taking no for an answer the way Reid and Pelosi did on Iraq?” asks the House aide in the expletive-filled office. “They’d find a way to get the votes. They’d get it done somehow.”

But any suggestion that the Democrats had an obligation to fight this good fight infuriates the bund of hedging careerists in charge of the party. In fact, nothing sums up the current Democratic leadership better than its vitriolic criticisms of those recalcitrant party members who insist on interpreting their 2006 mandate as a command to actually end the war. Rep. David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee and a key Pelosi-Reid ally, lambasted anti-war Democrats who “didn’t want to get specks on those white robes of theirs.” Obey even berated a soldier’s mother who begged him to cut off funds for the war, accusing her and her friends of “smoking something illegal.”

Rather than use the vast power they had to end the war, Democrats devoted their energy to making sure that “anti-war activism” became synonymous with “electing Democrats.” Capitalizing on America’s desire to end the war, they hijacked the anti-war movement itself, filling the ranks of peace groups with loyal party hacks. Anti-war organizations essentially became a political tool for the Democrats — one operated from inside the Beltway and devoted primarily to targeting Republicans.

This supposedly grass-roots “anti-war coalition” met regularly on K Street, the very capital of top-down Beltway politics. At the forefront of the groups are Thomas Matzzie and Brad Woodhouse of Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq, the leader of the anti-war lobby. Along with other K Street crusaders, the two have received iconic treatment from The Washington Post and The New York Times, both of which depicted the anti-war warriors as young idealist-progressives in shirtsleeves, riding a mirthful spirit into political combat — changing the world is fun!

But what exactly are these young idealists campaigning for? At its most recent meeting, the group eerily echoed the Reid-Pelosi “squeezed for time” mantra: Retreat from any attempt to end the war and focus on electing Democrats. “There was a lot of agreement that we can draw distinctions between anti-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans,” a spokeswoman for Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq announced.

What the Post and the Times failed to note is that much of the anti-war group’s leadership hails from a consulting firm called Hildebrand Tewes — whose partners, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, served as staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). In addition, these anti-war leaders continue to consult for many of the same U.S. senators whom they need to pressure in order to end the war. This is the kind of conflict of interest that would normally be an embarrassment in the activist community.

Worst of all is the case of Woodhouse, who came to Hildebrand Tewes after years of working as the chief mouthpiece for the DSCC, where he campaigned actively to re-elect Democratic senators who supported the Iraq War in the first place. Anyone bothering to look — and clearly the Post and the Times did not before penning their ardent bios of Woodhouse — would have found the youthful idealist bragging to newspapers before the Iraq invasion about the pro-war credentials of North Carolina candidate Erskine Bowles. “No one has been stronger in this race in supporting President Bush in the War on Terror and his efforts to effect a regime change in Iraq,” boasted the future “anti-war” activist Woodhouse.

With guys like this in charge of the anti-war movement, much of what has passed for peace activism in the past year was little more than a thinly veiled scheme to use popular discontent over the war to unseat vulnerable Republicans up for re-election in 2008. David Sirota, a former congressional staffer whose new book, The Uprising, excoriates the Democrats for their failure to end the war, expresses disgust at the strategy of targeting only Republicans. “The whole idea is based on this insane fiction that there is no such thing as a pro-war Democrat,” he says. “Their strategy allows Democrats to take credit for being against the war without doing anything to stop it. It’s crazy.”

Justin Raimondo, the uncompromising editorial director of Antiwar.com, regrets contributing twenty dollars to Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq. “Not only did they use it to target Republicans,” he says, “they went after the ones who were on the fence about Iraq.” The most notorious case involved Lincoln Chafee, a moderate from Rhode Island who lost his Senate seat in 2006. Since then, Chafee has taken shots at Democrats like Reid, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, all of whom campaigned against him despite having voted for the war themselves.

“Look, I understand partisan politics,” says Chafee, who now concedes that voters were correct to punish him for his war vote. “I just find it amusing that those who helped get us into this mess now say we need to change the Senate — because we’re in a mess.”

The really tragic thing about the Democratic surrender on Iraq is that it’s now all but guaranteed that the war will be off the table during the presidential campaign. Once again — it happened in 2002, 2004 and 2006 — the Democrats have essentially decided to rely on the voters to give them credit for being anti-war, despite the fact that, for all the noise they’ve made to the contrary, in the end they’ve done nothing but vote for war and cough up every dime they’ve been asked to give, every step of the way.

Even beyond the war, the Democrats have repeatedly gone limp-dick every time the Bush administration so much as raises its voice. Most recently, twelve Democrats crossed the aisle to grant immunity to phone companies who participated in Bush’s notorious wiretapping program. Before that, Democrats caved in and confirmed Mike Mukasey as attorney general after he kept his middle finger extended and refused to condemn waterboarding as torture. Democrats fattened by Wall Street also got cold feet about upsetting the country’s gazillionaires, refusing to close a tax loophole that rewarded hedge-fund managers with a tax rate less than half that paid by ordinary citizens.

But the war is where they showed their real mettle. Before the 2006 elections, Democrats told us we could expect more specifics on their war plans after Election Day. Nearly two years have passed since then, and now they are once again telling us to wait until after an election to see real action to stop the war. In the meantime, of course, we’re to remember that they’re the good guys, the Republicans are the real enemy, and, well, go Hillary! Semper fi! Yay, team!

How much of this bullshit are we going to take? How long are we supposed to give the Reids and Pelosis and Hillarys of the world credit for wanting, deep down in their moldy hearts, to do the right thing?

Look, fuck your hearts, OK? Just get it done. Because if you don’t, sooner or later this con is going to run dry. It may not be in ‘08, but it’ll be soon. Even Americans can’t be fooled forever.

By Ahmed Ali

The violence around the continuing U.S. military operations in this city has robbed children of their childhood.

Only two provincial schools and one private kindergarten school are functioning in this city of 280,000, located 50 km north of Baghdad. Most children know neither school nor play.

Or even the food they want. “We parents can hardly meet the basic requirements of food,” Mahdi Hassan, a father of four, told IPS.

“Nobody even mentions chocolate or pastries or anything else because Iraqis know they are not important,” Baquba resident Wissam Jafar told IPS. “Children eat what the other members of the family eat. Toys and games are offered only at festivals and on special occasions.”

Baquba city, capital of Diyala province, has been at the centre of major U.S. military operations to fight al-Qaeda like forces. People have suffered from the violence from both sides.

By now Iraq has seen a generation of children pass with just survival a major issue. During the period of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, more than half a million children died, according to the United Nations.

In 1996, former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl on the CBS ླྀ Minutes’ show if she thought the price of half a million dead children was worth it. She replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

One in eight children in Iraq died during that period of malnutrition, disease, and lack of medicine.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq during March 2003 brought hope that things might change, but that change has only been for the worse.

“During the nineties, they were malnourished but they could find a place to play in the streets,” Khalid Ali, a local economist, told IPS. “Nowadays, they cannot even get out of their home because of the violence. And a large number of children have been killed through the violence.”

There is one park in Baquba with some basic swings for children; another was recently renovated by an Iraqi NGO. Both get overcrowded on festivals and holidays. Parents feel obliged to take their children out on these days, despite the risk.

On other days, no more than two or three families visit the parks.

Sajid Asim who earns 175 dollars a month from his job in the water department says the money is barely enough for food for the family. “Surely, there won’t be any extra money to bring the children special food or clothes, or games, or even taking them to picnics.” For those without work — and there are many — the situation is worse.

Schoolteachers and managers spoke to IPS of the problems facing children who do manage to go to school.

“Teaching has been hit by the political situation in Iraq,” said Salma Majid, manager of a local primary school. “Children can often not get to the school, and we may have more than three days off in a week. The whole academic year may be delayed because the violence has been so extreme this year.”

Schools can provide children a chance to play but sometimes it is not safe,” she said. “A number of school buildings have been hit by mortar.”

According to an Oxfam report on Iraq released Jul. 30, “92 percent of children had learning impediments that are largely attributable to the current climate of fear. Schools are regularly closed as teachers and pupils are too fearful to attend. Over 800,000 children may now be out of school, according to a recent estimate by Save the Children UK — up from 600,000 in 2004.”

The Oxfam report also said that child malnutrition rates in Iraq have risen from 19 percent before the invasion in 2003, to 28 percent. “More than 11 percent of newborn babies were born underweight in 2006, compared with 4 percent in 2003.”

Scarcity has brought all sorts of difficulties for children. “I put a sandwich in the bag for my son to take to school,” said a mother who declined to give her name. “When he got back home, he said he could not have it because his classmates do not bring their own sandwiches; their parents do not give them sandwiches.”

A local primary school teacher, Ali Abbas, said it is common now for students to arrive at school without breakfast.

“One day, one of the children suddenly passed out,” Abbas said. “We immediately took her to the administration room. When she regained consciousness, I asked her why she fainted. She told me that she did not have breakfast because there was no breakfast at home.”

(*Ahmed, our correspondent in Iraq’s Diyala province, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

Xinhua

The U.S. forces allegedly killed three people and wounded a fourth from one family in a town in Salahudin province, north of Baghdad, on Tuesday, a source from the U.S. and Iraqi liaison office said.

    The incident took place at dawn in the town of al-Dowr, 30 km north of the provincial capital of Tikrit, the source from the provincial Joint Coordination Center (JCC) told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

    He said that an interpreter working for the U.S. troops informed the branch of the JCC in the town of the killing and asked them to collect two bodies in a house in one of the town’s neighborhoods.

    An Iraqi police force headed to the scene and found three bodies–those of a man and his wife in their 40s as well as their18-year-old son. All of the three were killed with gunshots in the head, he said.

    The police also found many spent cartridges of weapons used by U.S. troops at the scene, he added.

    Residents at the neighborhood told the police force that they heard gunshots at dawn and saw U.S. military vehicles leaving the neighborhood later, the source said.

    He also said that a 16-year-old daughter of the family made a call with a mobile phone for help as she was injured and taken by the U.S. troops to a medical facility in a U.S. base in the province.

    The three bodies were transported to the main hospital of Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, he said.

    The U.S. military did not confirm the incident yet.

    On Monday, the U.S. military conceded in a statement that its troops had killed accidentally nine Iraqis and wounded three others, including two children, in a military operation against al-Qaida, near the town of Iskandariyah, about 50 km south of Baghdad.

AFP

When Saad Tawfiq watched Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on February 5 2003 he shed bitter tears as he realised he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

As one of Saddam Hussein’s most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 — and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was the then US secretary of state — Tawfiq’s television was able to received international news through a link pirated from Saddam’s spies next door — waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

“When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost,” Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Now in his fifties, a round-faced man with a small moustache and lively eyes behind delicate spectacles, Tawfiq described how the CIA set up an elaborate operation to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists and then ignored the results.

From the end of 2002 the US spy agency had sources inside Iraq’s weapons plants telling them clearly what the whole world now knows — that Saddam had ended efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Nevertheless in March 2003 the United States and Britain invaded Iraq to disarm Saddam of this non-existent arsenal and in the process triggered the effective collapse of the Iraqi state, plunging it into chaos and bringing thousands of deaths.

Saad Tawfiq’s role in this drama began in June 2002 with calls from his sister Sawsan, a doctor who lives with her husband Ali in Moreland Hills, a pleasant suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, in the mid-western United States.

“Our Abu Mahmuds are putting pressure on me,” she told him, using the nickname they shared for Saad’s secret police minder as a makeshift code for the US intelligent agent who had contacted her, “Chris.”

“Chris was very nice, very polite,” Sawsan, a small energetic woman, told AFP. Chris wanted Sawsan’s help to discover the status of Saddam’s weapons programme, and in particular his efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

She joined one of the most successful attempts by the CIA to penetrate Saddam’s Iraq, a programme dreamt up by agency veteran Charlie Allen to target Iraqi weapons technicians through their relatives.

The scientists were well known to the UN weapons inspectors who had been keeping tabs on Iraq’s arms plants since 1991, and the Americans were able to draw up a list of 30 who had relatives in the United States.

The American relatives were to be sent to Iraq and ask about weapons.

“I was nervous, and we even discussed with Ali what to do if something happened to me,” Sawsan said. “It was a very emotional visit back home, because I had not been there for years and I had not seen my brother for years.”

Sawsan was right to be nervous. Saddam’s notorious secret police dealt with spies mercilessly. She was taking a risk with her life and that of her brother, but was determined to help rid her original homeland of a tyrant.

The CIA provided her with a detailed questionnaire about Iraq’s weapons programmes. Fearing she would forget it, Sawsan disguised it in sketches and crosswords in a kind of homemade code.

Tawfiq picked his sister up from Baghdad airport on September 9, 2002. Her homecoming was emotional, but the pair had work to do. They met secretly at night in the family garden and took walks together in the city.

The weapons engineer was astonished by the CIA’s questions, which he thought showed the depths of the agency’s ignorance about events in his country.

“I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: ‘They know you have a programme,’ and I was saying: ‘There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing’,” Tawfiq said.

“She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: ‘No, no, no…’ I kept swearing on the grave of my mother.”

According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programmes in 1995, after his brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.

“I was Saddam’s scientist,” Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. “In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid something you were killed!”

Sawsan dutifully gathered this information and returned to the United States to pass it on to her handlers. But the CIA was unimpressed.

“Saad told me there was nothing left,” she told AFP. “That everything had been either destroyed or dismantled by the UN and the regime has abandoned its nuclear programme. And he begged me to explain all that back in the States.

“I went back and I reported what he had told me in full detail. I even went personally to Washington. In the beginning they listened to me but then they told me that my brother was lying,” she said.

Of course Tawfiq and other colleagues approached by the CIA were telling the truth, as the United States would discover after it had launched a bloody war that has cost tens of thousands of lives.

Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the time of the operation to question Tawfiq, said weapons scientists had not been ignored, but had been contradicted by other sources.

“To the extent that the debriefings did not have more of an effect in Washington, it probably was not because the effort came too late but instead because there were other indications that seemed to contradict what the individuals were saying, and that suggested Iraqi unconventional weapons programmes were continuing,” he told AFP.

But as Saddam’s scientist lamented five years later: “You don’t have to destroy a country for that.”

Research conducted by a leading British polling group shows that more than one million Iraqis have died as a result of war in their country.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household because of the conflict, rather than natural causes, Reuters reported.

The survey has been conducted in August and September 2007 with a 1.7 percent margin of error.

The research covered 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Those not covered included two of Iraq’s more volatile regions — Karbala and Anbar — and the northern province of Arbil, where local authorities refused them a permit to work.

The director of the ORB, Allan Hyde, said it had no objective other than to record as accurately as possible the number of deaths among the Iraqi population as a result of the invasion and ensuing conflict.

MGH/RA

Bush and his top officials waged a campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose “Duelfer Report” established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq’s nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:

• On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney’s assertions went well beyond his agency’s assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, “Our reaction was, ‘Where is he getting this stuff from?’ “
• In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: “The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.” A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn’t been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn’t requested it.
• In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: “Sure.” In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of “compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda.” What’s more, an earlier DIA assessment said that “the nature of the regime’s relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear.”
• On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories.” But as journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons. The team’s final report, completed the following month, concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons.
• On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement “probably is a hoax.”
• On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: “What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.” As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named “Curveball,” whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had “decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government].”

The false statements dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion.

(click for larger version)

In addition to their patently false pronouncements, Bush and these seven top officials also made hundreds of other statements in the two years after 9/11 in which they implied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or links to Al Qaeda. Other administration higher-ups, joined by Pentagon officials and Republican leaders in Congress, also routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.

The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, “independent” validation of the Bush administration’s false statements about Iraq.

The “ground truth” of the Iraq war itself eventually forced the president to backpedal, albeit grudgingly. In a 2004 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, for example, Bush acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And on December 18, 2005, with his approval ratings on the decline, Bush told the nation in a Sunday-night address from the Oval Office: “It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.”

Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual “ground truth” regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who’s Who of domestic agencies.

On the other hand, a growing number of critics, including a parade of former government officials, have publicly — and in some cases vociferously — accused the president and his inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence. In the end, these critics say, it was the calculated drumbeat of false information and public pronouncements that ultimately misled the American people and this nation’s allies on their way to war.

Bush and the top officials of his administration have so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. There has been no congressional investigation, for example, into what exactly was going on inside the Bush White House in that period. Congressional oversight has focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government’s pre-war intelligence — not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability of its highest officials. And, of course, only four of the officials — Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz — have testified before Congress about Iraq.

Short of such review, this project provides a heretofore unavailable framework for examining how the U.S. war in Iraq came to pass. Clearly, it calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were the unwitting victims of bad intelligence.

Above all, the 935 false statements painstakingly presented here finally help to answer two all-too-familiar questions as they apply to Bush and his top advisers: What did they know, and when did they know it?

Time magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengel discussed a new Pentagon report that says “1 in 5 American servicemen and women who have been in Iraq are coming back with brain injuries.” Stengel called it the “real toll” of the war, adding that “the legacy of that will last all of our lifetimes and it’s incalculable.”

In total, according to Stengel, “more than 250,000 people” are affected by “mild traumatic brain injuries” sustained in Iraq.

John Tirman

The warmongers who got us into Iraq are blaming everyone but themselves for the humanitarian disaster they created.

Now I know what Hillary Clinton meant, first hand, by that “vast right-wing conspiracy.” When the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Sunday Times in London are going after you — along with about 100 right-wing bloggers — rest assured you’ve hit a nerve.

Or is it just Soros Derangement Syndrome at work?

More than two years ago, I commissioned a household survey of Iraq to learn how many people had died in the war. This topic had been virtually ignored by the news media and the U.S. government. It was important to know for at least three reasons. The first was to try to understand the nature of the violence there, which was steadily growing and creating a humanitarian crisis, possibly a regional conflagration. Second, it might tell us something about how and when to exit. Third, we needed to know for the sake of our national soul. What had we wrought?

So I contacted the people who had done a previous, largely ignored survey-top public health professionals at Johns Hopkins University. They had published a survey in October 2004 that showed 98,000 had died in the first 18 months of the war, which was greeted with disbelief and charges of politicizing science, and quickly dismissed.

I said: ‘do a bigger survey to improve the accuracy, and I will make sure it gets the proper attention in the news media.’ They did do a bigger survey, and I managed a public education campaign that permitted the results to be considered more broadly, results that estimated total deaths at 600,000 by violence after 40 months of war. The survey was published in The Lancet, the British medical journal. And get attention it did, roundly disbelieved and scorned by war supporters, but spurring a brief but intense debate about the human cost of the war.

Dozens of statisticians and other professionals scoured the study and its data to see if the methods and implementation were proper; a special committee at the World Health Organization was convened to review it, and the Lancet had also subjected it to rigorous peer review. The survey held up to this scrutiny, with quibbles and some lingering “should have done this” and “might have done that.” But virtually every competent person agreed that the study provided the best estimate we have.

Then, earlier this month, the National Journal, a Capitol Hill “insider” weekly, ran a cover story titled “Data Bomb” by Neil Munro and Carl Cannon. In a note by Munro published by the National Review blog, he asserts:

George Soros funded the survey. The U.S. authors played no role in data-collection, and did not apply standard anti-fraud measures. The chief Iraqi data-collector had earlier produced medical articles to help Saddam’s anti-sanctions campaign in the 1990s, and said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey. Some of the field surveyors were employed by Moqtada Sadr’s Ministry of Health. The Iraqis’ numbers contain evidence of fakery, and the Lancet did not check for fakery.

It’s a neat summary of their allegations, which include dozens of unfounded charges, promiscuous innuendo, misquoting of the principals, and misunderstanding statistics, and relies on two disgruntled critics. It was a hatchet job, pure and simple. Not a sentence of Munro’s summary is truthful, and that goes for much of the NJ article, too, which I have demolished elsewhere (PDF). The principal author, Gilbert Burnham, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues have taken time from their clinics in Afghanistan and Jordan and Africa to answer the charges on the John Hopkins website, too ( with a letter here, and a FAQ here).

But lies have a way of proliferating on the Internet, and so it was with this set of schoolyard bully brickbats. What seemed most to get under the skin of the right-wing media was a small grant for public education funded by the Open Society Institute, a foundation created by George Soros.

The charges of fraud that NJ clumsily made but never came close to proving were of course a tonic to the war supporters who were shamed by the estimate of 600,000 fatalities. There is nothing as devastating to the increasingly discredited case for war as the specter of the U.S. invasion having caused, directly and indirectly, more deaths than were attributed to the bloody reign of Saddam Hussein.

But it was news that “Soros” was a donor, and the wingnuts went berserk. The line that Munro and Cannon took was that “Soros” was somehow behind the survey from the start, which was timed to affect the 2006 elections. It was not only fraud, they contend, but the perversion of science for political ends backed by the disgruntled, Bush-hating billionaire.

It’s classic right-wing defamation, and of course none of it is true. Munro and Cannon were painstakingly walked through the chronology and donors, but deliberately ignored it to fashion their paranoid fairy tale, and the Wall Street Journal et al lapped it up.

We commissioned the survey on October 25, 2005, hoping to get it done as quickly as it could be done professionally, and perhaps have the results out in the spring. Why wait? But Iraq quickly became too violent to permit teams of questioners go out to 1,000 randomly chosen households. So it was not until late spring that they did begin the door-to-door work-still very perilous-and completed the survey in early July. It took another two months to enter the data, have biostatisticians at Johns Hopkins analyze it, and write up the article. The Lancet then took weeks to peer review. It was released when ready. There was no political agenda; there didn’t need to be. The results spoke for themselves.

The Open Society Institute came late to the process, announcing to me that a grant had been made for public education on May 4, 2006. That is six and a half months after the survey process began. We had already paid for the survey out of internal funds. Less than half of the cash needs of the survey, the analysis, and the public education effort was paid for by OSI. (If the real cost of the effort were totaled-to include salaries of Burnham, myself, and many others who were not compensated directly-then the OSI contribution would have offset about 10 percent of the cost.) I doubt very much whether George Soros himself was ever aware of the grant. OSI is a very large, humanitarian foundation, and their $46,000 grant to MIT is small by their standards.

And, needless to say, OSI and “Soros” had no influence over the initiation, conduct, or findings of the survey. Neither Burnham and his colleagues nor the Lancet editors knew OSI was one of the donors. The contract was with MIT.

I carefully told this to Munro on the telephone, and Burnham’s colleague Les Roberts emailed the same information to Cannon last autumn. Munro had asked, among other hostile questions, whether any Muslims or Arabs were supporting the survey, a racism reflected in his remark about Allah above and a charge in the NJ piece that the survey teams lacked American oversight and were thereby suspect. But he was emotionally fixated on Soros, and asked about his role repeatedly. When I tried to offer corroborating evidence for the survey, he screamed at me that none of that mattered. I could see where this was going.

Of course, Munro himself has been a rabid supporter of the war from the start. In the tradition of former NJ editor Michael Kelly, who called opponents of the war traitors, Munro agitated for the “destruction of Iraq” as early as November 2001. He had elsewhere insisted that the peace in Northern Ireland was the result of the British Army’s iron fist. His sentiments were on display through the hatchet job on us, not least in alleging that The Lancet article was a spur to jihadists.

So the headlines-”Soros Underwrites Osama’s Talking Points,” and “$oros Iraq Death Claim was a Sham” are typical. The Soros Derangement Syndrome derives, I suspect, from his special status as a traitor to his class, as the right used to refer to FDR. Someone so intelligent, articulate, actively compassionate, and rich cannot be tolerated.

In an odd twist, a new mortality survey-approvingly mentioned by the NJ piece-appeared earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, it found 151,000 deaths by violence as of June 2006, about the same period as the Lancet article. Newspaper coverage duly noted that their estimate was only one-quarter that of the Lancet. But a little digging would have revealed much more: the total deaths attributable to the war, non-violent as well as violent, was about 400,000 for that period, now 19 months ago. If the same trends continued, that total today would be more than 600,000.

The deaths-by-violence in that latter survey remained the same from year-to-year, however, which is not plausible-all observers agree that violent deaths were rising sharply in 2005 and 2006. The discrepancy is found in how the survey was conducted: interviewers identified themselves as employees of the Ministry of Health, then under the control of Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr. Those interviewed, therefore, would be wary of saying a brother or son or husband had been killed by violence, fearing retribution. And, indeed, there are non-violent categories in the survey that suggest just such equivocation: “Unintentional injuries” would equal about 40 percent of the death-by-violence toll, for example. Road accidents were ten times their pre-war totals-if someone is run off a highway by a U.S. convoy, is that a “non-violent” death?

The researchers, to their credit, acknowledge that their estimate is likely too low due to several factors. They did not go into dangerous neighborhoods, which made up 11 percent of the sample, and could not accurately estimate the death toll in those, which would of course have been high. Still, the survey is revealing on the non-violent mortality, too: deaths by kidney failure, cancer, diabetes, and others rose by several times, signaling the near-collapse of the health care system.

The MoH survey is the fifth trying to measure mortality during the war, and there is significant congruence among all. (The Lancet estimate is not actually the highest; that belongs to the private British polling firm, Opinion Research Business, which found that as of August 2007, 1.2 million Iraqis were dead due to the war.) But all the surveys point to one thing: a colossal amount of killing and dying has been going on, far more than numbers used in most discussions of the issue in the fleeting instances when concern for Iraqis appears.

And that, of course, should be the real issue here, not whether George Soros is interested in the issue. The NJ calumny and the many gleeful references to it are a sign that the pro-war legions are really at wit’s end. The catastrophe they created and supported must be blamed on others-the conveyors of bad news, the quisling liberals, and the Iraqis themselves.

But the dead in Iraq cannot be silenced as long as we have courageous researchers who will go into the warzone to gather data and tell us the truth. That’s what five surveys-against perilous of odds-have done, and the findings should haunt us every day.

Sen. John McCain may have stunned some Americans with his projection that the U.S. occupation of Iraq could last 100 years or more. But the political pressures in Washington sometimes make ending a war more difficult than starting one.

In this guest essay, the Independent Institute’s Robert Higgs discusses what it might take to bring the troops home:

By Robert Higgs

On Oct. 19, 2001, in speaking about the new government controls and heightened surveillance already being clamped on the American people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney said that the new war “may never end. At least not in our lifetime. . . .  The way I think of it is, it’s a new normalcy.”

We should have taken his grim forecast more seriously.

The U.S. attack on and occupation of Iraq, represented by the Bush administration as a critical element in the larger Global War on Terror, began nearly five years ago, and it shows no signs of ending soon.

Indeed, if John McCain is elected president and (with help from his successors) carries out the not-so-veiled threat to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for a hundred years, then we can confidently expect that the war will not end in our lifetime. Such a prospect is so seemingly preposterous, however, that one’s mind does not readily assimilate it.

It is difficult enough to absorb the reality that the United States has now been at war against the Iraqis for almost five years. An engagement sold to the public as a “cakewalk” and represented just six weeks after it began as a “mission accomplished” has now (as I write) continued for 1,760 days.

Compare this duration with the time the United States was formally engaged in World War I (589 days) or World War II (1,365 days). In the 1940s, the U.S. forces (with important allies, to be sure) defeated two major economic and military powers in a globe-circling war in less time than the U.S. forces have been engaged in Iraq.

And after all this time, where does the U.S. venture stand? Evidently it is no closer to the “victory” the president has repeatedly said he seeks than it was immediately after the occupation began.

The 901 U.S. troops who lost their lives in Iraq during 2007 were the largest number in any calendar year since the war began.

As 2008 begins, we read reports of a U.S. air strike on the outskirts of Baghdad in which B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters dropped 40,000 pounds of explosives, an attack described by Major Alayne Conway as “one of the largest airstrikes since the onset of the war.”

The attack came only a day after six U.S. soldiers participating in a major ground offensive were reported killed in the “biggest one-day loss in Iraq since May.” These events do not epitomize minor “mopping up” activities. The war obviously has no end in sight.

Notwithstanding these inauspicious developments and Sen. McCain’s bizarre pronouncement, we might well think in a more focused way about what will ultimately bring the war to an end, because it almost certainly will end someday.

Given its nature, it cannot be ended as each of the world wars was ended, by the formal capitulation of an  enemy state. Loosely organized insurgents and guerrillas do not stop fighting in that fashion.

In view of the particulars on the ground in Iraq, it would seem that no complete cessation of armed hostilities can occur there until the United States withdraws its military forces. So the question becomes:  What will induce a future U.S. president or a future U.S. Congress to act decisively to bring the troops home?

In the abstract, the answer is easy:  U.S. authorities will extract their occupation force when they perceive that doing so is in their interest. Note well that I said, “in their interest.”

Whether a U.S. withdrawal serves my interest, or yours, or that of 95 percent of the American people is not necessarily important, because government leaders do not act to serve other people’s interests.

Anyone who has advanced beyond infancy in his understanding of political affairs knows that despite all the dutiful claptrap that political leaders and their functionaries spout in public, they invariably pursue their own interests. Those interests may be material, political, institutional, or ideological, but in any event they are their own interests, not yours or mine.

It follows directly that up to this point the continued prosecution of the war has served the leaders’ interests. They may say they are trying to end the war. They may have secured their election or reelection, as many of the Democrats now serving in Congress have, by promising to do whatever they can to end the war. Yet the truth is that they’ve sold the public a bill of goods.

When the leaders have considered all the personal consequences they expect to follow from acting to end the war, they have concluded that, all things being considered, doing so does not serve their interest, and therefore they have refrained from doing so.

After all, it’s not as though the U.S. war effort has a mind of its own. Whenever the president wants to remove the troops, he can do so; he has the power. Whenever the members of the majority in Congress want to remove the troops, by stopping the funding to support them there, they can do so; they have the power.

The posture of powerlessness that our leaders often affect―my goodness, what can I do? my hands are tied―is a disingenuous pose. They can stop the U.S. engagement in the war whenever they want to do so. Thus far, they simply have not wanted to do so.

What might cause them to reach a new conclusion about what serves their personal interest? Several developments might turn the trick. Nearly all of them work by heightening the public’s anger with their leaders’ decisions.

Historically, the decisive development in similar instances has been the cumulation of public costs, especially the costs in life and limb. In both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the public’s disfavor of the engagement closely tracked the cumulation of casualties.

As political scientist John Mueller showed in his book War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, “every time American casualties increased by a factor of 10, support for the war dropped by about 15 percentage points” in the polls.

One reason the public has continued to tolerate their leaders’ continued prosecution of the war in Iraq is that the casualties have not been nearly so great, by an order of magnitude, as they were in Korea and Vietnam.

So far, not quite 4,000 U.S. military personnel have been killed in Iraq. That’s only one death for every 75,000 persons living in the United States, and therefore the loss of life has not cut deeply into the public psyche―most Americans have not been personally acquainted with anyone killed in the war.

(The vastly greater loss of Iraqi lives seems to have made even less impression.)

Sad to say, the public may not turn decisively against their leaders’ continued prosecution of the war until many more American soldiers have died.

Economic costs have also mounted, and they have loomed relatively much larger in this war than in the earlier wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Who says the military leaders never learn? They’ve certainly learned how to increase hugely the financial costs of fighting a war.

Estimates of the costs to date vary widely, depending on how one accounts for various joint, indirect, and implied costs, but a total cost to date in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars is not implausible, and later costs, including those associated with decades of care for the war’s legions of physically and mentally disabled, will add enormously to the total.

In earlier wars, even though the costs were relatively greater in blood than in dollars, the public eventually wearied of the economic sacrifices entailed by the financial expenses of continued fighting.

Economist Hugh Mosley concluded that the Johnson administration “was reluctant to resort to increased taxes to finance the war for fear of losing public support for its policy of military escalation.”

Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote that President Richard Nixon “realized that for economic reasons (the war was simply costing too much) and for the sake of domestic peace and tranquility he had to cut back on the American commitment to Vietnam”; the retrenchment was “forced on [him] by public opinion.”

As the recession that has just begun deepens, the public may well object more strenuously to the government’s squandering of such vast amounts of tax money on a senseless continuation of the war in Iraq.

When their purses are not so full, people may resent every additional dollar spent on the war more than they did previously. Ultimately, they may become so angry that they will take actions to punish severely the political leaders who continue to support the war.

Serious political challengers may attract a mass following by embracing the example of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who promised in the 1952 campaign to end the enormously unpopular war in Korea and, after he took office, kept his promise expeditiously.

When substantial negative feedback begins to jeopardize the personal job security, not to speak of the respect and fawning, the electorate affords incumbents, they will begin to take notice, and to discount more heavily the contributions from defense contractors, big financial establishments, petrochemical companies, and other high rollers who have encouraged them to stay the hopeless course―though not hopeless for these special interests, of course; for them it has been a bonanza.

George W. Bush parlayed a campaign of fear-mongering into his reelection in 2004, but unless another major terrorist attack occurs in the United States, the public will grow increasingly resistant to such appeals and more eager to throw the rascals out as the war’s costs continue to mount.

It is extremely unfortunate that escalating costs in blood and money are the only proven means of bringing the general public to resist strongly their political leaders who are committed to a continuation of unnecessary, unwise, and immoral war.

Some of us wish that rational argument, cogent evidence, and humane sentiment would persuade a preponderance of the public to demand an end to the war. History suggests, however, that only personal grief and economic pain will induce the American public to act against their perfidious leaders.

Needless to say, if the public remains as passive and as easily bamboozled as it has been during the past seven years, the war will continue, maybe even for the hundred years in which Senator McCain declares that a U.S. occupation of Iraq would be “fine with me.”

Robert Higgs is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, and the University of Economics, Prague. He is the author of many books, including Depression, War, and Cold War.

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