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Thursday, March 15th, 2007
Volume 6, No. 5
4 Articles
1. Setting Up The Next US-Israeli Target (Iran) For Another "Supreme International Crime"
3. Republicans are Flummoxed When it Comes to Senator Clinton
4. See Hillary Run (From Her Husband's Past On Iraq)
1. SETTING UP THE NEXT US-ISRAELI TARGET (IRAN) FOR ANOTHER "SUPREME INTERNATIONAL CRIME" PART 3
BY
EDWARD S. HERMAN AND DAVID PETERSON
6. Iran was among the original signatories to the NPT (1968); and though the Islamic Republic of Iran dates only from 1979, it has consistently denounced the nuclear-weapon option, instructing the IAEA that it "considers the acquiring, development and use of nuclear weapons inhuman, immoral, illegal and against its very basic principles."18 Iran has cooperated with the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to an impressive extent. For some years prior to 2003, it did hide aspects of its nuclear program, most notably its early research in the field of uranium enrichment, possibly recognizing that its enemies (the United States and Israel) would give it trouble for any work it did in this area even if it was legal. In order to satisfy the IAEA's ever-changing doubts, however, Iran adopted numerous and sometimes unprecedented "confidence building" measures over the course of 2003-2005, including the voluntary suspension of a uranium enrichment program in which it has every right to engage under the NPT, and the voluntary observance of the stricter Additional Protocol measures, even though Iran never adopted them formally. More important, no IAEA report on Iran's implementation of its non-proliferation commitments has ever determined that Iran diverted its nuclear program away from civilian toward military uses. Nor has the CIA found any evidence of a secret program to develop nuclear weapons.19
7. On the other hand, the United States (along with every other nuclear-weapon state) has violated its commitment under the same NPT “to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control," in the words of the unanimous opinion of the International Court of Justice (July 8, 1996).20 The United States not only refuses to move toward nuclear disarmament, it has recently declared nuclear weapons part of its regular war arsenal, has unilaterally abrogated its NPT promise never to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states, and it is busily modernizing its nuclear weapons to make them more practicable.21 Further, although the NPT requires nuclear states to help non-nuclear states develop civilian technology, the United States not only refuses to do this, it openly denies that right to Iran.
8. Israel remains outside the NPT, and has secretly built up a sizable arsenal of nuclear weapons, giving it unique status as the only Middle Eastern country with nuclear arms. This also has been normalized by the UN and international community, and Israel’s nuclear arms are unchallenged despite its numerous violations of Security Council and International Court rulings, the Geneva Conventions that relate to the behavior of an occupying power, and its recent major aggression against Lebanon. While Israel remains outside the IAEA’s jurisdiction, it threatens to attack Iran with its own nuclear arsenal, or those acquired from the Americans. Regardless, the Security Council has never adopted sanctions against Israel for building up a nuclear weapons arsenal that constitutes a grave threat to international peace and security. In September 2006, the United States, France, Germany and Britain (among others) blocked a vote at an IAEA meeting that would have declared Israel’s nuclear capabilities a threat. So the double standard is institutionalized and official: Only a U.S. target poses a threat in acquiring nuclear weapons; the United States and its clients pose no such threat, even when they warn of their possible use of nuclear weapons in a further “supreme international crime” of aggression.
In an act of remarkable chutzpah, the Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs, and noted racist, Avigdor Lieberman wrote to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to formally request that he "Revoke Iran's membership in the United Nations" for its failures in dealing with the charges against it under NPT rules, to which of course Israel has avoided subjecting itself.22 In the Kafka Era, Iran finds itself "surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons: Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west and us in the Persian Gulf," as Robert Gates recently remarked, but it has no right to even embark on nuclear activities to which it is entitled under the NPT, because the United States says so.
9. Close U.S. allies India and Pakistan also remain outside the NPT, despite having built-up and tested nuclear weapons, India at least twice (1974 and 1998), and Pakistan once (1998). In December 2006, just days before the Security Council imposed sanctions on Iran, Bush signed legislation that allows the U.S. to sell nuclear fuel and technology to India for the first time since it exploded a nuclear device in 1974. Bush, the Washington Post reported, "reversing three decades of nonproliferation policy,…persuaded Congress to make an exception for India despite its not having signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty." Within disarmament and non-proliferation circles, the India-exception is regarded as a nightmare scenario, as it permits India to designate "only 14 of its 22 nuclear reactors as civilian," and open to inspections; the other eight "are considered military and will remain shielded from international scrutiny." This "will allow India to import nuclear fuel for civilian use," while enabling it to "use its own facilities to produce enough fuel for 40 or 50 nuclear bombs per year." But as the Financial Times noted, "US officials hope the agreement will given US companies such as Westinghouse a 'leg up' in contracts for civilian nuclear plants in India…." One section of the law requires the White House to periodically certify that India is not transferring nuclear material or technology to Iran. Upon signing it, however, the White House issued a statement announcing that it will construe all such requirements as "advisory." As Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns explained, "We don't have any doubts that India also wishes to deny Iran a nuclear weapons capability."23 In the Kafka Era, nuclear-weapons proliferation to India and beyond is acceptable, so long as India (and anybody else) serves U.S. political interests.
10. Instead of trying to curb the aggressions and NPT violations of the United States and Israel, or their allies like India and Pakistan, the Security Council and international community have zeroed-in on the U.S. and Israeli target already under attack and threatened with a more massive aggression. Under U.S. pressure the IAEA has devoted at least 20 different reports to the assessment of Iran’s nuclear program since March 2003. Although Iran has NPT rights to peaceful nuclear activities, the United States has openly declared that it will refuse Iran those legal rights, and it has continuously pressed for a complete suspension of Iran’s enrichment and processing activities as a pre-condition for any negotiations with Iran on any issue. After more than three years of arm-twisting, the UN Security Council has finally gone along with this, twice adopting resolutions in 2006 under Chapter VII's "threat to the peace" articles that demanded, first, that Iran suspend all enrichment and reprocessing activities (1696, July 31), and later that all states withhold assistance to specified aspects of Iran's program (1737, December 23).24 In short, a sanctions regime was imposed on the “defiant” state (i.e., U.S. target).
11. The Security Council adopted these resolutions despite reaffirming the right of all states "to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination" (here echoing Art. IV.1 of the NPT). Despite the fact that ever since the present round of harassment began in 2003, Iran has steadfastly renounced the nuclear-weapon option as anathema to Islamic principles. Despite the fact that no IAEA report on Iran's implementation of its non-proliferation commitments has ever found Iran guilty of diverting its nuclear program away from civilian toward military uses. Despite the fact that Iran advocates the establishment of a Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone in the Middle East—as does every other state in the region, with one exception. Despite the fact that in order to satisfy the IAEA's ever-changing doubts, Iran adopted numerous and sometimes unprecedented "confidence building" measures over the course of 2003 - 2005. Despite the fact that there are as many as 442 nuclear power plants currently operating in more than 30 different countries around the world, with nearly one-quarter of the total located in the United States alone, and zero inside Iran. Despite the fact that Iran long ago declared its intention to develop its own nuclear energy sector to provide electricity to a rapidly growing population, and to free-up its oil sector for desperately needed export earnings—an argument supported by a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.25 And despite the fact that the United States once supported Iran in this objective—though only at a time when a so-called "special relationship" still existed between the two states, Iran then ruled by the U.S.-installed client regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, under whose "great leadership" Iran was regarded as an "island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world" (Jimmy Carter, New Year's Eve 1977).
12. The range of "nuclear"-related material and activities that the U.S. seeks to deny Iran is far more extensive than just those that clearly have a potential weapons or even "dual-use" applications, such as Iran's Heavy Water Reactor Program at Arak. "Iran gets IAEA technical aid for more than 15 projects and dozens more that also involve other countries," Associated Press reports. "Diplomats familiar with the American strategy for the next IAEA board meeting March 5 say Washington wants at least half of the aid projects permanently eliminated." Although 1737 makes exceptions for aid that does not contribute to "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities," specifically if it serves "food, agricultural, medical or other humanitarian purposes" (par. 9), the projects currently under review include those designed "to bolster the peaceful use of nuclear energy in medicine, agriculture [and] power generation"—clearly not military related. Perhaps most strikingly, AP mentions "cancer therapy programs and requests for help in international nuclear licensing procedures."26 Thus the U.S. seeks to exploit the IAEA review process to heighten tension with Iran and to penalize it in a flagrant fashion.27
It is ironic that while the U.S. struggles to prevent Iran from researching even medical projects that make use of nuclear technology, it is able to dispatch nuclear-powered warships to the same region, including two aircraft carrier strike groups and a nuclear-powered submarine that on January 8 rear-ended a Japanese supertanker in the Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. In the Kafka Era, for Iran to develop even a peaceful nuclear program constitutes a threat to the peace, while for seven decades running, the U.S. has researched, developed, and manufactured nuclear-powered weapons and warships, and sent them to any theater on the planet it chooses, as a guardian of the peace.
13. Both 1696 and 1737 state that the "IAEA is unable to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran." Similarly, the IAEA's November 14 report noted that "While the Agency is able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran, the Agency will remain unable to make further progress in its efforts to verify the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran unless Iran addresses the long outstanding verification issues"—locutions repeated many times over the course of the IAEA's reporting on Iran.28 In plainer English, the IAEA can verify that there are no serious NPT-violations in Iran. Therefore it has been necessary to seize upon any area of Iran's nuclear program where there are ambiguities, and to use these "outstanding issues" that Iran can never fully satisfy to keep Iran under the gun. In analogous fashion, the regime of Saddam Hussein could never satisfy UNSCOM or UNMOVIC, even when it had no WMD. Although the IAEA and Security Council would never face a comparable "gap in knowledge" were they to examine the programs and stockpiles of the eight nuclear-weapons states (for the time being, we'd exclude North Korea from this category), it is the repetitive allegation that there are "outstanding issues" in Iran that has transformed Iran's nuclear program into an apparent problem, independently of what Iran's leadership does or does not do. In the Kafka Era, Iran is obliged to prove a negative. Its inability to do so is a threat to the peace.
14. In another triumph of U.S. war-making “diplomacy”—recall the Rambouillet Conference on Kosovo in February 1999, which cleared the ground for NATO bombing29—1696 and 1737 are on the books now, reinforcing the presumption of Iran's "threat to the peace." Both Russia's and China's UN ambassadors explained that a reason their states had voted in favor of sanctions was that 1737 "clearly affirms that, if Iran suspends all activities relating to the enrichment and chemical reprocessing of uranium, the measures spelled out…will be suspended" (Russia's Vitaly Churkin). "The sanctions measures adopted by the Security Council this time are limited and reversible," China's Wang Guangya added later. "There are also explicit provisions indicating that if Iran suspends its enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, complies with the relevant resolutions of the Security Council and meets with the requirements of the IAEA, the Security Council would suspend and even terminate the sanctions measures."30 But these testimonies are false and disingenuous. In accepting the 1737 sanctions, surely Russia and China recognize that they have handed the belligerent members of the Security Council a weapon that can be used to punish Iran economically and to facilitate another major war of aggression.
Recalling the history of the U.S. and British manipulation of the UN during the long march towards war with Iraq, common sense tells us that, once having secured the Council's approval of sanctions on Iran, Washington will never surrender them without achieving its ultimate goal. To lift the 1737 sanctions requires Security Council determination "that Iran has fully complied" with its demands. If Iran has not complied the Council will "adopt further appropriate measures…to persuade Iran to comply." Given the U.S. veto and other forms of leverage, this means that the sanctions will remain until U.S. objectives are met. One of those objectives is “regime change." And since Washington has declared that it will not accept Iran’s right even to civilian uses of nuclear power, "full compliance" may never be recognized by the United States without a military attack. The Iraq “sanctions of mass destruction” were only lifted after the U.S. invasion and occupation. The Iran sanctions are similarly structured to provide the United States with a casus belli—an incident for war. They very well may be lifted only in the ruins of another victim of aggression.
Conclusion
In a statement delivered to the IAEA more than three-and-one-half years ago, Iran still held out hope "that not all international organizations have yet come [to] the state of total domination."31 That hope has not been realized and the performance of the UN and UN Security Council in the Middle East crises has been shameful. To have allowed two global rogue states that have evaded or violated the NPT and committed a stream of major UN Charter and Geneva Convention violations to drag Iran before the Security Council, and to obtain Chapter VII sanctions against it, constitutes a most grave moral and political collapse of any genuine international community worthy of the name. The Iran case is a true throwback to Munich-style appeasement and poses a serious threat to world peace. This is because it bends multilateral institutions to fit the super-rogue state's will, and provides it with a semi-legal basis for attacking its next target, an amazing innovation in the annals of power and lawlessness, given its performance in brushing aside any UN constraints when attacking Iraq just four years ago.
2. GUANTANAMO IS NOT A PRISON
(11 WAYS TO REPORT ON GITMO WITHOUT UPSETTING THE PENTAGON)
BY
KAREN J. GREENBERG
Several weeks ago, I took the infamous media tour of the facilities at Guantanamo. From the moment I arrived on a dilapidated Air Sunshine plane to the time I boarded it heading home, I had no doubt that I was on a foreign planet or, at the very least, visiting an impeccably constructed movie set. Along with two European colleagues, I was treated to two-days-plus of a military-tour schedule packed with site visits and interviews (none with actual prisoners) designed to "make transparent" the base, its facilities, and its manifold contributions to our country's national security.
The multi-storied, maximum security complexes, rimmed in concertina wire, set off from the road by high wire-mesh fences, and the armed tower guards at Camp Delta, present a daunting sight. Even the less restrictive quarters for "compliant" inmates belied any notion that Guantanamo is merely a holding facility for those awaiting charges or possessing useful information.
In the course of my brief stay, thanks to my military handlers, I learned a great deal about Gitmo decorum, as the military would like us to practice it. My escorts told me how best to describe the goings-on at Guantanamo, regardless of what my own eyes and prior knowledge told me.
Here, in a nutshell, is what I picked up. Consider this a guide of sorts to what the officially sanctioned report on Guantanamo would look like, wrapped in the proper decorum and befitting the jewel-in-the-crown of American offshore prisons… or, to be Pentagon-accurate, "detention facilities."
1. Guantanamo is not a prison. According to the military handlers who accompanied us everywhere, Guantanamo is officially a "detention facility." Although the two most recently built complexes, Camps Five and Six, were actually modeled on maximum and medium security prisons in Indiana and Michigan respectively, and although the use of feeding tubes and the handling of prisoners now take into account the guidelines of the American Corrections Association (and increasingly those of the Bureau of Prisons as well), it is not acceptable to use the word "prison" while at Gitmo.
2. Consistent with not being a prison, Guantanamo has no prisoners, only enemies, specifically, "unlawful enemy combatants." One of my colleagues was even chastised for using the word "detainee." "Detained enemy combatants" or "unlawful enemy combatants," we learned, were the proper terms.
3. Guantanamo is not about guilt and innocence -- or, once an enemy combatant, always an enemy combatant. "Today, it is not about guilt or innocence. It's about unlawful enemy combatants," Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris, Jr.,the Commanding Officer of Guantanamo tells us. "And they are all unlawful enemy combatants." This, despite the existence of the official category "No Longer an Enemy Combatant" which does not come up in our discussions. Nor was the possibility that any of the detainees at Guantanamo might have been mistakenly detained ever discussed. As the administrator for the tribunals that are to determine the status of each detainee explained to us, the U.S. Government takes "a risk when we transfer" detainees out of Guantanamo.
4. No trustworthy lawyers come to Guantanamo. Our handlers use the term "habeas lawyers" as a seemingly derogatory catch-all for lawyers in general, both defense attorneys -- those who are defending their clients before the military commissions -- and habeas attorneys, those who seek to challenge in U.S. courts the government's right to detain their clients. The U.S. military and its Public Affairs Officers are convinced that the terrorists are transmitting information to their colleagues in the outside world via their lawyers. According to our escorts, "habeas lawyers" may be the unwitting pawns of terrorists. As a power-point presentation at the outset of our formal tour (and as subsequent remarks make clear to us), it is the belief of the American authorities that the detainees are using their lawyers in accordance with the directives outlined in the al-Qaeda training manual that was discovered in Manchester, England in 2000. This manual, they assure us, encourages terrorists to "take advantage of visits with habeas lawyers to communicate and exchange information with those outside."
5. Recently, at least, few if any reliable journalists have been reporting on Guantanamo; only potential betrayers are writing about it. "The media" arrive with ostensibly open eyes. Yet these guests, graciously hosted from morning to night, go home perversely refusing to be complimentary to their hosts. They suffer from "the chameleon effect," as I was told more than once by military public information office personnel, and "we just don't understand it." For our part, we visitors didn't understand why we were forbidden to walk anywhere -- even to the bathroom -- by ourselves, talk to anyone other than those we were introduced to (none actual prisoners), or even take a morning run up and down the street we were lodged on, although there was not a prisoner in sight.
6. After years of isolation, the detainees still possess valuable information -- especially today. When asked what kind of useful information the detainees could possibly have for interrogators, many already locked away in Gitmo for over five years, the answer was: "I believe that we are, in fact, getting good and useful and interesting intelligence -- even after five years." Right now, they are especially useful. This is because, Admiral Harris told us, "We have up-and-coming leadership in al-Qaeda and in the Taliban in Afghanistan [and] we don't know what they look like. There's never been a photograph taken of them or there's never been a photograph that US forces have of them. But their contemporaries… are quite often the same individuals that are in the camps here today. So we will work with law enforcement… and their sketch artists will work with these detainees, the compliant and cooperative detainees… And those pictures will be sent out to the forward fighting area." No one asked just how reliable our own memories would be after five years of isolated detention.
7. Guantanamo contains no individuals -- inside the wire or out. The prisoners are referred to not by name, but by number. The guards and others, even outside the confines of the prison camp, remove the Velcroed names which are on their uniforms, leaving blank strips on their chests where their identity would normally be, or they replace their names with their ranks. Either way, they strive to remain anonymous. They tell us that they fear retaliation against themselves and their families from a presumably all-seeing, all-reaching jihadi network. With the media, most follow the same rules. We, too, could evidently land them in trouble with al-Qaeda. Thus, many refuse to tell us their names, warning those we greet to be careful not to mistakenly call them by name in front of us.
8. Guantanamo's deep respect for Islam is unappreciated. All the food served in the prison is halal, prepared in a separate kitchen, constructed solely for the detainees. All cells, outdoor areas, and even the detainee waiting room in the courthouse where the Military Commissions will be held, have arrows pointing to Mecca. All compliant detainees have prayer rugs and prayer beads. All detainees, no matter how they behave, have Korans. The library includes books on Islamic history, Islamic philosophy, and on Mohammed and his followers. Our escorts are armored against our protests about the denial of legal rights to prisoners. The right to challenge their detention in court, actually being charged with a crime, or adhering to the basic rules of procedure and evidence that under gird American law -- none of this is important. They do not see that what's at stake is not building a mosque at Gitmo, any more than it is about serving gourmet food, or about the cushy, leather interrogation chairs we are shown. It is about extending the most basic of legal rights, including the presumption of innocence, to those detained here.
9. At Guantanamo, hard facts are scarce. This, we are told, is a security measure. "As the 342nd media group to come through here, you'll notice that we speak vaguely. We can't be specific. You will notice that we talk in approximate terms and estimates only. Those are operational security measures. We don't want to take away position" -- a phrase which I took as shorthand for revealing actual numbers, names, locations, dates, etc.
Typical examples of preserving Gitmo security through a refusal to give out specific facts:
"What is that building?" [I am referring to one directly in our view.]
"Which building?"
"How long has the lieutenant been here?"
"Since she got here."
"Where is Radio Range?" [This is the area on which the camps are built.]
"I never heard of it."
10. Guantanamo houses no contradictions. And if you notice any -- and they're hard to miss -- it's best to keep quiet about them, unless you want a sergeant without a name chastising you about the dangers posed by enemy combatants, or one of the officers without a name reprimanding your lower ranking escort for giving out "misinformation." Stories are regularly presented to portray a policy as particularly generous to the detainees; only later does someone mention that it might have been an answer to the needs of the guards themselves. A typical example:
"We allow two hours of recreation a day in order to comply with the Geneva Conventions," they tell us. But a guide at another moment leads us to believe that there is actually a more pressing reason for allowing the recreation. "We need them to go outside so that we can search their cells for weapons and contraband."
These sorts of contradictions leave me ultimately feeling sorry for our escorts. It is not their fault that they know so little about the place they are charged with explaining to us. Most of them arrived roughly eight months ago and were handed a defensive script. They are often quite sincere when they tell us that they don't know answers to our questions.
They actually don't know what went on before their arrival, or where things were located in earlier days, or if perchance abuses or outbursts, not to speak of torture, might have occurred at Gitmo, or even who was in charge as little as a year ago. Few, if any, from the old days are there to instruct or correct them.
Of course, if they wanted to, they could learn the details that many of us have picked up over the years simply by reading or by talking to those who spent time there. But this is not their task; they are but mouthpieces, nothing more, as they try to tell us time and again when we ask our questions. And, anyway, they themselves expect to leave relatively unscathed sometime this spring.
Finally, for those of us who want to write about Guantanamo and who are grateful for having been shown around and had the myths and realities of the Bush administration's most notorious detention facility laid out so clearly, a final lesson:
11. Those who fail to reproduce the official narrative are not welcome back. "Tell it the wrong way and you won't be back," one of our escorts warns me over lunch.
Only time will tell if I got it right.
3. REPUBLICANS ARE FLUMMOXED WHEN IT COMES TO SENATOR CLINTON
BY
RALPH NADER
Just as the Democrats could never seem to get a handle on Ronald Reagan in his sixteen years as Governor of California and President, the Republicans cannot get a handle on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
No matter what they tried-and they were admittedly timid-the Democrats could neither upset, mire, or throw Ronald Reagan on the defensive. He smiled, shrugged his shoulders and tefloned his way to victory after victory.
The Republicans are flummoxed when it comes to Senator Clinton. They could not even mount a hardy campaign against her in 2006, leaving a nominal Yonkers mayor the hapless task to take up the space on the ballot opposite her. She walked to victory, spending over $35 million in the process.
The reasons why Republicans cannot score points against Clinton is that she is so much like them on the key corporate power issues. Although she is on the Armed Services Committee, she took President Eisenhower's description of the "military-industrial complex" and repeatedly rubber stamped the massive, bloated, wasteful and corrupt expenditures.
It was not for her to question any redundant weapons systems, no longer strategically needed in the post-Soviet Union era. It was not for her to act on the scores of investigative findings by the Government Accountability Office of the Congress documenting corporate waste, fraud and abuse and do something about them. Let a thousand weapon systems bloom was and is her mantra.
The corporate crime wave of the past seven years, draining and looting trillions of dollars from workers, investors and pension-holders did not catch her industrious attention either. Notwithstanding the publicized enforcement efforts of her state's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, whose popularity took him to a landslide win for the Governorship, she refused to extend his efforts in the U.S. Senate by pushing the regulatory agencies for a necessary crackdown on corporate crime. He gave her the ultimate political cover, by showing the great public support for his "law and order" drives, but she lacked the political fortitude and opted instead for the political cash for her campaigns.
Further contributing to the gigantic government deficit in Washington are the dozens of programs providing subsidies, handouts and bailouts to large corporations known as "corporate welfare." One would think that all that experience in her husband's White House, which she touts routinely, would have predisposed her to championing cutting corporate welfare that now amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars a year in an upward distribution of wealth from the have-littles to the have-lots. No way. Hillary lets the tax revenues and the tax loopholes grow and the windfalls swell the coffers of big business.
By this time the Republicans cannot describe her in the least as "anti-business." Why the junior Senator from New York has done virtually nothing about the business crimes against the poor in her state, especially in the inner city where outrageous interest charges on pay-day loans, predatory lending, redlining, landlord abuses and code violations, lead and asbestos abound. Many of these financial scams benefit Wall Street financiers.
What's left for the Republicans to work on? The Iraq war? Senator Clinton voted for the war resolution and refuses to admit her mistake in so doing. She remains generally a Democratic Hawk on foreign policy.
What about global corporate trade? She is a fervent backer of the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, though she now wants to tweak them with some unenforceable labor and environmental qualifications. The evidence behind the treaties' supplanting our nation's legitimate sovereignty and procedural safeguards through these transnational forms of autocratic, secretive governance, is overwhelming. The evidence that these trade treaties have cost good industrial jobs, driven down efforts to keep living wages, and contributed to the country's huge trade deficits is also decisive.
Yet Senator Clinton follows the Republicans and neuters what could be the latter's criticism of any potential demand for renegotiating these vise-like trade shackles that have led to shipping whole industries to the communist dictatorship in China.
Moreover, she has co-sponsored bills with Republicans and received their public praise, including that of former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich.
The new publication, Politico, headlined recently an article by Jim Vandehei and Carrie Sheffield with the words-"Clinton Presidency May be Inevitable, Republicans say." Former House Majority leader, Tom DeLay, is quoted as saying: "If the conservative movement and Republicans don't understand how massive the Clinton coalition is, she will be the next president." He should know about massive coalitions.
The article also quotes other Republican Party bigwigs in the same vein. None of them offered any strategy. Instead they speak generalities that simply prove the point that Senator Clinton has them neutralized and nullified by the very brazen scope of her political expediency and opportunism.
About all these Republican operatives could offer is that a Hillary presidency would prod and shock conservative foot soldiers into action. Such an attitude means capitulation for 2008
4. SEE HILLARY RUN (FROM HER HUSBAND'S PAST ON IRAQ
BY
SCOTT RITTER
Senator Hillary Clinton wants to become President Hillary Clinton. "I'm in, and I'm in to win," she said, announcing her plans to run for the Democratic nomination for the 2008 Presidential election.
Let there be no doubt that Hillary Clinton is about as slippery a species of politician that exists, one who has demonstrated an ability to morph facts into a nebulous blob which blurs the record and distorts the truth. While she has demonstrated this less than flattering ability on a number of issues, nowhere is it so blatant as when dealing with the issue of the ongoing war in Iraq and Hillary Clinton's vote in favor of this war.
This issue won't be resolved even if Hillary Clinton apologizes for her Iraq vote, as other politicians have done, blaming their decision on faulty intelligence on Iraq's WMD capabilities. This is because, like many other Washington politicians at the time, including those now running for president, she had been witness to lies about Iraq's weapons programs to justify attacks on that country by her husband President Bill Clinton and his administration.
"While there is no perfect approach to this thorny dilemma, and while people of good faith and high intelligence can reach diametrically opposed conclusions, I believe the best course is to go to the UN for a strong resolution that scraps the 1998 restrictions on inspections and calls for complete, unlimited inspections with cooperation expected and demanded from Iraq," Senator Clinton said at the time of her vote, in a carefully crafted speech designed to demonstrate her range of knowledge and ability to consider all options. "I know that the Administration wants more, including an explicit authorization to use force, but we may not be able to secure that now, perhaps even later. But if we get a clear requirement for unfettered inspections, I believe the authority to use force to enforce that mandate is inherent in the original 1991 UN resolution, as President Clinton recognized when he launched Operation Desert Fox in 1998."
Hillary would have done well to leave out that last part, the one where her husband, the former President of the United States, used military force as part of a 72-hour bombing campaign ostensibly deemed as a punitive strike in defense of disarmament, but in actuality proved to be a blatant attempt at regime change which used the hyped-up threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as an excuse for action. Sound familiar? While many Americans today condemn the Bush administration for misleading them with false claims of unsubstantiated threats which resulted in the ongoing debacle we face today in Iraq (count Hillary among this crowd), few have reflected back on the day when the man from Hope, Arkansas sat in the Oval Office and initiated the policies of economic sanctions-based containment and regime change which President Bush later brought to fruition when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
"My vote," Hillary said with great sanctimony, "is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for unilateralism, or for the arrogance of American power or purpose -- all of which carry grave dangers for our nation, for the rule of international law and for the peace and security of people throughout the world." But by citing the policies of her husband, there can be no doubt that this was exactly what her vote was about.
I should know. From January 1993 until my resignation from the United Nations in August 1998, I witnessed first hand the duplicitous Iraq policies of the administration of Bill Clinton, the implementation of which saw a President lie to the American people about a threat he knew was hyped, lie to Congress about his support of a disarmament process his administration wanted nothing to do with, and lie to the world about American intent, which turned its back on the very multilateral embrace of diplomacy as reflected in the resolutions of the Security Council Hillary Clinton so piously refers to in her speech, and instead pursued a policy defined by the unilateral interests of the Clinton administration to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
I personally witnessed the Director of the CIA under Bill Clinton, James Woolsey, fabricate a case for the continued existence of Iraqi ballistic missiles in November 1993 after I had provided a detailed briefing which articulated the UN inspector's findings that Iraq's missile program had been fundamentally disarmed. I led the UN inspector's investigation into the defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, in August 1995, and saw how the Clinton administration twisted his words to make a case for the continued existence of a nuclear program the weapons inspectors knew to be nothing more than scrap and old paper. I was in Baghdad at the head of an inspection team in the summer of 1996 as the Clinton administration used the inspection process as a vehicle for a covert action program run by the CIA intending to assassinate Saddam Hussein.
I twice traveled to the White House to brief the National Security Council in the confines of the White House Situation Room on the plans of the inspectors to pursue the possibility of concealed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, only to have the Clinton national security team betray the inspectors by failing to deliver the promised support, and when the inspections failed to deliver any evidence of Iraqi wrong-doing, attempt to blame the inspectors while denying any wrong doing on their part.
This last fact hits very close to home. As a former Marine Corps officer, and as a Chief Inspector responsible for the welfare of the personnel entrusted to my command, I take the act of official betrayal very seriously. "I want the men and women in our Armed Forces to know," Senator Clinton said during her speech defending her vote for war, "that if they should be called upon to act against Iraq, our country will stand resolutely behind them." I am left to wonder if, in citing the record of her husband when he was President, if Hillary would stand behind the troops with the same duplicitous 'vigor' that her husband displayed when betraying the UN weapons inspectors?
In February 1998 the Clinton administration backed a diplomatic effort undertaken by then-Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, to help get the weapons inspection process back on track (inspections had been stalled since January 1998, when a team I led was prevented by the Iraqis from carrying out its mission because, as the Iraqis maintained, there were too many Americans and British on the team implementing the unilateral policy of regime change instead of the mandated task of disarmament). Hillary stated that she wanted a strong UN resolution designed to promote viable weapons inspections, and specifically singled out the compromises brokered by Kofi Annan to get inspectors back into Iraq as a failed effort which weakened the inspection process. What she fails to mention is that her husband initially supported the Annan mission, not so much because it paved a path towards disarmament, but rather because it provided a cover for legitimizing regime change.
I sat in the office of then US Ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, as the United States cut a deal with then-United Nations Special Commission Executive Chairman Richard Butler, where the timing and actions of an inspection team led by myself (a decision which was personally approved by Bill Clinton) would be closely linked to a massive US aerial bombardment of Iraq triggered by my inspection. I was supposed to facilitate a war by prompting Iraqi non-compliance. Instead, I did my job and facilitated an inspection that pushed the world closer to a recognition that Iraq was complying with its disarmament obligation. As a reward, I was shunned from the inspection process by the Clinton administration.
In April 1998 Bill Clinton promised Congress that his administration would provide all support necessary to the UN inspectors. In May 1998 his National Security Team implemented a new policy which turned its back on the inspectors, seeking to avoid supporting a disarmament process which undermined the policies of regime change so strongly embraced by Bill Clinton and his administration. When I resigned in August 1998 in protest over the duplicitous policies of Bill Clinton's administration, I was personally attacked by the Clinton administration in an effort to divert attention away from the truth about what they were doing regarding Iraq. Four months later Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of Iraq, Operation Desert Fox, referred to in glowing terms by Hillary Clinton as she endorsed the policies of deception that led our nation down the path towards war.
"So it is with conviction," Hillary said at the moment of her vote, "that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our Nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our President and we say to him -- use these powers wisely and as a last resort. And it is a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein -- this is your last chance -- disarm or be disarmed."
It turned out Saddam was in fact already disarmed. And it turned out that Hillary's husband, President Bill Clinton, knew this when he ordered the bombing of Iraq in 1998. Hillary can try to twist and turn the facts as she defends the words she spoke when casting her fateful vote in favor of a war with Iraq. But no amount of re-writing history can shield her from the failed policies of her very own husband, policies she embraced willingly and whole heartedly when endorsing war.
Run, Hillary, run. But your race towards the White House will never outpace the hypocrisy and duplicity inherent in your decision to vote for war in Iraq.
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