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Tuesday, January 31st , 2008
Volume 7, No. 2
4 Articles, 19 Pages
1. Suharto, The Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places
3. Voter Scam is the Real Fraud
1. SUHARTO, THE MODEL KILLER, AND HIS FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
BY
JOHN PILGER
In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence filmed on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. "This is an historically unique moment," says one of them, "that is truly uniquely historical." This is Gareth Evans, Australia's foreign minister. The other man is Ali Alatas, principal mouthpiece of the Indonesian dictator, Gen. Suharto. It is 1989, and the two are making a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a treaty that allowed Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor, then illegally and viciously occupied by Suharto. The prize, according to Evans, was "zillions of dollars."
Beneath them lay a land of crosses: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides. Filming clandestinely in East Timor, I would walk into the scrub and there were the crosses. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that "at least 200,000" had died under Indonesia's occupation: almost a third of the population. And yet East Timor's horror, which was foretold and nurtured by the U.S., Britain, and Australia, was actually a sequel. "No single American action in the period after 1945," wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, "was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre." He was referring to Suharto's seizure of power in 1965-1966, which caused the violent deaths of up to a million people.
To understand the significance of Suharto, who died on Sunday, is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer – "our" is used here advisedly. "One of our very best and most valuable friends," Thatcher called him, speaking for the West. For three decades, the Australian, U.S., and British governments worked tirelessly to minimize the crimes of Suharto's Gestapo, known as Kopassus, who were trained by the Australian SAS and the British army and who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler and Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica "riot control" vehicles. Prevented by Congress from supplying arms directly, U.S. administrations from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton provided logistic support through the back door and commercial preferences. In one year, the British Department of Trade provided almost a billion pounds worth of so-called soft loans, which allowed Suharto to buy Hawk fighter-bombers. The British taxpayer paid the bill for aircraft that dive-bombed East Timorese villages, and the arms industry reaped the profits. However, the Australians distinguished themselves as the most obsequious. In an infamous cable to Canberra, Richard Woolcott, Australia's ambassador to Jakarta, who had been forewarned about Suharto's invasion of East Timor, wrote: "What Indonesia now looks to from Australia … is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia…." Covering up Suharto's crimes became a career for those like Woolcott, while "understanding" the mass murderer came in buckets. This left an indelible stain on the reformist government of Gough Whitlam following the cold-blooded killing of two Australian TV crews by Suharto's troops during the invasion of East Timor. "We know your people love you," Bob Hawke told the dictator. His successor, Paul Keating, famously regarded the tyrant as a father figure. When Indonesian troops slaughtered at least 200 people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor, and Australian mourners planted crosses outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, foreign minister Gareth Evans ordered them destroyed. To Evans, ever-effusive in his support for the regime, the massacre was merely an "aberration." This was the view of much of the Australian press, especially that controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose local retainer, Paul Kelly, led a group of leading newspaper editors to Jakarta, to fawn before the dictator.
Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto's takeover of Indonesia as "the model operation" for the American-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders," he wrote, "[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965." The U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a "zap list" of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC's south east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. "British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust," he said. "I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time…. There was a deal, you see."
The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called "the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in southeast Asia." In November 1967, the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens, U.S. Steel, and many others. Across the table sat Suharto's U.S.-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A U.S./ European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. America, Japanese, and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on "a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened." Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a "model pupil."
Shortly before he died, I interviewed Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was Britain's minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his weapons. I asked him, "Did it bother you personally that you were causing such mayhem and human suffering?"
"No, not in the slightest," he replied. "It never entered my head."
"I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are seriously concerned with the way animals are killed."
"Yeah?"
"Doesn't that concern extend to humans?"
"Curiously not."
BY
SCOTT RITTER
It has become a mantra of sorts among the faltering Republican candidates: Victory is at hand in Iraq. Mitt Romney, in particular, has taken to so openly embracing the “success” of the U.S. troop “surge” that it has become the centerpiece of his litany of attacks on the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton.
“Think of what’s happened this year,” Romney recently implored a crowd in Iowa. “General [David] Petraeus came in to report to Congress and Hillary Clinton said she couldn’t believe him. She said she just couldn’t believe General Petraeus. Now think about that. He’s been proven to be right. He should be on the cover, by the way, of Time magazine, and not Putin.”
Clinton, for her part, has stood her ground. Addressing a crowd of voters in Iowa, she took a swipe back at Romney: “We all know the Republican candidates are just plain wrong when they declare mission accomplished about the troop surge.” She went on to note that U.S. casualty figures in Iraq for 2007 were at an all-time high, and that for all of the positive reports concerning the surge, Iraq remains a nation on the verge of a civil war, no closer today to a political solution than it was before the escalation. She promised that, if nominated, “I will not hesitate to go toe to toe with Republicans in the debates to end the war as quickly and responsibly as possible.”
Therein lies the catch. How does Clinton explain her commitment to quick and responsible withdrawal in the context of the short-term reduction of violence in Iraq achieved by the surge? How does she propose to rectify the admitted internal shortcomings inside Iraq, which she likens to near-civil war conditions, with her pledge for a “responsible” withdrawal? If one takes at face value the alleged successes of the surge, it is difficult to justify the embrace of an alternative policy option. Likewise, if one chooses to criticize the surge as all smoke and mirrors, as Clinton has, and yet argues for a quick and responsible end to the war in Iraq without revealing the details of how this would be accomplished, the rhetoric comes across as remarkably shallow.
I’m not one inclined to speak out in support of Hillary Clinton. She made her bed with Iraq, and she should now be forced to sleep in it. However, she is right that nothing the surge has accomplished so far remotely approaches a solution to these enormously destabilizing realities: a largely disaffected Sunni population which finds the current Shiite-dominated government of Iraq fundamentally unacceptable; a decisively fractured Shiite population torn between an Iranian-dominated government on the one hand (controlled by the political proxies of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, itself an Iranian proxy) or an indigenous firebrand, Muqtyada al-Sadr; and a false paradise in Kurdistan, where the dream of an independent Kurdish homeland corrupts a viable Kurdish autonomy and threatens regional instability by provoking Turkish military intervention.
“Quickly and responsibly”? The problem with Clinton is that when it comes to Iraq, she is as shallow as the next candidate, and once one gets past her flowery rhetoric and protestations of expertise, it becomes crystal clear that she, like almost everyone else in the presidential race from either party, hasn’t a clue about what is really happening on the ground in Iraq.
There are, in fact, five Iraqs that must be dealt with by a singular American policy. The first is the Iraq of the Green Zone, and by that I mean the Iraqi government brought about by the "purple finger revolution" of January 2005. Those sham elections produced a sham democracy which lacks any viability outside of the never-never land of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone. This lack of centralized authority has led some, like Sen. Joe Biden and the U.S. Senate, to advocate the division of Iraq into three de facto states, one Sunni, one Shiite and one Kurdish, lumped together in a loose federation overseen by a weak central authority. Given that the 2005 elections were designed to prevent this very sort of Iraqi breakup to begin with, one can begin to understand the fallacy of any policy that contradicts the very foundation upon which it is built. But this sort of behavior defines the entire Iraq fiasco, one contradiction built upon another, until there has been woven a web of contradictions from which no clarity can ever be found. That, in a sentence, is the reality of the current Iraqi government. It is almost as if by design the Bush administration has cobbled together a wreck incapable of governance. How does Hillary Clinton propose to deal “quickly and responsibly” with such a mess?
The second Iraq is the one being managed from Tehran. This Iraq, stretching from Basra in the south up into Baghdad, exists outside of the reach of the compromised disaster that is the current government of Iraq, and is instead dominated by SCIRI and its military wing, the Badr Brigade. Here one finds the unvarnished reality of the dream of the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites, those who reached political maturity festering in the anti-Saddam ideology cooked up in the theocracy of Iran. Given the roots of this political movement, bred and paid for by the reactionary mullahs of Iran, the politics of revenge that it embraces should come as no surprise. However, whereas the mullahs in Tehran seek long-term political stability guaranteed by a friendly, compliant government in Baghdad, the Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiites seem more focused on rapidly reversing decades of inequities, real and perceived. Revenge is not a policy that breeds stability, and yet it is the politics of revenge that dominates the mind-set of SCIRI.
Serving as a major domestic counterweight to SCIRI is the indigenous grass-roots Iraqi Shiite movement controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr, the third Iraq. Possessing similar geographic reach as SCIRI, the Iraq of the “Mahdi Army” is one which rejects the SCIRI proxy government operating out of the Green Zone as but a tool of the American occupation, and the SCIRI movement itself as a tool of Iran. While maintaining close relations with Tehran, al-Sadr mocks those who would govern in south Iraq as having Farsi, vice Arabic, as their first tongue. The movement headed by al-Sadr bases its credibility on its pure Iraqi roots, derived as it is from the Shiites of Iraq who actually lived under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Surprisingly, these Shiites are more inclined to find common cause with their fellow Iraqis, including Sunnis who are disaffected with the current government, than with their SCIRI co-religionists. While much has been made of the Sunni-Shiite divide, the fact is that one of the most serious threats to stability in Iraq is the emerging Shiite-versus-Shiite conflict between al-Sadr and SCIRI.
The fourth Iraq is the Iraq of the Sunni. The first three years of the American occupation were dominated by violence emanating from the Sunni heartland as those elements loyal to Saddam, and those opposed to Shiite domination, worked together to make the American occupation, and any affiliated post-Saddam government derived from the occupation, a failure. To this extent, elements of the Sunni of Iraq, drawn primarily from the intelligence services of the Hussein regime, facilitated the creation and operation of al-Qaida in Iraq. The work of this Iraqi al-Qaida has been successful in destabilizing the country to the point that the United States has been compelled to fund, equip and train Sunni militias in an effort to confront al-Qaida, as well as to make up for the real shortfalls of the central Iraqi government when it comes to security and stability in the Sunni areas. The newfound relationship between the Sunni and the United States, especially in Anbar province, is cited as a major factor in the success of the surge.
The fifth Iraq is that of the Kurds. Long hailed as a poster child of stability and prosperity, the fundamental problems inherent in post-Saddam Kurdistan are coming to a head. The inherent incompatibility between the “sanctuary” created by the United States through the northern “no-fly zone” and post-Saddam Iraq is more evident today than ever. The Kurds, pleased with their status as a “special case” in the eyes of the Bush administration, have made no honest effort to assimilate into a centralized system of government. Furthermore, the false dream of an independent Kurdish homeland has not only poisoned relations with the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad (witness the conflict over oil deals in Kurdistan and the Iraqi national oil law), but also between the U.S. and its NATO ally, Turkey. The Iraqi Kurds’ ongoing support of Kurdish nationalist groups in Turkey and Iran has led to increased instability, the most current manifestation of which are the ongoing cross-border attacks into Iraqi territory by the Turkish military. And, given the high level of emotion attached to matters pertaining to Kurdish nationalism, the likelihood of the situation de-escalating anytime soon is remote.
Five Iraqs, and one Iraq policy ill-suited to the reality of any single situation, yet alone the whole. The success of the surge is pure fantasy, a fancy bit of illusion that would do David Copperfield proud, but not the people of Iraq or the United States. The surge addresses events in Iraq based upon short-term objectives (i.e., reducing the immediate level of violence) without resolving any of the deep-seated, long-term issues that promote the violence to begin with. It is like placing a Band-Aid on a gaping chest wound. The pink, frothy blood may not be visible on the surface, but the wound remains as grave as ever, and because it is not being directly attended to, it only gets worse. Eventually the lungs will collapse and the body will die. This is the reality of Iraq today. Thanks to the surge, we do not see the horrific wound that is Iraq for what it truly is. As such, our policies do nothing to cure the problem, and in doing nothing, only make the matter worse.
History will show that this period of relative “calm” we attribute to the surge is but the pause before the storm. Hillary Clinton is correct to label the surge a failed strategy. But her motivation for doing so rests more with her desire to position herself politically on the domestic front than it is a reflection of a thoughtful Iraq policy. So long as American politicians, regardless of political affiliation, seek to solve the problem of Iraq from a domestic political perspective, then the problem that is Iraq will never be resolved, either “quickly” or “responsibly.” Iraq is an unpopular war. There are, therefore, no “popular” solutions, only realistic ones.
The five-dimensional problem embodied in post-Saddam Iraq cannot be bundled up into a neat package. America, and its leaders, must do the right thing in Iraq, not for Iraq, but for America, even when doing so requires making some tough decisions. Narrow the problem set from five dimensions to two, and the problem becomes more manageable. For my money, I choose working with the Sunnis and al-Sadr to create a viable coalition, and then cutting a deal with Iran that trades off better relations in exchange for encouraging the current failed Iraqi government to step aside in favor of new elections. And the Kurds? Autonomy or nothing.
My loyalty is first and foremost to the United States, and when we look at the situation in Iraq from a genuine national security perspective, there is no threat worthy of the continued sacrifice being asked of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. As such, the only policy option worthy of consideration is that which brings our troops home as expeditiously as possible. Politicians who embrace a different policy are simply using the sacrifice of our service members as a shield behind which to hide their ignorance of Iraqi issues, and their personal cowardice, which manifests itself any time brave young men and women are allowed to die in order to preserve someone’s political viability.
As we in the United States celebrate this holiday season, let us not forget those who serve overseas in uniform, and the sacrifices they make in our name. And as we approach the coming election season, let us never forget those politicians who would have these sacrifices continue in order to safeguard their individual political fortune. This applies to all who seek the nomination for the office of the presidency, even those like Hillary Clinton who claim to embrace an anti-war position but whose words and actions strongly suggest something else.
3. VOTER ID SCAM IS THE REAL FRAUD
BY
CYNTHIA TUCKER
If the U.S. Supreme Court upholds Indiana’s harsh voter ID law, as its justices seem poised to do, hundreds of thousands of black Americans should march in protest. So should hundreds of thousands of Latino Americans. Native Americans, too. Political activists from across the ethnic spectrum should convene the biggest political demonstration since the historic March on Washington in 1963.Where is the Rev. Al Sharpton when a genuinely critical issue comes along? Where’s the Rev. Jesse Jackson?
The GOP-led campaign to pass stringent voter ID laws is a greater injustice than the prosecutions of the Jena Six, more significant than the incarceration of Michael Vick, more damaging than the insulting rants of Don Imus. This is a frankly brazen effort to block the votes of thousands of people of color who might have the temerity to vote for Democrats. And it’s un-American.
As happened in several states, including Georgia, the then-GOP-dominated Indiana legislature pushed through a rigid law in 2005 requiring state-sponsored photo IDs at the ballot box. While the Republican spin machine has worked mightily to portray this as an effort to curb voter fraud, it is no such thing. There has never - never - been a single case of “voter impersonation” at the ballot box, with a fake voter using an electric bill or phone bill to pretend to be a valid voter.
Earlier this month, radio journalist Warren Olney pressed Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita about the prosecution of voter impersonation cases in Indiana. “Oh, yeah. We suspect it happens all the time,” Mr. Rokita said. “Suspect?” Mr. Olney countered.
“Well, are you saying you want to define whether or not there’s fraud based on whether or not its prosecuted?” Mr. Rokita answered, adding, “It’s a hard type of crime to catch. … It’s hard to catch one in the act.”
OK, then. Got that? It’s a little like the search for life on other planets. Extraterrestrials are out there, even if none has actually been spotted.
(If Republicans were interested in actual voter fraud, they would have tightened the rules for absentee ballots, since that’s where most voter fraud occurs. But because Republican voters tend to favor absentee ballots, many GOP-dominated legislatures have made absentee balloting rules less stringent.)
But there is evidence aplenty of this: There are thousands of law-abiding registered voters across the land who have no government-sponsored ID - no passport, no driver’s license - and who will be banned from the ballot box if the highest court upholds this highly partisan law. It is difficult for middle-class citizens to believe, I know. If you live inside the comfortable economic mainstream, where taking airplane trips and renting DVDs is a routine part of life, you can’t imagine voters without a state-sponsored photo ID.
But they’re out there. Just ask Mary-Jo Criswell, 71. Her ballot was thrown out when she showed up at her Indiana polling place expecting to use the same forms of ID, including a bank card with a photo, that she had used in the past. She has epilepsy, she says, so she has never had a driver’s license.
Citizens like Ms. Criswell are Americans, too, and they have every right to vote. It is elitism, pure and simple, to suggest requiring them to obtain a state-sponsored photo ID is a “minor inconvenience.” But that’s exactly what Justice Anthony M. Kennedy called it during oral arguments, noting that the law is expected to affect only a small percentage of voters.
That’s true. The GOP is aiming at a small pool of voters - mostly poor, often elderly, usually black or brown - who lack driver’s licenses. As it happens, they tend to support Democrats. With so many elections decided by a margin of a few hundred votes, Republicans figure they can stay in power by blocking just a few Democratic ballots.
But the Republicans could be in for a jolt. The electorate seems much more excited about Democratic candidates this year. The Democratic presidential candidates have topped the Republicans in fundraising, and in early primary states, more Democratic ballots have been cast than Republican ones.
The way things are going, Republicans running for national office could lose by a lot of votes - not a few. So they’ll need a new scam to win elections.
BY
DEVANIE ANGEL
It looks fairly innocuous, a metal-and-plastic square with wires coiled up like an angular snail, a lot like the anti-theft tag you'd find if you pried apart a book you'd just bought at a chain store. But it's a Radio Frequency Identification tag, RFID for short, and each one has a tiny antenna that can broadcast information about the product, or person, to which it is attached.
To the industry that makes and markets RFID, it's simply the next logical step from bar codes: providing a cheap, easy way to keep products on the shelves, consumers happy and companies making money.
But to many privacy-rights advocates, RFID tags could be the forerunner to nightmare scenarios in which RFID technology is the Trojan horse that brings Big Brother into your home, snooping through your medicine cabinets, fridge and underwear drawer to find out what you do, buy and believe, and, ultimately, what you are.
This small tag has, so far, largely flown under the radar of consumers and the mainstream press. But in early October, privacy-rights advocates Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre published a book, "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID," that has RFID proponents on the defensive.
The book holds up plenty of evidence to back up the fears of people who otherwise might be written off as tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists: IBM taking out a patent for a "person-tracking unit" that uses RFID tags to identify individuals, their movements and purchases in stores. Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart collaborating on a test that put cameras on a store shelf in Oklahoma and watched customers pluck lipsticks off an RFID-enabled shelf. A Sutter County grade school's experimental program requiring students to wear RFID-enabled badges to track their on-campus movements, thanks to supplies donated by the InCom Corp. based 50 miles northwest of Sacramento.
And the federal government plans to put RFID tags in passports, prescription medications and perhaps driver's licenses and postage stamps. One day, the "Spychips" authors fear, the tiny tags could be on everything from candy bars to dollar bills, compromising both privacy and personal security.
"I think the industry is waiting until they've done adequate PR to where the public will really embrace it," Albrecht said. "They want to get the infrastructure in place [and] find ways to integrate this technology in a way that is not going to scare people. They envision these things in our homes and our refrigerators and in the doorway of our kids' bedrooms."
In the weeks after "Spychips"' release, RFID supporters retaliated with rebuttals calling the book at best a futuristic fairy tale and at worst a delusional pack of lies by fringe alarmists.
As much as the RFID industry (which researchers say will be a $4.2 billion-a-year business by 2011) might want to ignore the book and its authors, it can't afford to do so. One RFID company has even bought space on Google, eBay and Amazon so when consumers search for "Spychips," a link to a 24-page rebuttal pops up.
"We felt we had a responsibility to educate consumers," said Nicholas Chavez, president of RFID Ltd., who co-authored the rebuttal released November 4. "They may get first blanch at the consumers through the book," he said. "There's a big fear out there that people will go read 'Spychips' and then go out and tell 10 people."
"Spychips," he said, casts RFID in "this sinister, Orwellian light" and presupposes applications that aren't within the current capabilities of the technology. RFID was first envisioned in the 1940s, combining the existing disciplines of radio broadcast technology and radar to communicate via reflected power, according to a history by AIM Global, the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility. It wasn't until the late 1970s that technical capabilities caught up with the vision and RFID began to be applied commercially.
While "active" RFID tags send out radio signals, the more typical "passive" tags lie dormant until picked up by devices called readers, which can be positioned anywhere from a couple of inches to several feet away. The reader transmits the information to a database, where it can be stored. There's some debate over actual vs. intended read range, and Albrecht says she has registered results from as far as 15 feet away, but "you don't need these massive read ranges," Albrecht said, if RFID readers are placed in strategic locations, such as freeway onramps, grocery-store aisles, floors or doorways of homes. While some chips are smaller than a grain of sand, the ones currently in use on shipping crates are the size of a credit card.
It's a technology that ultimately will win over consumers through convenience and savings, said Gail Tom, a California State University, Sacramento, professor who teaches marketing courses and has written two books on consumer behavior.
And yet, she acknowledged, "if you went up to the average person on the street, they would not know what RFID is."
The "Spychips" book, she said, "alerts people to at least think about it." "Whenever you have new technology, there are concerns, and it's good to have concerns [due to] just the possibility that there could be Draconian and negative things. You would hope the good outweighs the bad," she said. "When UPC codes came out, it was somewhat controversial, too," Tom said, remembering worries that unscrupulous retailers would switch prices on unsuspecting customers.
"Using the analogy of the bar code is a good one, because it tracks the product, it doesn't track you," she said. "Marketers are not interested in individuals. They're interested in segments and clumps of people." A lot of the technology's success depends on how the RFID industry plays it, and Tom agreed it's now somewhat on the defensive. "It may not have occurred to marketers that they needed to publicize this, because they may not have seen a lot of the privacy issues."
Underwear tags and smart shopping carts
The RFID industry's adversaries are smart, passionate and media-savvy. With each new development, the authors of "Spychips" fire off an e-mail press release touting their successes or assailing their critics, turning industry leaders' own words against them. They've organized pickets at Wal-Marts, along with boycotts of companies such as Gillette and European retail store Tesco. (In 2003, that store collaborated to package RFID tags with Mach3 razor blades and surreptitiously snap photos of customers taking them from the shelf, and later at the cash register, in a test designed in part to identify potential shoplifters.) The clothing company Benetton canceled its plans to put RFID in underwear and other products after Albrecht launched an "I'd rather go naked" campaign.
Their message is resonating with anti-government Libertarians, conservative Christians and staunch American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) types. But that's not all. "It doesn't have a demographic," Albrecht said of "Spychips." "Everyone's got a reason not to be spied on."
Try to get biographical information out of Katherine Albrecht, and you'll get some unintended insight into what she's all about. She started taking college courses at age 15 but won't say where she grew up. Along with a master's in instructional technology from Harvard (she's working on her doctorate there), she has a bachelor's degree in international marketing but won't say from where. She's married and has kids but won't say how many. Her family lives somewhere in the state of New Hampshire.
She'll eat a loss before handing over her driver's license to reverse an overcharge at Kmart. She also refuses to use credit or ATM cards, only paying cash. Fittingly, she likes to wear mirrored sunglasses.
"I think I've always been kind of a rebel," Albrecht said. "The ultimate irony is that by being the person who is so openly advocating for privacy, I've become a public figure."
Disturbed by the concept of supermarket loyalty cards, which she feels blackmail shoppers into turning over personal data in exchange for lower prices, Albrecht decided to study the practice for her master's thesis. In 1999, she founded CASPIAN, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering.
So, it wasn't a reach when, a couple of years later, Albrecht heard about "smart" shopping carts that use RFID to track shoppers throughout a store. She researched and wrote an article for the Denver University Law Review and began attending RFID trade shows in the United States and Europe, where she heard the multiple, often conflicting messages companies were sending to clients, consumers and the general and trade presses.
Also in 1999, corporations and academia were collaborating to create the Auto-ID Center on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus. The nonprofit research project was founded and funded by Procter & Gamble, Gillette and the Uniform Code Council, which manages the bar code.
"It was just down the street from Harvard, where I was working on my doctorate," Albrecht said. In the spring of 2002, she signed up as a member of the media to attend a meeting at the Auto-ID Center, which was in the midst of its successful quest to get $300,000 each from companies that wanted to be sponsoring partners. "I was a fly on the wall taking notes in the back." By then, years into her anti-loyalty-card crusade, Albrecht was a confirmed skeptic and wasn't surprised that big business would want to gather personal information on and track customers, or that it would hope to fly under consumers' radar until RFID was embedded in society and it was too late to do anything about it. "What surprised and horrified me in 2002 was that they actually had a technology to do this."
And no one seemed to be talking about privacy issues.
"I came home that day so sickened and so reeling that I sat down with my husband and said, 'I feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders because I know what's coming.'
"This is going to fundamentally change everything."
At another board meeting at MIT, Albrecht found herself sharing an elevator with the then-executive director of the Auto-ID Center, Kevin Ashton. Ashton, who was not available for comment and now works for a company that makes RFID readers, has told interviewers that item-level RFID tagging will become common between 2007 and 2010, with RFID common in the home between 2010 and 2020. He also envisions an "Internet of Things" that will link every item sold, from a can of Pepsi to an Armani dress shirt, to its own Web page, tracking it from manufacturer to warehouse to transport and beyond, until the tag is presumably killed by the consumer.
"He gets it. He sees the hugeness of this," Albrecht said of the man she considers her arch nemesis. "He embraces this future; I'm horrified."
To track or to serve?
In October 2003, the Auto-ID Center dissolved, and EPCGlobal took its place as a nonprofit entity standardizing what's referred to as Electronic Product Code. Unlike a bar code, which can reveal only the type of product you purchased, an EPC is a unique identifier that attaches a serial number to tell a reader exactly which item you have.
On the corporate level, Wal-Mart has been leading the push toward RFID in a retail setting. This year, the company began requiring the 100 top suppliers to its Texas stores to put RFID tags on their shipping pallets and cases of products at an estimated cost of millions of dollars a year.
"We are also on target to have the next top 200 suppliers live in January 2006," said Christi Gallagher, a media-relations representative for Wal-Mart. "We don't anticipate each item in the store being tagged for 10 to 15 years," she added. "Wal-Mart is not looking at RFID technology to track customers, but rather to serve them by enhancing its supply-chain process."
The industry envisions "smart shelves," which would alert stores when inventory is low, so they could restock or reorder, decreasing frustration and increasing sales. RFID also has anti-theft applications and could help expedite returns, product recalls and warranties.
Theoretically, the stores would pass savings on to customers.
In November 2003, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on a trial by Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart in which shoppers in a Broken Arrow, Okla., store were viewed remotely from Procter & Gamble headquarters as they took packages of Max Factor Lipfinity lipstick off a shelf. The boxes contained small RFID chips, and readers were embedded in the shelf liner.
Although representatives from both companies initially denied such a study ever took place, Wal-Mart now says it was anything but secret.
"There were signs present saying a test was being conducted," Gallagher said. Gallagher said Albrecht "may not fully understand the technology" and that, "because of our size, we are often the target of criticism by these special-interest groups with their own very narrow agendas, which typically do not reflect the philosophies of the majority of our customers."
The Department of Defense has ordered suppliers to affix RFID tags to shipping crates. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has called for RFID tags on pharmaceuticals' shipping containers, which it says would reduce counterfeiting and theft, and the companies that manufacture OxyContin and Viagra are already on board. The U.S. State Department announced in May that it was backing off on RFID-enabled passports after privacy-rights advocates pointed out that, lacking encryption, the tags could be read remotely by anyone, including terrorists who could stand in airports with handheld RFID readers, separating out Americans and allowing precision-level targeting. The scheduled rollout had been last summer.
Already, San Francisco Bay Area motorists use FasTrak to quickly traverse bridges and other toll areas, with an RFID-enabled device automatically debiting their accounts. A Mobil gas station Speedpass uses the same technology, as do VeriChips implanted in pets in case they get lost.
More recently, appliance makers have developed microwave ovens and washing machines that can scan bar codes and, eventually, read RFID tags on products to determine how and how long to cook or wash a product. The food industry could tag and track meat and other products, making recalls much simpler. If you have a keyless remote for your car, you are carrying around an RFID tag.
And for convenience's sake, the possibilities are exciting: Load up your shopping cart, wheel it through an RFID-enabled bay that will instantly scan the items, store loyalty card and payment card, and check out in seconds.
Privacy rights meet the spy chip
Simson Garfinkel, Ph.D., has seen all sides of the issue and says it's not a Utopia-vs.-Armageddon scenario. An author and instructor at Harvard, he is an expert in computer security and studies information policy and terrorism.
"The public is largely not participating in this debate, and unfortunately the decisions are being made right now," he said. For example, he said, MasterCard and Visa claim they have deployed 1.5 million RFID-enabled cards with no customer complaints. "The fact is these people don't even know that they're carrying the cards," Garfinkel said.
Garfinkel is a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a signer of the nonprofit's Position Statement on the Use of RFID in Consumer Products. The statement, which also is endorsed by CASPIAN, the ACLU and various consumer and privacy organizations, calls for a voluntary moratorium on item-level tagging and also seeks to preserve consumers' right to disable tags, avoid being tracked without consent and preserve anonymity.
Spurred in part by the Sutter County student-tagging controversy, the EFF and ACLU drafted a bill for the California Legislature that became Senate Bill 768, and Senator Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, agreed to carry it. The bill currently is parked on the Assembly floor, to be resurrected for discussion in January. It calls for a three-year moratorium on the use of RFID technology on driver's licenses, library cards, student-body cards, Medi-Cal cards and other "mass distribution" documents. It also would set fines for "intentional remote reading" of someone's personal information without his or her knowledge and would require personal information on RFID tags to be encrypted.
"It's hardly a household word," Lee Tien, staff attorney for EFF, said of RFID. "But those people who are aware of it have fairly predictable reactions. [And] the more people know about it, they more concerned they are."
In October 2003, a survey commissioned by the National Retail Federation found that while 43 percent of those who had heard of RFID viewed it favorably, almost 70 percent of consumers were "extremely concerned" that data collected via RFID could be used by a third party, that it would make them the target of advertisers or that they themselves could be tracked through their purchases. "Should the industry fail to educate consumers about RFID, that role will default to consumer-advocacy groups," warned consulting firm CapGemini.
The Sacramento-based California NOW (National Organization for Women) has signed on as an official supporter of S.B. 768 and is joining the ACLU, the Commission on the Status of Women and the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence in lobbying the Legislature in favor of the bill.
"California NOW's primary concern about the use of RFIDs is the threat to women and their children's safety," said Jodi Hicks, California NOW's legislative director. "Women and their children who are fleeing domestic violence need to be protected by having their whereabouts concealed from their abuser. RFIDs are the dream tool of an abuser or stalker, and we must do what we can to keep that technology out of the hands of those criminals."
For Chavez, of RFID integrator RFID Ltd., it's a battle for consumers' trust. "You can't take it personally," he said, but "I do take offense to the fact that they're influencing consumers' opinions of anyone and everyone in the RFID industry as being secretive or Machiavellian in their efforts."
He wants Albrecht and McIntyre to agree to join his company's advisory board, participate in public debates and train to become "certified" in RFID. "If they wish to be credible in talking about RFID technology, they need to be certified." Chavez tempers his criticism, acknowledging that others in the industry have directed "very well-publicized slurs" at the Spychips authors.
Privacy advocates raise important concerns, he said. "I'm all for labeling, and the consumers should have the option to kill the tag at the point of sale." Most in the industry believe in some form of a code of ethics but ultimately want to police themselves.
RFID trade association AIM Global, which also published a rebuttal to "Spychips," calls the book a "great read" for "conspiracy buffs" and says it includes "a lot of conjecture, old news, unfounded assumptions, and a hodgepodge misrepresentation of the various types of RFID--even as the book admits the technology's limitations."
Mark Roberti, founder and editor of the RFID Journal, said RFID is a wonderful technology that is getting a bad rap by a vocal minority. "You can't see it--that's what creeps people out.
"The fact is, everywhere RFID has been introduced, people love it."
Roberti has written hundreds of articles about RFID and its applications, editorialized against the Spychips book and said its authors "consistently overstate the truth."
"They don't understand the fundamentals of business," Roberti said of the idea that collected data could become common knowledge. "Businesses never share information about their customers. The company is always going to do what will make it money."
That's only the beginning of the "misguided" and "pathetic" ideas that Roberti said pervade "Spychips." "The book is so stupid in the fact that it does not relate technology to reality. ... Wal-Mart cannot change the laws of physics."
"They're struggling to read tags on cases traveling through a dock door 10 feet wide at 5 miles an hour," Roberti said, and it's easy to disable or "jam" tags. Read ranges are only a few inches in most cases, and it will be years before RFID tags are cheap enough--5 cents, the industry hopes--to place on individual products.
And nowhere in the book, Roberti says, is there an example of a specific person whose privacy has been invaded.
"Every time you go into a store, video cameras are assuming you're guilty. Why is RFID suddenly the problem?" said Roberti, who is against tracking people by name and is disturbed that U.S. privacy laws are not as advanced as those in Europe. Still, he said, "these are not evil people out to screw all these consumers. These are good people who want to sell products."
"In my view, RFID gives the consumer all the power," he said. "Wal-Mart has no power. We choose to shop there. ... Vote with your wallet. If you don't want someone to put an RFID tag in a product, don't buy that product."
Albrecht, who authored a rebuttal to Roberti's rebuttal, said he misrepresents what "Spychips" is all about. It's not about how corporations and the government have invaded people's privacy. It's about how they plan to invade their privacy in the future.
"Part of what the book does is show industry vision," she said. "Before 1910, when electrical outlets were invented, if you had said, 'There will be a way to tap into a worldwide power grid, and [devices] will be every 10 feet in your house,' people would say, 'You're nuts,'" she said.
It's largely the "what if" thought progression that has RFID proponents so mad about "Spychips."
What if the "smart" medicine cabinet developed by Accenture didn't just warn people, by matching face-recognition software to FDA-mandated RFID tags on medicine bottles, that they were about to take the wrong medicine, but broadcast that information to their family members, doctor or the government? What if the government or insurance companies start using information gathered by RFID to deny people health coverage?
What if the same refrigerator that lets you know when you're out of cheese also radios the information to marketers, who in turn bombard you with unwanted advertisements?
What if police decide to use the passes carried by toll-bridge users to determine via RFID readers that a driver had gotten from Point A to Point B too quickly and issue speeding tickets?
What if you have your RFID-enabled passport in your pocket when you go to an anti-war rally, and government agents remotely scan it and put you in a database?
"That's the more dangerous, insidious side of RFID," said the EFF's Tien of the possibility of surreptitious government use of RFID. "The private sector and the government work hand in hand in many areas of surveillance. ... It's all one big blob a person has to worry about."
"Some people say, 'I don't care if people find out I wear size 8 Levi's jeans,'" Tien said. But what about more sensitive and personal possessions, such as a pregnancy home-test kit, or meds for bipolar disorder or HIV? "There are a lot of issues about your preferences and your beliefs," Tien said. "It's the same debate as the Patriot Act. Some people will say they have nothing to hide, and the government could find the same things out another way."
Tom, the CSUS professor, said that at the end of the day, most consumers don't really care how a technology works; they just think "it's neat that it works."
If they don't like a technology, or how it's being applied, "the power is still in the hands of the consumer. The consumer still has the power at the very end to rip off the tag."
"I don't see industry in general using RFID tags in a stealth manner," Tom said. Garfinkel said it would be a shame if RFID were dismissed completely because the industry is "incompetent" at addressing privacy concerns. He embraces many uses of the technology and especially sees ways it could be used to help blind people.
"The industry is acting very poorly." RFID manufacturers contradict themselves, he says, when they talk about how powerful their tags are and then tell consumers not to worry about them being read covertly, or from a distance beyond the recommended read range.
"Lots of times, things we think are not possible under the laws of physics actually are possible because it's an engineering problem, not a physics problem."
What it comes down to is whether you trust the government and big business to keep your privacy and other best interests at heart, he said. "I think it's a mistake to simply assume that business would never do anything secret," Garfinkel said. "The government is already following people around. I could easily see us being in a world where this is pervasively deployed. A lot of personal info could be leaked."
Albrecht said CASPIAN's intent has never been to ban RFID, she said, but rather to make companies tell consumers when tags or readers are being used so they can make informed choices.
If consumers wait and hope for the best, it may be too late, said Tien, of the EFF. "Privacy violations are not like a lot of other kinds of violations. You don't see them right away," he said, drawing a comparison with identity theft.
"There's really no reason to wait until a disaster happens until you deal with it. You can do something now rather than wait for a crisis."
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Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
Volume 7, No. 1
1 Article, 26 pages
BY
SCOTT RITTER
I wish I were writing about how good things are happening in the cause of peace, how congress has reversed course and they’re bringing our boys and girls home, how the Bush administration has woke up suddenly and said, ‘you know, this concept of global domination through the unilateral application of military force is not sound policy,’ and the Democrats woke up for the first time in a long time and said, ‘you know, we facilitated this war in Iraq. We’re as much to blame as George W. Bush.’ But that’s not the case. We live in a time where bad things are happening.
The fact is we live in very sad times, and, if you reflect long and hard on the reality of the issue, as I’m sure everyone agrees that these are not just sad times but depressing times. I’m not going to say much that’s going to give one hope because there’s not much to be hopeful about.
We are in a war that shows no inclination of ever ending. Yes, there’s a lot of rhetoric in congress now about ‘let’s create new benchmarks that need to be fulfilled in Iraq so that we can have a time table of bringing the troops home.’ But that’s just political rhetoric because the benchmarks they talk about putting in place are unrealistic. Therefore, there will never be a time line.
And let’s keep in mind that this is a congress that voted for the war, Republican and Democrat alike, and they are trapped by that vote to the extent that they cannot meaningfully interfere with the Bush administration’s plans on Iraq, and the plans of the Bush administration regarding Iraq was most recently articulated by Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, when she told the congress of the United States that we will be in Iraq for at least ten years.
All right, this is the reality. See, I told you that it wasn’t going to be very uplifting. This is the reality, and we have to deal with the reality, because if we don’t deal with the reality, if we don’t have a true grasp of what is happening as we speak, there cannot be a solution. Now one of the things that they pounded in my head early on when I joined the Marine Corps was that, before we talk about solving a problem, Lieutenant (because every Lieutenant has a solution to every problem in the world. We were the smartest people on the face of the Earth. I’m sure you see that. High school teachers see that with every new student that comes in. They’re the smartest, the brightest. They have the answer to everything. ) But the answer to what? What problem are we solving?
Don’t talk to me about a solution until you’ve defined the problem, and right now, In Washington, D.C. and right across the country, we’ve got a whole host of people now that suddenly are anti-war. It’s amazing how many anti-war people have come out of the woodwork now that President Bush’s popularity ratings have plummeted down to an all-time low. Where were these people of courage when we needed them? Where were they when they could have made a difference, when they could have stopped the war? Well, they weren’t anti-war back then because it wasn’t convenient to be anti-war. You see, the President had high popularity ratings.
People were trapped by their own ignorance and the fear that is induced by ignorance so that they could not stand up and speak truth to power because, frankly speaking, most people didn’t know what the truth was. We were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and, to be honest, most Americans didn’t have a clue what a weapon of mass destruction was. They didn’t know what chemical weapons were, biological weapons were, long-range ballistic missiles. They might have a vague understanding of what a nuclear weapon is, but not really, not what it takes to build a nuclear weapon. They were so ignorant about nuclear weapons that they bought into the argument that Iraq, a nation that is sitting on many tons of yellow-cake uranium ore, would have to go to an African country to buy new stockpiles. They were so ignorant about nuclear weapons that they bought at face value Dick Cheney’s proclamation that Iraq was acquiring aluminum tubes to build a new family of centrifuges to enrich uranium when everybody who deals with the enrichment of uranium using the centrifuge method knows that aluminum tubes will never work. We don’t build them with aluminum tubes. It doesn’t happen.
But, no, the American people, informed as always about the complexities of these very difficult issues, said ‘my gosh, the President has said yellow cake, and Dick Cheney has said aluminum tubes, and there must be a nuclear threat because Condoleezza Rice has told us ‘we don’t want to wait for the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.’ So like the compliant little sheep that we are, we *bah, bah* get led down the path towards a war that has been a disaster, an unmitigated disaster, a war based on a lie, a war based on not just the ignorance of the American public but the moral indifference of those whom we elect to higher office to represent us in our name, namely the Congress of the United States of America.
A lot of people want to call this George W. Bush’s war. It’s a little convenient to say that, especially if you are a Democrat or somebody who is not very fond of the Republican Party, either a progressive, a Green, etc. It’s George W. Bush’s war. Well, you know, if that’s what you’ve been calling it, you’re wrong, and, remember, we’re looking for a solution here. We’re trying to find the way forward. I already said there’s not going to be a solution until you’re honest about the problem, and, if you call this George W. Bush’s war, you already have a problem of definition because this isn’t George W. Bush’s war. This is America’s war. This is Bill Clinton’s war. This is the Congress of the United States’ war. This is an indifferent American public’s war. This is our war. We’re to blame. We’re responsible. We’re the ones that facilitated this mad rush to insanity that has occurred in Iraq today.
In defense of Bill Clinton, and I don’t often speak in defense of Bill Clinton, but, in defense of Bill Clinton, he inherited a problem. You see, the Iraq problem wasn’t something that Bill Clinton made up. When he came into office in 1993, we already had an Iraq policy in place, the Iraq policy of George Herbert Walker Bush, Papa Bush. You know, the big Bush as opposed to the Shrub. And Papa Bush had a policy that, in itself, was a reactive policy on Iraq. See, this is one of the problems that we face, not just in terms of foreign policy, but I’ll tell you it’s a problem we face as an anti-war movement, and I call myself part of the anti-war movement even though I’m not a pacifist. I’m anti-war, and I’ve been to war. I know what war is about. War is the most horrible thing mankind can inflict on mankind because war is only about man killing man. There’s nothing else. That’s what it does. What happens when you go to war? I’m anti-war, and here we are reacting.
Where’s the proactive thought in the peace movement? We’re reacting. Bush does this; let’s have a demonstration against what Bush does. Congress does this; let’s have a demonstration against what congress does. Well, what the hell do we stand for? I know what we’re against, but what do we stand for? Where’s our proactive policy? But this isn’t just a problem of the peace movement. It’s a problem of the United States. This is how we got into Iraq to begin with, because we’re reacting. We’re not proactive.
When we first started with Saddam Hussein’s government, he was a terrorist sponsor. He was a client of the Soviet Union. He was an enemy of the United States of America. This was in the 1970’s. He was somebody who gave safe haven to the Peoples’ Liberation Organization of the Palestinians, and then, in 1979, the good ally of America, the Shah suddenly isn’t in power in Iran, Iraq’s neighbor, anymore. Someone named Ayatollah Khomeini takes over, and Iran, instead of being a bastion of western-style, American thinking and defense against the Soviet Union, becomes this festering cesspool of anti-American sentiment, and Iraq, which was a state sponsor of terror, suddenly becomes an ally of convenience, a secular bulwark against the expansion of Islamic fundamentalism coming out of Iran, and Saddam Hussein, a state sponsor of terror, now becomes a critical ally of the United States.
So critical, in fact, that we turned a blind eye to Iraq’s policies against the state of Israel. We turned a blind eye against Iraq’s oppressive policies at home. We turned a blind eye to Saddam Hussein’s acquisition of chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, and long-range ballistic missiles. So long as Iraq is in the business of killing Iranians and holding the Iranians in check, Saddam’s a good guy, so good, in fact, that George Herbert Walker Bush sends a delegation to Iraq in the spring of 1990, led by a Republican Senator named Bob Dole, who embraces Saddam Hussein and calls him a true friend of the American people. A true friend of the American People. This state sponsor of terror in the 1970’s now, in March of 1990, is a true friend of the American people.
And most Americans turn on their TV, take a look at the news, read the headlines, and go ‘that’s Saddam. Good guy. Two thumbs up for Saddam. He’s a true friend of the American people.’ Except in August 1990, this true friend of the American people invades Kuwait, and now the President of the United States has to convince the American people that it’s in the national interest to mobilize 700,000 American troops to go off and fight in a war against this true friend of the American people. Now how does he explain the shift? Is the President going to be honest and talk about the complexities of the relationship? Is he going to talk about the fact that we had a policy of constructive engagement with Saddam, that, yes, we recognized how bad this man was, but we needed him to stand up against the Iranians, and, now that the Iran-Iraq war is over, we need to make sure that Saddam doesn’t depart out of the fold, so we constructively engaged with him.
We gave him billions of dollars of agricultural loans that he diverted to acquire chemical and biological weapons, and we knew this but we didn’t do anything to stop it, that we knew that he was building weapons that threatened the state of Israel, which was why Israel threatened to attack Iraq, which was why Iraq threatened to burn half the state of Israel? Do we get into the honesty and the complexity of this problem? Is that the kind of relationship we have with our politicians? Of course not. A general ones told me, “when you’re explaining, you’re losing, son. It doesn’t matter if you’re right. If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
And to have the President to stand up before the American people and explain why we’re going to war, he’s losing politically. I’ll give you a little insight into how politicians really interact with the people of the United States of America. They think we’re stupid. They think we’re dumb. They don’t think we understand complex issues. And as a result, they treat us like simple little children. That’s why the President got up in October 1990 in an effort to convince the American people that Saddam was no longer a true friend.
He said Saddam Hussein’s now a personification of evil, one of the most amazing transformations that’s taken place in modern history. A man went from being a true friend of the United States in March of 1990 to being the personification of evil in October of 1990. Had the President left it at that, we would not be at war with Iraq today. He took the next step, and he was on a roll, you see.
He was explaining things now to the American people. Saddam Hussein is not just a personification of evil. He is the Middle East equivalent of Adolph Hitler, requiring a Nuremberg-like retribution for the crime of invading Kuwait and occupying Kuwait.
Once the President uses that language, he has eliminated any possibility of a diplomatic solution, because, once you invoke Hitler, you have invoked evil itself, and no American politician can ever talk about negotiating with evil. The policy of regime change against Iraq began in October of 1990 when President George Herbert Walker Bush trapped himself with his own rhetoric.
Now how did he trap himself? Because we, the people of the United States of America, are too stupid to say, ‘excuse me, Mr. President, you used the term “Hitler” too loosely. Saddam may be a bad guy, but he’s not Hitler, and we disagree with your analysis.’ No, the dumb American people went, ‘yeah, Hitler, evil. Yeah, we accept that.’ And now we trapped our politicians in congress, you see, because, if the constituents buy into the notion of Adolf Hitler, the congressmen and women can’t deviate from this policy. Even if congress said, ‘wait a minute. This is stupid. This is bad policy. We need to go back to the policy of constructive engagement,’ and, even as bad as that was, it’s better than this rush to war. Now they can’t, you see, because, if a congressman or woman says, ‘hey, I want to have constructive engagement with Iraq,’ the voters will say, ‘wait a minute. That means you want to have constructive engagement with Hitler, and nobody has constructive engagement with Hitler. We’ve got to go to war. We’ve got to get rid of this guy,’ because that’s what we talked about, going to war.
Even as the Security Council talked about a war of liberating Kuwait, when George Herbert Walker Bush compares Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler, it becomes a war against evil, a struggle of good versus evil of biblical proportions that can only be terminated when George H. W. Bush delivers Saddam Hussein’s head on a platter. That’s what he wanted. I fought in that war. Yeah, we fought to liberate Kuwait, but we fought to do a heck of a lot more than that. I was part of a targeting team that tried to track down Saddam Hussein, put a bomb on the place where he was, not because we called this assassination. We’re far too civilized to assassinate leaders. We simply called it removing critical national command authority targets.
We’re cute with terminology. So we’re going to get rid of a critical national command authority target, but we didn’t. Saddam survived the war. We liberated Kuwait, a great success for the international community that said that Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait could not stand, that, by invading Kuwait, Saddam was acting in flagrant violation of international law, the United Nations charter. That’s why the UN supported the multilateral approach to liberate Kuwait. That was law, after all.
The UN didn’t support the unilateral objectives of the Bush administration, getting rid of Saddam Hussein. That was never on the UN’s books. That’s why, when the war ended, because it did end with the liberation of Kuwait, and the troops came home, at first, everybody was wildly cheering. We had great victory parades in New York City and Washington, D.C. Vietnam was behind us. The American military had stood up to the test and had passed the test, defeating the world’s forth largest military in a decisive land battle, except the American people maybe weren’t so dumb after all, because they’re sitting there, scratching their heads, saying, ‘well, Mr. President, you said this is a battle of good versus evil, and you define evil as Saddam Hussein, and troops are home. We’re declaring victory, but evil still resides in Baghdad.’
Ladies and gentlemen, the President has a problem, not a problem of national security, because Saddam Hussein does not pose a threat to the United States of America, especially after the 1991 Gulf War. No, what Saddam Hussein poses a threat to is the political fortunes of George Herbert Walker Bush. Saddam Hussein’s survival is a political embarrassment to George Herbert Walker Bush, and George Herbert Walker Bush turns to the CIA and says ‘what do I do? We have to get rid of this character, Saddam. He’s causing me some political problems here at home.’ The CIA said ‘don’t worry, Mr. President. Six months max, and that guy’s gone. He can’t survive the war, the devastation, the economic consequences of sanctions that were imposed in 1990 that are squeezing the country.’ They said, ‘all we have to do is contain Saddam for six months, and he’s out of here,’ which is one of the reasons the President said that the Iraqi people must take things in their own hands, and the Kurds rose up in the north, and the Shi’a rose up in the south, we stood by and did nothing while Saddam Hussein turned to surviving remnants of his military on the Kurds and on the Shi’a and crushed them.
You see, there was a calculation going on. Yeah, we didn’t want Saddam Hussein in, and here’s the ultimate hypocrisy of regime change. See, regime change means more than just getting rid of a leader. It means getting rid of a system. When we speak of regime change in Iraq, we’re talking about getting rid of the Baathist party, the system of oppression that has the Sunni minority holding in check through violence and coercion the Kurdish and Shi’a majorities that exist in Iraq. That’s regime change. We didn’t want regime change.
We weren’t politically threatened by the Baathist, and they didn’t pose a national security risk to us. In fact, the Baathist Party was an asset to the national security of the United States because we recognized that Iraq was a nation state that was, in effect, a failed nation state, and, if you took away the glue that was Saddam Hussein and the Baathist party, Iraq would devolve into chaos and anarchy that would have the Shi’a fighting the Sunnis, the Sunnis fighting the Kurds, the Shi’a fighting each other, the Sunni fighting each other, the Kurds fighting each other. No, we didn’t want regime change. We wanted the Baathists to stay in power. We wanted Sunni domination through military force and a police state.
Our problem wasn’t the regime. Our problem was a political problem because of the name Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was equated to Adolf Hitler. The Baath Party was not equated to Nazism, so we could live with the Baath Party. We just couldn’t live with Saddam Hussein. We had to get rid of him, get rid of a man, because of political problems for a President. Isn’t this already disturbing, that we’re talking about going to war because some politician has a political problem, that American boys and girls might be called upon to die in a foreign land because of a politician’s political problem?
I always thought, when I joined the military, that I took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies, foreign and domestic. It never once crossed my mind that I might have to go out and fight and die in a foreign land because of a President’s political problem. But that’s what’s happened. This is what has occurred here. The President has a political problem. He tells the CIA to get rid of Saddam Hussein. The CIA says, ‘well, we could have helped the Kurds. We could have helped the Shi’a,’ and they say, ‘no, no, no. We don’t want the Kurds or the Shi’a to win. We want the Baathists to be in power. We just want Saddam gone.’
Ah. What we need to do then is to create the conditions in which the Baathist Party turns on Saddam. They’re already unhappy because the military was defeated in a war. They’re already unhappy because the economy has been shut down because of economic sanctions. If we can continue to squeeze Saddam’s regime, somebody’s going to apply the 75-cent solution, the cost of 1 9mm bullet in the back of Saddam’s brain. That’s what we were hoping for. The best way to contain him? Economic sanctions. They were in place as we speak in 1991, but they were linked to the liberation of Kuwait, which has been achieved.
And so now, many people are sitting here going ‘hey, you know, Iraq’s sitting on the second largest proven reserves of oil in the world. We’d like to gain access to that oil, because oil means money, and money means that I get to buy a yacht and a vacation in the Bahamas. I like oil, but I can’t get to the oil as long as sanctions are in place. Let’s lift the sanctions.’ But, if you lift the sanctions, you break containment, and the CIA’s saying, ‘you can’t break containment. We’ve got to squeeze Saddam for six months.’ So we need a new justification for economic sanctions.
A justification comes in the form of weapons of mass destruction: chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, long-range ballistic missiles. Saddam’s got them. Prior to 1991, we knew he had them. We didn’t view him as a threat to international peace and security. It was a regional issue. If you’re Israeli, you should be concerned. If you’re Kuwaiti, you should be concerned. If you’re Saudi Arabian, you should be concerned. If you’re Iranian, you should be concerned. If you’re American, you’re yawning because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t impact you in a decisive fashion.
But, suddenly, in March and April of 1991, Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction become a threat to international peace and security of such a great magnitude that the Security Council has to pass a Chapter 7 resolution, the strongest kind of resolution, saying that Iraq must be disarmed of these weapons.
Furthermore, they say that economic sanctions imposed in August of 1990 linked to the liberation of Kuwait will be continued until Iraq is found to be disarmed, so the lifting of sanctions is now contingent upon Iraq’s compliance with their obligation to disarm. Now this is important. This is critical not only for what happened historically but what I’m going to say about in a little bit regarding Iran. What is the onus behind the sanctions, the onus behind extending the sanctions? Would you say it was more linked to disarmament or regime change, and the answer is regime change.
Disarmament was a vehicle used to facilitate regime change by creating the framework for the continuation of economic sanctions that would contain and squeeze Saddam Hussein. The United States was a drafter of this resolution. The United States voted in favor of this resolution, and the language of the resolution makes it sound as if this is about disarmament. It says Iraq must declare the totality of its weapons holding, turn them over to inspectors for inspection and eventual dispossession, and then, and only then, will economic sanctions be lifted. The United States voted for this resolution in April of 1991.
Immediately, members of congress came up and started whispering to Bush. ‘Hey, boss, what are you doing?’ ‘What do you mean, what am I doing? I passed a resolution.’ ‘Yeah, but that resolution holds within it the key for Saddam Hussein to break out of containment. If he cooperates with the inspectors and gives up his weapons, we’ve got to lift sanctions, and, if we lift sanctions, we’ve broken containment, and Saddam Hussein comes back into the fold of the international community as the head of Iraq. That means that we’re letting Hitler survive.’ And Bush said, ‘don’t worry.’
In May of 1991, the Secretary of State, James Baker, issues a speech. The speech goes along these lines. Even if Iraq complies with its obligation to disarm, economic sanctions will be maintained until which time Saddam Hussein is removed from power. Do you see the utter hypocrisy of the American position? While we vote for a Security Council resolution to continue economic sanctions based on Iraq’s obligation to disarm, and then we turn around a month later and say it’s irrelevant, we’re going to keep the sanctions in place forever, even if Iraq disarms, until Saddam Hussein is removed from power.
Do you understand why weapons inspections were never a valid, legitimate process to begin with? It didn’t matter what the weapons inspectors wanted. It only mattered what the policymakers wanted. In fact, disarmament becomes the enemy, especially after six months when Saddam Hussein continues to survive. The wildly little crafty dictator didn’t just roll over and play dead. He sustained his rule. He expanded his rule. He became more of a viable leader in Iraq. And now Bush is stuck. What do you do? We don’t have a plan. The plan was to wait six months, and Saddam’s gone. So what do you do? So Bush reacts, ‘just keep the sanctions in place, contain, and we’ll come up with a solution here, but nothing dramatic.
Nothing dramatic because I’ve got to run for re-election in 1992, so I don’t want a new war. I don’t want a new war which highlights the fact that I didn’t accomplish the mission in the first war. I want to build on the notion that we won a grand victory in the first war.’ That’s a hard notion to sustain when you’ve got the Iraqi government at first confronting the inspectors, not cooperating with them, and thereby maintaining the impression that Saddam Hussein is thumbing his nose at the United States.
It didn’t matter that the weapons inspectors were actually on the ground doing their job. It didn’t matter that the weapons inspectors were actually succeeding in disarming Iraq. It didn’t matter that, in June of 1991, after Iraq failed to declare a nuclear weapons program, that weapons inspectors found a convoy of 100 vehicles on the back of which was enrichment equipment related to a nuclear weapons program, forcing the Iraqis to admit they lied, forcing the Iraqis to turn over the totality of their nuclear weapons program. It didn’t matter that the weapons inspectors … with the fact that the Iraqis had failed to declare almost a hundred missiles, through the perseverance and tenacity of their work, compelled the Iraqis to admit, oops, we lied, here’s your missiles. It didn’t matter that the weapons inspectors were destroying more chemical agent than people could shake a stick at. No, this was irrelevant, you see, because disarmament was the enemy. If inspectors succeeded, you create a political problem.
This is why, when I went to the CIA in October of 1992 and briefed them on the fact that we had succeeded in accounting for all of Iraq’s ballistic missiles, instead of being greeted with high-fives and cheers, I was greeted with stoic silence. You see, because what I was telling them was that their policy of regime change was on the brink of failure, because, if inspectors can succeed in disarming Iraq, the world’s going to talk about lifting the sanctions. This is why the Bush administration did two things in October 1992. The first thing they did was issue a rebuttal to the U.N. inspectors’ report saying, ‘no, we disagree. We disagree with your finding.’
They did an amazing thing, too. And we talk about the American public and how they gain access to information. We gain access to information by watching TV. Let me give you a little insight here. We inspectors just finished doing, in a serious of inspections over the course of several months in 1992 where we went to hundreds of sight sin Iraq, we interviewed hundreds of people, we did forensic investigation, and we came up with a technically based determination that we could account for almost all the missiles. The CIA, in disagreeing with us, and not only were they disagreeing with us, but George Tenet [sic] got on national TV before the United States Senate, and said that the United States government’s position is that there’s up to 200 missiles missing in Iraq.
That’s mathematically impossible. It couldn’t happen. But, if you’re an American citizen, you turn on the TV or you open the newspaper and see on the front page of the New York Times, it wasn’t George Tenet at that time, the CIA director says 200 missiles in Iraq, you’re thinking there’s 200 missiles in Iraq. You’re thinking that there’s a threat there. See, the CIA’s job is not to disarm Iraq. They’d never received that task from the President of the United States. The CIA’s job is to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and one key aspect of getting rid of Saddam Hussein was to contain him through the continuation of sanctions.
The continuation of sanctions required that the CIA maintain public perception of a noncompliant Iraq. What I just said should shock you. The CIA knew in 1992 that there were no missiles left in Iraq. The CIA knew in 1992 that there was no nuclear weapons capability in Iraq. The CIA knew in 1995 that all chemical weapons and all biological weapons were accounted for. And, yet, here we are today, and it’s amazing.
Turn on the television, and listen to the President, and listen to the Democrats. The President will say,’ we got it wrong on the weapons. We thought they were there, and they weren’t. Oops.’ And then the Democrats said, ‘we were misled. The President said that there were weapons there, so we voted for the war, but now it turns out there weren’t. We went to war on the basis of a lie. We were misled. Don’t blame us.’ Blame everyone, ladies and gentlemen, because I’m here to tell you they knew there were no weapons. They knew it. The CIA knew it. The U.S. intelligence community knew it. Congress knew it. The Senate knew it, especially those who sat on the oversight committees and were cognizant of the intelligence information.
They knew that the policy was regime change. They supported the policy of regime change. They were part of the implementation of the policy of regime change and the formulation of the policy of regime change. There was a Republican controlled congress in 1994 that used Bill Clinton’s inability to deal with Saddam Hussein as a political foil to put pressure on the Clinton administration, thereby making Bill Clinton concerned about his prospect for re-election in 1996, thereby having Bill Clinton order the CIA to up the ante and go after Saddam in a very aggressive fashion which culminated with a coup attempt in June of 1996 which used the UN weapons inspection process not only as a vehicle for the CIA to gather intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s security but as a trigger for military action.
Don’t tell me congress didn’t know. They knew. They knew it was never about disarmament. They knew it was always about regime change, and Bill Clinton’s inability to get rid of Saddam in 1996 empowered congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to unite in a bipartisan fashion, to pass what is called the Iraq Liberation Act, which set aside $100,000,000 of U.S. taxpayers’ money to fund Iraqi opposition groups to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Regime change not only became U.S. policy. It became U.S. law, public law, and congress pretends they didn’t know what was going on. How absurd is that?
We have a guy touring Washington, D.C., a guy named Ahmad Chalabi, and everyone likes to boo and hiss about Ahmad Chalabi and say that he’s the man that sold the bad information to the Bush administration. Well, you know what? Ahmad Chalabi is a creation of the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton created Ahmad Chalabi. Bill Clinton’s CIA funded Ahmad Chalabi. Bill Clinton is the first administration to swallow Ahmad Chalabi’s poison, but, you know, it wasn’t Ahmad Chalabi’s poison. It was our poison.
We created Ahmad Chalabi, created the poison that we would swallow, to sustain the notion of a noncompliant Iraq. A lot of people talk about the interim Iraqi government. You know, there’s that guy Iyad Allawi who used to be the Prime Minister of Iraq, but, before he embarked on a career of Iraqi politics, he was a paid agent of the CIA. He’s the guy behind the 1996 coup attempt, a product of Bill Clinton, briefed to the United States congress. They knew what the facts were. Bill Clinton gets on TV in December 1998 to sell the American people on a program of action called Operation Desert Fox, a three-day bombing campaign ostensibly against targets of weapons of mass destruction. Read Bill Clinton’s speech. It’s available on the Internet. Read it. Compare and contrast it to what George W. Bush said.
There is no change. There is no difference. It’s the same speech. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. The United States has no choice but to act and bomb Iraq. The only difference was Bill Clinton wasn’t sending in troops to invade. He was bombing, but it was the same story, the same lies, and Bill Clinton knew they were lies. In April of 1998, Bill Clinton appeared before the United States congress to explain why inspectors might believe that the United States wasn’t supporting the inspection process, and Bill Clinton was aghast. He said, ‘no, no. It’s the policy of the United States of America to give the inspectors all of the support they need. We’re behind the disarmament of Iraq 100%.’
He came back from congress, turned to Madeleine Albright, his Secretary of State, and Sandy Berger, his National Security Advisor, and ordered them to have a secret meeting to redraft American policy not to support the inspectors but to undermine the inspectors, to disengage the United States away from the inspectors because the inspectors were causing Bill Clinton a huge problem. We were disarming Iraq. We were succeeding, and the United States could never allow the inspectors to succeed, so the United States put the break on the inspectors, started undermining the inspectors even more than they did, and, in December, 1998, popular mythology may hold Saddam Hussein kicked the weapons inspectors out of Iraq, but this is wrong, ladies and gentlemen. They were ordered out by Bill Clinton.
He ordered them out and then said that Iraq is not cooperating with the inspectors, and that’s why we need to bomb. The purpose of the bombing wasn’t to get rid of weapons of mass destruction because there were none and they knew it. The purpose of the bombing was two-fold. To target Saddam Hussein using intelligence information gathered by weapons inspectors. The first four cruise missiles that went into Iraq tried to knock out Saddam Hussein because U.N. intelligence said he might be sleeping either in Baghdad or in Tekrit. Of the 120 targets hit, 111 dealt with the security of Saddam Hussein.
The others hit factories that we knew not to have any relation to weapons of mass destruction. Now they didn’t get Saddam, but what they did do is kill inspections because, when the Iraqis woke up after three days and walked through all the targets that were bombed, they realized that these targets were the exact same places inspected by United Nations weapons inspectors. They realized that the only way the United States could have received precise coordinates of where to strike was through the intelligence gathered by UN weapons inspectors.
The Iraqis said the inspectors are not welcome back in, which is a victory for the United States because, without weapons inspectors, we can’t disarm Iraq. If you can’t disarm Iraq, economic sanctions will not be lifted, and they’ll continue. Now a lot of people like to talk about weapons inspections and disarmament of Iraq as if it’s a big victory for us. We weapons inspectors did a good thing, but let me educate you on a couple of things.
Weapons inspections do not exist in isolation. They didn’t just happen. They were an outgrowth of a war. United Nations weapons inspections were extensions of the war. We cannot treat them as separate events. UN weapons inspectors may not have had guns, but we actually inflicted more harm on Iraq than military weapons did because we were responsible for the continuation of economic sanctions, economic sanctions that devastated Iraq for a decade, economic sanctions that killed between 700,000 and 2.5 million Iraqi civilians, and yet we sit here and talk about disarmament and weapons inspections as if it’s something neat. Disarmament only works if you can isolate it from war.
Disarmament is a proactive measure in its own right, but disarmament is simply an extension of the war and war objectives using disarmament as a cover. It’s not disarmament. Don’t be fooled. Don’t be fooled. UN weapons inspections in Iraq were not about getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. They were about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. They were about continuing economic sanctions to destabilize Saddam Hussein. Why is this important?
Well, it’s important, first of all, because we’re talking about our politicians today, our brave politicians who are taking advantage of George W. Bush’s low popularity ratings to suddenly come out of the woodwork like rats on a sinking ship and declare how they’re against the war, but they’re not really against the war, because talk to them in depth. They’re against what’s happening now. They’re against the quagmire we face today. They’re against the fact that the Bush administration did not plan adequately for a post-Saddam environment. They’re not against the war. They’re political opportunists.
To be against this war, you have to say that we shouldn’t be in Iraq to begin with. To be against this war, you must say that Iraq was better off with Saddam Hussein in power than it was with Saddam Hussein out of power. To be against this war, you must recognize that the congressional vote for war in 2002 was a complete abrogation of Constitutional responsibility. That’s being against this war, and there isn’t a politician out there today that is against this war using that terminology, or very few politicians, none that aspire to national political leadership. No, all the great politicians out there who say ‘I want to run for President’ are saying it’s good to have gone to war to get rid of Saddam Hussein. They say it’s just that we’ve done badly in the post-war phase. No, ladies and gentlemen, you can’t be half against this war. You have to be all against this war, and, sadly, there’s far too few politicians who are all against this war.
It is this type of political half-stepping that creates a quandary not only for Iraq but for Iran. You see, a lot of people, when I started talking, in 2001 and 2002, I traveled around the country and talked about the impending war with Iraq. And everyone went, ‘well, there isn’t going to be a war with Iraq. That’s insane. The President’s embarked on diplomacy. There’s going to be a diplomatic solution. They’re going to give inspectors a chance. There will not be a war.’ I kept saying no, war has been decided upon because it is the policy decided upon to remove Saddam Hussein from power. No one wanted to recognize that policy.
Then the war came. Then today there’s a growing recognition that we were misled into this war. But now I’m mentioning the war with Iran that’s already occurring, and everybody goes ‘no, there’s no war with Iran. Don’t be crazy. We can’t go to war with Iran. We don’t have enough troops. We’re bogged down in Iraq. No one would be crazy enough to go to war with Iran.’
The same man that got us involved in this war in Iraq (I should say men, Clinton and Bush), got us involved with a future war with Iran. The die has already been cast. The decision has been made, and, as much as Bill Clinton facilitated war with Iraq, he facilitated war with Iran by embarking on a policy of dual containment in the 1990’s, putting unilateral U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, creating the politics of demonization where the American public on a daily basis has been bombarded with nothing but negative visuals, negative information about Iran, nothing positive.
According to the U.S. media, Iran is populated by 50 million anti-American whirling dervishes who want nothing more than to come out of the country and cut off our heads. We don’t recognize the cultural diversity of Iran. We don’t recognize the fact that Iran is populated by human beings that care about life just as much as we do. We don’t recognize that the Iranian mothers want a good future for their children just as much as the American mothers want a good future for their children. We don’t recognize that Iranian men just want to have a job, a job that pays the bills, so that they can go home and maybe have a nice weekend with their family. That’s the reality of Iran, but we don’t have that. You see, we’re told that Iran is a threat.
We’re told that the mad mullahs in Iran must be done away with in the same way that the mad dictator in Baghdad was done away with. The policy of regime change is in place today. This is why, when the Bush administration speaks of regional transformation, it’s not just hypothetical. They mean it, and, just like the Downing Street Memo, that British document that refers to meetings that took place in July, 2002, says that the United States had a policy of regime change already in place that was not going to be changed and they were fixing intelligence around the policy, I’m here to tell you today that we have a policy of regime change in place about Iran, and we are fixing the intelligence around the policy.
We have a congress that is unwilling to stand up and talk about the reality of Iran. And listen to Hillary Clinton when she asks ridiculous questions, when she has testimony about the Iranian threat. She doesn’t have probing questions. She sits there and reinforces the negativity. She sits there and reinforces the notion of an Iranian threat, and the danger with that is that the compliant beast we call the American public, these sheep that allow themselves to be led to and fro, are listening to what she says.
That’s why I could be a pollster and ask the following question. Do you think America should go to war with Iran? And most Americans say no, it’s stupid, we’re already bogged down in Iraq, why should we go to war with Iran? Put those polling numbers up, and everybody will see, 'there’s not going to be a war with Iran, Scott. What are you worried about?’ Let me get a little more tricky with you here. Do you think the Iranian government poses a threat to the United States of America? 78% of the American public says yes. How does the Iranian government pose a threat? Do they pose a threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons? The same numbers, 78%, yes, Iran poses a threat in the form of nuclear weapons. Now comes the cute part: how should we deal with this threat? Oh, we’re not going to that war thing because it sort of went bad in Iraq.' What do you want to support? 'Ah, economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations.'
84% of Americans believe that we should impose sanctions against Iran through the United Nations as a manner to deal with the Iranian nuclear weapons threat that supposedly threatens the security of the United States. That’s why we’re going to war because we have bought into the notion that Iran is a threat without question, without thinking. We just parrot back what’s told to us by our elected officials. We bought into the notion that Iran is a threat in the form of nuclear weapons, even though no evidence has been put forward by anybody to sustain this notion. In fact, all of the intelligence information points to the reality that there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Every case made by the Bush administration has fallen apart on investigation of guess what, the eternal threat to peace and security. United Nations weapons inspectors who had the audacity to go to Iran and investigate baseless allegations and expose them as baseless allegations.
Well we "know" they have nuclear weapons. And, now that we’ve said there’s a threat, we say that the only way to deal with this threat is to impose economic sanctions, but you know what? They have to be imposed by the United Nations Security Council. The United Nations Security Council has members such as Russia, France, and China, not so much France right now on the issue of Iran but Russia and China, who have said ‘we will not allow economic sanctions to be imposed because we have seen what you’ve done with the Iraqi model, that this isn’t about getting rid of a nuclear threat.
This is about regime change, and we’re not going to let this occur.’ But the United States is pushing hard to have the issue brought to the Security Council knowing full well that Russia and China will veto it. What does this mean, ladies? It means that, when Russia and China veto it, as we know they will, the President has no choice. His hands are tied. He didn’t want to go to war, but he has no choice, you see, because Iran is a threat, a nuclear threat, and the United Nations will not do anything about this threat, and no President is going to stand by and let a threat exist. No President is going to allow the national security of the United States of America to be held hostage by the United Nations, and, as distasteful as war is, the President has no choice but to engage in a war with Iran. That’s why we’re going to war, because the President wants it.
The American people have been preconditioned to accept the terms of conflict, and the vehicle for facilitating this is in place: John Bolton, the United Nations ambassador, has already written his speech that he will deliver before the Security Council when they refuse to impose economic sanctions. That speech will be that America will not allow itself to be held hostage by the United Nations.
Then the President will order bombing, and this is where it gets really interesting, because one of the true things about the Iranian threat is we do not have enough troops to invade and occupy Iran. You see, the Bush administration is amazing. They don’t believe in reality. They say this themselves. They say that America has overwhelming economic, diplomatic, and political strength that we can bring to bear on any given situation and create our own reality, that the old rules of diplomacy no longer apply, that we have such overwhelming force that we can shape events so that a new reality is created. Now they sort of had a hick-up, a bad one in Iraq where they thought the new reality would be greeting us with songs and flowers.
They were a little wrong on that one, but they’ve modified their formulation apparently because they believe that, if we bomb Iran with a massive aerial bombardment, then the Iranian people will rise up and remove the Mullahs from power, even though history shows that it’s not very likely that a nation that’s bombed is going to rise up and support those who are bombing them. But, if that fails, the military has been told to be prepared to send troops from Azerbaijan, along the Caspian Sea coast, to the outskirts of Tehran where it would project a force of 40-60,000. The Iranian people would be motivated by our presence and rise up and overthrow the mad Mullahs of Tehran. We’ll even put another 20-30,000 Marines on the coast where we can control the Straits of Hormuz, preventing the Iranians from shutting down that. .. oil shipping lane. What happens when that doesn’t work?
And it doesn’t take a mathematical whiz to figure that it’s not going to work. Iran is a nation about 2.5 times the size of Iraq. Iran has a population of almost 50 million people, and we’re talking about putting 60-80,000 troops on the ground. We can’t control a nation of 25 million people with 161,000 troops. What makes us think we’re going to control 50 million with 80,000? It’s not going to happen.
Now is where it gets really frightening, because the Bush administration, if they go down this course of action, will have no choice at that point in time but to use nuclear weapons, and they have already developed the weapons — they call them usable nukes. It’s funny that term, usable. This is not about mutually assured destruction anymore. This is not about deterrence. The Bush administration has radically departed from past doctrine to say that we will have a family of nuclear weapons that are usable nuclear weapons, meaning that we can conceive of using them, and then they’ll say we could use them preemptively in a non-nuclear environment, meaning that it’s not about opposing somebody with nuclear weapons or biological weapons or chemical weapons, it’s we can use them any time we want to if it’s in the strategic national interest of the United States.
This war has a good chance of beginning in 2007. What are you going to do, peace movement? What are you going to do? Sit back and go, ‘oh my God, this is too much to think about. I’m going to hit the delete button and pretend that Ritter can't be right.’ Or do what others do? ‘Na, he’s a crazy wild man. Na, I’m not buying into that garbage. We’re just going to move on thinking that Iraq’s bad and they’ll never going on into Iran.’
Study the facts I’ve just put on the table. You will not contradict a single one of them. You cannot contradict a single one of them because they are facts. I’m not making it up. It’s all based on written and spoken statements made by Bush administration officials, past and present.
What are you going to do? Wait for congress to do the right thing? Congress has already sold out. Congress isn’t going to oppose this President. Congress has already bought into the notion of the Iranian threat. What are you going to do? One thing you can do is change congress, and you have a window of opportunity. The 2006 election may well go down in history as one of the most critical elections that this country has ever faced, because, if I’m right, and I pray I’m not, I pray I’m wrong, I pray I’m on drugs, I pray I’m having some hallucinations, I pray that none of this is true. What if I’m right and we don’t change congress in 2006?
We will unleash forces that will devastate this country, not just economically, not just politically, not just militarily, not just morally. Physically, because, if we drop nuclear weapons on Iran, we will have uncorked the genie, and that genie will not allow itself to be recorked until an American city has been vaporized in a radioactive cloud in a terrorist counterstrike to the American initiation of nuclear holocaust, and that is the statement of fact.
Right now, when people talk about terrorism and nuclear weapons, I’m not too worried about it because I still think that we have to be concerned about it, but there’s enough sanity that prevails in the world today where leaders such as Musharraf in Pakistan and others will not transfer this technology to the terrorists out of fear of the devastation that will be caused. If the United States drops nuclear weapons, all bets are off.
The Muslim world will not rest until the Americans pay a price similar to the one that’s been inflicted on them. What can you do? … Find a candidate worth supporting, and put all of your resources into supporting that candidate and getting that candidate in position, reaching out across the nation to other states and say ‘we need to get effective checks and balances in place in Washington, D.C. right now to hold this administration in place, in check.’
History shows us that, when an administration starts floundering in the way that George W. Bush has, that they take on a fortress-like mentality. Witness Richard Nixon in the aftermath of Watergate. Things are going to get worse for George W. Bush before they get better, if they ever get better. More allegations of misconduct, more allegation of lies, deceit, distortion are going to be put forward, and we already see how this President reacts, not with an embrace that’s inclusive but to reject and be derisive and to go on a counter-attack.
The President, unable to generate any friction in terms of getting his policies implemented here at home because congress is starting to rise up and revolt, will look for distractions overseas in the same way that Richard Nixon looked to create a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and the Middle East.
It’s very dangerous times very dangerous times, and, therefore, it’s incumbent upon us to recognize that we cannot wait for someone to give us the solution. We must re-read the Constitution and take strength from the words in the preamble that speak of we the people of the United States of America.
The only way we’re going to get a solution to this dual deception that’s taken place today in Iraq and Iran is for we, the people of the United States of America, to re-empower ourselves as citizens, to break free of this cocoon of comfort, this consumerism we trapped ourselves into so that we are addicted to a lifestyle that can only be sustained by elected representatives who will carry out aggressive policies.
We got to elect good people, and that’s the thing. We’ve got to elect. No one else is going to elect them. We’ve got to nominate them. No one is going to nominate them. We’ve got to support and sustain them because no one else is going to do that.
