Neocon Max Boot Critical of Ambassador Wilson, Karen Kwiatkowski & Ray McGovern

http://www.latimes.com/services/site...ered.intercept

COMMENTARY

The Fringe Fires at Bush on Iraq
Max Boot

March 11, 2004

Ted Kennedy delivered another stemwinder last week, accusing the Bush
administration of lying its way into Iraq for political gain. Ho-hum. Nothing
new there. But one paragraph caught my attention.

In trying to buttress his charge that the president twisted intelligence about
Saddam Hussein, Kennedy cited "Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a recently retired
Air Force intelligence officer who served in the Pentagon during the buildup to
the war." He quoted her as follows: "It wasn't intelligence — it was
propaganda … they'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make
it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, usually by
juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together."

Sounds pretty damning, doesn't it? Those aren't the words of a political
opponent; that's the judgment of a presumably disinterested military
professional. Except that Kwiatkowski's judgment doesn't look so disinterested
when you examine her views more closely.

Since her retirement in March 2003, she has become a prolific contributor to
isolationist publications like the American Conservative, Pat Buchanan's
magazine, and lewrockwell.com, an ultra-libertarian website. Pretty much all
her work is devoted to uncovering "neoconservative warmongers" who have
supposedly taken over U.S. foreign policy.

She is not subtle in denouncing "Dickie Cheney, Richie Perle and Dougie Feith"
(as well as, occasionally, "my pal, Max Boot"), whose "neoconservative
philosophy is hateful to humanity, anti-American, statist and anti-free trade."
(Anti-free trade?) She thinks the United States is a "maturing fascist state."
And she predicts a dire fate for those who led us into the Iraq war: "Some
folks on the Pentagon's E-ring may be sitting beside Hussein in the war crimes
tribunals."

Kennedy's speechwriters must have been familiar with Kwiatkowski's oeuvre —
how else could they have dredged up that quote? — but it did not stop them
from holding her up as a trustworthy source. This isn't unusual. Many retired
national security bureaucrats claiming President Bush lied about Iraq have a
not-so-hidden agenda.

The best-known example is Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador who has
accused the administration of spreading misinformation about Iraqi attempts to
acquire uranium and of deliberately outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as an
undercover CIA operative. Wilson is now notorious as a world-class publicity
hound who makes Paris Hilton look meek by comparison. Since l'affaire Plame
broke last summer, Wilson has been making paid speeches denouncing the
president, writing a memoir and even appearing with his wife in a Vanity Fair
photo spread.

Wilson is motivated by more than a desire for fame and fortune. He's also an
ideologue. On March 3, 2003 — long before the contretemps over his wife —
he was denouncing the invasion of Iraq in the Nation, a leftist magazine. He
claimed that "the underlying objective of this war is the imposition of a Pax
Americana on the region and installation of vassal regimes that will control
restive populations." Since then, Wilson has emerged as an active Democrat who
has advised John Kerry on foreign policy. He was quoted last year explaining
what he's up to: "Neoconservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked
this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy
both."

Equally biased are the former CIA officers who call themselves Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity — a name that implies the
administration, which they oppose, is insane. Ray Close, David MacMichael and
Ray McGovern, who make up VIPS' steering committee, have many decades of
intelligence experience among them, which is why they are often cited as
sources by news organizations like the New York Times when they write stories
about how the Bush team has run roughshod over "objective" CIA analysts.

What is seldom mentioned is where the VIPS-ters publish most of their anti-Bush
screeds: on Counterpunch.org, a conspiracy-mongering website run by Nation
columnist Alexander Cockburn. VIPS even has an e-mail address at Counterpunch,
which is so extreme that it has run an article suggesting that the only major
difference between George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler is that "Bush simply is not
the orator that Hitler was." But then, that wouldn't bother someone like VIPS'
McGovern, who in an interview equated the administration's selling of the Iraq
war with the techniques employed by "Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels
[who] said, if you repeat something often enough, the people will believe it."

Simply because Kwiatkowski, Wilson, McGovern, et al have flaky views doesn't
necessarily mean they're wrong in all the charges they make against the
administration. But those who hear their vituperative accusations should at
least be aware of where they're coming from. Citing them out of context gives
them an authority that their own intemperate words undermine.

Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes a weekly
column for the Los Angeles Times.

Neocons' Iraq Strategy Now Focused on Syria:

http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat...ernational&Num
ber=1355135&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=21&part=

More on 'A Clean Break' document:

The 'A Clean Break' document was prepared by JINSA (Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs) /PNAC (Project for the New American Century) Zionist
Neocon extremists Richard Perle and Douglas Feith for Israeli (Likudite) Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (as you can read the 'A Clean Break' document via
the link in the following article) to neutralize Israel's enemies (as no US
soldier should be dying in Iraq for such):

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=1032

'A Clean Break' was also prepared by Zionist extremist David Wurmser (who is
now working for Dick Cheney).

You can watch/listen to the 'A Clean Break' panel discussion via the link at
the following URL:

http://www.irmep.org

Additional links about JINSA/CSP/PNAC appear at the end of the following
article which appeared in the UK Guardian newspaper this past Saturday:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/...163522,00.html

Need to build a case for war? Step forward Mr Chalabi

If governments are going to rely on intelligence, its reliability is critical

Isabel Hilton
Saturday March 6, 2004
The Guardian

In the mayhem that followed the explosions in Baghdad and Karbala this week,
Ahmad Chalabi, an ever more powerful member of the Iraqi Governing Council and
a Pentagon favourite, was swiftly at the scene, behaving like a politician come
to offer sympathy. It was a shrewd piece of public relations - if you forget
the responsibility Chalabi bears for Iraq's present tragic condition. It was
Chalabi, more than any other individual, who helped persuade the US that
toppling Saddam Hussein would bring peace and democracy, and break the link
that he alleged existed between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaida.
The argument surrounding the decision to go to war in Iraq, Tony Blair said
yesterday, is not about trust or integrity but about judgment and intelligence.
That is also the case his critics make. In the approach to war, both the US and
the UK governments mobilised a mishmash of arguments in a campaign of
persuasion that was based not on rigorous analysis of intelligence but on the
selective use of data and informants. And in this sorry tale, no one played a
more critical role than the man many proclaim the most likely future leader of
Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.

He has been working to take power in Iraq for a long time. The son of a wealthy
and influential family in Iraq that lost its place with the fall of the
monarchy, Chalabi has a long association with US intelligence. In the early
1990s, he was considered a serious asset by the CIA - but they soon found him
to be unreliable. By then, however, he had found other supporters, among them
the staff and advisers of one of the neo-cons' favourite thinktanks, the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) in Washington. In 1997, Jinsa
declared: "Jinsa has been working closely with Iraqi National Council leader Dr
Ahmad Chalabi to promote Saddam Hussein's removal from office and a
subsequently democratic future for Iraq."

Jinsa describes its mandate as two-fold: "To educate the American public about
the importance of an effective US defence capability...and to inform the
American defence and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel
can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and
the Middle East." Their interests, Chalabi persuaded them, coincided: Saddam,
the supporter of Palestinian suicide bombers, the strongest and most
troublesome leader in the Arab world and a menace to Israel, should be replaced
with a friendly government that would make peace with Israel and become the
US's best Arab friend.

The advocates of radical action in the Middle East came to power with Bush. The
next steps are now well documented. As Richard Perle once complained: "The CIA
has been engaged in a character assassination of Ahmad Chalabi for years now,
and it's a disgrace." To bypass such obstacles, an alternative intelligence
group - the Office of Special Plans - was created. But there was still a
shortage of evidence on two key points: that Saddam had WMD and that he had
links to al-Qaida. Step forward Ahmad Chalabi, whose INC benefited from nearly
$100m of US taxpayers money, despite Chalabi's conviction for a $300m bank
fraud in Jordan. Chalabi, who knows a market when he sees one, claimed his
sources inside and outside Iraq could supply the necessary evidence.

In 2001, Colin Powell declared: "He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any
significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction...our
policies have strengthened the security of the neighbours of Iraq." Tony Blair
told the Commons in November 2000 that, "We believe that the sanctions regime
has effectively contained Saddam Hussein." These assessments coincided with the
view of the intelligence services and the inspectors.

The alternative intelligence, marshalled to make the case for war, came
overwhelmingly from Chalabi's INC and their carefully coached "sources". Among
the INC allegations that have not been borne out were that Hussein had built
mobile biological weapons facilities, that he was rapidly rebuilding his
nuclear weapons programme and that he had trained Islamic warriors at a camp
south of Baghdad. Now defence officials acknowledge that the defectors' tales
were "shaky" at best.

On whose judgment was this shaky information included in official pre-war
intelligence estimates of Iraq's illicit weapons programmes and key statements
by US and UK politicians? On September 12 2002, for instance, claims by Iraqi
military officers supplied by the INC that Iraq had been training Arabs in
"hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage and
assassinations" were given uncritical prominence in a White House report. And
what is now described as an INC "fabrication" - that Iraq had mobile biological
warfare research facilities - was included in Powell's presentation to the UN
security council in February 2003.

To give wider credibility to this dubious narrative, Chalabi planted stories in
mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times, stories that were then quoted
as independent corroborative evidence by administration officials. The paper's
now much-criticised specialist on WMD, Judith Miller, has acknowledged her
10-year association with Chalabi.

Chalabi has admitted that the "evidence" he supplied was wrong. Unlike Blair,
he is no longer interested in pretending that there are any WMD in Iraq, but
nor is he repentant. Bush may lose the election and Blair is trapped in the
political minefield of the war's aftermath, but Chalabi is a clear winner. "We
are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph. Since Saddam was gone, "What was
said before is not important."

When the US flew Chalabi into Iraq by helicopter early in the war, along with
700 friends and supporters, he was not remotely electable. He did, though, look
like a man positioning himself to be at the centre of power. This week, Iraq's
provisional constitution was agreed. Given Bush's need to create a puppet
government in time for the US elections, power will now remain in the hands of
the governing council until such time as elections might be held - a promise
that recedes into the future with each terrorist outrage. The first drafts of
the Iraqi transitional administrative law were written by Chalabi's nephew. The
longer elections are postponed, the better for Chalabi, who is now in control
of Iraq's finances and of de-Ba'athification.

Perhaps his greatest coup was to gain possession of 25 tonnes of captured
Saddam documents that could prove useful in the future. Before the war, for
instance, the Jordanian foreign minister criticised Chalabi as untrustworthy.
Chalabi then threatened to "expose" documentary evidence of the Jordanian royal
family's close relations with Saddam. The public criticisms stopped. Since the
war several forged documents have come into circulation. Some have been used to
animate dead arguments, others to discredit critics of the war, such as George
Galloway.

With power there also come opportunities for enrichment. US authorities in Iraq
have awarded more than $400m in contracts to a company that has extensive
family and business ties to Chalabi. One, for $327m, to supply equipment for
the Iraqi armed forces, is now under review after protests to Congress.

If intelligence, Blair tells us, is to be of even greater importance in the
future, its reliability is critical - an argument, perhaps, to learn from
recent experience. Not for the US Defence Department. It plans to spend $4m
over the next year buying intelligence on Iraq. And who does it plan to buy
that intelligence from? Step forward Ahmad Chalabi.



Additional material related to the above appears at the following URL:

http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=13757

Forwarded:


Bush is following the JINSA/CSP/PNAC (Zionist extremist) policy which most
Americans don't even have a clue about because the Zionist-hijacked press/media
in the USA doesn't convey such to them... But we can still find out about it
via courageous journalists like Robert Fisk (in the following article) and
Jason Vest (how many times have you seen the Zionist-hijacked media in the USA
interview Jason Vest?):

http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles114.htm

Men from JINSA and CSP (by Jason Vest) as this is the article which Fisk refers
to in the above URL:

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest

Dual Loyalties in the Bush regime:

http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/12/Counterpunch_1.html

War Conceived in Israel (Must Read):

http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_conc1.htm

Whose War?:

http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html

The following article conveys how Zionist extremist Jews have used the
'democracy' line to get their wars going for Israel as the article also conveys
that they will use supposed non-Jews to push their agenda as well (like Bush,
Cheney and Rumsfeld):

http://www.vdare.com/misc/macdonald_neoconservatism.htm

The 'War Conceived in Israel' article (linked under the 'greater Israel' map on
the left after scrolling down to it at the following URL) says it all:

http://www.nowarforisrael.com


The proposed oil pipeline from Iraq to Israel (as no US/UK soldier should have
to die for such in Iraq) is shown at the following URL:

http://www.nogw.com/warforisrael.html