Piecing together the story of the weapons that weren't

Piecing together the story of the weapons that weren't
By Charles J. Hanley, The Associated Press

Beneath the giant dome of a Baghdad palace, facing his team of scientists and engineers, George Tenet sounded more like a football coach than a spymaster, a coach who didn't know the game was over.

Weapons of mass destruction were not found by these U.N. weapons inspectors, right, in Baghdad Feb. 5, 2003, nor since.

By David Guttenfelder, AP

"Are we 85% done?" the CIA boss demanded. The arms hunters knew what he wanted to hear. "No!" they shouted back. "Let me hear it again!" They shouted again.

The weapons are out there, Tenet insisted. Go find them.

Veteran inspector Rod Barton couldn't believe his ears. "It was nonsense," the Australian biologist said of that February evening last year, when the then-chief of U.S. intelligence secretly flew to Baghdad and dropped in on the lakeside Perfume Palace, chandelier-hung home of the Iraq Survey Group.

"It wasn't that we didn't know the major answers," recalled Barton, whose account matched that of another key participant. "Are there WMD in the country? We knew the answers."

In fact, David Kay, quitting as chief of the U.S. hunt for WMD, or weapons of mass destruction, had just delivered the answer to the world. The inspectors were 85% finished, Kay said, concluding: "The weapons do not exist."

The story of the weapons that weren't there, the prelude to war, was over, but a long post-mortem is still unfolding — of lingering questions in Washington, of revelations from investigations, leaks, first-person accounts. Some 52% of Americans believe the Bush administration deliberately misled them about the presence of banned arms in Iraq, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll taken in June.

Hans Blix, U.N. inspector, says Washington's "virtual reality" about Iraq eventually collided with "our old-fashioned ordinary reality." Now, drawing from findings of the Iraq Survey Group and other official investigations, from U.N., U.S., Iraqi and British documents, from Associated Press interviews and on-scene reporting, from books by Blix and others, it's possible to reconstruct much of the "ordinary reality" of this extraordinary story, one that has changed the course of history.

By Mario Tama, Getty Images
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, left, and Hans Blix listen as Colin Powell make a case against Iraq on Feb. 5, 2003. Blix battled U.S. impatience for war while leading inspections in Iraq.

Destroyed in 1991

The story could begin behind the creamy stone walls of another palace, the hilltop Hashemiyah outside Amman, Jordan, where in August 1995 a prize Iraqi defector was pouring out for interrogators whatever they wanted to know about Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction.

Hussein Kamel, son-in-law of President Saddam Hussein, had headed Iraq's advanced arms programs during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, when the Baathist regime unleashed chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Iraqi civilians in rebellious Kurdish areas.

What the U.N., American and other debriefers learned from Kamel led to headline-making successes for U.N. inspectors as they tracked down banned arms-making gear inside Iraq.

But an interrogation transcript shows he told them something else as well, something they questioned and kept to themselves: All Iraqi WMD were destroyed in 1991.

Hussein Kamel, soon to be killed by fellow clansmen as a traitor, was telling the truth.

The U.N. experts had entered Iraq in 1991, after U.S.-led forces drove Iraq's invasion army from Kuwait in a lightning war, and the U.N. Security Council required the defeated nation to submit to inspections and destruction of its unconventional arms.

The inspectors withdrew in late 1998, in a dispute over access to sites. By then, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) teams could report that Iraq's nuclear program, which never built a bomb, had been dismantled. As for chemical and biological weapons, only scattered questions remained about possible hidden stockpiles.

In fact, as President George W. Bush took office 25 months later, the CIA was reporting, "We do not have any direct evidence" Baghdad was rebuilding its WMD programs.

Baghdad on his mind

Bush, however, concentrated on Iraq's capital.

The new president quickly called an inner Cabinet meeting to discuss Iraq as a destabilizing force in the Mideast, ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recalls in the book, The Price of Loyalty. Tenet unrolled a grainy satellite photo of an Iraqi factory, suggested it was making banned weapons, but said his CIA didn't really know, O'Neill said.

Washington and Baghdad had glowered at each other throughout Bill Clinton's presidency, but for a decade it was largely a cold war. Now Bush was ending this White House meeting by ordering Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to study possible military action, O'Neill said. Soon U.S. policymakers began hearing more about Iraq.

In April 2001, Pentagon intelligence said satellites spotted construction at old nuclear sites. Was Iraq resuming bomb research? That same month a CIA report told of another "indicator": Iraq was shopping for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes, said to be useful as cores of centrifuges to enrich uranium, the stuff of atom bombs.

Then a shipment of the tubes was intercepted in neighboring Jordan, news that upset Baghdad's military industry chief. Abdel Tawab Huweish needed those tubes — 3 feet long, 3 inches wide — to make standard artillery rockets. He now ordered another metal be found, one that wouldn't arouse U.S. suspicions, Huweish later told U.S. arms investigators.

On April 11, 2001, a day after the classified CIA report was distributed, the Energy Department filed a swift dissent. Energy, home of U.S. centrifuge specialists, said the tubes' dimensions weren't well-suited for centrifuges, and were more likely meant for artillery rockets. The U.N. nuclear agency, the Vienna-based IAEA, told U.S. officials the same.

Evidence shows Iraq in 2001 had little interest in nuclear "reconstitution." In one captured document from that May, Iraqi diplomats in Kenya reported to Baghdad that a Ugandan businessman had offered uranium for sale, but they turned him away, saying U.N. sanctions forbade it.

Other 'indicators' surface

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for months had been receiving reports from German intelligence about an Iraqi defector, code-named "Curveball," who claimed to have worked on a project to build concealed bioweapons labs atop truck trailers.

Around this time, in June 2001, the trailers that U.S. officials later thought confirmed his account were ordered built at the al-Kindi factory in northern Iraq, inspectors would learn. Contract No. 73/MD/RG/2001 called not for secret weapons labs, however, but for two trailer units to make hydrogen for weather balloons. By this time, too, U.S. intelligence had been informed that Curveball was a possible alcoholic and "out of control."

The tubes tale, Curveball's account and other questionable stories about Iraqi WMD would survive for two years, in presidential speeches and newspaper headlines, on the road to war.

For now, in the summer of 2001, Iraq was back-page news. But Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser, assured an interviewer, "Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen." By summer's end, in the traumatic aftermath of Sept. 11's terror, he was in the crosshairs.

Post-9/11

On the day after Sept. 11, the talk in the White House Situation Room was of "getting Iraq," says former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke. Clarke's memoir says an insistent Bush ordered him to look for "any shred" to tie Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks — even though U.S. agencies knew al-Qaeda was responsible and Iraq wasn't linked to the terror group.

By Alex Wong, AFP/Getty Images
Joseph Wilson reported the story of Iraq receiving uranium from Nigeria was unfounded.

The immediate target was Afghanistan, however, invaded by U.S. forces in October 2001, and as 2002 began the WMD case against Iraq remained unimpressive. In his annual unclassified review, Tenet didn't even cite evidence of an imminent Iraqi nuclear threat. But Vice President Dick Cheney apparently thought he'd found such evidence, in a DIA report.

It told of a deal in 2000 in which Iraq bought 500 tons of uranium concentrate from Niger in central Africa. The information came from Italian intelligence, based on what it said was an official Niger document. Because of Cheney's interest, the CIA dispatched a seasoned Africa hand, ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson, to Niger to check it out.

After dozens of interviews, Wilson reported back that the story appeared unfounded. The State Department's intelligence bureau also deemed it implausible. In addition, the text of the supposed Niger document, transcribed for the Americans by the Italians, contained misspellings and mistaken titles for people that should have been easily detectable.

It was a forgery. But "Niger uranium" had won a place in the case against Iraq.

Building a coalition

In Iraq itself, the government was far from resurrecting a bomb program: In April 2002 workers in the western desert were busy smelting down the last gear from a long-defunct uranium-enrichment project, U.S. inspectors later learned.

Around this time, U.S. satellite reconnaissance was doubled over suspected Iraqi WMD sites, and analysts soon reported stepped-up activity, suggesting renewed production, at possible chemical weapons factories. What they apparently didn't realize, however, was that activity was being photographed more frequently — not that there necessarily was more activity.

The White House, meanwhile, worked on a political plan.

Leaked British documents show that Prime Minister Tony Blair told Bush at his Texas ranch in April 2002 that London would support military action to oust Saddam. But the British set conditions: Washington should seek re-entry of U.N. inspectors — which Saddam was expected to refuse — and then Security Council authorization for war.

Blair's Cabinet fretted. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in the secret minutes of a July 2002 meeting, observed that the case for war was "thin" but Bush had made up his mind. Intelligence chief Richard Dearlove, fresh from high-level Washington talks, also told the 10 Downing St. session that war had become inevitable, and U.S. intelligence was being "fixed" around this policy.

Blair and U.S. officials now deny war was predetermined and intelligence "fixed" to that end. From midsummer 2002 on, however, the Bush administration sharply stepped up its anti-Iraq rhetoric, along with U.S. air attacks on Iraqi defenses, done under cover of patrols over the "no-fly zones," swaths of Iraqi airspace denied to Iraqi aircraft. It also stepped up its citing of questionable intelligence.

As early as July 29, Rumsfeld spoke publicly of reports of Iraqi bioweapons labs "on wheels in a trailer" that can "make a lot of bad stuff."

A second Iraqi exile source had echoed Curveball's talk of such trailers. He was judged a fabricator by the CIA in early 2002, but by July his statements were back in classified U.S. reports. As for Curveball, whose veracity was never checked by the DIA, within three months his German handlers would be telling the CIA he was unreliable, a "waste of time."

As the summer wore on, Cheney struck an urgent, unequivocal tone in public.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," the vice president told veterans assembled at an Opryland hotel in Nashville.

In an unusual move, Cheney shuttled to the CIA through mid-2002 to visit analysts 10 times, according to Patricia Wald, a member of the presidential investigative commission headed by Judge Laurence Silberman and ex-U.S. Sen. Charles Robb. The commission concluded analysts "worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom."

Strong as aluminum

That conventional wisdom took on more urgency on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, when the lead article in The New York Times, citing unnamed administration officials, said Iraq "has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb."

The "tubes" story had been resurrected. Condoleezza Rice went on the TV talk circuit that morning saying the tubes were suited only for uranium centrifuges. Four days later in New York, President Bush was at the marble podium of the U.N. General Assembly, demanding the world body take action on Iraq or become "irrelevant." He, too, cited the aluminum tubes — proof of danger.

But neither the Times story nor administration officials hinted at the background debate over whether the tubes, in reality, were meant for Huweish's rockets. In fact, a CIA officer had recently suggested obtaining dimensions of an Italian rocket on which the Iraqi design was based, to compare them with the tubes. His idea was rejected.

As U.S. officials built up the threat, Saddam handed them a surprise: Iraq would allow Blix's U.N. inspectors back unconditionally.

Bush promptly labeled the Sept. 16 announcement a "ploy." But Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, told the General Assembly his country was "totally clear" of banned arms.

White Paper and not read

Democratic senators, wary as war momentum built in Washington, demanded a comprehensive intelligence report on Iraq. The CIA and other agencies patched together a classified National Intelligence Estimate, made available to lawmakers in early October.

Its unclassified version, a 25-page White Paper, was packed with "probablys," "mays" and "coulds," uncertainties that somehow led to certainties: "Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs," and "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons."

It would eventually emerge that the DIA, a month before the White Paper, had reported there was "no reliable information" on Iraqi chemical weapons production, and it didn't know the nature, amounts or condition of any biological weapons.

Across the Atlantic, Blair's government issued an assessment like the U.S. estimate, with conclusions unsupported by evidence.

"We were told there was other intelligence that we, the experts, could not see," senior British government analyst Brian Jones has since said. It later became clear such intelligence never existed, Jones said.

The Australian biologist Barton, a 1990s weapons inspector who by 2002 was a top Blix aide, was amazed at the British report's unexplained claim that Iraq could "deploy" chemical or biological weapons "within 45 minutes" — a claim picked up by Bush in a radio address.

Over an Irish-pub dinner in New York, Barton asked old friend David Kelly, a British bioweapons specialist, how he could have allowed something "so silly" in the report. "He just shook his head and said something like, 'People put in what they want to put in,'" Barton recalled.

Months later Kelly would commit suicide, caught in a political furor as a source for news reports that the WMD dossier was "sexed up."

The 93-page classified U.S. report had more qualifiers than the White Paper. But Wald says her commission learned that only 17 Congress members read the lengthier estimate. On Oct. 10-11, the two houses voted overwhelmingly to authorize Bush to use military force against Iraq.

U.N. debunking

Then the U.N. Security Council unanimously voted Nov. 8 to send Blix's inspectors to Iraq with expanded powers. It denied Washington "trigger" authority, however, to attack if the Americans deemed Iraq in violation of the resolution.

Blix knew U.S. leaders were impatient. In his book on the crisis, he writes that he met with Cheney at the White House and was told inspections could not go on forever, and Washington "was ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament" — that is, forcible disarmament.

On Nov. 27, 2002, the U.N. teams returned to Iraq. Springing surprise inspections across the countryside, the experts soon were debunking U.S. claims. At the Fallujah II chemical plant, for example, caught in a satellite's camera lens in the October U.S. estimate, they found the production line long broken-down.

By December, Saddam was informing senior generals in secret meetings that Iraq truly had no chemical or biological arms, U.S. investigators later learned. Baghdad's troops would have to fight without them.

Back in Washington, WMD "indicators" were being further undercut. "The Administration will ultimately look foolish — i.e. the tubes and Niger!" an Energy Department analyst told a colleague in an e-mail later uncovered by Senate Intelligence Committee investigators.

State of the Union

Preparing for Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, and sensing the weakness, Rice's national security staff asked the CIA for more. It responded with the report of a Niger uranium sale.

By Tim Dillon, USA TODAY
President Bush used shaky information in his State of the Union address in 2003. Vice President Dick Cheney, back, later told a TV audience that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons.

That story had grown still more dubious since Wilson's Niger visit 11 months earlier.

In October 2002, the State Department had obtained a copy of the original "Niger document." Its analysts told sister agencies they suspected forgery, and in mid-January alerted all that it "probably is a hoax." In October, too, Tenet had warned Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, against using the alleged uranium sale in a Bush speech.

This time, however, Hadley accepted the uranium nugget — though attributed to the British — to bolster the State of the Union speech.

The tubes story also had slipped deeper into murkiness. State Department intelligence was siding with Energy in viewing them as likely rocket casings. The CIA arranged for centrifuge-like testing of the tubes in January, and they seemed to fail, only to supposedly pass after a "correction" was made.

On Jan. 28, 2003, with the world listening, Bush delivered his annual address.

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," he said. "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

The U.S. chief executive also claimed Iraq had mobile bioweapons labs, but this story of Curveball's would fall further apart in the coming days.

On Feb. 3, 2003, word went up the CIA ladder that this Iraqi informant's German handlers "cannot vouch for the validity of the information." The next day, Senate investigators found, a CIA superior e-mailed a worried analyst that "this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say."

Mr. Powell goes from Washington

The timing was critical — the eve of a pivotal presentation by Colin Powell.

By Mario Tama, Getty Images
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell held a vial of anthrax in trying to demonstrate to the U.N. Feb. 5, 2003 the threat Iraq posed.

That next morning, at the U.N. Security Council's horseshoe table, with CIA chief Tenet behind him, the secretary of state delivered an 80-minute indictment of Iraq, complete with aluminum tubes, up to "500 tons of chemical weapons agent," and artist's conceptions of Curveball's questionable "mobile labs."

Powell's sources went unidentified, tapes of intercepted conversation were cryptic, claims made about satellite photos were uncorroborated.

It turned out the State Department's own analysts had warned, futilely, against saying vehicles in spy photos were chemical "decontamination trucks," since they might be simple water trucks. And a senior CIA officer has told investigators he raised the Curveball concerns with Tenet the night before the speech, something Tenet denies.

After watching the performance on CNN in Baghdad, Amer al-Saadi, Iraqi liaison for the inspections, lamented that "the fiction goes on. It goes on and on."

But Powell's sober authority worked in America, where support for action soared.

Staunch against 'So-called inspections'

On the ground in Iraq, meanwhile, Blix's inspectors grew frustrated at the Iraqis' failure to explain leftover discrepancies from the 1990s. The chief inspector emphasized, however, that "unaccounted for" didn't necessarily mean weapons existed.

In one example, former Iraqi bioweapons specialists would eventually tell U.S. arms hunters that they never documented destruction of one batch of their anthrax in 1991 because it was dumped near a Saddam palace. They feared the dictator's wrath.

By January 2003, the experts from Blix's U.N. commission and Mohamed ElBaradei's IAEA had inspected 13 major "facilities of concern" from the previous fall's U.S. and British reports, and found no signs of weapons-making. The IAEA publicly exposed the Niger document as a forgery, and found the aluminum tubes poor candidates for centrifuges. Checking supposed sites for manufacturing mobile labs, Blix's teams debunked Curveball's tale at the Iraq end.

Washington was unmoved. Administration loyalists dismissed the "so-called inspections." In late February 2003, a Powell aide sternly told Blix nothing would suffice short of Iraq's unveiling its "secret hide sites." Most significantly, Bush ordered no reassessment of his government's collapsing claims.

Blix told the Security Council he could complete the work within months. The White House wasn't interested. "More time, more inspectors, more process, in our judgment, is not going to affect the peace of the world," Bush said on March 6, as the Pentagon counted down toward war.

Cheney at one point even told a TV audience — without challenge from the host — that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons. Of ElBaradei, whose IAEA refuted the claims about uranium and tubes, Cheney said, "I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong." But the CIA had already accepted ElBaradei's judgment on the Niger uranium document.

WMDs: 'That is what this war was about'

On March 17, in New York, U.S. diplomats gave up trying to win Security Council backing for war. That evening, on television, Bush told the American people there was "no doubt" Iraq had "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

The bombing began two days later, and as U.S. troops swept up the Tigris and Euphrates plain to easy victory, they searched for WMD. "We know where they are," Rumsfeld claimed on March 30. But despite a flurry of false "finds" by eager troops, they weren't there.



Just before the war, al-Kindi company technicians had tested the unit and it worked, its tubes spewing hydrogen for weather balloons. They could deliver on the 2001 contract. To empty-handed U.S. analysts, however, the vehicle and a second trailer looked like the artist's conception of Curveball's mobile labs, ready to concoct killer germs.

The White House embraced this illusion. "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories," President Bush assured Polish television on May 29. By then, however, experts had tested a trailer and found no trace of pathogens or toxins.

"They have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on April 10. But soon the Washington line shifted to claims Iraq had not weapons, but WMD "programs" — also untrue, inspectors later certified. Then the war was framed as one to democratize Iraq.

Through 2003, Iraqis watched their land slip into a chaos of looting, terror bombings and anti-American insurgency. "A country was destroyed because of weapons that don't exist!" Baghdad University's president, Nihad Mohammed al-Rawi, despaired to an AP reporter.

Month by month, David Kay and his 1,500-member Iraq Survey Group labored over documents, visited sites, interrogated detained scientists and came to recognize reality. But when he wanted to report it, Kay ran into roadblocks in Washington.

"There was an absolutely closed mind," Kay tells AP. "They would not look at alternative explanations in these cases," specifically the aluminum tubes and bioweapons trailers.

In December 2003, Kay flew back to Washington and met with Tenet and CIA deputy John McLaughlin. "I couldn't budge John, and so I couldn't budge George," he says. Kay resigned, telling the U.S. Congress there had been no WMD threat.

Ex-CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, speaking for Tenet, points out that Kay himself, in Senate testimony at the time, said the tubes remained an "open question," although it was "more than probable" they were rocket casings.

'Fool's gold'

The Bush administration then sent Charles Duelfer — like Kay a senior U.N. inspector from the 1990s — to take over the arms hunt. He arrived in time for Tenet's secret visit and palace pep talk on Feb. 12, 2004, but, like Kay before him, Duelfer could find no sign of WMD.

Still, the pressure continued. Barton, recruited as a Duelfer adviser, told AP the American chief inspector received an e-mail that March from John Scarlett, head of Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee, urging that nine "nuggets," past allegations, be dropped back into an interim report by Duelfer's group.

Those "sexy bits," as the Australian called them, are believed to have included, for example, baseless speculation that Iraq worked to weaponize smallpox. Duelfer called the nuggets "fool's gold," Barton says, and left them out.

Asked about this, the British Foreign Office said Scarlett contacted Iraq Survey Group leaders as part of his job, but that the report's content was Duelfer's responsibility alone.

Barton said CIA officers in the Iraq Survey Group insisted that its reporting should not discredit the mobile-labs story "because that contradicts what Tenet has said." They also wanted the report to suggest the tubes might have been for centrifuges, although Duelfer's experts concluded otherwise.

Duelfer's interim testimony to Congress in March 2004 said nothing about mobile labs and said the tubes remained under study.

As late as Sept. 30 last year, in an election debate, Bush stuck to his views.

"Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming," Bush maintained.

A week before, Duelfer had conveyed his 1,000-page final report to the CIA, saying Saddam had disarmed 13 years earlier.

Note: This reconstruction of what happened on the road to war in Iraq is based on government inquiries, official documents, fresh interviews and other sources.

Top aide to Colin Powell :: UN presentation "lowest point in my life"

Former aide: Powell WMD speech 'lowest point in my life'

Tuesday, August 23, 2005; Posted: 10:44 a.m. EDT (14:44 GMT)

(CNN) -- A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state's presentation to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "the lowest point" in his life.

"I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life."

Wilkerson is one of several insiders interviewed for the CNN Presents documentary "Dead Wrong -- Inside an Intelligence Meltdown." The program pieced together the events leading up to the mistaken WMD intelligence that was presented to the public. A presidential commission that investigated the pre-war WMD intelligence found much of it to be "dead wrong."

Powell's speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Wilkerson says the information in Powell's presentation initially came from a document he described as "sort of a Chinese menu" that was provided by the White House.

"(Powell) came through the door ... and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers, and he said, 'This is what I've got to present at the United Nations according to the White House, and you need to look at it,'" Wilkerson says in the program. "It was anything but an intelligence document. It was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose."

Wilkerson and Powell spent four days and nights in a CIA conference room with then-Director George Tenet and other top officials trying to ensure the accuracy of the presentation, Wilkerson says.

"There was no way the Secretary of State was going to read off a script about serious matters of intelligence that could lead to war when the script was basically un-sourced," Wilkerson says.

In one dramatic accusation in his speech, Powell showed slides alleging that Saddam had bioweapons labs mounted on trucks that would be almost impossible to find.

"In fact, Secretary Powell was not told that one of the sources he was given as a source of this information had indeed been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar, a fabricator," says David Kay, who served as the CIA's chief weapons inspector in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. That source, an Iraqi defector who had never been debriefed by the CIA, was known within the intelligence community as "Curveball."

After searching Iraq for several months across the summer of 2003, Kay began e-mailing Tenet to tell him the WMD evidence was falling apart. At one point, Wilkerson says, Tenet called Powell to tell him the claims about mobile bioweapons labs were apparently not true.

"George actually did call the Secretary, and said, 'I'm really sorry to have to tell you. We don't believe there were any mobile labs for making biological weapons,'" Wilkerson says in the documentary. "This was the third or fourth telephone call. And I think it's fair to say the Secretary and Mr. Tenet, at that point, ceased being close. I mean, you can be sincere and you can be honest and you can believe what you're telling the Secretary. But three or four times on substantive issues like that? It's difficult to maintain any warm feelings."

Pickup truck runs through a row of memorial crosses

You Mowed Down His Cross
By Perry Jefferies, First Sergeant, USA (retired)
t r u t h o u t | Letter

Thursday 18 August 2005

Mr. Northern:

I am a Veteran of the Iraq war, having served with the 4th Infantry Division on the initial invasion with Force Package One.



While I was in Iraq, a very good friend of mine, Christopher Cutchall, was killed in an un-armored HMMWV outside of Baghdad. He was a cavalry scout serving with the 3d ID. Once he had declined the award of a medal because Soldiers assigned to him did not receive similar awards that he had recommended. He left two sons and a wonderful wife. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.



One of my Soldiers in Iraq was Roger Turner. We gave him a hard time because he always wore all of his protective equipment, including three pairs of glasses or goggles. He did this because he wanted to make sure that he returned home to his family. He rode a bicycle to work every day to make sure that he was able to save enough money on his Army salary to send his son to college. At Camp Anaconda, where the squadron briefly stayed, a rocket landed inside a tent, sending a piece of debris or fragment into him and killed him. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.



One of my Soldiers was Henry Bacon. He was one of the finest men I ever met. He was in perfect shape for a man over forty, working hard at night. He told me that he did that because he didn't have much money to buy nice things for his wife, who he loved so much, so he had to be in good shape for her. He was like a father to many young men in his section of maintenance mechanics. They fixed our vehicles with almost no support and fabricated parts and made repairs that kept our squadron rolling on the longest, fastest armor advance ever made under fire. He was so very proud of his son-in-law that married the beautiful daughter so well raised by Henry. His son-in-law was a helicopter pilot with the 1st Cavalry Division, who died last year. Henry stopped to rescue a vehicle belonging to another unit on what was to be his last day in Iraq. He could have kept rolling - he was headed to Kuwait after a year's tour. But he stopped. He could have sent others to do the work, but he was on the ground, leading by example, when he was killed. On Monday night, August 16, you took it upon yourself to go out in the country, where a peaceful group was exercising their constitutional rights, and harming no one, and you ran down the memorial cross erected for Henry and for his son-in-law by Arlington West.

Mr. Northern - I know little about Cindy Sheehan except that she is a grieving mother, a gentle soul, and wants to bring harm to no one. I know little about you except that you found your way to Crawford on Monday night in August with chains and a pipe attached to your truck for the sole purpose of dishonoring a memorial erected for my friends and lost Soldiers and hundreds of others that served this nation when they were called. I find it disheartening that good men like these have died so that people like you can threaten a mother who lost a child with your actions. I hope that you are ashamed of yourself.

Perry Jefferies, First Sergeant, USA (retired)




Complaint Filed After Driver Crushes Crosses At Anti-War Protest Site

Larry Northern, 59, of McLennan County, was charged Tuesday with Criminal Mischief Over $1,500 and under $20,000 after a pickup truck tore through a row of white crosses erected by anti-war protesters gathered near the President’s ranch in Crawford.

Bail was set at $3,000. Northern later posted bond and was released.

The crosses bear the names of U.S. military personnel who have died in the war in Iraq.

Witnesses said the driver swerved the truck in and out of the makeshift memorial Monday night.

The protesters who are camped out in Crawford expressed outrage at the vandalism.

Cindy Sheehan, the California woman around whom the protesters have rallied since Aug. 6, is the focal point of national controversy.

She is demanding a meeting with the President about the death of her son Casey, a 1st Cavalry Division soldier who was killed last year in Iraq.

“Our hearts are broken about this,” Sheehan said in a prepared statement about the destruction of the crosses released Tuesday afternoon.

“ We continue to work closely with local law enforcement offices and the secret service to be good neighbors,” she said.

References:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_082005A.shtml

http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/1686471.html

http://crawfordupdate.blogspot.com/2005/08/rude-awakening.html

Iraq war takes heavy toll on civilians Survey says 25,000 killed since start of conflict; U.S. disputes details

Iraq war takes heavy toll on civilians Survey says 25,000 killed since start of conflict; U.S. disputes details

Updated: 11:13 a.m. ET July 19, 2005
BAGHDAD - U.S.-led forces, insurgents and criminal gangs have killed nearly 25,000 civilians, police, and army recruits since the war began in March 2003, according to a survey by Iraq Body Count, a U.S.-British non-government group.

Nearly half the deaths in the two years surveyed to March 2005 were in Baghdad, where a fifth of Iraq's 25 million people live, according to media reports monitored by the group.
Of the total, nearly 37 percent were killed by U.S.-led forces, it said.
The U.S. military disputed the findings and said it did not target civilians.
"We do everything we can to avoid civilian casualties in all of our operations," said Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad.

"Since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom until now, we have categorically not targeted civilians. We take great care in all operations to ensure we go after the intended targets."
Iraq Body Count said its findings provided "a unique insight into the human consequences of the U.S.-led invasion."

"Leaders who commit troops to wars of intervention have diminishingly few excuses for failing to seriously weigh the human costs," it said in a 28-page dossier.
The numbers included civilians, army and police recruits,and serving police. They do not include serving Iraqi military or combatant deaths, for which there are "no reliable accounts... either official or unofficial."

The group took its data, including figures showing that more than 42,000 civilians were wounded in the same period, from an analysis of more than 10,000 press and media reports.
Survey confirms U.N. findingsThe death toll almost mirrors a U.N.-funded survey conducted last year, which found some 24,000 conflict-related deaths since the U.S.-led invasion.
Another survey, published in Britain's Lancet medical journal last October, found nearly 100,000 deaths in the 18 months after the invasion, more than half due to violence. These findings were contested by U.S. and British officials.

Since the media in Iraq is forced to focus on Baghdad for security reasons, it is likely that Iraq Body Count's death toll throughout the country is under-estimated.
The survey found that almost a third of civilian deaths occurred during the invasion itself, from March 20 to May 1, 2003, when U.S.-led forces carried out their "shock and awe" bombing campaign on Baghdad.

In the first year after the invasion, around 6,000 civilians were killed, a number that nearly doubled in the second year, indicating a general increase in violence. The group said deaths caused by insurgents and criminals had risen steadily.

U.S. forces primarily responsibleU.S.-led forces were found to be chiefly responsible for deaths, and criminals a close second at 36 percent, while insurgents accounted for a surprisingly small 9.5 percent.

That would not appear to tally with the situation on the ground, where insurgent violence is rife. It may reflect media sourcing, since it is often not clear who carried out a specific attack. According to Iraq Body Count, "unknown agents" were responsible for 11 percent of deaths.

"I don't know how they are doing their methodology and can't talk to how they calculate their numbers," said the U.S. Army's Boylan, disputing the findings on who is responsible for deaths.
The survey would also appear not to capture the full extent of the devastation caused by insurgent car bombings. Over the past 18 months, hundreds of suicide car bombs have exploded around the country, killing well over 2,000 people.

Moral : Up or Down?

News media differ in how to describe how the soldiers feel about fighting and sometime being killed and most often criticized -there at the war and at home- while they continually risk their lives fighting an unpopular war that was based on lies and self serving profit motivations by former Haliburton CEO who now happens to be the Vice President whispering into the ear of the befuddled `missing in action' President.....



Army: GI morale low in IraqChicago Tribune, IL - 5 hours agoWASHINGTON -- A majority of US soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according to an Army report. But soldiers' mental health has ...

US soldiers in Iraq suffer "psychological stress"Aljazeera.com, UK - 6 hours agoAn Army report says that the majority of the American soldiers in Iraq reported morale problems, with psychological stress weighing heavily specially among ...

Morale of soldiers in Iraq improving, Army survey findsSeattle Times, United States - 8 hours agoBy Josh White and Ann Scott Tyson. WASHINGTON — Morale among US soldiers in Iraq has improved since the start of the war in 2003 ...

Survey: Troops' morale better, still a problemMinneapolis Star Tribune (subscription), MN - 14 hours agoWASHINGTON, DC -- Morale among US soldiers in Iraq has improved since the start of the war in 2003, and the soldiers' suicide rate dropped by more than half ...

Majority of Soldiers Say Iraq Morale LowSan Francisco Chronicle, United States - 19 hours agoBy ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer. A majority of US soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according to an Army report that finds ...

Army Cites Drop in Suicides Among SoldiersGuardian Unlimited, UK - 23 hours agoBy ROBERT BURNS. WASHINGTON (AP) - The overall mental health of US soldiers in Iraq has improved from the early months of the insurgency ...

Report:Morale on upswingConcord Monitor, NH - 3 hours agoBy JOSH WHITEand ANN SCOTT TYSON. ASHINGTON - Morale among US soldiers in Iraq has improved since the start of the war in 2003, and ...

Soldiers’ mental health has improvedThe State, SC - 4 hours agoWASHINGTON — A majority of US soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according to an Army report that finds psychological stress weighs particularly heavily on ...


Army finds the mental health of GIs in Iraq getting betterSan Antonio Express (subscription), TX - 9 hours agoWASHINGTON — The mental health of US troops in Iraq improved last year despite constant combat stress, according to an Army study. ...

NEW: Mental health of troops in Iraq improvesSan Antonio Express (subscription), TX - 13 hours agoWASHINGTON — The mental health of US troops in Iraq improved last year despite constant combat stress, but an Army study also showed that more than half of ...
Army says mental health among soldiers in Iraq has improved but ...WBAY, WI - 22 hours agoPENTAGON The Army says there are fewer suicides among its personnel in Iraq and Kuwait, but morale is still low. The Army has released ...

US soldiers in Iraq report low moraleBoston Globe, United States - 1 hour agoBy Robert Burns, AP Military Writer July 21, 2005. WASHINGTON --A majority of US soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according ...

US Soldiers in Iraq Report Low MoraleSalon - 3 hours agoBy ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer. July 21,2005 WASHINGTON -- A majority of US soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according to ...
US soldiers in Iraq report low moraleSan Jose Mercury News, United States - 3 hours agoWASHINGTON - A majority of US soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according to an Army report that finds psychological stress is weighing particularly heavily ...

US Soldiers in Iraq Report Low MoraleWashington Post, United States - 4 hours agoBy ROBERT BURNS. WASHINGTON -- A majority of US soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according to an Army report that finds psychological ...

Soldiers say morale low; mental health seen upBoston Globe, United States - 8 hours agoBy Robert Burns, Associated Press July 21, 2005. WASHINGTON -- A majority of US soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according to ...

Army finds morale woes among US soldiers in IraqWired News - 18 hours agoBy Will Dunham. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than half of US soldiers in the Iraq war reported morale problems in their units, with ...

Army says mental health among soldiers in Iraq has improved but ...USA Today - 22 hours agoWASHINGTON (AP) — The overall mental health of US soldiers in Iraq has improved from the early months of the insurgency, with a significant drop in suicides ...

Army Cites Drop in Suicides Among SoldiersLos Angeles Times, CA - 23 hours agoBy ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer. WASHINGTON -- The overall mental health of US soldiers in Iraq has improved from the early months ...

A well written blog:

Tomgram: The Immoral Relativists of the Bush Administration
by Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com

(Images were added)

"At a breakfast meeting with reporters, Wolfowitz said he hasn't read the [Downing Street] memos because he doesn't want to be ‘distracted' by ‘history' from his new job as head of the world's leading development bank. He returned this weekend from a tour of four African nations.

"'There's a lot I could say about what you're asking about, if I were willing to get distracted from the main subject,' Wolfowitz said. ‘But I really think there's a price paid with the people I've just spent time with, people who are struggling with very real problems, to keep going back in history.'" (Jon Sawyer, Wolfowitz won't talk about war planning, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)
For at least 30 years now, the right has fought against, the Republican Party has run against, and more recently, the Bush administration has claimed victory over the "moral relativism" of liberals, the permissive parenting of the let-them-do-anything-they-please era, and the self-indulgent, self-absorbed, make-your-own-world attitude of the Sixties. Since September 11th, we have been told again and again, we are in a different world... finally. In this new world, things are black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. You are for or you are against. The murky relativism of the recent past, of an America in a mood of defeat, is long gone. In the White House, we have a stand-up guy so unlike the last president, that draft dodger who was ready to parse the meaning of "is" and twist the world to his unnatural desires.

In his speeches, George Bush regularly calls for a return to or the reinforcement of traditional, even eternal, family values and emphasizes the importance of personal "accountability" for our children as well as ourselves. ("The culture of America is changing from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and if you've got a problem, blame somebody else, to a new culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life.") And yet when it comes to acts that are clearly wrong in this world -- aggressive war, the looting of resources, torture, personal gain at the expense of others, lying, and manipulation among other matters -- Bush and his top officials never hesitate to redefine reality to suit their needs. When faced with matters long defined in everyday life in terms of right and wrong, they simply reach for their dictionaries.

You want to invade a country not about to attack you. No problem, just pick up that Webster's and rename the act "preventive war." Now, you want an excuse for such a war that might actually panic the public into backing it. So you begin to place mushroom clouds from nonexistent enemy atomic warheads over American cities (Condoleezza Rice: "[W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."); you begin to claim, as our President and other top officials did, that nonexistent enemy UAVs (Unmanned Airborne Vehicles) launched from nonexistent ships off our perfectly real East coast, might spray nonexistent biological or chemical weapons hundreds of miles inland, and -- Voila! -- you're ready to strike back.
You sweep opponents up on a battlefield, but you don't want to call them prisoners of war or deal with them by the established rules of warfare. No problem, just grab that dictionary and label them "unlawful combatants," then you can do anything you want. So you get those prisoners into your jail complex (carefully located on an American base in Cuba, which you have redefined as being legally under "Cuban sovereignty," so that no American court can touch them); and then you declare that, not being prisoners of war, they do not fall under the Geneva Conventions, though you will treat them (sort of) as if they did and, whatever happens, you will not actually torture them, though you plan to take those "gloves" off. Then your lawyers and attorneys retire to some White House or Justice Department office and, under the guidance of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales (now Attorney General), they grab those dictionaries again and redefine torture to be whatever we're not doing to the prisoners. (In a 50-page memo written in August 2002 for the CIA and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, now an Appeals Court judge, hauled out many dictionaries and redefined torture this way: "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.") And if questioned on the subject, after emails from FBI observers at the prison lay out the various acts of abuse and torture committed in grisly detail, the Vice President simply insists, as he did the other day, that those prisoners are living the good life in the balmy "tropics." ("They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want. There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people.")

Women and Children Last
What the Bush administration has proved is that, if you have a mind to do so, there's no end to the ways you can define "is." No administration has reached not just for its guns but for its dictionaries more often, when brought up against commonly accepted definitions of what is.
Why just the other day, faced with a downward spiraling situation in Iraq and plummeting public-opinion polls, Vice President Cheney went on Larry King Live and declared that the Iraqi insurgency was actually in its "last throes." In this case, he had perhaps reached for his dictionary a little too fast. The phrase was taken up and widely questioned. So Cheney who, as Juan Cole reminds us, claimed he "'knew where exactly' Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction were and who was sure Iraqis would deliriously greet the U.S. military as liberators," simply returned to the administration's definitional stockpile. When asked by CNN's Wolf Blitzer whether General John Abizaid's description of the Iraqi situation -- that the insurgency was "undiminished" (with ever more foreign fighters entering Iraq) -- didn't contradict his, he responded:
"No, I would disagree. If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period -- the throes of a revolution. The point would be that the conflict will be intense, but it's intense because the terrorists understand if we're successful at accomplishing our objective, standing up a democracy in Iraq, that that's a huge defeat for them. They'll do everything they can to stop it."

Actually, according to my own patriotically correctly named and so indisputable reference book, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, a "throe" is "a severe pang or spasm of pain, as in childbirth," and the "throes" of a country in, say, revolution or economic collapse would also be brief spasms. Of course, just the other day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, looking into his murky crystal ball, claimed that this "spasm" could last up to another 12 years. I suppose from now on we should all speak of that period from birth to death as the "throes of life." As it happens, the American people seem uncomfortable with our Vice President's latest definitional forays. (For more on defining "throes," I turn you over to the indefatigable Juan Cole.)

Here's the strange thing, then: No one in our lifetime has found the nature of reality to be more definitionally supple, more malleable, more… let's say it… postmodern and relative (to their needs and desires) than the top officials of the Bush administration.

Their watchwords might be defined, if you don't mind my reaching for my dictionary of sayings, as -- batten down the definitional hatches, full speed ahead, and if you hit a mine, women and children last. In that way, they have redefined "accountability" as never having to say you're sorry; or, as then-Governor of Texas evidently put it to the man ghostwriting his campaign autobiography in 1999, "...as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake"; or as former Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz put it when telling reporters he hadn't bothered to read the Downing Street Memos, you shouldn't let yourself be "distracted" by messy old "history." In the Bush administration, accountability has largely meant promotion.
Let's throw in just a few other moments of high Bush postmodernism: No administration in memory has been quicker to lie in its own interests and never stop doing so, no matter what. (For instance, to this day the President never ceases to push the absurd link between the war in Iraq and the September 11th attacks). None in recent memory has been quicker to lie about or smear its opponents, or had, in political hand-to-hand combat, a nastier, sometimes filthier mouth, publicly (as Karl Rove proved in recent statements) or privately. None has, in fact, seemed to care less about any of the moral categories of behavior it was ostensibly promoting, when those happened to run aground on the shoals of its own political desires and fantasies.
A Five-Star Rendition and Other Acts of Relativity

Every administration sets a mood. You can see the one this administration has established reflected way down the line -- in, for example, the depths of Abu Ghraib's interrogation chambers. As it happens, you can also catch a glimpse of it in five-star Italian hotels. The other day, Stephen Grey and Don Van Natta of the New York Times reported (Thirteen With the C.I.A. Sought by Italy in a Kidnapping) that an Italian judge had ordered the arrest of 13 American agents, assumedly working for the CIA, for performing an "extraordinary rendition" in Italy. They kidnapped an Egyptian cleric named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, who may or may not have been linked al-Qaeda, and flew him to Egypt to be tortured. Now, you may imagine that our "shadow warriors," operating in the dark zone of international illegality in the name of our President's Global War on Terror, are Spartan men and women, stripped down for action, ready to sacrifice everything for missions they believe in. You undoubtedly assume that, while in Italy, they laid low, bunking in safe houses, while organizing their covert kidnapping. But wait, these are representatives of the Bush administration, so think again. Here was a paragraph buried deep in the Times piece that caught my eye:
"The [CIA] suspects stayed in five-star Milan hotels, including the Hilton, the Sheraton, the Galia and Principe di Savoia, in the week before the operation, at a cost of $144,984, the [Italian] warrant says, adding that after Mr. Nasr was flown to Egypt, two of the officers took a few days' holiday at five-star hotels in Venice, Tuscany and South Tyrol."

A Washington Post report added this little detail: "The Americans stayed at some of the finest hotels in Milan, sometimes for as long as six weeks, ringing up tabs of as much as $500 a day on Diners Club accounts created to match their recently forged identities." The Los Angeles Times contributed the fact that the $145,000 tab actually only covered accommodations. As it happens, our luxury warriors were gourmets as well. They ran up tabs at Milan's best restaurants.

All of this fits so well with general attitudes at the upper reaches of this self-indulgent administration. Ours is, after all, a war to satisfy our own desires, to make the world the way we wish it -- and who wouldn't wish for luxury surroundings and a nice five-star, post-kidnapping vacation in Venice or Florence, all at the taxpayer's expense? (I guarantee, by the way, that our agents also ate all the macadamia nuts and drank all the liquor and downed all the $10 cokes in their mini-fridges.) And yet you can rest assured that no one in this administration is going to demand repayment. In fact, no one has even whispered a word about these expenses so far, no less promised taxpayers our money back, but you wouldn't expect that from an administration that stonewalls for a corporation, Halliburton, which seems to have taken both the American taxpayer and the Iraqis to the five-star cleaners. And while we're at it, let's just note that our rendition teams circle the world not on some scruffy cargo plane, but on a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort "favored by CEOs and celebrities," as Dana Priest of the Washington Post puts it. This is the mentality not of warriors, of course, but of looters who never saw a payoff or an opening they didn't exploit.

From top to bottom, Bush's people are, in this sense, a caricature of their own caricature of the 1960s. In fact, given their fixation on the Sixties, it's worth revisiting their record in that long-ago era when they were already the most morally relative of beings. On the central issue of those years, the Vietnam War, they were essentially missing in action; or, as our Vice President so famously commented, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." The striking thing about the record of most of the Bush administration's key players (and almost all of the neocons) was that they used privilege, legalistic tricks, and every bit of slyness they could muster to avoid any entanglement with Vietnam (on any side of the issue) and later on, coming to power, they had not the slightest compunction about wrapping themselves in the flag and the uniform, acting like the warriors they never were, and attacking those who had engaged in some fashion with the Vietnam War.

It is perhaps not an irony but a kind of inevitability that, having worked so hard to avoid Vietnam (and its "mistakes") all those years, they now find themselves tightly gripped by a situation of their own making that has a remarkably Vietnam-like look to it; and, worse yet, they find themselves acting as if they were now, after all these years, back in the 1960s fighting the War in Vietnam rather than the one in Iraq. In his testimony before the Senate last week, Donald Rumsfeld even managed to get the classic Vietnam word "quagmire" and the equivalent of "light at the end of the tunnel" into a single sentence: "There isn't a person at this table who agrees with you [Senator Ted Kennedy] that we're in a quagmire and there's no end in sight."
As a group, the top figures in this administration have often seemed like so many aggressive children let loose in the neighborhood sandbox by deadbeat dads and moms. Does nobody wonder where those mommies and daddies, the people who should have taught them right from wrong, actually went? Certainly, their children are, in the best Sixties manner, all libido. Let me, in fact, suggest a label for them that, I hope, catches their truest political nature: They are immoral relativists.
Yet, even for the most self-absorbed among them, the ones most ready to twist reality (and the names we give it) into whatever shape best suits their needs of the moment, reality does have a way of biting back. Count on it.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.
[Special thanks go to Nick Turse for his invaluable research aid.]
Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt

Teddy Troopers 'Jump' Into Arms of Iraqi Children

by Spc. Derek Del Rosario, USASpecial to American Forces Press Service

CAMP TAJI, Iraq, July 15, 2005 – They can be seen parachuting into various areas around Baghdad -- specially trained individuals recruited during Operation Iraqi Freedom 3, whose primary mission is to bring smiles to the faces of Iraqi children.
Army Spc. Benjamin L. Kepenke, a crew chief with Company C, 4th Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment (Assault Helicopter), prepares a "Teddy Trooper" for its descent to children below. Operation Teddy Drop is a humanitarian mission geared to give teddy bears to Iraqi children. Photo by Spc. Del Rosario, USA



high-resolution image available. These airborne "soldiers" are actually "Teddy Troopers" or "Para-Bears," stuffed animals with makeshift parachutes jumping into the arms and hearts of children during Operation Teddy Drop.
The commander for this unique operation is Army Chief Warrant Officer 4 Randy M. Kirgiss, a pilot with Company C, 4th Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment (Assault Helicopter). He said he started the airborne mission as a way to impact the lives of Iraqi children.
Kirgiss began the operation in mid-April, inspired by previous humanitarian efforts he had witnessed, as well as by Col. Gail Halvorsen, the "Berlin candy bomber" who dropped candy to German children during the Berlin Airlift.
"I got the idea from a lot of my friends who conducted humanitarian missions on some of my previous deployments," Kirgiss said. "In Bosnia, I saw school supplies donated; in Kosovo, teddy bears were given out. I wanted to model something after the Candy Bomber who parachuted bags of candy to kids. It was from this idea that Operation Teddy Drop began."
In order for his airborne humanitarian mission to get off the ground, Kirgiss needed support from his chain of command, his unit, and from friends and family to help him gather the stuffed animals.
He said he had the support of his company and battalion commanders. "They were very supportive, and they helped me brainstorm ideas to make the operation run safely and smoothly, he said.
In conjunction with his official flight missions, Kirgiss brings boxes of stuffed animals with makeshift parachutes along with him. When he sees a child down below, he instructs a crewmember to drop a Teddy Trooper.
"There is a mission to be done, but dropping bears doesn't take away from that mission," Kirgiss said. "We have the assets to do both our mission and execute Operation Teddy Drop effectively."
Kirgiss originally told a group of eight friends and family members about the operation. He received help in the form of donated stuffed animals and parachute supplies. The original network of eight grew immensely, and Kirgiss began to receive donations from everywhere around the States -- receiving old parachutes and boxes of teddy bears. Kirgiss is even getting a donation from a well-known teddy bear manufacturer.
"Originally, I just wanted my friends and families to look into their kid's closet to find old teddy bears to donate," said Kirgiss. "When unit members started talking and my friends started talking, through word of mouth it just got out, and now I get donations from everywhere."
Kirgiss spends most of his free time, usually at night, making the parachutes for the Teddy Troopers. The airborne recruits come in all shapes and sizes, so specialized parachutes usually have to be made. Using material from old, donated parachutes, Kirgiss makes the parachutes that are best suited for his troopers so they can complete their "mission." It takes Kirgiss approximately three minutes to make each chute, he said.
The unit's largest recruit jumped May 21 as part of the largest drop in the unit's short history. "We received eight boxes of donated stuffed animals one day. The boxes stacked to my ceiling," Kirgiss said. "The following day we dropped (more than) 200 stuffed animals, including the largest one we have ever received -- a bear that was about 3 feet tall and weighed around six pounds. I needed to make a special chute for that trooper."
Kirgiss tries to get the plush toys to all kids, but his main aim is to get them to the poorer Iraqi children in the countryside.
"It can be a safety hazard to drop them in the city. We don't want kids running into the streets to get them," said Kirgiss, also the safety officer of the company. "When we can, we try to send the bears to urban and poorer areas, and for each kid we see we send down a bear so there is no fighting among the children."
Sending these Teddy Troopers on their mission is very fulfilling for Kirgiss. He said he enjoys seeing the smiles on their faces when they get hold of their new stuffed animals. "It's a great thing to see, even from 200 feet above," Kirgiss said. "When we see those kids wave and we send down a bear, most kids will not know what it is at first. Some hide behind their parents, some stay back in hesitancy, but once they see that parachute open, they know what it is and go running toward it. Some even catch them before they hit the ground."
More than 900 Para-Bears have bravely "jumped" since the start of the operation.
It is Kirgiss' hope to continue the humanitarian mission for the duration of his deployment and hopefully pass on the operation to the next aviation unit that comes to Taji. For Kirgiss, it is a personally gratifying experience to be a part of the operation -- an operation he hopes will have an impact on the future.
"It is something I find very fun and constructive," he said. "Talking about it also helps me stay grounded to my two young children. I can't help but think that somewhere down the line we might be influencing the future decision makers of Iraq. This operation is only a small way to show that we are human and compassionate. We are soldiers, but we are humane as well."
(Army Spc. Derek Del Rosario is assigned to 3rd Infantry Division's Aviation Brigade.)

Army Spc. Richard Kanagie, Company B, 4th Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment, prepares a "Teddy Trooper" for descent. Photo by Staff Sgt. Mick Minecci, USA

Joe Wilson -Background information

Notes:
1. Wilson, who was in charge of the Embassy in Iraq during the first Gulf War under Bush 41
2. Wilson was the last American to speak personally with Saddam Hussein before the
war begain,
3. Wilson and was responsible for taking care of some 125 Americans who had sought refuge in the American Embassy there when they were not allowed by Saddam to leave the country just prior to the war
4. Wilson wrote an article San Jose Mercury News, on October 13, 2002, in which Wilson related his concerns about the pitfalls of the approach to Iraq being taken at the time by both the U.N. and the U.S.
5.In reply to that article, Wilson said that the former President Bush 41 wrote that he had "read your article and I agree with a lot of it."
6.Bush 41's own National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, had contacted him to ask whether he "could walk on over to the White House with the letter" at the time
7. Plame, Wilson's wife, was indeed a "NOC", an agent with "nonofficial cover", the most valuable, secretive and vulnerable of CIA assets at the time of her outing.
8."The CIA said [my wife] was not the person to have authorized my trip. They've repeated that time and time again." ( Though not in this article, it has been claimed that it was actually Cheney who had picked Wislon to go to Nigers- Cheney would deny this.)
blogged on http://www.bradblog.com/?p=1591

posted by here by Paul Grant (follower of Basho)
See related post:
23 Administration Officials Involved In Plame Leak

Video Documentary- Part 4 on the Neocons

Joe Wilson's Op-Ed for New York Times


BLOGGED BY Brad ON 7/13/2005 2:45PM
JOE WILSON: 'The President should fire Rove'!
The Ambassador Strikes Back, Answers to the Right Wing Spin Machine
*** A BRAD BLOG EXCLUSIVE ***

Ambassador Joseph Wilson fired back today at the Rightwing Spin Machine, which, having been issued marching orders late yesterday in a set of talking points from the RNC, is once again hoping to distract from the potentially treasonous crimes that George W. Bush's top political operative and Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, is alleged to have committed.

In a phone discussion early this afternoon, Wilson told The BRAD BLOG in no uncertain terms that "the President should fire Rove."

He told us that he'd be appearing on NBC's Today Show tomorrow morning and would be repeating that call.



As well, he told The BRAD BLOG that he planned to read a letter on air which he received from Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush shortly after an article of his was printed in the San Jose Mercury News, on October 13, 2002, in which Wilson related his concerns about the pitfalls of the approach to Iraq being taken at the time by both the U.N. and the U.S.

In reply to that article, Wilson said that the former President wrote that he had "read your article and I agree with a lot of it."



Additionally, Wilson explained, Bush 41's own National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, had contacted him to ask whether he "could walk on over to the White House with the letter" at the time. Which apparently he did.


Wilson also had sent the article to Bush 41's Secretary of State, James Baker.

"None of them responded saying you're a Democratic partisan hack and your views suck," said Wilson.

The above points are notable, because armed with those RNC talking points, Rush Limbaugh, Fox "News" and Friends have today kicked into overdrive smearing and lying about Wilson, claiming that he was against the Iraq War from the get-go.

If fact, Wilson, who was in charge of the Embassy in Iraq during the first Gulf War under Bush 41 (he was the last American to speak personally with Saddam Hussein before the war begain, and was responsible for taking care of some 125 Americans who had sought refuge in the American Embassy there when they were not allowed by Saddam to leave the country just prior to the war), says that it was "a full eight months" after he was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium there, "before I had said anything publicly about what America should consider in regard to a war with Iraq."

"My real concern was always WMD," he told us, "not Regime Change."

That concern was expressed in the October 2002, San Jose Mercury News editorial which apparently George W. Bush's own father and National Security Advisor tended to agree with. Wilson's trip to Niger occurred a full eight months earlier, in February of that same year.


We asked him if he had heard Fox "News'" John Gibson make his deplorable and irresponsible statement yesterday which said that "Karl Rove should receive a medal," because Wilson's wife, covert CIA asset Valerie Plame, "should have been outed."

"Where I come from," slurred Gibson, "we do not want secret spy masters pulling the puppet strings in the background.

Gibson's "logic", such that he has any, seems to be based on the unsupported claims that Plame --- or Wilson's "little wifey" as Gibson condescendingly referred to her --- was "pulling the puppet strings" of national policy from her covert position in the CIA, by sending Wilson to Niger. That was, in Gibson's false claim, because Wilson, "was opposed to the War in Iraq, opposed to Bush policy, and pointedly and loudly said so."

No, he didn't, Mr. Gibson. Never mind those pesky facts. It's only Fox "News" you work for, so we realize such facts are hardly relevant to you receiving your paycheck there.

"That is something that should be out in the open," blathered Gibson, "And the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it. So Rove should get a medal, if he did do what he says he didn't do."

In response, Wilson simply said, "Well, that's a lie. But no surprise there."

In the meantime, despite such pesky facts, the wingnuts also continue to claim that Plame was, in fact, not even a covert asset at the time of her outing.

The BRAD BLOG has learned from several sources, as also confirmed in Time magazine that Plame was indeed a "NOC", an agent with "nonofficial cover", the most valuable, secretive and vulnerable of CIA assets.

In regard to whether she was covert or not at the time of her outing by Rove, Bob Novak or whoever his "two senior administration sources" were, Wilson said, "What I can say is, that the CIA looked at the evidence of what had happened and referred the case to the Justice Department. That means that the CIA may think that a crime has been committed."

On Rightwing Hackery hoping to cynically deflect from the seriousness of the potentially treasonous crime committed by claiming that "Wilson lied" about his wife's involvement in sending him to Niger, Wilson says, "In actual fact, all I've done is repeat what the CIA itself has said since July 22nd, 2003 as reported initially in Newsday by Knut Royce and Tim Phelps."

That Newsday article says [emphasis added]:
A senior intelligence official confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked "alongside" the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.

But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. "They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising," he said. "There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason," he said. "I can't figure out what it could be."

"The CIA said [my wife] was not the person to have authorized my trip. They've repeated that time and time again."

And the Bush Apologists, who suddenly don't seem to care all that much about National Security after all, keep repeating the opposite. Time and time again.

Peace in Iraq

Telling the Iraq War story by the Numbers

Little Progress in Training Iraqi Forces

Congress approved the Bush Administration April 2005 request for about $80 billion more for a third year of US spending and war efforts in Iraq.

To evaluate this request and war progress to date, it's vital to understand results in the two years since the US invaded and overthrew leadership of Iraq.

For your clear and quick reading, I listed key statistics taken from data analyzed by various think tanks, including the Center for American Progress and The Brookings Institution. Most info is presented through March 2005, except as indicated.

Spent & approved to spend in Iraq $300 billion of US taxpayers' money, as of June 2005
Lost & Unaccounted for in Iraq $9 billion of US taxpayers' money
Halliburton Overcharges Hidden by the Pentagon from Auditors $108 million

Troops Total 175,000, including 150,000 from the US, 8,000 from the UK, 3,600 from South Korea

US Troop Casualities 1,535 US troops; 98% male.
93.6% non-officers; 79% active duty, 13% National Guard; 60.1% white, 9.1% African-American, 6.4% Latino.

34% were killed by unidentified causes. Non-US Troop Casualties Total 177, with 87 from the UK.

US Troops Wounded 11,568

Iraqi Forces Casualities about 3,700, including police, soldiers, security forces and interpreters

Iraqi Civilians Killed 28,000 to 40,000

Iraqi Insurgents Killed 15,000

US Contractors Killed 232

Non-Iraqi Kidnapped 193, including 33 killed, 85 released, 3 escaped, 2 rescued and 20 status unknown.

Estimated insurgents, June 2003 5,000

Estimated insurgents, March 2005 18,000, including less than 1,000 foreign nationals

Daily insurgent attacks, Feb 2004 14

Daily insurgent attacks, Feb 2005 70

Trained Iraqi Troops Needed by July 2006 271,000

Trained Iraqi Troops, Per the Pentagon 142,472

Trained Iraqi Troops, Per General Richard Meyers 40,000

Trained Iraqi Troops, Per US Senator Joseph Biden 4,000 to 18,000

Iraqi Police Needs - Weapons Have 93,093; Need 213,185

Iraqi Police Needs - Vehicles Have 5,923; Need 22,395

Iraqi Police Needs - Body Armor Have 42,941; Need 135,000

Iraqi Unemployment Rate 28 to 40%

Average Hours Iraqi Homes Have electricity 8

Length of Gasoline Lines 1 mile

Hepatitis Outbreaks 2002, 100; 2003, 170; 2004, 200.

Car Traffic Change 500% from July 2003 to Jan 2005

Children Enrolled in Primary School 2000, 3.6 million; 2003, 4.3 million

Telephone Subscribers pre-war, 833,000; March 2005, 2.9 million

And the statistic that us cyber-writers find interesting....Internet Subscribers pre-war, 11,000; March 2005, 147,076

Eliot A. Cohen;: Editorial as his Son Goes to War in Iraq

washingtonpost.com
A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War

By Eliot A. Cohen
Sunday, July 10, 2005; B01

War forces us, or should force us, to ask hard questions of ourselves. As a military historian, a commentator on current events and the father of a young Army officer, these are mine.

You supported the Iraq war when it was launched in 2003. If you had known then what you know now, would you still have been in favor

of it?

As I watched President Bush give his speech at Fort Bragg to rally support for the war the other week, I contemplated this question from a different vantage than my usual professorial perch. Our oldest son now dresses like the impassive soldiers who served as stage props for that event; he too wears crossed rifles, jump wings and a Ranger tab. Before long he will fight in the war that I advocated, and that the president was defending.

So it is not an academic matter when I say that what I took to be the basic rationale for the war still strikes me as sound. Iraq was a policy problem that we could evade in words but not escape in reality. But what I did not know then that I do know now is just how incompetent we would be at carrying out that task. And that's what prevents me from answering this question with an unhesitating yes.

The Bush administration did itself a disservice by resting much of its case for war on Iraq's actual possession of weapons of mass destruction. The true arguments for war reached deeper than that. Long before 2003, weapons inspections in Iraq had broken down, and sanctions, thanks to countries like Russia, China and France, were failing. The regime's character and ambitions, including its desire to resume suspended weapons programs, had not changed. In the meanwhile, the policy of isolation had brought suffering to the Iraqi people and had not stabilized the Gulf. Read Osama bin Laden's fatwas in the late 1990s and see how the massive American presence in Saudi Arabia -- a presence born of the need to keep Saddam Hussein in his cage -- fed the outrage of the jihadis with whom we are in a war that will last a generation or more.

More than this: Decades of American policy had hoped to achieve stability in the Middle East by relying on accommodating thugs and kleptocrats to maintain order. That policy, too, had failed; it was the well-educated children of our client regimes who leveled the Twin Towers, after all.

The administration was and is right in thinking that the overthrow of Saddam's regime could change the pattern of Middle Eastern politics in ways that, by favoring the cause of decent government and basic freedoms, would favor our interests as well. Iraq will not become Switzerland, a progressive and prosperous social democracy, for generations, if ever. But it can become a state that makes room for the various confessions and communities that constitute it, that has reasonably open and free politics, and that chooses a path to a future that could inspire other changes in the Arab Middle East. I still think something like that will happen. The administration believed that the invasion of Iraq would jolt and transform a region bewitched by the malignant dreams that my colleague Fouad Ajami has described so well -- the dark fantasies of Baathists, ultra-nationalists and religious fanatics. And indeed, in the aftermath of the Iraq war the cracks have begun to show -- in Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, and even in Syria and Saudi Arabia.

But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV" -- the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the "real" war -- as of secondary importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks's blitzkrieg. I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq -- brave, honorable and committed though they were -- would be so unsuited for their tasks, and that they would serve their full length of duty nonetheless. I did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country's borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs.

I did not know, but I might have guessed.

You are a military historian; what does

the history of war have to tell us about the future of Iraq?

History provides perspective and context, not lessons. The failures and squandered opportunities of that first year in Iraq do not look that different from some of the institutional stupidities we saw in Vietnam. What is different here is how quickly -- relatively speaking -- the United States changed its course. It took five years before we became serious about training our Vietnamese allies to take our place. It has taken about a year to get serious about training Iraqis.

The political side of insurgency, which is the side that counts most, never really came to the fore in Vietnam, but it has in Iraq. For the presidents who got us into Vietnam, and for that matter out of it, the war was a distraction from other, more important priorities. For this president, the war is the defining decision of his tenure, and he knows it. Whatever his faults may be, a lack of determination is not one of them. And in war, character -- and above all persistence -- counts for a very great deal.

That's particularly true here because counterinsurgency is inherently a long, long business. Conceivably, the Iraqi insurgency could collapse in a year or so, but that would be highly unusual. More likely Iraq will suffer from chronic violence, which need not prevent the country as a whole from progressing. If the insurgencies in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka and Kashmir continue, what reason do we have to expect this one to end so soon? Most insurgencies do, however, fail. Moreover, most insurgencies consist of a collection of guerrilla microclimates in which local conditions -- charismatic leaders (or their absence), ethnographic peculiarities, concrete grievances -- determine how much violence will occur and with what effect.

This is an unusually invertebrate insurgency, without a central organization or ideology, a coherent set of objectives or a common positive purpose. The FLN in 5lgeria or the Viet Cong were far more cohesive and directed. The decentralized ad hoc nature of the insurgency makes it harder to figure out, but also less likely to succeed; there is a reason why it is well-organized and disciplined guerrillas who eventually occupy presidential palaces. And with all of its errors and follies, the United States remains an extraordinarily wealthy and formidable foe. By any historical standard, our resources are immense, our technology fabulous, the quality of our people on the ground superb. We have far more power than the Britain of the 19th century or the America of the 1960s. That fact may invite hubris, but it also provides solace.

None of this predetermines the outcome, of course, or foretells the consequences of a muddled success or a blurred failure in Iraq. Historians have the comfort of knowing how past wars played out. But short of clairvoyance, no one can forecast the outcome and the second- or third-order effects of events as they unfold. Five or even 10 years from now, we still may not be able to judge our Iraq venture in a definitive way. Unfortunately, that philosophical detachment is cold consolation in the here and now, as young men and women go off to war.

Your son is an infantry officer, shipping

out soon for Iraq. How do you feel about that?

Pride, of course -- great pride. And fear. And an occasional burning in the gut, a flare of anger at empty pieties and lame excuses, at flip answers and a lack of urgency, at a failure to hold those at the top to the standards of accountability that the military system rightly imposes on subalterns.

It is a flicker of rage that two years into an insurgency, we still expose our troops in Humvees to the blasts of roadside bombs -- knowing that even the armored version of that humble successor to the Jeep is simply not designed for warfare along guerrilla-infested highways, while, at the same time, knowing that plenty of countries manufacture armored cars that are. It is disbelief at a manpower system that, following its prewar routines, ships soldiers off to war for a year or 15 months, giving them two weeks of leave at the end, when our British comrades, more experienced in these matters and wiser in pacing themselves, ship troops out for half that time, and give them an extra month on top of their regular leave after an operational deployment.

It is the sick feeling that churned inside me at least 18 months ago, when a glib and upbeat Pentagon bureaucrat assured me that the opposition in Iraq consisted of "5,000 bitter-enders and criminals," even after we had killed at least that many. It flames up when hearing about the veteran who in theory has a year between Iraq rotations, but in fact, because he transferred between units after returning from one tour, will go back to Iraq half a year later, and who, because of "stop-loss orders" involuntarily extending active duty tours, will find himself in combat nine months after his enlistment runs out. And all this because after 9/11, when so many Americans asked for nothing but an opportunity to serve, we did not expand our Army and Marine Corps when we could, even though we knew we would need more troops.

A variety of emotions wash over me as I reflect on our Iraq war: Disbelief at the length of time it took to call an insurgency by its name. Alarm at our continuing failure to promote at wartime speed the colonels and generals who have a talent for fighting it, while also failing to sweep aside those who do not. Incredulity at seeing decorations pinned on the chests and promotions on the shoulders of senior leaders -- both civilians and military -- who had the helm when things went badly wrong. Disdain for the general who thinks Job One is simply whacking the bad guys and who, ever conscious of public relations, cannot admit that American soldiers have tortured prisoners or, in panic, killed innocent civilians. Contempt for the ghoulish glee of some who think they were right in opposing the war, and for the blithe disregard of the bungles by some who think they were right in favoring it. A desire -- barely controlled -- to slap the highly educated fool who, having no soldier friends or family, once explained to me that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties are not really all that high and that I really shouldn't get exercised about them.

There is a lot of talk these days about shaky public support for the war. That is not really the issue. Nor should cheerleading, as opposed to truth-telling, be our leaders' chief concern. If we fail in Iraq -- and I don't think we will -- it won't be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed. Rather than fretting about support at home, let them show themselves dedicated to waging and winning a strange kind of war and describing it as it is, candidly and in detail. Then the American people will give them all the support they need. The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do. What the father in me expects from our leaders is, simply, the truth -- an end to happy talk and denials of error, and a seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country sends into the fight.

Eliot Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

U.S. military helicopter shot down in Iraq (again)

U.S. military helicopter shot down in Iraq
5/27/2005 10:30:00 AM GMT




The U.S. military uses the OH-58 Kiowa for surveillance missions


A U.S. military helicopter was shot down near the Iraqi city of Baquoba, the U.S. army said on Friday, adding that two soldiers died in the crash.

The military said that two armed U.S. reconnaissance helicopters were flying in support of combat operations near Baqouba, 60 km northeast of Baghdad, when they were hit by small arms fire.

It added that one copter crashed and the other managed to land safely at a nearby airbase.

"Two Task Force Liberty soldiers were killed when their helicopter crashed near Baquba on May 26," the military statement said.

"Coalition forces responded to the scene and secured the site,” it added.

The Pentagon said that the crashed helicopter was an OH-58 Kiowa helicopter, a one-engined, two-seater craft.

The attack came as about 1,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops continued their offensive against rebels in the western al-Anbar province in the city of Haditha.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials are investigating the killing of three Iraqis who were shot dead by U.S. soldiers after they opened fire at their vehicle in southeastern Baghdad on Thursday, military spokesman Master Sgt. Greg Kaufman said.

Kaufman claimed that U.S. forces shot at the van after its driver failed to respond to their warnings to stop the car.

Iraqi police Sgt. Najim Aboud said two of the slain Iraqis were brothers and that their mother was also in the vehicle.

no war - picture