Bush personally bullied UN diplomats into supporting Iraq war

Ambassador: Bush personally bullied UN diplomats into supporting Iraq war


Heraldo Muñoz, a personal friend of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Chilean ambassador to the United Nations, details the Bush administration's persuasion tactics in the months leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq in his upcoming memoir, the Washington Post reports.



"A Solitary War: A Diplomat's Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons," to be released in April 2008, outlines bullying tactics exercised by President Bush in attempts to persuade United Nations diplomats to back a 2003 resolution to authorize military force against Iraq. Mocking of unsupportive allies, threats of trade reprisals and attempts to fire U.N. envoys were among actions taken by the Bush administration against those less than cooperative, Muñoz writes.

Ultimately, he continues, America's "rough-and-tumble" strategy backfired, with Bush later reaching out to Chile and Mexico, which he'd earlier spurned for preventing the war resolution, aggressively backed by the United States and Britain, from taking hold.
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EXCERPTS:

On March 14, 2003, less than one week before the eventual invasion, Chile hosted a meeting of diplomats from the six undecided governments to discuss its proposal. But U.S. ambassador John D. Negroponte and then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell moved quickly to quash the initiative, warning their governments that the effort was viewed as "an unfriendly act" designed to isolate the United States. The diplomats received calls from their governments ordering them to "leave the meeting immediately," Muñoz writes.

Muñoz said subsequent ties remained tense at the United Nations, where the United States sought support for resolutions authorizing the occupation of Iraq. He said that small countries met privately in a secure room at the German mission that was impervious to eavesdropping. "It reminded me of a submarine or a giant safe," Muñoz said in an interview.

The United States, he added, expressed "its displeasure" to the German government every time they held a meeting in the secure room. "They couldn't listen to what was going on."
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The entire Washington Post article can be read HERE.

Video: US funds Terrorist indirectly :: Negropante knew

Negropante knew- plus he might be the one planning it.




John Negropante is a career diplomat.

In early January 2007, President George W. Bush nominated John Negroponte to be deputy secretary of state, the number two position at the State Department behind Condoleezza Rice. The move amounted to a demotion for Negroponte, who since 2005 was director of national intelligence (DNI), a Cabinet post created by Congress after 9/11 to improve coordination between the country's various intelligence agencies. (Negroponte was a career Foreign Service diplomat who has also served as ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations during the Bush presidency.) The previous deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, stepped down in mid-2006 to take up a post at Goldman Sachs. Rice reportedly had difficulty finding a replacement, which according to a Los Angeles Times editorial was rumored to be because “her choices have either declined to sign up for a stint likely to be best remembered for the debacle in Iraq or have been vetoed as too liberal by the White House” (January 5, 2007). Negroponte was apparently “the only person acceptable to both Rice and [Vice President Dick] Cheney.


After 9/11 Negropante qas our ambassador to the UN:

The fear and passionate patriotism that followed the 9/11 attacks likely spared Negroponte from an intense grilling in his Senate confirmation hearings for his UN ambassadorship, which had already stalled for several months due to the Senate's request for documents. At the UN he led the Bush administration's drive for war, and tried to persuade the Mexican and Chilean governments to recall their UN ambassadors when they did not agree to support the planned invasion. According to news reports, Negroponte authorized wiretaps and other audio surveillance of both allies and critics at the UN in the run-up to the Security Council vote and the invasion (see COHA Memorandum to the Press 04.20, April 27, 2004; CounterPunch, June 9, 2004; and “Nomination of John Negroponte,” Congressional Record, September 14, 2001).

In Honduras:

During Negroponte's tenure as anbassador to Honduras, US military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million; the US launched a covert war against Nicaragua and mined its harbors, and the US trained Honduran military to support the Contras.

John Negroponte worked closely with General Alvarez, Chief of the Armed Forces in Honduras, to enable the training of Honduran soldiers in psychological warfare, sabotage, and many types of human rights violations, including torture and kidnapping. Honduran and Salvadoran military were sent to the School of the Americas to receive training in counter-insurgency directed against people of their own country. The CIA created the infamous Honduran Intelligence Battalion 3-16 that was responsible for the murder of many Sandinistas. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, a graduate of the School of the Americas, was a founder and commander of Battalion 3-16. In 1982, the US negotiated access to airfields in Honduras and established a regional military training center for Central American forces, principally directed at improving fighting forces of the Salvadoran military.

In 1994, the Honduran Rights Commission outlined the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents.

It also specifically accused John Negroponte of a number of human rights violations.

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This is a man who should probably be in jail instead of a high ranking position in our government. But the Bush plan of un-stabalizing the Shiite power base needs someone who is not afraid of playing dirty.

Seymour Hersh: America Covertlly Funding Al Qaida

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh ("New Yorker") on plans by the Bush administration for the invasion of Iran. Covert operations have already begun in order to destabilize Iran, among other things by supporting Al Qaida affiliated groups against the Shiites in Iran.
Aired 2/25/07

Iraq leaders call for International meeting to help stabalize thier country

1. Iraq invited all neighboring countries to the conference next month, which is aimed at improving security in the country amid daily attacks on civilians The conference is tentatively set for March 10-11, Iraq's ambassador in Washington, Samir Sumaidaie, said last month.

2. The four countries that hold permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council with the U.S. -- Britain, China, France and Russia -- also are invited, Invitations have also gone out to Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Bahrain, and the Arab League

3.Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Ja'afari, said today his government hasn't decided whether to attend.

4. This will mark the first time the U.S. has sat with Iran and Syria to look at Iraq's future, an initiative that lawmakers and a bipartisan panel of American statesmen have sought. The Iraq Study Group, headed by former secretary of state Republican James Baker, recommended in its Dec. 6 report that the U.S. engage in a wider regional diplomatic offensive to curb violence in Iraq.The group also recommended direct U.S. talks with Iran and Syria without conditions

John Negroponte, the new deputy secretary of state, said in his Jan. 30 confirmation hearing that he didn't consider such a conference to be of utmost urgency. ``I would not say that, as a matter of priority, one would have to go right to a regional- type conference,'' he told senators

Special Forces May Train Assassins, Kidnappers in Iraq

Special Forces May Train Assassins, Kidnappers in Iraq
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 7:59 p.m. CT Jan 14, 2005

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)

Meanwhile, intensive discussions are taking place inside the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Defense department’s efforts to expand the involvement of U.S. Special Forces personnel in intelligence-gathering missions. Historically, Special Forces’ intelligence gathering has been limited to objectives directly related to upcoming military operations—"preparation of the battlefield," in military lingo. But, according to intelligence and defense officials, some Pentagon civilians for years have sought to expand the use of Special Forces for other intelligence missions.

Pentagon civilians and some Special Forces personnel believe CIA civilian managers have traditionally been too conservative in planning and executing the kind of undercover missions that Special Forces soldiers believe they can effectively conduct. CIA traditionalists are believed to be adamantly opposed to ceding any authority to the Pentagon. Until now, Pentagon proposals for a capability to send soldiers out on intelligence missions without direct CIA approval or participation have been shot down. But counter-terrorist strike squads, even operating covertly, could be deemed to fall within the Defense department’s orbit.

The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days. Shahwani told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named three former senior figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam Hussein’s half-brother—were essentially safe across the border in a Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain that they are in Syria and move easily between Syrian and Iraqi territories," he said, adding that efforts to extradite them "have not borne fruit so far."

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

Pentagon sources emphasize there has been no decision yet to launch the Salvador option. Last week, Rumsfeld decided to send a retired four-star general, Gary Luck, to Iraq on an open-ended mission to review the entire military strategy there. But with the U.S. Army strained to the breaking point, military strategists note that a dramatic new approach might be needed—perhaps one as potentially explosive as the Salvador option.

With Mark Hosenball
EDITOR'S NOTE: This report, initially published on Jan. 8, was updated on Jan. 10 to include Negroponte's comments to NEWSWEEK.
And at a news conference on Jan. 11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the idea of a Salvador option was "nonsense" and denied that U.S. Special Forces were going into Syria. But when asked whether such a policy was under consideration, he replied, "Why would I even talk about something like that?"

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/