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Thursday, March 23, 2023
Iraq snapshot
Thursday, March 23, 2023. The press sold the Iraq War and the press sold out the Iraqi people -- even the Iraqis they depended upon for reporting.
We're going to start with Trudy Rubin. She's been a columnist for THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER since 1983. During the long -- and ongoing -- Iraq War, there have been times where her column was the only thing about Iraq that week in US media. She's a columnist so she's expressing an opinion and sometimes I disagree and sometimes I agree but I have always applauded her for the fact that she has covered Iraq -- even after the only real US withdrawal from Iraq ever took place -- the US media withdrawal of December 2008. This is from her latest column:
Twenty years ago, when I first hired him in Baghdad, my Iraqi interpreter and driver Salam was thrilled that the Americans had toppled Saddam Hussein. I worked with Salam over the next several years, on my many reporting trips to Iraq, and I can’t stop thinking about his personal tragedy as we reach the 20th anniversary of the invasion.
A Shiite Muslim whose uncle had been murdered by Saddam’s thugs, Salam was delighted to see the domination of the dictator’s Sunni minority come to an end. Yet he was friends with Sunnis in his neighborhood and took me to meet them in their mosque and in their homes.
Salam was certain the Americans were going to transform Iraq for the better. He eagerly helped the U.S. soldiers in the FOB (forward operating base) in his mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhood, tipping them off about a local Shiite militia that had started murdering Sunni residents. But when the FOB pulled out, members of the Shiite family he had fingered got their relatives in the now Shiite-run army to arrest him as a “terrorist.”
In 2010, I managed to visit Salam in a filthy, smoke-filled jail. He had lost 50 pounds and showed me the torture marks from electric shocks on his body, before starting to cry. A heavyset, bearded, chain-smoking Iraqi intelligence agent, who thankfully didn’t speak English, glared at us the whole time we talked.
When he was finally set free, nearly two years after being detained, Salam received death threats from the Shiite militia and had to flee with his family. They barely made it through Syria to Turkey, then traveled on an open refugee boat to Turkish Cyprus, and finally sneaked illegally through barbed wire into Greek Cyprus. Unable to work legally, Salam had to exist by smuggling.
Meantime, one brother in Baghdad was killed by his vengeful Shiite neighbors and a second brother had to live in hiding after death threats. The surviving brother was entitled to a U.S. special immigrant visa as a relative of someone who had worked with U.S. journalists but was left waiting for years — as happened to so many eligible Iraqis.
For years, I stayed in touch with Salam and even visited him in Cyprus in 2011 to help him get temporary residence when the Cypriot government was kicking out most Iraqis. But the last time I called, he could only gurgle on the phone, having suffered a stroke. His dreams, his family, his life had been destroyed by the war he had welcomed, as Iraq deteriorated into a morass of sectarian chaos and corruption. His brother, still forced to live in hiding in Baghdad, never got that visa to the U.S.
And that's a perfect story for the Iraq War. Even someone who was happy at the start had those hopes dashed. The Iraq War accomplished nothing of value. And so many outlets were shameful. Let's note the MCCLATCHY reporter. I'm not talking Leila or Nancy. Sorry, I can't give her name but I don't want another boo-hoo e-mail about how mean I am to her.
MCCLATCHY had huge mistakes throughout the war. Lulu was with NPR then but among the stupid things she's done this week at THE NEW YORK TIMES was talk about the ethnic cleansing. I call it stupid because she's yet to own the fact that she wasn't calling it that then nor was MCCLATCHY. We called it ethnic cleansing when it was taking place and the US 'surge' allowed it to take place but don't expect any of the US blowhards on the left -- or pretending to be -- to address that reality either even they bother to attack the surge.
But anyway, nameless didn't do much in Iraq -- she hid behind Iraqi staff, they had to go out like stringers on a US election night gathering polling data while the 'correspondent' rested. She leaves Iraq and stops covering it but she's really, honest to God, interested in these people who helped her and she, hand on heart and pinky swear, wants them to be here in the US. Why, anytime there's an event, she shows up.
Yes, if there are cameras around, she is there. But as we noted -- and made her cry boo-hoo -- she had a post at MCCLATCHY where she never wrote about the topic. Shove a microphone at her and she'll talk about it to get personal publicity for herself but she Tweeted multiple times daily and never made time to Tweet about the Iraqis who had helped them and were now suffering.
She suffered! She wanted me to know in one e-mail. She did not feel good the night of that party but she went. Feel good? As I replied back, "I think you mean you didn't look good. Is it a home perm? It looks like a home perm in the photos." But bad hair or not, she went to the party and posed for pictures and, honestly, shouldn't that be enough!!!!
No, dear, it wasn't.
But in the spirit of the 20th anniversary, let me give you a little gift. I don't have time to track you. I wouldn't even have known if the people you were betraying weren't writing to this site and telling me about it. So grasp that. Grasp that I called you out and made you cry but it was the Iraqis that your personally knew and betrayed that were the reason we covered this sad and pathetic period in your career.
Time and again, US journalists used Iraqis. During the ethnic cleansing, for example, the US journalists didn't go out in the streets of Baghdad. They were too scared and it wasn't safe enough. But they were always fine with Iraqis having to come into their office or to the hotels they were staying at. They often billed themselves as un-embedded, these US journalists, and pretended they were so brave when the reality was that they farmed out bravery to people paid peanuts, to people who didn't get the prizes and the glory and then on top of that got betrayed when they should have received the US visas they were applying for. I remember talking to Ted Kennedy about it because he did do a lot of work on the issue of Iraqi visas and he made a point of noting that Iraqis who were interpreters for the US military had various military people -- rank and file and decorated officers -- who would contact his Senate office to try to assist with Iraqis they knew getting visas. But, no, no media outlets ever contacted the office to try to help an Iraqi who'd provided their coverage of Iraq.
Remember that the next time there's some event and our MCCLATCHY woman shows up for photos and wants you to know that it's really important that we don't betray these Iraqis. We?
You mean you.
Staying with the topic of the press, Zainab Almashat (GUARDIAN) writes about press realities in US 'liberated' Iraq today:
A grenade was thrown into the central Baghdad offices of the Iraqi television network UTV last month. It failed to explode, but the attack is typical of the relentless assault on journalists in Iraq over the past two decades.
The target of the attack was believed to be Adnan Altia, the host of a political talkshow who has criticised the unrestrained use of arms in Iraq. “My questions don’t aim to provoke politicians but to ask them to justify,” he says. “But they’re quickly turned into a weapon to kill me in many different ways.”
Altia had already been forced into exile by previous threats against him and his family and now lives in Turkey, working as a journalist for Iraqi channels, including UTV, which has offices in the country.
The 2005 Iraqi constitution established freedom of expression and freedom of the press, followed by a later law to protect journalists. But far from facilitating a free and independent press, post-invasion Iraq has produced a partisan and sectarian media landscape in which violence against journalists has increased.
At least 282 journalists have been killed in Iraq since 2003, according to estimates by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, with most killed by anonymous gunmen or armed factions, and others by the Iraqi forces. The country ranks fifth in the CPJ’s Global Impunity Index, behind only Somalia, Syria, South Sudan and Afghanistan. A further 74 journalists and media assistants have been abducted, with most of them killed.
Afrah Shawqi had been working as a journalist in Iraq since the mid-1990s and was a correspondent for the Saudi-founded Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, based in London, when about 20 masked gunmen tied up her family and abducted her from her Baghdad home in December 2016.
“I was accused of receiving money from the Saudi and American embassies to write against my country and of cheating my husband with other men, and they made me sign papers to affirm that. Whenever I refused to sign, they would hit me with a baton,” says Shawqi, who was forced into exile to France soon after her release in January 2017, amid a significant social-media campaign on her behalf. “Being in exile is very difficult for journalists, it’s difficult to communicate so far from home,” she says.
I'm not seeing those realities in the worthless garbage so many US outlets are producing this week -- I'm especially looking at you Richard Engel with your NBC 'NEWS' report about how things are going so great. It's as though you're deliberately ignoring what's happening to Iraqi journalists, what's happening to Iraq social media participants, the crackdown on anyone who disagrees with the Iraqi government online, it's as though you're needing to lie for a reason. Is it guilt, Richard? Because if it's guilt over lying, more lies will not bring you peace.
We've been noting the past on Iraq since last week and that includes my applause for Janeane Garofalo who I've known for years.
An idiot wrote to the public e-mail account (common_ills@yahoo.com) to tell me that I'd forgotten a woman -- "You who claim to be a feminist, forgot to note her!" -- oooh, even an exclamation point. I had forgotten brave Rachel Maddow.
No, I was being kind.
I wasn't mentioning her. I don't care what your whore ass Crapapedia tells you today, Rachel is not now and never was someone against the Iraq War. In fact, before going to AIR AMERICA RADIO, Rachel supported the Iraq War. Once at AIR AMERICA? She wasn't against the war. She was against the way it was being run. Like the disgusting Al Franken, she didn't call for US troops to come home, she called for a 'smarter' war. So take CRAPAPEDIA and flush it down the toilet because Rachel never opposed the Iraq War. Randi Rhodes did. I could note her. In fact, she's on YOUTUBE now and I was going to note her but it looked like she was selling the US-proxy war on Russia so I'm not going to include one of her videos. (If she's not, e-mail and let me know and we'll note her.) But Randi was against it. And Janeane was against it. There were a few others. But not many.
Rachel was part of the war effort. And that's why she whored and pimped Lawrence Wilkerson.
To this day, I can't watch NO WAY OUT (1987, starring Kevin Costner and Sean Young) and not see Colin in Gene Hackman's character and Lawrence in Will Patton's. Lawrence just loves Colin so much and he brought that love onto Rachel's whorish show and everybody pretended for years like it was fine and truthful. It took him years to even slightly call out his crush Colin Powell.
Colin was a liar and it started during Vietnam. As for lying about the Iraq War, he started lying long before he sat down at the United Nations. Jeffrey St. Clair (COUNTERPUNCH) notes:
If the intelligence didn’t fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician.
She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as “the queen of Madison Avenue.” On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben’s Rice and another for Head and Shoulder’s dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
At the State Department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell’s words, “the branding of U.S. foreign policy.” She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.
“Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time,” said Beers. “All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world.” Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.
Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It’s a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.
The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of “freedom” to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: “This war is about peace.”
Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all after play.
Yeah, Colin hired her because he's a liar and he knew lies were needed to sell the illegal war and all Lawrence Wilkerson tears, nocturnal emissions and other bodily fluids squirted out while calling Colin's name won't ever change that reality.
FAIR has an article we may note tomorrow. If we do, and I'm just not into it, we'll just quote from it. If I'm in the mood, I'll fix it for them because, as usual, they can't seem to get the story right. Why am I not in the mood? It's about Alissa J. Rubin. Apparently our most read and circulated post on her is the one calling her a "crack whore" in the headline. Her early reporting lacked a lot but she did do some finer things later on and became one of the better US correspondents. If they want to tackle Alissa the problem for them is that they really ignored Iraq when she began covering it. Meaning they don't get how bad her reporting was back then. I'm not sure if I'll be in the mood to unpack all of that including her spin on Sahwa that we called out in real time and said it would fall apart and, of course, it fell apart. Sahwa did not change the course of the Iraq War or change Iraq for that matter.
I've never liked Charles Pierce and this column reminds me why. Supposedly, it's about the Iraq War but you learn more about what Charles was doing -- magazine writing -- than you do about Iraq or the journalists selling Iraq. I have a friend at ESQUIRE who asked for the link and I said I'd give them a link but I probably wouldn't be kind. And I'm not going to be kind.
Howard Kurtz was at THE WASHINGTON POST when the Iraq War started. At FOX NEWS, he reflects:
One of the toughest stories I’ve ever had to do was on how my employer screwed up coverage of the march to war in Iraq.
Two decades ago, while at the Washington Post, I decided to examine how a newspaper with so much talent essentially enlisted in the Bush administration’s effort to sell the coming invasion. Pronouncements by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and others that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction got huge play, while the relative handful of stories questioning such claims ran deep inside the paper.
"I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder…I think I was part of the groupthink," Bob Woodward told me.
"Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday," said Tom Ricks, the military correspondent and author of several books. "There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"
And I drew this acknowledgment from my ultimate boss, Len Downie, the executive editor.
"We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale," Downie told me. "Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part…We didn't pay enough attention to the minority."
The article he wrote then was an important one and it remains one of the few articles an outlet did on themselves and how they got the Iraq War wrong. Everyone else pretty much hid behind Judith Miller and who knew the woman was responsible for all three broadcast networks, cable, all print outlets and THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW -- if you're late to the party, yes, Oprah pimped the Iraq War -- she even had Judith Miller on and she even jumped on one of her audience members who dared to question going to war.
Okay, we need to move on or we're not going to get to the big Iraq news of the week. It was in THE GUARDIAN but, in the US at least, no one appears to have picked up on it. Diane Abbot is a member of the Labour Party and, since 1987, has been a member of Parliament. That would speak to her being in the know. In a column earlier this week, she wrote the following:
Local party members contacted their MPs asking them to vote against the war. Even some Tory MPs were declaring that they would vote against it. Blair must have been increasingly alarmed, frightened that he might lose the vote. In the days running up to it, the prime minister had individual MPs brought to his offices to pressure them to vote his way. He did not invite me, or other determined anti-war MPs; he must have judged us to be a lost cause.
When private meetings with him did not seem to be working, I was told that Blair enlisted his wife, Cherie Blair, and the former US president Bill Clinton to ring Labour MPs to apply more pressure. Blair was always a little disdainful of ordinary MPs and parliament, but he was so desperate that he took to physically coming to the House of Commons and touring the bars, tea rooms and other places where MPs gather informally. He was buttonholing MPs and trying to make the case for war. Parliament became a pressure cooker. Everyone knew that the vote was not actually about the merits of the war. Instead, it was becoming a vote on whether you supported Blair personally or not. Everyone knew that voting against the war meant that your career was effectively over.
Is it true? Was Bill Clinton pressuring Labour MPs to vote for the Iraq War? Clintonista Joe Conason wrote a lengthy book extolling Bill on Iraq (among other things) but didn't include that detail. Is it accurate? If it is, Bill and Hillary have a lot more to answer for. And if it's true, Bill owes the world an apology but, ask Juanita Broaddrick, Bill's not too good at apologies or admissions of guilt.
Amy Goodman continued the conversation on the Iraq War with two major segments yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: While President Obama pledged to remove all troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, today, more than a decade later, there are still more than 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq, and violence has continued in Iraq, as well. In 2020, in just one example, a bomb destroyed the American Institute for English in Najaf, Iraq, the school that was founded by our guest, Sami Rasouli. At the time of the bombing, Sami was visiting the United States. Since then, he has remained here with his family, which was finally reunited at the end of last year, his wife and son returning to be with him and their kids. He’s now working on starting a new organization called the American-Iraqi Peace Initiative.
Sami Rasouli, it’s great to have you back with us, as I talk to you from New York and you’re sitting in a studio in Minneapolis. It’s amazing to go back on that journey. As we met you in Minneapolis, the antiwar movement so warmly supported you, the whole community at your restaurant in Minneapolis. But then you said, “I’m closing it all up, and I don’t care if I have to just sweep the streets of Najaf, I’m going to improve my country in any small way I can,” as the U.S. bombs were falling. Take us on that journey 20 years later and how you ended up back in the United States. But talk about that first decision you made, from your comfortable abode in Minneapolis, to say, “I’m going back to Iraq.”
SAMI RASOULI: Hello, Amy. Thank you for having me. And thank you for reviewing our past meetings. It has been a while since we met.
Anyway, I’m back now. And regarding your question, I always tell my listeners that — and friends, of course, that Sami and salmon, the fish, has something in common: that they go upstream. But they also have no income, and that salmon doesn’t come back, but Sami keeps coming back, because my good friend Jeremy Iggers here from Minneapolis said, “Sami, remember, you always wanted to build a bridge for peace between the two countries, your country of birth and your country of choice. So remember that bridge has two ends. You have to maintain both ends.” That meant to come back again and go back. So, wherever I go, that’s my home, and I am privileged to have that.
As you mentioned, eventually, I got reunited with my wife and my stepson. My family and I survived. My dreams and school has been destroyed in Najaf back in September 2020, after killing General — the Iranian General Soleimani by Mr. Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: At the Iraq airport.
SAMI RASOULI: Correct, in Baghdad, Baghdad airport, yes.
Well, it looks like my wife, my kids and I are safe now here, but the war in Iraq, 20 years ago, have left scars and visible legacy. And this is the babies, the babies in Fallujah and Najaf and Basra. And the rise of the incidence of cancer, if we speak in general, fourfolds went up, but among the kids, 12 times went up. And that’s catastrophic. The gruesome deformality of newborn babies, whether in Najaf or in Fallujah, keeps happening as a witness for the crimes committed against peaceful nation in 2003.
And that brings the question how we’re going to deal with that. I always say a just compensation, a just compensation to respect that nation and leave that nation alone. That nation is rich in its resources, but, unfortunately, Bush’s administrations, represented by Paul Bremer, assigned people that’s incompetent. They have nothing to do with leading a country, such a country called the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia. They are just selling each part of the country out to others. And we, as the people of Iraq, living an unsecure country, and actually it’s not state, a lawless state. So, there is no security. There is no respected economic system, social system, health system, education system.
And when I say just compensation, I mean to build a new culture here, the backyard of the rest of the world, the United States of America, the new culture that’s based on justice and peace, that deal with, for example, local, domestic, severely affected all of us. It’s a school mass shooting. Since Columbine in April 20th, 1999, we haven’t done yet anything to prevent that, because since that shooting in 1999 up to date, there are about 366 school mass shootings happened already. And those disturbed kids, that receiving very bad education system — by their political leaders, I should emphasize — because at school they teach them how to be kind and nice to their neighbors, to their friends, and teach them not to be racist against any colors or other people that they meet, to be diversified. But again —
AMY GOODMAN: Sami, I wanted to —
SAMI RASOULI: — they are told the same thing by their parents —
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to interrupt for one second —
SAMI RASOULI: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — because you’re making an extremely interesting point, as you talk about, you know, this country being really the only place in the world that has this level of mass shootings day after day. And you go back to Columbine. As you said, Columbine was April 20th, 1999. And I’ll never forget President Clinton’s comments at the time. What was it? Four — three days later that the U.S.-backed NATO forces, for example, bombed RTS, the Radio Television studio in Belgrade, Serbia, and we saw the body parts of makeup artists and technicians being taken out of this civilian structure. That was just one example. But Columbine happening in the midst of the bombing of Yugoslavia, and President Clinton saying, “How do we teach our children that violence is not the answer to resolving conflict?” And the irony of this with the backdrop of war, then Yugoslavia. In your case, we’re talking about Iraq, and now talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
SAMI RASOULI: Right. I mean, kids, the lessons. I mean, they were like 12 years old or 17 years old, the perpetrators. Those kids — and they come as a challenge for their surrounding world. They would like to make some changes in this stage of age. So, to tell them at school and at home, “Violence is bad, and we should not do it,” but yet we are doing it by our political leaders in Iraq and Syria and other places, and we tell them, “That’s good, but the violence, for example, or attacking Ukraine today is not OK.” So, we are — what we are doing, we are contributing to disturb their minds, their psyche, and eventually they end up with a conclusion that human life has no value, whether it’s their friends, their classmates or their enemies.
And bullying their classmates if they are bigger or stronger, just they’ve seen it when the U.S., as a superpower, goes and march in Iraq, with no reason, and destroy the country and come back, and go, after that, to Syria, destroy it, to Libya, and the saga will continue. So, that should be ended. And as I said, a new culture of peace and justice should lead our mind and hearts, not only at home and at school, but also in the Pentagon and the White House and the Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: Going back to Iraq, and in a moment we’re going to be speaking with a well-known Iraqi American who, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, left Minneapolis and said, “I don’t care if I just have to sweep the streets of my city of Najaf, I’m going to be there with my people,” and has now returned. We see that President Putin has been now charged by the International Criminal Court with war crimes. The question of where American officials should stand, not 20 years later, but even 10 or before that. President Obama was famous for saying we should always just look forward. But for culpability when it comes to the destruction of this nation of Iraq, what about George W. Bush, who — yesterday I was saying on the show — just a day after 9/11, when we know 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, was pushing his counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, on the issue of Iraq, “How can we make that connection?” And Richard Clarke was saying back to him, “There is zero connection.” But then, what this means, what this led to? Should he also be charged with war crimes? And should others be in the dock with him?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, first of all, there’s no question, in my opinion, that the Iraq War, initiated by the United States, a war of choice, was a crime, a really horrid crime. I’m probably easier on President Bush than many other people are. You know, I view him as an individual, really, of limited talent, to put it bluntly. He became president because his last name was “Bush.” He was an unimaginative figure and was utterly unprepared for what happened on September 11th. And his reaction, which I wouldn’t defend, I think is primarily attributable to the associates that he chose to surround himself with. In other words, if I’m looking for bad guys, I don’t begin by looking at Bush. I begin with Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice, people who fancied themselves to be strategic thinkers. They fancied themselves to have a grasp of world politics, who believed that American military might was so great that we would sweep aside Saddam Hussein’s forces, and some vast benefit would result. Well, they miscalculated. They were utterly wrong. And so, when I’m looking for somebody to blame, I tend to blame those people more than Bush — not letting Bush of the hook. He was the commander-in-chief. But again, I think, in at least some sense, it was not his hands that were on the controls.
AMY GOODMAN: If Bush was so untalented, why couldn’t the largest antiwar movement in the world stop him? And it’s not only in the United States. I mean, remember, February 15th, 2003, millions of people took to the streets of the world to stop the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I don’t think Bush or anybody in the Bush administration cared about world opinion. I mean, they cared about whether or not they were going to be able to line up certain allies, like Great Britain, to support the war. In that, they succeeded. You know, shame on Tony Blair. But I don’t think world opinion factored, in a large sense, in the inner circles of Washington, D.C. But your larger question is — because I remember those. I happened to be in New York City, in Manhattan, on the day of the — was it February, I think, 15th?
AMY GOODMAN: February 15, 2003.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Moving, massive, astonishing, and I think had zero political impact. Why? Well, I think that says something about our democracy, that elites tend to bow toward the will of the people, but then, when they sit around the table and they make decisions, decisions related to war and peace, I don’t think that they think very seriously about, “Well, you know, what do the folks back in Indiana think?” Their calculation is shaped by considerations of power and, again, I would say, with regard to the Bush administration in 2003, when the war began, radically defective understanding of the war, understanding of ourselves, understanding of the potential of American military power. So, our leadership, elected and appointed, was stupid. The people, actually, I think, had a better grasp of the dangers that we were undertaking when we went to war with Iraq.
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Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Iraq snapshot
Wednesday, March 22, 2023. YOUTUBE censors DEMOCRACY NOW! in their efforts to lie for the criminals behind the Iraq War, Bret Stephens shows up at NYT to reveal what we always knew (he has no soul), and much more.
Thinning hair and no spine, Bret Stephens shows up -- where else? -- in the pages of THE NEW YORK TIMES today. Is he again pimping racism? Or maybe he's again telling us that climate change doesn't exist?
No, the foppish fool wants the world to know that he doesn't "regret supporting the Iraq War."
Just like women don't regret sleeping with him and his tiny little choo-choo.
Sure, Bret, keep telling yourself that.
I guess if you have no shame, there really isn't anywhere else for you to go than the pages of THE NEW YORK TIMES. No one did more to sell the Iraq War, after all. Running Bret's boast is running their own opinion.
They lied. They didn't just lie before the Iraq War. They lied during it to keep it going.
And when public editor Daniel Okrent forced them to finally acknowledge their lies, the paper just lied again. Bill Keller insisted that they're (tiny) mea culpa was only the first step and they would be looking into all that published reporting. They never did.
Bill wanted war on Iraq. So did trashy Jill Abramson. Jill blamed Judith Miller for everything. She started a whisper campaign against reporter Judith. She did that because she was actually over Judith and could have stopped Judith's reporting at any minute. But she didn't. Because she liked the Iraq War.
She's always got an excuse and she's always got an agenda.
She was part of the lying campaign that all US troops were out of Iraq. Eight months after the drawdown -- not a withdrawal -- then-President Barack Obama -- running for re-election claiming to have ended the Iraq War -- began sneaking US troops back into Iraq. This was the sort of huge story anyone would want to break, right?
Tim Arango had it. He had a US general on record about it.
Jill wouldn't let the story run. To her, news didn't matter as much as re-electing Barack Obama. The Iraqi people, the truth, none of it was more important to her than re-electing Barack Obama.
Tim finally got it into the paper. Not as a front page article on Iraq -- because this is a huge headline -- grasp that. A sitting US president is sneaking US troops back into Iraq -- huge news all by itself -- and dong so while lying that he ended the Iraq War -- even bigger news -- and using that lie to run for re-election -- huge.
But Jill didn't want huge news.
Here's all Tim Arango was able to do with that news in September of 2012 -- weeks before the 2012 election:
And on top of that, it's not the lede, it's not the opening paragraph, it's buried in the middle of an article that's mainly on Syria. Tim Arango's September 25, 2012 NEW YORK TIMES report included this,
"Iraq and the United States are negotiating an agreement that could
result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on
training missions. At the request of the Iraqi government, according to
[US] General [Robert L.] Caslen, a unit of Army Special Operations
soldiers was recently deployed to Iraq to advise on counterterrorism and
help with intelligence."
The paper of (mis)record has so much to apologize and atone for but, all these years later, it's still more comfortable running the mad ravings of human filth like Bret Stephens.
Stephens regrets nothing because he's human filth and casualties and death don't bother his gated-community mind. Others die for his lies and he's okay with it.
The papal nuncio who served in Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion 20 years ago told Vatican News that Christians in Iraq were worse off after Saddam Hussein was removed from power.
Cardinal Fernando Filoni was appointed by Pope John Paul II in 2001 as the Vatican’s ambassador to Iraq and Jordan. He told Vatican News that when war broke out on March 20, 2003, he remained at his post at the papal nunciature in Baghdad.
“I remember this period as one of the most tough periods of my life,” Filoni said. “This was the moment in which not only myself but also the bishops, the priests, the faithful, and the people in Iraq, we had the perception of our incapacity to give a different perspective than that of war.”
In the weeks before the U.S. invasion Pope John Paul II had pressed for peace. Addressing the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See on Jan. 13, 2003, the pope said: “No to war! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity.” He announced a day of prayer and fasting for peace in the Middle East to take place on March 5, 2003.
That's how awful the Iraq War has been -- even the Church can note life is much worse for Christians in Iraq now than it was before the US-led invasion kicked off these 20 years of war. And don't forget, Christians in Iraq are usually the ones who sell alcohol. Their businesses have been targeted with bombing throughout the war and now their own government has just banned importing alcohol into Iraq. Guess there are going to be even more Iraqis out of a job now.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US-led Coalition of the Willing was a model exercise of maligning the very international system of rules Washington, London and Canberra speak of when condemning their latest assortment of international villains. It recalled those sombre words of the International Military Tribunal, delivered at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
The invasion of Iraq defied the UN Security Council as the sole arbiter on whether the use of force would be necessary to combat a genuine threat to international peace and security. It breached the UN Charter. It encouraged instances of horrendous mendacity (those stubbornly spectral weapons of mass destruction) and the inflation of threats supposedly posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein.
This included the unforgettable British contribution about Saddam’s alleged ability to launch chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes. As Blair declared to MPs in September 2002: “It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.”
Putin, not one to suffer amnesia on this point, also noted this fact in his speech made announcing Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Iraq, he noted, had been invaded “without any legal grounds.” Lies, he said, were witnessed “at the highest state level and voiced from the high UN rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss of human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the infrastructure of the country was ruined, its army and public service disbanded, leaving rich pools of disaffected recruits for the insurgency that followed. The country, torn between Shia, Sunni and Kurd and governed by an occupation force of colossal ineptitude, suffered an effective collapse, leaving a vacuum exploited by jihadis and, in time, Islamic State.
Meanwhile, an e-mail to the public account asked why I don't note
Iraqi Body Count? Why? Do I look like Fiorella Isabel? The e-mails says she's noting them and linking to them. Oh. Well I'm not that
stupid. We noted Iraq Body Count in the early days of the war and this site. Then
we noted serious problems with their counting methods -- and this was just on
US service members who were killed in Iraq. We noted more problems, John Stauber
noted problems, Nafeez Ahmed noted problems . . . Sorry to upset Fiorella who can't
stop Tweeting about AOC -- excuse me, AOCIA -- as Fiorella prefers to call
her -- but the two men behind IBC have both been on the payroll of the
US Peace Institute (a government agency that has nothing to do with
peace). Meaning? Their ties to the CIA and other alphabet soups are a
little stronger than the mythical ones AOC supposedly has.
For additional reading, refer to Pierre Bienaime (COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW) and especially pay attention to this section:
Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed has accused IBC of downplaying the war’s toll on Iraq’s people, noting that its two founders also co-directed Every Casualty, a program funded by the United States Institute of Peace, which Ahmed calls a “neocon front agency.”
Hamit Dardagan, one of IBC’s founders, insists the funding doesn’t compromise the group’s integrity.
It didn't compromise the group's integrity . . . because the group has no integrity.
We stopped noting Iraqi Body Count years ago. There was a 'think tank' in the US that had a man -- of course, it was a man, we said it was a US think tank -- who was doing his own counter. He'd just started it. And we noted it. And then he whined in an e-mail about this that and everything else. But the real takeaway there is that he started it with a lot of fan fair and promises and six weeks later it was no longer updating. I believe that's the story of his life but maybe you'd have to ask Phyllis Bennis to be sure?
It's okay, boys and girls, Phyllis knows who I'm talking about -- and agrees with me.
THE KATIE HALPER SHOW noted the Iraq War last night.
Apparently, Katie's the only one who can interview a veteran of the Iraq War who is against the Iraq War. Didn't realize it was that hard to do. Thank you to Katie for doing what appears to be the impossible.
Talk about the impossible, Emma Graham-Harrison and Joe Dyke (GUARDIAN) can report on events of the Iraq War that took place after Bully Boy Bush was out of the White House:
The transcript of the drone operators’ remarks is brief and blunt, but it captures with grim clarity the moment they realised their deadly mistake.
“Two children” someone called out in the control room, as hundreds of miles away in Mosul, under a warm late autumn sun, the missile they had fired detonated beside a woman and her young family.
Enam Younis, 31 at the time, was thrown to the ground by the blast and has never walked again. Her older daughter, Taiba, six, inquisitive and desperate to start school, was killed instantly. Zahra, just three, was hurled over a fence. She survived but was peppered with shrapnel that tore into her stomach and is still lodged deep in her skull. Doctors have said that if it moves, it could cause devastating brain injury.
There was a third child, Ali, a toddler too young to walk, who was shielded from the drone cameras – and the worst of the blast – by his mother’s arms, but who still lost part of a foot and hand.
Younis was taken out of Mosul for treatment and even six years later, her memories are too painful for her to return to the city she called home. “It is still impossible for me to think about going to Mosul now,” she said weeping. “I didn’t even visit my daughter’s grave. I can’t do it.”
ritain’s planes and drones operated over Mosul throughout the two-year battle to reclaim it from Islamic State (IS), which began in 2016. The Ministry of Defence has detailed how many militants were killed by Paveway bombs and Brimstone and Hellfire missiles it used.
The UK military claim to have fought a “perfect” war in Iraq, one in which British weapons did not harm a single civilian, even as missiles from their allies in the US-led coalition killed and maimed hundreds.
An investigation into this implausible claim, by the Guardian and Airwars, the not-for-profit watchdog that investigates harm to civilians in conflict zones, led reporters to Younis’s current home, in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, as well as to the site where her daughter had been killed.
Britain says one Hellfire missile killed three militants in Mosul on 29 November 2016. Official data released by the US, the coalition and its allies, and eyewitness interviews on the ground, show that strike also probably killed Taiba and badly injured her family.
The tragedy was so clear, even on the fuzzy aerial video feed, that the
team that fired the missile immediately reported the strike to their
commanders, prompting an internal investigation, which is detailed in
coalition documents released to the New York Times under a freedom of
information request.
The coalition concluded the civilian casualty report was “credible”, but would not say which country had launched the missile. The alliance was structured to make investigations – and responsibility – for civilian deaths collective.
Washington has acknowledged that coalition weapons killed 455 civilians in Mosul, although Airwars estimates the real toll to be almost three times higher.
Civilians being killed . . . What does that remind us of?
It should remind you of WIKILEAKS.
At last, the world has found someone to punish for the Iraq War -- Julian Assange whose 'crime' is telling the truth about what took place in Iraq.
Julian remains imprisoned and remains persecuted by US President Joe Biden who, as vice president, once called him "a high tech terrorist." Julian's 'crime' was revealing the realities of Iraq -- Chelsea Manning was a whistle-blower who leaked the information to Julian. WIKILEAKS then published the Iraq War Logs. And many outlets used the publication to publish reports of their own. For example, THE GUARDIAN published many articles based on The Iraq War Logs. Jonathan Steele, David Leigh and Nick Davies offered, on October 22, 2012:
A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the
Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the
whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident
US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have
leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters
and civilian killings in the Afghan war.
The new logs detail how:
•
US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse,
torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct
appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.
• A US helicopter gunship involved in a
notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after
they tried to surrender.
• More than 15,000 civilians died in
previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no
official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081
non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent deat
The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal assaults under Donald Trump.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.
But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used before for publishing classified information.
Whether the US justice department continues to pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to protect the press.
Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution.
Julian remains persecuted. Julian told the uncomfortable truth.
And the world just got more ridiculous which I didn't think possible. Last week, Amy Goodman spoke with Julian's father and brother. We were going to embed the video below.
We can't.
YOUTUBE hasn't just put an age-restricted warning on the conversation of Assange's family with Amy, they've also taken away the option to embed the video.
They've got a warning "The following content ahs been identified by the YOUTUBE community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences."
You can watch it at DEMOCRACY NOW! -- shame on YOUTUBE -- and we'll note a lengthy excerpt from the transcript.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our coverage of the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by looking at the imprisonment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who’s been jailed for exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. Julian has spent nearly four years locked up in the U.K.'s notorious Belmarsh prison, often called “Britain's Guantánamo.” He’s been held there as the U.S. government seeks his extradition to face espionage and other charges. If extradited and convicted in the U.S., Julian faces 175 years in a maximum-security prison.
In 2010, WikiLeaks gained international attention after publishing a trove of classified documents leaked by former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning. Included were numerous accounts of war crimes in Iraq. One video released by WikiLeaks showed a U.S. helicopter gunship in Baghdad slaughtering a dozen civilians, including two Reuters staff — Reuters journalist, the up-and-coming photographer, videographer, 22-year-old Namir Noor-Eldeen, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, father of four. WikiLeaks titled the video “Collateral Murder.” This is an excerpt.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Let me know when you’ve got them.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Let’s shoot. Light ’em all up.
U.S. SOLDIER 3: Come on, fire!
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’.
U.S. SOLDIER 4: Hotel, Bushmaster two-six, Bushmaster two-six, we need to move, time now!
U.S. SOLDIER 2: All right, we just engaged all eight individuals.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange appeared on Democracy Now! in April 2010, a day after WikiLeaks published the “Collateral Murder” video.
JULIAN ASSANGE: When we first got it, we were told that it was important and that it showed the killing of journalists, but we didn’t have any other context, and we spent quite some months, after breaking the decryption, looking closely into this. And the more we looked, the more disturbing it became. This is a sequence which has a lot of detail and, I think, in some ways, covers most of the bad aspects of the aerial war in Iraq and what we must be able to infer is going on in Afghanistan. …
These are not bad apples. This is standard practice. You can hear it from the tones of the voices of the pilots that this is in fact another day at the office. These pilots have evidently and gunners have evidently become so corrupted, morally corrupted, by the war that they are looking for excuses to kill.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Julian Assange sitting in a Washington, D.C., studio right after he released the, what they call, “Collateral Murder” video. I later interviewed Julian in 2014 about WikiLeaks releasing the Iraq War Logs. At the time, he was living inside the Ecuadorian Embassy, where he had sought political asylum. We sat together there.
JULIAN ASSANGE: With the Iraq War Logs, which were published in October 2010, which in some ways has been one of our best analytical works, we worked together with not just other media organizations, but a number of statistical organizations to work out what the kill count was for Iraq, and combining with other figures, and we ended up with more than 100,000 civilian casualties — in fact, 15,000 new, completely undocumented civilian kills — and documenting U.S. involvement and approval of Iraqi torture centers within the police and many killings of civilians at checkpoints and some political issues and so on. And that produced a number of inquiries and has fed into cases that have been taken by Iraqis, and that has now ended up with an ICC filing, International Criminal Court filing, against the British military.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was one of several interviews I did with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London when we traveled to interview him there. That was in 2014.
Well, in a moment, we’ll be joined by Julian’s father, John Shipton, and his brother, Gabriel Shipton. They’re here in the U.S. for the opening of a new documentary about John Shipton’s struggle to free his son. It’s titled Ithaka. This is the film’s trailer.
It's outrageous that YOUTUBE is censoring DEMOCRACY NOW! Outrageous. We'll continue the topic of the reality 20 years later tomorrow and we'll be talking about a US president we haven't mentioned yet and his involvement with the illegal war.
The following sites updated:
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EXTRAPOLATIONS9 hours ago
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Nepobabies10 hours ago
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Carrots?10 hours ago
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Crazy ass Tulsi Gabbard10 hours ago
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United 2310 hours ago
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Jimmy Dore lies and Nick and CJ cosign10 hours ago
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