Tuesday, February 18, 2003

- Wakana Yokota on NY demonstration

Hi. I am Wakana Yokota, who goes to school in Boston now.  I went to the protest in NY on Feb 15. It was a great experience, and I was really happy to be there being a part of the big crowd.  I left Boston about 7:00 am and I arrived at 45 street, 9th ave in NYC at 10:30am.  I was going to 47 street 1st ave, but police blocked streets so I couldn’t get there.  Around 11:00am, many people gradually gathered and started walking, so I just followed them.  There were many children and mothers and fathers, older poeple, young people.  I even didn’t know how big the crowd was becuase I was in the middle of the people and hardly could see out side of the crowd(Iam short!).  I just knew that there were so many people.  People shouted into the sky,"we want peace!” Manhattan echoed with thier voices, which was the most beautiful, warmest, and strontest sound I ever heard. 

There was a group of young people who were palying music and dancing.  They were so beautiful.  I haven’t seen such a beautiful thing for a while.  I I saw many people moving thier bodies with music, smiling, and singing.  That was such a beautiful moment in the world. 

The protest was quite peaceful besides police.  I ever saw so many police men at the same time.  They blocked streets so every time people were blocked they had to find another way to go.  Police took hourses and cars and blocked streets.  I heard some people were injured because a horse run into the crowd.  I accidentally came in front, and a horse passed in front of me.  That was scarely, but I was totally fine besides that. 

People kept marching unitll 4 or 5 pm.  I sitll feel like that I was in a dream.  Feb 15 is definitely one of the greatest experiences in my life.  I am very proud that I was with those warm and strong people in NYC.

Thank you very much

Sunday, February 09, 2003

- The Disquieted American by Chalmers Johnson

Daniel Ellsberg’s leaks from inside the Pentagon helped to end the Vietnam war. On the eve of another unpopular war, Chalmers Johnson holds out for an Ellsberg in the Bush administration…

--reprinted from The Guardian (UK) February 6, 2003 under FAIR USE principles--

(Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg Viking, 498 pp., $29.95, October 2002, 0 670 03030 9)

The subject of Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir is the decadence of American democracy. The conditions he began fighting in 1969 are much worse today and far more dangerous to many more people. Yet central casting could not have produced a more perfect foil for the American imperial Presidency than Ellsberg.

An infantry lieutenant in the Marine Corps with genuine battle experience in Vietnam, a PhD in economics from Harvard, and a defence intellectual employed by the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, with the highest security clearances, Ellsberg is as good as the American system can produce in the way of a male citizen working in the foreign policy apparatus.

His odyssey from Pentagon staff officer to the man who spirited 47 volumes of top secret documents out of the Rand Corporation, copied them, and delivered them to the New York Times and a dozen other newspapers is breathtaking.

Ellsberg helped end the Vietnam War, but publication of this memoir now is not just a happy coincidence. The features of American government he documents - the cult of Presidential infallibility, the march of militarism, the executive’s routine lying to the other two branches and to the people, and the cancerous growth of official secrecy - are just as relevant today as they were thirty years ago. The United States, even the world, desperately needs more Ellsbergs.

Sunday, 13 June 1971 is a day I remember very clearly: the day when excerpts from the History of US Decision- Making in Vietnam, 1945-68 (the actual title of the ‘Pentagon Papers’) began to appear in the press. I was serving as a consultant to the CIA’s Office of National Estimates at the time. A collective sigh of relief went through the Agency: the truth was finally coming out.

CIA analysts, who had long known that the United States could not possibly ‘win’ the Vietnam War, would no longer have to pretend that victory was in sight. They had repeatedly warned the Government that things would only go from bad to worse.* But Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were interested above all in the effects the war would have on the elections of 1964, 1968 and 1972 respectively.

The source of the revelations was not a long-haired anti-war radical but one of us: a Marine officer, an insider’s insider, who had acted out of patriotism but fully expected to go to prison - had it not been for the fallout from Watergate and Nixon’s stupidities, he might have been eligible for parole in 2008.

Ellsberg and I were both born in 1931. He made his first visit to Vietnam in 1961; I made my one and only visit in 1962. In my opinion, his is the best, and psychologically the most convincing, account of how a well-educated young American of the 1950s and 1960s could think of himself as a ‘liberal’ and still be a committed Cold Warrior. As he says, ‘whether we had a right - any more than the French before us - to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our leaders had chosen was a question that never occurred to me.’

His parents were professionals, of Russian Jewish ancestry but born in the US, and devout Christian Scientists. He went to Harvard on a full fellowship from the Pepsi Cola Company and did a postgraduate year at Cambridge on a Woodrow Wilson scholarship. Conscription was still in effect, and after his educational deferments ran out, Ellsberg had to decide how to fulfil his military service obligation. On his return from Britain, he applied for officer candidate school in the Marine Corps and enrolled in graduate school at Harvard until called. His PhD oral took place on the day he left for the Marine Corps training base at Quantico, Virginia.

Ellsberg is proud of his service as a rifle platoon leader in the Third Battalion, Second Marine Division. I don’t know how far to believe him when he writes: ‘More important for me, the Corps didn’t bomb cities; in the Pacific and Korea, it fought soldiers, not civilians,’ though it’s not a wholly implausible claim.

A persistent theme is his abhorrence of both terror and so-called ‘precision’ bombing, and particularly of nuclear weapons, a subject on which he subsequently became an expert at Rand. Like many people, he doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of air power and takes the view that terror bombing imitates Nazi practices.

He extended his service in the Marine Corps until the Suez Crisis had passed. When President Eisenhower forced the British and French to end ‘their Suez adventure’, he was ‘surprised and proud as an American… When I picked up European magazines and saw photos of what our allies’ bombing planes had done to the city of Port Said at the head of the canal, I felt glad that Americans didn’t have to look at pictures like those as our work.’

Ellsberg returned to Harvard to write his doctoral dissertation - on a typically American subject, game theory - and then accepted a position with the Economics Department of the Rand Corporation. He was put to work on command and control problems in fighting a nuclear war.

Disillusionment set in at once. In the autumn of 1961, shortly after Kennedy had effectively exploited the so- called missile gap for his own electoral purposes, Ellsberg read a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the subject and discovered that it had all been a lie: there was a gap but it was ten to one in favour of the US. This, he said, had ‘a shocking effect on my professional worldview’. There were many more to come.

At this time, Ellsberg was not particularly interested in Vietnam. He had made a short trip to Saigon in 1961 and concluded (as I did) that the slogan ‘Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem’ was a recipe for failure. In July 1964, however, he was asked by John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co- ordinating strategy towards Vietnam, and he wanted Ellsberg to take charge of the day-to-day details. Ellsberg, then 33 years old, was appointed at the exalted civil service grade of GS-18, equivalent in terms of status and salary to a position between major- general and lieutenant-general.

It would soon go to his head, as it does with everyone who is granted unrestricted access to secrets beyond top secret. He remembers telling Henry Kissinger in a briefing after Kissinger had become Nixon’s National Security Adviser:

“After you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget that there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t… and that all those other people are fools… You’ll be thinking… ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues… and with myself.”

His first full day at the Pentagon was 4 August 1964, the day the destroyer USS Maddox sent flash dispatches to Washington from the Gulf of Tonkin saying that it was ‘under continuous torpedo attack’. President Johnson went on television to tell the nation that the ship was on a ‘routine patrol in international waters’, that the attack was ‘unprovoked’, and that the US was the victim of a ‘deliberate pattern of naked aggression’. Johnson ordered the carrier USS Ticonderoga to launch air strikes against North Vietnam. On 7 August, by a vote of 416 to 0 in the House of Representatives and 88 to 2 in the Senate, Congress approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, setting the United States on a path to full-scale war against North Vietnam.

And yet, Ellsberg writes, ‘I was learning from cables, reports and discussions in the Pentagon the background that gave the lie to virtually everything told both to the public and more elaborately to Congress in secret session.’ The Vietnamese attack, if it had actually occurred at all, was assuredly provoked. The Maddox had been on a secret mission well inside Vietnamese territorial waters. The highest ranking officials of the US Government had approved the mission in advance. The director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, told the President that the North Vietnamese were ‘reacting defensively’. Nonetheless, Johnson personally lied to Senator William Fulbright, the highly respected chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in order to get him to sponsor the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in Congress.

Ellsberg took all this calmly. He accepted Johnson’s campaign slogan for the 1964 Presidential election - ‘We seek no wider war’ - even though he knew the President was moving in precisely the opposite direction. He believed that these deceptions were necessary ploys to defeat the Republican candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater, who wanted to use nuclear weapons against Vietnam and China.

In mid-1965, the legendary Major-General Edward Lansdale - ‘legendary’ for having thoroughly militarised the Philippine Government in the name of ‘counterinsurgency’ - was asked to return to Vietnam as special assistant to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. After hearing Lansdale talk in Washington, Ellsberg asked to join his team. He transferred from the Department of Defense to the Department of State at the same civil service grade, and set off for Saigon, still very much with the outlook of a Cold Warrior and a Marine infantry officer. Lansdale assigned him the job of visiting every province of South Vietnam and reporting on the ‘pacification’ efforts.

To do this, Ellsberg associated himself with another legendary figure, John Paul Vann, then working as an adviser to the US Agency for International Development. With Vann at the wheel of a jeep, they drove all over South Vietnam. Vann taught the neophyte Ellsberg many tricks of the trade: always drive fast because that makes it much harder for guerrillas to detonate a mine under your car, and always travel in the morning, after the previous night’s mines have been blown but before they have all been replaced.

During these inspection tours, Ellsberg went on patrol with American units and often found himself in combat. Even though he was technically a civilian, he could not go along as a simple observer. He got a Swedish K submachine-gun from the CIA and revived his skills as an infantryman. He was surprised to discover that, with a little experience, you can usually tell from the sound when a bullet is coming directly at you. From walking around up to his neck in flooded marshes he caught hepatitis. In mid-summer 1967, after he had recovered somewhat, he left Vietnam and returned to Rand.

This tour of duty was very important to Ellsberg’s political development. There was no pacification, since our South Vietnamese allies simply had no stomach for fighting their fellow Vietnamese. He discovered that the conflict was not a civil war, as so many academics around the world believed. One side, the South, was entirely equipped and paid for by a foreign power. As he writes, ‘we were not fighting on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.’

Back in the US, Ellsberg was particularly incensed by the daily drumbeat of official statements from the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State and the high command in Vietnam, all of them insisting that the US was making great ‘progress’ in winning the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people.

Then came the Tet Offensive of 29 January 1968 - simultaneous Vietcong attacks in almost every province of South Vietnam as well as in Saigon itself. The scale of the offensive strongly suggested that American leaders were either incompetent or lying. On 10 March, the New York Times published a leak from inside the Pentagon to the effect that General William Westmoreland, the commanding officer in Vietnam, was asking for 206,000 more troops. Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith reported this leak, which was accurate and had a devastating effect on Congress and the American people.

It did not come from Ellsberg, but ‘as I observed the effect of this leak,’ he recalls, ‘it was as if clouds had suddenly opened. I realised something crucial: that the President’s ability to escalate, his entire strategy throughout the war, had depended on secrecy and lying and thus on his ability to deter unauthorised disclosures - truth-telling - by officials.’ It dawned on Ellsberg that, in the wake of Tet and the leak, President Johnson could not get away with his deceptions any longer.

Ellsberg was recalled from Rand to Washington to join a high-level working group evaluating the full range of options on Vietnam for the incoming Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford. In the capital he learned that McNamara had ordered John McNaughton to organise the writing of an internal historical study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to the present based on top secret documents. McNaughton assigned the project to his deputy, Morton Halperin, who in turn delegated leadership of the work to his deputy, Leslie Gelb. At the time neither Halperin nor Gelb had ever been to Vietnam.

They, in turn, hired Ellsberg to write one of the projected 47 volumes, and he chose to work on JFK and the year 1961. One of the first things he did was to obtain from the CIA all the National Intelligence Estimates for Indochina from 1950 to 1960. ‘What was evident in each one of the years of major decision was that the President’s choice was not founded upon optimistic reporting or on assurances of the success of his chosen course.’ Ellsberg thus began to ask himself a forbidden question: why did every one of the Presidents from Truman to Johnson ‘mislead the public and Congress about what he was doing in Indochina?’ He had discovered part of the answer: it was not because the President’s subordinates deceived him.

The Pentagon Papers do not take the story beyond 31 March 1968, the day Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election. The entire nation took his decision to mean that, whoever won the election, the new President would end the war through a negotiated withdrawal such as the one that had already been agreed in Laos. No one imagined that in the years to come the United States would drop enough bombs on Vietnam to equal just under three times World War Two’s total tonnage.

Ellsberg returned to Rand, but his research on the history of American policy in Vietnam had intrigued him. He therefore arranged to have a complete set of the Pentagon Papers transferred out of channels to his top secret safe at the Rand Corporation in California, where he could continue to study them in detail.

The trigger that set in motion the biggest leak of classified documents in American history, a constitutional crisis over the First Amendment’s protection of press freedom and Nixon’s resignation, was an article by Ted Sell on the front page of the Los Angeles Times of 30 September 1969 entitled ‘Murder Charges against Green Berets Dropped by Army’.

>From it Ellsberg learned that the Secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor, had ordered the military commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, to suspend the courts martial of Colonel Robert Rheault, commander of all Special Forces in Vietnam, and five other intelligence officers. They had been charged with killing a Vietnamese who had worked for them for the previous six years and then dropping his body in a weighted bag into the South China Sea. Their defence was that they thought he was a double agent. Interestingly enough, though this is not mentioned by Ellsberg, the author of the original screenplay of Apocalypse Now, John Milius, has said that the character of Kurtz, the maniacal American officer played by Marlon Brando, was inspired by Rheault.

Ellsberg was enraged by all the lies Resor proffered in his defence and by the comments of various Congressmen on how bad it would be for morale should American troops face criminal charges ‘just for killing one Vietnamese civilian in cold blood’. In his 1994 diary H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, confirmed that it had been Nixon and Kissinger who gave the orders to stop the prosecution - which was exactly what Ellsberg had suspected. ‘It occurred to me,’ he writes, ‘that what I had in my safe at Rand was seven thousand pages of documentary evidence of lying, by four Presidents and their Administrations over 23 years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder. I decided I would stop concealing that myself.’

On 1 October 1969, aided by his Rand colleague Anthony Russo and using a primitive Xerox machine in the office of Russo’s friend Lynda Sinay, the owner of a small advertising agency, Ellsberg began his monumental task. Working through the night, he and his friends would copy 47 volumes of the Pentagon Papers, cutting off the top and bottom markings on each page that read Top Secret so that they could later make more copies in commercial copy-shops.

Once finished, he gave a full set of the Papers to Senator Fulbright and tried to interest Senators Gaylord Nelson and George McGovern in publicising them or printing them in the Congressional Record. But Congressional courage, then as now, was in short supply. No Senator, not even Fulbright, accepted his offer.

On 2 March 1971, Ellsberg called Neil Sheehan of the New York Times. Sheehan was interested but never gave Ellsberg any assurances that the Times would publish the Pentagon Papers either in whole or in part. He also insisted that Ellsberg give him a full set of the Papers to show his editors. Ellsberg realised that if he did that he would cease to have any control over what the Times did with them or with him - it was after all possible that he would be turned over to the FBI before he could get the Papers out.

Ellsberg heard nothing from Sheehan for several weeks. In the meantime, as Ellsberg later discovered, Sheehan had gone in secret to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ellsberg and his wife were living. Knowing the Ellsbergs were out of town and using a key Ellsberg had lent him (Ellsberg never explains why), Sheehan gained access to the apartment of Ellsberg’s wife’s younger brother, to whom Ellsberg had entrusted a set of Papers for safe-keeping. Sheehan removed the Papers and he and his wife photocopied them before returning them to the apartment.

Without saying anything to Ellsberg, the Times worked at a feverish pace to get the Papers ready for publication. On 12 June, a friend at the Times, assuming that Ellsberg already knew about it, called to say that the Papers were coming out the following day. Ellsberg was panic-stricken, thinking he might be arrested at any time. He hastily removed a set of the Papers from his own apartment and lodged them with Howard Zinn, a prominent anti-war activist. Ellsberg and his wife went into hiding and for 13 days managed to evade the FBI. Although he was pleased that the New York Times was publishing the Papers, Ellsberg found it easy to control his enthusiasm for the paper’s integrity in its dealings with him.

For the first time in American history, an Administration successfully obtained an injunction against a newspaper to stop a story it did not like. The New York Times ceased publication of the Pentagon Papers. On 30 June, the Supreme Court by a vote of six to three voided the injunction on constitutional grounds and publication resumed. In the meantime, in order to ensure that as many copies of the Papers as possible became available to the public, Ellsberg spent his last few days of freedom sending them to 18 other newspapers, including the Washington Post, all of which began publishing them.

On 28 June Ellsberg surrendered to Federal authorities in Boston. He was charged with a variety of felonies, although after carefully researching the matter, his attorney told him that he had probably not violated any existing law. As it happened, his fate wasn’t decided by a jury, but instead became enmeshed with the debacle at the White House and the scandal surrounding the Republican Party’s burglary of the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building.

Nixon was never enthusiastic about using legal means to try to stop the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, or about getting Ellsberg convicted in a Federal court. He was, however, scared to death that Ellsberg had or was receiving more secret documents not just about previous Administrations but about his own. ‘Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America. He must be stopped at all costs,’ Kissinger had said in the presence of the President.

In fact, Ellsberg did not have any materials touching on the Nixon Administration, but the President and Kissinger didn’t know that. Nixon therefore ordered Charles Colson, an official on his staff, to come up with a plan to ‘neutralise’ Ellsberg. Colson in turn enlisted the services of a former CIA officer called Howard Hunt, who had been the mastermind behind the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.

Hunt had several creative ideas. One was to send his agents to break into the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr Lewis Fielding, in Beverly Hills. They were hoping to find material they could use to blackmail Ellsberg into silence and perhaps also to embarrass Dr Fielding into testifying against his patient. However, the burglary of Dr Fielding’s office on 3 September proved to be, in Hunt’s words, a ‘dry hole’.

Some months later, on 3 May 1972, on the orders of Colson, the White House arranged to fly some Cuban- American veterans of the Bay of Pigs to Washington from Miami. They were told that Ellsberg (now released on bail) would be attending an anti-war rally on the steps of the Capitol and were instructed to assault him - to ‘break his legs’. The thugs did not go through with the plan when they realised that the crowd was too big to allow them to escape.

Meanwhile, the White House had invited Judge Matthew Byrne, the presiding magistrate at Ellsberg’s trial, to Nixon’s home in San Clemente, California. There Byrne met the President and his aide John Ehrlichman, who offered him the position of director of the FBI. It was an unspoken bribe to put Ellsberg away. But by then the Watergate investigation was gathering steam, and on 27 April 1973 the Watergate prosecutor sent Judge Byrne a letter telling him about the Fielding break-in.

On 30 April the judge received an FBI report of an interview with Ehrlichman, in which he admitted that the White House had ordered the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. That evening Ehrlichman and Haldeman resigned from the President’s staff. Simultaneously, Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, revealed that on the President’s orders the CIA had prepared a profile of Ellsberg, which by law it was forbidden to do where an American citizen was concerned. By now it was beginning to dawn on Judge Byrne that if this went much further, he rather than Ellsberg might end up in a Federal penitentiary. On 11 May, he accepted a motion for the dismissal of all charges against Ellsberg.

The story of the Pentagon Papers raises at least three questions of considerable contemporary relevance. The first derives from Ellsberg’s interest in the matter of Presidential lying. Was the problem then, as it is again today, that all American Presidents prefer to lie rather than to tell the public what it has a right to know?

- Justice Dept. Drafts Sweeping Secret Expansion of Anti-Terrorism Act

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2003)—The Bush Administration is preparing a bold, comprehensive sequel to the USA Patriot Act passed in the wake of September 11, 2001, which will give the government broad, sweeping new powers to increase domestic intelligence-gathering, surveillance and law enforcement prerogatives, and simultaneously decrease judicial review and public access to information.

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained a draft, dated January 9, 2003, of this previously undisclosed legislation and is making it available in full text (12 MB). The bill, drafted by the staff of Attorney General John Ashcroft and entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, has not been officially released by the Department of Justice, although rumors of its development have circulated around the Capitol for the last few months under the name of “the Patriot Act II�? in legislative parlance.

Full text of report in pdf format

More

- A U.N. Alternative to War:  “Uniting for Peace"/General Assembly

In the last few months the Bush Administration has been unyielding in its march towards war over the objections of some allies and despite the efforts of the United Nations. It now seems inevitable that the United States, with some other countries, may soon engage in armed conflict in Iraq. But for people around the world terrified by the current conflict, there may be hope yet. That hope lies in a little-discussed mechanism of the United Nations which, although it seems marginalized by American power, has the potential to stop the war.

In 1950, the Security Council set up a procedure for insuring that stalemates between countries would not prevent the United Nations from carrying out its mission to “maintain international peace and security.�? With the United States playing an important role in its adoption, the Council adopted Resolution 377, the aptly named “Uniting for Peace�? in an almost unanimous vote.

Uniting for Peace provides that if, because of the lack of unanimity of the permanent members of the Security Council (France, China, Russia, Britain, United States), the Council cannot maintain international peace where there is a “threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression,�? the General Assembly “shall consider the matter immediately….�? The language of Uniting for Peace would also allow its use even if the Security Council approved the use of force against Iraq. It can be employed “if the Security Council...fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security…�?
More

- ZNet | Iraq | Tortured Liberals (on media war cheerleaders)

[Journalist John] Pilger recalled some of his own experiences of war and death in Vietnam:
“I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.
“They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the ‘long box’ pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a ‘box’ was presumed destroyed.
“When I reached a village within the ‘box’, the street had been replaced by a crater.
“I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast. The children’s skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.” (Daily Mirror, January 29, 2003)
What on earth does it say about the culture we are living in - about the insidious effects of high-paid corporate compromise - that Pilger is virtually alone in writing like this now, with pictures like this now, in the face of a war of such utterly transparent cynicism?
More

- ZNet Commentary: Responding to Colin Powell

If one believes everything Colin Powell said to the Security Council yesterday, one’s first response ought to be that there’s no reason to fight a war, since U.S. surveillance capabilities are so awesome that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) can easily be found. And one’s first question should be why has the United States for over two months withheld this apparently so damaging evidence from those weapons inspectors, who could have verified conjectures and destroyed WMD stocks and production facilities.

If indeed the evidence presented is of the character claimed by Powell, then the United States has chosen to sabotage UN Security Council Resolution 1441, clause 10 of which “Requests all Member States to give full support to UNMOVIC and the IAEA in the discharge of their mandates, including by providing any information related to prohibited programmes.”

The actual evidence may not even warrant that conclusion. What Powell served up to the Council was a sorry mess of fuzzy aerial photographs of buildings, a cute “organizational chart” of supposed al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, a couple of tape recordings that are capable of multiple interpretations and, as before, a large number of undated reports by unnamed Iraqi defectors.....
More

Thursday, February 06, 2003

- Laura Bush Cancels poetry reading, fearing war of words

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15100

See earlier article on Sam Hamill’s call for anti-war poems
http://tokyoprogressive.org/news/tpnews_comments.php?id=P158_0_2_0_C

By John Nichols, The Nation
February 4, 2003
A bit of advice for the Bush White House: Don’t pick fights with professional wordsmiths.
First Lady Laura Bush’s decision to cancel a White House symposium on the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes because she feared antiwar sentiments might be expressed has provoked a pummeling of the Administration by poets who would have been part of the February 12 “Poetry and the American Voice” session.

“The abrupt cancellation of the symposium by the White House confirms my suspicion that the Bush administration is not interested in poetry when it refuses to remain in the ivory tower, and that this White House does not wish to open its doors to an ‘American Voice’ that does not echo the Administration’s misguided policies,” declared Rita Dove, the nation’s poet laureate from 1993 to 1995.

“I had no doubt in my mind that I couldn’t go, if only because of the hideous use of language that emanates from this White House: The lying, the Orwellian euphemisms...” added Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Levine, who said that he was sorry the First Lady cancelled the symposium before he could refuse his invite.

Stanley Kunitz, the 2001 and 2002 poet laureate, observed that, “I think there was a general feeling that the current Administration is not really a friend of the poetic community and that its program of attacking Iraq is contrary to the humanitarian position that is at the center of the poetic impulse.”

The poet who got off the best line may have been Sam Hamill, who noted that his name was on the invitation list despite his own history of antiwar activism. “I’m sure the person who put my name on the list is looking for a job,” joked Hamill, whose request that writer friends send him antiwar poems for the symposium might have inspired the Administration’s decision to cancel the event with a tart statement from Mrs. Bush’s office that “it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.” (Hamill’s call has, so far, drawn more than 2,000 responses, including those of W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who sent along a copy of, “Coda,” a poem featuring the line: “And America turns the attack on the World Trade Center-Into the beginning of the Third World War.")

Actually, Mrs. Bush would have been lucky if her symposium had featured only contemporary criticism of US imperialism and conservative policies. A far greater danger for the Administration was the prospect that those attending the conference would have used the words of Dickinson, Hughes and Whitman against them.

Dickinson may not have been a radical, but neither was she enthusiastic about militarism. Benjamin Lasee, a distinguished professor emeritus of English at Northeastern Illinois University, has written of how Dickinson counted the cost of war: “In one poem (’It feels a shame to be Alive’), she provides a startling image of corpses stacked up like dollars and closes by asking why ‘such Enormous Pearl’ as life should be dissolved ‘In Battle’s horrid Bowl.’”

Hughes (who would have turned 101 on Saturday, Feb. 1) was a proud leftist whose poetry condemned US government hypocrisy at home and abroad. Reflecting on racism in the United States, Hughes wrote, “I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes...” and argued: “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed. Let it be that great strong land of love where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.” And could there be a more damning reflection of the Bush’s Administration’s use of post-September 11 sentiment to pass the Patriot Act than Hughes’ line: “O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath”?

Whitman, of course, would have been the most problematic poet for the Bushes. Openly gay and radical, he was no friend to politicians, complaining that offices such as the presidency were “bought, sold, electioneered for, prostituted, and filled with prostitutes.”

And one can only imagine the reaction of this Administration’s conservative thought police to Whitman’s great mandate: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...”

Hamill, who plans to post the antiwar poems at PoetsAgainstTheWar.org, made a very good point when he said, “I saw profound irony in their choice of poets. These people wouldn’t let Walt Whitman within a mile of the White House – the good gay gray poet! I don’t believe anybody there has ever read Whitman.”

- Powell, Blair and Bush Push for War Built on Lies

LATER STORIES FIRST

British Intelligence Iraq Dossier Relies on Recycled and Plagiarised Academic Articles
A close textual analysis suggests that the UK authors had little access to first-hand intelligence sources and instead based their work on academic papers, which they selectively distorted. Some of the papers used were considerably out of date. This leads the reader to wonder about the reliability and veracity of the Downing Street document.
More

Colin Powell Is Flawless—Inside A Media Bubble
Powell doesn’t face basic questions like these:You cite Iraq’s violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions to justify the U.S. launching an all-out war. But you’re well aware that American allies like Turkey, Israel, and Morocco continue to violate dozens of Security Council resolutions. Why couldn’t other nations claim the right to militarily “enforce” the Security Council’s resolutions against countries that they’d prefer to bomb?
More

Only by Swallowing Big Lies Can Powell Justify a War
We know in advance that Colin Powell’s performance will be flawless. His military career has prepared him well to execute the orders of his commander in chief, no matter what his doubts as to their morality, efficacy or logic. Making a seamless case for preemptive war on Iraq to the United Nations, the secretary of State can draw on his decade of wartime experience in which he publicly justified the deaths of more than a million Vietnamese, tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Laotians and Cambodians.....
LIES: Read the rest of this article by Robert Sheer

Note from the Institute for Public Accuracy

Institute for Public Accuracy 915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ___________________________________________________

Wednesday, February 5, 2003

Colin Powell in the Spotlight: The Record Behind the Image

A new USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll found that—“when it comes to U.S.  policy toward Iraq”—Americans trust Secretary of State Colin Powell more than President Bush by a margin of 63-24 percent.

NORMAN SOLOMON, co-author of the new book “Target Iraq,” which includes an extensive assessment of Powell’s role in relation to Iraq during late 2002 critiques [in the book]milestones of Powell’s career in Washington, including his participation in major events such as the Iran-Contra scandal, the invasion of Panama, the Gulf War and the public-relations battle during the Florida recount after the 2000 presidential election.  Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said today: “Contrary to popular belief, Powell has been a powerful asset for Washington policymakers committed to launching an all-out war on Iraq.  Today, Powell is a more effective war advocate than people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. This is consistent with a pattern that has held steady with Powell for decades—cultivate a ‘moderate’ image while developing strategies in collaboration with extreme militarists in high places.” An excerpt from “Target Iraq” dealing with Powell is posted at:  http://www.accuracy.org/unilateral.pdf

ELOMBE BRATH, producer for the radio program “Afrikaleidoscope,” [who]went to high school with Colin Powell, said today: “Powell’s image of a reluctant warrior masks his take-no-prisoners attitude, which he displayed in the slaughter of retreating Iraqis in the Gulf War. The image he tries to foster among people of color is a more humane figure, but he offers no contradiction to Bush; rather, he helps the administration find methods to better achieve their ends.”

RAHUL MAHAJAN, author of the forthcoming book “The U.S. War on Iraq,” said today:  “The arrogant imperial rhetoric from ‘hawks’ like Rumsfeld prepares the stage for the diplomatic arm-twisting of Powell; we saw it before the passage of the U.N. resolution in November and we’re seeing it again. The dismissal of the need to provide evidence also lowers expectations, making it possible for Powell to offer a cobbled-together pastiche of innuendo, inconclusive claims, and possibly minor violations as a justification for a major war. Powell’s ‘sudden’ shift to a hawkish stance is just as choreographed as the rest of the administration’s performance over the past eight months.”

- (1) Woman Disables U.S. Death Plane/ (2) Gloucester Weapons Inspectors

Five members of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement ( 2 ) cut their way into Shannon Airport ( 2 ) early on Monday. The peace activists poured human blood on the runway that has been servicing US military flights, deploying troop and munitions to US military bases in Kuwait and Qatar. They then constructed a shrine on the runway to Iraqi children killed and threatened by US/British bombardment and sanctions before damaging a US Navy plane with hammers, doing extensive damage.

In a major embarrassment to the Irish government and police this action follows a similar direct action one week ago when peace activist Mary Kelly ( Audio ) damaged the same plane.

More

Also....

The Shannon Peace Camp was established to highlight the use of our civilian airport, Shannon Airport, by the U.S. military in their preparations for a war that will result in the killing of many thousands of innocent people. A US led war on Iraq is unjustified, immoral and contravenes International law, including the United Nations Charter.

We have been and continue to be successful in our endeavours to publicise the use of our airport for this war. The efforts by the Irish government to hide this activity have been exposed. The Irish people are now aware that thousands of weapons, soldiers, and military planes move thru our airport on a daily basis in preparation for a deadly war. We call on the Irish government to immediately end the use of our airport for these immoral activities.

We believe that the Irish people may be guilty of crimes against humanity if we fail to stop Irish involvement in this war. The Peace Camp will continue in its endeavours to bring this involvement to an end. We call on the Irish people to act now to help end this involvement.

More

Meet the Gloucester Weapons Inspectors
The Protest at the Fairford Stealth Bomber Base
By DAVID WILSON
January 30, 2003

‘For evil to triumph it is only necessary for good men to do nothing.’

Edmund Burke 1729--1797

Fairford, Gloucestershire, England. Fairford is the biggest bomber base in Europe and has recently been upgraded to a forward base for the B-2 Stealth bombers as well as the smaller B-1 and older B-52 bombers. There are only three forward bases for the Stealth Bombers, two on British territory, at Fairford and Diego Garcia, the third is in Guam. These bombers are nuclear capable and the B-2 has test dropped B61-11 nuclear bunker busters. The B61-11 is the only US nuclear weapon still deployed outside US borders and there is already a stockpile in this country.

A new group of peaceniks in the area have recently set up the “Gloucester Weapons Inspectors"--an open group of concerned citizens with no affiliation to any political party or pressure group. They employ a refreshingly humorous approach to the serious business of weapons inspection. Dressed in white decontamination suits they carry inspection equipment made from household appliances. Their sophisticated equipment includes smart bomb intelligence testers, hypocrisy detectors and collateral damage anticipation indicators.

Together with members of CND, revived Greenham Common women, (who camped outside the Cruise Missile bases in the 19801s), Buddhist monks, students, school children, pensioners and others, 1,500 people marched last Sunday from the picturesque village of Fairford to the death-organising airbase which now fractures the quiet and beauty of this part of the Cotswolds. I joined them to help a friend film the day’s protest for Indymedia.

Led by a large banner proclaiming “Stop Taking The Peace” our arrival at the main gates to the base soon became a celebration of life. There were musicians performing with a PA powered by two clowns peddling a tandem cycle, and topped with a small wheel that drove a water-mill that blew out large bubbles; unicyclists, stilt-walkers, drummers and the white-suited “arms inspectors”. Two girls arrived peddling a mobile brazier that was hardly needed as the weather on this January day was as clement as the gathering. A papiermache Stealth bomber had difficulty making its way up the country lane to the base; its wings catching to the roadside bushes.

Protestors started festooning the outer perimeter with antiwar messages, peace symbols, flowers, prayers and prayer flags and less-than-adulatory messages to our leaders, George and Tony. A group of women wove an enormous peace symbol on the wire with straw and wool. When we left that evening the main gate to the base and much of the surrounding perimeter fence had been transformed, with Ministry of Defence notices lost under a sea of life, colour and humour.

Meanwhile the “arms inspectors” set off with their wire-cutters to break into the base and carry out their own UNofficial inspections for Weapons of Mass Destruction. 40 got in and one we met had made it into one of the hangers where he was chased by two policemen. After being tackled to the ground, one of the PCs pulled him up, and gave him a hug. “Well done,” he said. “You’re doing the right thing”.

To a group of smiling coppers I said, “See you in London on 15th” (15 February is the day for the big Stop the War demo) to which one replied, “I’d be there with you, but I’m on duty that day.” It was clear to us all that the police, at least here in Gloucester, were quite unlike anything experienced by us Londoners with the Metropolitian Police (not renowned for their smiles) . The most hostile remarks we got were, “Can’t give you my private opinion now, not until dinner time.”

We interviewed school children and grannies, Greenham Common veterans and students, even an ex-RAF/BA pilot wearing a sign saying “Pilots Against the War”, who told us that he had 40 volunteers prepared to fly over Fairford. As we set off along the perimeter road a BMW drew up; its occupants dressed as though they were looking for the nearest Countryside Alliance demo and the epitome of Blair1s much beloved “Middle England”. They removed their hand-made anti-war posters from the boot and strode briskly over to the main gates. Set to one side were The Stroud Peace Group serving free teas. They had clearly brought their trestle table and tea urns from the village hall.

And the bombers have not yet arrived The organisers expect that each Sunday will see an increase in the numbers of protestors. Take a day out in the country and help the anti-war struggle--and remember to take your wire-cutters.

David Wilson can be reached at:

Information on Fairford and the protests

Contacts

Gloucestershire Weapons Inspectors--email:

website:

[url=http://www.gwi.org.uk]http://www.gwi.org.uk[/url]

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

- Activists in Iraq/Media is cheerleading for war

1-3 VOICES FROM THE WILDERNESS (Anti-War Activists in Iraq)

4 MEDIA ADVISORY: Iraq’s Hidden Weapons: From Allegation to Fact (FAIR)
Job of inspectors-not Pentagon- is to find and destroy weapons, but media is cheerleader for war

1. CRUCIAL DAYS AHEAD BY KATHY KELLY

January 30, 2003

BAGHDAD - Nine of us arrived in Baghdad close to midnight last night. This is my twentieth trip to Iraq since our campaign began in 1996. “After the first trip, the novelty wears off,” joked Thorne Anderson, as we waited several hours to clear the Jordanian and Iraq borders. But a novel sadness awaited us as we entered a country on the verge of being attacked. At breakfast, several hotel workers whom I’ve known for years greeted me warmly and then asked, timidly, “There will be a war?” Another friend had a more dire view. “They are going to kill us,” he said, matter-of-factly.

We began our day at a press conference held by the Center for Economic and Social Rights during which international scholars reported on the likelihood of catastrophic humanitarian crises in Iraq should the US decide to wage a new war here. Roger Normand, an international law scholar, insisted that human beings are entitled to protection under international law.  Pentagon plans for high intensity bombardment in a comprehensive war would translate into severe and more intensified suffering for Iraq’s people.  Hans von Sponeck, former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, insisted that although the CESR team intended to create a data base for use in the event of evaluating effects of warfare, it is nevertheless crucial to assert that peace is still possible. “Iraqis want to turn a chapter in their history and prevent war,” said Mr. Von Sponeck. He will remain in Iraq for two more days, working to develop peace initiatives with other humanitarian groups and “high profile” individuals.

Our team members have met for long hours working out various details, e.g., how to operate an emergency back-up generator, usage of the satellite phone that I carried in, emergency medical training, maintenance of files for individual declarations that, in the event of death, one prefers cremation rather than shipping a corpse back to the US. And a less dire list gives names of people who want to help set up an arts and crafts workshop for children hospitalized at a local cancer ward.

“Maybe Monday, me and my family will make a well,” said Sattar, our driver, as we neared Baghdad. This afternoon, the desk manager at our hotel pointed toward the open lot where hired workers were installing a well for our use. “Will you have room for more of us?” I asked. “Yes, sure,” he joked, “we are making room on the rooftop.”

It is too soon to answer our friends who ask if there will be a war, too soon to declare that war is inevitable. Crucial days ahead offer people throughout the world a momentous opportunity to prevent bloodshed and destruction.  The novelty of such a triumph would never wear off. It could usher all of us toward the political maturity required to survive our shameful capacity for annihilation.

For more dispatches from Iraq, see the “diaries” page at http://iraqpeaceteam.org

2. ON THE WEB: COMMUNITY OF RESISTANCE

United For Peace [url=http://www.unitedforpeace.org]http://www.unitedforpeace.org[/url]

Iraq Pledge of Resistance [url=http://www.peacepledge.org/resist/default.htm]http://www.peacepledge.org/resist/default.htm[/url]

National Network to End the War Against Iraq [url=http://www.endthewar.org]http://www.endthewar.org[/url]

International A.N.S.W.E.R. [url=http://www.internationalanswer.org]http://www.internationalanswer.org[/url]

Not in Our Name [url=http://www.notinourname.net]http://www.notinourname.net[/url]

3. VOICES IN THE WILDERNESS UPDATE

To get more up-to-date about the projects at the Voices office (Iraq Peace Team, Declaration 2002-03, the Mirror of Truth Tour, or speaking events, etc.), visit our websites.

Voices in the Wilderness 1-773-784-8065 http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw 1460 West Carmen Ave Chicago IL 60640

**Please visit http://www.iraqpeaceteam.org

4. MEDIA ADVISORY:
Iraq’s Hidden Weapons: From Allegation to Fact

February 4, 2003
While teams of U.N. experts scouring Iraq have yet to find any hidden caches of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, some U.S. journalists seem to have already turned up their own smoking guns.  Whether out of excess zeal or simple carelessness, the media’s intensive coverage of the U.N. inspections has repeatedly glided from reporting the allegation that Iraq is hiding banned weapons materials to repeating it as a statement of fact.

“The Bush administration is seeking to derail plans by the chief U.N. weapons inspector to issue another report,” wrote the Washington Post’s Colum Lynch (1/16/03), “fearing it could delay the U.S. timetable for an early confrontation over Iraq’s banned weapons programs.”

“Today Mr. Bush left it to his spokesman to answer critics who asked what precise threat Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction pose to America,” reported NBC White House correspondent David Gregory (NBC Nightly News, 1/27/03).

Tony Blair, wrote Time’s Michael Elliot (2/3/03), has declared that “Britain’s troops will fight alongside their American counterparts if Washington judges that Saddam Hussein is not making a good-faith effort to disarm Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Clearly, however, it has not been demonstrated that Iraq continues to hold unconventional weapons, such as the chemical munitions it used in its war against Iran.  (Iraq is barred from possessing or developing such weapons under the ceasefire agreement that ended the 1991 Gulf War.) On the contrary, the 1999 U.N. report that led to the establishment of UNMOVIC summarized the state of Iraq’s disarmament this way: “Although important elements still have to be resolved, the bulk of Iraq’s proscribed weapons programmes has been eliminated.” (The report was issued by the U.N. Security Council’s disarmament panel, whose members included senior UNSCOM officials, such as its American deputy executive director, Charles Duelfer.)

Rolf Ekeus, who led UNSCOM from 1991 to 1997, agrees with that assessment: “I would say that we felt that in all areas we have eliminated Iraq’s capabilities fundamentally,” he told a May 2000 Harvard seminar (AP, 8/16/00), adding that “there are some question marks left.”

Iraq’s failure to document its answers to those remaining “question marks” formed the basis of Hans Blix’s critical January 27 progress report to the U.N.

But while Blix said he could not certify that all of the proscribed materials Iraq once possessed had been destroyed, neither did he find evidence that any remain.  In private, some inspectors do not rule out the possibility that Iraq truly is free of banned weapons: “We haven’t found an iota of concealed material yet,” one unnamed UNMOVIC official told Los Angeles Times Baghdad correspondent Sergei Loiko (12/31/02), who added: “The inspector said his colleagues think it possible that Iraq really has eliminated its banned materials.”

Yet some major news outlets seem to have made up their minds to the contrary.  The Bush administration, according to CBS’s John Roberts (CBS Evening News, 12/29/02), is “threatening war against Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction,” while Dan Rather (CBS Evening News, 1/6/03) announced that “the CIA is being urged to make public more of its intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

In a piece about how the United States is winning the debate at the U.N. over Iraq, the New York Times (2/2/03) claimed that “nobody seriously expected Mr. Hussein to lead inspectors to his stash of illegal poisons or rockets, or to let his scientists tell all.” On January 27, CNN host Paula Zahn teased the network’s upcoming live coverage of the inspectors’ “highly anticipated progress report on the search for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Through constant repetition of phrases like “the search for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” the media convey to the public the impression that the alleged banned weapons on which the Bush administration rests its case for war are known to exist and that the question is simply whether inspectors are skillful enough to find them.  In fact, whether or not Iraq possesses banned weapons is very much an open question, one which no publicly available evidence can answer one way or the other.  As they routinely do in other cases, journalists should make a habit of using the modifier “alleged” when referring to Iraq’s alleged hidden weapons.

Tuesday, February 04, 2003

- Experts Warned Of Budget Cuts, Safety Concerns

Did Privatisation cause accident?

Experts Warned Of Budget Cuts, Safety Concerns

By R. Jeffrey Smith, Joby Warrick and Rob Stein

February 2, 2003; washingtonpost.com

The thunderous explosion of Columbia over central Texas yesterday was presaged by a drumbeat of warnings by government auditors and experts who voiced concerns about lapses in oversight and deferred safety improvements for NASA’s aging fleet of space shuttles.

Although “safety first” was the watchword of shuttle launches, aerospace engineers have repeatedly complained that belt-tightening and shifting priorities were denying Columbia and the three other shuttles the necessary upgrades and improvements.

As recently as last April, the chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warned Congress that NASA’s management of the shuttle program had drawn “the strongest safety concern the panel has voiced” in 15 years. “I have never been as worried for space shuttle safety as I am right now,” said Richard Blomberg, who was then chairman of the panel.

None of this was supposed to happen. The last lethal shuttle disaster, 17 years ago, provoked calls for revolutionary changes in the program’s management. The agency promised that safety would henceforth be put far ahead of all other considerations, including budget constraints, the demands of its users and political pressures.

“We will never launch when it is unsafe,” Fred Gregory, then NASA’s director of space flight, promised the House science and space subcommittee nine months ago.

While none of those who issued warnings pointed specifically to a defect immediately known to be implicated in yesterday’s disaster, they warned repeatedly that safety was losing the battle for scarce NASA funds. The program’s 40 percent budget decline over the past decade had undermined its ability to guarantee flawless performances, they said.

NASA’s response was mostly to say it disagreed: The problems were not that bad; safety was still the top priority; and the number of shuttle “anomalies” or defects was dropping fast. “NASA will continue to ensure that an adequate staff and shuttle workforce” is available to maintain a perfect record, Gregory promised.

But safety experts have long said NASA’s claim that safety was improving stemmed from an illusion. The shuttle, they said, was an aging, balky and delicate space truck that exceeded NASA’s own risk limits for manned flight. Time was not its friend.

The ungainly glider was created in the 1970s through a marriage of adventurous design and well-known technology, and it was considered underfunded from the outset. By all accounts, the program has never really embraced the past decade’s stunning advances in aerospace engineering and safety testing.

After the shuttle Challenger exploded on launch in 1986, for example, numerous safety advisers urged that a crew ejection capsule be added to save lives even in the midst of calamity. “There is a clear need . . . to develop a plan to address the absence of an escape system by either upgrading the space shuttle or initiating a program with a realistic timetable to replace it,” the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel concluded last year.

NASA has studied the problem for years, but the costs of retrofitting such a device kept it from acting. As a result, Columbia’s crew had no choice but to follow the craft’s fate as it broke up around the point of reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

No new shuttle has been in development, and, in fact, many of the most recent safety alarms stemmed from the agency’s recent plan to try to extend the life of the current shuttles by an additional 25 years. Blomberg warned, in particular, that budget-tightening compelled the shuttle program to spend most of its resources on current operations while planned improvements, including some that would “directly reduce flight risk,” were deferred or eliminated.

“The concern is not for the present flight or the next or perhaps the one after that,” Blomberg said last April. “One of the roots of my concern is that nobody will know for sure when the safety margin has been eroded too far.”

“Repeated government and contractor hiring freezes” during the shuttle’s operating life “have led to a lack of depth of critical skills” that become more troubling as the system ages, Blomberg said.

In an implied criticism of Congress and the White House, the panel said in its most recent published report that NASA’s budgets were “not sufficient to improve or even maintain the safety risk level of operating the space shuttle. Needed restorations and improvements cannot be accomplished under current budgets and spending priorities.”

In mid-2001, five of the nine members of the aerospace advisory panel and two consultants were asked to step down after NASA changed its charter and required rotating memberships. They were replaced, but the year “was one of significant upheaval on the panel,” the panel said in a report last March.

The most detailed independent assessment of shuttle safety in recent years, completed in March 2000, pointed to specific problems that analysts yesterday said may have played a role in Columbia’s breakup around the time of its reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

It called for scrutiny of wiring problems in “difficult-to- inspect regions” of the Columbia shuttle, in particular, a problem that NASA said it had fixed. It also said that NASA was not using the latest scientific techniques to find and fix structural cracks and other consequences of routine aging. The panel said further that NASA was not working hard enough to find and fix corrosion beneath the tiles that protect the shuttle from intense heat during reentry, and that the agency was not working hard enough to find a way to probe or study portions of each shuttle’s structure—one- tenth, on average—that are entirely inaccessible.

“The large reduction in NASA quality assurance inspectors for each shuttle is very disturbing,” said the panel, which was chaired by Henry McDonald, director of NASA’s own Ames Research Center.

Some of the safety alarms stemmed from what experts have described as inadequate NASA oversight of those parts of the program that have been privatized. Just three days ago, for example, the General Accounting Office (GAO) described NASA’s management of its major contractors as “weak” and “debilitating,” and accused the space agency of placing “little emphasis on end results [or] product performance.”

The GAO report was the latest in a series by the congressional auditing agency faulting NASA’s management of major programs, including the shuttle. Weak contract management had been ranked as a “high-risk” problem at NASA since at least 1990, the report said.

The increased fiscal pressure on NASA is partly the result of steep budget cuts over the past decade. Funding for NASA and other civilian agencies involved in the space program was slashed by $1 billion in fiscal 2002, while Defense Department spending on space programs rose by $600 million, according to a recent study by the Aerospace Industries Association, an industry trade group.

“The civil space program that NASA runs has been neglected for a generation, and as a consequence we find ourselves flying increasingly aged technology,” said Loren Thompson, a defense industry analyst for the Lexington Institute, a think tank.

In 1996, NASA turned over space shuttle flight operations to the United Space Alliance, a private firm owned by Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. Under pressure from the Clinton administration and Congress to cut costs, NASA had gradually shifted many responsibilities to the private sector.

United Space is now considered the prime contractor for the space shuttle program and manages about a third of the program’s budget. In addition to its role as part of United Space, Bethesda-based Lockheed also provides many crucial functions, including construction of the external tank that feeds liquid propellant to the shuttle’s three main engines. It also develops the electronic systems that perform navigation, guidance and flight control for the space program and manages data collection, said spokesman Tom Jurkowsky.

While NASA managers have described their contractor oversight as adequate, NASA’s Office of Inspector General disagreed. “The lack of systematic and well-documented contract surveillance is a particular area of concern,” the inspector general said in a report last June.

In response to such reports, NASA has sometimes sought increased funding, added backup systems and new safety routines, and has taken other steps designed to bolster its already complex procedures for preventing accidents. But NASA has always acknowledged that the program would never be 100 percent reliable.

After the post-Challenger safety upgrades, NASA estimated there was a 1-in-250 chance of catastrophic failure and fatalities. “The shuttle is a wonderful machine, but it is at that left-hand bar of risk to humans,” Sam Venneri, head of NASA’s aerospace technology office, said in congressional testimony last year.

John Pike, a director of GlobalSecurity.org and a longtime critic of the agency’s shuttle management, said even this estimate is speculative. “NASA has been wildly unrealistic about shuttle reliability. If you go back and look at their reliability estimates, I think that they basically just made them up,” Pike said.

“There’s a statistical chance every time you launch that there could be an accident. This is just a very hard thing to do,” John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said yesterday. “It’s only in retrospect that you can say that it wasn’t enough. Second-guessing is easy. Hindsight is wonderful.”

“What people have done to keep an old system flying is just amazing. But it’s an old system. At some point, they had to expect something to go wrong,” said Donna Shirley, a former Mars exploration manager at NASA and now an instructor in aerospace engineering at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. “It’s remarkable that they’ve kept it going this long.”

Brian Chase, executive director of the National Space Society, noted that NASA had also struggled with aging support facilities crucial for maintaining the fleet. “There’s definitely been concern about the facilities on the ground,” Chase said. “Everything from rusting pipes to crumbling concrete.”

Staff writer Eric Pianin contributed to this report.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

- The Manufactured And Real Iraq Crisis by Edward Herman

[The] reasons to “topple Saddam Hussein”.... are merely excuses, some false, some trivial, all profoundly hypocritical, designed to justify an aggression based entirely on other political and strategic considerations. 

ZNet Commentary--please support ZNet Sustainer program at http://zmag.org

With enough power and chutzpah it is possible for an aggressive and over-armed state to manufacture a crisis and pretend that the crisis lies with the threatened victim rather than with the aggressor state. Today, the United States has not only manufactured one crisis but two: The first is Saddam Hussein’s alleged failure to disarm; the second is North Korea’s attempt to acquire nuclear arms.

The first REAL crisis is the determination of the United States to attack Iraq, depose Saddam Hussein, and establish a dependent regime in that country, AND the failure of the “international community” to oppose this blatant plan of aggression in violation of the UN Charter. The second REAL crisis is the failure of the international community to vigorously contest the Bush administration’s announced plans to militarize space, to abandon the Nuclear Test Ban and Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaties, to threaten preemptive wars to stifle challenges to its domination, and to refine and possibly use nuclear weapons. North Korea’s nuclear plans clearly follow in the wake of those developments, along with the U.S. inclusion of North Korea in the “axis of evil,” so that the North Korean “threat” is derivative and miniscule in comparison with that posed by the big bully.

There is a third REAL threat attributable to the big bully, namely the ongoing serious ethnic cleansing being carried out by Israeli leaders in Palestine, in violation of international law and in opposition to a global consensus. This deadly process has intensifed under the protection of the Bush administration’s carte blanche to “man of peace” Ariel Sharon and the diversion provided by the Iraq “crisis,” and it may escalate further under the cover of the U.S. attack on Iraq. This third real threat is closely tied to the first, not only operationally but in terms of intent, as numerous high Bush administration officials have “dual loyalties” and are at least partially serving Likud-Israeli interests.

In the propaganda outpourings of the Bush administration, however, their “patience” with Saddam Hussein has run out and, given his “growing menace” (Bush), he must be removed by force. This “crisis” has been completely contrived by Bush officials, just as the Guatemala crisis of 1954--based on alleged Soviet proxy aggression!--was fabricated. Every Bush administration argument is false or irrelevant, and the “international community” is once again having to expend much effort trying to appease and contain the bully. However, that community has not had the guts to straightforwardly oppose him, and the puny efforts to appease via a revised inspections system have actually given him further weaponry--he has “gone along” with the inspections, so what more can be asked of him before he does what he planned to do anyway?

That Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) threaten U.S. national security is laughable--even if he has a few such weapons (unproven), he has no delivery systems that could reach the United States and he may not wish to commit suicide. On the other hand, U.S. WMD not only threaten Iraq but anybody else who crosses the administration, which has even announced an intention to preemptively attack enemies of choice and to ignore international law.

Saddam Hussein does pose a threat to his neighbors, but much less so than Israel, which has more powerful armed forces and, even more important, is under the protection of the United States, which has sanctioned numerous Israeli attacks on neighbors, systematic ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories, and Israel’s acquisition of a large WMD arsenal. Saddam can’t make a move across borders because the United States is waiting to pounce; but Israel can do so because the United States regularly vetoes any condemnation of Israeli invasions and would not abide an attempt to halt Israel by force. Saddam was generously supplied with WMD by the United States and Britain in the 1980s when he was fighting Iran, so apparently his possession of them is not inherently threatening, but only when not serving approved U.S.-British ends. It is well-known--though not reported and reflected on in the U.S. media--that the United States seized the 12,000 page Iraq report on its WMD in order!
to remove some 8,000 pages that detailed U.S. and other Western company and official provision of WMD to Iraq in earlier years. Leaving that material in would have shown U.S. approval of the weapons whose possession is now deemed a huge menace, demonstrating that the pretense of menace is blatant hypocrisy.

Since the 1980s, and under the impact of war, sanctions and the inspections regime, Iraq’s military capability and WMD have been drastically reduced, with high level inspectors claiming that at least 90-95 percent of Saddam’s stocks of chemical weapons have been destroyed, and the IAEA contending in 1998--and as recently as January 27, 2003--that he has no nuclear weapons or meaningful nuclear weapons program (Bush’s contention in his State of the Union Message that Saddam “had” such a program and “was working” on methods of enriching uranium is therefore misleading if not outright lying). Saddam’s “threat” must therefore be much much smaller than in the period when he was using WMD with U.S. and British approval. That he now poses a “growing menace” justifying a war is therefore a misrepresentation of fact and a cover for a semi-hidden agenda.

There is also the claim that Saddam Hussein has produced a “crisis” by his failure to cooperate with the inspection system, disarm, and obey Security Council rulings. But the inspection system, like the “sanctions of mass destruction,” has always been a U.S.-British mechanism for punishing Iraq until there was a “regime change.” Numerous U.S. officials have said that the sanctions would not be lifted until Saddam is removed. This has been a violation of the original settlement agreement of 1991, which called for terminable inspections and made no mention of required regime change. All participants except the United States and Britain have felt that a 90-95 percent WMD removal sufficed; and it is worth repeating that the partners who have disagreed are the ones who most lavishly supplied Iraq with those weapons in the 1980s, and opposed any condemnations of Saddam for using them!

The legal basis of the charges against Iraq is therefore fatally compromised by the fact of multiple U.S. and British violations of the terms of Security Council Resolution 687--including, in addition to imposing the illict objective of regime change, the use of inspections for locating non-WMD miitary targets (recently acknowledged by longtime Executive Chairman of UNSCOM, Rolf Ekeus), the unauthorized “no-fly zone” patrols and attacks, and the transformation of the sanctions system into a mode of punishment of an entire people, with enormous civilian casualties. The sanctimonious U.S.-British call for enforcement of Security Council resolutions also flies in the face of their double standard on this matter: Israel is not only permitted to acquire WMD, it can repeatedly ignore Security Council rulings without any penalty whatsoever.

The imminent war is therefore based on considerations that have nothing to do with Saddam’s dictatorship or military threat. Key members of the Bush administration had announced an aim of “toppling Saddam Hussein” back in 2000 in the publication of the Project for the New American Century, Robert Kagan’s and William Kristol’s edited volume entitled Present Dangers, where Saddam’s military threat and WMD were barely mentioned, but the need to control an important resource-rich area was openly acknowledged. These and other Bush administration officials have also been notorious for their strong support of Likud and Israeli ethnic cleansing, three of them--Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser--even having contributed to a strategy paper for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996. The Bush administration’s protection of Sharon’s state terrorism and the imminent attack on Iraq serve expansionist Israeli interests well. This factor, along with the desire to take advant!
age of military superiority to show the world who is boss, to firm up contol of an oil-rich territory, and to provide a cover for Bush’s domestic policies, gives us the real motives behind the manufacture of the Iraq “crisis.”

There has been a desperate Bush administration search for plausible reasons to “topple Saddam Hussein"--ties to Al Qaeda, aversion to dictatorship and concern for Iraqis, Saddam’s growing menace, evasions of inspections and disrespect for Security Council resolutions, etc. But they are merely excuses, some false, some trivial, all profoundly hypocritical, designed to justify an aggression based entirely on other political and strategic considerations.