The Smoking Bullet in the Smoking Gun

[urbsdad6]

By Jeremy Scahill
Democracy Now!

Friday 24 June 2005

It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was war.

But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002 - a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before "shock and awe" officially began.

At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the extent of the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in response to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.

The Sunday Times of London recently reported on new evidence showing that "The RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war." The paper cites newly released statistics from the British Defense Ministry showing that "the Allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001" and that "a full air offensive" was under way months before the invasion had officially begun.

The implications of this information for US lawmakers are profound. It was already well known in Washington and international diplomatic circles that the real aim of the US attacks in the no-fly zones was not to protect Shiites and Kurds. But the new disclosures prove that while Congress debated whether to grant Bush the authority to go to war, while Hans Blix had his UN weapons-inspection teams scrutinizing Iraq and while international diplomats scurried to broker an eleventh-hour peace deal, the Bush Administration was already in full combat mode - not just building the dossier of manipulated intelligence, as the Downing Street memo demonstrated, but acting on it by beginning the war itself. And according to the Sunday Times article, the Administration even hoped the attacks would push Saddam into a response that could be used to justify a war the Administration was struggling to sell.

On the eve of the official invasion, on March 8, 2003, Bush said in his national radio address: "We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force." Bush said this after nearly a year of systematic, aggressive bombings of Iraq, during which Iraq was already being disarmed by force, in preparation for the invasion to come. By the Pentagon's own admission, it carried out seventy-eight individual, offensive air strikes against Iraq in 2002 alone.

"It reminded me of a boxing match in which one of the boxers is told not to move while the other is allowed to punch and only stop when he is convinced that he has weakened his opponent to the point where he is defeated before the fight begins," says former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Von Sponeck, a thirty-year career diplomat who was the top UN official in Iraq from 1998 to 2000. During both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Washington has consistently and falsely claimed these attacks were mandated by UN Resolution 688, passed after the Gulf War, which called for an end to the Iraqi government's repression in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south. Von Sponeck dismissed this justification as a "total misnomer." In an interview with The Nation, Von Sponeck said that the new information "belatedly confirms" what he has long argued: "The no-fly zones had little to do with protecting ethnic and religious groups from Saddam Hussein's brutality" but were in fact an "illegal establishment...for bilateral interests of the US and the UK."

These attacks were barely covered in the press and Von Sponeck says that as far back as 1999, the United States and Britain pressured the UN not to call attention to them. During his time in Iraq, Von Sponeck began documenting each of the air strikes, showing "regular attacks on civilian installations including food warehouses, residences, mosques, roads and people." These reports, he said, were "welcomed" by Secretary General Kofi Annan, but "the US and UK governments strongly objected to this reporting." Von Sponeck says that he was pressured to end the practice, with a senior British diplomat telling him, "All you are doing is putting a UN stamp of approval on Iraqi propaganda." But Von Sponeck continued documenting the damage and visited many attack sites. In 1999 alone, he confirmed the death of 144 civilians and more than 400 wounded by the US/UK bombings.

After September 11, there was a major change in attitude within the Bush Administration toward the attacks. Gone was any pretext that they were about protecting Shiites and Kurds - this was a plan to systematically degrade Iraq's ability to defend itself from a foreign attack: bombing Iraq's air defenses, striking command facilities, destroying communication and radar infrastructure. As an Associated Press report noted in November 2002, "Those costly, hard-to-repair facilities are essential to Iraq's air defense."

Rear Admiral David Gove, former deputy director of global operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on November 20, 2002, that US and British pilots were "essentially flying combat missions." On October 3, 2002, the New York Times reported that US pilots were using southern Iraq for "practice runs, mock strikes and real attacks" against a variety of targets. But the full significance of this dramatic change in policy toward Iraq only became clear last month, with the release of the Downing Street memo. In it, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon is reported to have said in 2002, after meeting with US officials, that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime," a reference to the stepped-up air strikes. Now the Sunday Times of London has revealed that these spikes "had become a full air offensive" - in other words, a war.

Michigan Democratic Representative John Conyers has called the latest revelations about these attacks "the smoking bullet in the smoking gun," irrefutable proof that President Bush misled Congress before the vote on Iraq. When Bush asked Congress to authorize the use of force in Iraq, he also said he would use it only as a last resort, after all other avenues had been exhausted. But the Downing Street memo reveals that the Administration had already decided to topple Saddam by force and was manipulating intelligence to justify the decision. That information puts the increase in unprovoked air attacks in the year prior to the war in an entirely new light: The Bush Administration was not only determined to wage war on Iraq, regardless of the evidence; it had already started that war months before it was put to a vote in Congress.

It only takes one member of Congress to begin an impeachment process, and Conyers is said to be considering the option. The process would certainly be revealing. Congress could subpoena Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Gen. Richard Myers, Gen. Tommy Franks and all of the military commanders and pilots involved with the no-fly zone bombings going back into the late 1990s. What were their orders, both given and received? In those answers might lie a case for impeachment.

But another question looms, particularly for Democrats who voted for the war and now say they were misled: Why weren't these unprovoked and unauthorized attacks investigated when they were happening, when it might have had a real impact on the Administration's drive to war? Perhaps that's why the growing grassroots campaign to use the Downing Street memo to impeach Bush can't get a hearing on Capitol Hill. A real probing of this "smoking gun" would not be uncomfortable only for Republicans. The truth is that Bush, like President Bill Clinton before him, oversaw the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam against a sovereign country with no international or US mandate. That gun is probably too hot for either party to touch.



This article and links at:


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062505C.shtml



Doc Urb

[BLUEHAWK]

t.f. Patriot Files articles

"It was a normal day. I reported to work, started logging into the computer, checking e-mails, taking phone calls, talking with the office about what was going on. Then someone heard about the happenings at the World Trade Center - the first plane. We were able to watch the live video and started hearing the reports. Then we saw the footage of the second aircraft coming into the second tower.

It did not seem like it was too much longer after that when we felt a violent shudder and a loud explosion. We looked at each other and pretty much made the implicit assumption that we were under some sort of attack. Everyone said, "We better get out of here; we gotta get out of here!" So we started heading out. Obviously, a lot of people in the corridors were evacuating as well.


I stopped and thought, "Well, I obviously have medical training. Perhaps I should go to the site and see if there were some injured people around." I went down the 4th Corridor, a long corridor that goes from the inner courtyard to the outer court. It was full of smoke from ceiling to floor. There were some walking wounded coming out. People were saying there were injured people down there. I grabbed some paper towels, moistened them, and started heading down there. You literally had to crawl on your belly. Even on your hands and knees you could barely breathe, the smoke was so thick. I crawled, feeling along the wall, and was able to assist getting some people out to the inner courtyard. I do not know if they thought to come to the inner courtyard or they were injured, dazed, and confused.


I went back in and found myself in the open air space between the B and the C Ring on the inner aspect of the C Ring between the 4th and 5th Corridors. There was a big exploded hole in the wall that was pouring out thick black smoke, and there was a big plane tire sitting there, and evidence of human remains. I heard cries for help from inside this wall. This was not an exit through which people could come. The doors, 20 yards either way, were spewing out black smoke. A couple of people exited from there.


But we heard these cries in there from people who were trapped. So a few of us - four or five people - grabbed fire extinguishers and started fighting our way in through this exploded breach.


We made a serpentine path through there throwing out some debris, spraying back the fire. And as we did that, we came into a space where two Navy personnel were trapped and very close to succumbing to smoke and flames. We were able to get them out through this makeshift passageway. They would certainly have perished in there not aware there was a possibility of an exit.


Then they told CAPT Dave Thomas and me that there were more people in there so we continued on in further. There were live electrical wires in this area. I got shocked twice. It was so hot the debris was melting and dripping onto my skin, searing it and melting my uniform. We went a little further, turned a comer, and came into this bombed out office space that was a roaring inferno of destruction, smoke, flames, and intense heat. You could feel it searing your face. We thought we heard something off to the right. Dave Thomas or someone handed me a flashlight. I shined it through this little opening and saw the bruised and bloody head of a gentleman who was leaning back saying, "Help me.? Help me.


I had a moistened Tee-shirt I was using to beat back the flames a little bit. I threw it into him and told him to breathe through that. I then told him he had to get out of there. There were secondary explosions going on. The structure was collapsing. Stuff was falling from the ceiling. The flames were approaching and he was pinned by this debris that was on fire. On one side of him there were no flames but the other side was all flames. He did not have very long at all and it looked like he was drifting in and out of consciousness from his injuries or oxygen deprivation.


We tried to free some of the debris from where we were but it really could not be done. So I crawled along on my belly and hands and knees over the debris into the space where he was. It was a very small cramped space. I said, "I am a doctor. We are going get you out of here, but you have got to help yourself. You have got to fight your way out."


He said, "I can't. I'm pinned. I've been trying and trying. I can't move."


I tried to pull him. I tried to push. There was nothing I could do. I, myself, was very close to succumbing to the smoke and fumes, and I do not know how he was even still alive because he had been there for awhile and was losing strength quickly. Out of desperation, I lay on my back underneath him and put my feet up on the pile of debris over his head. I leg-pressed up as hard as I could and was able to raise it a few inches, just enough to free him a little bit so he could start to wriggle free. I grabbed him; he grabbed on to me and I pulled him out right through my legs. I told him not to knock my legs because I did not want the debris to come back down again. As he crawled right over my body, and we were almost face to face, I said, "Is there anyone else in here?"


"Yes, I think there are others." I was very distressed to hear that. I then pushed him on past me out to where CAPT Thomas grabbed him and escorted him outside.


Hearing that there might be others, I still held up the debris and yelled, "Is there anyone else in here? Is there anyone else in here?" After not hearing anyone, I lowered the debris, hoping it would stop, and it did. I then rolled over and crawled my way out, coughing, retching, and trying to catch my breath. A few people were standing about. They had already taken Jerry Henson to the courtyard. He was the victim, a retired Navy captain. It seemed like less than 60 seconds before that whole space was just engulfed in smoke and flames going all the way up the side of the building.


I gathered myself and went into the courtyard where there were a few casualties. Some medical personnel from the clinic had brought up some medical supplies and there was a corpsman attending to Mr. Henson. I went in and assisted getting some oxygen started on him, starting some IVs, getting some fluids going, taking his vital signs, and triaging the few casualties that were there. I determined that Mr. Henson was the worst off, mostly from respiratory distress. We ensured that he was loaded first on an ambulance and sent him on his way.


I went back to the scene where we had been, hoping the fire crews would arrive and maybe we could rescue some more people. They arrived not too long after but were unable to penetrate any of these spaces, even with their protective gear. By then, conditions had really deteriorated and they could not go in. We kept waiting and hoping there might be more people to assist but it did not turn out to be the case."

Note: by Lieutenant Commander David Tarantino, MC, USN