Confidential Memo Reveals US Plan to Provoke an Invasion of Iraq

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Jamie Doward, Gaby Hinsliff and Mark Townsend
June 21, 2009 - The Observer/UK

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A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be "brought out" to give a public presentation on Saddam's WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was "solidly with the president".

The five-page document, written by Blair's foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, and copied to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador to the UN, Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, and the UK's ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, outlines how Bush told Blair he had decided on a start date for the war.

Paraphrasing Bush's comments at the meeting, Manning, noted: "The start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin."

Last night an expert on international law who is familar with the memo's contents said it provided vital evidence into the two men's frames of mind as they considered the invasion and its aftermath and must be presented to the Chilcott inquiry established by Gordon Brown to examine the causes, conduct and consequences of the Iraq war.

Philippe Sands, QC, a professor of law at University College London who is expected to give evidence to the inquiry, said confidential material such as the memo was of national importance, making it vital that the inquiry is not held in private, as Brown originally envisioned.

In today's Observer, Sands writes: "Documents like this raise issues of national embarrassment, not national security. The restoration of public confidence requires this new inquiry to be transparent. Contentious matters should not be kept out of the public domain, even in the run-up to an election."

The memo notes there had been a shift in the two men's thinking on Iraq by late January 2003 and that preparing for war was now their priority. "Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," Manning writes. This was despite the fact Blair that had yet to receive advice on the legality of the war from the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, which did not arrive until 7 March 2003 - 13 days before the bombing campaign started.

In his article today, Sands says the memo raises questions about the selection of the chair of the inquiry. Sir John Chilcott sat on the 2004 Butler inquiry, which examined the reliability of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, and would have been privy to the document's contents - and the doubts about WMD running to the highest levels of the US and UK governments.

Many senior legal experts have expressed dismay that Chilcott has been selected to chair the inquiry as he is considered to be close to the security services after his time spent as a civil servant in Northern Ireland.

Brown had believed that allowing the Chilcott inquiry to hold private hearings would allow witnesses to be candid. But after bereaved families and antiwar campaigners expressed outrage, the prime minister wrote to Chilcott to say that if the panel can show witnesses and national security issues will not be compromised by public hearings, he will change his stance.

Lord Guthrie, a former chief of the defence staff under Blair, described the memo as "quite shocking". He said that it underscored why the Chilcott inquiry must be seen to be a robust investigation: "It's important that the inquiry is not a whitewash as these inquiries often are."

This year, the Dutch government launched its own inquiry into its support for the war. Significantly, the inquiry will see all the intelligence shared with the Dutch intelligence services by MI5 and MI6. The inquiry intends to publish its report in November - suggesting that confidential information about the role played by the UK and the US could become public before Chilcott's inquiry reports next year.

Closing the Farm to Plate Knowledge Gap

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Rob Smart
June 19, 2009 - Civil Eats

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In the battle for the hearts and minds (and pocket books) of everyday Americans, the large corporate players in today's industrial food system must be pleased.

Consumer advocates for sustainable, healthy food are fighting with farmers, not because either picked a fight with the other, but because the knowledge gap between them has grown so expansive that misunderstandings rule the day. Credit the gap to industrial specialization and consumer marketing, which I will return to in a moment. Often times, these misunderstandings turn personal, further driving apart two groups that have much to gain by working together.

How this benefits the industrial food players may not be obvious, but by fighting amongst ourselves, we are paying less attention to the mechanized system generating massive amounts of unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly food and unprecedented concentrations of profits.

For the average consumer, and likely many farmers, the "black box" of industrial food is a mystery. There is little to no transparency, except through increasingly common investigative journalism and documentaries, which industrialists and their associations quickly line up to discredit.  Keeping us in the dark allows industrial food processors and large food retailers to paint an idyllic picture of grassy fields and red barns backed annually by an estimated $33 billion1 spent on advertising to reinforce a desired, yet highly inaccurate image of where our food comes from.

Unfortunately, they have most of us fooled, which is why it is critical that we - consumers and farmers alike - find a shared set of priorities to unite our voices in securing safe, healthy, tasty food for generations to come. Let us abandon overused stereotypes and language that divides us, and instead concentrate on educating consumers about where the food they eat comes from, including industrial and "alternative" food systems.

Closing the farm-to-plate knowledge gap won't be easy. With the earliest advances in agriculture resulting in food surpluses, people, no longer physically needed on the farm, moved to urban centers to pursue non-agricultural careers. As the years passed and the complexity of the food system increased, people came to rely, exclusively in most cases today, on food processors and retailers to provide for them. In effect, we traded knowledge for convenient, cheap food.

On the surface, this seems like a great tradeoff, and for most of agriculture's history it has been. Civilizations prospered. Farmers made a decent living. Consumers readily found fresh produce, meats, and other ingredients to prepare wholesome, nutritious, tasty meals. But things started to change. Industrialization intensified. Corporate consolidation accelerated. Seeds became intellectual property (protected by patents). High-paid lobbyists proliferated. Politicians bowed. And, most important, people stopped paying attention.

Take a snap shot of today's food system. Study the details. What you find are a number of increasingly dramatic side effects that most people are not aware of, most of which are getting worse.

  •Today's average farmer makes about 55 percent less money for the food they grow than they did 50 years ago. According to the USDA, farmers' share of consumer food expenditures dropped from about $0.40 per dollar in 1950 to around $0.19 in 2006. The balance of consumer expenditures, termed the Marketing Bill, goes to "value-add" (i.e., industrial food companies).

  •While farmers' financial situations have deteriorated, food manufacturers' fortunes have skyrocketed to the tune of $3.1 trillion in revenues per year with above average profit margins. Judging by the fact that the Top 50 Food Processors and Top 50 Supermarket & Grocery Chains all have over $1.0 billion in annual sales, with Wal-Mart topping the list at nearly $100 billion, increasing concentrations of power are clear.

  •One billion people are obese, thanks in part to value-add convenience foods (e.g., fast food, prepared meals, snacks, sodas), massive advertising campaigns, and time-constrained lifestyles (e.g., two income households with kids). This, while another one billion people go hungry, bypassed because they are unable to provide profit margins required by industrial food.
 
•According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, obesity (one of the "western diseases" attributed to diet) accounted for $75 billion in extra medical costs in 2003. The Journal of the American Medical Association attributed some 112,000 premature deaths in 2000 to obesity. These additional health care costs, half of which are paid for by taxpayers, have all but erased the cost-of-living savings claimed by the makers of cheap, convenient food. And it's going to get worse before it gets better.
 
  •Analysis by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization reports that agriculture contributes 14% of human-released greenhouse gases each year, through methane from livestock and rice paddies, nitrous oxide from fertilizers, and fossil fuel use during production. In an era where controlling carbon emissions is critical, the industrialized food system must change or give up market share to environmentally friendly alternatives.

We have turned our food over to a system that doesn't have our best interests in mind, despite what billions of dollars of advertising tell us. Power is concentrated, not by farms or consumers, but by multi-national corporations. Increasing complexity rules the day, making it harder for even those in industry to keep food safe. And the halls of Congress are jammed with food system lobbyists fighting for more power, or, at a minimum, maintaining the status quo.

It's up to us - farmers and consumers - to take back control of the food we eat. At a minimum, we need to fight for the checks and balances needed to ensure safe, affordable, and environmentally-friendly food for generations to come. It won't be easy given the stacked deck industry is playing with. But by thoughtfully considering each other's perspectives, while separating ourselves from the complex, concentrated, industrial food system, we will find the common ground necessary to drive the change we seek.

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Rob Smart is a food entrepreneur focusing on regional food systems and consumer retail experiences. He blogs on alternative food systems at Every Kitchen Table.

Neo-Nazis are nothing new on American scene

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Ed Tant
June 20, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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He was an American naval officer who became an American Nazi. He claimed to regret having "fought on the wrong side" in World War II. His hatred for Jews, black people and anyone else who was not part of his "Aryan America" brought shame and sadness to his family members, who also were victims of his mad obsession.

He was George Lincoln Rockwell, and until he was gunned down by one of his own men in 1967 he served as the model, template and evil inspiration for later American Nazis such as James von Brunn, who fatally shot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington earlier this month.

Like Rockwell, von Brunn is a former military man who hates blacks and Jews and embraces the deadly doctrines of the Third Reich. Like Rockwell, von Brunn's militant madness claimed family members as its first victims. Rockwell's parents had been vaudeville performers with many Jewish friends in the entertainment world, including Groucho Marx. They were heartbroken by their son's hatred. Von Brunn's murderous hatred caused emotional distress and embarrassment for his long-suffering wife and son.

Commander Rockwell, as he liked to be called, began his neo-Nazi crusade in the America of the late 1950s. He railed against the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and, despite the laughably small size of his American Nazi Party, Rockwell had a vaudevillian's ability to garner publicity with speeches and appearances on television, radio and college campuses.

In "American Fuehrer," his biography of Rockwell, author Frederick James Simonelli says the neo-Nazi "never commanded more than a few hundred loyalists and never rose above the status of a curiosity to most Americans. Yet his influence on the racist right in American politics is lasting and profound. ... Within the racist right, Rockwell holds a place of honor and homage." Though he was deservedly disdained by the vast majority of Americans during his life, today he is championed by racists and reactionaries such as James von Brunn, who have gone even more crazy than usual now that a black man resides in the White House.

Nazis are nothing new in America. Two decades before Rockwell agitated for an Aryan America, the German-American Bund gained thousands of members during the Great Depression. The Bund packed New York City's Madison Square Garden with a throng of thousands who rallied for homegrown Hitlerism here in the land of the free that is fertile soil for the growth of fascism during uncertain economic times.

In 1984, members of a neo-Nazi group called The Order shot and killed Alan Berg, a liberal, Jewish radio host whose talk show broadcast from Denver reached listeners in more than 30 states. Several years before right-wing radio's Rush Limbaugh had a national stage, Berg was informing and entertaining large and growing audiences with liberal lambastings of the reactionary right-wingers until he was killed by the cowardly curs and neo-Nazi nutcases of The Order.

Today, such hate groups as American Nazis are once again at work sowing their poison seeds of domestic terrorism and discord. One does not have to look far to read sentiments like those voiced by James von Brunn and his ilk who howl that President Obama is a Muslim or a socialist who was not born in America.

Back in 1950, nearly 60 years before the Department of Homeland Security would infuriate conservative TV talkers and online right-wing squawkers with warnings of terrorism from the reactionary wing of politics, journalist George Seldes was prescient and correct when he wrote, "The main threat to democracy comes not from the extreme left but from the extreme right, which is able to buy huge sections of the press and radio, and wages a constant campaign to smear and discredit every progressive and humanitarian measure."

Politicians screw around because they can

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Doug Thompson
June 17, 2009 - Capitol Hill Blue

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When then-President Bill Clinton had a chance to come clean about allowing White House intern Monica Lewinsky to nosh on the First Member, he looked America in the eye and lied, saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman...Ms. Lewinsky."

Years later, after he left office and appeared on 60 Minutes to promote his book, Clinton offered this admission on why he dallied with young Monica in the Oval Office.

"Because I could," he said.

Yes, he could. That's why so many politicians screw around. Because they can. Because politics gives them a chance to score. Were they not elected officials with at least the aura of power, most of these clowns couldn't get laid in a whorehouse.
Sen. John Ensign is the latest to admit he porked a campaign aide. He's not the first and he sure as hell won't be the last. But his position as a member of Congress provided him with more opportunity simply because he is there and some flock to elected officials like groupies to rock stars.

Politics is a heady business and the chance to score extends not only to elected officials but those who work for them. When I worked on the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1984, White House staffers and campaign aides would slip off their wedding rings as soon as Air Force One cleared the runway. The motto: Wheels up, rings off. Women who wouldn't give me a second look in ordinary life invited me back to their hotel room because I worked, at the time, for the President of the United States.

The lure of easy sex makes politicians risk their careers and their reputations without a second thought. Colorado Senator Gary Hart challenged reporters to follow him around when he ran for President and they did just that, catching Washington party girl Donna Rice sneaking out of his DC townhouse after spending the night.

John Edwards screwed around while his wife battled cancer. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was nailing a House committee staff member while publicly chastising Clinton for his adultery. Gingrich later dumped his wife to marry the staffer -- the second time he divorced because of an adulterous affair.

Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer banged high-priced call girls. So does Lousiana Sen. David Vitter.

In the interest of equality, we should note that it's not just the male politicians who mess around. Congresswoman Mary Bono was a coed when she met Sonny Bono in his Palm Springs restaurant. Their affair led to the breakup of his marriage to his third wife. After Bono died in a skiing accident, May Bono ran for his Congressional seat and dated around before entering an adulterous relationship with Rep. Connie Mack IV. Mack dumped his wife of nine-and-a-half years to marry Bono.

Sexual stupidity is not limited to married politicians or heterosexual ones. Rep. Barney Frank, the most openly-gay member of Congress, suffered political embrassment when police arrested his live-in boyfriend for running a gay prostitution ring out of the Congressman's Capitol Hill home.

Former New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato may have summed it up best. When asked why so many elected officials get caught with their pants down, D'Amato replied: 'When the little head gets hard, the big head goes soft.'