In article <bglbaa$1i8$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, Dave Muller says...

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 Meet the Real WMD Fabricator

 A Swede Called Rolf Ekeus

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
August 2, 2003
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08022003.html

Week after week Bush and his people have been getting pounded by newly 
emboldened Democrats and liberal pundits for having exaggerated the 
threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his still-elusive weapons of mass 
destruction. One day CIA director George Tenet, is hung out to dry; the 
next it's the turn of Paul Wolfowitz's platoon of mad Straussians. The 
other side of the Atlantic, the same sort of thing has been happening to 
Tony Blair.

They deserve the pounding, but if we're to be fair there's an even more 
deserving target, a man of impeccable liberal credentials, well 
respected in the sort of confabs attended by New Labor and espousers of 
the Third Way. I give you Rolf Ekeus, former Swedish ambassador to the 
United States and, before that, the executive chairman of the United 
Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq from 1991 to 1997. These 
days he's chairman of the Stockholm International Peace Research 
Institute, a noted dovecote of the olive branch set.

In the wake of the first Iraq war it was UNSCOM chief Ekeus, exuding 
disinterested integrity as only a Swede can, who insisted that Saddam 
Hussein was surely pressing forward with the manufacture of weapons of 
mass destruction. It was Ekeus who played a pivotal role in justifying 
the continued imposition of sanctions, on the grounds that these 
sanctions were essential as a means of applying pressure to the tyrant 
in Baghdad.

In 1996 Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General, and a leading critic 
of the indiscriminate cruelty of these sanctions, wrote an open letter 
to Ekeus beginning thus: "Dear Mr. Ekeus, How many children are you 
willing to let die while you search for 'items' you 'are convinced still 
exist in' Iraq? Every two months for the past half year, and on earlier 
occasions, you or your office have made some statement several weeks 
before the Security Council considers sanctions against Iraq which you 
know will be used to cause their continuation This cruel and endless 
hoax of new disclosures every two months must stop. The direct 
consequence of your statements which are used to justify continuation of 
the sanctions against Iraq is the deaths of hundreds of thousands of 
innocent and helpless infants, children and elderly and chronically ill 
human beings."

Despite many such furious denunciations, till the day he handed over his 
job as UNSCOM chief to the more obviously suspect and disheveled 
Australian, Richard Butler, Ekeus continued in the manner stigmatized by 
Clark and others. US ambassador to the UN Madeline Albright notoriously 
said to Lesley Stahl of CBS, of the lethal sanctions which killed over 
half a million Iraqi children, "we think the price is worth it", but 
Ekeus was the one who furnished the UN's diplomatic cover for that 
repulsive calculus.

It's fortunate for Ekeus's reputation among the genteel liberal crowd 
that public awareness of what he really knew about Saddam's chemical, 
biological and nuclear weapons is still slight. In fact Ekeus was 
perfectly well aware from the mid-l990s on that Saddam Ussein had no 
such weapons of mass destruction. They had all been destroyed years 
earlier, after the first Gulf war.

Ekeus learned this on the night of August 22, l995, in Amman, from the 
lips of General Hussein Kamel, who had just defected from Iraq, along 
with some of his senior military aides. Kamel was Saddam's son-in-law 
and had been in overall charge of all programs for chemical, biological 
and nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

That night, in three hours of detailed questioning from Ekeus and two 
technical experts, Kamel was categorical. The UN inspection teams had 
done a good job. When Saddam was finally persuaded that failure to 
dispose of the relevant weapons systems would have very serious 
consequences, he issued the order and Kamel carried it out. As he told 
Ekeus that night, "All weapons, biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, 
were destroyed." (The UNSCOM record of the session can ne viewed at 
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.pdf). In similar debriefings 
that August Kamel said the same thing to teams from the CIA and MI6. His 
military aides provided a wealth of corroborative details. Then, the 
following year, Kamel was lured back to Iraq and at once executed.

Did Ekeus immediately proclaim victory, and suggest that sanctions could 
be abated? As we have seen, he did not. In fact he urged that they be 
intensified. The years rolled by and Iraqi children by the thousand 
wasted and died. The war party thumped the drum over Saddam's WMDs, and 
Kamel's debriefings stayed under lock and key. Finally, John Barry of
Newsweek unearthed details of those sessions in Amman and in February on 
this year Newsweek ran his story, though not with the play it deserved. 
I gather that when Barry confronted Ekeus with details of the suppressed 
briefing, Ekeus was stricken. Barry's sensational disclosure was mostly 
ignored.

And Ekeus's rationale for suppressing the disclosures of Kamel and his 
aides? He claims that the plan was to bluff Saddam and his scientists 
into further disclosures. Try to figure that out.

For playing the game, the way the US desired it to be played, Ekeus got 
his rewards: a pleasing welcome in Washington when he arrived there as 
Swedish ambassador, respectful audiences along the world's diplomatic 
circuits. To this day he zealously burnishes his "credibility" with 
long, tendentious articles arguing that Bush and Blair had it right. He 
betrays no sign of being troubled by his horrible role. He will never be 
forced to squirm in hearings by Democratic senators suddenly as brave as 
lions. He won't have to wade through raw sewage to enter the main 
hospital in Baghdad and watch children die or ride in a Humvee and wait 
for someone to drop a hand grenade off a bridge and blow his head off.

Today he grazes peacefully in the tranquil pastures of the Stockholm 
Peace Research Institute. But if we're going to heap recriminations on 
Bush and Blair and the propagandists who fashioned their lies, don't 
forget Ekeus. He played a worse role than most of them, under the blue 
flag of the UN.

---------------------------------------------------------------
*/Robert Fisk:/ US fostering sinister sort of democracy*

01.08.2003 - COMMENT

Paul Bremer's taste in clothes symbolises "the new Iraq" well. He wears 
a business suit and combat boots. As the pro-consul of Iraq, you might 
have thought he'd have more taste.

But he is a famous "antiterrorism" expert who is supposed to be 
rebuilding the country with a vast army of international companies - 
most of them American, of course - and creating the first democracy in 
the Arab world.

Since he seems to be a total failure at the "anti-terrorist" game - 50 
American soldiers killed in Iraq since President George W. Bush declared 
the war over is not exactly a blazing success - it is only fair to 
record that he is making a mess of the "reconstruction" bit as well.

In theory, the news is all great. Oil production is up to one million 
barrels a day; Baghdad airport is preparing to reopen; every university 
in Iraq is functioning again and the health services are recovering 
rapidly.

And an Iraqi Interim Council is up and hobbling.

But there's a kind of looking-glass fantasy to all these announcements 

>from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the weasel-worded title 

with which the American-led occupation powers cloak their decidedly 
undemocratic and right-wing credentials.

Take the oil production figures. Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the 
US commander in Iraq, even chose to use these statistics in his "great 
day for Iraq" press conference last week, the one in which he announced 
that 200 soldiers in Mosul had killed the sons of Saddam rather than 
take them prisoner. But Sanchez was talking rubbish.

Although oil production was indeed standing at 900,000 barrels per day 
in June (albeit 100,000bpd fewer than the Sanchez version), it fell last 
month to 750,000. The drop was caused by power cuts and export smuggling.

The result? Iraq, with the world's second-highest reserves of oil, is 
now importing fuel.

Then comes Baghdad airport. Sure, it's going to reopen. But it just 
happens that the airport, with its huge American military base and 
brutal US prison camp, comes under nightly grenade and mortar attack.

No major airline would dream of flying its aircraft into the facility in 
these circumstances.

The Iraqis are told, for example, that the first flights will be run by 
"Transcontinental Airlines" (a name oddly similar to the CIA's transport 
airline in Vietnam), which is reported to be a subsidiary of "US 
Airlines", and the only flight will be between Baghdad and - wait for it 
- the old East Berlin airport of Schonefeld.

Open universities are good news. And few would blame Bremer for 
summarily firing the 436 professors who were members of the Baath Party.

In the same vein, the CPA annulled the academic system whereby student 
party members would automatically receive higher grades. But then it 
turned out that there wouldn't be enough qualified professors to go 
round. Quite a number of the 436 were party men in name only and 
received their degrees at foreign universities.

So at Mustansiriyah University, for example, the very same purged 
professors were rehired after filling out forms routinely denouncing the 
Baath Party.

Bremer seems to have a habit of reversing his own decisions; having 
triumphantly announced that he'd sacked the entire Iraqi Army, he was 
humiliatingly forced to put them back on rations in case they all 
decided to attack US soldiers in Iraq.

Health services? Well, yes, the new Iraqi health service is being 
encouraged to rehabilitate the country's hospitals and clinics. But a 
mysterious American company called Abt Associates has turned up in 
Baghdad to give "Ministry of Health Technical Assistance" support to the 
US Agency for International Development and "rapid response grants to 
address health needs in-country".

It has decreed that all medical equipment must accord with US technical 
standards and modifications - which means that all new hospital 
equipment must come from America, not from Europe.

Of course, Iraqis protest at much of this. Much good does it do them.

When Iraqi ex-soldiers demonstrated outside Bremer's office at the 
former Presidential Palace, US troops shot two of them dead. When 
Falujah residents staged a protest as long ago as April, the American 
military shot 16 dead. Another 11 were later gunned down in Mosul.

During two demonstrations against the presence of US troops near the 
shrine of Imam Hussein at Karbala last weekend, US soldiers shot dead 
another three.

"What a wonderful thing it is to speak your own minds," Sanchez said of 
the demonstrations in Iraq last week.

All this might be incomprehensible if one forgot that the whole illegal 
Iraqi invasion had been hatched up by a bunch of right-wing and 
pro-Israeli ideologues in Washington, and that Bremer - though not a 
member of their group - fits squarely into the same bracket.

Hence Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime instigators of this war - he was 
among the loudest to beat the drum over the weapons of mass destruction 
that didn't exist - is now trying to deflect attention from his 
disastrous advice to the US Administration by attacking the media, in 
particular that pesky, uncontrollable channel, Al-Jazeera.

Its reports, he now meretriciously claims, amount to "incitement to 
violence" - knowing full well, of course, that Bremer has officially 
made "incitement to violence" an excuse to close down any newspaper or 
TV station he doesn't like.

Indeed, newspapers that have offended the Americans have been raided by 
US troops in the same way that the Americans have conducted raids on the 
offices of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose 
leader, Ayatollah Mohammed al-Hakim, is a member of the famous Interim 
Council - not exactly a bright way to keep a prominent Shia cleric on 
board.

But the council itself is already the subject of much humour in Baghdad, 
not least because its first acts included the purchase of cars for all 
its members; a decision to work out of a former presidential palace; and 
- this the lunatic brainchild of the Pentagon-supported and convicted 
fraudster Ahmed Chalabi - the declaring of a national holiday every 
April 9 to honour Iraq's "liberation" from Saddam.

What could be more natural than celebrating the end of the Beast of 
Baghdad? But Iraqis, a proud people who have resisted centuries of 
invasions, realised their new public holiday would mark the first day of 
their country's foreign occupation.

And so there has begun to grow the faint but sinister shadow of a 
different kind of "democracy" for Iraq, one in which a new ruler will 
have to use a paternalistic rule - moderation mixed with autocracy, a la 
Ataturk - to govern Iraq and allow the Americans to go home.

Inevitably, it has been one of the American commentators from the same 
failed lunatic right as Wolfowitz - Daniel Pipes of the Middle East 
Forum think tank, which promotes American interests in the region - to 
express this in its most chilling form.

He now argues that "democratic-minded autocrats can guide [Iraq] to full 
democracy better than snap elections". What Iraq needs, he says, is "a 
democratically minded [sic] strongman who has real authority", who would 
be "politically moderate" but "operationally tough" (sic again).

Of course, it's difficult to resist a cynical smile at such double 
standards, although their meaning is frightening enough. What does 
"operationally tough" mean, other than secret policemen, interrogation 
rooms and torturers to keep the people in order - which is exactly what 
Saddam set up when he took power, supported as he was at the time by the 
US and Britain?

What does "strongman" mean other than a total reversal of the promise of 
"democracy" which Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair made to the 
Iraqi people?

Democracies are not led by autocrats, and autocrats are not led by 
anyone but themselves.

But today Bremer is the strongman, and under his rule US troops are 
losing hearts and minds by the bucketful with each new, blundering and 
often useless raid against the civilians of Iraq.

Still obsessed with capturing - or, rather, killing - Saddam, they are 
destroying any residual affection for them among the population. On a 
recent operation in the town of Dhuluaya, for example, two innocent men 
were killed and the Americans' Iraqi informer - originally paraded 
before those he was to betray in a hood to keep his identity secret - 
was executed by his own father.

The enterprising newspaper Iraq Today found that the "intelligence" 
officers of the 4th Infantry Division even left behind mug shots, aerial 
reconnaissance photographs and secret operational documents - complete 
with target houses and briefing notes - at the scene. The paper 
gleefully published the lot.

Anarchic violence is now being embedded in Iraqi society in a way it 
never was under the genocidal Saddam. Scarcely a day goes by when I do 
not encounter the evidence of this in my daily reporting work.

Visiting the Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad to seek the identity of 
civilians killed by American troops in Mansour this week, I came across 
four bodies lying out in the yard beside the building in the 50C heat. 
All had been shot.

Three days earlier, on a visit to a supermarket, I noticed that the 
woman cashier was wearing black. Yes, she said, because her brother had 
been murdered a week earlier. No one knew why.

Trying to contact an ex-prisoner illegally held by the Americans at his 
home in a slum suburb of Baghdad, I drove to the mukhtar's house to find 
the correct address. The mukhtar is the local mayor. But I was greeted 
by a group of long-faced relatives who told me that I could not speak to 
the mukhtar - because he had been assassinated the previous night.

So if this is my experience in just the past four days, how many murders 
and thefts are occurring across Baghdad - or, indeed, across Iraq?

Only a few days ago, I sat in the conference hall that the occupation 
authorities use for their daily press briefings, follies that are used 
to condemn "irresponsible reporting", but which record only a fraction 
of the violence of the previous 24 hours - violence which, of course, is 
well known to the authorities.

And there was a disturbing moment when Charles Heatley, the British 
spokesman from the Foreign Office, appointed by Blair at the behest of 
Alastair Campbell, talked about the reports of abduction and rape in 
Iraq. He acknowledged that there had been some cases, but then - I 
enjoyed the beautiful way in which he tried to destroy any journalistic 
interest in this terrible subject - talked about the number of "rumours" 
that turned out to be untrue when checked out.

But this is not the experience of the Independent, which in just one day 
recently discovered the identity of one young woman who had been 
kidnapped, raped and then freed - only to attempt suicide three times.

Why don't the occupation authorities realise that Iraq cannot be "spun"? 
This country is living a tragedy of epic proportions, and now - after 
its descent into hell under Saddam - we are doomed to suffer its 
contagion. By our hubris and by our lies and our fantasies we are 
descending into the pit.

For the people of Iraq, the next stage in their long suffering is under 
way. For us, a new colonial humiliation, the like of which may well end 
the careers of Bush and Blair, is coming. Of far more consequence is 
that it is likely to end many innocent lives as well.

- INDEPENDENT
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storyprint.cfm?storyID=3515705

The archives of South News can be found at
http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/southnews/ 

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Pretty interesting stuff, huh Patty!!! So I was right
about 9/11 being a covert op, the invasion of Iraq
being nothing but resource stealing and about
some UFO's being ET craft; and you being
a complete idiot!!!