The Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy October 31, 2003 By Noam Chomsky 

Establishment critics of the war on Iraq restricted their comments regarding the attack to the administration arguments they took to be seriously intended: disarmament, deterrence, and links to terrorism. They scarcely made reference to liberation, democratization of the Middle East, and other matters that would render irrelevant the weapons inspections and indeed everything that took place at the Security Council or within governmental domains. The reason, perhaps, is that they recognized that lofty rhetoric is the obligatory accompaniment of virtually any resort to force and therefore carries no information. The rhetoric is doubly hard to take seriously in the light of the display of contempt for democracy that accompanied it, not to speak of the past record and current practices. Critics are also aware that nothing has been heard from the present incumbents -- with their alleged concern for Iraqi democracy -- to indicate that they have any regrets for their previous support for Saddam Hussein (or others like him, still continuing) nor have they shown any signs of contrition for having helped him develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when he really was a serious danger. Nor has the current leadership explained when, or why, they abandoned their 1991 view that "the best of all worlds" would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein" that would rule as Saddam did but not make the error of judgment in August 1990 that ruined Saddam's record. At the time, the incumbents' British allies were in the opposition and therefore more free than the Thatcherites to speak out against Saddam's British-backed crimes. Their names are noteworthy by their absence from the parliamentary record of protests against these crimes, including Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon, and other leading figures of New Labour. In December 2002, Jack Straw, then foreign minister, released a dossier of Saddam's crimes. It was drawn almost entirely from the period of firm US-UK support, a fact overlooked with the usual display of moral integrity. The timing and quality of the dossier raised many questions, but those aside, Straw failed to provide an explanation for his very recent conversion to skepticism about Saddam Hussein's good character and behavior. When Straw was home secretary in 2001, an Iraqi who fled to England after detention and torture requested asylum. Straw denied his request. The Home Office explained that Straw "is aware that Iraq, and in particular the Iraqi security forces, would only convict and sentence a person in the courts with the provision of proper jurisdiction," so that "you could expect to receive a fair trial under an independent and properly constituted judiciary." Straw's conversion must, then, have been rather similar to President Clinton's discovery, sometime between September 8 and 11, 1999, that Indonesia had done some unpleasant things in East Timor in the past twenty-five years when it enjoyed decisive support from the US and Britain. Attitudes toward democracy were revealed with unusual clarity during the mobilization for war in the fall of 2002, as it became necessary to deal somehow with the overwhelming popular opposition. Within the "coalition of the willing," the US public was at least partially controlled by the propaganda campaign unleashed in September. In Britain, the population was split roughly fifty-fifty on the war, but the government maintained the stance of "junior partner" it had accepted reluctantly after World War II and had kept to even in the face of the contemptuous dismissal of British concerns by US leaders at moments when the country's very survival was at stake. Outside the two full members of the coalition, problems were more serious. In the two major European countries, Germany and France, the official government stands corresponded to the views of the large majority of their populations, which unequivocally opposed the war. That led to bitter condemnation by Washington and many commentators. Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the offending nations as just the "Old Europe," of no concern because of their reluctance to toe Washington's line. The "New Europe" is symbolized by Italy, whose prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was visiting the White House. It was, evidently, unproblematic that public opinion in Italy was overwhelmingly opposed to the war. The governments of Old and New Europe were distinguished by a simple criterion: a government joined Old Europe in its iniquity if and only if it took the same position as the vast majority of its population and refused to follow orders from Washington. Recall that the self-appointed rulers of the world -- Bush, Powell, and the rest -- had declared forthrightly that they intended to carry out their war whether or not the United Nations (UN) or anyone else "catches up" and "becomes relevant." Old Europe, mired in irrelevance, did not catch up. Neither did New Europe, at least if people are part of their countries. Poll results available from Gallup International, as well as local sources for most of Europe, West and East, showed that support for a war carried out "unilaterally by America and its allies" did not rise above 11 percent in any country. Support for a war if mandated by the UN ranged from 13 percent (Spain) to 51 percent (Netherlands). Particularly interesting are the eight countries whose leaders declared themselves to be the New Europe, to much acclaim for their courage and integrity. Their declaration took the form of a statement calling on the Security Council to ensure "full compliance with its resolutions," without specifying the means. Their announcement threatened "to isolate the Germans and French," the press reported triumphantly, though the positions of New and Old Europe were in fact scarcely different. To ensure that Germany and France would be "isolated," they were not invited to sign the bold pronouncement of New Europe -- apparently for fear that they would do so, it was later quietly indicated. The standard interpretation is that the exciting and promising New Europe stood behind Washington, thus demonstrating that "many Europeans supported the United States' view, even if France and Germany did not." Who were these "many Europeans"? Checking polls, we find that in New Europe, opposition to "the United States' view" was for the most part even higher than in France and Germany, particularly in Italy and Spain, which were singled out for praise for their leadership of New Europe. Happily for Washington, former communist countries too joined New Europe. Within them, support for the "United States' view," as defined by Powell -- namely, war by the "coalition of the willing" without UN authorization -- ranged from 4 percent (Macedonia) to 11 percent (Romania). Support for a war even with a UN mandate was also very low. Latvia's former foreign minister explained that we have to "salute and shout, 'Yes sir.' . . . We have to please America no matter what the cost." In brief, in journals that regard democracy as a significant value, headlines would have read that Old Europe in fact included the vast majority of Europeans, East and West, while New Europe consisted of a few leaders who chose to line up (ambiguously) with Washington, disregarding the overwhelming opinion of their own populations. But actual reporting was mostly scattered and oblique, depicting opposition to the war as a marketing problem for Washington. Toward the liberal end of the spectrum, Richard Holbrooke stressed the "very important point [that] if you add up the population of [the eight countries of the original New Europe], it was larger than the population of those countries not signing the letter." True enough, though something is omitted: the populations were overwhelmingly opposed to the war, mostly even more so than in those countries dismissed as Old Europe. At the other extreme of the spectrum, the editors of the Wall Street Journal applauded the statement of the eight original signers for "exposing as fraudulent the conventional wisdom that France and Germany speak for all of Europe, and that all of Europe is now anti-American." The eight honorable New European leaders showed that "the views of the Continent's pro-American majority weren't being heard," apart from the editorial pages of the Journal, now vindicated. The editors blasted the media to their "left" -- a rather substantial segment -- which "peddled as true" the ridiculous idea that France and Germany spoke for Europe, when they were clearly a pitiful minority, and peddled these lies "because they served the political purposes of those, both in Europe and America, who oppose President Bush on Iraq." This conclusion does hold if we exclude Europeans from Europe, rejecting the radical left doctrine that people have some kind of role in democratic societies. Noam Chomsky is the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, from which this commentary is adapted. For more information on the book, published by Metropolitan Books, see http://www.hegemonyorsurvival.net.

 

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1012 

Guestdispatch: Zap, zap, you're dead... Years ago, as a sideline, I used to write about the world of children's toys for various publications. Sometime in the late 1980s, I took my daughter and a young friend to "interview" prototype Talking Cabbage Patch Dolls, part of a high-tech doll revolution just then underway. Though Cabbage Patch "conversation" turned out to be restricted to "I like vanilla ice cream, what's your favorite flavor?", "I like pink, what's your favorite color?" and other less than revolutionary riffs, those microchipped dolls and their various nephews, cousins and relatives at other toy companies did represent something new -- as I was about to learn. In a background interview arranged by the toy company, I spoke with one of the engineers who made the dolls "talk" and discovered, to my surprise, that he had also worked on a "talking cockpit" project for the Air Force. Moving from the world of high-tech toys to the world of futuristic war was, he indicated, nothing special in his life. The very idea of talking dolls and talking cockpits -- of, that is, an intersection between two such seemingly disparate sides of the electronic revolution -- seemed so odd to me then that I never wrote about it, and yet somehow it lodged in memory along with those ridiculous dolls. In his report below, a breakthrough piece of internet research on the changing shape of our society, Nick Turse shows us just how fully the worlds of toy-making and war-making, of toy companies, video-game outfits, movie studios, and the Pentagon have meshed. The wildest thoughts of Pentagon dreamers, Hollywood fantasists, and youthful game players now meet, fully funded by our military, in our own living rooms, as you'll see. I was one of those kids who grew up in the 1950s obsessively playing out a version of American history and of war American-style with toy soldiers on my floor or, with stick in hand, in a local park. (This is a subject, once near and dear to many boys and a few girls, that has almost never written about, though I did take it on in my history of American triumphalism, The End of Victory Culture.) But the Vietnam War drove war itself, as well as war-gaming and its associated toys right out of American culture -- at least for a while. When the original G.I. Joe action figure was "furloughed" by its maker Hasbro in the wake of that war, it was possible to imagine that war play had left the American century and planet Earth for good. As late as Christmas 1994, four years after the first Gulf War (and with all those remaindered General "Stormin'" Norman Schwartzkopf dolls already moldering in their graves), I could write, surveying the toy scene, "To wheel a shopping cart down the endless aisles of Toys 'R' Us is to experience the story that has resulted, one unrecognizable from anyone's version of American history -- or any history at all. No children in 1995 will defeat Geronimo or refight the Battle of the Bulge. Nor will toy marines burst into Iraqi bunkers made of Legos. No modern-day Custer will lead a last stand in a mini-Mogadishu. Not on this or any future Christmas will toy G.I.'s patrol a Port-au-Prince made of wooden blocks." ("The Morphing of the American Mind," the New York Times, Dec. 24, 1994) Beware of prophets – and not just because teens are indeed shooting it out in the back alleys of Mogadishu via the "first person shooter" video game "Delta Force V: Black Hawk Down" ("now live the battle"). As Nick Turse shows, in our new, perhaps short-lived era of triumphalism, boys with (war) toys are back with a passion, their latest toys well-funded, exceedingly well-designed, and with a whole nexus of power behind them. Read on and meet the new military- industrial-entertainment complex. Tom ------------------------------------------- Bringing the War Home: The New Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex at War and Play By Nick Turse In his famed 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of a dangerous intertwining of private corporations, the armed forces, and the federal government for which he coined the term "the military-industrial complex." By then, the Pentagon had long been exercising script control over most war films made in Hollywood and the CIA was running covert operations in Vietnam through a front program at Michigan State University, but Ike wasn't focused on minor supporting players like the entertainment industry or academia. In the intervening decades, however, both have grown ever more central to the Pentagon's mission. No longer is the Ivory Tower's participation limited to advisory programs and research for future weapons systems or Hollywood's contribution a series of Why We Fight propaganda films or triumphalist John Wayne flicks. In the late 1990s, the otherwise dreadful soundtrack for Godzilla, that blockbuster-flop of a movie, featured a track, "No Shelter," by rebel rap/rockers Rage Against the Machine that trashed both the movie ("And Godzilla pure muthafuckin filler, To keep ya eyes off the real killer") and a consumer-driven militarized Hollywood, writ large: What ya need is what they sellin' Make you think that buyin' is rebellin' From the theaters to malls on every shore Tha thin line between entertainment and war The line had by then grown thin indeed. Today, it hardly exists at all. The military is now in the midst of a full-scale occupation of the entertainment industry, conducted with far more skill (and enthusiasm on the part of the occupied) than the one in Iraq. Perhaps the "front" where the most significant victories have been scored in the military's latest media-entertainment blitz is the one where our most vulnerable population – children -- resides. Through toys, especially videogames, the military and its partners in academia and the entertainment industry have not only blurred the line between entertainment and war, but created a media culture thoroughly capable of preparing America's children for armed conflict. This is less a matter of simple military indoctrination than near immersion in a virtual world of war beyond John Wayne's wildest dreams. "Can someone please call my father?..." Last holiday season the Forward Command Post, a bombed-out dollhouse from hell, rankled many consumers who objected to a toy that seemed to glorify civilian casualties and so prompted an outcry that caused JC Penny to withdraw it from sale and KBToys to stop stocking the item. This year's target is likely to be the "Battle Command Post Two- Story Headquarters," a brownstone-turned-battle bunker. At 2 ½ feet tall complete with fully stocked gun-rack, it's a militarized dollhouse large enough to dwarf your child (but also with a basement hospital –perhaps a nod to peacenik parents and liberal loudmouths.). Tiny action figures would disappear in its airy expanses, but if your child has a collection of 12" high G.I. Joe figurines then he's in great shape. And he'll be well prepared to take out the "Talking DOA Uday," a specialty doll with a two-sided head that spins 360 degrees (à la The Exorcist) transforming Saddam Hussein's son Uday from a smiling face into the bloody mangled one popularized in U.S.-issued photographs. And just when you thought it couldn't get worse, it does. In an unabashedly Orientalist faux- Middle-Eastern accent, the doll cries out: "Someone must help me. I . . . I am still alive only I am very badly burned. Anyone! Can someone please call my father? I am in a lot of pain, I am very badly burned so if you could just… (gunshot). You shot me !! Why did you… (3 gun shots)?" (Click here to see it and, while you're there, click on the sound clip for Talking Uday.) In a recent article on war toys at Salon.com, Petra Bartosiewicz noted, "Since 9/11, a new generation of war toys has emerged -- action figures and accessories pegged to U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," and then asked, "Are they harmless patriotic playthings, or a shameless attempt to market combat to kids?" These toys, however, represent primitive means of marketing militarism, clunky methods of a bygone era when a child had to check out war American-style at the local movie theater and then go home and fight battles with toy soldiers on the floor of his room with fortifications made out of any object at hand. Today, the video screen is available to anyone; war play is a controller's button- click away; and the U.S. military is capable of bringing war into a child's home in ways that put action figures and play-sets to shame. Play all that you can play In 2002, the Army launched "America's Army," a training and combat -- they balk at the term "shooter"-- style videogame that it made available online and at recruiting stations free of charge. Developed at the Modeling, Virtual Environment and Simulation Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School with the assistance of such entertainment and gaming industry stalwarts as Epic Games, NVIDIA, the THX Division of Lucasfilm Ltd., Dolby Laboratories, Lucasfilm Skywalker Sound, HomeLAN, and GameSpy Industries, it cost taxpayers some $6-8 million, but was a huge success for the Army. It hit the very youth demographic the Army was targeting for potential recruits as well as their younger siblings. "America's Army" teaches military training, weapons, and tactics by allowing players to "experience" Army life -- from the on-screen "rigors" of boot camp to blasting away at enemy troops. It is now one of the five most popular videogames played on-line, boasting over 2 million registered users. This October, the Army will introduce an update, making the combat simulator even more realistic and introducing the elite U.S. Special Forces ("Green Berets") into the mix. Chris Chambers, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, a former Army major and the deputy director of development for "America's Army" admits that the game is a recruiting tool. However, in response to criticisms that its scenarios of blood, violence, and killing are excessive, he says, "The game is about achieving objectives with the least loss of life." He notes as well that it "doesn't reward abhorrent behavior, it rewards teamwork." To highlight the point, Chambers notes that a player who frags (assassinates) his drill sergeant instantly materializes inside a jail cell. Killing non-U.S. personnel, however, is perfectly acceptable as long as it's done the Army way. The Navy-produced "America's Army" is only the tip of the military's video iceberg. While the game may be a recruiting device masquerading as a toy, there's nothing clandestine about who was involved in its creation. Much less evident is the Army's role in "Full Spectrum Warrior" (FSW) – a videogame for the recently unveiled Microsoft Xbox system that will be released to the public early in 2004. FSW is a realistic combat simulator that allows the gamer to act as an Army light infantry squad leader conducting operations in "Tazikhstan," a fictional nation, nestled between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China. Following the lead of America's present commander-in-chief, the game leaves out all gray areas, casting Tazikhstan firmly within the axis of evil due to its fanatical strongman Mohammad Jabbour Al-Afad, a former guerilla leader of Mujahideen fighters. His "hatred of the western world is well known" and he has turned his nation into "a haven for terrorists and extremists," especially "Taliban and Iraqi loyalists." In short, "Tazikhstan" is a one-stop shop for evil-doers. But FSW is not just any old military-themed video game. It was developed under the watchful eye of military personnel who teach at the Army's Infantry School at Fort Benning, and is actually a revamped version of "Full Spectrum Command," a PC-game/combat simulator used by the military to teach the fundamentals of commanding a light infantry company in urban environments. Thus, unlike other shoot-em-ups that use violent imagery and military themes strictly for entertainment purposes, FSW has been designed specifically as a combat learning tool. So just how did military instructors create a videogame that teaches gamers the fundamentals of Army strategy, tactics, and weaponry? The answer lies in Marina Del Ray, California, at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), a center within the University of Southern California system. ICT is a $45 million joint Army/USC venture begun in 1999, designed to link up the military with academia and the entertainment and video game industries. Full spectrum dominance In addition to creating "Full Spectrum Command" and "Full Spectrum Warrior," ICT is involved in a "full spectrum" of other military projects from "Advanced Leadership Training Simulation" a partnership between ICT and entertainment giant Paramount Pictures designed for training soldiers in crisis management and leadership skills, to "Think Like a Commander…," a collaboration between the US Army, the Hollywood filmmaking community, and USC researchers designed to "support leadership development for U.S. Army soldiers" through software applications. Believe it or not, the Institute for Creative Technologies also draws on the talents of a host of Hollywood's top creative minds to dream up futuristic weapons, vehicles, equipment and uniforms for the Army. Through ICT, production designer Ron Cobb (Star Wars, Aliens, Total Recall) lent his creative skills to a program to design the Army's super soldier of the future, the Objective Force Warrior (OFW). The OFW is to be unlike any other soldier the Army has ever sent into battle, having been "built" from the ground up like other sophisticated weapons systems. The OFW concept relies on constructing an integrated system of weapons, armor, camouflage, and electronics that will monitor a soldier's vitals signs, the outside environment, and an on-board temperature regulation device. Think of it as a first step toward Hollywood's sci-fi dream of the cyborg soldier -- an integrated human/machine combat system that, says the military, will transform a man or woman into a "Formidable Warrior in an Invincible Team." And, owing to its Tinsel-town roots, it looks the part. In June 2003, General Dynamics won the contract to complete "preliminary and detailed design" for the Objective Force Warrior project for $100 million. Yet, even before General Dynamics had its contract, toy-maker Hasbro, perhaps best known for its G.I. Joe line of action figures, had already received the specifications of the OFW concept. Why Hasbro? Perhaps because the Army is reportedly patterning its new quick-loading assault weapons on the design of Hasbro's immensely popular Super-Soaker water gun. The interconnectedness is confusing, isn't it? So let's recap: ICT's Hollywood team put together the concept for the Army super soldier of the future and its video-game corps developed the military simulator "Full Spectrum Command" that has now spawned "Full Spectrum Warrior," a video game produced by the military-entertainment- videogame complex at ICT for Microsoft's Xbox system. And Microsoft isn't just adapting Army video concepts either. It turns out that this sort of "gaming" is a genuine two-way street, for Microsoft is also the core software provider of wearable computers for an Army program now in production, the Land Warrior, a proto-super soldier package to be introduced next year which, just to square the circle, is scheduled to be replaced in the 2010s by the Objective Force Warrior. Microsoft also appears to be embracing the OFW concept, because its futuristic combat game "Halo" features soldiers who look strikingly similar to the Army's future super soldiers. Dropping down an age level, Hasbro may also embrace the Objective Force Warrior concept for its toys as they have evidently been given advanced access to the OFW plans. Whew. Got that? So now from tots to video- playing teens to teen soldiers playing video to soldiers turned into cyborg warriors, we know what "full-spectrum dominance" actually means. Such cooperation -- or is the word "interpenetration"? -- wasn't always the order of the day. Hasbro's video-game line now boasts a tank combat simulation called M1 Tank Platoon 2 that was developed by a company known as Microprose. In the late 1980s, Microprose introduced its predecessor, M1 Tank Platoon, but, for security reasons, its creators were barred by the Army from even setting foot inside an actual tank for research purposes. By 1997, however, the military had seen the light. The Marine Corps inked a deal with a company named MÄK technologies to create the first combat simulation game "to be co-funded and co-developed" by the Department of Defense (DoD) and the entertainment industry. A year later, the Army signed a contract with MÄK to develop a sequel to its commercial tank simulation video game "Spearhead" for use by the U.S. Army Armor School as a training tool and by the Army's Mounted Maneuver Battle Lab for weapon experiments and tactical analysis. The military has been gaming ever since. Children at work, do not disturb In 2001, the DoD pressed another video game "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear" into service to train military personnel in how to conduct small unit military operations in urban terrain. Recently, a sequel to "Rogue Spear," Tom Clancy's "Rainbow Six: Raven Shield," was drafted to test the Army's Objective Force Warrior concepts. Perhaps ICT was a bit put off by the Army's choice of "Raven Shield" over their "Full Spectrum" video games, but it has now hooked up with the CIA to develop a game to help Agency "analysts think like terrorists" according to a recent article in the Washington Times. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield explains, "For out-of-the-box thinking, we are reaching out to academics, think tanks and external research institutes that are critical in the fight against terrorism" -- though a military official derided the project as "a ridiculous and absurd scheme." Of course, the military just might be jealous of the fact that CIA counterterrorism officials who traveled to ICT headquarters were given VIP tours of Hollywood movie studios, or perhaps they're bothered by the way the Agency recently landed television-secret agent Jennifer Garner of ABC's highly rated CIA drama Alias to star in its recruitment videos. Says the CIA's liaison to the entertainment industry Chase Brandon, "If Jennifer ever decides she doesn't want to wear dark glasses of the celebrity status, she can put on dark glasses and be a spy. She's got what it takes." In the meantime, Garner's co-star from the movie Daredevil, Michael Clarke Duncan, is lending his voice to a Sony videogame set to be released this fall, "SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs," produced with the assistance of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command. Not surprisingly, Alias itself, complete with Garner's voice has been turned into a video game (to be released this December). "SOCOM II" and "Alias" will be joined on store shelves in early 2004 by "Kuma War," developed by newcomer Kuma Reality Games in cooperation with the Department of Defense. This is being billed as the first shooter game that will allow players to recreate actual military missions, such as the raid that killed Saddam Hussein's two sons -- with each combat assignment introduced by television footage and a CNN-style news anchor. Like any good military-industrial company, Kuma has linked itself to the military through the Pentagon's revolving door of employment: a retired Marine Corps Major General serves as one of its corporate chiefs. Further, Kuma boasts a board of military veteran advisors "whose job it is to make sure the missions [they] put out are as realistic as possible." But the interaction between the toy industry and the military doesn't end there. Video games are being used not only to train present and future soldiers in Army tactics and concepts, but also to help soldiers learn how to operate other military "toys" with minimal training. Case in point: the Dragon Runner, a small remote-controlled car-like vehicle designed to travel inside buildings and spy for Marines waiting outside. Developed by researchers from the Naval Research Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute working with the Marine Corps' Warfighting Laboratory, the toy-like Dragon Runner is guided by a six-button keypad, modeled after Sony's PlayStation 2 videogame controller. Major Greg Heines, a Marine attached to the Warfighting Lab project, says it was chosen because, "that's what these 18-, 19-year-old Marines have been playing with pretty much all of their lives, [so they] will pick up [how to drive the Dragon Runner] in a few minutes." But perhaps the central player in providing the Pentagon's boys with their high-tech, lethal toys is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Founded in 1958, in the wake of the USSR's Sputnik launch, to make certain that the U.S. was never again caught flatfooted on military-applications technology, DARPA specializes in outside-the-box high-tech projects. It reports directly to the Secretary of Defense and operates "in coordination with, but completely independent of, the military research and development (R&D) establishment." It should come as little surprise then, that MÄK Technologies, Inc, which produced the first Pentagon-sponsored video games and the creators of "SOCOM II" both have a DARPA legacy that stretches back to the 1980s. These days, DARPA is gearing up for a new project that promises to further entwine the various parts of the military-industrial- entertainment complex -- the "Grand Challenge," an off-road race between Los Angeles and Las Vegas by "autonomous ground vehicles" (translation from DARPA-speak: unmanned, self-driving trucks and sport utility vehicles). To the team that wins this March 2004 race, which will take the robotic vehicles over a 250-mile off-road course (the exact route of which won't even be revealed to competitors until two hours before the start of the race) and is mandated to last less than 10 hours, goes $1 million dollars, dreams of future DoD contracts, and the knowledge that they, says DARPA, will be playing "a vital role in helping to shape the future of America's national defense." To all the participating teams, made up of a motley array of "Advertisers and corporate sponsors, Artificial intelligence developers, Auto manufacturers and suppliers, Computer programmers, Defense contractors, Futurists, Inventors, Motor sport enthusiasts, Movie producers, Off-road racers, Remote-sensing developers, Roboticists, Science fiction writers, Technology companies, Universities,[and] Video game publishers" go increased interactions with other key players in the military-industrial-entertainment complex. According to Don Shipley, a DARPA spokesman for the Grand Challenge, the idea behind the race was to "attract fresh thinking on the subject [of creating unmanned combat vehicles and] to get beyond the Lockheeds and the Grummans." But what the contest has actually done is link up big name defense contractors with academic centers, independent inventors, techies, and entertainment professionals. At the race itself, a Cal Tech team, sponsored by Northrop- Grumman, Ford Motor Company, IBM, and ITT, among others, will face off against a team of scientists and engineers dubbed American Industrial Magic, with backing from Hewlett Packard, and a vehicle named after Jennifer Garner's Alias alter ego Sydney Bristow. At a recent competitors' conference for race participants, members of these teams were joined by folks from such defense giants as Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing and Northrop Grumman; entertainment industry types from Indigo Films, Dezart Cinematic, Authentic Entertainment, Sierra Films, and Wired Magazine; techies from firms like CISCO Systems, SoftPro Technologies, Rockwell Scientific, Adobe Systems Inc. and Intel; and representatives from such academic institutions as the University of Michigan, Auburn University, University of Washington and Ohio State University and, of course, government/military players from DARPA, the Air Force and the Naval Surface Warfare Center While helping along the creation of advanced fighting vehicles of a sort that once might only have inhabited movies like Star Wars, the great DARPA race of 2004 is likely to forge yet more complex collaborations among entertainment and high-tech companies, the military, and the older branches of the military-industrial complex, connecting them all in ways that must leave Ike spinning in his grave. With military spending locked in (even without the supplemental requests the Iraq war is sure to inspire) at nearly $400 billion in 2004, with a $10-plus billion videogame industry, a toy industry that brings in $20-plus billion each year, a transnational entertainment and media industry that tops out annually at $479 billion, and with no outcry from the public over the militarization of popular culture, who knows what the future holds? Can the day be far off when DARPA gets a producer credit for an ABC TV combat reality-series and Kuma Reality Games is granted office space in the Pentagon? With the lines between entertainment and war blurring totally, more and more toys are poised to become clandestine combat teaching tools, while an increasing number of weapons are likely to be inspired by toy culture or its makers. What of America's children in all this? How will they imagine the world through the dazzling set of military training devices now landing in their living rooms, crafted by Hollywood and produced by videogame giants under the watchful eyes of the Pentagon? Nick Turse once boasted a collection of G.I. Joe action figures and toy guns. He also played various combat simulators on video game systems and PC's of a bygone era. Today, a graduate student, he devotes much of his time to studying the fall-out of the Vietnam War, especially Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among Vietnam veterans for Columbia University's Department of Epidemiology. Copyright C2003 Nick Turse

Impeach Bush Now
Unmasking a CIA Agent is Bad, Lying to Congress Worse. With Each US Death in Iraq, the Case Against the President Grows Stronger.  by John R. MacArthur
Now that the U.S. government's chief weapons inspector in Iraq has, in effect, confirmed an obvious truth -- that President George W. Bush and his closest advisers promoted a non-existent nuclear and chemical weapons threat from Iraq to justify a war -- an obvious question presents itself: Why aren't Americans talking seriously about impeachment?

After all, Mr. Bush now stands plausibly accused of the lofty crime of subverting the Constitution of the United States -- that is, lying to Congress about an imminent danger to the American people in order to collect enough votes to authorize his corporate/imperial project in Iraq. Yet, outside of a few brave remarks from Senator Robert Graham, and the considered opinion of Watergate stool pigeon John W. Dean, almost nobody dares speak the "I" word.

Is the notion really so preposterous? Reasonable people can disagree about the "intent" of the founding fathers when they wrote the clause that states that "the president . . . shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors."

But one doesn't need to be a constitutional scholar to interpret the meaning of a civil covenant that leaves plenty of room for political maneuver.

Indeed, the genius of James Madison and his colleagues lay not so much in their literal specificity, but in their deliberate ambiguity. Depending on the era and circumstances, one man's high crime is Bill Clinton lying about sex with Monica Lewinsky in front of a grand jury; another's is Richard Nixon's involvement in (and lying about) the Watergate burglary cover up. Lately, my idea of a high crime is lying to Congress, before the authorization for war was voted last Oct. 11 -- a time when the administration was touting an atomic bomb threat from embargo-starved Baghdad.

Those who imagine there might be some "strict constructionist" guide to launching an impeachment should consider Alexander Hamilton's elucidation of the Senate's purview in the event of an impeachment trial. "The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the conduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust," he wrote. "They are of a nature which may with particular propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."

Can there be any greater violation of the public trust than to bear false witness to the people's representatives in pursuit of short-term political gain? Can there be injuries more immediate to society than to send American citizens to their death on a fraudulent pretext? With each shooting of a U.S. soldier in Iraq, the case for impeachment grows stronger.

Until now, most critics of the administration have focused on the President's alleged lie in his January 28th State of the Union address about Iraq's phantom uranium purchases from Niger. Distracted by the current furor over who in the administration leaked the name of Joseph Wilson's CIA-employed wife, the attack dogs are forgetting an important point -- that lying after Oct. 11, the day the Senate passed the war bill -- isn't as politically (or, I suspect, legally) significant as lying before the vote, when the rush to war could have been halted. Anyway, Mr. Bush's alibi -- that the British were the source on Niger "yellowcake" -- is tough to get around, since Tony Blair seems mafia-like in his devotion to lying to protect his friend George Bush.

But look at what Mr. Bush was saying on Sept. 7, 2002 when he appeared at a press conference with Mr. Blair at Camp David. The British Prime Minister had just invoked "the threat from Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, potentially nuclear weapons capability," and added for emphasis "that threat is real." And then, significantly: "We only need to look at the report from the International Atomic [Energy] Agency this morning showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapons sites to realize that."

Mr. Bush took the ball from Mr. Blair and ran for darkness.. In response to the question, "Can you tell us what conclusive evidence of any nuclear -- new evidence you have of nuclear weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Bush replied, "We just heard the Prime Minister talk about the new report. I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."

Well, there wasn't any new report from the IAEA. Nor had there ever been one specifying a timetable for Iraq's acquisition of an atom bomb. A prosecutor could do a lot with that.

And 9/7 was only the start. By the time the congressional resolution was drafted and ready for a vote, Mr. Bush, either personally or through his surrogates, had asserted an al-Qaeda connection with Saddam that didn't exist, and had larded his first lie about the "six months away" menace with all sorts of other A-bomb claptrap, my personal favorite being the attempted purchase of "high-grade" aluminum tubes (they were intended for conventional rockets).

These are big lies. And if Mr. Bush suborned his henchmen to lie on his behalf, as Richard Nixon did in Watergate, it would seem an equally grave crime against the Constitution.

I'm sorry that Senator Graham is such a realist. "The fact is. . .Tom DeLay and the other [Republican] leadership of the House are not going to impeach George W. Bush," Mr. Graham told a TV interviewer in July.But not all the Republican members of the House are so cynical, nor so politically self-destructive. If Mr. Bush continues to fall in the polls, GIs keep dying, and l'affaire Wilson leads to the appointment of a special counsel, the rodents might start fleeing the sinking ship, seeking cover in the vagaries of Article II, Section IV.

Then Mr. Bush's question, "What more evidence do we need?" might finally take on the significance it deserves.

John R. MacArthur is publisher of <?color><?param 0000,0000,FFFF>Harper's Magazine<?/color>.

John Pilger

People's Assembly in London
Stop the War (United Kindom)

I'm making a documentary at the moment to be shown on 22 September and it's
producing some extraordinary information. We found some very revealing
archive footage of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush
gang. In early 2001, visiting Cairo, Colin Powell said, "Saddam Hussein has
not developed any capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He
is unable to project even conventional power against his neighbours. "So in
effect our policies have strengthened the security of the region."
Condoleezza Rice said something very similar at the time.

If you look through all the archive footage, as I've had the dubious
pleasure of doing, it confirms that as far as their public position is
concerned the Bush gang were in no doubt that Saddam Hussein was no threat.
That's true of course. The UN inspectors and everyone else confirmed it. He
was no threat and there was no issue of weapons of mass destruction.

This only arose after 11 September, and gradually. They somehow had to back
up the long-held ambition of the Bush people, particularly those they
euphemistically call the "neo-cons" like Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld had a
meeting of the cabinet on 12 September 2001 and wanted Iraq attacked almost
immediately. That was the strategy. Attack Iraq regardless and find a public
excuse. And of course Rumsfeld has since admitted it. He said while I was in
Washington that there had been no real dramatic change in Saddam Hussein's
posture as far as they were concerned. Wolfowitz said -he didn't use the
word
excuse, well in effect he did- that this was the only excuse they all agreed
on.

Now we have to go through this dreadful charade which is this sham of the
Hutton inquiry. Yes, some things have come out, and yes it's revealed Blair.
But it basically is a sham. It will tut-tut to the BBC, Blair appears to
have got away with it and no high court judge will cross the line and tell
the truth.

Hutton hasn't asked Blair to explain why he went to war. The issues of the
deaths of up to 10,000 people in Iraq has not arisen. The inquiry's virtue
is that it will reinforce the public view that the government are a pack of
liars, they are a pack of warmongers and they deserve only cynicism and they
deserve direct action. I have never known in a reasonably long career in
journalism for the public to be so aware, for their political consciousness
to be so high.

I know my colleagues in the media would like to represent this as a brand of
nihilistic cynicism, something very negative. It isn't negative at all -just
as the fact that people didn't vote Labour in droves in the last election,
the worst turnout in history, was not apathy. It was a strike.

Bush is in trouble. There's no doubt about it. I interviewed a number of the
people around him. When I raised the question of civilian casualties with
one of the super-hawks, a man called Douglas Feith, number three at the
Pentagon, a colonel jumped in front of the camera and said we had to stop
the interview. I pointed out the only time this had happened before is in a
country that didn't call itself a democracy.

I interviewed another one of the other hawks, a man who is very keen to
attack North Korea, whose name is John Bolton. His official title is Under
Secretary of State for Non-proliferation and International Security -very
Orwellian. At the end of the interview in which I challenged most of what he
said, he said, "Hey you must be a member of the Labour Party!" I said, "No,
they are the conservatives in our country." Then he pulled out the old one,
"Then you must be a Communist." The point is that the attack on Iraq is now
a disaster for them. We know it's a disaster for the Iraqi people.

We know because those of us who followed it carefully, who've been to Iraq,
knew that the majority of the Iraqi people had no difficulty keeping two
thoughts in their heads -a vehement opposition to Saddam Hussein and a
vehement opposition to their country being attacked.

The masking of that reality was one of the media projects. It failed because
in the end most people didn't buy it. The greatest demonstration in British
history proved that. The war and occupation are a disaster for Iraq, yes.
But it is grave disaster for the United States and its accomplices. In
Washington the biggest open secret is that the number of American casualties
is much, much higher than they are publicising.

The military hospitals in Washington are all full and overflowing. They are
sending people all over the country -an indication that the numbers of
wounded that are coming back from this war of resistance in Iraq are huge.
Bush in his own terms is certainly in trouble. If Bush is in trouble then so
is Blair. It is not only the situation in Iraq. I have not long ago been to
Afghanistan. And that is what they call a forgotten situation. But it is
unravelling so fast.

More people are being killed and dying at the hands of the clients of Bush
and Blair, that is, the warlords who run the country, than at any time for a
long time. In many of the rural areas people are saying the Taliban were
better. For women in the rural areas, because the Taliban were ideologically
driven, there was a kind of perverse protection applied. Now these warlords,
these monsters, are kidnapping whole communities of women, putting them in
private prisons. The human rights abuses now in Afghanistan are much greater
than they had been even during the Taliban period. We're hearing nothing
about this, but again it is another American disaster.

In both cases, certainly in Iraq, the historical parallel is with the
Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Americans are now caught in Iraq just
as the Russians were caught in Afghanistan. We know the result of that -a
great deal of suffering and bloodshed and a political earthquake that struck
the USSR- not all as a result of Afghanistan but certainly that was one of
the strings.

The same thing is happening to the Americans in Iraq and a version of it is
happening to the Americans in Afghanistan. Of course distracting us from all
these facts is the name of the game. But people are not fooled. The media
talks to itself -the ten o'clock news is a sort of in-house video. They will
now go out of their way to protect Blair. A lot of that is already
happening, before, during and after the attack on Iraq.

But it won't work. You only have to listen to all those people who queued up
to go to listen to the Hutton inquiry and they all regarded Blair's
perfomance as one of a liar.

There is an enormous atmosphere in this country for radical change. You can
compare it with the growing movement against the war in Vietnam. I reported
that war and I remember the growth of the movement being a long, long haul.
The movement has already grown this time. We have the greatest international
anti-war movement in my lifetime. There are two world superpowers -the US is
one, we are the other. That's not just rhetoric, it's true.

I'm sure all of you will understand the ruthlessness of power and how
difficult it is to shift it sometimes. But you also understand that it can
fall over. It is not invincible. Power has been removed by direct action, by
people in the streets, by people not giving up. That is what is going to
happen this time.

Look at the achievements already of the anti-war movement, that incredible
demonstration in London. I was actually in Sydney, where I addressed 500,000
people. I couldn't believe it. That movement didn't go away. It's back. It
is the democratic opposition in country after country. Direct action takes
time, it takes planning. But in the end it will work. It will work in
surprising ways, in undermining the support that stayed with Blair inside
the Labour Party. That support now is on the verge of crumbling. If Bush
comes down in an election next year, that will be a seismic event in the
United States.

One of the interviews I did in Washington was with a man called Ray McGovern
who is a senior CIA cold warrior, a friend of George Bush's father. I asked
him, quoting Norman Mailer, if America had entered a pre-fascist era. I'm
careful about using the word fascist because it's often too rhetorical.

But McGovern said, and this is a man who ran the Cold War, "The only thing I
would disagree with that is that we are not entering it, we're already
there." That is a view shared among those who were, and still are, part of
the American establishment. That's how dangerous they are.

At the same time they are very close to a point of being vulnerable, where
they could be pushed over. That is certainly the case with Blair in this
country. That is why there are so many lies, so much spin, because they fear
public opinion. If they didn't fear public opinion they wouldn't lie so
much.

John Pilger
London

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16749

Who Knew?: The Unanswered Questions of 9/11

By Seth Ackerman, In These Times
September 10, 2003

On July 24, Congress' joint intelligence panel finally released a declassified version of its inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. Described variously in the next day's press reports as "scathing," "damning," "harshly critical," and an "indictment" of White House secrecy, the report detailed a stunning series of failures by the CIA and FBI that led to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

 

No one in the early post-9/11 months, when the panel was born, could have predicted how damaging its findings would eventually prove. Although the committee was established in defiance of the White House – President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney each personally asked Tom Daschle to limit any investigation to the regular intelligence committees – its work got off to an uninspiring start. Its first staff director, Britt Snider, resigned in April 2002 as committee members squabbled over the scope of the investigation. Expectations for the probe were low.

 

But the investigation was transformed a month before its first hearings were set to begin. In May 2002, a string of explosive leaks ignited a public debate over the government's handling of the 9/11 attacks and made the performance of the intelligence agencies a political issue. CBS reporter David Martin revealed that weeks before the attacks, the CIA had warned Bush personally of Osama Bin Laden's intent to use hijacked planes as missiles. That followed the damaging exposure by The Associated Press's John Solomon of a pre-9/11 FBI memo from an officer in Phoenix warning of suspicious Middle Eastern men training at flight schools – a warning that went unheeded.

 

The disclosures rocked the administration. "BUSH KNEW," blared the May 16, 2002 cover of the Murdoch-owned New York Post . A front-page headline in the Washington Post warned, "An Image of Invincibility Is Shaken by Disclosures." Even worse for Bush, the news set off an interagency war of press leaks over who was to blame for the mishaps, with each embarrassing leak from the CIA provoking a defensive counter-leak from the FBI. The result of the battle, which wore on through the summer, was political misery for the White House.

 

By September 2002, Bush was forced to accept the one thing he had been desperately hoping to avoid: an independent blue-ribbon commission into the 9/11 attacks. The commission, as Newsweek put it, may turn out to be "the most far-reaching and explosive government inquiry in decades." Bush agreed to it only after a series of contentious White House meetings with families of 9/11 victims who were outraged over the summer's disclosures. Faced with this powerful new political force, the administration saw no way out. "There was a freight train coming down the tracks," one White House official said. The resulting National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, formally established in late 2002, will not release its final report until May 27, 2004.

 

In the meantime, the 858-page report of the congressional inquiry is the fullest official accounting to date of what went wrong with the government's handling of the 9/11 plot. The picture that emerges from its pages (and from information that didn't make it between its covers) entirely contradicts the administration's initial portrayal of how 9/11 happened: that a group of quietly efficient attackers slipped unnoticed into the United States and blended into an anonymous, open society, leaving the authorities no chance to pick up their trail – what Seymour Hersh, citing a former FBI counterintelligence official, has labeled "the superman scenario." Bush himself encapsulated this view two weeks after the attacks when he said: "These terrorists had burrowed in our country for over two years. They were well organized. They were well planned. They struck in a way that was unimaginable."

 

In reality, Hersh quotes a top CIA official as saying, the plotters "violated a fundamental rule of clandestine operations." Instead of "working independently and maintaining rigid communications security, the terrorists, as late as last summer, apparently mingled openly and had not yet decided which flights to target. The planning for September 11th appears to have been far more ad hoc than was at first assumed."

 

Moreover, the hijackers did not fly under the radar of the intelligence agencies. The agencies, it turns out, did in fact manage to spot – and even monitor – several of the 9/11 hijackers before they carried out the attacks, in some cases long before. Yet for reasons that so far remain a mystery, counterterrorism officials at FBI headquarters and the CIA consistently dropped the ball when it came to apprehending them – sometimes acting in ways that ran counter to standard practice, at times to the bafflement and anger of their colleagues.

 

It's a point that was underlined during a revealing exchange that took place at a recent meeting between senior FBI agents and relatives of 9/11 victims. At the meeting, Kristen Breitweiser, a widow of one of the dead, posed a question: "How is it that a few hours after the attacks, the nation is brought to its knees, and miraculously FBI agents showed up at Embry-Riddle flight school in Florida where some of the terrorists trained?"

 

"We got lucky," was the reply, according to an account of the meeting by Gail Sheehy in the New York Observer.

 

Breitweiser then asked how the FBI had known exactly which Portland, Maine ATM machine would turn up a videotape of Mohammed Atta, the terrorist ringleader. "The agent got some facts confused, then changed his story," Sheehy reports. Finally, he asked Breitweiser: "What are you getting at?"

 

"I think you had open investigations before Sept. 11 on some of the people responsible for the terrorist attacks," she said.

 

"We did not," insisted the agent.

 

Yet that is exactly what the evidence unearthed by the congressional investigators points to. If at one time it seemed as if catching the hijackers prior to the attacks would have been like finding a needle in a haystack – how could anyone have pinpointed 19 covert terrorists among 290 million Americans? – now the right question seems to be how the FBI and CIA failed to catch the terrorists when they were right under their noses.

 

Why Were Hijackers Left Off the Watchlist?

 

A key section of the congressional report tells the puzzling story of a pair of Saudi hijackers who settled in San Diego almost two years before the attacks. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were two of the terrorists aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. In the report's judgment, their story represents "perhaps the intelligence community's best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot."

 

The tale begins in late 1999, when counterterrorism agents working round-the-clock in preparation for the Millennium celebrations got wind that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, who had been connected to the 1998 East Africa bombings, were planning a trip to Malaysia. According to a CIA officer who testified to the committee, "a kind of tuning fork buzzed" when he and his colleagues heard the news. The CIA arranged for Malaysian intelligence to monitor the pair once they landed in Kuala Lumpur on January 5, 2000. Their behavior, CIA Director George Tenet testified, "was consistent with clandestine activity."

 

In Kuala Lumpur, the two men attended a high-level al-Qaeda meeting at the home of Yazid Sufaat, a Malaysian chemist with ties to the bin Laden network. Photographs of the gathering were taken secretly by Malaysian intelligence and transmitted back to CIA headquarters. By that time, the CIA had obtained a copy of al-Mihdhar's Saudi passport, giving the agency his full name, passport number, birth date and other details. The passport showed that al-Mihdhar had a visa, issued at the U.S. consulate in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, giving him the right to enter the United States at any time until the visa expired in April 2000.

 

Yet no action was taken to warn U.S. customs officials. According to Tenet, "We had at that point the level of detail needed to watchlist [al-Mihdhar] – that is, to nominate him to State Department for refusal of entry into the US or to deny him another visa. Our officers remained focused on the surveillance operation and did not do so."

 

It got worse. In March, CIA headquarters received a cable from one of its own overseas stations informing them that shortly after attending the Malaysia meeting, al-Hazmi had boarded a plane and flown to Los Angeles, entering the United States on January 15, 2000. A message addressed to the CIA's bin Laden unit from a different station noted "with interest" the fact that "a member of this group traveled to the U.S. following his visit to Kuala Lumpur."

 

Despite the fact that al-Hazmi was already regarded as a "terrorist operative" by the intelligence agencies, again no action was taken – even though only three months earlier, CIA headquarters had sent a cable to all its bases reminding officers of the importance of watch-listing potential terrorists: Information on suspects need only "raise a reasonable suspicion that the individual is a possible terrorist," the reminder said.

 

It was in January 2001, while investigating the USS Cole bombing, that the CIA managed to identify one of the Malaysian plotters captured on film as Khallad bin Attash, a mastermind behind the Cole attack. "This was the first time that CIA could definitively place al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar with a known al-Qaeda operative," Tenet testified. In May, a CIA counterterrorism officer investigating the Cole case put in a request to dig up the year-old surveillance photos of the Malaysia meeting. He explained in an e-mail that he was interested "because Khalid al-Mihdhar's two companions also were couriers of a sort, who traveled between [the Far East] and Los Angeles at the same time." In other words, as the congressional report explains, "information about al-Hazmi's travel to the United States began to attract attention at CIA at least as early as May 18, 2001" – four months before the World Trade Center attacks.

 

All along, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were living openly in the San Diego area, using their real names on their California driver's licenses and rental agreements. Even more shocking, they had befriended and moved in with a prominent local Muslim leader, Abdussattar Shaikh, who, unbeknownst to them, was a long-time undercover FBI counterterrorism informant in regular contact with a terrorism case officer in the bureau's San Diego office. According to Newsweek , it was such a close encounter that "on one occasion the [FBI] case agent called up the informant and was told he couldn't talk because 'Khalid' – a reference to al-Mihdhar – was in the room."

 

The congressional investigators who prepared the report asked to talk to Shaikh, but, they explained, "the [Bush] Administration and the FBI have objected to the Joint Inquiry's request to interview the informant and have refused to serve a Committee subpoena and notice of deposition."

 

Another associate of the hijackers was Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national living in San Diego. Al-Bayoumi, who fled the country shortly before 9/11, assisted al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi on various occasions. He co-signed their lease and paid their first month's rent and security deposit. According to the congressional report, al-Bayoumi "had access to seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia." In recent months, he has become the focus of intense scrutiny in Washington over his suspected links to Saudi intelligence.

 

On the day of his first meeting with the hijackers, at a Los Angeles restaurant, al-Bayoumi stopped by the Saudi consulate for a closed-door chat. Some law enforcement officials, according to Newsweek, believe he met there with Fahad al Thumairy, a member of the consulate's Islamic and Culture Affairs Section, who was later expelled from the United States for suspected links to terrorism. The congressional report cites the FBI's "best source" in San Diego as saying that al-Bayoumi "must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power." A senior FBI official went further, telling Newsweek: "We firmly believed that he had knowledge [of the 9/11 plot], and that his meeting with [the hijackers] that day was more than coincidence."

 

It was only on August 23, 2001 – three weeks before 9/11 – that CIA officers reviewing their files on the year-and-a-half old Malaysia meeting made a decision to try to track down the Saudi militants. An alert was sent out to the FBI and other agencies to find the "bin Laden-related individuals" al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The search failed.

 

Who Was Watching? Who Was Stalling?

 

Allegations that another key hijacker, Mohammed Atta, was being watched by authorities before 9/11 went unaddressed by the congressional panel. On September 24, 2001, the German newsmagazine Focus reported that Atta, the suspected terrorist ringleader, was under FBI surveillance while he was living in Hamburg during the months before he moved to the United States. Sourced to German police investigators, Focus reported that from January to May 2000, "U.S. agents followed him around the greater Frankfurt area and noted that he made purchases at numerous different drugstores and apothecaries and amassed a substantial amount of chemicals that could be used to construct a bomb." The German Staatschutz, or state security police, were not informed.

 

Like 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser, a German official quoted by Focus was struck by the FBI's amazingly detailed knowledge of Atta's history in the days immediately after 9/11: "Security experts are still dumbfounded, as they were at the time, by the speed with which the FBI was able to make a presentation to [German investigators] laying out the extremely conspiratorial connections between Atta and his alleged Hamburg accomplices. 'It was like all they had to do was push a button,' said one insider. 'It was as if the Americans had already amassed scads of information long before in their database about the perpetrator.'"

 

Particularly strange is that Atta received approval for his visa from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin on May 18, 2000, exactly when, as Focus put it, "his designated agent from the US secret service was observing his suspicious chemical buying." Focus quoted a Staatschutz official who declared: "It can no longer be ruled out that the Americans kept their eye on Atta after his entry into the United States."

 

Perhaps that's not so far-fetched. On June 6, 2002 Knight Ridder revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) was monitoring Mohammed Atta's phone calls while he was in the United States, and translated several conversations between Atta and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks who was apprehended in Pakistan last March. Some U.S. officials said the NSA failed to share the information with other intelligence agencies, though one official told Knight Ridder it was "simply not true" that the information was collected and not shared.

 

Not only are these episodes staggering intelligence failures in their own right, they also illustrate how crucial the FBI's mishandling of a third case turned out to be – that of Zacarias Moussaoui, the supposed "20th hijacker." A French citizen of Moroccan descent, Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges a month before 9/11 after a flight-school instructor in Minnesota, alarmed by his suspicious behavior and large cash payments, called the FBI. John Rosengren, the flight school's director of operations, feared that Moussaoui "could have been a hijacker who could have tried to take an airplane filled with passengers," according to the New York Times . "There was discussion of how much fuel was on board a 747-400 and how much damage that could cause if it hit anything."

 

According to a now-famous whistle-blowing memo from FBI agent Coleen Rowley, the agent who responded to the call "identified [Moussaoui] as a terrorist threat from a very early point." These suspicions, she wrote, "quickly ripened into probable cause, which, at the latest, occurred within days of Moussaoui's arrest when the French Intelligence Service confirmed his affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama bin Laden."

 

The agents became "desperate" to search Moussaoui's personal computer and other belongings. To do this, they needed permission from FBI headquarters to request a search warrant from a judge. Had they been granted a warrant before 9/11, they would have found a treasure trove of evidence. A notebook belonging to Moussaoui contained the phone number of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, the former roommate of Mohammed Atta in Hamburg. Just two weeks before the arrest, Bin al-Shibh had wired money to Moussaoui and twice in the previous year he had wired money to yet another hijacker, Marwan al-Shehhi, in Florida. Agents also would have found a letter from bin Laden operative Yazid Sufaat, whose Kuala Lumpur apartment had been the venue for the January 2000 al-Qaeda meeting attended by al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.

 

But the Minneapolis agents never got their search warrant. "Key FBI [headquarters] personnel," according to Rowley, "continued to, almost inexplicably, throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis' by-now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant, long after the French intelligence service provided its information and probable cause became clear."

 

One FBI supervisor in Washington, Rowley says, "seemed to have been consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents' efforts." He and other officials "brought up almost ridiculous questions in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause." And at one point the official "deliberately further undercut" the search warrant effort by omitting key intelligence information about Moussaoui from a warrant request while "making several changes in the wording of the information" – all of which made it unlikely that the warrant would be approved. One Minneapolis agent described Washington's actions as "setting this up for failure."

 

To obtain a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the FBI must show, according to former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, that a suspect is "a member of or connected to a terrorist organization, that there was reason to believe that he was actively engaged in the aims of that terrorist organization." In off-the-record interviews with reporters, FBI officials in Washington denied that the information from France linked Moussaoui to bin Laden. They claim the data connected Moussaoui only with Islamic rebels in Chechnya, who don't figure on the official U.S. list of "terrorist" groups.

 

But in a pathbreaking investigative report, CBS reporter Scott Pelley traveled to Paris, where he spoke with "a number of sources inside French intelligence" who insisted that France "had reason to connect Moussaoui to the organization of Osama bin Laden." French agents had monitored Moussaoui' s trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan; they believed he met with Abu Jaffa, a top aide to Osama bin Laden; and Moussaoui's name had been placed on a French terrorist watch list. In the words of top French terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, "we gave [the FBI] everything we had."

 

According to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, on the morning of 9/11, as aides rushed over to George Tenet's table at the St. Regis Hotel restaurant to tell him the news of the World Trade Center strike, the CIA director was overheard to say: "I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training."

 

Why Did We 'Back Off' Investigating the Saudis?

 

"Almost everyone's first question was 'Why? Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case?'" Rowley wrote in a footnote to her memo. "Jokes were actually made," she added in an eye-catching aside, "that that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hanssen, who were actually working for Osama bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis' effort."

 

Rowley assumed that careerism, timidity, and bureaucratic inertia at FBI headquarters had simply gotten the better of crime-fighting instincts. So far, that has also been the gist of most of the speculation in the press.

 

But some have alleged that other factors were at work. Several cases from recent years have come to light in which FBI agents complained of being held back by superiors from investigating Islamic extremist groups. In each instance, it was alleged that high-ranking officials acted out of concern that these inquiries could lead back to America's closest Arab ally: Saudi Arabia.

 

"All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization can be found in Saudi Arabia," John O'Neill, the FBI's former top bin Laden investigator, said shortly before his death in the World Trade Center. O'Neill explicitly referred to interference from US policymakers concerned about U.S.-Saudi relations. He "complained that the F.B.I. was not free to act in international terror investigations because the State Department kept interfering," according to a New York Times account of O' Neill's interview with French journalist Jean-Charles Brisard shortly before his death. O'Neill "explains the failure in one word: oil."

 

Last year, the Washington Times reported that in in the mid-'90s, the Clinton administration had "shut down" an investigation of Islamic charities operating in the United States, "concerned that a public probe would expose Saudi Arabia's suspected ties to a global money-laundering operation." Citing law enforcement authorities and others, the Times reported that "the State Department pressed federal officials to pull agents off the previously undisclosed probe after the charities were targeted in the diversion of cash to groups that fund terrorism."

 

In October 2001, in The New Yorker , Seymour Hersh reported on the 1994 defection of a Saudi diplomat in the United States. "He brought with him, according to his New York lawyer, Michael J. Wildes, some fourteen thousand internal government documents" including "evidence that the Saudis had given financial and technical support to Hamas, the extremist Islamic group whose target is Israel."

 

Wildes held a meeting at his office with two F.B.I. agents and an Assistant United States Attorney. "We gave them a sampling of the documents and put them on the table," Wildes told Hersh. "But the agents refused to accept them." In an interview on BBC's Newsnight, Wildes said that the FBI agents wanted to accept the documents, but had been forbidden from doing so by higher-ups.

 

The BBC's Greg Palast said that a "high-placed member of a U.S. intelligence agency" told him that "while there's always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it's gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to 'back off' investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents." The official added that "since September 11th the policy has been reversed."

 

On orders of the Bush administration, a 28-page section dealing with suspected Saudi ties to the 9/11 plot was blacked out of the declassified version of the congressional report. Bush claimed that declassifying the information "would reveal sources and methods" and "help the enemy." But Sen. Bob Graham, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, decried the redactions. "In my judgment there is compelling evidence that a foreign government provided direct support through officials and agents of that government to some of the September 11 hijackers," Graham said. Sen. Chuck Schumer went further: "There seems to be a systematic strategy of coddling and cover-up when it comes to the Saudis."

 

Of course, it may well turn out that all such suspicions about the government's motives are misplaced. Many of the facts about the mishandling of the 9/11 case are perfectly consistent with old-fashioned bungling and incompetence – albeit incredible bungling and staggering incompetence. Somehow it ought to be possible to steer a middle course between wild speculation and cynical whitewash. At both extremes, credulity is a danger. One thing is certain: History keeps surprising us with how venal our national security state can be.

 

What's needed now is more evidence. That blue-ribbon panel has its work cut out for it.

 

Seth Ackerman is a contributing writer to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Research assistance was provided by In These Times intern Daniel Morris.