Live from Austin!

I dreamt I was on Tracy Island. Jeff Tracy wasn’t around, because it was finally his turn to man Thunderbird 5, so I had been left in charge of the boys.

Unfortunately, they had invited Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il to visit the island. Saddam and Jong-il were claiming to be bored, and wanted to play with the Tracy family’s video camcorder. I realized that they actually wanted to record as much information as they could about the Thunderbird craft, so they could use Brains Hackenbacker’s technology to create Weapons of Mass Destruction. So, I had to keep putting them off by claiming I couldn’t find a blank tape and couldn’t find something they could tape over.

Obviously I blame Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

In his trial on the 22nd, Saddam Hussein claimed that he and his co-defendents had been beaten and tortured by US authorities.

You’d think that would be bad enough, that maybe people would start to realize that this whole ‘torture is as American as apple pie!’ thing would come back and bite ‘em on the ass. But there was more.

Reporters then heard one of the guards at the trial telling Taha Yassin Ramadan (former Iraqi vice president) that he was going to give him another beating.

Apparently the exchange was edited out of the TV feed. So this is what passes for American justice these days: torture, beatings, kangaroo courts, and censored trial proceedings.

Why are we bothering with a trial at all? Doing it this way, nobody’s going to believe it’s a fair trial. We might as well just execute the guy and save some time if we’re not going to be serious about justice.

When I first heard that Bush and Rumsfeld had signed off on pro-torture policy documents written by our new Attorney General, one of my first thoughts was: How will they react when American soldiers are tortured by foreign powers?

The answer, amazingly enough, is that they are being consistent. The Bush administration is now fighting Gulf War veterans in court, trying to prevent them from claiming compensation for being tortured by Saddam Hussein. The rationale given is…well, several rationales are given, ranging from the legalistic to the economic, but conspicuously avoiding any discussion of morality. So much for “values”.

I guess Bush and his cronies think torture is no big deal in general—not just when carried out on Arabs. I feel like I ought to at least be glad that everyone tortured at Abu Ghraib is being treated equally badly, whether American or not, but instead I just feel even more horrified. It’s easy to believe that Bush doesn’t give a shit about Iraqis; it’s somewhat harder to accept that he doesn’t give a shit about US veterans either.

The results are in:

The comprehensive 15-month search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has concluded that the only chemical or biological agents that Saddam Hussein’s regime was working on before last year’s invasion were small quantities of poisons, most likely for use in assassinations.

A draft of the Iraq Survey Group’s final report circulating in Washington found no sign of the alleged illegal stockpiles that the US and Britain presented as the justification for going to war, nor did it find any evidence of efforts to reconstitute Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme.

—Guardian

So there we have it. Iraq had no WMD. Those reports on Fox News saying they’d found sarin and mustard gas bombs were just typical Fox News propaganda, it seems. No chemical weapons in mass quantities were actually found, nor were there any factories capable of making them.

I’m sure there are some people who still doubt that Bush decided to attack Iraq immediately after 9/11, in spite of the fact that the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian and Iraq had nothing to do with it at all. So:

PRESIDENT George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.

According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after the strikes using hijacked jets, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror’s initial goal—dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Meyer claims Bush replied: ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.’ Regime change was already US policy.

It was clear, Meyer says, ‘that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn’t be to discuss smarter sanctions’. Elsewhere in his interview, Meyer says Blair always believed it was unlikely that Saddam would be removed from power or give up his weapons of mass destruction without a war.

Faced with this prospect of a further war, he adds, Blair ‘said nothing to demur’.

Details of this extraordinary conversation will be published this week in a 25,000-word article on the path to war with Iraq in the May issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair. It provides new corroboration of the claims made last month in a book by Bush’s former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, that Bush was ‘obsessed’ with Iraq as his principal target after 9/11.

—Observer

I know it’s churlish of me to keep harping on about this, but:

…investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen—combining pox virus and snake venom—that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a “grave and gathering danger” by President Bush and a “mortal threat” by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

[…]

The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s. Kamel, who had married one of Saddam Hussein’s daughters, Raghad, and controlled Baghdad’s Military Industrial Commission, told his Western debriefers about major programs in biological and nuclear weaponry that had gone undetected or unconfirmed. Iraq was forced to acknowledge what he exposed, but neither inspectors nor U.S. officials were sure Kamel had told all there was to tell.

A handwritten Iraqi damage report, composed five days after the defection, now suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out.

[…]

The most significant point in [Hossam] Amin’s letter, U.S. and European experts said, is his unambiguous report that Iraq destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons.

—Washington Post

So Saddam’s brother-in-law, #1 in charge of weapons programs, personally defects and sings like a canary. The story says he told us about “major programs”; what it doesn’t mention is that he told us they were all shut down. However, the government didn’t want to believe him, and we went ahead with the war anyway. Now we discover from the reports of Iraq’s #1 guy in charge of intelligence, that Saddam’s brother-in-law was telling the truth. Well, duh.

George Bush: “We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks.”

US News:

On the evening of February 1, two dozen American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the public case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should—and should not—say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. “I’m not reading this,” he declared. “This is bullshit.”

[…]

Today, the mystery is what happened to Iraq’s terror weapons. “Everyone believed they would find it,” says a senior official. “I have never seen intelligence agencies in this government and other governments so united on one subject.”

Were they right? Powell and Tenet were convinced that chemical agents had been deployed to field units. None have been found. War planners used the intelligence when targeting suspected weapons of mass destruction sites. Yet bomb-damage assessments found that none of the targets contained chemical or biological weapons. “What we don’t know at this point,” says an Air Force war planner, “is what was bad intelligence, what was bad timing, what was bad luck.”

[…]

Senior administration officials say they remain convinced that weapons of mass destruction will turn up. The CIA and the Pentagon reported last week that two trucks seized in Iraq were apparently used as mobile biological weapons labs, though no biological agents were found.

Sydney Morning Herald:

Condoleezza Rice was smart enough to attempt her U-turn weeks ago. According to the US National Security Adviser, WMD bombs, missiles and drones are out. Dual-use technology and just-in-time manufacturing are in. Find a pesticide factory, for instance, and you find a chemical warfare facility. And don’t be concerned about looters. The more the place is trashed, the more difficult will be any dispute about the evidence. More recently, the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, has said publicly that Iraq may have destroyed its WMDs prior to the war.

[…]

This is not to say that Iraq was of no concern or that some WMD-related materials will never be found in Iraq. Iraq had what’s known in the business as a breakout WMD capability in its many dual-use facilities. The Fallujah III castor oil production plant near Baghdad, for example, was, like similar plants elsewhere in the world, suitable for conversion to a ricin toxin factory.

And Iraq, again like many countries including Australia, probably still has stockpiles of potential WMD ingredients – the chlorine needed for clean water, for example, can also be used to make deadly chemical agents.

Moreover, Iraq almost certainly had other WMD-related materials. US claims about mobile biological warfare facilities could yet prove true, though the implication that Iraq’s biological weapons program relied on a handful of trailers tends to confirm the program was limited.

The trailers, and any other finds, will remain irrelevant until scrutinised by independent officials. The same goes for the interrogation reports of former Iraqi scientists, including those now detained in Morocco. With so much at stake, the possibility can’t be ruled out that a zealous coalition official might attempt to tamper with the evidence.

Claims by Iraqis in custody that the WMD program was dismantled before the war could be true, especially if Saddam thought he could survive the war and achieve some sort of moral victory. But that would mean the program must have been much smaller than US assessments. Just as elusive is hard evidence of active co-operation with al-Qaeda. This was always an extraordinary proposition, not least because Saddam was a secular dictator intent on eradicating Islamic fundamentalism.

[…]

One of the major concerns about the war now is the way it will encourage the proliferation of WMDs. America’s adversaries are being encouraged to acquire WMDs to deter US aggression.

From The Washington Post:

The Bush administration has devised a strategy to declare victory in Iraq even if Saddam Hussein or key lieutenants remain at large and fighting continues in parts of the country, officials said yesterday.

If only they’d thought of that idea thirty years ago, Vietnam could have gone down as one of the great American military victories.

Last night on IRC, someone was ranting about how all the peace protests were actually just a front, and that they’d been organized by…

…the Communist Party.

I was told that peace protestors are all brainless dupes who have been fooled by Communist propaganda, and that the main source of propaganda in America is the Workers World Party. Apparently the WWP are the organizers of all the peace protest, and they’re doing it to support Saddam Hussein.

I responded in the only way that seemed appropriate: I said that terrorists were probably responsible for putting fluoride in our drinking water and corrupting our Purity Of Essence, and that I hoped everyone had their tinfoil hats on.