Weapons Of Mass Distraction

Tony Blair The War Criminal Suspect

It seems so long go, yet the ghastly wound the whole Iraq War inflicted not just on Iraq and the Middle East but to our own polity is still suppurating. It's so long ago that it dates back to even before the original entries of this blog. In many ways this blog began amid the rancour in the post-invasion days - what the hell were we doing there'd just how justified was this bit of military adventurism worth? The eventual hanging of Saddam Hussein in 2005 left a bitter after-taste that basically destroyed any pretence that the invasion was anything but the Bush family vendetta against Saddam and his family.

The Chilcot Report has landed and the world is awash with the notion that basically Tony Blair ignored expert advice and took the UK to war with Iraq. The ramification being, he is a war criminal. Certainly the Chilcot Report places him squarely as a suspect, if only the Hague could work up the gumption to sign an arrest warrant that Interpol can then put into action. Of course, Tony Blair is 'defiant'. One imagines that if an arrest warrant is issued by Interpol, the British establishment will tighten the huddle, standing should to shoulder claiming that Heads of States can't be brought to the Hague for War Crimes trials. It sure didn't stop Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic respectively ending up at the Hague so we'll sure see about that one.

Paul McGeough has a pretty good rundown over at the shake-my-head:

The former British Prime Minister earns a rare place in history's crosshairs as one of just two on the planet who might have stopped crazy man Bush – the other being Bush's hapless Secretary of State, Colin Powell. By not restraining the US president, each was an enabler in Washington's worst-ever foreign policy blunder. 

And the Australian PM? Howard's was a bit part, but it was important – as the patsy from Down Under, his eagerness to sign on made it possible for Bush to dress up his miscalculated need to go after Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as an imposing "Coalition of the Willing".

Now the arrogance – Donald Trump would call it stupidity – of this trio, in unleashing their mind-boggling incompetence on the world, is revealed in a damning critique by the Chilcot Report, which was released in London on Wednesday. 

Chilcot can write as he does, because of the exhaustive, forensic nature of his seven years' work – and I can concur because for much of the last 15 years I have seen, first-hand, the brutal impact of their ignorance and indifference, in particular, on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan; and consequentially, on populations great and small, from the Mediterranean all the way to the Hindu Kush.

Chilcot's unambiguous findings include:

• There was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein
• A strategy of containment was preferable to military intervention
• There was no justified certainty to London's judgments on the severity of any threat imposed by Iraq's WMD
• Blair was warned explicitly, but chose to underestimate the consequences of the 2003 invasion
• Planning for managing post-Saddam Iraq was inadequate

In all of Chilcot's 12 volumes that comprise 2.6 million words, just a few hundred words in Blair's "I will be with you, whatever…" letter to Bush are as self-incriminating as they are revealing. 

And there it is, the cat is out of the bag at long last. The world's worst kept secret that was the outrageous conglomeration of pseudo-facts and blurry pictures and underwhelming presentations to the UN that Saddam Hussein was this massive threat with 'weapons of mass destruction'. He didn't exactly have nukes or Fuel-Air Bombs like the Americans, Europeans and Russians did, but he had mustard gas! ("Run for the hills!")

Yes, the Iraqis had mustard gas that they bought from the CIA who organised the German recipe  from World War I so Iraq could use against Iran in chelate 1980s. Of course after the Gulf War, UNSCOM went in to chase him around for them and he kept playing hide-the-sausage with his chemical weapons but ultimately they were found and blown up by Bill Clinton's Operation Desert Fox. Queue the irony because Operation Desert Fox only came about because Bill Clinton was neck deep in the breaking scandal of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. It's oddly ironic that all these years later the Democratic candidate for the POTUS elections this years Hillary Rodham Clinton. The more things change, the more they stay the same. You've been warned, America!

By the time George W. Bush and Tony Blair were pimping this notion that Saddam had really dangerous WMDs, Saddam Hussein's capability to actually use them were too far degraded to be any serious threat. And let's all be honest here; if there was one thing that was proven by the Gulf War, it was how far war technology had come, and if Saddam Hussein wasting to unleash his World War I tech of mustard gas, it sure as heck wasn't going to change the tide of the war. In short, the case of Saddam having WMDs worth calling WMDs were slight at best.
Yet in they went and the rest is history.

When Tony Blair denies culpability, the punchline that springs timing is "he who denied it supplied it." It's a shame the Iraq War is a much, much bigger tragedy than mis-told schoolyard fart jokes.

George W. Bush "Hasn't Read The Report"

Some things never change. George W. Bush has led off his defence with the fact that he hasn't read the Chilcot Report. As if his not reading it somehow invalidates its contents. It's curious how the mind of George W. Bush works to come up with that, but that's what we've got.

In a statement, Bush spokesman Freddy Ford explained that the former president hasn't had the chance to read the Chilcot report and that "despite the intelligence failures and other mistakes he has acknowledged previously, President Bush continues to believe the whole world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power". 

"He is deeply grateful for the service and sacrifice of American and coalition forces in the war on terror. And there was no stronger ally than the United Kingdom under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair," Ford said.

Somehow principle of the law escapes George W. Bush as well as the obvious fact that just because he hasn't read it doesn't mean it's not right. Where do you start explaining this to a functional idiot - even if he was once POTUS?

The years have not been kind to his administration. There is no revisionism that makes his administration look any good. Even Donald Trump is running on the platform that the Iraq War was a bad idea This merely adds the frosting on the cake that was  his terrible two terms as POTUS, an early harbinger for the kind of politics that results in Donald Trump being the GOP nominee. Oh, and Hillary Clinton being the Democratic nominee. We're a morass of stupidity and mendacity, thanks to the slipstream of stupid that GWB created, that is still curdling politics around the world.

John Howard Defends The Indefensible

And this little guy is doing the same, sticking to form, for if there's one thing John Howard is known for is his ability to defend the indefensible, like Pauline Hanson the first time around. So here he is, John Howard defending his decision to go to war.

At the time, Mr Blair said intelligence showed that dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but after the invasion none were found.
Critics of the war have said that amounted to lies, but Mr Howard today disagreed with that assertion. 

"There was no lie. There were errors in intelligence, but there was no lie," he said.
Mr Howard said one of the most relevant findings to come out of the report was that there was no evidence to support claims that intelligence used to justify the war on Iraq had been doctored by Western governments. 

"The joint intelligence committee, which is the broad equivalent in the United Kingdom of the Office of National Assessments in Australia, accepted ownership of the dossier and agreed its content," he said.

The indelicate hair-splitting going on there is John Howard to a tee. The first claim that there was lie and there were errors in intelligence flies utterly in the face of the Chilcot Report. Just blindly insisting that his recollection is different doesn't make the findings exactly ... go away.

It's lovely how he states thing that just fly in the face of the Chilcot Report's salient points.  The Intelligence was there; Andrew Wilkie could tell you all about it.

Mr Wilkie, who quit as a government intelligence analyst in 2003 because of concerns about the invasion, said it had been "the biggest security and foreign policy blunder in our country's history".

He claimed neither the Lindt Cafe siege nor the 2005 Bali bombings would have happened if not for the 2003 Iraq invasion because it had "created the circumstances for the rise of the Islamic State". 

He accused then Mr Howard and former foreign minister Alexander Downer of taking the country "to war on a lie". He added there was a "pretty compelling case" that Mr Howard along with then US president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair had committed war crimes and should face an international court. 

Mr Wilkie called for a full Australian inquiry and vowed to raise the issue with whoever became Australia's next prime minister when election counting has concluded.

Where intelligence wasn't was between the ears of these guys.

Also, here's Paul Keating on John Howard and his denials of culpability:

On Thursday evening, Mr Keating gave a scathing assessment of Mr Howard's justification, saying it was a "stubborn and unctuous denial" that should be "held in contempt by every thinking Australian". 

"Could you imagine the woebetidings of Howard and the Liberal Party, had it been [Bob] Hawke or I who had committed Australia to such an un-mandated assault on another country?" Mr Keating said in a statement. 

"We would never have heard the end of it. The Liberals would have been wringing their hands for decades. 

"The incompetent management of Iraq following the invasion, fractured that country and with it, Syria and the region around it, casting millions adrift from their lives and homes. A sea of refugees. Yet Howard has no shame of it. And no responsibility.
"Howard has visited on Australia the whole spectre of terrorism, through his craven and ill-judged support of the United States and its invasion." 

Mr Keating said Australia was "perhaps the most successful multicultural society in the world", with the settlement of a large Muslim population, but "John Howard put the torch to that". 

"Now we live perpetually with the spectre of terrorism and racial strife, visited upon us by his prejudices and lack of judgment," he said.
"In the face of the Chilcot Report, John Howard should atone for his actions and those of his government. He should, at least, hang his head in shame."

And that would be the least of it. 

'Here, Hold The Leash Lynndie'

For my musical mates and I, if there ever was a moment that politics fractured in the Western World, it would have been under George W. Bush's watch as POTUS. You don't expect the massive political edifice that is the US Government, the UK Government and even the Australian government to jointly descend into a Punch-and-Judy farce to pitch a war to the world. Frankly, we were horrified and appalled.

Which drove us to creative overdrive. The mid-2000s were fruitful with songs. One of which was our take on just how badly the farce went down. The Chilcot Report essentially underlines what were real concerns at the time of the invasion.
So, here's the song by Coelacanth to commemorate that horrible moment history:

That's right. If you look hard enough at the photos, you can almost imagine it. 

The CIA And Its Torture Record

Where Does The Buck Stop With Torture? 

It's always bothered me that the Abu Ghraib prison mess ended up with Lynndie England going to prison and the CIA handlers of the torture got away scot free. If you can't remember, Lynndie England was the poor sod left holding the leash in the photo of some Iraqi prisoner being tortured in Abu Ghraib prison. The way the trial concluded, it essentially placed all the culpability on a PFC with  less than average intelligence. As if it was all her idea.

The hypocrisy of the US Army and government satisfying itself with this outcome and shoving the whole issue under the carpet was one of the horrible little spectacles of the 2000s. Now we're finding out that the US government is atlas willing to form a commission to say the truth - that the CIA regularly tortured people, that the torture did not yield significant information and people responsible for these crimes against humanity have essentially walked free. Rank Hath Its Privileges and all that operating from top to bottom, which dovetails with the way PFC England's trial went.

Even the legal loophole that placed the Guantanamo Bay prisoners out of reach of US civilian courts, or the way 'renditions' were carried out so that the torture took place on foreign soil where torture was accepted indicates a a kind of ethical vacuum where hypocrisy played fast and loose papered over scrutiny and objection. Even now, republican politicians are saying the 'enhanced interrogations' were fruitful and necessary, and that the report is 'hooey'. Is 'hooey' even a proper refutation of anything?

"I declare your augment 'hooey'"
"Well good sir, I guess you got me a good one. Your call of 'hooey' renders all the facts and evidence presented before us meaningless now."
I don't think so Dick.

In light of all that, it's refreshing to see people want those in the highest offices be held accountable for those acts. It would be hard to see the likes of GW Bush, Dick Cheney, Condy Rice and Donald Rumsfeld brought to account for their part in this horrifying chapter in the War Against Terror. The problem is that it is aways so hard to wage a War Against Error. If there were any justice in any of this, the Bush Administration cabal of politicians would land in the dock for their part in presiding over this stuff. The cynic in me doubts it would happen. President Obama is speaking in a neutral tone trying to douse that flame. I guess he's got drone strikes on his record to worry about.

The Euphemisms Suck

Speaking of which... 'Enhanced Interrogation' is one of these euphemisms that make you wonder how much people are willing to screw with words in order to hide meaning. Calling torture 'Enhanced Interrogation' is like describing rape as 'Enhanced Seduction'. The impulse to substitute Latinate words over old Anglo-Saxon ones goes a long way towards making things sound more official and legitimate.

They do this in Asia too, whereby if you want something to sound more official, you dig up ever more obscure Chinese characters to describe things. So it's not a phenomenon unique to English. As a writer of some experience, it's easy to spot that the same trick is being used exactly to enhance authority and enhance legitimacy on something that is at its deepest core dodgy and suspect.

David Hicks Rears His Ugly Head

It didn't take long before the Guantanamo Bay returnee piped up and made himself visible as the victim of torture at Gitmo. After all these years I still find it difficult to be sympathetic, but I do take his point that if they wanted to know if people got tortured by the CIA, they need not have looked too much further than the inmates at Guantanamo Bay base. I didn't believe him when he said he was an accidental bystander, but I did believe him when he said they tortured him and others down in Gitmo.

I've been pondering from where this belief came, and I have to say it seemed obvious that the US Marines might not take too kindly to enemy captives who were suspected terrorists, in the wake of 9/11. It seemed far more unbelievable that such captives wouldn't be tortured in Gitmo. I would even posit and say the least surprising thing is to find confirmation that the CIA used renditions to torture prisoners in third-party nations, during the years straight after 9/11.

All the same I have mixed emotions about David Hicks turning up to confront the world with his experience of torture. Yes torture is bad and never justified, so I'm not going to say he deserved the torture he got but there's still a cloud over how and why Hicks ended up in a war zone with the Taliban to begin with. Most of us who witnessed the Twin Towers come down that day still went to work and we did our thing, discharged our duties and lived proper civilised lives. He - feeling inspired - went to fight with the Taliban (a fact he has tried to downplay since his return).

The disquiet I've always felt with David Hicks is that he won't come clean about that bit, so it's really hard for me to give him a whole lot of moral high ground just because he got captured, sent to Guantanamo Bay and got tortured. Sure torture is a terrible thing and it sucks that it happened to him. Be that as it may, there's a very good reason the vast majority of humanity didn't end up in Camp X-Ray with him - what ever it was that he did that led him to Gitmo, it was an asshole thing to do; and I am a cynic, doing my best not to get fooled again.

From the Mailbag

Some Stuff From Pleiades

Pleiades has sent in a couple of interesting links.
No.1 is interesting, contrarian commentary from Uruknet, which is dare I say some kind of Pro-Saddam English language site in/about Iraq.

The ruling, by Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle -- a long-time right-wing apparatchik -- must be seen to be believed. As Reuters reports:

Government employees who engage in questionable acts, such as abusing prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility or engaging in defamatory speech, cannot be held individually liable if they are carrying out official duties, the court said.

"The conduct, then, was in the defendants' scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States," Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in the opinion.

WP's excellent analysis of the ruling and its implications should be read in full. But here is a taste, from his conclusion:

So let's recap, shall we? A Federal court has ruled that some of the highest officials in our government are not accountable for their acts of treason, mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity -- not because they were following orders (for surely some of them, especially Karl Rove and Dick Cheney [photo], were giving the orders); not because they thought they were doing something righteous or Blessed by God; but simply because they held positions in the United States government -- regardless of the fact that these actions violated the most serious federal and international laws, regardless of the fact that they all knew their actions were deeply illegal, and regardless of the fact that they were never legitimately elected to those government positions in the first place -- or legitimately re-elected in the second place.

Furthermore, the court decrees, this immunity applies not only to the principals in this case but to all manner of American government officials committing all manner of horrific crimes -- including torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Did you get that? Do you finally get it now?

And these are the people who preach to the world about democracy and freedom and rule of law.

Well, maybe. The guy I work for likes to say "Sucks to be you!" when ever he gets his way over other people. I think it's a descendant of the Thucydides notion that the strong do as they do and the weak can only deal with the strong in the capacities which they can.

No.2 is the actual source quoted in the article. I think the point is this:

It is interesting -- and horrifying! -- to note that this decision ventures well beyond the "just following orders" defense which was used by the Nazi war criminals and found wanting at Nuremberg.

It even goes beyond the "divine right of government officials" long desired by the Dominionists of the allegedly "Christian" so-called "Right". At least under the proposed "Constitution Restoration Act", government officials would have to claim they believed they were carrying out the will of God in order to be absolved of their crimes.

Now, at best I'm not big on War Crimes Tribunals - On bad days I think they are a bad joke. I mean, hanging Saddam or Milosevic or Karadzic is just so little compensation for the vast pain and suffering they visited upon ordinary people. trying them makes us feel better as it serves to make it look like justice is being served but it's always just a political front - And then to kill them in a kangaroo-court-sanctioned execution is pathetically inadequate. They can only pay with one death for millions. Calling it justice is an insult to the idea of justice. But that's just me.

So Thucydides is right. The strong do as they do. The rest of the world just has to deal with it in the ways that they can.