Envoy’s Letter Counters Bush on Dismantling of Iraq Army

Envoy’s Letter Counters Bush on Dismantling of Iraq Army

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: September 4, 2007

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — A previously undisclosed exchange of letters shows that President Bush was told in advance by his top Iraq envoy in May 2003 of a plan to “dissolve Saddam’s military and intelligence structures,” a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.

Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been “to keep the army intact” but that it “didn’t happen.”

The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents. In releasing the letters, Mr. Bremer said he wanted to refute the suggestion in Mr. Bush’s comment that Mr. Bremer had acted to disband the army without the knowledge and concurrence of the White House.

“We must make it clear to everyone that we mean business: that Saddam and the Baathists are finished,” Mr. Bremer wrote in a letter that was drafted on May 20, 2003, and sent to the president on May 22 through Donald H. Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense.

After recounting American efforts to remove members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein from civilian agencies, Mr. Bremer told Mr. Bush that he would “parallel this step with an even more robust measure” to dismantle the Iraq military.

One day later, Mr. Bush wrote back a short thank you letter. “Your leadership is apparent,” the president wrote. “You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence.”

On the same day, Mr. Bremer, in Baghdad, had issued the order disbanding the Iraqi military. Mr. Bush did not mention the order to abolish the military, and the letters do not show that he approved the order or even knew much about it. Mr. Bremer referred only fleetingly to his plan midway through his three-page letter and offered no details.

In an interview with Robert Draper, author of the new book, “Dead Certain,” Mr. Bush sounded as if he had been taken aback by the decision, or at least by the need to abandon the original plan to keep the army together.

“The policy had been to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” Mr. Bush told the interviewer. When Mr. Draper asked the president how he had reacted when he learned that the policy was being reversed, Mr. Bush replied, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, “This is the policy, what happened?’ ”

Mr. Bremer indicated that he had been smoldering for months as other administration officials had distanced themselves from his order. “This didn’t just pop out of my head,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday, adding that he had sent a draft of the order to top Pentagon officials and discussed it “several times” with Mr. Rumsfeld.

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House is not commenting on Mr. Draper’s book, said Mr. Bush indeed understood the order and was acknowledging in the interview with Mr. Draper that the original plan had proved unworkable.

“The plan was to keep the Iraqi Army intact, and that’s accurate,” the official said. “But by the time Jerry Bremer announced the order, it was fairly clear that the Iraqi Army could not be reconstituted, and the president understood that. He was acknowledging that that was something that did not go as planned.”

But the letters, combined with Mr. Bush’s comments, suggest confusion within the administration about what quickly proved to be a decision with explosive repercussions.

Indeed, Mr. Bremer’s letter to Mr. Bush is striking in its almost nonchalant reference to a major decision that a number of American military officials in Iraq strongly opposed. Some senior administration officials, including the secretary of state at the time, Colin L. Powell, have reportedly said subsequently that they did not know about the decision ahead of time.

Gen. Peter Pace, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in February 2004 that the decision to disband the Iraqi Army was made without the input of the joint chiefs. “We were not asked for a recommendation or for advice,” he said.

The reference from Mr. Bremer’s note to Mr. Bush is limited to one sentence at the end of a lengthy paragraph in a three-page letter. The letter devoted much more space to recounting what Mr. Bremer described as “an almost universal expression of thanks” from the Iraqi people “to the U.S. and to you in particular for freeing Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny.” It went on to recall how Mr. Bremer had been kissed by an old Iraqi man who was under the impression that Mr. Bremer was Mr. Bush. In his 2006 memoir, Mr. Bremer said he had briefed senior officials in Washington on the plan, but he did not mention the exchange of letters with Mr. Bush.

On Monday, Mr. Bremer made it clear that he was unhappy about being portrayed as a renegade of sorts by a variety of former administration officials.

Mr. Bremer said he sent a draft of the proposed order on May 9, shortly before he departed for his new post in Baghdad, to Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials.

Among others who received the draft order, he said, were Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense; Douglas J. Feith, then under secretary of defense for policy; Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, then head of the American-led coalition forces in Iraq; and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Bremer said that he had briefed Mr. Rumsfeld on the plan “several times,” and that his top security adviser in Baghdad, Walter B. Slocombe, had discussed it in detail with senior Pentagon officials as well as with senior British military officials. He said he received detailed comments back from the joint chiefs, leaving no doubt in his mind that they understood the plan.

“I might add that it was not a controversial decision,” Mr. Bremer said. “The Iraqi Army had disappeared and the only question was whether you were going to recall the army. Recalling the army would have had very practical difficulties, and it would have political consequences. The army had been the main instrument of repression under Saddam Hussein. I would go on to argue that it was the right decision. I’m not second-guessing it.”

General McKiernan reportedly felt unhappy with Mr. Bremer’s plan to slowly build a new Iraqi Army from scratch, as were other American officers. In his farewell meeting with Mr. Bremer in June 2003, he urged him to “go bigger and faster” in fielding a new military.

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting.

Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11

Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11
Published: 25 August 2007

Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the "raver". Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a "raver".

His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don't you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We disrupted al-Qa'ida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer" in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

Also in this section

• Robert Fisk: The Iraqis don't deserve us. So we betray them...
• Robert Fisk: We admire those who went before us
• Robert Fisk: Looking back at Lebanon
• Lebanese militants vow to take battle outside camp
• Robert Fisk: Lebanese strike a blow at US-backed government

The Iran Attack That Wasn't

The Iran Attack That Wasn't
How reporters trumped up a story about Iranians killing Americans in Iraq
Gareth Porter
August 2, 2007

On July 2 and 3, The New York Times and the Associated Press, among other media outlets, came out with sensational stories saying that either Iranians or Iranian agents had played an important role in planning the operation in Karbala, Iraq last January that resulted in the deaths of five American soldiers. Michael R. Gordon and John F. Burns of The New York Times wrote that "agents of Iran" had been identified by the military spokesman as having

"helped plan a January raid in the Shiite holy city of Karbala in Iraq in which five American soldiers were killed by Islamic militants …"

Lee Keath of the Associated Press wrote an even more lurid lead, asserting that U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner had accused "Iran's elite Quds force" of having

"helped militants carry out a January attack in Karbala that killed five Americans."

The story was a big break for the war-with-Iran faction in Washington. Within hours, Sen. Joe Lieberman issued a press release saying that the Iranian government "has declared war on us." That set the stage for the unanimous passage the following week of his amendment stating that "the murder of members of the United States Armed Forces by a foreign government or its agents is an intolerable act of hostility against the United States," and demanding the government of Iran "take immediate action" to end all forms of support it is providing to Iraqi militias and insurgents.

No one questioned the authenticity of the story at the time. But the official source -- Brig. Gen. Bergner -- offered no real evidence of Iranian involvement in planning the January attack in his press briefing on July 2. Even more remarkably, Bergner never even explicitly claimed such direct Iranian involvement in the planning. Instead, he used carefully ambiguous language that implied but did not state such an Iranian role.

It was not Bergner, in fact, but New York Times military reporter Michael Gordon who articulated the narrative of an Iranian-inspired attack on Americans. Gordon, readers may recall, played a key role, along with Judith Miller, in legitimizing a major theme of the Bush administration's Iraq propaganda -- the infamous aluminum tubes argument -- as the White House Iraq Group kicked off its campaign to prepare public opinion for war in September 2002. And in February 2007, Gordon enthusiastically embraced the administration's charge of official Iranian arms exports to Iraq in his coverage of that issue, despite a notable lack of evidence for the charge.

But at the Bergner press briefing on July 2, Gordon went even further in playing the role of transmission belt for the Bush administration line. The transcript of that briefing, obtained from the U.S. military command press desk in Baghdad, shows that when Bergner failed to claim a direct Iranian involvement -- or even through a Hezbollah operative in Iraq -- in the planning of the January raid in Karbala, Gordon pushed him to state clearly that the Iranians not only helped plan but actually "directed" the attack on Americans.

What Bergner said in his prepared statement was that both Hezbollah operative Ali Musa Daqduq, who was in liaison with the militia group which carried out the attack, and Kais Khazali, the Iraqi said to have been in charge of the group -- both of whom had been captured on March 22 -- "state that senior leadership within the Qods Force knew of and supported planning for the eventual Karbala attack …"

Using such indirect language -- "knew of and supported planning" -- is a far cry from claiming actual participation or assistance in planning the attack. Bergner gave no indication of when or how the Iranian Qods Force might have learned about the attack plans, for example, or how much they might have known about them. That vagueness implied that the prisoners had not implicated Iran in the planning of the operation.

Bergner also said Daqduq "contends that the Iraqi special groups could not have conducted this complex operation without the support and direction of the Qods Force." That statement was ambiguous: it could be interpreted as referring to support and direction of the Karbala operation, but if Bergner meant to flatly state that there was such "direction" of the operation from Iran, why would he have attributed such indirect language to the same prisoner?

These statements seem to be a deliberate tease by Bergner, who provided neither complete transcripts of the interrogations nor quotations from the prisoners.

Although Bergner provided a number of details in the briefing about Hezbollah training of Shiite militia groups in Iran, including the number of sites, their location, and the number of militiamen trained at any given time, he did not claim that the specific group in question had been trained by Hezbollah, either in Iran or anywhere else. And he stated that the attack was authorized not by the Hezbollah cadre or by the Qods Force, but by the group's Iraqi chief, Kais Khazali.

Bergner's failure to refer explicitly to an Iranian or Hezbollah role in the actual planning of the attack prompted Gordon to help formulate the story for the spokesman. "What's new here, as I understand it," said Gordon during the briefing, "is that you're asserting the Qods Force and the Iranians had specific knowledge of this attack in advance and helped guide and support it, not merely train the force." He then prodded Bergner to say that the purpose of Iranians was to try to "capture these American soldiers in the hope of trading them for the detained Iraqi officials."

Bergner refrained from addressing Gordon's restatement of the story as Iranian help and guidance of the January attack. Instead he responded to Gordon's thesis about the objective of the Karbala operation, saying, "The specific motivations behind these operations that I described, we're still learning more about that."

Frustrated by Bergner's unwillingness to be specific, Gordon pushed him once again. "But you're asserting essentially that the Qods Force directed and helped plan this attack in Karbala," he insisted.

Bergner responded, "That is what we learned from [K]ais Khazali," and said nothing more on the subject. If Bergner’s earlier failure to use such precise language had been due merely to incompetence, one might have expected him to take advantage of Gordon’s prompting to state the story more forcefully and even elaborate on it. But his use of the indefinite "that" and his failure to volunteer anything further indicate that Bergner was not prepared to be quoted as making an explicit allegation of direct Iranian -- or Hezbollah -- involvement in planning the Karbala raid – even though he did not discourage reporters from writing the story that way.

Another indication that the command had no evidence of Iranian involvement in the attack was the statements of the top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, on the issue in an April 26 press briefing. Petraeus had referred to a 22-page memorandum captured with the Shiite prisoners that he said "detailed the planning, preparation, approval process and conduct of the operation that resulted in five of our soldiers being killed in Karbala." But he did not claim that either the document or the interrogation of Khazali had suggested any Iranian or Hezbollah participation in, much less direction of the planning of the Karbala assault.

Later in that briefing, a reporter asked whether Petraeus was "saying that there was evidence of Iranian involvement in that [Karbala] operation?" Petraeus responded, "No. No. No. That -- first of all, that was the operation that you mentioned, and we do not have a direct link to Iranian involvement in that particular case."

At the time Petraeus made this statement, Khazali, the chief of the militia group that had carried out the attack, had been in U.S. custody for more than a month. Despite nearly five weeks of intensive interrogation of Khazali, Petraeus's comments would indicate that U.S. officials had not learned anything that implicated Iran or Hezbollah in the planning or execution of the Karbala attack

The raid on the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center on Jan. 20 was a serious embarrassment for the Bush administration. Some 30 gunmen traveled in a convoy of at least seven SUVs with tinted windows, just like those driven by top U.S. military officials, wearing uniforms similar to those worn by the U.S. military. By flashing fake identification cards, they gained access to the compound through three different checkpoints without a security screening.

Soon after the attack, U.S. officials speculated that it had been carried out by Iranians or "Iranian-trained operatives," arguing that it was "beyond what we have seen militias or foreign fighters do." Officials suggested that the raid -- coming a little over a week after Iranian officials had been seized by U.S. forces in Iraq -- was aimed at exchanging American prisoners for those Iranians. But it was also reported that some officials had concluded that it was an "inside job," which could not have been undertaken without help from someone working within the camp.

The revival of the charge of Iranian involvement in the Karbala attack, despite the earlier Petraeus denial, has the all the hallmarks of a White House decision. The alleged Iranian export of arms to Iraqi Shiites, on which the U.S. command briefed the media in Baghdad in February, reflected the administration's decisions in the preceding months to hold Iran responsible for the killing of U.S. troops in Iraq with armor-piercing explosives. After the replacement of the top commander in Iraq with a general who had pledged to carry out the surge strategy chosen by the White House, and the June arrival of a new U.S. command spokesman in Baghdad -- Gen. Bergner -- who had been special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq, the command’s briefings were tied more closely to the White House propaganda machine than ever before.

But the success of this media operation also depended on journalists who would fill in the blanks cleverly left open by Bergner with their own imagination. As the transcript of the briefing shows, Michael Gordon was not just a passively recording the line presented by the administration. He was actively pushing the sensational -- and unsubstantiated and highly suspect -- story of "Iranians killing Americans" that would then become a mantra of the war-with-Iran crowd.

Gareth Porter, a historian and journalist, writes regularly on U.S. policy in Iran and Iraq for Inter Press Service. His most recent book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005).

The Birth of a Torture Program

The Birth of a Torture Program

Jane Mayer reveals how government torture programs come to be.

by Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, Aug. 6, 2007, at 7:24 PM ET


There are two ways to think about the Bush administration's willingness to torture prisoners in the wake of 9/11.

• One is the story we were sold after we learned about Abu Ghraib: A few "bad apples" at the lowest levels of the military went a little crazy and tortured some prisoners on their own initiative, for which (some) were duly punished.
  
• The second is confirmed in a new and devastating piece of investigating by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer: A systematic and rigorous program of highly abusive interrogation was approved at the highest levels of government at so-called "black sites" around the world. This second version of the national torture story reveals not so much the bad apples as a profoundly diseased tree.

Mayer's piece is important enough to warrant reading in its entirety. President Bush's recent executive order purported to lay out the boundaries of legal detention and interrogation but in fact left enormous gaps as to what is defined as permissible, making questions about who can do what to extract information from whom less than academic. What is devastating about Mayer's report is the sense that everyone along the way was willing to sign off on this program of state-sanctioned abuse, without evidence of its efficacy, either because the White House was bearing down and demanding more information, or because nobody could come up with a better torture system on short notice.

Mayer describes a Red Cross report on the black sites that has been kept quiet (the Red Cross is afraid of forfeiting access to other prisoners). The report evidently characterized the

"agency's detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture" and found that "American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes."

The most striking aspect of Mayer's report is the extent to which the interrogators who invented the torture program at these black sites did so almost wholly on the fly: While the abuse itself may have been rigorous and systematic, apparently no rigorous or systematic thought was given to the larger program, which seems to have been cobbled together from the greatest hits albums of torture regimes past and present. According to Mayer, since the CIA had almost no trained interrogators, they simply mined Vietnam-era torture programs; practices borrowed from Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia; and the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program that had been created during the Korean War. That the SERE was designed to teach American captives to resist torture, not as a system of interrogation in itself, was apparently immaterial.

---

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Another contrast between the abuse at the black sites and at Abu Ghraib? The cold, precise way in which this rigid system was administered. In one striking passage, Mayer quotes an outside expert familiar with the interrogation protocol saying that

"at every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you've heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process."

A system ostensibly designed to elicit information seems to have become a program designed merely to break detainees. Mayer details cavity searches, caging, nakedness, prolonged sensory deprivation, suspension from one's arms, waterboarding, and sleep deprivation as part of the larger program. One of the most haunting images is of desperate prisoners driven to attempt suicide and repeatedly being stitched up by doctors in order to be abused some more.

The governing CIA objective here, "learned helplessness," required that prisoners be humiliated and disoriented and broken. As Mayer points out, this was goal of the KGB model. But the purpose of the KGB was to obtain false confessions, she adds, not good intelligence. Where was the evidence that systematically breaking down and degrading prisoners leads to accurate information?

The most damning part of this damning article comes at its conclusion, when Mayer explains that, following years of brutal interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, it remains entirely unclear which parts of his voluminous confessions are true and which were fabricated—either to end his abuse or to inflate his ego. According to Mayer,

"cables carrying Mohammed's interrogation transcripts back to Washington reportedly were prefaced with the warning that "the detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead."

In Mayer's hands, the story of our torture program becomes the story of interrogators driven to do anything to elicit information—be it truthful or not—and the doctors, lawyers, and scientists who signed off without question on the banal day-to-day abuses that were put into practice to achieve that end.

In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, President Bush expressed horror at what he characterized as the "abhorrent" practices there; promising the world that,

"those mistakes will be investigated and people will be brought to justice."

The question Bush, Cheney, CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, and others must now be pressed to answer is how the "abhorrent" practices at Abu Ghraib differed from those that allegedly happened at the black sites and whether the only difference between abusive and permissible interrogation is the existence of a formal government program.

jurisprudence: The law, lawyers, and the court.

Bumbbling Bush and his stooges.

You tube has so many items of bush and his cronies.Or is that phonies?
That it should be made into the official archival site for the history of the fall of America.

clipped from www.youtube.com

The ongoing journalistic scandal at the New York Times

The ongoing journalistic scandal at the New York Times

Monday July 9, 2007 06:50 EST
Glenn Greenwald

Following up on yesterday's post, I want to return to the topic of Sunday's column by NYT Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, because the more one thinks about it, the more extraordinary it is. It is really a watershed moment for revealing what our media is and what role it plays.

The profound (and confessed) journalistic failures of the NYT in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq is, without question, one of the worst scandals in that paper's history -- perhaps its worst. At exactly the time when journalistic skepticism was needed most, as our country debated whether to invade another country which had not attacked us, the Times allowed itself to be completely manipulated by the government and/or eagerly participated in its propaganda campaign, obediently reciting the government's false claims on its front pages and selling this war to its then-trusting readers.

The Times itself has been forced to acknowledge these failures and solemnly insists that it has learned, and taken to heart, the important lessons about the need for skepticism when it comes to government claims about war. Back in February, when Michael Gordon's gullible, government-reliant reports about Iran's actions in Iraq prompted a tidal wave of blogosphere-generated (and FAIR-generated) reader complaints, then-Public Editor Byron Calame spoke with NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller about these complaints:

The situation [of the Times' reporting on Bush's claims about Iran] closely parallels the pre-war period when The Times prominently reported that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Deeply shamed when they were not found, the paper publicly acknowledged that its coverage had been "insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged."

Times editors clearly were mindful of the W.M.D. coverage as they pursued the Iranian weapons issue. "W.M.D. has informed everything we've done on Iran," Bill Keller, the executive editor, told me three days after the Baghdad briefing. "We don't have to tell the reporters to be as skeptical as possible. W.M.D. restored a level of skepticism."

But Hoyt's column yesterday demonstrates that exactly the opposite is true. The Times is still doing exactly what it did before the invasion of Iraq -- the activities that supposedly brought it such "shame" -- and in many cases, it is exactly the same people who are doing it.

Just consider what Hoyt's criticisms yesterday mean. These criticisms apply not only to one article, but rather, to a whole series of articles. The criticisms concern not some obscure topic or isolated special report, but rather, the single most important political and journalistic issue of this decade -- the war in Iraq and the American media's coverage of government claims about that war.

And most significantly of all, Hoyt's criticisms are grounded not in a technical violation of some petty rule or failure to adhere to some debatable journalistic custom, but rather,involve the worst journalistic sin of all: namely, a failure to treat government claims with skepticism and a willingness mindlessly to recite such claims without scrutiny. If a newspaper simply prints government claims without skepticism, what remote value does it have other than as a propaganda amplifier? None. And yet, as Hoyt's column potently demonstrates, that is exactly what the NYT is doing in Iraq -- yet again.

In light of all of this, what rational argument can be mounted in response to the claim that the NYT is simply not interested in practicing real journalism when it comes to the Bush administration's actions in Iraq, or worse, that at least some editorial factions at the Times support the war and want to prop up the administration's political case? What other explanation is possible in light of the clear, lengthy record of the newspaper?

Just consider the record of Michael Gordon -- who, I want to stress, is not personally the problem but merely the most vivid manifestation of the ills of American political journalism. Based exclusively upon what has appeared in the Times itself -- thus excluding all external criticisms of his reporting -- this is Gordon's record of shame over the last four years:

* A May 26, 2004 NYT Editors' Note identifies several articles written or co-written by Gordon about the Bush administration's pro-war Iraq claims and says about that reporting "that it was not as rigorous as it should have been"; that the war-fueling case "was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged"; and the reporting was flawed because "Administration officials were allowed to hold forth at length" with virtually no challenge or dissent.

* On January 28, 2007, NYT Public Editor Byron Calame reports that "Times editors have carefully made clear their disapproval of the expression of a personal opinion about Iraq on national television by the paper's chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon," in which Gordon expressed clear support for President Bush's "surge" plan. The Times Washington Bureau Chief, Philip Taubman, said that Gordon "stepped over the line" by admitting that he supported escalation in Iraq.

* On February 27, 2007, Calame gently though clearly criticized an article by Gordon written about the Bush administration's "saber-rattling about Iranian intervention in Iraq" (and other articles on the same topic) on the ground that (a) Gordon's article violated the paper's rules on the use of anonymous government sources; (b) the reported government claims about Iran "needed some qualification" about whether they were based on evidence or inference; (c) readers "deserved a clearer sense" of whether such a belief about the Iranian leadership's involvement in Iraqi insurgent attacks is shared by a consensus of intelligence officials (which, as even the President subsequently admitted, it was not); and, most incriminatingly (given its obvious similarity to Gordon's pre-war failures), (d) "editors didn't make sure all conflicting views were always clearly reported" and the "story also should have noted . . . that the president's view on this point differed from the intelligence assessment given readers of [Gordon's] Feb. 10 article."

* Hoyt's column yesterday identifies a series of articles about Iraq, many written or co-written by Gordon, which "slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda's role in Iraq," and further criticized the articles because "in using the language of the administration," these articles presented a misleading picture of Iraq.

Does anyone at the NYT really need help seeing the clear pattern here? What more does Gordon need to do in order to show how journalistically irresponsible he is, how either incapable or unwilling he is to treat Bush administration claims about the war with scepticism and do anything other than serve as an obedient vessel for pro-war government claims?

This is a disgraceful record that continuously exhibits the same journalistic sins and the same exceedingly transparent pro-war, pro-Bush bias, not just bias that Gordon harbours personally but bias which time and again permeates his "reporting." And again, this is the record as established by the Times itself. There are countless other instances where Gordon does this that do not make it into the pages of his newspaper, but which are nonetheless egregious.

And yet, the Editors of the NYT continue not only to make Gordon their featured star reporter when it comes both to Iraq and related stories about Iran, but also to approve of the same defective, corrupt journalistic methods that are his hallmark. The deficiencies in his reporting are not complex or hidden. They are all right there out in the open, easy to see. All one has to do is read Gordon's articles and it is immediately apparent that, time and again, they do nothing other than recite highly questionable and highly inflammatory claims from the military and the Bush administration, and he conveys them with no meaningful question, challenge, dissent, or qualification.

And he does this not once, but over and over. This is exactly what the NYT claims to be so ashamed of its having done prior to the war, and yet it so plainly continues to do it, four years later -- in the form of the same reporter and likely the same editors. After all, as Hoyt's column demonstrate, it is not just Gordon who is guilty of these failures. If bloggers can see it, and Hoyt sees it, isn't it safe to assume that the editors who approve of these articles see it, too? How can they not?

There is important and revealing symbolism in having these criticisms voiced in the NYT by Hoyt. As blogger and journalist Joe Gandleman, who worked briefly with Hoyt, notes, Hoyt has one of the most impressive resumes in modern journalism -- including his work at McClatchy, which exhibited the requisite scepticism of Bush's pre-war claims exactly at the time when the NYT, along with most of our establishment press, so notably -- and so destructively -- failed to do so.

And it bears emphasizing how obvious, basic and long-recognized are the dangers posed when journalists fail to subject government claims -- especially about war -- to real scepticism. In 1994 -- on the 30-year anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that spawned the escalation of the Vietnam war -- journalists Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon documented the role of the shoddy reporting by the American media, tragically led by the NYT, which enabled the government to perpetuate false claims about that incident:

Thirty years ago, it all seemed very clear.

"American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression", announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.

That same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: "President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and 'certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam' after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin."

But there was no "second attack" by North Vietnam -- no "renewed attacks against American destroyers." By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.

A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media...leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties. . . .

An exhaustive new book, The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam, begins with a dramatic account of the Tonkin Gulf incidents. In an interview, author Tom Wells told us that American media "described the air strikes that Johnson launched in response as merely `tit for tat' -- when in reality they reflected plans the administration had already drawn up for gradually increasing its overt military pressure against the North."

Why such inaccurate news coverage? Wells points to the media's "almost exclusive reliance on U.S. government officials as sources of information" -- as well as "reluctance to question official pronouncements on 'national security issues.'"

Just read Hoyt's column from yesterday, along with much (though not all) of the reporting on Iraq over the last year by Gordon and the NYT, and see if there is a single material difference between what happened then, what happened in 2002-2003, and what is happening now. There is none.

It is hard to imagine a bigger or more important journalistic scandal than the one highlighted yesterday by the Times Public Editor -- namely, the NYT continues, systematically, to engage in precisely the same gullible, government-worshipping reporting about Iraq that it engaged in prior to the invasion, perpetuated by some of the same reporters and approved (presumably) by some of the same editors, despite how transparent and severe are the journalistic sins. Contrary to its solemn assurances, the Times obviously has learned nothing -- or, if it has learned anything, it is consciously disregarding those lessons.

Three years after Judy Miller's departure from that paper, the newspaper's own Public Editor has scathingly pointed out what is glaringly obvious in plain sight -- the defining practices of Judy Miller (blind, uncritical trust in the government's and military's sources) continue to shape and dominate much of the paper's coverage about Iraq and issues related to Iran. Judy Miller, like Michael Gordon, was but a symbol, an extreme expression, of a rotted journalistic system still in place at the Times and most other establishment media outlets in this country.

That her co-writer and editors responsible for those profound failures continue not only to work at the Times, but to remain in charge of its war coverage using exactly the same methods that brought such shame to that paper, is as compelling evidence of the state of American journalism as one can imagine. "Judy Miller" is not just a disgraced journalist, but is also a method of journalism that extends far beyond her.

A Soldier speaks the truth. The Neocons spout rhetoric.

clipped from www.veteransforamerica.org Troops inured to politics

The Hate in this country is frightening. When a real soldier speaks the truth and the Neocons who are safe at home attack such a person. I wonder why anyone would want to fight for this country. Read from this URL and see if you are not disgusted By how the Privileged Neocons Try to shame a soldier simply because he speaks the truth.

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1854078/posts

Mission Accomplished?

clipped from thinkprogress.org ‘Mission Accomplished’ By The Numbers On May 1, 2003, President Bush stood underneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner and announced that “Major combat operations have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Here’s a by-the-numbers look at the situation then, compared to the situation now:

clipped from mathaba.net Washington Post Caught Out in Propaganda Rewrite Posted: 2007/04/09 From: Mathaba The Washington Post has been caught red-handed inadvertently printing the truth from a Reuters news feed and then censoring and rewriting the story to conform to government propaganda and lies.