Bernie Sanders for President

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has taken the progressive world by storm with his populist message calling wealth and income inequality “the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time.” Part of Sanders’s program to reduce wealth inequality is obliging megarich oligarchs and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, but as Sanders said last night at a campaign event in Iowa, a reflective look at government waste is needed to make truly meaningful gains:

“when we talk about making government more cost effective, it doesn’t simply mean cutting Medicaid and food stamps…What it does mean is taking a hard look at an agency, which receives $600 billion per year where there is an immense amount of waste and fraud…”

Politicians have railed for decades about the bloated budget and absolute waste in the Department of Defense (DoD) – infamous for $500 hammers and $600 toilets seats. While the U.S. Military is unquestionably great at fighting wars, it seems to be wildly incompetent at managing money. AsOccupyDemocrats reported earlier this year, “partly because of its convoluted bookkeeping systems, $8.5 trillion—yes, trillion—taxpayer dollars doled out by Congress since 1996 has never been accounted for” – enough money to cut our national debt in half.

Sanders notes that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (for whom Sanders has little appreciation) said that “there are trillions of dollars in the Dept. of Defense that we can’t account for.” The speech in which Rumsfeld delivered this outrageous news was given the day before 9/11 and received scant attention. Part of the excuse for the MIA funds has been “an overreliance on private contractors with a lack of oversight.” As Sanders said: “Well, they really don’t know. It’s so complicated… .” In fact, Congress tried to exert pressure on the Department in 2009 by passing a law “requiring the DoD to be audit-ready by 2017.  After spending—no wasting—billions on failed accounting software, the department is likely to miss that deadline…”

The “fiscally restrained” – in name only – Republicans in Congress impose projects on the military that the military itself spurns. It is clear that at this point they cry “overspending” at any program they disagree with – but had no problem putting Bush’s wars on the national credit card. Take, for instance, the omnibus spending bill that went to Congress a couple of weeks ago included $640 million for a Coast Guard ship the Coast Guard doesn’t even want.

Sanders recognizes something is gravely out of whack and needs to be fixed when military families must rely on food stamps to survive. It cannot go unmentioned that at the very same time, Republicans have proposed budgets that would kick millions out of the program in the name of waste: The bottom line, as Sanders said:   

“And while we have massive cost overruns with defense contractors, we’ve got deployment after deployment for our soldiers, and we’ve got military families on food stamps. So maybe we want to change that.”

Sanders’s belief that wealth and income inequality are the great moral and social issues of our time is on spot-on. He is also right that unequitable laws applied to wealthy oligarchs and corporations(which move tens of billions of dollars off-shore each year to avoid taxes) need to be changed so they can’t escape paying their fair share. And he is also right that government needs to be accountable to its citizens and generous to the men and women in uniform who risk life and limb in defense of our nation, and require a governmental agency that receives $6oo billion a year with an enormous amount of waste and fraud – needs to be reined in and held accountable.  

You're not Luke Skywalker

"You grew up wanting so bad to be Luke Skywalker, but you realize that you were basically a Stormtrooper, a faceless, nameless rifleman, carrying a spear for empire, and you start to accept the startlingly obvious truth that these are people like you."

When a Reddit user posted an open question to U.S soldiers asking them how they justify their actions against innocent civilians abroad, he probably didn’t expect this candid response…

‘You kill. Watch friends die. It’s usually quick, almost never quiet, but for the rest of your life, when you remember sitting at the bar with them, they’re blown open. You picture the nights you spent downtown at Scruffy Murphy’s, but instead of the stupid hookah shell necklace, your boy’s jaw is blown off, and his left eye is ruined, and he’s screaming. You fight, you kill, you watch friends die, and you notice a distinct lack of change. You kick in doors and tell terrified women to sit on the floor while you and your friends ransack their home, tearing the place apart, because they might be hiding weapons. There is no reason to believe this house in particular is enemy, same for the next one, and the one after that, or the seven before; they just happened to be there, and maybe they had weapons. Probably not, they almost never did.’

The moving testimony is just a snippet from the refreshingly honest reply given by U.S soldier Daniel Crimmins when asked how military servicemen can be so “blasé” about drone strikes and other civilian deaths due to the ‘War On Terror’.

Someone with the username VisualEffects originally posted:
‘9/11. The day Americans feel so strongly about that they say “Never forget”. A tragedy for sure. But you’ve retaliated and killed over 50 fold as many innocent civilians abroad as retribution for this event. How do you as a people walk around head held high, knowing that every few months you are committing a 9/11 event to other people? Imagine if the 9/11 terror attacks were happening in America every few months. Again and again, innocent people dying all around you. And yet you just go around the rest of the world doing it on a weekly basis to other people and don’t think twice about it. It brings me to tears knowing how absolutely blasé you guys are about it.’

Crimmins, from U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division, left a surprising reply to the post. He explained to the Redditor that like many others, he had been brainwashed into believing the ‘good vs evil narrative’, even comparing it to the legacy that Star Wars left him with as a child. Crimmins is clearly full of regret over his decision to sign up, resentment towards the government, grief at having lost his friends, anger at the mainstream media, and compassion for those innocent people he was sent to kill.

Crimmins’s response is heartbreaking and powerful, showing us that there are NO winners in War: everyone is a pawn, everyone is a victim, and the only ones who stand to gain from this destruction are the rich old white men who send these young, naive patriots into battle against their fellow human beings.

Here is his moving reply in full:

‘Many of us are unable. Many of us watched 9/11, and accepted the government and media’s definition of the attack as a act of war rather than a criminal action. A smaller portion, drifting along passively thought a major war was coming, that people we knew were going to fight and die. Some of us maybe worried about our younger brother being drafted, despite being in college.

Now, it seems stupid, but in the 72 hours after 9/11, some Americans, maybe suffering from depression, certainly with a mind shaped by comic books and action movies, ate up the “us vs. them” good vs. evil rhetoric spouted by the cowboy in chief. After all, he was the president, and no matter how bright you might think yourself, you can still be swayed by passion and emotion, led to terrible decisions.

Some of us, therefore, left our dorm rooms, and walked down Main Street to the recruiter’s office. Some of us were genuinely surprised the office wasn’t full to bursting of young men eager to avenge their fallen countrymen. Some of us were genuinely surprised when we had to push the recruiter to stop trying to sell desk jobs and just let us join the damn Infantry.

Some of us got enlisted, then, and went down to Georgia, head high to mask the anxiety and fear they might have helped. Perhaps some number of Americans in this situation discovered that maybe it hadn’t been the best idea, but would be goddamned if they were going to admit it, and let everyone back home smugly remark on how right they were. So they persevere. They learn to work as a unit, to look past personality issues, to see each other as Soldiers rather than as a race, or economic status, or any of the other things people hate about each other. They learn to kill.
Then some of these people, perhaps while sitting hungover in the platoon area in the Republic of Korea hear that we have invaded Iraq. They have “Big Scary Bombs”, and Saddam Hussein, the secular Arab dictator had somehow colluded with the devoutly religious OBL to attack the US. They hated our freedom, you see.

Then some of these young American men might transfer back to Georgia and be assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, and end up in Iraq in January of 2005. And maybe these kids, still drunk on Fox News and fantasies of glory and renown being enough to win their ex-girlfriends back, are excited to go to Iraq. Sure, we hadn’t found any WMDs yet, and we had Hussein in custody, but they were still somehow a threat and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into Jeffersonian democracy. Inside every dirka is a good American, yearning to be free.
So you fight. You kill. Watch friends die. Its usually quick, almost never quiet, but for the rest of your life, when you remember sitting at the bar with them, they’re blown open. You picture the nights you spent downtown at Scruffy Murphy’s, but instead of the stupid hookah shell necklace, your boy’s jaw is blown off, and his left eye is ruined, and he’s screaming.

You fight, you kill, you watch friends die, and you notice a distinct lack of change. You kick in doors and tell terrified women to sit on the floor while you and your friends ransack their home, tearing the place apart, because they might be hiding weapons. There is no reason to believe this house in particular is enemy, same for the next one, and the one after that, or the seven before; they just happened to be there, and maybe they had weapons. Probably not, they almost never did. There were a few times when we had deliberate raids based on solid intel and we’d turn up some stuff, but generally we were just tossing houses because we could.

US Army, Flickr, CC. A soldier receives a medal of honor

Then maybe your FISTer forgets to carry the remainder, and drops a mess of mortars on the village your supposed to protect. Maybe the big Iraqi running at you screaming was just mentally ill. Of course, you won’t know this until after you’ve but seven rounds through his ribcage, and his wailing, ancient mother is cradling his body, spitting at you.

Maybe when you get back to the FOB, the Platoon Sergeant tells you you did the right thing; next time, it might be a suicide bomber. They tell you it was an honest mistake, it wasn’t your fault. They tell you to go get some chow, take a shower if the water works, and sleep it off. You did good work that day, apparently. During chow, the TV is on AFN, and they are rebroadcasting some Fox News show, and you’re hearing about drone strikes, and all the great things we’re doing, and you can’t help but see that poor dumb assholes face, looking past his mother as he bleeds to death. He’s in pain, obviously, but he has the most perfectly confused look on his face. He doesn’t comprehend what’s happening. Little more hot sauce on your eggs doesn’t really help.

Then you realize you haven’t seen anything to support the idea that these poor fuckers are a threat to your home. You look around and you see all he contractors making six figure salaries to fix your shit, train Iraqis, maintain the ridiculous SUVs the KBR dicks ride around in. You consider the fact that every 25mm shell costs about forty bucks, and your company has been handing those fuckers out like shrapnel flavored parade candies. You think about all the fuel you’re going through, all the ammo and missiles and grenades. You think about every time you lose a vehicle, the Army buys a new one. Maybe you start to see a lot of people making a lot of money on huge amounts of human suffering.

Then you go on leave, and realize that Ayn Rand has no idea what the fuck she’s talking about. You realize that Fox News and Limbaugh and John McCain don’t respect you or your buddies. They don’t give a fuck if you get a parade or a box when you get home, you’re nothing to them but a prop. Then you get out, and you hate the news. You hate the apathy, and you hate the murder being carried out in your name. You grew up wanting so bad to be Luke Skywalker, but you realize that you were basically a Stormtrooper, a faceless, nameless rifleman, carrying a spear for empire, and you start to accept the startlingly obvious truth that these are people like you.

Maybe your heart breaks a little every time some asshole brags about a “successful” drone strike. Your statement is correct enough; if all of America was one dude, that dude would not give a shit about the little brown people we’re burning and crushing and choking to death. We aren’t all like that, but it makes me incredibly, profoundly sad to see what my country actually is. Some of us care, and I think there are more every day.’
Crimmins’s reply was originally reported by AnonHQ and Upriser, based on a Reddit thread  posted last year.

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This article (Heartbreaking: Here’s What A U.S Soldier Said When Asked To Justify The War On Terror) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com

"U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Afghan Allies’ Abuse of Boys"

NY Times Article

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEINSEPT. 20, 2015

KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

More -->

Anti-War Sniper

Originally published Here:
by Carl Gibson
January 27, 2015
(ReaderSupportedNews) One American sniper called Iraqi natives “savages,” compared them to American welfare recipients, and bragged about looting their homes after killing them. Another American sniper became so disgusted by what he had done that he started the first-ever antiwar blog, and is actively encouraging his fellow soldiers to use their First Amendment rights to speak out against what he calls an “illegal occupation” in Iraq. Guess which one had a blockbuster movie made about him, and which one got ignored?
Between February 2004 and February 2005, Garett Reppenhagen was a sniper in Iraq’s Diyala province, serving as a cavalry scout with the U.S. Army. It was his job to conceal himself near roadsides and kill anyone he saw planting IEDs. He was also ordered to wait in fields and target Iraqi insurgents pulling up in pickup trucks to launch mortars on American bases. While Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who killed over 160 people during his time in Iraq, relished in pulling the trigger and wrote “I only wish I had killed more” in his memoir, Reppenhagen became increasingly more remorseful after each kill.

“Every time I pulled the trigger, I had to really convince myself that I was saving a buddy of mine. And it got increasingly difficult,” Reppenhagen told an audience at Colorado College in May of 2011.
Reppenhagen came from a military family – his father was a Vietnam veteran, and his grandfather served in World War II. He enlisted in 2001 and was stationed in Vilseck, Germany, with the 2-63 Armored Battalion, 1st Infantry Division. Between 2002 and 2003, his division was stationed in Kosovo on a peacekeeping mission. After completing international interdiction training at the NATO Special Forces School in Steton, Germany, he was deployed to Iraq in 2004. During that time, Reppenhagen learned that most of the men in his division were serving simply because a recruiter had bullied them into joining to get out of a bad economic situation. One of his fellow soldiers from Los Angeles had joined the military to get away from the gangs in his neighborhood. Another man from Ohio joined because the factory in his rust belt town had shut down and jobs were scarce.
“It was just 2 months of basic training for a cavalry scout, and out we come,” Reppenhagen said. “They’re just like you. They were given a bad haircut and an M-16 in their hands and they’re scared shitless.”

As Zaid Jilani recently wrote, the film “American Sniper” uses clever editing to suggest that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11: In one scene, Chris Kyle is watching the 9/11 attacks unfold on TV. In the next scene, Kyle is seen deploying to Iraq. But unlike Kyle, Reppenhagen became aware that he and his division were risking their lives in Iraq for fabricated causes, and actively started speaking out against the war.

“It was the conduct of the war that really started turning me, and the fraudulent causes that sent me there that really put me over the edge,” Reppenhagen said. “There were no ties to 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction.”

Reppenhagen later started the first-ever antiwar blog, which was called “Fight to Survive.” It became a place where he and his fellow soldiers could share combat experiences with the world that would shape their view of the war and make the case for their outspoken opposition.
In one blog entry from November 13, 2006, a soldier who identifies only as “Hellblazer” wrote a detailed post about a skirmish that erupted in the city of Ba’Quba in 2004. After an hour of receiving gunfire from all sides and getting orders to “shoot anything the [sic] moved,” Hellblazer noticed an insurgent with an AK-47 run out from a corner across a nearby street. Despite Hellblazer’s chasing him with machinegun fire, the Iraqi made it to another corner and out of sight. But one of the targets in the gun’s wake was a trailer that had been riddled with Hellblazer’s bullets.

“Now falling out from behind this trailer was the body of a teenage boy. The void in his chest replaced what was once his heart and his body convulsed slightly as his nerve endings fired their last. His body lay there in the filthy dirty street, muddy water surrounding him from the drainage of the nearby houses … Nausea filled my stomach and a cold feeling overtook my flesh. How long had he been behind that trailer? Had he been there through the whole mess? Not to [sic] long afterwards, an older man emerged from around a corner, immediately collapsing nest [sic] to the young man’s body.”
– Excerpt from The Day That Haunts Me, by “Hellblazer”

During his 2011 lecture at Colorado College, Reppenhagen noted that 18 veterans commit suicide every day (now 22 veteran suicides per day), and that more veterans have committed suicide after returning from combat than have been killed while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined. He theorizes that atrocities like the Haditha massacre of 2005 and the slaughter of Iraqis at a canal in 2007 are perpetrated by veterans who have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury re-deploying again and again, making them less stable in battle.
Reppenhagen’s theory was sadly and ironically proved by the death of famed “American Sniper” Chris Kyle. It wasn’t an insurgent in a foreign battlefield who ended Kyle’s life in February of 2013, but a traumatized veteran named Eddie Ray Routh, at a shooting range in Texas. In the June 2013 issue of The New Yorker, Routh was profiled as a troubled young man who succumbed to his inner demons after a tour of duty. His father recalled one telephone call from Iraq in which Routh hinted that he had killed a child.

“More veterans are killing themselves than are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Reppenhagen said in 2011. “You think they’re coming home because they’re proud of what they did? 3rd Brigade just came back to Fort Carson two weeks ago, and six of them killed themselves already.”

After his honorable discharge in 2005, Reppenhagen became the first active duty member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). Since then, IVAW has simultaneously become a vast antiwar movement and a support community for returning veterans who are proud of serving their country, but want to express their opposition to the acts carried out around the world in their name.
“There are ways to resist this war within army regulations. You still obtain your rights as a citizen,” Reppenhagen said at a lecture in March of 2008. “You’re able to use those rights, and you should, since you’re the one sacrificing to protect those rights. It’ll be a shame if the actual use of your First Amendment right becomes unpatriotic.”

Today, IVAW is in 48 states, Washington D.C., Canada, and military bases around the world, including Iraq. Its members advocate for full funding of the office of Veterans Affairs, full quality healthcare (including mental healthcare) and full benefits for veterans when they return from duty. While IVAW reaches out to returning veterans, Reppenhagen is quick to separate their methods of engagement from military recruiters.

“We’re not gonna come out and recruit soldiers and veterans. We’re not going to try to trick you into joining us. But we will ask you,” Reppenhagen said.

“There’s a lot of pride in joining our army, our corps,” he continued. “We can fight for a cause that will change America and the world for the better and stop these occupations.”

Fact or Fiction?

FBI Whistleblower: Pentagon, CIA, NATO and MI6 Were Masterminds Behind 9/11

Posted on September 11, 2014

Washington’s Blog

“As Far As People Who Ran The Show, It Was The Highest Levels of NATO, the U.S., MI6, CIA And The Pentagon”

Sibel Edmonds has just released her fantastic spy thriller,  The Lone Gladio.     Here’s our review, comparing it to the best of Clancy or Ludlum … but with a twist.
In the real world, Edmonds is a former FBI translator who translated terror-related communications for the FBI right after 9/11. In that capacity, she read communications between terrorists and other radicals.
Edmonds has been deemed credible by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, several senators (free subscription required), and a coalition of prominent conservative and liberal groups.
The ACLU described Edmonds as:

The most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.

Famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says that Edmonds possesses information “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers”. He also says that the White House has ordered the press not to cover Edmonds:

I am confident that there is conversation inside the Government as to ‘How do we deal with Sibel [Edmonds]?
The first line of defense is to ensure that she doesn’t get into the media. I think any outlet that thought of using her materials would go to to the government and they would be told “don’t touch this . . . .”

Even Paul Newman praises Edmonds, saying:

Sibel Edmonds would not let an intimidating FBI shut her mouth, and as a result, suffered grievous consequences, but she has persevered and we are better off for her sacrifices.

Edmonds is the founder and president of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, a group of high-level national intelligence and security officials.
To understand why Edmonds’ information is so explosive, we need a little background on “Operation Gladio.”

Background: “Operation Gladio”

The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.
As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred).
This was codenamed “Operation Gladio”. And watch this BBC special. And see this for the big picture background.

Operation Gladio Continues to this Day

Edmonds told Washington’s Blog that she wrote The Lone Gladio because the FBI classified 100% of her previous book, Classified Woman. When she found out that she doesn’t need to get pre-publication approval for “novels”, she decided to write a novel.
So Edmonds decided to write a work of fiction based on the real-life operation- ‘Operation Gladio B’ – as the context, and with fictional events and characters in the novel The Lone Gladio.
[WASHINGTON’S BLOG]: You’ve previously claimed that Gladio was not terminated with the fall of the Soviet Union, but has continued up until today … the so-called “Gladio B”.
[SIBEL EDMONDS]: Yes. The title “Gladio B” was given by the FBI, because we don’t know what they really call it.
NATO, MI6, MIT (the Turkish military and intelligence service), and the Pentagon, also some outside rogue elements connected with Gladio.
[WASHINGTON’S BLOG]: Did you see – when you were still with the FBI – source documents about this so-called “Gladio B”? In The Lone Gladio, you have a “fictitious” set of memos that have players from NATO, the U.S. State Department and high-level terrorists meeting together. Did you see documents like that when you were at FBI?
[SIBEL EDMONDS]: Yes. I reviewed over 5,000 documents. Not only from FBI’s Washington office. A lot of documents came from FBI’s Chicago office. The document were from the period 1996 through February 2002. There were written documents, and audio translated by FBI translators.
[WASHINGTON’S BLOG]: Were NATO personnel actually mentioned in some of the documents or transcripts you saw as being part of these Gladio B meetings?
[SIBEL EDMONDS]: A number of generals were involved. Both U.S. generals and British generals and other generals involved with NATO. And many recognizable, public names with the U.S. State Department.
Most of this involved people from and State Department and the CIA. These are at the top levels … you’re not going to get operative-level involved with this.

Edmonds explained that the State Department doesn’t just deploy “soft power”, but is involved in many “hard power” operations, often coordinating through well-known “Non-Governmental Organizations” (NGOs).
Specifically, Edmonds explained that numerous well-known NGOs – which claim to focus on development, birth control, women’s rights, fighting oppression and other “magnificent sounding” purposes or seemingly benign issues – act as covers for State Department operations. [Background.] She said that the State Department directly places operatives inside the NGOs.
As one example, Edmonds said that – during the late 90s and early 2000s – perhaps 30-40% of the people working for NGOs operated by George Soros were actually working for the U.S. State Department.
Edmonds also said that Osama Bin Laden – and several other members of his family – were working with U.S. agencies as part of Gladio B right up until 9/11. Edmonds notes that Bin Laden and his family members were helping the West set up terrorist groups in Chechnya up until 9/11.
Edmonds also said that the FBI failed to prosecute any of the criminal activities occurring in the United States as revealed by these documents.

9/11 Was Part of Gladio

Back to our interview …
[WASHINGTON’S BLOG]: In terms of 9/11, what’s your opinion about whether there were countries involved, or whether it was rogue Gladio personnel?
[SIBEL EDMONDS]: You have to separate the pawns from the main players. There might have been elements involved within countries: for example Prince Bandar in Saudi Arabia, or Turkish people at the MIT.
But the people who ran the show at the top were NATO and Gladio. And Gladio was under the U.S. It was – and is – an operation under the U.S., for U.S. empire.
As far as people who ran the show, it was the highest levels of NATO, the U.S., MI6, CIA and the Pentagon.

The Goal: Control of Eurasia, Oil and Other Resources

Edmonds says that the entire focus of the U.S. and these related groups is to control the world’s resources, such as oil and gas pipelines in Eurasia.
She explained that many of the people in Eurasian region speak Turkic languages. For that reason, Turkey and its intelligence service – MIT – has been a major conduit for Gladio operations. And since a lot of the resources are in former Soviet countries, a lot of Gladio’s focus has been in those countries.
Postscript:  Edmonds has previously stated that Bin Laden – and his number 2 Al Qaeda lieutenant – Ayman al-Zawahiri – worked with the U.S. government for 3 months AFTER 9/11 to coordinate destablization in the Caucus region.
And she previously told Washington’s Blog:

For the past 11 years I have been emphasizing that my State Secrets Privilege & Gag Orders had to do with the FBI files (covering period 1996-2002 February) on covert-terrorist operations in Caucasus and Central Asia backed, managed and armed by US actors. These US-NATO directed operations in the region involved Bin-Laden and mainly Zawahiri …..
The FBI documents contained damning evidence (audio and written) collected between 1996-2002 tying these terror operations directly to the U.S. persons in the State Department/CIA and Pentagon. Also, how the State Department got Congress to grant huge amounts of funds to “front’ NGOs and businesses (mainly Turkish companies in US-listed/members of ATC) to funnel money to the terrorist cells in this region.

If you want to hear Edmonds name some names, watch part 1 and part 2 of her interview with James Corbett.
Washington’s Blog

This entry was posted in 9/11 Truth, False Flag Operations, September 11, US News, War & Peace and tagged 9/11 truth, false flag operation, Operation Gladio, September 11.

• The American Public: A Tough Soldier or a Chicken Hawk Cowering in a Cubicle? Some Thoughts on ISIS Intervention
• 9/11: The Mother of All Big Lies

 

Well Earned Wisdom

VICE on HBO Debrief: Children of the Drones

Unjustified

http://yournewswire.com/declassified-cia-document-reveals-iraq-war-had-zero-justification/
Posted by  Sean Adl-Tabatabai   in  News, US     3 weeks ago     Leave your thoughts  

 247  33.1K 

The justification for going to war in Iraq thirteen years ago, was based on a 93-page classified document that allegedly contained “specific information” on former Iraqi leader President Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs he was apparently running.

Now that document has been declassified and it reveals that there was virtually zero justification for the war. The document reveals that there was “no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda” and no WMD programs.

Vice.com reports:

Thirteen years ago, the intelligence community concluded in a 93-page classified document used to justify the invasion of Iraq that it lacked “specific information” on “many key aspects” of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

But that’s not what top Bush administration officials said during their campaign to sell the war to the American public. Those officials, citing the same classified document, asserted with no uncertainty that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, concealing a vast chemical and biological weapons arsenal, and posing an immediate and grave threat to US national security.

Congress eventually concluded that the Bush administration had “overstated” its dire warnings about the Iraqi threat, and that the administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMD program were “not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting.” But that underlying intelligence reporting — contained in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was used to justify the invasion — has remained shrouded in mystery until now.

The CIA released a copy of the NIE in 2004 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but redacted virtually all of it, citing a threat to national security. Then last year, John Greenewald, who operates The Black Vault, a clearinghouse for declassified government documents, asked the CIA to take another look at the October 2002 NIE to determine whether any additional portions of it could be declassified.

The agency responded to Greenewald this past January and provided him with a new version of the NIE, which he shared exclusively with VICE News, that restores the majority of the prewar Iraq intelligence that has eluded historians, journalists, and war critics for more than a decade. (Some previously redacted portions of the NIE had previously been disclosed in congressional reports.)

For the first time, the public can now read the hastily drafted CIA document [pdf below] that led Congress to pass a joint resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, a costly war launched March 20, 2003 that was predicated on “disarming” Iraq of its (non-existent) WMD, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and “freeing” the Iraqi people.

A report issued by the RAND Corporation last December titled “Blinders, Blunders and Wars” said the NIE “contained several qualifiers that were dropped…. As the draft NIE went up the intelligence chain of command, the conclusions were treated increasingly definitively.”

An example of that: According to the newly declassified NIE, the intelligence community concluded that Iraq “probably has renovated a [vaccine] production plant” to manufacture biological weapons “but we are unable to determine whether [biological weapons] agent research has resumed.” The NIE also said Hussein did not have “sufficient material” to manufacture any nuclear weapons. But in an October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, then-President George W. Bush simply said Iraq, “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”

One of the most significant parts of the NIE revealed for the first time is the section pertaining to Iraq’s alleged links to al Qaeda. In September 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed the US had “bulletproof” evidence linking Hussein’s regime to the terrorist group.

“We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad,” Rumsfeld said. “We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training.”

But the NIE said its information about a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq was based on “sources of varying reliability” — like Iraqi defectors — and it was not at all clear that Hussein had even been aware of a relationship, if in fact there were one.

“As with much of the information on the overall relationship, details on training and support are second-hand,” the NIE said. “The presence of al-Qa’ida militants in Iraq poses many questions. We do not know to what extent Baghdad may be actively complicit in this use of its territory for safehaven and transit.”

The declassified NIE provides details about the sources of some of the suspect intelligence concerning allegations Iraq trained al Qaeda operatives on chemical and biological weapons deployment — sources like War on Terror detainees who were rendered to secret CIA black site prisons, and others who were turned over to foreign intelligence services and tortured. Congress’s later investigation into prewar Iraq intelligence concluded that the intelligence community based its claims about Iraq’s chemical and biological training provided to al Qaeda on a single source.

“Detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — who had significant responsibility for training — has told us that Iraq provided unspecified chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qai’ida members beginning in December 2000,” the NIE says. “He has claimed, however, that Iraq never sent any chemical, biological, or nuclear substances — or any trainers — to al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan.”

Al-Libi was the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, which the Taliban closed prior to 9/11 because al-Libi refused to turn over control to Osama bin Laden.

Last December, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified summary of its so-called Torture Report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. A footnote stated that al-Libi, a Libyan national, “reported while in [redacted] custody that Iraq was supporting al-Qa’ida and providing assistance with chemical and biological weapons.”

“Some of this information was cited by Secretary [of State Colin] Powell in his speech to the United Nations, and was used as a justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” the Senate torture report said. “Ibn Shaykh al-Libi recanted the claim after he was rendered to CIA custody on February [redacted] 2003, claiming that he had been tortured by the [redacted], and only told them what he assessed they wanted to hear.”

Al-Libi reportedly committed suicide in a Libyan prison in 2009, about a month after human rights investigators met with him.

The NIE goes on to say that “none of the [redacted] al-Qa’ida members captured during [the Afghanistan war] report having been trained in Iraq or by Iraqi trainers elsewhere, but given al-Qa’ida’s interest over the years in training and expertise from outside sources, we cannot discount reports of such training entirely.”

All told, this is the most damning language in the NIE about Hussein’s links to al Qaeda: “While the Iraqi president “has not endorsed al-Qa’ida’s overall agenda and has been suspicious of Islamist movements in general, apparently he has not been averse to some contacts with the organization.”

The NIE suggests that the CIA had sources within the media to substantiate details about meetings between al Qaeda and top Iraqi government officials held during the 1990s and 2002 — but some were not very reliable. “Several dozen additional direct or indirect meetings are attested to by less reliable clandestine and press sources over the same period,” the NIE says.

The RAND report noted, “The fact that the NIE concluded that there was no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda did not offset this alarming assessment.”

The NIE also restores another previously unknown piece of “intelligence”: a suggestion that Iraq was possibly behind the letters laced with anthrax sent to news organizations and senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy a week after the 9/11 attacks. The attacks killed five people and sickened 17 others.

“We have no intelligence information linking Iraq to the fall 2001 attacks in the United States, but Iraq has the capability to produce spores of Bacillus anthracis — the causative agent of anthrax — similar to the dry spores used in the letters,” the NIE said. “The spores found in the Daschle and Leahy letters are highly purified, probably requiring a high level of skill and expertise in working with bacterial spores. Iraqi scientists could have such expertise,” although samples of a biological agent Iraq was known to have used as an anthrax simulant “were not as pure as the anthrax spores in the letters.”

Paul Pillar, a former veteran CIA analyst for the Middle East who was in charge of coordinating the intelligence community’s assessments on Iraq, told VICE news that “the NIE’s bio weapons claims” was based on unreliable sources such as Ahmad Chalabi, the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group supported by the US.

“There was an insufficient critical skepticism about some of the source material,” he now says about the unredacted NIE. “I think there should have been agnosticism expressed in the main judgments. It would have been a better paper if it were more carefully drafted in that sort of direction.”

But Pillar, now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, added that the Bush administration had already made the decision to go to war in Iraq, so the NIE “didn’t influence [their] decision.” Pillar added that he was told by congressional aides that only a half-dozen senators and a few House members read past the NIE’s five-page summary.

David Kay, a former Iraq weapons inspector who also headed the Iraq Survey Group, told Frontline that the intelligence community did a “poor job” on the NIE, “probably the worst of the modern NIE’s, partly explained by the pressure, but more importantly explained by the lack of information they had. And it was trying to drive towards a policy conclusion where the information just simply didn’t support it.”

The most controversial part of the NIE, which has been picked apart hundreds of times over the past decade and has been thoroughly debunked, pertained to a section about Iraq’s attempts to acquire aluminum tubes. The Bush administration claimed that this was evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated at the time on CNN that the tubes “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs,” and that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

The version of the NIE released in 2004 redacted the aluminum tubes section in its entirety. But the newly declassified assessment unredacts a majority of it and shows that the intelligence community was unsure why “Saddam is personally interested in the procurement of aluminum tubes.” The US Department of Energy concluded that the dimensions of the aluminum tubes were “consistent with applications to rocket motors” and “this is the more likely end use.”

The CIA’s unclassified summary of the NIE did not contain the Energy Department’s dissent.

“Apart from being influenced by policymakers’ desires, there were several other reasons that the NIE was flawed,” the RAND study concluded. “Evidence on mobile biological labs, uranium ore purchases from Niger, and unmanned-aerial-vehicle delivery systems for WMDs all proved to be false. It was produced in a hurry. Human intelligence was scarce and unreliable. While many pieces of evidence were questionable, the magnitude of the questionable evidence had the effect of making the NIE more convincing and ominous. The basic case that Saddam had WMDs seemed more plausible to analysts than the alternative case that he had destroyed them. And analysts knew that Saddam had a history of deception, so evidence against Saddam’s possession of WMDs was often seen as deception.”

According to the latest figures compiled by Iraq Body Count, to date more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, although other sources say the casualties are twice as high. More than 4,000 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and tens of thousands more have been injured and maimed. The war has cost US taxpayers more than $800 billion.

In an interview with VICE founder Shane Smith, Obama said the rise of the Islamic State was a direct result of the disastrous invasion.

“ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” Obama said. “Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”

Iraq October 2002 NIE on WMDs (unedacted version)

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