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Category: weapons of mass destruction

  • John Minto: The first casualty of war is truth – the rest are mostly civilians

    COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    Good slogans have people nodding their heads in agreement because they recognise an underlying truth in the words.  

    I have a worn-out t-shirt which carries the slogan, “The first casualty of war is truth — the rest are mostly civilians”.

    If you find yourself nodding in agreement it’s possibly because you have found it deeply shocking to find this slogan validated repeatedly in almost eight months of Israel’s war on Gaza.

    The mainstream news sources which bring us the “truth” are strongly Eurocentric. Virtually all the reporting in our mainstream media comes via three American or European news agencies — AP, Reuters and the BBC — or from major US or UK based newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Washington Post or The New York Times. 

    This reporting centres on Israeli narratives, Israeli reasoning, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications for what they are doing to Palestinians. Israeli spokespeople are front and centre and quoted extensively and directly.

    Palestinian voices, when they are covered, are usually at the margins. On television in particular Palestinians are most often portrayed as the incoherent victims of overwhelming grief.

    In the mainstream media Israel’s perverted lies dominate. 

    Riddled with examples
    The last seven months is riddled with examples. Just two days after the October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters were accused of chanting “Gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House.

    The story was carried around the world through mainstream media as a nasty anti-semitic slur on Palestinians and their supporters. Four months later, after an intensive investigation New South Wales police concluded it never happened. The words were never chanted.

    However the Radio New Zealand website today still carries a Reuters report saying “A rally outside the Sydney Opera House two days after the Hamas attack had ignited heated debate after a small group were filmed chanting “Gas the Jews”.

    Even if RNZ did the right thing and removed the report now the old adage is true: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its trousers on”. Four months later and the police report is not news but the damage has been done as the pro-Israel lobby intended.

    The same tactic has been used at protests on US university campuses. A couple of weeks ago at Northeastern University a pro-Israel counter protester was caught on video shouting “Kill the Jews” in an apparent attempt to provoke police into breaking up the pro-Palestine protest.

    The university ordered the protest to be closed down saying “the action was taken after some protesters resorted to virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews’”. The nastiest of lies told for the nastiest of reasons — protecting a state committing genocide.

    Similarly, unverified claims of “beheaded babies” raced around the world after the October 7 attack on Israel and were even repeated by US President Joe Biden. They were false.

    No baby beheaded
    Even the Israeli military confirmed no baby was beheaded and yet despite this bare-faced disinformation the Israeli ambassador to New Zealand was able to repeat the lie, along with several others, in a recent TVNZ interview on Q&A without being challenged.

    War propaganda such as this is deliberate and designed to ramp up anger and soften us up to accept war and the most savage brutality and blatant war crimes against the Palestinian people.

    Recall for a moment the lurid claims from 1990 that Iraqi soldiers had removed babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die on the floor. It was false but helped the US convince the public that war against Iraq was justified.

    Twelve years later the US and UK were peddling false claims about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” to successfully pressure other countries to join their war on Iraq.

    Perhaps the most cynical misinformation to come out of the war on Gaza so far appeared in the hours following the finding of the International Court of Justice that South Africa had presented a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide.

    Israel smartly released a short report claiming 12 employees of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) had taken part in the October 7 attack on Gaza. The distraction was spectacularly successful.

    Western media fell over themselves to highlight the report and bury the ICJ findings with most Western countries, New Zealand included, stopping or suspending funding for the UN agency.

    Independent probe
    eedless to say an independent investigation out a couple of weeks ago shows Israel has failed to support its claims about UNRWA staff involved in the October 7 attacks. It doesn’t need forensic analysis to tell us Israel released this fact-free report to divert attention from their war crimes which have now killed over 36,000 Palestinians — the majority being women and children.

    The problem goes deeper than manufactured stories. For many Western journalists the problem starts not with what they see and hear but with what their news editors allow them to say.

    A leaked memo to New York Times journalists covering the war tells them they are to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to avoid using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land.

    They have even been instructed not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” or the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza settled by Palestinian refugees driven off their land by Israeli armed militias in the Nakba of 1947–49.

    These reporting restrictions are a blatant denial of Palestinian history and cut across accurate descriptions under international law which recognises Palestinians as refugees and the occupied Palestinian territories as precisely what they are — under military occupation by Israel.

    People reading articles on Gaza from The New York Times have no idea the story has been “shaped” for us with a pro-Israel bias.

    These restrictions on journalists also typically cover how Palestinians are portrayed in Western media. Every Palestinian teenager who throws a stone at Israeli soldiers is called a “militant” or worse and Palestinians who take up arms to fight the Israeli occupation of their land, as is their right under international law, are described as “terrorists” when they should be described as resistance fighters.

    The heavy pro-Israel bias in Western media reporting is an important reason Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing violence which results from it, has continued for so long.

    The answer to all of this is people power — join the weekly global protests in your centre against Israel’s settler colonial project with its apartheid policies against Palestinians.

    And give the mainstream media a wide berth on this issue.

    John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Joe Lieberman Backed the Iraq War and Opposed the Public Option

    While current and former officials across the U.S. political spectrum shared praise for and fond memories of former Sen. Joe Lieberman in response to news of his death on Wednesday, critics highlighted how some of his key positions led to the deaths of many others. Lieberman’s family said the 82-year-old died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital after a fall at his home in the Bronx. He served in the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden and Other Democrats Helped Colin Powell Spread George W. Bush’s Iraq Lies

    Secretary of State Colin Powell speaks to the media outside the Security Council Chambers at United Nations headquarters on February 14, 2003, in New York City.

    While the death of former Secretary of State and retired Gen. Colin Powell has elicited praise-filled eulogies in the mainstream media and officials in Washington, many Americans still carry bitter feelings over Powell’s support for the illegal, unnecessary and predictably disastrous war in Iraq. In particular, critics cite his February 2003 speech before the United Nations Security Council in which he put forward a litany of demonstrably false statements in making the case that Iraq had compiled a dangerous arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction” and was actively supporting the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

    In light of the negative reaction from the arms control community and other knowledgeable sources, as well as many of the United States’ European allies and others, Powell’s speech would not have had anything close to the war-justifying impact it did were it not for efforts by prominent Democrats — including then-Sen. Joe Biden — to defend him.

    Virtually all of the accusations that Powell put forward in his nationally televised speech were based upon the word of anonymous sources. His interpretation of the fuzzy photos he displayed were similarly unconvincing. Despite years of spy satellites and aerial surveillance combing that largely-desert country, no evidence of ongoing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons activity had been spotted, nor were any of the proscribed missiles and other weapons systems. In addition, United Nations inspectors, who had been given unfettered access to suspect sites throughout Iraq since late the previous year, had visited suspect sites and had found nothing. So while his speech was eloquent, Powell fell far short of proving that Iraq had anything that could seriously threaten the security of its neighbors, much less the United States.

    Powell’s remarks were widely dismissed in the international community. The Security Council rejected his calls to authorize an invasion of that oil-rich country. Hans Blix, executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC), categorically rejected many of Powell’s claims. For example, the respected Swedish diplomat insisted that there was absolutely no evidence to back Powell’s claims of mobile biological weapons laboratories, of Iraq trying to foil inspectors by moving equipment before his teams arrived, or that his organization has been infiltrated by Iraqi spies, later noting how UNMOVIC had not “found evidence of the continuation or resumption of proscribed items.”

    The weakest part of Powell’s presentation was his effort to link the decidedly secular Iraqi regime with the fundamentalist al-Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden had referred to Saddam Hussein as “an apostate, an infidel, and a traitor to Islam.” Reports cited by Powell attempting to link Hussein to affiliated groups like Ansar al-Islam came almost exclusively from anti-Hussein Iraqis in exile hoping that establishing such a link could encourage U.S. military action to oust the dictator. Indeed, Ansar al-Islam’s stated goal was to overthrow the secular Baathist regime in Baghdad and replace it with an Islamic state.

    The efforts to tie al-Qaeda figure Abu Musab Al Zarqawi to the Iraqi regime were also based largely on unattributed sources. Ansar al-Islam fighters and their al-Qaeda supporters had been seen only in autonomous Kurdish areas beyond Iraqi government control. (Indeed, Powell’s claim that there had been “decades” of contact between Hussein and al-Qaeda was particularly odd, given that the terrorist network was less than 10 years old at that point.) Furthermore, none of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi, none of al-Qaeda’s leaders have been Iraqi and none of the money trail has ever been traced to Iraq.

    Subsequent reports indicate that Powell himself didn’t even believe what he was saying, but saw himself obliged as a “good soldier” to obey the commands of his commander-in-chief.

    Despite the lack of compelling evidence and the ridicule the claims made in the speech received from knowledgeable observers, leading Democrats rushed in to defend Powell in the face of his transparently false claims.

    For example, Sen. Joe Biden who, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served as the Democrats de facto foreign policy spokesperson, insisted that Powell’s testimony was “very powerful and I think irrefutable,” telling Powell, “I am proud to be associated with you.” The Washington Post highlighted Biden’s statement in an editorial praising Powell’s speech, which it titled as a nod to Biden’s statement, “Irrefutable.”

    Even though Iraq had already disarmed itself from its proscribed weapons and weapons systems and had eliminated its weapons programs years earlier, Nancy Pelosi was inspired by Powell’s speech to reiterate the lie that Iraq had not done so, saying, “The case for disarming Saddam Hussein is strong and well known, and Secretary Powell reiterated that case today.”

    Susan Rice, who held senior positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations (and is currently serving in the Biden administration), insisted that Powell “has proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don’t think many informed people doubted that,” a particularly ironic statement given the strong doubts among arms control community, including those within the U.S. government, such as the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and within the CIA itself, which questioned claims about Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs and delivery systems.

    Senators John Kerry and Hillary Clinton — both future Democratic presidential nominees and secretaries of state, along with then-Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt — insisted that Powell’s testimony was “compelling,” as did Sen. Maria Cantwell, who also stated that Powell had made a strong case that the isolated and disarmed country suffering under the toughest sanctions in world history was somehow a “serious threat to global stability.”

    Rep. Ed Markey, now a U.S. senator, insisted that Powell had made a case “as well as it can be made.” Sen. Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, claimed that Powell had made a “compelling, convincing, and chilling case.” Sen. John Edwards, the subsequent Democratic vice-presidential nominee, claimed that, “Powell made a powerful case before the United Nations,” and that Saddam Hussein constituted a “grave threat.”

    Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Powell’s testimony convinced her that “I don’t know that there’s any other solution” than war. Similarly, Kerry used Powell’s speech to push the United Nations to grant the United States the authority to invade Iraq, saying, “With such strong evidence in front of them, it is now incumbent on the U.N. to respect its own mandates.” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid also insisted that Powell had made a convincing case for war, though he later admitted that he was “sucked in by General Powell,” and regretted believing him over more credible sources.

    It is unclear as to why so many leading Democrats would have rushed to defend what virtually all knowledgeable observers saw as a transparently weak case for war. One possible reason is that they figured that if the United States invaded Iraq only to find there were no biological or chemical weapons, no nuclear program, no offensive weapons systems and no ties to al-Qaeda, they could simply blame the Bush administration or “faulty intelligence” and not suffer the political consequences. Indeed, the Democrats who praised Powell’s speech were almost all easily reelected to Congress, even after they acknowledged that Powell’s statements were untrue, while Kerry, Clinton and Biden all later received the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

    To this day, leading Democrats continue to side with Republicans on the Israeli and Moroccan occupations, increased military spending, support for dictatorial regimes, and attacks on the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, as well as other controversial foreign policy positions rationalized through demonstrably false statements. As long as Democrats can defend Republican lies without suffering any consequences from their constituents, they have little incentive to do otherwise.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Colin Powell, Who Helped George W. Bush Lie Nation Into Iraq War, Dies

    Colin Powell looks at a flag-draped coffin

    Colin Powell, the former U.S. Secretary of State who helped President George W. Bush under whom he served to sell the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the United Nations and the American people, has died at the age of 84.

    According to the New York Times, “He died of complications from Covid-19, his family said in a statement. He was fully vaccinated and was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, his family said.”

    In 2003, Powell, a retired four-star U.S. Army General who also served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs before becoming the nation’s top diplomat under Bush, made the now infamous presentation to the U.N. Security Council in which he claimed that the Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein was hiding a secret chemical weapons program from the international community and supporting international terrorists following the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

    Powell later claimed that the testimony he gave in 2003 was a “great intelligence failure,” but critics — including his chief of staff at the time, Lawrence Wilkerson — said the speech was significant both for its dishonesty and that Powell’s “gravitas” was a crucial “part of the two-year-long effort by the Bush administration to get Americans on the war wagon.”

    “That effort,” Wilkerson wrote in 2018, “led to a war of choice with Iraq — one that resulted in catastrophic losses for the region and the United States-led coalition, and that destabilized the entire Middle East.”

    In a 2018 column detailing what the former Secretary of State knew and was saying privately at the same time he was selling the Iraq invasion to the U.S. public, The Intercept’s John Schwarz wrote that “Powell’s loyalty to Bush extended to being willing to deceive the world: the United Nations, Americans, and the coalition troops about to be sent to kill and die in Iraq. He’s never been held accountable for his actions, and it’s extremely unlikely he ever will be.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ‘Fortress USA’: How 9/11 produced a military industrial juggernaut

    ANALYSIS: By Clare Corbould, Deakin University

    Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is suffused with policing and surveillance.

    This ranges from the inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian, such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too big to use on regular roads.

    This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of its victims.

    The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on racist justifications.

    The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the Second World War. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people were killed in US-led or sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a conservative estimate.

    When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left the presidency in 1961, he famously warned against the growing “military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result.

    General Dwight D. Eisenhower in second world war.
    General Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers prior to D-Day in the Second World War. Image: Wikimedia Commons

    The 9/11 attacks then intensified US militarisation, both at home and abroad. George W. Bush was elected in late 2000 after campaigning to reduce US foreign interventions.

    The new president discovered, however, that by adopting the persona of a tough, pro-military leader, he could sweep away lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his election.

    Waging war on Afghanistan within a month of the Twin Towers falling, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. War in Iraq, based on the dubious assertion of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, soon followed.

    The military industrial juggernaut
    Investment in the military state is immense. 9/11 ushered in the federal, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, with an initial budget in 2001-02 of US$16 billion. Annual budgets for the agency peaked at US$74 billion in 2009-10 and is now around US$50 billion.

    This super-department vacuumed up bureaucracies previously managed by a range of other agencies, including justice, transportation, energy, agriculture, and health and human services.

    Centralising services under the banner of security has enabled gross miscarriages of justice. These include the separation of tens of thousands of children from parents at the nation’s southern border, done in the guise of protecting the country from so-called illegal immigrants.

    More than 300 of the some 1000 children taken from parents during the Trump administration have still not been reunited with family.

    Detainees in a holding cell at the US-Mexico border.
    Detainees sleep in a holding cell where mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed at the US-Mexico border. Image: The Conversation/Ross D. Franklin/AP

    The post-9/11 Patriot Act also gave spying agencies paramilitary powers. The act reduced barriers between the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to permit the acquiring and sharing of Americans’ private communications.

    These ranged from telephone records to web searches. All of this was justified in an atmosphere of near-hysterical and enduring anti-Muslim fervour.

    Only in 2013 did most Americans realise the extent of this surveillance network. Edward Snowden, a contractor working at the NSA, leaked documents that revealed a secret US$52 billion budget for 16 spying agencies and over 100,000 employees.

    Normalisation of the security state
    Despite the long objections of civil liberties groups and disquiet among many private citizens, especially after Snowden’s leaks, it has proven difficult to wind back the industrialised security state.

    This is for two reasons: the extent of the investment, and because its targets, both domestically and internationally, are usually not white and not powerful.

    Domestically, the 2015 Freedom Act renewed almost all of the Patriot Act’s provisions. Legislation in 2020 that might have stemmed some of these powers stalled in Congress.

    And recent reports suggest President Joe Biden’s election has done little to alter the detention of children at the border.

    Militarisation is now so commonplace that local police departments and sheriff’s offices have received some US$7 billion worth of military gear (including grenade launchers and armoured vehicles) since 1997, underwritten by federal government programmes.

    Atlanta police in riot gear.
    Atlanta police line up in riot gear before a protest in 2014. Image: The Conversation/Curtis Compton/AP

    Militarised police kill civilians at a high rate — and the targets for all aspects of policing and incarceration are disproportionately people of colour. And yet, while the sight of excessively armed police forces during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests shocked many Americans, it will take a phenomenal effort to reverse this trend.

    The heavy cost of the war on terror
    The juggernaut of the militarised state keeps the United States at war abroad, no matter if Republicans or Democrats are in power.

    Since 9/11, the US “war on terror” has cost more than US$8 trillion and led to the loss of up to 929,000 lives.

    The effects on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have been devastating, and with the US involvement in Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, Mali, and Kenya included, these conflicts have resulted in the displacement of some 38 million people.

    These wars have become self-perpetuating, spawning new terror threats such as the Islamic State and now perhaps ISIS-K.

    Those who serve in the US forces have suffered greatly. Roughly 2.9 million living veterans served in post-9/11 conflicts abroad. Of the some 2 million deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps 36 percent are experiencing PTSD.

    Training can be utterly brutal. The military may still offer opportunities, but the lives of those who serve remain expendable.

    Fighter jet in the Persian Gulf
    Sailor cleaning a fighter jet during aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2010. Image: The Conversation/Hasan Jamali/AP

    Life must be precious
    Towards the end of his life, Robert McNamara, the hard-nosed Ford Motor Company president and architect of the United States’ disastrous military efforts in Vietnam, came to regret deeply his part in the military-industrial juggernaut.

    In his 1995 memoir, he judged his own conduct to be morally repugnant. He wrote,

    We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.

    In interviews with the filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara admitted, obliquely, to losing sight of the simple fact the victims of the militarised American state were, in fact, human beings.

    As McNamara realised far too late, the solution to reversing American militarisation is straightforward. We must recognise, in the words of activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “life is precious”. That simple philosophy also underlies the call to acknowledge Black Lives Matter.

    The best chance to reverse the militarisation of the US state is policy guided by the radical proposal that life — regardless of race, gender, status, sexuality, nationality, location or age — is indeed precious.

    As we reflect on how the United States has changed since 9/11, it is clear the country has moved further away from this basic premise, not closer to it.The Conversation

    Dr Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.