Subject: RE: General admits to secret air war Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:11:42 -0500 Message-ID: <B14120EE5C432443B21102F7925DAD0202E3F46F@COKE.uwec.edu> From: "Grossman, Zoltan C." <GROSSMZC@uwec.edu>
This is the complete scoop by
Jeremy Scahill, who works with Amy Goodman at
Democracy Now. He would be great to invite to
Eau Claire some time. I've interviewed him
many times and he is a great speaker on
U.S. intervention.
ZG
The Smoking Bullet in the Smoking Gun
By Jeremy Scahill
Democracy Now!
Friday 24 June 2005
It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes
flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft
were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and
Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped
precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense
facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in
wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi
command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary
Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The
Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was
war.
But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not
officially. This was September 2002 - a month before Congress had voted
to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months
before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six
months before "shock and awe" officially began.
At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the extent
of the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the
so-called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in
response to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war
was already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the
undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.
The Sunday Times of London recently reported on new evidence showing
that "The RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were
dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein
into giving the allies an excuse for war." The paper cites newly
released statistics from the British Defense Ministry showing that "the
Allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as
they did during the whole of 2001" and that "a full air offensive"
was
under way months before the invasion had officially begun.
The implications of this information for US lawmakers are profound.
It was already well known in Washington and international diplomatic
circles that the real aim of the US attacks in the no-fly zones was not
to protect Shiites and Kurds. But the new disclosures prove that while
Congress debated whether to grant Bush the authority to go to war, while
Hans Blix had his UN weapons-inspection teams scrutinizing Iraq and
while international diplomats scurried to broker an eleventh-hour peace
deal, the Bush Administration was already in full combat mode - not just
building the dossier of manipulated intelligence, as the Downing Street
memo demonstrated, but acting on it by beginning the war itself. And
according to the Sunday Times article, the Administration even hoped the
attacks would push Saddam into a response that could be used to justify
a war the Administration was struggling to sell.
On the eve of the official invasion, on March 8, 2003, Bush said in
his national radio address: "We are doing everything we can to avoid war
in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be
disarmed by force." Bush said this after nearly a year of systematic,
aggressive bombings of Iraq, during which Iraq was already being
disarmed by force, in preparation for the invasion to come. By the
Pentagon's own admission, it carried out seventy-eight individual,
offensive air strikes against Iraq in 2002 alone.
"It reminded me of a boxing match in which one of the boxers is told
not to move while the other is allowed to punch and only stop when he is
convinced that he has weakened his opponent to the point where he is
defeated before the fight begins," says former UN Assistant Secretary
General Hans Von Sponeck, a thirty-year career diplomat who was the top
UN official in Iraq from 1998 to 2000. During both the Clinton and Bush
administrations, Washington has consistently and falsely claimed these
attacks were mandated by UN Resolution 688, passed after the Gulf War,
which called for an end to the Iraqi government's repression in the
Kurdish north and the Shiite south. Von Sponeck dismissed this
justification as a "total misnomer." In an interview with The Nation,
Von Sponeck said that the new information "belatedly confirms" what he
has long argued: "The no-fly zones had little to do with protecting
ethnic and religious groups from Saddam Hussein's brutality" but were in
fact an "illegal establishment...for bilateral interests of the US and
the UK."
These attacks were barely covered in the press and Von Sponeck says
that as far back as 1999, the United States and Britain pressured the UN
not to call attention to them. During his time in Iraq, Von Sponeck
began documenting each of the air strikes, showing "regular attacks on
civilian installations including food warehouses, residences, mosques,
roads and people." These reports, he said, were "welcomed" by Secretary
General Kofi Annan, but "the US and UK governments strongly objected to
this reporting." Von Sponeck says that he was pressured to end the
practice, with a senior British diplomat telling him, "All you are doing
is putting a UN stamp of approval on Iraqi propaganda." But Von Sponeck
continued documenting the damage and visited many attack sites. In 1999
alone, he confirmed the death of 144 civilians and more than 400 wounded
by the US/UK bombings.
After September 11, there was a major change in attitude within the
Bush Administration toward the attacks. Gone was any pretext that they
were about protecting Shiites and Kurds - this was a plan to
systematically degrade Iraq's ability to defend itself from a foreign
attack: bombing Iraq's air defenses, striking command facilities,
destroying communication and radar infrastructure. As an Associated
Press report noted in November 2002, "Those costly, hard-to-repair
facilities are essential to Iraq's air defense."
Rear Admiral David Gove, former deputy director of global operations
for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on November 20, 2002, that US and
British pilots were "essentially flying combat missions." On October 3,
2002, the New York Times reported that US pilots were using southern
Iraq for "practice runs, mock strikes and real attacks" against a
variety of targets. But the full significance of this dramatic change in
policy toward Iraq only became clear last month, with the release of the
Downing Street memo. In it, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon is
reported to have said in 2002, after meeting with US officials, that
"the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the
regime," a reference to the stepped-up air strikes. Now the Sunday Times
of London has revealed that these spikes "had become a full air
offensive" - in other words, a war.
Michigan Democratic Representative John Conyers has called the
latest revelations about these attacks "the smoking bullet in the
smoking gun," irrefutable proof that President Bush misled Congress
before the vote on Iraq. When Bush asked Congress to authorize the use
of force in Iraq, he also said he would use it only as a last resort,
after all other avenues had been exhausted. But the Downing Street memo
reveals that the Administration had already decided to topple Saddam by
force and was manipulating intelligence to justify the decision. That
information puts the increase in unprovoked air attacks in the year
prior to the war in an entirely new light: The Bush Administration was
not only determined to wage war on Iraq, regardless of the evidence; it
had already started that war months before it was put to a vote in
Congress.
It only takes one member of Congress to begin an impeachment
process, and Conyers is said to be considering the option. The process
would certainly be revealing. Congress could subpoena Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, Gen. Richard Myers, Gen. Tommy Franks and all of the
military commanders and pilots involved with the no-fly zone bombings
going back into the late 1990s. What were their orders, both given and
received? In those answers might lie a case for impeachment.
But another question looms, particularly for Democrats who voted for
the war and now say they were misled: Why weren't these unprovoked and
unauthorized attacks investigated when they were happening, when it
might have had a real impact on the Administration's drive to war?
Perhaps that's why the growing grassroots campaign to use the Downing
Street memo to impeach Bush can't get a hearing on Capitol Hill. A real
probing of this "smoking gun" would not be uncomfortable only for
Republicans. The truth is that Bush, like President Bill Clinton before
him, oversaw the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam
against a sovereign country with no international or US mandate. That
gun is probably too hot for either party to touch.
-----Original Message-----
From: sfpj-request@listserve.uwec.edu on behalf of Alarcon, Eberth G.
Jr.
Sent: Mon 6/27/2005 9:19 AM
To: sfpj@listserve.uwec.edu
Subject: General admits to secret air war
Colleagues,
Check this one out!
The American general who commanded allied air forces during the Iraq war
appears to have admitted in a briefing to American and British officers
that coalition aircraft waged a secret air war against Iraq from the
middle of 2002, nine months before the invasion began.
Addressing a briefing on lessons learnt from the Iraq war
Lieutenant-General Michael Moseley said that in 2002 and early 2003
allied aircraft flew 21,736 sorties, dropping more than 600 bombs on 391
"carefully selected targets" before the war officially started.
The nine months of allied raids "laid the foundations" for the allied
victory, Moseley said. They ensured that allied forces did not have to
start the war with a protracted bombardment of Iraqi positions.
If those raids exceeded the need to maintain security in the no-fly
zones of southern and northern Iraq, they would leave President George W
Bush and Tony Blair vulnerable to allegations that they had acted
illegally.
......more.......
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1669640,00.html
Eberth
________________________________________
My name is Eberth, and I approve this message