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"Dozens of members of President Bush's security team assembled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are now working for companies that sell security products and services to the government agencies they once helped manage.

The Times found that at least 90 former officials in the department and the White House Office of Homeland Security now work for companies that do billions of dollars worth of business in the homeland security industry."

When John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the heavyweight of the realist school of international affairs, and Stephen M. Walt, former dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, published their now famous essay on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," the outcry from all the usual suspects was stupendous. After all, the professors had unapologetically said what everyone knows to be true: that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is geared to Israeli and not American interests. It is a case of altruism sui generis.

If anyone says that - out loud, that is - the price they pay is exorbitant, and clearly Mearsheimer and Walt were and are prepared to pony up. Anyone who crosses "the Lobby," as their paper puts it, risks incurring the wrath of "the Great Silencer." This means, in plain terms, that anyone who criticizes Israel, or, more significantly, notices the Lobby's decisive influence over U.S. policymakers, risks their career, whether it be in politics, the media, or academia.

In regard to this last, Mearsheimer and Walt report that the Lobby has recently begun a campaign to "take back the campuses," and I would point out that the latest victim is Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan. Professor Cole is a Middle East expert, a distinguished scholar, and an articulate critic of our interventionist foreign policy. His popular blog, Informed Comment, richly deserves its name, and he has lately become someone the more in-depth media outlets turn to when they want knowledgeable commentary about current events in the region. The news that he was up for an appointment at Yale University, to head up a new department of Middle Eastern studies, was just what the Lobby needed to hear to swing into action.

Cole's sin: he, like Mearsheimer and Walt, had noted the inordinate influence of what The Nation magazine termed "American Likudniks" on the course of our foreign policy, and it wasn't long before the appointment was buried in a blizzard of outraged op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun, while the neocon contingent of the blogosphere was frothing at the mouth. In what was quite clearly an organized effort, Joel Mowbray, a smalltime neocon columnist who specializes in smearing enemies of the Lobby with the tar brush of "anti-Semitism" - his enemies list includes Gen. Anthony Zinni and the U.S. Justice Department, which had the temerity to prosecute admitted Israeli spy Larry Franklin - sent a letter to a good number of Yale donors, alerting them to Cole's pending appointment and urging action. Jewish Week reports that "several faculty members said they had heard that at least four major Jewish donors ... have contacted officials at the university urging that Cole's appointment be denied."

In the end, Cole's appointment was nixed - and a central contention of Mearsheimer and Walt's analysis was confirmed. As they wrote:

"Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. 'One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,' Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia."

Yale's turn came soon enough. Whose turn will it be tomorrow?

In the Lobby's arsenal, character assassination is a major weapon of choice, and this was wielded against Cole time and again. Michael Rubin, a former employee of the Coalition Provisional Authority whose views are so extreme that he now accuses the Bush administration of selling out its original program of "regime change," wrote:

"While Cole condemns anti-Semitism, he accuses prominent Jewish-American officials of having dual loyalties, a frequent anti-Semitic refrain. That he accuses Jewish Americans of using 'the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment' is unfortunate."

This "Gurkha regiment" phrase, lifted out of context, occurred in the course of Cole's analysis of the Larry Franklin espionage case, in which Franklin, a Pentagon analyst who specialized in Iran, admitted passing sensitive classified intelligence to Israeli officials via Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, two top officials of the pro-Israel lobbying group scheduled to go on trial soon. Here is the original context:

"Here is my take on the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal in the Pentagon.

"It is an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then Iran. David Wurmser, a key member of the group, also wanted Syria included. These pro-Likud intellectuals concluded that 9/11 would give them carte blanche to use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv (not wars that really needed to be fought, but wars that the Likud coalition thought it would be nice to see fought so as to increase Israel's ability to annex land and act aggressively, especially if someone else's boys did the dying)."

Franklin is not Jewish, and the Jewishness of these "pro-Likud intellectuals" has nothing to do with Cole's opposition to their activities, which seem - in Franklin's case, and also Rosen's and Weissman's - to include espionage on behalf of Israel. It is typical, however, of the Lobby to smear anyone who criticizes them as an "anti-Semite" - an accusation that, if it sticks, effectively immunizes the neoconservatives who put Israel first from all criticism.

Tellingly, Rubin doesn't reveal his own involvement in the Franklin affair, but one of the charges against the former Pentagon analyst is that Franklin reiterated the contents of a classified draft national-security presidential directive (NSPD), co-authored by Rubin, in which it was proposed that the U.S. should undertake a policy of "regime change" in Iran, just as it did in Iraq. And Rubin, who worked with Franklin and other neocons in the infamous Office of Special Plans - the source of much of the bogus "intelligence" that misled Congress and the American people in the run-up to war - has been a leading defender of his colleague, as an interesting piece in The American Prospect pointed out:

"In the current probes of Franklin and AIPAC, Michael Rubin has led the strident charge. On September 4, during the media flap over the investigations, Rubin sent an e-mail memo - obtained by the Prospect - to a list of friendly parties targeting two of Washington's more respected mainstream journalists, calling them key players in an 'increasing anti-Semitic witch hunt.' The memo fingered Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as one likely source of the leaks about the investigation, and also urged that, if the accusations had any merit, the White House demand the evidence be made public. 'I'm increasingly concerned about the leaks spinning off from the Franklin affair,' Rubin wrote. 'It was bad enough when the White House rewarded the June 15, 2003, leak by canceling consideration of the NSPD. It showed the State Department that leaks could supplant real debate. ... Bureaucratic rivalries are out of control.'"

Cornered, the Lobby screeches "bigotry!" - but this is merely a reflex, uttered without sincerity or any indication that even the accusers take it seriously. It is merely meant to blacken the name of anyone who stands up to the threats and intimidation routinely employed by a cabal of ruthless political operatives, who have no more of a moral compass than a flamethrower.

The utter ruthlessness of the Amen Corner's tactics resembles nothing so much as the tactics and methods of a covert action carried out by agents of a foreign power, and, indeed, some of these people - such as Larry Franklin, for example, along with his accomplices - are foreign agents, who would stop at nothing to achieve their goals. Character assassination is, for them, a routine matter - and, in certain cases, physical assassination is not out of the question. The news that Lebanon has uncovered an Israeli spy ring that routinely engaged in a number of assassinations ought not surprise anyone. With all the mysterious explosions occurring in that tortured land, and with Israel's long history of involvement - both open and clandestine - in that country, this hardly comes as a shock. Perhaps now the great mystery of who killed Rafik Harriri - a heinous act somewhat dubiously attributed by UN investigators to Syria - will be opened up to some new interpretations. Oh, but nix that - everybody knows that the Mossad would never, ever engage in assassinations, and to even imply such a thing is to confess that one's favorite reading material is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense

"It's obvious. [the Iraq War] was a mistake. And I've said this from the very start. I mean, you had no weapons of mass destruction, you had no connection with al-Qaeda, there was no danger to our national security. We don't put young people in harm's way unless we have a threat to our national security."

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), MSNBC- Meet the Press, June 18, 2006

"If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest."

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) 3rd American President

Journalists keep asking the above question but are frustrated they never receive a straight answer. It has become more and more obvious to them that, from the start, the official story on Iraq never made sense. Last April, political commentator Chris Matthews of MSNBC-Hardball tried again to elicit an answer when he interviewed Republican Congressman Vin Weber, a card carrying member of the Project for the New American Century. Here is one exchange:

Chris MATTHEWS: "What was the reason we went to war? -I've never gotten that straight from anybody, why did we go to war with Iraq?"

Congressman Vin WEBER: "Because we had a dangerous dictator who'd made war on three of his neighbors and who hated the United States of America and had used weapons of mass destruction in the past." (April 6, 2006)

Most of the American people are in the same position as Chris Matthews. They were never truthfully told the reasons why young Americans went to Iraq to kill and to be killed and why their government violated international law to launch a war of aggression. According to Congressman Weber, it was to punish a dangerous dictator who had waged war, ten or twenty years before, with neighboring Kuwait and Iran, was not friendly enough with Israel, 'hated' the United States and had weapons of mass destruction in the past. Of course, Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons during the 1980's, because the Reagan administration had helped in supplying them to Iraq to fight Iran. -But it was well known that Iraq had destroyed all of these weapons in 1991. We are dealing with the absurd when one country attacks another because it has weapons provided to the latter by the former, even if the attacker has the knowledge that such weapons have been destroyed years before.

It will be an historical irony that the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the hands of Saddam Hussein was given as the chief reason for the decision of the Bush-Cheney administration to invade Iraq and topple his government, in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The same justification was used by Tony Blair's government for involving the United Kingdom in the illegal war. However, on October 6, 2004, the United States Senate Armed Services Committee definitely established that the group did not find any evidence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had produced and stockpiled any weapons of mass destruction since 1991, when the first UN sanctions were imposed.

The real but undiscloseable reasons why the Bush-Cheney administration defied international law and invaded Iraq have been known for a long time and had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, hypothetical links with al-Qaeda or the vaporous concept of democracy in the Middle East. Rather, things are much simpler: the war was launched because powerful interests connected to the state of Israel, to the oil industry and to the Pentagon wanted to take advantage of the political opportunity created by the 9/11 attacks to implement a plan of invasion of Iraq they had prepared years before. For example, in an in-depth and well-researched article in September 2002, titled "The president's real goal in Iraq", author Jay Bookman, the deputy editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, convincingly identified the real and explicit reasons for the rush to war. Bookman also identified Bush Jr.'s main neocon advisers in favor of a war against Iraq and their plan to turn that country into a client state. They were the ones who had been pushing for such a war for many years and had launched the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), in 1997, i.e. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Kristol, Kagan, Libby, Podhoretz, Wurmser, Abrams, Khalilzad, Krauthammer, Shulsky and Co. They were joined later on in the cabal by Ledeen, Rubin, Cohen, Franklin, Frum, Bolton, Kirkpatrick, Woolsey, Gaffney Jr., etc. -As Tom Friedman of the New York Times put it, in 2005, [the Iraq War] "is a war of an elite. ... I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened."

Super-religious Bush Jr. and super-nationalist Cheney were, from the very first days of their administration, obsessed with the security of oil supplies. That is the reason why they so naturally teamed up with the pro-Israel Neocon cabal. They considered the security of oil supplies a basic US strategic goal. Thus, the strategy of controlling petroleum resources globally through military means, especially in the Middle East, the richest oil region of all. But that goal of U.S. strategic dominance of oil resources has been a failure and will haunt the U.S. and world economies for years to come.

A fourth reason is related to George W. Bush himself, and to his political ambitions. In 1999, Bush confided in Mickey Herskowitz, who interviewed him extensively for an autobiography, that it was his opinion that a "successful" president of the United States "needs a war" to gain political clout domestically. Bush already had the idea of invading Iraq, if given the chance. He got his chance after winning the 2000 presidential election with half a million votes fewer than Democrat Al Gore, and especially after the 9/11 attacks provided an opportunity for any military excursion the 'Commander-in-chief' wanted to undertake to avenge the traumatism that resulted in the population. In taking a militarist posture, George W. Bush was only trying to profit politically from the deeply ingrained war mentality that exists in a large segment of American society.

And, as an indication of the kind of person GWB is, he told Herskowitz that "as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake; that is one of the keys to being a leader." -He don't admit mistakes! -But it is the essence of democracy that leaders must be accountable and answer to the people. Otherwise, it is not called democracy, but dictatorship. In Bush Jr.'s mouth, words like "democracy," "freedom," "liberty," "peace," "justice," seem to be empty of any meanings and are unrelated to reality.

Let us all compare what President Woodrow Wilson had to say, in July 1919, with George W. Bush's utterances: "For my own part, I am as intolerant of imperialistic designs on the part of other nations as I was of such designs on the part of Germany. The choice is between two ideals; on the one hand, the ideal of democracy, which represents the rights of free peoples everywhere to govern themselves, and, the ideal of imperialism which seeks to dominate by force and unjust power, an ideal which is by no means dead and which is earnestly [sought] in many quarters still." Well, eighty-seven years later, President Wilson's words still ring true, but you would not find them in G. W. Bush's mouth.

Original

There was a time when the arbitrary act of the powerful was the unquestioned rule and the abuse of the prince was called the 'art of government'. The word 'justice' was used to describe the prince's magnanimity or the reward for the suffering of this life, because... justice is not of this world.

Centuries of darkness and misery are now called the history of civilization.

During this history, women and men have constantly rebelled and struggled to bring about freedom, hope and justice in this life. Because of their appeal to Reason they have always paid the highest price. Humiliation, prison, torture and death have not succeeded in killing the human spirit, despite the 'art of government' developed to the sophisticated levels of today's propaganda.

International law and science are among the most important achievements of this human struggle. Though both are 'works in progress' and too often conditioned by that 'art of government' they were originally born to limit, we need to strongly support them in these times of darkness.

International law

After WWII

"THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war... and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights... of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained... AND FOR THESE ENDS to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest..." (1)

"I promise you I stand wholeheartedly on the principles that we should not forgive or forget acts which are against international law, and that we should ensure that international law is upheld. These things are matters of conscience. But I can't quite see why they oblige me to report news which is an entire year old." (4)

"We also contacted the World Tribunal on Iraq [WTI] for their response. Communications coordinator Caroline Muscat told us WTI had invited the BBC World Service correspondent in Istanbul, Jonny Dymond, to attend the Tribunal's hearings. She helped to set up interviews and provide footage: "we did our best to meet his needs".

Dymond confirmed to us that he attended the opening press conference, and was present on the first day of the 5-day proceedings (email from Jonny Dymond to Media Lens, July 14, 2005). This resulted in a news story on the BBC World Service lasting 24 seconds, and a longer report of about 90 seconds in length. These reports failed to mention the Tribunal's finding that the BBC, and other named, mainstream media, bears "special responsibility for promoting the lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction". (5)

"Thank you for your email criticising the BBC for lack of coverage of the World Tribunal on Iraq. We have received numerous complaints on this subject in different parts of the BBC and - after careful consideration of the matter - the following is the BBC response, which I am sending on behalf of the BBC. The subjects under discussion at the Istanbul meeting are indeed important and many of the topics are matters which the BBC has examined persistently and regularly across our outlets. There are many conferences which the BBC does not cover and - given finite resources - we take the view that what is important is that a full range of issues is aired. (...)

"Turning to the agenda of the World Tribunal on Iraq, the BBC has examined events in Iraq from many angles, including the legal framework; the role of the UN; international relations; the conduct of coalition forces and the human rights violations at Abu Graib; the controversy over Guantanamo Bay. But unlike the WTI which takes the war in Iraq as unjust as its premise, the BBC must be open-minded and impartial in its approach." (Ibidem)

Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. (Interpretation)

Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. (Findings) (7)

"The researchers found that the majority of deaths were attributed to violence, which were primarily the result of military actions by Coalition forces. Most of those killed by Coalition forces were women and children... Eighty-four percent of the [violent] deaths were reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes and artillery." (8)

"When I presented these results to about thirty Pentagon employees last fall, one came up to me afterwards and said, "We have dropped about 50,000 bombs, mostly on insurgents hiding behind civilians. What the [expletive] did you think was going to happen?" Our survey team's 100,000 death estimate for the first 18 months after the U.S. led-invasion equates to about 101 coalition-attributed violent deaths per day." (9)

"However, this number is only the central point of a range that extends from 8,000 to 194,000. This huge disparity was mocked ignorantly by one American commentator as 'not an estimate, it's a dartboard'. It was also defended, equally ignorantly, by the editor of The Lancet, who said: 'It's highly probable the figure is 98,000. Anything more or less is much less probable.' Both wrong. What the figures say is that there is a 95 per cent chance that the true figure lies between 8,000 and 194,000... It is statistically respectable, which is why The Lancet article passed its peer reviews, but it produces estimates hedged about with great uncertainty.

And there are good reasons for thinking that the true figure is towards the lower end of The Lancet's range." ('We should be counting the dead in Iraq, but let's not get the figures out of proportion like this,' John Rentoul , The Independent on Sunday, December 10, 2004)

"The Iraqi Body Count figure is probably much too low, because US military tactics ensure high civilian losses. American firepower, designed to combat the Soviet army, cannot be used in built-up areas without killing or injuring many civilians. Nevertheless a study published in The Lancet, estimating that 100,000 civilians had died in Iraq, appears to be too high." ('Terrified US soldiers are still killing civilians with impunity,' Patrick Cockburn, The Independent on Sunday, April 24, 2005)

[the Lancet findings has been reached] "by extrapolating from a small sample... While never completely discredited, those figures were widely doubted". ('The true measure of the US and British failure,' Leader, The Independent, July 20, 2005)

"even Iraq Body Count, an anti-war campaign, puts the total attributable to coalition forces at under 10,000, rather than the figure with an extra zero that is the common misconception of anti-war propaganda". ('Islam, blood and grievance,' John Rentoul, The Independent, July 24, 2005)

"This survey technique has been criticised as flawed, but the sampling method has been used by the same team in Darfur in Sudan and in the eastern Congo and produced credible results. An official at the World Health Organisation said the Iraq study 'is very much in the league that the other studies are in ... You can't rubbish (the team) by saying they are incompetent'". (Stephen Fidler, 'Lies, damned lies and statistics,' Financial Times, November 19, 2004)

"Les [Roberts] has used, and consistently uses, the best possible methodology," says Bradley A. Woodruff, a medical epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Indeed, the United Nations and the State Department have cited mortality numbers compiled by Mr. Roberts on previous conflicts as fact -- and have acted on those results.(...) Mr. Roberts has studied mortality caused by war since 1992, having done surveys in locations including Bosnia, Congo, and Rwanda. His three surveys in Congo for the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental humanitarian organization, in which he used methods akin to those of his Iraq study, received a great deal of attention. "Tony Blair and Colin Powell have quoted those results time and time again without any question as to the precision or validity," he says." (10)

"The figures it details are now around one year old where as ['whereas', presumably] those produced by Iraq Body Count are continually updated." [and] "We do not usually use the Lancet's figure in standard news stories because it is so far out of line with other studies on the same issue. There are also some questions over the validity of the Lancet study in the case of measuring casualties in Iraq. The technique of sampling and extrapolating from samples has been criticised because the pattern of violence in Iraq has been so uneven. In this particular news story, the Iraq Body Count figure is used because it is the most recent study on the issue." (11)

A perfect example of this masking effect was provided by the Independent's Andy McSmith on March 4. McSmith reported that the war in Iraq "has cost the lives of 103 British troops, 2,300 US soldiers, and up to 30,000 Iraqis". (McSmith, 'Blair: "God will be my judge on Iraq"', The Independent, March 4, 2006; http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article349125.ece)

McSmith was challenged by activist Gabriele Zamparini of The Cat's Dream (http://thecatsdream.com). Zamparini asked:

"What's the source of that number, 'up to 30,000 Iraqis'? Were you referring to Mr Bush's '30,000, more or less' ? Were you referring to the numbers provided by Iraq Body Count?" (Forwarded to Media Lens, March 6, 2006)

McSmith responded:

"Dear Gabriele

"The source of the 30,000 figure was Iraq Body Count. I am aware of the criticism that it is a 'passive' source of information, in that it does not send canvassers out to do random sampling, but it is respected and reliable.
There has been a lot written about the Lancet study, which was professionally conducted but under difficult conditions, but which necessarily relied on a small sample with a wide margin or error. They estimated 8,000-194,000 'excess deaths', and put the probable total at 98,000. This included increases in infant mortality, traffic accidents etc, with 60% directly attributable to the violence. It is the small sample and very wide margin of error that makes people nervous about the Lancet figure.

Thank you for the email

Andy McSmith" (Forwarded to Media Lens, March 6, 2006) (12)

"Their behaviour is far worse than most of our right-wing or pro-war critics, who, on the whole, have behaved rather more honourably. These people, I trust them less than just about anyone else in the world, and they would have to do 50 to 100 times more in order to regain my trust. (...) They like the sense of being a beleaguered minority. What's most chilling is if you look at people's allegiance to much more dangerous causes than either of our critics are adopting. This is also the mindset that draws angry young men towards terrorism. And it's ultimately self-destructive." (14)

On November 19, 2005, the day of the Haditha Massacre, al-Jazeera had long since been banned from operating in Iraq. The station forced to conduct its war reporting from a desk in Doha, Qatar, was doing so via telephone. Two Iraqis worked diligently to cover the US occupation of Iraq through a loose network of contacts within Iraq. Defying the US-imposed extreme challenges, al-Jazeera, by dint of its responsible reporting, had the entire Haditha scoop as soon as it occurred, which they shared with Western and other media outlets, while the latter were content to participate in delaying the story nearly four months by regurgitating unverified military releases.

Two days after the massacre, DahrJamailiraq.com was the only free place on the Internet that carried al-Jazeera's report translated into English (it could be viewed at MidEastWire.com for a fee).

The anchorperson for al-Jazeera in Doha, Qatar, interviewed journalist Walid Khalid in Baghdad. Khalid's report, translated by MidEastWire.com, was as follows:

Yesterday evening, an explosive charge went off under a US Marines vehicle in the al-Subhani area, destroying it completely. Half an hour later, the US reaction was violent. US aircraft bombarded four houses near the scene of the incident, causing the immediate death of five Iraqis. Afterward, the US troops stormed three adjacent houses where three families were living near the scene of the explosion. Medical sources and eyewitnesses close to these families affirmed that the US troops, along with the Iraqi Army, executed 21 persons; that is, three families, including nine children and boys, seven women, and three elderly people. (...)

It wasn't until four months after the event that the Western corporate media started to straighten out the story. On March 19, 2006, it was Time Magazine that "broke" the Haditha story in a piece titled "Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha." The primary sources for this piece were a video shot by an Iraqi journalism student produced the day after the massacre and interviews conducted with witnesses. Another glaring evidence of how a few simple interviews with Iraqis and some readily available photographs and video can drastically correct the glaring errors in the Western media's representations of the occupation. (...)

There are countless other stories which the US corporate media has deliberately delayed from their reportage and which may never reach the wide US audience that they deserve. It is necessary to ask, when will the corporate media report on stories such as the following: (...) (16)

The casualty count is significant for many reasons. There are, of course, moral considerations. Is the way we wage war now indiscriminate with regard to non-combatants? Is the rhetoric about "precision" in our airborne weaponry masking a darker reality of unnecessary carnage on the ground? Avoidable killing of non-combatants is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, regardless of the actions of the insurgency. And the possibility that the Coalition forces could be responsible for as many as 200,000 Iraqi civilian deaths or more would likely alter the political mood in the United States with respect to the legitimacy of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." (see note 9)

According to Les Roberts (Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, one of the world's top epidemiologists and lead author of the Lancet report) there might be as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths (Do Iraqi Civilian Casualties Matter?, By Les Roberts, AlterNet, February 8, 2006)

Not to mention too Bob [another messageboard poster], that the specific claim he keeps circulating (or at least the speculation from which it was derived, the "factor of five or ten" nonsense) has already been retracted by Roberts (though several other errors remain in the analysis uncorrected).

Gabriele wouldn't know this either, because he's sticking with "science" - ie: whatever inaccurate or untested speculations might be made by selectively chosen "experts" who might utter things Gabriele wants to hear. (17)

I wrote a chapter in a HPN [Humanitarian Practice Network] paper and in a table, I said the IBC count was 17 deaths per day over the period 3/1/03 - 2/1/05. That was wrong. The count was 17 during 2003 but went up later and I had the wrong dates. That was unfortunate. As reported at that time, the IBC number was actually around 26 or 27 per day over the first 18 months of occupation that spanned the period of the Lancet study (the reason I cannot pin it down is because as IBC learns of past deaths, it seems that they go back and revise the numbers which is wonderful in terms of science, but diminishes the apparent contrast that occurred at that time). The NGO Coordinating Committee for Iraq recorded 50 deaths per day through their NGO network over the same time period and our study estimated that there were 101 deaths per day when we excluded Anbar Province. Thus, this does not change the basic conclusion that IBC was estimating a rate far lower than the ground-based evaluations.

Thus, the statement below ["the specific claim he keeps circulating (or at least the speculation from which it was derived, the "factor of five or ten" nonsense) has already been retracted by Roberts (though several other errors remain in the analysis uncorrected)."] is both in spirit and in fact incorrect.

- a "review" (sic!) of Noam Chomsky's last book "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy", presented to the Guardian-Observer's readers as a "A noxious form of argument: Noam Chomsky has allowed bile and rhetoric to replace intellectual rigour in his latest diatribe against the present United States administration, says Peter Beaumont" (18)

- a pre-emptive strike, "Microscope on Medialens: After taking Noam Chomsky to task over his new book, Failed States, our foreign affairs editor, Peter Beaumont, addresses his predicted critics before they organise a campaign against him". (19)

"Austrian right-wing populist Joerg Haider [who] called President Bush a war criminal on Saturday, days before Austria's government hosts Bush and European leaders in Vienna. (...) 'He is a war criminal. He brought about the war against Iraq deliberately, with lies and falsehoods (...) The Iraqi population is suffering terribly. Bush took the risk of an enormous number of victims' said Haider." (20)

Gabriele Zamparini is an independent filmmaker, writer and journalist living in London. He's the producer and director of the documentaries XXI CENTURY and The Peace! DVD and author of American Voices of Dissent (Paradigm Publishers). He can be reached at info@thecatsdream.com - Find out more about him and his work at http://TheCatsDream.com
Comment on this Editorial

In a short editorial, the Detroit News asked an interesting question:

"Some war critics are suggesting Iraq terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi should have been arrested and prosecuted rather than bombed into oblivion. Why expose American troops to the danger of an arrest, when bombs work so well?"

Here's one possible answer: In order not to send a five-year-old Iraqi girl into oblivion with the same 500-pound bombs that sent al-Zarqawi into oblivion.

Of course, I don't know whether the Detroit News editorial board, if pressed, would say that the death of that little Iraqi girl was "worth it." Maybe the board wasn't even aware that that little girl had been killed by the bombs that killed Zarqawi when it published its editorial. But I do know one thing: killing Iraqi children and other such "collateral damage" has long been acceptable and even "worth it" to U.S. officials as part of their long-time foreign policy toward Iraq.

This U.S. government mindset was expressed perfectly by former U.S. official Madeleine Albright when she stated that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from the U.S. and UN sanctions against Iraq had, in fact, been "worth it." By "it" she was referring to the U.S. attempt to oust Saddam Hussein from power through the use of the sanctions. Even though that attempt did not succeed, U.S. officials still felt that the deaths of the Iraqi children had been worth trying to get rid of Saddam.

It's no different with respect to President Bush's war on Iraq and the resulting occupation, which has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Iraqi people, including countless children. (The Pentagon has long had a policy of not keeping count of the number of Iraqi people, including children, it kills.) In the minds of U.S. officials, the deaths and maiming of all those Iraqi people, including the children, while perhaps unfortunate "collateral damage," have, in fact, been worth it.

That's why U.S. officials gave nary a thought to the death of that five-year-old girl who was bombed into oblivion with the bomb that did the same to Zarqawi. The child's death was "worth it" because the bomb also killed a terrorist, which U.S. officials believe, brings the Middle East another step closer to peace and freedom.

Wars of aggression versus defensive wars

Some would argue that such "collateral damage" is just an unfortunate byproduct of war. War is brutal. People get killed in war. Compared with the two world wars, not that many people have been killed in Iraq, proponents of the Iraq war and occupation would claim.

Such claims, however, miss an important point: U.S. military forces have no right, legal or moral, even to be in Iraq killing anyone. Why? Because neither the Iraqi people nor their government ever attacked the United States. The Iraqi people had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington. Thus, this was an optional war against Iraq, one that President Bush and his military forces did not have to wage.

The attack on Iraq was akin to, say, attacking Bolivia or Uruguay or Mongolia, after 9/11. Those countries also had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and so it would have been illegal and immoral for President Bush to have ordered an invasion and occupation of those countries as well. To belabor the obvious, the fact that some people attacked the United States on 9/11 didn't give the United States the right to attack countries that didn't have anything to do with the 9/11 attacks.

That made the United States the aggressor nation and Iraq the defending nation in this conflict. That incontrovertible fact holds deep moral implications, as well as legal ones, for U.S. soldiers who kill people in Iraq, including people who are simply trying to oust the occupiers from Iraq. Don't forget that aggressive war was punished as a war crime at Nuremberg.

Suppose an armed robber enters a person's home and the owner's neighbor comes over to help him. The homeowner and his neighbor fire at the robber who fires back, killing both the homeowner and his neighbor.

Can the robber claim self-defense? No, because he had no right to be in the home in the first place. The intruder is guilty of murder, both morally and legally, because he doesn't have the right to be where he is when he shoots the homeowner and his friend.

The situation is no different in Iraq because U.S. soldiers don't have any right to be there. "But they were ordered to invade Iraq by their commander in chief." They could have refused to obey orders to deploy to Iraq, just as Lt. Ehren Watada has done. Watada refused to loyally obey the orders of his commander in chief. Instead, he chose to obey his conscience and also to fulfill the oath he took to support and defend the Constitution.

Many Americans have a difficult time processing this because they simply want to block out of their minds that their own federal government — the paternalistic government that takes care of them with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, and education and protects them from drug dealers, immigrants, terrorists, and big oil — would ever do anything gravely wrong.

Let's put the situation this way. Suppose a coalition of Muslim countries successfully invaded the United States to overthrow the Bush regime and that foreign troops were now occupying the country and supervising new elections. Suppose some Americans began violently resisting the occupation and that British citizens came over to help them. While there undoubtedly would be some Americans supporting the foreign occupation of America and cooperating with it, my hunch is that most Americans would support the resistance.

Or put it this way: Suppose it was the Soviet Union that had done everything to Iraq that the U.S. government has done: imposed brutal sanctions that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, invaded Iraq, and then had Soviet troops occupying the country while organizing elections, killing insurgents and resisters, censoring the press, confiscating guns, conducting warrantless searches, detaining people without trials, and torturing and sexually abusing detainees.

Is there any doubt that a large segment of the American people, especially conservatives and neo-conservatives, would be railing like banshees against the Soviet communist forces in Iraq?

War versus occupation

Moreover, what people often forget is that the United States is no longer at war in Iraq. This is an occupation, not a war. The war ended when Saddam Hussein's government fell. At that point, U.S. forces could have exited the country. (Or they could have exited the country when it became obvious that Saddam's infamous WMDs were nonexistent.) Instead, the president opted to have the troops remain in Iraq to "rebuild" the country and to establish "democracy," and the troops opted to obey his orders to do so. Occupying Iraq, like invading Iraq, was an optional course of action.

As an occupation force serving a sovereign regime, U.S. forces are not engaged in a war but instead are simply serving as a domestic police force for the sovereign Iraqi regime. The problem, however, is that they've been trained as soldiers, not policemen.

The military mindset is totally different from the police mindset. Assume that there is a suspected terrorist hiding among 10 innocent people. How would the military and the police deal with that situation?

The military would not chance the suspected terrorist's escaping or his killing a soldier in a gun battle. As we have seen in the al-Zarqawi killing, the military would simply drop a bomb on the suspect, even knowing that the innocent people around him would also be killed. In the mind of the military, the "collateral damage" would be worth it, even if it included children.

This military mindset was put on display a few years ago by a CIA paramilitary operation in Yemen. Convinced that an automobile in Yemen was being driven by an al-Qaeda terrorist, the CIA fired a missile into the car, killing all six people in the car, including an American citizen. As the Detroit News would ask, why bother with trying to capture the suspects and then go through all the hassles associated with extradition and trial when one missile can do the trick? And how exactly do we know that everyone in the car was guilty of terrorism and deserving of the death penalty? Because the CIA (which claimed that there were WMDs in Iraq) said so.

Consider another real-world example. A few years ago, the Washington, D.C., area was terrorized by two gunmen who were sporadically shooting and killing people at random. The police were having a very difficult time capturing them. One day, someone spotted the suspected snipers parked at a highway roadside park where lots of other cars were parked.

Taking the chance that the suspected snipers could escape to kill again, the cops slowly surrounded the roadside park. They then approached the car and took both of the suspects into custody, after which they were tried and convicted.

What would have been the military response? Drop a couple of 500-pound bombs on them, just as they did with the terrorist Zarqawi. After all, in the words of the Detroit News, why take the chance that the suspects could escape and kill even more people? So what if the bystanders, including children, would be also killed in the process? That collateral damage would be worth it because the suspects would very likely have gone on to kill more people than the bombs did. Of course, the dead would include American children, rather than Iraqi children, but certainly that wouldn't be an important distinction to the Pentagon, or would it?

That raises another distinction between the military and the police. It's not difficult to see that the military holds the Bill of Rights in contempt, which is precisely why the Pentagon established its torture and sex abuse camps in Cuba and former Soviet-bloc countries — so as to avoid the constraints of the U.S. Constitution and any interference by our country's federal judiciary.

It is not a coincidence that in the Pentagon's three-year effort to "rebuild" Iraq it has done nothing to construct a judicial system that would have independent judges issuing search and arrest warrants or that would protect due process, habeas corpus, jury trials, and the right to counsel. To the military, all that is anathema, not only because it would presumably enable lots of guilty people to go free but also because it might inhibit the ability of the military to take out people without having to go through all those legal and technical niceties.

Several months ago, a U.S. attorney told a federal court of appeals that the United States is as much a battleground in the war on terrorism as other countries in the world, including Iraq. Heaven forbid that the American people ever permit the U.S. military to expand to the United States the war-on-terrorism tactics it has employed overseas.

More important, all too many Americans have yet to confront the moral implications of invading and occupying Iraq. U.S. officials continue to exhort the American people to judge the war and occupation on whether it proves to be "successful" in establishing "stability" and "democracy" in Iraq. If so, the idea will be that the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, including countless Iraqi children, will have been worth it. It would be difficult to find a more morally repugnant position than that.

Not mentioned here of the fact the "five insurgent groups led by al-Qaida in Iraq," with the exception of Jaish al-Taifa al-Mansourah and the so-called "Zarqawi network" (now presumably the al-Masri network), are unknown Salafi-jihadi terrorist groups outside of the larger resistance, composed of nationalists, primarily former Ba'athists and Saddam Hussein loyalists, although we must assume there is no shortage of average Iraqis determined to get rid of the occupiers.

"The formation of the Council is clearly an attempt to unify insurgent efforts against Iraqi and US forces," explains the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base. "Some analysts believe it also to be a reaction to, or a reflection of, a rift between the numerous Sunni insurgent groups. At the time of its formation, the groups represented in the Council were all unified by an extremist Salafi ideology, separating themselves from other less extreme Islamist and nationalist organizations.... By creating the Council, al-Qaeda can continue its operations without having to claim direct responsibility for its violent actions."

In other words, the "violent actions" of the CIA-ISI created terror operation "al-Qaeda" may now be attributed to a larger and more diffuse (and thus more threatening) range of radical Islamic groups. "We give the good news ... to the Islamic nation that we have carried God's verdict by slaughtering the two captured crusaders," the alleged MSC internet message states. Naturally, for propaganda reasons and sheer horror effect, instead of simply executing the captives with a bullet to the back of the head, they were beheaded. No doubt a video of this grisly event will surface soon enough.

Abu Ayyub al-Masri and the Mujahedeen Shura Council are a continuation of business as usual-the ongoing demonization of Arabs and Muslims, thus our two minute hate sessions, broadcast ceaselessly by various corporate divisions of the Ministry of Lies and Manufactured Truth, may proceed, inculcating the public further in preparation for the ultimate conflagration, i.e., World War Four, as plotted by the neocons.