Friends, When I first saw those torture photos, with the grinning female GI, I knew something unusual was coming down. The torture itself was of course not news. We've already seen numerous reports of prisoners being tortured, beaten to death, and murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan. I've published some of those and I'm sure you folks get such stuff off the net as well. The involvement of junior soldiers and females was a bit odd, and the fact that photos were taken and distributed freely around the prison was certainly not traditional procedure. But the strangest thing was the fact that we were seeing the images and hearing the stories on mainstream TV. What was that about? Why was the media undermining the President and a war that the media has been staunchly supporting all along? Why have the networks suddenly sprouted a social conscience? Part of the reason, of course, is that once the photos were distributed widely in the military, and then uploaded to the net, the story became difficult to sit on. "Someone's going to break it, so why not get in early?". Perhaps that's the whole reason for the media coverage. But I doubt it very much. There is lots of disturbing evidence all over the net, regarding all sorts of American transgressions - which never sees the light of a media camera. When has the mainstream media ever talked about depleted uranium, or snipers shooting unarmed women and children, or units firing heavy weapons into unarmed crowds? I've gotten hundreds of reports like that, and I believe there are photos available as well. If they can sit on all that and more, month after month, why couldn't they sit on the torture story? My suspicion was that there is some kind of struggle emerging in high-level circles. Circles high enough to get leaks published and high enough to infiltrate the prison and initiate the photo activity. Evidently, it seemed to me, there is a very well-connected little circle within the bigger elite circle, and that little circle is hostile to the neocons. It is not difficult to guess what kind of people are likely to be in that little circle of friends. It is open knowledge that veteran brass and intelligence people are very pissed off at the neocons. Those veterans knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, they know that there was plenty of warning before 9/11, and they know that the interceptors were held back on the day. And yet they're the ones who are taking the blame for "intelligence failures" and they are the ones who have to send GIs off to die in Iraq. The neocons are arrogant upstarts in DC, a bit like JFK was, and like him they've made a lot of enemies. Not even the oil companies are happy about administration policy in Iraq. The little circle may not be all that little. OK, enough preamble. Something big is coming down, and I'd like to show you some of the breaking news items. I'll quote excerpts from various articles, and include the URLs of the full articles. To begin with, and as you know from the media - the revelations are not stopping with that first batch of photos. Even as the White House scurries into damage-control mode, damning testimony and new evidence is appearing in rapid succession. This first article is an interview with Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey, a 12 year Marine veteran who served in both Iraq campaigns. Here is someone with very high public credibility. He wasn't involved with prisons, but he describes, or more confesses, things he and others did in Iraq. He talks about wiping out a group of unarmed young demonstrators, and says, "The order to shoot the demonstrators, I believe, came from senior government officials, including intelligence communities within the military and the U.S. government." He talks graphically about depleted uranium, and cluster bombs. He goes on to tell how his actions became increasingly difficult for him to justify, despite his strong sense of duty and discipline as a Marine. He describes an incident with a superior: ______________________________________________________ http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051804A.shtml Atrocities in Iraq: 'I Killed Innocent People for Our Government' By Paul Rockwell Sacramento Bee Sunday 16 May 2004 There was an incident. It was right after the fall of Baghdad, when we went back down south. On the outskirts of Karbala, we had a morning meeting on the battle plan. I was not in a good mindset. All these things were going through my head - about what we were doing over there. About some of the things my troops were asking. I was holding it all inside. My lieutenant and I got into a conversation. The conversation was striking me wrong. And I lashed out. I looked at him and told him: "You know, I honestly feel that what we're doing is wrong over here. We're committing genocide.'" He asked me something and I said that with the killing of civilians and the depleted uranium we're leaving over here, we're not going to have to worry about terrorists. He didn't like that. He got up and stormed off. And I knew right then and there that my career was over. I was talking to my commanding officer. ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051804C.shtml The Roots of Torture By John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff Newsweek International May 24 Issue The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war. The story begins in the months after September 11, when a small band of conservative lawyers within the Bush administration staked out a forward-leaning legal position. The attacks by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these lawyers said, had plunged the country into a new kind of war. It was a conflict against a vast, outlaw, international enemy in which the rules of war, international treaties and even the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These positions were laid out in secret legal opinions drafted by lawyers from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and then endorsed by the Department of Defense and ultimately by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, according to copies of the opinions and other internal legal memos obtained by NEWSWEEK. By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had "requested that you reconsider that decision." Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. "As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The nature of the new war places a - high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions. ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ http://truthout.org/docs_04/051904AA.shtml 'Definitely a Cover-Up' By Brian Ross and Alexandra Salomon ABCNEWS.com Tuesday 18 May 2004 Former Abu Ghraib Intel Staffer Says Army Concealed Involvement in Abuse Scandal Dozens of soldiers - other than the seven military police reservists who have been charged - were involved in the abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, and there is an effort under way in the Army to hide it, a key witness in the investigation told ABCNEWS. "There's definitely a cover-up," the witness, Sgt. Samuel Provance, said. "People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet." Provance, 30, was part of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed at Abu Ghraib last September. He spoke to ABCNEWS despite orders from his commanders not to. Top military officials have claimed the abuse seen in the photos at Abu Ghraib was limited to a few MPs, but Provance says the sexual humiliation of prisoners began as a technique ordered by the interrogators from military intelligence. ______________________________________________________ These are hard-hitting stories. Their content, like the torture photos, is not particularly new or surprising - but their presence in mainstream channels is. And each of the stories I quoted not only expands on the list of crimes, but also points the finger upwards, to high officials and intelligence officers. This is the kind of media material that can turn the whole population against the war, and against Bush and the neocons. Now that it's OK to put out damning Iraq stories - regardless of why it's now OK - there are lots of reporters and interviewees who will go for it because they think it's the right thing to do. It can't be stopped now. The damn has broken, and it's beginning to feel like the early days of Watergate. If there is a 'little circle' out to get the neocons, then they have succeeded in launching a media blitz that will make the Monica Lowenski affair seem minor. Bush, it would seem, is on his way out. This is his scandal, like Lowenski before, and the Iranian Hostage Crisis before that. Is there really a 'little circle'? This next article might shed some light on that question ______________________________________________________ http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051904C.shtml Army, CIA Want Torture Truths Exposed By Martin Sieff UPI Senior News Analyst Tuesday 18 May 2004 Washington - Efforts at the top level of the Bush administration and the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense to contain the Iraq prison torture scandal and limit the blame to a handful of enlisted soldiers and immediate senior officers have already failed: The scandal continues to metastasize by the day. Over the past weekend and into this week, devastating new allegations have emerged putting Stephen Cambone, the first Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, firmly in the crosshairs and bringing a new wave of allegations cascading down on the head of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when he scarcely had time to catch his breath from the previous ones. Even worse for Rumsfeld and his coterie of neo-conservative true believers who have run the Pentagon for the past 3 1/2 years, three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by them, it's payback time. Those three institutions are: The United States Army, the Central Intelligence Agency and the old, relatively moderate but highly experienced Republican leadership in the United States Senate. None of those groups is chopped liver: Taken together they comprise a devastating Grand Slam. The spearhead for the new wave of revelations and allegations - but by no means the only source of them - is veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. In a major article published in the New Yorker this week and posted on to its Web-site Saturday, Hersh revealed that a high-level Pentagon operation code-named Copper Green "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation" of Iraqi prisoners. He also cited Pentagon sources and consultants as saying that photographing the victims of such abuse was an explicit part of the program meant to force the victims into becoming blackmailed reliable informants. Hersh further claimed in his article that Rumsfeld himself approved the program and that one of his four or five top aides, Cambone, set it up in Baghdad and ran it. ...intelligence and regular Army sources have told UPI that senior officers and officials in both communities are sickened and outraged by the revelations of mass torture and abuse, and also by the incompetence involved, in the Abu Ghraib prison revelations. These sources also said that officials all the way up to the highest level in both the Army and the Agency are determined not to be scapegoated, or allow very junior soldiers or officials to take the full blame for the excesses. ______________________________________________________ As a follow-up, here's an article about the Republican leadership in the US Senate: ______________________________________________________ http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051804D.shtml Senators to Press Scandal By Richard Simon and Elizabeth Shogren Los Angeles Times Monday 17 May 2004 A GOP-controlled panel, feeling slighted by the administration and obliged to look at abuse of prisoners, has no plan to drop the issue soon. Washington - As the White House struggles to get beyond the prisoner abuse scandal, it faces an unsettling fact: The Senate Armed Services Committee - controlled by Republicans - plans to keep the issue alive for weeks to come. That promises more headaches for the White House and once undreamed-of opportunities for Democrats on the committee, such as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and other critics of President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. The Armed Services Committee, led by 77-year-old Senate veteran John W. Warner of Virginia, has served noticed that it would not pull back, as the House Armed Services Committee has done. Instead, Warner plans extended hearings to call on the carpet such high-profile officials as Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. More disturbing still for the White House, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate committee say they will shift the focus from the misdeeds of a handful of guards at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. What they want to dig into instead is how senior Pentagon officials loosened the rules protecting prisoners during interrogation. ______________________________________________________ Think about the sequence of events. The media sequence was: (1) photos, (2) more revelations, (3) Senate decides to investigate, (4) Senate decides to be a bull dog on the matter. The public is supposed to assume that (1) led to (2) led to (3) led to (4). But does that make sense? If Martin Sieff, a UPI Senior News Analyst, has properly checked his sources, as he would with such an article, then the Grand Slam of Army, CIA, and Republican Senate leadership have had it in for Bush for some time now. And certainly these people talk to each other all the time. The Armed Services Committee, the CIA, and the Army work together very closely, and sharing secrets is a routine part of their jobs. These are hardball players. Why would they not pursue their common interests, using very straightforward means easily at their disposal? The Army and the CIA would have no trouble at all between them setting up whatever conditions and climate they wanted at Abu Ghraib. And who do you imagine it is in DC that liaisons with the media? Who actually makes the phone calls and passes the leaks to the key editors? In most cases that would be the CIA's job. Relationships build up over time, trust develops. The editor gets a call, "Trust me on this one, run with it. You won't get roasted." The real sequence of events goes more like this. (1) our little circle decides to take action, (2) Army, CIA, and Senate each prepare for their role, (3) when all is in place, the photos are published. The dead give-away is the rapidity of the media version of the sequence. Just as the War on Terrorism sprung into life impossibly quickly after the towers collapsed, so have too many ducks fallen into place too quickly since the photos appeared. And just as we learned later about the neocon's "New Pearl Harbor" agenda, now we learn of long-simmering resentment in the Grand Slam. You do the math. What we are seeing is a power struggle between the neocons and the old-cons - the traditional conservatives. So far it looks like a replay of Watergate, and if it goes that way the neocons will be out, and Kerry will be working within a new power alignment and a new set of priorities. The glove, to some extent, will be put back on the fascist fist. But the neocons are not pushovers. They obviously have their own little fascist circles, within the CIA, military intelligence, and the private sector, or they wouldn't have been able to do all the things they've been doing, in the face of institutional disapproval. They too can play hardball. They proved that on 9/11. Whatever little circles pulled that off, domestic or foreign, are still in place - and they're in it up to their necks now, committed to the program. There's one obvious scenario that could keep the neocons in power and enable them to aggressively pursue their New American Century: (1) a major "terrorist" event just before the election, something big - perhaps the Senate building, (2) Al Qaeda is immediately blamed and 'evidence' released, (3) Bush declares Marshall Law and cancels the election, (4) see: German history from 1933. And guess what? Just as the neocons told us about the new Pearl Harbor before it happened, now they're telling us what to expect next... ______________________________________________________ From U.S. News and World Report http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040524/whispers/24whisplead.htm Washington Whispers From the White House, a nightmare scenario White House officials say they've got a "working premise" about terrorism and the presidential election: It's going to happen. "We assume," says a top administration official, "an attack will happen leading up to the election." And, he added, "it will happen here." There are two worst-case scenarios, the official says. The first posits an attack on Washington, possibly the Capitol, which was believed to be the target of the 9/11 jet that crashed in Pennsylvania. Theory 2: smaller but more frequent attacks in Washington and other major cities leading up to the election. To prepare, the administration has been holding secret antiterrorism drills to make sure top officials know what to do. "There was a sense," says one official involved in the drills, "of mass confusion on 9/11. Now we have a sense of order." ______________________________________________________ Sense of order indeed. Which sense? "Alles in Ordnung" sense? "New World Order" sense? Take your pick. rkm -- ============================================================ If you find this material useful, you might want to check out our website (http://cyberjournal.org) or try out our low-traffic, moderated email list by sending a message to: •••@••.••• You are encouraged to forward any material from the lists or the website, provided it is for non-commercial use and you include the source and this disclaimer. Richard Moore (rkm) Wexford, Ireland _____________________________ "...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the Reichstag fire." - Srdja Trifkovic There is not a problem with the system. The system is the problem. Faith in ourselves - not gods, ideologies, leaders, or programs. _____________________________ "Zen of Global Transformation" home page: http://www.QuayLargo.com/Transformation/ QuayLargo discussion forum: http://www.QuayLargo.com/Transformation/ShowChat/?ScreenName=ShowThreads cj list archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=cj newslog list archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=newslog _____________________________ Informative links: http://www.globalresearch.ca/ http://www.MiddleEast.org http://www.rachel.org http://www.truthout.org http://www.zmag.org http://www.co-intelligence.org ============================================================