Tuesday, December 13, 2005
News Roundup
There has been a LOT of news lately. Here's a bit of it.
The UPI belatedly picks up this bit of common knowledge: In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument." Saddam went on the CIA payroll in 1959.
But here's a bombshell: According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam's ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.
The US has been at war with Iran for 17 years.
Hersh hands a rack of bombshells to Antiwar.com (a website that I confess I do not like; but what matters iis Hersh): Allawi is pretty much the candidate of the CIA, some in the State Department, and some in the White House. They love him because he will do what we want, and if we need someone to give us cover in terms of asking us to leave or asking us to withdraw, or whatever, he's going to be our man. He's also pretty tough. At one point, he was running his own militia. In his career, he's been inside. He has worked very close to Saddam Hussein inside the Mukhabarat Iraqi Secret Army and secret, if you will, the torture police. He's not an amateur at torture and he is not an amateur to bloody operations, but he is our guy.
Before major combat operations began, the US had already started massive bombing: The Marines fly their own close air support for combat on the ground and they are doing a lot of it. And the air wing reported in the fall, in November of '04, that the previous, I'd say 15 or 16 months, they had dropped 500,000 tons of ordinance, bombs, rockets, etc. ...That translates into, get this, 2 million 500-lb. bombs..... Plus also, there is only one Marine wing. I don't know Air Force wings or units are flying, and I don't know how many Navy units are flying, but the Navy and Air Force are doing many more missions than the Marines. So there you are. It adds up to... look, it's not the kind of tonnage we had in the Vietnam War when B-52 planes were dropping, but most of the bombing we do is done in urban areas - that's where most of the combat is.
The accusations against Syria are baseless: ... there is no empirical evidence[as to who killed Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri]. Everybody in the world has an idea that the American propaganda of the United States and the French is, of course, is that Syria did it. And then there's been this alleged investigation by a German prosecutor name Mehlis, M-e-h-l-i-s, who came up with a report that, if one read it carefully, and I mean anyone, there's no there, there. The report hangs on two witnesses that Mehlis in his report debunks, and one of which, about a week ago, four or five days ago, publicly admitted in Damascus - we, of course, don't accept [that] anything that's said publicly there is true - one of the two witnesses said he'd been paid off by the Saudis and been terrorized and been forced to face some of the statements he made through the Mehlis commission. So it's a very, very less-than-persuasive report played to a fare-thee-well by the United States.
Israel is working with Kurds to create an independent zone and foment war: . The Israelis are investing in their good partners the Kurds, they support an independent Kurdistan, or at least a strong Kurdistan. And for sure, there are operations going on, Israeli-led operations are going on inside Kurdistan into Iran, Syria, absolutely. The Israelis have a platform there.
More blogs about politics.
