Iraq snapshot Thursday, December 11, 2014.
Thursday, December 11, 2014. Chaos and violence continue, more lies to sell the current wave of the Iraq War continue, Senator Carl Levin exposed one of the lies that sold the 2003 invasion, and much more.
To sell Barack's latest wave in the never-ending Iraq War, liars strip events from the narratives, they remove and omit facts. It wasn't always that way. To start the illegal war in 2003, liars added details, fake ones, that (falsely) linked Iraq to the 9-11 attacks on the United States.
It was one false link, it was many.
We'll turn to Crapapedia for this example of Chris Hedges writing for the New York Times and promoting a false link in what can only be termed "government propaganda":
Most significant was a November 8, 2001 front page story about two former Iraqi military commanders who claimed to have trained foreign mujahedeen how to hijack planes without using guns.[17] Hedges quoted a man he believed to be an Iraqi general as saying, “These Islamic radicals… came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. ” The two defectors also asserted there was a secret compound in Salman Pak facility where a German scientist was producing biological weapons.[18]
According to Mother Jones, “The impact of the article... was immediate: Op-eds ran in major papers, and the story was taken to a wider audience through cable-TV talk shows. When Condoleezza Rice, then George W. Bush’s national security adviser, was asked about the story at a press briefing, she said, ‘I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilizing.’” As late as 2006, conservative magazines like The Weekly Standard and National Review continued to use the story to justify the invasion of Iraq.[19]
It later surfaced that the story was “an elaborate scam.” The defector Hedges quoted, who identified himself as Lt. General Jamal al-Ghurairy, was actually a former sergeant, and the real Ghurairy had never left Iraq. Hedges said that he had taken the story at the request of Lowell Bergman of Frontline, who wanted the defectors for his show but could not go to Beirut for the interview.
That was only one lie.
Today another lie was exposed.
Senator Carl Levin's office issued the following:
Levin will introduce a letter he received from CIA Director John Brennan, declassifying for the first time some details of a March 2003 CIA cable warning the Bush administration against references to the allegation that Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, had met before the attacks in Prague, Czech Republic, with an Iraqi intelligence officer. He also introduced a translated excerpt from a book by the former head of Czech counterintelligence, describing U.S. pressure to confirm that the meeting took place. In fact, no such meeting occurred. And he called on Brennan to fully declassify the CIA cable.
Following is Levin’s Senate floor speech on the matter, as prepared for delivery:
Mr. President, I want to speak for a few moments about one of the most significant events in my 36 years as United States Senator, the war in Iraq. I want to speak about important historical records crucial to our understanding of why we went to war against Iraq in 2003. I want to enter into the public record recent revelations not yet made public. And I make one more public call for a key document to be made fully public.
I will begin by renewing a request to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan. It is a request I have also made to his predecessors: I ask Director Brennan to declassify fully a March 13, 2003 CIA cable debunking the contention that 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official named Ahmad al-Ani.
Earlier this year, Director Brennan wrote to me, refusing, as did his predecessors, to fully declassify the CIA cable. But in his letter to me he makes public for the first time a few lines from that document. While this is a significant addition to the public record, and I will discuss that in a moment, it is still not the full cable, and I am calling on him to declassify and release the full cable.
Now, in order to understand why I am making that request, we need to return to early 2003.
On March 6, 2003, just two weeks before U.S. troops would cross the Iraqi border, President Bush held a prime-time televised press conference. In that press conference he mentioned the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks eight times, often in the same breath as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. There was a concerted campaign on the part of the Bush administration to connect Iraq in the public mind with the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks. That campaign succeeded. According to public polls in the week before the Iraq war, half or more of Americans believed Saddam was directly involved in the attacks. One poll taken in September 2003, six months after we invaded Iraq, found that nearly 70 percent of Americans believed it likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Americans who believed in a link between Iraq and 9/11 overwhelmingly supported the idea of invading Iraq. Of course, connections between Saddam and 9/11 or al Qaeda were fiction.
America’s intelligence community was pressed to participate in the administration’s media campaign. Just a week after the President’s prime-time press conference, on March 13, 2003, CIA field staff sent a cable to CIA headquarters, responding to a request for information about a report that Mohammad Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11 hijackings, had met in 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech capital of Prague. In stark terms, this CIA cable from the field warned against U.S. government officials citing the report of the alleged Prague meeting.
Yet the notion of such a meeting was a centerpiece of the administration’s campaign to create an impression in the public mind that Saddam was in league with the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. On multiple occasions, including national television appearances, Vice President Dick Cheney cited reports of the meeting, at one point calling it “pretty well confirmed.” Officials from Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, who set up a sort of rogue intelligence analysis operation, briefed senior officials with a presentation citing the Prague meeting as a “known contact” between Iraq and al Qaida.
Now, why am I bringing up a CIA cable from more than a decade ago? Isn’t this old, well-covered terrain? No, it isn’t. This is about giving the American people a full account of the march to war as new information becomes available. It is about trying to hold leaders who misled the public accountable. It is about warning future leaders of this nation that they must not commit our sons and daughters to battle on the basis of false statements.
Mr. President, there is no more grave decision for a nation to make than the decision to go to war. And there is no more important issue for every member of Congress than the decision to authorize the use of military force. A decision to authorize force is a decision to unleash the might of our armed forces – the strongest military on the planet. It commits the men and women of our armed forces to fight, and perhaps to die, on the battlefield. The decision to go to war must be careful, considered, and based on the facts.
Such careful consideration was tragically absent in the march to war in Iraq.
Here is what the Vice President said on December 9, 2001, in an interview on “Meet the Press:” “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.”
Far from “pretty well confirmed,” there was almost no evidence that such a meeting took place. Just a single unsubstantiated report, from a single source, and a mountain of information indicating there was no such meeting, including the fact that travel and other records indicated that Atta was almost certainly in the United States at the time of the purported meeting in Prague.
It was highly irresponsible for the Vice President to make that claim. Calling a single, unconfirmed report from a single source “pretty well confirmed,” as he did on Dec. 9, 2001, was a reckless statement to make on such a grave topic as war, in the face of overwhelming doubt that such a meeting occurred.
Yet Vice President Cheney’s reckless statements continued, even as evidence mounted that there was no Prague meeting. In September 2002, he said Atta “did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official.”
The Vice President made those statements in the face of a then-classified June 2002 CIA assessment that said the alleged meeting was “not verified,” called the information about it “contradictory,” and described assessments of Iraqi cooperation with al Qaida terror plots as “speculative.” The Vice President made those statements in the face of a July 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency analysis, which reported that there was no evidence that Atta was in the Czech Republic at the time. He made those statements despite a Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum in August 2002 rejecting the claims by a rogue intelligence analysis shop at the Pentagon that the meeting was an example of a “known contact” between Iraq and al Qaida.
That brings us to the March 13, 2003 cable. Mr. President, it is unfortunate that I cannot fully lay out the contents of that cable, because much of it remains classified. But as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2006 “Phase II” report indicates, it appears that the cable was sent in response to a request from headquarters at Langley for comment on the claim that Atta and al-Ani had met in Prague because the White House was considering a reference to a Prague meeting in a speech. At that time, according to then-CIA Director George Tenet’s memoir, the CIA had been given a draft of a speech by Vice President Cheney containing assertions about connections between Iraq and al Qaida. Tenet writes in his memoir that he had to object to the President that the speech went “way beyond what the intelligence shows. We cannot support the speech and it should not be given.”
Mr. President, the text of this cable and the information surrounding it was almost entirely redacted by the CIA from the Intelligence Committee’s 2006 Phase II report. A number of us objected to that redaction at the time the report was made public; indeed, the Majority Leader introduced legislation which I cosponsored that would have declassified the cable, legislation Republicans blocked. At the time of the report’s release, I joined several members of the Intelligence Committee, including Ranking Member Rockefeller, Senators Feinstein, Wyden, Bayh, Mikulski and Feingold, in concluding that the administration’s decision to keep the contents of the cable classified “represents an improper use of classification authority by the intelligence community to shield the White House.”
In the years since I have sought declassification of the March 2003 CIA cable on numerous occasions. Twice, in 2011 and 2012, I wrote to then-CIA Director Petraeus asking him to declassify the cable. Then in February 2013, I asked Director Brennan during his confirmation hearing whether he would contact the Czech government to ask if they would object to declassification of the cable, and he responded, “Absolutely, Senator, I will.”
Despite his commitment, I heard nothing from Director Brennan for some time. Finally, in March of this year, more than a year after his public commitment to me, I received a letter from Director Brennan. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Director Brennan’s March 13, 2014, letter to me be entered into the record.
The letter contains no indication that he had asked the Czech government for its view, as he committed to do. But Director Brennan’s letter includes, and therefore finally declassifies, this very clear statement from the cable: “[T]here is not one USG [counterterrorism] or FBI expert that … has said they have evidence or ‘know’ that [Atta] was indeed [in Prague]. In fact, the analysis has been quite the opposite.”
Again, that cable was sent to CIA headquarters on March 13, 2003 – a week before our invasion of Iraq. But the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, continued to suggest the meeting may have taken place. He said the following about the meeting on “Meet the Press” on September 14, 2003 – six months after CIA received that cable: “We’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.” Here is what he told the Denver Post newspaper on January 9, 2004: “We’ve never been able to collect any more information on that. That was the one that possibly tied the two together to 9/11.” Here is what he told CNN on June 17, 2004: “We have never been able to confirm that, nor have we been able to knock it down. We just don’t know.”
Mr. President, those statements were simply not true. We did know. We did know that there was no evidence that such a meeting had taken place. We did know there was ample evidence it did not take place. We did know that there was, as the CIA cable says, “not one” government expert who said there was evidence that Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague. The Vice President recklessly disregarded the truth, and he did so in a way calculated to maintain support for the administration's decision to go to war in Iraq.
There is a second recent revelation about how the “Prague meeting” progressed from unsubstantiated report to justification for war. It comes from Jiri Ruzek, who headed the Czech counterintelligence service on and after 9/11. Mr. Ruzek published a memoir earlier this year, which we have had translated from Czech. It recounts the days after the terror attack, including how his nation’s intelligence services first reported a single-source rumor of a Prague meeting between Atta and al-Ani, how CIA officials under pressure from CIA headquarters in turn pressured him to substantiate the rumor, and how U.S. officials pressured the Czech government when Czech intelligence officials failed to produce the confirmation that the Bush administration sought.
Mr. Ruzek writes, “It was becoming more and more clear that we had not met expectations and did not provide the ‘right’ intelligence output.” Mr. Ruzek goes on: “The Americans showed me that anything can be violated, including the rules that they themselves taught us. Without any regard to us, they used our intelligence information for propaganda press leaks. They wanted to mine certainty from unconfirmed suspicion and use it as an excuse for military action. We were supposed to play the role of useful idiot thanks to whose initiative a war would be started.”
That’s chilling. We have a senior intelligence official of a friendly nation describing the pressure that he and other Czech officials were under to give the Bush administration material it could use to justify a war.
When it came to the most serious decision a government can make – the decision to commit our sons and daughters to battle – the Bush administration was playing
The March 13, 2003, cable is an invaluable record in helping the American people understand how their elected officials conducted themselves in going to war. Continuing to cloak this document with a veil of secrecy, revealing a few sentences at a time, allows those who misled the American people to continue escaping the full verdict of history. It deprives the American people of a complete understanding of how we came to invade Iraq. In his letter to me, Director Brennan writes, “I understand that your principal concern is that the historical record be as complete as possible regarding this period in our history, and on this point we are in agreement.” But Director Brennan’s apparent refusal to do what he has committed to do – to ask the Czech government if it objects to release of the cable – now takes on the character of a continuing cover-up.
Mr. President, I believe decision-makers should have to face the full, unadulterated, unredacted truth about their decisions. The American people should know the full story – not just so we can understand the decisions in 2002 and 2003 that took us to war, but as a warning to future leaders against the misuse of intelligence and the abuse of power.
Again, they added lies -- lots of them -- to sell war on Iraq in 2002 and 2003 and today they strip away reality as they attempt to resell it.
But while we're all encouraged to call out Bully Boy Bush, the Cult of St. Barack works overtime to ensure that the Christ-child is never called out.
Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing. During it, a member offered a testimonial to the greatness:
US House Rep Gregory Meeks: It's easy for many of us to be up here and think that it's simple. We thought it was simple to get rid of Saddam Hussein. We said that it would take just a few days. In fact, we got on the ship that said Mission Accomplished a few days after shock and awe. I am glad we are not being that simplistic about this. The administration has been honest to say it will take years to get this done and to get it done right not based upon emotion, not based upon trying, just get it together so we can say rah-rah [. . .]
Testimonials and endorsements can be important. But let's first see just what sort of person was slobbering over Barack. Here's how CREW sees Meeks:
A swirling federal corruption probe into crooked charities associated with Rep. Meeks is just the tip of the iceberg in the congressman’s litany of ethical lapses.
Rep. Meeks has accepted numerous improper gifts while in office, including a below-market rate on a new home, major loans that he failed to disclose for years, and discounted rent on his district office. He has also accepted at least six trips to Caribbean resorts from a non-profit backed by convicted financier R. Allen Stanford, on whose behalf Rep. Meeks may have sought a favor from the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
"It's complicated. It's going to take some time. We're going to have to figure this out," declared Meeks but he wasn't talking about his legal strategy.
First thing Meeks might figure out is how to pronounce areas in Iraq. Erbil can be spelled Arbil but no one pronounces it "EE-BRILL."
Nor does anyone say "KurDICKstan."
It's Kurdistan.
Gregory Meeks, please keep your dick out of Kurdistan.
Yesterday's House Foreign Affairs Committee may have actually been hugely revealing in a way no one noticed.
US House Rep Albio Sires: Can you talk a little about Camp Liberty and any of the abuses by the Iraqis. I know you're on the discussion.
Brett McGurk: Well I get a briefing on this every single day. I get reports from the residents and also from the United Nations. And as you know UN monitoring teams confirms to us about humanitarian supplies and the overall situation at the camp. We look at it every single day. My colleague Jonathan Winer who's our senior advisor on the MEK resettlements. He's in Albania today with a team, an interagency team with DHS represented as well -- representatives as well. And we've gotten about 600 residents of Camp Liberty out of Camp Liberty and out of Iraq to safety over the past year and we're looking to increase that number this year and Albania has been very helpful in this regard. And Jonathan Weiner has really done a heroic, courageous job of getting this moving. And I think the new government will be even more cooperative. And we want to get all the residents of Camp Liberty -- as I've testified before -- out of Iraq to safety. That is our goal and we're working with partners around the world to achieve that goal. And right now Albania has been extremely cooperative and we should thank them for taking in hundreds of residents. And the residents are assimilating quite well in Albania. But Jonathan -- my colleague -- Mr. Winer is there addressing this issue right now, and I'm sure he'd very happy to follow up with you.
600?
Some outlets wrongly reported this year that Winer took his post in October of 2013 (here forHuffington Post getting it wrong)..
No.
He was first noted by the State Dept in a September 6, 2013 press statement by spokesperson Marie Harf:
He's been 'on the job' since at least September 2013 and Brett's proud of him for finding homes in that time for 600 Ashraf residents?
Most people presented with approximately 3,000 people who needed to get out of country -- a life-or-death issue -- would work to successfully get them out in 90 days tops. Check out previous evacuation efforts by the US is you doubt that.
But the White House is fine with it taking 15 months for Winer to relocate 600 people is acceptable?
At this rate, it will take over five years to relocate all the refugees -- over five years to do what previous administrations accomplished in 90 days.
No wonder Barack thinks his 'plan' (bombing Iraq) will require years to 'fix' things.
By the way, Brett may be impressed with Winer's work but he's likely the only one.
Not only is 600 a ridiculously small number, Winer's position isn't important enough in the eyes of the State Dept.
As Domani Spero (Diplopunidit) noted May 22nd, State Dept spokesperson Jen Psaki declared in a press briefing:
Jonathan Winer, who you also may know, visited Tripoli in February in his role as Special Coordinator for Libya and met with a variety of Libyan and international partners, and he’s working closely with Ambassador Satterfield and our NEA team.
Spero pointed out:
Jonathan Winer, the new Special Coordinator for Libya was previously appointed by the State Department as Senior Advisor for MEK Resettlement in 2013. In that capacity, he was tasked with overseeing USG efforts to help resettle the residents of Camp Hurriya to permanent, and secure locations outside of Iraq. He also previously served as chief counsel and principal legislative assistant to then Senator Kerry for 10 years and was a DAS at INL.
Again, Brett may be impressed but the State Dept and White House felt it was such a nothing assignment that they tasked him to be Special Coordinator for Libya as well.
As to Barack and his ridiculous 'plan,' it does not take years.
Even Meeks can't be such an idiot to believe that nonsense.
Iraq needs a political solution -- even Barack has said that.
A political solution dissolves support for the Islamic State as well as indifference to fighting it -- they are not the same thing. There are Sunnis who support the Islamic State in Iraq because of the targeting of Sunnis. There are Sunnis who look the other way due to the targeting of Sunnis. A political solution that truly includes the Sunnis -- which means ending the targeting -- makes it impossible for the Islamic State to operate freely.
Martin Chulov (Guardian) reports on the Islamic State today. Excerpt:
Abu Ahmed was an essential member of the earliest incarnation of the group. He had been galvanised into militancy as a young man by an American occupation that he and many like him believed was trying to impose a power shift in Iraq, favouring the country’s larger Shia population at the expense of the dominant Sunnis. His early role in what would become Isis led naturally to the senior position he now occupies within arevitalised insurgency that has spilled across the border into Syria. Most of his colleagues regard the crumbling order in the region as a fulfilment of their ambitions in Iraq – which had remained unfinished business, until the war in Syria gave them a new arena.
He agreed to speak publicly after more than two years of discussions, over the course of which he revealed his own past as one of Iraq’s most formidable and connected militants – and shared his deepening worry about Isis and its vision for the region. With Iraq and Syria ablaze, and the Middle East apparently condemned to another generation of upheaval and bloodshed at the hands of his fellow ideologues, Abu Ahmed is having second thoughts. The brutality of Isis is increasingly at odds with his own views, which have mellowed with age as he has come to believe that the teachings of the Koran can be interpreted and not read literally.
His misgivings about what the Islamic State has become led him to speak to the Guardian in a series of expansive conversations, which offer unique insight into its enigmatic leader and the nascent days of the terror group – stretching from 2004, when he met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Camp Bucca, to 2011, when the Iraqi insurgency crossed the border into Syria.
Zach Beauchamp (Vox) sums up Chulov's report, "In other words: without the Iraq war and American prisons there meant to detain possible terrorists, ISIS as we know it wouldn't exist."
Liars like Senator Barbara Boxer want to pretend that atrocities happened in Syria but not in Iraq.
Atrocities happened in Iraq. We'll leave Syria for someone that follows Syria.
And in the face of the disappearing of Sunnis -- via execution and via vanishing into the prisons -- the Sunni community was not silent. They were thrilled, for example, when Nouri lost the 2010 elections. But Barack Obama demanded Nouri get a second term (and the US brokered The Erbil Agreement that gave loser Nouri a second term). They voted and they won but their votes didn't count.
Then their representatives and other politicians attempted another means to justice: A no-confidence vote on Nouri.
This would have removed Nouri as prime minister in 2012.
Iraqiya's Ayad Allawi, Shi'ite cleric and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr, Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani and others all came together for this effort.
And the White House, specifically Vice President Joe Biden, leaned hard on Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to bury the effort. (Talabani declared he had the power to remove people's names from the petition even if they admitted they signed it. He had no such power.)
So they'd used their votes, the ballot box.
And then their votes were overturned.
They'd turned to their political leaders and the leaders used a Constitutional measure to attempt to remove Nouri only to see Jalal Talabani invent a 'power' that didn't exist to destroy the petition (his only legal role was to officially present the petition to Congress).
So now their politicians couldn't help them.
They then took to the streets and protested continuously for over a year.
They were targeted by Nouri and his thugs.
Some were followed from protests to their homes in an effort at intimidation.
Some were seized and beaten. Some were seized and killed.
Some were wounded at protests.
Some were killed at protests.
The most infamous example of that was the April 23, 2013 massacre of a peaceful sit-in in Hawija when Nouri sent his federal forces storming in. Alsumaria noted Kirkuk's Department of Health (Hawija is in Kirkuk) announced 50 activists have died and 110 were injured in the assault. AFP reported the death toll rose to 53. UNICEF noted that the dead included 8 children (twelve more were injured).
Even after that massacre, it would take Barack over a year to finally stop supporting thug Nouri.
Even after that massacre, Iraqis would continue to protest.
They'd been denied redress via the ballot box, they'd been denied justice when their elected officials attempted to seek it.
Now their protests were being ignored and Nouri was calling them "terrorists" and as 2013 ended and 2014 began, his forces began attacking protests as Nouri insisted -- publicly, on Iraqi television -- that he would burn the sites down with the protesters in them.
And Barbara Boxer wants to pretend Sunnis weren't victims, weren't targeted?
Some Sunnis are loudly and publicly opposed to the Islamic State.
But some Sunnis have joined them and many others have decided to turn their eye away because of the Iraqi government's targeting, hunting, killing, imprisoning of Sunnis.
The US government can drop all the bombs from planes that they want for as many years as they want.
It's not a 'plan.'
It's also not the answer to how you remove support for the Islamic State.
And until you remove support -- direct or complicit -- you can't remove the Islamic State from Iraq.
And Iraq may have a new prime minister -- Haider al-Abadi -- but Sunnis continue to be killed, Sunni civilians, by the Iraqi government.
Iraqi Spring MC Tweeted the most recent civilians -- including children -- killed with the never ending bombing of residential neighborhoods in Falluja -- and these bombings are the Iraqi military bombing the homes of Falluja -- Falluja being a Sunni dominant city.
Until you admit what's happened in Iraq, especially what's been done to the Sunnis (most notably in the last four years, but actually since the 2003 invasion), you're never going to get to peace because you're lying and aiding the violence by doing so.
Margaret Griffis (Antiwar.com) counts 182 violent deaths across Iraq. And Cedric and Wally offered:
Their joint-post notes that Barack's authorization for war on Iraq passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (on party lines -- and this means it now moves to the full Senate floor -- if it's not voted on before the next Congress is sworn in, it would automatically die and need to be re-introduced in order to be voted on).
To sell Barack's latest wave in the never-ending Iraq War, liars strip events from the narratives, they remove and omit facts. It wasn't always that way. To start the illegal war in 2003, liars added details, fake ones, that (falsely) linked Iraq to the 9-11 attacks on the United States.
It was one false link, it was many.
We'll turn to Crapapedia for this example of Chris Hedges writing for the New York Times and promoting a false link in what can only be termed "government propaganda":
Most significant was a November 8, 2001 front page story about two former Iraqi military commanders who claimed to have trained foreign mujahedeen how to hijack planes without using guns.[17] Hedges quoted a man he believed to be an Iraqi general as saying, “These Islamic radicals… came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. ” The two defectors also asserted there was a secret compound in Salman Pak facility where a German scientist was producing biological weapons.[18]
According to Mother Jones, “The impact of the article... was immediate: Op-eds ran in major papers, and the story was taken to a wider audience through cable-TV talk shows. When Condoleezza Rice, then George W. Bush’s national security adviser, was asked about the story at a press briefing, she said, ‘I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilizing.’” As late as 2006, conservative magazines like The Weekly Standard and National Review continued to use the story to justify the invasion of Iraq.[19]
It later surfaced that the story was “an elaborate scam.” The defector Hedges quoted, who identified himself as Lt. General Jamal al-Ghurairy, was actually a former sergeant, and the real Ghurairy had never left Iraq. Hedges said that he had taken the story at the request of Lowell Bergman of Frontline, who wanted the defectors for his show but could not go to Beirut for the interview.
That was only one lie.
Today another lie was exposed.
Senator Carl Levin's office issued the following:
Thursday, December 11, 2014
WASHINGTON – Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, today plans to introduce into the Congressional Record important new information about how Bush administration officials misled the nation in advance of the Iraq War, and called on CIA Director John Brennan to fully declassify an important 2003 CIA cable.Levin will introduce a letter he received from CIA Director John Brennan, declassifying for the first time some details of a March 2003 CIA cable warning the Bush administration against references to the allegation that Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, had met before the attacks in Prague, Czech Republic, with an Iraqi intelligence officer. He also introduced a translated excerpt from a book by the former head of Czech counterintelligence, describing U.S. pressure to confirm that the meeting took place. In fact, no such meeting occurred. And he called on Brennan to fully declassify the CIA cable.
Following is Levin’s Senate floor speech on the matter, as prepared for delivery:
Mr. President, I want to speak for a few moments about one of the most significant events in my 36 years as United States Senator, the war in Iraq. I want to speak about important historical records crucial to our understanding of why we went to war against Iraq in 2003. I want to enter into the public record recent revelations not yet made public. And I make one more public call for a key document to be made fully public.
I will begin by renewing a request to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan. It is a request I have also made to his predecessors: I ask Director Brennan to declassify fully a March 13, 2003 CIA cable debunking the contention that 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official named Ahmad al-Ani.
Earlier this year, Director Brennan wrote to me, refusing, as did his predecessors, to fully declassify the CIA cable. But in his letter to me he makes public for the first time a few lines from that document. While this is a significant addition to the public record, and I will discuss that in a moment, it is still not the full cable, and I am calling on him to declassify and release the full cable.
Now, in order to understand why I am making that request, we need to return to early 2003.
On March 6, 2003, just two weeks before U.S. troops would cross the Iraqi border, President Bush held a prime-time televised press conference. In that press conference he mentioned the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks eight times, often in the same breath as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. There was a concerted campaign on the part of the Bush administration to connect Iraq in the public mind with the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks. That campaign succeeded. According to public polls in the week before the Iraq war, half or more of Americans believed Saddam was directly involved in the attacks. One poll taken in September 2003, six months after we invaded Iraq, found that nearly 70 percent of Americans believed it likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Americans who believed in a link between Iraq and 9/11 overwhelmingly supported the idea of invading Iraq. Of course, connections between Saddam and 9/11 or al Qaeda were fiction.
America’s intelligence community was pressed to participate in the administration’s media campaign. Just a week after the President’s prime-time press conference, on March 13, 2003, CIA field staff sent a cable to CIA headquarters, responding to a request for information about a report that Mohammad Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11 hijackings, had met in 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech capital of Prague. In stark terms, this CIA cable from the field warned against U.S. government officials citing the report of the alleged Prague meeting.
Yet the notion of such a meeting was a centerpiece of the administration’s campaign to create an impression in the public mind that Saddam was in league with the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. On multiple occasions, including national television appearances, Vice President Dick Cheney cited reports of the meeting, at one point calling it “pretty well confirmed.” Officials from Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, who set up a sort of rogue intelligence analysis operation, briefed senior officials with a presentation citing the Prague meeting as a “known contact” between Iraq and al Qaida.
Now, why am I bringing up a CIA cable from more than a decade ago? Isn’t this old, well-covered terrain? No, it isn’t. This is about giving the American people a full account of the march to war as new information becomes available. It is about trying to hold leaders who misled the public accountable. It is about warning future leaders of this nation that they must not commit our sons and daughters to battle on the basis of false statements.
Mr. President, there is no more grave decision for a nation to make than the decision to go to war. And there is no more important issue for every member of Congress than the decision to authorize the use of military force. A decision to authorize force is a decision to unleash the might of our armed forces – the strongest military on the planet. It commits the men and women of our armed forces to fight, and perhaps to die, on the battlefield. The decision to go to war must be careful, considered, and based on the facts.
Such careful consideration was tragically absent in the march to war in Iraq.
Here is what the Vice President said on December 9, 2001, in an interview on “Meet the Press:” “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.”
Far from “pretty well confirmed,” there was almost no evidence that such a meeting took place. Just a single unsubstantiated report, from a single source, and a mountain of information indicating there was no such meeting, including the fact that travel and other records indicated that Atta was almost certainly in the United States at the time of the purported meeting in Prague.
It was highly irresponsible for the Vice President to make that claim. Calling a single, unconfirmed report from a single source “pretty well confirmed,” as he did on Dec. 9, 2001, was a reckless statement to make on such a grave topic as war, in the face of overwhelming doubt that such a meeting occurred.
Yet Vice President Cheney’s reckless statements continued, even as evidence mounted that there was no Prague meeting. In September 2002, he said Atta “did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official.”
The Vice President made those statements in the face of a then-classified June 2002 CIA assessment that said the alleged meeting was “not verified,” called the information about it “contradictory,” and described assessments of Iraqi cooperation with al Qaida terror plots as “speculative.” The Vice President made those statements in the face of a July 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency analysis, which reported that there was no evidence that Atta was in the Czech Republic at the time. He made those statements despite a Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum in August 2002 rejecting the claims by a rogue intelligence analysis shop at the Pentagon that the meeting was an example of a “known contact” between Iraq and al Qaida.
That brings us to the March 13, 2003 cable. Mr. President, it is unfortunate that I cannot fully lay out the contents of that cable, because much of it remains classified. But as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2006 “Phase II” report indicates, it appears that the cable was sent in response to a request from headquarters at Langley for comment on the claim that Atta and al-Ani had met in Prague because the White House was considering a reference to a Prague meeting in a speech. At that time, according to then-CIA Director George Tenet’s memoir, the CIA had been given a draft of a speech by Vice President Cheney containing assertions about connections between Iraq and al Qaida. Tenet writes in his memoir that he had to object to the President that the speech went “way beyond what the intelligence shows. We cannot support the speech and it should not be given.”
Mr. President, the text of this cable and the information surrounding it was almost entirely redacted by the CIA from the Intelligence Committee’s 2006 Phase II report. A number of us objected to that redaction at the time the report was made public; indeed, the Majority Leader introduced legislation which I cosponsored that would have declassified the cable, legislation Republicans blocked. At the time of the report’s release, I joined several members of the Intelligence Committee, including Ranking Member Rockefeller, Senators Feinstein, Wyden, Bayh, Mikulski and Feingold, in concluding that the administration’s decision to keep the contents of the cable classified “represents an improper use of classification authority by the intelligence community to shield the White House.”
In the years since I have sought declassification of the March 2003 CIA cable on numerous occasions. Twice, in 2011 and 2012, I wrote to then-CIA Director Petraeus asking him to declassify the cable. Then in February 2013, I asked Director Brennan during his confirmation hearing whether he would contact the Czech government to ask if they would object to declassification of the cable, and he responded, “Absolutely, Senator, I will.”
Despite his commitment, I heard nothing from Director Brennan for some time. Finally, in March of this year, more than a year after his public commitment to me, I received a letter from Director Brennan. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Director Brennan’s March 13, 2014, letter to me be entered into the record.
The letter contains no indication that he had asked the Czech government for its view, as he committed to do. But Director Brennan’s letter includes, and therefore finally declassifies, this very clear statement from the cable: “[T]here is not one USG [counterterrorism] or FBI expert that … has said they have evidence or ‘know’ that [Atta] was indeed [in Prague]. In fact, the analysis has been quite the opposite.”
Again, that cable was sent to CIA headquarters on March 13, 2003 – a week before our invasion of Iraq. But the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, continued to suggest the meeting may have taken place. He said the following about the meeting on “Meet the Press” on September 14, 2003 – six months after CIA received that cable: “We’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.” Here is what he told the Denver Post newspaper on January 9, 2004: “We’ve never been able to collect any more information on that. That was the one that possibly tied the two together to 9/11.” Here is what he told CNN on June 17, 2004: “We have never been able to confirm that, nor have we been able to knock it down. We just don’t know.”
Mr. President, those statements were simply not true. We did know. We did know that there was no evidence that such a meeting had taken place. We did know there was ample evidence it did not take place. We did know that there was, as the CIA cable says, “not one” government expert who said there was evidence that Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague. The Vice President recklessly disregarded the truth, and he did so in a way calculated to maintain support for the administration's decision to go to war in Iraq.
There is a second recent revelation about how the “Prague meeting” progressed from unsubstantiated report to justification for war. It comes from Jiri Ruzek, who headed the Czech counterintelligence service on and after 9/11. Mr. Ruzek published a memoir earlier this year, which we have had translated from Czech. It recounts the days after the terror attack, including how his nation’s intelligence services first reported a single-source rumor of a Prague meeting between Atta and al-Ani, how CIA officials under pressure from CIA headquarters in turn pressured him to substantiate the rumor, and how U.S. officials pressured the Czech government when Czech intelligence officials failed to produce the confirmation that the Bush administration sought.
Mr. Ruzek writes, “It was becoming more and more clear that we had not met expectations and did not provide the ‘right’ intelligence output.” Mr. Ruzek goes on: “The Americans showed me that anything can be violated, including the rules that they themselves taught us. Without any regard to us, they used our intelligence information for propaganda press leaks. They wanted to mine certainty from unconfirmed suspicion and use it as an excuse for military action. We were supposed to play the role of useful idiot thanks to whose initiative a war would be started.”
That’s chilling. We have a senior intelligence official of a friendly nation describing the pressure that he and other Czech officials were under to give the Bush administration material it could use to justify a war.
When it came to the most serious decision a government can make – the decision to commit our sons and daughters to battle – the Bush administration was playing
games
with intelligence. The full, still classified cable includes critically important, relevant information, and it has been redacted and denied to the public in order to protect those in the Bush White House who are responsible.The March 13, 2003, cable is an invaluable record in helping the American people understand how their elected officials conducted themselves in going to war. Continuing to cloak this document with a veil of secrecy, revealing a few sentences at a time, allows those who misled the American people to continue escaping the full verdict of history. It deprives the American people of a complete understanding of how we came to invade Iraq. In his letter to me, Director Brennan writes, “I understand that your principal concern is that the historical record be as complete as possible regarding this period in our history, and on this point we are in agreement.” But Director Brennan’s apparent refusal to do what he has committed to do – to ask the Czech government if it objects to release of the cable – now takes on the character of a continuing cover-up.
Mr. President, I believe decision-makers should have to face the full, unadulterated, unredacted truth about their decisions. The American people should know the full story – not just so we can understand the decisions in 2002 and 2003 that took us to war, but as a warning to future leaders against the misuse of intelligence and the abuse of power.
###
Again, they added lies -- lots of them -- to sell war on Iraq in 2002 and 2003 and today they strip away reality as they attempt to resell it.
But while we're all encouraged to call out Bully Boy Bush, the Cult of St. Barack works overtime to ensure that the Christ-child is never called out.
Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing. During it, a member offered a testimonial to the greatness:
US House Rep Gregory Meeks: It's easy for many of us to be up here and think that it's simple. We thought it was simple to get rid of Saddam Hussein. We said that it would take just a few days. In fact, we got on the ship that said Mission Accomplished a few days after shock and awe. I am glad we are not being that simplistic about this. The administration has been honest to say it will take years to get this done and to get it done right not based upon emotion, not based upon trying, just get it together so we can say rah-rah [. . .]
Testimonials and endorsements can be important. But let's first see just what sort of person was slobbering over Barack. Here's how CREW sees Meeks:
A swirling federal corruption probe into crooked charities associated with Rep. Meeks is just the tip of the iceberg in the congressman’s litany of ethical lapses.
Rep. Meeks has accepted numerous improper gifts while in office, including a below-market rate on a new home, major loans that he failed to disclose for years, and discounted rent on his district office. He has also accepted at least six trips to Caribbean resorts from a non-profit backed by convicted financier R. Allen Stanford, on whose behalf Rep. Meeks may have sought a favor from the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
- Nine-term member of Congress representing New York’s 5th district
- Under federal investigation for his ties to several corrupt non-profit groups, including one that lost track of thousands of dollars intended for victims of Hurricane Katrina
- Previously named to CREW’s Most Corrupt in 2011 and 2012
- One of four members of Congress from New York named to CREW’s Most Corrupt
- Appeared in CREW’s Family Affair exposé
"It's complicated. It's going to take some time. We're going to have to figure this out," declared Meeks but he wasn't talking about his legal strategy.
First thing Meeks might figure out is how to pronounce areas in Iraq. Erbil can be spelled Arbil but no one pronounces it "EE-BRILL."
Nor does anyone say "KurDICKstan."
It's Kurdistan.
Gregory Meeks, please keep your dick out of Kurdistan.
Yesterday's House Foreign Affairs Committee may have actually been hugely revealing in a way no one noticed.
US House Rep Albio Sires: Can you talk a little about Camp Liberty and any of the abuses by the Iraqis. I know you're on the discussion.
Brett McGurk: Well I get a briefing on this every single day. I get reports from the residents and also from the United Nations. And as you know UN monitoring teams confirms to us about humanitarian supplies and the overall situation at the camp. We look at it every single day. My colleague Jonathan Winer who's our senior advisor on the MEK resettlements. He's in Albania today with a team, an interagency team with DHS represented as well -- representatives as well. And we've gotten about 600 residents of Camp Liberty out of Camp Liberty and out of Iraq to safety over the past year and we're looking to increase that number this year and Albania has been very helpful in this regard. And Jonathan Weiner has really done a heroic, courageous job of getting this moving. And I think the new government will be even more cooperative. And we want to get all the residents of Camp Liberty -- as I've testified before -- out of Iraq to safety. That is our goal and we're working with partners around the world to achieve that goal. And right now Albania has been extremely cooperative and we should thank them for taking in hundreds of residents. And the residents are assimilating quite well in Albania. But Jonathan -- my colleague -- Mr. Winer is there addressing this issue right now, and I'm sure he'd very happy to follow up with you.
600?
Some outlets wrongly reported this year that Winer took his post in October of 2013 (here forHuffington Post getting it wrong)..
No.
He was first noted by the State Dept in a September 6, 2013 press statement by spokesperson Marie Harf:
Marie Harf
Washington, DC
September 6, 2013
We are continuing to follow with urgency the situation at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. The United States reiterates its condemnation of the horrific attack that took place on September 1 and we express our condolences to the families and friends of the victims.
We further reiterate our support for the United Nations Assistance Mission (UNAMI) and its efforts to conduct an independent fact finding investigation into this terrible event and to document what took place. We have called on the Government of Iraq to fully support UNAMI’s efforts to conduct a full investigation of its own and to help find and return to safety those who are missing. We insist that the perpetrators of this barbarous act be brought to justice.
We also note the troubling statements issued by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) praising the attack, and call on the Government of Iran to use whatever influence it might have with groups that may be holding missing persons from the camp to secure their immediate release.
Regarding the immediate situation at Camp Ashraf, we urge all parties to cooperate with a plan proposed by UNAMI to ensure the safe and secure relocation of the survivors to Camp Hurriya as soon as possible. Consistent with this plan, we call on the Government of Iraq to move expeditiously to enhance security structures within Camp Hurriya, pursuant to the plan discussed with UNAMI, and we call on the MEK to make all necessary preparations to move remaining residents at Camp Ashraf to Camp Hurriya in full cooperation with UNAMI. The United States stands behind the UNAMI efforts to resolve this crisis.
The State Department has appointed a Senior Advisor for MEK Resettlement, Jonathan Winer, to oversee our efforts to help resettle the residents of Camp Hurriya to safe, permanent, and secure locations outside of Iraq, in addition to those countries, such as Albania, that have admirably assisted the United Nations in this important humanitarian mission.
We further reiterate our support for the United Nations Assistance Mission (UNAMI) and its efforts to conduct an independent fact finding investigation into this terrible event and to document what took place. We have called on the Government of Iraq to fully support UNAMI’s efforts to conduct a full investigation of its own and to help find and return to safety those who are missing. We insist that the perpetrators of this barbarous act be brought to justice.
We also note the troubling statements issued by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) praising the attack, and call on the Government of Iran to use whatever influence it might have with groups that may be holding missing persons from the camp to secure their immediate release.
Regarding the immediate situation at Camp Ashraf, we urge all parties to cooperate with a plan proposed by UNAMI to ensure the safe and secure relocation of the survivors to Camp Hurriya as soon as possible. Consistent with this plan, we call on the Government of Iraq to move expeditiously to enhance security structures within Camp Hurriya, pursuant to the plan discussed with UNAMI, and we call on the MEK to make all necessary preparations to move remaining residents at Camp Ashraf to Camp Hurriya in full cooperation with UNAMI. The United States stands behind the UNAMI efforts to resolve this crisis.
The State Department has appointed a Senior Advisor for MEK Resettlement, Jonathan Winer, to oversee our efforts to help resettle the residents of Camp Hurriya to safe, permanent, and secure locations outside of Iraq, in addition to those countries, such as Albania, that have admirably assisted the United Nations in this important humanitarian mission.
He's been 'on the job' since at least September 2013 and Brett's proud of him for finding homes in that time for 600 Ashraf residents?
Most people presented with approximately 3,000 people who needed to get out of country -- a life-or-death issue -- would work to successfully get them out in 90 days tops. Check out previous evacuation efforts by the US is you doubt that.
But the White House is fine with it taking 15 months for Winer to relocate 600 people is acceptable?
At this rate, it will take over five years to relocate all the refugees -- over five years to do what previous administrations accomplished in 90 days.
No wonder Barack thinks his 'plan' (bombing Iraq) will require years to 'fix' things.
By the way, Brett may be impressed with Winer's work but he's likely the only one.
Not only is 600 a ridiculously small number, Winer's position isn't important enough in the eyes of the State Dept.
As Domani Spero (Diplopunidit) noted May 22nd, State Dept spokesperson Jen Psaki declared in a press briefing:
Jonathan Winer, who you also may know, visited Tripoli in February in his role as Special Coordinator for Libya and met with a variety of Libyan and international partners, and he’s working closely with Ambassador Satterfield and our NEA team.
Spero pointed out:
Jonathan Winer, the new Special Coordinator for Libya was previously appointed by the State Department as Senior Advisor for MEK Resettlement in 2013. In that capacity, he was tasked with overseeing USG efforts to help resettle the residents of Camp Hurriya to permanent, and secure locations outside of Iraq. He also previously served as chief counsel and principal legislative assistant to then Senator Kerry for 10 years and was a DAS at INL.
Again, Brett may be impressed but the State Dept and White House felt it was such a nothing assignment that they tasked him to be Special Coordinator for Libya as well.
As to Barack and his ridiculous 'plan,' it does not take years.
Even Meeks can't be such an idiot to believe that nonsense.
Iraq needs a political solution -- even Barack has said that.
A political solution dissolves support for the Islamic State as well as indifference to fighting it -- they are not the same thing. There are Sunnis who support the Islamic State in Iraq because of the targeting of Sunnis. There are Sunnis who look the other way due to the targeting of Sunnis. A political solution that truly includes the Sunnis -- which means ending the targeting -- makes it impossible for the Islamic State to operate freely.
Martin Chulov (Guardian) reports on the Islamic State today. Excerpt:
Abu Ahmed was an essential member of the earliest incarnation of the group. He had been galvanised into militancy as a young man by an American occupation that he and many like him believed was trying to impose a power shift in Iraq, favouring the country’s larger Shia population at the expense of the dominant Sunnis. His early role in what would become Isis led naturally to the senior position he now occupies within arevitalised insurgency that has spilled across the border into Syria. Most of his colleagues regard the crumbling order in the region as a fulfilment of their ambitions in Iraq – which had remained unfinished business, until the war in Syria gave them a new arena.
He agreed to speak publicly after more than two years of discussions, over the course of which he revealed his own past as one of Iraq’s most formidable and connected militants – and shared his deepening worry about Isis and its vision for the region. With Iraq and Syria ablaze, and the Middle East apparently condemned to another generation of upheaval and bloodshed at the hands of his fellow ideologues, Abu Ahmed is having second thoughts. The brutality of Isis is increasingly at odds with his own views, which have mellowed with age as he has come to believe that the teachings of the Koran can be interpreted and not read literally.
His misgivings about what the Islamic State has become led him to speak to the Guardian in a series of expansive conversations, which offer unique insight into its enigmatic leader and the nascent days of the terror group – stretching from 2004, when he met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Camp Bucca, to 2011, when the Iraqi insurgency crossed the border into Syria.
Zach Beauchamp (Vox) sums up Chulov's report, "In other words: without the Iraq war and American prisons there meant to detain possible terrorists, ISIS as we know it wouldn't exist."
Liars like Senator Barbara Boxer want to pretend that atrocities happened in Syria but not in Iraq.
Atrocities happened in Iraq. We'll leave Syria for someone that follows Syria.
And in the face of the disappearing of Sunnis -- via execution and via vanishing into the prisons -- the Sunni community was not silent. They were thrilled, for example, when Nouri lost the 2010 elections. But Barack Obama demanded Nouri get a second term (and the US brokered The Erbil Agreement that gave loser Nouri a second term). They voted and they won but their votes didn't count.
Then their representatives and other politicians attempted another means to justice: A no-confidence vote on Nouri.
This would have removed Nouri as prime minister in 2012.
Iraqiya's Ayad Allawi, Shi'ite cleric and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr, Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani and others all came together for this effort.
And the White House, specifically Vice President Joe Biden, leaned hard on Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to bury the effort. (Talabani declared he had the power to remove people's names from the petition even if they admitted they signed it. He had no such power.)
So they'd used their votes, the ballot box.
And then their votes were overturned.
They'd turned to their political leaders and the leaders used a Constitutional measure to attempt to remove Nouri only to see Jalal Talabani invent a 'power' that didn't exist to destroy the petition (his only legal role was to officially present the petition to Congress).
So now their politicians couldn't help them.
They then took to the streets and protested continuously for over a year.
They were targeted by Nouri and his thugs.
Some were followed from protests to their homes in an effort at intimidation.
Some were seized and beaten. Some were seized and killed.
Some were wounded at protests.
Some were killed at protests.
The most infamous example of that was the April 23, 2013 massacre of a peaceful sit-in in Hawija when Nouri sent his federal forces storming in. Alsumaria noted Kirkuk's Department of Health (Hawija is in Kirkuk) announced 50 activists have died and 110 were injured in the assault. AFP reported the death toll rose to 53. UNICEF noted that the dead included 8 children (twelve more were injured).
Even after that massacre, it would take Barack over a year to finally stop supporting thug Nouri.
Even after that massacre, Iraqis would continue to protest.
They'd been denied redress via the ballot box, they'd been denied justice when their elected officials attempted to seek it.
Now their protests were being ignored and Nouri was calling them "terrorists" and as 2013 ended and 2014 began, his forces began attacking protests as Nouri insisted -- publicly, on Iraqi television -- that he would burn the sites down with the protesters in them.
And Barbara Boxer wants to pretend Sunnis weren't victims, weren't targeted?
Some Sunnis are loudly and publicly opposed to the Islamic State.
But some Sunnis have joined them and many others have decided to turn their eye away because of the Iraqi government's targeting, hunting, killing, imprisoning of Sunnis.
The US government can drop all the bombs from planes that they want for as many years as they want.
It's not a 'plan.'
It's also not the answer to how you remove support for the Islamic State.
And until you remove support -- direct or complicit -- you can't remove the Islamic State from Iraq.
And Iraq may have a new prime minister -- Haider al-Abadi -- but Sunnis continue to be killed, Sunni civilians, by the Iraqi government.
Iraqi Spring MC Tweeted the most recent civilians -- including children -- killed with the never ending bombing of residential neighborhoods in Falluja -- and these bombings are the Iraqi military bombing the homes of Falluja -- Falluja being a Sunni dominant city.
#الانبار:
اطفال الفلوجة هم أهداف القوات الحكومية التي تدعي في كل يوم انها قتلت مجموعات من داعش.
. http://fb.me/70UivcFIT
YouTubeUntil you admit what's happened in Iraq, especially what's been done to the Sunnis (most notably in the last four years, but actually since the 2003 invasion), you're never going to get to peace because you're lying and aiding the violence by doing so.
Margaret Griffis (Antiwar.com) counts 182 violent deaths across Iraq. And Cedric and Wally offered:
Their joint-post notes that Barack's authorization for war on Iraq passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (on party lines -- and this means it now moves to the full Senate floor -- if it's not voted on before the next Congress is sworn in, it would automatically die and need to be re-introduced in order to be voted on).
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