Each Bush Lie ---> Thousands Die

• Bush Was Set on Path to War,Memo by British Adviser SaysNew York Times, March 27, 2006

In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin." [...]

Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident. [...]

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

Those proposals were first reported last month in the British press, but the memo does not make clear whether they reflected Mr. Bush's extemporaneous suggestions, or were elements of the government's plan. [...]

Despite intense lobbying by the United States and Britain, a second United Nations resolution was not obtained. The American-led military coalition invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, nine days after the target date set by the president on that late January day at the White House.
• What Bush Was Told About IraqNational Journal, March 2, 2006

[A highly classified intelligence] report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that it was unlikely that Saddam would try to attack the United States -- except if "ongoing military operations risked the imminent demise of his regime" or if he intended to "extract revenge" for such an assault, according to records and sources.

On at least four earlier occasions, beginning in the spring of 2002, according to the same records and sources, the president was informed during his morning intelligence briefing that U.S. intelligence agencies believed it was unlikely that Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States.

The one-page documents prepared for Bush are known as the "President's Summary" of the much longer and more detailed National Intelligence Estimates.... The summaries stated that both the Energy and State departments dissented on the aluminum tubes question. This is the first evidence that Bush was aware of the intense debate within the government during the time that he, Cheney, and members of the Cabinet were citing the procurement of the tubes as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program.

That a summary was also prepared for Bush on the question of Saddam's intentions regarding an unprovoked attack on the United States is significant because the administration has claimed that the president was unaware of intelligence information that conflicted with his public statements and those of the vice president and members of his Cabinet on the justifications for attacking Iraq.

• Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on IraqWashington Post, February 10, 2006

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade. [...]

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote. [...]

[Note to reader--we highly recommend reading Intelligence, Policy, and the War In Iraq by Paul R. Pillar, the source material from which this article is based.

• Blair 'made secret US Iraq pact'BBC, February 3, 2006

Tony Blair and George W Bush decided to invade Iraq weeks earlier than they have admitted, a new book by a human rights lawyer has claimed.

The book by Philippe Sands says the two leaders discussed going to war regardless of any United Nations view.

And it suggests the US wanted to provoke Saddam Hussein by sending a spy plane over Iraq in UN colours.

Downing Street said on Thursday it did not comment on discussions that "may or may not have happened" between leaders.

[T]he new book centres on a meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair at the White House three weeks earlier, on 31 January.

Professor Sands, a QC and professor of international law at University College London, says the two-hour meeting was also attended by six advisers.

The book quotes from a note it says was prepared by one of the participants.

According to the note, Mr Bush said the military campaign was pencilled in for March. Mr Blair is quoted as saying he was "solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam".

The book claims Mr Blair only wanted a second UN Security Council resolution because it would make it easier politically to deal with Saddam.

And it says Mr Bush told Mr Blair the US "was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours".

If Saddam fired on them, the Iraqis would be in breach of UN resolutions, he suggested.
Mr Bush is also quoted saying it was possible an Iraqi figure would defect and be able to give a "public presentation" of weapons of mass destruction.

The note said Mr Bush thought there was also "a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated".

The book also claims the president "thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups". [...]

• Report: Bush, Blair decided to go to war months before UN meetingsChristian Science Monitor, February 3, 2006

In a case of yet another leaked memo in Britain, one of the United Kingdom's top international lawyers quotes minutes from a January 31, 2003 meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush in an updated version of his book, "Lawless World", where it appears the two men made the decision to go to war regardless of what the United Nations decided about passing a second resolution that would have allowed the start of the war.

Britain's Channel Four TV network, which says it has seen the minutes of the meeting, reports that during the meeting, Mr. Bush raised the idea of painting US U-2 spy planes in the colors of the United Nations, in the hope that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein would fire on the planes, and thus give the US and Britain a legal basis to attack Iraq. [...]

• Bush wanted plane in UN colours to trick SaddamThe Herald, February 3, 2006

George W Bush wanted to use a spy plane painted in United Nations colours to trick Saddam Hussein into breaching UN rules, according to a new version of a book on the Iraq invasion.

During a meeting with Tony Blair focusing on the need to identify evidence that the dictator had broken UN Resolution 1441, the US president suggested a plot to lure Saddam into firing on the plane.

According to a leaked memo from the meeting, Mr Bush told the prime minister that the US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq painted in UN colours. [...]

• Blair 'backed Iraq war in January 2003'The Telegraph, February 3, 2006

Tony Blair and George W Bush decided to invade Iraq weeks earlier than they have admitted, a new book by a human rights lawyer has claimed.

The book by Philippe Sands says the two leaders discussed going to war regardless of any United Nations view.

And it suggests the US wanted to provoke Saddam Hussein by sending a spy plane over Iraq in UN colours.

Downing Street said on Thursday it did not comment on discussions that "may or may not have happened" between leaders.

[T]he new book centres on a meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair at the White House three weeks earlier, on 31 January.

Professor Sands, a QC and professor of international law at University College London, says the two-hour meeting was also attended by six advisers.

• Book: Bush, Blair Talked War in Jan. '03CBS/AP, February 3, 2006

President Bush told Prime Minister Tony Blair nearly two months before the invasion of Iraq that the United States intended to go to war even if inspectors failed to find evidence of a banned weapons program...

Author Phillippe Sands said Bush made the comments in a White House meeting with Blair on Jan. 31, 2003. He cites a memo of the meeting as saying Bush also told Blair that military intervention was scheduled for March 2003 even without U.N. backing.

The prime minister responded that he was "solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm" Saddam Hussein...

A spokesman for Blair, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said Downing Street does not comment on books or on leaked documents, and reiterated that Britain only committed to military action in Iraq after approval by the House of Commons on March 18, 2003. [...]
Other claims made in the book say Bush floated the idea of a number of extreme measures aimed at provoking Saddam.

The president is said to have told Blair the U.S. "was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq. The aircraft would be painted in U.N. colors, so that if Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach of U.N. resolutions, the book said.

The book also claims Bush "thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups" in Iraq following the invasion.

• Blair accused of supporting Iraq invasion before approach to UNFinancial Times, February 3, 2006

Tony Blair faces dramatic new allegations today that he and George W. Bush were set on invading Iraq well before diplomatic efforts to secure explicit United Nations support had failed.
In an updated version of his book Lawless World, Philippe Sands, an international law professor, says Mr Blair offered his full support for Mr Bush at the White House in January 2003 during a private meeting in which the president disclosed he had pencilled in a March 10 invasion date and suggested military action was inevitable. The president, the book says, also floated a way of tricking Saddam Hussein into breaching UN demands and even talked of assassinating the former Iraqi leader. [... Balance of article behind paid subscription wall]

• Bush 'plotted to lure Saddam into war with fake UN plane'The Independent, February 3, 2006

George Bush considered provoking a war with Saddam Hussein's regime by flying a United States spy-plane over Iraq bearing UN colours, enticing the Iraqis to take a shot at it, according to a leaked memorandum of a meeting between the US President and Tony Blair.

The two leaders were worried by the lack of hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had broken UN resolutions, though they were privately convinced that he had. According to the memorandum, Mr Bush said: "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."
He added: "It was also possible that a defector could be brought out who would give a public presentation about Saddam's WMD, and there was also a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated." The memo damningly suggests that the decision to invade Iraq had already been made when Mr Blair and the US President met in Washington on 31 January 2003 - when the British Government was still working on obtaining a second UN resolution to legitimise the conflict.

The leaders discussed the prospects for a second resolution, but Mr Bush said: "The US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would 'twist arms' and 'even threaten'. But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway." He added that he had a date, 10 March, pencilled in for the start of military action. The war actually began on 20 March. [...]

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• Bush 'tried to lure Saddam into war using UN aircraft'The Times (London), February 3, 2006

PRESIDENT BUSH had plans to lure Saddam Hussein into war by flying an aircraft over Iraq painted in UN colours in the hope he would shoot it down, a book reveals.

Mr Bush told Tony Blair of the extraordinary plan during a meeting in the White House on January 31, 2003, six weeks before the war started, according to an updated version of Lawless World by Philippe Sands, a human rights lawyer. He says the President made it clear that he had already decided to go to war, despite still pressing for a UN resolution. [...]

If the U2 idea was a serious proposal, it would have made sense only if the spy plane was ordered to fly at an altitude within range of Iraqi missiles. Mr Bush’s reference in the recorded conversation to the U2 being escorted by fighter aircraft indicates that that is what he had in mind. [...]

• Blair-Bush deal before Iraq war revealed in secret memoThe Guardian, February 3, 2006

Tony Blair told President George Bush that he was "solidly" behind US plans to invade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion's legality and despite the absence of a second UN resolution, according to a new account of the build-up to the war published today.

A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 - nearly two months before the invasion - reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme.

"The diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning", the president told Mr Blair. The prime minister is said to have raised no objection. He is quoted as saying he was "solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam".

The disclosures come in a new edition of Lawless World, by Phillipe Sands, a QC and professor of international law at University College, London...

The memo seen by Prof Sands reveals:

· Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]". [...]

· Mr Bush told the prime minister that he "thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups". Mr Blair did not demur...

The revelation that Mr Blair had supported the US president's plans to go to war with Iraq even in the absence of a second UN resolution contrasts with the assurances the prime minister gave parliament shortly after. [...]

Downing Street did not deny the existence of the memo ...

• The White House memo Revealed: Bush and Blair discussedusing American Spyplane in UN colours to lure Saddam into warChannel 4 News (UK), February 3, 2006

... Channel 4 News has seen minutes from that meeting, which took place in the White House on 31 January 2003. The two leaders discussed the possibility of securing further UN support, but President Bush made it clear that he had already decided to go to war. The details are contained in a new version of the book 'Lawless World' written by a leading British human rights lawyer, Philippe Sands QC.

Memo extractsTaken from the White House Meeting Memo, 31 January 2003, seen by Channel 4 News - and detailed in 'Lawless World' by Philippe Sands.

President Bush to Tony Blair: "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach" [...]

Blair: "A second Security Council Resolution resolution would provide an insurance policy against the unexpected and international cover, including with the Arabs. " [...]

• Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence DoubtsNew York Times, November 6, 2005

A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al 8Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’

The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi’s statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration’s misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. [...]

• MPs unite for inquiry into Blair’s conduct over IraqThe Sunday Times, November 6, 2005

Tony Blair is set to face an unprecedented parliamentary inquiry into his conduct in the run-up to the Iraq war. [...]

The failure to plan for the aftermath is likely to be at the heart of the committee’s inquiries now that Iraq is in the grip of a violent insurgency, says the Tory MP Douglas Hogg, one of the inquiry’s architects and who is canvassing support for the move. [...]

Sir Menzies Campbell, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman, said his party had not supported earlier attempts to impeach the prime minister but was in no doubt that parliament should hold its own inquiry.

“Information that has emerged, in particular the memos leaked to The Sunday Times, strengthen overwhelmingly the case for an inquiry into the judgments of ministers, and in particular the prime minister, in the run-up to war and thereafter,” he said. [...]

• Democrats close Senate to push war probeCNN, November 1, 2005

Democrats forced the Senate into a closed session Tuesday to pressure the Republican majority into completing an investigation of the intelligence underpinning the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Democrats demanded that Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts move forward on a promised investigation into how Bush administration officials handled prewar intelligence about Iraq's suspected weapons programs.

The probe would be a follow-up to the July 2004 Intelligence Committee report that blamed a "series of failures" by the CIA and other intelligence agencies for the mistaken belief among U.S. policymakers that Iraq had restarted its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

The Senate reopened about two hours later, after members agreed to appoint a bipartisan group of senators to assess the progress of the "Phase 2" probe, the office of Majority Leader Bill Frist said. [...]

• A Leak, Then a Deluge -Did a Bush loyalist, trying to protect the case for war in Iraq,obstruct an investigation into who blew the cover of a covert CIA operative?Washington Post, October 30, 2005

That Saturday afternoon, the indictment states, is when Libby confirmed for Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and disclosed to Judith Miller of the New York Times the classified fact that Wilson's wife, who was known as Valerie Plame, "worked at the CIA." Just over two weeks earlier, after a previous conversation with Cheney, Libby had told Miller more tentatively that Plame "might work at a bureau of the CIA." [...]

Libby's possible motive is only one of many unknowns left in the aftermath of Friday's indictment, which prompted the resignation of one of the most powerful figures in the White House and left the Bush administration reeling politically. Still to be determined is who first leaked Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak -- the original act that led to Fitzgerald's investigation -- and the roles of many other administration officials, including Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. [...]

• CIA leak illustrates selective use of intelligence on IraqKnight-Ridder, October 25, 2005

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's arguments, its own reporting at the time and the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2004 report shows that the White House followed a pattern of using questionable intelligence, even documents that turned out to be forgeries, to support its case - often leaking classified information to receptive journalists - and dismissing information that undermined the case for war.

The Iraqi National Congress, an exile opposition group whose leader, Ahmad Chalabi, was close to Cheney and others, had begun feeding Western reporters Iraqi defectors' tales that Saddam was training Islamic extremists to hit U.S. targets and hiding banned weapons shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The INC, which was deeply distrusted by the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, piped the same information into Cheney's office and the Pentagon, according to a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee from the group's Washington spokesman.

• Official Says U.S. Rushed to War in IraqLos Angeles Times, October 22, 2005

A top U.S. official for aid to Iraq has accused the Bush administration of rushing unprepared into the 2003 invasion because of pressures from President Bush's approaching reelection campaign.
Robin Raphel, the State Department's coordinator for Iraq assistance, said that the invasion's timing was driven by "clear political pressure," as well as by the need to quickly deploy the U.S. troops that had been amassed by the Iraq border.

Soon after the invasion, Raphel said, it became clear that U.S. officials "could not run a country we did not understand". It was very much amateur hour."

... Although the officials' views vary widely — and some are positive about the U.S. effort — the accounts make clear that many of the veteran diplomats who were the first to be sent to Iraq had misgivings about the effort from the beginning, with their views foreshadowing criticisms that followed months and even years later.

Many analysts speculated in 2003 that the timing of the invasion might be affected by Bush's desire to complete the war before the beginning of the 2004 political campaign. But Raphel is apparently the first government official closely involved in the effort to publicly level such an accusation.

Raphel, a 28-year veteran of the State Department's foreign service and a former assistant secretary of State, said in her account that veteran diplomats who were sent to Iraq early in 2003 shared a view that "we were not prepared."

• Prewar Memo Warned of Gaps in Iraq PlansWashington Post, August 18, 2005

One month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, three State Department bureau chiefs warned of "serious planning gaps for post-conflict public security and humanitarian assistance" in a secret memorandum prepared for a superior.

The State Department officials, who had been discussing the issues with top military officers at the Central Command, noted that the military was reluctant "to take on 'policing' roles" in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The three officials warned that "a failure to address short-term public security and humanitarian assistance concerns could result in serious human rights abuses which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally. Jay M. Garner, the first post-invasion administrator, was told of the issues in the memo, its authors said.

The Feb. 7, 2003, memo, addressed to Paula J. Dobriansky, undersecretary for democracy and global affairs, came at a time when the Pentagon was increasingly taking over control of post-invasion planning from the State Department. It reflected the growing tensions between State Department and Pentagon officials and their disparate assessments about the challenges looming in post-invasion Iraq.

• Poll shows most Americans feel more vulnerableUSA Today, August 8, 2005

An unprecedented 57% majority say the war has made the USA more vulnerable to terrorism. A new low, 34%, say it has made the country safer.

A 54% majority say going to war in Iraq was a mistake, equaling highs measured last summer when insurgent attacks were increasing. The same proportion say the war was not "worth it." A majority of Americans have expressed that view since last October.

• Key No 10 aides were split over warThe Sunday Times, July 31, 2005

Ministers have... insisted that the stepped-up attacks, which began in May 2002, were as a result of increased Iraqi activity and were not an attempt to provoke a response that would give the allies an excuse for war.

The figures do not support those claims. In the first seven months of 2001 the allies recorded a total of 370 "provocations" by the Iraqis against allied aircraft. But in the seven months between October 2001 and May 2002 there were just 32.

• Senate probe of prewar intelligence stallsThe Boston Globe, July 27, 2005

The revelation that Karl Rove, a White House political adviser, leaked information about a CIA operative to discredit her husband's complaints about President Bush's use of intelligence has focused new attention on the relationship between the White House and CIA. But the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has shown no signs of moving ahead with its investigation.
"The chairman has declared firmly that it will be done," said Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia. ''I always think there's a reluctance to do anything which might embarrass the administration. I think that's been true since the beginning of all of this."

• Poll: USA doubts Iraq success, but not ready to give upUSA Today, July 26, 2005

For the first time, a majority of Americans, 51%, say the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — the central justification given for invading. The administration's credibility on the issue has been steadily eroding since 2003 after stores of the weapons weren't found.

• Use and abuse of intelligenceThe Guardian, July 19, 2005

The security and intelligence agencies had their own specific concerns: Britain's alliance with the US did not help their attempts to recruit agents or informants where they most needed them, in the mosques and the souks.

Al-Qaida is now as much of a concept as an organisation or network. It blossomed in Afghanistan, and the US soon became a target, partly because of its military presence in the Middle East. Al-Qaida would have continued out there anyway, on videos and websites. But Iraq has helped to spread its influence and encourage young Muslims.

• Top Cheney Aide Among Sources in C.I.A. Story The New York Times, July 17, 2005

The vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was a source along with the president's chief political adviser for a Time story that identified a CIA officer, the magazine reporter said Sunday, further countering White House claims that neither aide was involved in the leak.

In an effort to quell a chorus of calls to fire deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove, Republicans said that Rove originally learned about Valerie Plame's identity from the news media. That exonerates Rove, the Republican Party chairman said, and Democrats should apologize.

But it is not clear that it was a journalist who first revealed the information to Rove.

A lawyer familiar with Rove's grand jury testimony said Sunday that Rove learned about the CIA officer either from the media or from someone in government who said the information came from a journalist. The lawyer spoke on condition of anonymity because the federal investigation is continuing.

In a first-person account in the latest issue of Time magazine, reporter Matt Cooper wrote that during his grand jury appearance last Wednesday, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "asked me several different ways if Rove had indicated how he had heard that Plame worked at the CIA." Cooper said Rove did not indicate how he had heard.

The White House's assurance in 2003 that Rove was not involved in the leak of the CIA officer's identity ''was a lie,'' said John Podesta, White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration. He said Rove's credibility "is in shreds."

• State Dept. Memo Gets Scrutiny in Leak Inquiry on C.I.A. OfficerThe New York Times, July 16, 2005

Investigators in the case have been trying to learn whether officials at the White House and elsewhere in the administration learned of the C.I.A. officer's identity from the memorandum. They are seeking to determine if any officials then passed the name along to journalists and if officials were truthful in testifying about whether they had read the memo...

The memorandum was dated June 10, 2003, nearly four weeks before Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he recounted his mission and accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. The memorandum was written for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and it referred explicitly to Valerie Wilson as Mr. Wilson's wife...

The memorandum was prepared at the State Department, relying on notes by an analyst who was involved in meetings in early 2002 to discuss whether to send someone to Africa to investigate allegations that Iraq was pursuing uranium purchases.

• Hinchey presses for Iraq probeThe Daily Freeman, July 8, 2005

The Downing Street memos, a series of communications that some say proves the Bush administration fabricated its justification for the war in Iraq, should be the subject of a full-blown Congressional inquiry, U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey told the crowd assembled for a presentation on the memos on the SUNY New Paltz campus Thursday night.

But the lack of checks and balances in the "monolithic" government, in which both the Congress and Senate favor the administration, will make mounting such an investigation a difficult prospect for those lawmakers who have questioned and continue to question both the impetus for the war in Iraq, and America's continued involvement there, Hinchey, D-Hurley, said.

• The Impeachment QuestionWashington Post, July 6, 2005

More than four in 10 Americans, according to a recent Zogby poll, say that if President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment.

[The polls] suggest an appetite for more investigation into Bush's reasons for war and specifically -- in light of the assertions in the Downing Street memos -- whether his public rationales were in fact at all like his private rationales.

Was Bush motivated more by personal animosity toward Saddam Hussein than by a post-Sept. 11 desire to protect America from a grave threat? Did he exaggerate that threat? At what point was war inevitable?

Those are not settled questions. And evidently quite a few Americans would like to see some accountability if Bush deceived them.

• Secret air campaign against Iraq?Christian Science Monitor, June 30, 2005

The Downing Street plan, according to the leaked briefing paper, was to use the United Nations to trap Saddam Hussein into giving them a reason to attack.

But if that didn't work, the US was already working on "Plan B," and the information on that was in the Downing Street memo.

[quoting Michael Smith] "It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that 'the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime.' This we now realize was Plan B [and apparently confirmed by Gen. Moseley's comments mentioned above]. Put simply, US aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict."

Smith reported that another of the leaked documents, a paper on British Foreign Office legal advice, showed that the increased bombing campaign was "illegal" under international law, despite US claims to the contrary.

• Blair Downplays 'Downing Street'CBS News, June 29, 2005

"I am a bit astonished at how this has received such coverage in the U.S. because the fact is after the memo was done we went to the United Nations," Blair said.

"What people forget about that memo is that that (it) occurred nine months before the conflict... So whatever issues there were, we resolved them ultimately by saying we have got to give it one last chance to work peacefully."

• Survey Finds Most Support Staying in Iraq, Public Skeptical About Gains Against InsurgentsWashington Post, June 28, 2005

So far, continuing spasms of violence in Iraq are competing with regular declarations of progress in Washington. Few people agree with Vice President Cheney's recent claim that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The survey found that 22 percent of Americans – barely one in five – say they believe that the insurgency is getting weaker...

A large majority, about six in 10 people, say the United States is "bogged down" in Iraq.

For the first time, a narrow majority -- 52 percent -- said the administration deliberately misled the public before the war, a nine-point increase in three months. Forty-eight percent said the administration told the public what it believed to be true at the time.

Fewer than half -- 46 percent -- of those interviewed agreed that defeating the insurgents in Iraq would do much to defeat terrorism elsewhere, while 53 percent said it would have, at best, only limited impact on the broader anti-terrorism campaign.

• 'Downing Street Memo' Has Lingering EffectWall Street Journal, June 28, 2005

After a slow start in the U.S., a half-dozen liberal activists are having some success in making the documents fodder for Capitol Hill rhetoric and White House news briefings.

"The coverage seems to be getting more intelligent," after reporters initially gave the memos short shrift, says Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Mr. Reid himself has begun citing the documents in public remarks, ad libbing a reference to them in a recent Senate floor speech.

The idea to target news operations came from Michael Clark, [who] said he knew nothing about running such a campaign but decided to contact three media outlets a day, including the likes of C-Span, the Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

A search of U.S. publications and television news-program transcripts shows that in the two weeks after the London Times broke its story, the Downing Street memo was mentioned fewer than 100 times. The phrase has appeared nearly 800 times since Mr. Clark's efforts began, although it isn't clear the extent to which this is the result of his campaign.

• From Memos, Insights Into Ally's Doubts On Iraq WarWashington Post, June 28, 2005

Behind the scenes, British officials believed the U.S. administration was already committed to a war that they feared was ill-conceived and illegal and could lead to disaster...

British cabinet ministers, Foreign Office diplomats, senior generals and intelligence service officials all weighed in with concerns and reservations. Yet they could not dissuade their counterparts in the Bush administration -- nor, indeed, their own leader -- from going forward...
A U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of the events said the concerns raised by British officials "played a useful role."

"Were they paid a tremendous amount of heed?" said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I think it's hard to say they were..."

"What has changed that suddenly gives us the legal right to take military action that we didn't have a few months ago?" demanded David Blunkett, one of Blair's closest political allies.

"Blair comes back from Crawford with a clear sense that the Americans are preparing for war," said Michael Clarke, director of the International Policy Institute at King's College, who met with policymakers at key points during the year. "But the British approach is slightly different -- that we are preparing for war as a means of forcing Iraq to comply so that we don't actually have to fight."

• General admits to secret air warThe Sunday Times, June 26, 2005

Addressing a briefing on lessons learnt from the Iraq war Lieutenant-General Michael Moseley said that in 2002 and early 2003 allied aircraft flew 21,736 sorties, dropping more than 600 bombs on 391 "carefully selected targets" before the war officially started.

The nine months of allied raids "laid the foundations" for the allied victory, Moseley said. They ensured that allied forces did not have to start the war with a protracted bombardment of Iraqi positions.

If those raids exceeded the need to maintain security in the no-fly zones of southern and northern Iraq, they would leave President George W Bush and Tony Blair vulnerable to allegations that they had acted illegally.

Details of the Moseley briefing come amid rising concern in the US at the war. A new poll shows 60% of Americans now believe it was a mistake.

• Brits backed Sunni-led Iraq,Newsday, June 26, 2005

The British government, in sharp disagreement with the United States' ultimate position, believed that post-invasion Iraq should be run by a Sunni-led government and not one controlled by the majority Shias.

The current insurgency is led by disaffected Sunnis who controlled the government under Hussein while only accounting for 20 percent of the Iraqi population.

Iraq's Arab neighbors have virtually boycotted the new government that resulted from the election process dictated by the United States. Only Egypt announced yesterday at a summit sponsored by the United States and the European Union in Brussels that it would send an ambassador to Baghdad.

• Relatives of some troops killed in Iraq seek hearings on Downing Street memo,Stars and Stripes, June 22, 2005

"This war was based on lies and deception," said Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, whose son was killed in April 2004 while providing security for investigators searching for WMD. "The only way we can understand how we’ve come to this disastrous position is to find out what the truth is."

Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., said if true the allegations in the memo are "shameful" and told the parents, "Those who are responsible should be held accountable."

"This clearly wasn’t a war of necessity; it was a war of choice," he said.

• Wolfowitz won't talk about war planning,St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 22, 2005

At a breakfast meeting with reporters, Wolfowitz said he hasn't read the memos because he doesn't want to be "distracted" by "history" from his new job as head of the world's leading development bank...

The authenticity of the British documents has not been challenged, but Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have both denied any pre-determination to go to war. They insist that the war decision came only after diplomatic alternatives had been exhausted.

Wolfowitz professed no recollection of discussing U.N. tactics with [then-British Ambassador Christopher] Meyer.

• WMD claims were 'totally implausible',The Guardian, June 20, 2005

"I'd read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there's no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too".
Carne Ross, who was a member of the British mission to the UN in New York during the run-up to the invasion, resigned from the FO last year...

"There was a very good alternative to war that was never properly pursued, which was to close down Saddam's sources of illegal revenue", he says.

• U.S. War Plans Much-Discussed in Memos,Associated Press, June 18, 2005

"We have also to answer the big question — what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything," [UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw] said in a March 25, 2002, memo to Blair.

"Most of the assessments from the U.S. have assumed regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq's WMD threat," he said. "But none has satisfactorily answered how that regime change is to be secured, and how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be better. Iraq has had NO history of democracy, so no one has this habit or experience."

• 2002 Memos Undercut British WMD Claims,Associated Press, June 18, 2005

An intelligence dossier before the Iraq war [claimed] that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could deploy some within 45 minutes.

No WMD were found after the war, and the official Butler inquiry said the intelligence used was drawn in part from "seriously flawed" or "unreliable" sources. It also said the dossier, which helped Blair win the support of Parliament to join the U.S. in the conflict, had pushed the government's case to the limits of available intelligence and left out vital caveats.

• British documents portray determined U.S. march to war,Knight Ridder, June 17, 2005

By mid-March 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, top British officials were already so resigned to a war that they seemed preoccupied mostly with building international support and finding a legal justification.

Neither the U.S. government nor the British government has disputed the memos' authenticity.
The British memos document in crisp, sometimes wry, prose how advanced political preparations were even more than a year before the March 2003 invasion.

In his own letter to Blair... Straw also seemed to question the scale of the threat. "In the documents so far presented, it has been hard to glean whether the threat from Iraq is so significantly different from that of Iran and North Korea as to justify military action," he wrote.
While Bush continues to assert that he tried diplomacy, things looked different in the spring and summer of 2002, at least as seen through the prism of the British government.

• Bush pressed to answer `Downing Street Memo' questions,Knight Ridder, June 16, 2005

Thursday's hearing on the memo was organized by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

It was held in a cramped Capitol basement room and was attended by about 20 House Democrats and some anti-war activists. Republicans, who control Congress, refused to hold an official hearing or to participate, so Conyers termed it a "forum." [...]

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said, "The evidence that appears to be building up points to a direction of whether the president deliberately misled Congress. I want so badly to believe that no president would ever sacrifice human life."

"Now we're at $300 billion, countless lives and there's no end in sight," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif.

The official cost of the war so far is $208 billion and the lives of 1,704 U.S. troops, according to the Congressional Research Service and the Department of Defense. [...]

Conyers delivered petitions signed by 105 [122] members of Congress and some 540,000 [560,000] signatures sent via e-mail to a security gate at the White House early Thursday evening. The petitions urged Bush to thoroughly answer questions about the memo. [...]

• U.S. Democrats cite British memo in Bolton fight,Reuters, June 16, 2005

U.S. Senate Democrats rejected a Republican compromise over John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador on Thursday and cited a British report backing their view that the Bush administration hyped intelligence on Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, scheduled a procedural vote on Monday to try to break the deadlock. Democrats said they had enough votes to stall the nomination until the White House turns over information they demanded on Bolton. [...]

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid demanded a full accounting of whether Bolton exaggerated assessments of several countries' weapons programs, a key issue in the long-stalled nomination.
"All over the news the last few days has been concerns about weapons of mass destruction by virtue of the memo that was discovered," the Nevada Democrat said, referring to the so-called "Downing Street memo."

• Congressman Tries to Renew Focus on US Justifications for War in Iraq,Voice of America, June 16, 2005

A Democratic member of Congress is trying to focus new attention on a document known as the Downing Street Memo, in which British officials are quoted as describing the Bush administration as having shaped intelligence findings to justify a pre-determination to go to war against Saddam Hussein. [...]

On Thursday, Democratic Congressman John Conyers, who has criticized the Republican congressional leadership for not holding a hearing on the subject, staged a public forum in the U.S. Capitol.

"We can't do anything in this hearing to change the facts and the problems on the ground in Iraq today," said Mr. Conyers. "But we can pledge today to do everything within our power to find out how we got there, and to make sure it never happens again." [...]

As part of his efforts to shine a new spotlight on administration justifications for going to war in Iraq, Congressman Conyers included a family member of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, Cindy Sheehan.

"As far as I am concerned, it doesn't matter whether one is a Democrat or Republican. A full investigation into the veracity of the Downing Street memo must be initiated immediately," said Ms. Sheehan. [...]

Democrat-sponsored efforts include a petition signed by some 540,000 [560,000] Americans demanding that President Bush answer questions about the Downing Street memo.

All of this comes amid renewed legislative steps, including one by a small group of four House Democrats and Republicans, to demand a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.
• From Downing Street to Capitol Hill,Newsweek, June 15, 2005

Two senior British government officials today acknowledged as authentic a series of 2002 pre-Iraq war memos stating that Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program was "effectively frozen" and that there was "no recent evidence" of Iraqi ties to international terrorism—private conclusions that contradicted two key pillars of the Bush administration's public case for the invasion in March 2003.

A March 8, 2002, secret "options" paper prepared by Prime Minister Tony Blair's top national-security aides also stated that intelligence on Saddam's purported weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was "poor".... [T]he options paper concluded "there is no greater threat now than in recent years that Saddam will use WMD."

[T]he March 8, 2002, “options paper”—which asserted the Iraqi opposition was “weak, divided, and lacks domestic credibility”—described Chalabi as a “convicted fraudster” who was nonetheless “popular on Capitol Hill."

The memos were first obtained by Michael Smith, a London-based reporter who previously wrote for The Daily Telegraph and now works for the Sunday Times of London... On the advice of the Telegraph’s lawyers, the paper had a secretary retype the documents verbatim on separate paper—then returned the originals to his source.

• New Memos Detail Early Plans for Invading Iraq,LA Times, June 15, 2005

The documents contain little discussion about whether to mount a military campaign. The focus instead is on how the campaign should be presented to win the widest support and the importance for Britain of working through the United Nations so an invasion could be seen as legal under international law.

The memo [from UK ambassador to the US David Manning to Blair] went on to say: "Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed. But there were some signs, since we last spoke, of greater awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks. From what she said, Bush has yet to find answers to the big questions:

• How to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified; • What value to put on the exiled Iraqi opposition; • How to coordinate a US/allied military campaign with internal opposition (assuming there is any); • What happens the morning after?

Another memo, from British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on March 22, 2002, bluntly stated that the case against Hussein was weak because the Iraqi leader was not accelerating his weapons programs and there was scant proof of links to Al Qaeda "U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda is so far frankly unconvincing," he said.

The paper said the British view was that any invasion for the purpose of regime change "has no basis under international law."

• Deep Throat of Downing Street,Washington Post, June 14, 2005

The document, a British government briefing paper from July 21, 2002, informed Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet ministers eight months before the invasion of Iraq that Blair had already committed Britain to supporting an American-led attack and that "they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal."

The leak of the document gives unprecedented publicity to the arguments made by skeptics of U.S. policy in Blair's inner circle. The documents openly question the use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the legal basis for the decision to go to war.

"The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war," Smith wrote.

• More British memos on pre-Iraq war concerns,MSNBC, June 13, 2005(video of NBC Nightly News segment available at this link also)

It started during British Prime Minister Tony Blair's re-election campaign last month, when details leaked about a top-secret memo, written in July 2002 — eight months before the Iraq war. In the memo, British officials just back from Washington reported that prewar "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" to invade Iraq.[...]

But now, war critics have come up with seven more memos, verified by NBC News.

One, also from July 2002, says U.S. military planners had given "little thought" to postwar Iraq.
“The memos are startlingly clear that the British saw that there was inadequate planning, little planning for the aftermath,” says Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

And there's more. To prepare Blair for a meeting at the president's ranch in April 2002, a year before the war, four other British memos raised more questions.[...]

In fact, current and former diplomats tell NBC News they understood from the beginning the Bush policy to be that Saddam had to be removed — one way or the other. The only question was when and how.

• Public starts to get a fix on 'fixing' intelligence,Philadelphia Inquirer, June 12, 2005

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a war analyst at Boston University, said: "The memo is significant because it was written by our closest ally, and when it comes to writing minutes on foreign policy and security matters, the British are professionals. We can conclude that the memo means precisely what it says. It says that Bush had already made the decision for war even while he was insisting publicly, and for many months thereafter, that war was the last resort.

"This is no longer a suspicion or accusation. The memo is an authoritative piece of information, at the highest level."

[British Foreign Secretary Jack] Straw... suggested, according to the memo, that Bush needed "help with the legal justification for the use of force." Blair's idea was that Bush should go to the United Nations; this was a "political strategy to give the military plan the space to work."

But, in the view of many Iraq experts, the memo shows that Bush went to the United Nations not as a means to avoid war (his public stance) but as a way to gain more political support for the war he intended to wage.

• Ministers Were Told of Need for Gulf War 'Excuse',The Sunday Times, June 12, 2005

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper... said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war.

• Memo: U.S. Lacked Full Postwar Iraq Plan,Washington Post, June 12, 2005

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

The memo's authors point out, "A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise." The authors add, "As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point."

The British, however, had begun focusing on doubts about a postwar Iraq in early 2002, according to internal memos.

A March 14 memo to Blair from David Manning, then the prime minister's foreign policy adviser and now British ambassador in Washington, reported on talks with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Among the "big questions" coming out of his sessions, Manning reported, was that the president "has yet to find the answers . . . [and] what happens on the morning after."

• "Downing Street" memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy,Knight Ridder, June 5, 2005

A highly classified British memo... indicates that President Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. [...]

The principal U.S. intelligence analysis, called a National Intelligence Estimate, wasn't completed until October 2002, well after the United States and United Kingdom had apparently decided military force should be used to overthrow Saddam's regime.

A White House official said the administration wouldn't comment on leaked British documents.
In July 2002, and well afterward, top Bush administration foreign policy advisers were insisting that "there are no plans to attack Iraq on the president's desk."

But the memo quotes British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, a close colleague of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, as saying that "Bush had made up his mind to take military action." Straw is quoted as having his doubts about the Iraqi threat. [...]

Powell in August 2002 persuaded Bush to make the case against Saddam at the United Nations and to push for renewed weapons inspections.

• The war before the war,The New Statesman, May 30, 2005

What most people will not have realised until now, however, was that Britain and the US waged a secret war against Iraq for months before the tanks rolled over the border in March 2003. Documentary evidence and ministerial answers in parliament reveal the existence of a clandestine bombing campaign designed largely to provoke Iraq into taking action that could be used to justify the start of the war.

[In May 2002] Donald Rumsfeld had ordered a more aggressive approach, authorising allied aircraft to attack Iraqi command and control centres as well as actual air defences. The US defence secretary later said this was simply to prevent the Iraqis attacking allied aircraft, but Hoon's remark gives the game away. In reality, as he explained, the "spikes of activity" were designed "to put pressure on the regime".

...it would have been extremely convenient for Bush and Rumsfeld if Saddam had retaliated against the bombing offensive, thus giving London and Washington the chance to cry, "He started it!"

• Blair faces US probe over secret Iraq invasion plan,The Sunday Times, May 22, 2005

SENIOR American congressmen are considering sending a delegation to London to investigate Britain's role in preparations for the war in Iraq.

The Democrat letter, drafted by Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, said that the memo raised “troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of your own administration”.

"They (the Republicans) are trying desperately to wait it out and hope that nobody will bring this up," Conyers said. "But this thing will not be snuffed out."

"There are members saying that if they knew then what they know now they wouldn’t have given him those powers (to wage war)," Conyers said.

By sending investigators to London, Conyers hopes to stir the US media into re-examining a story largely ignored in America since Bush's re-election victory in November.

"We have The Sunday Times to thank for this very important activity. It reminds me of Watergate, which started off as a tiny little incident reported in The Washington Post. I think that the interest of many citizens is picking up."

• British Memo on U.S. Plans for Iraq War Fuels Critics,The New York Times, May 20, 2005

More than two weeks after its publication in London, a previously secret British government memorandum that reported in July 2002 that President Bush had decided to "remove Saddam, through military action" is still creating a stir among administration critics. [...]

Eighty-nine House Democrats wrote to the White House to ask whether the memorandum, first disclosed by The Sunday Times on May 1, accurately reported the administration’s thinking at the time, eight months before the American-led invasion. [...]

Among other things, the memorandum reported that Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, reporting back from talks in Washington, had told other senior British officials that President Bush "wanted to remove" Mr. Hussein, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D.," or weapons of mass destruction. "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," Sir Richard was reported in the memorandum to have told his colleagues. [...]

The British government has not disputed the authenticity of the British memorandum, written by Matthew Rycroft, a top foreign policy aide to Mr. Blair. [...]

The primary observations were those offered by Sir Richard, who had met in Washington with senior American officials, including George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence. In the memorandum, Sir Richard is identified only as "C," the letter traditionally used to refer to the chief of British intelligence. [...]

• White House challenges UK Iraq memo,CNN, May 17, 2005

Claims in a recently uncovered British memo that intelligence was "being fixed" to support the Iraq war as early as mid-2002 are "flat out wrong," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Monday. [...]

However, McClellan also said he had not seen the "specific memo," only reports of what it contained.

Earlier this month, the Times of London published the minutes of a meeting of top British officials in mid-2002, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush's staunchest ally in the Iraq war. [...]

The memo also quoted British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that the final push to war would likely begin a month before the U.S. congressional elections in November 2002, with an actual attack coming in January 2003.

President Bush did begin trying to build public support for military action against Iraq during the mid-term election, which saw Republicans pick up seats in both the House and Senate. The invasion came four months later, in March 2003.

British officials have not disputed the authenticity of the memo published by the Times.
After the minutes of the meeting became public, 89 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Bush asking for an explanation.

The memo "raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war, as well as the integrity of your administration," the letter said.

• British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War,Washington Post, May 13, 2005

Seven months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of British foreign intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush wanted to topple Saddam Hussein by military action and warned that in Washington intelligence was "being fixed around the policy," according to notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting with Blair at No. 10 Downing Street.

"Military action was now seen as inevitable," said the notes, summarizing a report by Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, British intelligence, who had just returned from consultations in Washington along with other senior British officials. Dearlove went on, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

"The case was thin," summarized the notes taken by a British national security aide at the meeting. "Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

The notes were first disclosed last week by the Sunday Times of London, triggering criticism of Blair on the eve of the May 5 British parliamentary elections that he had decided to support an invasion of Iraq well before informing the public of his views.

The notes of the Blair meeting, attended by the prime minister's senior national security team, also disclose for the first time that Britain's intelligence boss believed that Bush had decided to go to war in mid-2002, and that he believed U.S. policymakers were trying to use the limited intelligence they had to make the Iraqi leader appear to be a bigger threat than was supported by known facts...

• Bush asked to explain UK war memo,CNN, May 12, 2005

Eighty-nine Democratic members of the U.S. Congress last week sent President George W. Bush a letter asking for explanation of a secret British memo that said "intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support the Iraq war in mid-2002.

The timing of the memo was well before the President brought the issue to Congress for approval. [...]

The White House has not yet responded to queries about the congressional letter, which was released on May 6.

• Indignation Grows in U.S. Over British Prewar Documents,LA Times, May 12, 2005

[I]n the United States, where the reports at first received scant attention, there has been growing indignation among critics of the Bush White House, who say the documents help prove that the leaders made a secret decision to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein nearly a year before launching their attack, shaped intelligence to that aim and never seriously intended to avert the war through diplomacy.

• Memo: Bush manipulated Iraq intel,NY Newsday, May 9, 2005

A highly classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain's just-concluded election campaign, indicates that President George W. Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy.

The visit took place while the Bush administration was still declaring to the American public that no decision had been made to go to war. [...]

"There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable," the MI-6 chief said at the meeting, according to the memo. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD," or weapons of mass destruction. [...]

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.
A former senior U.S. official called it "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" during the senior British intelligence officer's visit to Washington. He spoke on condition of anonymity. [...]

The principal U.S. intelligence analysis, called a National Intelligence Estimate, wasn't completed until October 2002, well after the United States and United Kingdom had apparently decided military force should be used to overthrow Hussein's regime.

• A New Memo-gate? Knight Ridder CoversLeaked British Document That Disputes Bush Claims on Iraq ,Editor & Publisher, May 6, 2005

Among other things, [Rep. Conyers] wants to know: "Did the Administration lie to the American people about its intentions with respect to Iraq? Did the Administration deliberately manipulate intelligence to deceive the American people about the strength of its case for war?"

Strobel and Wolcott noted that the White House has repeatedly denied accusations by top foreign officials that intelligence estimates were manipulated.

But they report that a former senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called it "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" during Dearlove's visit to Washington.

• British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy,Knight Ridder, May 5, 2005

A highly classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain's just-concluded election campaign, indicates that President Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy.
The document, which summarizes a July 23, 2002, meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, reports on a visit to Washington by the head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service.

The visit took place while the Bush Administration was still declaring to the American public that no decision had been made to go to war.

The newly disclosed memo, which was first reported by the Sunday Times of London, hasn't been disavowed by the British government. [...]

A former senior U.S. official called it "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" during the senior British intelligence officer's visit to Washington. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

In July 2002 and well afterward, top Bush Administration foreign policy advisers were insisting that "there are no plans to attack Iraq on the president's desk."

But the memo quotes British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, a close colleague of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, as saying that "Bush had made up his mind to take military action."

Straw is quoted as having his doubts about the Iraqi threat.

"But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran," the memo reported he said.

• Blair backed war before invasion,The Age, May 2, 2005

The memo also shows that Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith warned Mr Blair eight months before the invasion that finding a legal justification for war would be difficult and "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action".

• Papers reveal commitment to war,The Guardian, May 2, 2005

The documents show how Mr Blair was told how Britain and the US could ‘create the conditions’ for an invasion, partly, in the words of Jack Straw, to ‘work up’ an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein even though, in the foreign secretary's own words, ‘the case was thin’.

The officials said "certain conditions" should be met and that efforts should be made to "shape public opinion." Before and after his Texas meeting, Mr Blair insisted to MPs that no decision had been taken on military action.

• Blair planned Iraq war from start,The Sunday Times, May 1, 2005

The Americans had been trying to link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks; but the British knew the evidence was flimsy or non-existent. Dearlove warned the meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".

It was clear from Dearlove’s brief visit that the US administration’s attitude would compound the legal difficulties for Britain. The US had no patience with the United Nations and little inclination to ensure an invasion was backed by the security council, he said.

Nor did the Americans seem very interested in what might happen in the aftermath of military action. Yet, as Boyce then reported, events were already moving swiftly.

Back to News & Media page

George Orwell: Politics and the English Language

, April 01, 2006

George Orwell's Politics and the English Language

George Orwell Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder. Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens! Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

DYING METAPHORS. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

OPERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

PRETENTIOUS DICTION. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i. e., e. g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers(1). The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

MEANINGLESS WORDS. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning(2). Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip — alien for akin — making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence(3), to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs. 1946
_____
1) An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-awayfrom the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific. [back]

2) Example: ‘Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative ginting at a cruel, an inexorably selene timelessness... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation’. (Poetry Quarterly.) [back]

3) One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field. [back]

THE END
____BD____ George Orwell: ‘Politics and the English Language’ First published: Horizon. — GB, London. — April 1946.

Reprinted: — ‘Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays’. — 1950. — ‘The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage’ — 1956. — ‘Collected Essays’. — 1961. — ‘Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays’. — 1965. — ‘The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’. — 1968. ____ Machine-readable version: O. Dag Last modified on: 2004-07-24

Genocide: Canadian Style

Tuesday, August 08, 2006
GENOCIDE: CANADIAN STYLE

MILTON BORN WITH A TOOTH ON TRAIL OF TEARS CAMPAIGN ACROSS CANADA
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MILTON BORN WITH A TOOTH ON TRAIL OF TEARS CAMPAIGN ACROSS CANADA
MNN. August 7, 2006.

Milton Born with a Tooth showed up at my house at 9:00 pm. last Friday. He had a very important colonial tale to tell. Milton Born With a Tooth is a Blackfoot Indigenous man from Piegan in Alberta. He went to jail for four and a half years for trying to divert the Old Man River back to its natural course in 1990. As a lone Fighter he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon. The weapon was a bulldozer. In 1921 the river had been diverted to an irrigation canal for the benefit of non-native farmers in southern Alberta. The Blackfoot of Piegan did not give their consent for this diversion and had always protested it.

From August 3rd to September 7th 1990 Milton worked. He took a bulldozer and alone started to dig a ditch so that the river would return to its natural course. 75 RCMP officers descended on him, followed by government officials and a SWAT team. Altogether 200 armed police arrived to overpower Milton. Was this overkill or what? Initially he was going to get 56 years in jail. He got out in 1995 serving the last part of his sentence in the Kainai Correction Institute on the Blood Reserve near Lethbridge Alberta.

When Milton was asked where he got the plan to divert the river, he said, I got it from the beaver. The old people gave an offering to the caretaker of the river. If he can do it without money and a weapon, then I could do it too? declared Milton. He used the laws for safeguarding traditional medicines. He said that the culture of the river provides our understanding of the basis of where we come from and who we are. He tried to divert the river to show that we are still in touch with nature. He had lobbied and gotten national and international scientific support to stop this irrigation project. He even got National Geographic to support him.

While Milton was in jail, the elders and environmentalists took it to court. In 1991 the Supreme Court ruling came down. The Piegan got $64 million, half from the federal government and half from the provincial government. In future, to do anything on the Old Man River they have to consult the Piegan people. The first offer went to the people for a vote. They said No. It was taken back. Another clause was added that they would take $10 million of it to distribute to the people who were poor. This was agreed upon. In 2002 the agreement was finalized.

In the meantime when Milton got out of jail he went to court. He got an injunction that the provincial government of Alberta had no right to divert the Old Man River in the first place.

Once the money came to the Blackfoot, then troubles began. All kinds of sharks descended on the Piegan people. Alberta and Indian Affairs recommended that the chief and four councilors hire a young financial advisor, Lili Kostic, for $1.5 million per year to serve them. She is Indian Affairs ideal, a Pamela Anderson look-alike. This is what Indian Affairs thinks a nouveau riche Indian man should want.

In the agreement the CIBC holds the $54 million in a block account. Remember them? They were in the Enron scandal. They didn't come out of it too clean.

Meanwhile the community can get a financial report. Five non-native consultants were also hired, one from the World Evangelistic Church. They'e there to pacify the Indigenous people. Indian Affairs is up to its old tricks. All these helpers[who are helping themselves to the people money] are being paid from the education, housing, health, economic development and other social programs. They have now depleted all the funds. This is when Indian Affairs decided to put the community into receivership and took over the management of their financial and all their affairs. This is totally disgusting and all too familiar.

Throughout this saga the community was involved emotionally in the Old Man River dam issue. This $64 million was supposed to help them. Suddenly these outsiders got parachuted into their community by Indian Affairs. No reports are filed. The people don't know what's going on.

The chief and council are flying around and incurring all kinds of expenses. In March 2005 a councillor, Edwin Small Legs, sat in a meeting with the CIBC Joe Marino in Calgary. While in the meeting the councilors and the chief heard Joe Marino complain the he was feeling the hit and was worried because of the other people involved. Marino turned around to Small Legs and asked him, What will I do with this? The pressure was on because of the questions being raised by the people.

Small Legs asked, What do you mean? Everything stopped. The whole community was asking too many questions throughout.

In December 2005 Joe Marino refused to give any documents on how he was handling their funds. The community found out a whole lot of money was missing through embezzlement by the chief, Peter Strikes With a Gun, and others. The chief started to panic. In late May 2005 the chief told Milton, don't like being called a crook. He decided to resign. He went in front of the people and sang a tear jerking finale. Five days later he returned. Indian Affairs had gotten a court injunction appointing him as the chief.

Then there was an election. Indian Affairs knew that Peter Strikes With a Gun was going to lose. The morning of the election, at 9:00 am. Indian Affairs in Calgary got a court order and quickly sent it to Ottawa. It was sent back and arrived at Piegan by 3:43 pm the same day. What happened is that two-thirds of the way into the election, the RCMP showed up with the court order and confiscated all the ballot boxes.

The community freaked out. Indian Affairs had used three community women to take out this injunction. In the end these women did something that impeded the will of the people. The community erupted into chaos.

Edwin Small Legs, a councilor, called a friend in Ottawa, Walter Rudnicki, who found somebody to help. In the end nothing was done about the corrupt non-election.

From September until December 7th 2005, Edwin Small Legs finally decided to come clean. Things were going crazy. Everybody was getting harassed. What do I do ? he asked Milton. A media conference was called and Milton spoke about the situation. Documents were presented showing the duplicity of Joe Marino of CIBC with the chief and four of the councilors. Edwin got scared. He was afraid he was going to be the fall guy.

The following day the financial advisor, Lili Kostic, charged Milton with threatening to kill her and he daughter. Milton went to the RCMP. He decided to play dumb. He was afraid that because he is an Indian in a racist community, the white woman would be considered more credible.

Then Milton went to the chief of police. He released all the documents he had and charged her with blackmailing him. With the knowledge of the cops Milton reported that Kostic gave him money. She showed him her panties in her car. Milton swears he never took her up on her offer. He reported these incidents each time to the RCMP.

Since then this case has been under investigation. In April 2006 the RCMP brought evidence of financial mismanagement to the Commercial Crimes Division in Calgary. The preliminary investigation is finished and there is a strong case of fraud against these people.

On July 5, 2006, Milton held a press conference announcing that he had charged everybody with fraud; the chief, four councilors, two financial officers, two financial institutions, three Indian Affairs officials and the 6 consultants. One of those charged was Neil Sharp Adze. One week later he killed himself. Indian Affairs knows how to get their hooks into a guy like Sharp Adze, get him to compromise himself and scare him into thinking he is he? going to be blamed for everything. They are partly to blame for what happened. Look, folks! Whatever wrong you may have done in the past, don't kill yourself. You can make amends to the people. You owe it to future generations to do what you can to make things better. You don't owe your soul to that criminal organization called Indian Affairs.

Milton went to the constituency office of the Minister of Indian Affairs, Jim Prentice. He spoke to his Chief of Staff. At this meeting an offer was made that they would look into the chief's resignation issue, the RCMP interference in the election and the dealings of the financial officers. It is obvious the RCMP needs training on who they should take orders from. Do they have to be patsies for every crook going? It looks like things haven't changed since the bad old days when Duncan Campbell Scott had free reign to depose Indigenous governments left, right and center.

On his journey to other Indigenous communities across Canada, Milton has found this kind of corruption everywhere in almost every Indigenous community. He is asking for a full public inquiry into Indian Affairs and its crimes against his people. We can hope that the Canadian public will support his cause. Indian Affairs is using their tax money for illegal purposes.

Milton wants to take water from the Atlantic Ocean and from the Pacific Ocean. He will mix them together and pour it into the Old Man River.

The way things are going, we are shocked when we hear that someone in government is honest!

Why Are American Indian Soldiers Serving in Iraq?

Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Why Are American Indian Soldiers Serving in Iraq?

Why are American Indian soldiers serving in Iraq?
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Posted: August 04, 2006
by: Michael Yellow Bird
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Editor's note: Dr. Yellow Bird's essay will be disagreeable to many and welcomed by many. Please read carefully. Share your views with editor@indiancountry.com.
An open letter to all indigenous peoples.
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As the United States celebrates its annual Independence Day, I strongly urge all of our nations to hold critical and independent discussions on why we are committing our young people to serve the U.S. military in its occupation of Iraq.
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The recent reporting (including revelations of a cover-up) of the murders, executions and massacres of innocent Iraqi citizens by U.S. troops prompts me to ask, ''Why are indigenous (American Indian) soldiers serving in Iraq?'' I wonder why our tribal communities have not had critical debates on the immorality of this war, on the lies of the present Bush administration that got us into this war and on the spiritual, economic, social and psychological costs that our people and the Iraqi people will pay for this war. It is clear from the history of many of our tribes that our people understood the grave costs of war and so took this act very seriously.
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Before engaging in war, many of our tribes initiated peace councils and sent emissaries to negotiate goodwill and friendship with the ''enemy'' in order to avoid war. As sovereign indigenous nations, we did not do this before or during the invasion of Iraq. We instead let the United States make the decision for us as to whether we should or should not enter into this war. I wonder when was the last time that the United States asked our people for our opinion about war and its costs.
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Our history tells us that because war was so destructive on many different levels, many of our tribal nations ''before committing to war against another tribe'' consulted our elders, peacemakers, women, youth, philosophers, intellectuals, spiritual leaders, children, warriors and veterans to weigh the costs of war. This is something that many of our nations have not done for some time. Many of us have ''outsourced our thinking'' to the United States with respect to when and why we should or should not go to war.
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We are sovereign nations with very intelligent and moral people who do not need to rely on this country to interpret for us the meaning and the costs that war will bring to our communities. Most of us already know the answer to this. And we know that we should decide for ourselves, after careful, deliberate and intelligent discussions, whether we must commit our people and resources to the wars of the United States.
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Along with the U.S. invasion of the lands of our respective nations, the last two major conflicts of the United States - Vietnam and now Iraq - were based on lies created by the U.S. government. That track record makes it even more imperative that we rely upon our own thinking, experiences and morality when we enter into discussions on why our tribal nations should compel our people to go to war.
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The Vietnam lie was very expensive and horrific: it was responsible for the deaths of 58,191,000 American soldiers and 153,303 wounded. One million Vietnamese combatants and 4 million civilians were killed for this American lie. The missing in this war includes approximately 2,300 American soldiers and 200,000 Vietnamese.
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In Iraq, more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since 2003. After so many lies told to our people by the United States, do we trust this nation to be honest with us? Do we trust it to care about life as much as we do?
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If we are to have discussions about this war, topics must include:
Our belief that all people and beings are related to us, so what does it mean to make war on our relatives?
The fact that we value all life so, therefore, war truly must be a last resort.
The fact that we value Mother Earth as a living being and the fact that the U.S. military is contaminating the lands, waters, trees, plants and people in Iraq through the use of biowarfare, land mines and depleted uranium which will kill innocent people and poison much of their territory for many years.
The fact that we believe in the great circle of life (e.g., what goes around comes around; and what we are doing to the Iraqi people is what the United States did to our ancestors).
What are the effects that all of the killing, maiming, poisoning and torturing will have upon our people, especially on the psychic and cosmological levels?
How the United States has treated us in the past and the present, and how it has conscripted our minds and hearts so that we are participating in their same oppressive behavior of another group/race of humans.
What other nations have the United States overthrown for its own interests?
How many innocent non-U.S. peoples have been killed by this country's covert operations, and who is it planning to attack in the future? Why?
Who benefits most from war and who are the biggest losers? "
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Finally, there are many other reasons that we can discuss and analyze. It seems that we cannot rely on corporate media or the U.S. government to tell us the truth or to give us the facts about why we should go to war or whom we should consider our enemy.
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John Stockwell, the highest-ranking CIA official to leave the agency and go public with information about CIA-sponsored activities, once said that the United States neither does ''bloody, gory operations'' in Europe nor does it spend its time attacking these countries. Rather, it performs such operations in countries that are filled with people of color who do not have the military strength and resources to protect themselves from U.S. invasions. I am convinced that Stockwell is suggesting that the U.S. government has a clear racist war ideology and readily employs it against people or races that are not white.
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So, we must use all the available evidence to independently decide for ourselves if and when we should go to war and who is our enemy. An enemy should not be invented because of the color of its skin or religious beliefs. I believe that it is time for us to demand that our tribal governments call for critical and independent discussions, and we need to tell the United States to immediately call for withdrawal of its military forces from Iraq. Most importantly ''and independently of their decision or indecision'' we must immediately pull our people out of this quagmire.
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Countries such as Japan, Honduras, Tonga, Nicaragua, Spain, Dominican Republic, Philippines, Thailand, New Zealand, Portugal and Moldova already have pulled out their troops and many other nations are planning to reduce their troop commitment in the near future. So why are we still in Iraq fighting the United States of America's illegal war?
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It also is time for our tribal leaders and communities to impose a moratorium upon any further enlistments of our young men and women into the U.S. military. The United States has abused our trust and has coerced us to fight its illegal, immoral wars long enough. Many things about this war trouble me to the very core.
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One of the most disturbing questions is why does it seem that of all the countries that have been or continue to be in this war, it is only U.S. soldiers who are committing the murders of, and atrocities against, innocent Iraqi citizens (the unarmed, the disabled, the defenseless elders, the women and the children)? Is it because the United States is serving in larger numbers? Is it because the United States is serving in more hazardous situations? Is it because the United States is more trigger-happy? Is it because of poor oversight and supervision by the upper ranks of the military? Is it because U.S. troops are a more violent group and enjoy killing more than do other soldiers? Is it because the architects of this war, including President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz care more about profit than ''just war'' principles? Is it all of the above?
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As I write this, two National Guardsmen are being investigated for killing an innocent Iraqi man earlier this year; seven Marines and one Navy corpsman were charged with the shooting death of an Iraqi man, whom they had kidnapped from his home, forced into a hole, and shot to death. They then left a stolen AK-47 near his body to make it look like he was firing at them; three soldiers and one noncommissioned officer were charged with killing (in May 2006) three unarmed Iraqis who were in military custody. And many more Iraqi people have been abused and tortured to death in U.S. custody (especially in the military prisons). Many of these atrocities have been covered up or are ''under investigation.'' The story currently receiving the most press is the November 2005 massacre of the 24 innocent civilians (including women and children) in Haditha by U.S. Marines. This mass killing is being compared to the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
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A Washington Post article reported that ''Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident,'' said he watched and listened from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of three families; recalled hearing his neighbor across the street, Younis Salim Khafif, plead in English for his life and the lives of his family members. ''I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: 'I am a friend. I am good,' Fahmi said. 'But they killed him, and his wife and daughters.' The girls killed inside Khafif's house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1'' (Saturday, May 17, 2006).
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Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine who maintains close ties with senior Marine officers despite his opposition to the war, stated, ''Marines overreacted ... and killed innocent civilians in cold blood.'' Murtha already has called for the withdrawal of the U.S. military from Iraq and has called the war ''a flawed policy wrapped in illusion'' (Larry Downing, Reuters, Nov. 18, 2005).
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There are many reasons why we must immediately get our people out of this war:
1. War is not a moral act. The occupation, torture, mutilation, killing and murder of innocent Iraqi people are acts of immorality. Our people should not be complicit in atrocities.
2. The invasion of Iraq was based on lies. Iraq was accused of having weapons of mass destruction by the Bush administration; it did not. Iraq was accused of having ties with Osama Bin Laden; it did not. Our people should not be complicit in lies.
3. The war against Iraq does not meet the standards of a ''just war'' that evolved among ''civilized'' societies. Our people have enough struggles and battles, and should not be complicit in unjust global activities on behalf of the United States.
4. The war on Iraq was for ''regime change'' which is not legal under international law, Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter. Our people should not be complicit in lawlessness.
5. After two decades of wars, invasions and sanctions, Iraq did not have the military power to pose a clear and present danger to the United States before or after being invaded in 2003. Our people should not be complicit in oppressing and occupying a nation that never attacked us.
6. Many people in the United States and throughout the world oppose this war. Our nations should exercise their right to voice their opposition to U.S. military operations, conflicts, wars and occupations.
7. The U.S. soldiers who have murdered Iraqi civilians must now stand trial. Several of them could receive the death penalty. Will more death and life sentences follow or will the deaths of innocent Iraqis be ignored or covered up? Do we want our men and women involved in situations that might conclude in such trials or cover-ups? Our people should mentor their young into just and moral activities that benefit their nations, while encouraging conflict-resolution when possible.
8. This war is creating new ''terrorism'' and retribution that will be directed at the United States for its invasion of Iraq and its torturing and killing of innocent people. Our people should not contribute to U.S. creation of hatred.
9. There is no end in sight for a U.S. military exit out of Iraq. Many sources report that the United States is establishing permanent military bases in Iraq which would keep troops in Iraq for many years. Our people should not contribute to the expansion and maintenance of U.S. militarization, colonization and occupation.
10. Invading Iraq is extremely financially costly and takes resources away from many badly needed priorities at home. At present, it costs nearly $1 billion a week to wage this ''war on terrorism.'' Our people should not be complicit in U.S. activities that waste money.
11. Billions of dollars have been authorized by Congress to be used for occupation and reconstruction. There is evidence that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars have been lost through waste, abuse and fraudulent billing. In a June 8, 2006, article published in The Baltimore Chronicle, Dave Lindorff reported that $21 billion ''has gone missing without a trace in Iraq.'' Who is responsible for this? I am reminded that our people are fighting for, in part, accountability of billions of lost dollars in the Eloise Pepion Cobell, et al. v. Gale Norton, Secretary of the Interior lawsuit in the United States. Our people should never be complicit in U.S. theft, fraud and dishonesty.
12. The United States is supposed to be rebuilding Afghanistan, but it is not; rather, it is targeting most of its focus and resources on Iraq. Our people should not contribute to unilateral U.S. policy and doctrines.
13. Despite billions of U.S. dollars spent in Iraq after its invasion, very little of the promised rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure has been accomplished. Our people ''who are familiar with broken promises and treaties'' should never be complicit in the lies of the United States.
14. The rebuilding of Iraq is not happening. Many U.S. firms that went to Iraq to perform reconstruction services have been accused of ''bilking'' funds intended for reconstruction.
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In an April 16, 2006, news story, the Boston Globe reported that ''American contractors swindled hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi funds.'' For instance, in March 2006, a Rhode Island-based company called The Custer Battles was found ''liable for $3 million in fraudulent billings in Iraq.'' Stories such as this are outrageous and numerous. Many of these companies had/have ties to the current Bush administration, especially Cheney. Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. Halliburton has made hundreds of millions of dollars from this war and occupation. Our people should not be complicit in helping the rich, like Cheney, get richer. We must no longer allow our nations to remain in the fog of war, participating in the United States continued colonization and destruction of the world. What this country has done and continues to do to the Iraqi people is unconscionable and must stop.
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The U.S.-led war in Iraq is wrong, immoral, illegal, unjust, a lie; it is about profiteering for a very small, corrupt, elite sector of the U.S. population. Our people, many of whom occupy some of the lowest levels of decision-making in the U.S. military, are considered expendable and are being used for cannon fodder so that the rich, especially in the United States, can become richer. We must realize that many of the people in the highest levels of the U.S. government suffer from an addiction to war, power and colonization. Many, but not all, indigenous peoples have become co-dependent in this addiction as demonstrated by not holding public meetings and councils that question the U.S. invasion, and by allowing our people to participate in this unjust, illegal war that is creating suffering for untold numbers of innocent Iraqi people.
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In the fall of 2004, the academic journal Wicazo Sa Review published a paper I wrote entitled ''Cowboys and Indians: Toys of Genocide, Icons of American Colonialism.'' In that article, I stated that ''it took me some years to understand that colonialism is a sickness, an addiction to greed, power, and exploitation. ... Colonialism has taught many Indigenous Peoples to be silent, passive, compliant victims who participate in, excuse, enable, or ignore the colonizer's addictive behaviors. Left unchecked, colonialism has continued to flourish, devastate, and suppress Indigenous Peoples, keeping them in a the perpetual role of 'the Indian,' causing many to say, do and think things they never would if their minds and hearts were free from American colonial rule.''
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Today this addictive behavior or the drug of choice of this country is its illegal, dishonest and brutal invasion of Iraq. I urgently ask each and every indigenous person to quit enabling the addictive behavior of the United States. In this same article, I also wrote that there are ''antidotes to colonialism that Indigenous Peoples can and must employ: courage, intelligent resistance, development of a counter-consciousness and discourse, and a fierce critical interrogation of American colonial ideology.''
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It is incumbent upon our peoples to employ these antidotes in order to condemn and get our people out of this war. We must commit all of our intellectual and truth-seeking energies to this objective and not let anyone, indigenous or non-indigenous, hijack our need for such critical and independent discussions. A key democratic principle of our peoples was our willingness to allow our people dissent from popular opinion so that we might consider all of our options. We must not let accusations that our ''honor and courage as warriors is on the line'' prevent us from deciding to leave Iraq - and the U.S. military. After generations of service in the U.S. military - and its numerous wars - our people have repeatedly proven that we are brave and courageous beyond compare. However, our ability to think morally, critically and independently about our participation in this war is another matter that we now must undertake ever so seriously. Maybe, just maybe, if we act using our traditional indigenous forms of morality that value truth, intelligence, honesty, life and dignity, and refuse to be enablers to the U.S. addiction to greed, war, power and colonization, we can help it overcome its unhealthy, destructive obsession for war, conquest, and killing of others.
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And, as it recovers from this addiction, maybe we also can help it overcome its two greatest phobias: dikephobia (the fear of justice) and hypegiaphobia (the fear of responsibility). I pray that that you will take this open letter (or a statement of your own) to your tribal leaders and communities and immediately begin the important critical and independent discussions that will promote and act upon the well-being of all of our people.
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Michael Yellow Bird, Ph.D., is founder and director of the Center for Indigenous Peoples' Critical and Intuitive Thinking and an associate professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Program at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan. E-mail him at mybird@ku.edu.

All Kinds of Holocaust Denial Going Around

Thursday, December 21, 2006
All Kinds of Holocaust Denial Going Around

BUSH-NAZI LINK CONFIRMED
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Documents in National Archives Prove George W. Bush's Grandfather Traded with Nazis - Even After Pearl Harbor
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by John Buchanan (Exclusive to the New Hampshire Gazette)
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WASHINGTON - After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his "enemy national" partners.
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The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.
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Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial tycoon for nearly a year after the U.S. entered the war.
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No Story? For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II and its aftermath.
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The White House did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
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The Summer of '42 The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway in New York under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran simultaneously in the New York Herald-Tribune and Washington Post on July 31, 1941. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.
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"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the front-page Herald-Tribune headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's original patron a decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen's autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also acknowledges his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.
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The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen's U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs" including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.
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Business is Business The "bank," founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury bonds. The company's activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.
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The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC's private banker. A confidential FBI memo from that period suggested, without naming the Bush and Harriman families, that politically prominent individuals were about to come under official U.S. government scrutiny as Hitler's plunder of Europe continued unabated.
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After the "Hitler's Angel" article was published Bush and Harriman made no attempts to divest themselves of the controversial Thyssen financial alliance, nor did they challenge the newspaper report that UBC was, in fact, a de facto Nazi front organization in the U.S.
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Instead, the government documents show, Bush and his partners increased their subterfuge to try to conceal the true nature and ownership of their various businesses, particularly after the U.S. entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense, Thyssen's personal appointee to oversee U.S. matters for his Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to U.S. government investigators any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of Thyssen in it. Brown Brothers Harriman sent letters to the government seeking reconsideration of the seizures by using false information.
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UBC's original group of business associates included George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, who had a relationship with the Harriman family that began in 1919. In 1922, Walker and W. Averell Harriman traveled to Berlin to set up the German branch of their banking and investment operations, which were largely based on critical war resources such as steel and coal.
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The Walker-Harriman-created German industrial alliance also included partnership with another German titan who supported Hitler's rise, Friedrich Flick, who partnered with Thyssen in the German Steel Trust that forged the Nazi war machine. For his role in using slave labor and his own steel, coal and arms resources to build Hitler's war effort, Flick was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to prison.
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The Family Business In 1926, after Prescott Bush had married Walker's daughter, Dorothy, Walker brought Bush in as a vice president of the private banking and investment firm of W.A. Harriman &Co., also located in New York. Bush became a partner in the firm that later became Brown Brothers Harriman and the largest private investment bank in the world. Eventually, Bush became a director of and stockholder in UBC.
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However, the government documents note that Bush, Harriman, Lievense and the other UBC stockholders were in fact "nominees," or phantom shareholders, for Thyssen and his Holland bank, meaning that they acted at the direct behest of their German client.
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Seized On October 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the U.S. Congress seized UBC and liquidated its assets after the war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No. 248 in the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by U.S. Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley.
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In August, under the same authority, Congress had seized the first of the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities, Hamburg-American Line, under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by Crowley. Eight days after the seizure of UBC, Congress invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act again to take control of two more Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses - Holland-American Trading Corp. (Vesting Order No. 261) and Seamless Steel Equipment Corp. (Vesting Order No. 259).
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The documents from the Archives also show that the Bushes and Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold, coal, steel and U.S. Treasury bonds, to their foreign clients overseas between 1931-33, as Hitler engineered his rise to power.
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Still No Story? Since 1942, the information has not appeared in any U.S. news coverage of any Bush political campaign, nor has it been included in any of the major Bush family biographies. It was, however, covered extensively in George H.W. Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. Chaitkin's father served as an attorney in the 1940s for some of the victims of the Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.
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The book gave a detailed, accurate accounting of the Bush family's long Nazi affiliation, but no mainstream U.S. media entity reported on or even investigated the allegations, despite careful documentation by the authors. Major booksellers declined to distribute the book, which was dismissed by Bush supporters as biased and untrue. Its authors struggled even to be reviewed in reputable newspapers. That the book was published by Lyndon LaRouche's organization undoubtedly made it easier to dismiss, but does not change the facts.
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The essence of the story has been posted for years on various Internet sites, including BuzzFlash.com and TakeBackTheMedia.com, but no online media seem to have independently confirmed it.
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In the 1990s, former U.S. Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John Loftus, now honorary president of the Florida Holocaust Museum, wrote a book and launched a web site (www.john-loftus.com) which did breakthrough reporting, including establishing the link between Prescott Bush, Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and forced labor at Auschwitz. Although the widely-respected Loftus established a successful international speaking career with his information, no U.S. newspaper or major TV news program acknowledged his decade of work, nor did he ever see many of the recently released documents.
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Meanwhile, the mainstream media have apparently made no attempt since World War II to either verify or disprove the allegations of Nazi collaboration against the Bush family. Instead, they have attempted to dismiss or discredit such Internet sites or "unauthorized" books without any journalistic inquiry or research into their veracity.
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Loyal Defenders The National Review ran an essay on September 1 by their White House correspondent Byron York, entitled "Annals of Bush-Hating." It begins mockingly: "Are you aware of the murderous history of George W. Bush - indeed, of the entire Bush family? Are you aware of the president's Nazi sympathies? His crimes against humanity? And do you know, by the way, that George W. Bush is a certifiable moron?" York goes on to discredit the "Bush is a moron" IQ hoax, but fails to disprove the Nazi connection.
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The more liberal Boston Globe ran a column September 29 by Reason magazine's Cathy Young in which she referred to "Bush-o-phobes on the Internet" who "repeat preposterous claims about the Bush family's alleged Nazi connections."
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Poles Tackle the Topic Newsweek Polska, the magazine's Polish edition, published a short piece on the "Bush Nazi past" in its March 5, 2003 edition. The item reported that "the Bush family reaped rewards from the forced-labor prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp," according to a copyrighted English-language translation from Scoop Media
(http://www.scoop.co.nz). The story also reported the seizure of the various Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.
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Still Not Interested Major U.S. media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald, as well as Knight-Ridder Newspapers, have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them beginning Friday, August 29. Newsweek U.S. correspondent Michael Isikoff, famous for his reporting of big scoops during the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual affair of the 1990s, declined twice to accept an exclusive story based on the documents from the archives.
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Aftermath In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.
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John Buchanan is an award-winning and internationally published journalist and investigative reporter with 33 years of experience in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Miami. His work has appeared in more than 50 newspapers, magazines and books. He can be reached by e-mail at: jtwg@bellsouth.net. Interview with a Prosecutor John Buchanan interviews John Loftus on the significance of the Prescott Bush - Nazi story.
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Interview by John Buchanan from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 2, October 24, 2003
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Buchanan - What do you think is the true significance of the story in the New Hampshire Gazette?
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Loftus - Your story, the first in a "reputable" US newspaper in 60 years, redeemed my two decades of work that only resulted in the mainstream media slamming doors in my face, despite my credentials as a Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor. I give a lot of credit to the courage of the New Hampshire Gazette as well, for practicing journalism as it should be practiced - tell the truth and let the facts speak for themselves.
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Buchanan - How do you explain the fact that the mainstream media has simply refused to touch it?
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Loftus - It's a complex story and the media hate that now in the age of the sound bite headline. It's also unpopular and frightening to most people, understandably. But the truth about this period of our history as a nation must come out and be dealt with. You and the Gazette have helped to accomplish that. It will come out now, I think.
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Buchanan - What is the importance of it coming out, in your view?
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Loftus - Your stories will be the crack in the dam and it will come flooding out. For 60 years, it has been a huge cover-up of the activities of some of the people who brought us the worst grief in the history of the world - the Holocaust. This country needs to understand which of its most prominent families supported Hitler, even after the US went to war with Germany.
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Buchanan - Can you offer a good example?
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Loftus - Joseph Kennedy bought his Nazi stocks from Prescott Bush. The British thought Kennedy was guilty of treason because his code clerk was tried in London as a Nazi agent and convicted.
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Buchanan - How do you account for the failure of the media to break this story before the Gazette did?
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Loftus - My feeling is that about 15 years ago, when big corporations started taking over media companies that had been privately owned by families or individuals, we ended up with an over-worked but well-intentioned media without the staff or resources, in light of all the corporate cost-cutting that was done, to look into the really big stories. The real enemy is the multinational corporations who are only interested in profits and choose profits over truth.
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Buchanan - What can be done about that?
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Loftus - We need to educate the media.
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Buchanan - Should Prescott Bush, George Herbert Walker and the Harrimans have been tried for treason?
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Loftus - Yes, they should have been tried for treason, because they continued to support Hitler after the US entered the war. As a former prosecutor, I could have made that case.
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Buchanan - What do you think their true motives were in betraying their country for profit?
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Loftus - It was a perfect example of spin, before the term was even invented. Their goal was that no matter which side won the war, their international industrial cartel would survive and prosper. They had a perfect set-up - a bank in New York (UBC), one in Holland (Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart), and one in Germany (August Thyssen Bank). They were prepared for anything that could have happened. They wanted to avoid exactly what happened to Fritz Thyssen after WWI. That was the whole point. He had lost many of his major businesses, and they came up with a better way to prepare for the Second World War.
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Buchanan - How did they manage the cover-up after the first seizures in 1942 and continue with their dealings until 1951, when Thyssen died in Argentina?
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Loftus - They brought in John Foster Dulles and Sullivan and Cromwell, and his brother Allen in Europe. The Dulles brothers put into effect a cloaking arrangement?that was reflected in the records of Brown Brothers Harriman. There was one account - Brown Brothers Schroeder Rock - that was a cloaking account at Schroeder Bank. The Rock was the Rockefellers.
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Buchanan - What were they most guilty of after the US entered the war?
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Loftus - They shipped gold through axis countries after the US entered the war. That certainly was treason, because it gave aid and comfort to the enemy and assisted them economically.
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Buchanan - Why would they do that - take that chance of facing execution for treason if caught?
Loftus - They were afraid Britain would lose the war and they were protecting themselves.
Buchanan - If there is information like that to be uncovered still, what do you propose?
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Loftus - I want a full Congressional investigation and I think your reporting in the Gazette certainly justifies one. I want the cover-up itself investigated, and I want the long-concealed Nazi histories of these families brought out to the public.
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Buchanan - Who should investigate?
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Loftus - Now that this information has finally come out, I am calling for full investigations by both the House and Senate Judiciary committees. We'll see where it goes from there. But I want the cover-up fully and aggressively investigated. The American people and Congress have a right to find out how this happened, to make sure it never happens again. It's too late for justice, but it's never too late for the truth. The American people and survivors of the Holocaust and veterans of the war are entitled to the truth.
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Buchanan - Why hasn't it come out before?
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Loftus - President Clinton wanted all the Nazi files declassified, but it didn't happen fast enough. Some of the documents you saw on I.G. Farben were only declassified a few days before you walked into the archives. You were very lucky, I'd say.
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Buchanan - What is the most damning single thing you've learned in your 20 years of working on this?
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Loftus - That it wasn't just the Nazis. The Harrimans backed a Communist-Soviet front of international trade and they sold the Czar's gold to support the Bolsheviks and fund the Russian Revolution. W. Averell Harriman also did business through other Brown Brothers Harriman and Harriman Fifteen Corp. enterprises that did business with Joseph Stalin as he purged his opposition.
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Buchanan - How many people died while Brown Brothers Harriman and the Bush-Walker-Harriman partnership did business with Stalin?
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Loftus - Millions, including American and Allied soldiers and people in concentration camps, both in Germany and Russia. And all the while, even during WWI when American troops died in Russia, the Harrimans did business with the Bolsheviks and then Stalin.
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Buchanan - What should happen next as a result of this coming out?
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Loftus - I think that American war veterans and Holocaust survivors are entitled to compensation. I'm not as interested in filing another reparations lawsuit, as I am in a bill in Congress.
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Buchanan - How realistic is that?
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Loftus - They did it for Japanese internees. I don't see why they wouldn't do it on this issue if the public outcry is loud enough. We should reimburse those vets and Holocaust survivors whose lives were harmed by the Bushes and Harrimans in their dealings as traitors with enemies of the US.
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Buchanan - Do you think it will happen?
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Loftus - I don't know, but I do know that all you can do in this world is tell the truth and see what happens.
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John Loftus served as a prosecutor with the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit. John Buchanan wrote "Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed," in our last issue. - The Ed.
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Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951?- Federal Documents
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If George W. Bush had been born poor he never would have been made president. Where did his family's money come from?
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By John Buchanan and Stacey Michael from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 3, November 7, 2003
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After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal.
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Furthermore, the records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal their activities from government investigators.
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Bush's partners in the secret web of Thyssen-controlled ventures included former New York Governor W. Averell Harriman and his younger brother, E. Roland Harriman. Their quarter-century of Nazi financial transactions, from 1924-1951, were conducted by the New York private banking firm, Brown Brothers Harriman.
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The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment.
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Although the additional seizures under the Trading with the Enemy Act did not take place until after the war, documents from The National Archives and Library of Congress confirm that Bush and his partners continued their Nazi dealings unabated. These activities included a financial relationship with the German city of Hanover and several industrial concerns. They went undetected by investigators until after World War Two.
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At the same time Bush and the Harrimans were profiting from their Nazi partnerships, W. Averell Harriman was serving as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's personal emissary to the United Kingdom during the toughest years of the war. On October 28, 1942, the same day two key Bush-Harriman-run businesses were being seized by the U.S. government, Harriman was meeting in London with Field Marshall Smuts to discuss the war effort.
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Denial and Deceit
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While Harriman was concealing his Nazi relationships from his government colleagues, Cornelius Livense, the top executive of the interlocking German concerns held under the corporate umbrella of Union Banking Corporation (UBC), repeatedly tried to mislead investigators, and was sometimes supported in his subterfuge by Brown Brothers Harriman.
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All of the assets of UBC and its related businesses belonged to Thyssen-controlled enterprises, including his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, the documents state.
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Nevertheless, Livense, president of UBC, claimed to have no knowledge of such a relationship. "Strangely enough, (Livense) claims he does not know the actual ownership of the company," states a government report.
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H.D Pennington, manager of Brown Brothers Harriman and a director of UBC "for many years," also lied to investigators about the secret and well-concealed relationship with Thyssen's Dutch bank, according to the documents.
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Investigators later reported that the company was "wholly owned" by Thyssen's Dutch bank.
Despite such ongoing subterfuge, U.S. investigators were able to show that "a careful examination of UBC's general ledger, cash books and journals from 1919 until the present date clearly establish that the principal and practically only source of funds has been Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart."
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In yet another attempt to mislead investigators, Livense said that $240,000 in banknotes in a safe deposit box at Underwriters Trust Co. in New York had been given to him by another UBC-Thyssen associate, H.J. Kouwenhoven, managing director of Thyssen's Dutch bank and a director of the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin. August Thyssen was Fritz's father.
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The government report shows that Livense first neglected to report the $240,000, then claimed that it had been given to him as a gift by Kouwenhoven. However, by the time Livense filed a financial disclosure with U.S. officials, he changed his story again and reported the sum as a debt rather than a cash holding.
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In yet another attempt to deceive the governments of both the U.S. and Canada, Livense and his partners misreported the facts about the sale of a Canadian Nazi front enterprise, La Cooperative Catholique des Consommateurs de Combustible, which imported German coal into Canada via the web of Thyssen-controlled U.S. businesses.
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"The Canadian authorities, however, were not taken in by this maneuver," a U.S. government report states. The coal company was later seized by Canadian authorities.
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After the war, a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC-related client assets were seized under The Trading with the Enemy Act, including several that showed the continuation of a relationship with the Thyssen family after the initial 1942 seizures.
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The records also show that Bush and the Harrimans conducted business after the war with related concerns doing business in or moving assets into Switzerland, Panama, Argentina and Brazil - all critical outposts for the flight of Nazi capital after Germany's surrender in 1945. Fritz Thyssen died in Argentina in 1951.
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One of the final seizures, in October 1950, concerned the U.S. assets of a Nazi baroness named Theresia Maria Ida Beneditka Huberta Stanislava Martina von Schwarzenberg, who also used two shorter aliases. Brown Brothers Harriman, where Prescott Bush and the Harrimans were partners, attempted to convince government investigators that the baroness had been a victim of Nazi persecution and therefore should be allowed to maintain her assets.
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"It appears, rather, that the subject was a member of the Nazi party," government investigators concluded.
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At the same time the last Brown Brothers Harriman client assets were seized, Prescott Bush announced his Senate campaign that led to his election in 1952.
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Investigation Investigated?
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In 1943, six months after the seizure of UBC and its related companies, a government investigator noted in a Treasury Department memo dated April 8, 1943 that the FBI had inquired about the status of any investigation into Bush and the Harrimans.
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"I gave 'a memorandum' which did not say anything about the American officers of subject," the investigator wrote. "(Another investigator) wanted to know whether any specific action had been taken by us with respect to them."
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No further action beyond the initial seizures was ever taken, and the newly-confirmed records went unseen by the American people for six decades.
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What Does It All Mean?
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So why are the documents relevant today?
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"The story of Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman is an introduction to the real history of our country," says L.A. art book publisher and historian Edward Boswell. "It exposes the money-making motives behind our foreign policies, dating back a full century. The ability of Prescott Bush and the Harrimans to bury their checkered pasts also reveals a collusion between Wall Street and the media that exists to this day."
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Sheldon Drobny, a Chicago entrepreneur and philanthropist who will soon launch a liberal talk radio network, says the importance of the new documents is that they prove a long pattern of Bush family war profiteering that continues today via George H.W. Bush's intimate relationship with the Saudi royal family and the bin Ladens, conducted via the super-secret Carlyle Group, whose senior advisers include former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III.
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In the post-9/11 world, Drobny finds the Bush-Saudi connection deeply troubling. "Trading with the enemy is trading with the enemy," he says. "That's the relevance of the documents and what they show."
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Lawrence Lader, an abortion rights activist and the author of more than 40 books, says "the relevance lies with the fact that the sitting President of the United States would lead the nation to war based on lies and against the wishes of the rest of the world." Lader and others draw comparisons between President Bush's invasion of Iraq and Hitler's occupation of Poland in 1939 - the event that sparked World War Two.
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However, others see an even larger significance.
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"The discovery of the Bush-Nazi documents raises new questions about the role of Prescott Bush and his influential business partners in the secret emigration of Nazi war criminals, which allowed them to escape justice in Germany," says Bob Fertik, co-founder of Democrats.com and an amateur 'Nazi hunter.' "It also raises questions about the importance of Nazi recruits to the CIA in its early years, in what was called Operation Paperclip, and Prescott Bush's role in that dark operation."
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Fertik and others, including former Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John Loftus, a Constitutional attorney in Miami, and a former Veterans Administration official, believe Prescott Bush and the Harrimans should have been tried for treason.
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What Next?
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Now, say Fertik and Loftus, there should be a Congressional investigation into the Bush family's Nazi past and its concealment from the American people for 60 years.
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"The American people have a right to know, in detail, about this hidden chapter of our history," says Loftus, author of The Secret War Against the Jews. "That's the only way we can understand it and deal with it."
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For his part, Fertik is pessimistic that even a Congressional investigation can thwart the war profiteering of the present Bush White House. "It's impossible to stop it," he says, "when the worst war profiteers are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who operate in secrecy behind the vast powers of the White House."
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John Buchanan is a journalist and magazine writer based in Miami Beach. He can be reached by e-mail at jtwg@bellsouth.net.
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Stacey Michael is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of Religious Conceit. His most recent book is Weapons of Mass Dysfunction: The Art of "Faith-Based" Politics, due in early 2004. He can be reached by email at staceymichael@religiousconceit.com.
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