United States News Digest
Iraq: Vietnam in the Desert
Texas Republican Congressman: 'Can We Afford To Occupy Iraq?'
In a Sept. 3 statement to the Congressional Record, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) updates his continuing opposition to the Iraq war, and the neo-conservative's imperial policy. Paul says that the bombing of UN headquarters drove home how "dangerous" the situation in Iraq is, but though the Bush Administration is "softening" on the question of the use of UN forces, we "should not expect any international coalition to help us pay the bills for occupying Iraq."
"It's easy for politicians to say" spend whatever it takes on Iraq because it's not their money, says Paul, adding that the American people deserve more than what the warmakers in the Administration have given themi.e., "clear goals and a definite exit strategy."
The paradox, however, built by this bad war policy is that if there are "open elections," there's a good chance an anti-American regime would be chosen, maybe even one which is "fundamentalist." If the U.S. influences the election, a pro-American regime will not be trusted. "Realities" beg the question, "How will we ever get out." He says that the Korean occupation shows that occupation doesn't solve problems.
The Army Does Not Have Enough Troops To Occupy Iraq
By March 2004, the number of regular military forces available for Iraq would be 38,000 to 64,000, says a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, done at the request by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV). The CBO report came at a point that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a sarcastic critic of those who warned that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed for an occupation, had called for one more "division" to bolster the 139,000 U.S. troops already in Iraq. Rumsfeld and his chickenhawks want the troops to come from foreign "allies," but their requests have been turned down by India, Turkey, and others, who insist that they will only join under a UN peacekeeping mandate, not the U.S. "unilateral" war.
By the U.S. Army rotation policy currently announced, U.S. troops will have to stay for one year, and most of the force will be rotated out
The CBO report also examines several options to increase that number, including eliminating the forces normally kept in readiness for contingencies, employing National Guard brigades, Army special forces in occupation duties and Marine Corps regiments, and increasing the Army's force structure, all at a vast cost increase.
Bush To Ask For $60-70 Billion More for Iraq
In yet another demonstration that nothing in Iraq is going according to how the chickenhawks predicted it would, the White House has informed Congress that it will be asking for yet another giant supplemental appropriations bill to fund ongoing operations in Iraq. The amount of that request, $60 to $70 billion, is said to be about twice what most members of Congress were expecting, and comes only a little more than five months after the $79-billion supplemental that the Bush Administration sprung on the Congress only days after starting the war in Iraq. This suggests that the optimistic scenarios that the Pentagon was spinning for the occupation as recently as July are not proving out, in particular, that the deployment of foreign troops in Iraq would substantially reduce the bill for U.S. military operations, which Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim pegged at about $3.9 billion per month. Zakheim, in an interview with EIR in July, expressed great pride at his office's ability to forecast the monthly costs of Iraq operations through the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30, but the projection is way off the mark.
U.S. Begging for Help in Iraq
A New York Times op ed by the Middle East Policy Council's Donald Hepburn details how incompetent the Cheney war has been. Hepburn says, in the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. coalition effort was called "Operation Tin Cup" and raised $60 billion from the coalition. Now, says Hepburn, the U.S. coalition effort should be called "Operation Begging Bowl"and nobody is giving! The article called, "Nice War, Here's the Bill," calculates that at $1 billion per week for the military, a five-year occupation will cost $300 billion. And, it's all borrowed money, already accruing interest. Then there's refugees, reconstruction, $8 billion for immediate salaries; $5 billion for initial humanitarian aid; and $7 billion immediately for public utilities, yet to be added. In addition, the "mythical" oil revenues that the Pentagon chickenhawks promised would pay for everything will not be seen for three to five years.
More Indications of the Iraq Quagmire
Thomas White, the former Army Secretary ousted by Rumsfeld in June, 2003, has written a book about Iraq exposing that "the plan for winning the peace is totally inadequate." USA Today reports that White says the current Iraq policy "threatens to turn what was a major military victory into a potential humanitarian, political and economic disaster." White had agreed with former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki's sober assessment to Congress that more than 200,000 troops would be needed for "peace-keeping" in Iraq, and such criticism of the chickenhawks' "group think" was a reason White was fired.
And, after less than four months, 9/11 "hero" New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik quit as the Iraq Occupation's police chief, responsible for recruiting and training the Iraqi police force. Kerik would have been at the Baghdad police station on Sept. 2, when the bomb went off, but he changed his plans at the last minute to leave Iraq one day earlier.
Wolfowitz, Abizaid Brief Congress on Iraq
Congressional concerns, including numbers of U.S. troops and the costs of U.S. operations, were at the top of the agenda when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and U.S. Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid marched up to Capitol Hill on Sept. 4. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner (R-Va.) might have been expressing Congressional sentiment when he told reporters after the second of two closed-door meetings that "everything isn't going quite as we had hoped," the two concerns in particular having to do with the upcoming supplemental budget request and the growing list of U.S. military casualties in Iraq.
Both Wolfowitz and Abizaid maintained that there's no need for more American troops in Iraq but there is a need for foreign troops. "We very much would welcome the inclusion of international forces," Abizaid said, "and we have long said for quite some time that we would welcome that." Wolfowitz claimed that the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad "did have the effect, I think, of energizing the international community," and the result was that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan came forward with an idea that "they understand a multinational force would have to have unity of command, would have to be under U.S. command, that really solved our principal concerns on the military side and we have embraced that quite eagerly."
Cheney Violated Law in Lying to Congress About GAO Probe
Vice President Dick Cheney lied to Congress about the GAO's investigation of his Energy Task Force, in violation of the Federal False Statements statute, writes John W. Dean, the former Watergate figure who is now a banker and a legal columnist.
Dean notes, in a Aug. 29 column for Findlaw.com, that the GAO (an arm of Congress) asked Cheney for documents concerning Task Force expenditures, Cheney stonewalled, refusing to hand over any documents. On Aug. 2, 2001, Cheney sent a letter to Congress, demanding that Congress get the Comptroller General off his back, and he stated that his staff had already provided responsive documents to the Comptroller General concerning Task Force costs.
But the GAO report shows that this statement was a lie. According to the report, Cheney's office had only provided 77 pages, which the GAO described as useless. A July 18, 2001 letter from the Comptroller said the GAO was continuing "to request all records responsive to our request."
Dean writes: "Cheney's claim to have produced responsive documents was a false statement, and all evidence suggests, an intentional one. That means it is a criminal offensea false statement to Congress." Dean adds that the GAO report also "provided evidence of what the motive for the crime was"which is that Cheney had met with big energy interests, and had given them a major role in setting the Administration's energy policy.
Over 100 Death Sentences Voided
The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, on Sept. 2 overturned the death sentences of 167 Death Row inmates in five Western states. The court based its ruling on a July 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision which said that only juries, not judges, can decide on factual matters to determine whether a defendant should get life imprisonment or the death penalty. The Supreme Court had said, citing the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of trial by jury, that any factual issue that might result in an increased penalty must be decided by a jury, not by a judge in a separate sentencing proceeding which is subject to a lesser standard of proof. Since other circuits have said that the Supreme Court's ruling should not apply retroactively, the Ninth Circuit's ruling will be appealed to Supreme Court.
White House Withdraws Estrada Nomination
Each side in the partisan dispute in the Senate over judicial nominations managed to paint Miguel Estrada, President Bush's nominee to the D.C. Court of Appeals, as the victim of the other. Estrada was originally first nominated by Bush in April 2001, and had been the subject of a Democrats' filibuster since last January. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), speaking shortly after the White House withdrew the nomination on Sept. 4, declared that Estrada "is an unfortunate victim of a White House policy of not cooperating with the Senate and stonewalling in the appointment of judges." On the other side, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn) said, a few hours later, "Miguel Estrada has been denied the opportunity to be considered by this body by a single up-or-down vote, whereby individual colleagues could vote either for or against a brilliant, a qualified nominee, all because of the obstruction of a few."
Bush's response to the filibuster of Estrada and two nominees from Texas has been to nominate, without consultation with the Democrats, two more controversial individuals to the same D.C. Court of Appeals. The Democrats have vowed not to be, as they say, intimidated. Their determination to stop a few of Bush's judicial nominees is a reflection of their decision, in early 2001, not to filibuster the nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general. Ashcroft has since proven to be a direct threat to Constitutional liberties, just as Lyndon LaRouche had warned at the time of his nomination.
Pollard Seeks Release From Life Sentence for Espionage
On Sept. 2, convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Jay Pollard appeared in Federal court in Washington, D.C. for a sentence-reduction-related hearing. Presiding Judge Thomas Hogan ordered that Pollard be moved from his prison in North Carolina, to appear in court on the appeal for the first time, but Hogan did not explain his decision. In 1985, Pollard was arrested by the FBI while trying to seek asylum in the Israeli embassy in Washington. Pollard, who worked as a civilian analyst for the U.S. Navy, and his wife at the time, Anne Henderson Pollard, had spied for Israel for years, in a network run by "Dirty Rafi" Eytan, Sharon's terrorist-mastermind and espionage chief. The Pollards had also sold classified documents to China. Israel never cooperated with the U.S. in the investigation, and Pollard's Israeli handlers and paymasters were whisked off to Israel, where U.S. officials have never been allowed to question them.
EIR's Special Report from 1986, "Moscow's Secret Weapon: Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Mafia," revealed that highly sensitive information that Pollard got from the U.S., was then passed by the Israelis to the Soviet Union. The nature of documents obtained by Pollard, who had security clearance beyond what would be expected for a job at his level, indicated that he had assistance from others inside the U.S. government, who fed him the document numbers to obtain. As EIR reported, senior U.S. intelligence officials believed that there was not simply a single "mole" aiding Pollard, but an "entire molehill," dubbed "The X Committee." In the 1980s, EIR published a list of the suspected members of that "X Committee" including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney (of the Center for Security Policy), and Michael Ledeen, and other top operatives of the neo-conservative inner circle.
Now, with these neo-cons in power in Washington, under Vice President Dick Cheney, a new move is afoot to free Pollard. The Sept. 2 appeal hearing for Pollard is part of a campaign by Sharon personally to get him out. On Sept. 2, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported that Sharon's spokesman, Ra'anan Gissin, said, "We are using all our efforts to get him released." Sharon carried with him into the July 30 meeting with President Bush a petition for Pollard's freedom signed by 112 members of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament). However, the Sharon/Bush meeting was so unfriendly that Sharon did not present Bush with the request. Now, Pollard's attorneys, Jacques Semmelman and Eliot Lauer, are seeking to have his sentence of life imprisonment with no parole, reduced to time served.
The attorneys argue a "big lie"that Pollard's spying did not harm the U.S., because he was "only" taking U.S. information about terrorist links of countries like Syria and Iran, out of concern for Israel's security. They also want the release of a 40-page classified document prepared by the office of then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, concerning the damage that Pollard's spying did to U.S. national security. The lawyers say the Weinberger document was government "misinformation." High-level military figures have complained about Pollard's espionage, and opposed his release. CIA Director George Tenet has reportedly said he would resign if Pollard is let out of prison.
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