DEMOCRACY NOW– Writing in The Nation magazine, Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill reports on Washington’s undeclared air war against Iraq in 2002:

“It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein’s major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon’s goal was clear: Destroy Iraq’s ability to resist. This was war.

“But there was a catch: The war hadn’t started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002–a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before “shock and awe” officially began.”

AMY GOODMAN: Here to talk about this all with us is Jeremy Scahill, producer and correspondent for Democracy Now!, has an article at The Nation magazine’s website, called “The Other Bomb Drops: How Bush Began the Iraq Invasion Before He Went to Congress or the U.N.” We are also joined on the telephone by Hans Von Sponeck, former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations. And we are joined by John Bonifaz, who has just begun a website that deals with this issue. He is author of Warrior King: The Case for Impeaching George W. Bush. The website is called, AfterDowningStreet.org, a coalition of various groups urging Congress to begin a formal investigation to whether Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the invasion of Iraq. Let’s begin, Jeremy, with you. Welcome to Democracy Now!, on this side of the mic.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thank you, Amy. It’s good to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you found.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I think for many people who have been following the politics of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it comes as no surprise to learn that the Bush administration intentionally misled the U.S. public and the world and operated with tremendous bad faith when it said it was trying to do everything it could to avoid war. And what we have here is really solid documentation that backs that up. What the British Times of London published last weekend was statistics from the British defense ministry that showed that in the second half of 2002—let’s remember that the invasion of Iraq officially began in March of 2003—that from May 2002 until the end of 2002, that the United States and Britain doubled the amount of attacks that—the number of attacks that they were carrying out against Iraq, from the whole of 2001. So, what you saw was the Bush administration ordering attacks, offensive attacks on Iraq, that were intended to take out communications infrastructure in the country, the ability of commanders in the Iraqi military to communicate with one another, pretty much defensive mechanics for the country, and these attacks were happening with the justification that they were protecting the so-called no-fly zones in Iraq.

The real scandal here is that the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, oversaw the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam. We reported on this show for years consistently that the United States was bombing Iraq once every three days. This bombing began—you could say that the preparations for this invasion began the moment that the so-called Gulf War ended and that Clinton laid the groundwork for this in his regular bombings of Iraq. We saw a spike in activity in these so-called no-fly zone attacks which had no U.N. mandate whatsoever, which were not approved by the international community.

AMY GOODMAN: Which are often mistakenly called the U.N. no-fly zones.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. And it was only the United States and Britain. France pulled out almost immediately after the United States began this program. So you had the United States and Britain, and then with the approval and support of some of the puppet regimes in the region that were for whatever reason in bed with the United States. After the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, you saw an escalation in the so-called no-fly zones. The Clinton administration was using them to try to provoke Saddam Hussein’s regime into attacking the United States to justify further attacks. And you remember there was the heavy bombing known as “Operation Desert Fox” in December of 1998. So the Clinton administration is not innocent here. It carried out illegal bombings against Iraq consistently throughout the presidency of Clinton.

What we saw that sort of changed here under Bush is that the Bush administration dropped all of the rhetoric about the no-fly zones having something to do with defending Shiites or Kurds and actually were quite public about what they were using these no-fly zones for. They were using them to systematically and preemptively degrade Iraq’s ability to defend itself, not from an uprising of Shiites or Kurds, but from the invasion of a foreign army.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, can you locate the Downing Street memo, talk about its significance, and what happened with the bombing then? This Downing Street memo, what, July 23rd, 2002.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yes. It reports on a meeting that senior British officials had had with members of the Bush administration, and what it is is a reflection of what the British understood to be the United States’ policy at the moment. And what’s clear from reading this—it’s actually not a memo, it’s minutes, but it’s called the Downing Street memo. It’s minutes of this meeting with Tony Blair and some of his most senior defense advisers. And the picture that is painted from this memo is that the United States already was not just planning and preparing for war, but was actively carrying out air strikes in support of this war. The invasion had begun already when the British had this meeting. And we find that in the form of remarks attributed to Geoff Hoon within these minutes, where he is talking about the Americans already spiking up activity against Saddam Hussein, and what he’s referring to is the increasing use of these so-called no-fly zones to degrade Iraq’s ability to defend against a U.S. invasion and to prepare the route for U.S. Special Forces to enter into the country. In September of 2002—now this is months before the actual invasion officially began, and a few months before Bush went to the Congress or the United Nations—100 aircraft violate Iraqi airspace, British and American aircraft. They go in and they carry out a systematic campaign of air strikes in the west of Iraq and basically destroy the west of Iraq’s ability to defend against an invasion. And that was one of the main places where U.S. Special Forces troops came in from Jordan into the west of Iraq. That happened in September of 2002. We’re talking about months before the actual invasion began.

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Democracy Now! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, has a piece in The Nation online called “The Other Bomb Drops.” When we come back, we’ll also be joined by attorney John Bonifaz and the former U.N. Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck..

Photo by Flickr user US Army

LA TIMES– Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Friday criticized a U.S. military program that pays Iraqi newspapers to plant stories favorable to the American mission, and mistakenly said the Pentagon had shut down the program shortly after its existence was revealed.

In his most specific comments thus far about the information operations program, — carried out by U.S. troops and a private contractor — Rumsfeld said the U.S. military should not be paying Iraqi media to publish articles, whose origin was concealed even from the news outlets.

He said he had not been initially aware of the clandestine program, and ordered it shut down after news outlets published details of it.

“When we heard about it, we said, ‘Gee, that’s not what we ought to be doing,’ ” Rumsfeld said Friday during a taped interview on PBS’ “The Charlie Rose Show.”

Rumsfeld said the contractor, Lincoln Group, and commanders in Iraq were notified of the Pentagon’s concerns and ended the propaganda effort. “They stopped doing that,” he said.

Rumsfeld’s remarks were made available by PBS producers before the show aired late Friday night. One person familiar with Lincoln Group’s operations, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of an ongoing investigation, said the program in Iraq was still active as of a week ago.

Read more at LA TIMES.

© LA TIMES 2006

Photo by flickr user DBKing

INDEPENDENT– Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.

Investigators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items.

The report, by the non-profit group Centre for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were making use of the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs). Not one told viewers who had produced the items.

“We know we only had partial access to these VNRs and yet we found 77 stations using them,” said Diana Farsetta, one of the group’s researchers. “I would say it’s pretty extraordinary. The picture we found was much worse than we expected going into the investigation in terms of just how widely these get played and how frequently these pre-packaged segments are put on the air.”

Ms Farsetta said the public relations companies commissioned to produce these segments by corporations had become increasingly sophisticated in their techniques in order to get the VNRs broadcast. “They have got very good at mimicking what a real, independently produced television report would look like,” she said.

The FCC has declined to comment on the investigation but investigators from the commission’s enforcement unit recently approached Ms Farsetta for a copy of her group’s report.

The range of VNR is wide. Among items provided by the Bush administration to news stations was one in which an Iraqi-American in Kansas City was seen saying “Thank you Bush. Thank you USA” in response to the 2003 fall of Baghdad. The footage was actually produced by the State Department, one of 20 federal agencies that have produced and distributed such items.

Many of the corporate reports, produced by drugs manufacturers such as Pfizer, focus on health issues and promote the manufacturer’s product. One example cited by the report was a Hallowe’en segment produced by the confectionery giant Mars, which featured Snickers, M&Ms and other company brands. While the original VNR disclosed that it was produced by Mars, such information was removed when it was broadcast by the television channel – in this case a Fox-owned station in St Louis, Missouri.

Bloomberg news service said that other companies that sponsored the promotions included General Motors, the world’s largest car maker, and Intel, the biggest maker of semi-conductors. All of the companies said they included full disclosure of their involvement in the VNRs. “We in no way attempt to hide that we are providing the video,” said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel. “In fact, we bend over backward to make this disclosure.”

The FCC was urged to act by a lobbying campaign organised by Free Press, another non-profit group that focuses on media policy. Spokesman Craig Aaron said more than 25,000 people had written to the FCC about the VNRs. “Essentially it’s corporate advertising or propaganda masquerading as news,” he said. “The public obviously expects their news reports are going to be based on real reporting and real information. If they are watching an advertisement for a company or a government policy, they need to be told.”

The controversy over the use of VNRs by television stations first erupted last spring. At the time the FCC issued a public notice warning broadcasters that they were obliged to inform viewers if items were sponsored. The maximum fine for each violation is $32,500 (£17,500).

Editor’s note: To check out 36 examples of VNRs, including the client(s) that funded it, the TV stations that aired it, and the deceptive techniques that newsrooms used to disguise it as genuine journalism go HERE. You can also compare Quicktime videos of the original VNRs with selected newscasts that incorporated them.

© INDEPENDENT 2006

ZOGBY INTERNATIONAL– Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll shows just one in five troops want to heed Bush call to stay “as long as they are needed.”

*While 58% say mission is clear, 42% say U.S. role is hazy

*Plurality believes Iraqi insurgents are mostly homegrown

*Almost 90% think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11, most don’t blame Iraqi public for insurgent attacks

*Majority of troops oppose use of harsh prisoner interrogation Plurality of troops pleased with their armor and equipment

An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and more than one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows.

The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies, showed that 29% of the respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should leave Iraq “immediately,” while another 22% said they should leave in the next six months. Another 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months, while 23% said they should stay “as long as they are needed.”

Different branches had quite different sentiments on the question, the poll shows. While 89% of reserves and 82% of those in the National Guard said the U.S. should leave Iraq within a year, 58% of Marines think so. Seven in ten of those in the regular Army thought the U.S. should leave Iraq in the next year. Moreover, about three-quarters of those in National Guard and Reserve units favor withdrawal within six months, just 15% of Marines felt that way. About half of those in the regular Army favored withdrawal from Iraq in the next six months.

Continue reading about the Thoughts of Soldiers.

Photo by US Army flickr

© ZOBGY, 2006

CNN– The U.S. military’s first and only study looking into ties between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda showed no connection between the two, according to a military report released by the Pentagon.

A U.S. soldier in front of a bus hit by a roadside bomb near Nasiriyah, southeast of Baghdad, Iraq, on Tuesday.

The report released by the Joint Forces Command five years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq said it found no “smoking gun” after reviewing about 600,000 Iraqi documents captured in the invasion and looking at interviews of key Iraqi leadership held by the United States, Pentagon officials said.

The assessment of the al Qaeda connection and the insistence that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were two primary elements in the Bush administration’s arguments in favor of going to war with Iraq.

The Pentagon’s report also contradicts then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who said in September 2002 that the CIA provided “bulletproof” evidence demonstrating “that there are, in fact, al Qaeda in Iraq.”

Although other groups, like the September 11 commission, have concluded that there was no link between Hussein and al Qaeda, the Pentagon was able to analyze much more information.

The documents cited in the report do reveal that Hussein supported a number of terrorists and terrorist activities inside and outside Iraq.

“The Iraqi regime was involved in regional and international terrorist operations prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq,” according to the report. Read excerpts from report (pdf)

Most of the terrorism was aimed at keeping Hussein and his Baath party in power, according to Pentagon officials.

“State sponsorship of terrorism became such a routine tool of state power that Iraq developed elaborate bureaucratic processes to monitor progress and accountability in the recruiting, training and resourcing of terrorists,” according to the report.

The report cited such examples as training for car bombs and suicide bombings in 1999 and 2000, both of which U.S. and Iraqi forces have struggled to contain since the rise of the insurgency in summer 2003.

Photo by flickr user DBKing

© COPYRIGHT CNN, 2008