On 25 Jun 2005 22:51:19 GMT, "james g. keegan jr."
<keegan@nycap.rr.com> wrote:

The Smoking Bullet in the Smoking Gun
By Jeremy Scahill
Democracy Now!

Friday 24 June 2005

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.

At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the
extent of
the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the so-
called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in response
to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was
already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the
undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.

The Sunday Times of London recently reported on new evidence
showing
that "The RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were
dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein
into giving the allies an excuse for war." The paper cites newly
released statistics from the British Defense Ministry showing that
"the Allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of
2002 as they did during the whole of 2001" and that "a full air
offensive" was under way months before the invasion had officially
begun.

The implications of this information for US lawmakers are
profound. It
was already well known in Washington and international diplomatic
circles that the real aim of the US attacks in the no-fly zones was
not to protect Shiites and Kurds. But the new disclosures prove that
while Congress debated whether to grant Bush the authority to go to
war, while Hans Blix had his UN weapons-inspection teams scrutinizing
Iraq and while international diplomats scurried to broker an
eleventh-hour peace deal, the Bush Administration was already in full
combat mode - not just building the dossier of manipulated
intelligence, as the Downing Street memo demonstrated, but acting on
it by beginning the war itself. And according to the Sunday Times
article, the Administration even hoped the attacks would push Saddam
into a response that could be used to justify a war the Administration
was struggling to sell.

On the eve of the official invasion, on March 8, 2003, Bush said
in his
national radio address: "We are doing everything we can to avoid war
in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be
disarmed by force." Bush said this after nearly a year of systematic,
aggressive bombings of Iraq, during which Iraq was already being
disarmed by force, in preparation for the invasion to come. By the
Pentagon's own admission, it carried out seventy-eight individual,
offensive air strikes against Iraq in 2002 alone.

"It reminded me of a boxing match in which one of the boxers is
told
not to move while the other is allowed to punch and only stop when he
is convinced that he has weakened his opponent to the point where he
is defeated before the fight begins," says former UN Assistant
Secretary General Hans Von Sponeck, a thirty-year career diplomat who
was the top UN official in Iraq from 1998 to 2000. During both the
Clinton and Bush administrations, Washington has consistently and
falsely claimed these attacks were mandated by UN Resolution 688,
passed after the Gulf War, which called for an end to the Iraqi
government's repression in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south. Von
Sponeck dismissed this justification as a "total misnomer." In an
interview with The Nation, Von Sponeck said that the new information
"belatedly confirms" what he has long argued: "The no- fly zones had
little to do with protecting ethnic and religious groups from Saddam
Hussein's brutality" but were in fact an "illegal establishment...for
bilateral interests of the US and the UK."

These attacks were barely covered in the press and Von Sponeck
says
that as far back as 1999, the United States and Britain pressured the
UN not to call attention to them. During his time in Iraq, Von Sponeck
began documenting each of the air strikes, showing "regular attacks on
civilian installations including food warehouses, residences, mosques,
roads and people." These reports, he said, were "welcomed" by
Secretary General Kofi Annan, but "the US and UK governments strongly
objected to this reporting." Von Sponeck says that he was pressured to
end the practice, with a senior British diplomat telling him, "All you
are doing is putting a UN stamp of approval on Iraqi propaganda." But
Von Sponeck continued documenting the damage and visited many attack
sites. In 1999 alone, he confirmed the death of 144 civilians and more
than 400 wounded by the US/UK bombings.

After September 11, there was a major change in attitude within
the
Bush Administration toward the attacks. Gone was any pretext that they
were about protecting Shiites and Kurds - this was a plan to
systematically degrade Iraq's ability to defend itself from a foreign
attack: bombing Iraq's air defenses, striking command facilities,
destroying communication and radar infrastructure. As an Associated
Press report noted in November 2002, "Those costly, hard-to-repair
facilities are essential to Iraq's air defense."

Rear Admiral David Gove, former deputy director of global
operations
for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on November 20, 2002, that US and
British pilots were "essentially flying combat missions." On October
3, 2002, the New York Times reported that US pilots were using
southern Iraq for "practice runs, mock strikes and real attacks"
against a variety of targets. But the full significance of this
dramatic change in policy toward Iraq only became clear last month,
with the release of the Downing Street memo. In it, British Defense
Secretary Geoff Hoon is reported to have said in 2002, after meeting
with US officials, that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity'
to put pressure on the regime," a reference to the stepped-up air
strikes. Now the Sunday Times of London has revealed that these spikes
"had become a full air offensive" - in other words, a war.

Michigan Democratic Representative John Conyers has called the
latest
revelations about these attacks "the smoking bullet in the smoking
gun," irrefutable proof that President Bush misled Congress before the
vote on Iraq. When Bush asked Congress to authorize the use of force
in Iraq, he also said he would use it only as a last resort, after all
other avenues had been exhausted. But the Downing Street memo reveals
that the Administration had already decided to topple Saddam by force
and was manipulating intelligence to justify the decision. That
information puts the increase in unprovoked air attacks in the year
prior to the war in an entirely new light: The Bush Administration was
not only determined to wage war on Iraq, regardless of the evidence;
it had already started that war months before it was put to a vote in
Congress.

It only takes one member of Congress to begin an impeachment
process,
and Conyers is said to be considering the option. The process would
certainly be revealing. Congress could subpoena Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, Gen. Richard Myers, Gen. Tommy Franks and all of the
military commanders and pilots involved with the no-fly zone bombings
going back into the late 1990s. What were their orders, both given and
received? In those answers might lie a case for impeachment.

But another question looms, particularly for Democrats who voted
for
the war and now say they were misled: Why weren't these unprovoked and
unauthorized attacks investigated when they were happening, when it
might have had a real impact on the Administration's drive to war?
Perhaps that's why the growing grassroots campaign to use the Downing
Street memo to impeach Bush can't get a hearing on Capitol Hill. A
real probing of this "smoking gun" would not be uncomfortable only for
Republicans. The truth is that Bush, like President Bill Clinton
before him, oversaw the longest sustained bombing campaign since
Vietnam against a sovereign country with no international or US
mandate. That gun is probably too hot for either party to touch.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062505C.shtml

I've heard it said that the Kerry vs Bush thing was really just a
"wink, wink" kind of an affair between two Skull and Bones brothers
with Bush the guaranteed winner partly because of stuff like this.
How long has the government gotten away with crap like this?