Peter L. Sroufe
Mon, 26 Apr 1999 07:39:51 -0700
-Caveat Lector-
"No blood for blow jobs"
--a placard
MOST DANGEROUS PRESIDENCY
Weapons of Mass Distraction
Christopher Hitchens
Vanity Fair | March 1999
THIS IS AN ESSAY ABOUT CANINES. It concerns, first, the President of the
United States and commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, whose
character was once memorably caught by a commentator in his native Arkansas
who called him "a hard dog to keep on the porch." It concerns, second, the
dog or dogs which did not bark in the nighttime. (In the Sherlock Holmes
tale Silver Blaze, the failure of such a beast to give tongue—you should
pardon the expression—was the giveaway that exposed his master as the
intruder.) And it concerns, third, the most famous dog of 1998: the dog that
was wagged by its own tail. Finally, it concerns the dogs of war, and the
circumstances of their unleashing.
Not once but three times last year, Bill Clinton ordered the use of cruise
missiles against remote and unpopular countries. On each occasion, the
dispatch of the missiles coincided with bad moments in the calendar of his
long and unsuccessful struggle to avoid impeachment. Just before the
Lewinsky affair became public in January 1998, there was a New York
prescreening party for Barry Levinson's movie Wag the Dog, written by Hilary
Henkin and David Mamet. By depicting a phony president starting a phony war
in order to distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing
cupcake, this film became the political and celluloid equivalent of a
Clintonian roman à clef. Thrown by Jane Rosenthal and Robert DeNiro, whose
Tribeca Productions produced the movie, the party featured Dick Morris and
an especially pleased and excited Richard Butler, who was described by an
eyewitness as "glistening." Mr. Morris is Mr. Clinton's fabled and
unscrupulous adviser on matters of public opinion. Mr. Butler is the
supervisor of United Nations efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein's despotism.
In February 1998, faced with a threatened bombing attack that never came,
Iraqi state TV prophylactically played a pirated copy of Wag the Dog in
prime time. By Christmastime 1998, Washington police officers were giving
the shove to demonstrators outside the White House who protested the
December 16-19 bombing of Iraq with chants of "Killing children's what they
teach—that's the crime they should impeach" and a "No blood for blow jobs"
placard.
Is it possible—is it even thinkable—that these factors are in any way
related? "In order that he might rob a neighbor whom he had promised to
defend," wrote Macaulay in, 1846 of Frederick the Great, "black men fought
on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great
Lakes of North America." Did, then, a dirtied blue dress from the Gap cause
widows and orphans to set up grieving howls in the passes of Afghanistan,
the outer precincts of Khartoum, and the wastes of Mesopotamia? Is there
only a Hollywood link between Clinton's carnality and Clinton's carnage? Was
our culture hit by weapons of mass distraction? Let us begin with the
best-studied case, which is Khartoum.
On August 20, 1998, the night of Monica Lewinsky's return to the grand jury
and just three days after his dismal and self-pitying non-apology had
"bombed" on prime-time TV, Clinton personally ordered missile strikes
against the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Co. on the outskirts of
Sudan's capital city. The Clinton Administration made three allegations
about the El Shifa plant:
That it did not make, as it claimed, medicines and veterinary products.
That it did use the chemical EMPTA (Oethyl methylphosphonothioic acid),
which is a "precursor," or building block, in the manufacture of VX nerve
gas.
That it was financed by Osama bin Laden, the sinister and fanatical Saudi
entrepreneur wanted in connection with lethal attacks on U.S. embassies in
Africa—or by his shadowy business empire.
These three claims evaporated with astonishing speed. It was conceded within
days, by Defense Secretary William Cohen, that the factory did make
medicines, vials of which were filmed as they lay in the rubble. It was
further conceded that there was no "direct" financial connection between the
plant and bin Laden's holdings. Later came the humbling admission that a
local CIA informer in Sudan had been fired for the fabrication of evidence.
Later still came the even more humbling refusal to produce the "soil
sample," taken from outside the factory, which the Clinton Administration
claimed contained traces Of EMPTA. In the end, the United States was placed
in the agonizing position, at the United Nations, of opposing a call for
on-site inspection that had been put forward by the Sudanese.
Bad enough, you might think. But this was only the beginning. The British
engineer who was technical manager at the time of El Shifa's construction,
Mr. Tom Carnaffin, came forward to say that it contained no space for
clandestine procedures or experiments. The German ambassador to Khartoum,
Werner Daum, sent a report to Bonn saying that he was familiar with the
factory—often used as a showcase for foreign visitors—and that it could not
be adapted for lethal purposes. R. J. P. Williams, professor emeritus at
Oxford University, who has been called the grandfather of bio-inorganic
chemistry, told me that even if the soil sample could be produced it would
prove nothing. EMPTA can be used to make nerve gas, just as fertilizer can
be used to make explosives, but it is also employed in compounds for dealing
with agricultural pests. " ‘Trace elements in adjacent soil are of no use,’
" Williams said. "We must be told where the compound was found, and in what
quantity it is known to have been produced. Either the Clinton
Administration has something to hide or for some reason is withholding the
evidence." It was a rout.
Seeking to reassure people, Clinton made a husky speech on Martha's Vineyard
eight days after the attack. He looked the audience in the eye and spoke as
follows: "I was here on this island up till 2:30 in the morning, trying to
make absolutely sure that at that chemical plant there was no night shift. I
believed I had to take the action I did, but I didn't want some person who
was a nobody to me—but who may have a family to feed and a life to live and
probably had no earthly idea what else was going on there—to die the
needlessly"
At the time, I thought it odd that such a great statesman and general could
persuade himself, and attempt to persuade others, that the more deadly the
factory, the smaller the chance of its having a night watchman. Silly me. I
had forgotten the scene in Rob Reiner's movie The American President where a
widower Fast Citizen played by Michael Douglas has a manly affair with a
woman lobbyist of his own age played by Annette Bening. While trying to
impress us with his combination of determination and compassion, this
character says, "Somewhere in Libya right now, a janitor is working the
night shift at Libyan intelligence headquarters. And he's going about doing
his job because he has no idea that in about an hour he's going to die in a
massive explosion."
In the event, only one person was killed in the rocketing of Sudan. But many
more have died, and will die, because an impoverished country has lost its
chief source of medicines and pesticides.
The rout continues. In fact, it becomes a shambles. Let us suppose that
everything the Administration alleged about El Shifa was—instead of
embarrassingly untrue—absolutely verifiable. The Sudanese regime has
diplomatic relations with Washington. Why not give it a warning or notice
of, say, one day to open the plant to inspection? A factory making deadly
gas cannot be folded like a tent and stealthily moved away. Such a demand,
made publicly, would give pause to any regime that sheltered Mr. bin Laden
or his assets. (Of course, his best-known holdings have been in Saudi
Arabia, but a surprise Clintonian cruise-missile attack on that country,
with the princes finding out the news only when they fiddle with the remote
and get CNN, seems improbable, to say the least.) It is this question which
has led me to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the edge of the Beltway—the
non-Monica Ritz-Carlton located within brunching distance of Langley,
Virginia—there to meet with Milt Bearden.
Mr. Bearden is one of the Central Intelligence Agency's most decorated
ex-officers, having retired in 1994 without any stain from assassination
plots, black-bag jobs, or the like. During his long service, he was chief of
station in Sudan, where he arranged the famous airlift of Ethiopian Jews to
Israel. He also directed the CIA effort in Afghanistan. (His excellent new
thriller, The Black Tulip, carries a 1991 photograph of him standing at the
Russian end of the Friendship Bridge, across which the Red Army had marched
in defeat.) Nobody knows clandestine Sudan and clandestine Afghanistan in
the way he does. We speak on background, but after some fine-tuning he
agrees to be quoted in exactly these words: "Having spent 30 years in the
CIA, being familiar with soil and environmental sampling across a number of
countries, I cannot imagine a single sample, collected by third-country
nationals and especially by third-country nationals whose country has a
common border, serving as a pretext for an act of war against a sovereign
state with which we have both diplomatic relations and functioning back
channels."
This bald statement contains a lot of toxic material. The local "agents" who
collected that discredited soil sample were almost certainly Egyptians, who
have a Nilotic interest in keeping Sudan off-balance because, as Bearden
pungently says, "their river runs through it." Moreover, when the United
States wanted Mr. bin Laden to leave the territory of Sudan, Washington
contacted Khartoum and requested his deportation, which followed
immediately. (He went to Afghanistan.) When the French government learned
that Carlos "the Jackal" was lurking in Sudan, they requested and got his
extradition. Business can be done with the Sudanese regime. What, then, was
the hurry last August 20? No threat, no demand, no diplomatic d'emarche . .
. just a flight of cruise missiles hitting the wrong target. Take away every
exploded hypothesis, says Sherlock Holmes—this time in The Adventures of the
Beryl Coronet—and the one you are left with, however unlikely, will be true.
Take away all the exploded claims about Sudan, and the question "What was
the hurry?" practically answers itself.
Can the implication—of lawless and capricious presidential violence—be taken
any further? Oh yes, amazingly enough, it can. On more than one occasion, I
have argued the case across Washington dinner tables with Philip Bobbitt of
the National Security Council. He's a nephew of LBJ's, and he tries to trump
me by saying that the US. does possess evidence of nerve-gas production at
El Shifa and "human and signals intelligence" about a bin Laden connection
to the Sudanese. But this evidence cannot be disclosed without endangering
"sources and methods" and the lives of agents.
Bearden has forgotten more about "sources and methods" than most people will
ever know, and snorts when I mention this objection. "We don't like to
reveal sources and methods, true enough. But we always do so if we have to,
or if we are challenged. To justify bombing [Colonel Qaddafi] in 1986,
Reagan released the cables we intercepted between Tripoli and the Libyan
Embassy in East Berlin. Same with Bush and Iraq. Do you imagine that the
current administration is sitting on evidence that would prove it right?
It's the dogs that don't bark that you have to listen to." And so my canine
theme resumes.
In a slightly noticed article in The New Yorker of October 12, 1998, (almost
the only essay in that journal in the course of the entire twelve months
which was not a strenuous, knee-padded defense of the President), Seymour
Hersh revealed that the four service chiefs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had
been deliberately kept in the dark about the Sudan and Afghanistan bombings
because if they had been consulted they would have argued against them. He
further disclosed that Louis Freeh, head of the FBI , was kept out of the
loop. Mr. Freeh, who has clashed with Clinton and with Attorney General
Janet Reno over the issue of a special prosecutor for campaign finance, was
not delighted to hear of the raids. For one thing, he and many of his agents
were already in the field in east Africa, somewhat exposed as to their own
security, and were in the course of securing important arrests. They would
have greatly appreciated what they did not in fact get: adequate warning of
a strike that would enrage many neighboring societies and governments. It's
now possible to extend the list of senior intelligence personnel who
disapproved both of the bombings and of their timing. At the CIA, I gather,
both Jack Downing, the deputy director for operations and the chief for the
Africa Division, told colleagues in private that they were opposed. It is
customarily very hard to get intelligence professionals to murmur dissent
about an operation that involves American credibility. However, it is also
quite rare for a cruise-missile strike to occur on an apparent whim, against
an essentially powerless country, at a time when presidential credibility is
a foremost thought in people's minds.
The Afghanistan attack, which took place on the same night as the Sudan
fiasco, is more easily disposed of. In that instance, the Clinton
Administration announced that Osama bin Laden and his viciously bearded
associates were all meeting in one spot, and that there was only one
"window" through which to hit them. This claim is unfalsifiable to the same
extent that it is unprovable. Grant that, on the run after the embassy
bombings, bin Laden and his gang decided it would be smart to forgather in
one place, on territory extremely well known to American intelligence.
All that requires explaining is how a shower of cruise missiles did not
manage to hit even one of the suspects. The only casualties occurred among
regular Pakistani intelligence officers, who were using the "training camps"
to equip guerrillas for Kashmir. As a result, indignant Pakistani
authorities released two just-arrested suspects in the American Embassy
bombings—one Saudi and one Sudanese. (The Saudi citizen, some American
sources say, was a crucial figure in the planning for those outrages in
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.) Not great, in other words. One might add that a
stray cruise missile didn't even hit Afghanistan but fell on Pakistani
territory, thus handing the Pakistani military a free sample just months
after it had defied Clinton’s feeble appeals to refrain from joining the
"nuclear club." All in all, a fine day's work. Pressed to come up with
something to show for this expensive farce, the Clintonoids spoke of damage
to bin Laden's "infrastructure." Again, to quote Milt Bearden, who knows
Afghanistan by moonlight: "What 'infrastructure'? They knocked over a
lean-to? If the Administration had anything—anything at all—the
high-resolution satellite images would have been released by now." Another
non-barking canine, for a president half in and half out of the doghouse.
Speaking of the doghouse, last fall the President's lawyer Bob Bennett gave
a speech to the National Press Club in Washington. On a single day—so he
informed an open-mouthed audience—he had had four substantial conversations
with Clinton about the Paula Jones case and, feeling this excessive, "I had
to cut it short and the President said, 'Yeah, I've got to get back to
Saddam Hussein,' and I said, 'My God, this is lunacy that I'm taking his
time on this stuff.’ " Well, I hope Mr. Bennett didn't charge for that day,
or for the other time-wasting day when he naively introduced Lewinsky's
false affidavit on Clinton’s behalf. But, if he hoped to persuade his
audience that Clinton should be left alone to conduct a well-meditated Iraq
policy, his words achieved the opposite effect. Policy toward Baghdad has
been without pulse or direction or principle ever since Mr. Clinton took
office. As one who spent some horrible days in Halabja, the Kurdish city
that was ethnically cleansed by Saddam's chemical bombs, I have followed
Washington’s recent maneuvers with great attention. The only moment when
this president showed a glimmer of interest in the matter was when his own
interests were involved as well.
And thus we come to the embarrassing moment last December when Clinton
played field marshal for four days, and destroyed the UN inspection program
in order to save it. By November 14, 1998, Saddam. Hussein had exhausted
everybody's patience by his limitless arrogance over inspections of weapon
sites, and by his capricious treatment of the United Nations Special
Commission (UNSCOM) inspectorate. In a rare show of Security Council
solidarity, Russia, China, and France withdrew criticism of a punitive
strike. The Republican leadership in both houses of Congress, which had
criticized the Clinton Administration for inaction, was ready to rock 'n'
roll with Iraq. The case had been made, and the warplanes were already in
the air when the President called them back. No commander in chief has ever
done this before. Various explanations were offered as to why Clinton, and
his close political crony Sandy Berger, had made such a wan decision. It was
clearly understood that the swing vote had been the President's, and that
Madeleine Albright and William Cohen had argued the other way.
But in mid-November the President was still flushed with the slight gain
made by his party in the midterm elections. Impeachment seemed a world away,
with Republican "moderates" becoming the favorite of headline writers and
op-ed performers alike. This theme persisted in the news and in the polls
until after the pre-Hanukkah weekend of December 12-13, when, having been
rebuffed by Benjamin Netanyahu at a post-Wye visit in Israel, Clinton had to
fly home empty-handed. This must have been galling for him, since he had
only imposed himself on the original Wye agreement, just before the November
elections, as a high-profile/high-risk electoral ploy. (He had carried with
him to Tel Aviv, on Air Force One, Rick Lazio and Jon Fox, two Republican
congressmen widely hailed as fence-sitters regarding impeachment. So it
can't easily be said that he wasn't thinking about the domestic implications
of foreign policy.) But by Tuesday, December 15, after Clinton's last-ditch
non-apology apology had "bombed" like all its predecessors, every headline
had every waverer deciding for impeachment after all. On Wednesday
afternoon, the President announced that Saddam Hussein was, shockingly
enough, not complying with the UN inspectorate. And the cruise missiles took
wing again. Within hours the House Republicans had met and, "furious and
fractured," according to the New York Times, had announced the postponement
of the impeachment debate, due to begin Thursday morning.
This was not quite like the preceding dramas. For one thing, it could and
probably would have happened—unlike Sudan and Afghanistan—at any time. For
another thing, the President was careful to say that he had the support of
his whole "national-security team," which he wouldn't have been able to say
of his cop-out decision in November. Presidents don't normally list the
number of their own employees and appointees who agree with them about
national-security questions, but then, most presidents don't feel they have
to. (Though most presidents have avoided making their Cabinet members back
them in public on falsehoods about "private" and "inappropriate" conduct.)
Having gone on slightly too long about the endorsements he'd won from his
own much-bamboozled team, Clinton was faced with only a few remaining
questions. These included:
Why, since Saddam Hussein has been in constant noncompliance, must bombing
start tonight?
Why has there been no open consultation with either Congress or the United
Nations?
When did you find out about the Richard Butler report on Saddam Hussein's
violations?
The last question, apparently a simple one, was the most difficult to
answer. It emerged that Clinton had known the contents of the Butler report
at least two days before it was supposed to be handed to the UN
secretary-general, Kofi Annan. It was Kofi Annan's job, furthermore, to
present it to the world body for action. Members of the National Security
Council in Washington, however, were leaking the report (which "discovered"
Saddam Hussein's violations) to friends of mine in Washington by Tuesday,
December 15. This timeline simply means that Clinton knew well in advance
that he was going to be handed a free pretext in case of need. Mr. Butler
might care to explain why he hurriedly withdrew his inspectors without
Security Council permission—leaving some 400 United Nations humanitarian aid
workers to face the music—at least a day before the bombs began to drop.
Once again the question: What was the rush? It must have meant a lot to
Clinton to begin the strikes when he did, because he forfeited the support
of the UN, of Russia, of China, of France, and of much of the congressional
leadership—all of which he had enjoyed in varying degrees in November. (The
Russians, whose volatile stock of "weapons of mass destruction" is far more
of a menace than Iraq's, actually withdrew their ambassador from Washington
for the first time in history, and threatened again to freeze talks on
strategic-arms limitation.)
To the "rush" question, Clinton at first answered that the weekend of
December 19-20 marked the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and one
would not want to be bombing an Islamic people while they were beginning
their devotions. However, the postponed impeachment debate continued well
into Saturday, December 19, and so did the bombardment, which concluded a
few hours after the impeachment vote itself. Muslim susceptibilities were
therefore even more outraged, even in normally friendly countries such as
Kuwait, by the suspicious coincidence of timing. During the debate, the
House Democratic leadership took the position, openly encouraged by the
White House, that a president should not be embarrassed at home while
American troops were "in harm’s way" abroad. Again, it is made clear by
Clinton’s own conduct and arguments that for him foreign policy and domestic
policy do not exist in parallel universes, but are one and the same.
And, again, I found myself talking to someone who is normally more hawkish
than I am. Scott Ritter, who served with UNSCOM from 1991 until August of
1998 and who was the chief of its Concealment Investigations Unit, had been
warning for months that Saddam Hussein was evading compliance inspections.
This warning entailed a further accusation, which was that UNSCOM in
general, and Richard Butler in particular, were too much under the
day-to-day control of the Clinton Administration. (An Australian career
diplomat who, according to some of his colleagues, was relinquished with
relief by his masters Down Under, Butler owes his job to Madeleine Albright
in the first place.) Thus, when the United States did not want a
confrontation with Iraq, over the summer and into the fall, Butler and the
leadership acted like pussycats and caused Ritter to resign over their lack
of seriousness. But then, when a confrontation was urgently desired in
December, the slightest pretext would suffice. And that, Ritter says, is the
bitterest irony of all. The December strikes had no real military value,
because the provocation was too obviously staged.
"They sent inspectors to the Baath Party HQ in Baghdad in the week before
the raids," Ritter told me. "UNSCOM then leaves in a huff, claiming to have
been denied access. There was nothing inside that facility anyway. The stuff
was moved before they got there. The United States knew there was nothing in
that site. And then a few days later, there are reports that cruise missiles
hit the Baath Party HQ! It's completely useless. Butler knew that I'd resign
if the U.S. continued to jerk UNSCOM around, and he even came to my leaving
party and bought me a drink. But now he's utterly lost his objectivity and
impartiality, and UNSCOM inspections have been destroyed in the process, and
one day he'll be hung out to dry. Ask your colleagues in Washington when
they got his report."
>From the Washington Post account by Barton Gellman, on Wednesday, December
16, written the day before the bombing began and on the day that Kofi Annan
saw the Butler report for the first time:
Butler's conclusions were welcome in Washington, which helped orchestrate
the terms of the Australian diplomat's report. Sources in New York and
Washington said Clinton Administration officials played a direct role in
shaping Butler's text during multiple conversations with him Monday at
secure facilities in the U.S. mission to the United Nations.
"Of course," Ritter told me almost conversationally, "though this is Wag the
Dog, it isn't t quite like Sudan and Afghanistan in August, which were Wag
the Dog pure and simple."
Well, indeed, nothing is exactly like Wag the Dog. In the movie, the whole
war is invented and run out of a studio, and nobody actually dies, whereas
in Sudan and Afghanistan and Iraq, real corpses were lying about and real
blood spilled. You might argue, as Clinton's defenders have argued in my
hearing, that if there was such a "conspiracy" it didn't work. To this there
are three replies. First, no Clinton apologist can dare, after the victim
cult sponsored by both the President and the First Lady, to ridicule the
idea of "conspiracy," vast or otherwise. Second, the bombings helped to
raise Clinton's poll numbers and to keep them high, and who will say that
this is not a permanent White House concern? Third, the subject was
temporarily changed from Clinton's thing to Clinton’s face, and doubtless
that came as some species of relief. But now we understand what in November
was a mystery A much less questionable air strike was canceled because, at
that time, Clinton needed to keep an "option" in his breast pocket.
On January 6, two weeks after I spoke to Scott Ritter, UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan's office angrily announced that, under Richard Butler's
leadership, UNSCOM had in effect become a wholly owned subsidiary of the
Clinton Administration. The specific disclosure concerned the organization's
spying activities, which had not been revealed to the UN. But Ritter's
essential point about UNSCOM's and Butler's subservient client role was also
underscored.
The staged bombing of Iraq in December was in reality the mother of all
pinpricks. It was even explained that nerve-gas sites had not been hit, lest
the gas be released.
(Odd that this didn't apply in the case of the El Shifa plant, which is
located in a suburb of Khartoum.) The Saddam Hussein regime survived with
contemptuous ease, while its civilian hostages suffered yet again. During
the prematurely triumphant official briefings from Washington, a new
bureaucratic euphemism made its appearance. We were incessantly told that
Iraq’s capacities were being "degraded." This is not much of a target to set
oneself, and it also leads to facile claims of success, since every bomb
that falls has by definition a "degrading" effect on the system or the
society. By acting and speaking as he did, not just in August but also in
December, Clinton opened himself, and the United States, to a charge of
which a serious country cannot afford even to be suspected. The tin pots and
yahoos of Khartoum and Kabul and Baghdad are micro-megalomaniacs who think
of their banana republics as potential superpowers. It took this president
to "degrade" a superpower into a potential banana republic.
Copyright © 1999 CondéNet Inc. All rights reserved.
==============================
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God."
--- Thomas Jefferson
Bard
Visit me at:
The Center for Exposing Corruption in the Federal Government
http://www.xld.com/public/center/center.htm
Federal Government defined:
....a benefit/subsidy protection racket!
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om