THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

Bush 'plotted to lure Saddam into war with fake UN plane'

By Andy McSmith
Published: 03 February 2006

George Bush considered provoking a war with Saddam Hussein's regime by flying a United States spyplane over Iraq bearing UN colours, enticing the Iraqis to take a shot at it, according to a leaked memo 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 privately they were 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 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.

Mr Blair replied that he was "solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam." But he also insisted that " a second Security Council resolution would provide an insurance policy against the unexpected, and international cover, including with the Arabs" .

The memo appears to refute claims made in memoirs published by the former UK ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, who has accused Mr Blair of missing an opportunity to win the US over to a strategy based on a second UN resolution. It now appears Mr Bush's mind was already made up.

There was also a discussion of what might happen in Iraq after Saddam had been overthrown. President Bush said that he "thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups". Mr Blair did not respond. Details of the meeting are revealed in a book, Lawless World, published today by Philippe Sands, a professor of law at University College London.

"I think no one would be surprised at the idea that the use of spy planes to review what is going on would be considered," Mr Sands told Channel 4 News last night. "What is surprising is the idea that they would be painted in the colours of the United Nations to provoke an attack which could then be used to justify material breach.

"Now that plainly looks as if it is deception, and it raises... questions of legality, both in terms of domestic law and international law."

Other participants in the meeting were Mr Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, her deputy, Dan Fried, the chief of staff, Andrew Card, Mr Blair's then security adviser, Sir David Manning, his foreign policy aide, Matthew Rycroft, and his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell.
...

D, the word from Salaam Pax is most interesting. He has his ear to the ground.

That's a nice story, but not accurate to reality.
My description is "accurate to reality".

Bush and Blair decided to attack months before the UN presentation by Powell. Hell, Bush's handlers decided to attack Iraq before 9/11 even happened.
No they didn't.

Your story makes it seem as if they weren't decided until the last minute. That's bullsh*t. And your lists of reasons why we invaded Iraq focuses on #10 and #11, because the other more important reasons were in fact lies. So don't make it out as if Bush came to some sort of reasoned decision after months of agonizing stuggle.
Bush finally decided to order the invasion of Iraq in his January 31, 2003 meeting with Blair. The other reasons whether false or true were less not more important. The WMD reasons were false but were not lies.

Cycloptichorn

REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Saddam's Documents
January 13, 2006

It is almost an article of religious faith among opponents of the Iraq War that Iraq became a terrorist destination only after the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein. But what if that's false, and documents from Saddam's own regime show that his government trained thousands of Islamic terrorists at camps inside Iraq before the war?

Sounds like news to us, and that's exactly what is reported this week by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard magazine. Yet the rest of the press has ignored the story, and for that matter the Bush Administration has also been dumb. The explanation for the latter may be that Mr. Hayes also scores the Administration for failing to do more to translate and analyze the trove of documents it's collected from the Saddam era.

Mr. Hayes reports that, from 1999 through 2002, "elite Iraqi military units" trained roughly 8,000 terrorists at three different camps—in Samarra and Ramadi in the Sunni Triangle, as well as at Salman Pak, where American forces in 2003 found the fuselage of an aircraft that might have been used for training. Many of the trainees were drawn from North African terror groups with close ties to al Qaeda, including Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Mr. Hayes writes that he had no fewer than 11 corroborating sources, and yesterday he told us he'd added several more since publication.

All of this is of more than historical interest, since Americans are still dying in Iraq at the hands of an enemy it behooves us to understand. If Saddam did train terrorists in Iraq before the war, then many of them must still be fighting there and the current "insurgency" can hardly be called a popular uprising rooted in Sunni nationalism. Instead, it is a revanchist operation led by Saddam's apparat and those they trained to use terror to achieve their political goals.

This means in turn that much of the Sunni population might be willing to participate in Free Iraq's politics but is intimidated from doing so by these Saddamists. The recent spurt of suicide bombings, aimed at Iraqi civilians and police trainees, looks like an attempt to revive such intimidation after the successful election. These Saddamists can't be coaxed into surrender by political blandishments because their goal isn't to share power but is to dominate Iraq once again. Or if they do play in the political process, it will only be in the Sinn Fein sense of doing so as cover for their real terror strategy.

In any case, it is passing strange that the Bush Administration has been so uninterested in translating, and assessing, the information in the two million documents, audio and videotapes and computer hard drives it has collected in Iraq. Mr. Hayes reports that only 50,000 of these "exploitable items" have been examined so far, and those by a skeleton crew with few resources. Does anyone think, had there been a Nazi insurgency after Hitler fell, that the U.S. wouldn't have scoured everything found in Berlin? Why the dereliction this time?

A benign explanation is that the first Bush priority was searching Saddam's files for WMD, not terror ties. But the WMD work has been done since the Duelfer report was substantially wrapped up well over a year ago. The current threat to U.S. soldiers in Iraq is from terror attacks, not WMD. Anything the U.S. can discover about whether and how Saddam and his coterie planned a guerrilla war before the invasion could be invaluable in defeating this enemy.

In his new memoir about his year in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer reports that in July of 2003 he was told about a captured document from Saddam's intelligence service (dated January 2003) outlining a "strategy of organized resistance" if the regime fell. About the same time, pamphlets began circulating in Baghdad describing the "Party of Return," with vows to kill Iraqis who worked with the Coalition. We also know that documents discovered with Saddam in his rabbit hole in late 2003 included a claim that the insurgents would know they had won when a U.S. Presidential candidate called for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. These are signs of a disciplined political party, not some broad Algerian-like nationalism.

A less benign explanation for the Bush Administration's lethargy is that its officials don't want to challenge the prewar CIA orthodoxy that the "secular" Saddam would never cavort with "religious" al Qaeda. They've seen what happened to others—"Scooter" Libby, Douglas Feith, John Bolton—who dared to question CIA analyses. Mr. Hayes reports that the Pentagon intelligence chief, Stephen Cambone, has been a particular obstacle to energetic document inspection.

But if we've learned nothing else about U.S. intelligence in the last four years, it is that its "consensus" views are often wrong. The 9/11 Commission has confirmed extensive communication between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda over the years, including sanctuary for the current insurgent leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. We have also learned that in the years leading up to his ouster Saddam had implemented a "faith campaign" to use fundamentalist Islam as a tool of internal control. Especially if U.S. troops are going to remain to help the new Iraq government defeat the terrorists, we should want to know everything we can about them.

And the American people should know too. For three years now, opponents of the war in Congress and the bureaucracy have cherry-picked intelligence details and leaked them to influence public opinion. The Bush Administration until recently has been remarkably reluctant to fight back. Telling truths about Saddam that are revealed by his own documents is part of that fight.

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May 27, 1999
Lawmakers Raise Questions About International Spy Network
By NIALL McKAY
An international surveillance network established by the National Security Agency and British intelligence services has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, as lawmakers in the United States question whether the network, known as Echelon, could be used to monitor American citizens.

Last week, the House Committee on Intelligence requested that the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency provide a detailed report to Congress explaining what legal standards they use to monitor the conversations, transmissions and activities of American citizens.

The request is part of an amendment to the annual intelligence budget bill, the Intelligence Reauthorization Act. It was proposed by Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican and was supported by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss, a Florida Republican. The amendment was passed by the House on May 13 and will now go before the Senate.

Barr, a former CIA analyst, is part of a growing contingent in the United States, Europe and Australia alarmed by the existence of Echelon, a computer system that monitors millions of e-mail, fax, telex and phone messages sent over satellite-based communications systems as well as terrestrial-based data communications. The system was established under what is known as the "UKUSA Agreement" after World War II and includes the security agencies of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Although Echelon was originally set up as an international spy network, lawmakers are concerned that it could be used to eavesdrop on American citizens.

"I am concerned there are not sufficient legal mechanisms in place to protect our private information from unauthorized government eavesdropping through such mechanisms as Project Echelon," Barr said in an interview on Tuesday.

The finished report will outline the legal bases and other criteria used by United States intelligence agencies when assessing potential wiretap targets. It will be submitted to the House and made available to the public.

"If the agencies feel unable to provide a full account to the public, then a second classified report will be provided to the House Committee on Intelligence," Barr said. "This is to stop the agencies hiding behind a cloak of secrecy."

Judith Emmel, chief of public affairs for the NSA, declined to comment about the UKUSA Agreement but said the agency was committed to responding to all information requests covered by Barr's amendment. "The NSA's Office of General Counsel works hard to ensure that all Agency activities are conducted in accordance with the highest constitutional, legal and ethical standards," she said.

Until last Sunday, no government or intelligence agency from the member states had openly admitted to the existence of the UKUSA Agreement or Echelon. However, on a television program broadcast on Sunday in Australia, the director of Australia's Defence Signals Directorate acknowledged the existence of the agreement. The official, Martin Brady, declined to be interviewed for the "Sunday Program," but provided a statement for its special on Echelon. "DSD does cooperate with counterpart signals intelligence organizations overseas under the UKUSA relationship," the statement said.


Related Articles
European Parliament Debates Wiretap Proposal
(May 7, 1999)

Dutch Law Goes Beyond Enabling Wiretapping to Make It a Requirement
(April 14, 1998)

European Study Paints a Chilling Portrait of Technology's Uses
(February 24, 1998)

Meanwhile, European Parliament officials have also expressed concern about the use of Echelon to gather economic intelligence for participating nations. Last October, the spying system came to the attention of the Parliament during a debate on Europe's intelligence relationship with the United States. At that time, the Parliament decided it needed more information about Echelon and asked its Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel to commission a report.

The report, entitled "Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information", was published on May 10 and provides a detailed account of Echelon and other intelligence monitoring systems.

According to the report, Echelon is just one of the many code names for the monitoring system, which consists of satellite interception stations in participating countries. The stations collectively monitor millions of voice and data messages each day. These messages are then scanned and checked against certain key criteria held in a computer system called the "Dictionary." In the case of voice communications, the criteria could include a suspected criminal's telephone number; with respect to data communications, the messages might be scanned for certain keywords, like "bomb" or "drugs." The report also alleges that Echelon is capable of monitoring terrestrial Internet traffic through interception nodes placed on deep-sea communications cables.

While few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists, many are concerned that the system could be abused to collect economic and political information.

"The recent revelations about China's spying activities in the U.S. demonstrates that there is a clear need for electronic monitoring capabilities," said Patrick Poole, a lecturer in government and economics at Bannock Burn College in Franklin, Tenn., who compiled a report on Echelon for the Free Congress Foundation. "But those capabilities can be abused for political or economic purposes so we need to ensure that there is some sort of legislative control over these systems."

On the "Sunday Program" special on Echelon, Mike Frost, a former employee of Canada's Communications Security Establishment, said that Britain's intelligence agency requested that the CSE monitor the communications of British government officials in the late 1980s. Under British law, the intelligence agency is prohibited from monitoring its own government. Frost also said that since the cold war is over, the "the focus now is towards economic intelligence."

Still, Echelon has been shrouded in such secrecy that its very existence has been difficult to prove. Barr's amendment aims to change that.

"If this report reveals that information about American citizens is being collected without legal authorization, the intelligence community will have some serious explaining to do," Barr said.

Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.

* National Security Agency

* Central Intelligence Agency

* Representative Bob Barr

* Sunday Program

* DSD memo, page 1

* European Parliament

* European Union Report

* Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel

* Patrick Poole's report





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MEASURABLE PROGRESS TOWARD ACHIEVING GOAL (A):
Stop the terrorists and Saddamists from threatening Iraq's democracy.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=3889&R=C495A28
Saddam Hussein’s regime murdered more than 576,000 Iraq civilian men, women, and children over the 24 years or 288 months from 1979, when Saddam became president of the Iraq government, to 2003, when Saddam was removed by the Coalition.

On average, Saddam’s regime murdered more than 2,000 Iraq civilian men, women, and children per month over the 288 months from 1979 to 2003.

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/
Saddamists and al-Qaeda murdered, and Coalition killed 31,928 Iraq civilian men, women, and children over the 37 months from 1/1/2003 to 1/31/2006.

Saddamists and al-Qaeda murdered, and Coalition killed 609 Iraq civilian men, women, and children over the 1 month from 1/1/2006 to 1/31/2006.

Thus, Saddamists and al-Qaeda murdered, and Coalition killed 31,319 Iraq civilian men, women, and children over the 36 months from 1/1/2003 to 12/31/2005.

On average Saddamists and al-Qaeda murdered, and Coalition killed 863 Iraq civilian men, women, and children per month over the 37 months from 1/1/2003 to 1/31/2006.

On average, Saddamists and al-Qaeda murdered, and Coalition killed 870 Iraq civilian men, women, and children per month over the 36 months from 1/1/2003 to 12/31/2005.

Consequently, over this past January, the monthly average changed from 870 to 863, a reduction of 7, and that is surely some measurable progress.

NSA is monitoring overseas calls between al-Qaeda persons.

NSA is monitoring calls between al-Qaeda persons located overseas and persons located within the USA.

NSA is monitoring calls of persons located within the USA who have been discovered to have called al-Qaeda persons, or who have been discovered to have been called by al-Qaeda persons.

NSA is not monitoring calls between persons located in the USA who have not called al-Qaeda persons (or any other of our self-declared enemies) or who have not been called by al-Qaeda persons (or any of our other self-declared enemies).

Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects
NSA's Hunt for Terrorists Scrutinizes Thousands of Americans, but Most Are Later Cleared

By Barton Gellman, Dafna Linzer and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 5, 2006; Page A01

Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.

Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as "terrorist surveillance" and summed it up by declaring that "if you're talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why." But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.

The Bush administration refuses to say -- in public or in closed session of Congress -- how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.

The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.

Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, "wash out" most of the leads within days or weeks.

The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush's circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged "reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.

Introduction

The culmination of the Cold War conflict brought home hard realities for many military and intelligence agencies who were dependent upon the confrontation for massive budgets and little civilian oversight. World War II Allied political and military alliances had quickly become intelligence alliances in the shadow of the Iron Curtain that descended upon Eastern Europe after the war.

But for some intelligence agencies the end of the Cold War just meant a shift in mission and focus, not a loss of manpower or financial resources. One such US governmental organization is the National Security Agency (NSA). Despite the disintegration of Communism in the former Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe, the secretive NSA continues to grow at an exponential rate in terms of budget, manpower and spying abilities. Other countries have noticed the rapid growth of NSA resources and facilities around the world, and have decried the extensive spying upon their citizens by the US.

A preliminary report released by the European Parliament in January 1998 detailed research conducted by independent researchers that uncovered a massive US spy technology network that routinely monitors telephone, fax and email information on citizens all over the world, but particularly in the European Union (EU) and Japan. Titled "An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control,"<1> this report, issued by the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA) committee of the European Parliament, caused a tremendous stir in the establishment press in Europe. At least one major US media outlet, The New York Times,<2> covered the issuance of the report as well.

The STOA report also exposed a festering sore spot between the US and our EU allies. The widespread surveillance of citizens in EU countries by the NSA has been known and discussed by European journalists since 1981. The name of the system in question is ECHELON, and it is one of the most secretive spy systems in existence.

ECHELON is actually a vast network of electronic spy stations located around the world and maintained by five countries: the US, England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These countries, bound together in a still-secret agreement called UKUSA, spy on each other's citizens by intercepting and gathering electronic signals of almost every telephone call, fax transmission and email message transmitted around the world daily. These signals are fed through the massive supercomputers of the NSA to look for certain keywords called the ECHELON "dictionaries."

Most of the details of this mammoth spy system and the UKUSA agreement that supports it remain a mystery. What is known of ECHELON is the result of the efforts of journalists and researchers around the world who have labored for decades to uncover the operations of our government's most secret systems. The 1996 publication of New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager's book, Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network,<3> provided the most detailed look at the system and inflamed interest in ECHELON as well as the debate regarding its propriety.

This paper examines the expanse of the ECHELON system along with the intelligence agreements and exchanges that support it. The operation of ECHELON serves the NSA's goal of spying on the citizens of other countries while also allowing them to circumvent the prohibition on spying on US citizens.
ECHELON is not only a gross violation of our Constitution, but it violates the good will of our European allies and threatens the privacy of innocent civilians around the world. The existence and expansion of ECHELON is a foreboding omen regarding the future of our Constitutional liberties. If a government agency can willingly violate the most basic components of the Bill of Rights without so much as Congressional oversight and approval, we have reverted from a republican form of government to tyranny.

The Warning

While the UKUSA relationship is a product of Cold War political and military tensions, ECHELON is purely a product of the 20th Century - the century of statism. The modern drive toward the assumption of state power has turned legitimate national security agencies and apparati into pawns in a manipulative game where the stakes are no less than the survival of the Constitution. The systems developed prior to ECHELON were designed to confront the expansionist goals of the Soviet Empire - something the West was forced out of necessity to do. But as Glyn Ford, European Parliament representative for Manchester, England, and the driving force behind the European investigation of ECHELON, has pointed out: "The difficulty is that the technology has now become so elaborate that what was originally a small client list has become the whole world."<64>

What began as a noble alliance to contain and defeat the forces of communism has turned into a carte blanche to disregard the rights and liberties of the American people and the population of the free world. As has been demonstrated time and again, the NSA has been persistent in subverting not just the intent of the law in regards to the prohibition of domestic spying, but the letter as well. The laws that were created to constrain the intelligence agencies from infringing on our liberties are frequently flaunted, re-interpreted and revised according to the bidding and wishes of political spymasters in Washington D.C. Old habits die hard, it seems.

As stated above, there is a need for such sophisticated surveillance technology. Unfortunately, the world is filled with criminals, drug lords, terrorists and dictators that threaten the peace and security of many nations. The thought that ECHELON can be used to eliminate or control these international thugs is heartening. But defenders of ECHELON argue that the rare intelligence victories over these forces of darkness and death give wholesale justification to indiscriminate surveillance of the entire world and every member of it. But more complicated issues than that remain.

The shameless and illegal targeting of political opponents, business competitors, dissidents and even Christian ministries stands as a testament that if America is to remain free, we must bind these intelligence systems and those that operate them with the heavy chains of transparency and accountability to our elected officials. But the fact that the ECHELON apparatus can be quickly turned around on those same officials in order to maintain some advantage for the intelligence agencies indicates that these agencies are not presently under the control of our elected representatives.

That Congress is not aware of or able to curtail these abuses of power is a frightening harbinger of what may come here in the United States. The European Parliament has begun the debate over what ECHELON is, how it is being used and how free countries should use such a system. Congress should join that same debate with the understanding that consequences of ignoring or failing to address these issues could foster the demise of our republican form of government. Such is the threat, as Senator Frank Church warned the American people over twenty years ago.

At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…

I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.<6

ican711nm wrote:

NSA is monitoring overseas calls between al-Qaeda persons.

NSA is monitoring calls between al-Qaeda persons located overseas and persons located within the USA.

NSA is monitoring calls of persons located within the USA who have been discovered to have called al-Qaeda persons, or who have been discovered to have been called by al-Qaeda persons.

NSA is not monitoring calls between persons located in the USA who have not called al-Qaeda persons (or any other of our self-declared enemies) or who have not been called by al-Qaeda persons (or any of our other self-declared enemies).

You are 100% wrong. The NSA is monitoring many people who did nothing wrong whatsoever.

...

You are simply incorrect. Further investigations will bear this out.

Cycloptichorn

Ican, try reading someones post before you declare it incorrect. You obviosly did no Google search . I provided two links..... where are yours?
...