Subject: Clinton finds his voice, CIA's Iraqi missing, media control, aid shipment blocked, history lessons


Clinton blasts US foreign policy
From correspondents in New York

Agence France-Presse
16Apr03

FORMER US president Bill Clinton today blasted US foreign policy adopted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, arguing the United States cannot kill, jail or occupy all of its adversaries.

"Our paradigm now seems to be: something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us," said Clinton, who spoke at a seminar of governance organised by Conference Board.

"And if they don't, they can go straight to hell."

The Democratic former president, who preceded George W Bush at the White House, said sooner or later the United States had to find a way to cooperate with the world at large.

"We can't run," Clinton pointed out. "If you got an interdependent world, and you cannot kill, jail or occupy all your adversaries, sooner or later you have to make a deal."

He said he believed Washington overreacted to German and French opposition to US plans for military action against Iraq and suggested that the current administration had trouble juggling foreign and domestic issues.

"Since September 11, it looks like we can't hold two guns at the same time," Clinton said. "If you fight terrorism, you can't make America a better place to be."

Clinton said if he were at the White House right now he would scrap a $US726 billion ($1.2 trillion) tax cut proposal made by the president in January to stimulate the flagging economy.

Congress has since cut the proposal to $US550 billion ($908.04 billion) in the case of the House of Representatives and $US350 billion ($577.84 billion) under a Senate version of the plan.


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The San Francisco Chronicle  is running a long story on the disappearance three weeks ago from Denmark of the CIA's prime candidate to lead Iraq, former army Chief of Staff Nizar Khazraji, who was being held under house arrest after being charged with war crimes for his part in military attacks in the 1980s that resulted in the deaths of some 180,000 Iraqi Kurds.  The Pentagon is backing Chalabi who faces only charges of bank fraud (in Jordan) but he seems to have gotten his man in as interim governor of Baghdad. 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/04/16/MN96124.DTL

However two days ago, an Egyptian paper Al Bawaba ran this item without any details of time or place, so it may not be reliable.  If true, is this a case of interagency rivalry run amuk, or did some of Khazraji's former comrades take revenge for his betrayal?

Nizar Khazraji, a prominent Iraqi general who defected to the West, was assassinated Monday on his way to attend a U.S.-called meeting of opposition groups in the southern city of Nassiriya.

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US bans media from protests

The Age
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Baghdad

US forces yesterday tried to stop the media from covering a third day of anti-American protests by Iraqis outside a hotel housing a US operations base, according to a reporter at the scene.

Up to 300 Iraqis gathered outside the Palestine Hotel to express rage at what they said was the US failure to restore order after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

For the first time, visibly angered US military officials sought to distance the media from the protest, moving reporters and cameras about 30 metres from the barbed-wired entrance to the hotel.

"We want you to pull back to the back of the hotel because they (the Iraqis) are only performing because the media are here," said a marines colonel who would not give his first name or title.

The crowd later moved to the nearby square where a statue of Saddam was toppled last Wednesday, signaling the end of the regime. The Iraqis chanted: "No, no, USA."

Tension has been rising in front of the hotel, where Iraqis protest against a lack of police protection, water, electricity and other basic services.

As the protest grew more vocal, a marines corporal held an impromptu briefing for a few reporters about progress in bringing Iraq back to normal.

Corporal John Hoellwarth said the US forces planned to boost joint police patrols, bring more hospitals back into service and restore power to parts of Baghdad within 72 hours

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US blocks charity aid flight

Matt Weaver
Thursday April 17, 2003

An aid agency plane carrying vital medical supplies to northern Iraq has been refused permission to land by coalition forces, it emerged today.

The charity Save the Children has been trying to airlift supplies into Irbil in northern Iraq for more than a week.

It claims that the United States army's decision to block the landing amounts to a breach of the Geneva convention that is costing children's lives.

Its plane is carrying enough medical supplies and feeding kits to help 40,000 people.

The United Nations has already declared that Irbil is "safe and secure" but US officials are still telling the charity that no aid flights will be allowed until the area is safe.

Rob MacGillivray, the charity's emergency programme manager, said: "The lack of cooperation from the US is a breach of the Geneva convention and its protocols, but more importantly the time being wasted is costing children their lives."

He pointed out that under the convention occupying forces are obliged to protect civilians and open up air space for humanitarian relief work.

Mr MacGillivray added: "The doctors we are trying to help in Mosul have been struggling against odds for weeks to continue saving lives, but now the help we have promised them is being endlessly delayed."

The charity first sought to land the plane in Irbil on April 9. A formal request for landing was then submitted on April 12. At the time it was told that the plane would be allowed in within four days. But it is still being blocked

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,938879,00.html



FEATURE-Former U.S. official says CIA aided Iraqi Baathists

By David Morgan

PHILADELPHIA, (Reuters) - If the United States succeeds in shepherding the creation of a postwar Iraqi government, it won't be the first time that Washington has played a primary role in changing the country's rulers.

At least not according to Roger Morris, who says the CIA had a hand in two coups in Iraq during the darkest days of the Cold War, including a 1968 putsch that set Saddam Hussein firmly on the path to power.

"This takes you down a longer, darker road in terms of American culpability," said Morris, a former State Department foreign service officer who was on the National Security Council staff during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

In 1963, two years after the ill-fated U.S. attempt at overthrow in Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs, Morris says the CIA helped organize a bloody coup in Iraq that deposed the Soviet-leaning government of Gen. Abdel-Karim Kassem.

"As in Iran in '53, it was mostly American money and even American involvement on the ground," said Morris, referring to a U.S.-backed coup that had brought the return of the shah to neighboring Iran.

Kassem, who had allowed communists to hold positions of responsibility in his government, was machine-gunned to death. And the country wound up in the hands of the Baath Party.

At the time, Saddam was a Baath operative studying law in Cairo, one of the venues the CIA chose to plan the coup, Morris says. In fact, he claims the former Iraqi ruler castigated by President Bush as one of history's most "brutal dictators," was actually on the CIA payroll in those days.

"There's no question," Morris told Reuters. "It was there in Cairo that (Saddam) and others were first contacted by the agency."   

U.S. ROLE ALLEGED IN SADDAM'S RISE

Five years later, in 1968, Morris says the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath Party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protege in 1979.

"It's a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and the (CIA's) involvement there was really primary," Morris said.

His version of history is a far cry from current American rhetoric about Iraq -- a country that top U.S. officials say has been liberated from decades of tyranny and given the chance for a bright democratic future without their making mention of America's own alleged role in giving birth to the regime.

A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on Morris' claims of CIA involvement in the Iraqi coups but said his assertion that Saddam once received payments from the CIA was "utterly ridiculous."

Morris, who resigned from the NSC staff over the 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia, says he learned the details of American covert involvement in Iraq from ranking CIA officials of the day including President Teddy Roosevelt's grandson Archibald Roosevelt.

Now 65, Morris went on to become a Nixon biographer and is currently writing a book about U.S. covert action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He regards Saddam as a deposed U.S. client in the mold of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

"We climb into bed with these people without really knowing anything about their politics," Morris said in an interview from Seattle where he is working on his book. "It's not unusual, of course, in American policy. We tire of these people, and we find reasons to shed them."   

POISONED HANDKERCHIEF?

But many experts, including foreign affairs scholars, say there is little to suggest U.S. involvement in Iraq in the 1960s.

David Wise, a Washington-based author who has written extensively about Cold War espionage, says he is only aware of records showing that a CIA group known as the "Health Alteration Committee" tried to assassinate Kassem in 1960 by sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief.

"Clearly, they felt that Kassem was somebody who had to be eliminated," Wise said.

Morris contends that little is known about CIA involvement in the Iraqi coups because the Middle East did not hold as much strategic importance in the 1960s and most senior U.S. officials involved there at the time have since died.

But even if the United States played no role in the rise of Iraq's Baath Party, experts say Washington has obviously had to confront unintended consequences of former U.S. policies -- including those of Bush's father, President George Bush, a former CIA director.

"There are always some unintended consequences. There were unintended consequences in World War One that brought the rise of Hitler," said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, guest scholar in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution and former NSC staffer.

The United States and other Western powers supported Saddam's regime during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, even after the Baghdad government used chemical weapons to kill thousands of Kurdish villagers in Halabja.

The 1988 atrocity recently was used by U.S. officials to justify the toppling of Saddam's regime.

But Jon Alterman, Middle East program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he was a legislative aide on Capitol Hill at the time and recalls Bush allies dismissing the Halabja issue as a ploy by pro-Israel lobbyists to disrupt U.S.-Iraqi relations.   

U.S. SENDS ANTHRAX, OTHER PATHOGENS

Before war broke out last month, a flurry of U.S. headlines also called attention to reports that pathogens used by Iraq for its biological warfare program came from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the private Manassas, Virginia-based biological samples repository called the American Type Culture Collection.

Officials at the two institutions said shipments of anthrax, West Nile virus, botulinum toxins and other pathogens were sent to Iraq in the 1980s with U.S. Commerce Department approval for medical research purposes.

Even Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program, which U.S. officials said was on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb last year, got under way with help from a 1950s Eisenhower administration program to share the peaceful benefits of nuclear energy called "Atoms for Peace."

That is according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based group co-founded by media mogul Ted Turner and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to reduce the global threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

James Phillips, senior Middle East analyst for the Heritage Foundation, disagrees that President Bush's war in Iraq is the result of CIA involvement or U.S. policy.

But he said the United States did turn a blind eye to the chance to topple Saddam during the 1991 Gulf War, just as it left Afghanistan to the mercy of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network after Soviet forces left that country.

"I am reminded of the biblical expression about the sins of the father," Phillips said.

"The first Bush administration was the one that decided to cut off aid to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and set them adrift. And they were also the ones who decided not to go to Baghdad during the first Gulf War."

04/17/03 08:00 ET

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Pretty strong stuff but well done

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2939.htm