A Conspiracy To Kill

A Conspiracy to Kill

http://english.daralhayat.com/opinio...05f/story.html

Jihad el Khazen
11/9/2005

Justice, Saddam Hussein style, was to hang the accused then try him. Those found innocent would then be declared "martyrs of wrath" and their families would be compensated.

Justice, American style, is for a Likud cabal within the Bush administration to prepare a war on the basis of completely false accusations in which over a hundred thousand Iraqis and two thousand Americans are killed, and when a co-conspirator is referred to trial he is not accused of taking part in the murder of tens of thousands of innocent people but of perjury.

Traditional American justice is great and American human rights are an example for the world to follow, but I am talking here about justice under the Bush administration, since Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, began his effort about 18 months ago to find out who leaked the name of an intelligence operative, Valerie Plame, as an act of revenge against her husband, Joseph Wilson. Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, was sent to Niger and returned to confirm that information about Iraq's attempt to buy uranium, known as yellow cake, from that country was bogus, thus destroying a main premise for launching the war against Iraq.

President Bush is not directly responsible; he just does not know because he prefers to exercise in the White House gym or ride his mountain bike. Responsibility rest with the cabal led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who hijacked U.S. foreign policy and launched an unjustified war that killed thousands of Americans and Iraqis and destroyed a country while claiming to rebuild it.

Lewis Libby, chief of staff of Vice President Cheney's office, has claimed innocence of leaking Wilson's name in his short court appearance. Yeah, he is innocent as much as I am of ever breaking traffic laws in forty years of driving in three continents.

They are all guilty. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Douglas Feith, Libby and others, with the help of Likudniks on the outside like William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Frank Gafney, David Frum, Michael Ledeen and many others who are part of the conspiracy. I can call it such because Fitzgerald himself spoke of a "criminal conspiracy". And while he started with chasing a leak, the investigation must end in murder charges.

In criminal law a conspiracy is an agreement between "two or more persons" to follow a course of conduct that, if completed, constitutes a crime. The Supreme Court defined a conspiracy to defraud the United States as "to interfere with, impede or obstruct a lawful government function by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least my means that are dishonest."

The conspiracy was hatched long before 9/11. I will not delve into the history of the neo-cons but rather go back only to the year 2000 when Dick Cheney asked the Project for a New American Century, a hub of anti-peace Likudniks, for a strategic study that was presented in September that year stressing that "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." But the hawks admitted that the American public would not support a war against Iraq unless there was a "catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."

And so it was and the 9/11 attacks gave the hawks the excuse they needed. Iraq was not officially linked to the atrocity but every official statement also made mention of Iraq to establish a subconscious link in the mind of the American public.

The Niger uranium remains one of the most outrageous lies of the whole affair. It started with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi visiting Washington on October 15, 2001 with Nicolo Pollari, the new head of Italian intelligence (SISMI). Keen to please, they offered documents claiming that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. The CIA studied the documents and decided they ere unreliable. Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger and confirmed the agency's suspicion.

Of course they were forged. The Niger Embassy in Rome was burgled in 2000 and only official paper, letter heads and the like went missing. A former SISMI operative, Rocco Martino, tried to peddle the forged documents to news outlets in Italy for $10,000. Still in September 2002 Michael Ledeen set up a meeting between Pollari and Stephen Hadley, then deputy head of the National Security Council. Ledeen was connected with the Office of Special Plans established at the Defence Department by Wolfowitz and Feith to bypass the intelligence agencies and produce fake intelligence justifying the war on Iraq.

As a result of all this conspiracy President Bush included in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003 the famous 16 words "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The lie was also included in the British dossier about Iraq and I hope that the British officials responsible also face trial, like the Americans, in connection with a conspiracy that killed over a hundred thousand Iraqis and two thousand Americans and not just perjury or obstruction of justice. More tomorrow.