Maine Owl

Seen along Back Cove in Portland on Sunday

Former UK ambassador to US cites anthrax as key Iraq causus belli

Just about no one here has noticed that the UK is having a major inquiry into the causes and conduct of the Iraq war.

Sir Christopher Meyer, who was British ambassador to the United States in 2003 told of how pre-invasion planning included "convergence" of former President Bush and former Prime Minister Blair. According to a story in the Independent, Meyer

suggested that Mr Blair may have agreed to back military action during a secretive meeting with President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. "There was a large chunk of that time when no adviser was there," he said. "To this day I am not entirely clear what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch."

Meyer also cited alleged involvement of Iraq in the fall 2001 anthrax mailings to US senators and others as a factor, important to "an extent not appreciated by him at the time."

Today, Glenn Greenwald jumps on this statement by Meyer, concluding:

Greenwald: Here we have one of the most consequential political events of the last decade at least -- a lethal biological terrorist attack aimed at key U.S. Senators and media figures, which even the FBI claims originated from a U.S. military lab. The then-British Ambassador to the U.S. is now testifying what has long been clear: that this episode played a huge role in enabling the attack on Iraq. Even our leading mainstream, establishment-serving media outlets -- and countless bio-weapons experts -- believe that we do not have real answers about who perpetrated this attack and how. And there is little apparent interest in investigating in order to find out. Evidently, this is just another one of those things that we'll relegate to "the irrelevant past," and therefore deem it unworthy of attention from our future-gazing, always-distracted minds.

To add to Greenwald, and as I have pointed out before, my sites for several years have distributed a key work explaining a significant piece of the anthrax puzzle: United States exports of biological materials to Iraq: Compromising the credibility of international law by Geoffrey Holland (pdf format, 463kb download).

The origin of the 2001 anthrax probably was domestic, as was the real anthrax actually sent to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. No wonder there is a see-no-evil attitude towards unearthing these details in the U.S.

Escalation and drone war highlight a year of Obama. I had hoped for better.


Obama promises to "finish the job." Sound familiar?

I know he told us he'd put more war into Afghanistan during the 2008 campaign. But is escalating now to "dismantle and degrade" terrorists no longer there really worth it? And that's according to Obama's general himself. He's really just a bookend with Bush in the War Party.

Meanwhile, covert war with use of Blackwater (aka Xe) as a tool along with the Joint Special Ops drone aircraft rages in Pakistan:

Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan: Jeremy Scahill Reveals Private Military Firm Operating in Pakistan Under Covert Assassination and Kidnapping Program
Democracy Now! 11-24-2009

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, explain who is behind the drone attacks in Pakistan, who has been killed, and talk about legality here.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. The CIA of course has been running a drone campaign in Pakistan going back years into the Bush administration. When President Obama took office on January 23, he ordered his first drone strike inside of Pakistan. There were two strikes in North and South Waziristan, and has bombed Pakistan regularly ever since. In fact, Vice-President Joe Biden, part of his strategy reportedly is calling for escalation of these drone strikes. This has caused some controversy because there of a large numbers of civilian deaths as a result of these bombings.

And technically, the operations of the CIA need to be reported to Senator Dianne Feinstein and others on the intelligence committee. and there was a controversy this summer because Leon Panetta ran up the hill and said he had cancelled the CIA assassination program and that sort of put the drones in an intense focus on the hill. What I am told now though, is that there is actually and has been for some time, a parallel drone strike program that is being run by the Joint Special Operations Command and that these JSOC drone strikes are sometimes done with very little regard for how many civilians may die in the pursuit of one quote unquote "Bad guy,"

In fact, my military intelligence source said to me if there's one guy we're trying to hit and there are 34 other people in the building, 35 people are going to die that day. And he said part of the reason why these strikes are happening is because JSOC works on a classified mandate and they really don?t care because they are not going to go to the Hill and talk to Congress about it and they are not going to face consequences, and its an open secret no one wants to talk about. [emphasis added]

Sir John Chilcot says there will be no "whitewash" in the current full-blown inquiry into Britain's involvement in Iraq.

Iraq war inquiry will be no whitewash, Chilcot says
BBC | Monday, 23 November 2009

The man in charge of the inquiry examining events surrounding the Iraq war has said his committee will not produce a report that is a "whitewash"...

... Sir John acknowledged that, for many people, the overriding questions would be whether Britain was right to go to war and whether the conflict had been legal.

This, of course, begs the question of whether or not the earlier Hutton inquiry had been a whitewash, specifically about the "45-minute" claim in the so-called "Dodgy Dossier." I wrote about this HERE.

THIS sampling of UK internal documents already exposes a fair bit of the rotten underbelly.

And how about one more begged question: When is a similar inquiry going to happen in the US? The provocative but truncated Senate Intelligence Committee "Phase II" report (pdf) issued in July 2008 would be a fine starting point.

It's a Canon SX 120 IS point-and-shoot. Quite inexpensive (sub-$200), but with full manual control. I think the results are quite good. Today is cloudy, so I used cloudy white balance along with the "vivid" picture setting. Worked well. You'll be seeing more from this camera.

Via Atrios, is this LINK to a review of "The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11" by John Farmer. For some years I've been trying to put as succinctly as reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn does exactly what the Terror War has been all about:

The Lies They Told
The New York Times | November 12, 2009

For all the trillions of dollars lavished on it, for all the talk about confronting new security threats, for all the exhortations to reinvent government, America?s defense establishment, as John Farmer reminds us in "The Ground Truth," continued to fight the cold war more than a decade after it had ended. ...

In trumpeting an ill-defined war against terrorism, Bush simply transposed the bombast of the cold war to the present to suggest that he was a new Churchill staring down evil and that America needed to combat a new totalitarian threat emerging from the Islamic world.

A whole new period of beating drums has emerged from stories of new "plots," the horrendous shooting spree of a madman at Fort Hood that wingnuttia all too easily fits into the rubric of Terror War, and upcoming New York circus trials of tortured suspects that Attorney General Holder announced this week. It's all part and parcel of the fear mongering that has proven so useful in keeping our country a bloodthirsty, revenge-thirsty purveyor of violence not just since 9/11, but for decades.

I don't mind telling you that I'm tired of it. War is making us broke, hated, and subject to blowback. It's time for new approaches that begin with standing down the foreign occupations, and the machinations of Terror War on all fronts.

H.R. 3962, The Affordable Health Care for America Act, is anything but. It requires little beyond some modest caps on abusive co-pays and a requirement for guaranteed issue even if there are "pre-existing conditions." In return, the law would deliver tens of millions of new captive customers to non-competitive private insurance companies under the specter of tax penalties for those who won't cooperate.

Businesses that depend on low-wage workers will celebrate clauses deflecting the need for them to cover younger employees. The Stupak anti-abortion amendment rightly is being called the "sepsis amendment" because of its threat to deny women in need treatment thus driving them to undergo unsafe procedures. Thanks a lot, Mike Michaud. The so-called "public option" is in there, but it is effectively disabled for nearly everybody. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has it pegged just about right:

Kucinich: Why I Voted NO
Washington, Nov 7

But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies ? a bailout under a blue cross.

By incurring only a new requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, a weakened public option, and a few other important but limited concessions, the health insurance companies are getting quite a deal. The Center for American Progress' blog, Think Progress, states "since the President signaled that he is backing away from the public option, health insurance stocks have been on the rise." Similarly, healthcare stocks rallied when Senator Max Baucus introduced a bill without a public option. Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that "money will start flowing in again" to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation. Investors.com last month reported that pharmacy benefit managers share prices are hitting all-time highs, with the only industry worry that the Administration would reverse its decision not to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices, leaving in place a Bush Administration policy.

During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The "robust public option" which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies.

Maybe a filibuster by Joe Lieberman now is the best chance to save the Democrats from themselves, and us too in the process.

Related posts:

• President Snowe answers the call of history
• Snowe fires bullet into head of public option
• Collins: "I oppose the public plan"
• Snowe amongst the rubes
• Health negotiations on C-Span?
• Health insurance winners
• Public option died (somebody tell Howard Dean)
• Unprincipled health insurance non-reform
• Public option dead at the hand of Snowe?
• Wanking single payer
• Pro-Obama health care rally in Bangor

The loss of the Maine same-sex marriage law obviously is a big disappointment and certainly is around our household. I want to say the same thing my old friend and gubernatorial candidate Steve Rowe said,

While I share in the sadness of this defeat, I woke up this morning feeling hopeful for the future and focused on the many gains we have made on our journey for justice for all.

Let's remember how far we've come, and how fast.

Put plainly, a decade ago, marriage equality was unthinkable. President Bush used fear of marriage equality as a political tool for his re-election only 5 years ago. Just a few years ago, states couldn't sell civil unions as a compromise to marriage equality.

Yesterday, 47% of Mainers voted to recognize what now seems obvious to so many of us: equal should mean equal. Thousands of straight volunteers joined their gay and lesbian friends and neighbors in knocking on doors and making calls - starting a conversation about fairness and equality that will far outlive this one vote.

The sun will rise again tomorrow.

Be sure to read the fine Comment today in the Guardian of London on Maine Ballot Question 1, by our contributor, Gerald Weinand: Putting gay marriage to the test.

If you haven't yet, you still have one hour to get out and vote No on 1.

Some of the best feeder footage ever, with lots of Chickadee talk!