Chilcot Inquiry: the Report and the Regrets

Channel 4 New: Published on Jul 4, 2016. It has been long in coming, but at long last and finally, here it is: “The inquiry has not expressed a view on whether military action was legal. That could, of course, only be resolved by a properly constituted and internationally recognised court . . . We have however concluded that the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory”.

Jeremy Corbyn – Response to the Chilcot Inquiry report

‘This is the entire speech I just gave to the House of Commons in response to the Chilcot Inquiry report into the Iraq war. It is only a provisional response – as I only received the report this morning – but I will be giving a further response later today. The intervention in Iraq was a tragic decision which lead to the deaths of 179 British personnel and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – while destabilising the region and increasing the threat of terrorism to our own country. Published on Jul 6, 2016’.

The Report of the Iraq Inquiry. Executive Summary

Introduction

1. In 2003, for the first time since the Second World War, the United Kingdom took part in an opposed invasion and full‑scale occupation of a sovereign State – Iraq. Cabinet decided on 17 March to join the US‑led invasion of Iraq, assuming there was no last‑minute capitulation by Saddam Hussein. That decision was ratified by Parliament the next day and implemented the night after that.
2. Until 28 June 2004, the UK was a joint Occupying Power in Iraq. For the next five years, UK forces remained in Iraq with responsibility for security in the South‑East; and the UK sought to assist with stabilisation and reconstruction.
3. The consequences of the invasion and of the conflict within Iraq which followed are still being felt in Iraq and the wider Middle East, as well as in the UK. It left families bereaved and many individuals wounded, mentally as well as physically. After harsh deprivation under Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Iraqi people suffered further years of violence.
4. The decision to use force – a very serious decision for any government to take – provoked profound controversy in relation to Iraq and became even more controversial when it was subsequently found that Iraq’s programmes to develop and produce chemical, biological and nuclear weapons had been dismantled. It continues to shape debates on national security policy and the circumstances in which to intervene.
5. Although the Coalition had achieved the removal of a brutal regime which had defied the United Nations and which was seen as a threat to peace and security, it failed to achieve the goals it had set for a new Iraq. Faced with serious disorder in Iraq, aggravated by sectarian differences, the US and UK struggled to contain the situation. The lack of security impeded political, social and economic reconstruction.
6. The Inquiry’s report sets out in detail decision‑making in the UK Government covering the period from when the possibility of military action first arose in 2001 to the departure of UK troops in 2009. It covers many different aspects of policy and its delivery.[1]

[1] “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry. Executive Summary” The Iraq Inquiry. http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/246416/the-report-of-the-iraq-inquiry_executive-summary.pdf.

CIA Covert Operations and U.S. Interventions

 ‘Special thx go out to Frank Dorell and all who contributed to this documentary (Posted 19 Jan 2012)’.  

 

Blackwater in the Ukraine: Bild am Sonntag & Suzanne Kelly

‘Allegations of for- profit “Blackwater” like mercenaries in Eastern Ukraine fly but how far off could those speculating be? We ask former CIA officer Jack Rice (15 May 2014)’.

McClatchy’s Matthew Schofield writes insightfully that “the notion that elite American fighters are prowling the backroads and slag heaps of [the Ukraine] is oft-repeated. After first surfacing in March [2014], the rumors sounded like the sort of paranoid fantasies created in a war zone where anti-Americanism is rampant. But now the rumors are being repeated in Germany’s capital — and resonating. That alone may count as a victory for Russian propagandists, even if there are no American mercenaries. The White House says there are not. Bild am Sonntag, a tabloidlike newspaper that occasionally breaks major stories on the German government, is reporting that German intelligence has told Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office that it had unconfirmed reports that 400 Americans appear to be aiding the interim Ukrainian government in its fight against pro-Russian separatists. According to Bild, the German intelligence agency cited U.S. intelligence officials as its source. The report, which appeared Sunday [, 11 May], has since been repeated by many German news outlets. The allegation that the information was presented to the chancellor’s office in a weekly briefing in April lends it gravitas. That such reports in Bild on more than one occasion have proved true enhances its credibility. The chancellor’s office and the German intelligence service have declined to either confirm or deny, a development that leaves an atmosphere of doubt in a country where tensions are rife about just how angry Germany should be at Russia’s actions in Ukraine — fuelled in no small part by German reliance on Russian natural gas and oil and the extensive business ties between the two nations”.[1]

The report in the weekend edition of Bild am Sonntag indicated that circa 400 members of the U.S. security firm Academi (the mercenary outfit previously known as Blackwater) were operating in support of the Ukrainian army. In addition, the paper informs its readers that apparently the German government had been informed of this by the U.S. secret service on 29 April 2014.[2] Moreover the below clip was also provided as confirming this piece of news.

Academi’s Vice President Suzanne Kelly denied the report subsequently: “Academi is not taking part in any operations in Ukraine, and in the future this is not planned”.[3]

 

 

[1] Matthew Schofield, “Rumors of American mercenaries in Ukraine spread to Germanya” McClatchy (15 May 2014). http://www.stripes.com/news/europe/rumors-of-american-mercenaries-in-ukraine-spread-to-germany-1.283154.

[2] “Kämpfen US-Söldner in der Ukraine?” Bild am Sonntag (09 May 2014). http://www.bild.de/politik/ausland/ukraine/us-soeldner-von-blackwater-im-einsatz-34992896.bild.html.

[3] “Academi bestreitet Einsatz in Ukraine” ?” Bild am Sonntag (12 May 2014). http://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2014-05/ukraine-academi-soeldner-dementi; “Academi denies reports of American mercenaries in Ukraine’s east” Ukrinform (12 May 2014). http://www.ukrinform.ua/eng/news/academi_denies_reports_of_american_mercenaries_in_ukraines_east_321284.

Dirty Wars Trailer: JSOC in Action

It has been quite a few years now since Jeremy Scahill told the world about Blackwater and its nefarious actions, but now he is set to be back on people’s minds bothering administrations in an attempt to bring truth to the people: Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill into the heart of America’s covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond. Part political thriller and part detective story, Dirty Wars is a gripping journey into one of the most important and underreported stories of our time (29 November 2013).

The freelance journalist and researcher Dawn Paley tells us that “Scahill’s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield [, released on 23 April] . . .  is a valuable volume for those wishing to better understand how current and past events in Mexico and Central and South America connect to the so-called war on terror. A must-read for anyone wanting to learn more about the US drone wars and targeted kill programs, Dirty Wars is a bit slow going off the top, but before long, Scahill introduces compelling characters and provides readers with access to entire families who have been adversely impacted by US war policies in Yemen and elsewhere. Dirty Wars also contains a number of items of specific interest to folks whose interests lie south of the US border. Using carefully gathered evidence, Dirty Wars makes it clear that American military campaigns do little more than exacerbate existing situations. Sadly, this is as true in the Western hemisphere as it is in the Middle East. Scahill carefully documents how the militaristic approach taken by the US government towards perceived terror threats in Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere has served to drive up the influence of local armed groups”.[1]

As such, Scahill wants to create a new meaning for the term ‘dirty wars’, which has been in use since the seventies to describe “state repression against political opponents, trade unionists and civilians in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia)”,[ii] as Paley reminds us. Scahill’s Dirty Wars clearly refer to what is happening today, as the U.S. is flexing its covert military muscle. On the film’s dedicated website this can be read: “Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill stumbles upon a US night raid gone badly wrong in a remote corner of Afghanistan, where a witness swears to having seen American soldiers digging bullets out of the bodies of pregnant dead women. Scahill’s investigation leads him to unravel the secret manoeuvres of the shadowy and powerful Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) as he is drawn into a world of covert operations unknown to the public and carried out across the globe by men who do not exist on paper and may never appear before Congress. In military jargon, JSOC teams “find, fix, and finish” their targets, who are selected through a secret process. No target is off limits for Obama’s “kill list,” including US citizens. From Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia, as well as back home in New York where he tries to piece the puzzle together, Scahill meets with Special Forces operators, military generals and US-backed warlords who go on camera and on the record—some for the first time. He tracks down the survivors of targeted assassinations and drone strikes, including the family of the first American citizen being hunted by his own government. Described as “a mystery thriller as compelling as any feature film” by The Huffington Post, Dirty Wars is also a New York Times Bestselling book (Serpent’s Tail publishers) by Jeremy Scahill on the same topic, exhaustively researched and footnoted”.[3]

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[1] Dawn Paley, “Scahill’s ‘Dirty Wars’ Offers Lessons for Latin America” Upside Down World (10 July 2013). http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/4370-scahills-dirty-wars-offers-lessons-for-latin-america.

[2] Dawn Paley, “Scahill’s ‘Dirty Wars’ Offers Lessons for Latin America”.

[3] “FILM SYNOPSIS” Dirty Wars. http://dirtywars.org/blog.

Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers

Robert Greenwald’s classic 2006 documentary is a damning indictment of the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq: ‘The story of what happens to everyday Americans when corporations go to war. Acclaimed director Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed) takes you inside the lives of soldiers, truck drivers, widows and children who have been changed forever as a result of profiteering in the reconstruction of Iraq. Iraq for Sale uncovers the connections between private corporations making a killing in Iraq (Blackwater, Halliburton/KBR, CACI and Titan) and the decision makers who allow them to do so’.[1]

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[1] http://iraqforsale.org/.

U.S. Demands Iranian Answers, or how to Respond to Ludicrous Allegations

In Honolulu things have been heating up over the past days and now temperatures have reached boiling point. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton namely declared the following: “Iran has a long history of deception and denial regarding its nuclear program and in the coming days we expect Iran to answer the serious questions raised by this report. The U.S. will continue to consult closely with our allies on the next steps we can take to increase pressure on Iran”.[1]  In a way that resembles Colin Powell’s 2003 deception, the IAEA under its new chief Amano ‘showed satellite images, letters and diagrams to 35 nations earlier Friday [, 11 November] in Vienna as it sought to underpin its case that Iran apparently is working secretly on developing a nuclear weapon’.[2]  In spite of the fact that its newly released report does not deliver any clear proof or convincing arguments regarding Iran’s bomb-building abilities, sufficing to spice the text with lots of ‘mights’, ‘coulds’ and ‘mays’, and literally stating that “There are also indications that some activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device continued after 2003, and that some may still be ongoing”.[3]  Now the war drums are sounding loudly across the Western world because of ‘indications’ that something ‘may still be ongoing’ . . .

The Bush administration was adamant in its condemnation of Iran, even suggesting that its troubles in Iraq were due to machinations hatched in Tehran . . . The Obama administration has been equally vocal in its opposition to the Islamic Republic. About two weeks ago, Clinton staged a media assault employing the offices of VOA: ‘U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has told VOA that she believes the government of Iran is a dictatorship, and she said the United States wants to assure Iranians that their aspirations for freedom are legitimate. She spoke to VOA’s Persian News Network Wednesday [, 26 October] and addressed the Iranian people directly. She said the United States hopes to open a “virtual embassy in Tehran” online by the end of the year. She said America would very much like to improve relations with Iranians and encouraged Iranian students to “come and study in the United States.” And she said Washington seeks to provide tools that would allow Iranians to circumvent the “electronic curtain” she said Iran has imposed on communications online’.

 

Could it be that the Obama administration, borrowing a leaf from the Bush playbook, is heating up the temperature at home by means of conjuring up another warlike phantom abroad in time for the 2012 presidential elections???  Now that the Libyan war has been brought to a provisional conclusion of sorts with the authorised murder of Colonel Gadhafi, and the prospect of more sweet crude flowing in the right direction, and now that U.S. combat troops are vacating Iraqi territory to be replaced by well-paid contractors, while the inconclusive war in the Hindu Kush continues in spite of the execution of Usamah bin Laden, the presentation of a new bogeyman seems appropriate: re-enter Iran and its phantom-like nuclear weapons programme. As  reiterated by VOA’s Persian News Network’s reporter, President Obama has called the Libya operation “a recipe for success”, unlike Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution, which was probably instigated by the Bush administration, now it has the appearance that the current U.S. administration is floating the possibility of regime change in Tehran. In the above clip, Clinton is presenting the “soft power” side of this new resolve. The recently released IAEA report, on the other hand, seems well-placed to usher in the “hard power” segment of Washington’s plans for Iran and its political leadership.

President Obama seems to have begun his re-election bid in earnest now. At the end of October he appeared on Jay Leno’s TV show to announce his administration’s foreign policy strategy to the American public: in Libya “[n]ot a single U.S. troop was killed or injured, and that, I think, is a recipe for success in the future”.[4]  In this way Obama has clearly positioned himself at the opposite side of his predecessor’s stance, his predecessor  whose foreign policy has led to many American troops dying in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the current U.S. president is all but continuing the Bush strategy in the Hindu Kush, the operations in North Africa are now rhetorically employed to define President Obama’s approach to American military intervention. Air power and unmanned drone strikes are the new weapons of choice. President Obama is thus staking out his position at the forefront of a new understanding of warfare, a new understanding that sees military intervention as remote-controlled and from above, rather than consisting of boots on the ground effectively occupying foreign soil. Whereas Donald Rumsfeld on 10 September 2001 envisioned an American military that was a slimmed down yet still powerful fighting machine, consisting of gun-toting men and women, the current administration apparently views tomorrow’s soldiers as joystick-wielding operators bringing death and destruction from afar and above, aided by special forces executing targeted assassinations and other delicate groundwork.

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[1] “U.S. demands Iran response to IAEA report within days” AP (11 November 2011). http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/u-s-demands-iran-response-to-iaea-report-within-days-1.395137.

[2] “U.S. demands Iran response to IAEA report within days”.

[3] “Iran and the IAEA: Tehran Warns U.S., Allies Against an Attack” A Pseudo-Ottoman Blog (11 November 2011). https://sitanbul.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/iran-and-the-iaea-tehran-warns-u-s-allies-against-an-attack/.

[4] Jim Kuhnenn, “Obama to Leno: Libya a recipe for success” AP (26 October 2011). http://news.yahoo.com/obama-leno-libya-recipe-success-043624485.html.

Iraq Troop Withdrawal: Private Contractors Return to Baghdad and Beyond

Last month Joshua Hersh wrote that the “Obama administration is willing to drop American troop levels in Iraq to as low as 3,000 by the end of this year, The Huffington Post has confirmed. The new figure, first reported Tuesday [, 6 September] by Fox News, represents a significant drop in the number of American military personnel expected to remain in the country after the American mission in Iraq expires on Dec. 31. A source familiar with the situation told HuffPost that the 3,000 figure was correct, although  there may end up being as many as 5,000 troops in the country at any time, given the logistics of troop rotations. Administration and Pentagon officials had hoped to secure Iraqi-government approval for a larger troop presence in Iraq into 2012, with the U.S. recently pushing for a final figure of around 10,000. But administration officials have lately come to believe that approval would be hard to get for anything more than a few thousand troops. The troop presence would probably include some combination of  military trainers and air and naval advisers, the source said, adding that some Pentagon officials fear the 3,000 number may be too small to achieve even their limited missions”.[1]  So, President Obama is thus apparently sticking to his campaign promise of removing American men and women in uniform from Iraq, give or take a few thousand. Or, is he???

On Tuesday, 4 October, the U.S. State Department divulged its plans ‘to bring in thousands of private contractors to protect diplomats once American troops withdraw from Iraq at the end of the year’. The mercenaries could number ‘as many as 17,000’, bringing the total of armed U.S. personnel on the ground in Iraq to 20,000 at the end of 2011.[2]  CNN’s Charley Keyes notes that the “U.S. Defense Department has spent $206 billion on contractors to support the latest wars. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said contractor costs would continue to rise as the State Department increases its workforce in Iraq because of the withdrawal of U.S. troops. ‘The State Department will increase its manpower from about 8,000 to 17,000, the great majority of whom will be contractors for security, medical, maintenance, aviation and other functions’, Issa said. The congressman said President Barack Obama has failed to combat waste and fraud.  ‘This record will continue unless this administration takes concrete actions to protect precious taxpayer dollars’, Issa said. ‘The United States has not achieved the peace dividend that this administration promised by doubling down in Afghanistan’”.[3]  And so it seems that the waste and incompetence displayed by the Bush administration and documented in Robert Greenwald’s documentary Iraq for Sale, is set to continue under the auspices of the Obama administration, including the wrangling between the Department of Defense and the State Department. The long shadow of Donald Rumsfeld will now also be tainting Barack Obama . . . But now there is the Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC) to ensure that the excesses of the Bush administration are not repeated in the second decade of the 21^st century. Alas, as indicated on the dedicated website the CWC did ‘sunset on September 30, 2011’,[4]  and will thus no longer be in a position to exert any kind of oversight on the Obama administration’s handling of the contractor issue in Iraq (or Afghanistan).

 

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[1] Joshua Hersh, “Iraq Troop Withdrawal: Obama Administration Supports Reducing U.S. Forces To 3,000 By End Of 2011” The Huffington Post (06 September 2011). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/iraq-troop-withdrawal-reducing- forces_n_950576.html.

[2] Charley Keyes, “Plans for private contractors to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq criticized” CNN (04 October 2011). http://articles.cnn.com/2011-10-04/us/us_us-contractors-war-zones_1_contractors-iraq-and-afghanistan-dov-zakheim?_s=PM:US.

[3] Charley Keyes, “Plans for private contractors to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq criticized-2”. http://articles.cnn.com/2011-10-04/us/us_us-contractors-war-zones_1_contractors-iraq-and-afghanistan-dov-zakheim/2?_s=PM:US.

[4] Commission on Wartime Contracting. http://www.wartimecontracting.gov/.

Cynthia McKinney Talks Turkey

Cynthia McKinney tells RT America that the US needs to take care of domestic issues. The financial debt debate has many wondering what is going on with the US financial situation. Many are demanding that the US stop spending on the wars and bring that revenue home to help with domestic issues. Does it make senses to spend billions of dollars on our defense when we are so close to default? Cynthia McKinney, former US Representative and target of O’ Reilly, tells us what’s really going on.

Inside Story: Afghanistan in Transition

Are Afghans ready to secure their own nation???  But, is this the right question to ask and is America really leaving the Afghan scene???

 

Killing a Monster: OBL and the War on Terror

In the wee hours of 2 May 2011 (or late 1 May in the U.S.), the world was shaken by the news that the U.S. had finally made good on its promise to rid the world of Public Enemy #1. President Obama proudly announced to the world that he had previously given the order to pursue the high value target of Usamah bin Laden into Pakistani territory. The President recalled the “worst attack on the American people in our history” on 11 September 2001. He dramatically declared that “The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory”. In fact, months of painstaking intelligence work led the U.S. to track down Al Qaeda’s elusive leader in the unassuming city of Abottabad, at not that great a distance from Islamabad, the capital of the Land of the Pure. Back in the fall of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when George W. Bush had declared his unending war on terror, some voices, such as that of Tariq Ali, pointed out the folly of the Bush plan. Instead, these reasonable people argued that the best way to counter a terrorist threat is by means of good old fashioned police work and intelligence gathering. Still, following the end of the Cold War and high on the surplus of the Clinton years, America did not listen to reason and subsequently dragged the world into a war with no end in sight. Still, the amorphous enemy was given a tangible shape in the form of the Saudi financier of the eighties’ Jihad against the Soviets-turned-sponsor of a global war-on-the-West in the 21^st century, Usamah bin Laden, looking quaintly-Japanese in print spelled as Osama and abbreviated as OBL. Subsequently, what the BBC following ABC had termed Terror, Inc. became Al Qaeda, and the West led by the U.S. had a new enemy. Bush then made the appropriate noises: “The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him” (13 September 2001); followed four days later by “I want justice . . .There’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive”. As Clinton’s actions had already pointed the way in 1998, Usamah bin Laden, or OBL, was hiding in the mountains of the Hindu Kush within the borders of Afghanistan, the battlefield that had determined the outcome of the Cold War in the view of Zbigniew Brzezinski. And as a result, the invasion of Afghanistan, apparently pre-planned during a four-day meeting under the heading “brainstorming on Afghanistan” held in July, went ahead to public acclaim and universal approval. The world-at-large was outraged by the wanton killing of innocents in New York, Washington and in a field in Pennsylvania and supported the U.S. in an unprecedented show of solidarity and good-will. Moreover, as Afghanistan was ruled by the “the perfidious Taliban — oppressors of women and growers of beards”, other nations willingly joined the American forces in their quest for justice, retribution, and good-old-fashioned revenge. The invaders joined the Afghan Northern Alliance and quickly defeated the Taliban, capturing Kabul on 13 November and pushing south into Kandahar – homeland of the Taliban and their Pashtu constituency. Three days prior to the fall of Kabul, , in the words of two tribal leaders present at the event, Public Enemy #1 Usamah bin Laden apparently told a crowd in Jalalabad that the “Americans had a plan to invade, but if we are united and believe in Allah, we’ll teach them a lesson, the same one we taught the Russians”. In spite of his boisterous words, resistance was futile and OBL had to run away and apparently ended up hiding in the Tora Bora mountains. The invaders’ progress had been momentous, and nothing seemed able to stop them. But suddenly, in the Tora Bora mountains, the U.S.-led invasion seemed to falter and the high value target was allowed to get away . . .Usamah bin Laden escaped and nobody was able to track him down. In spite of his earlier assurances, President Bush suddenly changed tone and told the public the following: “I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority . . . I am truly not that concerned about him” (13 March 2002). What had happened?  How did, in the space of but a few months, Public Enemy #1 suddenly become an irrelevant person?

Hindsight, as documented by Bob Woodward, tells us now that the Bush Administration had other fish to fry. The newly-appointed Enemy #1 moved to the backburner and his place was taken up by another enemy, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Baath party regime. In the Washington Post, Woodward and Dan Balz state that, following the 9/11 attacks, Bush “said, ‘Terrorism against our nation will not stand’. It was an echo of ‘This will not stand’, the words his father, President George H.W. Bush, had used a few days after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990” (27 January 2002). In his Plan of Attack (2004), Woodward argues that President Bush, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and the war cabinet started their meetings on the invasion of Iraq in late December 2001. Throughout the year 2002, intensive war planning created its own momentum towards invasion and occupation. In the run up to and during the execution of Operation Desert Storm (1990-91), Bush, Sr. had vilified the Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, effectively turning the Middle East dictator into a new Hitler. Bush, Jr. eagerly took up his father’s legacy and started planning the invasion of Iraq while Bin Laden fled the Tora Bora mountains. Rather than pursuing Bin Laden, exacting retribution and seeing that justice was served, Bush, Jr., as expressed by the ever-perceptive Naomi Klein, dedicated himself to “[p]illaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia”.

The 9/11 attacks provided the “new Pearl Harbor”, that had been suggested as a necessary pre-condition for reaffirming U.S global dominance by the PNAC, and helped bolster the Military-Industrial Complex, in the process making some individual very rich while killing others in the hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands. One could argue that ‘Usamah bin Laden and Al Qaeda’ had delivered the preamble to the full-blown text of the NeoCon takeover of the U.S. Even though, on an intellectual plane, Junior was but a lightweight, his administration operated on a purely ideological basis that took scant account of real world events and public opinion, other than providing the justification needed to implement otherwise unpopular policies and military actions. The Bush Administration’s ideological concerns had strong ties to commercial success however. While Bin Laden was slowly making his way to Abbottabad, the Bush team launched a concerted campaign to convince the U.S. and world public about “Iraq’s alleged ties to Al Qaeda and its alleged weapons of mass destruction”, to justify military intervention in Iraq and withdrawal from Afghanistan. A year later, on 20 March 2003, Bush, Jr. ordered his troops to invade Iraq in a fury of “Shock & Awe”. The war was quickly won and Iraq was duly occupied by U.S. and allied forces. A year after the invasion, Naomi Klein went to Iraq to witness the “construction boom [supposedly rebuilding the sanction-affected and war-torn nation], but after weeks of searching I had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery apart from tanks and Humvees”. She continues matter-of-factly: “Then I saw it: a construction crane. It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner in a busy shopping district I thought that I was finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so much about. But as I got closer I noticed that the crane was not actually rebuilding anything – not one of the bombed-out government buildings that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many power lines that remained in twisted heaps even as the heat of summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was hoisting a giant billboard to the top of a three-story building. SUNBULA: HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia”. The Bush Administration was thus not interested in capturing Bin Laden nor was it concerned with reviving the Iraqi people and economy. The Bush agenda was much more brazen than that. Again quoting Klein, abandoning Afghanistan and invading Iraq was beneficial to such American companies like “the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq’s famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions”. Moreover, there is also the fact that Iraq has the largest proven stocks of oil in its underground, plentiful and easily extractable. Access to resources is after all what drives most if not all conflicts: “American bestselling author and academic Michael T. Klare coined the term “resource wars” in 2001, indicating that in his opinion most wars of the future, like many of those of the past and present, will be caused by conflicts over access to natural resources, particularly oil, natural gas and water”. But in the end, this manifestation of NeoCon greed let to a numbers of unwanted consequences. The Bush-declared War-on-Terror turned into a quagmire that contributed to the loss of prestige on the part of the U.S. While the amounts of money spent reached staggering heights and the ostensible culprit remained out of reach. In the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers, Bush introduced the Patriot Act, curtailing the freedom of U.S. citizens and turning every global individual into a potential terrorist suspect liable to become the subject of “extraordinary rendition” to be tortured by proxy.

While the Bush Administration was busy plundering Iraq, the war in Afghanistan continued largely unnoticed and severely underreported. But, opposed to George W., his eventual successor appeared to care a lot more about the land in the Hindu Kus: “[a]lready in 2007, then-candidate Obama unequivocally stated that when president his ‘first step must be to get off the wrong battlefield in Iraq and take the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan’. At the time, Obama also hinted at the threat posed by an al-Qaeda presence in the so-called Af-Pak theatre”. But Adam Curtis’ documentary The Power of Nightmares (2004) convincingly argues that the U.S. authorities fabricated a terrorist organisation named Al Qaeda based on the testimony of a former associate of Bin Laden, Jamal al-Fadl. The 1998 U.S. Africa embassy bombings had made Bill Clinton aware of Bin Laden, which led to the unsuccessful air strikes on targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. Subsequently, in order to prosecute Bin Laden in absentia, U.S. prosecutors had to prove he was the head of a criminal organisation responsible for the bombings – Al Qaeda, the global terror network bent on destroying the West and its way of life. The Bush Administration wholeheartedly appropriated the idea of a Muslim extremist terror network to launch its global war efforts. In hindsight, the veracity of claims relating to Al Qaeda as a SPECTRE-like network appears to be a shaky proposition. As I wrote in Today’s Zaman at the end of January: “the independent journalist Pepe Escobar declared that ‘Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. Al-Qaeda remains a catch-all ghost entity’. In other words, his contention is that the name al-Qaeda is used by the US to suggest the presence of a threat that is then employed to justify military intervention. The flipside of that stance is now that terrorists and like-minded individuals opposing US dominance and interventionism equally cite the name al-Qaeda to gain credibility, notoriety and media exposure”. This assertion cannot but lead to the question, “does al-Qaeda, as a worldwide terrorist network aiming to deceive, disrupt and destroy the Free World, really exist?, which seems to have been answered satisfactorily by Adam Curtis and his The Power of Nightmares.

But the U.S. and ISAF forces are in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and providing support for Hamid Karzai and his government. In spite of this reality on the ground, President Obama continues the Bush legacy and keeps reiterating his alliterative mantra, which was also repeated in the Overview of the Afghanistan and Pakistan Annual Review (December 2010) to justify the continued occupations of Afghanistan: the “core goal of the US strategy in the Afghanistan and Pakistan theater remains to disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al-Qaeda in the region and to prevent its return to either country”. But even U.S. experts admit that Al Qaeda poses but a minor threat in Afghanistan proper. In December 2009, a senior US intelligence official told ABC News that there were only about 100 al-Qaeda members left in that country, while six months later, CIA Director Leon Panetta went a step further, telling ABC News: “I think at most, we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100, maybe less. It’s in that vicinity. There’s no question that the main location of al-Qaeda is in tribal areas of Pakistan”. And as it turns out now, Al Qaeda’s legendary leader wasn’t even there. Instead he was hiding in plain sight, in the city of Abbotabad. Even the just-quoted Overview of the Afghanistan and Pakistan Annual Review confidently talks of the “Pakistan-based leadership and cadre of al-Qaeda,” thereby offering justification for the US drone attacks in Pakistani territory. But the Pakistani army has for the past several years been fighting the Pakistani Taliban (TTP or Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan who, in response, have unleashed a campaign of terror throughout the whole country. While just now, more “than 80 paramilitary soldiers were killed when at least one suicide bomber blew himself up Friday morning [, 13 May] at a military training center in northwest Pakistan, a commander of the Frontier Constabulary said. The bombing was the first major terrorist attack since the American raid in Abbottabad on May 2 that killed Osama bin Laden”, as reported by Jane Perlez in the New York Times.

Given that Al Qaeda appears to be a U.S.-engineered figment of the imagination, that has now taken the shape of numerous independent terrorist cells inflicting harm in such varied geographic locations as Yemen and North Africa, the matter of the actual guilt that should be attributed to the recently killed Usamah bin Laden (OBL) crops up. Again quoting my January op-ed, “On Sept. 28, 2001, Bin Laden was interviewed by the Urdu-language Pakistani daily Ummat: ‘I have already said that I am not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle. … Whoever committed the acts of Sept. 11 are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, common American people have been killed’. Was bin Laden merely trying to deflect attention and building an alibi against a possible US attack? As for the famous video confession so conveniently stumbled upon in the Afghan city of Jalalabad in November 2001, theologian-turned-Sept. 11 debunker Professor David Ray Griffin maintains that ‘Osama bin Laden experts have called this later video a fake, and for good reasons. Many of the physical features of the man in this video are different from those of bin Laden (as seen in undoubtedly authentic videos)’. The fact that the FBI last year used an image of the Spanish lawmaker Gaspar Llamazares to create an up-to-date picture of an aging bin Laden proves that US institutions do indeed dabble in creating fakes and make-believes. The incredible story of the digitally enhanced image of bin Laden using Llamazares’ hair and facial wrinkles was broken by The Associated Press”. Now that Bin Laden has been killed in cold blood, his testimony in a court of law will never become available. Why was an unarmed man crawling out of bed shot in the head???  U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder nevertheless declared somewhat disingenuously: “If the possibility had existed, if there was the possibility of a feasible surrender, that would have occurred . . . But their protection, that is the protection of the force that went into that compound, was I think uppermost in our minds”. After all, dead men tell no tales . . .  and monsters need to be killed.