A Public Secret

[dweller]

by JEREMY SCAHILL


It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was war.

But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002--a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before "shock and awe" officially began.

At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the extent of the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in response to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.

The Sunday Times of London recently reported on new evidence showing that "The RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war." The paper cites newly released statistics from the British Defense Ministry showing that "the Allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001" and that "a full air offensive" was under way months before the invasion had officially begun.

print edition of The Nation article


dp

[stillcool]

1. So much info to keep track of....

there was a Kos diary about the drip...drip...of this Downing St minutes debacle. It seems to me like the sh*t is hitting the fan from all sides....

[dweller]

4. just not from the MSMCON side...

yet.

dp

[stillcool]

6. i've given up on them....

not even emails to tell them what lying sacks of sh*t they are. i have cut them out of my life as the cancer they are.

[firefox]

2. Holy shit, what an article

We were bombing the hell out of Iraq in 2002 without any lawful reason. This is one of the few articles I have ever printed out. I am going to start a notebook of printed material that will include the Downing Street Minutes. This is no short mention of illegality. They mean to make the point that the country has gone mad and even a blissfully ignorant, know-nothing Republican with two connected brain cells should be outraged at what this article says.

The closing paragraph helps answer the question why nobody has taken to the Capitol steps calling for the chimpeachment of the war criminal now in residence in the White House. It is worthy of amplification and it shows the straight talking attitude of the whole article.

But another question looms, particularly for Democrats who voted for the war and now say they were misled: Why weren't these unprovoked and unauthorized attacks investigated when they were happening, when it might have had a real impact on the Administration's drive to war? Perhaps that's why the growing grassroots campaign to use the Downing Street memo to impeach Bush can't get a hearing on Capitol Hill. A real probing of this "smoking gun" would not be uncomfortable only for Republicans. The truth is that Bush, like President Bill Clinton before him, oversaw the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam against a sovereign country with no international or US mandate. That gun is probably too hot for either party to touch.

[dweller]

5. print a few or many extras

for the streets.

spread the word.

dp

[dweller]

3. you can rate the Yahoo link to this article

here
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/thenation/20050601/cm_thenation/20050613scahill_1

and keep it in the top stories on Yahoo News.

dp

[fooj]

7. Kick!

:kick:

[Karenina]

8. Kick!

:kick: