WAR, WHATEVER

Exclusive By Paul Gilfeather, Whitehall Editor


GEORGE Bush's top security adviser last night admitted the US would attack Iraq even if UN inspectors fail to find weapons.

Dr Richard Perle stunned MPs by insisting a "clean bill of health" from UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix would not halt America's war machine.

Evidence from ONE witness on Saddam Hussein's weapons programme will be enough to trigger a fresh military onslaught, he told an all- party meeting on global security.

Former defence minister and Labour backbencher Peter Kilfoyle said: "America is duping the world into believing it supports these inspections. President Bush intends to go to war even if inspectors find nothing.

"This make a mockery of the whole process and exposes America's real determination to bomb Iraq."

Dr Perle told MPs: "I cannot see how Hans Blix can state more than he can know. All he can know is the results of his own investigations. And that does not prove Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction."

The chairman of America's defence policy board said: "Suppose we are able to find someone who has been involved in the development of weapons and he says there are stores of nerve agents. But you cannot find them because they are so well hidden.

"Do you actually have to take possession of the nerve agents to convince? We are not dealing with a situation where you can expect co-operation."

Mr Kilfoyle said MPs would be horrified at the admission. He added: "Because Saddam is so hated in Iraq, it would be easy to find someone to say they witnessed weapons building.

"Perle says the Americans would be satisfied with such claims even if no real evidence was produced.

"That's a terrifying prospect."

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Disgraced Admiral Now a Super Spy

by Joe Conason

Those compassionate conservatives in the Bush White House feel quite strongly that a convicted felon deserves a second chance (unless, of course, he or she is unlucky enough to be executed). How else would they explain their decision to hire Iran-contra mastermind John Poindexter? They have employed him not as a clerk or a chauffeur?positions for which the retired admiral and Navy physicist would be overqualified?but to oversee one of the government's most sensitive departments.

Rehabilitation should be society's hope for every nonviolent offender?even if, as in Dr. Poindexter's case, said offender escaped a deserved jail sentence thanks to a technicality. (He had lied to Congress and shredded official documents to conceal the Reagan administration's conspiracy to trade arms for hostages and then use the dirty money for covert operations.)

We now know that under the ethical code of the Bush loyalists, lying can be permissible, even admirable, but only if the lies protect a politician from accountability for activities like dealing with a terrorist regime. Lying about the oral endearments of a lovestruck intern would obviously be dishonorable.

As Ari Fleischer explained in his blandly sinister style last February, "Admiral Poindexter is somebody who this administration thinks is an outstanding American, an outstanding citizen, who has done a very good job in what he has done for our country, serving the military."

For several months now, the rehabilitated admiral has directed a spooky-sounding outfit known as the Information Awareness Office, located within the Pentagon's ultra-high-tech Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (The seal of the Information Awareness Office, illustrated on its Web site at www.darpa.mil/iao, may stimulate paranoia. It's that occult pyramid with the all-seeing eye, gazing upon a globe. The agency's motto: "Knowledge is power.")

Dr. Poindexter aspires to create "Total Information Awareness," a gigantic matrix that will track enemies of the state by amassing and analyzing every last byte of data in cyberspace, from E-ZPass tolls to Travelocity tickets to motel charges and far more. When an efficient bureaucrat like Dr. Poindexter says "everything," he must be presumed to mean literally every I.R.S. return, every medical record, every telephone bill, every credit report, every bank-card swipe, every movie ticket, every book, everything that isn't paid for in cash. All of that?plus every e-mail sent by anybody anywhere.

As described by Dr. Poindexter in an August speech at a meeting in California, T.I.A. will create "ultra-large-scale, semantically rich, easily implementable database technologies," allowing intelligence agencies to access "the world-wide, distributed, legacy data bases as if they were one centralized data base." Another priority, he reassured his listeners, is "to develop privacy protection technologies," although he has yet to explain how privacy is compatible with an omniscient centralized data repository.

In an otherwise laudable column about the T.I.A. project, William Safire warned that its potentially massive invasion of privacy "is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks." That alarming statement isn't quite accurate. For the moment, what Dr. Poindexter and his colleagues are developing is a prototype system, using a simulated information environment.

Yet in a larger sense, the Times columnist is right. T.I.A. seeks to breach all boundaries between commercial and governmental information systems, wiping out the distinction between public and private to an extent that is difficult to imagine. It carries the imperative to uncover terrorist plotting much too far.

What is innovative about this plan is Dr. Poindexter's technological ambition. But there is nothing new about his blithe evisceration of the First and Fourth Amendments. The urge to snoop and intimidate seems to be an inherited trait of Republican administrations.

This unwholesome impulse can be traced back to the Huston Plan uncovered in the Watergate investigation, a massive domestic-espionage program justified by antiwar and racial unrest, which was named after Tom Charles Huston, a White House bureaucrat whose pedigree included activism in the Young Americans for Freedom. An enlarged version emerged again, ironically, during the Iran-contra investigation, when the Miami Herald exposed a Reagan administration plan to "suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." The most recent incarnation was Attorney General John Ashcroft's ridiculous but threatening TIPS program.

The recruitment of a former Iran-contra operative such as Dr. Poindexter, one of several brought into this administration, underlines a disturbing disrespect for the Constitution. Vaguely ominous overtones of the phrase "homeland security" are gradually congealing into an authoritarian reality. But the Senate can still restrain this historic trespass against liberty.

You may reach Joe Conason via email at: jconason@observer.com.

This column ran on page 5 in the 11/25/2002 edition of The New York Observer.

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Fighting terror by terrifying U.S. citizens

ROB MORSE
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2002%2F11%2F20%2FMN218568.DTL

Live by the Internet, be enslaved by the Internet.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded the development of the Internet, is now funding the Information Awareness Office (IAO) to develop a "large-scale counterterrorism database." The idea is to keep track of every bit of information on everyone in the country and "detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists."

So far, the Pentagon scientists have terrified a lot of Americans. The program manager for the IAO is John Poindexter, the retired admiral who masterminded the shameful Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scheme.

Now he's master-minding the supercomputers that DARPA developed in the '80s,

while he was lying to Congress.

Poindexter doesn't have all our phone calls, Macy's purchases and bridge crossings in a database yet. So far DARPA has an arrows-and-boxes model of what this "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) system will look like.

Your "transactional data" (financial, medical, governmental, etc.) will be combined with biometric data such as fingerprints in "automated virtual data repositories" -- after passing through a dotted line in the flow chart labeled "privacy and security."

It's a very thin dotted line.

Then the data will be fed into a "collaborative multiagency analytical environment," which probably means a bunch of spooks sitting around a table. From there the data goes to the "policy and ops environment," and the ops include "pre-empt."

I don't know if that means Guantanamo or a bullet to the back of the head. But remember who's in charge of the data. And remember that it's data on you.
So far individual crazies and wonks are ahead of Poindexter in mining data from the Internet.

In June, the Illuminati Conspiracy Archive posted a story on the IAO amid stories on UFOs and microchips implanted in humans. It pointed out that the official seal of the IAO is the "all-seeing eye" associated with the Illuminati -- a shadowy group of Freemasons that for centuries has been rumored to rule the world.

Sure enough, the IAO logo shows an eye on top of a pyramid shining onto a globe -- with the Middle East most brightly lit.

Poindexter. The all-seeing eye. The Illuminati. A centralized database measured in petabytes. Thank you, DARPA, for giving us the Total Paranoia System.
How could Big Brother be so dumb? DARPA has hired a proven scoundrel to rummage through all our records without a warrant.

"DARPA was founded in 1958, and the people who sat in that office in those early years were much more attuned to broader policy issues," said Smithsonian Institution historian Martin J. Collins, who wrote "Cold War Laboratory," on science, weapons development and free society during the Cold War.

DARPA's notion of using "Total Information Awareness" to find a few terrorists sounds like SOSUS, the Navy's Sound Surveillance System that picked up all the sound in the ocean to track Soviet submarines.

"That's an interesting analogy," said Collins, who found the use of acronyms similar to the Cold War. "But it makes it (TIA) sound too benign."

These are not whales, merchant ships and Foxtrot-class subs the government will be listening to. The government will be listening to every move we make. You'll have to take the word of a man who lied to Congress that he's just listening to terrorists.

On "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" Monday, Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Center said: "I think there's a real argument to be made at this point that this project should be suspended by the U.S. Congress until further investigation of the capability and imagined ends are understood."

Perhaps he puts too much faith in Congress. Poindexter has been there before, and Congress is weaker now.

All our technological strength bespeaks weakness. Poindexter's IAO is also funding "Babylon," a handheld automated speech translation system for the soldiers of a country weak on languages.

Maybe that will work, but how about "FutureMAP," which concentrates on "market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events."

It sounds like a jobs program for out-of-work stock market analysts. Man, are we in trouble. I am, anyway. This goes straight into the database.

Rob Morse's column appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. His e-mail address is rmorse@sfchronicle.com.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 2

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Europe lacks moral fibre, says US hawk

Edward Pilkington and Ewen MacAskill
Wednesday November 13, 2002
The Guardian

Richard Perle, a leading Pentagon adviser on Iraq, last night launched an extraordinary tirade against Europe which he accused of losing its moral direction and providing succour to Saddam Hussein.

"I think Europe has lost its moral compass. Many Europeans have become so obsessed by the prospect of violence they have failed to notice who we are dealing with," he said in an interview with the Guardian.

Mr Perle expressed serious reservations about the United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and the ability of his team to disarm Iraq.

But he reserved his most scathing comments for Germany and Chancellor Gerhard Schrِder's new anti-war stance.

"Germany has subsided into a moral numbing pacifism. For the German chancellor to say he will have nothing to do with action against Saddam Hussein, even if approved by the United Nations, is unilateralism," Mr Perle said.

France, which led resistance within the UN security council to the Bush administration's drive for an automatic mandate for war against Iraq, fared little better.

Did the French show more signs of moral fibre? "I have seen diplomatic manoeuvre, but not moral fibre," Mr Perle said.

He exempted Tony Blair from his criticism, saying the British prime minister had displayed the outrage towards President Saddam that should be felt.

But he accused the European left in general of choosing to ignore the realities of the Iraqi leader's excesses.

"I don't see how anyone, particularly any liberal, can say anything that can be construed as protecting the regime of Saddam Hussein. And yet that's the position that many on the left have taken."

Mr Perle's comments reflect the strained ties between Washington and Europe since George Bush came to power in 2000 over a range of issues, from the environment to trade and now Iraq.

US-German relations slumped to their worst since 1945 in the wake of Chancellor Schrِder's recent anti-Iraq war election campaign.

Mr Perle, who is close to key hawks within the Pentagon and who was an early advocate of regime change in Baghdad, predicted that Iraq was just the first of a long list of dictatorships and countries harbouring terrorists that merited the international community's attention. He mentioned Iran, Syria and North Korea.

Referring to North Korea's recent admission that it had a nuclear weapons programme, he said: "Now you understand what he [President Bush] meant by axis of evil. There are some people you can't do deals with. You could not do a deal with Hitler, and you can't do a deal with Saddam Hussein or with North Korea."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

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Saudis won't let bases be used against Iraq

Flyover rights for U.S. planes also rejected
Esther Schrader, Los Angeles Times
Monday, November 4, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2002%2F11%2F04%2FMN95892.DTL

Washington -- Saudi Arabia will not permit bases on its soil to be used in an attack against Iraq, its northern neighbor, and will not grant flyover rights to U.S. military planes even if the United Nations sanctions an invasion, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said Sunday.

The prince's remarks on CNN were the strongest Saudi rejection to date of any assistance to a possible U.S. attack on Iraq. Although the Pentagon says the United States is able to launch such an attack without Saudi assistance, military officials agree that doing so would constrain the strategic options open to war planners.

More than 5,000 U.S. troops are based in Saudi Arabia, and the country is bristling with U.S. military equipment and weaponry. Nearly 12 years ago, an American base near Riyadh, the Saudi capital, was a launch pad for the U.S.- led Persian Gulf War, which drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait after a seven- month occupation.

"We can live without Saudi bases, but it obviously makes it tougher," one military official said Sunday. "If they don't at least give us flyover rights, it's going to be a lot more complex moving supplies and people over there."

Asked whether Saud's comments marked a serious military setback to any U.S.- led effort against Iraq, Mary Matalin, counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney,

said on CNN's "Late Edition" that other allies in the region would fill the gap if necessary.

"We have many friends and allies in the region, and we have many friends and allies around the world," Matalin said. "We would never engage unless we were sure that we could get the job done well."

Saudi officials have gone back and forth for months on the issue of basing rights for U.S. forces in the event of an invasion of Iraq -- most recently saying that the United States could use the bases if the attack were sanctioned by the United Nations -- and they had left the window open on allowing U.S. combat, reconnaissance or refueling planes to land on Saudi soil.

Sunday, however, Saud appeared to take Saudi opposition further.

"We will cooperate with the Security Council, but as to entering the conflict or using the facilities as part of the conflict, that is something else," Saud said when asked about allowing overflights by U.S. forces.

Pressed about whether the Saudi bases could be used, he gave a definite "No. "

The Security Council is debating a U.S. proposal to toughen U.N. weapons inspections after Iraq agreed to allow inspectors to return after nearly four years. The United States wants the council to authorize harsh measures against Iraq if it fails to cooperate.

However, Russia, China and France oppose the American proposal, fearing that it would give a green light to Washington to attack Iraq without further consultations. Security Council members expect the United States to offer an amended draft resolution this week.

In Baghdad, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said he believed the U.S. and British determination to make war on Iraq could collapse under the weight of anti-war sentiment in the two countries.

"Time is in our favor, and we have to buy more time hoping that the U.S.- British alliance might disintegrate because of . . . the pressure of public opinion on American and British streets," Hussein told the Egyptian weekly Al- Osboa in a rare interview.

"The demonstrations in the Arab and Western world include hundreds of thousands of peace-loving people who are protesting the war and aggression on Iraq," he said, apparently referring to protests in the United States and around the world last month.

Most of Hussein's interview was loaded with standard Iraqi rhetoric -- he blamed "Zionist schemes" for Iraq's troubles.

But his references to anti-war demonstrations in the West were the first signal that he believed protests could undermine President Bush's and British Prime Minister Tony Blair's drive to build a coalition to attack Iraq.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

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