Senator Robert Byrd: 'Today, I weep for my country'

Speech delivered on the floor of the US Senate, March 19, 2003 3:45pm

I believe in this beautiful country. I have studied its roots and gloried in the wisdom of its magnificent Constitution. I have marveled at the wisdom of its founders and framers. Generation after generation of Americans has understood the lofty ideals that underlie our great Republic. I have been inspired by the story of their sacrifice and their strength.

But, today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned.



Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. Instead of isolating Saddam Hussein, we seem to have isolated ourselves. We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many. We say that the United States has the right to turn its firepower on any corner of the globe which might be suspect in the war on terrorism. We assert that right without the sanction of any international body. As a result, the world has become a much more dangerous place.

We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance. We treat UN Security Council members like ingrates who offend our princely dignity by lifting their heads from the carpet. Valuable alliances are split.

After war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America's image around the globe.

The case this Administration tries to make to justify its fixation with war is tainted by charges of falsified documents and circumstantial evidence. We cannot convince the world of the necessity of this war for one simple reason. This is a war of choice.

There is no credible information to connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11. The twin towers fell because a world-wide terrorist group, Al Qaeda, with cells in over 60 nations, struck at our wealth and our influence by turning our own planes into missiles, one of which would likely have slammed into the dome of this beautiful Capitol except for the brave sacrifice of the passengers on board.

The brutality seen on September 11th and in other terrorist attacks we have witnessed around the globe are the violent and desperate efforts by extremists to stop the daily encroachment of western values upon their cultures. That is what we fight. It is a force not confined to borders. It is a shadowy entity with many faces, many names, and many addresses.

But, this Administration has directed all of the anger, fear, and grief which emerged from the ashes of the twin towers and the twisted metal of the Pentagon towards a tangible villain, one we can see and hate and attack. And villain he is. But, he is the wrong villain. And this is the wrong war. If we attack Saddam Hussein, we will probably drive him from power. But, the zeal of our friends to assist our global war on terrorism may have already taken flight.

The general unease surrounding this war is not just due to "orange alert." There is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too many questions unanswered. How long will we be in Iraq? What will be the cost? What is the ultimate mission? How great is the danger at home?

A pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of thousands of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq.

What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomatic efforts when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?

Why can this President not seem to see that America's true power lies not in its will to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire?

War appears inevitable. But, I continue to hope that the cloud will lift. Perhaps Saddam will yet turn tail and run. Perhaps reason will somehow still prevail. I along with millions of Americans will pray for the safety of our troops, for the innocent civilians in Iraq, and for the security of our homeland. May God continue to bless the United States of America in the troubled days ahead, and may we somehow recapture the vision which for the present eludes us.

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LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
The New Yorker, Issue of 2003-03-17
Posted 2003-03-10

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

The letter mentioned the firm’s government connections prominently: “Three of Trireme’s Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme’s principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that Board.” The two other policy-board members associated with Trireme are Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only a member of Trireme’s advisory group and is not involved in its management), and Gerald Hillman, an investor and a close business associate of Perle’s who handles matters in Trireme’s New York office. The letter said that forty-five million dollars had already been raised, including twenty million dollars from Boeing; the purpose, clearly, was to attract more investors, such as Khashoggi and Zuhair.

Perle served as a foreign-policy adviser in George W. Bush’s Presidential campaign—he had been an Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan—but he chose not to take a senior position in the Administration. In mid-2001, however, he accepted an offer from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to chair the Defense Policy Board, a then obscure group that had been created by the Defense Department in 1985. Its members (there are around thirty of them) may be outside the government, but they have access to classified information and to senior policymakers, and give advice not only on strategic policy but also on such matters as weapons procurement. Most of the board’s proceedings are confidential.

As chairman of the board, Perle is considered to be a special government employee and therefore subject to a federal Code of Conduct. Those rules bar a special employee from participating in an official capacity in any matter in which he has a financial interest. “One of the general rules is that you don’t take advantage of your federal position to help yourself financially in any way,” a former government attorney who helped formulate the Code of Conduct told me. The point, the attorney added, is to “protect government processes from actual or apparent conflicts.”

Advisory groups like the Defense Policy Board enable knowledgeable people outside government to bring their skills and expertise to bear, in confidence, on key policy issues. Because such experts are often tied to the defense industry, however, there are inevitable conflicts. One board member told me that most members are active in finance and business, and on at least one occasion a member has left a meeting when a military or an intelligence product in which he has an active interest has come under discussion.

Four members of the Defense Policy Board told me that the board, which met most recently on February 27th and 28th, had not been informed of Perle’s involvement in Trireme. One board member, upon being told of Trireme and Perle’s meeting with Khashoggi, exclaimed, “Oh, get out of here. He’s the chairman! If you had a story about me setting up a company for homeland security, and I’ve put people on the board with whom I’m doing that business, I’d be had”—a reference to Gerald Hillman, who had almost no senior policy or military experience in government before being offered a post on the policy board. “Seems to me this is at the edge of or off the ethical charts. I think it would stink to high heaven.”

Hillman, a former McKinsey consultant, stunned at least one board member at the February meeting when he raised questions about the validity of Iraq’s existing oil contracts. “Hillman said the old contracts are bad news; he said we should kick out the Russians and the French,” the board member told me. “This was a serious conversation. We’d become the brokers. Then we’d be selling futures in the Iraqi oil company. I said to myself, ‘Oh, man. Don’t go down that road.’” Hillman denies making such statements at the meeting.

Larry Noble, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research organization, said of Perle’s Trireme involvement, “It’s not illegal, but it presents an appearance of a conflict. It’s enough to raise questions about the advice he’s giving to the Pentagon and why people in business are dealing with him.” Noble added, “The question is whether he’s trading off his advisory-committee relationship. If it’s a selling point for the firm he’s involved with, that means he’s a closer—the guy you bring in who doesn’t have to talk about money, but he’s the reason you’re doing the deal.”

Perle’s association with Trireme was not his first exposure to the link between high finance and high-level politics. He was born in New York City, graduated from the University of Southern California in 1964, and spent a decade in Senate-staff jobs before leaving government in 1980, to work for a military-consulting firm. The next year, he was back in government, as Assistant Secretary of Defense. In 1983, he was the subject of a New York Times investigation into an allegation that he recommended that the Army buy weapons from an Israeli company from whose owners he had, two years earlier, accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar fee. Perle later acknowledged that he had accepted the fee, but vigorously denied any wrongdoing. He had not recused himself in the matter, he explained, because the fee was for work he had done before he took the Defense Department job. He added, “The ultimate issue, of course, was a question of procurement, and I am not a procurement officer.” He was never officially accused of any ethical violations in the matter. Perle served in the Pentagon until 1987 and then became deeply involved in the lobbying and business worlds. Among other corporate commitments, he now serves as a director of a company doing business with the federal government: the Autonomy Corporation, a British firm that recently won a major federal contract in homeland security. When I asked him about that contract, Perle told me that there was no possible conflict, because the contract was obtained through competitive bidding, and “I never talked to anybody about it.”

Under Perle’s leadership, the policy board has become increasingly influential. He has used it as a bully pulpit, from which to advocate the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the use of preëmptive military action to combat terrorism. Perle had many allies for this approach, such as Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, but there was intense resistance throughout the bureaucracy—most notably at the State Department. Preëmption has since emerged as the overriding idea behind the Administration’s foreign policy. One former high-level intelligence official spoke with awe of Perle’s ability to “radically change government policy” even though he is a private citizen. “It’s an impressive achievement that an outsider can have so much influence, and has even been given an institutional base for his influence.”

Perle’s authority in the Bush Administration is buttressed by close association, politically and personally, with many important Administration figures, including Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, who is the Pentagon’s third-ranking civilian official. In 1989, Feith created International Advisors Incorporated, a lobbying firm whose main client was the government of Turkey. The firm retained Perle as an adviser between 1989 and 1994. Feith got his current position, according to a former high-level Defense Department official, only after Perle personally intervened with Rumsfeld, who was skeptical about him. Feith was directly involved in the strategic planning and conduct of the military operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan; he now runs various aspects of the planning of the Iraqi war and its aftermath. He and Perle share the same views on many foreign-policy issues. Both have been calling for Saddam Hussein’s removal for years, long before September 11th. They also worked together, in 1996, to prepare a list of policy initiatives for Benjamin Netanyahu, shortly after his election as the Israeli Prime Minister. The suggestions included working toward regime change in Iraq. Feith and Perle were energetic supporters of Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial leader of the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress, and have struggled with officials at the State Department and the C.I.A. about the future of Iraq.

Perle has also been an outspoken critic of the Saudi government, and Americans who are in its pay. He has often publicly rebuked former American government officials who are connected to research centers and foundations that are funded by the Saudis, and told the National Review last summer, “I think it’s a disgrace. They’re the people who appear on television, they write op-ed pieces. The Saudis are a major source of the problem we face with terrorism. That would be far more obvious to people if it weren’t for this community of former diplomats effectively working for this foreign government.” In August, the Saudi government was dismayed when the Washington Post revealed that the Defense Policy Board had received a briefing on July 10th from a Rand Corporation analyst named Laurent Murawiec, who depicted Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that the Bush Administration give the Saudi government an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its financial assets in the United States and its oil fields. Murawiec, it was later found, is a former editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, a magazine controlled by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., the perennial Presidential candidate, conspiracy theorist, and felon. According to Time, it was Perle himself who had invited Murawiec to make his presentation.

Perle’s hostility to the politics of the Saudi government did not stop him from meeting with potential Saudi investors for Trireme. Khashoggi and Zuhair told me that they understood that one of Trireme’s objectives was to seek the help of influential Saudis to win homeland-security contracts with the Saudi royal family for the businesses it financed. The profits for such contracts could be substantial. Saudi Arabia has spent nearly a billion dollars to survey and demarcate its eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile border with Yemen, and the second stage of that process will require billions more. Trireme apparently turned to Adnan Khashoggi for help.

Last month, I spoke with Khashoggi, who is sixty-seven and is recovering from open-heart surgery, at his penthouse apartment, overlooking the Mediterranean in Cannes. “I was the intermediary,” he said. According to Khashoggi, he was first approached by a Trireme official named Christopher Harriman. Khashoggi said that Harriman, an American businessman whom he knew from his jet-set days, when both men were fixtures on the European social scene, sent him the Trireme pitch letter. (Harriman has not answered my calls.) Khashoggi explained that before Christmas he and Harb Zuhair, the Saudi industrialist, had met with Harriman and Gerald Hillman in Paris and had discussed the possibility of a large investment in Trireme.

Zuhair was interested in more than the financial side; he also wanted to share his views on war and peace with someone who had influence with the Bush Administration. Though a Saudi, he had been born in Iraq, and he hoped that a negotiated, “step by step” solution could be found to avoid war. Zuhair recalls telling Harriman and Hillman, “If we have peace, it would be easy to raise a hundred million. We will bring development to the region.” Zuhair’s hope, Khashoggi told me, was to combine opportunities for peace with opportunities for investment. According to Khashoggi, Hillman and Harriman said that such a meeting could be arranged. Perle emerged, by virtue of his position on the policy board, as a natural catch; he was “the hook,” Khashoggi said, for obtaining the investment from Zuhair. Khashoggi said that he agreed to try to assemble potential investors for a private lunch with Perle.

The lunch took place on January 3rd at a seaside restaurant in Marseilles. (Perle has a vacation home in the South of France.) Those who attended the lunch differ about its purpose. According to both Khashoggi and Zuhair, there were two items on the agenda. The first was to give Zuhair a chance to propose a peaceful alternative to war with Iraq; Khashoggi said that he and Perle knew that such an alternative was far-fetched, but Zuhair had recently returned from a visit to Baghdad, and was eager to talk about it. The second, more important item, according to Khashoggi and Zuhair, was to pave the way for Zuhair to put together a group of ten Saudi businessmen who would invest ten million dollars each in Trireme.

“It was normal for us to see Perle,” Khashoggi told me. “We in the Middle East are accustomed to politicians who use their offices for whatever business they want. I organized the lunch for the purpose of Harb Zuhair to put his language to Perle. Perle politely listened, and the lunch was over.” Zuhair, in a telephone conversation with me, recalled that Perle had made it clear at the lunch that “he was above the money. He said he was more involved in politics, and the business is through the company”—Trireme. Perle, throughout the lunch, “stuck to his idea that ‘we have to get rid of Saddam,’” Zuhair said. As of early March, to the knowledge of Zuhair, no Saudi money had yet been invested in Trireme.

In my first telephone conversation with Gerald Hillman, in mid-February, before I knew of the involvement of Khashoggi and Zuhair, he assured me that Trireme had “nothing to do” with the Saudis. “I don’t know what you can do with them,” he said. “What we saw on September 11th was a grotesque manifestation of their ideology. Americans believe that the Saudis are supporting terrorism. We have no investment from them, or with them.” (Last week, he acknowledged that he had met with Khashoggi and Zuhair, but said that the meeting had been arranged by Harriman and that he hadn’t known that Zuhair would be there.) Perle, he insisted in February, “is not a financial creature. He doesn’t have any desire for financial gain.”

Perle, in a series of telephone interviews, acknowledged that he had met with two Saudis at the lunch in Marseilles, but he did not divulge their identities. (At that time, I still didn’t know who they were.) “There were two Saudis there,” he said. “But there was no discussion of Trireme. It was never mentioned and never discussed.” He firmly stated, “The lunch was not about money. It just would never have occurred to me to discuss investments, given the circumstances.” Perle added that one of the Saudis had information that Saddam was ready to surrender. “His message was a plea to negotiate with Saddam.”

When I asked Perle whether the Saudi businessmen at the lunch were being considered as possible investors in Trireme, he replied, “I don’t want Saudis as such, but the fund is open to any investor, and our European partners said that, through investment banks, they had had Saudis as investors.” Both Perle and Hillman stated categorically that there were currently no Saudi investments.

Khashoggi professes to be amused by the activities of Perle and Hillman as members of the policy board. As Khashoggi saw it, Trireme’s business potential depended on a war in Iraq taking place. “If there is no war,” he told me, “why is there a need for security? If there is a war, of course, billions of dollars will have to be spent.” He commented, “You Americans blind yourself with your high integrity and your democratic morality against peddling influence, but they were peddling influence.”

When Perle’s lunch with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and his connection to Trireme, became known to a few ranking members of the Saudi royal family, they reacted with anger and astonishment. The meeting in Marseilles left Perle, one of the kingdom’s most vehement critics, exposed to a ferocious counterattack.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who has served as the Saudi Ambassador to the United States for twenty years, told me that he had got wind of Perle’s involvement with Trireme and the lunch in Marseilles. Bandar, who is in his early fifties, is a prominent member of the royal family (his father is the defense minister). He said that he was told that the contacts between Perle and Trireme and the Saudis were purely business, on all sides. After the 1991 Gulf War, Bandar told me, Perle had been involved in an unsuccessful attempt to sell security systems to the Saudi government, “and this company does security systems.” (Perle confirmed that he had been on the board of a company that attempted to make such a sale but said he was not directly involved in the project.)

“There is a split personality to Perle,” Bandar said. “Here he is, on the one hand, trying to make a hundred-million-dollar deal, and, on the other hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail—‘If we get in business, he’ll back off on Saudi Arabia’—as I have been informed by participants in the meeting.”

As for Perle’s meeting with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and the assertion that its purpose was to discuss politics, Bandar said, “There has to be deniability, and a cover story—a possible peace initiative in Iraq—is needed. I believe the Iraqi events are irrelevant. A business meeting took place.”

Zuhair, however, was apparently convinced that, thanks to his discussions with Trireme, he would have a chance to enter into a serious discussion with Perle about peace. A few days after the meeting in Paris, Hillman had sent Khashoggi a twelve-point memorandum, dated December 26, 2002, setting the conditions that Iraq would have to meet. “It is my belief,” the memorandum stated, “that if the United States obtained the following results it would not go to war against Iraq.” Saddam would have to admit that “Iraq has developed, and possesses, weapons of mass destruction.” He then would be allowed to resign and leave Iraq immediately, with his sons and some of his ministers.

Hillman sent Khashoggi a second memorandum a week later, the day before the lunch with Perle in Marseilles. “Following our recent discussions,” it said, “we have been thinking about an immediate test to ascertain that Iraq is sincere in its desire to surrender.” Five more steps were outlined, and an ambitious final request was made: that Khashoggi and Zuhair arrange a meeting with Prince Nawaf Abdul Aziz, the Saudi intelligence chief, “so that we can assist in Washington.”

Both Khashoggi and Zuhair were skeptical of the memorandums. Zuhair found them “absurd,” and Khashoggi told me that he thought they were amusing, and almost silly. “This was their thinking?” he recalled asking himself. “There was nothing to react to. While Harb was lobbying for Iraq, they were lobbying for Perle.”

In my initial conversation with Hillman, he said, “Richard had nothing to do with the writing of those letters. I informed him of it afterward, and he never said one word, even after I sent them to him. I thought my ideas were pretty clear, but I didn’t think Saddam would resign and I didn’t think he’d go into exile. I’m positive Richard does not believe that any of those things would happen.” Hillman said that he had drafted the memorandums with the help of his daughter, a college student. Perle, for his part, told me, “I didn’t write them and didn’t supply any content to them. I didn’t know about them until after they were drafted.”

The views set forth in the memorandums were, indeed, very different from those held by Perle, who has said publicly that Saddam will leave office only if he is forced out, and from those of his fellow hard-liners in the Bush Administration. Given Perle’s importance in American decision-making, and the risks of relying on a deal-maker with Adnan Khashoggi’s history, questions remain about Hillman’s drafting of such an amateurish peace proposal for Zuhair. Prince Bandar’s assertion—that the talk of peace was merely a pretext for some hard selling—is difficult to dismiss.

Hillman’s proposals, meanwhile, took on an unlikely life of their own. A month after the lunch, the proposals made their way to Al Hayat, a Saudi-owned newspaper published in London. If Perle had ever intended to dissociate himself from them, he did not succeed. The newspaper, in a dispatch headlined “washington offers to avert war in return for an international agreement to exile saddam,” characterized Hillman’s memorandums as “American” documents and said that the new proposals bore Perle’s imprimatur. The paper said that Perle and others had attended a series of “secret meetings” in an effort to avoid the pending war with Iraq, and “a scenario was discussed whereby Saddam Hussein would personally admit that his country was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction and he would agree to stop trying to acquire these weapons while he awaits exile.”

A few days later, the Beirut daily Al Safir published Arabic translations of the memorandums themselves, attributing them to Richard Perle. The proposals were said to have been submitted by Perle, and to “outline Washington’s future visions of Iraq.” Perle’s lunch with two Saudi businessmen was now elevated by Al Safir to a series of “recent American-Saudi negotiations” in which “the American side was represented by Richard Perle.” The newspaper added, “Publishing these documents is important because they shed light on the story of how war could have been avoided.” The documents, of course, did nothing of the kind.

When Perle was asked whether his dealings with Trireme might present the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said that anyone who saw such a conflict would be thinking “maliciously.” But Perle, in crisscrossing between the public and the private sectors, has put himself in a difficult position—one not uncommon to public men. He is credited with being the intellectual force behind a war that not everyone wants and that many suspect, however unfairly, of being driven by American business interests. There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that may gain from a war. In doing so, he has given ammunition not only to the Saudis but to his other ideological opponents as well.

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Senator Asks FBI to Investigate Fake Iraq Document

By Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the FBI (news - web sites) on Friday to investigate fake documents the United States used as evidence to the United Nations (news - web sites) of alleged Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger.

"As you know, the International Atomic Energy Agency has recently determined that some of the intelligence documents provided to it by the United States are forgeries," Sen. John Rockefeller said in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller.

"These documents were provided to the IAEA as evidence of Iraqi efforts to procure uranium from the Republic of Niger. I am writing to request that the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigate this matter," the West Virginia senator said.

The documents were among intelligence U.S. officials used in seeking U.N. Security Council support for their assertion that Iraq (news - web sites) is hiding biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs. Iraq denies having such weapons programs.

An FBI official said the FBI would probably launch some type of initial inquiry, but in part to determine whether it was an FBI issue or should be handled by the CIA (news - web sites), which deals with intelligence collected abroad. The CIA had no comment.

U.S. and British forces are amassed in the Gulf region for a potential war against Iraq, which Washington says may be necessary to disarm Baghdad.

President Bush (news - web sites) alluded to the evidence in his State of the Union address, saying Britain had learned Iraq had sought "significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

FORGERIES

IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei undermined the U.S. position on March 7 by telling the U.N. Security Council the documents on the Iraq-Niger-uranium connection were forgeries.

U.S. officials say it was not known who forged the papers, but they were given to the United States and Britain by a third country which they would not identify.

The United States gave other information on the uranium issue to the IAEA in early February, along with the documents with caveats attached about their credibility, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.

U.S. intelligence analysts "believed from the beginning the information was questionable and I understand that they did not factor it into their analysis of the Iraqi threat," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said.

"The bottom line is that the United States does not need this one piece of evidence to make its case against Iraq," the Kansas Republican said in a statement.

Rockefeller expressed concern that the forgeries "may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq."

"The implication of Senator Rockefeller's letter is that the intelligence community forged these documents to somehow bolster the case against Iraq. It just doesn't make sense that the U.S. government would forge documents and then not use them in its case or vouch for their authenticity," Roberts said.

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'Rumsfeld refused to back 1989 UN resolution to investigate Iraq'
Date: Friday, March 14 @ 09:37:47 EST

By Jason Leopold, Columbus Free Press

In 1989, the State Department released a report that described in gruesome detail Iraq's violation of human rights, specifically how Iraq's President Saddam Hussein tortured his own people for allegedly being disloyal.

But despite the atrocities outlined in the report, which President Bush now refers to when speaking about his desire to remove Hussein from power, the United States, under the first Bush Administration, refused to vote in favor of a United Nations resolution calling for an inquiry into Iraq's treatment of its population and possibly indicting Hussein for war crimes and human rights abuses.

The two people most vocal about refusing to go along with the U.N. investigation are now lobbying for a U.N. resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq and are highly critical of the countries that refuse to back a U.S. led coalition to use military force to remove Hussein from power. Those men are Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.



But in 1989, the first Bush administration refused to join the U.N. in publicly protesting the forced relocation of at least half a million ethnic Kurds and Syrians in the late 1980s, even though the act violated principles of the 1948 Genocide Convention, according to Middle East Watch, a human rights organization.

The Bush and Reagan administrations also declined to punish Iraq when it used poison gas against Iranian soldiers in 1984 and Kurdish citizens in 1988. Moreover, the U.S. did not oppose the fact that Hussein bought 45 American helicopters, worth about $200 million, with assurances they were for civilian use, then transferred them to his military.

Armitage said in 1990 that that "in retrospect, it would have been much better at the time of their use of gas if we'd put our foot down," according to an August 1990 story in the Los Angeles Daily News.

Despite U.S. intelligence reports that showed Iraq's capability of building weapons of mass destruction and its inhumane treatment of its own civilians, the Bush Administration turned a blind eye and instead focused on improving U.S. relations with Hussein. The U.S. removed Iraq from its list of countries supporting terrorism in 1983, which reopened the door to federal subsidies and loans to Iraq.

Saddam Hussein "made it clear that Iraq was not interested in making mischief in the world," Rumsfeld said, who, as a Middle East envoy for the Regan Administration, reopened discussions with Saddam in 1983, according to the Daily News story. "It struck us as useful to have a relationship with him."

The current Bush Administration, many of whom served in the Reagan and the first Bush administrations, refuse to acknowledge that their policies toward Iraq at the time backfired and we may be paying a price for it now. But at this point, Iraq does not pose a threat to the U.S. and threats against the nation appear to be purely personal.

Under former Rumsfeld's watch during his years in the Reagan and Bush administrations, he and the former presidents allowed Hussein to build his army and a cache of chemical and nuclear weapons. In fact, many of the hawks that serve in the current Bush Administration assisted Hussein's regime in reaching these goals during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

For example, Judicial Watch said, according to the Daily News story, "that the U.S. extended $270 million in government-guaranteed credit from the Export-Import Bank to buy other American goods, despite repeated failures to make loan repayments on time. Since 1982, Baghdad has become one of the biggest buyers of U.S. rice and wheat, purchasing $5.5 billion in crops and livestock with federally guaranteed loans and agricultural subsidies and its own hard cash."

"Iraq benefited from a thriving grain trade with American farmers, cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies, oil sales to American refiners that helped finance its military, and muted White House criticism of its human rights and war atrocities," the Daily News story said.

Armitage admitted in 1990 that the Reagan and Bush administrations were well aware of Hussein's brutality, but still, the U.S. was more interested in maintaining a healthy relationship with Iraq because the country's vast oil reserves was beneficial to U.S. interests.

"We knew this wasn't the League of Women Voters," Armitage said, referring to Hussein's regime, according to the Daily News story.

(c) 1970-2003 The Columbus Free Press

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'The view from Wonderland'

Date: Wednesday, March 12 @ 09:46:39 EST

By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers

Are the people who are caught up in a mass delusion ever aware that they are living in a malignant fantasyland? Did the puritans of the Salem colony suspect that they were not hanging real "witches," but instead were collectively engaged in a monstrous injustice? Did the "good Germans" in the thirties, ever doubt that Adolf Hitler was anything less than what the captive press said he was: the "savior of the nation and the protector of the Aryan race?" Did the "good patriots" of the fifties ever ask for proof that Senator Joe McCarthy really had a list in his hand of "known communists in the State Department?" (The number changed with each speech). How long did we persist in believing the telegenic Generals' reassurances that "we've turned the corner in Viet Nam," and that "there was a light at the end of the tunnel?"

When society has gone mad, does the "conventional belief" somehow "feel different" to those within the society? The question virtually answers itself and history confirms that when reason departs and collective insanity takes over, it all seems "perfectly sensible" from the inside.



True, in all such cases, a few discerning individuals stand apart, like the child who saw no clothes on the Emperor. But such individuals are quickly marginalized as they are denounced as "traitors," shouted into silence, exiled if they are lucky, and liquidated if they are not. After the madness has passed, statues are cast and monuments built in their name -- names familiar to us all: Dietrich Bonheoffer, Klaus von Stauffenberg, Hans and Sophie Scholl, Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Welch, Edward R. Murrow, George Ball, Daniel Ellsberg, John Dean.

These heroes see what almost anyone might see -- anyone who prizes his and her liberty and independence, whose wits are operational, and whose moral principles are intact. Add to this, the courage to speak out against the madness and to defend the betrayed moral principles, whatever the cost, and you have a hero.

When a society has gone collectively bonkers, this can be readily recognized by succeeding historians (no one defends the Salem witch trials today), by onlookers from outside that society (for example, in Europe and Canada where they still have a free press), and even by discerning individuals within. All these, and particularly those within, can do so by the exercise of familiar and ordinary principles of critical thinking: logic (tests of consistency and coherence), evidence, objectivity (suppression of bias), and recognition of common fallacies.

In the present crisis that has befallen our republic, there is still access to relevant information and there is an abundance of fallacy in "the official version" to be exposed, so that those of us with eyes to see, ears to hear, and the ordinary smarts to think it over, are quite able to come up with a reasonable assessment of our peril, and of our most prudent means to deal with it.

For in point of fact, the case for war against Iraq is so pathetically flimsy that it would not survive a preliminary hearing before Texas judge. Time and again, the Bushistas have come up with "evidence" against Saddam, and time and again it has been knocked down by "burly truth." We know the particulars, but let's review them again if only to contemplate the accumulating weight of this folly:

* Bush and his defenders, citing a document from the International Atomic Energy Agency, continue to this day to tell us that Saddam came within six months of developing a nuclear weapon. The UN agency denies that there is, or ever was, such a document.
* The alleged meeting in Prague of 9/11 hijack leader, Mohammed Atta and Iraqi agents, never took place. Determined attempts by US and Czech officials to obtain evidence of such a meeting has come up empty.
* It is claimed that the UN inspectors have discovered aluminum tubes intended for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Physicists and nuclear engineers have stated unequivocally that the tubes are totally unsuited for such purposes. Nonetheless, the charge persists.
* In his UN "show and tell" speech, Colin Powell displayed photographs of trucks allegedly used as "mobile chemical weapons labs." The UN inspectors have examined the trucks, and found that they are used for food shipments. No such labs have been discovered.
* Powell also showed a photo of an "al Qaeda training camp and chemical weapons facility" in northern Iraq. What he didn't say was that the area was under the control of the Kurds, and thus readily accessible for inspections. And sure enough, when inspected, there was no evidence of a "training camp" or a "weapons lab" (which, due to residual chemicals, would be impossible to conceal).
* A "secret report" cited by Powell at the UN and by Tony Blair before Parliament, turned out to be a plagiarized student paper, written a decade earlier.
* In his recent (so-called) "press conference" Bush repeatedly said that we must fight Saddam to rid the world of terrorism such as the 9/11 attacks -- thus furthering the wide-spread belief that Saddam is directly involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center. The CIA, FBI and NSA have all reported to the White House that there is no evidence of such a collaboration. Still the myth is broadcast far and wide, and most Americans believe it. (More about this below).
* In that same "scripted" news conference, Bush also told of hidden microphones that were present during interviews of Iraqi scientists. No confirming evidence of this was presented or reported by the inspectors. We have also been told by Colin Powell that even as the Iraqi missiles are being destroyed, still more are being assembled in "secret" factories. Again, no evidence is presented -- not to the public, and not to the UN inspectors, whose job it is to locate and disclose such facilities.
* Documents "proving" the shipment of uranium from Niger to Iraq have proven to be forgeries.

In short, the Bush gang's "case for war" consists of a series of false leads, embarrassing concoctions and outright fraudulent "evidence."

In the meantime, the UN inspectors have failed to come up with any evidence of significant production or storage of weapons of mass destruction. To this, Donald Rumsfeld has famously replied, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Even less is "absence of evidence, evidence of presence" -- though some "chicken-hawks" have gone so far as to assert that the failure of the inspectors to find contraband weapons only "proves" the effectiveness of Saddam's deception. (Still worse, we are told: "Our justification for war is to stop Saddam's production of WMDs. You want evidence that Iraq has WMDs? Just wait till we take Iraq, then we'll show you plenty of evidence." The mind boggles at this circularity).

And so, with the Iraqi military decimated by the Gulf War and under constant surveillance through 1998 by the UN, and thereafter by US satellites, aircraft, and media monitors, we are about to embark upon the greatest military mismatch since the marines took Granada. And we are to launch this war with a "shock and awe" attack of 3000 cruise missiles -- ever careful, of course, that we keep "collateral damage" (i.e., dead Iraqi women and children) to a minimum. After we have leveled their cities and massacred their civilians, the survivors, we are assured, will greet their "liberators" with flowers and kisses.

We must do this, we are told, because Saddam Hussein, who has attacked no one in a dozen years, "threatens us." One is reminded of how World War II was launched on September 1, 1939, on the pretext that the Wehrmacht and the Lufftwaffe, at the time the mightiest military forces in history, were being "threatened" by the Polish biplanes and horse cavalry.

Saddam's alleged military "threat' is but one morsel in the revolving menu of justifications. Others include the alleged "alliance" between Saddam and al Qaeda, for which not a scrap of evidence has been produced. Another is our altruistic desire to "bring democracy" to Iraq and the benighted Middle Eastern states.

I submit that the qualifications of the United States as a "bestower of Democracy" is a bit tainted. Iran had an operating democracy, with an elected government and Prime Minister in the fifties -- a government that decided that Iran deserved a fair share of the oil revenues. Our answer (via the CIA) was to give them the Shah and his dreaded secret police, the Savak. The Chileans democratically elected Salvador Allende. But Henry Kissinger said that "we can't allow the Chileans to elect a Marxist." And so we "gave" them Agusto Pinochet. And so on, with Somoza in Nicaragua and Marcos in the Philippines. The most recent democracy to fall victim, of course, was that of the United States of America. Accordingly, with a record like this, an Iraqi with even a modest awareness of recent history might be forgiven if he is a bit skeptical about the next "bestowal" of democracy by the current government of the United States.

(Standard disclaimer: Saddam Hussein is without question an unmitigated disaster to Iraq and its people, who will be well-rid of him. Of this we can be certain. We can be much less certain that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and the lasting enmity of hundreds of millions of Arabs and Moslems from Morocco to Indonesia is an acceptable price for this removal).

In a poll just released, 54% of the US population has expressed a willingness to go to war with Iraq, even without the sanction of the Security Council. But other polls have indicated that over two-thirds of the population believes that Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers, and that Saddam Hussein was involved in that attack. Hell, if I believed that, I too would be among those calling for war with Iraq. But it is a simple and demonstrable fact that there were no Iraqis among the hijackers, and as we have noted, the CIA, the FBI and the NSA have, despite exhaustive investigations, all failed to come up with any evidence of a Saddam - al Qaeda connection.

Clearly, the big lie of "Saddam-sponsored terrorism" repeated ad nauseum by both the Bush supporters and its media flacks, has taken hold of the American public. That is truly shocking. But equally shocking is the fact that the American media has made no effort to disabuse the public of this misinformation. One can only conclude from this that the media no longer regards itself, and no longer functions, as a source of facts to the public and as a forum for the open discussion of urgent public issues. Instead, it serves to promulgate false information and propaganda at the behest of the Bush regime and the corporate interests that put him in power and that dictate his agenda.

But we knew that already, didn't we?

In the final and fourth part of his brilliant and unfortunately forgotten PBS series, "The Public Mind" (c. 1989), Bill Moyers studied "group-think," and examined in particular, four "case studies:" The Bay of Pigs fiasco, Watergate, the Viet Nam War, and the Challenger disaster. In all these cases, a focus by the "decision makers" upon a desired objective drew them all into a chorus of concurrence ("group think") which shut out discordant reality and blinded them to the possibility of unintended consequences and disastrous failure. When such thoughtless policies are also promulgated to the public through a subservient and uncritical media, skillful in the black arts of propaganda and public relations, the "group think" infects the public at large.

Only after the disaster, as the nation faces the grim task of rebuilding from the wreckage, do they ask, "how could this have happened?"

Consider the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. Ill-trained Cuban expatriates were landed , without air support, in a swamp on the northern shore of Cuba. The CIA assured the Kennedy team that, according to their "best intelligence," this landing would be a catalyst to a popular uprising that would overthrow Castro. (Precisely what the chicken hawks predict will happen in Baghdad). The day after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when the second thoughts crept in and the team looked back at the suppressed "realities," Kennedy asked, "how could I have been so stupid?"

In an interview with Moyers, psychologist Daniel Goleman replies: Kennedy's advisors let him "be stupid." "They wanted it to be true. They suppressed all their doubts. They censored themselves. They did all the things that would make the operative belief seem to be true."

Kennedy learned well from this bitter lesson. When the next, far greater emergency -- the Cuban Missile crisis -- arose, he took great care to have a multitude of opinions present, and always a "devil's advocate" to offer an answer to the question, "why not?" It was a far more painful, more unsettling, more drawn-out process that produced a much more subjectively uncertain conclusion. But such a process is far more likely to bring forth an wiser decision. As several historians have noted, by altering the mode of White House decision-making, the Bay of Pigs may have, ironically, saved the world from a thermonuclear disaster.

One can scarcely imagine George Bush undergoing such an ordeal of cognitive dissonance. He has a much simpler and more immediate mode of decision-making: his "gut." As he told Bob Woodward: "I can only just go by my instincts ... I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player."

Gawd help us all!

George Bush's "gut," fed by the far-right ideologues that surround him, has led the American public into a kind of "alternative universe," detached from the reality which we in fact inhabit. It is a universe in which there is no global warming and pollution has no harmful effects, a reality in which all social problems can be solved by the free market, and economic growth is best accomplished by starving social services and education, and giving still more money to the very wealthy. And, it is a universe in which one super-power can establish "hegemony" over all the nations of the earth and expropriate their resources, whereupon the peoples thereof will simply be grateful to that power for "establishing order," bringing "democracy," and vanquishing the "evil-doers." It is a universe comprehended by "gut instinct" unconfounded by science, practical experience, or even common sense; a universe without unintended consequences, or unfortunate side-effects.

It is, of course, a fantasyland -- not remotely like the world we inhabit. And we know that Bush's fantasy isn't reality -- or at least we can know this.

Once we free ourselves from Bush's fantasies, we still we have a large advantage over those who experienced the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, Viet Nam and the Challenger. They lived through their disasters. Ours, now directly before us, has not yet happened. And before it does, we can still reflect:

* Most of us remember Viet Nam and acknowledge it was a terrible mistake.
* We know that history refutes the American promise of "bringing democracy."
* We know "the Gulf of Tonkin incident" was a lie.
* We know that before the onset of the Gulf War, we were told lies about the incubator babies and the Iraqi troops reported to be assembling along the Saudi border.
* Today, we can, with a modest effort, identify the lies that we are now being fed.
* And we can, if we wish, learn from our mistakes.

The facts are "out there" for all to see, albeit they may have to be ferreted out from the remaining free media abroad, the few surviving independent voices at home, and of course, the internet.

The facts are out there, and yet public at large does not recognize that theirs is a view from Wonderland. The Bushevik regime does not want us to wake from our dogmatic slumbers, and the captive media is all to willing to oblige them. We are the corporate media's mushrooms: it is their task to keep us in the dark, and feed us BS.

Thus the American public is, by and large, captivated by a collective delusion, and no more aware of this than the faithful puritans of Salem, the "good Germans" who followed their leader, and the mass of loyal American citizens, determined to avenge the destroyer Maddox, "ruthlessly attacked" in the Bay of Tonkin.

We are drifting rudderless toward disaster. Time is running out.

Can we escape from the disaster that is immediately before us? The prospects are not good. But not to attempt this escape is the worst betrayal -- a betrayal of hope and a betrayal of the future.

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" (www.igc.org/gadfly) and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" (www.crisispapers.org).

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Obviously Oil
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, AlterNet
March 11, 2003
Viewed on March 12, 2003

Editor's Note: Although Dennis Kucinich was aggressively attacked by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen for suggesting that the preemptive strike on Iraq was based on oil, the Post refused to print the presidential candidate and Ohio Democrat's response. This was especially frustrating, since the Post editorial stance and balance of editorial page columns have been decidedly pro-war. You can tell the Post how you feel about this ommission at ombudsman@washpost.com.

Is President Bush's war in Iraq about oil? Of course it is. Sometimes, the obvious answer is the right one: Oil is a major factor in the President's march to war, just as oil is a major factor in every aspect of U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf.

Ask yourself:

What commodity accounts for 83 percent of total exports from the Persian Gulf? What is the U.S. protecting with our permanent deployment of about 25,000 military personnel, 6 fighter squadrons, 6 bomber squadrons, 13 air control and reconnaissance squadrons, one aircraft carrier battle group, and one amphibious ready group based at 11 military installations in the countries of the Persian Gulf? (Note, the disproportionate troop deployments in the Middle East aren't there to protect the people, who constitute only 2 percent of the world population.)

What was Iraq's number one export when the U.S. made an alliance with Saddam Hussein, sold him biological and chemical weapons agents, and then did not object when he gassed his own people?

For what major Iraqi resource has Saddam Hussein denied contracts with the largest U.S. and U.K. multinational companies? (Note, those companies are the #2 (ExxonMobil), #4 (BP-Amoco), #8 (Shell) and #14 (ChevronTexaco) largest companies in the world, and the Bush Administration has been known to listen when large energy corporations speak.)

For what Iraqi resource did French and Russian multinational companies receive lucrative contracts from Saddam Hussein? What valuable commodity does one reprehensible, megalomaniacal tyrant (Saddam Hussein) control that another reprehensible, megalomaniacal tyrant (Kim Chong-il) does not?

How do the White House and State Department plan to pay for a post-Saddam occupation and reconstruction?

The answer to all of these questions is oil, of course. Oil obviously drives U.S. policy in the Middle East. So who can doubt that this war in Iraq concerns oil?

Meanwhile, the justifications the Administration has made for this war can be rather easily dismissed. Contrary to Administration assertions, a war against Iraq will not be in self-defense: Iraq does not pose an imminent threat to the United States. It doesn't have the ability, nor has it ever had the ability, to shoot a missile or send a bomber to harm America. Iraq does not possess nuclear weapons. Furthermore, there is no credible evidence that Iraq had anything to do with the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

No credible link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda has been made. Iraq did not have anything to do with the anthrax-containing letters that killed several Americans.

Contrary to the Administration's portrayal of an Iraqi threat, Iraq is hardly uniquely threatening. Sixteen other countries in the world have or might have nuclear weapons, 25 countries have or might have chemical weapons, 19 other countries have or might have biological weapons, and 16 other countries have or might have missile systems. Yet the Bush Administration is not on the verge of invading them.

Contrary to their denials that this war has anything to do with oil, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle wanted to go to war in Iraq long before they became Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. In a 1998 letter they sent to then-President Clinton, they stated "it hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction ... a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will all be put at hazard... The only acceptable strategy is ... to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."

Does President Bush's war in Iraq concern Iraq's oil? Obviously.

Presidential candidate and Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is the ranking Democrat on the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations. Visit www.kucinich.us.

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US firms set to cash in on reconstruction of Iraq

Danny Penman and agencies
Tuesday March 11, 2003
The Guardian

The American government is on the verge of awarding construction contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild Iraq once Saddam Hussein is deposed.

Halliburton, one of the companies in the running for the highly profitable deals, was formerly headed by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney. Halliburton has already been awarded a lucrative contract to resurrect the Iraqi oilfields if there is a war.

Other companies have strong ties to the US administration, including the construction giant Bechtel, the Fluor Corporation, and the Louis Berger Group, which is involved in the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

Only US companies are on the shortlist of five. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) defended the narrow shortlist.

A spokeswoman said: "Because of the urgent circumstances and the unique nature of this work, USAID will undertake a limited selection process that expedites the review and selection of contractors for these projects."

The spokeswoman said that it was a policy of USAID to use US companies for projects funded by the American taxpayer. Non-US companies were free, through their governments, to organise their own business, she said.

The winning company would get about $900m (£563m) to repair Iraqi health services, ports, airports, schools and other educational institutions.

Sources at the companies said the invitation was unusual in that USAID did not ask them to set a price for defined services but rather asked them to say what they could do for $900m.

All five bidders have submitted their proposals or are preparing to do so after USAID "quietly" sent out a detailed request soliciting proposals from the likely bidders.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Iraq reconstruction plan will require contractors to fulfil various tasks, including reopening at least half of the "economically important roads and bridges" - about 1,500 miles of roadway within 18 months.

The contractors will also be asked to repair 15% of high-voltage electricity grid, renovate several thousand schools and deliver 550 emergency generators within two months.

Construction industry executives said the handful of firms are competing fiercely in part because they believe it could provide an inside track to postwar business opportunities. The most highly sought-after prizes are oil industry contracts.

The US government is believed to be wary of any backlash against an invasion and is preparing plans for a "hearts and minds" operation that will swing into place as soon as the country is occupied. The government is mindful of the long-term benefits of feeding hungry Iraqis, delivering clean water, and by paying teachers and health workers.

"It's a sensitive topic because we still haven't gone to war," said one industry executive. "But these companies are really in a position to win something out of this geopolitical situation."

It remains unclear whether Iraqis, Americans or an international consortium will manage the oil industry during an early post-conflict period.

Steven Schooner, a George Washington University law professor, said many billions of dollars are at stake. He estimated that $900m would barely last six months given the scope of the projects the administration has sketched out.

"The most sophisticated firms that come in first, and establish good will with the locals obviously will reap huge benefits down the road," said Mr Schooner.

"These are going to become brand names in Iraq. That's huge."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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