UK Iraq inquiry: Government ‘intentionally and substantially’ exaggerated WMD threat

Tony Blair's government 'intentionally and substantially' exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein ahead of the war in Iraq, a former senior British diplomat has claimed.

Carne Ross, who was First Secretary responsible for the Middle East at the United Nations, accused the former government of issuing “lies” to the public about the dictator's capacity to launch weapons of mass destruction.

He said that it was a "disgrace" that ministers failed to exhaust all peaceful options before going to war against Iraq.

"There was no deliberate discussion of available alternatives to military action in advance of the 2003 invasion," Mr Ross added.

"There is no record of that discussion, no official has referred to it, no minister has talked about it, and that seems to me to be a very egregious absence in this history - that at some point a Government before going to war should stop and ask itself, 'are there available alternatives?"'

Giving evidence before the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, Mr Ross said that “nuanced” intelligence about the threat from Iraq was “massaged” into "more robust and terrifying" messages about Saddam's supposed WMD.

Mr Carne, who served at the UN between 1997 and 2002, claimed that the British and United States governments were fully aware that there was no “substantial threat” from Iraq ahead of the war.

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US to access Europeans' bank data in new deal

Euro MPs have approved a new deal to allow US anti-terror investigators to access Europeans' bank data.

The vote followed tough negotiations with US authorities after a previous agreement was blocked by the European Parliament in February.

EU negotiators say the new deal gives EU officials authority to monitor the US investigators' actions.

The deal gives the US access to bulk data from Swift, a firm that handles millions of bank transactions daily.

Washington says the Swift deal is crucial to fighting terrorism, as part of the US Terrorist Financing Tracking Programme (TFTP) set up after the September 2001 attacks on the US.

Privacy concerns

Top US officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, lobbied the EU over the data transfer deal.

The agreement was passed with 484 MEPs in favour and 109 against. There were 12 abstentions.

In February Euro MPs rejected an earlier draft agreement, saying the privacy safeguards were inadequate.

The fact that the US was secretly accessing Swift bank data did not come to light until 2006.

Under the new deal, the EU police agency Europol will assess whether specific data requests are necessary for the fight against terrorism before the data is sent to the US, the European Commission says.

The Commission will appoint EU officials to monitor the US investigators' actions.

There is also a requirement that bulk data can never be sent to third countries.

EU citizens who believe their data has been misused will have the right to legal action in the US courts.

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Ken Kesey's Mexico - On the Lam With Ken Kesey

... I said I was doing nothing, but I'm actually trying to summon somebody: Ken Kesey, novelist, psychedelic prophet, leader of the Merry Pranksters, hero of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” It was here, on this beach, that he took to the waves as I did, back in 1966. He was a hunted man then, on the run from the F.B.I. and Mexican federales, but even he, a man of great aplomb, found time for thoughtful bobbing.

“He's working on his wave theory. This morning for breakfast he brewed and drank enough weed to put a horse in orbit. He's been out there for three hours with his eyes closed ... imagining that he's a piece of kelp or a jellyfish.”

The observer is Mountain Girl, one of several Merry Pranksters who followed Kesey to Manzanillo. She watches from the beach while pondering his oracular musings.

“It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world ... by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.”

Manzanillo now is not nearly as metaphysical as that account, from a trippy Kesey volume called “Over the Border,” would suggest. It's a tourist town, a cruise destination, one gem in the resort strand of Mexico's Pacific coast, cousin to Acapulco, Ixtapa, Puerto Vallarta. It's a city of strip malls and cineplexes, dive shops and all-inclusive resorts where the help wears uniforms.

But Manzanillo then was jungle outpost, a nowhere port town on a two-lane road from Guadalajara. It was a place where a gringo — even a famous novelist gringo accompanied by family and friends, an abundant supply of drugs and an International Harvester school bus covered in Day-Glo paint and blaring music from a sophisticated loudspeaker system — could reasonably expect to hide out for a while.

You probably know most of the back story. Kesey is a promising writer at Stanford, publishes “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” his first novel, in 1962, and a huge deal is made of it. A circle forms in Palo Alto, bound by Kesey's charisma and brightened by psychoactive chemicals and Day-Glo paint. It moves to the woods of La Honda, Calif., and roams the country in an old school bus. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters stage a journey into life, art, rock-and-roll and experimental drug use that attracts hangers-on, Hell's Angels, Tom Wolfe and, inevitably, cops.

Kesey is busted for marijuana possession once, twice. Now he faces real time: a bad trip he does not want to take. He parks a truck on a coastal bluff, writes a fake suicide note — Ocean, Ocean, I'll beat you in the end — then slips into Mexico in a car trunk. ...

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America’s Secret Prisons

By Niamh Marnell

Communications Management Units (CMUs), nicknamed “Little Gitmo” by the inmates for the resemblance to the Guantanamo Bay prison, are coming under criticism for their controversial policies, constitutionality, and secrecy. Prisoners assigned to these units cover a broad interpretation of the “War on Terror,” from Muslim men thought to have extreme leanings to radical environmental and animal rights activists. 

Opened under the Bush administration, CMUs are designed to severely restrict prisoner communication for inmates. Under the proposed  new rules, which are even more restrictive than those currently in place, prisoners would be limited in communication to: one three-page, double sided letter per week to one recipient; one 15-minute phone call per month to immediate family only; and a single one-hour visit per month with immediate family only which must be non-contact in nature.

Secret Prisons Seek Approval

The American Civil Liberties Union  (ACLU) and the ACLU of Indiana filed a legal complaint June 18, 2009, challenging the secret creation of the housing units within federal prisons in which prisoners are severely isolated from the outside world. The ACLU says that the housing units are intended for prisoners the government labels as terrorists and that their creation violated federal law which requires a period of public comment. A staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project, David Shapiro, said, “The government created CMUs without any opportunity for public comment or oversight in an effort to skirt obligations of accountability and transparency.”

The two CMUs, one at Terre Haute, Indiana, and the other at Marion, Illinois, opened in 2006 and 2007 without any public notice. After a series of legal complaints were filed against the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for creating the prisons outside of the required channels and for violating the constitutional rights of inmates, the BOP opened a period of public comment earlier this year, which just recently closed.

On June 2, 2010, the ACLU submitted their comments to the BOP.  Others also submitted comments, including the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), other civil rights and liberties groups, CMU prisoners, family members and friends, legal organizations, former correctional officials, environmental organizations, psychologists, and more.

No Due Process

One of the major complaints voiced in the public comments was the lack of due process at the CMUs. Prisoners are routinely kept ignorant of why they were moved to the CMU or what evidence, if any, was used in the decision to move them. There is also no prison structure in place through which they can challenge their placement at the CMU nor is there any review process through which they could earn their way out.

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Hawks sharpen claws for Iran strike

"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," explained then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card in September 2002, in answer to queries about why the administration of George W Bush had not launched its campaign to rally public opinion behind invading Iraq earlier in the summer.

And while it's only July - and less than a month after the United Nations, the European Union and the US Congress approved new economic sanctions against Iran - a familiar clutch of Iraq war hawks appear to be preparing the ground for a major new campaign to rally public opinion behind military action against the Islamic Republic.

Barring an unexpected breakthrough on the diplomatic front, that campaign, like the one eight years ago, is likely to move into high gear this autumn, beginning shortly after the Labor Day holiday on September 6, that marks the end of the summer vacation.

By the following week, the November mid-term election campaign will be in full swing, and Republican candidates are expected to make the charge that Democrats and President Barack Obama are "soft on Iran" their top foreign policy issue. In any event, veterans of the Bush administration's pre-Iraq invasion propaganda offensive are clearly mobilizing their arguments for a similar effort on Iran, even suggesting that the timetable between campaign launch and possible military action - a mere six months in Iraq's case - could be appropriate.

"By the first quarter of 2011, we will know whether sanctions are proving effective," wrote Bush's former national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Israeli Brigadier General Michael Herzog in a paper published this month by the Washington Institute for Near Policy (WINEP), a think-tank closely tied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

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