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	Poll: Majority questions Bush Administration Ethics in a Time of War and Scandal by AP / Bloomberg / TruthOut USA   November 12, 2005   Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter "Disturbed" by direction of U.S. (AP)   Former US President Jimmy Carter questioned the direction of the country and sharply criticized the Bush administration in a book tour stop here.   Everywhere you go, you hear, "What has happened to the United States of America? We thought you used to be the champion of human rights. We thought you used to protect the environment. We thought you used to believe in the separation of church and state," the Nobel Peace Prize winner said Friday at Unity Temple. "That"s not the case anymore."   Carter is promoting "Our Endangered Values: America"s Moral Crisis. It is his 20th book, but Carter says it"s his first political one.”I felt so disturbed and angry about this radical change in America that I have always loved and still love, he said.   Referring to his latest book"s title, Carter said the Bush administration is responsible for the country"s moral crisis. He railed against Bush"s pre-emptive war policy; the erosion of the church-state separation; a ballooning budget deficit; inadequate attention to the environment; and the use of torture against some prisoners. This administration has injected into the American political system a dramatic, unprecedented and profound change in the basic values of our national policy," Carter said.   November 11, 2005   Poll: Majority questions Bush Administration Ethics in a Time of War and Scandal, by Will Lester. (The Associated Press)   Most Americans say they are not impressed by the ethics and honesty of the Bush administration, already under scrutiny for its justifications for an unpopular war in Iraq and its role in the leak of a covert CIA officer"s identity.   Almost six in 10 - 57 percent - said they do not think the Bush administration has high ethical standards and the same portion says President Bush is not honest, an AP-Ipsos poll found. Just over four in 10 say the administration has high ethical standards and that Bush is honest. Whites, Southerners and evangelicals were most likely to believe Bush is honest.   Bush, who promised in the 2000 campaign to uphold "honor and integrity" in the White House, last week ordered White House workers, from presidential advisers to low-ranking aides, to attend ethics classes.   More than eight in 10, 82 percent, described Bush as "stubborn," with almost that many Republicans agreeing to that description. That stubborn streak has served Bush well at times, but now he is being encouraged to shake up his staff and change the direction of White House policies.   Concern about the administration"s ethics has been fueled by the controversy over flawed intelligence leading up to the Iraq war and the recent indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney"s top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for his role in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame"s name.   That loss of trust complicates Bush"s efforts to rebuild his standing with the public. His job approval rating remains at his all-time low in the AP-Ipsos poll of 37 percent.   "Honesty is a huge issue because even people who disagreed with his policies respected his integrity," said Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist from the University of Texas. The mandatory White House lectures on ethics for its employees came after the Libby indictment, and some people say they aren"t impressed. "It"s like shutting the barn door after the horse escaped," said John Morrison, a Democrat who lives near Scranton, Pa.   "This week"s elections were just a preview of what"s going to happen," he said, referring to Tuesday"s New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, both won by Democrats. "People are just fed up."   Only 42 percent in the new poll said they approve of Bush"s handling of foreign policy and terrorism, his lowest rating yet in an area that has long been his strongest issue. The war in Iraq is at the core of the public"s unrest, polling found. In an AP-Ipsos poll in early October, almost six in 10 disapproved of the way Bush was doing his job, and Iraq was a dominant factor..   11 November 2005   Presient Bush disputes charges of intelligence misuse in war, by Richard Keil. (Bloomberg)   US President George W. Bush, battling a long slide in the polls and growing public doubts about the war in Iraq, fired back at Democratic critics who say he misused pre-war intelligence to justify the March 2003 invasion.   "Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," Bush said in a Veterans Day speech. "These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community"s judgment related to Iraq"s weapons programs," he said.   Bush went on the offensive after weeks of charges by Democrats including Senators John Rockefeller of West Virginia and John Kerry of Massachusetts that the White House overstated or manipulated intelligence. Kerry today was quick to respond to Bush. "This administration misled a nation into war by cherry-picking intelligence and stretching the truth beyond recognition," he said in a statement. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the speech was little more than "political attacks as his own political fortunes and credibility diminish."   Questions about the quality of US intelligence and whether Mr Bush misled the nation on the threat posed by the Iraqi dictator have arisen because none of the president"s three main justifications for the war turned out to be true.   United Nations weapons inspectors found no evidence that Hussein possessed or was trying to obtain chemical or biological weapons, and the bipartisan Sept. 11 Commission concluded there were no prewar links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Investigators also found no evidence that Hussein was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program.   Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement that Bush was using the Veterans Day speech "as a campaign-like attempt to rebuild his own credibility by tearing down those who seek the truth about the clear manipulation of intelligence" that led to war.   10 November 2005   The President should be held Accountable, by Senator Ted Kennedy.   Earlier this week, several of our Republican colleagues came to the Senate floor and attempted to blame individual Democratic Senators for their errors in judgment about the war in Iraq.   It was little more than a devious attempt to obscure the facts and take the focus off the real reason we went to war in Iraq. 150,000 American troops are bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq because the Bush Administration misrepresented and distorted the intelligence to justify a war that America never should have fought.   As we know all too well, Iraq was not an imminent threat. It had no nuclear weapons. It had no persuasive links to al Qaeda, no connection to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.   But the President wrongly and repeatedly insisted that it was too dangerous to ignore the weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, and his ties to al Qaeda.   In his march to war, President Bush exaggerated the threat to the American people. It was not subtle. It was not nuanced. It was pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam"s ability to provide nuclear weapons to al Qaeda justified immediate war.   Administration officials suggested the threat from Iraq was imminent, and went to great lengths to convince the American people that it was.   At a roundtable discussion with European journalists last month, Secretary Rumsfeld deviously insisted: "I never said imminent threat."   In fact, Secretary Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee on September 18, 2002, "... Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain."   In May 2003, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked whether we went to war "because we said WMD were a direct and imminent threat to the United States." Fleischer responded, "Absolutely."   What else could National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have been suggesting, other than an imminent threat - an extremely imminent threat - when she said on September 8, 2002, "We don"t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."   President Bush himself may not have used the word "imminent," but he carefully chose strong and loaded words about the nature of the threat - words that the intelligence community never used - to persuade and prepare the nation to go to war against Iraq.   n the Rose Garden on October 2, 2002, as Congress was preparing to vote on authorizing the war, the President said the Iraqi regime "is a threat of unique urgency."   In a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, President Bush Specifically invoked the danger of nuclear devastation: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."   At an appearance in New Mexico on October 28, 2002, after Congress had voted to authorize war, and a week before the election, President Bush said Iraq is a "real and dangerous threat."   At a NATO summit on November 20, 2002, President Bush said Iraq posed a "unique and urgent threat." In Fort Hood, Texas on January 3, 2003, President Bush called the Iraqi regime a "grave threat."   Nuclear weapons. Mushroom cloud. Unique and urgent threat. Real and dangerous threat. Grave threat. These words were the Administration"s rallying cry for war. But they were not the words of the intelligence community, which never suggested that the threat from Saddam was imminent, or immediate, or urgent.   It was Vice President Cheney who first laid out the trumped up argument for war with Iraq to an unsuspecting public. In a speech on August 26, 2002, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he asserted: "... We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons…Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." As we now know, the intelligence community was far from certain. Yet the Vice President had been convinced.   On September 8, 2002, he was even more emphatic about Saddam. He said, "[We] do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon." The intelligence community was deeply divided about the aluminum tubes, but Vice President Cheney was absolutely certain.   One month later, on the eve of the watershed vote by Congress to authorize the war, President Bush said it even more vividly. He said, "Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes ... which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed ... Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists."   In fact, as we now know, the intelligence community was far from convinced of any such threat. The Administration attempted to conceal that fact by classifying the information and the dissents within the intelligence community until after the war, even while making dramatic and excessive public statements about the immediacy of the danger.   In October 2002, the intelligence agencies jointly issued a National Intelligence Estimate stating that "most agencies" believed that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program after inspectors left in 1998, and that, if left unchecked, Iraq "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."   The State Department"s intelligence bureau, however, said the "available evidence" was inadequate to support that judgment. It refused to predict when "Iraq could acquire a nuclear device or weapon."   About the claims of purchases of nuclear material from Africa, the State Department"s intelligence bureau said that claims of Iraq seeking to purchase nuclear material from Africa were "highly dubious." The CIA sent two memorandums to the White House stressing strong doubts about those claims.   But the following January, in 2003, the President included the claims about Africa in his State of the Union Address, and conspicuously cited the British government as the source of that intelligence.   Information about nuclear weapons was not the only intelligence distorted by the Administration. On the question of whether Iraq was pursuing a chemical weapons program, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in September 2002 that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has - or will - establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities."   That same month, however, Secretary Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Saddam has chemical weapons stockpiles.   He said, "We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction," that Saddam "has amassed large clandestine stocks of chemical weapons." He said that "he has stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons," and that Iraq has "active chemical, biological and nuclear programs." He was wrong on all counts.   Yet the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate actually quantified the size of the stockpiles, stating that "although we have little specific information on Iraq"s CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons and possibly as much as 500 metric tons of CW agents - much of it added in the last year." In his address to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went further, calling the 100 to 500 metric ton stockpile a "conservative estimate."   Secretary Rumsfeld made an even more explicit assertion in his interview on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on March 30, 2003. When asked about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he said, "We know where they are. They"re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."   The Administration"s case for war based on the linkage between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda was just as misguided.   Significantly here as well, the Intelligence Estimate did not find a cooperative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. On the contrary, it stated only that such a relationship might develop in the future if Saddam was "sufficiently desperate" - in other words, if America went to war. But the estimate placed "low confidence" that, even in desperation, Saddam would give weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda.   A year before the war began, senior al Qaeda leaders themselves had rejected a link with Saddam. The New York Times reported last June that a top al Qaeda planner and recruiter captured in March 2002 told his questioners last year that "the idea of working with Mr. Hussein"s government had been discussed among al Qaeda leaders, but Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals." According to the Times, an al Qaeda chief of operations had also told interrogators that it did not work with Saddam.   Mel Goodman, a CIA analyst for 20 years, put it bluntly: "Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were enemies. Bin Laden considered and said that Saddam was the socialist infidel. These were very different kinds of individuals competing for power in their own way and Saddam Hussein made very sure that al Qaeda couldn"t function in Iraq."   In February 2003, investigators at the FBI told the New York Times they were baffled by the Administration"s insistence on a solid link between al Qaeda and Iraq. One investigator said: "We"ve been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don"t think it"s there."   But President Bush was not deterred. He was relentless in playing to America"s fears after the devastating tragedy of 9/11. He drew a clear link - and drew it repeatedly - between al Qaeda and Saddam.   On September 25, 2002, at the White House, President Bush flatly declared: "You can"t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."   In his State of the Union Address in January 2003, President Bush said, "Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda," and that he could provide "lethal viruses" to a "shadowy terrorist network." Two weeks later, in his Saturday radio address to the nation, a month before the war began, President Bush described the ties in detail, saying, "Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks..."   He said: "Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document-forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. An al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990s for help in acquiring poisons and gases. We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad."   Who gave the President this information? The NIE? Scooter Libby? Chalabi?   In fact, there was no operational link and no clear and persuasive pattern of ties between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda. A 9/11 Commission Staff Statement in June of 2004, put it plainly: "Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." The 9/11 Commission Report stated clearly that there was no "operational" connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. That fact should have been abundantly clear to the President. Iraq and al Qaeda had diametrically opposing views of the world.   The Pentagon"s favorite Iraqi dissident, Ahmed Chalabi, is actually proud of what happened. "We are heroes in error," Chalabi said in February 2004. "As far as we"re concerned, we"ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush Administration is looking for a scapegoat. We"re ready to fall on our swords, if he wants."   What was said before does matter. The President"s words matter. The Vice President"s words matter. So do those of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and other high officials in the Administration. And they did not square with the facts.   The Intelligence Committee agreed to investigate the clear discrepancies, and it"s important that they get to the bottom of this, and find out how and why President Bush took America to war in Iraq. Americans are dying. Already more than 2000 have been killed, and more than 15,000 have been wounded.   The American people deserve the truth. It"s time for the President to stop passing the buck and for him to be held accountable.
	The fallout from Amman by OpenDemocracy Middle East   16 - 11 - 2005   "The fallout from Amman", by James Howarth. (openDemocracy)   The 9 November bombs in Amman that slaughtered fifty-seven people in three hotels were unprecedented for two reasons: they were the first ever suicide attacks in Jordan, and the first such attacks anywhere perpetrated by a married couple. This revelation, apparently confirmed by Sajida al-Rishawi"s confession on Jordanian television, has added a macabre new twist in the bloodstrewn trail of events since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It comes as no surprise to hear that three of her brothers, one of whom was allegedly a confidant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been killed in the fighting there.   The attacks have posed a brutal challenge to the country"s status as a peaceful haven wedged between conflict zones. Now certified as the work of the nascent but deadly al-Qaida in Iraq organisation, they raise critical questions over the relationship between moderate Jordan and chaotic Iraq. All four bombers were from the neighbouring Anbar province in western Iraq where US troops have been sucked into a grisly struggle against insurgents. Tensions are simmering here in Amman, where the large community of Iraqi exiles, the "new Palestinians", remains nervous of a backlash, despite assurances that they are welcome. Their anxiety is mixed with genuine sorrow and on all sides there is a resolve that nothing should change in the wake of the blasts.   It is clearly worrying that the terror dragon just goes on growing new heads. But the strong public reaction in Jordan denouncing the attacks, and Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi in particular, has given observers some cause for cautious optimism amidst the carnage. For days, the city has been filled with demonstrators and processions of horn-blaring cars expressing both disgust at the terrorists and support for the Hashemite administration. Jordanian society stands united in rejecting the spread of terror over its borders. This is a far cry from the Pew survey in July 2005 which found that 57% of Jordanians deemed suicide bombings and other violent actions justifiable in the defence of Islam.   Prince Hassan, the uncle of King Abdullah II and a respected international voice, told CNN outside the Radisson SAS Hotel where a wedding party was blown to pieces that Jordan must continue along its path of progressive social reform. The strategy, given that "hard security" can never be entirely watertight, would be based on a long-term "soft security" approach involving economic inclusion and good governance.   The crisis of al-Qaida   At one level the Amman attacks, like the London bombs and the French riots, represent a shocking expression of dissent. But the similarity ends there. From a regional perspective and in light of the Iraq war, they come at the fragmented end of over four decades of an Islamist ideology that awoke in the 1960s when the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb - traumatised by a two-year working trip to mid-west America as well as imprisonment and torture under Gamal Abdel Nasser - became the leading theorist for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood had its origins in Sufism, but against the backdrop of modern social and political malaise, adapted to form a political movement inspired by both leftist and rightist European ideas, based a supposedly catch-all ideology "Islam is the solution" that aimed for a full-scale takeover of the state.   The Islamist movement, having failed to achieve its principal objective, resorted to ever-more desperate measures, but only succeeded in alienating the peaceful, law-abiding Egyptian populace. One of its main protagonists, Ayman al-Zawahiri, went on to become the main ideologue for al-Qaida during its Sudan and Afghanistan days. Now in its Iraqi incarnation, and aiming to spread terror across the region from its new recruitment and training ground there, it seems this time to have shot itself in the foot. Whatever armchair support existed in Jordan has undeniably decreased.   Al-Qaida, lacking any positive social or political programme, contains the seeds of its own destruction. In its current guise under al-Zarqawi, the movement cannot set its sights on much more than anarchist criminality. They may be able to make life almost impossible for the US army in Iraq, but they lack the political capacity to win the war outright.   The logic behind the Amman attacks was no doubt to open up an unsettling rift between the monarchy and a population who were overwhelmingly against the Iraq war. If anything, it has achieved the opposite, and the alienation of whatever support may have existed in Jordan may well prove to be another step in the inevitable decay of radical Islamism. A relative newcomer to al-Qaida, al-Zarqawi clearly lacks not only Qutb"s intellectual erudition and political vision but also bin Laden’s rhetorical and media skills. His naivety and rashness are symptomatic of the decline. What was once considered the definitive global terror network may be splintering into a haze of localised and practically unconnected outbursts.   As with historical precedents, however, Islamist movements generally are bifurcating between those who wish to continue a futile violent struggle and those who may prove amenable to negotiation and adaptation. The fact that behind the scenes talks are being conducted with the likes of Hamas and Hizbollah reveals a western strategy of trying to co-opt political Islam into a compromise with democratic processes and strengthen their more moderate wings, encouraging these hardline organisations to chart a similar route to the IRA and officially renounce violence.   This may lead to a much sought-after reconciliation between the demand for democracy in the region and the resurgence of Islamic sentiment, regardless of the potential pitfall of legitimising political violence. That Jordan"s own Islamists have at certain times been allowed reasonable political space to operate may be one reason why the country has escaped the violence until now.   Jordan"s path   It may have seemed only a matter of time before violence of this nature hit a Jordan stuck between a lawless Iraq, an overheated Israel-Palestine, a hardline Saudi Arabia and a hesitant Syria. But the hope in Amman is that the heartening show of solidarity here from all sections of society might prove to be a turning-point. Could it spur a long-awaited popular regional backlash against the ideas of bin Laden and al-Zarqawi?   As his regular statements ground to a halt nearly a year ago, bin Laden may well be dead. The handing over of his mantle to a protégé devoid of any real strategy can be seen as a sign both of strength and weakness. The movement will continue for now, but could be fatally undermining itself in the process. Terror in the name of Islam may actually now start to go the way of all the many other movements that have tried to change the world through violence, such as the 19th century anarchists and far-left groups like the Red Brigades in Italy. Iraq and localised conflicts notwithstanding, global jihadism is petrifying intellectually and, if it continues its increasingly desperate and miscalculated strikes, will lose the battle for hearts and minds.   One way for Arab governments and intellectuals to accelerate this process would be to fight back the extremists on two levels: the practical and the theological. Jordan itself, most recently at the Amman conference in July 2005, when 170 Muslim scholars from forty countries came to discuss "the reality of Islam and its role in contemporary society", has pioneered the argument that radical Islamism involves a perverted understanding of the faith. As for external powers, there is undoubtedly a need to better understand and define the basic parameters of the opponent before any meaningful strategy can be formulated. Senior international security analysts readily admit there is a long way to go towards developing a conceptual apparatus to deal with the challenge.   Moreover, the internal weakness of jihadist movements does not necessarily make them any less dangerous. This is especially so as long as the critical needs of the region remain to be fulfilled:   * for broader, more transparent political participation   * greater economic inclusion and social mobility   * peaceful, effective evolution beyond the simple choice of autocracy vs theocracy   As long as these issues are unresolved, the middle east will contain the potential for violent unrest.
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