BOZO : This one is a real pearl !!! Just for you... Watching how you can stand to make such an ass out of yourself for your Fuhrer is truly exhilarating. Please ! Don't leave the thread now, we're getting to the best part of your circus act.... Enjoy the reading....
MOST DANGEROUS PRESIDENCY
Weapons of Mass Distraction
Vanity Fair | March 1999
PART I
THIS IS AN ESSAY ABOUT CANINES. It concerns, first, the President of the United States and commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, whose character was once memorably caught by a commentator in his native Arkansas who called him "a hard dog to keep on the porch." It concerns, second, the dog or dogs which did not bark in the nighttime. (In the Sherlock Holmes tale Silver Blaze, the failure of such a beast to give tongue—you should pardon the expression—was the giveaway that exposed his master as the intruder.) And it concerns, third, the most famous dog of 1998: the dog that was wagged by its own tail. Finally, it concerns the dogs of war, and the circumstances of their unleashing.
Not once but three times last year, Bill Clinton ordered the use of cruise missiles against remote and unpopular countries. On each occasion, the dispatch of the missiles coincided with bad moments in the calendar of his long and unsuccessful struggle to avoid impeachment. Just before the Lewinsky affair became public in January 1998, there was a New York prescreening party for Barry Levinson's movie Wag the Dog, written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet. By depicting a phony president starting a phony war in order to distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake, this film became the political and celluloid equivalent of a Clintonian roman à clef. Thrown by Jane Rosenthal and Robert DeNiro, whose Tribeca Productions produced the movie, the party featured Dick Morris and an especially pleased and excited Richard Butler, who was described by an eyewitness as "glistening." Mr. Morris is Mr. Clinton's fabled and unscrupulous adviser on matters of public opinion. Mr. Butler is the supervisor of United Nations efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein's despotism. In February 1998, faced with a threatened bombing attack that never came, Iraqi state TV prophylactically played a pirated copy of Wag the Dog in prime time. By Christmastime 1998, Washington police officers were giving the shove to demonstrators outside the White House who protested the December 16-19 bombing of Iraq with chants of "Killing children's what they teach—that's the crime they should impeach" and a "No blood for blow jobs" placard.
Is it possible—is it even thinkable—that these factors are in any way related? "In order that he might rob a neighbor whom he had promised to defend," wrote Macaulay in, 1846 of Frederick the Great, "black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America." Did, then, a dirtied blue dress from the Gap cause widows and orphans to set up grieving howls in the passes of Afghanistan, the outer precincts of Khartoum, and the wastes of Mesopotamia? Is there only a Hollywood link between Clinton's carnality and Clinton's carnage? Was our culture hit by weapons of mass distraction? Let us begin with the best-studied case, which is Khartoum.
On August 20, 1998, the night of Monica Lewinsky's return to the grand jury and just three days after his dismal and self-pitying non-apology had "bombed" on prime-time TV, Clinton personally ordered missile strikes against the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Co. on the outskirts of Sudan's capital city. The Clinton Administration made three allegations about the El Shifa plant:
That it did not make, as it claimed, medicines and veterinary products.
That it did use the chemical EMPTA (Oethyl methylphosphonothioic acid), which is a "precursor," or building block, in the manufacture of VX nerve gas.
That it was financed by Osama bin Laden, the sinister and fanatical Saudi entrepreneur wanted in connection with lethal attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa—or by his shadowy business empire.
These three claims evaporated with astonishing speed. It was conceded within days, by Defense Secretary William Cohen, that the factory did make medicines, vials of which were filmed as they lay in the rubble. It was further conceded that there was no "direct" financial connection between the plant and bin Laden's holdings. Later came the humbling admission that a local CIA informer in Sudan had been fired for the fabrication of evidence. Later still came the even more humbling refusal to produce the "soil sample," taken from outside the factory, which the Clinton Administration claimed contained traces Of EMPTA. In the end, the United States was placed in the agonizing position, at the United Nations, of opposing a call for on-site inspection that had been put forward by the Sudanese.
Bad enough, you might think. But this was only the beginning. The British engineer who was technical manager at the time of El Shifa's construction, Mr. Tom Carnaffin, came forward to say that it contained no space for clandestine procedures or experiments. The German ambassador to Khartoum, Werner Daum, sent a report to Bonn saying that he was familiar with the factory—often used as a showcase for foreign visitors—and that it could not be adapted for lethal purposes. R. J. P. Williams, professor emeritus at Oxford University, who has been called the grandfather of bio-inorganic chemistry, told me that even if the soil sample could be produced it would prove nothing. EMPTA can be used to make nerve gas, just as fertilizer can be used to make explosives, but it is also employed in compounds for dealing with agricultural pests. " ‘Trace elements in adjacent soil are of no use,' " Williams said. "We must be told where the compound was found, and in what quantity it is known to have been produced. Either the Clinton Administration has something to hide or for some reason is withholding the evidence." It was a rout.
Seeking to reassure people, Clinton made a husky speech on Martha's Vineyard eight days after the attack. He looked the audience in the eye and spoke as follows: "I was here on this island up till 2:30 in the morning, trying to make absolutely sure that at that chemical plant there was no night shift. I believed I had to take the action I did, but I didn't want some person who was a nobody to me—but who may have a family to feed and a life to live and probably had no earthly idea what else was going on there—to die the needlessly"
At the time, I thought it odd that such a great statesman and general could persuade himself, and attempt to persuade others, that the more deadly the factory, the smaller the chance of its having a night watchman. Silly me. I had forgotten the scene in Rob Reiner's movie The American President where a widower Fast Citizen played by Michael Douglas has a manly affair with a woman lobbyist of his own age played by Annette Bening. While trying to impress us with his combination of determination and compassion, this character says, "Somewhere in Libya right now, a janitor is working the night shift at Libyan intelligence headquarters. And he's going about doing his job because he has no idea that in about an hour he's going to die in a massive explosion."
In the event, only one person was killed in the rocketing of Sudan. But many more have died, and will die, because an impoverished country has lost its chief source of medicines and pesticides.
The rout continues. In fact, it becomes a shambles. Let us suppose that everything the Administration alleged about El Shifa was—instead of embarrassingly untrue—absolutely verifiable. The Sudanese regime has diplomatic relations with Washington. Why not give it a warning or notice of, say, one day to open the plant to inspection? A factory making deadly gas cannot be folded like a tent and stealthily moved away. Such a demand, made publicly, would give pause to any regime that sheltered Mr. bin Laden or his assets. (Of course, his best-known holdings have been in Saudi Arabia, but a surprise Clintonian cruise-missile attack on that country, with the princes finding out the news only when they fiddle with the remote and get CNN, seems improbable, to say the least.) It is this question which has led me to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the edge of the Beltway—the non-Monica Ritz-Carlton located within brunching distance of Langley, Virginia—there to meet with Milt Bearden.
Mr. Bearden is one of the Central Intelligence Agency's most decorated ex-officers, having retired in 1994 without any stain from assassination plots, black-bag jobs, or the like. During his long service, he was chief of station in Sudan, where he arranged the famous airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. He also directed the CIA effort in Afghanistan. (His excellent new thriller, The Black Tulip, carries a 1991 photograph of him standing at the Russian end of the Friendship Bridge, across which the Red Army had marched in defeat.) Nobody knows clandestine Sudan and clandestine Afghanistan in the way he does. We speak on background, but after some fine-tuning he agrees to be quoted in exactly these words: "Having spent 30 years in the CIA, being familiar with soil and environmental sampling across a number of countries, I cannot imagine a single sample, collected by third-country nationals and especially by third-country nationals whose country has a common border, serving as a pretext for an act of war against a sovereign state with which we have both diplomatic relations and functioning back channels."
This bald statement contains a lot of toxic material. The local "agents" who collected that discredited soil sample were almost certainly Egyptians, who have a Nilotic interest in keeping Sudan off-balance because, as Bearden pungently says, "their river runs through it." Moreover, when the United States wanted Mr. bin Laden to leave the territory of Sudan, Washington contacted Khartoum and requested his deportation, which followed immediately. (He went to Afghanistan.) When the French government learned that Carlos "the Jackal" was lurking in Sudan, they requested and got his extradition. Business can be done with the Sudanese regime. What, then, was the hurry last August 20? No threat, no demand, no diplomatic d'emarche . . . just a flight of cruise missiles hitting the wrong target. Take away every exploded hypothesis, says Sherlock Holmes—this time in The Adventures of the Beryl Coronet—and the one you are left with, however unlikely, will be true. Take away all the exploded claims about Sudan, and the question "What was the hurry?" practically answers itself.
Can the implication—of lawless and capricious presidential violence—be taken any further? Oh yes, amazingly enough, it can. On more than one occasion, I have argued the case across Washington dinner tables with Philip Bobbitt of the National Security Council. He's a nephew of LBJ's, and he tries to trump me by saying that the US. does possess evidence of nerve-gas production at El Shifa and "human and signals intelligence" about a bin Laden connection to the Sudanese. But this evidence cannot be disclosed without endangering "sources and methods" and the lives of agents.
Bearden has forgotten more about "sources and methods" than most people will ever know, and snorts when I mention this objection. "We don't like to reveal sources and methods, true enough. But we always do so if we have to, or if we are challenged. To justify bombing [Colonel Qaddafi] in 1986, Reagan released the cables we intercepted between Tripoli and the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin. Same with Bush and Iraq. Do you imagine that the current administration is sitting on evidence that would prove it right? It's the dogs that don't bark that you have to listen to." And so my canine theme resumes.
In a slightly noticed article in The New Yorker of October 12, 1998, (almost the only essay in that journal in the course of the entire twelve months which was not a strenuous, knee-padded defense of the President), Seymour Hersh revealed that the four service chiefs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been deliberately kept in the dark about the Sudan and Afghanistan bombings because if they had been consulted they would have argued against them. He further disclosed that Louis Freeh, head of the FBI , was kept out of the loop. Mr. Freeh, who has clashed with Clinton and with Attorney General Janet Reno over the issue of a special prosecutor for campaign finance, was not delighted to hear of the raids. For one thing, he and many of his agents were already in the field in east Africa, somewhat exposed as to their own security, and were in the course of securing important arrests. They would have greatly appreciated what they did not in fact get: adequate warning of a strike that would enrage many neighboring societies and governments. It's now possible to extend the list of senior intelligence personnel who disapproved both of the bombings and of their timing. At the CIA, I gather, both Jack Downing, the deputy director for operations and the chief for the Africa Division, told colleagues in private that they were opposed. It is customarily very hard to get intelligence professionals to murmur dissent about an operation that involves American credibility. However, it is also quite rare for a cruise-missile strike to occur on an apparent whim, against an essentially powerless country, at a time when presidential credibility is a foremost thought in people's minds.
The Afghanistan attack, which took place on the same night as the Sudan fiasco, is more easily disposed of. In that instance, the Clinton Administration announced that Osama bin Laden and his viciously bearded associates were all meeting in one spot, and that there was only one "window" through which to hit them. This claim is unfalsifiable to the same extent that it is unprovable. Grant that, on the run after the embassy bombings, bin Laden and his gang decided it would be smart to forgather in one place, on territory extremely well known to American intelligence.
All that requires explaining is how a shower of cruise missiles did not manage to hit even one of the suspects. The only casualties occurred among regular Pakistani intelligence officers, who were using the "training camps" to equip guerrillas for Kashmir. As a result, indignant Pakistani authorities released two just-arrested suspects in the American Embassy bombings—one Saudi and one Sudanese. (The Saudi citizen, some American sources say, was a crucial figure in the planning for those outrages in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.) Not great, in other words. One might add that a stray cruise missile didn't even hit Afghanistan but fell on Pakistani territory, thus handing the Pakistani military a free sample just months after it had defied Clinton's feeble appeals to refrain from joining the "nuclear club." All in all, a fine day's work. Pressed to come up with something to show for this expensive farce, the Clintonoids spoke of damage to bin Laden's "infrastructure." Again, to quote Milt Bearden, who knows Afghanistan by moonlight: "What 'infrastructure'? They knocked over a lean-to? If the Administration had anything—anything at all—the high-resolution satellite images would have been released by now." Another non-barking canine, for a president half in and half out of the doghouse. |
