The Myths of Feb 15, 2003

This morning on Democracy Now, the last headline Amy Goodman read was:

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the historic wave of global protests against the war in Iraq. Tens of millions of people took to the streets in hundreds of cities around the world to say no to war. The BBC said the protest in London was the largest in the capital’s political history. Protest sites included Australia, Johannesburg, Tel Aviv, Syria, Tokyo, Bangladesh, South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Puerto Rico, Brazil, East Timor, India, and even the South Pole. At least half a million rallied in New York City alone 10 years ago. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would begin just over a month later.

Now, what's the takeaway from that in the way Goodman phrased it? It's clearly that there were these massive protests and the war still happened. Therefore, such protest is ineffective. I think this is a stinky, rotten, sickening notion.

I've spent some of the last couple of weeks helping to organize a "The Feb. 15 Call for Global Protests for Democracy, Solidarity and Justice." The statement actually addresses this notion: 

The invasion of Iraq still began after the 2003 protests, but the violence wreaked by Bush was more limited than the U.S. government inflicted on Vietnam a generation earlier. Our vigilance was part of the reason for that. Had we acted sooner, we might have been able to avert the disastrous invasion. The lesson is we need more global protest and solidarity, not less. Indeed, had we continued vigorously protesting, we might not have seen the years since 2003 show a lack of accountability for the war makers, even as conscientious whilstleblowers are prosecuted. 

After the 2003 protests, the New York Times called global public opinion "a superpower". And the antiwar movement never tried to do anything like it again. Instead, there were a series of protest in D.C. They all took place in the late summer or fall of 2004, 2006 and 2008. Of course those were all election years. The "movement" had become defunct and had in effect melded itself into helping the Democratic Party, in effect leading to the current situation with a pro-war Democratic administration and no vibrant movement. That has to change and it changes in part by crossing national boundaries. 

But it's very threatening to do that. If you have global protests, you are making common cause with others around the world and than can feel threatening, especially for people in the U.S., who do, or have convinced themselves they do, enjoy privileges based on being "American". But the alternative is largely to be increasingly marginal within the U.S. political sphere, which would be a tragedy, because there really is a world to gain. 

National Press Club Newsmakers Committee Chair Resigns in Protest Regarding Handling of Israeli Ambassador

So it looks like the Press Club leadership took exactly the wrong lesson from my interaction with Saudi Amb. Turki of over a year ago (I asked him about the legitimacy of the Saudi regime). Here, ahead of an evert with Israeli Ambassador Zalman Shoval -- who will be at the Press Club today at 4:00 -- they seem to be insuring ways of restricting tough questioning rather than helping to foster it, bypassing the usual committee structure of the Club. 

National Press Club Newsmakers Committee Chair Resigns in Protest

By Russell Mokhiber

Ronald Baygents has resigned his position as chairman of the National Press Club’s Newsmakers Committee.

Baygents is a reporter for the Kuwait News Agency in Washington, D.C. and was chair of the Newsmakers Committee for the last two years — until Saturday, when he resigned over the handling of the upcoming appearance at the Club of Israeli special envoy Zalman Shoval.

Shoval is scheduled to attend a Newsmakers Event at the Press Club Wednesday February 13, 2013 at 4 p.m.

Shoval’s Newsmaker event was set up by Newsmakers Committee member Peter Hickman — and Hickman was scheduled to moderate the event — until Monday of this week.

That’s when current Press Club President Angela Greiling Keane e-mailed Hickman to inform him that he wasn’t going to be allowed to moderate the event.

“Peter — thank you for your work in lining up the Israeli envoy for the Newsmaker this week,” Keane wrote. “I’m glad we’re having him at the Club. Because of the potentially contentious nature of the audience he may attract, I’ve asked Donna Leinwand to moderate it.”

Leinwand is a reporter for USA Today and a former Press Club President.

Baygents said that Press Club presidents have a prerogative to intervene and moderate a major event, but this usually means that the President moderates it.

Keane’s concern about the “contentious nature of the audience” is rooted in recent Press Club history — most notably a Press Club Newsmakers event in November 2011 featuring Saudi Prince Turki Al-Faisal Al Sa’ud.

That event was hosted by Hickman. 

At the event, Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a Press Club member, got into a heated back and forth with the Prince about the legitimacy of the Saudi regime.

“Before the end of the day, I’d received a letter informing me that I was suspended from the National Press Club ‘due to your conduct at a news conference,’” Husseini wrote after the event. “The letter, signed by the executive director of the Club, William McCarren, accused me of violating rules prohibiting ‘boisterous and unseemly conduct or language.’ After several days of efforts, I’ve been able to obtain video of the news conference. The video shows that I did not engage in any ‘boisterous and unseemly conduct or language.’”
The video shows Hickman interrupting Husseini a couple of times — saying — “Sam let him answer” and “Sam that’s enough.”

(Husseini was unsuspended from Club within two weeks of his suspension.)

We e-mailed Keane, asking for her to comment.

She answered with an e-mail saying only that “It’s not unusual to have presidents or past presidents moderate events such as tomorrow’s.”

In a follow up phone conversation, we asked Keane how Leinward would handle a “contentious” audience better than Hickman would.

Keane said she wouldn’t address that issue.

“As chairman of the Newsmakers Committee, I have always taken a lot of pride in what our committee generates for the Club,” Baygents said.

“And I try to make sure that our Committee members, who work hard to pull together these events, are able to host them.”

“A new President comes in and removes one our members —  who put together the event — from hosting it,” Baygents said. “She didn’t not allow me — with my Middle East background — to host it as Chairman. She didn’t discuss with me finding another Committee member who she was comfortable with.  And she sends over someone who is not a member of the Committee to host it. And she gives me no opportunity for any input on that decision. I found that professionally insulting and somewhat inexplicable.”

Colin Powell Showed that Torture DOES Work

The Film Hollywood Should Make is About al-Libi's Torture Helping Lead to Iraq War Disaster 

Ten years ago, Colin Powell made the case for invading Iraq before the United Nations Security Council. Many aspects of his case were clearly dubious at the time, but one notorious aspect desperately needs to be truly understood: Some of Powell's argument for an Iraq link to al-Qaeda came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who was tortured into giving such "evidence" -- that is, he told the torturers what they wanted to hear so that the torture would stop. 

This is particularly noteworthy as the movie Zero Dark Thirty has many liberals screaming "torture doesn't work" -- which, in a sense is totally true and at the same time exactly misses the point. Torture does work. It just doesn't work in so far as its stated purpose (catching criminals, stopping evil plots) is concerned. 

Former long-time CIA analyst Ray McGovern, has written that the al-Libi case was central to Powell keeping the alleged al-Qaeda link to Iraq in his UN speech: 

Al-Libi’s stories misinformed Colin Powell’s U.N. speech, which sought to establish a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda to justify invading Iraq.

Al-Libi recanted his claims in January 2004. That prompted the CIA, a month later, to recall all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the 9/11 Commission. ...

The al-Libi case might help you understand why, even though information from torture is notoriously unreliable, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the sycophants running U.S. intelligence ordered it anyway.

In short, if it is untruthful information you are after, torture can work just fine!

Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s own former chief of staff, similarly wrote:

“What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda.

“So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee ‘was compliant’ (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, ‘revealed’ such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

“There in fact were no such contacts." [Wilkerson elaborated on this on Democracy Now Wednesday morning, should be posted here. He notes he and Powell agreed to drop the accusation of an al-Qaeda link to Iraq until they were given the "evidence" from al-Libi's interrogation.] 

I asked Powell about this in 2009 and he seemed remarkably defensive and uninterested in finding out if the words he uttered on the world stage were based on misinformation from torture, see video on blip.tv and YouTube:

Sam Husseini: General, can you talk about the al-Libi case and the link between torture and the production of tortured evidence for war?

Colin Powell: I don’t have any details on the al-Libi case.

SH: Can you tell us when you learned that some of the evidence that you used in front of the UN was based on torture? When did you learn that?

CP: I don’t know that. I don’t know what information you’re referring to. So I can’t answer.

SH: Your chief of staff, Wilkerson, has written about this.

CP: So what? [inaudible]

SH: So you’d think you’d know about it.

CP: The information I presented to the UN was vetted by the CIA. Every word came from the CIA and they stood behind all that information. I don’t know that any of them believe that torture was involved. I don’t know that in fact. A lot of speculation, particularly by people who never attended any of these meetings, but I’m not aware of it.

But my questioning was based on statements by Wilkerson, who was in the room. Presumably Powell is waiting for the CIA to call him and tell him directly that torture was used to extract some of the information he used. 

This problem of torture yielding useful but false information was not unforeseeable. Professor As'ad AbuKhalil appeared on a news release I assembled the day after Powell's notorious UN speech: "The Arab media is reporting that the Zakawi story was provided by Jordanian intelligence, which has a record of torture and inaccuracy." 

But the al-Libi story gets even worse. First off, al-Libi had initially cooperated with FBI officials when he was first questioned by them, giving them true and useful information without being tortured. Secondly, he was tortured by chief Egyptian spymaster Omar Suleiman, widely seen and the CIA's man in Cairo, who attempted to take over from Mubarak when the longtime dictator finally stepped down because of the uprising in 2011 (Suleiman himself died in a Cleveland hospital in 2012). 

After al-Libi recanted to the CIA, he was eventually shipped off to Libya where he died in a prison cell. The newspaper of one of Qaddafi's son's claimed it was a suicide. As Juan Cole wrote at the time: "The best refutation of Dick Cheney’s insistence that torture was necessary and useful in dealing with threats from al-Qaeda just died in a Libyan prison." 

Before his death, Human Rights Watch “briefly met with al-Libi on April 27 during a research mission to Libya. He refused to be interviewed, and would say nothing more than: ‘Where were you when I was being tortured in American jails.’" 

After al-Libi's death Human Right Watch stated: "The death of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi means that the world will never hear his account of the brutal torture he experienced. So now it is up to Libya and the United States to reveal the full story of what they know, including its impact on his mental health." Right after Al Capone investigates his own dealings. 

Note that al-Libi died in Libyan custody when relations were quite chummy between Qaddafi and the U.S. It's hard not to think this was part of a quid pro quo -- the Qaddafi regime offs al-Libi to help the U.S. cover up the torture-war link and in exchange Qaddafi got (rather short-lived) acceptance from part of the U.S. establishment. 

If Hollywood -- or any media for that matter -- had any interest in communicating the realities of the modern Mideast and U.S. policy there, the story of al-Libi should be front and center.