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Palast for Conyers: The OTHER ' Memos' from
Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue
by Greg Palast
www.OpEdNews.com
Greg Palast, unable to attend hearings in Washington Thursday, has
submitted the following testimony:
Chairman Conyers,
It's official: The Downing Street memos, a snooty New York Times
"News Analysis" informs us, "are not the Dead Sea Scrolls." You are
warned, Congressman, to ignore the clear evidence of official
mendacity and bald-faced fibbing by our two nations' leaders because
the cry for investigation came from the dark and dangerous world of
"blogs" and "opponents" of Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush.
On May 5, "blog" site Buzzflash.com carried my story, IMPEACHMENT
TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED," bringing the London Times report of the
Downing Street memo to US media which seemed to be suffering at the
time from an attack of NADD -- "news attention deficit disorder."
The memo, which contains the ill-making admission that "the
intelligence and facts were being fixed" to match the Iraq-crazed
fantasies of our President, is sufficient basis for a hearing toward
impeachment of the Chief Executive. But to that we must add the
other evidence and secret memos and documents still hidden from the
American public.
Other foreign-based journalists could doubtless add more, including
the disclosure that the key inspector of Iraq's biological weapons,
the late Dr. David Kelly, found the Bush-Blair analysis of his
intelligence was indeed "fixed," as the Downing Street memo puts it,
around the war-hawk policy.
Here is a small timeline of confidential skullduggery dug up and
broadcast by my own team for BBC Television and Harper's on the
secret plans to seize Iraq's assets and oil.
February 2001 - Only one month after the first Bush-Cheney
inauguration, the State Department's Pam Quanrud organizes a secret
confab in California to make plans for the invasion of Iraq and
removal of Saddam. US oil industry advisor Falah Aljibury and others
are asked to interview would-be replacements for a new US-installed
dictator.
On BBC Television's Newsnight, Aljibury himself explained,
"It is an invasion, but it will act like a coup. The original plan
was to liberate Iraq from the Saddamists and from the regime."
March 2001 - Vice-President Dick Cheney meets with oil company
executives and reviews oil field maps of Iraq. Cheney refuses to
release the names of those attending or their purpose. Harper's has
since learned their plan and purpose -- see below.
October/November 2001 - An easy military victory in Afghanistan
emboldens then-Dep. Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to convince the
Administration to junk the State Department "coup" plan in favor of
an invasion and occupation that could remake the economy of Iraq.
And elaborate plan, ultimately summarized in a 101-page document,
scopes out the "sale of all state enterprises" -- that is, most of
the nation's assets, "… especially in the oil and supporting
industries."
2002 - Grover Norquist and other corporate lobbyists meet secretly
with Defense, State and Treasury officials to ensure the invasion
plans for Iraq include plans for protecting "property rights." The
result was a pre-invasion scheme to sell off Iraq's oil fields,
banks, electric systems, and even change the country's copyright
laws to the benefit of the lobbyists' clients. Occupation chief Paul
Bremer would later order these giveaways into Iraq law.
Fall 2002 - Philip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, is brought
in by the Pentagon to plan the management of Iraq's oil fields. He
works directly with Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. "There were
plans," says Carroll, "maybe even too many plans" -- but none
disclosed to the public nor even the US Congress.
January 2003 - Robert Ebel, former CIA oil analyst, is sent, BBC
learns, to London to meet with Fadhil Chalabi to plan terms for
taking over Iraq's oil.
March 2003 - What White House spokesman Ari Fleisher calls
"Operations Iraqi Liberation" (OIL) begins. (Invasion is
re-christened "OIF" -- Operation Iraqi Freedom.)
March 2003 - Defense Department is told in confidence by US Energy
Information Administrator Guy Caruso that Iraq's fields are
incapable of a massive increase in output. Despite this
intelligence, Dep. Secretary Wolfowitz testifies to Congress that
invasion will be a free ride. He swears, "There's a lot of money to
pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money. …We're
dealing with a country that can really finance its own
reconstruction and relatively soon," a deliberate fabrication
promoted by the Administration, an insider told BBC, as "part of the
sales pitch" for war.
May 2003 - General Jay Garner, appointed by Bush as viceroy over
Iraq, is fired by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The general
revealed in an interview for BBC that he resisted White House plans
to sell off Iraq's oil and national assets.
"That's just one fight you don't want to take on," Garner told me.
But apparently, the White House wanted that fight.
The general also disclosed that these invade-and-grab plans were
developed long before the US asserted that Saddam still held WDM:
"All I can tell you is the plans were pretty elaborate; they didn't
start them in 2002, they were started in 2001."
November/December 2003 - Secrecy and misinformation continues even
after the invasion. The oil industry objects to the State Department
plans for Iraq's oil fields and drafts for the Administration a
323-page plan, "Options for [the] Iraqi Oil Industry." Per the
industry plan, the US forces Iraq to create an OPEC-friendly state
oil company that supports the OPEC cartel's extortionate price for
petroleum.
The Stone Wall
Harper's and BBC obtained the plans despite official denial of their
existence, then footdragging when confronted with the evidence of
the reports' existence.
Still today, the State and Defense Departments and White House
continue to stonewall our demands for the notes of the meetings
between lobbyists, oil industry consultants and key Administration
officials that would reveal the hidden economic motives for the war.
What are the secret interests behind this occupation? Who benefits?
Who met with whom? Why won't this Administration release these
documents of the economic blueprint for the war?
To date, the State and Defense Department responses to our reports
are risible, and their answers to our requests for documents run
from evasive to downright misleading. Maybe Congress, with it's
power of subpoena, can do better.
Blogs, the Media and Democracy
Let me conclude with a comment about those pesky "blogs" that so
bother the New York Times. We should stand and offer a moment of
quiet gratitude to the electronic swarm of gadfly commentators who
make it so much harder for the US media to ignore news not
officially blessed. Yes, Judith Miller's breathless reports for The
Times that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction may have
maintained "access" for the mainstream press to its diet of White
House propaganda, but the blogs insure that, whatever nonsense the
US press is biting on, the public need not swallow.
********
This week Greg Palast's investigative team was named winner of a
2004-5 Project Censored award from the California State University
at Sonoma Journalism School for their exposé of the secret US plans
to seize Iraq's oil assets. Special thanks to the chief investigator
on Iraq, Leni von Eckardt, as well as additional support from Matt
Pascarella. The investigation was conducted for Harper's Magazine,
BBC Television Newsnight and "blog" outlet TomPaine.com.
View the BBC television reports and the Harper's and related reports
at www.GregPalast.com
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