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Report Says U.S. Did Target Indy Media Outlets In Gulf War II |
Current rating: 0 |
by Christ AKA DAN "Faked Headlines Are MY Speciality" Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
13 Jul 2003
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A newly released report notes that during the coalition air assault on Iraq, Central Command “authorized” bombing strikes against “media facilities” in which a number of journalists were killed and employed weapons that human rights groups want banned. |
A detailed analysis of the coalition air campaign done by Michael Moseley of the U.S. Air Force says there were 10 authorized strikes against “media facilities,” including the bombing of the Baghdad office of the Qatar-based al Jazeera Arabic television news network, according to an article in The Age, an Australian newspaper that obtained an unclassified version of the report.
In Baghdad three journalists were killed on April 8 when their offices were shelled or bombed by U.S. forces. Two journalists died when a tank shell struck the Reuters office in the Palestine Hotel and the third died when the offices of the Qatar-based al Jazeera were hit by a single missile fired from a U.S. aircraft. A third office belonging to a news network from Abu Dhabi was also hit on the same day.
Robert Fisk, a British journalist reporting from Baghdad for The Independent, said that U.S. claims made by Gen. Buford Blount that there had been sniper fire coming from the Palestine Hotel were false.
“I was between the tank and the hotel when the shell was fired,” said Fisk. “There was no sniper fire—nor any rocket-propelled grenade fire, as the American officer claimed—at the time.”
In a scathing article titled “Did the U.S. murder these journalists?” Fisk wrote that Mohamed Jassem al-Ali, managing director of al Jazeera, had written to Victoria Clark, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, at the Pentagon on Feb. 24 informing her of the precise coordinates of al Jazeera’s office in Baghdad. Al-Ali’s letter informed the Pentagon of the location of the office and the fact that civilian journalists would be working in the building.
When al Jazeera’s office was bombed on April 8, killing the station’s reporter Tareq Ayoub, al-Ali wrote again to Clark: “We find these events unjustifiable, unacceptable, arousing all forms of anger and rejection and most of all [in] need of an explanation.”
The explanation seems to come in Moseley’s reported analysis of the bombing campaign, which states there were 10 authorized strikes against “media facilities.” Moseley’s assessment, titled “Operation Iraqi Freedom —By the Numbers,” is based on military records from March 19 to April 18.
American Free Press sent the Pentagon a copy of the June 3 article from The Age with a few questions. In reply to the question whether it were true that the bombing of al Jazeera’s office in Baghdad had been authorized, came a terse statement “attributable to Defense officials: Coalition forces did not deliberately nor specifically target news media.”
There was no response to the question: Is it true that al Jazeera provided the Pentagon and/or Centcom with the exact coordinates of their Baghdad office in order to inform the U.S. forces of their location as a precaution?
However, the fact that al Jazeera had informed the Pentagon of its coordinates and the code of its signal to the satellite transponder was reported in The Guardian on March 24.
Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul was also bombed in November 2001, despite having provided U.S. authorities in Washington with the coordinates of its location as a precaution. The Kabul office was destroyed by U.S. “smart” bombs two hours before the Northern Alliance took over the city.
It was the fact that al Jazeera was broadcasting “blood-and-guts images from the invasion of Iraq” around the world that angered the United States, according to The Guardian. “Millions of viewers throughout the Middle East saw pictures of Iraqi and American victims . . . that many western news organizations would consider too shocking to publish,” it said.
When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denounced al Jazeera for broadcasting images of captured U.S. soldiers, Jihad Ballout, a spokesman for the network responded: “Look who’s talking about international law and regulations. We didn’t make the pictures—the pictures are there. It’s a facet of the war. Our duty is to show the war from all angles.”
The assessment of the coalition air campaign also reported that 240,000 cluster bombs were dropped on Iraq. Because cluster bombs spread hundreds of “bomblets” over a large area they are not meant to be used in civilian areas. Due to a high frequency of unexploded bomblets, areas bombed by cluster bombs are “contaminated” and dangerous for years.
A leaked map of unexploded cluster bombs dropped by coalition aircraft was recently revealed in The Observer, a British newspaper. The map shows “an appalling level of contamination,” according to Richard Lloyd, director of Landmine Action. Lloyd, who visited Iraq to assess the danger, said about the map, “It confirms that American and British forces attacked built-up areas in cities with cluster bombs.”
Asked about the use of cluster bombs in Iraq, Defense officials told AFP, “Coalition forces conducted meticulous targeting techniques and used highly accurate weapons systems in order to minimize harm to Iraqi civilians and their infrastructure,” adding that they were “still working on information on the use of cluster bombs.”
“Operation Iraqi Freedom—By the Numbers” also said that the U.S. used 800 Tomahawk missiles. AFP asked the U.S. Navy’s office of Strike Weapons and Unmanned Aircraft about the approximate cost of each missile.
The Tomahawk Block 3 missiles used in Iraq were produced by Raytheon’s missile division in Tucson, Ariz., and cost $1 million each, according to the Navy, but today’s replacement cost for the missiles used would be $1.4 million “per copy” or about $1.2 billion.
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Navy Captain, Other Officials Call For Probe Of Israel�(TM)s Attack On USS Liberty |
by Delinda C. Hanley AKA DAN "Leave the Local Wire Alone or Your Stuff Disiappears" Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Jul 2003
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Ironically, it looks as though what actually was unintentional is that Cristol’s efforts to quell the debate have had exactly the opposite effect.
Reading reports of Cristol’s whitewash of the devastating attack, which killed 34 American crewmen and wounded 172 others, was the last straw for Capt. Ward Boston, senior legal counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry. The Commander-in-Chief Naval Forces Europe, Boston and the late Rear Adm. Isaac “Ike” Kidd were given just one week by Adm. John McCain (father of Sen. John McCain) to investigate the attack and gather testimony from survivors still on board the crippled ship. Capt. Boston asked each witness to tell his story for a court stenographer.
“There is no question in my mind that those people tried to kill every one on board,” Boston told Arab News. “I was the counsel. I put witnesses on. I talked to kids never exposed to combat who’d seen their friend’s head blown off. Kids who were crying as they told me what they’d gone through. Those boys who had their heads blown away were not out fighting [the Israelis]. They were sunbathing. They weren’t even given a chance to get to their machine guns.”
Boston also watched the bodies of the dead carried out of the hold and saw boys throw up as they retrieved body parts and mopped up after the shelling and torpedo attack. He recalled seeing the shot-up US flags that had clearly marked the ship as an American vessel.
Boston flatly dismisses the claims of Cristol and Israel that Israeli fighter pilots mistook the electronically advanced spy ship, complete with an 18-foot-wide satellite dish, a microwave dish, and antennae, for the El Quseir, a 1920s-era Egyptian horse transport ship.
The Navy captain heard survivors’ testimonies that the Israelis even shot up the Liberty’s lifeboats after they were lowered into the waters to save the crew.
That testimony was excised from the official record at some point after it left Boston’s hands. (The tattered rafts now are proudly displayed in an Israeli museum.) Boston recalls shaking hands with Liberty skipper Cmdr. William McGonagle, who had a big hole in his leg. “He thanked me later for that handshake,” Boston recalled, “because it made some shrapnel pop out of his hand.”
When Boston suggested going to Tel Aviv to have the Israelis tell their side of the story, he was told: “You can’t do it. Come on home and present the evidence you have.”
Armed with a gun to protect the evidence, which he had attached to himself with handcuffs, Adm. Kidd, along with Capt. Boston took the records to London.
As the week allotted for gathering testimony came to an end, the team gathered 20 people to type up the report, which ended up being three inches thick. After all the evidence was turned over to the US Embassy there, the report may have been altered. “I made lots of corrections which are no longer in the report,” Capt. Boston told Arab News. “There are even pages missing.”
A US Embassy official in London told Kidd that he and his men must keep quiet. Ten days after the attack, the Navy’s Court of Inquiry, despite all the evidence to the contrary, somehow exonerated Israel and ruled the attack was a case of mistaken identity. Following the Court proceedings in London, Adm. Kidd returned to Washington, DC and called Boston, to whom he was close. “We have to be quiet,” he said. “We can’t talk to the media.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson “had ordered us to put the lid on it,” Boston said. “And after 35 years of active duty, when I get an order, I follow those orders. All this time I’ve kept quiet until this [Cristol] book came out.”
After years of obeying those orders, Capt. Boston broke his silence on June 26, 2002, when he told Marine Corps Times reporter Bryant Jordan the attack was deliberate.
Boston said he just had to speak out after reading Cristol’s claim that Kidd, in interviews conducted in the early 1990s, had said Israel’s attack was not intentional. The captain told Arab News that he finds it hard to believe Cristol’s version of interviews with the now deceased Adm. Kidd, a man Boston greatly admired. “Adm. Kidd called me two hours after an interview with Cristol,” Boston related, “and said, ‘I think Cristol’s an Israeli agent.’”
According to Boston, both he and Adm. Kidd always believed that, despite the Court’s official conclusion, the Israelis knew the ship was American. “I have strong patriotic feelings,” he explained. “I believe the CIA slogan, ‘the truth will out,’ and hate the Israeli Mossad’s motto ‘win by deception.’”
“Cristol now says I recanted my interview with the Navy Times. That makes me madder than hell,” Boston said. “I have not recanted one thing. If anything, now I’m going to speak out louder than before and tell people what Adm. Kidd told me. He and I were very close.
He said: ‘Those guys knew what they were doing when they killed innocent sunbathing kids. They tried to sink that ship.’”
Cristol may now be kicking himself for waxing so eloquently about Boston’s qualifications and skills, and calling him a “man of integrity” on page 149 of his book.
Liberty survivor James Ennes, author of the groundbreaking book “Assault on the Liberty”, also had numerous conversations with Adm. Kidd over the years. Kidd never characterized the attack as an accident. In fact, Ennes says Kidd told him many times: “You are on the right track, Jim. Just keep on probing. Keep on doing what you’re doing.”
When asked why he thought the US government has covered up the attack for 36 years, Capt. Boston replied: “Iraq, Vietnam, the Liberty — it’s the same old story. When people are in power they don’t want to upset people who may help them get re-elected. Maybe people didn’t want the world to see that Israelis were slaughtering Egyptian prisoners of war. Maybe Johnson was afraid of upsetting potential voters.”
As a captain and staff legal officer in London, retired Adm. Merlin Staring reviewed the Court of Inquiry’s report in 1967.
Before he could finish, however, the report was taken away. Based on what he read, however, Staring, who later became the Navy’s top JAG officer, has said the evidence did not support the “accidental” attack contention.
Last year Richard Helms, CIA director at the time of the attack, agreed that “it was no accident.” Helms also told Marine Corps Times correspondent Jordan on May 29, 2002, “I’ve done all I can. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in court testifying about the incident.”
Helms’ book “A Look Over My Shoulder”, written in collaboration with William Hood, describes the Liberty attack as “one of the most disturbing incidents in the six days [war]. Israeli authorities subsequently apologized for the accident, but few in Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified as an American naval vessel.”
Adm. Rufus Taylor, Helms’ deputy, told his boss: “To me, the picture thus far presents the distinct possibility that the Israelis knew that Liberty might be their target and attacked anyway.”
An article by David Walsh was released in the Naval Institute Proceedings on June 3, 2003, (available on the USNI website at http://www.usni.org). Walsh’s well-documented article notes that even Clark Clifford, chairman of President Johnson’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a great supporter of Israel, called Israeli claims that the attack was accidental “unbelievable.”
Clifford told the president: “Something had gone terribly wrong and then it had been covered up. I never felt the Israelis had made adequate restitution or explanation for their unprovoked actions.”
US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Walsh’s article adds, had said there was “every reason to believe that the USS Liberty was identified, or at least her nationality determined, one hour before the attack.”
Finally, Walsh notes, former NSA and CIA director Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, based on his talks with NSA seniors at the time, “flatly rejected” the Cristol/Israel thesis.
Former Chief of Naval Operations and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Thomas Moorer has been on the record for some time as saying the attack on the Liberty was deliberate.
Among those agreeing with him are then-NSA Director Marshall Carter, Carter’s deputy, Louis Tordella, NSA “Liberty Incident” analyst Walter Deeley, and Hayden Peake, professor of intelligence history at the Joint Military Intelligence College and a retired CIA officer.
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence John Stenbit told an audience at a conference on “Transforming National Security and Protecting the Homeland,” held April 15 to 17 in Vienna, VA, that the Israelis had warned the US to move the USS Liberty or they would sink it.
His comments appeared in the Israeli daily Jerusalem Post and elicited a letter to the editor in the online section of the magazine. Both the letter and the article have mysteriously vanished from the website.
In addition to the many Americans noted above, Israelis and even Russians are adding to the public record on the attack. Nikolay Cherkashin, who has spent years investigating the Liberty tragedy, quoted a recently published Russian translation of Joseph Daichman’s History of the Mossad, which states that it was perfectly clear to Israelis that the Liberty was an American ship and that the attack was committed to deprive the US “of its eyes and ears.”
Daichman also argues that Israel had every right to attack the American ship. If the Liberty had reported that Israeli troops had moved from the Egyptian borders to the Syrian front, the Soviets, if they were eavesdropping on the US, could have warned the Arabs. Eliminating any eyes and ears, Israel was able to attack Syria and capture the Golan Heights.
Daichman also speculates that Israel may have tried to sink the ship and blame Egypt, and thus provoke a lethal US response. That theory is the theme of the documentary “Dead in the Water” and the new book “Operation Cyanide” by Peter Hounam.
Despite overwhelming new testimony, however, Cristol’s version of the attack on the Liberty is gaining fame. Michael Oren’s “Six Days of War” won an award for best history book at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. According to Ennes, Oren’s chapter on the treacherous attack echoes Cristol’s version, which Ennes describes as “pure Israeli spin.”
In his book’s acknowledgments Oren thanks the Shalem Center, where he is a senior fellow and “under whose auspices this book was researched and written.”
The center describes its senior fellows program as “promoting the research and writing of agenda-shaping work.” Its journal, Azure, with editorial offices in Jerusalem and Washington, DC, “champions a strong, free and Jewish State of Israel for the future of the Jewish people.”
“Cristol, though discredited at every turn, continues to hawk his book,” Ennes says, “arguing endlessly that the attack was a tragic accident and that we who say otherwise are simply either anti-Semites or blinded by blood and what he calls the fog of war. “Cristol will be promoting his book in August and speaking at a large veterans’ forum in Pigeon Forge, TN,” Ennes told Arab News. “Knowing the views of most veterans who know about the Liberty, I cannot imagine that Cristol will be well received.”
“Will the Liberty remain a sort of Flying Dutchman, sailing forever around her poor men’s souls?”” Walsh concludes his Liberty article by asking. Until a congressional investigation gives survivors the opportunity to tell their stories before they die, and Americans can examine top-secret reports still shrouded in secrecy, the Liberty’s ghost will not rest.
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