- Palast for Conyers: The OTHER ' Memos' from Downing
Street and Pennsylvania Avenue
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- Greg Palast, unable to attend hearings in Washington
Thursday, has submitted the following testimony:
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- Chairman Conyers,
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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,
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- March 2003 - What White House spokesman Ari Fleisher
calls "Operations Iraqi Liberation" (OIL) begins. (Invasion
is re-christened "OIF" -- Operation Iraqi Freedom.)
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "That's just one fight you don't want to take on,"
Garner told me. But apparently, the White House wanted that fight.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- The Stone Wall
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- Harper's and BBC obtained the plans despite official
denial of their existence, then footdragging when confronted with the evidence
of the reports' existence.
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- 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.
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- Blogs, the Media and Democracy
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- 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.
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- ********
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- 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.
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- View the BBC television reports and the Harper's and
related reports at www.GregPalast.com
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