Article: Bush's hand in the Terror War

Robert Fisk has pulled the shroud off Bush's Iraq policy and exposed the rotting corpse below. In his latest article "Seen through a Syrian Lens" (UK Independent 4-29-06) Fisk fingers the US as the driving force behind the present "alleged" sectarian violence in Iraq. He's produced information from a trusted "security source" that America is "desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties". It is a charge we've heard before but never quite as persuasively as from a veteran journalist who his relied on for "getting it right".

"I swear to you that we have very good information," Fisk recounts, "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."

Americans are sending unsuspecting Iraqis in vehicles to crowded areas, detonating the explosives, and then pinning it on Zarqawi or some other racist invention.

Can we believe Fisk?

As incredible as it seems, Fisk assures us that he's heard the same story many times from different sources.

Again:

"There was another man, trained by the Americans for the police. He too was given a mobile and told to drive to an area where there was a crowd - maybe a protest - and to call them and tell them what was happening. Again, his new mobile was not working. So he went to a landline phone and called the Americans and told them: 'Here I am, in the place you sent me and I can tell you what's happening here.' And at that moment there was a big explosion in his car."
There's been a great deal of speculation on whether the US is directly involved in the massive terror campaign that is sweeping through the Sunni heartland. Max Fuller has made a valuable contribution to the topic in his article "Crying Wolf: Media disinformation and Deaths squads in Occupied Iraq". Fuller has documented CIA involvement in training Iraqi death squads operating in the Interior ministry.

So far, there have been at least three separate incidents where occupation forces have been either caught or connected to bombings in Iraq.

The most famous of these was an incident in Basra where two British paramilitaries were caught disguised as Arabs with a truck-full of explosives in their vehicle. Panicky British forces destroyed the Basra jail to release the two captured SAS soldiers apparently afraid that their cover would be blown and Blair would be implicated in attacks on civilians.
The bombing of the Golden-domed mosque has also produced a number of suspicious leads which point to US involvement. The AFP reported that the bombing "was the work of specialists" and the "placing of explosives must have taken at least 12 hours". The report continues:

"Construction Minister Jassem Mohammed Jaafar said, "Holes were dug into the mausoleum's four main pillars and packed with explosives. Then charges were connected together and linked to another charge placed just under the dome. The wires were then linked to a detonator which was triggered at a distance."

Clearly the bombing was not carried out by rogue elements in the disparate Iraqi resistance but highly trained saboteurs executing a precision demolition to incite sectarian violence. The blast bears all the hallmarks of an Intelligence agency operation. Eyewitness accounts verify that American troops and Iraqi National Guard were active in the area throughout the night and that their cars could be heard running "the whole night until next morning". People living around the mosque were told "to stay in your shop and don't leave the area".

At 6:30 AM the American troops left, just 10 minutes before the bombs went off.

So far, there's been no independent investigation of the bombing even though the media has used the incident as proof of the growing sectarian divide. But, perhaps, there is no divide. Perhaps, as Fisk implies Bush is conducting a massive "dirty war" similar to earlier operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua. After all, that's where Negroponte, Cheney and Rumsfeld "cut their teeth" in the intricacies of clandestine warfare; learning the ropes of destabilizing regimes through the "application of extreme violence."

The implications of Fisk's article are shocking. The war on terror is the rickety scaffolding upon which the entire Bush presidency rests; there are no other accomplishments or programs. If the present allegations are true, then Bush and his cadres can be placed in the same category as Bin Laden and al Zarqawi; although those "alleged" villains could be just scratchy shreds of celluloid produced in the Pentagon basement.

There is no civil war in Iraq; it's all been fabricated to split the country apart. The violence we see is emanating in waves from its ultimate point of origin"1600 Pennsylvania Ave; the epicenter of global terrorism. Fisk's article just punctuates that point.
.