Antony Loewenstein

It’s not a surprise that 81% of Americans don’t believe the official story of 9/11, when even the chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission agree the official story is a fraud.

The chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, respectively Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, assert in their book, Without Precedent, that they were “set up to fail” and were starved of funds to do a proper investigation. They also confirm that they were denied access to the truth and misled by senior officials in the Pentagon and the federal aviation authority; and that this obstruction and deception led them to contemplate slapping officials with criminal charges.

Was democracy on the march 34 years ago?

Some of us have been marking the atrocities of September 11 for 34 years. On September 11, 1973, Nixon, Kissinger and their pals at ITT went beyond “making the Chilean economy scream” and enjoyed a full-blown military assault against Chile which began the bloody fascist coup there. Here is a very brief history of that September 11 from Wikipedia, which offers extensive links to some other basic readings and chronologies. (See sources at the end). On September 11, 2003, people asked “Why Do they hate US?” The events of September 11, 1973 were just one good, ironic example.

Andrew Sullivan puts it perfectly.

Brit Hume coaches Petraeus to echo Bush administration talking points, describing the entire conflict in Iraq as a battle against al Qaeda. It was the final word of the GOP infomercial last night, a low-point in military press relations. Now there’s no argument that al Qaeda exists in Iraq – because Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld gave it the space to come in, and the incentives to flourish. But that it is the central actor in that country, that our woes there are due to al Qaeda and not the inherent sectarian instability of Iraq: well this is absurd, ahistorical and can only be explained by Hume’s desire to advance the interests, as he sees them, of the party he supports and broadcasts for. Petraeus’ exclusive on Fox to my mind reveals that he has sadly been coopted by Rovism. This is about rallying the base of the GOP, by distorting the reality of the war to fit an ideological, propagandistic template. It’s a disgrace.

The US is building a military base right on the border with Iran, undoubtedly one of the most provocative acts short of war.

Netanyahu is not only insisting the world cannot wait for Iran to obtain what they are not even trying to develop, but is urging military action.

And all the while we are told that Iran is destabilizing the region. You couldn’t make it up.

For those who still insist Petraeus is a straight shooter.

Apparently Petraeus is counting “IED hoaxes” in the PowerPoint slide that shows a sharp decrease in IED attacks. That seems odd, doesn’t it? John Cole would like to see that chart replotted with just the actual IED attacks themselves. Me too.

Josh Marshall, meanwhile, notes that Petraeus told Congress that two intelligence agencies signed off on his methodology for calculating civilian death rates. That’s only two out of 18, which isn’t so hot, but he’d still like to know which ones they were. Me too.

For myself, I’ll just note the same thing I noted over the weekend: all the charts for civilian fatalities show basically the same trend: a big pre-surge drop between December and March, no progress from March through July, and then a modest drop in August. So Petraeus is hanging nearly his entire case on a single month.

BONUS POWERPOINT NOTE: Slide #12 shows the readiness of the Iraqi army. Level 1 means “fully independent.” Level 2 means “Iraqi lead with coalition support.”

So four years into this thing, how are we doing in getting Iraqi army units up to speed? Answer: at the beginning of the year we had 15 Level 1 units. Today we have 12. Level 2 units have gone from 78 to 83. Some progress.

Meanwhile, isn’t it interesting how no one seems interested in what Iraqis think of the surge?

The Bush doctrine is fast becoming the antithesis of how to win hearts and minds. It’s quite an achievement when the image of the US in a close ally like Turkey is almost as bad as it is in Palestine.

Nearly two-thirds of the Turkish public named the United States as their country’s greatest future threat, a recent Pew Global Attitudes Project survey has revealed – the highest percentage of any Middle Eastern or Islamic country polled.

The survey, which was also conducted in Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco and Israel, asked an open-ended question: “What country or groups pose the greatest threat to (survey country) in the future?” Turkey was the only country in which a majority of respondents pointed to the US.

Turkey, a US NATO ally and recipient of US and NATO security guarantees, also harbors the second-most negative attitudes towards the US, with 83 percent holding an “unfavorable” opinion of it – up 29 percent since 2002, the biggest drop in public opinion of the US in recent years.

Eighty-six percent of Palestinians express an unfavorable opinion of the US, the most negative response from a Middle Eastern country.

Dr. Emre Erdogan, a political scientist and founding partner of Infakto Research Workshop, says that this is “a result of intensifying terrorist activities of the PKK” – an armed militant group founded in the 1970s also known as the Kurdistan Workers Party – which has found increasing support since the Iraq war began.

The Turkish people “perceive the US as responsible for the worsening situation,” said Erdogan in a World Public Opinion (WPO)/Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) analysis of the Pew results.

The “increasing terrorist and political activity of the PKK” is seen to be “under direct supervision of the Northern Iraq Administration and the US,” and the Turkish media “continuously present evidence for this [US-PKK] collaboration,” said Erdogan.

According to a 2005 Infakto poll, 71 percent of Turks think that “the West has helped separatist groups in Turkey gain strength,” and a Pew 2007 survey found that 79 percent of Turks oppose “US-led efforts to fight terrorism”.

What are the chances that Israel will heed this advice?

Russia on Thursday called on Israel to respect international law following an alleged violation of Syrian airspace.

The country expressed “extreme concern” in the wake of Syrian claims that its military fired on an Israel Air Force warplane that had entered its airspace and “dropped munitions.”

“The reports have caused extreme concern in Moscow,” the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.

“Particularly troubling is that this is the Middle East, a region already heavy with serious conflicts and tension.”

Iran , meanwhile, slammed Israel over the reported incident, saying that it was seeking to compensate for its “failure” in last year’s war against Hezbollah.

An example of why blaming violence in Iraq on Al Qaeda should be received with skepticism.

In March 2007, a pair of truck bombs tore through the Shiite marketplace in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, killing more than 150 people. The blast reduced the ancient city center to rubble, leaving body parts and charred vegetables scattered amid pools of blood. It was among the most lethal attacks to date in the five-year-old Iraq War. Within hours, Iraqi officials in Baghdad had pinned the bombing on al-Qaeda, and news reports from Reuters, the BBC, MSNBC, and others carried those remarks around the world. An Internet posting by the terrorist group known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) took credit for the destruction. Within a few days, U.S. Army General David Petraeus publicly blamed AQI for the carnage, accusing the group of trying to foment sectarian violence and ignite a civil war. Back in Washington, pundits latched on to the attack with special interest, as President Bush had previously touted a period of calm in Tal Afar as evidence that the military’s retooled counterinsurgency doctrine was working. For days, reporters and bloggers debated whether the attacks signaled a “resurgence” of al-Qaeda in the city.

Yet there’s reason to doubt that AQI had any role in the bombing. In the weeks before the attack, sectarian tensions had been simmering after a local Sunni woman told Al Jazeera television that she had been gang-raped by a group of Shiite Iraqi army soldiers. Multiple insurgent groups called for violence to avenge the woman’s honor. Immediately after the blast, some in uniform expressed doubts about al- Qaeda’s alleged role and suggested that homegrown sectarian strife was more likely at work. “It’s really not al-Qaeda who has infiltrated so much as the fact [of] what happened in 2003,” said Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the Naval War College who served as an Army political adviser to the 3rd Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar until shortly before the bombing. “The formerly dominant Sunni Turkmen majority there,” he told PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer soon after the bombing, “suddenly … felt themselves having been thrown out of power. And this is essentially their revenge.”

It appears that all those images featuring political leaders strolling through Baghdad markets were indeed dog and pony shows, after all.

DEHGHANPISHEH: You know, I don’t know of any Westerners who go strolling around the streets of Baghdad, and unless you do have what you mentioned; a convoy of Humvees or choppers to back you up for protection. Then I think it would be suicidal.

UYGUR: You think it would be suicidal? So, if you’re a Westerner, the idea of going out for a stroll in Baghdad, you’re calling it suicidal. Your chances of getting killed or kidnapped is incredibly high?

Joe Biden, having just visited Baghdad, agrees.

On the September 9 edition of NBC’s Meet The Press, United States Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) announced that he believes the US military surge in Iraq is “a failure.”

“The truth of the matter,” said Biden, who just returned from Iraq, “is that this administration’s policy and the surge are a failure.”

He clearly forgot to drink from the Kool Aid fountain.

In fact, in spite of the surge extravanganza being put out by the neocons, the majority of the American public already expect that General Petraeus will be delivering an unrealistic assessment of the progress in Iraq, and realize that Bush’s policies regarding Iraq were never going to be affected by the report, either way.

In spite of the valiant efforts of the Israeli lobby to stifle criticism, Israel just can’t seem to get good press these days.

Young non-Orthodox US Jews are becoming increasingly lukewarm if not alienated in their support for Israel in a trend that is not likely to be reversed, according to a study released on Thursday.

Blending into US society, including marriage to non-Jews and a tendency to look on Judaism more in religious terms than ethnic ones, is part of what’s happening, the study found.

Norway has chipped in to criticize Israel.

Norway’s embassy in Tel Aviv has urged the government to criticize Israel for the alleged use of torture in prisons, the state radio network NRK reported Thursday.

The network said it had obtained a secret diplomatic document from the embassy urging action by expressing our concern that torture is still practiced in Israel.

According to Norway’s NRK, the concern stemmed from a report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, an Israeli human rights group, claiming that prisoners were sometimes beaten during interrogation, held in painfully tight handcuffs and suffered isolation, threats, humiliation and sleep deprivation.

This made Israel less than happy, expressing the usual outrage at being held to account without actually denying the allegations.  As is often the case, it’s not the criticism that Israel has a problem with, it is the fact that it is being criticized at all.

The officials said that the Norwegian embassy was “acting in an unprofessional and very one-sided way, and that their actions bordered on hostility.”

Human Rights Watch revealed what we already suspected from last year’s Lebanon War, that Israel does indeed target civilians.

In its harshest condemnation of Israel since the Second Lebanon War, Human Rights Watch charged that most of the Lebanese civilian casualties came from indiscriminate Israeli air strikes, according to a report to released Thursday.

Presenting the group’s findings at a news conference, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said there were only rare cases of Hezbollah operating in civilian villages.

“To the contrary, once the war started, most Hezbollah military officials and even many political officials left the villages,” he said. And indeed what we found is that most Hezbollah military activity was conducted from prepared positions outside Lebanese villages in the hills and valleys around.”

Meanwhile, Israel continues to behave badly.

According to a Western diplomat in Damascus, IAF planes which had allegedly infiltrated into Syrian airspace overnight Wednesday were most likely positioned in the area to take photographs, Israel Radio reported on Thursday night.

After Syrian aerial defense systems identified the jets, the pilots were forced to throw bombs and fuel tanks out of the planes, said the official.

The IDF spokesperson declined to comment, saying that the army does not respond “to such reports.”

One can only imagine the cries of indignation from Israel’s amen corner had an Arab country violated Israeli air space, along with the obligatory claims of right to self defense.

By every measure, the surge appears to have failed.

The violence across Iraq has gone up, not down.

The U.S. military‘s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

The Iraqi government is on the verge of collapse, and along with the fact that the US is backing Sunni insurgents opposed to a Shiite government, there goes any hope of reconciliation.

The confidential version of Congress’ Congressional Research Report on Iraq declares that Iraq’s government is “in collapse,” according to the New York Daily News’ James Meek, who first acquired the report.

Americans continue to kill Iraqi civilians, thereby winning hearts and minds.

US combat helicopters and tanks bombarded a Baghdad neighbourhood in pre-dawn strikes on Thursday, killing 14 sleeping civilians and destroying houses, angry residents and Iraqi officials said.

I guess this is what Bush meant by kicking ass in Iraq.

Fallujah, held up by Bush as a success of the surge, is only quiet because it has been all but destroyed.

A brave new attempt is under way to project that all is well now with Fallujah. Residents know better — or worse.

Former Iraqi minister of state for foreign affairs Rafi al-Issawi visited Fallujah, 60 km west of Baghdad, Aug. 22. Issawi, who resigned Aug. 1 when the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front withdrew from the government, visited the city with other members of the Sunni Accordance Bloc, al-Tawafuq.

The group toured the city and met with senior officials and community leaders in a show of conversion of the city from the most violent to the most peaceful in Iraq.

As for the surge, even the soldiers aren’t buying it.

Even US soldiers assigned to protect General Petraeus’s showcase remain sceptical. “Personally, I think it’s a false representation,” Staff Sergeant Campbell said, referring to the portrayal of the Dora market as an emblem of the surge’s success. “But what can I say? I’m just doing my job and don’t ask questions.”

Of course, there is always the possibility that success is being measured by the Bush administration metric of failing upwards.

We hear a lot about Al Qaeda in Iraq. It seems that anyone fighting the Americans or setting off a car bomb must be Al Qaeda, but the reality is that AQ is a minute component.

Who’s responsible for the violence in Iraq? According to George Bush, the most dramatic and destabilizing attacks come from al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group supposedly responsible for the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samara last year and for a spectacular truck bomb attack in Tal Afar five months ago. This view of AQI’s unique lethality is widespread, but what if it’s mistaken? What if AQI wasn’t responsible for either of those attacks? And what if AQI is nowhere near as dangerous as everyone thinks?

Andrew Tilghman is a former reporter for Stars and Stripes who spent nine months embedded in Iraq in 2005-06. Since then he’s been investigating the role of AQI and has come to the conclusion that both its size and the scope of its operations have been systematically exaggerated for political reasons. His story, “The Myth of AQI,” is forthcoming in our October issue, but today we’re offering a sneak preview:

What if official military estimates about the size and impact of al-Qaeda in Iraq are simply wrong? Indeed, interviews with numerous military and intelligence analysts, both inside and outside of government, suggest that the number of strikes the group has directed represent only a fraction of what official estimates claim. Further, al-Qaeda’s presumed role in leading the violence through uniquely devastating attacks that catalyze further unrest may also be overstated.

….In a background briefing this July in Baghdad, military officials said that during the first half of this year AQI accounted for 15 percent of attacks in Iraq….Yet those who have worked on estimates inside the system take a more circumspect view….spectrum of estimates, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent….But even the low estimate of 8 percent may be an overstatement.

….How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I’ve heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” according to Nance, “is a microscopic terrorist organization.”

….The view that AQI is neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed is widespread among working-level analysts and troops on the ground. A majority of those interviewed for this article believe that the military’s AQI estimates are overblown to varying degrees. If such misgivings are common, why haven’t doubts pricked the public debate?

Now, obviously AQI isn’t literally a “myth.” It exists. But amidst all the debate over violence levels, security benchmarks, and political progress in Iraq, the one thing that hasn’t been questioned until now is the military portrayal of AQI’s oversized, almost mythic role in sustaining the insurgency — as well as its political role as the last big argument for keeping U.S. troops in the country. Today Tilghman does just that. Read his whole piece to find out how and why it happened.