The Mystery Beneath The Blue Veil

April 1st, 2009  |   

It was Wednesday, the fifth day of February, 2003. Television satellite trucks were lined up along First Avenue in New York Cuty outside the United Nations Plaza.

Just before 10:30 in the morning, Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, entered the U.N. Security Council Chamber. Dressed in a respectable dark suit and red tie, he smiled and shook hands with delegates from other nations. Then he took his seat around a horseshoe-shaped table.

The visitors’ gallery was full-to-capacity with people who had lined up like cattle to be herded through a security tent and into the warm building.

General Powell was no stranger to the United Nations. One can only wonder if he had noticed the large blue veil that only the day before had been hung over a tapestry on the wall just outside the U.N. Security Council Chamber.

And what was it on that tapestry that the U.N. staff had wanted to cover with a veil?

A Coup de Grâce –Colin Powell’s Vial

Sitting behind Powell’s right shoulder at the horseshoe-shaped table was George Tenet, Director of the CIA.

Tenet would be the man who would later tell President Bush that the way to sell the public on going to war with Iraq was to convince people that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but no-sweat, a war would be a “slam dunk.”

Powell wanted Tenet predominately present as a visible on-camera prop to give CIA validation for the presentation he was about to make.

Behind Powell, on his left side, sat the Ambassador to the U.N., a bald John Negroponte.

When President Bush appointed Negroponte to that position, it was said that: “Giving him this job is a way of telling the U.N.: ‘We hate you.’”

Inside of General Powell’s briefcase was his speech. It was not the original draft written

He had rejected one written by “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff. Powell thought it was “worse than ridiculous.” He felt it was full of baseless information. He had his own speech to give. “My colleagues,” he said, “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

In fact, Powell’s statement was full of phony information, lies and manipulative propaganda designed to set the stage for a war with Iraq. The presentation was designed to eradicate any reluctance that the American public had about going to war with Iraq. 

The multimedia presentation took 76 minutes. It contained over 19,500 words punctuated with audio taped recordings, satellite photos, and  artists’ renderings of the mobile biological weapons labs he said had been described in detail by eyewitnesses.

The coup de grâce, like a bullfighter’s sword into the bull’s heart, came when General Powell held up a small vial of powder-white fake poison. Photographers smothered Powell’s pose. A powerful front-page photo would appear the next day in newspapers all over the world. The vial was an intimidating weapon of mass destruction—mass destruction of any resistance to invading Iraq. 

“Less than a teaspoon of dry anthrax,” he said, “about this amount … shut down the United States Senate in the fall of 2001.” He went on to say that Iraq had never accounted for 25,000 liters of anthrax that U.N. inspectors in the 1990’s estimated it had retained.

Powell wanted to scare Americans into war. He succeeded.

A Newsweek poll taken after the speech found that half of the Americans surveyed were now ready to go to war, compared to only a third the previous month.

Liberal columnist for The Washington Post, Mary McGrory, no fan of George Bush, wrote, “I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.” The paper said Powell’s evidence was “irrefutable” and that his case made it “hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

Colin Powell’s daughter, listening to the speech in her car, felt that his voice was strained and his words lacked passion.

The day after Powell’s speech he was praised when he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Joe Biden effervesced saying: “I’d like to move the nomination of Secretary of State Powell for President of the United States.” 

Forty-three days after Colin Powell walked out of the Security Council Chamber to meet the press, the United States invaded Iraq. The sixth anniversary of that fateful invasion took place last week on March 20. It went practically unnoticed.

Unnoticed as well was what lay beneath that tapestry covered veil.

Hidden beneath the blue veil, behind the press conference, was a tapestry. Unveiled, it would have been a diversion to what a White House aide called “the Powell buy-in.” 

What made this tapestry so dangerous, so subversive that it had to be hidden from view?

Guernica

What lay beneath the blue veil on the wall just outside the Security Council Chamber was a woven wool tapestry depicting Pablo Picasso’s famous painting Guernica. It had been covered because it most certainly did not  provide a good backdrop for General Powells’s  press conference. The Bush administration was apprised of that.

Powell had crafted a speech designed to send us to war. And war is no “slam dunk” thing.

Picasso’s Guernica was an artistic portrayal of the horrors of war—most certainly one of the world’s most famous antiwar statements.

On Monday, April 26, 1937, Hitler sent 28 planes to bomb the small Basque village of Guernica in northern Spain. The bombing, which lasted for three hours, killed some 1,600 people and injured hundreds of civilians, many of them women and children. 

Guernica—the painting—now hangs on the wall of a museum in Madrid. Eleven feet tall and 26.6 feet wide, it depicts people and animals in grotesque postures while suffering the assault from the air. A tortured bull and a horse—screeching mouth wide open—dominate the canvass, while people cry out to heaven and others fall dead to the earth.

Picasso had this to say about his work “In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.”

Guernica—the tapestry—has hung on the wall outside the Security Council Chamber for the past 24 years. Three weeks ago it was taken down, rolled up in cotton batting and waterproof polyethylene and shipped to the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. 

News reports say that Cassandra Needham, the exhibition organizer for the London gallery, flew from New York with the tapestry stashed away in the plane’s baggage hold.

My fantasy?  The plane is grounded and the tapestry extracted from the baggage hold. It’s whisked off to the very place where President Obama last week made the announcement that we would be sending more troops and more money to fight the war in Afghanistan.

Guernica then becomes the backdrop for President Obama’s announcement.

Presidential Props

There were no screaming animals or dying people—no Guernica as a backdrop for the rostrum from which President Obama’s announced his plan for Afghanistan.

American flags served as the backdrop for the announcement that 4,000 new troops would be sent to Afghanistan, in addition to the 17,000 troops redeployed there, on top of the 38,000 U.S. troops already in Afghanistan.

Behind Mr. Obama’s right shoulder was a stern Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

It was Ms. Clinton who called Colin Powell’s 2003 U.N. speech “compelling.”

It was Senator Clinton who never bothered to read the 2003 ninety-two page National Intelligence Estimate which blew a hole in General Powell’s U.N. rationale for war with Iraq. Acting out of her ignorance, she gave President Bush the green light for war. 

Behind Mr. Obama’s left shoulder was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates with his predictable poker face.

It was Robert Gates who played a key role as deputy director of the CIA in the Iran-Contra Affair, the illegal campaign against the government in Nicaragua. It was Gates who gave support, along with John Negroponte, to a ruthless war in Central America that brought terror to so many Latinos we now find here as part of our immigrant “problem.”

It was Robert Gates who was President Bush’s Secretary of Defense, appointed by President Obama for “continuity” in our “war against terrorism.”

I have friends who tell me that Mr. Obama’s announcement should come as no surprise because he told voters prior to the election that this is exactly what he would do. I find little comfort in that observation.

The so-called “Progressives,” for the most part, are silent about Obama’s planned military escalation in Afghanistan. They are as speechless as those Republican neoconservatives who knew the folly of the Iraqi occupation but refused to challenge George Bush when he was wasting valuable resources there and causing untold suffering.

We have just lived through eight years of a stiff-necked, hard-headed, unbending, rigidly inflexible, unwilling-to-change-course president. I don’t want any more of that.

Perhaps it’s my seasonal Lenten leanings—my religious sensibility—that insist upon confession for wrong doings, and rigorous penance as the way for individuals, and even nations, to emulate when mistakes are made—deadly mistakes.

I see many good post-election signs from our new president, particularly in his approach to domestic problems. They lead me to believe that Barack Obama was ready on “day one,” despite all those dire warnings by Republicans, and Senators Biden and Clinton.

But Mr. Obama seems as misguided as President Lyndon Johnson was when he set his sights on ending poverty and wound up in quicksand over his head in Vietnam.

Here’s my take on that.

• We inherited a failed war from the French in Southeast Asia. Obama has inherited a failed war from the Bush and Congress in Iraq/Afghanistan.

• We supported a corrupt government in South Vietnam. We are now supporting a corrupt president Hamid Karzai led government in Afghanistan.

• We sent troops into Vietnam as “advisors.” Ditto in Afghanistan. That also happens to be Obama’s plan.

• We escalated the war in Vietnam by increasing troop levels and direct U.S. military involvement. We are on the same path in Afghanistan.

• We strengthened the enemy’s recruitment and determination in Vietnam by increasing our troop levels. Our growing military presence in Afghanistan will empower Taliban and al-Qaeda recruitment and determination.

• We saw rising casualties in rugged terrain in Vietnam. We are now seeing and will see rising casualties in the most difficult terrain in the world—Afghanistan.

• We had to deal with drugs and a drug financed war in Vietnam. Afghanistan is inundated with drugs. President Karzai’s own brother is a big drug lord.

• We refused to talk with our North Vietnam enemy until too many lives were lost. President Obama, who recently said he would meet with some of the factions of the Taliban, now talks about eradicating them.

• There was no exit plan for Vietnam. There is no exit plan in Afghanistan.

• It is estimated that the Vietnam War cost the U.S. $200 billion. Lots of money back then. War in the region of Afghanistan will bring backbreaking expense, and at a time when our nation is experiencing economic turmoil.

Back on May 1, 2003, President Bush used the USS Abraham Lincoln as a backdrop for his “Mission Accomplished in Iraq” celebration. Quite a prop, don’t you think? But it had no stick to it—no adhesive—no sound foundation in reality.

It’s no April Fools Day trick when I tell you The New York Times is reporting that factional violence is increasing in Iraq. Saddam’s Baath Party is making a comeback. Meanwhile our troops are stuck there in the sand and our equipment is worn and rusting.

Philipp Meyer’s new novel, “American Rust,” set in an economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town (read Appalachia) tells the grim story of the devastation connected to our nation’s lost vision—the American dream.

And so we will send our rusty military gear to Afghanistan along with a military force exhausted and depleted from Iraq, reenlisted from troops who lost their jobs at home while away at war, and new recruits who can find no work at home.

I fear that the flag-bedecked rostrum from which President Obama rolled out his new strategy for the war in Afghanistan may well be his U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

A Look At What’s Beneath A Dead Soldier’s Broken Sword

For Christians, Lent, with its dark themes, comes to a climax with a Holy Week remembrance of the crucifixion of Jesus and the Easter resurrection.  

All that is dark and violent about imperial power surfaces as Jesus is put to death as a dangerous and treasonable threat to the Roman Empire. His refusal to bow to Caesar’s idolatrous image costs him his life.

Nonviolence is always seen as a threat to imperial power. A nation’s pride demands blood sacrifice on the part of its citizens. A refusal to shed blood is seen as a threat to established authority. The cost of discipleship to a nonviolent way of life that refuses to go to war is always a radical and dangerous threat  to society’s love affair with war.  

Picasso’s Guernica is full of death—stark violent death—no holds bar. Guernica is a crucifixion scene with slaughtered Nativity shepherds and manger animals. Iraq is a crucifixion scene. And Afghanistan is another Via Delorosa—the path of suffering and grief on its way to another Golgotha—a place somewhere outside of Kabul.

But if you look carefully at the painting, or the tapestry, you will see something pushing its way up from the ground beneath the broken sword of a dead soldier.

It is a flower—a tiny blossom, like the ones that are pushing their way through winter’s earth in my part of the world.

You can dress Easter up in fine lilies, trumpets, incense, choral flourishes, and a new bonnet. But Easter, for me, is more than that. It is that tiny flower that must find its way out from beneath broken weaponry and death-dealing militarism.

Resurrection, don’t you think, depends upon our willingness to help that flower survive?

Entry Filed under: Fig Tree Notes Archives