[Reader-list] Lies of Iraq

[Avishek Ganguly]

ZNet | Iraq

Blair's Lies
by John Pilger; Daily Mirror; March 14, 2003

THE Blair Government has known, almost from the day it
came to office in 1997, that Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction were almost certainly destroyed following
the Gulf War.
Of all the pro-war propaganda of Blair and Bush, and
their current threats giving Saddam Hussein yet
another deadline to disarm, what may be their biggest
lie is exposed by this revelation.
Two weeks ago, a transcript of a United Nations
debriefing of Iraqi general Hussein Kamel was obtained
by the American magazine, Newsweek, and by Cambridge
University analyst, Glen Rangwala (who last month
revealed that Blair's "intelligence dossier" on Iraq
was lifted, word for word, from an American student's
thesis).General Kamel was the West's "star witness" in
its case against Saddam Hussein. He was no ordinary
defector. A son-in-law of the Iraqi dictator, he had
immense power in Iraq; and when he defected, he took
with him crates of secret documents on Iraq's weapons
programme.
These secrets have been repeatedly cited by George W
Bush and his officials as "evidence" that Iraq still
has large quantities of deadly weapons of mass
destruction, and that only war can disarm it.
Bush, his officials and leading American commentators,
have frequently lauded General Kamel as the most
reliable source of information on Iraq's weapons. The
Blair government has echoed this.
In 1995, General Kamel was debriefed by senior
officials of the United Nations inspections team, then
known as UNSCOM, and by the International Atomic
Energy Agency. The complete transcript, now 
disclosed for the first time, contradicts almost
everything Bush and Blair have said about the threat
of Iraqi weapons.
For example, General Kamel says categorically: "I
ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All
weapons - biological,chemical, missile, nuclear - were
destroyed." All that remains, he says, are the
blueprints, computer disks and microfiches.
Newsweek says that the CIA and Britain's MI6 were told
this; and Blair and Bush must have been told the
truth. In other words, it is likely that Iraq has been
substantially disarmed for at least eight years.
With General Kamel now out of the way (he was killed
when he returned to Iraq in 1996), his "evidence" was
selectively made public by Washington and London. In
his dramatic presentation to the UN Security Council
on February 5, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said
that the truth about Iraq's nerve gas weapons "only
came out after inspectors collected documentation as a
result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam
Hussein's late son in law".
What Powell neglected to mention was that his star
witness had told them all the weapons had been
destroyed. 
GENERAL Kamel's sensational admission has been
corroborated by the former chief UN weapons inspector
Scott Ritter who says that when he left Iraq in 1998,
disarmament was "90 to 95 per cent".
A United Nations verifying panel set up by the
Security Council, confirmed that "the bulk of Iraq's
proscribed weapons programmes has been eliminated".
This has seldom been reported.
Of course, none of these facts will deter the American
and British security agencies from inventing and
planting "evidence" of "Saddam's secret weapons" once
Anglo-American forces take over Baghdad.
When America and Britain crush Iraq, a new phase of
their black propaganda will emerge - for which the
British public ought to be prepared. This new range of
deceptions will be designed to justify attacking a
sovereign state and killing innocent people: a crime
under international law, with or without a second UN
resolution.
Black propaganda of this kind has a long history. My
own experience of it was the American invasion of
Vietnam. In 1964, the US State Department published a
White Paper with pages of "conclusive proof" of North
Vietnam's preparations to invade the south. This
"proof" stemmed from the "discovery" of a stockpile of
weapons found floating in a junk off the coast of
South Vietnam. The White Paper, which provided a
quasi-legal justification for the American
invasion, was known as a "master illusion". The whole
episode was fake, a set-up. Master illusion was the
CIA's term for master lie. In 1982, I interviewed
Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA officer who documented the
planting of the fake evidence. He told me: "The CIA
loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with
communist weapons ... They floated this junk off the
coast of Central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and
made it look like a fire fight had taken place. They
then brought in the American press and the
international press and said, 'Here's the evidence
that the North Vietnamese are invading South Vietnam.'
Based on this 'evidence', the US Marines went in, and
the American air force began regular bombing of North
Vietnam."
As a result of this fakery, which included the
elaborate fiction that an American destroyer had been
attacked by a North Vietnamese gunboat, the United
States dispatched its greatest ever land army to
Vietnam, and dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in
the history of warfare, and forced millions of people
to abandon their homes, and used chemical weapons that
profoundly damaged the environment and human genes,
leaving a once beautiful land petrified.
AT least two million people were killed, and many more
were maimed and otherwise ruined. Now replace
"Vietnam" with "Iraq" in this story of lies; and you
have the essentials of the same justification
for another great criminal act.
Watch how the propaganda unfolds once the bombing is
over and the Americans are running Baghdad and their
spin machine. There will be the "discovery of Saddam's
secret arsenal," probably in the basement of one his
palaces. This will be accompanied by the "discovery"
of
gruesome evidence of Saddam's oppression. This will
not come as news to the many dedicated anti-war
campaigners, who for years tried to stop the American
and British governments from supplying Saddam with the
tools of his oppression.
They include many Iraqis exiled in Britain, such as
Khalid Sahi, who was tortured by the regime and
opposes an attack "will bring nothing but more
bloodshed, more misery"; and the anti-war Labour MP
Jeremy Corbyn, who has protested about the Iraqi
dictator for more than twenty years and demanded that
the British government prosecute British companies
that sustained the Iraqi torturers.Two years ago,
Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office minister, blocked a
parliamentary request to publish the full list of
British companies that had illegally traded with
Saddam Hussein.
The reason why became clear last week when the
Guardian newspaper disclosed that the Blair government
had secretly paid out more than £33 million in
taxpayers' money to British companies claiming
non-payment on the weapons they sold Saddam Hussein in
the 1980s.
The total loss to the taxpayer on sales to Iraq now
exceeds £1billion. Add this to the £3.5billion that
Gordon Brown has "put aside" for an attack on Iraq.
Add this to the £1billion that the bombing of Iraq has
already cost - the rarely reported bombing by British
and American aircraft in the so-called "no fly zones",
which now cover most of Iraqi airspace and were set
up, according to Blair, to "protect Iraq's
minorities". Who believes this now?
This week, the Ministry of Defence said: "We never
target civilians [in the no-fly zones]... there's no
evidence of civilian casualties." The lie of this
statement would be breathtaking were it not routine.
In northern Kurdish Iraq, I interviewed members of one
family who had lost their grandfather, their father
and four brothers and sisters when a "coalition"
aircraft (British or American)dive-bombed them and the
sheep they were tending. It was open desert, a
moonscape with not a sign of other life, let alone a
military installation. Amid the carcasses of blasted
sheep were pieces of clothing and a single shoe.
The attack was investigated and verified by the chief
United Nations representative in Iraq at the time,
Hans Von Sponeck, who drove there especially from
Baghdad. His findings are listed among dozens of
similar attacks - on shepherds, farmers, fishermen -
in a document prepared by the United Nations Security
Section.
At a windswept cemetery near the town of Mosul, I
caught sight of the shepherd's widow as she grieved
for her husband and four children. "I want to see the
pilot who did this," she shouted.
LAST week, "coalition" aircraft killed another six
people in the southern city of Basra. Nothing unusual
there. When I was last in Basra, an American missile
killed six children when it "mistakenly" hit Al
Jumohria, a very poor section of Basra's residential
area. I walked down the street where the missile had
struck in the early hours; it had followed the line of
houses, destroying one after the other. I met the
father of two sisters, aged eight and 10, who were
photographed by a local weddings photographer, Nabil
al-Jerani, shortly after the attack. Their bodies were
unlike the other four children, who were blown to
bits, their limbs and flesh in the overhead wires.
These two little girls were left intact. In Nabil's
photographs,they are in their nightdresses, one with a
bow in her hair, their bodies perfectly engraved in
the rubble of their homes, where they had been bombed
to death, murdered, in their beds.
Look closely at their images on these pages; they are
the faces of a stricken nation of whom 42 per cent are
children. When Blair speaks about the "moral case" for
sending hundreds of missiles against this nation of so
many children, as well as new types of cluster bombs
and bunker bombs and microwave bombs, and shells
tipped with pure uranium, a form of nuclear weapon,
the images of the two sisters provide an eloquent
commentary on the Prime Minister's Christian
"morality".
And when pictures of exhausted Iraqis greeting their
"liberation" are flashed around the world, remember
the faces that will be missing in the crowds - not
only those of the children bombed and disposed of as
"collateral damage", but more than a million faces
declared expendable by the American-driven and
British-backed economic embargo.
Remember the vaccines, cancer-treatment equipment,
pain-killers,plasma bags, food treatment equipment and
much else denied over fourteen years: $5.4 billion
worth as of last July,to be precise,blocked by the US
government, backed by the Blair government.
Remember the words of President Clinton's then
representative at the United Nations, Madeleine
Albright, when she was asked if the price of 500,000
Iraqi children was a price worth paying for the
embargo. "We think the price is worth it," she said.
AND when you next hear Bush or Blair or Straw or Hoon
talk about "the tyrant who gassed his own people",
remember those American officials and British
ministers who competed with each other to excuse and
effectively reward Saddam Hussein for gassing 5,000
Kurds in the town of Halabja.
Barely one month after the atrocity in 1988, Tony
Newton, Margaret Thatcher's Trade Secretary, flew to
Baghdad to offer Saddam £340million of taxpapers'
money in export credits. Three months later, the
smiling Newton was back, this time to celebrate with
Saddam the joyous news that Iraq was now Britain's
third-largest market for machine tools, from which a
range of Iraqi weapons was forged - some of them used
against British troops in the Gulf War.
Newton was followed by Assistant US Secretary of State
John Kelly who flew to Baghdad to tell Saddam that
"you are a source for moderation in the region, and
the United States wants to broaden her relationship
with Iraq".
When the "liberation" of Baghdad is on the front page,
remember the warmongering newspapers whose editorials
defended Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s by
promoting the lie that his use of chemical weapons
against Iran was purely defensive.
Remember, too, Blair's long silence. There is no
record of Blair saying anything worthwhile about
Saddam's "excesses" (as his crimes used to be known by
British ministers when he was "one of us") until
after September 11, 2001 when the Americans,
frustrated at having failed to catch Osama bin Laden,
declared the Iraqi dictator their number one enemy.

Like a discredited East European autocrat, attended
only by his court of supplicants and propagandists,
Blair has few left to deceive. He even claimed the
other day that "no Iraqis marched" in the great
demonstration of February 15. In fact, as many as
7,000
Iraqis and Kurds marched. Iraqi families stood on the
roadside holding up home-made placards: "Thank you for
supporting my people."
None, it can be assumed, has any time for Saddam
Hussein; but none want their country strangled,
attacked, poisoned and occupied by another variety of
dictator.


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