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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.
KILLED IN HER
BED: Little girl, aged eight, lies dead in the rubble of her
home after a US missile destroyed their home in a residential
area of Basra killing six. Her ten year old sister also perished
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.
KILLED IN HER
BED: Little girl, aged ten, lies dead in the rubble of her home
after a US missile destroyed their home in a residential area of
Basra killing six. Her eight year old sister also perished
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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