[Peace-discuss] Ali Abunimah comments on Colin Powell's statement

[David Green]

Focus on Iraq: Powell's UN speech dissected

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 5 February 2003

US media had suggested that Secretary of State Colin
Powell was playing down what he would present to the
UN Security Council about Iraq's alleged deceptions,
weapons of mass destruction, and support for
terrorism, so that when he made his revelations, they
would have all the greater impact. Having heard
Powell's presentation, it is now clear he was playing
things down because his hand was in fact so weak.

Powell's multi-media presentation was a rag-bag of old
allegations, which the United States has been making
for years, some of them based on information Iraq has
itself provided to UN inspectors. Other claims were
based on audio recordings and satellite images, and
still more were based on unverifiable claims from
unidentified human witnesses and "defectors." Powell
all but admitted the weakness of his case by
continually saying "these are facts, not assertions,"
at moments when he was providing the most sensational
yet least supported claims. He also resorted to the
comic book tactic of calling Saddam Hussein an "evil
genius" for having succeeded in hiding what the US
says is a vast arsenal, not only from UN inspectors,
but from the world's only super power. Let's look more
closely at some of the "new" elements in the American
case for an immediate attack on Iraq:

The Audio Tapes

Powell played what he said were intercepted
conversations between Iraqi officers who were
discussing ways to conceal prohibited materials from
UN inspectors. None of the three recordings, if real,
amounted to a "smoking gun." If they were real, they
could be incriminating in a certain context, but they
could also have been taken out of a context in which
they were entirely innocent.

The evidentiary value of the alleged recordings is
close to nil. The recordings could easily have been
faked, as the United States has a history of doing. In
2001, US public radio's "This American Life,"
broadcast recently declassified tapes from a
clandestine radio station set up by the CIA in the
1950s to help provoke a coup against the
democratically-elected government of Guatemala. The
radio station, which broadcast completely fake
"opposition" voices, is credited with helping bring a
repressive American client regime to power. (Program
broadcast on 30 November 2001. See www.thislife.org
for details.)

More directly related to current events, New York's
Village Voice newspaper reported late last year how,
during the 1990s, a Harvard graduate student
celebrated for his convincing impersonation of Saddam
Hussein was hired by the high-powered, US
government-linked public relations firm, the Rendon
Group, to make fake propaganda broadcasts of Saddam's
voice to Iraq. The student received three thousand
dollars a month for his troubles. "I never got a
straight answer on whether the Iraqi resistance, the
CIA, or policy makers on the Hill were actually the
ones calling the shots," the report quotes the ersatz
Saddam saying, "but ultimately I realized that the
guys doing spin (sic) were very well funded and
completely cut loose." ("Broadcast Ruse: A Grad
Student Mimicked Saddam Over the Airwaves," The
Village Voice, 13-19 November 2002)

In 1990, another Washington public relations firm,
hired by Kuwait, helped win support for the first Gulf
War by fabricating claims, presented to Congress, that
Iraqi troops threw Kuwaiti babies out of incubators.
(see "The Lies We Are Told About Iraq," The Los
Angeles Times, 5 January 2003)

Those taken in by that deception, will want to be more
skeptical this time around. It also doesn't help US
credibility that the Pentagon has repeatedly over the
past two years stated that it would use deception and
black propaganda to achieve its policy goals.

Satellite Imagery

Powell relied on satellite images in order to support
the claim that Iraq is still producing and hiding
chemical weapons. He said, for instance, that some of
the images he showed were of the Iraqis "sanitizing"
the "Al-Taji chemical munitions storage site" before
UN inspectors arrived

Again, it is impossible to tell if the satellite
photos displayed by Powell are real, fake, old or new.
But even if they are real, current photos of Iraq,
they are by themselves of no conclusive value. The New
York Times reported that American officials recently
gave the UN inspectors satellite photos of "what
American analysts said were Iraqi clean-up crews
operating at a suspected chemical weapons site." But
when the inspectors went to the site, they "concluded
that the site was an old ammunition storage area often
frequented by Iraqi trucks, and that there was no
reason to believe it was involved in weapons
activities." ("Blix Says He Saw Nothing to Prompt a
War," The New York Times, 31 January 2003)

For all we know the incident referred to in The New
York Times is probably the same used goods Powell
tried to sell to the Security Council. Only the
inspectors can tell us otherwise.

Mobile Units

Powell claimed, based on uncorroborated hearsay from
"defectors," that Iraq has an elaborate system of
mobile laboratories used for producing biological
weapons. With no hard evidence, Powell was reduced to
displaying "artists impressions" of what these
laboratories supposedly look like, a tactic routinely
used by American supermarket tabloids to produce
pictures to accompany the latest stories of landings
and abductions by space aliens.

In an interview with The New York Times, Hans Blix,
the chief UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, denied US
claims that the inspectors had found that Iraqi
officials were hiding and moving illicit materials
within and outside of Iraq to prevent their discovery
("Blix Says He Saw Nothing to Prompt a War," The New
York Times, 31 January 2003). Blix , who unlike the
United States, has hundreds of staff on the ground in
Iraq, is in a much better position to know than
Powell.

Iraq's links with Al-Qaida

Powell claimed that Iraq has close links with Al-Qaida
and based this largely on the alleged movements of the
threateningly unshaven gentleman Abu Musab Zarqawi.
Prior to Powell's presentation, The Washington Post
noted that Zarqawi, a Jordanian, "appears to be the
only individual named so far to make the link to Iraq
after more than a year of major investigations in
which 'a good deal of attention has been paid to what
extent a connection may exist between al Qaeda and
Iraq,'" ("U.S. Effort to Link Terrorists To Iraq
Focuses on Jordanian," The Washington Post, 5 February
2003)

To make up for the flimsiness of the case, Powell
resorted to building Zarqawi up into a frightening
figure in exactly the way the US in previous years
built up Usama Bin Laden. It seems that Usama, who is
still on the loose, and who did not feature as a topic
of Mr. Powell's address, has been replaced in American
affections.

Powell claimed that Zarqawi (who has now been promoted
by the Americans to the status of "The Zarqawi
Network," complete with flow charts) was training
terrorists in a poison-making camp in northern Iraq.
Powell skipped dismissively over a very pertinent
fact. Since the 1991 Gulf War, northern Iraq has been
out of the control of Saddam Hussein's government.

The United States and United Kingdom have been cruelly
bombing the illegally-declared northern and southern
"no-fly zones" for twelve years, largely to limit the
influence of Iraq's government to the center of the
country. Northern Iraq has been ruled by competing
Kurdish factions with United States backing. Since the
1991 Gulf War, the CIA has been operating freely in
northern Iraq, and the United States recently
acknowledged that its special forces are operating in
that part of the country. Powell showed what he said
was a satellite photo of the "terrorist camp." If the
United States knows where such a camp lies, and has
forces in the region, why has it not bombed it or
attacked it, as it has bombed so many other
installations in northern Iraq? An attack on a
"terrorist" installation in northern Iraq requires
anything but an invasion of the entire country.
Furthermore, if the camp even exists, why would the
United States give its occupants notice that it knows
where it is, rather than just taking it out, as, say,
it took out a car load of alleged "terrorists" in
Yemen last year? It just doesn't add up.

That the US is claiming that Al-Qaida-linked
terrorists are operating in the part of Iraq not
controlled by Saddam Hussein rather undermines the
argument that Saddam is backing such people. Powell's
only answer to this major problem in his case was to
offer more unsubstantiated claims that one of Saddam's
secret agents is in charge of the whole operation.

In the days prior to Powell's presentation, numerous
reports appeared in the American and British press
that senior intelligence officials from the FBI, CIA
and even the Israeli Mossad maintain there is no
evidence to tie Iraq to Al-Qaida in any meaningful
way. The BBC reported on 5 February that a top secret,
official British intelligence report given to Prime
Minister Tony Blair and leaked to the BBC states that
there are no current Iraqi links with al-Qaida. The
BBC added that the intelligence document "said a
fledgling alliance foundered due to ideological
differences between the militant Islamic group and the
secular nationalist regime." ("UK report rejects Iraqi
al-Qaeda link," BBC News Online, 5 February 2003)

At the present time, it appears that there is a much
stronger case on US-Al-Qaida links dating back to the
days when the Reagan Administration helped recruit men
from all over the Arab and Muslim world to join what
it called the "Afghan freedom fighters," than anything
to incriminate Iraq. Mr. Powell said not a word about
that.

Underlining the weakness of the Anglo-American case,
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the BBC before
Powell's address, that he had "seen no evidence which
directly links Iraq to al-Qaeda, but I would not be
surprised if it exists." Is this the sort of shabby
thinking on which decisions about war and peace are
made? More importantly, the Pentagon has brushed aside
the lack of evidence, and, to the dismay of senior CIA
and FBI officials, has exaggerated evidence for purely
ideological and political purposes. It is the result
of these political deceptions, not evidence, that was
presented to the Security Council by Mr. Powell.

Even if there were evidence of an Al-Qaida connection,
the US claims that it wants to go to war to enforce UN
resolutions. But no UN resolutions regarding Iraq say
anything about Al-Qaida. Hence, even the attempt by
the US to link Iraq to Al-Qaida must be interpreted as
an act of desperation by an administration that knows
it has not made its case on alleged weapons of mass
destruction.

Iraq and the United States

Closing his speech, Powell sought to "remind" the
Security Council that Saddam has been a horrible
monster for more than two decades. He cited Iraq's use
of chemical weapons against Kurds in 1988 as "one of
the twentieth century's most horrible atrocities." He
forget to mention, however, that at the time the
United States, which was supporting Saddam in his war
with Iraq, instructed its diplomats to implicate Iran.
Powell also forgot to mention that among the long
history of cooperation between the United States and
Saddam Hussein's Iraq were the several meetings that
once and future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held
with Saddam at the request of President Reagan, one of
them on the same day that Iraq was reported to be
using chemical weapons against Iran.

Nor did Powell point out that the same sort of
satellite evidence that he now uses to indict Iraq was
once gladly handed over to Saddam by the United States
to help Iraq deafeat Iran. And in claiming that there
is not a frightening disease in the pharmacology that
Iraq is not capable of creating, Powell forgot to
mention that the seed stock to make anthrax, E. Coli,
botulism and other biological agents was exported to
Iraq from a company based near Washington, DC, called
the American Type Culture Collection, under contracts
approved by the United States Goverment in the 1980s.
These sales continued even after Iraq was reported to
have used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians.
(see Iraq Under Siege, South End Press, 2000, p.39)

Powell also sought to "remind" the Security Council
about Iraq's horrible human rights record. He failed
to explain, however, when the United States found its
consicence on this matter which never troubled it in
all the years that it was allied with Saddam. Such
naked cynicism may yet fool some in an American public
whose knowledge of history is notoriously shallow, and
whose mass media scarcely dare challenge any
administration's foreign policy, but it will not fool
anyone else.

Powell was also cynical to criticize Saddam Hussein
for allegedly supporting Palestinian groups. Whether
this was simply an attempt to grasp at further
"evidence" is unclear. There are no known links at all
between Palestinian groups fighting Israel's
repression and Al-Qaida, despite the Sharon
government's attempts to manufacture them for American
consumption. What is certain, however, is that in the
Arab world, the attempt to use any alleged support for
the Palestinian cause as a justification to invade
Iraq can only further alienate and inflame public
opinion.

Conclusion

Taken together, the smorgasbord of old allegations,
show-and-tell and hearsay that Powell presented would
fall disastrously short of proving a case against an
accused person in an American court of law, where the
standard of proof must be "beyond a reasonable doubt."
The flashy presentation did not conceal holes in the
American case that a U.S. Navy battlegroup could sail
through with room to spare. The Americans have argued
that the Security Council is not a court of law, and
that the standards of proof are different, and need
not be beyond a reasonable doubt. But early in his
presentation Powell himself used judicial language
when he claimed that Iraq had earlier been "found
guilty" of "material breaches" by the Security
Council.

The American legal system, often held as an example to
the world, applies such strigent standards in order to
protect a single accused person from being wrongly
denied his freedom or life. If the United States
attacks Iraq, not one accused person, but thousands of
innocent people may lose their lives. The United
Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that
600,000 people may be forced to flee their homes, and
millions more may well be exposed to hunger, illness,
danger and chaos for years to come. Is all of this
worth it, when, as France's President Chirac once
again underlined on 4 February, that a perfectly
viable, non-violent alternative exists? In response to
a reporter's question about criticisms that one
hundred UN inspectors cannot possibly disarm a country
the size of Iraq, Chirac pointed out that the first
inspection regime destroyed more Iraqi weapons than
all of the deadly American firepower directed at that
country in 1991 and since. The solution to any
shortage of resources, if the inspectors should
complain of one (so far they have not), said Chirac,
is to increase those resources.

Powell said that by passing Resolution 1441 putting in
place the inspections last November, the Security
Council has given Iraq a "last chance" to disarm. It
appears that it was the United States that had a last
chance to convince the world that what is needed
instead is a US-led invasion of Iraq that could
devastate the whole region for years to come.

The early indications, judging from the speeches of
the Chinese, Russian, French and other foreign
ministers seated around the Security Council table,
are that the world remains convinced that inspections
should be given a chance to work, Iraq, which presents
no immediate threat to anyone, should urgently do
everything possible to cooperate, and as President
Chirac said, "war is always the worst solution."

Let us hope that someone in Washington is listening.


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