[Peace-discuss] Ex-bag cat

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following column from John Pilger -- or rather the quotes that it
contains, notably from Powell, saying that Saddam was no threat -- is
causing an uproar in Washington, after it was circulated by a Democrat
Congressional aide and mentioned in the Washington Post today.  Powell has
already tried to explain himself -- almost pitifully:
	<http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=
	4YO2VZ4ZUJ2CECRBAEKSFFA?type=politicsNews&storyID=3509888>.]

22 Sep 2003

PILGER FILM REVEALS COLIN POWELL SAID IRAQ WAS NO THREAT

EXACTLY one year ago, Tony Blair told Parliament: "Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.

"The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction
programme is not shut down. It is up and running now."

Not only was every word of this false, it was part of a big lie invented
in Washington within hours of the attacks of September 11 2001 and used to
hoodwink the American public and distract the media from the real reason
for attacking Iraq. "It was 95 per cent charade," a former senior CIA
analyst told me.

An investigation of files and archive film for my TV documentary Breaking
The Silence, together with interviews with former intelligence officers
and senior Bush officials have revealed that Bush and Blair knew all along
that Saddam Hussein was effectively disarmed.
 
Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President
Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam
Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East.

In Cairo, on February 24 2001, Powell said: "He (Saddam Hussein) has not
developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass
destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his
neighbours."

This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public.

Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of "containment" that had
effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator - again the very opposite of what
Blair said time and again. On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said
that Saddam Hussein had not been able to "build his military back up or to
develop weapons of mass destruction" for "the last 10 years". America, he
said, had been successful in keeping him "in a box".

Two months later, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and
militarily defenceless Iraq. "Saddam does not control the northern part of
the country," she said. "We are able to keep his arms from him. His
military forces have not been rebuilt."

So here were two of Bush's most important officials putting the lie to
their own propaganda, and the Blair government's propaganda that
subsequently provided the justification for an unprovoked, illegal attack
on Iraq. The result was the deaths of what reliable studies now put at
50,000 people, civilians and mostly conscript Iraqi soldiers, as well as
British and American troops. There is no estimate of the countless
thousands of wounded.

In a torrent of propaganda seeking to justify this violence before and
during the invasion, there were occasional truths that never made
headlines. In April last year, Condoleezza Rice described September 11
2001 as an "enormous opportunity" and said America "must move to take
advantage of these new opportunities."

Taking over Iraq, the world's second biggest oil producer, was the first
such opportunity.

At 2.40pm on September 11, according to confidential notes taken by his
aides, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, said he wanted to "hit"
Iraq - even though not a shred of evidence existed that Saddam Hussein had
anything to do with the attacks on New York and Washington. "Go massive,"
the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and
not." Iraq was given a brief reprieve when it was decided instead to
attack Afghanistan. This was the "softest option" and easiest to explain
to the American people - even though not a single September 11 hijacker
came from Afghanistan. In the meantime, securing the "big prize", Iraq,
became an obsession in both Washington and London.

An Office of Special Plans was hurriedly set up in the Pentagon for the
sole purpose of converting "loose" or unsubstantiated intelligence into US
policy. This was a source from which Downing Street received much of the
"evidence" of weapons of mass destruction we now know to be phoney.

CONTRARY to Blair's denials at the time, the decision to attack Iraq was
set in motion on September 17 2001, just six days after the attacks on New
York and Washington.

On that day, Bush signed a top-secret directive, ordering the Pentagon to
begin planning "military options" for an invasion of Iraq. In July 2002,
Condoleezza Rice told another Bush official who had voiced doubts about
invading Iraq: "A decision has been made. Don't waste your breath."

The ultimate cynicism of this cover-up was expressed by Rumsfeld himself
only last week. When asked why he thought most Americans still believed
Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of September 11, he replied: "I've
not seen any indication that would lead me to believe I could say that."

It is this that makes the Hutton inquiry in London virtually a sham. By
setting up an inquiry solely into the death of the weapons expert David
Kelly, Blair has ensured there will be no official public investigation
into the real reasons he and Bush attacked Iraq and into when exactly they
made that decision. He has ensured there will be no headlines about
disclosures in email traffic between Downing Street and the White House,
only secretive tittle-tattle from Whitehall and the smearing of the
messenger of Blair's misdeeds.

The sheer scale of this cover-up makes almost laughable the forensic
cross-examination of the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan about "anomalies" in
the notes of his interview with David Kelly - when the story Gilligan told
of government hypocrisy and deception was basically true.

Those pontificating about Gilligan failed to ask one vital question - why
has Lord Hutton not recalled Tony Blair for cross-examination? Why is
Blair not being asked why British sovereignty has been handed over to a
gang in Washington whose extremism is no longer doubted by even the most
conservative observers? No one knows the Bush extremists better than Ray
McGovern, a former senior CIA officer and personal friend of George Bush
senior, the President's father. In Breaking The Silence, he tells me:
"They were referred to in the circles in which I moved when I was briefing
at the top policy levels as 'the crazies'."

"Who referred to them as 'the crazies'?" I asked.

"All of us... in policy circles as well as intelligence circles... There
is plenty of documented evidence that they have been planning these
attacks for a long time and that 9/11 accelerated their plan. (The weapons
of mass destruction issue) was all contrived, so was the connection of
Iraq with al Qaeda. It was all PR... Josef Goebbels had this dictum: If
you say something often enough, the people will believe it." He added: "I
think we ought to be all worried about fascism (in the United States)."

The "crazies" include John Bolton, Under Secretary of State, who has made
a personal mission of tearing up missile treaties with the Russians and
threatening North Korea, and Douglas Feith, an Under Secretary of Defence,
who ran a secret propaganda unit "reworking" intelligence about Iraq's
weapons. I interviewed them both in Washington.

BOLTON boasted to me that the killing of as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilians
in the invasion was "quite low if you look at the size of the military
operation."

For raising the question of civilian casualties and asking which country
America might attack next, I was told: "You must be a member of the
Communist Party."

Over at the Pentagon, Feith, No 3 to Rumsfeld, spoke about the "precision"
of American weapons and denied that many civilians had been killed. When I
pressed him, an army colonel ordered my cameraman: "Stop the tape!" In
Washington, the wholesale deaths of Iraqis is unmentionable. They are
non-people; the more they resist the Anglo-American occupation, the more
they are dismissed as "terrorists".

It is this slaughter in Iraq, a crime by any interpretation of an
international law, that makes the Hutton inquiry absurd. While his
lordship and the barristers play their semantic games, the spectre of
thousands of dead human beings is never mentioned, and witnesses to this
great crime are not called.

Jo Wilding, a young law graduate, is one such witness. She was one of a
group of human rights observers in Baghdad during the bombing. She and the
others lived with Iraqi families as the missiles and cluster bombs
exploded around them. Where possible, they would follow the explosions to
scenes of civilian casualties and trace the victims to hospitals and
mortuaries, interviewing the eyewitnesses and doctors. She kept meticulous
notes.

She saw children cut to pieces by shrapnel and screaming because there
were no anaesthetics or painkillers. She saw Fatima, a mother stained with
the blood of her eight children. She saw streets, mosques and farmhouses
bombed by marauding aircraft. "Nothing could explain them," she told me,
"other than that it was a deliberate attack on civilians."

As these atrocities were carried out in our name, why are we not hearing
such crucial evidence? And why is Blair allowed to make yet more
self-serving speeches, and none of them from the dock?

First published in the Daily Mirror - www.mirror.co.uk

***