Memories of Watergate Come to Mind as Bush Team is Caught out over Tales
about Non-Existent Iraqi Weapons
Invoking Ghosts of Nixon
by Haroon Siddiqui
Published on Thursday, February 5, 2004 by the Toronto Star
Britons and Americans want to know why their leaders lied to them to wage
war on Iraq. Tony Blair and George W. Bush have instead ordered inquiries
into the known shortcomings of their intelligence agencies.
Both hope to get the issue out of the headlines long enough to get past the
next elections.
Or, Blair may just be buying the respite he needs to bow out on a relatively
high note, rather than submit himself to the verdict of the electorate.
Bush has tailored the timetable of the American probe to run well past the
fall presidential election. He has further insulated himself from political
accountability by diluting the mandate of his Iraq inquiry. He has ordered
it to examine the weapons programs in Iran, Libya and North Korea as well.
The probe will be less about the president misleading the nation and the
world, but more about the misdeeds of the same set of foreign evildoers whom
he regularly demonizes to great political advantage at home.
But the Bush-Blair tactics may backfire. The issue of trust that is at the
core of the controversy is too fundamental to be manipulated away. There are
signs that it can't be.
Britons have reacted with derision to last week's whitewash by Lord Hutton,
who placed the blame entirely on the BBC but skipped right over the more
central issue of whether Blair exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq to
justify war.
Similarly, Bush's announcement is being seen for what it is, a cynical ploy
in keeping with his instincts to dodge and duck, rather than be forthcoming.
Those traits have been on ample display in his resistance to the demands of
another commission, the one probing the security and intelligence failures
surrounding 9/11. He has been reluctant to share documents or heed its call
to testify.
His approval rating is down below 50 per cent for the first time. More so
than usual, the administration is speaking in multiple voices.
While Bush and Dick Cheney are adjusting their rationale for the war day by
day, neo-con believers like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are still
keeping the faith.
In an appearance before a Senate committee yesterday, the Defense secretary
offered eight self-serving explanations as to why no weapons of mass
destruction have been found in Iraq every conceivable answer except that
he may have been wrong, if not outright dishonest.
Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, the administration's most respected
member, is having trouble keeping his credibility intact.
It was a year ago today that he made his infamous presentation to the
Security Council, in which he made wild claims that have since been totally
discredited: that Iraq still had an active nuclear program; that it had
mobile biological labs; that it had "between 500 and 1,000 tonnes" of
chemical weapons; that it had long-range missiles capable of hitting
neighbors; that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, whose
operatives were running a poison factory in Iraq.
"What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid
intelligence," he told the Security Council. Not so. His assertions were no
more backed by facts than those of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others.
Powell's charge that Iraq was using aluminum tubes for centrifuges had
already been disputed by his own state department as well as by the energy
department.
And the accusation of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection had been discredited,
based as it was on an uncorroborated report.
But an administration hell-bent on going to war was not going to be
deterred. It leaned enough on Central Intelligence Agency director George
Tenet for him to change his tune and say what his bosses wanted to hear.
As early as the summer of 2002, Bush had reportedly told King Abdullah of
Jordan that his mind was made up about invading Iraq. Condoleezza Rice, the
president's national security adviser, is also on record as saying the same
thing.
Powell chose to remain the loyal soldier: a former chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff carrying out the orders of his commander-in-chief.
Yet with an eye on the history books, the consummate Washington insider also
let it be known within days of his shameful performance at the U.N., he had,
in fact, edited out some of the more fanciful assertions fed to him.
He is still trying to leave the impression that he stands apart from the
rest of the Bush crowd.
When asked this week by the Washington Post if he would have agreed to an
invasion knowing Iraq had no prohibited weapons, he replied:
"I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little
piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the
region and to the world ... (The) absence of a stockpile changes the
political calculus; it changes the answer you get."
Yet within hours of the publication of that interview, he was also telling
reporters that "the president made the right decision" in going to war.
Instead of trying to have it both ways, Powell should have resigned then and
should resign now. Or, he should learn to live with the taint of being
associated with the company he has chosen to keep.
As for the rest of his colleagues, they are beginning to sound and look like
the cast of characters around Richard Nixon in his final days.
Haroon Siddiqui is The Star's editorial page editor emeritus.
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.
____________________________________________________________
Blair's Mass Deception
by John Pilger
In the wake of the Hutton fiasco, one truth remains unassailed: Tony Blair
ordered an unprovoked invasion of another country on a totally false
pretext, and that lies and deceptions manufactured in London and Washington
caused the deaths of up to 55,000 Iraqis, including 9,600 civilians.
Consider for a moment those who have paid the price for Blair's and Bush's
actions, who are rarely mentioned in the current media coverage. Deaths and
injury of young children from unexploded British and American cluster bombs
are put at 1,000 a month. The effect of uranium weapons used by
Anglo-American forces - a weapon of mass destruction - is such that readings
taken from Iraqi tanks destroyed by the British are so high that a British
Army survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and
gloves. Iraqi children play on and around these tanks. British troops, says
the Ministry of Defence, "will have access to biological monitoring."
Iraqis have no such access and no expert medical help; and thousands are now
suffering from a related catalogue of miscarriages and hair loss, horrific
eye, skin and respiratory problems.
Neither Britain nor America counts its Iraqi victims, and the fact, let
alone the extent of the human carnage and material devastation is not even
acknowledged by a government that says it is "vindicated" by Lord Hutton,
whose report most British people clearly regard as a parody worthy of the
Prime Minister's resignation.
Blair has now announced an inquiry into the "failure of intelligence" that
has mysteriously denied him evidence of weapons of mass destruction, which
he repeatedly said were his "aim" in attacking Iraq. Just as the brawl with
the BBC and the Hutton inquiry were quite deliberate distractions, so this
latest inquiry is another panic measure. It is clear that George W Bush, as
one American journalist put it, "is now hanging Tony Blair out to dry."
Blair has, as ever, followed Bush. In announcing at the weekend his own
inquiry into an "intelligence failure," Bush hopes to cast himself as an
innocent, aggrieved member of the public wanting to know why America's
numerous spy agencies did not alert the nation to the fact, now confirmed by
Bush's own weapons inspector, David Kay, that there were no weapons of mass
destruction and probably weren't any since before the 1991 Gulf War, and
that the premise for going to war was "almost all wrong." "It was," Ray
McGovern told me, "95 per cent charade." McGovern is a former high-ranking
CIA analyst and one of a group of ex-senior intelligence officers, several
of whom have described how the Bush administration demanded that
intelligence be shaped to comply with political objectives, and the role of
Britain in the charade.
"It was intelligence that was crap," a former intelligence officer told the
New Yorker, "...but the brits wanted to plant stories in England and around
the world." He described how "inactionable" (unreliable) intelligence
reports were passed on to British intelligence, which then fed them to
newspapers.
Former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter says this false information
was spread systematically by British intelligence. The clue to this secret
operation was given by the weapons expert David Kelly the day before his
suicide and which Hutton later ignored. Kelly told the Prime Minister's
intelligence and security committee: "I liaise with the Rockingham cell."
As Ritter reveals, this referred to the top secret "Operation Rockingham"
set up within British intelligence to "cherry pick" information that might
be distorted as "proof" of the existence of a weapons arsenal in Iraq. It
was an entirely political operation, whose misinformation, says Ritter, led
him and his inspectors "to a suspected ballistic missile site. We...found
nothing. However, our act of searching allowed the US and the UK to say that
the missiles existed."
Ritter says Operation Rockingham's bogus intelligence would have been fed to
the Joint Intelligence Committee. The committee was behind the two
"dossiers" in which Blair government claimed Saddam Hussein was a threat.
Ritter says that Rockingham officers were acting on political orders "from
the very highest levels."
How high? Right up to Blair himself? It was Blair, after all, who made such
a personal "mission" of finding weapons of mass destruction. The question of
how high needs urgently to be answered. Will Scott Ritter be called to
Blair's inquiry? And will Blair explain to the inquiry why the February 2003
British "arms dossier," which Hutton chose to ignore, was so bogus that it
plagiarised an American student's theses, lifting it word for word including
the spelling mistakes?
The truth is that 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 1991 Gulf War - just as Bush's weapons
expert, David Kay, has now confirmed.
What else did Blair know?
In February last year, a transcript of a leaked United Nations debriefing of
Iraqi general Hussein Kamel, revealed that both the US and British
governments must have known that Saddam Hussein no longer had weapons of
mass destruction. General Kamel was no ordinary defector; he was Bush and
Blair's star witness in their governments' case against Saddam. A son-in-law
of the dictator, he had overall authority for Iraq's weapons' programmes,
and defected with crates of documents.
When Secretary of State Colin Powell made the Anglo-American case for an
attack on Iraq before the UN Security Council, he relied on and paid tribute
to the reliability of General Kamel's evidence. What he did not reveal, as
the transcript of the general's debriefing reveals, was this categorical
statement by Kamel: "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All
weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed."
The CIA and Britain's MI6 of course knew about this; and it beggars belief
that Bush and Blair were not told. But neither of them let on - just as
Colin Powell suppressed his informant's most sensational information, which
would have contradicted all his spurious claims. General Kamel (who was
later murdered by Saddam Hussein) corroborated Scott Ritter's statement that
Iraq had been disarmed "90 to 95 per cent."
Iraq was attacked so that the United States and Britain could claim its oil
and its assets. Only Mary Poppins would believe otherwise. For the latest in
a catalogue of evidence, turn to the Wall Street Journal, the paper of
America's ruling elite, which has obtained copies of the Bush
administration's secret plan to privatise the country by selling off its
assets to western corporations while establishing vast military bases.
The plan was drafted in February last year, just as Tony Blair was assuring
the British people that the only reason was Saddam Hussein's "threat."
The Bush/Blair attack on Iraq has brought death, destruction and great
bitterness to Iraq. Every indication is that most Iraqis now regard their
lives as immeasurably worse than during Saddam Hussein's rule. More than
13,000 people are held in concentration camps in their own country.
This is many more than were incarcerated in Saddam's political prisons in
recent years. None has been charged; most cannot see their families; the
allegations of torture and brutality by the occupiers grow by the day. As
the US-based Human Rights Watch reported last week, the worst atrocities
were in the 1980s - when he was backed by America and Britain.
The uprising in Iraq has accelerated and almost certainly strengthened since
the capture of Saddam. Drawn from 12 different groups, including those that
were always anti-Saddam, the resistance is well organised and will not stop
until the "coalition" leaves. The setting up of a puppet "democracy" will
merely increase the number of targets. As Blair's knowledge of imperial
history will tell him, this is precisely what happened in Britain's other
colonies before they threw out their occupiers, and in Vietnam.
One piece of intelligence which was true and which we know Blair received is
a report that warned him that an attack on Iraq would only increase
worldwide terrorism, especially against British interests and citizens. He
chose to ignore it.
Two weeks ago a panel of jurists called on the International Criminal Court
to investigate the British government for war crimes in Iraq. Whether or not
that succeeds, it is clear the Prime Minister will need to find another
Hutton, and quickly.
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