http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5615.htm
Blair's Mass Deception
By John Pilger
02/03/04: (Daily Mirror) 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. [ Add to that the 1.5
million who died because of the sanctions.]
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.
Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and
growing. The intelligence picture is extensive, detailed and
authoritative
SEPT 24 2002 Not only do we know that Saddam has weapons of mass
destruction, we also know he is capable of using them. Saddam must
disarm or face the consequences
NOV 30 2002 The biological agents we believe Iraq can produce include
anthrax, botulinum, toxin, aflatoxin and ricin. All eventually result
in excruciatingly painful death.
FEB 25 2003 We are asked now to accept that in the last few years -
contrary to all intelligence -Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy
those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd
MAR 18, 2003 The UN weapons
inspectors say vast amounts of chemical and biological poisons, such as
anthrax mustard gas and VX nerve agent remain unaccounted for in Iraq
MAR 20, 2003 Before people crow about the absence
of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a little
bit. I remain confident that they will be found
APRIL 28, 2003 There is no doubt
about the chemical programme, the biological programme, indeed the
nuclear weapons programme. All that is well documented by the United
Nations
MAY 30, 2003 If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that at
its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is
something I am confident history will forgive
Copyright: Daily Mirror. UK
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