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The
Big Lie
WMDs
Were Just a Pretext for Planned War on Iraq
by
John Pilger
September
23, 2003
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?
John Pilger is a renowned investigative
journalist and documentary filmmaker. His latest documentary film, “Breaking
the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror,” from which this article was
drawn from, was broadcast on the ITV network in the UK, on September 22. Earlier this year, Pilger was named the
winner of the Sophie Prize, one of the world's most
distinguished environmental and development prizes. He was also named Media Personality of the Year, at this
year's EMMA awards. His latest book is The New Rulers of the World
(Verso, 2002). Visit John Pilger’s website at: http://www.johnpilger.com
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