This week's stories: World's Stupidest Intelligence Report...Police
Corruption Enquiry To Be Doubled...ALP Wants to Stop Compulsive Gambling
and Lung Cancer - Sort of...Quotes of the Week.
The British government's 'intelligence report' on Iraq was largely
copied from reports in magazines and academic journals. American
academic Ibrahim al-Marashi says that the British government copied
passages from a report he wrote on Iraqi weapons. He said that they
even copied his grammatical errors. The British government report
distorted some of the points in the original article - for example, an
estimate that the Iraqi militia had 15,000 members became an estimate of
30-40,000. The British government has admitted that large sections of
its report were taken from magazines and other non-primary sources.
(The Age, February 9).
A taskforce investigating corruption in the Victorian drug squad will be
doubled in size, after uncovering 80 claims of serious corruption. The
Ceja taskforce is investigating claims that police:
- stole drugs, in once case with a value of up to $400,000
- trafficked drugs worth millions of dollars
- allowed informers to sell drug chemicals for profit
- falsified evidence against drug suspects, and
- in once case, took evidence from a crime scene and planted it in the
house of another suspect.
(The Age, February 8).
Tobacco companies gave a total of over $43,000 to the Victorian ALP over
the three years to June 30 2002. Gambling companies gave a total of
$604,000.
(The Age, February 8).
Quotes of the Week:
"I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am
strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. It
is not necessary to use only the most deadly gases; gases can be used
which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet
would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected."
Winston Churchill, urging the British Air Force to use chemical weapons
against the people of Mesopotamia, today called Iraq, in the 1920s.
Someone asks George Bush, "what proof do you have that Iraq has weapons
of mass destruction?"
He replies "We kept the receipts."
When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about 'bringing democracy
to the people of Iraq', remember that it was the CIA that installed the
Ba'ath Party in Baghdad from which emerged Hussein.
'That was my favourite coup,' said the CIA man responsible. When you
next hear Blair and Bush talking about a 'smoking gun' in Iraq, ask why
the US government last December confiscated the 12,000 pages of Iraq's
weapons declaration, saying they contained 'sensitive information' which
needed 'a little editing'.
Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed 150 American,
British and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with its nuclear,
chemical and missile technology, many of them in illegal transactions.
In 2000 Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister, blocked a
parliamentary request to publish the full list of lawbreaking British
companies. He has never explained why.
As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the page
like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game
unconnected to people's lives.
The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They are the end
result of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair, who
never see, or would have the courage to see, the effect of their actions
on ordinary lives: the blood on their hands.
Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers will be used in
the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people were
killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three
ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in
formation, unseen above the clouds.
They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as
the "long box" pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything
inside a "box" was presumed destroyed.
When I reached a village within the "box", the street had been replaced
by a crater.
I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch
filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown
into the air by the blast.
The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and
burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight
ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot
seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.
I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even in
that "media war" I never saw images of these grotesque sights on
television or in the pages of a newspaper.
I saw them only pinned on the wall of news agency offices in Saigon as a
kind of freaks' gallery.
Some years later I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese children
in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide called Agent
Orange. It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly for it
contained Dioxin, the deadliest known poison.
This terrible chemical weapon, which the cliche-mongers would now call a
weapon of mass destruction, was dumped on almost half of South Vietnam.
Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and food,
children continue to be born without palates and chins and scrotums or
are stillborn. Many have leukaemia.
You never saw these children on the TV news then; they were too hideous
for their pictures, the evidence of a great crime, even to be pinned up
on a wall and they are old news now.
That is the true face of war. Will you be shown it by satellite when
Iraq is attacked? I doubt it.
I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I travelled in
Iraq two years ago. A paediatrician showed me hospital wards of children
similarly deformed: a phenomenon unheard of prior to the Gulf war in 1991.
She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed on
grey little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe her eyes.
More than 300 tons of depleted uranium, another weapon of mass
destruction, were fired by American aircraft and tanks and possibly by
the British.
Many of the rounds were solid uranium which, inhaled or ingested, causes
cancer. In a country where dust carries everything, swirling through
markets and playgrounds, children are especially vulnerable.
For 12 years Iraq has been denied specialist equipment that would allow
its engineers to decontaminate its southern battlefields. It has also
been denied equipment and drugs that would identify and treat the cancer
which, it is estimated, will affect almost half the population in the south.
Last November Jeremy Corbyn MP asked the Junior Defence Minister Adam
Ingram what stocks of weapons containing depleted uranium were held by
British forces operating in Iraq.
His robotic reply was: 'I am withholding details in accordance with
Exemption 1 of the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information.'
Let us be clear about what the Bush-Blair attack will do to our fellow
human beings in a country already stricken by an embargo run by America
and Britain and aimed not at Hussein but at the civilian population, who
are denied even vaccines for the children. Last week the Pentagon in
Washington announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter Iraq
"physically, emotionally and psychologically" by raining down on its
people 800 cruise missiles in two days.
This will be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the
entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.
A military strategist named Harlan Ullman told American television:
'There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has
never been seen before, never been contemplated before.'
The strategy is known as Shock and Awe and Ullman is apparently its
proud inventor. He said: 'You have this simultaneous effect, rather like
the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes.'
What will his 'Hiroshima effect' actually do to a population of whom
almost half are children under the age of 14? The answer is to be found
in a 'confidential' UN document, based on World Health Organisation
estimates, which says that 'as many as 500,000 people could require
treatment as a result of direct and indirect injuries'.
A Bush-Blair attack will destroy 'a functioning primary health care
system' and deny clean water to 39 per cent of the population. There is
'likely [to be] an outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic
proportions'. It is Washington's utter disregard for humanity, I
believe, together with Blair's lies that have turned most people in this
country against them, including people who have not protested before.
Last weekend Blair said there was no need for the UN weapons inspectors
to find a 'smoking gun' for Iraq to be attacked. Compare that with his
reassurance in October 2001 that there would be no 'wider war' against
Iraq unless there was 'absolute evidence' of Iraqi complicity in
September 11. And there has been no evidence.
Blair's deceptions are too numerous to list here. He has lied about the
nature and effect of the embargo on Iraq by covering up the fact that
Washington, with Britain's support, is withholding more than $5billion
worth of humanitarian supplies approved by the Security Council.
He has lied about Iraq buying aluminium tubes, which he told Parliament
were 'needed to enrich uranium'. The International Atomic Energy Agency
has denied this outright. He has lied about an Iraqi 'threat', which he
discovered only following September 11 2001 when Bush made Iraq a
gratuitous target of his 'war on terror'. Blair's 'Iraq dossier' has
been mocked by human rights groups [and see this week's story].
Bush has said he will use nuclear weapons 'if necessary'. On March 26
last Geoffrey Hoon said that other countries 'can be absolutely
confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our
nuclear weapons'. Such madness is the true enemy. What's more, it is
right here at home and you, the people, can stop it.
(John Pilger, in the Mirror (UK), January 29 - slightly condensed by All
the News That Fits).
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