[A-List] Fw: THE MIRROR:The Big Lie by John Pilger

["Christopher Black" <bar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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From: "minja m." <minja@xxxxxxxx>
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Subject: THE MIRROR:The Big Lie by John Pilger


>
>
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=13434081_method=full_siteid=50143_headline=-THE-BIG-LIE-name_page.html
>
> THE MIRROR, Monday, September 22, 2003
>
> The Big Lie
>
> John Pilger
>
> 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?
>
>
> # A special report by John Pilger, Breaking The Silence: Truth And Lies
> In
> The War On Terror, will be shown tonight on ITV1 at 10.45 pm.
>
> __________
>
>