Pilger Article

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pilger could have mentioned that not one of Iraq's neighbours not even Iran
or Kuwait suggest an invasion of  Iraq. No doubt Israel would like Iraq
neutralised but the main outcry is not from neighbours but from Great
Britain and the United States that are thousands of miles away!' There is of
course an astonishing double-standard rarely remarked upon in the press. It
is fine for the US to produce weapons of mass destruction but it is utterly
immoral and not not be countenanced that any weak state be allowed to attain
the means to defend itself.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

The Daily Mirror (UK)        April 5, 2002

Not in our name

     How dare George Bush preach peace to Israel when he's meeting Blair to
     plan war on Iraq ... and the deaths of thousands more innocent people?


     By John Pilger

President George W Bush yesterday called on Israel to withdraw from the
Palestinian cities occupied by its forces during the last week.

He excused Israel's violence, but lectured the Palestinians and the rest of
the Middle East on the need for restraint and a lasting peace. "The storms
of violence cannot go on," said Bush. "Enough is enough."

What he neglected to say was that he needs a lull in the present crisis to
lay his own war plans; that while he talks of peace in the Middle East, he
is secretly planning a massive attack on Iraq.

This historic display of hypocrisy by Bush will be on show at his ranch in
Texas today, with Tony Blair, his collaborator, in admiring attendance.

Yes, enough is enough. It is time Tony Blair came clean with the British
people on his part in the coming violence against a nation of innocent
people.

AS THE crisis in Israeli-occupied Palestine deepens, Tony Blair will meet
George W Bush today to plan an attack on another country, Iraq.

Their decision may condemn to death more than 10,000 civilians. That is the
"medium case scenario" drawn up by the Pentagon. If the Americans implement
their current strategy of "total war" and target Iraq's electricity and
water, the consequences will be even more horrific.

There is no mandate in any United Nations resolution for this invasion. It
will be as lawless as Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, which triggered the
Second World War. Indeed, it may well trigger a Third World War, drawing in
nations of the region and beyond.

As Blair arrives at Bush's Texas ranch the question begs: Why does he
condemn Iraq, but is silent on Israel's current bloody and illegal rampage
through Palestine? Why has he not demanded that the Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon comply with UN Security Council resolutions, to which Britain
is a signatory, and withdraw from the Occupied Territories? Why has Blair
said nothing as Sharon has sent tanks and gunships and snipers against
civilians - a government targeting innocent people, like the deaf old lady
shot by an Israeli sniper as she tried to get to hospital? Why has Blair not
called at least for military sanctions against Israel, which has 200 nuclear
weapons targeted at Arab capitals?

Blair's culpable silence is imposed by the most dangerous American
administration for a generation. The Bush administration is determined to
attack Iraq and take over a country that is the world's second largest
source of oil. The aim is to get rid of America's and Britain's old friend,
Saddam Hussein, whom they no longer control, and to install another
compliant thug in Baghdad.

THAT is why Bush now tells Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian cities it
recently occupied while continuing to replenish the Israeli war machine. The
Americans want a rampant Israel guarding their flank as they attack Iraq and
expand their control across the Middle East, whose oil is now more critical
than ever to US military and economic dominance.

For almost two months, Downing Street, through the discredited system of
unattributable briefings that are secret to the public, have spun two
deceptions. The first is that the Prime Minister will play a vital role at
today's meeting with Bush on his Texas ranch in "counseling caution." The
second is that Blair has a "dossier of detailed evidence" that "proves" that
Saddam Hussein has "a nuclear capability" and is "investigating a way to
launch unsophisticated nuclear bombs" and is also building chemical and
biological weapons.

The fiction of Blair as a steadying hand on his Texas buddy is to be read in
Blair's unrelenting bellicose statements, and his attempts, against the
wishes of his senior military advisers, to send thousands of British troops
into the quagmire of Afghanistan, where his "cautionary influence" on Bush
saw as many as 5,000 civilians bombed to death while the Taliban and
al-Qaeda leaders got away.

While remaining silent on Israel, Blair is alone in Europe in his promotion
of an attack on Iraq, a nation of 22 million people with whom the British
have no quarrel. Mysteriously, the "dossier of proof" of the dangers posed
by the Iraqi regime has now been "shelved." This is because no such proof
exists and because, suddenly, more than 130 Labour Members of Parliament are
in revolt, including Cabinet and former Cabinet members. It must be dawning
on many of them that so much of this government's "spin" during the "war on
terrorism" has been a farrago of lies and half-truths provided by an
American intelligence apparatus seeking to cover its failure to provide
warning of the attacks of September 11.

Lie Number One is the justification for an attack on Iraq - the threat of
its "weapons of mass destruction." Few countries have had 93 per cent of
their major weapons capability destroyed. This was reported by Rolf Ekeus,
the chairman of the United Nations body authorized to inspect and destroy
Iraq's arsenal following the Gulf War in 1991. UN inspectors certified that
817 out of the 819 Iraqi long-range missiles were destroyed. In 1999, a
special panel of the Security Council recorded that Iraq's main biological
weapons facilities (supplied originally by the US and Britain) "have been
destroyed and rendered harmless."

As for Saddam Hussein's "nuclear threat," the International Atomic Energy
Agency reported that Iraq's nuclear weapons program had been eliminated
"efficiently and effectively". The IAEA inspectors still travel to Iraq and
in January reported full Iraqi compliance. Blair and Bush never mention this
when they demand that "the weapons inspectors are allowed back". Nor do they
remind us that the UN inspectors were never expelled by the Iraqis, but
withdrawn only after it was revealed they had been infiltrated by US
intelligence.

Lie Number Two is the connection between Iraq and the perpetrators of
September 11. There was the rumor that Mohammed Atta, one of the September
11 hijackers, had met an Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech Republic
last year. The Czech police say he was not even in the country last year. On
February 5, a New York Times investigation concluded: "The Central
Intelligence Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist
operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is
convinced that Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological
weapons to al-Qaeda or related terrorist groups."

Lie Number Three is that Saddam Hussein, not the US and Britain, "is
blocking humanitarian supplies from reaching the people of Iraq." (Foreign
Office minister Peter Hain). The opposite is true. The United States, with
British compliance, is currently blocking a record $5billion worth of
humanitarian supplies from the people of Iraq. These are shipments already
approved by the UN Office of Iraq, which is authorized by the Security
Council. They include life-saving drugs, painkillers, vaccines, cancer
diagnostic equipment.

This wanton denial is rarely reported in Britain. Hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis, mostly children, have died as a consequence of an American and
British riven embargo on Iraq that resembles a medieval siege. The embargo
allows Iraq less than £100 with which to feed and care for one person for a
whole year. This a major factor, says the United Nations' Children's Fund,
in the death of more than 600,000 infants.

I have seen the appalling state of the children of Iraq. I have sat next to
an Iraqi doctor in a modern hospital while she has turned away parents with
children suffering from cancers that are part of what they call a "Hiroshima
epidemic" - caused, according to several studies, by the depleted uranium
that was used by the US and Britain in the Gulf War and is now carried in
the dust of the desert. Not only is Iraq denied equipment to clean up its
contaminated battlefields, but also cancer drugs and hospital equipment.

I showed a list of barred drugs given to me by Iraqi doctors to Professor
Karol Sikora, who as chief of the cancer program of the World Health
Organization, wrote in the British Medical Journal: "Requested radiotherapy
equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by
United States and British advisers (to the UN Sanctions Committee). There
seems to be a rather ludicrous notion that such agents could be converted
into chemical and other weapons." He told me: "Nearly all these drugs are
available in every British hospital. It seems crazy they couldn't have
morphine. When I was in Iraq, in one hospital they had a little bottle of
aspirin pills to go around 200 patients in pain." No one doubts that if the
murderous Saddam Hussein saw advantage in deliberately denying his people
humanitarian supplies, he would do so; but the UN, from the Secretary
General himself, has said that, while the regime could do more, it has not
withheld supplies.

Denis Halliday, the assistant Secretary General of the United Nations,
resigned in protest at the embargo which he described as "genocidal".
Halliday was responsible for the UN's humanitarian program in Iraq. His
successor, Hans Von Sponeck, also resigned in disgust. Last November, they
wrote: "The death of 5-6,000 children a month is mostly due to contaminated
water, lack of medicines and malnutrition. The US and UK governments'
delayed clearance of equipment and materials is responsible for this
tragedy, not Baghdad."

Those who speak these facts are abused by Blair ministers as apologists for
Saddam Hussein - so embroiled is the government with the Bush
administration's exploitation of America's own tragedy on September 11. This
has prevented public discussion of the crime of an embargo that has hurt
only the most vulnerable Iraqis and which is to be compounded by the crime
of attacking the stricken nation. Unknown to most of the British public, RAF
and American aircraft have been bombing Iraq, week after week, for more than
two years. The cost to the British taxpayer is £800million a year. The Wall
Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a "dilemma" because
"few targets remain". "We're down to the last outhouse," said a Pentagon
official.

IN any attack on Iraq, Saddam Hussein's escape route is virtually assured -
just as Osama bin Laden's was. The US and Britain have no wish to free the
Iraqi people from a tyranny the CIA once described as its "greatest
triumph". The last thing they want is a separate Kurdish state and another
allied to the Shi'ite majority in neighboring Iran. They want another Saddam
Hussein: one who will do as he is told.

On March 13, the Foreign Office entertained Brigadier-General Najib Salihi,
a former commander of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard and chief of the
dreaded military intelligence who took part in the invasion of Kuwait in
1990. Now funded by the CIA, the general "denies any war crimes". Not that
he would ever face arrest in the West. At the Foreign Office, he is known as
a "rapidly rising star". He is their man, and Washington's man.

The British soldiers who take part in an invasion have every right to know
the dirty secrets that will underpin their action, and extend the suffering
of a people held hostage to a dictatorship and to international power games
over which they have no control. Two weeks ago, the Americans made clear
they were prepared to use "low yield" nuclear weapons, a threat echoed here
by Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon.

When will Europe stand up? If the leaders of the European Union fall silent,
too, in the face of such danger, what is Europe for? In this country, there
is an honorable rallying cry: Not In Our Name. Bush and Blair must be
restrained from killing large numbers of innocents in our name - a view,
according to the polls, shared by a majority of the British people. An arms
and military equipment embargo must be enforced throughout the region, from
Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Ariel Sharon's Israel. Above all, the siege of both
the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples must end now.