| Subject: Re: The Thieves of Bagdad |
Author:
Paddy Harrison
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Date Posted: 22:43:51 09/04/03 Thu
In reply to:
KW
's message, "Re: The Thieves of Bagdad" on 16:11:26 06/10/03 Tue
>This is an Article by Humanitarian Journalist, John
>Pilger.
>
>The Unravelling of Tony Blair who took Britain to war
>against Iraq illegally. He mounted an unprovoked
>attack on a country that offered no threat, and he
>helped cause the deaths of thousands of innocent
>people. The judges at the Nuremberg Tribunal following
>world war two, who inspired much of international law,
>called this "the gravest of all war crimes". Blair had
>not the shred of a mandate from the British people to
>do what he did. On the contrary, on the eve of the
>attack, the majority of Britons clearly demanded he
>stop. His response was contemptuous of such an epic
>show of true democracy. He chose to listen only to the
>unelected leader of a foreign power, and to his court
>and his obsession. With his courtiers in and out of
>the media telling him he was "courageous" and even
>"moral" when he scored his "historic victory" over a
>defenceless, stricken and traumatised nation, almost
>half of them children, his propaganda managers staged
>a series of unctuous public relations stunts.
>
>The first stunt sought to elicit public sympathy with
>a story about him telling his children that he had
>"almost lost his job". The second stunt, which had the
>same objective, was a story about how his privileged
>childhood had really been "difficult" and "painful".
>The third and most outrageous stunt saw him in Basra,
>in southern Iraq last week, lifting an Iraqi child in
>his arms, in a school that had been renovated for his
>visit, in a city where education, like water and other
>basic services, are still a shambles following the
>British invasion and occupation. When I saw this image
>of Blair holding a child in Basra, I happened to be in
>a hotel in Kabul in Afghanistan, the scene of an
>earlier "historic victory" of Bush and Blair in
>another stricken land. I found myself saying out loud
>the words, "ultimate obscenity". It was in Basra that
>I filmed hundreds of children ill and dying because
>they had been denied cancer treatment equipment and
>drugs under an embargo enforced with enthusiasm by
>Tony Blair. It was the one story Blair's court would
>almost never tell, because it was true and damning. Up
>to July last year, $5.4 billion in vital and mostly
>humanitarian supplies for the ordinary people of Iraq
>were being obstructed by the United States, backed by
>Britain. Professor Karol Sikora, head of the World
>Health Organisation's cancer treatment programme, who
>had been to the same hospitals in Basra that I saw,
>told me: "The excuse that certain drugs can be
>converted into weapons of mass destruction is
>ludicrous. I saw wards where dying people were even
>denied pain-killers." That was more than three years
>ago. Now come forward to a hot May day in 2003, and
>here is Blair - shirt open, a man of the troops, if
>not of the people - lifting a child into his arms, for
>the cameras, and just a few miles from where I watched
>toddler after toddler suffer for want of treatment
>that is standard in Britain and which was denied as
>part of a medieval siege approved by Blair.
>
>Remember, the main reason that these life-saving drugs
>and equipment were blocked, the reason Professor
>Sikora and countless other experts ridiculed, was that
>essential drugs and even children's vaccines could be
>converted to weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of
>Mass Destruction, or WMD, has become part of the
>jargon of our time. When he finally goes, Blair ought
>have WMD chiselled on his political headstone. He has
>now been caught; for it must be clear to the most
>devoted courtier that he has lied about the primary
>reason he gave, repeatedly, for attacking Iraq. THERE
>is a series of such lies; I have counted at least a
>dozen significant ones. They range from Blair's "solid
>evidence" linking Iraq with Al-Qaeda and September 11
>(refuted by British intelligence) to claims of Iraq's
>"growing" nuclear weapons programme (refuted by the
>International Atomic Energy Agency when documents
>quoted by Blair were found to be forgeries), to
>perhaps his most audacious tale - that Iraq's weapons
>of mass destruction "could be activated within 45
>minutes". It is now Day 83 in the post-war magical
>mystery hunt for Iraq's "secret" arsenal. One group of
>experts, sent by George Bush, have already gone home.
>
>This week, British intelligence sources exposed
>Blair's "45 minutes" claim as the fiction of one
>defector with scant credibility. A United Nations
>inspector has ridiculed Blair's latest claim that two
>canvas-covered lorries represent "proof" of mobile
>chemical weapons. Incredible, yesterday he promised "a
>new dossier". It is ironic that the unravelling of
>Blair has come from the source of almost all his lies,
>the United States, where senior intelligence officers
>are now publicly complaining about their "abuse as
>political propagandists". They point to the Defence
>Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul
>Wolfowitz who, said one of them, fed "the most
>alarming tidbits to the president ... so instead of
>giving the president the most considered, carefully
>examined information available, basically you give him
>the garbage. And then in a few days when it's clear
>that maybe it wasn't right, well then, you feed him
>some hot garbage." That Blair's tale about Saddam
>Hussein being ready to attack "in 45 minutes" is part
>of the "hot garbage" is not surprising. What is
>surprising, or unbelievable, is that Blair did not
>know it was "hot", just as he must have known that
>Jack Straw and Colin Powell met in February to express
>serious doubts about the whole issue of weapons of
>mass destruction.
>
>IT was all a charade.
>
>Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, has spoken
>this truth: the invasion of Iraq was planned long ago,
>he said, and that the issue of weapons rested largely
>on "fabricated evidence". Blair has made fools not so
>much of the British people, most of whom were and are
>on to him, but of respectable journalists and
>broadcasters who channelled and amplified his black
>propaganda as headlines and lead items on BBC news
>bulletins. They cried wolf for him. They gave him
>every benefit of the doubt, and so minimised his
>culpability and allowed him to set much of the news
>agenda. For months, the charade of weapons of mass
>destruction overshadowed real issues we had a right to
>know about and debate - that the United States
>intended to take control of the Middle East by turning
>an entire country, Iraq, into its oil-rich base.
>History is our evidence. Since the 19th century,
>British governments have done the same, and the Blair
>government is no different. What is different now is
>that the truth is winning through. This week,
>publication of an extraordinary map left little doubt
>that the British military had plastered much of Iraq
>with cluster bombs, many of which almost certainly
>have failed to detonate on impact. They usually wait
>for children to pick them up, then they explode, as in
>Kosovo and Afghanistan. They are cowardly weapons; but
>of course this was one of the most craven of all wars,
>"fought" against a country with no navy, no air force
>and rag-tag army.
>
>Last month, HMS Turbulent, a nuclear-power submarine,
>slipped back to Plymouth, flying the Jolly Roger, the
>pirates' emblem.
>
>How appropriate.
>
>THIS British warship fired 30 American Tomahawk
>missiles at Iraq. Each missile cost 700,000 pounds, a
>total of 21 million pounds in taxpayers' money. That
>alone would have provided the basic services that the
>British government has yet to restore to Basra, as it
>is obliged to do under international law. What did HMS
>Turbulent's 30 missiles hit? How many people did they
>kill and maim? And why have we heard nothing about
>this? Perhaps the missiles had sensory devices that
>could distinguish Bush's "evil-doers" and Blair's
>"wicked men" from toddlers? What is certain is they
>were not aimed at the Ministry of Oil. This cynical
>and shaming chapter in Britain's modern story was
>written in our name, your name. Blair and his
>collaborators ought not to be allowed to get away with
>it.
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