March 4, 2003
Media Compilation #119: Double Standards, Lies and Deception - and so Much More!
Dear journalist
Lots of IMPORTANT material for you to consider in this one.
Hoping this networking service is useful to you in some ways ;-)
Jean Hudon
Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator
http://www.EarthRainbowNetwork.com
This compilation is archived at http://www.EarthRainbowNetwork.com/Archives2003/MediaCompilation119.htm
"There is a plethora of conventions which Israel constantly violated, starting with Geneva Protocol of 1925 on Poisonous Gas to the 1993 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons. With this background, it seems a mockery of justice to despatch hundreds of inspectors to destroyed workshops and private homes in Iraq, while huge tons of weapons of mass destruction are staring them in the eye in Israel."
- Taken from "Traces of poison" at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/627/focus.htm (A MUST READ!!)
Israel, not Iraq, holds that distinction of being the first country in the region to use weapons of mass destruction with genocidal intent. (...) At a time when TV screens are filled with images of perceived weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq among people who are on the verge of starvation, the West turns a blind eye to the first biological terrorist in the Middle East, Israel, where the largest depot of WMD between London and Peking is located.
"Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that... I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
- Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio
Many more such revealing quotes at http://www.ilaam.net/Intl/IsraeliQuotes.html
CONTENTS
1. U.S. Diplomat John Brady Kiesling's Letter of Resignation
2. How The Press Has Buried The Truth Of Iraqi Disarmament
See also:
US Bugging phones and emails of Security Council members
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,905899,00.html
The Defector's Secret (MUST READ!)
http://www.msnbc.com/news/876128.asp
Before his death, a key defector said Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons but had retained the design and engineering details of its WMD.
Robert Fisk: A breakthrough in the war on terror? I'll believe it when we see some evidence
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=383299
March 3 - In the theatre of the absurd into which America's hunt for al-Qa'ida so often descends, the "arrest" – the quotation marks are all too necessary – of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is nearer the Gilbert and Sullivan end of the repertory.
The Double Standardsand Duplicity of this Fight Against Terror (Robert Fisk - Jan 4)
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=366199
UK/USA Employ Fear and Panic As Instruments of War (Feb 14)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/feb2003/terr-f14.shtml
Google nominated for Big Brother Award
http://www.mailgate.org/misc/misc.activism.progressive/msg58533.html
MI6 and CIA: the new enemy within (Feb 9)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=376732
Tony Blair and George Bush are encountering an unexpected obstacle in their campaign for war against Iraq – their own intelligence agencies. Britain and America's spies believe that they are being politicised: that the intelligence they provide is being selectively applied to lead to the opposite conclusion from the one they have drawn, which is that Iraq is much less of a threat than their political masters claim. Worse, when the intelligence agencies fail to do the job, the politicians will not stop at plagiarism to make their case, even "tweaking" the plagiarised material to ensure a better fit. CLIP
IS BUSH NUTS?
http://www.willthomas.net/isbushnuts.htm
What drives a man to go against the wishes of his countryfolk and the entire world community - including the presidents of Russia, China, France and Germany? (...) This expert writes that "George W. Bush manifests all the classic patterns of what alcoholics in recovery call 'the dry drunk'. His behavior is consistent with being brought on by years of heavy drinking and possible cocaine use.
Chopra Wants To Send Pope, Dalai Lama, & Himself As Human Shields To Iraq (Feb 27)
http://www.gomemphis.com/mca/america_at_war/article/0,1426,MCA_945_17743 89,0 0.html
(...) "If we bombed Baghdad tonight and thousands of children died, most people would be unaffected. But if the Pope was there we wouldn't do it. Isn't that funny?" Chopra said he would hope to be joined by heads of state and "tens of thousands of people" from around the world as part of a human-shield movement. (...) As of last week, more than 130 volunteers, including about 18 Americans, had arrived in Baghdad to act as shields -- some at specific sites such as the Baghdad South Power Plant.
"Human shields" take stand in Baghdad (Feb 25)
http://quicksitebuilder.cnet.com/supfacts/id137.html
British stagehand Ube Evans is one of some 200 foreign volunteers who have taken up positions at the South Baghdad Power Plant and other potential civilian targets in Iraq. The plant was bombed in the 1991 Gulf War. The volunteers have been welcomed and assisted by the Iraqi government, which hopes their presence will disrupt US bombing plans. Human Rights Watch calls Iraq’s use of human shields, even voluntary ones, a war crime, and adds the US would be equally guilty if it knowingly bombed installations where they are deployed. The volunteers have a wide variety of backgrounds, including veteran activists and a young American recruit who joined the group after learning about the initiative on CNN. (...) We're putting the American government on notice," said Ken Nichols O'Keefe, a former Marine who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War but has since renounced his U.S. citizenship and now coordinates the human-shield campaign. "If they bomb these sites, which have absolutely no military justification, it won't be collateral damage. It will be murder." CLIP
Out of the wreckage (George Monbiot, Feb 25)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,902274,00.html
By tearing up the global rulebook, the US is in fact undermining its own imperial rule.
The men who run the world are democrats at home and dictators abroad. They came to power by means of national elections which possess, at least, the potential to represent the will of their people. Their citizens can dismiss them without bloodshed, and challenge their policies in the expectation that, if enough people join in, they will be obliged to listen. Internationally, they rule by brute force. They and the global institutions they run exercise greater economic and political control over the people of the poor world than its own governments do. But those people can no sooner challenge or replace them than the citizens of the Soviet Union could vote Stalin out of office. Their global governance is, by all the classic political definitions, tyrannical.
Shock and Yawn (Geov Parrish, workingforchange.com Feb 24)
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=14544&CFID=5420517&CFTOKEN=63376510
Plan could kill millions in 48 hours -- why don't Americans care?
Exactly a month ago Pentagon planner Harlan Ullman, in a CBS-TV interview, publicly revealed for the first time the Pentagon's "Shock and Awe" plan for its assault upon Iraq, should (or when) George W. Bush orders it. Ullman's information was subsequently confirmed by a number of sources; it's for real. Here is what I wrote about it in my column of January 30: "The plan includes simultaneous ground invasions from north and south... It also includes a sudden decimation of Baghdad by raining down on its people, in two days, over 800 cruise missiles -- more than were used in the entire Gulf War. Ullman... characterized the Baghdad assault thusly: `You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons of Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes.' It would be a firestorm, a Dresden or Tokyo with 60 years of new technology. It would be a war crime of quick and staggering proportions. "Such a plan, of course, makes a mockery of Donald Rumsfeld's ritual insistence that the Pentagon takes enormous care to avoid civilian casualties; the plan apparently is to kill a staggering percentage of Baghdad's civilian population in the first day alone.
IOF Demolish 5,000 Houses, All Public Facilities in Jenin (Feb 23)
http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=1&id=615
"5,000 houses had been demolished in the Jenin province to date; 1,360 of which were in the city of Jenin, while about 13,000 Palestinians had been jailed, including 2,030 from Jenin .." JENIN - Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have demolished 5,000 houses, destroyed all public service facilities and buildings, detained 13,000 Palestinians and soared unemployment to 70 percent in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, its mayor Walid Musa told reporters in Kuala Lampor, Malaysia, on Saturday.
Harper's Weekly Review (Feb 25)
http://www.harpers.org/weekly-review/
Over the past year, as the Observer revealed on Sunday, the euro has started to challenge the dollar's position as the international means of payment for oil. The dollar's dominance of world trade, particularly the oil market, is all that permits the US Treasury to sustain the nation's massive deficit, as it can print inflation-free money for global circulation. If the global demand for dollars falls, the value of the currency will fall with it, and speculators will shift their assets into euros or yen or even yuan, with the result that the US economy will begin to totter.
Shaky US Dollar - The dollar under threat (Jan 7)
http://quicksitebuilder.cnet.com/supfacts/id80.html
The US is living on borrowed money and borrowed time because of it’s soaring current account deficit, says influential economics writer Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. The US imports far more than it exports, resulting in a net outflow of US dollars – historically unprecedented for a leading power. The dollar drain has been partially offset by overseas purchases of US dollar denominated stocks, bonds, and other investments, but the foreign investor appetite for US securities and other assets has been weakening in the wake of the stock market decline and uncertain economic outlook. Wolf estimates that on current trends the already worrisome trade deficit will continue to widen unless US exports rise dramatically on the strength of a massive devaluation of the US dollar. But if this were to happen, it would plunge the Asian and European economies into crisis, and so will be resisted. When and how this situation resolves itself remains, Wolf says, disturbingly obscure. The source of his concern may be the prospect of a round of competitive devaluations of the kind which precipitated the 1930's depression. (...) The superpower is living on borrowed money and borrowed time. Its rake's progress cannot continue for ever. But how and when it will end remains disturbingly obscure.
EU urges Russia to swap dollar for euro
http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/CD19Ag01.html
Russia could emerge as a crucial factor in the success of the fledgling European single currency, the euro, at the expense of the US dollar after leaders at this week's Russia-European Union summit agreed to study ways to boost the currency's use in trade and increase its share in Russia's official reserves.
The US debt bomb (Jan 20)
http://quicksitebuilder.cnet.com/supfacts/id91.html
Barron's, the influential US financial weekly, is worried that record levels of household and corporate debt may be moving the US toward the abyss of a bust - and then into a depression. Debt as a percentage of GDP is now higher than at the start of the Great Depression, and there are troubling signs the economy is beginning to slow while unemployment and loan defaults are on the rise. Domestic and global overcapacity are preventing companies from generating sufficient cash flow to work off their debts, and consumers have largely exhausted their capacity to extract more disposable income from their homes through remortgaging. If the debt bomb explodes, says Barron's writer Jonathan Laing, the detonator will likely be the collapse of the residential housing market, brought on by the inability of tapped-out homeowners to carry their ballooning mortgage debt.
War spending won't outweigh its negative effect on economy
http://quicksitebuilder.cnet.com/supfacts/id114.html
(...) The $100 billion or so the U.S. would be likely to spend fighting and then rebuilding Iraq won't make much difference to the $10-trillion-a-year U.S. economy. The harmful effects of war -- sharply reduced consumer confidence, a sagging stock market and reluctance by businesses to invest -- now overshadow any gains from military spending. CLIP
PATRIOT II... is it for you? Meaning, will they come and take you away? (Feb 14)
http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=11835&c=206
Section-by-Section Analysis of Justice Department draft "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003," also known as "PATRIOT Act II" - The Department of Justice (DOJ) has been drafting comprehensive anti-terrorism legislation for the past several months. The draft legislation, dated January 9, 2003, grants sweeping powers to the government, eliminating or weakening many of the checks and balances that remained on government surveillance, wiretapping, detention and criminal prosecution even after passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, Pub. L. No. 107-56, in 2001.
1.
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/international/27WEB-TNAT.html?pagewanted=print&position=top
U.S. Diplomat John Brady Kiesling
Letter of Resignation, to:
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
ATHENS | 27 February 2003
Dear Mr. Secretary:
I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a U.S. diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians, scholars and journalists, and to persuade them that U.S. interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my diplomatic arsenal.
It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.
The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.
The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo'
We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism' After the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead.
We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials. Has 'oderint dum metuant' really become our motto'
I urge you to listen to America's friends around the world. Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong international system, with the U.S. and EU in close partnership. When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly that the United States is as it was, a beacon of liberty, security, and justice for the planet'
Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from the excesses of an ideological and self-serving Administration. But your loyalty to the President goes too far. We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America's ability to defend its interests.
I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. Administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share.
John Brady Kiesling
See also:
U.S. Diplomat Resigns, Protesting 'Our Fervent Pursuit of War' (27 February 2003)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/international/middleeast/27NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS — A career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan resigned this week in protest against the country's policies on Iraq. The diplomat, John Brady Kiesling, the political counselor at the United States Embassy in Athens, said in his resignation letter, "Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson." Mr. Kiesling, 45, who has been a diplomat for about 20 years, said in a telephone interview tonight that he faxed the letter to Secretary of State Colin L, Powell on Monday after informing Thomas Miller, the ambassador in Athens, of his decision. He said he had acted alone, but "I've been comforted by the expressions of support I've gotten afterward" from colleagues. "No one has any illusions that the policy will be changed," he said. "Too much has been invested in the war." (...) Asked if his views were widely shared among his diplomatic colleagues, Mr. Kiesling said: "No one of my colleagues is comfortable with our policy. Everyone is moving ahead with it as good and loyal. The State Department is loaded with people who want to play the team game — we have a very strong premium on loyalty." CLIP
---
"To disregard what the world thinks of us is not only arrogant but utterly shameless.
- Cicero
2.
IMPORTANT FAILURE OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA EXPOSED
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
February 28, 2003
MEDIA ALERT: OUTRAGEOUS OMISSIONS
How The Press Has Buried The Truth Of Iraqi Disarmament
The Bush and Blair governments are dragging the public kicking and screaming into a war that threatens to plunge the world into chaos and which almost nobody wants. Like an occupying force, British politicians representing elite interests from both leading political parties are blatantly defying the will of the British public, just as their counterparts are defying the public in Turkey where 90% of the population is opposed to war in all circumstances, in Spain where 79% is opposed to war in all circumstances, and in Italy where 80% is opposed.
This would be outrageous enough, but there is more. A massive assault is being planned against a crushed Third World country that was demolished by the US/UK in the original Gulf War, by continuous (and now all but daily) bombing raids since, and by murderous sanctions that have been described as "genocidal" by senior United Nations diplomats who resigned in protest.
But even this is not the whole story. The British and US governments, with the near 100% complicity of the mainstream media, are basing their arguments for war on two key deceptions:
1) Iraq has large quantities of deadly weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which it is not prepared to disclose or surrender.
2) Iraq has had 12 years to disarm but has never done so - a further 120 days of weapons inspections (as proposed by the Franco-German initiative) are therefore pointless.
Desperate to stick to their early to mid-March timetable for war, the British and US governments have declared the futility of further inspections. Tony Blair has dismissed the Franco-German plan for peaceful disarmament, saying it was "absurd" to think UN inspectors could find lethal weapons without Baghdad's full cooperation:
"The idea that inspectors could conceivably sniff out the weapons... without the help of Iraqi authorities is absurd," the prime minister told parliament. "They are not a detective agency and even if they were Iraq is a country with a land mass roughly the size of France." (Mike Peacock, 'Britain's Blair Slams Franco-German Iraq Plan', Reuters, February 25, 2003)
In reality, Blair's key claims are flatly contradicted by the UNSCOM inspectors who sought to disarm Iraq between 1991-98.
Fundamentally Eliminated - The View From UNSCOM And Elsewhere
In 'Concerning Disarmament and Current and Future Ongoing Monitoring and Verification Issues, 27 March 1999, a United Nations Panel reported:
"[I]n spite of well-known difficult circumstances, UNSCOM and IAEA have been effective in uncovering and destroying many elements of Iraq's proscribed weapons programmes in accordance with the mandate provided by the Security Council. It is the panel's understanding that IAEA has been able to devise a technically coherent picture of Iraq's nuclear weapons programme. UNSCOM has achieved considerable progress in establishing material balances of Iraq's proscribed weapons. Although important elements still have to be resolved, the bulk of Iraq's proscribed weapons programmes has been eliminated." (http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/documents/Amorim%20Report.htm)
Corroborating this, an article in Newsweek (February 24) "raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist". Newsweek reports that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was killed after returning to Iraq in 1996, told UN inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims.
In its latest Media Advisory, the US media watch group FAIR reports how Gen. Kamel was previously best known for his role in exposing Iraq's deceptions concerning its pre-Gulf War development of biological weapons. But Newsweek's John Barry has obtained the transcript of Kamel's 1995 debriefing by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and UNSCOM. This transcript reveals how the US and UK have kept the public from the truth.
Inspectors were told "that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them," Barry writes. All that remained were "hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches" and production moulds. The weapons were destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of resuming production after inspections had finished.
The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Barry reports, and "a military aide who defected with Kamel... backed Kamel's assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks". These statements were "hushed up by the U.N. inspectors" in order to "bluff Saddam into disclosing still more". (FAIR, Media Advisory: 'Star Witness on Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed - Bombshell revelation from a defector cited by White House and press', February 27, 2003, http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.html)
In the transcript, Kamel says categorically:
"I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed." (See Glen Rangwala's analysis of the Kamel transcript: http://middleeastreference.org.uk/kamel.html)
Kamel was an extremely high-profile defector who has been repeatedly cited as a credible source by George Bush, Tony Blair and leading administration officials. Kamel was, for example, mentioned in Secretary of State Colin Powell's infamous February 5 presentation to the UN Security Council:
"It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX... The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law."
In an earlier Media Advisory, FAIR reported that some of the current UNMOVIC inspectors believe that Iraq may indeed be free of all banned weapons:
"We haven't found an iota of concealed material yet," one unnamed UNMOVIC official told Los Angeles Times Baghdad correspondent Sergei Loiko (December 31, 2002), who added:
"The inspector said his colleagues think it possible that Iraq really has eliminated its banned materials." (Fair, Media Advisory: 'Iraq's Hidden Weapons: From Allegation to Fact', February 4, 2003 http://www.fair.org/press-releases/iraq-weapons.html)
In an April 2002 briefing, 'A Threat to the World? The facts about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction', Cambridge analyst Glen Rangwala writes:
"UNSCOM recorded how there was compliance with most of its work for over seven years of intrusive inspections. As a result, UNSCOM's executive chairman Rolf Ekeus reported to the Security Council on 11 April 1997 that ' not much is unknown about Iraq's retained proscribed weapons capabilities'."
Many of the weapons inspectors have candidly recorded the extensive disarmament of Iraq. Reviewing the 9 years of Iraqi disarmament, Rolf Ekeus stated in a presentation at Harvard University on 23 May 2000 that "in all areas we have eliminated Iraq's [WMD] capabilities fundamentally". (http://www.arabmediawatch.com/iraq/reading/artgr6.htm)
As we have reported, chief UNSCOM weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, has described how Iraq was "fundamentally disarmed", with 90-95% of its weapons of mass destruction eliminated between 1991-98. Of nuclear weapons capability, for example, Ritter says:
"When I left Iraq in 1998... the infrastructure and facilities had been 100% eliminated. There's no doubt about that. All of their instruments and facilities had been destroyed. The weapons design facility had been destroyed. The production equipment had been hunted down and destroyed. And we had in place means to monitor - both from vehicles and from the air - the gamma rays that accompany attempts to enrich uranium or plutonium. We never found anything." (Ritter and William Rivers Pitt, War On Iraq, Profile Books, 2002, p.26)
Ritter explains how UN arms inspectors roamed the country monitoring Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear facilities, installing sensitive sniffers and cameras and performing no-notice inspections:
"We blanketed Iraq - every research and development facility, every university, every school, every hospital, every beer factory..." (p.38)
Two Notes On The Media
1) All of the above - crucial information relating to the current crisis - has been almost completely excluded from the media. People simply do not know that there are good reasons for thinking that Iraq has no WMD, and that arms inspections of the kind taking place now have been enormously successful in disarming Iraq in the past. Incredibly, there has been almost no discussion on the success of the 1991-98 UNSCOM inspections - an obviously key issue for understanding the worth of the current inspection process - and almost no mention of the opinions of previous inspectors describing "fundamental disarmament".
As a result of this media silence, politicians have been free to talk endlessly of the threat from Iraq's WMD, and of its lamentable failure to cooperate and disarm peacefully. In a recent BBC Question Time programme, UK environment minister Michael Meacher said that "no one would argue that Saddam Hussein doesn't have weapons of mass destruction" (February 27) - the entire panel appeared to be in agreement.
2) John Pilger aside, no mainstream journalist has sought to draw attention to this deep complicity of the media in suppressing the most important facts contradicting the US/UK case for war. Even radical journalists like Robert Fisk, Greg Palast and George Monbiot have failed to discuss the role of the liberal media - The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, the Independent on Sunday, and the BBC and ITN news - in burying these facts and in thereby making war possible.
Although the performance of the media has been appalling throughout this crisis, as we have documented, there remains a 'gentleman's agreement' among journalists whereby it is understood that media hosting a journalist's work should not be criticised (just as all corporate employees understand they are not to criticise their company's product in front of customers). This means that radical journalists - who all work for liberal media companies - are silent on the complicity of the media publishing them, such that these media are protected from all honest public criticism. This has long been unacceptable in a 'free press', but it is a genuine disaster for democracy now when these same liberal media are playing a key role in denying the public access to the most important facts that completely undermine the case for an unnecessary and grossly immoral war. As the ancient sage, Nagarjuna, warns:
"Not doing harm to others, Not bowing down to the ignoble, Not abandoning the path of virtue - These are small points, but of great Importance."
Now is the time for honesty, truth, dissent, protest and resignations - we must +not+ subordinate the welfare of others to our own self-interest. We must not bow down to the ignoble.
CLIP
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