This is where Lord Justice Scott conducted his Inquiry into the scandal of Britain's arms that went illegally to Saddam Hussein. The Scott Inquiry sat for four hundred hours and gathered evidence from more than two hundred witnesses, including the government’s chief arms salesman Ian McDonald, who said, ‘Truth is a very difficult concept.’ John Pilger, Flying the Flag (Arming the World)
The truth is that as soon as Thatcher took power, her ministers courted Saddam Hussein. A procession of them went to Baghdad: Lord Carrington, Cecil Parkinson, John Knott, John Biffin, Paul Channon, William Waldergrave. In 1981 Douglas Hurd tried to sell Saddam Hussein an entire air-defence system. And when in 1985 Britain banned the sales of arms to Iraq the flow of British arms and money did not stop. ibid.
This film is about the punishment of a whole nation. The killing of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them young children. These are the people of Iraq, silent victims not only of Saddam Hussein their dictator but of an endless war against civilians waged by western governments. John Pilger, Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq
This is the security council: centre of power of the United Nations in New York. In 1996 the Council allowed Iraq to sell some of its oil reserves in order to buy food and other basic needs. This is known as oil for food. All the money from the sale of Iraq’s oil is controlled by the Security Council, which the United States dominates, and with Britain takes a hard line on Iraq. Everything that goes to Iraq must be approved by a special sanctions committee run by the council. This committee has consistently blocked restoration of basic services in Iraq – power, light and clean running water ... The Department of Trade and Industry in London blocked a shipment of vaccines. ibid.
Sanctions are still in place, and the United Nations reports widespread chronic malnutrition and death among young children. An unprecedented human rights disaster. ibid.
The latest United Nations study says that the death rate of children has doubled under sanctions. That’s half a million dead in eight years. ibid.
In Britain the same relationship blossomed between the Thatcher government and Saddam Hussein. Cabinet ministers lined up to pay their respects and offer him trade deals and loans, almost everything he wanted. ibid.
Most of the Iraqi soldiers and civilians who died in the Gulf War belonged to the Kurdish and Shia peoples. The very people President Bush called upon to rise up against Saddam Hussein, and when they did rise up in February 1991 they were brutally betrayed. ibid.
Why has the suffering of the Iraqi people been allowed to go on year after year? Is there another agenda? Smashing Iraq gives the United States greater control over the Middle East. As the West expands across a vast new oil protectorate, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the former Soviet Union, Iraq may be the blueprint for policing this new order with the weapons of sanctions and bombing ... The sheer scale of the bombing of Iraq is a well-kept secret. Between May 1998 and January this year, the American Air Force and Navy flew 36,000 sorties over southern Iraq. That includes 24,000 combat missions. ibid.
At the dawn of the new millennium how is Western civilisation to be judged by the fine words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, words like the Right to Life? Or by the denial of that right to a whole nation? Do the representatives of the powerful who sit here in the Security Council ever think beyond their so-called interests and manoeuvres, and about their victims, small children dying needlessly half a world away? And do those politicians who tell us about their ethical policies and moral crusades ever ask the question, By whose divine authority do they punish 21,000,000 people for the misconduct of a dictator? We think the price is worth it, says Madeleine Albright. No it is not. And it never will be. And it’s time we reclaimed the United Nations. ibid.
In the wake of the Hutton fiasco, one truth remains unassailed: Tony Blair ordered an unprovoked invasion of another country on a totally false pretext, and that lies and deceptions manufactured in London and Washington caused the deaths of up to 55,000 Iraqis, including 9,600 civilians.
Consider for a moment those who have paid the price for Blair’s and Bush’s actions, who are rarely mentioned in the current media coverage. Deaths and injury of young children from unexploded British and American cluster bombs are put at 1,000 a month. The effect of uranium weapons used by Anglo-American forces – a weapon of mass destruction – is such that readings taken from Iraqi tanks destroyed by the British are so high that a British Army survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. Iraqi children play on and around these tanks. British troops, says the Ministry of Defence, ‘will have access to biological monitoring’.
Iraqis have no such access and no expert medical help; and thousands are now suffering from a related catalogue of miscarriages and hair loss, horrific eye, skin and respiratory problems.
Neither Britain nor America counts its Iraqi victims, and the fact, let alone the extent of the human carnage and material devastation is not even acknowledged by a government that says it is ‘vindicated’ by Lord Hutton, whose report most British people clearly regard as a parody worthy of the Prime Minister’s resignation.
Blair has now announced an inquiry into the ‘failure of intelligence’ that has mysteriously denied him evidence of weapons of mass destruction, which he repeatedly said were his ‘aim’ in attacking Iraq. Just as the brawl with the BBC and the Hutton inquiry were quite deliberate distractions, so this latest inquiry is another panic measure. It is clear that George W Bush, as one American journalist put it, ‘is now hanging Tony Blair out to dry’.
Blair has, as ever, followed Bush. In announcing at the weekend his own inquiry into an ‘intelligence failure’, Bush hopes to cast himself as an innocent, aggrieved member of the public wanting to know why America’s numerous spy agencies did not alert the nation to the fact, now confirmed by Bush’s own weapons inspector, David Kay, that there were no weapons of mass destruction and probably weren’t any since before the 1991 Gulf War, and that the premise for going to war was ‘almost all wrong’. ‘It was,’ Ray McGovern told me, ‘95 per cent charade’. McGovern is a former high-ranking CIA analyst and one of a group of ex-senior intelligence officers, several of whom have described how the Bush administration demanded that intelligence be shaped to comply with political objectives, and the role of Britain in the charade.
‘It was intelligence that was crap,’ a former intelligence officer told the New Yorker, ‘but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world.’ He described how ‘inactionable’ (unreliable) intelligence reports were passed on to British intelligence, which then fed them to newspapers.
Former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter says this false information was spread systematically by British intelligence. The clue to this secret operation was given by the weapons expert David Kelly the day before his suicide and which Hutton later ignored. Kelly told the Prime Minister’s intelligence and security committee: ‘I liaise with the Rockingham cell.’
As Ritter reveals, this referred to the top secret Operation Rockingham set up within British intelligence to ‘cherry pick’ information that might be distorted as ‘proof’ of the existence of a weapons arsenal in Iraq. It was an entirely political operation, whose misinformation, says Ritter, led him and his inspectors ‘to a suspected ballistic missile site. We … found nothing. However, our act of searching allowed the US and the UK to say that the missiles existed.’
Ritter says Operation Rockingham’s bogus intelligence would have been fed to the Joint Intelligence Committee. The committee was behind the two ‘dossiers’ in which Blair government claimed Saddam Hussein was a threat. Ritter says that Rockingham officers were acting on political orders ‘from the very highest levels’.
How high? Right up to Blair himself? It was Blair, after all, who made such a personal ‘mission’ of finding weapons of mass destruction. The question of how high needs urgently to be answered. Will Scott Ritter be called to Blair’s inquiry? And will Blair explain to the inquiry why the February 2003 British ‘arms dossier’, which Hutton chose to ignore, was so bogus that it plagiarised an American student's theses, lifting it word for word including the spelling mistakes?
The truth is that the Blair government has known, almost from the day it came to office in 1997, that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were almost certainly destroyed following the 1991 Gulf War – just as Bush's weapons expert, David Kay, has now confirmed.
What else did Blair know?
In February last year, a transcript of a leaked United Nations debriefing of Iraqi general Hussein Kamel, revealed that both the US and British governments must have known that Saddam Hussein no longer had weapons of mass destruction. General Kamel was no ordinary defector; he was Bush’ and Blair’s star witness in their governments’ case against Saddam. A son-in-law of the dictator, he had overall authority for Iraq’s weapons’ programmes, and defected with crates of documents.
When Secretary of State Colin Powell made the Anglo-American case for an attack on Iraq before the UN Security Council, he relied on and paid tribute to the reliability of General Kamel’s evidence. What he did not reveal, as the transcript of the general’s debriefing reveals, was this categorical statement by Kamel: ‘I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons – biological, chemical, missile, nuclear – were destroyed.’
The CIA and Britain’s MI6 of course knew about this; and it beggars belief that Bush and Blair were not told. But neither of them let on – just as Colin Powell suppressed his informant’s most sensational information, which would have contradicted all his spurious claims. General Kamel (who was later murdered by Saddam Hussein) corroborated Scott Ritter’s statement that Iraq had been disarmed ‘90 to 95 per cent’.
Iraq was attacked so that the United States and Britain could claim its oil and its assets. Only Mary Poppins would believe otherwise. For the latest in a catalogue of evidence, turn to the Wall Street Journal, the paper of America’s ruling elite, which has obtained copies of the Bush administration’s secret plan to privatise the country by selling off its assets to western corporations while establishing vast military bases.