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[casi] The lies that led us into war ...




  http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=411300


  The lies that led us into war ...


    Glen Rangwala shows how the UK and the US manipulated UN reports -
    and conjured an anthrax dump from thin air

01 June 2003

One key tactic of the British and United States governments in their
campaign on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was to talk up
suspicions and to portray possibility as fact. The clearest example was
the quotation and misquotation of the reports of United Nations weapons
inspectors.

Iraq claimed it had destroyed all its prohibited weapons, either
unilaterally or in co-operation with the inspectors, between 1991 and
1994. Although the inspectors were able to verify that unilateral
destruction took place on a large scale, they were not able to quantify
the amounts destroyed.

For example, they were able to detect that anthrax growth media had been
burnt and buried in bulk at a site next to the production facility at
al-Hakam. There was no way - and there never will be - to tell from the
soil samples the amount destroyed. As a result, UN inspectors recorded
this material as unaccounted for: neither verified destroyed nor
believed to still exist.

Translated into statements by the British and US governments, it became
part of "stockpiles" that they claimed Iraq was hiding from the
inspectors. Both governments knew UN inspectors had not found any
nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in Iraq since at least 1994,
aside from a dozen abandoned mustard shells, and that the vast majority
of any weapons produced before 1991 would have degraded to the point of
uselessness within 10 years.

Even the most high-profile defector from Iraq - Hussein Kamel, Saddam
Hussein's son-in-law and director of Iraq's weapons programmes - told UN
inspectors and British intelligence agencies in 1995 that Iraq had no
more prohibited weapons. And yet Britain's dossier last September
repeated the false claim that information "in the public domain from UN
reports ... points clearly to Iraq's continuing possession, after 1991,
of chemical and biological agents and weapons produced before the Gulf War".

There is no UN report after 1994 that claims that Iraq continued to
possess weapons of mass destruction. This was well known in intelligence
circles. That such a claim could appear in a purported intelligence
document is a clear sign that the information was "pumped up" for
political purposes, to support the case for an invasion.

The Government began to resort to more direct misquotation in the
immediate prelude to war, with UN chief inspector Hans Blix reporting on
7 March that Iraq was taking "numerous initiatives ... with a view to
resolving long-standing open disarmament issues", and that this "can be
seen as 'active', or even 'proactive' co-operation".

In response, Mr Blair and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, seized on
the Unmovic working document of 6 March entitled "Unresolved Disarmament
Issues",about matters that are still unclear. Although Mr Blix
acknowledged Iraqi efforts to resolve these questions, the Prime
Minister and Foreign Secretary repeatedly claimed that the document
showed Iraq still had prohibited weapons, a claim the report never made.
They relied on the presumption - probably accurate - that few MPs would
have time to go through its 173 pages, and would accept the Government's
misleading précis.

Mr Blair quoted from the report in his speech to the Commons two days
before the war began, to the effect that Iraq "had had far-reaching
plans to weaponise" the deadly nerve agent VX. Note the tense: that
quotation was from a "background" section of the report, on Iraq's
policy before 1991.

US and British leaders repeatedly referred to the UN inspectors'
estimate that Iraq produced 1.5 tonnes of VX before 1990. But in March
Unmovic reported that Iraq's production method created nerve agent that
lasted only six to eight weeks. Mr Blair's "evidence" was about a
substance the inspectors consider to have been no threat since early
1991. The Prime Minister didn't mention that.

Glen Rangwala is a lecturer in politics at Newnham College, Cambridge



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