[casi] NEEDED: AN INQUIRY INTO A SLAUGHTER

["as-ilas" <as-ilas@DELETETHISgmx.de>]

" ....
In Washington the other day, I asked John Bolton, Under-Secretary for
International Security at the State Department, the most outspoken of the
"neo-conservatives" around President Bush, about civilian deaths in Iraq. I
referred to the study that estimated up to 10,000 casualties. He replied:
"Well, I think it's quite low if you look at the size of the military
operation that was undertaken."
Quite low at 10,000. Puzzled that he should be subjected to such a line of
questioning, he said with a laugh: "You must be a member of the Communist
Party."

..."


http://pilger.carlton.com/print/133080

            Writing in the Independent on Sunday, John Pilger says that,
while the Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly has revealed more
evidence of the deception behind the attack on Iraq, a full public inquiry
into why Britain went to war is now needed. : Pilger :24 Aug 2003


     NEEDED: AN INQUIRY INTO A SLAUGHTER

            The 1994 inquiry by Lord Justice Scott into the scandal of
Britain's illegal supply of weapons to Saddam Hussein produced memorable
moments. There was Mark Higson's detailed description of "a culture of
lying" at the Foreign Office, where he was the Iraq Desk Officer. And there
was the anxious moment when it seemed that Margaret Thatcher might walk out.
"Lady Thatcher," said His Lordship, "we'll try and trouble you with as few
papers as possible".

            The Scott inquiry produced a mountainous report and opaque
conclusions. No politician was prosecuted; a few reputations were ruffled.
The English establishment is expert at this. Tim Laxton, an auditor who
examined the books of two British arms companies, believes that if there had
been a full and open inquiry, "hundreds" would have faced criminal
prosecution. "They would include," he said, "top political figures, very
senior civil servants throughout Whitehall: the Foreign Office, the Ministry
of Defence, the Department of Trade and Industry... the top echelon of
government."

            The Hutton inquiry into the circumstances of Dr David Kelly's
death has its memorable moments, too. The warning of Jonathan Powell, the
Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, not to "claim that we have evidence that
[Saddam] is a threat", points directly to Blair's lying. However, that was
exceptional. What is emerging is a pattern of protecting Blair, who is being
subtly spun as a restraining influence, a peacemaker, even a guardian of Dr
Kelly. A criminal abuse of power is not on any charge sheet: it is not
within Hutton's brief, yet the British people and the memory of the
thousands of innocent lives cut short in Iraq deserve nothing less.

            Credible research shows that up to 10,000 civilians were killed
in the attack on Iraq, together with perhaps 30,000 Iraqi soldiers, many of
them teenage conscripts. A slaughter. These people were killed by weapons
designed to reduce human beings to charcoal or to shred them. The British
Army littered urban areas with cluster bombs, while the Americans did the
same and in greater quantity, adding uranium-coated munitions, whose
radiation poison is ingested with the desert dust.

            In my experience, the unseen deaths are far more numerous.
Today, malnourished children are dying from thirst and gastroenteritis
because the world's biggest military machine, including the British, fails
to restore power and clean running water as its most basic obligations
require.

            This carnage, wrought in an unprovoked illegal assault on a
sovereign country, is a crime by any measure of international law: be it the
United Nations Charter or the Geneva conventions. The "supreme international
crime", the Nuremberg judges decided, was that of unprovoked aggression,
because it contains "the accumulated evil" of all war crimes.

            Blair has committed this crime. He shares responsibility for
causing violent death and suffering on a vast scale, which the web of deceit
spun by his courtiers has failed to justify. His co-conspirators in
Washington care nothing about this; only their ascendant power matters. In
their concentration camps, at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan and
Baghdad airport, there are no human rights, no recognisable rule of law, no
justice. In this Kafkaesque world, people "disappear" while others, charged
with nothing, plead for their lives. In the meantime, on the streets of
conquered Baghdad, an elite US unit acts as a death squad, shooting people
as they drive by.

            In Washington the other day, I asked John Bolton,
Under-Secretary for International Security at the State Department, the most
outspoken of the "neo-conservatives" around President Bush, about civilian
deaths in Iraq. I referred to the study that estimated up to 10,000
casualties. He replied: "Well, I think it's quite low if you look at the
size of the military operation that was undertaken."

            Quite low at 10,000. Puzzled that he should be subjected to such
a line of questioning, he said with a laugh: "You must be a member of the
Communist Party."

            Norman Mailer recently broke the great silence about the true
direction of Bush's America when he wondered if his country had entered a
"pre-fascist atmosphere". In Washington, I put this to Ray McGovern, a
former senior CIA officer, distinguished as a Soviet specialist and cold
warrior, a man who counts himself a personal friend of George Bush, the
president's father, who said: "I hope [Mailer] is right, because there are
others who are saying we are already in a fascist mode... when you see how
this war [on terror] is being conducted."

            Blair has made himself part of this. He is the fig leaf for what
Vice-President Cheney has speculated might be a war lasting "50 years or
more", including an attack on North Korea, which has nuclear weapons. The
Koreans, Blair told Parliament, might be "next". Watching him accept 18
choreographed standing ovations in Congress, flushed and eager and grateful,
was like watching a Stalinist puppet summoned to Moscow. Britain is not yet
Bush's America. Fear and loyalty oaths are not the currency here. Two
million people filled the streets of London in February, the greatest show
of dissent in this country, the British at their best. A critical public
intelligence, long denied in much of the media, understands what Blair and
his court have done and where the trail of blood leads: that he has handed
al-Qa'ida and other jihadi groups a gift in a devastated and humiliated Iraq
and, in so doing, has endangered us all.

            Why, then, should we accept merely a Hutton inquiry? David
Kelly's tragedy deserved public investigation; but so does the epic,
unneccessary. tragedy of the thousands of Iraqis whose lives Blair helped to
end or scar.

            This is not just rhetoric. Robert Jackson, the US prosecutor at
Nuremberg in 1946, said: "If certain acts of violation of treaties are
crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether
Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal
conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against
us..."

            It is time the issue of "our" criminality entered the public
arena - before a media-endowed respectability is allowed to settle over the
occupation in Iraq. "There never was a time," said Blair in his obsequious
speech to Congress, "when the power of America was so necessary or so
misunderstood or when, except in the most general sense, a study of history
provides so little instruction for our present day."

            Greater demagogues than Blair have said the same about history;
Richard Nixon was one of them. In Washington during the Watergate scandal,
the unsayable about Nixon was that he was a criminal. Then, as each lie was
revealed, as each courtier was exposed and each fall guy fell, the unsayable
was finally said, and he went. That took almost two years. Can we, and a
peace-loving world, afford to wait that long?



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