November 22nd, 2008
For some reason –probably all the hoohah over John Sargent– I missed the news last Monday that Lord Bingham, onetime senior law lord of the UK, criticised the War on Iraq as “a serious violation of international law and of the rule of law”:
Summarising Lord Goldsmith’s reasoning, Lord Bingham said: “A reasonable case could be made that resolution 1441 was capable in principle of reviving the authorisation in resolution 678, but the argument could only be sustainable if there were ‘strong factual grounds’ for concluding that Iraq had failed to take the final opportunity. There would need to be ‘hard evidence’.”
Ten days later, in a Parliamentary written answer issued on March 17, 2003, Lord Goldsmith said it was “plain” that Iraq had failed to comply with its disarmament obligations and was therefore in material breach of resolution 687. Accordingly, the authority to use force under resolution 678 had revived.
The former judge then quoted the conclusion to Lord Goldsmith’s Parliamentary statement: “Resolution 1441 would, in terms, have provided that a further decision of the Security Council to sanction force was required if that had been intended. Thus, all that resolution 1441 requires is reporting to and discussion by the Security Council of Iraq’s failures, but not an express further decision to authorise force.”
Lord Bingham was not impressed. “This statement was, I think flawed in two fundamental respects,” he said.
“First, it was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had: Hans Blix and his team of weapons inspectors had found no weapons of mass destruction, were making progress and expected to complete their task in a matter of months.
“Secondly, it passes belief that a determination whether Iraq had failed to avail itself of its final opportunity was intended to be taken otherwise than collectively by the Security Council.”
Which is more or less what every anti-war activist already knew anyway. Like the dirty dossiers and the claims about Iraq being thirty minutes away from attacking Britain, Goldsmith’s legal advice was always meant as a figleaf for a decision already taken. There was never the intent on the part of Blair to really test the legality of an invasion; his former roomie knew what he wanted and so he delivered it. Had Goldsmith’s argument been made in a court of law it wouldn’t have passed the laugh test. As long as it was good enough to convince the doubters in parliament and the press it was good enough.
The runup to the War on Iraq made hollow phrases of democracy and rule of law, as the first was ignored while the second was perverted to make possible this war. It made clear what the population’s role was: to shut up, vote every few years without expecting anything important to change and to let the important decisions be made by our betters. And then Hazel “bloody” Blears has the gall to lecture us about about political disengagment and the negativity of bloggers?
Categories: Law in action, War Lies, War on Iraq
Tags: Hazel Blears, Lord Goldsmith
May 31st, 2006
Noam Chomsky has argued, in For Reasons of State as well as elsewhere, that My Lai, when put in its proper context was only a minor incident, yet it became the symbol of everything wrong with America’s war on Vietnam. The same can be said for Haditha. Worse atrocities have taken place in Iraq, worse crimes have been perpetrated by American soldiers, so one more massacre should not matter that much, should it? Why has the Haditha massacre captured the imagination of the world press and the American public when earlier outrages did not?
I think it is because Haditha, like My Lai, is so undeniably a warcrime and as significantly, it went against everything Americans
like to think they stand for. Earlier misdeeds could always be excused away as “regretable errors”, “fog of war”, “a few bad apples”,
etc. But here it is very clear that there were no excuses for what happened. Where even Abu Ghraib could be excused as “hijinx” and
“fratboy behaviour” (conveniently ignored much more horrible things than naked human pyramids happened as well), it is nigh impossible to do so when US soldiers deliberately select innocent people and execute them, behaving like Nazis in occupied Poland.
Also, American soldiers just do not kill civilians in cold blood, that goes against everything yer average American believes in, which
is why My Lai came as such a shock and why Habitha is the same. Again, Abu Ghraib was much less problematic to explain away. Torture as a last ditch attempt by the good guys to get the villain to reveal where he put the bombs that would kill hundreds of innocents is a long cherished staple of pulp tv and action movies, the idea that a bit of roughing up of obvious baddies is no big deal. Easy enough to ignore the fact that something more than roughing up was going on or that the victims were not necessarily villains. But killing people in cold blood? That’s unamerican, that’s what the bad guys do.
Even so, it has taken quite a long time for this massacre to reach the public’s awareness. It happened in November of last year, but
was only starting to gain mass circulation in March (when I first posted about it) but only now has become wellknown enough for Bush to have to speak about. Much thanks for bringing this story to light should go to congressman John Murtha, without whose speech on the massacre this may have remained obscure. He has paid for it in attacks by wingnuts talking about how unamerican it is to mention that US soldiers engage in massacre, not noticing it is those that it is actually those that betray America’s ideals.
Categories: War Lies, War on Iraq
Tags: Haditha, Haditha massacre
November 27th, 2005
Compare and contrast, Democratic senator John Edwards, recently acknowledging his fuckup in voting for the war on Iraq:
Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told — and what many of us believed and argued — was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.
It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. It has been hard to say these words because those who didn’t make a mistake — the men and women of our armed forces and their families — have performed heroically and paid a dear price.
With Democratic senator Robert Byrd, in his speech explaining why he voted against the war:
So where does Iraq enter the equation? No one in the Administration has been able to produce
any solid evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attack. Iraq had biological and chemical
weapons long before September 11. We knew it then, and we know it now. Iraq has been an enemy
of the United States for more than a decade. If Saddam Hussein is such an imminent threat to the
United States, why hasn’t he attacked us already? The fact that Osama bin Laden attacked the
United States does not, de facto, mean that Saddam Hussein is now in a lock and load position and
is readying an attack on the United States. In truth, there is nothing in the deluge of Administration
rhetoric over Iraq that is of such moment that it would preclude the Senate from setting its own timetable and taking the time for a thorough and informed discussion of this crucial issue.
As I’ve said before, it’s simply not true that, as John Edwards wants us to believe, everybody though Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. The evidence presented for it was so flimsy anybody willing to look at it clearly could see that it was untrue even if, like me, they had to rely on newspaper reports rather than intelligence briefs. It’s just pathetic to suggest that as a US senator John Edwards could not have known this intelligence to be flawed; if he was mislead it was because he wanted to be mislead. Senator Byrd in his speech before the vote, which as you know was taken just before the 2002 elections, said that “Democrats favor fast approval of a resolution so they can change the subject to domestic economic problems.”
Which explains why the war issue was never raised during the 2004 presidential elections. Most of the
Democratic Party establishment wanted the war as badly as Bush did, for a mixture of reasons: they wanted to get back to “normal” politics, didn’t want to be seen as weak on defence, perhaps thought that Bush could genuinely pull it off, or similar dumb reasons. Now that it has blown up in their faces they’re trying to reposition themselves as skeptical of the war, but without great conviction.
So now we have the sorry spectacle of an opposition party unable or unwilling to actually provide opposition on the most important issue of the day, a party hopelessly compromised by its past support for this issue. Is it any wonder the Democrats can’t gain any traction against Bush?
Categories: War Lies
Tags: war lies, we were mislead
November 22nd, 2005
The greatest lies told about the war on Iraq are of course the lies about Saddam Hussein’s ties with Al Quida and his massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, lies that even at the time were hard to swallow and today only persist in hardcore Bushian circles and in the delusion bunker that is the Bush White House itself.
To cover up these lies in the aftermath of the invasion, once it became clear just how big those lies were and how little truth was in them, a new lie had to be invented. People like Tony Blair could no longer pretend to believe the prewar reports and instead resorted to a meta lie: “we misunderestimated the amounts of WMDs Iraq had, but everybody did” and “not just American and British intelligence was faulty, but the German and French intelligence services said the same things”.
The first charge is so much self serving nonsense. From the start, many if not most of the people against the war were sceptical about Saddam’s stash of WMDs — I know I was. And we had the support of people like Scott Ritter, the ex-weapons inspector who before the war made it clear these allegations were nonsense. The second claim is harder to reject, as funnily enough most intelligence services are reticent to talk about their work; you never know what information these services have that we do not. It makes it therefore easy for Blair to claim that they supported him before the war, that “we were all fooled” and that nobody is
to blame for this faulty intelligence.
Not anymore. The various investigations into the workings of MI5 and such in the wake of the death of Dr. David Kelly had already made much nonsense of Blair’s claims, but the final nail in the coffin might come from this report by the LA Times which shows that the CIA deliberately misrepresented German intelligence on Iraqi WMDs:
BERLIN — The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.
Five senior officials from Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.
According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball’s information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball’s accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.
Curveball’s German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.
“This was not substantial evidence,” said a senior German intelligence official. “We made clear we could not verify the things he said.”
The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. “He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy,” said a BND official who supervised the case. “He is not a completely normal person,” agreed a BND analyst.
Worse, those within the CIA who questioned this intelligence were ignored and punished for their views:
An investigation by The Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations, as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was worse than official reports have disclosed.
The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball’s account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq’s biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.
At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball’s account even though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.
One of the victims that need not have died if these people had done their job before the war.
Which leaves one important question: why did the German intelligence services or those CIA people who questioned Curveball not come forward before the war, when it might have done some good? You might also ask why the LA Times couldn’t have mounted this investigation then, come to think of it. Some 100,000 Iraqi people might still be alive if either party had deigned to blow the whistle earlier.
Categories: War Lies
Tags: German intelligence on WMDs, war lies
November 7th, 2004
Sir,
it takes particular cheek to cite the partisan TCS website refering to the Lancet as “Al-Jazeera on the Thames” when the website in question is well known for its activism on behalf of corporate intrerests and the “journalist” who provided you with this quote has managed to both misread and misrepresent the Lancet report [1] in his own writings on the subject.
He made exactly the same mistake as your article did when it stated that:
The report’s authors admit it drew heavily on the rebel stronghold of Falluja, which has been plagued by fierce fighting. Strip out Falluja, as the study itself acknowledged, and the mortality rate is reduced dramatically.
When in fact the excess mortality figure the report arrived at, of 98,000, was reached with the Falluja figures left out of the calculations. If these had been included, the figure would have been even higher.
All of which leads me to conclude that the writer of your article, rather than reading the report itself and drawing his own conclusions, has instead relied on the accusations of those for whom this report is embarassing and who have an ulterior motive in bringing it into doubt.
Yours sincerily,
Martin Wisse
[1]: PDF file
Categories: Iraqi war deaths, Manufacturing Consent, War Lies
Tags: Observer, war lies
October 13th, 2004
Because I get so godddamn aggresive from those stupid, deeply venal Labour pricks who come on and lie and lie about the war on Iraq. For fucks sake, you did not go to war because Saddam was a bad man or because he might think about starting up a WMD program in the next century or so, certainly not because he was so rude to the UN. And don’t think we don’t know the UN arms inspectors weren’t kicked out but recalled, both in 1998 and in 2003.
No, you went to war because you said he was a menace to your country, he had weapons of mass destruction and missiles that could hit the UK within 45 minutes. You said he had ties with Al Quaida and might hand over nuclear bombs to them. You knew at the time, as we suspected all along, that you lied. Now that everybody knowns these reasons were lies it behooves you to be a fucking bit less smug and stop lying.
But it is so easy to lie when nobody takes you to account. Your political opponents for the most part won’t, because they were either stupid enough to believe you or complicit enough to collued in your lies. The media won’t because they have to work with you and they like their cozy little jobs too much. The people can’t, because you made it abundantly clear you have nothing but disdain for them. But don’t be too fucking secure. Someday, you will get what’s coming to you.
Hopefully, it will be soon.
Categories: Numpties, War Lies, War on Iraq
Tags: New Labour pricks, Newsnight
