Tomgram

Weapons of mass destruction revisited (1)

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Those weapons of mass destruction, where did they go? Here’s a drama indeed. If you watch CNN and the like, you’ve seen soldiers scrubbing down thoroughly with some kind of disinfectant after finding an obvious site filled with barrels of… well, we do have to check, but the soldiers who found them got nauseous and dizzy and… And the story fades away, like the story of the buried mobile biological labs, and… well, you’ve undoubtedly seen some of these stories, breathlessly reported, followed later, far less breathlessly by the somewhat smaller oops… oops… ooops… well, maybe in Syria. The denials are so much less dramatic and so, once again, it might not be so hard to come away from a reasonable dose of TV reporting thinking that perhaps weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq.

But, of course, they haven’t. Even the UN inspectors (now eternally locked out of the country, along with the — to the Bush administration — infernal Mr. Blix) found emptied canisters that had once held mustard gas. But we’ve blitzed the country with all that surefire intelligence that before the war we insisted we had but wouldn’t trust the UN inspectors with, and… well, nothing. It seems clear that if the Iraqis had any wmd stockpiles left, they were too well hidden to have been used in this war.

Below, Eric Margolis, columnist for the Toronto Sun, begins a listing of the lies, misstatements, and misinformation the Americans mustered to pave the way for this war (you couldn’t fit it all in a single column) and William O. Beeman, commentator for Pacific News Service, considers Hans Blix, the man we’ve heard nothing from — and not because he’s said nothing either.

In the meantime, as I’ve mentioned on and off for many months, the only actual use of an officially designated weapon of mass destruction in recent years, the anthrax attacks of fall 2001 in the U.S. — a case in which we know that the strain employed came originally from the American weapons labs (see New Scientist magazine, Anthrax attack bug ‘identical’ to army strain, May 9, 2002,) and assumedly unlike Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and Saddam Hussein, the killer is hiding here among us — has disappeared from, it seems, consciousness. Media consciousness anyway. Erased might be a better word. Does no one think this remarkable? Is there no major (or minor) paper in the country willing to set a team of reporters, or even a single reporter with a cell phone, on the FBI to find out where the case stands now? Admittedly, only five people died, not nearly 3,000, but still there are no articles on the survivors today, no attempts to reconstruct what happened, no follow-ups on the one suspect who surfaced momentarily. Too bad it didn’t happen in Iraq. Then we’d get some coverage. Tom

Bush and Blair and the Big Lie
By Eric Margolis, Contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
April 20, 2003

A California superior court judge sent me the following quotation, which is well worth pondering:

“We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.”

A California superior court judge sent me the following quotation, which is well worth pondering:

“We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.”

This declaration was made by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel L. Jackson, America’s senior representative at the 1945 Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the tribunal’s chief prosecutor.

Those now exulting America’s conquest of Iraq should ponder Judge Jackson’s majestic words. Particularly now that the U.S.-British justifications for invading Iraq are being revealed as distortions.

To read more Margolis click here

The Elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction
By William O. Beeman,
Pacific News Service
April 16, 2003

U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix has been virtually ignored by U.S. press lately, but he’s been far from silent. PNS contributor William O. Beeman looks at what Blix has been saying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The stated purpose of the war in Iraq was to defend the United States from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Thus far no weapons have been found. Moreover, according to United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix and two top Iraqi scientists who have given themselves up, there are none of any significance to be found.

Hans Blix has not been interviewed in the American media since the war began on March 19. However, he gave an extensive interview to the Spanish newspaper, El País on April 9 in which he made it clear that the United States’ claim that intelligence sources had proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was doubtful at best.

Beeman ([email protected]) teaches anthropology and is director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is author of “Language, Status and Power in Iran,” and two forthcoming books: “Double Demons: Cultural Impediments to U.S.-Iranian Understanding,” and “Iraq: State in Search of a Nation.” The translations of passages from Blix’ El País interview are his.

To read more Beeman click here