Exposed: Case Against Iraq a Fraud

George Bush and Tony Blair have presented what they claim to be hard evidence against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which they claim proves undeniably that Baghdad is pursuing a Weapons of Mass Destruction program, thus justifying military intervention. However, recently this evidence has been discovered to be false.

When Tony Blair presented a document to Parliament last month which was based mainly upon conjecture and statements by embittered Iraqi exiles looking for a share of the spoils in a post-Saddam Iraq, many were the voices raised that said the “document” brandished by the British Prime Minister was no more than a propaganda exercise.

Now the intelligence community adds its voice to a growing body of experts who claim that Washington and London are steam-rolling over the truth, disregarding any evidence contrary to the “SOS Saddam” theory and silencing those experts who know the truth, that there is no case against Saddam Hussein.

As George Bush fantasized about “mushroom clouds” on Monday night, intelligence experts around the world were shaking their heads in dismay. Vincent Cannistraro, the former CIA Head of Counter-Intelligence, declared in an interview with the British newspaper, The Guardian, that “cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there is a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA."

Both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair declared that Iraq had tried to import aluminium tubes which in the former’s words, “are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." Experts claim they were far more probably destined for conventional weaponry and former UN weapons inspector David Albright stated that the final use of the tubes was unclear. This is a far cry from stating categorically that these tubes were intended as part of a WMD program.

David Albright also declared that experts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who had scorned these claims, had been instructed not to publicise their doubts about the veracity of the official line. An unnamed spokesperson working at the laboratory told journalists “The administration can say what it wants and we are expected to remain silent."

Another claim that there were high-level links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda are similarly warped. Suspected terrorist Abu Musab Zarqani, who had been arrested for his part in a plot to bomb tourist sites in Jordan in 2001, went to Baghdad for hospital treatment after his release. The CIA monitored his telephone conversations, none of which had any connection whatsoever with Iraqi authorities.

Finally, Bush’s claim that the Iraqis are converting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, “for missions targeting the United States” has been exposed by military experts as ridiculous, since the machines in question, converted L-29s from Eastern Europe, have a maximum range of hundreds of kilometres, not thousands of miles.

It is crystal clear what has been happening; the Bush Administration has been deliberately creating a case against Saddam Hussein to use as a pretext for an attack. Disregarding any evidence which points to the contrary, exaggerating and twisting any lead that could be contrived to support the preconceived claim.

That a man in the position of George Bush (not to mention Tony Blair) can deliver a speech making such serious accusations based entirely upon conjecture and “cooked” facts is utterly incredible due to its shallowness, limited scope of vision, dangerous consequences and its sheer unilateral promotion of the hegemony of the United States of America over the world’s resources.

If George Bush or Tony Blair had been speaking in any normal forum they could be accused of slander. Had they been speaking in a court of law they would be charged with perjury. As it is, in a world which gyrates egocentrically around the Bush Administration, the best that can be done is to call them liars.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru