Colin Powell's Iraq speech - liar, liar pants on fire
Ron F | 05.02.2003 20:25
Anyone not totally blinded by United States of Amnesia propaganda will recall the blatant lie orchestrated by the US administration about babies thrown from incubators by Iraqi's in Kuwait - a total fabrication designed to justify an aerial blitzkrieg. Likewise the bogus satellite photographs pretending to show Iraqi forces on the Saudi border. Old timers and historians will recall the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin "incident" used to justify the attack on Vietnam, which lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of US personnel and millions of Vietnamese. Similar examples of US deceit are legion.
Applying Secretary of State Powell's logic that Iraq's lying in the past means it cannot be believed today, it is clear that not a single word spoken by him can be trusted. Certainly much of his speech is demonstrably false.
Powell frequently referred to the murder of Kurds at Halabja by Saddam with chemical weapons but, as always, forgot the words - WITH OUR HELP.
If Washington is serious about Saddam's undoubted crimes will the US businessmen and government officials who supported him at the height of his atrocities be charged as accomplices? If not, then his expression of outrage at the Halabja slaughter is just one more lie, at the expense of 5,000 murder victims.
Equally, if non-compliance with UN resolutions is so wrong, why is the US giving over $3billion per year to Israel? Last week that country was found by a Christian Aid report to have caused levels of malnutrition in the illegally occupied territories as bad as those in Zimbabwe. This week Israel is reported, in the Israeli press, as using banned flachette tank shells on children. Israel has killed UN workers, including Briton Iain Hook, who was shot in the back by the IDF. Medical workers, hospitals, and food supplies are deliberately targeted.
Beyond any doubt Israel holds the world record for broken UN resolutions. Yet US tax dollars continue to pour into that country. Clearly, UN resolutions are to be applied selectively, as the US sees fit, and the sanctity of Security Council Resolutions is a big, fat lie.
If, as is likely, al Qaida has an interest in obtaining weapons like ours then the place they're likely to try to get them is Pakistan, not Iraq. This nuclear armed military dictatorship has thoroughly documented links with al Qaida, was the conduit through which billions of US dollars were funnelled to bin Laden in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and, according to India, still supports Islamic terrorism in Kashmir.
The seriousness behind US concern about weapons like ours is starkly illustrated by the response to Pakistan's dictator General Musharraf, who stole power from an elected government, and whose country stood at the brink of nuclear war with India last year. Washington's response is to sell him more weapons, grant more IMF credits and let him keep the bomb!
For the first time in many, many months a US politician talked about anthrax. But Powell forgot to mention that the anthrax used in the US mail was produced by the US governments own massive illegal bioweapons programme. The perpetrator remains free, while bio-weapons corporations are now set to get $6 billion, announced in Bush's State of the Union speech, as part of a "bio-weapons shield". That basically means tons of money for Bush's supporters in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, one of the biggest corporate donors.
Needless to say the possibility, and the evident need, for inspecting US bioweapons facilities is simply never raised. Likewise the fact that the US single - handedly scuppered the Bio-weapons inspection treaty, which was the only show in town when it comes to reducing the global threat such materials pose. Clearly US corporate and military secrets come before making the world a safer place.
Like they say, it's all about oil and power. Washington's words and actions show it has absolutely no interest in international law, justice or security.
Applying Secretary of State Powell's logic that Iraq's lying in the past means it cannot be believed today, it is clear that not a single word spoken by him can be trusted. Certainly much of his speech is demonstrably false.
Powell frequently referred to the murder of Kurds at Halabja by Saddam with chemical weapons but, as always, forgot the words - WITH OUR HELP.
If Washington is serious about Saddam's undoubted crimes will the US businessmen and government officials who supported him at the height of his atrocities be charged as accomplices? If not, then his expression of outrage at the Halabja slaughter is just one more lie, at the expense of 5,000 murder victims.
Equally, if non-compliance with UN resolutions is so wrong, why is the US giving over $3billion per year to Israel? Last week that country was found by a Christian Aid report to have caused levels of malnutrition in the illegally occupied territories as bad as those in Zimbabwe. This week Israel is reported, in the Israeli press, as using banned flachette tank shells on children. Israel has killed UN workers, including Briton Iain Hook, who was shot in the back by the IDF. Medical workers, hospitals, and food supplies are deliberately targeted.
Beyond any doubt Israel holds the world record for broken UN resolutions. Yet US tax dollars continue to pour into that country. Clearly, UN resolutions are to be applied selectively, as the US sees fit, and the sanctity of Security Council Resolutions is a big, fat lie.
If, as is likely, al Qaida has an interest in obtaining weapons like ours then the place they're likely to try to get them is Pakistan, not Iraq. This nuclear armed military dictatorship has thoroughly documented links with al Qaida, was the conduit through which billions of US dollars were funnelled to bin Laden in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and, according to India, still supports Islamic terrorism in Kashmir.
The seriousness behind US concern about weapons like ours is starkly illustrated by the response to Pakistan's dictator General Musharraf, who stole power from an elected government, and whose country stood at the brink of nuclear war with India last year. Washington's response is to sell him more weapons, grant more IMF credits and let him keep the bomb!
For the first time in many, many months a US politician talked about anthrax. But Powell forgot to mention that the anthrax used in the US mail was produced by the US governments own massive illegal bioweapons programme. The perpetrator remains free, while bio-weapons corporations are now set to get $6 billion, announced in Bush's State of the Union speech, as part of a "bio-weapons shield". That basically means tons of money for Bush's supporters in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, one of the biggest corporate donors.
Needless to say the possibility, and the evident need, for inspecting US bioweapons facilities is simply never raised. Likewise the fact that the US single - handedly scuppered the Bio-weapons inspection treaty, which was the only show in town when it comes to reducing the global threat such materials pose. Clearly US corporate and military secrets come before making the world a safer place.
Like they say, it's all about oil and power. Washington's words and actions show it has absolutely no interest in international law, justice or security.
Ron F
Comments
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To Ron F.
06.02.2003 00:00
Your precient commentary has hit some raw nerves at the DC IMC. And you're absolutely right; the world has no reason what-so-ever to believe a word from the metropole--Democrat or Republican. When it comes to maintaining or expanding the empire, they are the same, and that is the face they show the world. Even Wall Street didn't find Powell convincing: the faint glimmer of a rally before his speech faded soon after. I think it clear that Bush et al are presenting their "case" based on what they would do in the same situation: lie, cheat and steal as they've always done.
Keep up the struggle.
Karl
karlof1
tring...tring...
06.02.2003 00:01
Yes... the "forbidden weapons" hidden from Hans Blix are being mounted on the "modulated vehicle."
What... you mean the camel's hump has been genetically modulated to launch the "forbidden weapons?"
Shhhhhh......
Roger and Out
Desann the Pathetic fool!
06.02.2003 00:38
Desann
Lying is an old profession!!!
06.02.2003 14:02
Colin (Luther) Powell - Habitual fibber!!!
Colin Powell habitually lies and in fact made a profitable career out of it!!! It appears that his stint in the army consist mainly of telling lies to the whole world.
Let those free of sins cast the first stone!!!
Thief shouting thief!!!
Making the case for war
Only by swallowing big lies can Powell justify an invasion of Iraq
We know in advance that Colin Powell's performance will be flawless. His military career has prepared him well to execute the orders of his commander in chief, no matter what his doubts as to their morality, efficacy or logic. Making a seamless case for preemptive war on Iraq to the United Nations, the secretary of State can draw on his decade of wartime experience in which he publicly justified the deaths of more than a million Vietnamese, tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Laotians and Cambodians.
It took two decades for Powell, in his autobiography "My American Journey," to acknowledge that all the destruction brought down upon Indochina by the U.S. was based on an uneducated, unfocused and enormously costly policy that he and other military leaders had known to be "bankrupt."
But duty, apparently, required they not tell the public the truth.
"War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support," he wrote, summarizing Vietnam's lessons.
Does anybody outside of the extremist claque of think-tank warriors bending the president's ear really think we are at the point of "last resort" with Iraq, a poor country half a world away that is already divvied up into "no-fly" zones, crawling with U.N. inspectors and still shattered economically and militarily from two previous wars? Or that the American people, so divided and apathetic in polls on the subject, "understand and support" why we would start a firestorm in Baghdad and then send our young men and women to fight in its streets?
Regardless of Saddam Hussein's record of cruelty and regional power ambitions, as a military man Powell should be employing a straightforward equation: Does the target pose a direct threat to U.S. security? In the case of Iraq in 2003, the answer can be yes only if Powell is prepared to swallow a trio of Big Lies, the first of which is that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction that pose a real threat to the U.S. or our allies.
"There is no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear program since the elimination of the program in the 1990s," said the U.N.'s chief nuclear weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei.
Less clear is whether Iraq has made at least token efforts to replenish stocks of biological and chemical weapons. In any case, Iraq can deliver payloads only to regional enemies, and the most likely target, Israel, is armed with nuclear weapons.
However, Powell has gone way beyond these facts, claiming U.N. inspectors found that Iraq was concealing and moving illicit material. The U.N.'s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, categorically denied this in an interview last week with the New York Times, part of a comprehensive rebuke to White House exploitation and media misinterpretation of his balanced, dispassionate report.
Similarly, Powell and the president have employed an irresponsible pattern of exaggeration and innuendo in an attempt to link Iraq to Al Qaeda. This shameful canard molds a few extremely fuzzy and circumstantial bits of proto-evidence into an absurdly convenient "proof" that taking over Iraq will help prevent anti-American terrorism.
In a New York Times report Sunday, sources inside U.S. intelligence agencies "said they were baffled by the Bush administration's insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's network," they were upset that "the intelligence is obviously being politicized" and that "we've been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there." Blix also said there was no evidence Iraq had or planned to supply weapons to Al Qaeda.
All of which brings us to the most outrageous Big Lie of the Bush administration: that delaying an invasion to wait for the U.N. to complete inspections would endanger the U.S. The fact is that for more than a decade the military containment of Iraq has effectively neutered Hussein, and there is no reason to believe that can't continue.
Of course, there is a case to be made for keeping up pressure on Iraq to cooperate further with the U.N. It is, however, counterproductive to transparently lie to a skeptical world and immoral to denigrate the inspection process because we are afraid it will undermine our cobbled-together rationale for going to war.
As Powell knows from his Vietnam experience, lies have a way of catching up with you. Years from now, if the U.S. is still spending billions trying to micromanage the Middle East and reaping its rewards in blood, Bush will be marked indelibly, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon before him, as a leader who went to war on a lie.
www.workingforchange.com/
My Lai and my lies
My Lai is bigger than Saddam's lies!!!
06.02.2003 14:05
>>
So tell us more about that huge massacre of thousands of retreating Iraqi conscripts by the US armed forces during that other war!!!
Read the awar-winning book "Four Hours in My Lai" by
Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Viking (Penguin) Press, 1992
There's more cover-ups and deception there than Iraqi children have access to medicine.
Blackwash Inc.