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Anthrax, chemicals and nerve gas: who is lying?/Growing evidence of deception by Washington/independent/20 April
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=398705
Anthrax, chemicals and nerve gas: who is lying?
Growing evidence of deception by Washington
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
20 April 2003
If US and British forces are scratching their heads at their
inability to
find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, perhaps they should
talk to Scott Ritter, the United Nations weapons inspector who
famously quit in 1998, after seven years on the job, and has
been a controversial figure ever since.
For months, Mr Ritter has said Iraq's capability of producing
or deploying
chemical or biological weapons was 90-95 per cent destroyed on
his watch and was very unlikely to have been built up again under
international sanctions and the constant surveillance of spy
satellites and US and British war planes.
Iraq's nuclear programme was dismantled at the end of the
first Gulf War in 1991, he said, and factories to produce chemical
or biological agents
deactivated shortly thereafter. Any leftover nerve agents would
only have a shelf life of five years and would probably be useless
by now. The anthrax and botulism toxin that Iraq produced was
never weap-onised and, although it was put into warheads at one
point, was no more than harmless sludge that "could only
kill you if it landed on your head".
This is the same Scott Ritter who, when he first made these assertions last autumn, was vilified in the US media as "misguided", "disloyal", not to be taken seriously and "an apologist for and a defender of Saddam Hussein". One cable news host, Curtis Sliwa said on air he was a "sock puppet" who "ought to turn in his passport for an Iraqi one".
Perhaps it's time to give Mr Ritter another chance. It may, in fact, be time to reassess who exactly has been the deceiver and who the dupe in this whole affair. What Mr Ritter and others now allege, with increasing confidence, is a pattern of false information emanating from both Washington and London since last September - lies and distortions that launched a major war and are only now beginning to be widely exposed.
Exhibit number one is a speech Vice President Dick Cheney
gave to the
Veterans of Foreign Wars last summer. "The Iraqi regime
has in fact been
very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical
and biological
agents." he said. "And they continue to pursue the
nuclear programme they
began so many years ago." Mr Ritter says this is pure fiction.
Mr Cheney attributed his information to high-level defectors,
including
Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal. Supposedly, Kamal led UN
inspectors in
1995 to a chicken farm stuffed with secret documents on ongoing
weapons
programmes. Actually, according to Mr Ritter, Hussein Kamal told
US
intelligence that the weapons had been destroyed, and the chicken
farm
documents subsequently examined by UN inspectors corroborated
that.
Exhibit number two is the briefing paper issued by Downing
Street on 24
September, which first alleged the purchase of uranium for nuclear
weapons
use from Niger. The documents indicating this purchase have now
been exposed
by the International Atomic Energy Agency as glaringly obvious
fakes.
The timing of the nuclear allegation was crucial in persuading
the US
Congress to grant President Bush full war powers against Iraq
a few weeks
later. Several angry congressmen who voted in favour now want
to know how
and why they were misled.
"This is a breach of the highest order, and the American
people are entitled
to know how it happened," Henry Waxman of California wrote
to the President
last month. "I believed that you had access to reliable
intelligence
information that merited deference... The two most obvious explanations
- knowing deception or unfathomable incompetence - both have
immediate and serious implications."
Exhibit number three is the list of dangerous substances that President Bush and Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, said the Iraqis had not accounted for. Another distortion, according to Mr Ritter. The 15,000 litres of anthrax on the list, for example, was a hypothetical projection of future production at a biological plant that was closed down long ago.
Mr Ritter has not, of course, been vindicated quite yet. US
intelligence may really know something, and significant hidden
caches of weapons could still materialise. But the pattern of
deception and unsubstantiated allegation is unmistakable, even
as the political embarrassment for the Bush administration deepens.
21 April 2003 08:10