Petards of Mass Destruction

[davidswanson]

Is it possible to convict a group of people of the highest possible crime simply by editing together public statements that they made while planning it?

If so, the best attempt at doing so that I imagine I'll ever see is found in a new 72-minute film available for viewing free online or by purchasing a DVD at http://www.leadingtowar.com

"Leading to War" begins and ends with a very few words of text on the screen. The rest is almost entirely clips of public statements at rallies, in television interviews, and at press conferences, statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Blair, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the gang between September 11, 2001, and March 19, 2003. There is some little-known footage included, and the sequence of the clips tells a coherent and compelling story.

Of course, this format has some weaknesses. Someone whose knowledge was limited to this film would have no way of knowing that many of the statements made in it were lies. There's no indication that the invasion of Iraq was being planned prior to 911. There's no indication that the attack was secretly underway prior to March 19, 2003. When Bush refers to an IAEA report that didn't exist, we don't necessarily know that. When several of the film's protagonists make claims about "weapons of mass destruction" and ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, we are not informed that they knew they were lying. Claims about aluminum tubes, Prague meetings, uranium purchases, training of al Qaeda in Iraq, mobile production facilities, and even Bush's pretense that he was trying to avoid war, are allowed to stand or fall without commentary. Text at the end of the film informs us that these claims were not true, but not that they were known at the time to be untrue, as of course they were. Commentary missing from the film is provided on the website at http://www.leadingtowar.com Additional evidence is collected at http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/keydocuments

On the other hand, the film does a much better job of informing people than the above paragraph might suggest. For one thing, we see in the film not just the statements of the Bush-Cheney Gang but also the questions of interviewers. Tough questions were few and far between in the lead up to the invasion, and this film includes most of them. Anyone whose knowledge of this story was limited to this film would have a much higher opinion of the US news media than is deserved. The questions serve throughout the film as a straight-man to these thugs' murderous comedy. We even see Tim Russert, of all people, pointing out the exposure of the lies that launched the first Gulf War and the early exposure of the fraudulent and plagiarized British case for attacking Iraq this time around.

Just by watching this film, we are reminded or informed that:

--Iraq told the world truthfully in 2002 and 2003 that it had no WMDs,
--the world was broadly opposed to a U.S. attack on Iraq,
--Iraq was willing to sit down and talk, but the United States was not,
--Cheney didn't want inspectors in Iraq,
--Cheney and his cronies predicted joyful throngs greeting "liberators",
--Scott Ritter rejected the WMD lies and made it onto television doing so,
--Bush pushed the British claim that Iraq could attack us within 45 minutes,
--Bush told us Iraq could attack us with unmanned aerial vehicles,
--all of these people made their assertions about WMDs repeatedly and with absolute certainty,
--Bush and Rice said we risked waking up to a "mushroom cloud" if we didn't attack Iraq,
--Iraq cooperated with inspectors,
--most nations of the world and huge crowds of people around the world opposed an attack on Iraq,
--Rumsfeld swore the whole thing would cost under $50 billion,
--Bush said we should attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein used torture: "If this is not evil," said Bush (who was already torturing people himself), "then evil has no meaning,"
--the goal Bush said he had in launching an aggressive war was "a free and peaceful Iraq...an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," and
--most nations in the world saw no imminent threat from Iraq, and the United Nations refused to support an aggressive attack by the United States, which tried very hard to win U.N. approval but then attacked without it.

The film closes with some text indicating, among other things, that no WMDs were ever found, that the occupation has been costly, etc. These claims are all crafted to avoid any possible objections, to the point in some cases of erring wildly on the side of war supporters. When every serious study done finds over 1 million Iraqi deaths, this film grotesquely puts the count at 100,000.

But that's my one and only complaint with it. I highly recommend getting the DVD and showing it in your town, followed by a discussion. It would be very hard for anyone to argue with what they've seen: the people responsible for a war of aggression, the supreme international crime, hoisting themselves on their own petards. This is the greatest value videotape has.

It's hard, however, not to feel embarrassed when watching this for all the poor saps cheering the speeches, the soldiers used as props behind the podiums, and the morons at places like the American Enterprise Institute cheering for each and every lie.

[babylonsister]

1. Unreal. Thanks, and REC'D. And free to view for those interested! Int

[jeff30997]

2. K&R

[hisownpetard]

3. K&R

[mojowork_n]

4. Exactly, "Iraq was willing to sit down and talk but the US was not."

This morning I happened to pick up the revised, updated (2000) edition of Phillip Knightley's classic book on the history of military reporting, The First Casualty: the War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo.

The title comes from U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson's observation, in 1917, that, "the first casualty when war comes, is truth."

I happened to pick up the book because the cable TV Military Channel was showing a documentary about the early months of the first world war, concentrating on the reports of German atrocities in Belgium.

Phillip Knightley's book (originally published in 1975) exposed many completely bogus German 'atrocity stories', which were reported in the Western press during that period of the war, only to be revealed as completely made up, after the war ended.

But what else would you expect from The Military Channel?

The documentary didn't bother to mention even one of the dozens of discredited original reports. Instead, it was exclusively focused on the kernel of truth behind them, instances where the German military did condemn some civilians to death. However, the story about the infant whose hands were chopped off as it clung to its mother, the story about the German 'corpse factory', processing stacks of bodies for constituent chemicals with military application, the story that the Kaiser had 'personally ordered the torturing of three-year old children, specifying the tortures to be inflicted' -- not one of those spectacular lies were considered to be worth re-visiting, by the producers of the documentary.

The really tragic -- and still under-reported truth -- is that as bad as news reporting is, on domestic issues, when there's a "war" going on, all bets are off. The official propagandists' version of events, as they're unfolding, is very difficult to challenge, and the truth doesn't come out until months, or years later.

So, in the run up to first Gulf War, replayed on news channels countless times until it was finally exposed as a complete PR fabrication, we had the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador testifying for Congress about Iraqi soldiers 'stealing infant incubators from Kuwaiti hospitals.

Knightley writes that the origins of the Kuwaiti babies story, "go back to the First World War when British propaganda accused the Germans of tossing Belgian babies into the air and catching them on their bayonets. Dusted off and updated for the Gulf War, this version had Iraqi soldiers bursting into a modern Kuwaiti hospital, finding the premature babies ward and then tossing the babies out of incubators so that the incubators could be sent back to Iraq. ...the story lacked the human element--it was an unverified report, there were no pictures for television and no interviews with mothers grieving over dead babies. That was soon rectified. An organization calling itself Citizens for a Free Kuwait (financed by the Kuwaiti government in exile) had signed a $10 million contract with the giant American public relations company, Hill and Knowlton. ...President Bush picked up on the story and referred to it six times in the next five weeks as an example of the evil of Saddam Hussein's regime. Amnesty International lent its weight to the atrocity in its report of human rights violations... The Sunday Times of London helped keep the story alive by tracing a Dr. Ali Al-Huwail, a Kuwaiti, said to be living at a secret address in the United Arab Emirates. The doctor played down the number of babies said to have been murdered-- he could vouch for 'only ninety-two deaths'. ...It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The story was a total invention, a fabrication and a myth."

These days, unless you count the very small percentage of Americans who might have caught Seymour Hersh's reporting on the Highway of Death, in the New Yorker, all anyone remembers about the first Gulf War are the video game images of "surgical strikes" and the "accuracy of smart bombs." In fact, 'smart bombs' accounted for just seven percent of the bombs dropped on Iraq. As Knightley reported, "...the rest were modern area impact munitions, like the cluster bomb, designed to devastate a wide area rather than confine their destruction to a precise target... these bombs missed most of the time. The Washington Post, quoting a senior Pentagon source, said that of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq, no fewer than 70 percent missed their target."

A few years later, the 3 month NATO bombing attack on Serbia was justified by "genocide."

Again, the Serbs were 'willing to talk, but the US was not.'

Knightley reported, "...the American government decided that 500,000 Kosovar Albanians missing, feared dead, was an impressive figure and this was the one issued by the State Department on April 19. The U.S. defense secretary, William Cohen, reduced this on May 16 to 100,000. ...The British government said on June 17 that the Serbs had killed 10,000 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo... But before the western media lost interest, no one had been able to uncover evidence to justify even this greatly reduced estimate... {After the war}...with twenty forensic teams in Kosovo throughout the summer, the total number of bodies exhumed by early November was 2,108. But both US State Department officials and UN investigators warned that some of the dead in graves already examined were fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or may have died ordinary deaths." Reports of mass atrocities -- 350 at Ljubenic, 1,000 at the Trepca mines -- turned out to have no basis in fact (Trepca), or they were grossly exagerrated (5, not 350.)

Knightley's final two paragraphs, in the updated (2000) edition:

"...the likelihood is that governments, their spin doctors, propagandists and military commanders will find further justification for managing the media in wartime and that the Gulf and Kosovo will become the pattern for all future wars. In fact, I predict that control of war correspondents--both open and covert--will be even tighter and that in general this will be accepted by the media because in wartime it considers its commercial and political interests lie in supporting the government of the day.
The age of the war correspondent as hero is clearly over. Whether they wish to continue as propagandists and myth makers, subservient to those who wage the wars, is a decision they will have to take themselves."

Leaving no one to report the following, incredible statistic, (UNDP, Human Development Report, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 47)

"...at the beginning of the {twentieth} century, ninety percent of casualties in war were soldiers; at the end of the century ninety percent of casualties in war were civilians."