Registered: Jan 2002
Location: UK
Posts: 13002

Transcripted from the pages of Private Eye

Publish And Be Saddamed

New evidence has emerged in the United States which might help explain how Britiish newspapers got is so wrong propagating the Saddam doomsday scenario in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The US government paid millions of dollars to the Iraqi National Congress (INC) for work that apparently included placing stories about nonexistant weapons of mass destruction in the Sunday Times, Times, Observer, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, Express, Independent, Brimingham Post and Western Mail.

According to documents obtained by the American newspaper firm Knight Ridder, the INC still receives $4m a year for its 'information collection programme' - the scheme which Ahmed Chalabi's organisation used to pass inaccurate stories, gleaned from exiled Iraqis about Saddam;s WMD, to the US department of defence. But the INC also claims responsibility for getting similar stories into newspapers.

Indeed, to justify its continued funding, in June 2002 it wrote to the US Senate Appropriations Committee boasting of its success. It referred to 108 pieces in British and American newspapers under the heading "summary of ICP product cited in major English language news outlets worldwide (Oct 2001 - May 2002).

A major source for British hacks was the Iraqi civil engineer Adnan Al-Haideri, who claimed to have built underground bio-warfare labs and worked on an Iraqi nuclear programme. The INC list points to an article by Marie Colvin in the Sunday Times (17 March 2002) headlined "Saddam's arsenal reveleaed" and publicising Al-Haideri's claims. Colvin said a second defector had reveleaed the existance of seven mobile germ labs "disguised as milk trucks" and quoted an unamed official as saying the information was "high grade". Not the high grade it turns out.

The INC also claims credit for two articles by Damien Whitworth in the Times in December 2001 which uncritically reported Al-Haideri's claims "about the acceleration of President Saddam Hussein's work on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons".

In Decemebr 2002 Andrew Gumbel of the Independent and Toby Moore of the Express also reported Al-Haideri's claims without scepticism. The INC cites Ben Fenton of the Telegraph on the same subject, under the banner "Defector tells of Saddam's nuclear arms". At least the Telegraph noted that " Mr Al-Haideri's have not been confirmed by intelligence sources in Washington".

Christopher Hitchens is another British hack on the INC list. In his March 2002 comment piece in the Evening Standard he wrote that Saddam was "within measurable distance of acquiring doomsday materials". He went on to praise the "heroic" Chalabi as "the symbolic and actual head of the Iraqi opposition" and his "infromation concerning the whereabouts of the Ba'ath Party's weapons of mass destruction". the INC also claims credit for Hitchen's piece in that month's Guardian, which said Saddam "certainly has nerve gas and chemical weapons".

Hitchens cited the discredited exile Khidir Hamza to show that Iraq would soon have nuclear weapons, and used an INC source to show how Saddam was linked to the September 11th attacks.

The latter claim, the INC says, also appeared in a March 2002 piece by Toby Harnden in the Daily Telegraph which said Saddam "armed bin Laden and funded Al Qaeda allies". Relying on INC information, Harnden reported that "Iraq sent convential and perhaps biological or chemcial weapons to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan".

And so on. While US journals have taken publication of the INC list seriously and reexamined their INC-linked material, in Britain the response so far has been..... silence.

--------------------------------------------------

I love the British press. As Aneurin Bevan said, the British press should be read daily as it is one's source of "continuous fiction".

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Hilbert Space
Posts: 35656

I don't understand Chalabi's appeal to the US or UK. He has no constituency in Iraq. He might end up the big winner in all of this; his organisation provided us with defectors loaded with dubious information (some of which was used to support war), they appear to have manipulated public opinion through manipulation of media, and despite having no popular support in Iraq he has political power in Iraq. Weird.

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged