In 2001 - COLIN POWELL SAID IRAQ WAS NO THREAT

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In 2001 - COLIN POWELL SAID IRAQ WAS NO THREAT

Writing in the Daily Mirror, John Pilger reveals that both US Secretary 
of State Colin Powell and Bush's closest adviser Condaleeza Rice said, 
in 2001, that Saddam Hussein was effectively disarmed and no threat - 
putting the lie to their own propaganda. : Pilger : 22 Sep 2003 
PILGER FILM REVEALS COLIN POWELL SAID IRAQ WAS NO THREAT


EXACTLY one year ago, Tony Blair told Parliament: "Saddam Hussein's 
weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.

"The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass 
destruction programme is not shut down. It is up and running now."

Not only was every word of this false, it was part of a big lie invented 
in Washington within hours of the attacks of September 11 2001 and used 
to hoodwink the American public and distract the media from the real 
reason for attacking Iraq. "It was 95 per cent charade," a former senior 
CIA analyst told me.

An investigation of files and archive film for my TV documentary 
Breaking The Silence, together with interviews with former intelligence 
officers and senior Bush officials have revealed that Bush and Blair 
knew all along that Saddam Hussein was effectively disarmed.

Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, 
President Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 
that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle 
East.

In Cairo, on February 24 2001, Powell said: "He (Saddam Hussein) has not 
developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass 
destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his 
neighbours."

This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public.

Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of "containment" that had 
effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator - again the very opposite of 
what Blair said time and again. On May 15 2001, Powell went further and 
said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to "build his military back 
up or to develop weapons of mass destruction" for "the last 10 years". 
America, he said, had been successful in keeping him "in a box".

Two months later, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and 
militarily defenceless Iraq. "Saddam does not control the northern part 
of the country," she said. "We are able to keep his arms from him. His 
military forces have not been rebuilt."

So here were two of Bush's most important officials putting the lie to 
their own propaganda, and the Blair government's propaganda that 
subsequently provided the justification for an unprovoked, illegal 
attack on Iraq. The result was the deaths of what reliable studies now 
put at 50,000 people, civilians and mostly conscript Iraqi soldiers, as 
well as British and American troops. There is no estimate of the 
countless thousands of wounded.

In a torrent of propaganda seeking to justify this violence before and 
during the invasion, there were occasional truths that never made 
headlines. In April last year, Condoleezza Rice described September 11 
2001 as an "enormous opportunity" and said America "must move to take 
advantage of these new opportunities."

Taking over Iraq, the world's second biggest oil producer, was the first 
such opportunity.

At 2.40pm on September 11, according to confidential notes taken by his 
aides, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, said he wanted to "hit" 
Iraq - even though not a shred of evidence existed that Saddam Hussein 
had anything to do with the attacks on New York and Washington. "Go 
massive," the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things 
related and not." Iraq was given a brief reprieve when it was decided 
instead to attack Afghanistan. This was the "softest option" and easiest 
to explain to the American people - even though not a single September 
11 hijacker came from Afghanistan. In the meantime, securing the "big 
prize", Iraq, became an obsession in both Washington and London.

An Office of Special Plans was hurriedly set up in the Pentagon for the 
sole purpose of converting "loose" or unsubstantiated intelligence into 
US policy. This was a source from which Downing Street received much of 
the "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction we now know to be phoney.

CONTRARY to Blair's denials at the time, the decision to attack Iraq was 
set in motion on September 17 2001, just six days after the attacks on 
New York and Washington.

On that day, Bush signed a top-secret directive, ordering the Pentagon 
to begin planning "military options" for an invasion of Iraq. In July 
2002, Condoleezza Rice told another Bush official who had voiced doubts 
about invading Iraq: "A decision has been made. Don't waste your breath."

The ultimate cynicism of this cover-up was expressed by Rumsfeld himself 
only last week. When asked why he thought most Americans still believed 
Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of September 11, he replied: "I've 
not seen any indication that would lead me to believe I could say that."

It is this that makes the Hutton inquiry in London virtually a sham. By 
setting up an inquiry solely into the death of the weapons expert David 
Kelly, Blair has ensured there will be no official public investigation 
into the real reasons he and Bush attacked Iraq and into when exactly 
they made that decision. He has ensured there will be no headlines about 
disclosures in email traffic between Downing Street and the White House, 
only secretive tittle-tattle from Whitehall and the smearing of the 
messenger of Blair's misdeeds.

The sheer scale of this cover-up makes almost laughable the forensic 
cross-examination of the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan about "anomalies" 
in the notes of his interview with David Kelly - when the story Gilligan 
told of government hypocrisy and deception was basically true.

Those pontificating about Gilligan failed to ask one vital question - 
why has Lord Hutton not recalled Tony Blair for cross-examination? Why 
is Blair not being asked why British sovereignty has been handed over to 
a gang in Washington whose extremism is no longer doubted by even the 
most conservative observers? No one knows the Bush extremists better 
than Ray McGovern, a former senior CIA officer and personal friend of 
George Bush senior, the President's father. In Breaking The Silence, he 
tells me: "They were referred to in the circles in which I moved when I 
was briefing at the top policy levels as 'the crazies'."

"Who referred to them as 'the crazies'?" I asked.

"All of us... in policy circles as well as intelligence circles... There 
is plenty of documented evidence that they have been planning these 
attacks for a long time and that 9/11 accelerated their plan. (The 
weapons of mass destruction issue) was all contrived, so was the 
connection of Iraq with al Qaeda. It was all PR... Josef Goebbels had 
this dictum: If you say something often enough, the people will believe 
it." He added: "I think we ought to be all worried about fascism (in the 
United States)."

The "crazies" include John Bolton, Under Secretary of State, who has 
made a personal mission of tearing up missile treaties with the Russians 
and threatening North Korea, and Douglas Feith, an Under Secretary of 
Defence, who ran a secret propaganda unit "reworking" intelligence about 
Iraq's weapons. I interviewed them both in Washington.

BOLTON boasted to me that the killing of as many as 10,000 Iraqi 
civilians in the invasion was "quite low if you look at the size of the 
military operation."

For raising the question of civilian casualties and asking which country 
America might attack next, I was told: "You must be a member of the 
Communist Party."

Over at the Pentagon, Feith, No 3 to Rumsfeld, spoke about the 
"precision" of American weapons and denied that many civilians had been 
killed. When I pressed him, an army colonel ordered my cameraman: "Stop 
the tape!" In Washington, the wholesale deaths of Iraqis is 
unmentionable. They are non-people; the more they resist the 
Anglo-American occupation, the more they are dismissed as "terrorists".

It is this slaughter in Iraq, a crime by any interpretation of an 
international law, that makes the Hutton inquiry absurd. While his 
lordship and the barristers play their semantic games, the spectre of 
thousands of dead human beings is never mentioned, and witnesses to this 
great crime are not called.

Jo Wilding, a young law graduate, is one such witness. She was one of a 
group of human rights observers in Baghdad during the bombing. She and 
the others lived with Iraqi families as the missiles and cluster bombs 
exploded around them. Where possible, they would follow the explosions 
to scenes of civilian casualties and trace the victims to hospitals and 
mortuaries, interviewing the eyewitnesses and doctors. She kept 
meticulous notes.

She saw children cut to pieces by shrapnel and screaming because there 
were no anaesthetics or painkillers. She saw Fatima, a mother stained 
with the blood of her eight children. She saw streets, mosques and 
farmhouses bombed by marauding aircraft. "Nothing could explain them," 
she told me, "other than that it was a deliberate attack on civilians."

As these atrocities were carried out in our name, why are we not hearing 
such crucial evidence? And why is Blair allowed to make yet more 
self-serving speeches, and none of them from the dock?

First published in the Daily Mirror - www.mirror.co.uk