Fisk:--'The Myth of Western Intelligence Agencies'

(since this is GD, I have to throw in a few keywords: NADER, GREEN, NADER, COMMUNIST, ISRAEL, NADER, DEAN, CLARK, NADER)
(maybe it can be moved to Editorials later)

Lies and Mischief
The Myth of Western Intelligence Agencies
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent

They were at it again last week, the liars of our Western "intelligence" community. John Bolton, the US under-secretary of state for arms control and one of Donald Rumsfeld's cabal of pro-Israeli neo-conservatives, was giving testimony before the decidedly pro-Israeli sponsors of the Syria Accountability Act.

Mr Bolton, who once ludicrously claimed that Cuba had a biological weapons programme, accused Syria of maintaining a stockpile of sarin and of working on VX and biological weapons. And Congressmen Eliot Engel announced that "it wouldn't surprise me if those weapons of mass destruction that we cannot find in Iraq wound up and are today in Syria". For Baghdad, read Damascus.

--snip--

Yet we let these dumbos get away with it. Nobody interrupted Mr Blair, for example, when he arrived in Iraq in the summer and said we could not say there were no WMD because we "should wait until the 1,400 US, British and Australian investigators sent in to search for Iraq's weapons had finished work". But why, for heaven's sake, couldn't he have been patient enough to let the extremely competent UN inspectors finish their work before his illegal invasion? Only now, it seems, do we have to be patient--and we're going to have to go on being patient because the Iraq survey team in whom Mr Blair desperately placed his hopes is about to say it has found no WMD.

The liars in the intelligence services, of course, have been getting it wrong from the start. Remember all those bombs we dropped on innocent people in the hope that we might--just might--kill Saddam? This started back in 1991 when we sent a missile into a hardened air-raid shelter at Amariya in Baghdad and killed upwards of 400 civilians. The Americans were trying to assassinate Saddam but he wasn't there--and never had been. We have never apologised for this atrocity and I wasn't surprised that the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, chose to visit Halabja, the scene of Saddam's massacre by chemicals of 8,000 Kurds, on his trip to Iraq this month and miss out on the Amariya shelter. In fact, the only interest the Americans have shown in this grisly shrine in Baghdad was to search it for weapons.

At the end of this year's invasion of Iraq, the Americans announced that they had bombed a building in the Mansour district of Baghdad because Saddam may have been there. Again, he wasn't. Sixteen civilians, including a baby under a year old, were killed. Again, we have never apologised for this outrage. Donald Rumsfeld, it has now been revealed, had to give special approval if any air strike was thought likely to result in the deaths of more than 30 civilians. In fact, more than 50 such strikes were proposed-- and Mr Rumsfeld approved every one of them.(emphasis added)

And still it goes on. Only last week, the Americans used two jets to strike--at night--a house in Fallujah and claimed they killed a gunman. In fact, it's now clear that they killed three members of a perfectly innocent family. This happened scarcely three miles from the spot where soldiers of the supposedly elite 82nd Airborne gunned down eight of their own Iraqi policemen on a darkened roadway, an act which has still not been explained and which was only grudgingly acknowledged two days after the killings.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk09292003.html