Spinning a web of mass deceit

As a piece of media manipulation, the success of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair's media guru, in switching attention from the …

As a piece of media manipulation, the success of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair's media guru, in switching attention from the falsehoods that underpinned the foreseeable killing of thousands of people in Iraq, is quite spectacular, writes Vincent Browne.

For now, at least, media focus here and in Britain is riveted not on whether lies were told to ordain mass slaughter, but on whether the BBC contributed by exaggeration to the death of a single person.

It isn't yet established conclusively that either Tony Blair or George Bush lied to justify war on Iraq. But the evidence is mounting that on the issues of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and on links with al-Qaeda, they made claims at the United Nations, the US Congress and the House of Commons that people around them knew to be untrue. And it was on those very same bogus claims that they sought UN, Congressional, Parliamentary and world support for the bombardment of a country that already had been devastated by war and economic sanctions.

Both Blair and Bush cited evidence that the regime of Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium oxide from Niger as part of the build-up of a nuclear arms programme. It now emerges that this "evidence" came from an Italian journalist, Elisabetta Burba, a foreign correspondent for an Italian news magazine, Panorama. She visited Niger in the autumn of 2002 and was given a bundle of documents that purported to show that the Iraqis had tried to purchase uranium oxide there some time previously.

READ MORE

On returning to Rome, she told her editor that the story seemed "fake" to her, so the magazine ignored their own "discovery". However, she handed the documents over to the US embassy in Rome. Quite quickly, the CIA determined the documents were unreliable but, apparently, the British "intelligence" services did not so advise Tony Blair, even though, according to recent reports in the US media, the CIA informed their British counterparts of their belief that the documents were bogus.

In spite of this, George Bush made reference to this "evidence" in his State of the Union address in January. The British had cited the Niger documents in one of its now infamous dossiers. When these same documents were handed over to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, four months after the US had first received them, IAEA officials were able to discover within a few days that they were false. They did so, according to the Washington Post last Friday, by "using the Google Internet search engine, books on Niger and interviews with Iraqi and Nigerian officials".

Now Tony Blair insists the "evidence" of this attempted uranium purchase was "confirmed" by other intelligence information the British had received. This corroborative information was not passed on to the Americans and, according to former British intelligence agents, if this is true it was a unique restraint on the part of the British services in over half a century. In other words, it is not remotely believable.

Another "trump card" both Blair and Bush played in the lead-up to the attack on Iraq was linking the regime of Saddam Hussein with al-Qaeda. Repeatedly, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and even Colin Powell cited "evidence" of such links, claiming the prospect of Saddam arming al-Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction was real and imminent. Rumsfeld said it was "bullet-proof" evidence.

Yet the CIA had repeatedly discounted this prospect and, in the New York Times on Sunday, two former members of the National Security Council, stated that while on the NSC from 1994 to 1999, they "closely examined nearly a decade's worth of intelligence and we became convinced, like many of our colleagues in the intelligence community, that the religious radicals of al-Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one another or share sufficiently compelling interests to work together".

In the last few days, it has also emerged that the war on Iraq was long under way before America acknowledged on March 20th last (the day the war on Iraq started formally) what it was up to. According to a report also in last Sunday's New York Times, from mid-2002 into the first few months of 2003 the Americans dropped 606 bombs on Iraqi installations. This was done under the cover of purported Iraqi violations of the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. However, in the course of this covert bombardment, key Iraqi command centres, radar and other important military assets were attacked - this was at the same time that the US and Britain were seeking UN support for the war they had already covertly started.

In that report by Michael Gordon, the New York Times defence expert, it was also reported that commanders had to obtain the approval of Rumsfeld where any planned airstrike was thought likely to result in the deaths of more than 30 civilians. More than 50 such strikes were proposed and all were approved.

But, for now at least, the BBC is the target and, in America, the issue is whether countries which opposed the war can now be induced to pick up the pieces.