|
CounterPunch
February
6, 2003
You Wanted to Believe Him
Colin Powell
Does Sam Beckett
by ROBERT FISK
Sources, foreign intelligence sources, "our
sources," defectors, sources, sources, sources. Colin Powell's
terror talk to the United Nations Security Council yesterday
sounded like one of those government-inspired reports on the
front page of The New York Times--where it will most certainly
be treated with due reverence in this morning's edition. It was
a bit like heating up old soup. Haven't we heard most of this
stuff before? Should one trust the man? General Powell, I mean,
not Saddam.
Certainly we don't trust Saddam but Secretary
of State Powell's presentation was a mixture of awesomely funny
recordings of Iraqi Republican Guard telephone intercepts a la
Samuel Beckett that just might have been some terrifying little
proof that Saddam really is conning the UN inspectors again,
and some ancient material on the Monster of Baghdad's all too
well known record of beastliness. I am still waiting to hear
the Arabic for the State Department's translation of "Okay
Buddy"--"Consider it done, Sir"--this from the
Republican Guard's "Captain Ibrahim", for heaven's
sake--and some dinky illustrations of mobile bio-labs whose lorries
and railway trucks were in such perfect condition that they suggested
the Pentagon didn't have much idea of the dilapidated state of
Saddam's army.
It was when we went back to Halabja and
human rights abuses and all Saddam's old sins, as recorded by
the discredited Unscom team, that we started eating the old soup
again. Jack Straw may have thought all this "the most powerful
and authoritative case" but when we were forced to listen
to Iraq's officer corps communicating by phone--"yeah",
"yeah", "yeah?", "yeah..."--it
was impossible not to ask oneself if Colin Powell had really
considered the effect this would have on the outside world.
From time to time, the words "Iraq:
Failing To Disarm--Denial and Deception" appeared on the
giant video screen behind General Powell. Was this a CNN logo,
some of us wondered? But no, it was CNN's sister channel, the
US Department of State.
Because Colin Powell is supposed to be
the good cop to the Bush-Rumsfeld bad cop routine, one wanted
to believe him. The Iraqi officer's telephoned order to his subordinate--"remove
'nerve agents' whenever it comes up in the wireless instructions"--looked
as if the Americans had indeed spotted a nasty new little line
in Iraqi deception. But a dramatic picture of a pilotless Iraqi
aircraft capable of spraying poison chemicals turned out to be
the imaginative work of a Pentagon artist.
And when General Powell started blathering
on about "decades'' of contact between Saddam and al-Qa'ida,
things went wrong for the Secretary of State. Al-Qa'ida only
came into existence five years ago, since Bin Laden--"decades"
ago--was working against the Russians for the CIA, whose present
day director was sitting grave-faced behind General Powell. And
Colin Powell's new version of his President's State of the Union
lie--that the "scientists" interviewed by UN inspectors
had been Iraqi intelligence agents in disguise--was singularly
unimpressive. The UN talked to scientists, the new version went,
but they were posing for the real nuclear and bio boys whom the
UN wanted to talk to. General Powell said America was sharing
its information with the UN inspectors but it was clear yesterday
that much of what he had to say about alleged new weapons development--the
decontamination truck at the Taji chemical munitions factory,
for example, the "cleaning" of the Ibn al-Haythem ballistic
missile factory on 25 November--had not been given to the UN
at the time. Why wasn't this intelligence information given to
the inspectors months ago? Didn't General Powell's beloved UN
resolution 1441 demand that all such intelligence information
should be given to Hans Blix and his lads immediately? Were the
Americans, perhaps, not being "pro-active" enough?
The worst moment came when General Powell
started talking about anthrax and the 2001 anthrax attacks in
Washington and New York, pathetically holding up a teaspoon of
the imaginary spores and--while not precisely saying so--fraudulently
suggesting a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 2001 anthrax
scare.
When the Secretary of State held up Iraq's
support for the Palestinian Hamas organisation, which has an
office in Baghdad, as proof of Saddam's support for "terror''--there
was, of course, no mention of America's support for Israel and
its occupation of Palestinian land--the whole theatre began to
collapse. There are Hamas offices in Beirut, Damascus and Iran.
Is the 82nd Airborne supposed to grind on to Lebanon, Syria and
Iran?
There was an almost macabre opening to
the play when General Powell arrived at the Security Council,
cheek-kissing the delegates and winding his great arms around
them. Jack Straw fairly bounded up for his big American hug.
Indeed, there were moments when you might
have thought that the whole chamber, with its toothy smiles and
constant handshakes, contained a room full of men celebrating
peace rather than war. Alas, not so. These elegantly dressed
statesmen were constructing the framework that would allow them
to kill quite a lot of people, the monstrous Saddam perhaps,
with his cronies, but a considerable number of innocents as well.
One recalled, of course, the same room four decades ago when
General Powell's predecessor Adlai Stevenson showed photos of
the ships carrying Soviet missiles to Cuba.
Alas, today's pictures carried no such
authority. And Colin Powell is no Adlai Stevenson.
Yesterday's
Features
James Davis
Watching
the Fragments Fall:
Shuttle Crash as Entertainment
John Stanton
Hubris
and Shady Contractors:
Why NASA's O'Keefe Should Resign
Saul Landau
Bush
and Mexico:
A New Butt-Kisser
Milan Rai
Oil and
War
Jason Leopold
How Reliant Energy Bilked California
Consumers and Got Away with Only a Slap on the Wrist
Robert Jensen
The
Message from Porto Alegre:
Restrain the Empire!
Neve Gordon and Catherine Rottenberg
The Empire Strikes Back: Sharon and Settlers Destroy the Infrastructure
of Palestinian Existence
Edward J. Steele
War Dollars: What's a Few Zeroes Among Friends?
CounterPunch Wire
More Signs of Protest:
British Version
Website of the Day
Masturbate
for Peace!
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax--Deductible Donation Today Online!
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
February
1 / 2, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Railroading
Rosenthal; PeeWee and the Sex and the Sex Police
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Star Whores: Astronomers &
Apaches on Mt. Graham
Dian
Hardison
Former NASA Engineer: "I Fucking Warned Them"
Jerry Kroth
Jung & the Shuttle: Symbol &
the Sychronicity with the Columbia Disaster
Dave
Lindorff
Bush
& HItler: The Strategy of Fear
Behzad Yaghmaian
Report from Istanbul: the Peace
Movement in Turkey
Alan
Maass
Emptying Death Row
Forrest Hilton
The Weight of Forgetting: the Bolivian
Blockades in Context
Kurt
Nimmo
Inventing Crimes: FBI/CIA Entrapment
Matt Taibbi
Iraqt-Up: At Peace Rallies, Hundreds
of Thousands Go Missing
Jeremy
Scahill
Live
from Baghdad: FoxNews: Paying Saddam
Don Atapattu
Songs of Protest
Brian
J. Foley
An Immodest Proposal
Lawrence McGuire
Poker at Camp David
Adam
Engel
Just
Do It: Outrunning the President
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|