- While most Americans were impressed by Sec. of State
Collin Powell's Feb 5th case against Iraq before the UN Security Council,
I was struck by the weakness of it all. The presentation was a masterpiece
of propaganda, designed to lead the general public down a path of seemingly
perfect logic, to conclusions predetermined by the Bush administration.
However, anyone with any background in US intelligence methods would have
been able to perceive multiple ironies and contradictions in the Powell
presentation. Let's examine some of the contradictions and ironies.
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- 1) Satellite photos. First of all, after viewing the
satellite evidence, I was struck by the thought, ''Is that all there is?''
The US makes multiple daily passes over Iraq with high definition photo-reconnaissance
satellites, snapping thousands of photos per day, and all they can come
up with in terms of suspicious activity is an engine test stand and some
trucks loading or unloading things from a bunker? Neither of these photos
had provable time/date tags, and both were given highly subjective interpretations,
which cannot be verified without additional inspections on the ground.
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- This brings us to a crucial question which no establishment
journalist asked: Why was there no verification of these ''gotcha'' images
by the UNSCOM weapons inspectors before Powell's presentation? Powell gives
us a general time frame of November 2002 for the documentation of these
violations and yet none of this info was passed on to Hans Blix for UN
verification. If the US had been trying to make inspections work, they
could and should have immediately alerted inspectors to descend on the
trucks in question and examine their contents. If an immediate response
wasn't possible, US reconnaissance could have tracked the trucks to their
intended destinations and directed a subsequent inspection. In like manner,
it is suspicious that there aren't any photos of the engine test stand
in operation. If Iraq had ever mounted a missile engine on the test stand
in question, the US could have alerted inspectors to inspect it at close
range within hours. It is standard procedure for the US to do multiple
follow ups of such suspicious activities, so I know the US has the capability
of garnering this information.
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- The satellite photos of the supposed chemical weapons
burial sites at Al-Musayyib were also inconclusive, amounting essentially
to an expanse of desert with yellow lines drawn in by the CIA to help Powell
paint the desired results. Strangely, the public is required to take Powell's
word that this picture designates a chemical weapons burial site even though
just a cursory sampling of the dirt in the area by UN inspectors could
have proven Powell's assertions. Why was no soil sample analyzed?
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- The fact that better evidence against Iraq has not been
presented can only mean that either there is no actual smoking gun, or
the US is hiding the complete facts for political reasons. All of this
leads to the conclusion that the US is using its technology to sabotage
the inspection process, not assist it. In other words, they are more interested
in collecting ''gotcha'' moments for public consumption than in disarming
Iraq. Indeed, there is evidence the US is withholding other important satellite
photos. From leaks to the press prior to Powell's presentation, we know
that the US possesses multiple satellite photos of convoys of Iraqi military
trucks with armed escorts transporting tons of materials from weapons bunkers
and taking that material across the border to Syria. The US knows the origin
of the convoys and the destination. Israeli intelligence, which has multiple
human intelligence (HUMINT) resources in Syria, has confirmed that these
convoys contained Iraqi chemical and biological warheads. Why was this
information not included in Mr. Powell's presentation? First, it would
have made President Bush look like a liar for having challenged Iraq in
his State of the Union address to tell us what they have done with their
WMD - as if we didn't already know! Second, it would have pointed the finger
of culpability at Syria, a sitting member of the Security Council. Third,
it would have raised the question of why the US did not intervene to stop
these convoys, which had to pass through no fly zones controlled by American
aircraft.
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- 2) Tapes of US eavesdropping. It is impossible to know
if these tapes are valid or not. The US never allows any independent technical
lab to analyze these intercepts. Even if they are legitimate, one has to
ask again, ''Is that all there is?'' After a decade of electronic surveillance,
there should be hundreds of similar intercepts available for demonstration
if Iraq has been engaged in systematic violations.
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- Let's examine the possibility of falsification. The CIA's
private public relations firm, The Rendon Group, has long been engaged
in black propaganda on behalf of our government. Creating false audio recordings
is relatively easy to do. According to an article in NY's Village Voice,
a Harvard graduate student was hired by Rendon to make fake propaganda
broadcasts of Saddam's voice to be broadcast into Iraq. According to the
student, he was paid $3,000 per month and was never told who he was working
for (typical of US government black operations). He said, ''I never got
a straight answer on whether the Iraqi resistance, the CIA, or policy makers
on the Hill were actually the ones calling the shots.'' (See ''Broadcast
Ruse: A Grad Student Mimicked Saddam Over the Airwaves'', The Village Voice,
13-19 November 2002.)
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- Back in 1990, the CIA helped engineer support for the
Gulf War by manufacturing the lie that Iraqi troops invaded a hospital
and threw Kuwaiti babies out of their intensive care incubator tents. This
story was promulgated through another public relations front organization
(''The Lies We Are Told About Iraq," The Los Angeles Times, 5 January
2003). The CIA also has a long standing record of promoting suspiciously
vague voice and video recordings, supposedly of Osama bin Laden sending
out coded messages to his terror networks. No one in the media seems to
be smart enough to ask the most obvious question: How is it that bin Laden,
with the backing of millions in funds, and supposedly possessing encryption
communications equipment, can't seem to purchase or use a decent voice
or video recorder to record these crucial public relations messages? The
video and/or voice recording quality is so bad that none of these recordings
can be deciphered except by CIA experts-making them inherently suspect.
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- 3) The al Qa eda connection. This argument is so weak
as to border on the fraudulent. Powell's claims of Iraq's connection to
al Qaeda are based largely on the existence of one Abu Musab Zarqawi, a
Jordanian national found operating out of northern Iraq. Supposedly, Zarqawi
is part of a terror network, with a chemical lab in northern Iraq. Here
are the crucial contradictions. First, how can the US definitively link
Saddam Hussein to the elusive Zarqawi when Zarqawi is based in northern
Iraq which is off limits to Saddam Hussein and his military? Powell painted
a picture of Zarqawi running terrorist chemical warfare training camps
in northern Iraq but conveniently neglected to address the paradox that,
since 1991, northern Iraq has been completely out of control of Saddam
Hussein's government. The area is controlled by Kurds, who are hostile
to Saddam.
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- Kurds in the north have questioned whether Mr. Powell
was mistaken, or had mislabeled the photograph. Apparently, Khurmal, the
village named in the presentation by Komala Islami Kurdistan, a more moderate
Islamic group - not Ansar. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, has an American
intelligence team on the ground in the area and maintains open relations
with Komala. Thus Powell's intel raises the question of whether the presumed
laboratory is in Komala's area (which is financed by the Kurd's CIA slush
fund, or has the US made a mistake? One Kurdish source says Powell got
the wrong location. ''My sources say it is in Beyara, not in Khurmal''
said one Kurdish official. Ansar has a headquarters in Beyara, which is
several miles from Khurmal. An administrator for Komal Islami Kurdistan,
which controls Khurmal, said blatantly, ''All of it is not true.''
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- From what we know now, it appears as if the US has opened
a can of worms of its own doing and control. If this area is controlled
by the Kurds and the CIA, why hasn't this chemical weapons threat been
terminated by US special forces operating in the area? Perhaps the US is
too busy building a false case against Iraq to remove actual terrorists.
Add to this the stories about prior US stonewalling in northern Iraq and
the US loses all credibility. As I previously reported, the Kurds who have
been given control of northern Iraq have tried in vain to get the CIA to
take into custody, or even merely interrogate, three suspected al Qaeda
terrorist leaders being held by the Kurds.
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- 4) Mobile chemical labs. The US simply has nothing verifiable
to go on here except presumed defectors' statements - hence the artist
renderings. According to Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, the US has
directed UN inspectors on several occasions to these mobile railcars and
trucks. On every occasion, the inspectors said the vehicles inspected at
US request did not contain chemical weapons equipment. Powell neglected
to mention these follow up inspections.
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- 5) We must create a comparative construct with North
Korea. To get a sense of the hypocrisy of the Powell presentation, one
must construct a mental model of what the US could have shown about North
Korean violations and deceptions. Had the US given a similar presentation
of North Korean violations, using satellite photos, eavesdropping intercepts,
and defector statements about North Korean violations and deceptions, it
would have made Powell's Iraq presentation look like the US made a mountain
out of a molehill. The US has satellite photos of hundreds of Korean ships
transporting Scud missiles to dozens of nations around the world. It has
evidence of continual nuclear weapons deceptions as well as of the existence
of secret tunnels in which missiles are stored. If America was impressed
by the Powell presentation, it is only because Americans are ignorant of
the bigger picture.
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- 6) The Big Lie technique: declaring the unprovable as
fact. Collin Powell made the following statement on more than one occasion:
''Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated
by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other
countries.'' Normally such serious allegations necessitate actual proof
to warrant action; yet we are expected to take his word at face value.
He refused to say anything about his sources except to assert he had them
- leaving us with nothing by which to judge the verity of his claims.
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- EGG ON BRITAIN'S FACE
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- In other breaking news today Tony Blair is desperately
trying to explain how a US graduate student's decade old writings about
Iraq got included in Britain's latest intelligence assessment of the situation
in Iraq. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell got sucked into the deception
as he paid homage to the British dossier on Iraq during his presentation
to the Security Council on Wednesday. Several academics came forward yesterday
saying they recognized some of the British dossier as plagiarized material,
lifted verbatim from articles published years ago the US journal of Middle
Eastern Affairs.
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- Dan Plesch of the Royal United Services Institute said
that, ''This appears to be obsolete academic analysis dressed up as the
best MI6 and our other international partners can produce on Saddam.''
In reality, what it means is that MI6 probably refused to go along with
Blair's mandate to produce falsified data on Iraq, so 10 Downing street
put together its own version-without giving proper credit for lifted material.
Britain has become a laughing stock.
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- Partial Quotations with attribution permitted.
- Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief
- (http://www.joelskousen.com)
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