- Poor old Geoff Hoon. It must be tough having to defend
the indefensible when the Americans insist on plastering their missiles
with computer codes that reveal their provenance even after they have blown
the innocent to pieces. Take the poor old man - far poorer in every way
than Mr Hoon - who produced that telling scrap of fuselage at Shu'ala last
week, proving that the missile which hit the dirt-poor Shia Muslim slums
was made by Raytheon, manufacturers of the cruise missile.
-
- The Iraqi intelligence service is a brutal, crude organisation,
but subtlety and sophistication are not its strong points. To suggest that
President Saddam's goons could have turned up in the slums - amid a population
known for its hatred of the Iraqi Baath party and possibly responsible
for killing a number of its apparatchiks - and persuaded these largely
illiterate people to tell a complicated lie to foreign journalists is beyond
credibility. There were many bits of the same wretched missile all over
Shu'ala. I collected five pieces myself, made of the same alloy, two of
them dug out of the muck with my own hands.
-
- Does Mr Hoon really think the Iraqi torturers have the
ability to go about these hostile slums, burying obscure pieces of shrapnel
for the likes of The Independent to dig up there? Does he think that the
uncle of one of the dead men could make up his description of seeing the
aircraft bank away after the attack? So, too, the two missiles that struck
the Sha'ab district of Baghdad earlier in the week. Again, they exploded
amid Shia Muslim slums, homes of the very people who most oppose President
Saddam's regime. I had heard an aircraft fly over Baghdad and fire two
missiles at an army barracks a little earlier - I was amused to note that
Mr Hoon did not question this air attack - and at least three men in Sha'ab
talked to me about the plane they heard at the time of the missile strike.
-
- These were not members of President Saddam's regime,
as Mr Hoon libels them; they were the very people indeed whom Mr. Hoon
has sworn to "liberate" from the Iraqi leader. And the two explosions
occurred exactly opposite each other, one on each side of the dual carriageway
in Sha'ab. Does Mr Hoon think the Iraqis were able to stage two identical
explosions - from the air - at exactly equidistant points in a street packed
with cars, pedestrians, apartment doormen, restaurant workers and car repair
boys? But I suppose it's the familiar, world-weary mendacity of the Hoon
statement that is most pathetic. After the Americans bombed Libya in 1985,
we were treated to the same nonsense.
-
- The civilian dead were killed by the Libyan secret service
or by Libya's anti-aircraft fire. The Israelis had claimed the same about
many of the 17,500 dead of their 1982 Lebanon invasion. When the Americans
slaughtered dozens of Albanian refugees in Kosovo in 1999, they claimed
Serb aircraft had committed the massacre, until The Independent discovered
the missile parts, again dug out of the craters with my own hands, which
contained the computer codings that forced Nato to admit the truth.
-
- How many times, I wonder, do ministers think they can
con their electorate with this miserable routine? How often will the likes
of David Blunkett smear journalists for reporting "from behind enemy
lines" in a war that his government supports but which many millions
of Britons refuse to acknowledge as legitimate? I cannot help remembering
an Iranian hospital train on which I travelled back from the Iran-Iraq
war front in the early 1980s. The carriages were packed with young Iranian
soldiers, coughing mucus and blood into handkerchiefs while reading Korans.
They had been gassed and looked as if they would die. Most did. After a
few hours, I had to go around and open the windows of the compartments,
because the gas coughed back from their lungs was beginning to poison the
air in the carriage.
-
- At the time, I was working for The Times. My story ran
in full. Then an official of the Foreign Office lunched my editor and told
him my report was "not helpful". Because, of course, we supported
President Saddam at the time and wanted revolutionary Iran to suffer and
destroy itself. President Saddam was the good guy then. I wasn't supposed
to report his human rights abuses. And now I'm not supposed to report the
slaughter of the innocent by American or RAF pilots because the British
Government has changed sides.
-
- It's a tactic worthy of only one man I can think of,
a master of playing victim when he is in the act of killing, a man who
thinks nothing of smearing the innocent to propagate his own version of
history. I'm talking about Saddam Hussein. Geoff Hoon has learnt a lot
from him.
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