- The invasion of Iraq, which began one year ago today,
was "organised with lies", says the new Spanish Prime Minister.
Does anyone doubt this any more?
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- And yet these proven lies are still dominant in Australia.
Day after day, their perpetrators seek to obfuscate and justify an unprovoked,
illegal attack that killed up to 55,000 people, including at least 10,000
civilians; that every month causes the death and injury of 1000 children
from exploding cluster bombs; that has so saturated Iraqi towns and cities
with uranium that American and British soldiers are warned not to go where
Iraqi children play, for fear of contamination.
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- Set that carnage against the Madrid atrocity. Terrible
though that act of terrorism was, it was small compared with the terrorism
of the American-led "coalition". Yes, terrorism. How strange
it reads when it describes the actions of "our" governments.
So saturated are we in the West in the devilry of Third World tyrants (most
of them the products of Western imperialism) that we have lost all sense
of the enormous crime committed in our name.
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- This is not rhetoric. In 1946, the judges who tried the
German leadership at Nuremberg called the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign
country "the supreme international war crime". That principle
guided more than half a century of international law, until Bush and Blair
and Howard tore it up, covering their actions with a litany of lies.
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- On February 4 last year, in a speech lasting less than
an hour, John Howard referred more than 30 times to the "threat"
posed by Saddam Hussein. He offered authoritative detail: that Iraq's "arsenal
of chemical and biological weapons (was) intact" and was a "massive
program". All of this was false.
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- Ray McGovern, one of the CIA's most senior analysts and
a personal friend of George Bush snr, told me: "It was 95 per cent
charade. And they all knew it: Bush, Blair, Howard."
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- Set that truth against the present carnage in Iraq, and
set it against the wilful destruction that preceded it, which was barely
reported in Australia.
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- The UN's two senior officials in Iraq in the 1990s, Denis
Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck, both assistant secretaries-general of the
UN, have described in detail a "genocidal embargo" imposed by
America under a UN flag of convenience, aided and abetted by Australia.
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- "Almost a million Iraqis died as a direct result,"
Halliday told me, "including at least half a million children. The
UNICEF studies are on the record. It was US policy to destroy the infrastructure
of Iraq, such as the water supply, which killed thousands of infants. By
the time Bush invaded, a once prosperous country was a stricken nation."
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- In fact, UN records show that up to July 2002, more than
$US5 billion worth of humanitarian aid, approved by the UN Security Council
and paid for by Iraq, was blocked by the US.
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- How many Australians are aware of this and Australia's
complicity? Howard sent RAN ships to police what in reality was a medieval-style
siege? Who dared listen to Halliday and other distinguished witnesses that
it was this terrible siege that reinforced Saddam's rule and prevented
the Iraqi people from getting rid of him?
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- All this has been suppressed in Australia while the latest
lies are channelled and amplified by journalists. I am not referring to
the usual far-right windbags but those broadcasters who believe sincerely
they are being objective; by constantly framing the national debate in
the terms and cliches of mendacious power, they collude with it, censoring
by omission.
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- Do they ever consider that the very notion of a "war
on terror" is absurd when the power in Washington claiming to combat
terror has run an empire of terror: Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos,
Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua and now Haiti, again? By comparison al-Qaeda
is a lethal flea. The true danger is where a rampant superpower will strike
next: watch out Korea, Syria, Iran, even China.
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- As the prisoners begin to struggle home from the American
concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, the scale of the crime is emerging.
We now know that the British military command virtually refused to send
troops to Iraq until Blair gave them a guarantee they would not be prosecuted
by the International Criminal Court. Blair's guarantee was worthless. And
that frightens the British establishment, and the Australian establishment,
too.
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- Unlike the US, Britain and Australia are signatories
to the ICC. The times are changing; Washington-manipulated show trials
of Third World dictators are giving way to the promise of universal justice,
however tenuous it may seem.
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- The dock awaits those Westerners who bring terrorism
to faraway countries, then watch it blow back in our faces. Like al-Qaeda,
they should not be allowed to get away with it.
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- Copyright © 2004 The Age Company Ltd.
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- http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/19/1079199419302.html
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