By Ali Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada -5 February 2003
Ali Abunimah is vice president of Arab American Action Network and
co-founder of Electronicintifada.net
US media had suggested that Secretary of State Colin Powell was
playing down what he would present to the UN Security Council
about Iraq's alleged deceptions, weapons of mass destruction, and
support for terrorism, so that when he made his revelations, they
would have all the greater impact. Having heard Powell's
presentation, it is now clear he was playing things down because
his hand was in fact so weak.
Powell's multi-media presentation was a rag-bag of old
allegations, which the United States has been making for years,
some of them based on information Iraq has itself provided to UN
inspectors. Other claims were based on audio recordings and
satellite images, and still more were based on unverifiable
claims from unidentified human witnesses and "defectors." Powell
all but admitted the weakness of his case by continually saying
"these are facts, not assertions," at moments when he was
providing the most sensational yet least supported claims. He
also resorted to the comic book tactic of calling Saddam Hussein
an "evil genius" for having succeeded in hiding what the US says
is a vast arsenal, not only from UN inspectors, but from the
world's only super power. Let's look more closely at some of the
"new" elements in the American case for an immediate attack on
Iraq:
The Audio Tapes
Powell played what he said were intercepted conversations between
Iraqi officers who were discussing ways to conceal prohibited
materials from UN inspectors. None of the three recordings, if
real, amounted to a "smoking gun." If they were real, they could
be incriminating in a certain context, but they could also have
been taken out of a context in which they were entirely innocent.
The evidentiary value of the alleged recordings is close to nil.
First, the recordings could easily have been faked, as the United
States has a history of doing. In 2001, US public radio's "This
American Life," broadcast recently declassified tapes from a
clandestine radio station set up by the CIA in the 1950s to help
provoke a coup against the democratically-elected government of
Guatemala. The radio station, which broadcast completely fake
"opposition" voices, is credited with helping bring a repressive
American client regime to power. (Program broadcast on 30
November 2001. See www.thislife.org for details.)
More directly related to current events, New York's Village Voice
newspaper reported late last year how, during the 1990s, a
Harvard graduate student celebrated for his convincing
impersonation of Saddam Hussein was hired by the high-powered, US
government-linked public relations firm, the Rendon Group, to
make fake propaganda broadcasts of Saddam's voice to Iraq. The
student received three thousand dollars a month for his troubles.
"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," the report quotes the ersatz Saddam saying,
"but ultimately I realized that the guys doing spin (sic) were
very well funded and completely cut loose." ("Broadcast Ruse: A
Grad Student Mimicked Saddam Over the Airwaves," The Village
Voice, 13-19 November 2002)
In 1990, another Washington public relations firm, hired by
Kuwait, helped win support for the first Gulf War by fabricating
claims, presented to Congress, that Iraqi troops threw Kuwaiti
babies out of incubators. (see "The Lies We Are Told About Iraq,"
The Los Angeles Times, 5 January 2003)
Those taken in by that deception, will want to be more skeptical
this time around. It also doesn't help US credibility that the
Pentagon has repeatedly over the past two years stated that it
would use deception and black propaganda to achieve its policy
goals.
Satellite Imagery
Powell relied on satellite images in order to support the claim
that Iraq is still producing and hiding chemical weapons. He
said, for instance, that some of the images he showed were of the
Iraqis "sanitizing" the "Al-Taji chemical munitions storage site"
before UN inspectors arrived
Again, it is impossible to tell if the satellite photos displayed
by Powell are real, fake, old or new. But even if they are real,
current photos of Iraq, they are by themselves of no conclusive
value. The New York Times reported that American officials
recently gave the UN inspectors satellite photos of "what
American analysts said were Iraqi clean-up crews operating at a
suspected chemical weapons site." But when the inspectors went to
the site, they "concluded that the site was an old ammunition
storage area often frequented by Iraqi trucks, and that there was
no reason to believe it was involved in weapons activities."
("Blix Says He Saw Nothing to Prompt a War," The New York Times,
31 January 2003)
For all we know the incident referred to in The New York Times is
probably the same used goods Powell tried to sell to the Security
Council. Only the inspectors can tell us otherwise.
Mobile Units
Powell claimed, based on uncorroborated hearsay from "defectors,"
that Iraq has an elaborate system of mobile laboratories used for
producing biological weapons. With no hard evidence, Powell was
reduced to displaying "artists impressions" of what these
laboratories supposedly look like, a tactic routinely used by
American supermarket tabloids to produce pictures to accompany
the latest stories of landings and abductions by space aliens.
In an interview with The New York Times, Hans Blix, the chief UN
weapons inspectors in Iraq, denied US claims that the inspectors
had found that Iraqi officials were hiding and moving illicit
materials within and outside of Iraq to prevent their discovery
("Blix Says He Saw Nothing to Prompt a War," The New York Times,
31 January 2003). Blix , who unlike the United States, has
hundreds of staff on the ground in Iraq, is in a much better
position to know than Powell.
Iraq's links with Al-Qaida
Powell claimed that Iraq has close links with Al-Qaida and based
this largely on the alleged movements of the threateningly
unshaven gentleman Abu Musab Zarqawi. Prior to Powell's
presentation, The Washington Post noted that Zarqawi, a
Jordanian, "appears to be the only individual named so far to
make the link to Iraq after more than a year of major
investigations in which 'a good deal of attention has been paid
to what extent a connection may exist between al Qaeda and
Iraq,'" ("U.S. Effort to Link Terrorists To Iraq Focuses on
Jordanian," The Washington Post, 5 February 2003)
To make up for the flimsiness of the case, Powell resorted to
building Zarqawi up into a frightening figure in exactly the way
the US in previous years built up Usama Bin Laden. It seems that
Usama, who is still on the loose, and who did not feature as a
topic of Mr. Powell's address, has been replaced in American
affections.
Powell claimed that Zarqawi (who has now been promoted by the
Americans to the status of "The Zarqawi Network," complete with
flow charts) was training terrorists in a poison-making camp in
northern Iraq. Powell skipped dismissively over a very pertinent
fact. Since the 1991 Gulf War, northern Iraq has been out of the
control of Saddam Hussein's government.
The United States and United Kingdom have been cruelly bombing
the illegally-declared northern and southern "no-fly zones" for
twelve years, largely to limit the influence of Iraq's government
to the center of the country. Northern Iraq has been ruled by
competing Kurdish factions with United States backing. Since the
1991 Gulf War, the CIA has been operating freely in northern
Iraq, and the United States recently acknowledged that its
special forces are operating in that part of the country. Powell
showed what he said was a satellite photo of the "terrorist
camp." If the United States knows where such a camp lies, and has
forces in the region, why has it not bombed it or attacked it, as
it has bombed so many other installations in northern Iraq? An
attack on a "terrorist" installation in northern Iraq requires
anything but an invasion of the entire country. Furthermore, if
the camp even exists, why would the United States give its
occupants notice that it knows where it is, rather than just
taking it out, as, say, it took out a car load of alleged
"terrorists" in Yemen last year? It just doesn't add up.
That the US is claiming that Al-Qaida-linked terrorists are
operating in the part of Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein
rather undermines the argument that Saddam is backing such
people. Powell's only answer to this major problem in his case
was to offer more unsubstantiated claims that one of Saddam's
secret agents is in charge of the whole operation.
In the days prior to Powell's presentation, numerous reports
appeared in the American and British press that senior
intelligence officials from the FBI, CIA and even the Israeli
Mossad maintain there is no evidence to tie Iraq to Al-Qaida in
any meaningful way. The BBC reported on 5 February that a top
secret, official British intelligence report given to Prime
Minister Tony Blair and leaked to the BBC states that there are
no current Iraqi links with al-Qaida. The BBC added that the
intelligence document "said a fledgling alliance foundered due to
ideological differences between the militant Islamic group and
the secular nationalist regime." ("UK report rejects Iraqi
al-Qaeda link," BBC News Online, 5 February 2003)
At the present time, it appears that there is a much stronger
case on US-Al-Qaida links dating back to the days when the Reagan
Administration helped recruit men from all over the Arab and
Muslim world to join what it called the "Afghan freedom
fighters," than anything to incriminate Iraq. Mr. Powell said not
a word about that.
Underlining the weakness of the Anglo-American case, UK Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw told the BBC before Powell's address, that
he had "seen no evidence which directly links Iraq to al-Qaeda,
but I would not be surprised if it exists." Is this the sort of
shabby thinking on which decisions about war and peace are made?
More importantly, the Pentagon has brushed aside the lack of
evidence, and, to the dismay of senior CIA and FBI officials, has
exaggerated evidence for purely ideological and political
purposes. It is the result of these political deceptions, not
evidence, that was presented to the Security Council by Mr.
Powell.
Even if there were evidence of an Al-Qaida connection, the US
claims that it wants to go to war to enforce UN resolutions. But
no UN resolutions regarding Iraq say anything about Al-Qaida.
Hence, even the attempt by the US to link Iraq to Al-Qaida must
be interpreted as an act of desperation by an administration that
knows it has not made its case on alleged weapons of mass
destruction.
Iraq and the United States
Closing his speech, Powell sought to "remind" the Security
Council that Saddam has been a horrible monster for more than two
decades. He cited Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Kurds in
1988 as "one of the twentieth century's most horrible
atrocities." He forget to mention, however, that at the time the
United States, which was supporting Saddam in his war with Iraq,
instructed its diplomats to implicate Iran. Powell also forgot to
mention that among the long history of cooperation between the
United States and Saddam Hussein's Iraq were the several meetings
that once and future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held with
Saddam at the request of President Reagan, one of them on the
same day that Iraq was reported to be using chemical weapons
against Iran.
Nor did Powell point out that the same sort of satellite evidence
that he now uses to indict Iraq was once gladly handed over to
Saddam by the United States to help Iraq deafeat Iran. And in
claiming that there is not a frightening disease in the
pharmacology that Iraq is not capable of creating, Powell forgot
to mention that the seed stock to make anthrax, E. Coli, botulism
and other biological agents was exported to Iraq from a company
based near Washington, DC, called the American Type Culture
Collection, under contracts approved by the United States
Goverment in the 1980s. These sales continued even after Iraq was
reported to have used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians.
(see Iraq Under Siege, South End Press, 2000, p.39)
Powell also sought to "remind" the Security Council about Iraq's
horrible human rights record. He failed to explain, however, when
the United States found its consicence on this matter which never
troubled it in all the years that it was allied with Saddam. Such
naked cynicism may yet fool some in an American public whose
knowledge of history is notoriously shallow, and whose mass media
scarcely dare challenge any administration's foreign policy, but
it will not fool anyone else.
Powell was also cynical to criticize Saddam Hussein for allegedly
supporting Palestinian groups. Whether this was simply an attempt
to grasp at further "evidence" is unclear. There are no known
links at all between Palestinian groups fighting Israel's
repression and Al-Qaida, despite the Sharon government's attempts
to manufacture them for American consumption. What is certain,
however, is that in the Arab world, the attempt to use any
alleged support for the Palestinian cause as a justification to
invade Iraq can only further alienate and inflame public opinion.
Conclusion
Taken together, the smorgasbord of old allegations, show-and-tell
and hearsay that Powell presented would fall disasterously short
of proving a case against an accused person in an American court
of law, where the standard of proof must be "beyond a reasonable
doubt." The flashy presentation did not conceal holes in the
American case that a U.S. Navy battlegroup could sail through
with room to spare. The Americans have argued that the Security
Council is not a court of law, and that the standards of proof
are different, and need not be beyond a reasonable doubt. But
early in his presentation Powell himself used judicial language
when he claimed that Iraq had earlier been "found guilty" of
"material breaches" by the Security Council.
The American legal system, often held as an example to the world,
applies such strigent standards in order to protect a single
accused person from being wrongly denied his freedom or life. If
the United States attacks Iraq, not one accused person, but
thousands of innocent people may lose their lives. The United
Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that 600,000
people may be forced to flee their homes, and millions more may
well be exposed to hunger, illness, danger and chaos for years to
come. Is all of this worth it, when, as France's President Chirac
once again underlined on 4 February, that a perfectly viable,
non-violent alternative exists? In response to a reporter's
question about criticisms that one hundred UN inspectors cannot
possibly disarm a country the size of Iraq, Chirac pointed out
that the first inspection regime destroyed more Iraqi weapons
than all of the deadly American firepower directed at that
country in 1991 and since. The solution to any shortage of
resources, if the inspectors should complain of one (so far they
have not), said Chirac, is to increase those resources.
Powell said that by passing Resolution 1441 putting in place the
inspections last November, the Security Council has given Iraq a
"last chance" to disarm. It appears that it was the United States
that had a last chance to convince the world that what is needed
instead is a US-led invasion of Iraq that could devastate the
whole region for years to come.
The early indications, judging from the speeches of the Chinese,
Russian, French and other foreign ministers seated around the
Security Council table, are that the world remains convinced that
inspections should be given a chance to work, Iraq, which
presents no immediate threat to anyone, should urgently do
everything possible to cooperate, and as President Chirac said,
"war is always the worst solution."
Let us hope that someone in Washington is listening.