YOU probably won’t find a better site on the net than the one called the World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org) for articles and literature written in defence of the underprivileged, the poor, basically the underdog. It has sections on the arts and humanities, the sciences, and even philosophy, but perhaps the most interesting content relates to political issues and the way the mainstream media covers events of international magnitude. One thing that has been in the news a lot is the failure of the US occupation forces in Iraq to find any (or even traces) of Iraq’s much-hyped arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
For people interested in extremely well-researched and well-written critiques of US foreign and domestic policy and of big business, the WSWS site is the place to be. The article that takes a look at the media coverage of the issue, during the war, says: “Tens of thousands of litres of anthrax. Thousands of litres of botulinium toxin. Hundreds of tons of mustard gas. Tons of nerve gas. Illegally extended missiles and hundreds of bombs and artillery shells to deliver these deadly toxins. Mobile bio-weapons labs. Even secret facilities for the development of nuclear weapons. All these and more were alleged by the Bush administration during the months of diplomatic posturing, leading up to its attack on Iraq.
US troops went into battle heavily laden with defensive gear to protect them from attacks using chemical and biological weapons. The Bush administration and the US media harped on the likelihood that Iraq’s military would use weapons of mass destruction. There were repeated claims that Saddam Hussein had issued orders to his commanders, authorizing them to use chemical weapons once US forces neared Baghdad. The Pentagon even invented a name — the “red line”, dutifully parroted by the media.
“It is now more than a month since the US assault began, and American military forces have gained control of virtually every square mile of Iraq’s territory. Not a single biological or chemical weapon has been found, nor any site which shows signs of recent manufacture, use or even disposal. Despite intensive searches, and despite incessant Bush administration claims before the war that thousands of suspected weapons sites were under surveillance by US intelligence agencies, the results are, in round figures, zero.
“The political implications are clear: the claim of chemical and biological weapons was a hoax, deliberately concocted by the Bush administration to conceal its predatory aims in the invasion of a country with the world’s second-largest oil reserves.
The article also pointed out, quite correctly, that when Saddam was in power the US government was dying to get its hands on Iraqi scientists so that they could be interrogated by UN officials away from their regime. The US premise for this was that if kept away from Saddam’s minders they would reveal all that the regime was doing in terms of developing WMDs. Now that Saddam and his regime are no longer there, there are still no Iraqi scientists coming forward, ready to ‘speak the truth’, probably because the regime didn’t have any WMDs to hide. Even the chief Iraqi office who used to liaise with the UN inspectors, Gen Amir Al Sadi, and who gave himself up recently to the US forces in Baghdad has said that the regime had no WMDs. The architect of Iraq’s nuclear programme, Jalal Jaffar and Emad Husain Abdullah Ani, in charge of the VX nerve gas programme, are both now in US government custody, but still no verification of where the WMDs are.
“However, the Bush administration is not the sort to go on the defensive when some of its strategies so badly backfire. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went on one of his verbal mish-mash binges and as usual making little sense (and in the process wrecking the English language).
The WSWS site quotes him as telling Pentagon employees on April 17: ‘I don’t think we’ll discover anything, myself. I think what will happen is we’ll discover people who will tell us where to go find it. It is not like a treasure hunt, where you just run around looking everywhere, hoping you find something. I just don’t think that’s going to happen’.
No wonder the Americans are determined not to allow the UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq, and instead will deploy their own 1,000-strong team so that, as the WSWS says, the task and the timing of ‘discovering’ WMDs might be easier to manipulate.
In another article, WSWS’s Patrick Martin wrote a stinging critique of the way the New York Times had handled the whole WMD issue. In a front-page report headlined Illicit Arms kept till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist is said to assert, the paper’s correspondent wrote that “Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began.”
The article said that this report was “strategically timed” and came “amidst a mounting clamour internationally and a rising chorus of questions at home over the failure of American forces to discover a single piece of evidence substantiating the Bush administration’s insistence that the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein was guilty of hoarding (WMDs).”
All that is offered by the Times reporter, Judith Miller, is an unsupported and undocumented assertion by members of the American military unit, Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha. Martin points out that Ms Miller was deployed with the Alpha team in the Iraqi war zone. In the article, the reporter admits that she cannot corroborate any of the assertions of the Alpha team members, writing in her article: “Under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials. These officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted.... While this reporter could not interview the scientist, she was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that material from the arms programme was buried.”
Martin points out that Judith Miller previously wrote a story, a week before Sept 11, about a secret US germ warfare programme. He says that the Pentagon gave her and TV reporter from ABC access to the site of the programme. Her report, printed in two parts on Sept 4-5, 2001, said that the programme was purely defensive in nature and that US officials had told her that they had “never made anthrax or any other lethal pathogen.” She and her newspaper were proved wrong because the anthrax that was mailed to senior US politicians after Sept 11 was found to have originated from exactly this germs warfare programme, a project that was in direct violation of a biological weapons treaty that the US government signed in 1972.
As for the article about the Iraqi scientist and his claim that the WMDs were ordered destroyed before the US invasion, Martin has this telling point to make: “Leaving aside the obvious political motivations behind such a piece, it is, from the standpoint of elementary journalistic standards, a fraud that no reputable newspaper would allow to be published. The fact that the Times feels no obligation to adhere to such standards is a measure of the degradation of this newspaper, in particular, and American journalism in general.”
YOU probably won’t find a better site on the net than the one called the World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org) for articles and literature written in defence of the underprivileged, the poor, basically the underdog. It has sections on the arts and humanities, the sciences, and even philosophy, but perhaps the most interesting content relates to political issues and the way the mainstream media covers events of international magnitude. One thing that has been in the news a lot is the failure of the US occupation forces in Iraq to find any (or even traces) of Iraq’s much-hyped arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
