May 2005 (II): The British Are Coming

Image here
We've entered a period of something like reverse Paul Revere activity, with multiple incidents of truth-telling coming from British sources.

On May 1 The Sunday Times publishes the previously classified "Downing Street memo." It summarizes the July 23, 2002 meeting of Tony Blair's cabinet. At this point—eight months before the invasion of Iraq—the British are well aware that the U.S. government plans going to war, and is at work manufacturing justification for it:

[Intelligence chief Richard Dearlove] reported on his recent talks in Washington… Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

FAIR reviews the major media's unwillingness to cover the memo story.

Unwilling, because the memo is so clearly "smoking gun" quality evidence, as understood immediately by independent writers. For example, a short summary from Greg Palast, who gets right to it: "The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it."

Juan Cole on "The lies that led to war."

A long analysis by Mark Danner, "Secret Way to War."

Despite all efforts to the contrary, we do still have a "Constitution," which provides a process of "impeachment" for wrongdoing in office... Now, if only we had more than a small handful of "representatives" willing to uphold their oaths.

The Cannes Festival screens a feature length version of Adam Curtis' BBC TV series, "The Power of Nightmares."

The series was broadcast in Britain in October 2004 and again in January of this year. But it remains "the film US TV networks dare not show," tracing as it does the parallels between terrorism in the name of Islam and the ideology and rise to political power of the American neo-conservatives. And its conclusions are a look at how politicians are enhancing their power by instilling fear in the public.

As Curtis writes:

...although there is a serious threat of terrorism from some radical Islamists, the nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organisation waiting to strike our societies is an illusion.

As the films showed, wherever one looks for this "al-Qaeda" organisation - from the mountains of Afghanistan to the "sleeper cells" in America - the British and Americans are pursuing a fantasy.

The bombs in Madrid and Bali showed clearly the seriousness of the threat - but they are not evidence of a new and overwhelming threat unlike any we have experienced before. And above all they do not - in the words of the British government - "threaten the life of the nation". That is simply untrue.

The hour-long programs can be viewed online: Part 1, 2, 3.
Transcripts of the segments are here: Part 1, 2, 3.

And Scottish MP George Galloway, called before a Senate committee "investigating" supposed profiteers of the UN Oil-For-Food program, turns the tables on senatorial grandstanding:

I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his.

I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

Judith Miller writes the NYT's version of Galloway's appearance.The same Judith Miller who has been using the Oil-For-Food contracts as the basis of churning out

... a plethora of stories, chock full of innuendo and allegation but short of independent journalistic verification, suggesting that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is a bad man and perhaps a corrupt one, and that, by extension, the UN is hardly worth respecting and funding, much less including in geopolitical decision-making.

And the very same Judith Miller who was a key figure in spreading the pre-war lies of Iraq's WMD threat.

There are some noble attempts to get all these stories out, and they find the usual minority audience. But as a story more flattering to our glorious and heroic nation, the quaint picture of Paul Revere on a horse gets much better publicity.