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by Micah M. White
01 August 2012
from
AdBusters Website
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One month before the start
of the invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, United
States Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the
UN Security Council and presented the case for war.
�My colleagues, every
statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid
sources,� Powell told the world community on February 5,
2003.
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AP Images/J. Scott
Applewhite
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He then made a convincing presentation of alleged top-secret satellite
imagery, intercepted telephone conversations and eyewitness descriptions of
�biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails� which purported to
prove that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.
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Powell�s presentation was a domestic propaganda
coup. It swayed American and British public opinion and laid the foundation
for preemptive, unilateral war by
George Bush and Tony Blair.
We now know that the primary evidence America and Britain used to justify
preemptive war - a war that has killed over 150,000 innocents, displaced a
million more and forever contaminated the country with birth-defect-causing
depleted uranium - was based on fabricated information.
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In 2011, Powell�s �solid source,� an
unremorseful
Rafid al-Janabi, publicly admitted that
he made up the
story about mobile biological weapons labs a decade earlier. The
intelligence agencies who interviewed him at the time knew he was lying, al-Janabi
also claimed. Only later when a justification for war was desperately needed
did his fantasies reappear as �facts.�
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Documentary evidence supports the conclusion
that Bush and Blair knew at the time of Powell�s speech that claims of Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction were fabricated.
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A memo from a top-secret 2002 meeting between
Blair and British military-intelligence officials
reports that,
�intelligence and the facts were being fixed
around the policy� of regime change �justified by the conjunction of
terrorism and WMD.�
This is where most analysis of the Iraq War
ends: with a �stuff happens� shrug of the shoulders or, at best, a few words
of empty condolence for those who have died because of this war based on
lies.
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But now a global movement is afoot to go
further: to judge Bush and Blair by the same regime of international law
that they used to justify their preemptive war.
In November of 2011 and May of 2012, the
Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal,
an tribunal founded by Malaysia�s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad,
tried,
Bush and Blair were accused of violating the
Nuremberg Principles by committing �crimes against peace� - waging a war in
violation of the United Nations Charter and international law.
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Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their legal advisers
were also separately accused of �war crimes� and the �crime of torture.�
Asserting the right of universal jurisdiction, an international legal
principle that grants any state the right to prosecute individuals who
commit crimes which affect all of humanity, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes
Tribunal followed strict legal norms and rules of evidence. All parties were
provided with capable defense attorneys and the prosecution relied on
eyewitness and documentary testimony.
After four days of legal proceedings in November the Tribunal issued a
unanimous verdict finding both George Bush and Tony Blair guilty of,
�crimes against peace, crimes against
humanity, and genocide as a result of their roles in the Iraq War� based
on evidence that they knew the justification for the Iraq War was
fabricated.
In May, the Tribunal returned to take up the
charge of torture.
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After hearing testimony from several individuals
tortured by the US military while detained without trial - including,
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Moazzam
Begg who was told that his wife was being tortured in an adjoining cell and
then was forced to listen to a woman screaming
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Rhuhel Ahmed who was injected with
hallucinatory drugs and subjected to 45 days of sleep deprivation
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Abbas Abid whose fingernails were removed with pliers,
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five judge Tribunal unanimously delivered another guilty verdict against
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al.
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Evidence presented at the Tribunals is now being
sent to the International Criminal Court.
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal does not yet have the ability to
enforce its verdict against Bush and Blair but it does open the door to
further Tribunals around the world which will eventually have that power.
We are today one step closer to a just world where international war
criminals are ruthlessly hunted, arrested and prosecuted no matter which
country they are from.
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Bush and Blair be warned:
There is no statute of limitations for war
crimes.
What if we lived in a world where all war
criminals, regardless of how powerful they are, are treated the same? With
the taboo on discussing Bush and Blair�s war crimes now breaking down, what
would it take to bring them to justice?
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Bush's Big Lie
by Robert Adler
May 6, 2005
from
Etalkinghead Website
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"...the intelligence and the facts were
being fixed around the policy."
We went to war in Iraq at 5:30 a.m. Baghdad time
on March 20, 2003.
For more than a year before we launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, the
Bush administration went to
great lengths to try to convince us and the rest of the world that the war
was necessary because Saddam Hussein possessed and might use
weapons of mass destruction - WMDs.
In the State of the Union message on January 29, 2002, President Bush said
that Iraq was part of an "axis of evil" and vowed that the United States,
"will not permit the world's most dangerous
regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
On February 5, 2003, then Secretary of State
Colin Powell addressed the United Nations. He presented a detailed summary
of what U.S. and other intelligence services supposedly knew about Hussein's
WMDs.
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Powell concluded,
"The United States will not and cannot run
that risk to the American people. Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession
of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an
option, not in a post-September 11th world."
In short, President Bush put his credibility,
Powell's credibility, and our credibility as a nation on the line with the
repeated assertion that Hussein possessed WMDs.
We all know that these WMDs were never found and did not exist.
On July 9, 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee released its unanimous,
bipartisan report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq. The committee harshly
criticized the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies for
"mischaracterizing" or "overstating" their findings. In other words, the
blame was placed on the intelligence agencies for misinforming Congress and
the President.
It turns out that the truth was very different.
By July 23, 2002, President Bush and his administration had decided to go to
war in Iraq. From that point on, a just-released secret memo reveals,
"...the intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy."
On May 1, 2005, the Sunday Times published a
secret, "eyes only" memo that summarized a meeting between Tony Blair
and his top advisors that took place on July 23, 2002.
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They were briefed by Richard Dearlove,
then head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence agency, who was just back from
consultations in Washington.
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Dearlove told Blair that U.S. military action
was inevitable, and would be,
"justified by the conjunction of terrorism
and WMD."
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"It seemed clear that bush had made up his
mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided,"
the summary continues. "But the case was thin."
You can read "The
secret Downing Street memo".
One might think that a thin case for a decision as weighty as taking the
U.S. to war might be a problem.
"But," Blair was assured, "the intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Our intelligence agencies didn't get it wrong by
accident. They got it wrong because they were told to plump up that thin
case, to drum up enough noise to back Bush's WMD justification of the war.
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Why blame them? They were just following
orders.
"Fixing" the intelligence doesn't seem to have been that hard for Bush and
his team. Unfortunately, fixing the facts has turned out to be somewhat more
difficult, as the failure to find WMDs, and the continuing chaos and carnage
in Iraq show. Among the facts that are most difficult to fix are the 1,593
American soldiers who have died in Iraq so far, and the $300 billion the war
has already cost us.
President Bush lied to us. He took us to war, he said, because Saddam
Hussein had and might use WMDs. He told us that our intelligence agencies
knew those WMDs existed. It was "a slam dunk."
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Yet all the time he (and Tony Blair) knew
perfectly well that,
"the intelligence and facts were being fixed
around the policy."
Policy first. Then the decision to go to war.
Then fix the intelligence and the facts to justify the war.
Which means that this President flat-out lied to the American people and the
rest of the world, not about his sex life, but about starting a war.
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