Hard To Believe
by Charlie Rease
Probably the toughest thing for most Americans to do is to
recognize that their own government is deliberately deceiving them.
Americans have a tendency to place implicit faith in their leaders.
Unfortunately, there have been too many instances of government
deception for me to overcome skepticism. The Gulf of Tonkin
resolution, which plunged us into a real war in Vietnam, was based
on an incident that never happened. In the buildup to the first Gulf
War, two major deceptions were practiced on the American people.
One is the infamous tale of Iraqi soldiers yanking babies out of
incubators. It never happened. The other is the claim that Iraqi
forces were massing for an invasion of Saudi Arabia. That, too,
never occurred.
The fact that Saddam Hussein lacks credibility doesn't mean that
President Bush and his administration have it. They, too, have
been engaging in deception. Both Bush and Secretary of State Colin
Powell continue to claim that Iraq has a nuclear weapons program.
The nuclear inspectors, however, say they have found no evidence
of any nuclear weapons program. Moreover, a top Iraqi nuclear
scientist who defected to Canada (and therefore has no obligation
to tell American officials what they want to hear) broke his silence
recently. He was in Iraq up until 1998.
He said Iraq was so devastated by the war that scientists working
on the nuclear program were all pulled off and reassigned to help
rebuild the country's infrastructure. Dr. Imad Khadduri, now a
college instructor in Toronto, said, "All we had after the war from
that nuclear program were ruins, memoirs and reports of what we
had done ... on the nuclear weapon side, I am more than definitely
sure nothing has been done." In an interview with Reuters, he said
further, "For Bush to continue brandishing this image of a
superhuman Iraqi nuclear power program is a great fallacious
information."
Once again, Powell brought up the aluminum tubes as alleged
evidence of Iraq's nuclear program. Technical experts say, however,
that the kind of tubes necessary for a nuclear device must not be
anodized. Yet the tubes Iraq tried to buy were specifically ordered
to be anodized. Again, the nuclear inspectors agree with Iraq and
not with Bush and Powell.
Bush has repeatedly cited the 1988 gassing of Kurds in Halabja as
evidence of Iraqi cruelty. Recently, Stephen C. Pelletiere, a former
CIA analyst, has reminded us of a Defense Intelligence Study that
concluded that (1) the Kurds were casualties in a battle for the city
between Iraqi and Iranian forces and not the object of the attack;
and (2) that it was the Iranian gas that killed the Kurds.
I remember reading a story in The Washington Post about this
report. Now, one of two things is inescapable: Either the U.S.
government was lying when it issued the report, or the president
and his people are lying today when they blame it on Iraq. It has
to be one or the other.
As for Powell's dog-and-pony show, the satellite photos and the
alleged voice intercepts prove nothing, and both can be easily
fabricated. If you don't think American intelligence agencies indulge
in fabrications and forgeries, then you have a lot of reading to do
on the history of those agencies. The rest of his presentation was
based on "anonymous sources" and defectors who, as any veteran
intelligence officer will tell you, always have to be taken with a grain
of salt. Since their request for asylum depends on the intelligence
agency's recommendation, they have a tendency to say what they
know the intelligence people want to hear.
In the year 2003, it is way too late for Americans to view their
government as a benign big daddy who always tells the truth and
always has their best interests in mind. Sadly, government just
doesn't work that way. The bottom line is that Iraq is not a threat
to the United States, but it does have oil that's not now controlled
by any American or British company. |
