We are using depleted uranium right now:
Anglo-American Lies Exposed
Robert Fisk, The Independent
BAGHDAD, 24 March 2003 — So far, the Anglo-American armies are handing
their propaganda to the Iraqis on a plate. First, on Saturday, we were told —
courtesy of the BBC — that Umm Qasr, the tiny Iraqi seaport on the Gulf, had
“fallen”. Why cities have to “fall” on the BBC is a mystery to me; the phrase
comes from the Middle Ages when city walls literally collapsed under siege. Then
we were told — again on the BBC — that Nassariyah had been captured. Then its
“embedded “ correspondent informed us — and here my old journalistic
suspicions were alerted — that it had been “secured”. “Embedded” reporters are
those traveling with the American or British forces — and who are now subject to
a censorship that is willfully misleading the BBC’s listeners, not just in Britain but
all over the world.
Why the BBC should use the meretricious military expression “secured” is also a
mystery to me. “Secured” is meant to sound like “captured” but almost invariably
means, in the kind of parlance that the “embedded” reporters now adopt, that a
city has been bypassed or half-surrounded or, at the most, that an invading army
has merely entered its suburbs. And sure enough, within 24 hours, the Shiite city
west of the junction of the Euphrates and Tigress rivers, proved to be very much
unsecured, indeed had not been entered in any form — because at least 500 Iraqi
troops, supported by tanks, were still fighting there.
At one point on Saturday, the BBC introduced us to an “embedded” reporter “in
Basra”. This report fell to pieces when the correspondent admitted that he was
not “in Basra itself”; which is why the BBC anchor in London later signed him off
as a correspondent “in southeast Iraq”. Quite so.
But it’s not the nonsense that these journalists are churning out to us that
matters. It’s the treasure trove of point-scoring that it hands to the Iraqis. With
what joy did Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan inform us all yesterday
that “they claimed they had captured Umm Qasr but now you know this is a lie.”
With what happiness did the Iraqi information minister, Mohamed Said Al-Sahhaf,
boast yesterday that Basra was still “in Iraqi hands”, that “our forces” in
Nassariyeh are still fighting.
And well could they boast because, despite all the claptrap put out by the
Americans and British in Qatar, what the Iraqis said on this score was true. The
usual Iraqi claims of downed US and British aircraft — four supposedly “shot
down” around Baghdad and another near Mosul — were given credibility by the
Iraqi ability to prove that the collapse of their forces in the south was untrue —
quite apart from the film of prisoners obtained last night. Indeed, the Iraqi
government is slowly getting its own propaganda act together and was able,
yesterday — courtesy of a real live senior army officer (Gen. Hazim Al-Rawi) — to
read out what it claimed were the latest three dispatches from its army units in
Basra and the marshes to the north. These reported that 77 civilians had been
“martyred” by US cluster bombs dropped in Basra.
It’s not just the misleading American and British reporting emanating from what
would once have been called the “pool”. It’s also what we know is not being
divulged to us. We know, for example, that the Americans are again using
depleted uranium (DU) munitions in Iraq, just as they did in 1991. Before the war
began, they stated that they intended to use these warheads, which are
manufactured from the waste of the nuclear industry — to pierce armor — and
which are believed by thousands of Gulf War Syndrome sufferers, along with Iraqi
doctors, to be responsible for a plague of cancers. Yesterday, the BBC told us
that the US Marines had called up A-10 strike aircraft to deal with “pockets of
resistance “ — a bit more military-speak from the BBC — but failed to mention
that the A-10 uses DU rounds. So for the first time since 1991, we — the West —
are today spraying these uranium aerosols in battlefield explosions in southern
Iraq; and we’re not being told. Why not?
And where, for God’s sake, does that wretched, utterly dishonest phrase
“coalition forces” come from? There is no “coalition” in this Iraq war. There are the
Americans and the British and a few Australians. That’s it.
The “coalition” of the 1991 Gulf War does not exist. The “coalition” of nations
willing to “help” with this illegitimate conflict includes, by a vast stretch of the
imagination, even Costa Rica and Micronesia and, I suppose, poor old neutral
Ireland with its transit rights for US military aircraft at Shannon. But they are not
“coalition forces”. Why does the BBC use this phrase? I repeat, why? Even in the
Second World War, which so many journalists think they are now reporting, we
didn’t use this lie. When we landed on the coast of North Africa in Operation
Torch, we called it an “Anglo-American landing”.
And this is an Anglo-American war, whether we — and I include the “embedded
ones” — like it or not. The Iraqis are sharp enough to remember all this. At first,
they announced that captured US or British troops would be treated as
mercenaries, a decision that Saddam himself wisely corrected yesterday when he
stated that all prisoners would be treated “according to the Geneva Convention.”
All in all, then, this has not been a great weekend for Messers Bush and Blair.
Nor, of course, for Saddam although he’s been playing at wars for almost half the
lifetime of Blair. One of our own Tornadoes is shot down by the Americans —
after the British lose personnel in three helicopter disasters — and we haven’t
even totally captured the first town over the border from Kuwait. And even those
journalists who have most bravely tried to see for themselves what is going on
without the protection of their armies — an ITV crew near Nassariyeh, for example
— are in mortal peril of their lives.
So here’s a question from one who believed, only a week ago, that Baghdad
might just collapse, that we might wake up one morning to find the Baathist
militia and the Iraqi army gone and the Americans walking down Saadun Street
with their rifles over their shoulders. If the Iraqis can still hold out against such
overwhelming force in Umm Qasr for four days, if they can keep fighting in Basra
and Nassariyeh — the latter a city which briefly rose in successful revolt against
Saddam in 1991 — why should Saddam’s forces not keep fighting in Baghdad?
Certainly, Iraqi history will not be complete without a new story of “martyrdom” in
the country’s eternal battle against foreign occupiers. The last fighters of Umm
Qasr will become, in the years to come — whatever the fate of Saddam — men of
song and legend. The Egyptians long ago did the same for their men killed at
Suez in 1956.
Of course, this might all be a miscalculation. The pack of cards may be more
flimsy than we think. But suddenly, this weekend, the quick and easy war, the
conflict of “shock-and-awe” — the Pentagon’s phrase is itself a classic slogan
from the pages of the old Nazi magazine “Signal” — doesn’t seem so realistic.
Things are going wrong. We are not telling the truth. And the Iraqis are riding high
on it all.
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