Ten years ago, a major American magazine published a bombshell report about the non-existence of Iraq’s WMDs. But it was hardly noticed by a corporate press corps too busy hyping the threat from those non-existent weapons.
The story appeared in the March 3, 2003, issue of Newsweek–a short piece with the headline “The Defector’s Secrets.” It almost seemed as if the magazine didn’t know what it had on its hands. Or perhaps it did.
Hussein Kamel
The story by John Barry centered on defector Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s brother-in-law. Kamel was widely cited by U.S. political leaders and media figures as providing the proof that Iraq had substantial quantities of banned weapons.
But Newsweek reported that what Kamel actually said in 1995 was that Iraq had destroyed those stockpiles. As Barry put it, these revelations raised “questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist.”
FAIR noted (Media Advisory, 2/27/03) the Newsweek bombshell in real time:
Inspectors were told “that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them,” Barry wrote. All that remained were “hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches” and production molds. The weapons were destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Barry reported, and “a military aide who defected with Kamel… backed Kamel’s assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks.”
The FAIR report added:
The Kamel story is a bombshell that necessitates a thorough reevaluation of U.S. media reporting on Iraq, much of which has taken for granted that the nation retains supplies of prohibited weapons. (See FAIR Media Advisory, “Iraq’s Hidden Weapons: From Allegation to Fact,” 2/4/03.) Kamel’s testimony is not, of course, proof that Iraq does not have hidden stocks of chemical or biological weapons, but it does suggest a need for much more media skepticism about U.S. allegations than has previously been shown.
That did not happen, of course; as FAIR pointed out, days after the story appeared in print “no major U.S. newspapers or national television news shows” had touched it. Democracy Now! devoted a long segment to the report and its revelations (3/3/03).
And what about Newsweek? Just weeks later, the magazine’s cover story was “Saddam’s War,” which told stories of Iraqi military parades full of fighters
garbed in the familiar tan camouflage of the United States Army. Saddam has ordered thousands of uniforms identical, down to the last detail, to those worn by U.S. and British troopers. The plan: to have Saddam’s men, posing as Western invaders, slaughter Iraqi citizens while the cameras roll for Al-Jazeera and the credulous Arab press.
The article closed with what amounted to a call for war:
One Arab intelligence officer interviewed by Newsweek spoke of “the green mushroom” over Baghdad–the modern-day caliph bidding a grotesque bio-chem farewell to the land of the living alongside thousands of his subjects as well as his enemies. Saddam wants to be remembered. He has the means and the demonic imagination. It is up to U.S. armed forces to stop him before he can achieve notoriety for all time.
It says a lot about the capabilities of a propaganda system that an outlet that undermined the official story on Iraq could so promptly forget that it had done so.
I wish terms like “didn’t know” and “forget”, even if used figuratively, would be expunged from work dealing with the lies and distortions force fed to us by the corpress.
Unless you want to believe that the publishers, editors and reporters for these outlets are suffering from mass delusion, or victims of viral psychosis, you have to say that they know exactly what they’re doing
And why.
So say it
At every opportunity.
Let’s call a spade a spade
And try to force them to put all their cards on the table.
There’s not much corporate profit in waging … peace.
@Doug Latimer – having worked for two corporate news outlets and tried discussing this with editors, I have to say that I think that they suffer from mass delusion – they can’t for the most part see past their assumptions of benevolence. This derives from their faith in “objective” reporting, where it’s biased to say someone is lying but not to report the lie itself, without balancing facts. That way it gets pretty easy to adopt the repeated lies as background, and forget all the inconvenient facts you report. Hence George Orwell’s reference to the Memory Hole.
The Devil will defile the details.
Poor reporting in the beginning might be why about a third of the people who originally supported the war have changed their stance: http://www.mpopost.com/?p=860
I’m not sure what happened here. I responded to Daniel’s reply earlier today, but it’s vanished in the interim.
So, once more, with feeling …
Daniel, the problem I see with using terms like these is that they imply, whether intended or not, that this isn’t a matter of willfulness.
Any yet we have a great amount of evidence of instances in which the truth was known, indisputable
But was censored or distorted.
It may be the case that some of those responsible are able to delude themselves as to the motivations and consequences of their actions
But that doesn’t make them any less culpable, does it?
The death and destruction that flows from them is just as real
The suffering of the victims just as horrific.
For all but an extremely exceptional few, only a lack of humanity can ultimately explain whatever blindness may exist.
But Daniel, how to explain the conscious acts of deceit and complicity, which we have ample evidence of?
As to the general issue of delusion
I think most of those who commit harmful acts – evil, if you will – don’t view themselves as “bad people”
But do you think that you’re going to change a virulent despiser of “the other”, or a greed addicted CEO, by appealing to their humanity?
History would seem to deem that a foolish bet.
Better to focus our energy on persuading the honestly ignorant to think for themselves, and placing a wager on their capacity to come to a just conclusion
And find the will and the courage to struggle for it.
In the end, that’s our only hope, isn’t it?
Daniel, are you saying I don’t “prize accuracy”?
If so, you’re dipping your toe into the ad hominem
And those are always dangerous waters.
So I hope I’m mistaken.
And you’re mistaken in interpreting my remarks.
How did you get to “one can’t start from the position they’re dishonest” off what I wrote?
Whom am I supposed to be accusing of being dishonest?
We can continue here, or take this elsewhere, if you’d like. My add is in the intro to my blog.
No offense taken.
What I was trying to convey was the imperative to lift that veil of propaganda, that seeks to keep so many “honestly ignorant” of reality, not by replacing it with “benevolent” manipulation, but by laying out the facts, what we know – and what we can reasonably surmise, labeling it as such – and letting folks come to their own conclusions.
That, of course, is the antithesis of the aim of so much corpress reporting.
And I think I have such an aversion to the notion of self delusion due to my own history. I grew up in apartheid Miss’ssippi in the ’60s, my father a member of the White Citizens Council, and while I never personally witnessed the violence that defined that system, from a relatively early age I understood the injustice and inhumanity of it.
And so, immersed in that milieu, if I could see it for what it was, I just find it extremely difficult to believe that anyone else couldn’t.
I ain’t so special.
But I do realize that we are the only species willfully incapable of reason, and perhaps my inability to mindfuck myself is something of an anomaly.
(Being obsessive compulsive and possessing a hair trigger guilt reflex helps, if that’s the right term.)
Still, self delusion should never be viewed as an exculpatory circumstance, for we have to question what leads someone to reside in that state. An absence of empathy would seem to be a principal characteristic, don’t you think?
And again, I can’t ignore the fact that there are innumerable instances where self delusion played no role, where the desire to deceive in order to advance the exploitative agenda one was aligned with was the sole motivating factor.
I think the issue’s complex, and in essence academic. As you say, behavior will not change. Better to try to understand and obviate how the liers work their will on so many, rather than attempt to unravel the arcane innards of the perpetrators’ rationalizations.
Fool the people once
Shame on you
Fool them twice
Shame on us
The definitive book is; War on Iraq by William Rivers Pitt with Scott Ritter former U.N. Weapons Inspector : Context Books 368 Broadway NY NY 10013 : copyright 2002.
The information was well known and definitively documented.
not knowing is a lie. Not reporting is a lie.
It was propaganda – simply propaganda – deliberate propaganda.
My theory: We invaded because during the fateful run-up to the March 20 invasion, the UN inspectors were finding nothing to corroborate Bush’s WMD allegations. Every report of a negative UN inspection was slowly eroding Bush and Blair’s public case for war. By unilaterally calling off the UN inspectors with his “bombs away” notice, one US President ended the UN inspections regime and cleared the way for war. The inspectors, after all, were slowly undercutting his WMD thesis. The date for the UN/US attack date was moved up. Peace was out of the question. Bush should be tried in an international criminal court. Folks at Nuremburg hanged for less.
As an anthropologist I was interested in the motivations of the neocons pushing the US into invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I knew that many wanted “regime change” back during the first Gulf War. Using just the internet I was able to follow the trail of the war hawks (neocons) like Richard Perle to “A Clean Break” a 1996 policy paper which called for the removal of Israel’s triple threat: Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Letters were written by these hawks to then President Clinton calling for regime change in Iraq (1998). Likewise I knew that Hussein had no capacity for nuclear weapons because of the Israeli Raid on the Osirak Nuclear Reactor (1981 and then in 1991). It was patently clear to me then that the neocons in the Bush regime were able to use the hysteria after 9/11 to push Americans into an insane war. Iran is next.
Newsweek was not the only publication that published this information.
Time Magazine published it’s own version as well.
Strange, how TWO major publications totaly ignored their own publications, pretending they never existed.
We know now that even before he got into office Bush and Cheney and their fellow chicken hawks wanted war. They even marketed how they could convince the most people to join in. Nuclear threat was the ticket, the threat of the mushroom could sold the deal for enough people to believe long enough to let them go at it. So what if they have killed over 4 million people since 1990? They don’t care. For them they have more “important” things to do including getting even more rich and have more power.
Note: the Osirak reactor was just and empty shell, no nuclear machinery was in place when the Israelis bombed it.
In case anyone is still reading, still has doubts, and needs more supporting testimony, James Risen repeated the Kamal information in his 2006 book “State of War” and added that- just months before the invasion- the CIA had sent 30 Iraqi-Americans to Baghdad to ask their scientist-relatives about WMD’s. Each of them reported to the CIA that the Iraq nuclear weapons program was dead.
Why did Newsweek change from reporting a fact, to supporting the US governments propaganda line about WMD’s . . . because they were ordered to.
http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/10/25/6229051/the-inexplicable-denial-of-truth.html
The Truth is Morons that Saddam HIMSELF kept saying he had them! Hellllllloooo?! And guess what?! He did BUT he hid them in other countries. So those who wrote that article were complete idiots.
Now we know Saddam DID have them. But of course The left hates the Truth about Bush. They prefer all the Feeble-minded lies they pull out of their rear-ends.
I’ll right away grab your rss feed as I can not to find your email subscription hyperlink
or e-newsletter service. Do you have any? Kindly let me
know in order that I may just subscribe. Thanks.