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Skriven 2005-01-16 07:14:36 av Stephen Hayes (5:7106/20.0)
Ärende: family.debate: The WMD fraud
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* Forwarded (from: DEBATE_FMY) by Stephen Hayes using timEd/2 1.10.y2k.
* Originally from family.debate@family-list.org (8:8/2) to debate3.
* Original dated: Sat Jan 15, 08:39

The WMD Fraud
DAVE LINDORFF, CounterPunch

January 13, 2004

The great thing about being George W. Bush is never having to say you're sorry.

Several hundred billion dollars down the tubes in Iraq in a war that was
started on the trumped up claim that Saddam Hussein had been building and
stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction," and several hundred millions of
secret dollars spent belatedly trying to find a hint of such weapons, all for
naught.

Not only are there no such weapons, the few efforts that did exist to try to
make something nasty having been dismantled by 1991, but the Iraqi scientists
arrested by invading American troops, and held incommunicado for as long as two
years now have been found to have been innocent of any wrongdoing.

In fact, some of the leaders of the so-called Iraq Survey Group charged with
finding WMDs in Iraq have been calling on the Pentagon to release those
scientists, who include Gen. Amir Saadi, who had been a liaison between the
Hussein government and U.N. arms inspectors, Rihab Taha, the biologist American
reporters breathlessly referred to as "Dr. Germ" for his alleged work years ago
with germ weapon research, and Huda Amash, who was similarly, if somewhat
sexistly, awarded the moniker "Mrs. Anthrax." ISG officials say they have
cleared all three of involvement in any illegal WMD work for Hussein over the
past decade or more, and add that they have been cooperating with
investigators.

They shouldn't hold their breaths waiting for release, however. The Pentagon
appears bent on keeping them in captivity indefinitely, as it is doing with
most of the detainees at Guantanamo and other secret holding pens.

We shouldn't hold our breaths either for an honest accounting of what the ISG
did and what it learned about the imaginary WMDs that were the causus belli of
this ugly, bloody conflict in Iraq. The Bush administration and the Pentagon,
clearly massively embarrassed by the failure to turn up even a shred of
evidence of WMDs after two years of searching, are sealing the ISG's records,
and are not giving any account of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars
wasted in what was clearly a frantic political effort to find expost facto
justification for an illegal war.

We're supposedly "building democracy" in Iraq, but meanwhile we're
deconstructing it here at home, where the areas that the public has a right to
know about are being shrunk by the day.

In the name of those non-existing WMDs, American soldiers continue to die at a
rate of two or three a day, while Iraqi civilians, their cities flattened,
their water rancid, and their hospitals swamped, are dying at about ten times
that rate.

A policy mistake or fraud of this magnitude cries out for accountability.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death
Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns
titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press.
Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at
www.thiscantbehappening.net.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

:: The original address of this article is :
    www.counterpunch.org/lindorff01132005.html



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