 The mainstream U.S. news has been reporting that inspectors have found undeclared chemical warheads in Iraq, and it has been made to sound like "Aha, they lied, they had chemical warheads hidden, hoping we wouldn't find them". What they found were some old boxes, from the 1980s, covered with birdshit, that had never been opened, and which contained empty artillery shells. That is first of all within what is allowed for Iraq, and secondly, they were empty. Meaning, they could get filled with chocolate pudding or with explosives or with chemicals, but they weren't. At the bottom is a detailed response to the story, from somebody who knows what they're talking about.
And now the news is that the inspectors have found 3000 pages of information related to making nuclear weapons at the home of a top nuclear scientist, and those hadn't been listed in the official declaration. And they turn out to be old notes about an attempt to use lasers for isotope isolation, which project was abandoned in 1987.
There is a pattern there, which is obviously intended towards finding Iraq in violation of *something*, whether it is really of importance or not. It is a clever and effective pattern to use to do somebody in. The scheme is simply to make complex demands of what the country is supposed to declare, and when and how, and then, the moment they're a little late, or they forgot something somewhere, or they didn't do it exactly right, they can be shown to be in violation. It's a great plan. A country-wide bureaucracy will never be able to make a full and acurate inventory of everything they have anywhere. Particularly not a corrupt dictatorship of a country, who's infrastructure has already been destroyed several times. Are they going to remember all the places they stored some boxes of artillery shells? No. I'm sure, if you asked the U.S. military to do an inventory, they would forget hundreds of thousands of tons of deadly stuff, underground facilities, whole bases, missiles, submarines and who knows what, just because they can't keep track of it.
According to the same principle, you could go and methodically investigate the home of just about anybody in a typical western country, like me or one of my neighbors. And you would, I'd guess in at least 50% of the cases, find material enough to brand people as criminals, perverts, drug addicts, tax evaders, or whatever you happen to be looking for. If you don't really add things up in context, it is very easy to destroy the reputation of even the best of people. And for a screwed up country like Iraq, run by a crazy dictator, they're having a remarkably hard time doing the same thing.
[ Politics | 2003-01-18 18:12 | | PermaLink ] More >
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Tens of thousands of people protested yesterday in Washington D.C., San Francisco, and across the world in Europe and Asia. The good news is that this time the U.S. media didn't try to ignore it like the last time, and didn't lie about the numbers of attendees, as far as I can understand.
