Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Scott Ritter sulla farsa delle WMD

The invasion of Iraq was a crime of gigantic proportions, for which
politicians, the media and the public share responsibility
By Scott Ritter
01/27/05 "The Guardian" -- The White House's acknowledgement last
month that the United States has formally ended its search for weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq brought to a close the most calamitous
international deception of modern times.
This decision was taken a month after a contentious presidential
election in which the issue of WMD and the war in Iraq played a
central role. In the lead-up to the invasion, and throughout its
aftermath, President Bush was unwavering in his conviction that Iraq
had WMD, and that this posed a threat to the US and the world. The
failure to find WMD should have been his Achilles heel, but the
Democratic contender,  Kerry, floundered, changed his position on
WMD, Iraq many times.
Ironically, it was Kerry who forced the Bush administration to
acknowledge that it was WMD that solely justified any military action
against Iraq. Before the US Senate in 2002, secretary of state Colin
Powell responded to a question posed by Kerry about what would happen if
Iraq allowed UN
weapons inspectors to return and they found the country had in fact
disarmed.
"If Iraq was disarmed as a result of an inspection regime that gave us
and the security council confidence that it had been disarmed, I think
it unlikely that we would find a casus belli."
When one looks at the situation in Iraq today, the only way that it
would be possible to justify the current state of affairs - a once
secular society now the centre of a global anti-American Islamist
jihad, tens of thousands of civilians killed, an unending war that
costs almost $5 Billion a month, and the basic principles of democracy
mocked through an election process that has generated extensive
violence - is if the invasion of Iraq was for a cause worthy of the
price.
The threat to international peace and security represented by Iraqi
WMD seemed to be such a cause. We now know there were no WMD, and thus
no justification for the war. And yet there are no repercussions.
The culpability for the war can be traced to those same Senate
hearings in 2002, when Colin Powell said:"We can have debates about
the size of the stockpile ... but no one can doubt two things. One,
they [Iraq] are in violation of these resolutions ... And second, they
have not lost the intent to develop these weapons of mass destruction."
Politicians, the mainstream media and the public alike accepted this
line of argument, without debate, thus setting the stage for an illegal
war.
UN weapons inspections were never given a chance. Ever since the
Clinton administration ordered them out of Iraq in 1998, the US has
denigrated the efficacy of the inspection process. This was a policy
begun by Clinton, but perfected by Bush in the build-up to war. In
October 2002, a month after Saddam Hussein agreed to the unfettered
return of weapons inspectors, the US defence department postulated the
existence of secret production facilities, protected by a "concealment
mechanism" designed to defeat inspectors. Thus, even if they returned,
a finding of no WMD was meaningless.
Inspectors did return, and they found nothing. Iraq submitted a
complete declaration of its WMD holdings, which was dismissed as lies
by the Bush administration. Everyone seemed to accept this rejection
of fact. "Intelligence information" was assumed to be infallible. Andyet
it was all just hype.
There was never any serious effort undertaken by the Bush
administration to find Iraqi WMD. Prior to the invasion, the US
military re-designated an artillery brigade as an "exploitation task
force" designed to search for WMD as the coalition advanced into Iraq.
It did little more than serve as a vehicle for its embedded reporter,
Judith Miller of the New York Times, to recycle fabricated information
provided by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, creating
dramatic headlines that had no substance. Once Iraq was occupied,
Miller was sent home, and the taskforce disbanded.
A new organisation was created, the CIA-led Iraq survey group (ISG),
led by David Kay. His job was not to find WMD but to spin the data for
the political benefit of the White House. He hinted at dramatic
findings, only to suddenly reverse course once Saddam Hussein was
captured. Kay told us that everyone had got it wrong on WMD, that it
was no one's fault. He was replaced by Charles Duelfer, whose task was
to extend the WMD cover-up for as long as possible. Duelfer was very
adept at this, having done similar work while serving as the deputy
executive chairman of the UN weapons inspection effort.
I witnessed him manipulate reports to the security council, rejecting
all that didn't sustain his (& the U.S's) foregone conclusion that Iraq
had WMD.
As the head of the ISG, he was called upon to again manipulate the
data. As it was virtually impossible to conjure up WMD stockpiles
where none existed, he did the next best thing - he re-certified Colin
Powell's pre-war assertion that Saddam Hussein had the "intent" to
re-acquire WMD. Duelfer provided no evidence to support this
supposition. In fact, the available data seems to reject the notion of
"intent". But once again, politicians, the mainstream media and the
public at large failed to let facts get in the way of assertions. The
ISG had accomplished its mission - not the search for WMD, but the
establishment of a viable alibi. Its job done, the ISG slipped quietly
away, its passing barely noticed by politicians, media and a public
all too willing to pretend that no crime has been committed.
But, through the invasion of Iraq, a crime of gigantic proportions has
been perpetrated. If history has taught us anything, it is that it
will condemn both the individuals and respective societies who not
only perpetrated the crime, but also remained blind and mute while it
was being committed.
· Scott Ritter (
WSRi...@aol.com
) was a senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq
between 1991
and 1998 and is the author of "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction
and the Bushwhacking of America".


plonk!
Sdc non è solo una farsa. E' una farsa inutile.

 Sdc non è solo una farsa. E' una farsa inutile.
...disse il bue all'asino...
-Stefano

 By Scott Ritter
Scott Ritter e' una farsa gia' di per se :)
-Stefano