A BBC program broadcast last night proved that the United States and the United Kingdom both knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction [WMD] on the eve of their invasion ten years ago tonight. The “Panorama” episode called “The Spies Who Fooled the World” detailed how the White House and Downing Street willfully disregarded any information that contradicted their misbelief that the Saddamite regime was a major threat to global peace. The only thing one can conclude is that the Bush administration and the Blair government chose to launch a war of aggression.
The BBC reported “The former CIA Paris Station Chief, Bill Murray, explains how he used an intermediary to recruit Iraq’s Foreign Minister and his frustration when he found crucial intelligence from this source was rejected because it didn’t fit in with the White House’s agenda. The intelligence from Iraq’s Foreign Minister was confirmed four months later, when an MI6 officer met Iraq’s Head of Intelligence, who passed on the same message, saying Iraq had no WMD.”
The Guardian says of that confirmation,
Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 [James Bond’s employer] officer met Iraq’s head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002. Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that he was not told about Sabri’s comments, and that he should have been.
The Bush and Blair war party, instead, relied on an agent codenamed “Curveball” who defected to Germany in 1999. TheTelegraph says,
August Hanning, the former head of German intelligence, said that Curveball, whose real name is Rafed Al Janabi, told the German secret services that he had witnessed the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons. The information was passed by the Germans to American and British intelligence, along with concerns about its reliability, he said. Tyler Drumheller, the former head of the CIA in Europe, also claimed that he passed warnings about Curveball’s claims up the chain of command, while Mr Hanning said he sent a cable to George Tenet, who was then director of the CIA. Mr Tenet denies receiving the warnings, the programme said.
Why would the two governments be so blind about the truth? Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister at the time, told “Panorama” that his counterparts in London and Washington “were not in a state, or a mindset to be warned.” They had decided to commit the youth of their nations to the slaughter of war, and no damned facts were going to prevent that. At very least, the information was too unclear to justify getting one’s own troops killed.
This journal has referred to the Iraq War as a war of aggression for years and has done so with the full knowledge of what that means. At Nuremberg, the tribunal held that “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The idea of show-trials is odious, but based on the evidence, there is but one conclusion: the leaders of the US and UK committed the supreme international crime ten years ago.