Howe’s book Afrocentrism also discusses the arguments of the movement’s Black critics that its values represent those of the Black middle class and ignores the different needs of the classes below them. He writes
In the eyes of some critics the4 patriarchal bias is closely linked to a class-based one. Ransby and Matthew make this point in passing, seeing Afrocentric rhetoric as implicitly invoking classic stereotypes of the dysfunctional Black ‘underclass’. The argument is more central, however, in polemics like that of the prolific black socialist scholar Manning Marable, who sees the real origins of Afrocentrism like this:
‘The black-nationalist-oriented intelligentsia, tied to elements of the new African-American upper-middle-class by income, social position and cultural outlook, began to search for ways of expressing itself through the ‘permanent’ prism of race, while rationalising its relatively privileged class position.’
Asante’s theories, in Marable’s view, represent the more scholarly and philosophically coherent version of such elite self-rationalization. More ‘vulgar’ Afrocentrists – among whom Marable includes Leonard Jeffries – not only espouse a cruder, more dogmatic racial essentialism shot through with anti-Semitic rhetoric, but express their elite biases more nakedly:
‘Vulgar Afrocentrists deliberately ignored or obscured the historical reality of social class stratification within the African diaspora. They essentially argued that the interests of all black people – from… Colin Powell… (and) Clarence Thomas, to the Black unemployed, homeless and hungry of America’s decaying urban ghettoes – were philosophically, culturally, and racially the same… As such, vulgar Afrocentrism was the perfect social theory for the upwardly mobile black petty bourgeoisie. It gave them a vague, hard, critical study of historical realities… It was, in short, only the latest theoretical construct of a politics of racial identity, a worldview designed to discuss the world, but never really to change it.” (281)
Howe agrees, stating
‘Given the evidence of wildly unscholarly statements from writers like Asante that we have documented, one may think that Marable is overstating a distinction between ‘scholarly’ and ‘vulgar’ Afrocentrists, but his overall judgement has considerable weight.’ (281).
I think the same criticism could be levelled at Critical Race Theory, which rejects class in favour of race and specifically ‘whiteness’ as the main instrument of oppression in western society. It therefore sees all Blacks as equally disenfranchised, even if they are extremely wealthy, and all Whites uniquely privileged even if they are poor.
As well as covering Starmer’s attack on democracy in the Labour party, this fortnight’s Private Eye has also published a piece about how he’s recruited someone from the abortive United for Change party and one of Tweezer’s aides. The article runs
Centre Grounding
Labour’s scheme to grow a generation of pro-Starmer parliamentary candidates has recruited a man who tried to set up a multimillionaire-funded anti-Labour party and a former aide to Theresa May.
Labour launched the Future Candidates Programme in August to select, groom, and fast-track a new set of 360 would-be MPs. Announced in that well-known hive of left-wing activism the Times, the scheme was likened to David Cameron’s “A-list” scheme for new MPs, with Labour sources telling the paper the programme would “get pro-Starmer people” as candidates.
This month Labour wrote to the successful applicants, who will undergo online and face-to-face training. Among those announcing themselves as successful future candidates was Ryan Wain, 33 – co-founder and chief executive from 2018-19 of United for Change, a would-be new centrist party funded by multimillionaire Simon Franks.
In 2019 Franks and Wain claimed United for Change would become “the second biggest political party by membership”, with 125,000 members, and would “win the next general election”. But the new party never even launched. Undaunted, Wain found a new multimillionaireas a political sugar daddy, becoming political director of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
Josh Tapper also announced his place on the future candidates programme. Best known as a regular on Channel 4’s Gogglebox from 2013-18, he left the show when he started working in communications for the Cabinet Office. Although a civil service appointment, this brought him close to the top Tories: Tapper became a campaigns manager in the Cabinet Office during Theresa May’s leadership.
Faced with complaints that none of the applicants chosen was from the left of the party,, Labour sources were brisk with the LabourList website: “This isn’t factional. We just aren’t insulting voters with pisspoor candidates any more.” The man in charge of theselection process? Labour’s election chief Morgan McSweeney, an acolyte of, er, Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Peter Mandelson.
This basically confirms what you already knew, if you’d been following Mike’s blog: Starmer wanted to recruit a new generation of MPs loyal to his Blairite self, and deliberately ignored anyone from the left of the party, or indeed, any traditional Labour member or supporter. He asked people to consider becoming a Labour MP, even if they hadn’t considered supporting the party before. Or something like that. The party’s membership, meanwhile, were expected to continue stumping up the money to support the party, which shows that Starmer considers us to be no more than cash cows to be milked and exploited.
As for the United for Change Party, I remember them being promoted by the I newspaper, which raved about how there was going to be another party launched by politicians and (corporate) donors. Which tells you all you really need to know about that newspaper’s politics. It’s supposed to be independent, and so for convenience is lumped in with the liberal press. But like the Groan, it’s really Thatcherite corporatist with something of a pro-European slant and a concern with minority rights. In other words, Blairite Labour cum Cameron Tory.
Blair’s New Labour was serious about promoting multiculturalism and greater diversity with all-female shortlists and an ideology of inclusion. One of the role models Blair praised was the Black American soldier, General Colin Powell. This was at the same time Blair made illegal immigrants ineligible for receiving unemployment benefit, hence the rise of the food banks. These were set up to support the migrants before the Tories expanded it to included everyone thrown off benefits. But Starmer seems to be turning away from any kind of genuine anti-racism. His supporters have bullied Black and ethnic minority MPs and activists, Islamophobia is rising in the Labour party but the only ethnic minority Starmer seems to want to defend are Zionist Jews. Left-wing Jews who criticise Israel are smeared as anti-Semites and purged in a gross display of sectarian anti-Semitism. He’s pledged his support for gay and trans rights, but I wonder how long that will last as Starmer lies through his teeth and breaks promises as easily as breathing.
Starmer is turning Labour into another Tory party, and his adoption of these two candidates show his contempt for the rank and file members of the party he leads very clearly.
I just caught on the lunchtime news today the announcement that Boris Johnson is going to set up a commission to examine the knotty question of racism in the UK. He said something about how this had to be done because of the way people up and down the country had gathered in mass meetings to protest against it. While it showed that Johnson had been paying attention to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations here, America and across the world, not everyone was convinced that Johnson was entirely serious about his proposal. The Beeb’s report said that he’d been criticised already, as there were existing recommendations made in previous reports which hadn’t been acted upon. The Labour MP David Lammy also appeared to give his tuppence worth. He began by noting that Johnson had provided any specifics about this proposed commission. To me, it looks very much like another typical Tory dodge. Johnson will set up this commission to make it look like he’s really bothered about the issue and understands public concern, while making sure that it doesn’t actually do anything and hope that the matter will go away. I do know some genuinely anti-racist Tories. But the Tory party itself has consistently opposed non-White immigration and parts of it are viciously racist. Like the members of the Tory youth movements, who used to sing ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks and Asians’ to the tune of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’. The people that Jacobsmates exposed posting violently racist messages on the internet sites for supporters of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The people that formulated and backed the Tories ‘hostile environment’ policy, which saw hundreds of people illegally deported. People, who had been granted citizenship and then suddenly found it stripped from them by a racist, duplicitous government.
And you have to wonder where Starmer and Angela Rayner are in all this. So far their response has been very muted. After the protests at George Floyd’s murder broke out, Starmer and Rayner issued a statement last week declaring that they were shocked and angered at the killing. Rayner tweeted that ‘We stand in complete solidarity with those standing up against police brutality towards Black people and systemic racism and oppression across the United States, here in the United Kingdom and across the world.’ But actions speak louder than words, and no, they don’t. The suppressed report into the conspiracies by members of the Blairite faction within the party to unseat Corbyn and his supporters and actually make the party lose elections also revealed how these same plotters racially abused the Black MPs and activists Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Clive Lewis. It showed that there was a poisonous culture of anti-Black racism, dubbed Afriphobia, in the party that wasn’t being addressed. As a result, according to the Huffington Post, the Labour Party is haemorrhaging Black members, who say they feel politically homeless.
Starmer’s response to the toppling of the statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol has also been muted. When he was asked by caller Barry Gardiner on LBC radio what his views on it were, Starmer simply replied that it shouldn’t have been done that way, and that he didn’t condone lawlessness. This cut no ice with the mighty Kerry-Ann Mendoza of The Canary, who tweeted that they’d been trying to have it removed legally for the past forty years. As for the Labour party’s attitude to ethnic minorities, she tweeted
The Labour Party is not a safe place for Black people The Labour Party is not a safe place for Muslims The Labour Party is not a safe place for anti-zionist Jews The Labour Party is not a safe place for anti-zionists period The Labour Party is not a safe place for socialists
Mike in the article above argues quite correctly, in my opinion, that Starmer believes in a hierarchy of racism. He was quick to give his full support to the Zionist Jewish establishment, but has done nothing about the racists persecuting Blacks in the party. This is almost certainly because the persecutors were Blairites like himself, and he doesn’t want to alienate his supporters. At the same time, he is also using the fast-track expulsion process that has been set up to deal with alleged anti-Semites to start throwing out members. This is a real kangaroo court, as those accused are not giving a hearing and have no opportunity to defend themselves. And those expelled naturally include socialists and followers of Jeremy Corbyn, and especially anti-Zionist Jews. Tony Greenstein has written a couple of articles about this already. In an article posted yesterday, Tony describes how Starmer was handed a list in March of the people the woefully misnamed Jewish Labour Movement wanted purged. As the Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer refused to prosecute the coppers who shot Jean Charles de Menezes, whom they mistook for an Islamist terrorist. He was also not in the least interested in the deaths of Blacks in police custody. His expressed support for Black Lives Matter is hypocritical, as the Zionist movement in America has been doing its level best to destroy and discredit it because BLM has declared that Israel is an apartheid state, and supports the Palestinians. It considers that their condition in Israel is comparable to that of Blacks in America.
Tony has also posted this article about the mass expulsion of anti-Zionist Jews from the Labour party, as well as other, self-respecting anti-racist members.
Starmer’s reticence on anti-Black racism contrasts very strongly with the party’s direction over the previous forty years. After Thatcher’s election victory in 1979 or so, Labour strongly supported the aspirations of Britain’s Blacks and Asians for equality. The party put forward a new generation of ethnic minority MPs, who strongly articulated the desire for real change. This was extremely controversial – the Tory press blamed the 1981/2 race riots on Black racism and viciously attacked the new Black MPs, like Diane Abbott and Bernie Grant. And, in my opinion, some of them didn’t help. Brent council under Grant was particularly zealous in its determination to root out racism, to the point where it pursued a vigorous policy of censorship from its libraries. A policy that appalled others in the party, who were equally left-wing but less inflexible and intolerant. I’ve heard stories from people, who grew up in the area how extreme Grant could be in his accusations of racism. One of those he accused was the head of a local school, whose wife was Black and who was supposedly a member of the Communist party. In Bristol the five members of Labour’s ‘unofficial’ Black section went off on a trip to Ulster to support the Roman Catholics. They believed that Ulster’s Catholics were a colonised minority like Blacks. They had a point, but this allowed the Tories to paint the party as ‘loony Labour’, inhabited by embittered Communists, who hated Britain and supported the IRA. Nevertheless, it was this period that led to the vital implementation of policies, like ‘positive discrimination’ to improve conditions for Blacks and ethnic minorities. And Labour continued to include anti-racism, or at least anti-racist rhetoric, under Blair. Some Black activists did feel excluded and that Blair was less than serious about these issues. But I can remember Blair praising the example of America’s General Colin Powell, and wishing that Britain could also be a place where Blacks could rise to the highest ranks of the military.
But Starmer seems to be turning his back on all this in his determination to return Labour to the Thatcherite, neoliberal centre ground. It’s the inevitable result of Blairite triangulation. Blair studied what the Tories were doing, and then adopted it and tried to go further. He began in the 1990s by taking over scrapped recommendations for the restructuring of the civil service by Anderson Consulting. He continued the Tory policies of privatisation, including that of the NHS, and the destruction of the welfare state. And some Blairite MPs even began to make the same type of racist recommendations as the Tories. It’s also dangerous, as under Cameron the Tories did try to gain ethnic minority support by embracing Black and Asian community leaders.
Black Lives Matter and the anti-racism movement shouldn’t be above criticism. But Labour should be taking the lead in the debate. Instead, Starmer seems determined to alienate some of the party’s staunchest supporters.
All in the hope of appealing to the Thatcherites and neoliberals.
Next Thursday, 22nd March 2018, ITV are broadcasting at 9.00 pm a programme about Martin Luther King, presented by that British newsreading institution, Sir Trevor McDonald. The blurb for this in the Radio Times runs
On the 50th anniversary of the civil rights leader’s death, Trevor McDonald travels to the Deep South of America to get closer to the man who meant so much to him and so many others. As well as finding out about the horrors of lynching in 20th-century America, he asks Naomi Campbell, General Colin Powell and the Reverend Al Sharpton what Martin Luther King all means to them. Disturbingly, he also meets a former member of the Ku Klux Klan who admits that he would once have targeted him because of the colour of his skin. (p. 103).
There’s also a section three pages further back, on page 100, which adds a bit more. This says
It’s 55 years since Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream speech’ in Washington transfixed the world and became a rallying call for the American civil rights movement. Fifty years after King’s assassination, Trevor McDonald looks at a remarkable life that was cut short. he talks to friends of King’s, including singer Harry Belafonte.
It’s the small, if familiar, details that still move. Like hearing how the mighty gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, seeing King struggling with notes for his speech, prompted him loudly with “Tell them about the dream, Martin”. What followed was off the cuff and remains spine-tingling to this day.
MLK was also politically far more radical than he is often portrayed. A month or so ago there were a series of articles and videos by Counterpunch and the various American left-wing news programmes pointing out that the rather anodyne image of King as preaching simple racial reconciliation was carefully crafted to exclude his criticism of capitalism and American imperialism. King did believe in racial reconciliation between White and Black, but he also believed that capitalism and big business was keeping Whites and Blacks divided in order to weaken the working class, and allow ordinary folks of whatever colour to be exploited.
He was also an opponent of the Vietnam War, which he saw as more corporate imperialism to exploit and oppress the coloured people of that country, just as Blacks in America were being exploited.
This stance led him into conflict with the Democrat Party and the president, Lyndon Johnson. After MLK made a speech denouncing capitalism and the war at the Riverside Church, Johnson removed King’s bodyguards. It was an ominous measure that everyone knew would ultimately mean King’s death.
And King also didn’t mince his words when it came to describing the atrocities of the Vietnam War and American imperialism. You may remember the fuss the Republicans kicked up about the Reverend Jeremiah Cone, the pastor at Barack Obama’s church. Cone was also strongly anti-American because of what he viewed as the country’s intrinsic racial injustice, shouting out ‘God dam’ America!’ The Republicans claimed that he was anti-White, and that his hatred of Whites must also be shared by the Obama, then just campaigning for the presidency, because Obama had worshipped in the same church without objection for something like 20 years. I honestly don’t know if Cone was anti-White or not. It’s possible he was. But his comments on American imperialism were very much in line with what MLK, who certainly wasn’t racist, also said.
This is an issue I shall have to go back to, as it’s still very, very relevant today, when the racist right is once again trying to goose step back into power, and western imperialism is exploiting and plundering the countries of the world, all under the pretext of freeing them from terror.
I’ve blogged before about the way the Thames TV documentary, Death On the Rock, about the killing of an IRA terror squad by the SAS in Gibraltar, angered Maggie Thatcher so much that she destroyed Thames. The documentary presented evidence that the British army knew about the group’s movements, and could have picked them up peacefully at any time. They deliberately chose not to. The shootings were therefore a targeted assassination, with the SAS acting as a South American-style death squad.
This was, of course, too much for Maggie. She had Thames’ broadcasting licence removed, and they were replaced by Carlton. This is something to remember the next time John Humphries or anyone else at the Beeb tells you that she never interfered with the state broadcaster, and that this only began under Blair. I’m not arguing that Tory Tony didn’t interfere or throw his weight around with the Beeb. And there’s plenty of evidence that Maggie also had programme censored. She had the documentary, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’, produced by Panorama, censored because it argued that the Conservatives had been infiltrated by card carrying neo-Nazis, just like the Labour party had been infiltrated by Militant. Perhaps in Humphries’ case, the Conservatives didn’t interfere with the news coverage, because they didn’t need to. It already reflected their own bias.
Such censorship isn’t confined to Britain. It also happened in America. William Blum, a very long time critic of US foreign policy, has a section describing the censorship of a documentary on American television in 1998 in his book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (London: Zed Books 2014). The company aroused the ire of the political, economic and media elite because it dared to tell the truth about a US gas attack in Laos that resulted in the deaths of civilians and American servicemen. He writes
In September 1970, American forces in Laos, acting under “Operation Tailwind”, used aerosolized Sarin nerve agent (referred to also as CBU-15 or GB) to prepare their entry in an attack upon a Laotian village base camp, with the object of killing a number of American military defectors who were reported to be there. The operation succeeded in killing in excess of 100 people, military and civilian, including at least two Americans. How many died before the attack from the gas and how many from the attack itself is not known.
Sarin, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s, can kill within minutes after inhalation of its vapor. A tiny drop of it on the skin will do the same; it may even penetrate ordinary clothing. It works by inhibiting an enzyme needed to control muscle movements. Without the enzyme, the body has no means of stopping the activation of muscles, and any physical horror is possible.
When the invading Americans were making their getaway, they were confronted by a superior force of North Vietnamese and communist Pathet Lao soldiers. The Americans called for help from the air. Very shortly, US planes were overhead dropping canisters of sarin upon the enemy. As the canisters exploded, a wet fog enveloped the enemy soldiers, who dropped to the ground, vomiting and convulsing. Some of the gas spread towards the Americans, not all of whom were adequately protected. Some began vomiting violently. Today, one of them suffers from creeping paralysis, which his doctor diagnoses as nerve-gas damage.
This story was reported on June 7, 1998, on the TV programme “NewsStand: CNN & Time”, and featured the testimony of Admiral Thomas Moorer, who had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1970,, as well as lesser military personnel, both on and off camera, who corroborated the incidents described above.
Then all hell broke loose. This was a story too much in conflict-painfully so-with American schoolbooks, Readers Digest, the flag, apple pie and mom. It was damage-control time. The big guns were called out-Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Green Beret veterans, the journalistic elite, the Pentagon itself. The story was wrong, absurd, slanderous, they cried. CNN retracted, Moorer retracted, the show’s producers were fired…lawsuits all over the place.
Like the dissidents who became “non-persons” under Stalin, Operation Tailwind is now officially a “non-event”.
Notwithstanding this, the program’s producers, April Oliver and Jack Smith, put together a 78 page document supporting their side of the story, with actual testimony by military personnel confirming the use of the nerve agent. (pp. 139-141).
This is truly Orwellian. Orwell, of course, based 1984 on Stalin’s Russia, and the way party functionaries rewrote history to suit the needs of the party and Stalin. The most famous example of this was the way the regime turned Trotsky from a hero and co-author of the Revolution with Lenin, to its arch-enemy and betrayer.
This incident shows how the American military-industrial complex and its puppets and paid shills in the media are quite prepared to do the same, and vilify and expel anyone who commits the same cardinal crime of exposing state lies and atrocities.
Cockburn and Sinclair in their book, End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate, describe the way the American military and media have managed news reporting to support the Iraq invasion, up to and including the killing of journalists. Now the situation seems ready to get worse under Fuhrer Trump. But this would have been under Bill Clinton’s presidency. And Blum’s book shows that the corruption goes back further than that, right back to the Second World War.
It really makes you start to wonder how free the American press and media is, or if it ever was.
This is another great video from the American comedian Jimmy Dore, in which he provides another piece of historical evidence to show why no-one should trust the CIA about anything, let alone the recent allegations of Russian hacking and a supposed dossier they’re using to blackmail Trump. Dore shows a short clip about the 1975 Church Committee, which was convened to investigate whether the CIA was interfering in foreign politics and spying on US citizens. And it concluded that the agency was.
Dore rightly points out that the CIA was out of control, it was interfering in the affairs of foreign states, and that this has continued since then. He cites the way Colin Powell stood up and lied about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq along with the president and the secretary of state.
The American government more recently has suppressed a report revealing that the CIA tortured and anally raped suspects being interrogated through ‘anal feeding’.
And he also rips into the mainstream news media, which supported these official lies and sacked those journos who told the truth. Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, was sacked from the New York Times because he told the truth: there were no weapons of mass distraction. Phil Donohue was also fired, because he also told the truth. Hacks like Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, who repeat and promote these lies, are rewarded.
He makes the point that it’s no wonder that no-one trusts the mainstream media, and that they’re going to the internet. There are almost no real journalists left, journalists, who actually bother to report the truth. He names these true journalists, who include Glen Greenwalt and The Intercept. As for NBC and MSNBC, which retail this rubbish, the companies that owns them has been identified as the worst company in its treatment of workers. He then states that this is the reason Rachel Maddow is paid $30,000 a day: to shut her up and stop her from pointing this out.
This is an angry, embittered tirade, and it’s entirely right. The CIA was and is out of control. Its leader, James Jesus Angleton, was convinced that Harold Wilson was a KGB agent. Over the years Lobster, the parapolitics magazine, has carried numerous stories about the lies and clandestine interference and political manipulation the CIA and the other intelligence agencies and their British counterparts have been responsible for. Larry O’Hara’s Notes from the Borderland is doing the same thing. And the same lies are being retailed by our news media.
Don’t trust them, nor the Beeb when it claims that it’s Reality Check team will objectively counter fake news. This is just more lies to support American military and corporate dominance.
Last week, Obama threw out 35 Russian diplomats, claiming that they were spies responsible for the hacking of the Democrats’ computers, leaking the scandalous details of Clinton’s massive corruption and handing the presidency to Donald Trump. The FBI and CIA both claimed that the Russians were responsible for the hacking. However, yesterday Counterpunch posted an article by Thomas Knapp pointing out that the document the agencies produced to show this actually did no such thing. He wrote
Marcello Truzzi, a skeptic of paranormal claims, once said “an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.”
The claim of Russian interference in the election is certainly extraordinary (“beyond what is ordinary or usual; highly unusual or exceptional or remarkable”). So is US president Barack Obama’s response, including the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and closure of two diplomatic compounds in the US.
The “evidence” in the report, however, is not extraordinary. It’s not even ordinary. It’s non-existent. The report is just a list of cyber warfare methods accompanied by some pretty diagrams. No IP or MAC addresses. No chain of verifiable records showing suspect packets coming from, or going to, Russian machines. The report’s “evidence” for Russian government involvement is the same “evidence” we’ve been offered before: “It’s so because we say it’s so. Trust us.”
Did the Russians conduct cyber attacks for the purpose of influencing the election’s outcome? It wouldn’t surprise me, but I don’t know. You probably don’t know either. The US government continues to state it as fact while declining to prove it.
Knapp reminds his readers of the way American intelligence falsified the information on Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, which was cited by General Colin Powell, and provided the pretext for the invasion of Iraq. He concludes that attacking the Russians is a stupid move, if it’s designed to divert attention away from the content of the leaked information. And it’s also extremely dangerous, as it raises further tensions with Putin.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that the former British ambassador, who actually took possession of the leaked documents for WikiLeaks, said that he got them from Democrat insiders disgusted with Killary and her corruption. The Russians could have hacked the Democrats’ computer, but that’s not where he got the information from. And the American comedian and guest on The Young Turks, Jimmy Dore, has also pointed out that the CIA are notorious liars. They’ve cooked up false information throughout their history to justify their invasion of other countries for American interests, and against those of those nations’ own citizens.
So while Obama’s statement that the FBI and CIA have both provided proof that the Russians have tried to influence American domestic politics through hacking, the opposite is the case. It’s another unsupported claim, and one which deserves more than a little scepticism.
This is a piece from The Young Turks on a recently declassified report from the intelligence committee for the Joint Chiefs of Staff showing that instead of the confident knowledge the Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, the result was the complete opposite. Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney and Bush himself stated that they were absolutely certain that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and that they were only a few months away from developing nuclear bombs. They also claimed that the Iraqis also possessed the missiles to drop these bombs on Israel.
This report shows that instead of secure knowledge, Bush’s administration was profoundly ignorant whether Hussein really did pose a threat. The report states that they didn’t know how much they didn’t know. In some areas of Hussein’s weapons programme, they admitted that they had zero knowledge, while in others the information could go up to about 75 per cent. The report’s compilers admit that in some areas the report was based on 90 per cent uncertainty. They had very little information on Hussein’s chemical weapons. Furthermore, the report stated that the Iraqis did not have the precursors for a sustained chemical weapon attack. As for biological weapons, the report states they had no information on their whereabouts or the regime’s capabilities regarding the various stages in their manufacture. They also had little or no information regarding their nuclear weapons programme. And the report states that Hussein did not have long range missiles. In other words, there was absolutely no danger of him nuking Israel, despite Rice’s statement that the first information they would have about the Iraqi nuclear threat might be a mushroom cloud.
Cenk Uygur states that this report is damning. The invasion of Iraq was based on lies. The only fact to come out of it that might partially exonerate Bush himself, is a statement from one of the intelligence staff responsible for the report. When he was asked whether the report would have been sent to Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney to pass on to the president, he said, ‘That’s the last place it would have gone.’ The generals did not want Bush to know the truth, as they wanted war.
And in Britain Tony Blair’s regime also lied with the ‘dodgy dossier’ and ‘sexed up reports’. The results have been millions of dead and displaced Iraqis, the emergence of ISIS, and the destabilisation of almost the entire Middle East. But the American military wanted war anyway.
I think Ozzy Osbourne sang about this kind of affair in Black Sabbath’s War Pigs.
‘Generals gathering in their masses
Just like witches at Black Masses’.
I found this little snippet in the ‘View from the Bridge’ column in Lobster 45, published in summer, 2003.
Not in Front of the Children
When Colin Powell addressed the UN on the issue of Iraq in early February, UN officials hung a curtain over a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica which hung on the wall behind the spot where statements are made to the press.
‘Guernica’, is of course, Picasso’s bitter depiction of the destruction of the Basque city of that name by Fascist forces under General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. It is rightly one of the most celebrated portrayals of Fascist brutality. And clearly, it made Powell uncomfortable when describing the allies’ invasion of Iraq.
Lobster is on the web at http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/. They do have an archive of past issues, but unfortunately they’re only free from issue 56 onwards.
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