The crimes of the century
by David Atkins
It’s not as if we didn’t already know this to be true, but add a little more revolting icing to the top of an already rotten cake:
Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.
Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was “active”, “growing” and “up and running”.
A special BBC Panorama programme tonight will reveal how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.
It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, told the CIA’s station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had “virtually nothing” in terms of WMD.
Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was “totally fabricated”.
However, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 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.
Butler says of the use of intelligence: “There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages.”
The fact that no one in America or Britain has yet gone to jail or faced serious justice for perpetrating the crime of the century in conning the world into the invasion of Iraq is a disastrous, monumental moral failure. It was replicated only a few years later in failing to bring to justice the criminals who brought the world’s financial system to its knees while enriching themselves.
The mantra of the day to look forward, not backward. It’s apparently OK to apply that ethic only to the world’s biggest crimes, but not to its smallest.
There needs to be justice for what was done in Iraq and on Wall St. The political and financial systems of the world will be fundamentally broken until it happens.
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