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FROM: http://www.walden3.org/No_casus_belli_Invent_one!.htm
No
casus belli? Invent one!
As Colin Powell presents
evidence to the UN to justify war, Maggie O'Kane argues that the
US's justification for the first Gulf war does not bear scrutiny.
Wednesday February 5,
2003
In 1990 as the US prepared
for its first war with Iraq there was heavy reliance on the use of "classified"
satellite photographs purporting to show that in September 1990 - a
month after the invasion of Kuwait - 265,000 Iraqi soldiers and 1,500
tanks were massing on the border to gear up to invade Saudi Arabia.
The threat of Saddam aggressively expanding his empire to Saudi Arabia
was crucial to the decision to go to war, but
the satellite pictures were never made public.
Iraq invaded Kuwait on
August 2 1990. The US cabinet met the same day. At that point, war was
no more than a possibility. Norman Schwarzkopf recalls the prevailing
mood in his autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero. He quotes General
Colin Powell's remark to him: "I think we could go to war if they
invaded Saudi Arabia. I doubt if we would go to war over Kuwait."
Within days the mood
at the top had hardened. When Schwarzkopf next met Powell, he was told
to prepare to go to Saudi Arabia. "I was stunned," he says
in his book. "A lot must have happened after I left Camp David
that Powell wasn't talking about. President Bush had made up his mind
to send troops."
A lot had changed. By
the early weeks of September, America and Britain were leading the march
towards war. Somehow, almost without anybody noticing, the agenda was
changing. Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait alone was no longer acceptable.
New resolutions had been adopted by the UN security council
The photographs, which
are still classified
in the US (for security reasons,
according to Brent Scowcroft, President Bush senior's national security
advisor), purportedly showed more
than a quarter of a million Iraqi troops massed on the Saudi border
poised to pounce. Except, when a resourceful Florida-based reporter
at the St Petersburg Times persuaded her newspaper to buy the
same independently commissioned satellite photos from a commercial satellite
to verify the Pentagon's line, she saw no
sign of a quarter of a million troops or their tanks.
Jean Heller, an investigative
reporter on the St Petersburg Times, has been nominated for a Pulitzer
prize five times and come second twice, so when she asked permission
to spend $3,200 (£1,950) on two satellite pictures, the newspaper
backed her.
Heller's curiosity had
been aroused in September when she read a report
of a commercial satellite - the Soyuz Karta - orbiting and taking pictures
over Kuwait. She wanted to see what the
only independent pictures would make of
the alleged massive build-up of Iraqi troops on the Kuwait/Saudi border.
Soyuz Karta agreed to provide them. But no
trace of the 265,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks that the
US officials said were there could be found
in the photographs.
"The
satellite pictures were so clear that at Riyadh airport in Saudi Arabia
you could see American planes sitting wingtip to wingtip,"
Heller says.
She took the photographs
for analysis to two experts. "I looked at them with a colleague
of mine and we both said exactly the same thing at exactly the same
moment: 'Where are they?'"
recalls Peter Zimmerman, a satellite expert at George Washington University.
'We could see clearly
the main road leading right through Kuwait, south to Saudi Arabia, but
it was covered with sand banks from the wind and it was clear that no
army had moved over it. We could see empty
barracks where you would have expected these thousands of
troops to be billeted, but they were deserted
as well."
Jean Heller wrote her
story for the St Petersburg Times. It opened with the words: "It's
time to draft Agatha Christie for duty in the Middle East. Call it,
The Case of the Vanishing Enemy."
Looking back now, Heller
says: "If the story had appeared in the New York Times or the Washington
Post, all hell would have broken loose. But here we are, a newspaper
in Florida, the retirement capital of the world, and what are we supposed
to know?"
A year later, Powell
would admit to getting the numbers wrong.
There was no massive build-up. But by then, the war had been fought.
A
public relations firm on a $2m contract from the Kuwaiti government
had been surreptitiously employed to make the case for war. Hill &
Knowlton's coup de grace was their fabricated
"incubator baby" story. A story of how Iraqi soldiers
had thrown premature babies out of incubators in the Al Adnan hospital
in Kuwait city and "left them on the cold floor to die".
Hill & Knowlton's
work involved coaching six witnesses to give
the fake details of the attack on the premature baby unit.
The story was graphically told to Congress
in November 1990 - before a crucial vote - by Niyirah
al Sabah who, unknown to her audience,
was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US.
In her tearful testimony,
she said she had witnessed the Iraqi troops' brutality when
she worked as a volunteer in the maternity ward.
But Myra Ancog-Cooke,
a Filipino nurse who worked in the hospital,
said that none of the staff there had ever
heard of Niyirah al Sabah; they had been present in the hospital
throughout the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and
the story was untrue. A staunch Catholic, Ms Ancog-Cooke
explained that it was her duty and God's will that she stayed to care
for the sick. She was assigned to the children's ward and took
it in turns with the other Filipino nurse who stayed behind,
Freida Contrais-Naig, to sleep in the incubator
room with the babies.
"I remember someone
called and said, 'Look at CNN, they are talking
about us." We watched and it
was strange seeing that girl telling them about the Iraqis taking the
babies out of the incubators. I said to Freida, 'That's
funny, we've never seen her. She never worked here.' We didn't
think very much about it really. We were more excited seeing our hospital
on the television," she says.
Later, Amnesty International,
who had also been duped by the testimony, admitted it had got it wrong.
Andrew Whitley of Middle East Watch described it as a
fabrication, but it took months for the truth to come out.
Meanwhile, President Bush mentioned the incubator
babies in five speeches and seven
senators referred to them in speeches backing a pro-war resolution.
Subsequently, Hill
& Knowlton was unabashed that the media worldwide, the
UN security council and the US Congress had
been deceived by a 15-year-old girl who had been "trained"
by a public relations firm. Lauri Fitz-Pegado of Hill &
Knowlton, who prepared six witnesses to corroborate
the incubator story to Congress, told John Macarthur, author
of The Second Front, a book on censorship in the Gulf war: "Come
on John, who gives a shit whether there were six babies or two. I believed
her."
FROM: http://www.walden3.org/No_casus_belli_Invent_one!.htm
ALSO: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/15/iraq.usa
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