Bush, Blair, Howard — war criminals

Tom Pearson

US President George W Bush and Prime Ministers Tony Blair of 
Britain and John Howard of Australia are taking desperate evasive 
action as a tidal wave of evidence reveals they used deception 
and collusion in order to wage war on Iraq. The war, which has 
caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, was a 
criminal act and the leaders of the three countries that 
participated in it should be made to face the consequences of 
their actions and be charged with crimes against humanity before 
an international tribunal.

If there was ever any doubt that the governments of the US, 
Britain and Australia sent their countries to war based on lies, 
it has now been dispelled. The revelations are so damning that 
the trio have been forced to abandon their premise for war, that 
Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Instead they are claiming 
the war was based on UN resolutions on Iraq's weapons.

This is despite the fact that the world witnessed the US's 
arrogant dismissal of the overwhelming majority of UN members who 
opposed the war. The decision by the US and Britain to go to war 
also cut short the search for weapons by the UN weapons 
inspection team in Iraq, thus killing off any peaceful resolution 
to the situation.

Each leader has tried to shift the blame onto security 
misinformation, intelligence lapses and failures by weapons 
experts. "Intelligence is an imprecise science", said Howard last 
week.

The cold, hard fact is that no weapons of mass destruction have 
been found despite searches by teams of weapons exerts, including 
the UN team led by Hans Blix, and a 1400-strong US group headed 
by former CIA official David Kay, which has been in Iraq for 
eight months, 

As a diversionary tactic the three governments have each set up 
an inquiry into the information which they claim misled them to 
believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In Australia the findings of a parliamentary review, conducted by 
a small number of hand-picked trusted from the Liberal, National 
and Labor Parties will be vetted by Howard and the spy agencies 
before being made public. The small committee includes two former 
Labor Defence Ministers — Bomber Beazley and Senator Ray.

In Britain another inquiry has been proposed in the wake of the 
Hutton inquiry which last week whitewashed the Blair Government's 
mass deception of the British people.

In the US a presidential commission is now investigating the 
intelligence which the Bush administration claims made it believe 
Iraq possessed WMD. But intelligence analysts there, as in 
Australia and Britain, are breaking ranks, refusing to be made 
scapegoats.

And compounding the growing pressure on Bush, his Secretary of 
State Colin Powell is rolling over, saying he couldn't have 
justified going to war if he had known there were no WMD.

As it has become clear that there were never any weapons 
stockpiles, the trio have also dropped references to "arsenals" 
and started talking up "weapons programs".

In February last year after the Government had committed 
Australia to war, Howard said, "The Australian Government knows 
that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons. Iraq 
continues to work on developing nuclear weapons."

Last week on the ABC's 7.30 Report host Kerry O'Brien 
quizzed Howard: "Before the war you told the Australian people 
time and time again there was no doubt that Iraq had an arsenal 
of weapons.

"And even then, when the Australian people were doubtful about a 
war, how do you think they would have reacted to the idea of 
going to war, not because Iraq had weapons, but because it was in 
defiance of a UN resolution that demanded the destruction of 
weapons Iraq, apparently, didn't have?"

Howard answered that "everybody believed Iraq had WMD at the time 
the war was started."

Last year Andrew Wilkie, a security expert in the Howard 
Government's Office of National Assessment, resigned in protest 
at Government manipulation of intelligence. He called the 
information on Iraq used by the Howard Government "skewed, 
misrepresented, used selectively and fabricated". 

Weapons expert Brian Jones, who was in the British Ministry of 
Defence in the lead up to the war, stated last week: "In my view 
the expert intelligence analysts of the defence intelligence 
staff were overruled [by the government] in the preparation of 
the dossier [claiming Iraq had WMD] in September 2002, resulting 
in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."

The Australian Greens Senators are calling for a genuine 
investigation, a judicial inquiry. "We will move for an inquiry 
with the powers of a royal commission to subpoena papers and 
people — that includes anyone up to the Prime Minister", said 
Greens leader Senator Bob Brown.

He described the parliamentary inquiry as "a joke" because it has 
allowed its findings to be vetted by the government and the 
intelligence agencies.