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December 07, 2003
War on Iraq
So here's an Iraqi soldier who says he was the source for the 45-minute claim, and he tells the Sunday Telegraph it was absolutely true: 'Lt-Col al-Dabbagh, 40, who was the head of an Iraqi air defence unit in the western desert, said that cases containing WMD warheads were delivered to front-line units, including his own, towards the end of last year. He said they were to be used by Saddam's Fedayeen paramilitaries and units of the Special Republican Guard when the war with coalition troops reached "a critical stage"...The devices, which were known by Iraqi officers as "the secret weapon", were made in Iraq and designed to be launched by hand-held rocket-propelled grenades. They could also have been launched sooner than the 45-minutes claimed in the dossier."Forget 45 minutes," said Col al-Dabbagh "we could have fired these within half-an-hour."' Let's have a bit of a memory check here. This is the claim which the anti-war crew said wasn't true, a lie with which the Prime Minister is supposed to have browbeaten the intelligence service and misled the British people into war. Here's an Iraqi soldier, however, who corresponds to the information given by British intelligence about their source, and who says it was indeed true and he should know. Is he for real? I don't know. Did he originally tell the truth? I don't know. Is this something that should excite the media, which has been going on and on and on about how this claim wasn't true? Yes, it should. Are they excited? No, they appear not to give tuppence about it. Indeed, during the Hutton inquiry the media moved the goalposts so that the new accusation against the government was that it had given the impression that Saddam had ballistic weapons that could fire within 45 minutes (which it never actually said, but is being additionally blamed for the fact that certain newspapers jumped to the wrong conclusion) whereas the claim related only to battlefield weapons (as al Dabbagh confirms). No-one ever suggested, of course, that Saddam ever had ballistic weapons that could reach us, tipped with WMD or not; so the idea that we were all supposed to be petrified that the dossier was talking about weapons we knew he didn't have is, of course, one of the many lunacies in the current rewriting of history. But hey, the story is that Blair lied; and no damned Iraqi soldier who pops up to say excuse me, it was actually all true is going to stop the media's finest from nailing Blair to that cross they've so slaveringly constructed. Posted by melanie at December 7, 2003
Comments
The newspaper reports published at the time of the dossier were obviously sourced from only the dossier's foreword & pictures. WMD…To an Air-Defence Unit? For what? Does Melanie know what Air-Defence Units are tasked to do? Of what they are capable? Shooting down planes with ground-to-air missiles or rapid-fire, large-calibre machine guns. Neither of which requires or benefits from the employment of nuclear, biological or chemical warheads. To have assigned precious WMD stores to them would be like issuing a pest control man with a solid gold tennis racquet. And this guy is no run-of-the-mill loyal Iraqi Officer. He is, according to the Sunday Telegraph, a spy for the Iraqi National Accord; a London-based exile group, and has provided reports to British intelligence from early 2002, mainly on Saddam's plans to deploy weapons of mass destruction. Bit of a wrinkle then in the notion that he might be an impartial witness. Certainly it is to Melanie’s account, since she makes no mention of it. But I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, and acknowledge that she may simply have been unaware of the ST’s assertion. No wonder the Blair Government chose prudently not to jump all over this. It is highly suspect. Oh, and as for the supposed complete vacuum of news coverage surrounding this man and his claims, the following (although not limited to them) have reported extensively on the subject: Le Monde For the record, I do believe that Saddam had WMD capability. But we will need more than this poor showing to convince the world of it. *UPDATE...* The full story of Mr al-Dabbagh and his claims was just shown on Channel 7 television here in Australia, care of a BBC news program. Following on from the first reply, one should note that the BBC only ever quotes from the summary for policymakers part of the IPCC report on climate change - the foreword which deliberately reversed the report's conclusion that there was no demonstrably anthropogenic global working to claim that it was now an established fact. This, co-incidentally, guaranteed the future careers of the reports editors. They, however, clearly do not have a conflict of interest ... Posted by: Robert Dammers at December 8, 2003 09:57 AM |
