World deserves truthful answers

January 24, 2008


World deserves truthful answers


THE finding by two nonprofit journalism organisations that senior US administration officials, including President George W Bush himself, issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the Sept.11 2001 attacks is perhaps the strongest evidence of the one-track mind that Washington followed towards the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The findings by the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism, vindicates the conviction of many in this part of the world that Washington had planned and orchestrated a campaign that "effectively galvanised public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."
Top administration officials have since suggested that they were "misled" by intelligence reports, but they could not really make that claim because enough evidence is already on record that they were party to falsiflying and doctoring intelligence reports that deliberately ignored and suppressed anything that weakened the case they were building against Iraq.
The report names, apart from Bush himself, Vice-President Dick Cheney, then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, then Defence secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, then secretary of state Colin Powell, then deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan among those who had made the false statements.
Rumsfeld, Powell and Wolfowitz have since left the administration, but their roles in the campaign have been very pronounced while they were in office.
The study also affirms that the administration enlisted the corporate media in the campaign and received their wholehearted support in the false build-up to the war.
Well, we know most of the the media groups and individuals involved. Some of them have admitted that they had played an unwitting role in building a case that Iraq was somehow involved in the Sept.11 attacks and had weapons of mass destruction which it could deliver to terrorists to carry out more attacks — the two arguments that people in this part of the world always knew to be false but could not do much against the combined administration-media assault.
The study notes: "Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organisations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical," says the report. "These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, 'independent' validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq."
The findings bring to the front other nagging questions: How far falsified was the official report about the Sept.11 attacks ? Were the attacks an 'inside" job as claimed by many American and international experts? Who helped Al Qaeda — the group named as the culprit — to sidestep every aviation and security precaution that was in place? Why did the mighty US defences fail to even register the "hijackings" before it was too late? What was the role of the Israeli secret service Mossad in the attacks? Whose interests were served by the attacks?
The world needs truthful answers to these questions because the entire international community paid a heavy price for the way Washington went about in its self-proclaimed war against terror that it launched after the Sept.11 attacks. No one in the world was spared and that took the issue out of a strictly American context. Many around the world are continuing to pay the price, direct and indirect, for the no-holds-barred American push that came in the wake of the attacks. They need answers. Hopefully, someone as courageous and thorough as the authors of the study on the false statements on Iraq would come forth sooner than later and provide the right and truthful answers.