Developments overseas
More falsification

Basahin ang artikulong ito sa Pilipino

One of the most brazen lies that has enraged people especially from the countries dragged into the war is the false evidence that Bush used to terrorize the people about Iraq's supposed production of nuclear weapons.

In his State of the Union Address in January, Bush declared that they had verified Iraq's purchase of a large quantity of uranium from Niger, a country in west Africa. Uranium, the chief component in the production of nuclear arms, was supposedly being used by Iraq to develop nuclear weapons against the US. Blair also included this bit of "information" in a dossier prepared by his government intended to instill fear in the public mind and secure permission to invade Iraq immediately.

But according to the CIA, it had already proven the falseness of such a claim in the early part of 2002. This was immediately relayed by the CIA to Vice President Richard Cheney and concerned agencies and departments of the US government. Not only was it ignored, Cheney even used the falsified information in Bush's speech and made it a pretext for waging war on Iraq.

As early as September 2002, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had also released a secret assessment which stated that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling c h e m i c a l weapons." The White House concealed this i n forma t ion and put a gag order on those who made the assessment. Despite this, Bush and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brazenly told the US congress that Saddam Hussein had a secret arsenal of huge quantities of chemical weapons that included VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas.

In the last days before the US invasion of Iraq, the Bush regime had become so desperate to turn up any evidence of Iraq's possession of WMD. Thus, the Pentagon dispatched a secret commando unit under the Delta Force of the US Army Special Operations Forces just to scour Iraq and search for WMD.

The unit called Task Force 20 was sent to Iraq even before the outbreak of the war. They scoured a large part of Iraq, but could not find anything. In their report, they said that despite searching through numerous warehouses, confiscating several weapons and capturing Iraqi scientists supposedly involved in the production of WMD, they could find no evidence that Saddam Hussein had secret biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

The Bush regime and the Pentagon also kept Task Force 20's report secret but it was eventually divulged to the public.

21 June 2003
English Edition

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