Regardless of the eventual outcome brought about by the exposure of the Downing Street Cabinet Minutes, the corporate/state media’s collusion with state policy has come into the spotlight as never before. All the more reason therefore that the connections be analysed in the context of state policy.

From the very beginning of the build-up to the invasion, the media has played the state’s game by accepting at face value the propaganda line of the existence of Iraq’s possession of WMD. The resurfacing of the testimony of Hussein Kamel’s on the destruction of Iraq’s WMD arsenal is therefore all the more ironic insofar as the ‘alternative’ media was quick to point out that Hussein Kamel’s testimony was deliberately ignored at the time. And worse, not only deliberately ignored but rewritten and distorted by both Bush and Blair, distortions and lies the media were quite happy to reproduce without question.

In researching this piece I looked back through InI’s archives and came across the following piece that I penned on February 3, 2004 titled ‘Mea (ex) Culpa’ that looked at an article in the Independent by Mary Dejevsky headed ‘Let’s be honest: journalists failed’ (3/2/04), a piece all the more revealing in the light of the events of the past few weeks!

In it, Dejevsky attempted exculpate herself and corporate journalism in general, offering us the following reasons as to why journalists had failed the public it is alleged to serve. Here are some of the reasons Dejevsky gave at the time

It is hard now to think back to September 2002 and January 2003 when the Government issued its two dossiers on Iraq’s Weapons.

To hazard that these [the WMD] might not exist was to invite ridicule.

Very few of us have anything like the specialist expertise needed to assess the technical information we were given [about the alleged existence of WMD].

Where we did ask, we often failed to point out the inadequacy or non-existence of the answers.

The most vocal US sceptic about Iraq’s weapons, the former UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, was less easy to silence. Instead, his motives and character were systematically discredited to the point where few reporters were prepared to cite him as a credible source.

Which brings me back to the issue of Hussein Kamel’s testimony. In my piece I said

‘And where the information about Saddam’s CBW stocks having been destroyed were in the public domain, she (Dejevesky) once again falls back on the excuse of the source being “discredited” as with Saddam’s brother-in-law General Hussein Kamel who defected in 1995 and who was murdered after being “lured back to Iraq”. She tells us that his ‘revelation received…fleeting…attention [and] was not regarded as a credible source…[and that]…just a few weeks before the war, the US and British governments had no interest in promoting this version.’

Though Dejevsky neglected to offer the obvious reason as to why, namely that regardless of the evidence, Bush/Blair were intent on invading Iraq no matter what evidence was available. At the time MediaLens ran article on Hussein Kamel’s testimony that I quoted extensively from and it’s worth repeating it once more given the short-attention-span of corporate journalism

Independent on Sunday, March 2nd [2003]_Tony Blair wrote: “[..] the UN has tried unsuccessfully for 12 years to get Saddam to disarm peacefully. And if he doesn’t co-operate then no number of inspectors and no amount of time is going to ensure it happens in a country almost twice as big as the UK. The UN inspectors found no trace at all of Saddam’s offensive biological weapons programme – which he claimed didn’t exist – until his lies were revealed by his son-in-law. Only then did the inspectors find over 8,000 litres of concentrated anthrax and other biological weapons, and a factory to make more.” (”My Christian conscience is clear over war”, 2 March 2003)

Blair: “The UN inspectors found no trace at all of Saddam’s offensive biological weapons programme – which he claimed didn’t exist – until his lies were revealed by his son-in-law.” Jack Straw repeated the same falsehood in an interview on 1 June 2003: “[…] they denied that they had a nuclear or biological weapon programme – and carried on denying it […] and only finally did the truth about this weapons programme come out when an individual defected.middleeastreference.org.uk/quotesinspections.html

Kamel’s defection has been cited repeatedly by President Bush and leading officials in both the UK and US as evidence that (1) Iraq has not disarmed; (2) inspections cannot disarm it; and (3) defectors such as Kamel are the most reliable source of information on Iraq’s weapons.

Prime Minister Tony Blair in his statement to the House of Commons on 25 February 2003, said: “It was only four years later after the defection of Saddam’s son-in-law to Jordan, that the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme were discovered.”

President Bush declared in a 7 October 2002 speech: “In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq’s military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions.”

Colin Powell’s 5 February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council claimed: “It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein’s late son-in-law.”

In a speech on 26 August 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney said Kamel’s story “should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself”.

Hussein Kamel was not in the process of providing excuses for the Iraqi regime. Much of the interview is taken up with his criticisms of its mistakes: “They are only interested in themselves and not worried about economics or political state of the country. [..] I can state publicly I will work against the regime.” (p.14). And yet, when it comes to prohibited weapons, Kamel is unequivocal: Iraq destroyed these weapons soon after the Gulf War. middleeastreference.org.uk/quotesinspections.html

The point here is that the Downing Street Cabinet minutes are, in fact totally irrrelevant to the issue at hand, for as I have shown, the facts concerning the issue have always been in the public record. The fact that the corporate media is now falling back on the excuse that the ‘facts are not new’ (referring to Bush’s objective of the overthrow of Saddam’s regime) deliberately avoids the issue that the reasons were always based upon a lie, a lie that the corporate/state media were directly complicit in spreading as I think the record quite clearly shows.

To say that the media have been loathe to question the state’s reasoning cannot be put down to some kind of ‘fear’ or ‘reluctance’ to question the state, or do they know something we don’t? What of our alleged fearless media? What happened to our alleged objective media?

Those in the corporate media who have been quick to brand critics of the USUK as “paranoid” or worse, as part of the conspiracy brigade, are correct insofar as it’s not a conspiracy, as there has in fact been no attempt to hide the collusion between the state and the media, relying instead on the public’s reluctance to question what the ‘established’ press has to say on such issues.

That it has been the so-called alternative media that has consistently presented the true story in spite of being denigrated in the corporate/state media as “amateurs” or worse, as propagandists and apologists for Saddam rings especially poignantly given that the ‘established’ press has been at last revealed for what it is; the handmaiden of capital.

Apropos of which, I still await the BBC to respond to my queries regarding why it still ignores the issues at hand. So far, over the past week, as far as I can ascertain, only the BBC’s World Service has carried a story on the Cabinet Minutes. A search of the BBC’s Website revealed only two, yes, just two stories

Bloggers’ ‘victory’ over Iraq war memos
Bloggers’ determination to force mainstream media to investigate leaked Iraq war memos busy finally paid off, the BBC’s Kevin Anderson reports. 17/06/2005 news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4099120.stm

Typically, this story denigrates critics in the following manner (and even it gets this wrong by stating that only two, not six, minutes have been published) when it tells us

Since early May, left-leaning blogs have been trying to get mainstream media to pay attention to one – and now two – leaked secret memos from meetings that Prime Minister Tony Blair had with key cabinet members and intelligence figures in the summer before the war in Iraq.

The story continues

The bloggers believe the memos, leaked to the Sunday Times, show that the Bush administration had made up its mind to attack Iraq and then went about trying to justify it.

With the release of the second memo, blogs can take some credit in raising the profile of the story in the US media.

But not it seems, in the British media. Note that the BBC tells us that it’s only “bloggers [that] believe” but it seems, nobody else. The sub-text, “left-leaning” and the fact that it’s “blogs” that have kept up the pressure, serves to marginalize the issues. The BBC story avoids the central issue completely, focusing instead on the fact that it’s “left-wing blogs” using the phrase “left-wing” three times in the short (784 word) article. The article finishes by quoting a certain Professor Michael Cornfield who has, we are told, “studied the emerging impact of blogs on politics in the US” and who tells us that

It’s unclear what the bloggers want, he said, but some are calling for a congressional investigation.[my emph. WB] [1]

Unclear? No comment necessary I think. But it’s worth noting that the BBC doesn’t think much of UK-based ‘blogs’ as they get not a mention. By creating both a literal as well as metaphorical distance, the BBC article serves once again, to marginalise British analysis and criticism of the Blair government’s policies just as much as it does that in the US.

The second of the two BBC articles

Congressmen probe Iraq war memo
US Democrats investigate a UK memo suggesting President Bush decided on the Iraq war eight months in advance.
17/06/2005 news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4101420.stm

Reiterates the thrust of the first article telling us that

The affair has received scant coverage in the mainstream US media, although left-wing bloggers have had some success in bringing it to public attention.

But again, the central issue, that both Bush and Blair lied is studiously avoided. Instead, as with the first of these two paltry pieces of journalism, opponents of the invasion are again branded as “left-wing” and it mistakenly identifies the Cabinet minutes as “suggesting” that the decision to invade was taken months in advance, but as it (and its companion piece) fails to quote any of the relevant sections from the Cabinet minutes, anyone reading both these prime examples of disinformation wouldn’t know that the facts were “fixed” to support an invasion.

Does the BBC, when referring to supporters of Bush/Blair refer to their opinions as ‘right-wing’? No, unless of course they’re “right-wing bloggers”

While left-wing bloggers tried to play up the memo and the right wing bloggers heaped scorn on their opponents, it failed to warrant much mention in the American mainstream media.

And in an attempt to present the view that in Europe the Cabinet minutes got more coverage in the European media, it quotes Terry Neal of the Washington Post.

While the European media have covered the memo extensively, it has received scant attention by the mainstream media in America.

But not by the BBC that’s for sure! The BBC’s mission is surely obvious, to minimalise criticism of the state’s policies about which you need to ask yourself why? Because the criticism comes from the ‘left’, thus it (as opposed to the BBC) is not be trusted that’s why. Can there be any clearer evidence of collusion between the corporate/state media and the state than this. Once more, if you think that your license fee is being misused, I urge you to write to the relevant managers of the state’s media outlet

Helen Boaden, director of BBC news
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk
Pete Clifton, BBC news online editor
Email: pete.clifton@bbc.co.uk
Mark Thompson, BBC director general
Email: mark.thompson@bbc.co.uk
Michael Grade, BBC chairman
Email: michael.grade@bbc.co.uk

Notes

1. For more on Prof. Cornfield’s ‘credentials’, check out ‘Yet another catch phrase’