UPDATED - ColdType

are on plan,” the plan is working. He told his captors:
“I only came to fix broke stuff.” He was
asked if he came to shoot Iraqis. “No I come to
shoot only if I am shot at,” he said. “They (Iraqis)
don’t bother me, I don’t bother them.”
As for POWs and their treatment, the U.S. military
was sending around footage to media outlets
of Iraqi soldiers surrendering. Many outlets ran it
unverified. That was not a violation of the Geneva
Convention, apparently. One of our readers,
Catherine Kenward, reminded me about how controversial
U.S. treatment of prisoners has been in
Afghanistan (the Mazar-I-Sharif prison revolt and
the more recent reports of prisoners who suddenly
died in U.S. custody). Am I the only one who
finds it ironic to hear Donald Rumsfeld talking
about the Geneva Convention? Don’t we still have
Afghan prisoners living in cages at Guantanamo?
Aren’t we the ones talking about how convenient
it would be if we could use torture? Haven’t we
broken every international accord and treaty that
hindered us from doing exactly as we please? And
suddenly Rumsfeld is talking about the Geneva
Convention.
A week ago, the Village Voice reported on the
U.S. military shipping prisoners to other countries
that routinely practice torture. It makes for ‘plausible
deniability.’
That chemical plant?
EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
AND then there was the sudden discovery of a
chemical plant. To the frat pack on Fox, this was
the smoking gun. The GOTCHA! But then the network
brought in an ex-weapons inspector who
said he doubted it because it was too far south. He
was British. An American, David Kay, who double
dips as a TV analyst on MSNBC while working for
104
the Uranium Institute of the nuclear industry, was
less skeptical. He says that Iraq never declared the
plant. We still don’t know what is in that plant or
what he suddenly discovered there. The
Jerusalem Post this morning was saying that U.S.
officials confirmed to them that the plant was
making weapons. NBC later reported that it was
indeed a chemical weapons plant, with huge tanks
filled with chemicals. The Iraqi generals and officers
in the plant all surrendered.
Please remember that this war, these “serious
consequences” as Colin Powell used to call what
we are now seeing, were designed to disarm Iraq,
to find those alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Recall how many times the U.S. government
claimed to know where they were, rarely sharing
their “intelligence” with the U.N. inspectors. Well,
so far – and this could change – we have yet to see
this occur. I certainly do not trust Saddam’s
claims, but it is not surprising that he didn’t
destroy all his weapons, if that is the case, knowing
that nothing he could do would ever satisfy an
administration hell bent on invading.
Chemistry lesson
IN the meantime, let’s get chemical. Join me in
the time machine. Let’s go back to 1983 when Iraq
used bio-chem weapons 195 times against the Iranians
in a war in which the U.S. sided with Saddam.
Iran said Iraq killed or wounded 50,000 people,
soldiers and civilians.
This is 10 times as many people as in the northern
Kurdish area in and around Halabja, a horrific
gassing that has been cited repeatedly.
(There are some experts who say the Iranians
did that, not the Iraqis.) What is of interest is this:
How did the United States government react at