UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
“We’re getting patients who were hurt in the
looting, stabbed by their neighbors, hit by bullets
in squabbles between members of (Saddam’s)
Baath Party and their rivals,” said Muayad
Jumah Lefta, a doctor at the city’s largest hospital.
“The British are responsible for this,” he
seethed. He said even the hospital was targeted,
with the doctors themselves fending off the
thieves until a group of British soldiers arrived
yesterday and took up a position on the roof. . .
“Where are the soldiers when we need
water?” she said. “They look at people heaping
up everything they can and they just laugh. It’s
awful . . . The British have only brought freedom
to the thieves, not to the people,” she said.
Towards Freedom TV
WHILE all this was going on President Bush and
Tony Blair launched their own media war as a
new “Towards Freedom” TV station began
broadcasting from a plane into a city with no
electricity, so few could actually see it. (I wonder
how the folks in Vermont who publish the radical
magazine Toward Freedom feel about the appropriation
of their name?)
More people in the West saw the broadcasts
than in Iraq, I am sure. Dr. Mohammad T. Al-
Rasheed was watching for Arab News. His
review: “Watching George W. Bush deliver his
speeches is becoming more alarming as his diction
and body language become ever so transparently
arrogant.”
When it comes to body language, Bush speaks
volumes. The fixed stare in his eyes is boyish, as
he declares something as Biblical as, “The day of
reckoning is near.” He awaits the applause from
the “safe” crowds of servicemen and women as a
200
little child awaits the teacher’s commendations.
The posture seems to say, “How did I do in this
recitation of my Sunday school homework?” Not
bad, Mr. President.
Warnings were baseless
STEVEN SHALOM offers an assessment of this
war of liberation on ZNET: “The relative ease of
the U.S. military victory confirms how little
threat Saddam Hussein’s regime posed beyond
its borders. Where in 1990 Iraq had substantial
armed forces, it was clear well before the start of
this war that the Iraqi military was no longer a
formidable force, even by Middle Eastern standards.
The Bush administration claim that Saddam
in 2003 was a danger to his neighbors was
not taken seriously in the region and has now
been shown to have been baseless.
“Despite Bush’s constant repetition that there
was no doubt that Iraq had massive supplies of
chemical and biological weapons, no such
weapons, or even prohibited missiles, were used
by the Iraqi forces. Indeed, it seems the only
time U.S.-U.K. troops needed to wear their chemical
warfare suits was when recovering a body
from a friendly fire incident to protect themselves
from the radiation given off by U.S.
depleted uranium ordnance – which, of course,
the Pentagon claims is absolutely harmless.
“Nor, despite many fevered media reports,
have any hidden stores of Iraqi proscribed
weapons come to light. Since Iraq’s alleged possession
of banned weapons was the official
explanation for the war, their absence is rather
embarrassing for the administration.”