UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
THE STATUE SPECTACLE
We wanted it to be true but it wasn't
By TED RALL
NEW YORK, APRIL 16, 2003 – The stirring image
of Saddam’s statue being toppled on April 9th
turns out to be fake, the product of a cheesy media
op staged by the U.S. military for the benefit of
cameramen staying across the street at Baghdad’s
Palestine Hotel. This shouldn’t be a big surprise.
Two of the most stirring photographs of World War
II – the flag raising at Iwo Jima and General
MacArthur’s stroll through the Filipino surf – were
just as phony.
Anyone who has seen a TV taping knows that
tight camera angles exaggerate crowd sizes, but
even a cursory examination of last week’s statuetoppling
propaganda tape reveals that no more
than 150 Iraqis gathered in Farbus Square to watch
American Marines – not Iraqis – pull down the dictator’s
statue. Hailing “all the demonstrations in the
streets,” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld waxed rhapsodically:
“Watching them,” he told reporters, “one
cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.”
Hundreds of thousands of cheering Berliners
filled the streets when their divided city was
reunited in 1989. Close to a million Yugoslavs
crowded Belgrade at the end of Slobodan Milosevic’s
rule in 2000. While some individual Iraqis
have welcomed U.S. troops, there haven’t been
similar outpourings of approval for our “liberation.”
Most of the crowds are too busy carrying off Uday’s
sofas to say thanks, and law-abiding citizens are at
228
home putting out fires or fending off their rapacious
neighbors with AK-47s. Yet Americans
wanted to see their troops greeted as liberators, so
that’s what they saw on TV. Perhaps Francis
Fukuyama was correct – if it only takes 150 happy
looters to make history, maybe history is over.
Actually, they were 150 imported art critics. The
statue bashers were militiamen of the Iraqi
National Congress, an anti-Saddam outfit led by
one Ahmed Chalabi. The INC was flown into Iraq by
the Pentagon over CIA and State Department
protests. Chalabi is Rumsfeld’s choice to become
Iraq’s next puppet president.
Photos at the indispensable Information Clearing
House website place one of Chalabi’s aides at the
supposedly spontaneous outpouring of pro-American
Saddam bashing at Firdus Square.
“When you are moving through this country
there is [sic] not a lot of people out there and you
are not sure they want us here,” Sgt. Lee Buttrill
gushed to ABC News. “You finally get here and see
people in the street feeling so excited, feeling so
happy, tearing down the statue of Saddam. It feels
really good.” That rah-rah BS is what Americans will
remember about the fall of Baghdad – not the probability
that Buttrill, part of the armed force that cordoned
off the square to protect the Iraqi National
Congress’ actors, was merely telling war correspondents
what they wanted to hear. In his critically
acclaimed book “Jarhead,” Gulf War vet
Anthony Swofford writes that Marines routinely lie