Nothing But Politics

[Amaunet]

Now that U.S. troops are on Baghdad’s doorstep “watch how the propaganda unfolds once the bombing is over and the Americans are running Baghdad and their spin machine. There will be the "discovery of Saddam's secret arsenal," probably in the basement of one of his palaces. “

It will not be the first time we have ‘planted’ evidence.

Black propaganda of this kind has a long history. My own experience of it was the American invasion of Vietnam. In 1964, the US State Department published a White Paper with pages of "conclusive proof" of North Vietnam's preparations to invade the south. This "proof" stemmed from the "discovery" of a stockpile of weapons found floating in a junk off the coast of South Vietnam. The White Paper, which provided a quasi-legal justification for the American invasion, was known as a "master illusion". The whole episode was fake, a set-up.

Master illusion was the CIA's term for master lie. In 1982, I interviewed Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA officer who documented the planting of the fake evidence. He told me: "The CIA loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons ... They floated this junk off the coast of Central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place. They then brought in the American press and the international press and said, 'Here's the evidence that the North Vietnamese are invading South Vietnam.' Based on this 'evidence', the US Marines went in, and the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam."

As a result of this fakery, which included the elaborate fiction that an American destroyer had been attacked by a North Vietnamese gunboat, the United States dispatched its greatest ever land army to Vietnam, and dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of warfare, and forced millions of people to abandon their homes, and used chemical weapons that profoundly damaged the environment and human genes, leaving a once beautiful land petrified.

AT least two million people were killed, and many more were maimed and otherwise ruined. Now replace "Vietnam" with "Iraq" in this story of lies; and you have the essentials of the same justification for another great criminal act.

Watch how the propaganda unfolds once the bombing is over and the Americans are running Baghdad and their spin machine. There will be the "discovery of Saddam's secret arsenal," probably in the basement of one his palaces. This will be accompanied by the "discovery" of gruesome evidence of Saddam's oppression. This will not come as news to the many dedicated anti-war campaigners, who for years tried to stop the American and British governments from supplying Saddam with the tools of his oppression. - Pilger