war

Key facts and figures on an illegal invasion, in the eyes of the BBC. 7 years on, several billions later - and guess which country.

Phone subscriptions. Improvement.
Food security. Improvement.
Car ownership. Improvement, 3 times over.
Electricity supply. Improvement (mostly, except the glitch in the last quarterly figure).
Gap between electricity supply and demand. Improvement.
Clean drinking water. Improvement.
Sewerage systems. Improvement.
Violence. Improvement.
Oil production. Improvement (though not compared to the 1979 peak)

... That's it. No more key facts or figures.

What a war! They are clearly well worth fighting.

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush ... As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened.

He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers' defective products ... Obama did nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel's brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of victims' lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.

From Chris Hedges' Ralph Nader was right about Barack Obama

Is this enough to take our idol off the wall? No, no! He would have done so if he could (and didn't, so he obviously couldn't).

What does it take to take an idol off the wall? It takes another idol to replace him. Until that happens, and unless an idol loses his good looks, his ease, smooth charm and eloquence, he can smooth-charm his way through just as many lies as there are pores to let them out of his athletic body. He isn't there to lead us out of trouble: he's there for us to make-believe the trouble isn't there while he's in charge. And the smoother and more porous his athletic body is, the more we pin it on our walls to gaze at; the more we blame the things he said he'd do, and didn't do, on everyone, except for him.

Until the wall falls down. And even then, the wall fell down despite him, not because of him.

It's easier, more comforting, to cope with walls come tumbling down than it is to have our superheroes falling of their own accord. It's easier to have a superhero who we vote for every 4 or 5 years, and who will do the job of Change for us, mend everything, put things to rights. It's hard and most unsettling to think that superheroes don't exist and we have no-one else to put up on the wall. Or at least - no-one who has the powers of superheroes: the power to do for us what we need to do for ourselves.

I am not blaming Obama for not being super-human. I am blaming humans for believing in those who make-believe that they are superhuman - and cannot see, as Hedges says, that

Social change does not come through voting. It is delivered through activism

Blair, September 2002 dossier:

"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme."

In fact: Sir William Ehrman [a senior official within the Foreign Office] stated intelligence was "limited" in April 2000, "patchy" in May 2001, "sporadic and patchy" in March 2002, and that officials knew "very little" in August. Intelligence remained "limited" in September1.

Blair, September 2002 dossier:

"His military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them. I am quite clear that Saddam will go to extreme lengths, indeed has already done so, to hide these weapons and avoid giving them up."

Tim Dowse, who was head of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office: "Speaking personally, when I saw the 45 minutes report, I did not give it particular significance because it didn't seem out of line with what we generally assessed to be Iraq's intentions and capabilities with regard to chemical weapons... I don't think we ever said that it was for use in a ballistic missile."

Blair, March 2003, House of Commons:

"Iraq continues to deny it has any WMD, though no serious intelligence service anywhere in the world believes them."

Sir William Ehrman: "We did, I think on March 10, get a report that chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and Saddam hadn't yet ordered their assembly. There was also a suggestion that Iraq might lack warheads capable of effective dispersal of agents."

Blair, December 2003, interview:

"The Iraq Survey Group has already found massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories, workings by scientists, plans to develop long range ballistic missiles."

Tim Dowse: "I did not advise him to use those words." He added that nothing of "significance" had been found in Iraq since the invasion.

From the Iraq Inquiry, put together by the Independent

What is incredible is not just to hear these lies again - and they have all been in the public domain for years - but rather to see the desperate scramble by those who have been party to the lies attempting to get their side of the story out, to cover their moral backsides (such as they are) and to disclaim any responsibility for what happened. Ambassadors, top foreign office officials, Cabinet ministers, and the media.

The media feign shock horror, as if this is the first that they have heard about dodgy intelligence, overblown claims of 45 minutes; the first that they have heard about Blair's pact with Bush at his Texas ranch. But none of it is new, and the media have known it for years. The mere fact that anyone is surprised by reading any of the information coming out is testament to the fact that the media themselves failed miserably to put these facts out in the right way at the right time.

Of course the media cannot tell us that the facts and lies are old: that would not only fail to be a story, it would also suggest that those journalists who knew the facts and lies before, and did their best to tell another story, might themselves be culpable. Culpable in peddling lies, at best, and in serving as the Government's war propaganda machine, at worst.

1. 1. Carne Ross also said that: "I'd read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there's no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too." (quoted in the Guardian in 2005

On Saturday, Ahmedinejad made a speech about the western media distorting and fabricating news, and the BBC promptly misreported it (look at Version 1 on that page). Here's the correspondence I've had so far with them.

Dear Steve Hermann

The online story you have at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8288121.stm (Iran visit for UN nuclear chief) includes the following:

The IAEA chief arrived as Iran's president accused Mr Obama of making a "historic mistake" revealing the plant.

"The US president made a big and historic mistake," Iranian state TV quoted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying during a speech on Saturday.

I have looked at the report of the speech on Press TV and what it says is the following:

“[US President Barack Obama] made a huge mistake when he accused Iran of secrecy and gave rise to the recent torrent of false reports,” said President Ahmadinejad.
(http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=107711&sectionid=351020101)

Is this the part of the speech to which you are referring in your report? It is clear that Ahmedinejad is not accusing President Obama of 'making a "historic mistake" revealing the plant, he is accusing Obama of making a mistake when accusing Iran of secrecy. Please could you let me know if there is another section of the speech - not reported on Press TV - which makes the claim you have on the BBC website. It would, incidentally, be a strange claim for Ahmedinejad to make, given that Obama did not reveal the plant (even if he knew about it beforehand): the plant was 'revealed' in a letter to the IAEA by Iran's president himself.

I can also find no record of Ahmedinejad saying, as you quote him, that:

"Later it became clear that [Mr Obama's] information was wrong and that we had no secrecy."

In view of what appears to be a serious case of misquoting Ahmedinejad in the first case, please could you also confirm the context for this second quote, and that this is indeed the claim he was making. As you have presented it, the claim makes little sense, because we are not told which information was wrong. We are simply led to believe that Ahmedinejad makes strange statements. Perhaps that is your intention.

I note that you made no mention of the essence of Ahmedinejad's speech.

Thank you for your attention.

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