When All the News Is Bad
Vol: 19 Issue: 27 Sunday, April 27, 2003
The deeper the United States gets into the inner workings of the Saddam Hussein regime, the worse the news gets for nations like the French, Russians and Germans. And the worse the news gets for all those who confidently predicted that the post-war evidence would prove the war was really an American smokescreen behind which Washington could steal Iraq’s oil wealth.
The ones who continue to ask (now somewhat hysterically) “Where is the evidence of Iraq’s WMD? Huh? Huh?!” And, “what about the so-called connection to al-Qaeda?”
Now that the war is pretty much over, many of the documents blowing all over Baghdad are providing some of those answers and the spin doctors are working overtime trying to downplay them.
Documents found by reporters (not the administration) detail the private briefings that Washington regularly gave to its French allies as a courtesy. They were found in the wreckage of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry that proved that each of these private briefings were then immediately relayed from Paris to Baghdad.
The documents show a deep and intimate relationship that existed between Paris and Baghdad for decades before Gulf War I and all the way up to the outbreak of Gulf War II.
The information, described in the files as having come partly from “friends of Iraq” at the French Foreign Ministry, kept Saddam informed of every development in America’s planning and might have helped him prepare for war.
The French briefed Iraqi leaders of what evidence Washington had against Saddam and what evidence they DIDN’T have — so Saddam knew when to call Washington’s bluff and when not to.
The details of the French briefings were exquisitely painstaking, and were contained in a thick folder labeled ‘France 2001’.
An account of a meeting between former French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine and Powell after September 11 was also found in the Baghdad archives. At the meeting, Powell was reported to have said he was planning to raise the issue of Russian “cooperation” with Iraq.
The report said Powell “is going to ask the Russian foreign minister how Russia could cooperate with a country that had expressed satisfaction at America being subjected to such attacks. He is going to ask for a new draft resolution from the United Nations Security Council on Iraq.”
The French also provided Saddam Hussein with useful information it gleaned from other foreign governments. For example, another of documents in the France File was one telling Saddam that “the Israelis have informed the French ambassador in Washington that they have no evidence of Iraqi involvement in the attacks.”
All these documents blowing in the wind in Baghdad are filled with bad news for the ‘useful idiots’ (to quote Lenin) who were convinced that they finally had some reason for opposing the war apart from their hatred of the ‘selected’ Commander in Chief.
They’ve gone way out on a limb from the outset, believing the French-sponsored propaganda that the United States was inventing links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Also blowing in the Baghdad breeze were documents outlining a meeting between Saddam and an al-Qaeda envoy who was invited clandestinely to Baghdad in March 1998 to establish a relationship between Baghdad and al-Qaeda based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia. The meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for a visit to Baghdad by Osama bin-Ladin.
Three stapled pages, including two which bear the insignia and lettering of the Mukhabarat (intelligence service) include correspondence between Mukhabarat agencies over preparations for the visit of the al-Qaeda envoy, who travelled to Iraq from Sudan, where bin Laden had been based until 1996.
Apparently aware of the sensitivity of the subject matter, the newspaper reported that Iraqi agents at some point attempted to mask out all references to bin-Laden using white correcting fluid. The dried fluid was removed to reveal the clearly legible name three times in the documents.
One document, dated February 19, 1998, marked “Top Secret and Urgent,” and signed “MDA,”believed to be the director of one of the intelligence sections within the Mukhabarat, refers to the planned visit by bin-Ladin’s unnamed envoy.
The letter referred to bin-Ladin as an opponent of the Saudi regime and said the message to convey to him through the envoy “would relate to the future of our relationship with him, bin-Ladin, and to achieve a direct meeting with him.” A handwritten note at the bottom of the page recommended that “the deputy director-general bring the envoy to Iraq because we may find in this envoy a way to maintain contacts with bin-Ladin.”
The other documents confirmed the envoy’s visit to Baghdad in March 1998 and his stay at al-Mansour Melia hotel. It mentioned that his visit was extended by a week.
Assessment:
For the useful idiots and the doublecrossers in Europe, all the news is bad. The news is just as bad for those liberal media organizations who allowed partisan hatreds to cloud their judgement, convincing them that George Bush was just as big a crook as Bill Clinton.
They had grown used to expecting the White House to lie to them anyway, so it was not difficult for them to convince themselves of a vast right-wing conspiracy headed by the evil George Bush.
Now it is the media — not the government — who keep coming up with all these damning documents that they have to report while hoping the public has forgotten their previous pronouncements.
I don’t think that is going to happen. This morning I saw a new Fox News promo in which they touted their network as one that isn’t a ‘lapdog for dictators’ — a clear and deserved slam at CNN who covered up events in Iraq in order to keep their satellite open in Baghdad.
ABC’s Peter Jennings (who never met an Arab dictator or a socialist cause he didn’t like), warned for months of the long, brutal and painful war that was ahead. When that didn’t happen, he focused on the tens of thousands of civilian casualties that were ‘surely underreported by the Pentagon’ and when that didn’t happen, he found a way to blame Bush for the looting of the Baghdad Museum (which is still being investigated as a possible inside job pulled off during the fog of war). The way Jennings spun it, “The U.S. did not act in accordance with international law to prevent it.”
When Saddam’s statue was pulled down, Jennings suggested it was staged ‘for the cameras’ while making the same claim about video of Iraqis cheering the Americans as they moved across Iraq. Why the Iraqis would then want to cooperate with American journalists, Jennings doesn’t say.
Once it was clear that the jubiliation was real and that the Iraqis evidently hadn’t been watching his broadcasts to learn how angry they were, Jennings explained away the contradiction, saying the jubilation was because because they wanted to get out from under the yoke of Saddam Hussein, in part because the US supported him staying in power for a long time and kept sanctions.
For some, all the news is bad. The French are proved liars and double-crossers who sold their national integrity to Saddam Hussein for a few oil leases. And more — they actively spied for Saddam in secret. In public, they deplored Saddam but backed eliminating the sanctions out of sympathy for the plight of the Iraqi people. The bad news for them is that this is only the beginning.
For the liberal media, the bad news is that they are exposed for what they are. CNN has been proved to paid for its cushy Baghdad offices by playing footsie with Saddam. ABC has been exposed as a partisan tool of the liberal left.
For the useful idiots, the bad news is manifold. First, it turns out that the Bush administration had all the justification it claimed it had for the war in the first place. US troops continue to find chemical weapons components. Iraqi scientists have begun fessing up to the fact they lied to the UN inspection teams while Saddam was still in power and are pointing out where they hid everything.
Iraq is linked by documentary evidence to al-Qaeda in the months immediately leading up to the attacks on September 11, which made Saddam Hussein’s Iraq a legitimate, Congressionally approved, internationally legal war of self-defense, destroying 100% of the United Nation’s arguments about the legality or illegality of the war in the first place. If Saddam and bin-Laden colluded in the attack on America, the UN is no longer part of the legal equation.
It means that they have been useful pawns in the hands of the enemies of their own country — that they have wasted their time and treasure — not objecting against an unjust war, but instead helping the French, Germans and Russians cover up their own unjust profiteering at the expense of starving Iraqi children all sides claimed to be advocates for.
One of the most startling unintended consequences of Gulf War II is the sudden and brutal way that the veneer of lies has been ripped away. It is actually painful, like tearing off a band-aid too fast. So many lies were exposed at once that the sheer volume of them has somewhat of a numbing effect on the psyche. It’s almost as if it can’t be true.
We learned a lot about our own society and global social structure from the documents blowing in the Baghdad breeze.
“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.” (2 Timothy 3:1-5)
Because, as Paul writes, “evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.” (2 Timothy 3:13).
That is why we labor to put out your Omega Letter every morning. To provide you with the evidence necessary to dissipate the bodyguard of lies most people welcome into their homes with every newscast. We have our mission, and we pray that we do not falter as we grow closer to that Day.
“. . .continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”
Keep the faith.
Omegaletter 