Comment by Martin McLaughlin
9 January, 1999
Press reports over the past week have confirmed that the United Nations
Special Commission (UNSCOM), the agency charged with carrying out
weapons inspections in Iraq, has functioned as an instrument of US
intelligence operations aimed at overthrowing or assassinating Saddam
Hussein.
Articles in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the Wall Street Journal and other publications have provided many
details about the spying activities carried out by US agents working under
UNSCOM cover. These agents installed electronic equipment at
UNSCOM's facilities in Baghdad, which allowed them to monitor secret
communications by Iraq's Special Republican Guards and Special Security
Organization. These encrypted communications were relayed by satellite
to
the US National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, which
analyzed the conversations to collect information on the movements of
Saddam Hussein and other top Iraqi officials. Some of this information
was
used in the targeting for last month's US-British bombing raids on Iraq.
These revelations completely contradict the picture of US-Iraq relations
which has been presented by successive US governments and by the daily
newspapers and television networks in the eight years since the Persian
Gulf war. The American people have been lied to, not once or twice, but
repeatedly and on a grand scale.
The American public was told that Iraq was a "rogue state" threatening
the
world, which had to be subjected to an unprecedented regime of weapons
inspection to insure that it carried out the demands of the United Nations
that it dismantle its stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
and its facilities for building such "weapons of mass destruction." In
reality,
most such weapons and facilities were destroyed in the gulf war and the
remnants were disposed of within a few months. Subsequent years of
inspections have not produced any evidence that Iraq either possesses
more such weapons or is in the process of producing them.
Iraqi officials bitterly protested the activities of UNSCOM, declaring
that
its personnel were intelligence agents working for the United States, Britain
and Israel and that its activities were aimed, not at weapons monitoring,
but at overthrowing the government of Iraq. These charges have now been
confirmed, not only in the American press, but in the statements of Clinton
administration officials, who have conceded that US intelligence agents
worked undercover at UNSCOM and that data collected by UNSCOM
was passed on to the intelligence services of--the United States, Britain
and Israel!
Iraq's alleged refusal to cooperate fully with UNSCOM was used
repeatedly by the Clinton administration as the pretext to justify continuing
the trade embargo, enforced by US and British military forces, which has
wrecked the Iraqi economy and caused the premature deaths of as many
as a million people, the majority of them children. The latest revelations
demonstrate that the Iraqi government was resisting, not demands for
weapons inspections, but demands that it expose the innermost workings
of its military and intelligence commands to agents of its bitterest enemies,
to which no sovereign state could agree.
The exposure of American spying under UN cover is an indictment, not
merely of the US intelligence services, but of the entire media and political
establishment in the United States, which has uncritically parroted the
lies
and propaganda of the CIA and NSA. The daily newspapers and
television networks played the role of cheerleaders for a confrontation
with
Iraq, criticizing the Clinton administration only for being insufficiently
bellicose and postponing the much desired bombing of Baghdad.
In specific cases the role of the press went beyond even that of echoing
war propaganda. The Washington Post has admitted that it was in
possession of key details of the US spy operation in Baghdad last
October, but deliberately withheld them at the request of the CIA. This
was not in order to keep the operation secret from the Iraqis--they were
shouting about the CIA's role in UNSCOM from the rooftops. It was to
keep the operation secret from the American people, so that they could
continue to be deluded by Pentagon and CIA propaganda.
The UNSCOM-CIA revelations are a powerful vindication of the analysis
made by the World Socialist Web Site throughout 1998. During the
February crisis, when US military action was only forestalled by Kofi
Annan's trip to Baghdad, the WSWS denounced the provocative role of
UNSCOM. One item posted February 17 carried the headline "Inspectors
or spies--is there a difference?" and noted press reports about the
"unpublicized assistance" to UNSCOM from the American CIA and NSA.
In August, when UNSCOM inspector and ex-Marine Scott Ritter
resigned, denouncing Clinton's Iraq policy as insufficiently aggressive,
the
WSWS commented: "His revelations have, unwittingly, shattered the
pretense that UNSCOM is a purely technical and purely neutral body of
arms control experts, answerable only to the UN Security Council. By
Ritter's own account, UNSCOM is an intensely political body that
functions as an instrument of imperialist foreign policy, first and foremost,
that of the United States."
In December, in the midst of the four-day US-British air war on Iraq, the
WSWS commented on criticism of UNSCOM's role by French, Russian
and Chinese representatives at the UN Security Council, and noted that
UNSCOM's activities were widely credited in the American press with
making the bomb and cruise missile attacks more accurate and effective.
We wrote:
"These reports cast a new and sinister light on the activities of UNSCOM
during the past year, when the agency's inspectors have focused their
attention on surprise visits to so-called presidential sites within Iraq--that
is,
the various public buildings and residences set aside for the personal
use of
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The question is posed: were
UNSCOM's operations dictated by the need of the Pentagon to gather
intelligence on the movements of the Iraqi leader, so that he could be
targeted for US attack?"