Saddam Interrogation Screened - in Silence.

[Briar]

So what is it with the BBC and all the other news media that lamely told us that Saddam had been silenced and no more? Today thje BBC is still pouring out rubbish about the Michael Jackson trial, and still ignoring the real news. In fact according to Jim Naughtie, the facts about what is happening in Iraq - the chaos, the bloodshed, the whole destruction of a country - are not simple facts but must be qualified as "political". The implication, thanks to Naughtie's mealy-mouthed slip, is that the BBC now only reports news in a way which does not upset its political masters.



Saddam Interrogation Screened - in Silence. The Question Is:
Why?
By Robert Fisk


...

The Iraqis - or, let us speak frankly, the Americans who tried
to censor the old reprobate's previous court appearance - decided yesterday that his words would also be censored. That is Saddamism. This is how Saddam ran Iraq.

...

The pictures, the BBC admitted, were "mute". What in God's name did this mean? Who emasculated the BBC to such a degree that it should say such a ridiculous thing? Why were they mute? The BBC didn't tell us.

If Saddam was really being charged with war crimes over the killings of Shias - which I hope he was - then why, in heaven's name, didn't we hear what he had to say? Why use the methods of Saddam himself? The silent film, the assumption of guilt? Or was Saddam telling the court that the United States was behind his regime, that Washington had given him the means to destroy the Halabja Kurds with gas?

How can we know? And when so many of our journalistic brethren
failed to challenge the reason why this tape should be "mute", what does this say of us? We are told, by Saddam's jailers of course, that he is being questioned about the murder of Shia villagers south of Baghdad in 1982. I hope so. But how do we know?

....

More at:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/061405E.shtml

[tjwmason]

1. One has to wonder, why they are afraid.

What could he say which they don't want us, and the Iraqi people, to hear?

[ngGale]

2. He would love for the US to hear his story...

that's our US problem. He can take the whole empire down with him.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. What did Naughtie say?

and in what context? That sounds very interesting.

[Briar]

5. It was about 7.45

just before Thought for the Day (I was getting ready to switch off...) and he was interviewing a very interesting American woman singer. She was talking about being galvanised by the appalling things being done in Iraq, and Naughtie kinda discarded all the factual stuff (qualifying it as "political" - because let's face it, the truth is when your government doesn't want you to recognise it as such) and asked her to sing a song about being inspired by William Blake instead.

I'm sorry I can't remembeer more. I was really concentrating on driving at the time! She has a great voice, by the way.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. That's good enough - it was Patti Smith

The web recording of it is here.

Naughtie didn't seem too dismissive to me - she got to say what she wanted, and her criticism was of the Bush government generally, rather than just its Iraq invasion. And she is a musician, and the reason for the interview was the festival, so it's reasonable to end with the music.

Here's my transcript of the non-musical part of it:

Naughtie: It's interesting - obviously you have a political position from which you argue very strongly. In the United States at the moment, how do you see the cultural scene, the social scene, and the political scene? Because there seem to be a lot of mismatches.

Smith: Well, in the United States right now, our government is corrupt, is on the extreme right, is bedfellows with corporations and big business; they've destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq illegally, and the response of artists in our country has been lagging. I think part of this is because the events of September 11th made people leery of speaking out.

N: Without getting into a political debate about this, and obviously different people have different views, but looking at the scene as you see it, you first became active, politically aware, musically aware, in the 60s, when everything was exploding. Why is it not exploding, musically, culturally, now, if what you say is true?

S: I think one of the reasons it's not exploding is because in the 60s people were touched personally in the United States. Everyone was touched personally by the vietnam war, so it gave everyone a focus for their fears, anger, for being vigilant and watching what the government was doing. I feel like our times are worse than they were back then, but I feel that because people aren't touched personally, they are slower to react.

[Briar]

8. My problem was with his defensiveness

"without getting into a political debate about this, and obviously different people have different views" struck me as the BBC covering itself in a rather ponderous, anxious way - and the infrastructure of Iraq has been destroyed. That's a fact, not a matter of political debate.

[tjwmason]

9. The B.B.C. took a lot of flack

with acusations of the 'Baghdad Broadcasting Corportation' &c. flying round, I'd guess they're over-compensating now.

[Englander]

4. I think it's linked to the '80s arms sales to Iraq;

'Armed and dangerous
Arguments about whether ministers should resign are not the main point of the Scott Report, says Paul Foot. The real dynamite is in the connection between government and the arms industry--and the level of deception involved

>snip

Most people who have studied the matter know that the US and British governments 'tilted' to Iraq during the latter stages of the long and murderous Iran/Iraq war of 1980-1988. The Scott Report pushes the tilt back to the very start of the war. As Scott's figures for military and civilian trade decisively prove, Iraq was favourite from the outset. It follows that ministers' insistence on their impartiality in the conflict--the foundation stone of their declared policy on defence sales--was sheer hypocrisy.

The clearest example of that hypocrisy was the approach of the Export Credits Guarantee Department, which guarantees British exports. From 1985, the ECGD guaranteed the sale of defence equipment to Iraq to the tune of at least £25m a year. No such guarantee was available for Iran. In 1988, when the war ended, the guarantee for Iraq was quadrupled--to £100m. The chief secretary to the treasury who approved that huge leap (and denied any similar facility to Iran) was John Major, the man who has consistently pretended that he knew little or nothing of the arms to Iraq scandal while he was chancellor of the exchequer, foreign secretary and prime minister.

In two other sections, the report exposes the central government hypocrisy--that arms to Iraq were carefully restricted throughout the period. First, all sorts of weaponry, often of the most lethal kind, got to Iraq from Britain through 'diversionary routes', chiefly through Jordan. Arms sales from Britain to Jordan were 3,000 percent (about £500 million) higher in the 1980s than in the 1970s. This had nothing to do with the expansion of the Jordanian armed forces, which were actually contracting in the 1980s. Almost all the extra weaponry went on to Iraq, and there were other conduits too: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Portugal, Singapore, Austria.

Secondly, the 'restricted' policy became much less restricted for Iraq after the ceasefire of 1988. The entire British government was tempted by the honeypot which was opened up by Saddam Hussein as he expanded his vast armed forces after the peace treaty with Iran in 1988. The guidelines were changed to liberate a whole new category of defence sales, and no one was told about it.'

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr195/foot.htm



A quote from Major's testimony to the Scott inquiry;

“One of the charges at the time of course was that in some way I must have known because I had been the chancellor, because I had been the foreign secretary, because I had been the prime minister. And therefore I must have known what was going on, but I didn’t.”

____________________________________

The Scott Report;
'1996: Arms-to-Iraq report published
The long-awaited report into the sale of arms-to-Iraq in the 1980s has been published and contains strong criticisms of the ministers involved.

Having taken three years to produce, the report outlines mistakes made by ministers but rejects claims MPs were seeking to deprive defendants of a fair trial in the Matrix Churchill case.

Attorney General Sir Nicholas Lyell and Treasury Chief Secretary William Waldergave were singled out for criticism in the report, which was carried out by senior high court judge Sir Richard Scott.

One of the main problems highlighted in the report was the decision of the government not to inform parliament of reforms to arms export laws for fear of public outcry.

The report concluded government policy towards the export of non-lethal military goods was changed following the Iran-Iraq ceasefire in 1988 in a way that should have been reported to the Commons. '

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/15/newsid_2544000/2544355.stm

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. The silent screening does seem like giving in to the government

because it's accepting their spin. Having the pictures with no sound actually tells us very little - he's being questioned, but they could have told us that. It does give the impression "he's got something to answer for", without us actually having to bother hearing his answer (the implication being that he'll always lie - which is the kind of thinking they used when sexing up the war in the first place).