http://pacificfreepress.com/content/view/2248/1/There’s a cynical old saying that the victors write the history. CBS’s “60 Minutes” demonstrated how that process works on Jan. 27 in airing Scott Pelley’s interview with the FBI agent who de-briefed former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
On Dec. 7, 2002, Iraq even sent to the United Nations a 12,000-page declaration explaining how its WMD stockpiles had been eliminated. In fall 2002, Hussein’s government also allowed teams of U.N. inspectors into Iraq and gave them free rein to examine any site of their choosing.
Those inspections only ended in March 2003 when President George W. Bush decided to press ahead with war despite the U.N. Security Council’s refusal to authorize the invasion and its desire to give the U.N. inspectors time to finish their work.
But none of that reality is part of the history that Americans are supposed to know. The officially sanctioned U.S. account, as embraced by Bush in speech after speech, is that Saddam Hussein “chose war” by defying the U.N. over the WMD issue and by misleading the world into believing that he still possessed these weapons.
In line with Bush’s version of history, “60 Minutes” correspondent Pelley asked FBI interrogator George Piro why Hussein kept pretending that he had WMD even as U.S. troops massed on Iraq’s borders, when a simple announcement that the WMD was gone would have prevented the war.