WAR IS PEACE

Needed: an inquiry into a slaughter

  By John Pilger

The warning of Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister Blair's Chief of Staff, not to 'claim that we have evidence that [Saddam] is a threat', points directly to Blair's lying. However, that was exceptional. What is emerging is a pattern of protecting Blair, who is being subtly spun as a restraining influence, a peacemaker, even a guardian of Dr Kelly. A criminal abuse of power is not on any charge sheet: it is not within Hutton's brief, yet the British people and the memory of the thousands of innocent lives cut short in Iraq deserve nothing less.
Credible research shows that up to 10,000 civilians were killed in the attack on Iraq , together with perhaps 30,000 Iraqi soldiers, many of them teenage conscripts. A slaughter. These people were killed by weapons designed to reduce human beings to charcoal or to shred them. The British Army littered urban areas with cluster bombs, while the Americans did the same and in greater quantity, adding uranium-coated munitions, whose radiation poison is ingested with the desert dust.