This article by Eliot Weinberger is a stunning list of what we have all been told or heard about Iraq. It's quite long and rather sad at times, but is a great, albeit often vague on dates, resource to follow the history of the Iraq war. The dishonesty of this administration shines through as does the heartbreaking pain of the Iraqi people.
In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get `bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq'. I heard him say: `The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.'
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I heard the president say: `Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.'
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I heard the vice president say that the war would be over in `weeks rather than months'.
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I heard Donald Rumsfeld say he would present no specific evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction because it might jeopardise the military mission by revealing to Baghdad what the United States knows.
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I heard the vice president say that the war would be over in `weeks rather than months'.
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I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: `It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.'
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I heard the prime minister of the Solomon Islands express surprise that his was one of the nations enlisted in the `coalition of the willing': `I was completely unaware of it.'
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I heard an American soldier say: `There's a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think: "They hit us at home and now it's our turn."'
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I heard about Hashim, a fat, `painfully shy' 15-year-old, who liked to sit for hours by the river with his birdcage, and who was shot by the 4th Infantry Division in a raid on his village. Asked about the details of the boy's death, the division commander said: `That person was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
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I heard Anmar Uday, the doctor who had cared for Private Jessica Lynch, say: `We heard the helicopters. We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military. There were no soldiers in the hospital. It was like a Hollywood film. They cried "Go, go, go," with guns and flares and the sound of explosions. They made a show: an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors. All the time with cameras rolling.'
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I heard an old man say, after 11 members of his family - children and grandchildren - were killed when a tank blew up their minivan: `Our home is an empty place. We who are left are like wild animals. All we can do is cry out.'
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As the riots and looting broke out, I heard a man in the Baghdad market say: `Saddam Hussein's greatest crime is that he brought the American army to Iraq.'
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I heard Richard Perle tell Americans to `relax and celebrate victory'. I heard him say: `The predictions of those who opposed this war can be discarded like spent cartridges.'
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I heard Lieutenant-General Jay Garner say: `We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: "Damn, we're Americans."'
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I heard Colonel Nathan Sassaman say: `With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.'
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I heard Richard Perle say: `Next year at about this time, I expect there will be a really thriving trade in the region, and we will see rapid economic development. And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad named after President Bush.'
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I heard that air force regulations require that any airstrike likely to result in the deaths of more than 30 civilians be personally approved by the secretary of defense, and I heard that Donald Rumsfeld approved every proposal.
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I heard the president say: `We found biological laboratories. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.'
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I heard that 7 per cent of all American military deaths in Iraq were suicides, that 10 per cent of the soldiers evacuated to the army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany had been sent for `psychiatric or behavioural health issues', and that 20 per cent of the military was expected to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
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I heard Private Lynndie England, who was photographed in Abu Ghraib holding a prisoner on a leash, say: `I was instructed by persons in higher rank to stand there, hold this leash, look at the camera, and they took pictures for PsyOps. I didn't really, I mean, want to be in any pictures. I thought it was kind of weird.'
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Detainees 27, 30 and 31 were stripped of their clothing, handcuffed together nude, placed on the ground, and forced to lie on each other and simulate sex while photographs were taken. Detainee 8 had his food thrown in the toilet and was then ordered to eat it. Detainee 7 was ordered to bark like a dog while MPs spat and urinated on him; he was sodomised with a police stick while two female MPs watched. Detainee 3 was sodomised with a broom by a female soldier. Detainee 15 was photographed standing on a box with a hood on his head and simulated electrical wires were attached to his hands and penis. Detainees 1, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24 and 26 were placed in a pile and forced to masturbate while photographs were taken. An unidentified detainee was photographed covered in faeces with a banana inserted in his anus. Detainee 5 watched Civilian 1 rape an unidentified 15-year-old male detainee while a female soldier took photographs. Detainees 5 and 7 were stripped of their clothing and forced to wear women's underwear on their heads. Detainee 28, handcuffed with his hands behind his back in a shower stall, was declared dead when an MP removed the sandbag from his head and checked his pulse.
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This was the military summary for an ordinary day, 22 July 2004, a day that produced no headlines: `Two roadside bombs exploded next to a van and a Mercedes in separate areas of Baghdad, killing four civilians. A gunman in a Toyota opened fire on a police checkpoint and escaped. Police wounded three gunmen at a checkpoint and arrested four men suspected of attempted murder. Seven more roadside bombs exploded in Baghdad and gunmen twice attacked US troops. Police dismantled a car bomb in Mosul and gunmen attacked the Western driver of a gravel truck at Tell Afar. There were three roadside bombings and a rocket attack on US troops in Mosul and another gun attack on US forces near Tell Afar. At Taji, a civilian vehicle collided with a US military vehicle, killing six civilians and injuring seven others. At Bayji, a US vehicle hit a landmine. Gunmen murdered a dentist at the Ad Dwar hospital. There were 17 roadside bomb explosions against US forces in Taji, Baquba, Baqua, Jalula, Tikrit, Paliwoda, Balad, Samarra and Duluiyeh, with attacks by gunmen on US troops in Tikrit and Balad. A headless body in an orange jumpsuit was found in the Tigris; believed to be Bulgarian hostage Ivalyo Kepov. Kirkuk air base attacked. Five roadside bombs on US forces in Rutbah, Kalso and Ramadi. Gunmen attacked Americans in Fallujah and Ramadi. The police chief of Najaf was abducted. Two civilian contractors were attacked by gunmen at Haswah. A roadside bomb exploded near Kerbala and Hillah. International forces were attacked by gunmen at al-Qurnah.'
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I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: `Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.'
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I heard that, in the last year alone, the US had fired 127 tons of depleted uranium (DU) munitions in Iraq, the radioactive equivalent of approximately ten thousand Nagasaki bombs. I heard that the widespread use of DU in the first Gulf War was believed to be the primary cause of the health problems suffered by its 580,400 veterans, of whom 467 were wounded during the war itself. Ten years later, 11,000 were dead and 325,000 on medical disability. DU carried in semen led to high rates of endometriosis in their wives and girlfriends, often requiring hysterectomies. Of soldiers who had healthy babies before the war, 67 per cent of their postwar babies were born with severe defects, including missing legs, arms, organs or eyes.
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I heard Muhammad Abboud tell how, unable to leave his house to go to a hospital, he had watched his nine-year-old son bleed to death, and how, unable to leave his house to go to a cemetery, he had buried his son in the garden.
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I heard Kassem Muhammad Ahmed say: `I watched them roll over wounded people in the streets with tanks.'
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I heard a man named Khalil say: `They shot women and old men in the streets. Then they shot anyone who tried to get their bodies.'
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I heard that the Niger `yellowcake' uranium was a hoax legitimised by British intelligence, that the aluminium tubes could not be used for nuclear weapons, that the mobile biological laboratories produced hydrogen for weather balloons, that the fleet of unmanned aerial drones was a single broken-down oversized model airplane, that Saddam had no elaborate underground bunkers, that Colin Powell's primary source, his `solid information' for the evidence he presented at the United Nations, was a paper written ten years before by a graduate student. I heard that, of the 400,000 bodies buried in mass graves, only 5000 had been found.
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I heard a reporter ask Donald Rumsfeld: `If they did not have WMDs, why did they pose an immediate threat to this country?' I heard Rumsfeld answer: `You and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase "immediate threat". It's become a kind of folklore that that's what happened. If you have any citations, I'd like to see them.' And I heard the reporter read: `No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people.' Rumsfeld replied: `It - my view of - of the situation was that he - he had - we - we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that - that we believed and we still do not know - we will know.'
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I heard Saadoon al-Zubaydi, an interpreter who lived in the presidential palace, say: `For at least three years Saddam Hussein had been tired of the day-to-day management of his regime. He could not stand it any more: meetings, commissions, dispatches, telephone calls. So he withdrew . . . Alone, isolated, out of it. He preferred shutting himself up in his office, writing novels.'
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I heard that 5 per cent of eligible voters had registered for the coming elections.
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I heard that the American ambassador, John Negroponte, had requested that $3.37 billion intended for water, sewage and electricity projects be transferred to security and oil output.
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I heard a reporter ask Lieutenant-General Jay Garner how long the troops would remain in Iraq, and I heard him reply: `I hope they're there a long time.'
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I heard that the US military had purchased 1,500,000,000 bullets for use in the coming year. That is 58 bullets for every Iraqi adult and child.
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I heard that Saddam Hussein, in solitary confinement, was spending his time writing poetry, reading the Koran, eating cookies and muffins, and taking care of some bushes and shrubs. I heard that he had placed a circle of white stones around a small plum tree.
I oscillated between sad, angry and dark humor reading this litany of the administration's lies and their effects on the whole world.