(maybe you want to visit my front page...)
I'd like to tell you that, if you take the time to read the BBC news occasionally, you too can be an end product of the system of public disinformation:
I refer you to this article.
Here's why practically every paragraph of this item of 'news' is entirely hilarious:
Why should someone who claims to be a military intelligence source be believed? Despite the fact that this requires a large leap of the imagination, I ask you to believe for one moment that there was a real source for this intelligence.
If they were the real source, and if the US/UK intelligence don't want to reveal their sources, you'd have to imagine it would be both in their power (since they coerced him to talk in the first place) and in their interests (since they're not telling us themselves, with their added creditability) to make him not reveal his identity. Yet he's decided to speak to the Telegraph - the least respected British paper on the subject of the Iraqi war - to tell all. Strange.
The claim is that forward-deployed members of the Iraqi army had been given these WMDs. This was commonly stated by the government before the war started. When it appeared to be rendered unlikely by the fact that none were found among the artifacts, we were expected to believe that they had hidden them somewhere secret as soon as combat started. Maybe they thought such an action would undermine Blair's premiership, and that this end was vital to them; I can think of no more rational explanation.
The explanation offered in the article (that the soldiers "decided not to fight") is not well supported by the facts, or indeed by elementary common sense. Of course, they did fight. Many didn't surrender; about 10,000 were killed. Are we asked to believe that they decided, for some reason, to fight half-heartedly? Was every member of them suicidal, wanting neither to win nor to surrender but desiring only to die by losing a battle? This is what is being suggested.
What kind of WMD's are they that can be fired as a handheld rocket-propelled grenade warhead? It sounds more like a weapon of self-destruction to me. I shall say this again for clarity: RPGs, which are battlefield munitions, are not WMDs.
The threat, as frequently expounded to us was that we could not sleep safe in our beds. I don't think an RPG warhead thousands of miles away should have that effect on us - furthermore, no weapon of mass destruction can go in a RPG warhead, merely because mass destruction tends to imply the destruction of everyone within many times the range of an RPG.
It is claimed that "it is not made clear whether the weapons contained biological or chemical agents". This man was a Lt-Colonel in the Iraqi army, was in command of many troops carrying these weapons, and couldn't even say what they were? What use are weapons if the troops do not know how to use them? How can one know how to use a weapon unless one knows what it is?
To sum up, this is a direct restatement of the front page of today's Telegraph. This is a paper which is known to have been extremely mendacious in the past on this very subject (they are the paper that fabricated the story that Galloway was in the pay of Saddam Hussein).
The BBC is repeating it - and in doing so, of course, lending it enormous credibility - without so much as a sanity check. I think I have performed that sanity check above, and it doesn't come out too well.
Why couldn't the BBC (whose staff know much more than me) perform this sanity check themselves, and either leave the matter unreported (as it deserves) or provide at least a conjectured counteropinion? I'm sure there are a whole bundle of respected journalists who'd be happy to give it one.