Iraq's Missing Billions: Scott Lucas on Al Jazeera's Inside Story

This week the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction reported that the Pentagon cannot account for almost 95% of $9.1 billion allocated by the United Nations, from revenues from the sale of Iraqi oil and gas, after the Iraq War in 2003. There are still no records for $2.6 billion.

I discussed the issue on Inside Story alongside Mundher Adhami, an analyst on Iraqi affairs, and Jeremy Carver, a board member of Tranparency International.

Iraq: The Billions of Disappearing US Reconstruction Dollars

Iraq: British Documents "2003 War Was Illegal" (Sengupta)

For years I have tracked the story of how the British Government, led by Prime Minister Tony Blair, twisted and even created documents to declare that the military action against Iraq in 2003 was legal under international law.



It is an indication of how far we have supposedly moved beyond that war that almost no notice is paid any more to this issue. Yet it is still very much a live question. Kim Sengupta wrote for The Independent of London last week:

Documents about how the legal case for the Iraq war was formulated by the Blair government seven years ago were made public [last Wednesday], revealing the grave doubts of the Attorney General over impending military action.

The drafts of legal advice and letters sent to the Prime Minister by Lord Goldsmith had been kept secret despite repeated calls for them to be published. Yesterday they were released by the Chilcot Inquiry into the war, after the head of the Civil Service, Sir Gus O'Donnell, stated that the "long-standing convention" for such documents to be kept confidential had to be waived because the issue of the legality of the Iraq war had a "unique status".

It had been known that Lord Goldsmith had initially advised the government that an attack on Iraq would not be legal without a fresh United Nations resolution. However, just before the US-led invasion he presented a new set of opinions saying that a new resolution was not needed after all.

Tony Blair appeared to show his irritation with the warnings over military actions, saying in a handwritten note: "I just do not understand this." In another note, a Downing Street aide said: "We do not need further advice on this matter."

In the documents released yesterday, Lord Goldsmith repeatedly stated that an invasion without a fresh UN resolution would be illegal, and warned against using Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD (weapons of mass destruction) as a reason for attack. Two months later, in autumn 2002, Downing Street published a dossier that stressed the alleged WMD threat in an attempt to boost public support for war.

In a letter to Mr Blair on 30 July 2002, marked "Secret and Strictly personal – UK Eyes only", Lord Goldsmith stated: "In the absence of a fresh resolution by the Security Council which would at least involve a new determination of a material and flagrant breach [by Iraq] military action would be unlawful. Even if there were such a resolution, but one which did not explicitly authorise the use of force, it would remain highly debatable whether it legitimised military action – but without it the position is, in my view, clear."

In his letter, copied to the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, the Attorney General warned that any form of military assistance offered to the US, however limited, such as "the use of UK bases, the provision of logistical or other support ... would all engage the UK's responsibility under international law. We would therefore need to be satisfied in all cases as to the legality of the use of force."

Lord Goldsmith continued: "The development of WMD is not in itself sufficient to indicate such imminence. On the basis of the material which I have been shown ... there would not be any grounds for regarding an Iraqi use of WMD as imminent."

Successive inquiries into the Iraq war, by Lord Hutton, Lord Butler and now Sir John Chilcot, have heard repeated claims that Lord Goldsmith was subsequently persuaded to change his advice into the legality of military action by Mr Blair and members of his government.

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American Media Analysis: When is Torture Not Torture? (Hint: If the US is Involved....)

There has been a fuss over the last week over a study, pursued by students at Harvard University, that found:

"From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture....By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture....In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator."

Perhaps the most striking finding of the study was that the apparent catalyst for a shift in terminology was the revelation in early 2004 that the US military and private contractors were abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times was so unsettled by the criticism that it put out a statement, “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice [waterboarding] vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

Perhaps more provocatively, Keller indicated that the entire Harvard report was an unhelpful distraction: “I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious.”

The conclusion of the study:

The results of this study demonstrate that there was a sudden, significant, shift in major print media’s treatment of waterboarding at the beginning of the 21st century.

The media’s modern coverage of waterboarding did not begin in earnest until 2004, when the first stories about abuses at Abu Ghraib were released. After this point, articles most often used words such as “harsh” or “coercive” to describe waterboarding or simply gave the practice no treatment,

rather than labeling it torture as they had done for the previous seven decades.

There is also a significant discrepancy between the point of view offered by news articles and opinion pieces published in these papers. Opinion pieces were much more likely to characterize waterboarding as torture, suggesting that the private opinion of the editors and contributors did not align with the formal face the papers were presenting in their objective reporting.

Yet what caused this change in waterboarding’s treatment over time? Our data does not give any specific reason for this shift, but merely points to the existence of this change in syntax. A piece published by the public editor of The NY Times, Clark Hoyt, suggests that these choices were made deliberately by journalists and their editors, perhaps in an effort to remain neutral in the debate going on in the U.S. If the classification of waterboarding as torture is unclear, Hoyt suggests, then it is irresponsible for journalists to preempt this debate by labeling it as such.

The willingness of the newspapers to call the practice torture prior to 2004 seems to refute this claim. According to the data, for almost a century before 2004 there was consensus within the print media that waterboarding was torture. Yet once reports of the use of waterboarding by the CIA and other abuses by the U.S. surfaced, this consensus no longer held, despite the fact that the editors themselves seem to have still been convinced that waterboarding was torture, often labeling it as such in their editorials.

The classification of waterboarding is not unclear; the current debate cannot be so divorced from its historical roots. The status quo ante was that waterboarding is torture, in American law, international law,20 and in the newspapers’ own words. Had the papers not changed their coverage, it would still have been called torture. By straying from that established norm, the newspapers imply disagreement with it, despite their claims to the contrary. In the context of their decades‐long practice, the newspaper’s sudden equivocation on waterboarding can hardly be termed neutral.

Read the full report....