Former U-N inspector (Hans Blix): Americans were 'witch hunters' in lead-up to war

[sabra]

http://www.wbay.com/Global/story.asp?S=6213133

Former U-N inspector: Americans were 'witch hunters' in lead-up to war

LONDON Former chief U-N weapons inspector Hans Blix says the Americans were "witch hunters" in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, looking for anything that backed up the case for war.

Hans Blix tells Britain's Sky News that the U-K exercised its own spin, too. He says the British government replaced question marks with exclamation marks when compiling a now-discredited report on Iraq's weapons programs.

In the interview -- recorded over the weekend and broadcast today -- Blix calls the war illegal. He says the only good to come out of it was the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.

Blix says there are similarities in how the U-S is now handling Iran, but he suspects some in Washington are also tired of what he calls "military adventures.

[PDJane]

1. That's extravagantly hopeful........

Since the US economy is a war junkie......

[Javaman]

2. What floats?

Little rocks?

She's a witch!!! She's a witch!!!

[BootinUp]

3. But he turned us into newts! nt/t

[kenny blankenship]

4. Gee Hans, I wish you could have said something about that nice 'n loud BEFORE the war started

You might have told the world how they were leaning on you and how you couldn't find evidence of WMD programs...
Oh well, next time. Now that you know what the stakes are and how things work, next time you'll do better right?

[Saturday]

5. Right On!!

He was a sheeple BEFORE the war.

[eagler]

6. As I recall he was screaming that there were no WMDs,but

the bushies would not listen or didn't want to listen

[kenny blankenship]

8. I think you may have him confused with Scott Ritter

Blix and his UNMOVIC inspection team took up the search after Ritter's team found what there was left to find. Blix found nothing but a few empty warheads in a dump that could have--had they not been discarded--been used as chem weapons, and there was also the earth shattering discovery (!!!) that Iraq's remaining rockets could fly farther than allowed if they were carrying nothing as a payload. That is to say he found nothing. But he declined to make the reasonable inference that after all this time of finding nothing that there probably was nothing left to find. The US and UK leaned on him through the Security Council and he responded mostly by promising to lean harder on the Iraqis. At some point with war looming he ought to have laid it on the table that there was no case for war based on the WMD argument. Instead Blix just parroted the Bush line that "Iraq must do more than it has done so far". El-Baradai of the IAEA was more forthright in his certification that Iraq's atomic facilities were still under IAEA lock and key. Scott Ritter, the screamer you're thinking of probably, did the right thing in vocally stating the case that if there were any forbidden materials left they were of no importance because they were so degraded, so few, and scattered and discarded. Ritter's team found what was left to find after Gulf War One, and Ritter was being conservative, it turns out, when he said that 95% of whatever Saddam Hussein ever had was destroyed years before the coming of the second war (and the possibly remaining 5% was degraded trash not worth worrying about). I'm sure Hans Blix thought he was doing the right thing to make the UN look like it was being super tough with Iraq and thus defending its credibility in the situation. However what he did was to enable Bush's implacable demand for a war rationale. It was a sin of omission IMO--but a pretty huge sin nonetheless. He had every reason to know what Bush was up to--a child could see Bush was insisting on movable goalposts that Iraq was NOT SUPPOSED to ever reach-- and he, Blix, failed to say the way Scott Ritter said, that the claim that Iraq was a WMD threat was unsupported. That meant that Iraq was a "violator" who could be dealt with as Bush pleased. The consequences were predictable as they have been murderous. In his banally bureaucratic timidity, Hans Blix was Bush's accomplice.

[PDJane]

14. No. Hans Blix was loud and clear.

He claimed that there were no weapons there, that the US, while being willing to take time after the fact, wasn't willing to wait to go to war.

Hans Blix was also the one who stated that the UN was under the impression that the US would have to obey international law and come back for permission to invade Iraq, which they did not do.

It wasn't that he wasn't talking. It was that the media wasn't reporting what he said inside the US.

[Roland99]

7. He pretty much did (just not in a boisterous way...just stating the facts)

Jan. 27, 2003
http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/Bx27.htm

Feb. 14, 2003
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/14/iraq/main540681.shtml

Mar. 7, 2003
http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/SC7asdelivered.htm

[kenny blankenship]

10. No he did not. His new words liken our actions to a witch hunt

a witch hunt is bad right? We know "witch hunting" is bad because, as sane rational people, we understand there are no tests for witches. Even if there are people who call themselves witches or can be tortured into confessing that they are witches, there are no known effects from "witchcraft". Thus, witch hunts or witch trials are arbitrary affairs in which people who've been given the power of judgment over others, decide, purely according to how their own whim and pleasure, whether the accused is guilty of witchcraft or not, of a crime that has no objective existence. A witch hunt is as far from justice as a court proceeding can be. You don't need 5 years of perspective and reflection to understand that a witch hunt is the perverted image of justice if, as a sane and rational person, you've somehow been part of one. Mr. Blix was more than just peripherally involved in this witch hunt he speaks of. He was Secretary to the Inquisitor General. As I said in my post above, a child could see that Bush's whim and pleasure was that Iraq should never satisfy his demand that it prove itself free of any WMD witchcraft--how much clearer must it have been for an adult in Blix's position! Whatever Iraq did or said Bush said it was not enough. Iraq was required to prove an impossibility--that there could not possibly still be WMDs in their possession, or face total destruction as a nation state. No matter what you do to try to prove it's not possible that you possess something, a hostile judge may insist that it's still possible. The WMDs and WMD factories were still there they were just underground. Or they were constantly moving. They might appear and disappear in satellite photographs, and they might be disguised, looking for all the world like balloon factories and ice cream trucks. There was no end to the ways Iraq was deceiving us, we were told. Sane rational people understood what was going on. And yet at every turn Mr. Blix reiterated his statement that "Iraq must do more."

I'm sure he was sane and rational at the time. He simply failed as a human being to stand up and put aside his job title and say to Bush whatever threat Iraq may pose in possibility is a flyspeck compared to the tidal wave of mass murder you are imminently about to unleash. DON'T DO IT!

I am saying that he should have told the world (what he surely understood) that the US government was conducting a witch hunt, and he definitely did not do that when it could have mattered. Now he tells us. Well Hans that's a going to be a great consolation to the widows and orphans of Iraqis killed in the last 4 years and the families of however many thousands of U.S. servicemembers eventually die over there.

[Roland99]

12. It's much easier to make such comments given that hindsight is 20/20.

[kenny blankenship]

13. I'm not saying anything about Blix that I didn't say and feel in late 2002

He was filing his scrupulously detailed reports which I don't fault him for--and he was also participating in a murderous parody of a legal proceeding, a sham trial. You could see him straining under the role, and yet you could see him continue to participate without rebelling against it.

[Rydz777]

9. "the Americans"

"the Americans" sounds very monolithic. I wish Hans Blix would recognize that not all Americans supported the invasion of Iraq. I don't go around saying "the Swedes" supplied Hitler with raw materials during WWII. Some Swedes did not.

[Briar]

11. So there were good Swedes

as there were good Germans and good Americans and Brits. Unfortunately none of this goodness could stop the evil from being done. That's the challenge for those of us who oppose violence and war.