"Dodgy tapes, grainy videos, great rhetoric. Where's the proof?" headline London Mirror, Feb. 6, 2003

"Powell's Case Against Iraq: Piling Up the Evidence," headline The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2003

February 6, 2003

Buy Microsoft stock. PowerPoint will be selling off the shelves after Powell's multi-media tour de force yesterday at the UN. "Voluminous, thorough, shocking," are the adjectives the "objective" American media are using to describe the U.S. Secretary of State's 90-minute exposé.

The presentation was right out of an episode of "24"; damning phone intercepts ("Clean out all of the areas… make sure there is nothing there.''"), dramatic surveillance video (a French-built fighter takes off), and numerous incriminating satellite photos of alleged WMD-related trucks pulling up to alleged WMD-related buildings. But by far the most dramatic moment came when Powell whipped out a small vial of fake anthrax, reminding the nation: "Less than a teaspoon of dried anthrax shut down the U.S. Senate." Iraq, he said, had thousands of liters of the stuff.

The stunt was one of the most audacious uses of a visual aid since George Sr. produced an actual baggie of crack in a televised address to the nation in September 1989. The crack, a monster Ziplock's worth, purchased for $2,400 by undercover DEA agents in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House, was meant to underscore the out-of-control nature of the drug menace. Even the sacred home of our commander in chief wasn't safe from the scourge.

What Bush failed to mention, and what most of the mainstream media never reported, was that the drug bust was a staged event. Agents lured the teenage seller from a DC neighborhood to the park for theatrical purposes: making the bust a half-truth symbolic of the former CIA head's duplicity.

It was VP Bush's own shock troops, you might remember, the Contras, who had been sending thousands of tons of cocaine into America with the help of their friends in the basement of the White House and in the backrooms of Langley. Much of the operation is documented in the U.S. Senate's own Kerry Report and has been recounted by numerous U.S. government whistleblowers (see GNN's own little multi-media presentation we call "Crack the CIA").

For his part, Powell milked the specter of the white dust to great effect, because, in a way, he had to. The ex-General knows as well as anyone that fear is the only real way TO sell a war, and that a terrorist attack on American soil is the only thing we're really scared of (not the abstract notion of battle thousands of miles away).

Does it matter that every U.S. law enforcement official involved in the anthrax letters case has said the suspect is most likely domestic, and that he/she appears to have stolen the spores from a U.S. government lab?

Does it matter that the U.S. government's own reports have stated that Saddam's anthrax vials could very well be stamped Made in America? The Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs revealed in 1994 that under Reagan and Bush Sr. the U.S. government and major U.S. corporations sold everything from anthrax to VX nerve gas to West Nile fever germs to Iraq right up until March 1992.

The report summarized: "These biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction ... It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program."

Does it matter a letter from CIA director George Tenet (who was sitting behind Powell during his presentation) to Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in October stated: "[Iraq] for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or ... chemical and biological weapons against the United States," but if "Saddam should conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions."?

Or does it matter that the BBC is reporting today an even more inconvenient development? The news organization says a leaked classified document written by British defense intelligence officers three weeks ago concluded that, "there has been contact between the two [Iraq and Al Qaeda] in the past. But [the document] assessed that any fledgling relationship foundered due to mistrust and incompatible ideologies."

Even The New York Times reported Sunday that sources inside U.S. intelligence agencies said, "they were baffled by the Bush administration's insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's network," they were upset that "the intelligence is obviously being politicized" and that "we've been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there." The UN's Hans Blix has also said he has seen no evidence Iraq had or planned to supply weapons to Al Qaeda.

Now, of course, there could be new evidence, like what the Times is reporting today: an intel breakthrough that has revealed "a cell of Al Qaeda operating out of Baghdad was responsible for the assassination of the American diplomat Laurence Foley last October."

The story could be true. Probably is. Al Qaeda, after all, has cells in more than 40 countries, according to U.S. intelligence. For all we know, they're camped out in Lafayette Park. Maybe a regime change is in order.

Anthony Lappé is Executive Editor of GNN.tv