Letters to the Editor
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To get a better understanding of what precipitated the invasion of Iraq, I think Salon readers might be interested in the role of German Intelligence
John Goetz, a German journalist, has been investigating the story of "Curveball", the Iraqi chemical engineer who fed a load of lies about Saddam's biological wmd to an operative of German Intelligence. The Germans transmitted this "information" to the CIA and, apparently, it was on the basis of the fabrication of this ONE man that Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made his misleading statement to the UN on 5th February 2003. I was looking at BBC2 "Newnight" - Jeremy Paxman - last evening where all of this was discusses. Powell was duped, apparently, while the CIA and Britain's MI6 seem to have had very confused lines of communication with Germany in those fateful months before Iraq was invaded.
Further information on this hideous debacle is available on SPIEGELonline international which is in English, although it is a German publication. Gary Kamiya uses the word "hysteria", which the Greeks used only to apply to women, in regard to the reaction to Jeremiah Wright's pulpiteering but the invasion of Iraq has stirred up anti-American feeling throughout the world, some of it genuine and some of it opportunistic. German Intelligence is not entirely blameless either, the British government (Labour) narrowly defeated an Opposition motion in the House of Commons yesterday on a complete review of Britain's involvement in the invasion but, despite this stalling, the truth will emerge, little by little.
People of more than 80 different nationalities were killed in New York city on 9/ll and Jeremiah Wright's thunderings took no account o that. If the word "hysteria" is to be used of the reaction to that pastor's effusions, I wonder why Gary Kamiya did not concede that Wright's preaching is even more hysterical. A willing suspension of disbelief is required to accept that Wright's words were anything but baleful at a time that the NY emergency services were scrabbling through the rubble searching for the pathetic remains of those who died in the slaughter. He is not an Old Testament preacher -"an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth", although some have sought to represent him as such and, as I understand it, the message that Jesus brought to the world was forgiveness, difficult though it might be.
I did not write this with Jeremiah Wright uppermost in my mind but to recommend SPIEGEL online international to any readers interested in finding out more about what led up to the war that has cost you trillions of dollars, 4000 dead American soldiers and countless Iraqis, revenge attacks in Madrid and London, 5 million Iraqi refugees eking out a subsistence living in Jordan and Syria, not to mention the pernicious effect the war is having on your election 2008.