Big Splashes Across the Pond

This could be big. Really big. Remember the documents discovered in Baghdad rubble that "proved" antiwar MP George Galloway was in Saddam's pocket to the tune of $10M or so?

Sez the Mirror (thx, MaxSpeak):

But the documents, offered by former Republican Guard General Salah Abdel Rasool, contain obvious mistakes.

A scrawl claimed to be Mr Galloway's signature on "receipts" has no similarity to his real one ... glaring misspellings of Iraqi officers' names and mistakes in the title of Saddam's son Qusay, also said to have signed the document.

Why is it big? One, it's a major journalistic fraud with top-level career and policy implications. Two, a lot of war-justifying and France-flogging eyebrow raisers spilled out of those same troves of documents that remarkably didn't get incinerated when the building burned and were right on top when the reporters arrived. Psy-ops, for sure ... but whose?

Meanwhile, on the WMD front (where Washington has been retreating for weeks, but London had been standing firm) ... Foreign Minister Jack Straw is no longer standing firm. Now it seems he'll be surprised if anything ever turns up, but the war is still justified by, um, ... by something or other.

The Guardian has a lovely side-piece, "dire threat to minor concern in six easy stages".

This is big too, because Straw and Blair took such a firm stand ... and because on these grounds Mr. Straw virtually buried his French counterpart in a projectile barrage of spittle ... and because other MP's are tabling resolutions and looking in to it.

And the French are coming after at the Bush administration, calling put-up-or-shut-up on a whole series of apparently manufactured defamations (eagerly lapped up by warbloggers and Wurlitzers alike). More psy-ops, more disinsinnuendo. There's an old saying in Texas ... something about "lower than a snake's belly".

WaPo has the story, but for some reason I especially like the UPI follow-up headline: White House denies anti-French snipes.

These might get lost in the flood of other exposed lies, past and present. OTOH, there may be a storm a-brewin'... I can feel it in my bones.

RonK, Seattle

Posted May 15, 2003 06:33 PM | Comments (169)