Missing The Story

Thanks a lot, SBS:

Images of humiliated prisoners infuriated Iraqis and some predicted they would play into the hands of Saddam Hussein, whose chaotic trial has embarrassed the US-backed government.

The images were recorded at the same time as the Abu Ghraib 2004 images. The people responsible have already been punished. But SBS can't miss an opportunity to run down the West and try to get more Americans killed - and maybe some Australians as well.

Meanwhile, around the Arab world, the populace is reported as doing what they (and the MSM) do best - feigning outrage:

The images, which included an Iraqi prisoner banging his head against a metal door in desperation, came as a shock in the Arab world, even in staunchly pro-American Kuwait, where US-led troops crushed Saddam's troops in 1991.

Things were much better under Saddam, a luxury, in fact. You didn't even have to bang your own head against a door, your captors in Abu Graib would do it for you.

All this despite, this:

On one of the tapes, Hussein Kamel, a Saddam son-in-law who was in charge of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, speaks candidly about deceiving the UN.

"We did not reveal all that we have," Kamel says in a meeting with Saddam and his top henchmen. "Not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use: none of this was correct."

The tapes, broadcast yesterday on the ABC television network in the US, support claims that the 2003 "coalition of the willing" invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam was intent on developing WMD and could have provided them to terrorists.

The rest of the story's claim that Saddam 'warned' the US of upcoming terrorist strikes...

But Saddam is also heard telling aides that Iraq would not launch terror attacks on the West and that he had even warned the US and Britain that they were terrorist targets. "Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans and told the British as well," Saddam says on the tapes.

...is a total crock.

What he actually did was issue a veiled threat to terrorise the US or, more likely, supply materials to those who would:

"I think Hamed was there keeping the meeting minutes with one of them, that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction.

"What prevents this technology from developing and people from smuggling it? In the future, what would prevent that we see a booby-trapped car causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?

"This is coming, this story is coming, but not from Iraq."

Then on the tape, former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz tells Saddam:

"...a biological attack would be easy to arrange. "It's so simple that any biologist can make a bottle of germs and drop it into a water tower and kill 100,000," he says. "This is not done by a state. An individual can do it."

Yet the New.com headline is 'Saddam warned US of terror' while at The Australian it's 'Saddam warned US of terror attacks, secret tapes reveal'

Talk about double-speak, not just by Saddam but also by our own media.

-- Nick