Sludge Report #142: Richard Butler Is A CIA Asset

Thursday, 1 August 2002, 4:13 pm
Article: C.D. Sludge

In This Edition: Senate Hearing On Iraq “Blitzkrieg” Now On - Richard Butler Is A U.S. Spy, A CIA Asset

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Sludge Report #142

Senate Hearing On Iraq “Blitzkrieg” Now On

Link:
http://www.c-span.org/watch/cspan_rm.asp

Live on web streaming TV, a Senate debate on whether the U.S. should attack Iraq using what a U.S. General just described as “Blitzkrieg” tactics.

But that is not the topic of this report. Earlier this evening (it is now late night in Washington D.C.) former UNSCOM chief Richard Butler gave evidence, evidence that the U.S. Senate needs to understand the background of.

Richard Butler Is A U.S. Spy, A CIA Asset

Former UNSCOM Head, Chief Iraqi United Nations Arms Inspector, and Australian Richard Butler is a CIA Asset.

Sludge thinks it is very important to remind people of this fact at this time.

Why? Because Richard Butler is the slimiest of all forms of spy. He is the hawk’s hawk. For decades he has posed as an international bureaucrat, a man of peace and a figure responsible for nuclear disarmament. He says he cares, convincingly.

But during this period he has been one of the principle players – under all U.S. administrations, Republican and Democrat - in creating a system of international relations which enables the ongoing threat of first strike nuclear warfare.

Even worse he has actively assisted the U.S. to pursue unilateral, i.e. illegal non-UN sanctioned military adventures, at the same time as he has encouraged this inherently dangerous world.

He is a deeply corrupt individual.

It was Richard Butler who, as UNSCOM head in 1998, provided the U.S. with its official justification for what Scoop Media called at the time the Second Gulf War.

It is now a matter of historical record that the CIA and Mossad completely compromised UNSCOM during the period.

But for some reason few people have been informed of this part of the Gulf War history, and even fewer seem to remember it.

In 1998-99 the story went like this.

1. Saddam Hussein says UNSCOM contains CIA and Mossad spies. Which it did.
2. UNSCOM’S Richard Butler says he is doing his job impartially.
3. Saddam Hussein kicks out UNSCOM. Nobody believes him that UNSCOM are spies.
4. UNSCOM Inspector Scott Ritter tells everybody that Richard Butler is a liar.
5. Richard Butler tells everybody that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.
6. Saddam Hussein says he hasn’t.
7. Richard Butler says he wants to go back to inspect.
8. Saddam says no, not unless the inspectors are not CIA spies.
9. The USA sets a deadline for Iraq to let in inspectors.
10. The deadline passes and the US starts bombing Iraq to make him let Richard Butler back in.
11. (Several months later) It is revealed in an inquiry that Richard Butler’s UNSCOM was riddled with CIA and Mossad spies. I.E. Saddam was always right.

Richard Butler’s comments today are particularly important.
His objective in giving evidence to the Senate is to provide an excuse to attack Iraq.

And he wants to do this without the U.S. Senate realising what it has done.

This is a trick that Butler specialises in, and of a sort that he has engaged in in the past.

Butler was the mastermind behind the Indefinite Extension Of The Non Proliferation Treaty, the diplomatic miracle that led to a nuclear armed Indian sub-continent, and which gave the right to nuclear powers to keep their nuclear weapons for ever.

The Senate therefore needs to be very cautious about what value they give to the tenets of any policy Richard Butler suggests.

Richard Butler today told the senate that they should “give Iraq one last chance” to let inspectors in. And only then attack.

This is the identical strategy to that employed in 1998. Namely, insist on weapons inspections. Then when Iraq refuses, bomb it.

This is an "apparently reasonable" position especially when it is one expressed by a “disarmament” expert like Richard Butler.

But if the U.S. Senate and house consent to this argument, they will be co-opted on to the same side of the page as the Iraq hawks.

Then when Saddam decides not to let the inspectors back, it will not just be the weapons of mass destruction that are at stake, now it will be the credibility and honour of the U.S. Senate and it's willingness to live up to its word.

This was an identical process that led to the NATO military fiasco in Kosovo. NATO, Blair, Clinton, Europe, everybody gave Slobodan Milosevic deadline after deadline to stop killing Kosovars.

Though very reluctant to do so initially, these political leaders eventually authorised the US-led NATO bombing operation against Yugoslavia, at least in part because otherwise what would be the value of their word?

It should be written somewhere in the bedrock of diplomatic parlance that deadlines are the enemy of peace.

And the U.S. Senate should remember this, and not let any of the Richard Butler "last chance" language leak into any house resolutions.

Finally, we can also assume that because Richard Butler is an asset of the CIA, that his views are also the views that the CIA, and views that Israel's Mossad are in accord with.

Therefore do not be surprised if this same argument, “one last chance” rhetoric, starts turning up in all the usual places.

Anti©opyright Sludge 2002

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Alastair Thompson

Scoop Publisher

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

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