Wisconsin Project/Iraq Watch

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>All:
>
>Does anyone here know about these organizations and the people behind them?
>Iraq Watch, at iraqwatch.org, is a subsidary project of the Wisconsin
>Project on Nuclear Arms control--wisconsinproject.org--and is agressively
>*pro-regime change*.  It looks as though there are only two people writing
>their analyses--Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz.
>
>Basically, I smell a rat.  But I've been wrong before.
>--
>Curtiss, likely just having PMS

*****   Published on Wednesday, July 11, 2001
Media Deception & Iraq
by Jeffrey Weiss

The Associated Press released a story on June 19, written by Edith 
Lederer, that was published in many newspapers in the United States, 
alleging that Iraq was importing weapons despite economic sanctions. 
I conducted a brief study to find out the genesis of the article.

The local Des Moines Register picked up the AP story from the wire 
and gave the title: "Iraq evades arms sanctions, U.N. reports say." 
The story was based upon findings by Gary Mihollin, director of the 
Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. According 
to the group, Iraq "evaded U.N. sanctions in the 90s importing 
weapons from companies in Eastern Europe and Russia."

The "UN Reports" cited in the headline were in fact, according to the 
text of the story, "unpublished" reports released by "U.S. 
arms-control researchers" who got them from "sources outside the 
United Nations."

The category of "weapons" provided by companies in the study is never 
identified; AP writer Edith Lederer, however, makes a reference to 
Iraq's "nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs."

On June 25 I called Edith Lederer in Washington, D.C. at the AP 
bureau. The conversation went like this:

Edith: "I can answer one question and give you 15 seconds of my time so hurry."

Jeffrey: "Have you ever seen the unpublished U.N. report that is the 
subject of the story?"

Edith: "No."

Jeffrey: "Have you ever read any of the text of this unpublished 
report that is the focus of your story."

Edith: "No."

Jeffrey: "Do you think I can get a copy of this report from Gary in Wisconsin?"

Edith: "I doubt there is any chance that could happen .. Gary is a friend."

Jeffrey: So how do we know this report exists?

Edith: You can read the story in Commentary magazine

Jeffrey: "I looked upon the web site and found out the Wisconsin 
Project's Iraq program is funded in part by the Pentagon. You 
describe them as a non-profit watchdog group.

Edith: "I have to go now, but you can find the story in the Commentary."

On June 26, I got an e-mail response from the Wisconsin Project on my 
request for the report. According to Kelly Motz, the "report (she put 
the words in quotes!) is "actually an article in Commentary magazine."

Commentary, for those who don't know, is published by the American 
Jewish Committee. The July/August issue includes an article, 
"Shopping with Saddam Hussein," by Milhollin and Motz. The piece 
relies upon "confidential" reports before 1998 from "UN inspectors" 
ostensibly interviewed by the authors but never identified.

If the report was written, it was during the years the U.S. and U.K. 
acknowledged they had stacked UNSCOM with intelligence officers. A 
further irony is that the top weapons-inspector at the time of this 
report, former Marine Scott Ritter, says Iraq is "qualitatively 
disarmed" and that "there can be no honor in a policy that that leads 
to the death, through malnutrition and untreated disease, of 5,000 
children under the age of 5 every month." (Boston Globe, 3-9-2000)

The AP story describes the Wisconsin Project as a "nonprofit 
watch-dog group" but fails to include a passage from the 
organization's web site: "In the year 2000, the Project launched a 
joint effort with the Pentagon to improve export controls in the 
former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe."

The story gets better.

A previous report from the Wisconsin Project alleging Iraq had 
carried out a successful nuclear test was published in newspapers 
across the United States on June 10. On June 11, the chief UN arms 
inspector Hans Blix said there had been no nuclear tests and that 
"the information is totally wrong." Terry Wallace, professor of 
Geosciences at the University of Arizona, said there was no reason to 
believe the story is "anything but a hoax." Reuters distributed this 
piece that was picked up by a small number of newspapers in the U.S.

Every year UN agencies such as UNICEF and the Food and Agricultural 
Organization (FAO) release reports providing statistics of the deaths 
of children in Iraq under economic sanctions but they don't appear in 
many papers (see the work of Project Censored). Unfortunately, "UN 
reports" from the Wisconsin Project are deemed legitimate.

Jeffrey J. Weiss <JWeiss at afsc.org> is the Education Director/Central 
Region for the American Friends Service Committee, 4211 Grand 
Avenue/Des Moines, IA 50310515-274-4851, ext. 16 or 515-255-2465.

<http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0711-06.htm>   *****
-- 
Yoshie

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