Part Two

Here is Part Two of my interview with Joanne Tucker, producer and director of the film Breakdown.

M: In the film, you seem to intimate that the US government itself was responsible for the anthrax attacks. What do you think really happened with all of that? We haven't heard much about it and it seems that most people have forgotten.

J: I wasn't directly intimating that our government was responsible for the anthrax attacks of late 2001. What the film shows (in part one, The Message) is Colin Powell making the case for War on Iraq in February 2003 at the UN Security Council, in which our leadership was stating in an unequivocal way that Iraq possessed WMDs.

Powell, always speaking on behalf of his bosses, stressed throughout the key speech that these were not assertions but statements of solid fact. In the film I show one of those statements made by Powell flanked by the Head of the CIA and the US Ambassador to the UN, while holding up a vial of white (probably johnson's baby) powder before the Council and the world's TV cameras:

'This forced several hundred people to undergo emergency medical treatment and killed two postal workers just from an amount, just about THIS quantity that was inside of an envelope. Iraq declared 8500 litres of anthrax..'

The wording is very very clever and very very typical of the government and media persuasion campaign leading to war. I don't put the entire onus on Colin Powell, although he as others allowed himself to be used and I'm sure he as others, is not proud of that chapter.

Notice how Powell is speaking of the anthrax attacks directly after 9/11 that made headlines on every US news show linking it to Iraq or Arabs, and in the very next sentence, he talks of Iraq. But as usual with the Administration's propaganda build-up, it's all about juxtaposition (putting unrelated statements next to each other but leaving it up to the listener, to make the direct links that don't exist.) and omission.

He puts two statements together that are completely unrelated. It would have been much more relevant for example (but not good for a case for War on an oil-rich Islamic heartland state) if Powell had said in statement 2: 'A 52-year-old American belonging to the Aryan Nations, a US-based militant white separatist group, who in 1995 and 1998 was arrested by the FBI for possessing bubonic plague and convicted of threatening to wipe out the city of Las Vegas and the state of Nevada with military grade anthrax to which he had access, has not been determined to be responsible for the so far timely but unaccounted for anthrax attacks of late 2001.'

Powell's other party trick (the omission) is in saying: 'Iraq declared 8500 litres of anthrax..' Yeah. In 1991, before those 8500 litres were destroyed under UN supervision and documented by the UN (again, not mentioned.) No anthrax, biological or chemical weapons were ever found in Iraq. However, our government IS fedexing bubonic plague anthrax vx and other highest-level toxicity germs around the country to send to Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California (and others but primarily Livermore) where in 2004, it began a brand new expanded biological and chemical weapons programme with newly released funds from Congress and taxpayers' billions.

As for accountability? Weird that the Anthrax attacks story disappeared from the network airwaves as quickly as it had massively appeared in 2001, and was never mentioned by officials again. Could that have anything to do with the fact that the weapons grade anthrax spores being sent to TV celebrities was found to originate in an Army bio terrorism facility near Maryland? Newspaper exposures did not remotely receive the same level of TV buzz again or follow up of the investigations in the public interest.

M: I was shocked to see some of the footage of Jimmy Carter you put in the film. He really sounded a lot like our current president in regards to Middle Eastern policy. Do you think US Foreign Policy is better or worse depending upon whether it is a Democrat or a Republican in office? How is Bill Clinton that different than George W. Bush, for example?

J: Carter's very famous statement in his 1980 State of the Union Address: " Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force…" has to be understood in the context of US superpower ambitions and designs on the Persian Gulf region. It's irrelevant that Carter's a Democrat. He has since come clean about a lot of the hypocrisy and double standards.

When it comes to the Persian Gulf and Israel, Democrats and Republican are one and the same party. The solution does not have to be military or exclusively unjust. America can get all the oil it needs and all the friends it needs in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East without backing (Arab or Israeli) dictatorships or ethnocentric regimes in the region, without giving the most foreign assistance in grants weapons and contracts to Israel to the tune of more than $3 trillion dollars since 1973, to continue to fuel an unjust conflict where right and wrong are as clear as day to both Israelis and Palestinians, the vast majority of both of whom want to live in one country in peace. United States policies will not allow peace in the region, period.

Israelis recognize and write about this regularly in their press, as do neighbouring countries particularly Lebanon, especially since the spectacular failure of last Summer's Washington conceived, Israeli-executed War on Lebanon in 2006 which killed more than one thousand civilians and destroyed an entire country's infrastructure.

America can get all the oil and Arab or Israeli friends it needs, both of whom admire US values, striving to save democracy in their own countries so often blocked by US policies, without creating al Qaeda and spreading violence in the world's most sought after region throughout history, without diverting multiple billions of American taxpayer's money (supporters of long term injustice in the ME love to talk about small government and lower taxes but say nothing about Americans' money being flushed down the toilet in the cause of invasions, war and unjust escalations) to create an ever-growing arms race, pouring money and wmds into Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to name a few of our closest allies.

Only when Americans are informed about their country's policies will they correctly influence and lead their politicians' policies and decisions rather than be led by Arms, Israel or Oil lobbyists on the issues.

M: You mention Israel a lot in this answer and that leads me to the one area of the film with which I disagreed. The Israeli-Palestinian segment...It seemed a little one sided. Was that on purpose? What is your view on Hamas?

J: Hamas is a national liberation movement that uses its popularity in the political arena, an armed military wing and terror operations to achieve aims which for Palestinians are enshrined in long-passed but never enforced UN international laws and resolutions.

Which liberation movement in history apart from Gandhi's millions-strong non-violence movement in India, a luxury the Palestinians don't have being denied movement from one town to the next, connections to one another, their homes gardens or farm lands when annexed by the Army and even return to their families and residencies on a regular and arbitrary basis, so which independence or liberation movement in history has not used terror against more destructive sophisticated and widespread state terror, to achieve freedom?

Terror is not a one-way street and it is deeply tragic not only to Israeli families and victims who lose their loved ones but to Palestinians. Palestinians are the minority but Palestinian civilians have been killed in the 50 year+ conflict as a deliberate policy of state terror to force a settlement on Israeli terms (which has never worked) and in far greater numbers. Israeli settlers walk around Palestinian majority residential areas (such as East Jerusalem and Hebron) with M16s that they are free to use, but the more than a third of Palestinians killed by Israel's Military are under 16 according to the UN. The vast majority of Palestinians killed in the double digits daily are unarmed civilians. Israel has become great (the very best) at occupying civilians and capturing detaining or fighting unarmed civilians while at the same time, becoming extremely bad at the Art of War or strategy, because the Occupation is corrupting Israeli society and creating profoundly avoidable tragedies on both sides.

This is the model that the US is now emulating in Iraq and across the so-called New Middle East. Dr Rice called last Summer’s War on Lebanon ‘the birth pangs of a new Middle East.’ If this is the new Middle East, say the vast majority of people including Israelis who live there, give us the old unjust paradigm but where the violence was predictable and contained, any day of the year.

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