Iraq word games

ANDREW BOLT

War of the words
Andrew Bolt
23feb05

While Iraq triumphantly builds democracy, we are mired in a semantic war over the difference between an interview and an interrogation.

THANK heavens the rest of the world has moved on. Yes, Iraq has held its first free election, Lebanon has big rallies to demand freedom too, and even Saudi Arabia had to stage council elections of a sort.

Now Time even reports that leaders of Iraq's "insurgents" are negotiating with Washington to end their terror attacks and make peace with freed Iraq.
But back in the trenches of Australia, the Iraq war is still fought by fanatics who, like Left-behind Japanese soldiers, don't know they've lost. Up they bobbed again last week, blazing away to ping the Howard Government - surely, this time! - as a bunch of slimeballs who lied us into an unjust war.

Rod Barton is a respected microbiologist who served on the Iraq Survey Group, which has searched Iraq for the weapons of mass destruction even Barton once believed were there.
But last week, Barton the bomb searcher became Barton the bomb thrower, with the ABC's Four Corners giving him 45 unchallenged minutes to do his very worst to the Howard Government.
He went for it. The Government had been "dishonest", he said, when it claimed after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that no Australians had interrogated Iraqis there, or, it implied, anywhere else.
Not so, declared Barton. "I was involved." He'd interrogated one of 100 or so high-value prisoners at Camp Cropper.
What's more, prisoners held there may have been abused, given he'd seen mugshots of two with apparent abrasions on their faces - abrasions their guards claimed they'd suffered resisting arrest. Now he worried that another prisoner who he'd been told died of a brain tumour had in fact been beaten to death.

Barton also complained the prisoners had poky cells. The scientists and soldiers among them should be let go, because "they haven't done anything wrong".
And he accused the ISG of censoring its reporting of its failed hunt for Iraq's WMD.
"Some of the things we couldn't write about at all," he claimed. For instance, the ISG was "not allowed" to say that aluminium tubes found in Iraq were not part of Saddam's nuclear weapons program, as the CIA had said. Nor was it allowed in its interim report last March to debunk allegations that Saddam had mobile trailers to make biological weapons.
Small points, but almost damning. But let's test Barton's claims - if only for the novelty of the exercise.

First, did Barton "interrogate" (his word) a prisoner at Camp Cropper, or just "interview" (the Government's word) one instead? What's the diff, anyway?
Actually, there is indeed a "clear distinction", our Chief of Army, Lt-General Peter Leahy, told a Senate estimates committee last week. And said Barton should have known it.

Leahy read out from the army's "interrogation handbook" the official definition of an interview and an interrogation. He noted that the difference was that a person being questioned had a right not to answer and could leave. At Camp Cropper, prisoners were "not going to be able to leave detention", but "may be able to leave the interview".
Brigadier Steve Meekin, who led the first group of Australians in the ISG, told the committee every Australian at Camp Cropper was given an order: "The guidance was if it was an interrogation, they were not to be involved; they were to withdraw and report that to their contingent commander."
Defence Department head Ric Smith summed up: "I believe that what Mr Barton witnessed was not an interrogation - because he did not leave . . .
"He would have left the room, I expect, because they were his orders."
In fact, a senior Defence Department official, Michael Pezzullo, told the committee the Australian contingent commander spoke to Barton soon after his claimed "interrogation" of a prisoner in 2003.
"The contingent commander specifically recalls Mr Barton discussing the relaxed and casual nature of this interview, and that Mr Barton had not raised any concerns at the time regarding the conduct of the interview or over the treatment of the individual in question."
Pezzullo said the prisoner Barton was worrying about seemed to be Dr Rihab Taha, infamous as "Dr Germ", the woman who for 20 years headed much of Saddam's secret research into biological weapons.
(Barton this week suggested he had instead interviewed a man, and denied being ordered not to do interrogations. Strangely, he even claimed credit for calling a meeting of Camp Cropper interrogators to create a "new organisational structure". What authority did this biochemist think he had for this work?)
As for the hardships endured by poor Rihab and fellow inmates such as "Chemical Ali", former ISG boss David Kay last week noted they at least had clean cells and air-conditioning, while their guards lived in tents with no cooling. They also "were not shackled" and "interrogations" were more like "a professional conversation".

Perhaps that's why Barton, in reply to a Defence Department questionnaire, last year wrote: "I did not observe any mistreatment of detainees at Camp Cropper," complaining only about their cells and lack of exercise. But that was then.
Are these really the final proofs of the sheer rottenness of this lying government and its evil war?
Believe me, Barton's allegations get no better.
The prisoner he suspects, without hard evidence, may have been beaten to death? It's Mohammed Al Azmirli, one of the weapon researchers who apparently "haven't done anything wrong", but who an ISG report says researched poisons such as ricin right until the war, and tested them on humans.

And what about his claim that the ISG was banned from mentioning the embarrassing trailers and tubes?
In fact, back in January last year David Kay, who'd just quit as the ISG head, had already said neither the trailers nor tubes seemed part of a WMD program. True, the interim report by his successor, Charles Duelfer, two months later ruled nothing in or out, but Duelfer said he was just six weeks in the job, and wanted to review the ISG's work before giving findings.
But by October, his team had written a final report which not only said all Barton desired about trailers and tubes, but added "Iraq's WMD capability . . . was essentially destroyed on 1991", even if Saddam hoped to reboot it.

Some censorship. Is it just possible Barton went off half-cocked, sniffing little evils that were never there?
So here we are, firing at shadows and brawling over semantics, while in the Middle East millions of people build a new democracy on the ruins of tyranny. They build tomorrow, while we still war over yesterday.
bolta@heraldsun.com.au