The folks at ABC are probably biased and have an agenda to push. Considering that I do not ideologically fit into liberal/conservative nor Democrat/Republican, I have thus been offended over the years by reports on Fox, BBC, CNN, CBS, etc. Generally speaking, I have yet to find any news outlet that is fair and objective. They all bend their reports to fit an agenda. One thing I like when I listen to Air America (liberal talk radio) and Salem (conservative talk radio) is that at least they are honest about their bias and agenda-pushing, which makes me have a higher opinion of them than Fox and CNN.

Here is a fun excercise to try with a news article that I made up for myself a while ago. It does not help so well to detect blatant changing of the truth or intentionally leaving out facts, but sometimes it helps find agendas. It works well for liberal bias and conservative bias and probably any other bias. Next time you read a news article, copy/paste it and rewrite it simply by removing all adjectives other than concrete numbers and colours. Also try to remove any conjecturing: delete anything that predicts the future and delete anything tries to explain past events without concrete measurable data to back it up, especially quotes from "experts". Then see if what you get out of the new article feels different than the original. Sometimes it does nothing to the article. But other times it reveals that the article either chose loaded words and quotations that steered your reaction or actually had nothing of substance to report at all!

Edit: Note that my comments on ABC are not really about this specific story since I haven't been following it. Just pointing out a hypothetical reason why they could do so.

What I find amazing is that these "tapes" float up at the exact moment when the White House is hit over Guantanamo again. This whole soap opera is getting quite tiring:

Iraq footed the bill for 9/11! (where's the bill?)

Wait, no - Iraq has WMDs! (where are WMDs?)

Look over there - Iraq was hiding WMDs and not complying with the UN inspections! (now it's - where are the tapes?)

To answer the question of why no one cares: because you can expect people to watch a stupid show only for so long before they get bored with constant lies and media distractions, supported by zero proof and numbheaded rhetoric along the lines of "WMDs bad! Iraq be evil! You Jane, me Tarzan!"

Unless it's the US, right? Because that is exactly what we did when we invaded Iraq.

Bingo!

There are two main reasons that've been offered by the US about why they've invaded Iraq.

1) Saddam has WMDs. Okay, you've got tapes that show he had them ten years ago. Let's ignore the Downing St memo that claims that intelligence was tailored to suit those who wanted war. Where are the weapons of mass destruction?

2) Humanitarian concerns. Saddam was an evil bastard. However, you don't see Bradley tanks rolling into the Vatican and into Catholic churches over their concealment and protection of paedophiles, you don't see Marines storming sweatshops in Thailand and releasing slaves, and you don't see the US intervening in the wars being fought in Africa by armies of children.

The other thing that confuses me is that Americans (and this is a generalisation) ask 'does anyone outside the US care about this, it's important'. In Iraq at the moment, 90% of troops are from the US or the UK. South Korea has a large presence, though not in the scale of the US or UK, and Italy and Poland, the fourth and fifth largest presences, are withdrawing.

This war is yours. Why, exactly, should we, the people not involved in it, care what happens to you because of it?

@avator: The government is downplaying these tapes, and the 80% of the rest of the tapes that they took from Saddam saying they are historically interesting but irrelvant so we arn't going to waste our time translating them.

@Shikari: Germany is involved in Iraq, Australia is involed in Iraq, Denmark is now rethinking its involvement in Iraq since they have been banned from helping. America is not talking about these tapes... Also that paper that you said they wrote in 2000, I thought they wrote it in 98... You know, when america failed to respond appropriatly to the terrorist attacks against the embassies which later led to more attacks against the u.s. (like in Yemen)

@sylphas: I guess you forgot about the whole Vote that took place two years before the invasion that said the UN has the right to use the use of force to force compliance with the UN sanctions. The later vote was weather or not to actually comitt UN forces to the job or not.

I'm proud my country (Spain) called the troops back. Call us cowards or whatever, but it was a mistake to participate in this war.

Do you really believe that if the White House had tapes that could possibly lead to the discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it would've ignored them while facing accusations of forging intelligence data? From Negroponte's spokeperson's statement:



This says that the tapes were translated, reviewed, and found lacking anything of practical interest. In other words: this is old news that no one cares about, nor has any reason to care about.

Iraq had biological weapons? It admitted that itself after the Gulf war.

Iraq was obstructing the UN inspections? There are plenty of reports from those inspections documenting the obstructions mounted by Iraq.

No one needs Saddam to say these things out loud to know these things. And the bottom line is: there are no WMDs to date, despite the lack of any obstructions, and the tapes are the equivalent of necroing an old web forum thread.

But I am sure that Rep. Pete Hoekstra will keep waving these tapes around, revealing more and more "discoveries" found in them. To paraphrase him quoted in the ABC article: "Saddam liked toys that go 'boom' and hid them all over his backyard." Nice analysis there, Pete, your Child Psychology 101 is really paying off at last.



Actually, as far as I remember, the vote was concerning whether to give the UN Security Council mandate, which is required for any military action against one country-member of the UN (Iraq in this case) to be taken by another country-member (the US in this case) and to be considered "legit" according to the UN Charter. The US resolution drafts, proposed to the UNSC on that matter, where voted down and the US moved ahead using the excuse of pre-emptive self-defence which is where the whole WMD issue came in. Of course, the WMD issue turned out to be empty, and remains as such to this day, so...

Also worthy of notice, is that the point of the UN and its Security Council, at least the declarative point, is to prevent wars between member states, not to throw its collective weight around, supporting feuds between member states, which is why the need for the UNSC mandate to do anything against another member.

I'm embarrassed we are still involved in this travesty. I think a great majority of the Australian public are as well, there's no need for our troops to be endangered by America's colonialism.

I'm so moving to New Zealand one of these days... they seem to have a government that you can actually be proud of.

To rebut briefly - as of 11th July 2005:

Germany: Training Iraqi forces in locations outside Iraq such as the UAE and Germany. No troops on the ground inside Iraq.

Australia: Independent contingent of 450 troops including an infantry company, a cavalry squadron and around 40 LAVs deployed on Feb 22nd 2005. 120 Australian troops are assigned to protect their Embassy. There is a single Australian Naval LAST on general patrol in the Persian Gulf, for a total of about 700 troops deployed. The contingent of 450 land troops are planning withdrawal from theatre in May this year.

Denmark: Independent contingent of 550 troops including infantry, medics and military police in South East Iraq near Basra at "Camp Danevang".

Forces from the following nations involved in the invasion force have withdrawn from Iraq already: Bulgaria, Ukraine, Nicaragua, Spain, Honduras, Norway, Dominican Republic, Phillipines, Thailand, Hungary, Portugal, Singapore, Netherlands, Moldova.

The current US presence totals over 100,000 troops. The current British presence totals over 8,000.

China, with the world's largest standing land army, is not present in Iraq. Neither is India, who have the third largest standing land army.

As such, it is perfectly logical to state that this is an 'American war'. Remember who instigated it, after all, and it's your soldiers that are making up the bulk of the occupation forces.

The paper I am talking about was written in September 2000, for the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century. (link)

This is the first i've heard of these tapes, but i'm waiting to see what the news here shows.

Well, couldn't the Americans counter that statement to the rest of the world when they get massacred for what other countries do? Look at the Muhammed cartoon coming from the Dutch, which has led to not only Dutch consulates being attacked, but many American buildings and businesses getting destroyed. The extremists use that as a rally cry against the Western Culture, which they have called a battle against the Western Expansionists. Who are the going to attack when they want to hit the Western Culture? It won't be the Dutch, but as a result of them adding more to the fire it will be the US that takes the shots. I am not a huge supporter of the Iraqi War as I questioned it from the start, but I have gotten a little tired of the rest of the world complaining about Americans asking where everyone is at. Take a good look at WW2 where the US jumped in without major provocation, with the initial cutoff of oil to Japan.

The Middle East as a whole has never and probably will never be a stable environment, which is evident from its history for centuries. (read up on the history of Jerusalem for those who don't know it) You have a small land mass area with too many extremists on each end residing within it.

To take it a little off-topic, but are you serious? For years the Allies practically begged America to send in their troops. They cut off oil, sure, but that's hardly the same as sending in an army. Unless I'm totally mixing up my history here, America didn't get really involved until they were directly attacked. Until then there was a lot of aid supplied to allies and the American stock market was sailing along on military investments, but that's about it.

If I'm wrong, please point it out. Everything I've read and been taught over the years says I'm right, and I hate to be wrong where history is concerned .

Ok, now back on topic.

I've heard or read nothing in the Australian media about these tapes.

QFT

After the demonstrations in Barcelona (I was there) I can understand the change of president based strongly on how pissed people was about said war and the rest of the groveling before Bush&co.