Film on Iraq WMD lies

From British daily The Morning Star:

Explosive critique of Iraq WMD claims

Sunday 19 July 2009

by Brendan Montague

While in a London pub this week I bumped into a film-maker named Paul Hanes, who made The Truth About Weapons Of Mass Destruction.

The premise of the film is that Hans Blix was busy combing the sand dunes of Iraq in desperate search of chemical weapons old and new, while at the same time continental Europe was full of unexploded ordinance from the second world war.

Moreover, the US and Britain claimed that terrorists might be given chemical bombs by Saddam Hussein and then smuggle them into Britain.

So Hanes and his three chums, who together form Fourman Films, proved that you can easily source and smuggle chemical and biological weapons from just three hours of London through the channel tunnel.

The film won best international documentary at the Queens International Film Festival in 2007 and highest-rated film at the Global Peace Film Festival in Orlando, Florida.

Surprisingly the national media has run shy of the story with major tabloid news editors first excited by the scoop and then going cold once they had contacted their editors.

One explanation is there is a D-notice in force – a voluntary system where the Ministry of Defence warns newspapers that publication of a story would harm national defence. But this film is on YouTube.

Another explanation is that the prospect of Europeans travelling around with chemical bombs in their cars does not fit the discourse around Muslim extremists and rogue states.

Either way, the film-makers have raised serious questions about the war on terror and the bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan on a pretext of protecting Britain from chemical weapons.

The film’s blurb states: “In the summer of 2004 with the growing death toll in Iraq, the increasing cost of the war and the now public incompetence of the British Ministry of Defence, four lads with no media experience posed as film-makers and set out on a self-funded road journey to discovery the truth about weapons of mass destruction.

“Despite having no budget and a only basic knowledge of history, they soon found themselves among stockpiles of chemical weapons (with the full co-operation of one of Europe’s ministers of defence).

“It turns out that Europe has a chemical weapons problem and the lads spend a few days filming the clean-up process with the dedicated soldiers charged with this dangerous but gallant task.

“With discoveries of chemical weapons which only Hans Blix could have dreamed of, this film shows how easy it is for anyone to find chemical weapons and explores the possibility that one could be easily be brought back to London.”

A truly explosive critique of the Ministry of Defence, the weapons “dossier” and any minister who voted for the war in Iraq.