Ronda Hauben on Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:10:31 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> "Macbeth" and the Forged Documents of Niger |
The U.S. and world media have been covering the trail of the forged documents from Niger for the past few weeks. This has been a fruitful trail as it has led to seeing some of what has gone on behind the scenes in the Bush administration. Here is the introduction to an article I did that was recently published in Telepolis. "Macbeth" and the Forged Documents of Niger The White House Scandal Grows Ever More Grave by Ronda Hauben A modern opera produced by the German theater company Oper Frankfurt was performed last week at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City.1 The opera "Macbeth: three nameless acts (after Shakespeare)", was directed by Archim Frey. Juxtaposed to the images depicting the bloody deeds of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were words describing Macbeth: "Your face shall feign innocence, The eye shall be blind to what the hand shall do." George W. Bush delivering his State of the Union Adress on January 28, 2003 These words provide an artful way to describe the current scandal in the U.S. White House. The President and his advisors continue to feign their innocence. They didn't know. Their hands did the deeds, but their eyes, they claim, were blind. They couldn't see what their hands would do. In the past few weeks, however, the world has begun to see more and more clearly what the hands of the U.S. administration have done. On Wednesday, July 16, 2003, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica [1] copies of the forged documents the U.S. government had given to the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as proof of Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons capacity. The Italian newspaper pointed out the crude nature of the forgeries. Among the discrepancies in the forged documents were the fact that one letter was addressed to the President of Niger, but also his signature was included as the author of the document. Another document was on the stationary of a Niger Ministry with the signature of a person who had last been in the Ministry more than 10 years earlier. The White House claims that they only got these documents in October of 2002 and four months later gave them to the IAEA in February 2003. It only took the IAEA a few days, in contrast, to recognize these documents as forgeries. In their Report to the U.N. Security Council on March 7, 2003, the IAEA identified the fraudulent nature of the documents. This was still several weeks before the U.S. government went to war against Iraq (The U.S. Government Case for War in Iraq Based on Forgery and Lies[2]). [1] http://www.repubblica.it/online/esteri/iraqattacotrentacinque/dossi/doss i.html [2] http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/15062/1.html The url for the rest of the article is http://www.telepolis.de/english/inhalt/co/15268/1.html # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net