Free Republic

A host of Britons feature in the files of the Iraqi foreign ministry, which faithfully record dealings with Saddam Hussein's regime that many might prefer to forget. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing, but many of those who contacted the Iraqi regime wrote in somewhat naive terms. A letter from Sir Edward Heath dated March 6 2000 cheerfully records a luncheon with Mudhafar Amin, head of the Iraqi Interests Section in London, at his home in Salisbury. "I was delighted that you and your wife were able to come," wrote Sir Edward. "Thank you for leaving me with such an...

THE WAR FOR TRUTH By John Pilger   WE HAD a great day," said Sgt Eric Schrumpf of the US Marines last Saturday. "We killed a lot of people."He added: "We dropped a few civilians, but what do you do?" He said there were women standing near an Iraqi soldier, and one of them fell when he and other Marines opened fire. "I'm sorry," said Sgt Schrumpf, "but the chick was in the way".For me, what is remarkable about this story is that I heard almost the same words 36 years ago when a US Marine sergeant told me...

I was interested to see this week that Berlin will soon be getting a "GDR Fun Park", giving Germans the chance to re-live life in the old East Germany, complete with officious bureaucrats, a drab block of flats and shops with nothing to buy in them. It's apparently the latest example of "Ostalgi'' - nostalgia for the Communist east. So I asked my old friend, travel consultant Vera Surly, whether she could recommend any other nostalgia theme parks. "They're the new thing," she explained. "What with all this war and terrorism, people want to get back to simpler, stress-free times....

THE Blair government was told in January by the Americans that there was no justification for attacking Iraq in the "war on terrorism" and that their main aim was getting rid of Saddam Hussein who stood in the way of the West's control of Middle Eastern oil wealth. This partly explains why Blair abandoned presenting to Parliament a famous "dossier" in which "the evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction is simply vast". The dossier is no more than a stream of warmed-over assertions and deceptions, supplied by Washington. According to reliable intelligence sources in another Western country, who...