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Real History , Liars, and the coming of war Posted Friday, February 7, 2003 your Lipstadt actionindex Alphabetical index (text) We once had a parrot in our apartment in Madrid that could even imitate the ring of the telephone that its cage stood next to.

Jack Straw’s cage must be within squawking distance of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. — David Irving on the abilities of Foreign Secretary, who went to the same school as he, but evidently had different teachers February 6, 2003 (Thursday), London A GRACIOUS letter comes from Jeremy Paxman , who is one of the BBC’s finest broadcasters and most challenging, no-nonsense interviewers.

We had sent him reference copies of ” Hitler’s War ” (Millennium Edition, 2002) and ” Churchill’s War “, vol. ii: “Triumph in Adversity”; he confesses to having read only one of them so far. “Must try harder.” In the e-post somebody sends me two aerial photos taken in June 1991 of Saddam Hussein’s “Peenemünde,” the al-Kindi Missile Research Centre near Mossul in Iraq. (Not Mosul: I am a conservative. I still write “Peking” too). I am not sure what he is getting at.

I am familiar with Mossul: In May 1941 Adolf Hitler had a two-week ambition to conquer Iraq before the British could get there; Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg’s son Axel was killed when his Messerschmitt crash-landed at Mossul in the first wave of planes that Hitler sent down.

The Führer gave up the attempt almost immediately, and although the oil would have come in handy I suspect that Iraq would have been the same kind of headache for the Nazis in 1941 that it is for the Israelis and their stooges now. But I digress. My knowledge of the region is anchored in its World War I and II origins. We British have been dropping bombs (including gas bombs) on the Iraqi villagers ever since the 1920s.

I remember Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris ( right, with me ) or perhaps it was his deputy Sir Robert Saundby , who had taken part in those early exploits of the Royal Flying Corps, telling me: “The Iraqis were very sporting about it at the time.” That was in 1961, half-way between then and now. Saddam’s sporting instinct now seems to be less evident. According to the U.S.

Secretary of State, General Colin Powell — notice how we British insist on pronouncing his name the right way — the US Intelligence authorities have photographs showing that Saddam had the effrontery to move vehicles parked near a bunker site between the time that two air photos were taken. I am not sure how long the interval was: A Traffic Warden would pronounce, “Long enough!” but the UN are not traffic wardens.

Just as the British government’s Intelligence report on today’s threat from Iraq turns out today to have been plagiarised from a 1990 U.S. graduate student’s essay, the “before” photo may have been taken in June 1991 for all we know; indeed, it may in fact have been the “after” photo. That is how little we can trust the Americans, when they are arguing on behalf of war. THE photographs should not impress any intelligent observer.

The Americans are claiming that they can see things from 40,000 or 50,000 feet, or from an orbiting satellite, that UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and his team have not spotted while visiting the same location on the ground. Yeah, right.

Judge Gray was taken in by the same woolly arguments in the Lipstadt Trial: He was impressed by photos of four smudges on the roof of Krema II in Auschwitz when photographed from 36,000 feet — and totally unaffected by the admission by Lipstadt’s own expert, under my cross-examination, that there was no evidence of any holes on the actual roof when inspected from an altitude of six inches. No, let’s get