The first casualty of Pilger...

28 June 2003

John Sweeney says that John Pilger blames the Americans alone for birth defects in Iraq, and overlooks evidence that implicates Saddam Hussein

Pilger knows all about chemical weapons. He wrote in the Mirror in January, 'I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese children in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide called Agent Orange. This terrible chemical weapon was dumped on almost half of South Vietnam. Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and food, children continue to be born without palates and chins and scrotums or are stillborn. Many have leukaemia.' If chemical weapons cause cancers in Vietnam, why don't they do the same in Iraq? The answer seems a simple one: chemical weapons cause cancer so long as they are dropped by the Americans.

Shortly after Pilger's programme was broadcast in 2000, Arbuthnot phoned Gwynne Roberts, the only journalist brave enough to go to Iraq in 1988 and dig up soil contaminated by Saddam's chemical weapons. Portland Down found mustard gas in Roberts's soil samples. Arbuthnot was puzzled: how could the cancers in Iraq have started in 1992? Roberts's view, like mine, is that – without letting the West off the hook on the question of depleted uranium – the contribution that Saddam's chemical weapons may have made to the Hiroshima Effect should be seriously investigated.

I emailed John Pilger, asking him, 'You know about Saddam's use of chemical weapons, so why didn't you raise the possibility of that being the cause of the cancers and birth defects?' He replied, 'You apparently think my film was made in 1991. It wasn't. It was made in 1999, eight years after the 1991 Gulf war, or twice the time it takes for deformities to develop, according to you. In the film I clearly put to one of the doctors the doubts that depleted uranium is the cause of the deformities. Her answer was a good one. Another specialist himself raises the doubts and addresses them. At no point in the film do I say that DU is, on its own, responsible for the extraordinary rise in cancers over, I repeat, a period of eight years up to when the film was made.'

This is artful. If Pilger and Arbuthnot accept that DU cannot have caused cancers observed in 1992, why haven't they made this clear? None of the cancers and birth defects that Pilger's researcher dates back to 1992 can be the fault of depleted uranium. To omit the possibility that some of the cancers were caused by Saddam's chemical weapons is to misrepresent the facts. To imply by that omission that depleted uranium is solely responsible for the cancers and birth defects in Iraq as he does in his book, his film and in the Daily Mirror is a disgrace to journalism.

I accuse John Pilger of cheating the public and favouring a dictator.

John Sweeney is special correspondent for the BBC.