Wednesday, March 13, 2013

KURDS, AMERICA, AND TURKEY

AMERICA'S HISTORY OF ABANDONMENT OF THE KURDS AND COMPLICITY IN THE GENOCIDE OF KURDISH PEOPLE.

WE CAN DENY FACTS ALL WE WANT, BUT, WHEN THE EVIDENCE IS OVERWHELMING, WE FINALLY HAVE TO FACE THOSE FACTS.
YES, WE CAN LOVE OUR COUNTRY BUT ALSO BE ASHAMED OF THOSE WHO MADE SUCH DECISIONS AND PRAY THEY ARE FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE.
WE WOULD WANT JUSTICE IF THIS HAD HAPPENED TO US!
THESE ARE SIMPLY THE HISTORICAL FACTS. THIS IS WHAT WE MUST REMEMBER, SO THAT IT NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN.

Henry Kissinger abandoned the Kurds to the savagery of Saddam Hussein in the 1970s after having encouraged their revolt against Saddam Hussein.
The Kurdish leader, Mustafa Barzani, told Washington Post’s reporter Jon Randal in 1973,
“I trust America. America is too great a power to betray a small people like the Kurds.”
He was wrong!
In 1975 the Shah and the leaders of Iraq abruptly agreed to settle their disputes and signed a treaty of friendship. A key part of the agreement was that Iran would immediately cease its support of the Iraqi Kurds. The U.S., "friendly" to the Shah at the time , also called a sudden halt to their support. Seeing the Kurds thus abandoned, Iraqi troops began a massive offensive against them.
Barzani sent a desperate plea to Kissinger for aid. “Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way with silence from everyone. We feel, Your Excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people, who have committed  themselves to your country’s policy. Mr. Secretary, we are anxiously awaiting your quick response.”
ALMOST TWO WEEKS LATER, a U.S. diplomat in Tehran cabled CIA director William Colby, noting that Kissinger had not replied and warning that if Washington ”intends to take steps to avert a massacre it must intercede with Iran promptly.”
OVER THE FOLLOWING MONTHS, AS THE KILLING CONTINUED, Barzani issued repeated, almost constant desperate appeals to the CIA, to President Gerald Ford, to Henry Kissinger. NO ONE REPLIED, NO ONE! Kissinger not only refused to intervene but also turned down Kurdish requests for humanitarian aid for their thousands of refugees.
HOW DO WE KNOW THIS?
In 1975, the U.S. Congress’ Select Committee on Intelligence headed by New York's Otis Pike discovered the entire plan. The Pike report concluded that for Tehran and Washington the Kurds were never more than “a card to play", a " uniquely useful tool for weakening Iraq’s potential for international adventurism.” From the beginning said the report, “The President, Dr. Kissinger, and the Shah hoped that our clients  [the Barzani’s Kurds] would not prevail.” The Kurds were encouraged to fight solely to undermine Iraq. “Even in the context of covert operations, ours was a cynical enterprise,” the report stated.
The Pike report further stated: Had the U.S. not encouraged the Kurds to go along with the Shah and renew hostilities with Iraq, “the Kurds might have reached an accommodation with [Iraq’s] central government, thus gaining at least a measure of autonomy while avoiding further bloodshed. Instead the Kurds fought on, sustaining thousands of casualties and 200,000 refugees.”
One of the officials who testified before the committee in secret session was Henry Kissinger. When questioned by appalled congressmen about the U.S.’s decision to abandon the Kurds to their bloody fate, Kissinger chided the committee, “One should not confuse undercover action with social work.”

President Reagan supported Saddam’s massacre of the Kurds a decade later, included the gassing of the town of Halabja in March 1988, and we had provided the building blocks for that very gas as well as the aircraft used to drop it on those villagers. DOCUMENTED FACTS!
The hell Hussein unleashed on Halabja formed part of the genocidal "Anfal campaign" Saddam initiated against the Kurds. Aside from convicting the Kurds for supporting Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Hussein coveted the oil-rich land around Kirkuk occupied by the Kurds, an area  crucial to the Iraqi economy. The Kurds, moreover, are a non-Arabic, though mostly Muslim, people. To many Arabs (most?), that’s almost as incriminating as being an "infidel".

 Both Bush1's and Bush2's war boosters and the "men" themselves STILL habitually use the "fate of the Kurds", the massacre of 1988, as an excuse for the illegitimate, fabricated, internationally illegal 1991 AND 2003 invasions of Iraq. But when photos of the aftermath of Halabja hit the world in the face, when reporters sent home videos of the thousands of dead Kurds, dead mothers with dead babies in their arms, America's "heads of State opted to sit on the sidelines, say nothing meaningful, and kept right on funding Hussein! That funding, how we openly equipped Saddam at his most monstrous, providing him with chemical and biological precursors, pesticides and poisonous compounds to carry out his deeds against the Kurds is a matter of Congressional record, as many a Congressman rose in protest against both initial and continued funding. One by one, they were all silenced. The game continued.
In spite of being thus treated by America, even after Halabja, when the Kurds once again arose from the ashes to take on Saddam's regime, the US forsook the Kurds once again in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The Kurdish militia, the Peshmergas, rose up against the Ba'ath government, only to be jilted by George Bush the First.
GHW Bush had authorized Iraqi planes to fly over that area again in 1991 after that "defeat" of Saddam had instituted restricted no-fly zones. America knew what Sadam would do to the Kurds, who had welcomed the American presence.As Bush1 lifted those restrictions, Saddam once again used his American-supplied aircraft to immediately attack the Kurds. Frantic pleas for help from the U.S. AGAIN went unheeded as Saddam pushed the Kurds to the border with Iran and thousands once again died without U.S. intervention, though there were American forces still in Iraq that could have gone to their rescue!
AND AMERICANS KNEW, WE HAD REPORTS OF THIS! IT WAS IN THE "NEWS"!
Jim Drinkard OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS wrote , "Senate Report Says Lack of U.S. Help Derailed Possible Iraq Coup," A.P., May 2, 1991 (Westlaw database # 1991 WL 6184412). An excerpt: "Defections by senior officials in Saddam Hussein's army -- and possibly a coup attempt against Saddam -- were shelved in March because the United States failed to support the effort, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff report. "The public snub of Kurdish and other Iraqi opposition leaders was read as a clear indication the United States did not want the popular rebellion to succeed," the document stated. . . . The refusal to meet with the Iraqi opposition was accompanied by "background statements from administration officials that they were looking for a military, not a popular, alternative to Saddam Hussein," the committee staff report said. . . . The United States resisted not only the entreaties of opposition figures, but of Syria and Saudi Arabia, which favored aiding the Iraqi dissidents militarily, the report contended."
Also see Tony Horwitz', "Forgotten Rebels: After Heeding Calls To Turn on Saddam, Shiites Feel Betrayed," Wall Street Journal Europe, December 31, 1991, p. 1.
For more on the Bush1 decision  to ALLOW Saddam Hussein to massacre the rebelling Shiites and Kurds, in part using attack helicopters, as expressly permitted by U.S. commanders, at the conclusion of the Gulf War 1991, see for example, Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf, Boston: Little Brown, 1995, pp. 446-456 (on Saudi Arabia's rejected plan to assist the Shiites who were trying to overthrow Saddam, see pp. 454-456).
THE EVIDENCE BUILT.

March 28, 1991
Avoiding American Complicity in the Coming Kurdish Massacre
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/avoiding-american-complicity-in-the-coming-kurdish-massacre
<<Yesterday John Chancellor bitterly concluded that, "George Bush is supporting Saddam Hussein." The New York Times explained that: "President Bush has decided to let President Saddam Hussein put down rebellions in his country . . . rather than run the risk of splintering Iraq."
The situation in Iraq today is very clear, and poses a terrible dilemma of profound consequence for the United States. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein will soon massacre the Kurds. Civilian deaths in the south have already reached the tens of thousands. Many, many more will soon be slaughtered in the north.
As the killing proceeds, the United States government is doing nothing -- apart from predicting Saddam's overthrow and planning America's withdrawal. Critics compare this to Hungary in 1956, when the U.S. also urged a population to overthrow its government and then did nothing. But in 1956 the U.S. did not have overwhelming military superiority. Now, the U.S. stands like the Red army outside Warsaw watching the slaughter of the Polish resistance.

The implications of U.S. inaction will spread far and wide. We are watching the undermining of a central principle that helped end the Cold War -- that governments should not be free to suppress the will of their populations. If the United States says nothing about the situation in Iraq, why should it protest when the Soviet Union suppresses dissent in the Baltics or within Russia? Why should China be concerned about further Tiannamen Squares? And how can the Israelis take seriously American criticism of the expulsion of four Palestinians when America -- the dominant military power in the region -- tacitly accepts the annihilation of tens of thousands.>>
THE ARTICLE WENT ON TO PLEAD FOR THE BUSH1 ADMINISTRATION TO INTERVENE ON THE KURDS' BEHALF.
THAT NEVER HAPPENED.
JUST THE FACTS, JUST THE DOCUMENTED EVIDENCE OF COMPLICITY IN WAR CRIMES.

THE FOLLOWING IS REPRODUCED IN ITS ENTIRETY BY EXPRESS WRITTEN CONSENT OF THE PUBLISHER.
Copyright © CounterPunch
All rights reserved.
counterpunch@counterpunch.org
June 17, 2004
The Ties That Blind How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons
by NORM DIXON
http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/06/17/how-reagan-armed-saddam-with-chemical-weapons/
<BEGIN QUOTE>><<On August 18, 2002, the New York Times carried a front-page story headlined, "Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of gas". Quoting anonymous US "senior military officers", the NYT "revealed" that in the 1980s, the administration of US President Ronald Reagan covertly provided "critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war". The story made a brief splash in the international media, then died.

While the August 18 NYT article added new details about the extent of US military collaboration with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran, it omitted the most outrageous aspect of the scandal: not only did Ronald Reagan’s Washington turn a blind-eye to the Hussein regime’s repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Iraq’s Kurdish minority, but the US helped Iraq develop its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

A reader of the NYT article (or the tens of thousands of other articles written after the war drive against Iraq began in earnest soon after September 11, 2001) would have looked in vain for the fact that many of the US politicians and ruling class pundits who demanded war against Hussein–in particular, the one of the most bellicose of the Bush administration’s "hawks", defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld–were up to their ears in Washington’s efforts to cultivate, promote and excuse Hussein in the past.

The NYT article read as though Washington’s casual disregard about the use of chemical weapons by Hussein’s dictatorship throughout the 1980s had never been reported before. However, it was not the first time that "Iraqgate"–as the scandal of US military and political support for Hussein in the ’80s has been dubbed–has raised its embarrassing head in the corporate media, only to be quickly buried again.

One of the more comprehensive and damning accounts of Iraqgate was written by Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas and published in the February 23, 1992, Los Angeles Times. Headlined, "Bush secret effort helped Iraq build its war machine", the article reported that "classified documents obtained by the LA Times show … a long-secret pattern of personal efforts by [George Bush senior]–both as president and vice president–to support and placate the Iraqi dictator."

Even William Safire, the right-wing NYT columnist, on December 7, 1992, felt compelled to write that, "Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations [the US, Britain and Italy] to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator".

Washington’s support (innocuously referred to as a "tilt" at the time) for Iraq became more open after Iran succeeded in driving Iraqi forces from its territory in May 1982; in June, Iran went on the offensive against Iraq. The US scrambled to stem Iraq’s military setbacks. Washington and its conservative Arab allies suddenly feared Iran might even defeat Iraq, or at least cause the collapse of Hussein’s regime.

Using its allies in the Middle East, Washington funneled huge supplies of arms to Iraq. Classified State Department cables uncovered by Frantz and Waas described covert transfers of howitzers, helicopters, bombs and other weapons to Baghdad in 1982-83 from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait.

According to Mark Phythian’s 1997 book Arming Iraq: How the US and Britain Secretly Built Saddam’s War Machine (Northeastern University Press), in 1983 Reagan asked Italy’s Prime Minister Guilo Andreotti to channel arms to Iraq.

The January 1, 1984 Washington Post reported that the US had "informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the three-year-old war with Iran would be ‘contrary to US interests’ and has made several moves to prevent that result".

In 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department’s list of countries that allegedly supported terrorism. On December 19-20, 1983, Reagan dispatched his Middle East envoy–none other than Donald Rumsfeld–to Baghdad with a hand-written offer of a resumption of diplomatic relations, which had been severed during the 1967 Arab-Israel war. On March 24, 1984, Rumsfeld was again in Baghdad.

According to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, in a December 15, 1986 article, the CIA began to secretly supply Iraq with intelligence in 1984 that was used to "calibrate" mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops. Beginning in early 1985, the CIA provided Iraq with "data from sensitive US satellite reconnaissance photography … to assist Iraqi bombing raids".

The August 17, 2002 NYT reported that, according to "senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program", even though "senior officials of the Reagan administration publicly condemned Iraq’s employment of mustard gas, sarin, VX and other poisonous agents … President Reagan, vice president George Bush [senior] and senior national security aides never withdrew their support for the highly classified program in which more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes and bomb-damage assessments for Iraq."

Iraq’s 1982 removal from Washington’s official list of states that support terrorism meant that the Hussein regime was now eligible for US economic and military aid, and was able to purchase advanced US technology that could also be used for military purposes.

Conventional military sales resumed in December 1982. In 1983, the Reagan administration approved the sale of 60 Hughes helicopters to Iraq in 1983 "for civilian use". However, as Phythian pointed out, these aircraft could be "weaponised" within hours of delivery. Then US Secretary of State George Schultz and commerce secretary George Baldridge also lobbied for the delivery of Bell helicopters equipped for "crop spraying". US-supplied choppers were used in the 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja, which killed 5000 people.

By the end of 1983, US$402 million in agriculture department loan guarantees for Iraq were approved. In 1984, this increased to $503 million and reached $1.1 billion in 1988. Between 1983 and 1990, CCC loan guarantees freed up more than $5 billion. Some $2 billion in bad loans, plus interest, ended up having to be covered by US taxpayers.

A similar taxpayer-funded, though smaller scale, scam operated under the auspices of the federal Export-Import Bank. In 1984, vice-president George Bush senior personally intervened to ensure that the bank guaranteed loans to Iraq of $500 million to build an oil pipeline. Export-Import Bank loan guarantees grew from $35 million in 1985 to $267 million by 1990.

According to William Blum, writing in the August 1998 issue of the Progressive, Sam Gejdenson, chairperson of a Congressional subcommittee investigating US exports to Iraq, disclosed that from 1985 until 1990 "the US government approved 771 licenses [only 39 were rejected] for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application …

"The US spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted… US export control policy was directed by US foreign policy as formulated by the State Department, and it was US foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein."

A 1994 US Senate report revealed that US companies were licenced by the commerce department to export a "witch’s brew" of biological and chemical materials, including bacillus anthracis (which causes anthrax) and clostridium botulinum (the source of botulism). The American Type Culture Collection made 70 shipments of the anthrax bug and other pathogenic agents.

The report also noted that US exports to Iraq included the precursors to chemical warfare agents, plans for chemical and biological warfare facilities and chemical warhead filling equipment. US firms supplied advanced and specialised computers, lasers, testing and analysing equipment. Among the better-known companies were Hewlett Packard, Unisys, Data General and Honeywell.

Billions of dollars worth of raw materials, machinery and equipment, missile technology and other "dual-use" items were also supplied by West German, French, Italian, British, Swiss and Austrian corporations, with the approval of their governments (German firms even sold Iraq entire factories capable of mass-producing poison gas). Much of this was purchased with funds freed by the US CCC credits.

The destination of much of this equipment was Saad 16, near Mosul in northern Iraq. Western intelligence agencies had long known that the sprawling complex was Iraq’s main ballistic missile development centre.

Blum reported that Washington was fully aware of the likely use of this material. In 1992, a US Senate committee learned that the commerce department had deleted references to military end-use from information it sent to Congress about 68 export licences, worth more than $1 billion.

In 1986, the US defence department’s deputy undersecretary for trade security, Stephen Bryen, had objected to the export of an advanced computer, similar to those used in the US missile program, to Saad 16 because "of the high likelihood of military end use". The state and commerce departments approved the sale without conditions.

Just four months later, Washington stood by as the US giant Bechtel corporation won the contract to build a huge petrochemical plant that would give the Hussein regime the capacity to generate chemical weapons.

On September 8, 1988, the US Senate passed the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have imposed sanctions on the Hussein regime. Immediately, the Reagan administration announced its opposition to the bill, calling it "premature". The White House used its influence to stall the bill in the House of Representatives. When Congress did eventually pass the bill, the White House did not implement it.

Washington’s political, military and economic sweetheart deals with the Iraqi dictator came under even more stress when, in August 1989, FBI agents raided the Atlanta branch of the Rome-based Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) and uncovered massive fraud involving the CCC loan guarantee scheme and billions of dollars worth of unauthorised "off-the-books" loans to Iraq.

BNL Atlanta manager Chris Drougal had used the CCC program to underwrite programs that had nothing to do with agricultural exports. Using this covert set-up, Hussein’s regime tried to buy the most hard-to-get components for its nuclear weapons and missile programs on the black market.

et, even the public outrage generated by the Halabja massacre and the widening BNL scandal did not cool Washington’s ardour towards Hussein’s Iraq.

On October 2, 1989, US President George Bush senior signed the top-secret National Security Decision 26, which declared: "Normal relations between the US and Iraq would serve our long-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East. The US should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behaviour and increase our influence with Iraq… We should pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for US firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy."

As public and congressional pressure mounted on the US Agriculture Department to end Iraq’s access to CCC loan guarantees, Secretary of State James Baker–armed with NSD 26–personally insisted that agriculture secretary Clayton Yeutter drop his opposition to their continuation.

In November 1989, Bush senior approved $1 billion in loan guarantees for Iraq in 1990. In April 1990, more revelations about the BNL scandal had again pushed the department of agriculture to the verge of halting Iraq’s CCC loan guarantees. On May 18, national security adviser Scowcroft personally intervened to ensure the delivery of the first $500 million tranche of the CCC subsidy for 1990.

According to Frantz and Waas’ February 23, 1992, LA Times article, in July 1990 "officials at the National Security Council and the State Department were pushing to deliver the second installment of the $1 billion in loan guarantees, despite the looming crisis in the region and evidence that Iraq had used the aid illegally to help finance a secret arms procurement network to obtain technology for its nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile program".

From July 18 to August 1, 1990, Bush senior’s administration approved $4.8 million in advanced technology sales to Iraq. The end-users included Saad 16 and the Iraqi ministry of industry and military industrialisation. On August 1, $695,000 worth of advanced data transmission devices were approved.

"Only on August 2, 1990, did the agriculture department officially suspend the [CCC loan] guarantees to Iraq–the same day that Hussein’s tanks and troops swept into Kuwait", noted Frantz and Waas. >>
<END COUNTERPUNCH QUOTE, with my sincere appreciation for permission to post this.>

In an article titled “Anthrax for Export” (Progressive Magazine, April 1998), William Blum noted that “private American suppliers, licensed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, exported a witch’s brew of biological and chemical materials to Iraq,” including bacillus anthracis, clostridium botulinum and dozens of other pathogenic biological agents. This was detailed in a staff report for U.S. senator Don Riegle of the Senate Committee on Banking on “U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual Use Exports to Iraq” (7 October 1994). The report notes that these deadly organisms “were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction,” and it adds: “It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program.”

IT WASN'T JUST THE UNITED STATES! OTHER NATIONS GOT ABOARD THE 'SUPPLY SADDAM' TRAIN.
The London-based news agency, The Guardian published an exposé, titled “Britain’s Dirty Secret” shows that “British ministers knew at the time that the £14 million plant, called Falluja 2, was likely to be used for mustard and nerve gas production.” A Foreign Officer minister objected to the sale, but he was overruled by the trade minister in line with London’s policy of backing Hussein against Iran. The plant was built in 1985 by Uhde Ltd., a British subsidiary of Uhde, GmbH of Dortmund, which in turn was a subsidiary of the German chemical giant Hoechst. Not only did the British government approve the deal, it granted an export credit guarantee and eventually paid Uhde (now owned by Thyssen-Krupp) £300,000 when Iraqi payments were interrupted by the Gulf War. If Fallujah did produce chemical weapons before 1990, the responsibility is to be laid squarely on the doorstep of ALL who supplied Saddam with the means to do such things. He could have done little without their help!

March 3, 2003
Did the United States Supply Saddam with Biological Weapons in the 1980s?
<<Last year, Senator Robert Byrd discussed the Reagan Administration's transfer to Iraq of biological agents including anthrax, bubonic plague and many others, and placed supporting documentation in the Congressional Record. He recalled an exchange he had at a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 19, 2002:
I asked Secretary Rumsfeld:"Mr. Secretary, to your knowledge, did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq war? Are we in fact now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sewn?"
The Secretary quickly and flatly denied any knowledge but said he would review Pentagon records. I suggest that the administration speed up that review. My concerns and the concerns of others have grown. A letter from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, which I shall submit for the Record, shows very clearly that the United States is, in fact, preparing to reap what it has sewn. A letter written in 1995 by former CDC Director David Satcher to former Senator Donald W. Riegle, Jr., points out that the U.S. Government provided nearly two dozen viral and bacterial samples to Iraqi scientists in 1985--samples that included the plague, botulism, and anthrax, among other deadly diseases. According to the letter from Dr. Satcher to former Senator Donald Riegle, many of the materials were hand carried by an Iraqi scientist to Iraq after he had spent 3 months training in the CDC laboratory. The Armed Services Committee is requesting information from the Departments of Commerce, State, and Defense on the history of the United States, providing the building blocks for weapons of mass destruction to Iraq. I recommend that the Department of Health and Human Services also be included in that request. The American people do not need obfuscation and denial. The American people need the truth. The American people need to know whether the United States is in large part responsible for the very Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which the administration now seeks to destroy. We may very well have created the monster that we seek to eliminate. The Senate deserves to know the whole story. The American people deserve answers to the whole story. >>

September 8, 2002 by the Sunday Herald (Scotland)
How Did Iraq Get Its Weapons? We Sold Them
by Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot

THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.

Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.

Classified US Defense Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.

The Senate committee's reports on 'US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq', undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis -- the micro-organism that causes anthrax -- were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.

One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers' City, a military complex in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.

The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.

The Senate report also makes clear that: 'The United States provided the government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programs.'

The UN's former co-ordinator in Iraq and former UN under-secretary general, Count Hans von Sponeck, has also told the Sunday Herald that he believes the West is lying about Iraq's weapons program.
'We filmed the evidence of the dishonesty of the claims that they were producing chemical and biological weapons,' von Sponeck has told the Sunday Herald. 'They are indeed in the same destroyed state which we witnessed in 1999. There was no trace of any resumed activity at all.'

EVEN THE NAMES OF SUPPLIER COMPANIES TO IRAQ WERE KNOWN BY LATE 2002!

In early 2003, the Iraq Weapons Inventory included a long list of Western and U.S. companies (Union Carbide, Honeywell, Dupont, SpectraPhysics, Bechtel are some mentioned in “The Nation”, which published the list on 01/13/2003) that supplied Saddam with deadly and dual-use material. Hoping to disguise its own culpability in Iraq's past war crimes, the U.S. suppressed the list, but the dossier was leaked to a German newspaper, “Die Tageszeitung”.
More information trickled onto the back pages of “The New York Times” and “The Washington Post”. The main facts are no longer in dispute. In violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 (which outlaws chemical warfare), the Reagan-Bush1 administration authorized the sale of poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, from anthrax to bubonic plague, throughout the 1980s. In 1982, while Saddam Hussein constructed his machinery of war, Reagan and Bush removed Iraq from the State Department list of terrorist states.
IRAQ BECAME AMERICA'S FRIENDLY ALLY BY PRESIDENTIAL MANDATE!
OUR CONGRESS AGREED! OUR CONGRESS ALLOWED IT!

THERE IS A WEALTH OF DATA ON ALL THIS AT THE AWARD-WINNING WEBSITE OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/index.htm
DARE TO READ THERE.
NOW, TO ANY WHO MAY STILL BE UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT ALL THIS IS VICIOUS LIES, RUMORS, ETC, PLEASE ASK YOURSELVES THIS:
IF ALL THIS WAS LIES, ETC, WOULDN'T THE 'OFFENDED PARTIES' HAVE SUED FOR LIBEL?
IF ALL THIS WAS MERELY RUMORS AND LIES, WOULDN'T THOSE WHO POSTED/PUBLISHED SUCH THINGS HAVE BEEN TAKEN TO TASK AND THE 'LIES' REMOVED?
IF ALL THIS WAS LIES, WHY WAS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CAUGHT TRYING TO COVER SO MUCH OF IT UP... COVER IT UP, NOT DENY IT IN A COURT OF LAW!
IF ALL THIS WAS LIES, WHY HAVE BUSH2 AND CHENEY CANCELLED TRIPS TO CERTAIN NATIONS BECAUSE THEY WERE TOLD THEY'D BE ARRESTED AND HELD FOR TRIAL ON WAR CRIMES THERE?
IF ALL THIS WAS LIES WHY HAS THE "NUREMBERG CHARTER" BEEN INVOKED FOR BUSH2, CHENEY AND RUMSFELD?
[SEE: http://www.examiner.com/article/bush-cheney-rumsfeld-war-criminals-verdict-enforcement-phase-begins
AND
Former Powell Chief of Staff: Cheney "Fears Being Tried as a War Criminal"
"He's developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal"
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/powell-chief-staff-col-larry-wilkerson-cheney-fears/story?id=14414226
AND
"Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq.
A bipartisan Senate Report from 2006 found that Bush misled the press on Iraq link to Al-Qaeda.
In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage."
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/5-hours-after-the-911-attacks-donald-rumsfeld-said-my-interest-is-to-hit-saddam-he-also-said-go-massive-sweep-it-all-up-things-related-and-not-and-at-2.html
AND
<<So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.>>
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-house-watch/torture/torturing-for-propaganda-purpo.html
THAT IS A VERY "ENLIGHTENING ARTICLE, AND I RECOMMEND YOU READ IT ALL.]

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PAST PRESIDENTS AND THEIR CABINET MEMBERS WHO WERE COMPLICIT IN THE GENOCIDE OF THE KURDISH PEOPLE? WHAT ABOUT FORD, REAGAN, BUSH, Sr., KISSINGER, ALL WHO TURNED THEIR BACKS ON THE GENOCIDE OF A PEOPLE? WHAT ABOUT THOSE CRIMES? WHAT ABOUT THE CURRENT PRESIDENT WHO PROMISED TO END BOTH WARS, TO END GUANTANAMO, WHO ALSO HAS DONE LITTLE TO NOTHING ABOUT THE SELLING-OUT OF THE KURDISH PEOPLE?
WHAT ABOUT JUSTICE? HAVE WE FORGOTTEN WHAT THAT IS?
DO MODERN-DAY AMERICANS KNOW WHAT JUSTICE IS?
DOES ANYONE CARE ANYMORE?
IF, AS RUMOR HAS IT, WE ARE SENDING TROOPS BACK TO IRAQ, HOW WILL THE KURDS FARE THIS TIME?
DOES ANYONE CARE?
I DO!
I DO!


                 The Halabja massacre


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