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Saddam.....you're fired!
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| Saddam.....you're fired!
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| acefree |
| i dont think anyone is goina post to support him. unless some might feel he should be put back in power cause he might be the only person who can control the voilence of those animals in iraq |
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| Ass Boil |
Why don't you remind us what the crimes were he was actually convicted of, dumbshit.... |
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| nunpuncher |
Quote: Originally posted by Ass Boil
Why don't you remind us what the crimes were he was actually convicted of, dumbshit.... |
i heard he was bush supporter on sfn |
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| vegaseric |
"Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam Hussein's appeal Tuesday and said the former dictator must be hanged within 30 days for his role in the 1982 slayings of 148 Shiite Muslims from a town where assassins tried to kill him. "From tomorrow, any day could be the day" Saddam is sent to the gallows, the chief judge said. "
Did that not count? Ass Boil........your boy is gonna die. He deserves everything he is going to get. Fuck saddam and his liberal democrat allies in the USA. |
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| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by nunpuncher
i heard he was bush supporter on sfn |
I'm serious. Please list for us the crimes Saddam was convicted of....
While you look that up, keep in mind who was supporting Saddam at the time with intelligence, chemical weapons, helicopters, and equipment he could use to make WMD. |
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| vegaseric |
Keep in mind that "he's a dead mothafuckuh now"
The murder of 148 shiite muslims. If that's not enough for you then please.....stop blaming BUSH for the world problems/ |
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| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
"Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam Hussein's appeal Tuesday and said the former dictator must be hanged within 30 days for his role in the 1982 slayings of 148 Shiite Muslims from a town where assassins tried to kill him. "From tomorrow, any day could be the day" Saddam is sent to the gallows, the chief judge said. "
Did that not count? Ass Boil........your boy is gonna die. He deserves everything he is going to get. Fuck saddam and his liberal democrat allies in the USA. |
Who was supporting Saddam in 1982, you stupid fuck?
Try picking up a fucking history book sometime.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 17, 2004
The Ties That Blind
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons
By NORM DIXON
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.
Nor did the NYT dwell on the extreme cynicism and hypocrisy of President George Bush II's administration's citing of those same terrible atrocities--which were disregarded at the time by Washington--and those same weapons programs--which no longer exist, having been dismantled and destroyed in the decade following the 1991 Gulf War--to justify a massive new war against the people of Iraq.
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, war-mongering 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".
The background to Iraqgate was the January 1979 popular uprising that overthrew the cravenly pro-US Shah of Iran. The Iranian revolution threatened US imperialism's domination of the strategic oil-rich region. Other than Israel, Iran had long been Washington's key ally in the Middle East.
Washington immediately began to "cast about for ways to undermine or overthrow the Iranian revolution, or make up for the loss of the Shah. Hussein's regime put up its hand. On September 22, 1980, Iraq launched an invasion of Iran. Throughout the bloody eight-year-long war--which cost at least 1 million lives--Washington backed Iraq.
As a 1990 report prepared for the Pentagon by the Strategic Studies Institute of the US War College admitted: "Throughout the [Iran-Iraq] war the United States practised a fairly benign policy toward Iraq... [Washington and Baghdad] wanted to restore the status quo ante ... that prevailed before [the 1979 Iranian revolution] began threatening the regional balance of power. Khomeini's revolutionary appeal was anathema to both Baghdad and Washington; hence they wanted to get rid of him. United by a common interest ... the [US] began to actively assist Iraq."
At first, as Iraqi forces seemed headed for victory over Iran, official US policy was neutrality in the conflict. Not only was Hussein doing Washington's dirty work in the war with Iran, but the US rulers believed that Iraq could be lured away from its close economic and military relationship with the Soviet Union--just as Egypt's President Anwar Sadat had done in the 1970s.
In March 1981, US Secretary of State Alexander Haig excitedly told the Senate foreign relations committee that Iraq was concerned by "the behaviour of Soviet imperialism in the Middle Eastern region". The Soviet government had refused to deliver arms to Iraq as long as Baghdad continued its military offensive against Iran. Moscow was also unhappy with the Hussein's vicious repression of the Iraqi Communist Party.
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 funnelled 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.
Howard Teicher, who monitored Middle East policy at the US National Security Council during the Reagan administration, told the February 23, 1992, LA Times: "There was a conscious effort to encourage third countries to ship US arms or acquiesce in shipments after the fact. It was a policy of nods and winks."
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".
Central to these "moves" was the cementing of a military and political alliance with Saddam Hussein's repressive regime, so as to build up Iraq as a military counterweight to Iran. 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.
On that same day, the UPI wire service reported from the UN: "Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers ... a team of UN experts has concluded ... Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, US presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with foreign minister Tariq Aziz."
The day before, Iran had accused Iraq of poisoning 600 of its soldiers with mustard gas and Tabun nerve gas.
There is no doubt that the US government knew Iraq was using chemical weapons. On March 5, 1984, the State Department had stated that "available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons". The March 30, 1984, NYT reported that US intelligence officials has "what they believe to be incontrovertible evidence that Iraq has used nerve gas in its war with Iran and has almost finished extensive sites for mass producing the lethal chemical warfare agent".
However, consistent with the pattern throughout the Iran-Iraq war and after, the use of these internationally outlawed weapons was not considered important enough by Rumsfeld and his political superiors to halt Washington's blossoming love affair with Hussein.
The March 29, 1984, NYT, reporting on the aftermath of Rumsfeld's talks in Baghdad, stated that US officials had pronounced "themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the US and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name". In November 1984, the US and Iraq officially restored diplomatic relations.
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".
Iraqi chemical attacks on Iranian troops--and US assistance to Iraq--continued throughout the Iran-Iraq war. In a parallel program, the US defence department also provided intelligence and battle-planning assistance to Iraq.
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."
Retired DIA officer Rick Francona told the NYT that Iraq's chemical weapons were used in the war's final battle in early 1988, in which Iraqi forces retook the Fao Peninsula from the Iranian army.
Another retired DIA officer, Walter Lang, told the NYT that "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern". What concerned the DIA, CIA and the Reagan administration was that Iran not break through the Fao Peninsula and spread the Islamic revolution to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
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". It is believed that US-supplied choppers were used in the 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja, which killed 5000 people.
With the Reagan administration's connivance, Baghdad immediately embarked on a massive militarisation drive. This US-endorsed military spending spree began even before Iraq was delisted as a terrorist state, when the US commerce department approved the sale of Italian gas turbine engines for Iraq's naval frigates.
Soon after, the US agriculture department's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) guaranteed to repay loans--in the event of defaults by Baghdad--banks had made to Iraq to buy US-grown commodities such as wheat and rice. Under this scheme, Iraq had three years to repay the loans, and if it could not the US taxpayers would have to cough up.
Washington offered this aid initially to prevent Hussein's overthrow as the Iraqi people began to complain about the food shortages caused by the massive diversion of hard currency for the purchase of weapons and ammunition. The loan guarantees amounted to a massive US subsidy that allowed Hussein to launch his overt and covert arms buildup, one result being that the Iran-Iraq war entered a bloody five-year stalemate.
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.
In his book, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq, Kenneth Timmerman points out that several US agencies were supposed to review US exports that may be detrimental to US "national security". However, the commerce department often did not submit exports to Hussein's Iraq for review or approved them despite objections from other government departments.
On March 16, 1988, Iraqi forces launched a poison gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja, killing 5000 people. While that attack is today being touted by senior US officials as one of the main reasons why Hussein must now be "taken out", at the time Washington's response to the atrocity was much more relaxed.
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.
Russ Baker, writing in the March/April 1993 Columbia Journalism Review, noted: "Elements of the US government almost certainly knew that Drougal was funnelling US-backed loans--into dual-use technology and outright military technology. The British government was fully aware of the operations of Matrix-Churchill, a British firm with an Ohio branch, which was not only at the centre of the Iraqi procurement network but was also funded by BNL Atlanta... It would be later alleged by bank executives that the Italian government, long a close US ally as well as BNL's ultimate owner, had knowledge of BNL's loan diversions."
Yet, 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.
http://www.counterpunch.org/dixon06172004.html |
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| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
Keep in mind that "he's a dead mothafuckuh now"
The murder of 148 shiite muslims. If that's not enough for you then please.....stop blaming BUSH for the world problems/ |
You are one of the dumbest fuckers walking the planet, without a doubt. |
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| vegaseric |
NORM DIXON? Are you fucking kidding me? The guy who said the two bombs dropped in japan were the worst terrorist attacks ever? Come on man, pick someone who doesn't have a preconceived thought of WESTERN CIVILIZATION.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/
^MILITANT COMMUNIST GROUP |
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| acefree |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
"Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam Hussein's appeal Tuesday and said the former dictator must be hanged within 30 days for his role in the 1982 slayings of 148 Shiite Muslims from a town where assassins tried to kill him. "From tomorrow, any day could be the day" Saddam is sent to the gallows, the chief judge said. "
Did that not count? Ass Boil........your boy is gonna die. He deserves everything he is going to get. Fuck saddam and his liberal democrat allies in the USA. |
list his liberal supporters please. (perhaps someone can elaborate on who did business with saddam in the 1980s)
why does the gary the retard wing of the reps always post here :(
why cant once a smart republican come here and say smart things :(
id welcome it. and i know there are smart republicans, ive seen them talk in congress.
and if your main issue was geting rid of saddam, that coulda been accomplished with our very able army special forces. |
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| acefree |
Quote: Originally posted by Ass Boil
You are one of the dumbest fuckers walking the planet, without a doubt. |
ya he even sounds dumber then mikey. at least mikey memorized what karl told him to repeat |
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| nunpuncher |
Quote: Originally posted by Ass Boil
Who was supporting Saddam in 1982, you stupid fuck?
Try picking up a fucking history book sometime.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 17, 2004
The Ties That Blind
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons
By NORM DIXON
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.
Nor did the NYT dwell on the extreme cynicism and hypocrisy of President George Bush II's administration's citing of those same terrible atrocities--which were disregarded at the time by Washington--and those same weapons programs--which no longer exist, having been dismantled and destroyed in the decade following the 1991 Gulf War--to justify a massive new war against the people of Iraq.
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, war-mongering 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".
The background to Iraqgate was the January 1979 popular uprising that overthrew the cravenly pro-US Shah of Iran. The Iranian revolution threatened US imperialism's domination of the strategic oil-rich region. Other than Israel, Iran had long been Washington's key ally in the Middle East.
Washington immediately began to "cast about for ways to undermine or overthrow the Iranian revolution, or make up for the loss of the Shah. Hussein's regime put up its hand. On September 22, 1980, Iraq launched an invasion of Iran. Throughout the bloody eight-year-long war--which cost at least 1 million lives--Washington backed Iraq.
As a 1990 report prepared for the Pentagon by the Strategic Studies Institute of the US War College admitted: "Throughout the [Iran-Iraq] war the United States practised a fairly benign policy toward Iraq... [Washington and Baghdad] wanted to restore the status quo ante ... that prevailed before [the 1979 Iranian revolution] began threatening the regional balance of power. Khomeini's revolutionary appeal was anathema to both Baghdad and Washington; hence they wanted to get rid of him. United by a common interest ... the [US] began to actively assist Iraq."
At first, as Iraqi forces seemed headed for victory over Iran, official US policy was neutrality in the conflict. Not only was Hussein doing Washington's dirty work in the war with Iran, but the US rulers believed that Iraq could be lured away from its close economic and military relationship with the Soviet Union--just as Egypt's President Anwar Sadat had done in the 1970s.
In March 1981, US Secretary of State Alexander Haig excitedly told the Senate foreign relations committee that Iraq was concerned by "the behaviour of Soviet imperialism in the Middle Eastern region". The Soviet government had refused to deliver arms to Iraq as long as Baghdad continued its military offensive against Iran. Moscow was also unhappy with the Hussein's vicious repression of the Iraqi Communist Party.
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 funnelled 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.
Howard Teicher, who monitored Middle East policy at the US National Security Council during the Reagan administration, told the February 23, 1992, LA Times: "There was a conscious effort to encourage third countries to ship US arms or acquiesce in shipments after the fact. It was a policy of nods and winks."
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".
Central to these "moves" was the cementing of a military and political alliance with Saddam Hussein's repressive regime, so as to build up Iraq as a military counterweight to Iran. 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.
On that same day, the UPI wire service reported from the UN: "Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers ... a team of UN experts has concluded ... Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, US presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with foreign minister Tariq Aziz."
The day before, Iran had accused Iraq of poisoning 600 of its soldiers with mustard gas and Tabun nerve gas.
There is no doubt that the US government knew Iraq was using chemical weapons. On March 5, 1984, the State Department had stated that "available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons". The March 30, 1984, NYT reported that US intelligence officials has "what they believe to be incontrovertible evidence that Iraq has used nerve gas in its war with Iran and has almost finished extensive sites for mass producing the lethal chemical warfare agent".
However, consistent with the pattern throughout the Iran-Iraq war and after, the use of these internationally outlawed weapons was not considered important enough by Rumsfeld and his political superiors to halt Washington's blossoming love affair with Hussein.
The March 29, 1984, NYT, reporting on the aftermath of Rumsfeld's talks in Baghdad, stated that US officials had pronounced "themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the US and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name". In November 1984, the US and Iraq officially restored diplomatic relations.
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".
Iraqi chemical attacks on Iranian troops--and US assistance to Iraq--continued throughout the Iran-Iraq war. In a parallel program, the US defence department also provided intelligence and battle-planning assistance to Iraq.
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."
Retired DIA officer Rick Francona told the NYT that Iraq's chemical weapons were used in the war's final battle in early 1988, in which Iraqi forces retook the Fao Peninsula from the Iranian army.
Another retired DIA officer, Walter Lang, told the NYT that "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern". What concerned the DIA, CIA and the Reagan administration was that Iran not break through the Fao Peninsula and spread the Islamic revolution to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
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". It is believed that US-supplied choppers were used in the 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja, which killed 5000 people.
With the Reagan administration's connivance, Baghdad immediately embarked on a massive militarisation drive. This US-endorsed military spending spree began even before Iraq was delisted as a terrorist state, when the US commerce department approved the sale of Italian gas turbine engines for Iraq's naval frigates.
Soon after, the US agriculture department's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) guaranteed to repay loans--in the event of defaults by Baghdad--banks had made to Iraq to buy US-grown commodities such as wheat and rice. Under this scheme, Iraq had three years to repay the loans, and if it could not the US taxpayers would have to cough up.
Washington offered this aid initially to prevent Hussein's overthrow as the Iraqi people began to complain about the food shortages caused by the massive diversion of hard currency for the purchase of weapons and ammunition. The loan guarantees amounted to a massive US subsidy that allowed Hussein to launch his overt and covert arms buildup, one result being that the Iran-Iraq war entered a bloody five-year stalemate.
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.
In his book, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq, Kenneth Timmerman points out that several US agencies were supposed to review US exports that may be detrimental to US "national security". However, the commerce department often did not submit exports to Hussein's Iraq for review or approved them despite objections from other government departments.
On March 16, 1988, Iraqi forces launched a poison gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja, killing 5000 people. While that attack is today being touted by senior US officials as one of the main reasons why Hussein must now be "taken out", at the time Washington's response to the atrocity was much more relaxed.
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.
Russ Baker, writing in the March/April 1993 Columbia Journalism Review, noted: "Elements of the US government almost certainly knew that Drougal was funnelling US-backed loans--into dual-use technology and outright military technology. The British government was fully aware of the operations of Matrix-Churchill, a British firm with an Ohio branch, which was not only at the centre of the Iraqi procurement network but was also funded by BNL Atlanta... It would be later alleged by bank executives that the Italian government, long a close US ally as well as BNL's ultimate owner, had knowledge of BNL's loan diversions."
Yet, 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.
http://www.counterpunch.org/dixon06172004.html |
wouldnt thoose be wmd? |
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| vegaseric |
List of supporters:
1. The DNC
2. House and Senate
3.DNC Sheep(you) |
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| acefree |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
List of supporters:
1. The DNC
2. House and Senate
3.DNC Sheep(you) |
im not a democrat. and i think saddam should be hung too. sorry to ruin your theory :( |
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| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
NORM DIXON? Are you fucking kidding me? The guy who said the two bombs dropped in japan were the worst terrorist attacks ever? Come on man, pick someone who doesn't have a preconceived thought of WESTERN CIVILIZATION.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/
^MILITANT COMMUNIST GROUP |
I guess that means you cannot disprove any of the facts in his article, huh?
Here's another with the same info:
CounterPunch
February 24, 2003
Rumsfeld's Account Book
Who Armed Saddam?
by STEPHEN GREEN
You have to give Defense Secretary Rumsfeld this credit: he's a risk taker, and he's damned brassy about it.
Both were in evidence last week when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Under criticism for his prior characterizations of France and Germany as "old Europe," Rumsfeld fumed: "We would not be facing the problems in Iraq today if the technologically advanced countries of the world had seen the danger and strictly enforced the economic sanctions against Iraq."
The Defense Secretary knew well, naturally, his audience in the Senate Armed Services Committee. As Senator Robert Byrd recently said from the Senate floor, ...."this Chamber is, for the most part, silent--ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing."
Still, Rumsfeld's statement was some chutspa! He was well aware that it was the U.S. Senate itself (Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs) which had conducted extensive hearings in 1992 and 1994 on "United States Dual-Use Exports to Iraq and Their Impact on the Health of Persian Gulf War Veterans." And he'd probably read the front page Washington Post story ("U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup", 12/30/02) based upon recently declassified documents, which revealed that it was Rumsfeld himself who, as President Reagan's Middle East Envoy, had traveled to the Region to meet with Saddam Hussein in December 1983 to normalize, particularly, security relations.
At the time of the visit , Iraq had already been removed from the State Department's list of terrorist countries in 1982; and in the previous month, November, President Reagan had approved National Security Decision Directive 114, on expansion of U.S.-Iraq relations generally. But it was Donald Rumsfeld's trip to Baghdad which opened of the floodgates during 1985-90 for lucrative U.S. weapons exports--some $1.5 billion worth-- including chemical/biological and nuclear weapons equipment and technology, along with critical components for missile delivery systems for all of the above. According to a 1994 GAO Letter Report (GAO/NSIAD-94-98) some 771 weapons export licenses for Iraq were approved during this six year period....not by our European allies, but by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
To be sure, many of these weapons were expended in the latter phases of the Iran-Iraq war. Others were destroyed by Coalition forces in the Persian Gulf War, or by UN weapons inspectors in the control regime established by the UN Security Council following that conflict. But a great many undoubtedly remain, and pose grave risks to the 150,000 U.S. troops deployed in Kuwait, and 100,000 on the way. Imagine the embarrassment to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld before the Armed Services Committee last week if one or more Senators had had the awareness AND the courage to raise the matter of Iraq's secret supplier.
And in this case, the devil is quite literally in the details.
There were few if any reservations evident in the range of weapons which President Ronald Reagan, and his successor George W. H. Bush were willing to sell Saddam Hussein. Under the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, the foreign sale of munitions and other defense equipment and technology are controlled by the Department of State. During the 1980s, such items could not be sold or diverted to Communist states, nor to those on the U.S. list of terrorist-supporting countries. When Iraq came off that list in 1982, however, some $48 million of items such as data privacy devices, voice scramblers, communication and navigation equipment, electronic components, image intensifiers and pistols (to protect Saddam) were approved for sale during 1985-90.
But it was through the purchase of $1.5 billion of American "dual-use items," having, sometimes arguably, both military and civilian functions, that Iraq obtained the bulk of it weapons of mass destruction in the late 80s. "Duel-use items" are controlled and licensed by the Department of Commerce under the Export Administration Act of 1979. This is where the real damage was done.
In 1992 and again in1994, hearings were conducted by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which has Senate oversight responsibility for the Export Administration Act. The purpose of the hearings was the Committee's concern that "tens of thousands" of Gulf War veterans were suffering from symptoms associated with the "Gulf War Syndrome", possibly due to their exposure to chemical and biological agents that had been exported from the U.S. during that brief period of "normalisation" of relations with Iraq in 1985-90.
At the opening of the second round of hearings on May 25,1994, Chairman Donald Riegle and Ranking Member Alphonse D'Amato released a detailed staff report which constituted a searing indictment of U.S. arms export policies during the Reagan/Bush Administrations, linking those exports to the health problems of Gulf War veterans, and excoriating the then current (Clinton) Administration for denying that such a link existed.
According to the hearing reports (which are available on a current website: www.chronicillnet.org/PGWS/tuite/default.htm) among the chemical weapons which had been sold to Iraq were some of the very most lethal available: Sarin, Soman, Tabun, VX, Lewisite, Cyanogen Chloride, Hydrogen Cyanide, blister agents and Mustard Gas. Some of the powerful biological agents sold included anthrax, Clostridium Botulinum, Histoplasma Capsulatum (causes a tuberculosis-like disease) , Brucella Melitensis, Clostridium Perfringens and Escherichia Coli.
Witnesses on the first day of the hearings included Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, Edwin Dorn, and the officials in both the Defense Department and the CIA responsible for non-proliferation policy. Interestingly, in what was often an adversarial exchange between the Committee and these officials, the latter admitted in sworn testimony that while no chemical/biological weapons had been found to have been "stored or used" by the Iraqi Army during the conflict, American troops had nevertheless been exposed to airborne traces of C/B agents from having been downwind of storage facilities that were bombed by U.S. planes.
Simply put, while Saddam Hussein had shown restraint in the Gulf War by not deploying his most lethal weapons, the U.S. Government had, a) sold chemical/biological agents and shipped them directly to Iraqi military installations, including some just months before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, b) distributed faulty chemical/biological agent detection sensors and protrction gear such as gasmasks to U.S. troops and, c) caused the exposure of these troops by the bombing of military storage areas upwind of them.
It got worse. Dr. Gordon Oehler, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency's Non-Proliferation Center testified that, between 1984 and 1990, the CIA's Office of Scientific and Weapons Research had issued five alert memos...." covering Iraqi's dealings with United States firms on purchases, discussions, or visits that appeared to be related to weapons of mass destruction programs." Such memos, Oehler explained, were sent to Commerce, Justice, Treasury and the FBI when collected intelligence indicated that U.S. firms had been targeted by foreign governments of concern, or were involved in possible violations of U.S. law.
At another point in the hearings, Dr. Oehler indicated that CIA's concerns about Iraqi weapons programs, in particular...."a Samarra chemical plant, including six separate chemical weapons lines between 1983 and 1986," had been reported...."directly to our customers." Under questioning from Chairman Riegle, he identified these as the President and the Secretaries of Defense and State.
Perhaps the most surprising testimony taken by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs was that given in the earlier 1992 hearings on the matter of U.S. assistance to the Iraqi ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs. Gary Milhollin, Director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, testified that U.S. companies were being licensed by the Commerce Department to ship such items directly to the Al-Qaqaa and Badr facilities, which the Pentagon had formally identified as part of the Iraqi nuclear weapons production program, and to Salah al Din, known to be the center of its ballistic missile development efforts.
In all, Milhollin identified 40 U.S. companies involved in such sales. And it was critical equipment--vacuum pumps, electron beam welders, mass spectrometers, accelerometers, missile guidance systems, navigational radar, high speed computers and filling systems to load CB agents in missiles, among many other items. Such "stuff" was being sent to Iraq until late 1989 less than a year before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait!
Through the mid and late 1980s, said Milhollin, the Pentagon, the CIA and the Office Naval Intelligence, among others, continued to warn the White House that Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons were maturing at a rapid pace, as was work on the ballistic missiles to deliver them. The warnings were falling on deaf ears: in October, 1989, 10 months before the Kuwait invasion, President George Bush signed NSD 26, updating NSDD 114, and again committing the U.S. to normal relations with Saddam Hussein's government.
As had been the case with chemical and biological weapons, the list of American and European companies which sold the nuclear equipment and technology to Iraq were a virtual pantheon of industry names: Hewlett Packard, International Computer Systems, Siemens, TI Coating, Carl Zeiss, Rockwell Collins International, Spectra Physics, Unisys, Tektronix, Scientific Atlanta and Semetex, among many, many others. With such assistance, Iraq became a regional power during 1984-90, and developed regional ambitions.
But these companies were not, per se, Saddam Hussein's main weapons suppliers: that designation should properly go to Ronald Reagan and George W.H. Bush, the signers, respectively, of NSDD 114 and NSD 26, both of which remain classified. As the primary recipients and ultimate "customers" of the alert memos from the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community, they were currently and fully aware of the use to which the equipment and technology were being put, and of the security policy implications of the process.
And the instrument, the person, the envoy, who negotiated the process in the first instance, is the current U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.
http://www.counterpunch.org/green02242003.html |
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| Ass Boil |
Here's another:
Who armed Saddam?
From Lev Lafayette, 26 July 2002
1. The British Foreign Office's Report on Strategic Export Controls (released last night) shows that:
a. Arms sales to Indonesia increased from #2m to #15.5m. Licences include all-wheel vehicles, components for aircraft cannon, combat aircraft and military aero-engines. This to a country that committed state-sponsored terror in East Timor.
b. Arms sales to Pakistan increased from #6m to #14m. This to a military dictatorship that created the Taliban.
2. In light of these figures, and the rhetoric of war against Iraq, some points need to be made. Given that Saddam is often described as a man who is willing to kill his own people by using chemical weapons, it's worth examining who armed him in the first place.
3. In the 1970s, Saddam approached the USSR, until then his conventional weapons supplier, to buy a plant to manufacture chemical weapons, but his request was refused. Saddam then began courting the West, and received a much more favourable response.
4. An American company, Pfaulder Corporation of Rochester, New York, supplied the Iraqis with a blueprint in 1975, enabling them to construct their first chemical warfare plant. The plant was purchased in sections from Italy, West Germany and East Germany and assembled in Iraq. It was located at Akhashat in north-western Iraq, and the cost was around $50 million for the plant and $30 million for the safety equipment.
5. British, French and German multinationals turned the request down on moral grounds or because the Iraqi delivery schedule couldn't be met—not because their governments objected.
6. The United States took other steps to ensure that Saddam's rule was strengthened. Mobile phone systems were mainly in the military domain at the time, but the United States government approved the 1975 sale by the Karkar Corporation of San Francisco of a complete mobile telephone system. The system was to be used by the Ba'ath Party loyalists to protect the regime against any attempts to overthrow it.
7. The United States also supplied Saddam with satellite pictures of Iranian positions during the Iran-Iraq war.
8. France provided Saddam with extended-range Super Etendard aircraft capable of hitting Iranian oil facilities in the lower Gulf.
9. While Britain's Margaret Thatcher mouthed platitudes about not supplying either Iran or Iraq with lethal weapons, Britain's Plessey Electronics supplied Saddam with an electronic command center.
10. Iraq was also able to buy French-built Mirage-1 aircraft and Gazelle and Lynx helicopters from the British company Westland.
11. In 1976, while on a visit to France, Saddam concluded the purchase of a uranium reactor. Jacques Chirac, then the Prime Minister and now the President, approved the deal. The supplier was Commissart l'Energie Atomique (CEA) and the plutonium reactor was called Rhapsodie. France also signed a Nuclear Cooperation Treaty with France, providing for the transfer of expertise and personnel.
12. In 1978, the Italian firm Snia Technit, a subsidiary of Fiat, signed an agreement with Iraq to sell nuclear laboratories and equipment.
13. Whenever the declared policies of the Western countries stood in the way of an arms deal, Western governments used two methods to get around their own rules and thereby manage public opinion.
a. The first method was the well-established use of the 'front'. Thus, Western governments supplied Saddam through the pro-West countries of Jordan and Egypt, which acted as a front for Iraq. This was done to overcome Congressional, parliamentary and press hurdles, even when it was obvious to military experts that Jordan and Egypt had no use for the weapons in question. Saddam also set up his own weapons buying offices in the West, with the knowledge of the host governments. For example, Matrix Churchill was a weapons purchasing company set up in Britain.
b. The second method was to extend Saddam massive credits which he could then use for military purposes. Thus, the Banco di Lavoro in the United States gave Saddam US$4 billion worth of credits, ostensibly to buy food, but which was diverted to buy weapons with the knowledge of everyone involved. Britain's Export Credit Guarantee department kept increasing his credit and much of the money went to the direct purchase of arms. The French government guaranteed US$6 billion worth of loans to French arms makers to sell Saddam whenever he wanted. Whenever the declared policies of the Western countries stood in the way of an arms deal.
14. When Saddam did in fact use chemical weapons against his own people, he did so on the afternoon of 17 March 1988, against the Kurdish city of Halabja. The United States provided diplomatic cover by initially blaming Iran for the attack. The Reagan Administration tried to prevent criticism of the atrocity. The Bush (senior) administration authorised new loans to Saddam in order to achieve the goal of increasing US exports and put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record.
15. The US Department of Commerce licensed the export of biological materials—including a range of pathogenic agents—as well as plans for chemical and biological warfare production facilities and chemical-warhead filling equipment—to Iraq until December 1989, 20 months after the Halabja atrocity.
Sources:
Saod K. Aburish, Saddam Hussein, The Politics of Revenge, New York, 2000.
Mark Phythian, Arming Iraq, Boston, 1997.
Geoff Simons, Iraq from Sumer to Saddam, London, 1996.
Kenneth R. Timmermann, The Death Lobby, How the West Armed Iraq, London, 1994.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/040.html |
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| vegaseric |
| yeah...about six |
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| FatesWebb |
| I think Assboils point is, yes saddam should hang, and so should any accomplices he had. |
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| vegaseric |
| From the sounds of it to me......ass boil is upset and saddam has done nothing wrong. |
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| Ass Boil |
U.S. support for Iraq
After the Iranian Revolution, enmity between Iran and the U.S. ran high. Realpolitikers in Washington concluded that Saddam was the "lesser of the two evils", support for Iraq gradually became the order of the day.
"In June, 1982, President Reagan decided that the United States could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran. President Reagan decided that the United States would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran. President Reagan formalized this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive ("NSDD") to this effect in June, 1982," said the "Teicher Affidavit," submitted on 31 January 1995 by former NSC official Howard Teicher to the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida.[3]
According to retired Colonel Walter Lang, senior defense intelligence officer for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern" to Reagan and his aides, because they "were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose." He claimed that the Defense Intelligence Agency "would have never accepted the use of chemical weapons against civilians, but the use against military objectives was seen as inevitable in the Iraqi struggle for survival"[4], however, despite this allegation, Reagan’s administration did not stop aiding Iraq after receiving reports affirming the use of poison gas on Kurdish civilians.[5][6][7]
[edit]
Parties involved
Much of what Iraq received from the US, however, were not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology— mainframe computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. It is now known that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and elsewhere, fed Iraq's warring capabilities right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait [8]
The "Iraq-gate" scandal revealed that an Atlanta branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, relying partially on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled US$ 5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. In August 1989, when FBI agents finally raided the Atlanta branch of BNL, the branch manager, Christopher Drogoul, was charged with making unauthorized, clandestine, and illegal loans to Iraq—some of which, according to his indictment, were used to purchase arms and weapons technology.
Beginning in September, 1989, the Financial Times laid out the first charges that BNL, relying heavily on U.S. government-guaranteed loans, was funding Iraqi chemical and nuclear weapons work. For the next two and a half years, the Financial Times provided the only continuous newspaper reportage (over 300 articles) on the subject. Among the companies shipping militarily useful technology to Iraq under the eye of the U.S. government, according to the Financial Times, were Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, and Matrix Churchill, through its Ohio branch. [9]
Even before the Persian Gulf War started in 1990, the Intelligencer Journal of Pennsylvania in a string of articles reported: "If U.S. and Iraqi troops engage in combat in the Persian Gulf, weapons technology developed in Lancaster and indirectly sold to Iraq will probably be used against U.S. forces ... And aiding in this ... technology transfer was the Iraqi-owned, British-based precision tooling firm Matrix Churchill, whose U.S. operations in Ohio were recently linked to a sophisticated Iraqi weapons procurement network."[10]
Aside from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and ABC's Ted Koppel, the Iraq-gate story never picked up much steam, even though The U.S. Congress became involved with the scandal. [11]
In December 2002, Iraq's 1,200 page Weapons Declaration revealed a list of Eastern and Western corporations and countries—as well as individuals—that exported chemical and biological materials to Iraq in the past two decades. By far, the largest suppliers of precursors for chemical weapons production were in Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics (now part of EPC Industrie) sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq. The Kim Al-Khaleej firm of Singapore supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin, and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq. [12]
By contrast, Alcolac International, for example, a Maryland company, transported thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor, to Iraq. Alcolac was small and was successfully prosecuted for its violations of export control law. The firm pleaded guilty in 1989. A full list of American companies and their involvements in Iraq was provided by The LA Weekly in May 2003. [13]
On 25 May 1994, The U.S. Senate Banking Committee released a report in which it was stated that "pathogenic" (meaning disease producing), "toxigenic" (meaning poisonous) and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq, pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce. It added: "These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction."[14]
The report then detailed 70 shipments (including anthrax bacillus) from the United States to Iraqi government agencies over three years, concluding "It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the UN inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program." [15]
A report by Berlin's Die Tageszeitung in 2002 reported that Iraq's 11,000-page report to the UN Security Council listed 150 foreign companies that supported Saddam Hussein's WMD program. Twenty-four U.S. firms were involved in exporting arms and materials to Baghdad [16]
Donald Riegle, Chairman of the Senate committee that authored the aforementioned Riegle Report, said, "UN inspectors had identified many United States manufactured items that had been exported from the United States to Iraq under licenses issued by the Department of Commerce, and [established] that these items were used to further Iraq's chemical and nuclear weapons development and its missile delivery system development programs." He added, "the executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licenses for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think that is a devastating record."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control sent Iraq 14 agents "with biological warfare significance," including West Nile virus, according to Riegle's investigators [17] And The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust, also released a list of U.S. companies and their exports to Iraq. [18]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._s...e_Iran-Iraq_war |
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| vegaseric |
| Funny, you post all these messages...if they were all true.......why is BUSH president? |
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| acefree |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
yeah...about six |
i might be the most independant person u will talk to.
i voted for both my current senators. one is R one is D.
i dont vote or agree with someone based on party.
and the fact that u call me a DNC sheep, mearly cause i disagree with bushs iraqi policy, might lead free thinkers to believe u are an RNC sheep :)
i beg u to type something intelligent so we may debate. so far its like artie argueing with beetlejuice. while thats funny, it gets boring fast. |
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| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
From the sounds of it to me......ass boil is upset and saddam has done nothing wrong. |
You are a fucking retard.
If you feel Saddam should hang, don't you feel his co-conspirators should hang also?
We KNEW he was killing innocents with the chemicals and equipment we sold him.
You come here posting shit and you haven't the slightest fucking clue what you are talking about. |
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| BarkonCue |
I wonder if they will be able to tie Saddam's execution in with Bush's State of The Union on Jan 23rd ?
It should be interesting to hear Bush explain how Saddam's execution only proves Democracy is working in Iraq and freedom has truly come. :rolleyes: |
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| acefree |
Quote: Originally posted by BarkonCue
I wonder if they will be able to tie Saddam's execution in with Bush's State of The Union on Jan 23rd ?
It should be interesting to hear Bush explain how Saddam's execution only proves Democracy is working in Iraq and freedom has truly come. :rolleyes: |
of course they will. bush isnt writing the speech |
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| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
Funny, you post all these messages...if they were all true.......why is BUSH president? |
What?
Because there are plenty of inbred, fucktarded morons like you out there who lap up the shit he serves you without a second thought about it. That's why..... Congrats.
Well, that and the Supreme Court APPOINTED him president..... |
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| vegaseric |
| I would like to thank Ralph Nader for his help. I would also like to thank the democrats who helped win both elections due to anti-americanism. Thanks democrats! |
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| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
I would like to thank Ralph Nader for his help. I would also like to thank the democrats who helped win both elections due to anti-americanism. Thanks democrats! |
You mean the same "anti-americanism" that won you Republicunts the November elections...... Oh wait! |
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| acefree |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
I would like to thank Ralph Nader for his help. I would also like to thank the democrats who helped win both elections due to anti-americanism. Thanks democrats! |
quit rambling incoherently. comment on my reply, or type something intelligent. |
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| vegaseric |
| Get happy man...it's all you can do. We all know that can change in a few years......I will admit, I was shocked they won like they did but that can happen in the next elections./ |
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| acefree |
Quote: Originally posted by Ass Boil
You mean the same "anti-americanism" that won you Republicunts the November elections...... Oh wait! |
man ever since they lost the elections they been losing it.
also democratic voters didnt make the win, they already had those voters. its the republican voters who woke up that caused the dems to win both houses |
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| vegaseric |
| Don't get me wrong, I have to give them a chance and to see what they can do when they have a little bit of power. I hope these clowns are all you guys talk them up to be. |
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| acefree |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
Don't get me wrong, I have to give them a chance and to see what they can do when they have a little bit of power. I hope these clowns are all you guys talk them up to be. |
do u understand how to carry on a conversation, or do u keep typing wierd random thoughts like a torrets person? ima give up on u soon dude |
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| vegaseric |
| You should stop because I was responding to your comment. Yeah, give up man and click close on your browser. |
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| acefree |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
You should stop because I was responding to your comment. Yeah, give up man and click close on your browser. |
agreed. i wanted to give u every benefit of the doubt first to say something of substance or intelligent. then we coulda had a friendly debate. i see its not happening so ill close, as per yer advice.
maybe another time perhaps u wont just ramble.
peace and merry christmas |
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| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by vegaseric
Don't get me wrong, I have to give them a chance and to see what they can do when they have a little bit of power. I hope these clowns are all you guys talk them up to be. |
While you're doing that don't forget how you defended every failure of the Bush administration....
You don't get to criticize shit, you dolt. |
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