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| 2003/4/8 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:28025 Activity:high |
4/7 Here is a completely absurd question (I know this will never happen
but..) Imagine that Saddam Hussein and his cabinet of ministers are
all captured alive. Suppose, that six months later the we still fail
to find a credible proof that Iraq was producing WMDs. What other
excuse will our government use then for not reinstating Saddam
as the president again since he represents the legitimate government
of Iraq?
\_ You don't consider finding evidence of biological weapons and
chemical weapons enough proof of WMD?
\_ All planted by the US government.
\_ What evidence? So far everything that has been announced to be
a "Smoking Gun" eventually turned out to be missilies with
conventional warheads, or pesticides, or some other non-WMD
related chemicals. (e.g. http://csua.org/u/c9d
\_ He was killed while trying to escape, of course. Or we could just
release a video of him being some Bubba's bitch in prison. That
should fix his political future.
\_ How about a major blockbuster hit movie in which he is Satan's
gay lover? Thank you Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
\_ Excuse? So you consider WMD's an excuse (from your use of "other")?
How about 12 years of UN resolution violations?
\_ Never proven. And it would be upto UN to prosecute these.
\_ I used -excuse- word because the WMD argument was used merely
as an excuse to start the war. They didn't show us a credible
proof so far that these weapons exist and if they do whether
they posess any treat to USA.
\_ And how long has Israel been violating UN resolutions?
\_ Oh no! Israel has been brought to the table. Now someone
surely will -have- to delete this thread.
\_ irrelevant since he will be tried for War Crimes ie: Kurds
\_ American propaganda. The Kurdish accusation is absurd on its
face. There is no proof that chemical weapons were used.
Even if there were, the proof was manufactured by the
US and Kurdish traitors. Besides, the decision to use
chemical weapons were made at a local level. And Saddam
actually thought he was authorizing the spraying of fertilizers
anyway, and it was an honest mistake that chemical weaponry
were loaded into the missiles instead. Besides, Iraq did
not possess chemical weaponry, so it was impossible it
was used against the Kurds. qed.
\_ The truth is that the much touted "Saddam uses gas
on his own people" myth is almost assuredly a lie:
http://truthout.org/docs_02/020303C.htm
Saddam used mustard gas many times on the Iranians,
but that is not really the same thing.
\_ And of course, Iraq's actions during that war were
done with a full US support and approval.
\_ You mean our boy Jimmy who told Saddam he'd have
our full support if he invaded Iran? That support
and approval?
\_ The US did not approve of Hussein's use of gas.
\_ Yep. Guy citing top secret hush hush US intelligence
you-can't-read-them-just-trust-me-what-they-say
documents. Got me convinced.
\_ How about these Marine Corp assessments, that
say also that it was Iranian, not Iraqi gas?
http://fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/docs/3203/appb.pdf
\_ On the other hand, here's something more recent:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm
Whether recent means more likely to be slanted by
current politics or based on more recent information
is of course based on your own prejudices.
\_ Here is a very long, well documented, though
sometimes overstated summary of the evidence:
http://www.mediamonitors.net/robinmiller10.html
The Army War College assessment does not
disagree with the CIA document above, except
in omission. Both say there was a battle, both
say Iraq used mustard, but the Army and Marines
decided that Iran used blood agent, which caused
most of the casualties observed by the foreign
press. In any case, the evidence is weak, not
the slam dunk it was portrayed in the US press.
\_ The US government lies all the time to get us to agree to
dubious wars. GWB is hardly the first:
http://goatee.net/2003/deadly-deceit.html |
| 5/24 |
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| csua.org/u/c9d -> story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030407/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_war_wmd_030407175243 Advanced Document Not Found The document you requested is not found. |
| truthout.org/docs_02/020303C.htm The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them. A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade Iraq. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the country. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of when they seized Halabja. In the 1990's there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change. Hussein's Baath Party is driven from power, many lucrative opportunities would open up for American companies. But efforts to link the Iraqis directly to Osama bin Laden have proved inconclusive. Assertions that Iraq threatens its neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; And the most dramatic case are the accusations about Halabja. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive regimes Washington supports? |
| www.cia.gov/cia/publications/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm Not Found The requested object does not exist on this server. The link you followed is either outdated, inaccurate, or the server has been instructed not to let you have it. |
| www.mediamonitors.net/robinmiller10.html Another skeptic is 17 Milton Viorst, long-time Middle East correspondent for the New Yorker and author of a dozen books. He visited Kurdish areas in Iraq when the gassing allegations surfaced in 1988 and reported that: "From what I saw, I would conclude that if lethal gas was used, it was not used genocidally--that is, for mass killing. The Kurds compose a fifth of the Iraqi population, and they are a tightly knit community. If there had been large-scale killing, it is likely they would know and tell the world. But neither I nor any Westerner I encountered heard such allegations. Nor did Kurdish society show discernible signs of tension. He ordered his troops to go as far as the Iranian border and depopulate a swath of territory eight or ten miles deep, neutralizing for all time an area that had served the rebels as sanctuary. The army dynamited dozens of villages into rubble and dispatched thousands of inhabitants from their ancestral homes to newly built "resettlement villages" far in the interior. In the process, sixty thousand Kurds crossed the border into Turkey, where they told journalists they were fleeing from attacks of gas. The Iraqis angrily denied the charge, but Secretary of State Shultz claimed it was true, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, without investigating, proposed a bill to impose heavy sanctions on Iraq. With the pro-Israeli lobby fanning the fire, the bill nearly passed. Only later did these allegations evolve into claims that Iraq's killing methods had included gassing, bombing and mass executions. Its October 2002 dossier, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," identifies only 10 instances of reported Iraqi use of chemical weapons, and none of these were directed specifically at the Kurds. Yet all reports--and in particular atrocity reports--of refugees and their political supporters must be viewed with caution. In the absence of corroborating physical evidence, it's folly to speak with the certainty exuded in the HRW reports. Senate Foreign Relations Committee--particularly undermines the credibility of these refugee accounts. And, incredibly, Human Rights Watch makes assertions of genocide despite the extreme paucity of physical evidence. Of the three exhumed grave sites, one yielded 26 bodies of men and boys executed by firing squad. The other two grave sites--revealing only five separately-buried individuals who had died from unknown causes--supplied no evidence supporting allegations of genocide. There are several other reasons to doubt the accuracy of the Human Rights Watch reports: 1. Others who have investigated the situation have not reached similar conclusions. The reports do not even mention the existence, much less consider the weight, of contrary evidence. Although the 90-page War College report had been in the public domain for three years when HRW published "Genocide in Iraq" in 1993, the earlier assessment goes unmentioned. Nor is there any consideration of 38 Milton Viorst's nearly contemporaneous, firsthand observations. No serious assessment of any question--much less of claims of genocide--wholly ignores contrary evidence. The reports, and HRW's handling of them, reveal an unmistakable political bias in favor of Iraq's Kurdish movement. There simply is no proof of what agent--a legal chemical agent such as tear gas, an illegal chemical agent, or a nonchemical agent--caused the symptoms described in the Human Rights Watch reports. The most that HRW can say is that the injuries reported by the Kurds were "consistent with" exposure to mustard gas. Moreover, we know from 41 Stephen Pelletiere that mustard gas simply doesn't kill large numbers of people. Yet all HRW can say is that "forensic examination of the two skeletons was limited to determining whether there was any sign of trauma or perimortem violence that might contradict the account of the villagers that the two decedents were overcome by chemical weapons. To use this as conclusive evidence of a "chemical weapons attack" is preposterous. The various HRW statements exhibit both "claim creep"--the tendency, over time, to assert ever-larger numbers of victims--and fundamental change in the nature of the claim. Or maybe by 2003 it was only the men and boys who were "trucked to remote areas and machine-gunned to death, their bodies bulldozed into mass graves," while the women and girls were killed on site. On several occasions, Human Rights Watch reports explicitly invoke the Holocaust. Readers are told that "like Nazi Germany, the Iraqi regime concealed its actions in euphemisms"; Captured Iraqi Documents Human Rights Watch also relies heavily on Iraqi government documents captured by the Kurdish opposition. These documents have made their way to the Iraq Research and Documentation Project within the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. State Department--has posted a few of the documents on its website. After appointing the documents with suitably provocative names like "Bureaucratic Beheading" and "A Professional Rapist," the website makes wild claims about the significance of some of them. Consider the document titled "Admission of Chemical Use," which provides in its entirety: 48 27 "We have been informed of the following: 1- The Iranian enemy has supplied the saboteurs' families in the villages and rural areas along the border with pharmaceutical drugs, especially anti-chemical medicaments; They are along the Khanqawa route in order to stop the force accompanying the Village Deportation Committees, albeit most of the families in this region have left to Iran. The date, provenance and text of the document lend undeniable proof to the regime's genocide campaign, known as Anfal, against the Kurds. It's ludicrous to anoint this short document an "Admission of Chemical Use" by Iraq. Nerve Gas Allegations Physicians for Human Rights, which collaborated with Human Rights Watch, has also issued a number of reports. Most make claims similar to those in the HRW reports and are subject to the same objections. This is "Nerve Gas Used in Northern Iraq on Kurds," released on April 29, 1993. According to this report, a PHR team collected soil samples on June 10, 1992, from bomb craters near the Kurdish village of Birjinni in northern Iraq. The Iraqi military is claimed to have bombed Birjinni on August 25, 1988. Sarin, then, may have been a factor in the deaths of four Birjinni villagers reported that day. However, sarin is odorless, 52 31 and, according to Human Rights Watch, the villagers reported various distinctive odors from the bombs: "pleasant, at first. The CIA says that Iraq used nerve agents six times: five times against only Iranian troops, and at Halabja against both Iranians and Kurds. Four of the six instances involve the cruder tabun, rather than sarin, and the agents allegedly used on the other two occasions are unspecified. Air Force intelligence officer who was a liaison to the Iraqi military, puts the figure at four times in 1988. Another piece of Goldberg's narrative that doesn't fit--and this is true of the accounts of all of the genocide advocates--is that mustard gas generally doesn't have any immediate effects, yet the Kurds in these stories are portrayed as experiencing blistering, and sometimes falling dead, almost immediately. According to a December 2002 fact sheet from the British Health Department, "mustard gas does not usually cause pain at the time of exposure; Goldberg himself vehemently supports the "removal" of Saddam. Although a convert to the cause only after her 1998 visit to Halabja, she's a true believer. Army for science and technology in the Reagan years and informed himself on chemical agents because of his oversight responsibilities in that realm. Responding to Gosden's genocide claims, Prather is emphatic: 70 49 "Your lady doctor's assertion that Iraq bombed 280 villages with poison gas is a joke you should have seen without a fact-checker. There were hundreds of villages cleared by Baghdad on the Iraqi border, but the residents were moved to new villages built for them in the interior. He also entered Iraqi territory and brought back shell fragments on which a Briti... |
| goatee.net/2003/deadly-deceit.html Correll , it is clear Truman's priority was not the preservation of human life nor democratic principles, but vengeance and a desire to intimidate the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger conduct secret "carpet bombings" of Cambodia (killing thousands) during 1969-70 to destabilize the government, resulting in its overthrow and the establishment of the Khmer Rouge by Pol Pot whom the US later supported though it was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. There will be no American combat troops or advisers in Cambodia. Nothing should be done to jeopardize this invaluable asset. When lies must be told, they should be told by subordinate officials" 15 Zinn-M . While Pinochet was a bloody despot who had thousands of civilians tortured and murdered, he was also favorable to American corporate interests 18 Cooper . Many of his killers were trained in the "School of the Americas," in Fort Benning, Georgia 19 Anon1 . Unfortunately, we responded to an attack that 21 never happened 22 Cohen and Solomon . The first claim was 23 never substantiated and was 24 shown to be false by the subsequent release of Russian satellite photographs of the area 25 Peterson . The second claim was based on a media campaign by the Hill & Knowlton PR firm and perjured reports of a supposed "eyewitness" who was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US 26 Stauber . Bush claimed proof of terrorists meeting with Saddam Hussein prior to September 11, that an International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA report concluded that Iraq was six months away from developing nuclear weapons, and that Iraq has attempted to purchase high strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapon production. Confusion 27 continues during the prosecution of the war. This is only a sampling of the most prominent deceits which I've had the time to investigate. In some cases, they were mistakes that were exploited for aggression but never corrected. In those instances where there was some legitimacy to a claim, truth was abused so as to justify America's complicity in the very same evils. Japan, Germany, Russia and many others have committed horrible crimes, but few have managed to do it under such a self-deluded banner of self-serving hypocrisy. One simply can not trust what government officials say and they must be held to a level of scrutiny that -- unfortunately -- does not exist. Instead, these incidents show half a century of deceit and media failure because of a reliance upon government sources for information, little verification of stories before reporting them as predicates for aggressive action, and an acceptance of rationalizations that are merely excuses for a course of action that has already been planned. |