freburz
THE HALABJA GASSING AND OTHER LIES ABOUT IRAQ
Wed Apr 9 01:10:06 2003
208.152.73.65

From: "freburz" freburz@yahoo.ca

THE HALABJA GASSING AND OTHER LIES ABOUT IRAQ

The current war being waged by Britain and America against Iraq is
based on some of the most grotesque, blatant and shameless lies
ever to be seen in the International Political arena.

The single greatest lie has to do with an incident in March 1988
when a Kurdish village in northern Iraq was subjected to a chemical
weapon attack, killing up to 5000 people.

None other than George W. Bush himself has repeatedly told the US
public, and the world, that this attack was carried out by the Iraqi
regime as part of its campaign against the Kurds, who are agitating
for their own separate state. This has been echoed by Tony Blair,
British prime minister, in his attempts to whip up the British
public into a war frenzy as well.

An example of Bush's propaganda came in his radio address to the US
nation on 16 March 2003, the 15th anniversary of the Halabja attack.

In that speech, Bush told the world that "(T)his weekend marks a
bitter anniversary for the people of Iraq. Fifteen years ago,
Saddam Hussein's regime ordered a chemical weapons attack on a
village in Iraq called Halabja. With that single order, the regime
killed thousands of Iraq's Kurdish citizens. Whole families died
while trying to flee clouds of nerve and mustard agents descending
from the sky. Many who managed to survive still suffer from cancer,
blindness, respiratory diseases, miscarriages, and severe birth
defects among their children." (1)

This allegation has been repeated ad nauseum in the printed media
(2) and on television. (3)

THE TRUTH - 1991 CIA REPORT TOLD US GOVERNMENT THAT THE IRANIANS
CARRIED OUT THE ATTACK

The truth of the Halabja incident is in reality very different to
that which Bush and his media allies push out.

The CIA's own senior political analyst during the Iran Iraq war,
Stephen C. Pelletiere, who was responsible for drawing up a report
for the US government on the incident, stated very firmly that the
Iranians, and not the Iraqis, were responsible for the massacre of
Kurds by chemicals at Halabja in 1988. Pelletiere's report was in
fact published in the New York Times on 31 January 2003. (4)

Pelletiere explained in the New York Times his background to the
affair:

"I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence
Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war,
and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was
privy to much of the classified material that flowed through
Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I
headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a
war against the United States; the classified version of the report
went into great detail on the Halabja affair." (5) Pelletiere
continues:

"This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came
about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. 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. But they were not Iraq's main target." (6)

"And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United
States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a
classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence
community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was
Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas." (7)

"The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in
the battle around Halabja. 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." (8)

The Halabja incident is the most prominent shameless example of
American and British lies about Iraq. There are however others as
well.

MORE LIES - BRITISH COMPLILE REPORT FROM 12 YEAR OLD INTERNET DATA

The British government produced a dossier of Iraq's supposed crimes
on Monday 3rd February 2003, in which it claimed to have compiled a
complete catalogue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This was
done to try and convince the British public of the need for war
against Iraq.

Unfortunately for Tony Blair and the British government, the
dossier was nothing but a plagiarism of material found on the
Internet, with most of it being more than 12 years out of date. (9)

The BBC was even forced to report that the British government's
report was "copied from three different articles, including one
written by a postgraduate student." (10)

The BBC continued:

"Excerpts from a paper relating to the build-up to the 1991 Gulf
War by Californian student Ibrahim al-Marashi were used in the
intelligence document. The paper was published in the Middle East
Review of International Affairs." (11)

In addition, other portions of the report were taken from old
articles in the defence journal Jane's Intelligence Review. (12)

Despite this report therefore being utterly groundless and based on
information that was literally more than a decade old, US secretary
of state Colin Powell was full of praise for this blatantly
inaccurate and non-intelligence driven British concoction, as he
tried to justify the war against Iraq. (13)

AMERICAN CASE BASED ON OUTRIGHT FORGERY

That Colin Powell was full of praise for the British report should
not be surprising, as the US administration has engaged in its own
particularly poor set of lies about Iraq as well.

On 28 January 2003, George W. Bush himself, in his State of the
Union address of that date, announced to the world: "The British
government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa." (14)

The documents, given to International Atomic Energy Agency Director
General Mohamed ElBaradei, indicated that Iraq tried to buy 500
tons of uranium from Niger. (15)

Colin Powell referred to the documents directly in his flamboyant
presentation to the U.N. Security Council outlining the Bush
administration's case against Iraq. (16)

In December 2002, the US State Department used the information to
support its case that Iraq was lying about its weapons programs.
(17)

Unfortunately, for Bush and Powell, closer inspection of these
documents revealed that they were blatant and obvious forgeries.
(18)

One the documents was a letter discussing the uranium deal
supposedly signed by Niger President Tandja Mamadou. The UN Weapons
inspectors described the signature as "childlike" and said that it
clearly was not Mamadou's. (19)

Another, written on paper from a 1980s military government in Niger,
bears the date of October 2000 and the signature of a man who by
then had not been foreign minister of Niger in 14 years. (20)

The forgery was in fact highlighted by ElBaradei in his 7 March 2003
presentation to the U.N. Security Council (21) but this was simply
ignored by both the British and American governments.

The forgery was so shocking that even the top Democrat on the US
Senate Intelligence Committee has asked for a FBI investigation
into who manufactured the documents. (22)

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said he was uneasy about a
possible campaign to deceive the public about the status of Iraq's
nuclear program, (23) saying that an investigation would "help to
allay any concerns" that the government was involved in the
creation of the documents to build support for administration
policies. (24)

Indeed.

With a background of deception, lies, fraud and forgery like that,
the real wonder is that anyone believes anything that the Bush and
Blair administrations have to say at all.

Whatever Saddam Hussein's crimes may or may not be, it is clear
that the US and the UK have not managed to make a credible case for
the war against Iraq, and have been forced to fall back on a tissue
of lies and fabrications. The free world can only hope that they
are one day called to account.

Sources:
(1) Text of Bush's speech, and an audio copy, can be found at the
website of the American embassy in London,
http://www.usembassy.org.uk/bush243.html
(2) Diary, Matthew Norman, The Guardian, March 13, 2003,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/diary/story/0,3604,913007,00.html
(3) BBC, Tony Blair's speech to the Trades Union Congress in
Blackpool, 10 September, 2002,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2249312.stm
(4 - 8) New York Times, "A War Crime or an Act of War?" STEPHEN C.
PELLETIERE, 31 January 2003,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
(9 - 13) Iraq dossier 'solid' - Downing Street, BBC, 7 February,
2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2735031.stm )
14 - 16) Fake Iraq documents 'embarrassing' for U.S. CNN, Friday,
March 14, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq.documents )
(17) Senator Seeks FBI Probe of Iraq Documents, Associated Press, 14
March 2003, Kansas City Star,
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/5394313.htm )
(18 - 21 ) Fake Iraq documents 'embarrassing' for U.S. CNN, Friday,
March 14, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq.documents )
(22 - 24) Senator Seeks FBI Probe of Iraq Documents, Associated
Press, 14 March 2003, Kansas City Star,
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/5394313.htm )



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=====================================
IRAQ: The Cradle of Civilization

by J. R. Church

American troops are presently in the very place where civilization
began. The Garden of Eden once covered the area. Noah built his ship
there. After the deluge, he and his family returned to find a very
different place than they had known before the Flood. Where there were
once lush forests, a desert now lay. Sand had washed up out of the
Indian Ocean and covered the forests and animals. Soon, the heat and
pressure below would turn the antediluvian world into underground pools
of oil.

Nimrod, grandson of Ham, established man's first government there. He
built the Tower of Babel and claimed to be God's appointed Messiah. You
might say, Nimrod was the first of the Antichrist figures. Abraham
withstood Nimrod's idolatry, then left from there for new territory.

Yes, Iraq is the cradle of civilization. But that's not all. Centuries
later, Nebuchad-nezzar established a wealthy kingdom in Babylon. He
built the "hanging gardens" and restored the tower once called "Babel,"
dedicating it as a temple to Baal Marduk.

This ancient "cradle of civilization" became the prototype for Earth's
future MYSTERY BABYLON. So significant was Babylon, that
Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom fell there. The Medo-Persian kingdom fell
there. Greece fell there. And Rome? Rome fell at the hands of Germanic
invaders. Ah, but the Ishtar Gate now resides in a museum in Berlin. So
in a way, Rome fell at the hands of a future Babylon. Today, Europeans
are so proud of their Babylonian heritage that they built a European
Parliament Building in Strasbourg, France, designed after the unfinished
Tower of Babel!

Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post staff writer, recently published an
article on Iraq's ancient treasures - archeological sites like Babylon
and a thousand other digs that offer windows into the ancient past. He
fears that if Iraq falls under siege, people will pillage the museums
and carry off priceless treasures.

After the 1991 Desert Storm, the law became almost unenforceable. When
the future of Saddam Hussein was in doubt, uprisings were widespread.
Guards were withdrawn from museums and deployed elsewhere. Nine of the
13 regional museums were raided by mobs, who stole things straight from
the display cases. At least 3,000 historical objects disappeared.

Gugliotta does not worry about America's military. We have a hearty
respect for museums and their treasures. We painstakingly preserve
antiquities. But Arabs don't seem to exhibit the same sense of
historical pride for their national identity.

Gugliotta writes: "The gravest danger comes afterward, when authority
disappears and desperate people cope with chaos by stealing the
marketable treasures that reside in museums or in the ground. It
happened after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and Iraq never recovered
from the experience.

"'We're afraid the whole cycle will repeat itself,' said University of
Buffalo classicist Samuel M. Paley. 'If we do go to war, something has
to be done to put the heritage infrastructure back together.'

"In January, the Archaeological Institute of America issued a statement
calling on 'all governments' to protect cultural sites both during and
after a war, and late in the month a mix of scholars, museum
representatives, collectors and dealers made the same case during a
briefing at the Department of Defense."

There are at least 5,000 archeological sites listed and may be upwards
to 100,000 or more yet to be discovered. Today, the land is a veritable
archeologist's paradise.

The heritage of the country includes world-famous tourist attractions
like Babylon, Nineveh, Assur and Numrud. But there are thousands of
tiny, long-forgotten villages in the backlands. Perhaps after Saddam is
gone, the archeologists can return to their treasure fields in the
cradle of civilization.

• All about the Oil Wars

  — APFN, Wed Apr 9 03:36