4/8/03
THE SOURCE OF IRAQ’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
By Al Hembd
The article below reveals that hearings of the United States Senate
Committee on banking, housing, and urban affairs in 1992, uncovered the fact
that the United States, often illegally, sold Saddam West Nile Virus, anthrax,
VX nerve gas, and other items forbidden by the Geneva Accord, right up to March
of 1992. In other words, the US was still sending Iraq biochemical
materials forbidden by the Geneva Accord, even after the first Gulf War.
According to these two web sites, which
review a book on the subject, and a database of official US government
documents, the Reagan and Bush administrations illegally laundered these sales
through the Vatican Bank.
http://www.namebase.org/books57.html
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/iraqgate/iraqgate.html
Below follows the article which was
originally from the Scotland Sunday Herald.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/news_alert_090802_enemies.html
How did Iraq get its weapons? We sold them
Sunday Herald of Scotland 09/08/02: Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot
Original Link: http://www.sundayherald.com/27572
THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq
needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass
destruction.
Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban
affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the
US,
under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush
Snr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever
germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs
similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included
brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium
perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
Classified US Defence Dep-artment documents also seen by the Sunday
Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to
nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can
be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.
The Senate committee's rep orts on 'US Chemical and Biological
Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq', undertaken in 1992 in the
wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports.
The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of
bacillus anthracis -- the micro-organism that causes anthrax -- were
shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two
batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes
deadly botulism poisoning.
One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State
Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went
from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the
Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the
Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the
Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers' City, a military complex
in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the
gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men,
women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took
place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of
weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from
the US.
The Senate report also makes clear that: 'The United States provided the
government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in
the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system
programmes.'
This assistance, according to the report, included 'chemical
warfare-agent precursors, chem ical warfare-agent production facility
plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment,
biological warfare-related materials, missile fabrication equipment and
missile system guidance equipment'.
Donald Riegle, then chairman of the committee, said: 'UN inspectors had
identified many United States manufactured items that had been exported
from the United States to Iraq under licences 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 programmes.'
Riegle added that, between January 1985 and August 1990, the 'executive
branch of our government approved 771 different export licences for sale
of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think that is a devastating record'.
It is thought the information contained in the Senate committee reports
is likely to make up much of the 'evidence of proof' that Bush and Blair
will reveal in the coming days to justify the US and Britain going to
war with Iraq. It is unlikely, however, that the two leaders will admit
it was the Western powers that armed Saddam with these weapons of mass
destruction.
However, Bush and Blair will also have to prove that Saddam still has
chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities. This looks like a
difficult case to clinch in view of the fact that Scott Ritter, the UN's
former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, says the United Nations des
troyed most of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and doubts that
Saddam could have rebuilt his stocks by now.
According to Ritter, between 90% and 95% of Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction were destroyed by the UN. He believes the remainder were
probably used or destroyed during 'the ravages of the Gulf War'.
Ritter has described himself as a 'card-carrying Republican' who voted
for George W Bush. Nevertheless, he has called the president a 'liar'
over his claims that Saddam Hussein is a threat to America.
Ritter has also alleged that the manufacture of chemical and biological
weapons emits certain gases, which would have been detected by
satellite. 'We have seen none of this,' he insists. 'If Iraq was
producing weapons today, we would have definitive proof.'
He also dismisses claims that Iraq may have a nuclear weapons capacity
or be on the verge of attaining one, saying that gamma-particle atomic
radiation from the radioactive materials in the warheads would also have
been detected by western surveillance.
The UN's former co-ordinator in Iraq and former UN under-secretary
general, Count Hans von Sponeck, has also told the Sunday Herald that he
believes the West is lying about Iraq's weapons programme.
Von Sponeck visited the Al-Dora and Faluja factories near Baghdad in
1999 after they were 'comprehensively trashed' on the orders of UN
inspectors, on the grounds that they were suspected of being chemical
weapons plants. He returned to the site late in July this year, with a
German TV crew, and said both plants were still wrecked.
'We filmed the evidence of the dishonesty of the claims that they were
producing chemical and biological weapons,' von Sponeck has told the
Sunday Herald. 'They are indeed in the same destroyed state which we
witnessed in 1999. There was no trace of any resumed activity at all.'