[Peace] FW: The Mother of all Weapons of Mass Destruction

[Marianne Brun]

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Von: portsideMod <portsidemod at yahoo.com>
Antworten an: portside at yahoogroups.com
Datum: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 21:14:30 -0700 (PDT)
An: ps <portside at yahoogroups.com>
Betreff: The Mother of all Weapons of Mass Destruction

How did Iraq get its weapons? We sold them
==========================================

By Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot
Sunday Herald
(Scotland)

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

The Senate committee's 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 wea pons 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 des troyed 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.



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