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September 8th, 2002 - How Did Iraq
Get Its Weapons? We Sold Them News article by the Sunday Herald (Scotland) |
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How Did Iraq Get Its
Weapons? We Sold Them The Sunday Herald (Scotland) by Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot September 8, 2002 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 Sr, 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 Defense
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
reports 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 programs.' This assistance, according
to the report, included 'chemical warfare-agent precursors, chemical
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 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.' Riegle added that, between
January 1985 and August 1990, 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'. 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 destroyed 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 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 program. 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.' ©2002 smg sunday newspapers
ltd External link:
http://www.sundayherald.com/27572 |