come on, look at these contradictory reports.
American armed forces never, ever visited that site nor has Halabja even had its soil measured for chemical residue. The study by DOD that is cited in the links by the original poster fails to identify the analysis of how blood agents were determined to have been used, and merely places its determination from “Blood agents were “allegedly responsible”. However, for the sake of evidence a description of this is in the accompanying link.
Even though the same report states “Tabun is a crude agent; however the Iraqis are believed to have developed sarin, a more sophisticated variety that acts like tabun. This was supposedly employed during the 1988 attack on the Al Faw peninsula, and in several of the other operations which made up the Tawakalna Ala Allah campaign. However, we doubt this was the case.”
So, the authors state that while there are reports of the use of blood agents elsewhere by the Iraqis, at Al Faw, they don’t believe they were used by the Iraqis at Halabja,. Why? Because they don’t believe they were used by the Iraqis at Al Faw, and then go on to blame the attack on the Iranians.
Is that intellectual buggery or is it not?
You might want to read the link posted on this that cited personal accounts from Kurds who were gassed and the doctors who treated them and their medical studies on the post gassed health effects on the remaining population of Halabja.
In the article, “Iraqi jets dropped a variety of chemical weapons, which experts believe included mustard gas, sarin, VX nerve gas and aflatoxin dissolved in tear gas.”
http://home.cogeco.ca/~kurdistanobserver/2-7-02-88-gassing-still-killing.htmlThe DOD's Marine study that jude wanneski has ballyhooed has all the earmarks of the same sloppy analysis we have come to expect from the US military and intelligence communities where the rigor of peer review is anathema and produced no evidence, none at all from which its conclusion was determined as to the true source of the attack on Halabja. In fact its conclusion was based not upon evidence on the ground or the testimony of live witnesses, but specious thinking that would not pass muster in a star chamber.
OFFICERS SAY U.S. AIDED IRAQ IN WAR DESPITE USE OF GAS
http://query.nytimes.com/search/abstract?res=F20911FA38590C7B8DDDA10894DA404482 A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.U.S., Britain Helped Iraq Develop Chemical And Biological Weapons"
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/psn/mar98/0002.htmlSource: Reuters, February 12, 1998.
A British television news program reported last week that the United States
helped Iraq develop its chemical and biological weapons programs in the 1980s,
and Britain sold Baghdad the antidote to nerve gas as late as March 1992.
<snip>
Britain's Channel Four television news said it found intelligence documents
which showed 14 shipments of biological materials -- including 19 batches of
anthrax bacteria and 15 batches of botulinum, the organism that causes
botulism -- were exported from the U.S. to Iraq between 1985 and 1989.
<snip>
Twenty-nine batches of material were sent after Iraq killed 5,000 people in a
gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, the program reported.
<snip>
A senior Pentagon official said he stopped a 1988 order from Iraq for 1.5
million doses of atropine, which is used to protect troops from nerve gas. A
classified U.S. Defense Department document showed Iraq had bought pralidoxine an antidote to nerve gas -- from Britain in March 1992, after the Gulf War.
CHEMICAL WARFARE IN THE IRAQ-IRAN WAR
http://projects.sipri.se/cbw/research/factsheet-1984.html<snip>
Allegations
There have been reports of chemical warfare from the Gulf War since the early months of Iraq s invasion of Iran. In November 1980, Tehran Radio was broadcasting allegations of Iraqi chemical bombing at Susangerd. Three and a quarter years later, by which time the outside world was listening more seriously to such charges, the Iranian Foreign Minister told the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that there had been at least 49 instances of Iraqi chemical-warfare attack in 40 border regions, and that the documented dead totalled 109 people, with hundreds more wounded.
<snip>
THE POISON GASES IDENTIFIED BY THE UN TEAM
Mustard gas
Tabun
Germ-warfare agents: Israeli intelligence sources have been cited for reports that anthrax had been found in hospitalized Iranians. Iranian sources have referred to Iraqi use of "microbic" and "bacteriological" weapons.
<snip>
Indigenous or external sources of supply?
With the exceptions, maybe, of the last two of these different categories of putative Iraqi agent, sources of supply might as well be indigenous as external to Iraq, given the technology implied. Involvement of the last three categories would, in some circles, implicate the USSR as supplier, for the reason that the USSR is said, on evidence that has yet to be solidly substantiated but which has nonetheless attracted some firm believers, to have weaponized all three of them in recent years. For its part, the USSR has expressly denied supplying Iraq with toxic weapons. Reports of Soviet supply attributed to US and other intelligence sources have nonetheless recurred. The earliest predate reports of Iraqi use of chemical weapons in the Gulf War.
Official Iranian commentaries, too, have pointed to the USSR as a supplier of the Iraqi weapons. These sources have also accused Brazil, France and, most conspicuously, Britain of supplying the weapons. No basis for any of these Iranian accusations has been disclosed. France, alongside Czechoslovakia and both Germanies, is reportedly also rumoured, among "foreign military and diplomatic sources" in Baghdad, to have supplied Iraq with chemical precursors needed for an indigenous production effort. Unofficial published sources have cited Egypt as a possible supplier of actual chemical weapons. In the mid-1960s, when Iraq was alleged to be using chemical weapons against insurgent Kurdish forces, Swiss and German sources of supply were reported in the Western press.
<snip>
The search for materials
Any need to import special chemical-process plant and associated know-how could be lessened by importing, instead, some of the chemical intermediates needed to produce chemical-warfare agents, rather than attempting to manufacture those intermediates from indigenous raw materials (of which the Iraqi mining, petroleum and related industries appear to provide the full range needed for mustard and nerve gases, with the possible expection for some of the latter of fluoride minerals). Certain intermediates can be identified which could reduce the requirements for chemical plant to processing equipments of standard off-the-shelf or easily improvised types. Iraq has not concealed the fact that it is in the market for chemicals which do indeed fall within this category. This has been most conspicuous in Iraq's search in America for supplies of methylphosphonous dichloride and dimethyl methyl-phosphonate. These two chemicals do, however, have certain civil applications. But at least in the former case they are not ones which, in the normal course of events, Iraq might obviously be expected to exploit.
<snip>
Export controls
On 30 March, the US government announced the imposition of 'foreign policy controls' on the export to the Gulf-War belligerents of five chemicals that could be used in the production of mustard and nerve gases. US officials told the press that this had been done in response to an unexpected volume of recent orders from Iraq for those chemicals. They also said that Japan, FR Germany and other unspecified European countries had been exporting the chemicals to Iraq. The British government took action similar to that of Washington on 12 April, adding three more chemicals to the control list (see table). Since then, other European governments have also announced embargoes of varying scope, and on 15 May the Foreign Ministers of the European Community agreed in principle on a common and complementary policy. There are Western press reports of suspicions in Western diplomatic circles in the Middle East that the USSR is shipping intermediates to Iraq through Jordan.
http://projects.sipri.se/cbw/research/factsheet-1984.htmlThat you cling to the Pentagon report (or even that sited by the link at
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/helms.html)
that is inconclusive as to the Iraqi gas attack on the Kurds as your thrust to be against an American invasion of Iraq is a non-sequiter.
In demanding that the inconclusiveness of the Pentagon or UN reports on the gassing substantiates a claim that no gassing occurred is stupid, and I would expect that sort of intellectual deception from the far Right, and not the Left.
but i assume you want you want further proof. how about a left leaning group? how about human rights watch? is such an organization and its past and present reputation for forthright honesty acceptable for you?
http://hrw.org/reports/world/iraq-pubs.php“Iraq’s 1988 Anfal campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living within its borders resulted in the death of at least 50,000 and as many as 100,000 people, many of them women and children. This book, co-published with Yale University Press, investigates the Anfal campaign and concludes that this campaign constituted genocide against the Kurds. The book is the result of research by a team of Human Rights Watch investigators who analyzed eighteen tons of captured Iraqi government documents (10 of these documents are reproduced in the appendix) and carried out field interviews with more than 350 witnesses, most of them survivors of the Anfal campaign. It confirms that the campaign was characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass summary executions and disappearances of many tens of thousands of noncombatants; the widespread use of chemical weapons, among them mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands; the arbitrary jailing and warehousing of tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people for months, in conditions of extreme deprivation and without judicial order; the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers to barren resettlement camps after the demolition of their homes; and the wholesale destruction of some two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms, and power stations. The book is a searing indictment of the Iraqi government’s carefully planned and executed program to destroy a people, harrowing in its detailed and objective recounting of crimes against innocents.”
while i am not an advocate of the american invasion of iraq, i also do not want to use information that is suspect to defend my positon against that invasion.
the last thing the left needs is to look like al sharpton after the "tawana whatever her name was" affair
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