Ignoring all the documentary and expert testimony to the contrary; the CIA reports, DIA report, US Marine Corps report, Pentagon report etc;
taking ONLY the Human Rights Watch report of "genocide" of the Kurds in the alleged 1988 Anfal campaign, I'm still just not convinced.Human Rights Watch is the group that claims Iraq committed "genocide" against the Kurds in 1988. According to HRW, 50,000-100,000 Kurds were killed by Hussein under his "cleansing" or Anfal.
--HRW:
"By our estimate, in Anfal at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 persons, many of them women and children, were killed out of hand between February and September 1988."http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFALPRE.htmBy 2003, that number became "100,000". And only men and boys;
"Some 100,000 Kurdish men and boys were then rounded up, trucked to remote areas and machine-gunned to death, their bodies bulldozed into mass graves. HANNY MEGALLY
New York, Aug. 12, 2002
The writer is executive director, Middle East and North Africa Division, Human Rights Watch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/opinion/L13IRAQ.htmlThing is, HRW's "evidence" has me a bit puzzled. In their "A Note on Methodology",
HRW cite's 3 forms of evidence they used to conclude Hussein had committed genocide in his "Anfal" against the Kurds; (1) eyewitness testimony, (2)Iraqi government documents, and (3) forensic evidence (or what bushCartel call "mass graves").
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/METHOD.htm(1)Interviews of 350 Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1992 and 1993, four and five years after the events, with US government assistance. As criminal experts and lovers of murder myteries and L&O fans know, eyewitness testimony is the least credible form of proof. To add to the problem, HRW mentions the "considerable difficulty" encountered:
--HRW: "Due to the high incidence of illiteracy in rural Kurdistan, as well as the local population's particular way of marking time, the team encountered considerable difficulty in its attempts to establish exact dates for specific events, or particular chronologies, on the basis of interviews with individual villagers."
The US government involvement doesn't reassure me, either; US interviewers with representatives of the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That the US officials involved had an agenda is beyond doubt; they stated it themselves often enough. But I'll leave that for interested persons to research for themselves.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFALPRE.htm(2) Examination of documents taken by Kurdish rebels from captured Iraqi government offices. These documents, most of which the public still haven't been shown, were reviewed, researched, edited and reported on by...the Kurds.
But read through the documents that are in the public view; let me know if you come across any proof of genociding the Kurds. I've gone through them several times and had no luck, but it could be I require glasses.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1994/iraq/APPENDIX.htm#TopOfPage(3)exhumations of 3 grave sitesOf course, forensic evidence is considered the best form of proof, and usually you can't convict without having at least some direct "hard" evidence.
HRW exhumed bodies in 3 grave sites of 3 villages;1. 26 bodies of men and boys executed by firing squad.
Definitely an atrocity; but "genocide"? No.
2. 3 children's graves near the village of Erbil; "within the graveyard of a complex where survivors of the Anfal were taken,"
-Children who weren't killed in the alleged Anfal campaign, but later died of other causes. And this proves Kurds died AFTER the alleged Anfal. Ok. I don't have any problem believing that. In fact, I bet Kurds still die to this day.
3. 2 bodies near the village of Birjinni, who COULD have died from a chemical attack, as alleged, because there was no forensic proof that showed they DIDN'T die from a chemical attack. There was also no proof that showed they did.
--HRW: The forensic team was told that these two skeletons were those of the grandfather and the small boy who had died in the (chemical) attack.
Forensic examination of the two skeletons was limited to determining whether there was any sign of trauma or perimortem violence that might contradict the account of the villagers that the two decedents were overcome by chemical weapons. No indications contrary to death by chemical agents were found. So because there was no evidence saying it could NOT have been chemicals which caused the deaths, it must have been chemicals that caused the deaths? So if we dig up skeletons that died from heart attacks, we can claim they could have died from chemical attacks, because "no indications contrary to death by chemical agents were found"? Hmmm...I sure hope that doesn't become a standard measure here.
That's it. 31 remains. 26 of whom definitely were murdered, although why and by whom we don't know. But murdered they were.
(32 remains in another HRW report; 27 men & boys instead of 26)
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1992/iraqkor/Where did the other 99,974 bodies go? We killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqis because Hussein was a "murderous monster worse than Hitler" who committed "genocide" by killing "100,000 Kurds"...and we have 31 bodies, 2 of whom by HRW's own report died after the alleged Anfal campaign, and 2 of whom we have no idea how or why?
Human Rights Watch has an explanation for those missing 99,974 bodies;The other 99,974 people were
"trucked to remote areas and machine-gunned to death, their bodies bulldozed into mass graves".http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/opinion/L13IRAQ.html?ex=1118116800&en=272457f4307c66a2&ei=5070That have never been found.
Sorta like the "500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." mentioned by George W. Bush in the State of the Union Address. 1/28/2003
http://www.americanprogress.org/AccountTempFiles/cf/%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/PRIRAQCLAIMFACT1029.HTM"Remote areas". Such as the mountains? With bulldozers? And trucks full of 100,000 bodies? And no one knows a thing about where this massive mass grave is?
:wow:
"Mushroom cloud"..."there is no doubt"..."we were all wrong"..."genocide"...
There are others who make "genocide" claims;-Such as Christine Gosden, a professor of medical genetics at the University of Liverpool medical school.
Ms. Gosden didn't care for HRW's "100,000" figure; she upped it to "200,000", as she told to Jeffrey Goldberg.
"Now, if you take out two hundred thousand men and boys from Kurdistan"—an estimate of the number of Kurds who were gassed or otherwise murdered in the campaign, most of whom were men and boys—"you've affected the population structure."http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020325fa_FACT1Sure just toss on another 100,000! Hey why not!
Notice all the quotes offered from our friend Ahmed Chalabi; now there's credibility.
And while Goldberg mentions Hussein's son-in-law Kamel who "had then spoken publicly about Iraq's offensive biological, chemical, and nuclear capabilities", Goldberg never mentioned one rather important fact; Kamel also testified that Hussein had, in 1991, ordered all of Iraq's WMD be destroyed.
Dr. Gordon Prather, a nuclear physicist who was assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for science and technology, doesn't quite agree with Ms. Gosden, either, and she apparently wasn't aware of this fact;
"Your lady doctor's assertion that Iraq bombed 280 villages with poison gas is a joke you should have seen without a fact-checker. There were hundreds of villages cleared by Baghdad on the Iraqi border, but the
residents were moved to new villages built for them in the interior. Western journalists were invited in to observe the process, including Karen Eliot House of the Wall Street Journal, now the president of Dow Jones International."
http://www.polyconomics.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=2001We should believe ANYTHING from these pro-war pro-regime change who-needs-proof-trust-us bunch? How many times do we accept being lied to? We're supposed to believe they were wrong about WMD, wrong about ties to 911, wrong about ties to al Qaeda, wrong about the flowers & confectionary tossing, wrong about Iraq oil paying for everything, wrong about the "dead-enders", wrong about "mission accomplished" (several times)...but hey they're right about the "genocide"? And they have 26 remains to prove it!
Call me a cynic but I ain't buying it at this time.
Forget about proving who shot the 26 men & boys; Hussein's good for that one, no one is going to demand any proof, he's surely illegally killed that many, so charge him with their murders.
And let's also charge George W. Bush with some of the deaths of the 108 detainees who died (so far) in US custody, "mostly from violent causes", in Iraq and Afghanistan. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/03/16/national/w111607S94.DTL114 American POWs died from ALL causes during the entire Vietnam war.
http://vietnamresearch.com/history/stats.htmlBut "genocide" of 100,000 (or is it 200,000?) Kurds in 1988? Not until those 99,974 missing bodies are found. Or is it 199,974 missing bodies.
"Saddam Trial May Lack Evidence" http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/18/1071337066012.html?oneclick=trueGee, ya think? Shouldn't that have been thought of BEFORE we pronounced guilt, and invaded, occupied and "shock & awe" bombed the crap out of a nation?
And let's hope to hell our American justice system as applied to ourselves never becomes the same "justice" system the US applies to Iraq. There's a lot of cemeteries in the US that hold remains that would show "No indications contrary to death by chemical agents were found" and a whole lot of land where we could be accused of having "trucked" our victims "to remote areas and machine-gunned to death, their bodies bulldozed into mass graves"...and no actual bodies necessary.