Dismay among Kurds that genocide case unanswered

[IndianaGreen]

Even the Kurds suspect that Saddam's quick execution was motivated by a desire to prevent an investigation into the role Western countries played in providing him with WMD used on the Kurds.

Dismay among Kurds that genocide case unanswered

Michael Howard
Monday January 1, 2007
The Guardian

Mahmoud Othman, a prominent Kurdish MP in Baghdad who survived several assassination attempts by the former regime, criticised the Iraqi government's apparent rush to carry out the death sentence before the end of the Anfal trial.

"It was very important to keep him alive so that we could know the full details of what happened during all the atrocities that were committed," he said. "We need to know how and why he did what he did and who helped him, by providing political and material support to his regime."

Saddam had taken many secrets to his grave, he said, including vital knowledge about "the foreign companies and countries that supplied the parts and expertise to make chemical weapons."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1980917,00.html

[Trajan]

1. I have a recommendation ...

CONTINUE the investigation into WHO participated in the killing of Kurds AND Iranians using chemical weapons .... Discover ALL parties involved ...

Just because Saddam is dead doesnt mean the issue cannot go forward ...

MAKE it happen, and godspeed ....

[Crunchy Frog]

2. The Kurds have been screwed by us before

and I'm sure they fully expect to be screwed by us in the future. No wonder they're not disbanding their militias. Would you if you were in their place?

I heard a very angry sounding Kurd on NPR the other day discussing just this issue.

[IndianaGreen]

11. CIA used the Kurds against the Shah of Iran to keep him in line

and quickly dropped the Kurds once the Shah acquiesced to American demands.

[Say_What]

3. Folks might be interested in reading the Arab take on why he hung

for the wrong crime.

<clips>

...Dujail? Here is a man who began his career in power in the late 1960s by exterminating the entire (mostly Shia) leadership of the Communist party in Iraq, went on to launch an invasion of Iran in 1980 that cost up to half a million lives, massacred his own Kurdish population in 1987-88 when some of their leaders sided with the Iranians, invaded Kuwait in 1990, and massacred Iraqi Shiites in 1991 when they rebelled against his rule at the end of that war. And they hanged him for Dujail?

It’s as if they had taken Adolf Hitler alive in 1945, but ignored his responsibility for starting World War II and his murder of six million Jews and just put him on trial for executing people suspected of involvement in the July 1944 bomb plot. With all of Saddam’s other crimes to choose from, why on earth would you hang him for executing the people suspected of involvement in the Dujail plot?

Because the United States was not involved in that one. It was involved in the massacre of the Iraqi Communists (the US Central Intelligence Agency gave Saddam their membership lists). It was implicated up to its ears in Saddam’s war against Iran — to the point of arranging for Iraq to be supplied with the chemicals to make poison gas, providing Baghdad with satellite and AWACS intelligence data on Iranian targets, and seconding US Air Force photo interpreters to Baghdad to draw Saddam the detailed maps of Iranian trenches that let him drench them in poison gas.

The Reagan administration stopped Congress from condemning Saddam’s use of poison gas, and the US State Department tried to protect Saddam when he gassed his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja in 1988, spreading stories (which it knew to be false) that Iranian planes had dropped the gas. It was the US that finally saved Saddam’s regime by providing naval escorts for tankers carrying oil from Arab Gulf states while Iraqi planes were left free to attack tankers coming from Iranian ports. Even when one of Saddam’s planes mistakenly attacked an American destroyer in 1987, killing 37 crewmembers, Washington forgave him.

And it was George W. Bush’s father who urged Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds to rebel after Saddam was driven out of Kuwait in 1991, and then failed to use US air power to protect the Shiites from massacre when they answered his call. The US was deeply involved in all of Saddam’s major crimes, one way or another, so no trial that delved into the details of those crimes could be allowed.


http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=90555&d=1&m=1&y=2007

[cap]

5. yes.. and the secretary of defense at that time was

Dick Cheney... and the special envoy to Iraq was Rumsfeld...

There are probably a host of mid level folks who went on to prosper during this current administration as well.

[IndianaGreen]

10. "The US was deeply involved in all of Saddam’s major crimes"

I am sure that they are records from the Iraqi government containing all the gory details of Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad and all the deals made between the US and Saddam. The US has custody of those records. What became of them? How can we get the US government to make them public? Will the Maliki regime conspire to keep those records secret in order to protect Bush?

[Onlooker]

4. Obviously the sudden rush to execute Saddam ...

... was to cover up indirect involvement of other parties, including Americans, in the Kurd genocide.

[Kurovski]

6. K&R

The rush to do him in stinks powerful bad.

[Vidar]

7. Covering up our role in the Kurdish gassings is one of

the larger reasons for his hasty execution. Recommended.

[UpInArms]

8. The Corporations That Supplied Iraq's Weapons Program

http://www.thememoryhole.org/corp/iraq-suppliers.htm

>>> Even before Iraq released its weapons-program dossier on 7 December 2002, it was said that the report would name the corporations that supplied Iraq with the equipment and other material it needed to develop biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. Soon after the report was released, those suspicions were confirmed. Sources who had seen the report said that it identified suppliers from the US, UK, Germany, France, China, and elsewhere.

Now, that part of the report has been leaked. The leftist German daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung received portions of the original, uncensored 12,000-page dossier. (The names of the corporations have been blacked out of the version of the report given to the ten non-permanent members of the Security Council.) The paper has printed the list, presented below.



...more with a list...

[NYC]

15. U.S.A. list from the Memory Hole:

Key

A = nuclear weapon program
B = biological weapon program
C = chemical weapon program
R = rocket program
K = conventional weapons, military logistics, supplies at the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, and building of military plants



USA

1. Honeywell (R, K)

2. Spectra Physics (K)

3. Semetex (R)

4. TI Coating (A, K)

5. Unisys (A, K)

6. Sperry Corp. (R, K)

7. Tektronix (R, A)

8. Rockwell (K)

9. Leybold Vacuum Systems (A)

10. Finnigan-MAT-US (A)

11. Hewlett-Packard (A, R, K)

12. Dupont (A)

13. Eastman Kodak (R)

14. American Type Culture Collection (B)

15. Alcolac International (C)

16. Consarc (A)

17. Carl Zeiss - U.S (K)

18. Cerberus (LTD) (A)

19. Electronic Associates (R)

20. International Computer Systems (A, R, K)

21. Bechtel (K)

22. EZ Logic Data Systems, Inc. (R)

23. Canberra Industries Inc. (A)

24. Axel Electronics Inc. (A)

"In addition to these 24 companies home-based in the USA are 50 subsidiaries of foreign enterprises which conducted their arms business with Iraq from within the US. Also designated as suppliers for Iraq's arms programs (A, B, C & R) are the US Ministries of Defense, Energy, Trade and Agriculture as well as the Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories."

http://www.thememoryhole.org/corp/iraq-suppliers.htm

[The Backlash Cometh]

9. Who, besides Iraq benefitted from the Kurdish genocide?

[leesa]

12. Even the Kurds? You mean they don't buy our American propaganda

Saddam gassed you, don't ya know?

[LynnTheDem]

13. Oh it ain't a "secret" about which "foreign companies & countries".

U.S. and Iraq's Weapons (LA Times-23 Feb 93)
http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2000/msg00776.html

A 1994 investigation by the Senate Bank Committee found that U.S. companies had been licensed by the Commerce Department to export a "witch's brew" of biological and chemical materials, including precursors of anthrax and botulism. The report also noted the exports included plans for chemical and biolgical warfare facilities and chemical warhead filling equipment
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/12/503

IraqGate
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/iraqgate/iraqgate.html

[struggle4progress]

14. Gerald Ford completed Nixon's doublecross of the Iraqi Kurds

Volume 96, Number 9
Friday, March 5, 1976
... The Tech is published twice a week during the academic year (except during MIT vacations) and once during the first week of August ...

Oil policy
To the Editor ...

The following is an excerpt from the New York Times by William Safire (February 5,
1976) on some interesting facts about the Kurdish genocide:

"One section of the still-secret Pike committee report .. troubling to the White House is the revelation of a shameful action for which .. Ford must be held responsible: the betrayal of the Kurdish people ..."

http://www-tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_096/TECH_V096_S0067_P004.txt

[Say_What]

16. GHW Bush and the Kurds...

<clips>

December 30-31, 2006 -- SPECIAL REPORT. The Bush Crime Family may believe that with the execution of Saddam Hussein their involvement in illegal dealings with the Iranian Revolutionary Government in the wake of the downfall of the Shah will be secretly buried along with Saddam, the former CIA asset and U.S. agent of influence in the Iraq-Iran War. Although much has been written about George H. W. Bush's and former CIA director William Casey's pre-1980 U.S. presidential election maneuverings with the government of Ayatollah Khomeini to keep U.S. embassy personnel in Tehran as hostages until after the election (thus preventing an "October Surprise" of a hostage release that would benefit President Jimmy Carter), little has been written about the mysterious disappearance of a U.S.-flagged cargo ship that, according to our intelligence sources, was on a secret and unofficial trip to Iran and possibly carrying a weapons shipment agreed to between Bush and Casey and Iranian representatives in Paris in October 1980. According to classified Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) cables between the DEA in Washington and Scotland Yard in London, the ship, the SS Poet, may have been involved in a hijacking and the subsequent swapping U.S. cargo for Iranian heroin but that may have been a crafty cover story to throw off investigators.

...In any event, the Coast Guard search for the vessel was likely a ruse as was the DEA story about an Italian mob hijacking involving corn for heroin. However, one Persian Gulf intelligence service that keenly tracked every vessel entering the Gulf, especially those bound for Iran, was the Iraqi Mukhabarat. With its extensive network in Oman and the United Arab Emirates, the Mukhabarat would have been sure to have taken note of a U.S.-flagged vessel entering Iranian waters during a virtual state of war between Iran and the United States. Saddam Hussein, if left to tell his entire story on a witness stand, could have painted a very evil picture of George W. Bush's father and his current coterie of advisers, including current Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Bush, Jr. reportedly wanted Saddam hanged before he could begin testifying about the origin of the chem-bio weapons used on the Kurds. And Bush, Sr. may have dodged more than one bullet by Saddam's execution. The fate of the SS Poet may have been the icing on the Saddam's testimony about the Reagan-Bush administration supplying him with all the necessary chem-bio weapons he later used against Iran and the Kurds. If Saddam managed to spirit out of Iraq his memoirs about his long dealings with the Bush Crime Family, Bush Senior and Junior should be worried. Very worried.

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

[struggle4progress]

17. Since the Iraqi Kurds inhabit an oil-producing area, I'd wager they get screwed again ..

.. before W's current adventure ends.

[Say_What]

19. A 1991 Kurdish Betrayal Redux?

<clips>

...The Kurds also attest to the 'realist' betrayal of Iraq in 1991. As Coalition Forces were breaking the back of Saddam's army from the air, President George HW Bush's public suggestion to Iraqis, "to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside," encouraged Kurdish and Shiite uprising against the Baathist regime. George H.W. Bush and Baker provided no support and tens of thousands of Shi'a and Kurdish Iraqis were slaughtered in reprisal once the regime regrouped.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/AR2006120101308.html

[struggle4progress]

21. They were equally betrayed by Ford in 1975: once the Shah of Iran

obtained the desired results in his negotiations with Iraq, the US cut off all aid to the Kurdish resistence, and the Iraqis launched an immediate offensive. This was a decade and a half before the betrayal by Bush I. Another decade and a half having elapsed, we might expect to see Bush II try the same gambit ...

[Say_What]

22. US history is soooo bloody.. I think every president, with exception

of Carter, could be tried for war crimes. Instead we label them "decent men". :puke:

[Critters2]

18. I've been saying this for days!!! Why kill him before holding more trials?!

The answer is obvious...because more trials will lead to the truth about who kept him in power, who provided him with weapons..Rummy and the gang.

This seems so obvious to me!!

[gratuitous]

20. Glorioski, Kurds!

It turns out that the majority is no more sympathetic to your issues than the number two population group was. What a surprise that they're more interested in settling accounts with each other than in your petty little concerns.