Doug hates this (Casey can be just as self rightous as his antagonists) but, the piece refutes the Pelletaire BS that Leigh believes. PBS several years ago aired footage, several minutes long, of the Iraqi planes dropping the bio-chem on Halabja.And long interviews with survivors.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/archives/2003/su03/casey.htm Questioning Halabja Genocide and the Expedient Political Lie
Will Leigh read it? Nah, too caught up in his shtick.
>...As powerful as the film of Halabja is, it is only a small portion
of the evidence. In hundreds of eyewitness interviews conducted over
the next few years, survivor after survivor identified the source of
the gas at Halabja (and at other sites) as Iraqi military aircraft
that flew low enough so that their markings were visible from the
ground. Beginning in October of 1988, seven months after Halabja, a
series of forensic investigations, some sponsored by Middle East Watch
(now the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch) and Physicians
for Human Rights and others organized by independent medical
scientists, undertook medical examinations of survivors, conducted
tests for trace chemicals on soil samples and bomb fragments, and
performed autopsies of exhumed bodies. The results of a number of
these studies were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Based on these studies, scientists concluded that the victims of
Halabja and other sites had been exposed, in the words of medical
geneticist Christine Gosden, "to the highest doses of the most potent
cocktails of chemical and biological nerve and mustard agents ever
used against civilians." The nerve gases sarin and tubin, as well as
mustard gas, are known to have been used, and there is good reason to
believe that the nerve agent VX and biological weapons such as anthrax
and mycotoxins may also have been employed at different times.
The Origin of the Denials During the Gulf War and the popular uprisings that followed it, significant stores of Iraqi Baathist government documents and tapes were seized, mostly by the Kurdish Peshmerga. Ample documentation of the plans and the implementation of the poison gas attacks was found, including a tape of a particularly damning speech by the chief architect and executioner of Anfal, Ali Hassan al-Majid. Hassan says of the Kurds, "I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck the international community and those who listen to them!"
Every group that has examined this question-the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and others-has come to the same conclusion: that the Iraqi Baathist regime used poison gas on its Kurdish population during the Anfal campaign, in Halabja and at other sites. There simply is no reasonable doubt.
Yet no sooner had the pictures of the dead of Halabja appeared on television screens than the campaign to deny Iraqi responsibility began. The initial impetus for these efforts came from within the U.S. government. To understand how this came to pass, one must examine the Iraq policy of the United States during the 1980s.
Following the Iranian Islamist Revolution, the seizing of hostages from the American embassy, and the Iraqi invasion of Iran, Ronald Reagan's administration entered into "an enemy of my enemy" alliance with the Baathist state: it became an American proxy in its war with Iran. When Iran temporarily gained the upper hand in the war, the United States provided Iraq with "detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes, and bomb assessment damage," a New York Times investigative report concluded. German, British, and American corporations sold Iraq military hardware, arms technology, advanced computers, and key ingredients for the manufacture of missiles and chemical and biological weapons, with the active approval of the U.S. government, according to PBS Frontline, Washington Post, and Newsweek reports. Among the items purchased by Iraq, these reports determined, were American-built helicopters that were used, U.S. government officials concluded, in poison gas attacks on the Kurds. The Reagan State Department also approved, before being overruled by the Pentagon, the sale to Iraq of 1.5 million atropine injectors, a drug used to counter the effects of chemical weapons.
The first reports of the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis referred to battles against Iranian troops, and the U.S. government attempted to shift the blame onto the Iranians. As the evidence mounted, and especially after Halabja, the Reagan administration finally issued public condemnations of the use of poison gas. At first, the statements criticized both Iraq and Iran; eventually, they specifically cited and decried the Iraqi use of poison gas against the Kurds. But at no time, the New York Times reports, did the Reagan administration end the top-secret program through which more than sixty officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency provided the Iraqi government with intelligence information and battle plans that facilitated the use of chemical weapons. Instead, Reagan and then the first Bush administration officials fought back congressional efforts to place sanctions on Iraq for its use of poison gas at Halabja. The Pentagon "wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas," one of the veterans of the DIA program told the Times. "It was just one more way of killing people-whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference."
It was this context that produced the ur-text of Kurdish genocide denial-a 1988 DIA report suggesting that Iran, not Iraq, was responsible for the use of poison gas at Halabja. This report, and a subsequent Army War College study and book incorporating its argument, provide one single piece of evidentiary conjecture for placing responsibility on the Iranians: film and eyewitness reports of the dead at Halabja indicated that their mouths and extremities had turned blue, and such symptoms were consistent with exposure to blood agents using cyanide, which, it was argued, only the Iranians were known to use. None of the authors of these documents, the most notable of whom was Stephen Pelletiere, the senior CIA political analyst of Iraq during the Anfal campaign and later professor at the Army War College, had any expertise in medical and forensic sciences, and their speculation doesn't stand up to minimal scrutiny. To begin, it is not true that Iran alone used blood agent weapons. A 1991 DIA report concluded that "Iraq is known to have employed . . . a blood agent, hydrogen cyanide gas... against Iranian soldiers, civilians, and Iraqi Kurdish civilians."
Moreover, cyanide gas is not very effective in the open air, and could not have caused, by itself, the widespread devastation at Halabja. It is far more likely that, as forensic studies of the survivors and soil of Halabja indicate, the poison gas cocktail had as its main components a combination of mustard gas and the nerve gases sarin and tubin. The appearance of cyanide symptoms could have resulted either from the decomposition tubin undergoes when it is used or from the inclusion of hydrogen cyanide in the poison-gas cocktail.
Even if one were to ignore all the other evidence of Iraqi state responsibility for Halabja, as Pelletiere and his co-authors do, and even if one were to suspend disbelief regarding the plausibility of the claim that Iran would use poison gas on a city held by its Kurdish allies and then bring international news media to the scene to report on it, these documents are unconvincing. But in the fall of 1988, this most spurious of arguments served the purposes of a U.S. government alliance with Iraq against Iran, and so it was circulated with the authority of the intelligence apparatuses of the U.S. government behind it. And once this Pandora's box was opened, this expedient political lie gained a life of its own.
The Denials Spread In August of 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Faced with the prospect of Saddam Hussein gaining strategic control of much of the Persian Gulf oil reserves, American policy toward Iraq literally changed overnight: the Baathist state was now a threat. The poison gassing of the Kurds, which had been the most inconvenient of facts, suddenly acquired major propaganda value in the battle against the Saddam's regime. The U.S. government became a major broadcaster of the genocidal horrors of Halabja, and remains so to this day.
There would be no mention of the support given to the Baathist regime, no formal retraction of the disinformation that had been generated to cover that regime's crimes. This self-generated amnesia had unfortunate side effects. For just as the U.S. government turned on a dime, so too did those who oppose everything the United States does: in their eyes, once the United States saw the Baathist regime as an implacable foe, that regime acquired anti-imperialist legitimacy; once the United States proclaimed the fiendishness of the gassing of the Kurds, there was reason to question its authenticity. Because the U.S. government never formally disavowed the DIA and War College reports, these documents could now be cited as grounds for challenging the truth of the Iraqi campaign of genocide against the Kurds.
The Gulf War and its aftermath set the stage on which a second wave of denials of the Kurdish genocide would play itself out. There were many valid objections to this war, the biggest one being that the decision to go to war was premature, taken before less violent and destructive measures, such as economic sanctions, had a chance to work. But many in the reflexive opposition school of thought did not recognize the legitimacy of any efforts by the United States and its allies to undo the Baathist regime's annexation of Kuwait. Their arguments disputed the notions that the people of Kuwait had a right of self-determination-for them, Kuwait as a national entity was simply an artifact of imperialism-and that the Baathist regime was as morally depraved as the United States and its allies claimed.
Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic and political activist, was one of the more articulate exponents of this view. Writing in the London Review of Books at the very moment the Baathist regime was launching its brutal suppression of the post-Gulf War uprisings of the Kurds and Shiites, Said declared that "[t]he claim that Iraq gassed its own citizens has often been repeated. At best, this is uncertain. There is at least one War College report, done while Iraq was a U.S. ally, which claims that the gassings of the Kurds at Halabja was done by Iran. Few people mention such reports in the media today." On virtually any other question one could contemplate, Said would dispute the conclusions of the American intelligence and military apparatuses in the strongest possible terms, yet when it comes to the question of the use of poison gas on the Kurds, discredited and transparently false CIA and DIA claims suddenly become trustworthy.
The Gulf War denials were relatively few in number. (In addition to Said, the other prominent denier was New Yorker writer Milton Viorst, who, after a one-day helicopter tour of Kurdish Iraq provided courtesy of the Baathist regime, decided there was no gassing of Kurdish civilians; he also offered the DIA and CIA claims as confirmation of his judgment.) But they planted the seeds for a third wave of denials that exploded on the scene during the buildup to the Iraq War. Significant segments of the movement opposed to the invasion of Iraq seized upon the old DIA and War College reports to cast doubt upon the Bush administration's arguments for regime change. Among the liberal and left opponents of the war, these documents were recycled in a Roger Trilling Village Voice column; in a number of columns in the liberal Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Star, one of which was reproduced on the progressive Common Dreams Web site; and on a number of alternative Internet Indymedia sites. Most of the left, though, shared the dominant view-perhaps best expressed by Dilip Hiro in the Nation and elsewhere-which was unequivocal in its condemnation of the Baathist campaign of genocide against the Kurds, of the U.S. government's alliance with the Iraqi state during the period of the genocide, and of the 2003 invasion.
Not to be outdone, critics of the war from the right joined in the denials, often with a nastier edge. Speaking from the floor of the House of Representatives, the far-right libertarian Representative from Texas, Ron Paul, asked his colleagues, "Are you aware of a Pentagon report studying charges that thousands of Kurds in one village were gassed . . . which found no conclusive evidence that Iraq was responsible, that Iran occupied the very city involved, and that evidence indicated the type of gas used was more likely controlled by Iran than Iraq?" Jude Wanniski, best known as the conservative economist who founded the supply-side school, published a barrage of memoranda from his Polyconomics Web site, citing Pelletiere and the DIA and War College reports. Wanniski included in his memoranda several lengthy e-mails from an Iraqi whose family was highly placed in the Baathist regime, who offered fulsome assurances that poison gas was never used by that regime. At the same time, Wanniski managed to dismiss Jeffrey Goldberg's March 2002 New Yorker article on Halabja and the gassing of the Kurds, which includes a number of survivor testimonials, on the grounds that Goldberg is "seriously biased" because he is a dual U.S.-Israel citizen.
Denials of Halabja from both the extreme left and the extreme right gained undeserved credibility as a result of a decision of the editors of the New York Times that stunned the human rights community: on January 31 of this year, as the debate over the looming invasion of Iraq reached fever pitch, the Times published a lengthy op-ed piece by Pelletiere, in which he reasserted the claims of the DIA and War College reports that he had had a hand in writing. Why the Times editors would publish a piece that could not withstand fifteen minutes of Internet research only they can explain, but the consequences of their action are undeniable: from that point on, the authority and legitimacy of the Times was used, again and again, to support the denial of Iraqi genocide.
-- Michael Pugliese