On 19 Dec 2003 00:19:31 -0000, Eagle Eye
Post by Eagle EyePost by w***@harley.comOn 16 Dec 2003 00:13:49 -0000, Eagle Eye
[snip]
Post by w***@harley.comPost by Eagle EyeCould you elaborate on this? In what ways did the Carter and
Reagan administrations support the Iraqi regime? How much did
these administrations know of Iraq's WMD programs? How did their
support change after it was revealed that he used WMDs?
It was the Reagan/Bush administration. They sent Donald Rumsfeld
to meet with Hussein, and Rumsfeld told Reagan that " We can work
with this guy."
True. They chose to look the other way.
Post by w***@harley.comWe supplied them with military equipment,
The US supplied him with trucks and helicopters. His lethal
weapons were purchased from the USSR, Germany, France, China,
etc..
Post by w***@harley.comtechnology, even Nuclear, biological, and chemical.
That's the propaganda line, but the vast majority of WMD materiel
came from Europe. Some bacterial strains came from US labs.
Post by w***@harley.comThe reason that the administration believes that there are Weapons
of Mass Destruction in Iraq is that we have the reciepts,
Did the Germans and French give the US copies of their receipts?
After the Gulf War in 1991, plenty of weapons were confiscated,
conventional and WMDs. Can you document any which were not from
the USSR, Europe, China, North Korea, etc.?
This is from an interview with Andreas Zumach,
Geneva-based UN correspondent with the German
newspaper Die Tageszeitung who obtained an
unedited copy of Iraq's 12,000 page report to the
United Nations. The report reveals how German and
U.S. corporations helped build Iraq's weapons
program.
December 18, 2002 Democracy Now
A German newspaper has obtained portions of Iraq's
top secret weapons report that reveals at least 24
U.S. corporations as well as four agencies of the
U.S. government illegally helped Iraq build its
biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
Some of the corporations include Hewlett Packard,
DuPont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Tectronics, Bechtel,
International Computer Systems, Unisys, Sperry and
TI Coating.
The Berlin-based paper Die Tageszeitung also
reports the U.S. Department of Energy delivered
essential non-fissile parts for Baghdad's nuclear
weapons program in the 1980s. The Departments of
Agriculture, Commerce and Defense also provided
assistance.
According to the paper, only one country had more
business ties to Iraq than the U.S. That was
Germany. As many as 80 German companies are also
listed in Iraq's report. And the paper reported
that some German companies continued to do
business with Iraq until last year
Here is a part of a transcript of an interview by
Amy Goodman of Alan Friedman (global economics
correspondent for the International Herald Tribune
and author of the book Spiders Web: The Secret
History of How the White House Illegally Armed
Iraq):
I apologise for length
You can read the entire transcript, or listen to
the interview at www.democracynow.org
Now, I discovered this at the end of the 1980's
when I was reporting for The Financial Times of
London and we uncovered the scandal of more than
$5 billion of American taxpayer backed credits
that had been funneled by the Atlanta, Georgia
branch of an Italian bank to Saddam Hussein with
the full knowledge of the C.I.A. and later on of
the White House, under the Bush administration.
Thats because that bank, it later transpired, an
Italian bank called B & L, its Atlanta, Georgia
branch was being used to surreptitiously finance
Saddam Hussein's purchase of both agricultural
goods and weaponry. And the very frightening part
of it is that this group of intelligence agents
outside the government, but working with the
blessing of the government as it later turned out
with the blessing of people like James Baker and
George Herbert Walker Bush, this organization of
arms dealers and transshipment specialists
continued to sell a whole variety of equipment to
Saddam Hussein, including U.S. military rocket
cluster bombs that were transshipped from
Pennsylvania through Chile to Iraq, nuclear and
chemical weapons technology, and missile
technology and the United States didn't really do
anything to stop this shipment because at the time
the argument used by the C.I.A. and the White
House was that if you allowed a limited amount of
military weapons and technology to flow to Iraq,
even though it was completely illegal against U.S.
law, against international treaties, if you
allowed this to happen, as an intelligence
operation, the rationalization in the Bush
administration went, then you could keep better
track of what kind of weaponry Saddam was
developing.
What really happened, of course, is that there
were people along the way who were greedy, who
were making money off of it, and there were people
in governments in Italy and Britain and in the
Thatcher government and in the Andriotti
government in Italy who were working with their
American counterparts and they continued the flow
of equipment. Some of this is very sophisticated
stuff and one of the scandals -- the way the
scandal was developed was I first uncovered
financial documents for a British company called
Matrix Churchill based in Coventry in England that
was sending what seemed to be innocent machine
tool equipment to Saddam Hussein. But it wasn't.
It was dual use technology that the C.I.A. and the
British intelligence knew was going into Saddam's
missile program and his nuclear program, but they
allowed it to happen. So, the real problem is that
we had a Frankenstein monster that got out of
control, a Bush administration between 1988 and
"Operation Desert Storm in 1990 1991, that
essentially turned a blind eye to this continuing
shipment to Iraq, and then, of course, when we had
the invasion of Kuwait, and the United States
under Colin Powell and Schwarzkopf went in and
then President Bush decided not to finish the job,
but to leave Saddam alone, unfortunately, then it
became time to cover up the tilt to Iraq, to cover
up the way the United States has helped to shape
and build Iraq's military strength and then ensued
a traditional cover up which nobody cared about
when I brought it out with Ted Koppel in 1991,
1992, and the book, Spider's Web, 1993, because
people in America thought it was more interesting
to look at Whitewater.
Post by Eagle EyeThe notion that the Bush pere adminstration set a trap is pretty
stupid, considering the fact that it would have been far less
costly to avoid the whole war and keep the status quo.
Oh, I don't know how stupid it was. The
government has been trying to get control of
Middle East oil ever since the end of WWII. Henry
Kissinger said in 1972 that "Oil is too important
to be left in the hands of the Arabs." Now we
have Military forces all over the Middle East.
Post by Eagle EyePost by w***@harley.comPost by Eagle EyeNow, put it in context. Did anyone in the Reagan administration
fight others in the US government to sell nuclear reactors
capable of producing weapons-grade uranium? No? Oh yeah, that
was Jacques Chirac. Even the USSR balked at that request.
Did the US administration approve shipments of precursors? In
fact, once he started using chemical weapons, the US tightened
export restrictions. It was the Europeans who were selling.
What about conventional weaponry? Where did he get that?
I'm not arguing that the US administrations had clean hands, but
you should be more careful with your accusations and at least try
offer some perspective on the relative involvement of the US,
France, (East/West) Germany, USSR, etc..
Post by a***@no-spam-panix.comWilliam> Iran. Iran was the enemy of the US and an ally of
the William> Soviet Union,
No, Iran was an enemy of the Soviet Union. Iraq was closely
associated with the Soviet Union, Saddam greatly admired
Stalin.
That is not how I remember it. We had installed and supported a
puppet dictator in Iran that was controlled by the US government
and the oil companies. The people kicked the Shah out in the
70's,
Radical Islamic Revolutionaries kicked him out. "The people" were
not of one mind.
I guess you don't remember the images of the
crowds in the streets, it was pretty impressive.
Post by Eagle EyePost by w***@harley.comand the Ayatollah Khomeini (who had been in exile in France)
became the Islamic Fundamentalist ruler. He nationalized the oil,
and kicked the Americans out. Meanwhile the Shah was of no
further use to us, and we refused to grant him sanctuary. Iranian
Students stormed the US embassy in Tehran in 1978 and held the
Americans there hostage for over a year, until Ronald Reagan took
office. Reagan would later sell the Iranians weapons so that he
could finance the "Freedom Fighters" in Nicaragua, because
Congress refused to fund them. You might remember the Iran-Contra
scandal.
Yep.
Post by w***@harley.comPost by Eagle EyeThat's overly simplistic. Iran was never an ally of the USSR,
but the various factions (the shah and the Islamic
Revolutionaries) often used the Soviet's desire for influence
when it was to their advantage. The USSR generally sided with
Iraq, but relations were often strained with an attempted
Communist coup in Iraq and the
Bingo, in comes CIA and Saddam.
Saddam was already the number two guy in Iraq. He didn't need the
CIA to become the top dog.
That is true, but the number one guy was still
alive.
Post by Eagle Eye=====
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