Waarom Bush Saddam in Irak wil laten berechten

[Descartes Jr]

19/12 Vergès wil op proces Saddam ook westerse leiders dagvaarden

Jacques Vergès, de mediagenieke Franse advocaat die mogelijk Saddam Hoessein voor de rechtbank zal verdedigen, wil op het proces ook alle westerse leiders dagvaarden die de Iraakse leider ooit ontmoet en vaak zelfs geholpen hebben. Hij kan daarbij hard tegen de schenen schoppen van landen als de VS of Frankrijk.
De controversiële advocaat deed zijn uitspraken donderdag in de Jordaanse hoofdstad Amman, waar hij de familie van de Iraakse ex-vice-president Tarek Aziz bezocht. Vergès is de advocaat van Aziz, Saddams rechterhand die na de val van Bagdad in april 2003 gevangen werd genomen en zich momenteel waarschijnlijk in een gevangenis nabij Bagdad bevindt. Aziz' familie zocht na de arrestatie haar toevlucht in Jordanië.

Vergès herhaalde in Amman nogmaals zijn voornemen om de gearresteerde Iraakse leider Saddam Hoessein te willen verdedigen. "Als anderen het me zouden vragen, zou ik ook niet weigeren", aldus Vergès. Met Saddam is de advocaat niet aan zijn proefstuk toe. Eerder al stonden de Duitse nazileider Klaus Barbie (de "Slachter van Lyon") en de terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez ("Carlos de Jakhals") op zijn lijst van "onverdedigbare" cliënten.
Onlangs werd Vergès benoemd tot vice-voorzitter van de vertegenwoordiging van de Joegoslavische ex-president Slobodan Milosevic in de rechtszaak bij het Europese Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens in Straatsburg.

Als het proces van Saddam Hoessein en zijn getrouwen er komt, wil Vergès alle westerse leiders die in de jaren '80 in het zadel zaten, als getuigen voor de rechter. "Wie verkocht wapens aan Irak? Er wordt het land de oorlog met Iran verweten, maar wie moedigde deze oorlog aan?", zegt Vergès. Hij spreekt voorts over "gekunstelde boosheid" van bepaalde landen tegenover Irak.
Zo werd Irak tijdens de oorlog met Irak, een strijd die van 1980 tot 1988 duurde, bewapend door de VS en door Europese landen als Frankrijk en Groot-Brittannië. Die landen zagen in de Iraakse steun de beste manier om de uitbreidende islamitische revolutie van de Iraanse ayatollah Ruhollah Chomeini, die de pro-westerse dictator Sjah Rezah Pahlavi had afgezet, te counteren.
Toen Saddam echter chemische wapens begon in te zetten tegen de Koerden in Irak, was dat voor (de) westerse leiders het moment om afstand te nemen van de Iraakse dictator -al hield de regering-Reagan een veroordeling door het Congres van 'Halabja' uit strategische overwegingen tegen. In de golfoorlog van 1991 groepeerde "het westen" zich tegen Saddam, die de "democratie" in Koeweit had omvergeworpen.

Saddam was een product van de US. Maar die willen het niet geweten hebben . Dr Frankenstein trekt zich terug in zijn gecapitonneerde toren ...

[Wanne]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Descartes Jr

Saddam was een product van de US. Maar die willen het niet geweten hebben . Dr Frankenstein trekt zich terug in zijn gecapitonneerde toren ...

Zoveel miljarden aan ramen en deuren uitgesmeten voor iets dat ze zelf in de hand hebben gewerkt... En tegelijkertijd sterven er weer zoveel mensen op andere plaatsen in de wereld, terwijl ze met al dat geld zoveel levens zouden kunnen redden.

[Spelev]

"Zoveel miljarden aan ramen en deuren uitgesmeten voor iets dat ze zelf in de hand hebben gewerkt... En tegelijkertijd sterven er weer zoveel mensen op andere plaatsen in de wereld, terwijl ze met al dat geld zoveel levens zouden kunnen redden."

Juist!!!

[filosoof]

Een artikel van een linkse site ter informatie:
April 1998 Issue
http://www.progressive.org/0901/anth0498.html

Anthrax for Export
U.S. companies sold Iraq the ingredients for a witch's brew
by William Blum
../plaintexts/mailanth0498.html

The United States almost went to war against Iraq in February because of Saddam Hussein's weapons program. In his State of the Union address, President Clinton castigated Hussein for "developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them."
"You cannot defy the will of the world," the President proclaimed. "You have used weapons of mass destruction before. We are determined to deny you the capacity to use them again."
Most Americans listening to the President did not know that the United States supplied Iraq with much of the raw material for creating a chemical and biological warfare program. Nor did the media report that U.S. companies sold Iraq more than $1 billion worth of the components needed to build nuclear weapons and diverse types of missiles, including the infamous Scud.
When Iraq engaged in chemical and biological warfare in the 1980s, barely a peep of moral outrage could be heard from Washington, as it kept supplying Saddam with the materials he needed to build weapons.
From 1980 to 1988, Iraq and Iran waged a terrible war against each other, a war that might not have begun if President Jimmy Carter had not given the Iraqis a green light to attack Iran, in response to repeated provocations. Throughout much of the war, the United States provided military aid and intelligence information to both sides, hoping that each would inflict severe damage on the other.Noam Chomsky suggests that this strategy is a way for America to keep control of its oil supply:
"It's been a leading, driving doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources of the Gulf region will be effectively dominated by the United States and its clients, and, crucially, that no independent indigenous force will be permitted to have a substantial influence on the administration of oil production and price."
During the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq received the lion's share of American support because at the time Iran was regarded as the greater threat to U.S. interests. According to a 1994 Senate report, private American suppliers, licensed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, exported a witch's brew of biological and chemical materials to Iraq from 1985 through 1989. Among the biological materials, which often produce slow, agonizing death, were:
* Bacillus Anthracis, cause of anthrax.
* Clostridium Botulinum, a source of botulinum toxin.
* Histoplasma Capsulatam, cause of a disease attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord, and heart.
* Brucella Melitensis, a bacteria that can damage major organs.
* Clostridium Perfringens, a highly toxic bacteria causing systemic illness.
* Clostridium tetani, a highly toxigenic substance.
Also on the list: Escherichia coli (E. coli), genetic materials, human and bacterial DNA, and dozens of other pathogenic biological agents. "These biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction," the Senate report stated. "It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program."The report noted further that U.S. exports to Iraq included the precursors to chemical-warfare agents, plans for chemical and biological warfare production facilities, and chemical-warhead filling equipment.
The exports continued to at least November 28, 1989, despite evidence that Iraq was engaging in chemical and biological warfare against Iranians and Kurds since as early as 1984.[/b]
The American company that provided the most biological materials to Iraq in the 1980s was American Type Culture Collection of Maryland and Virginia, which made seventy shipments of the anthrax-causing germ and other pathogenic agents, according to a 1996 Newsday story.
Other American companies also provided Iraq with the chemical or biological compounds, or the facilities and equipment used to create the compounds for chemical and biological warfare. Among these suppliers were the following:
* Alcolac International, a Baltimore chemical manufacturer already linked to the illegal shipment of chemicals to Iran, shipped large quantities of thiodiglycol (used to make mustard gas) as well as other chemical and biological ingredients, according to a 1989 story in The New York Times.
* Nu Kraft Mercantile Corp. of Brooklyn (affiliated with the United Steel and Strip Corporation) also supplied Iraq with huge amounts of thiodiglycol, the Times reported.
* Celery Corp., Charlotte, NC
* Matrix-Churchill Corp., Cleveland, OH (regarded as a front for the Iraqi government, according to Representative Henry Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas, who quoted U.S. intelligence documents to this effect in a 1992 speech on the House floor).
The following companies were also named as chemical and biological materials suppliers in the 1992 Senate hearings on "United States export policy toward Iraq prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait":
* Mouse Master, Lilburn, GA
* Sullaire Corp., Charlotte, NC
* Pure Aire, Charlotte, NC
* Posi Seal, Inc., N. Stonington, CT
* Union Carbide, Danbury, CT
* Evapco, Taneytown, MD
* Gorman-Rupp, Mansfield, OH
Additionally, several other companies were sued in connection with their activities providing Iraq with chemical or biological supplies: subsidiaries or branches of Fisher Controls International, Inc., St. Louis; Rhone-Poulenc, Inc., Princeton, NJ; Bechtel Group, Inc., San Francisco; and Lummus Crest, Inc., Bloomfield, NJ, which built one chemical plant in Iraq and, before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, was building an ethylene facility. Ethylene is a necessary ingredient for thiodiglycol.
In 1994, a group of twenty-six veterans, suffering from what has come to be known as Gulf War Syndrome, filed a billion-dollar lawsuit in Houston against Fisher, Rhone-Poulenc, Bechtel Group, and Lummus Crest, as well as American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) and six other firms, for helping Iraq to obtain or produce the compounds which the veterans blamed for their illnesses. By 1998, the number of plaintiffs has risen to more than 4,000 and the suit is still pending in Texas.
A Pentagon study in 1994 dismissed links between chemical and biological weapons and Gulf War Syndrome. Newsday later disclosed, however, that the man who headed the study, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, was a director of ATCC. Moreover, at the time of ATCC's shipments to Iraq, which the Commerce Department approved, the firm's CEO was a member of the Commerce Department's Technical Advisory Committee, the paper found.A larger number of American firms supplied Iraq with the specialized computers, lasers, testing and analyzing equipment, and other instruments and hardware vital to the manufacture of nuclear weapons, missiles, and delivery systems. Computers, in particular, play a key role in nuclear weapons development. Advanced computers make it feasible to avoid carrying out nuclear test explosions, thus preserving the program's secrecy. The 1992 Senate hearings implicated the following firms:
* Kennametal, Latrobe, PA
* Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, CA
* International Computer Systems, CA, SC, and TX
* Perkins-Elmer, Norwalk, CT
* BDM Corp., McLean, VA
* Leybold Vacuum Systems, Export, PA
* Spectra Physics, Mountain View, CA
* Unisys Corp., Blue Bell, PA
* Finnigan MAT, San Jose, CA
* Scientific Atlanta, Atlanta, GA
* Spectral Data Corp., Champaign, IL
* Tektronix, Wilsonville, OR
* Veeco Instruments, Inc., Plainview, NY
* Wiltron Company, Morgan Hill, CA
The House report also singled out: TI Coating, Inc., Axel Electronics, Data General Corp., Gerber Systems, Honeywell, Inc., Digital Equipment Corp., Sackman Associates, Rockwell Collins International, Wild Magnavox Satellite Survey, Zeta Laboratories, Carl Schenck, EZ Logic Data, International Imaging Systems, Semetex Corp., and Thermo Jarrell Ash Corporation.
Some of the companies said later that they had no idea Iraq might ever put their products to military use. A spokesperson for Hewlett Packard said the company believed that the Iraqi recipient of its shipments, Saad 16, was an institution of higher learning. In fact, in 1990 The Wall Street Journal described Saad 16 as "a heavily fortified, state-of-the-art complex for aircraft construction, missile design, and, almost certainly, nuclear-weapons research."
Other corporations recognized the military potential of their goods but considered it the government's job to worry about it. "Every once in a while you kind of wonder when you sell something to a certain country," said Robert Finney, president of Electronic Associates, Inc., which supplied Saad 16 with a powerful computer that could be used for missile testing and development. "But it's not up to us to make foreign policy," Finney told The Wall Street Journal.
In 1982, the Reagan Administration took Iraq off its list of countries alleged to sponsor terrorism, making it eligible to receive high-tech items generally denied to those on the list. Conventional military sales began in December of that year. Representative Samuel Gejdenson, Democrat of Connecticut, chairman of a House subcommittee investigating "United States Exports of Sensitive Technology to Iraq," stated in 1991:
"From 1985 to 1990, the United States Government approved 771 licenses for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application. [Only thirty-nine applications were rejected.] The United States spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted. . . . The Administration has never acknowledged that it took this course of action, nor has it explained why it did so. In reviewing documents and press accounts, and interviewing knowledgeable sources, it becomes clear that United States export-control policy was directed by U.S. foreign policy as formulated by the State Department, and it was U.S. foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein."
Subsequently, Representative John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, investigated the Department of Energy concerning an unheeded 1989 warning about Iraq's nuclear weapons program. In 1992, he accused the DOE of punishing employees who raised the alarm and rewarding those who didn't take it seriously. One DOE scientist, interviewed by Dingell's Energy and Commerce Committee, was especially conscientious about the mission of the nuclear non-proliferation program. For his efforts, he received very little cooperation, inadequate staff, and was finally forced to quit in frustration. "It was impossible to do a good job," said William Emel. His immediate manager, who tried to get the proliferation program fully staffed, was chastened by management and removed from his position. Emel was hounded by the DOE at his new job as well.
Another Senate committee, investigating "United States export policy toward Iraq prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait," heard testimony in 1992 that Commerce Department personnel "changed information on sixty-eight licenses; that references to military end uses were deleted and the designation 'military truck' was changed. This was done on licenses having a total value of over $1 billion." Testimony made clear that the White House was "involved" in "a deliberate effort . . . to alter these documents and mislead the Congress."
American foreign-policy makers maintained a cooperative relationship with U.S. corporate interests in the region. In 1985, Marshall Wiley, former U.S. ambassador to Oman, set up the Washington-based U.S.-Iraq Business Forum, which lobbied in Washington on behalf of Iraq to promote U.S. trade with that country. Speaking of the Forum's creation, Wiley later explained, "I went to the State Department and told them what I was planning to do, and they said, 'Fine. It sounds like a good idea.' It was our policy to increase exports to Iraq."
Though the government readily approved most sales to Iraq, officials at Defense and Commerce clashed over some of them (with the State Department and the White House backing Commerce).
"If an item was in dispute, my attitude was if they were readily available from other markets, I didn't see why we should deprive American markets," explained Richard Murphy in 1990. Murphy was Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs from 1983 to 1989.As it turned out, Iraq did not use any chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces in the Gulf War. But American planes bombed chemical and biological weapons storage facilities with abandon, potentially dooming tens of thousands of American soldiers to lives of prolonged and permanent agony, and an unknown number of Iraqis to a similar fate. Among the symptoms reported by the affected soldiers are memory loss, scarred lungs, chronic fatigue, severe headache, raspy voice, and passing out. The Pentagon estimates that nearly 100,000 American soldiers were exposed to sarin gas alone.
After the war, White House and Defense Department officials tried their best to deny that Gulf War Syndrome had anything to do with the bombings. The suffering of soldiers was not their overriding concern. The top concerns of the Bush and Clinton Administrations were to protect perceived U.S. interests in the Middle East, and to ensure that American corporations still had healthy balance sheets.

William Blum is the author of "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II" (Common Courage Press, 1995).
../plaintexts/mailanth0498.html

../plaintexts/mailanth0498.html

D�*t legt uit waarom Saddam zeker niet voor een internationaal tribunaal zal verschijnen...

Ik vond ook een verwijzing naar een artikel van de Washington Post deze week, waaruit bleek dat Rumsfeld géén problemen had met het gebruik van biologische en chemische wapens door Saddam, tegen anderen dan de USA uiteraard...
Logisch: het gebruik van chemische wapens door Saddam tegen Irak werd met veel interesse op het terrein geëvalueerd door een equipe van de US inlichtingendiensten

[filosoof]

nog eentje, nu van een republikeinse nieuwszender:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,70073,00.html

[filosoof]

nog eentje..: dit werd gepubliceerd voor de oorlog begon!!
HOW DID IRAQ GET ITS WEAPONS? WE SOLD THEM
By Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot
http://www.sundayherald.com/27572

THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs which oversees American exports policy reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
Classified US Defence Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.
The Senate committee's reports on US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq , undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis the micro-organism that causes anthrax were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.
One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers' City, a military complex in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took placeÊin March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.
The Senate report also makes clear that: The United States provided the government of Iraq with dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programmes.
This assistance, according to the report, included chemical warfare-agent precursors, chemical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment, biological warfare-related materials, missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment.
Donald Riegle, then chairman of the committee, said: UN inspectors had identified many United States manufactured items that had been exported from the United States to Iraq under licences issued by the Department of Commerce, and [established] that these items were used to further Iraq's chemical and nuclear weapons development and its missile delivery system development programmes.
Riegle added that, between January 1985 and August 1990, the Òexecutive branch of our government approved 771 different export licences for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think that is a devastating record.
It is thought the information contained in the Senate committee reports is likely to make up much of the evidence of proof that Bush and Blair will reveal in the coming days to justify the US and Britain going to war with Iraq. [size=5]It is unlikely, however, that the two leaders will admit it was the Western powers that armed Saddam with these weapons of mass destruction.[/size]
However, Bush and Blair will also have to prove that Saddam still has chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities. This looks like a difficult case to clinch in view of the fact that Scott Ritter, the UN's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, says the United Nations destroyed most of Iraq's wea pons of massdestruction and doubts that Saddam could have rebuilt his stocks by now.
According to Ritter, between 90% and 95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were des troyed by the UN. He believes the remainder were probably used or destroyed during Òthe ravages of the Gulf War.
Ritter has described himself as a card-carrying Republican who voted for George W Bush. Nevertheless, he has called the president a liar over his claims that Saddam Hussein is a threat to America.
http://www.sundayherald.com/27572

Ritter has also alleged that the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons emits certain gases, which would have been detected by satellite. We have seen none of this, he insists. If Iraq was producing weapons today, we would have definitive proof.
He also dismisses claims that Iraq may have a nuclear weapons capacity or be on the verge of attaining one, saying that gamma-particle atomic radiation from the radioactive materials in the warheads would also have been detected by western surveillance.
The UN's former co-ordinator in Iraq and former UN under-secretary general, Count Hans von Sponeck, has also told the Sunday Herald that he believes the West is lying about Iraq's weapons programme.
Von Sponeck visited the Al-Dora and Faluja factories near Baghdad in 1999 after they were comprehensively trashed on the orders of UN inspectors, on the grounds that they were suspected of being chemical weapons plants. He returned to the site late in July this year, with a German TV crew, and said both plants were still wrecked.
ÒWe filmed the evidence of the dishonesty of the claims that they were producing chemical and biological weapons, von Sponeck has told the Sunday Herald.They are indeed in the same destroyed state which we witnessed in 1999. There was no trace of any resumed activity at all.
[size=5]08 September 2002[/size]
javascript:history.back()javascript:history.back() javascript:history.back()back to previous page

[size=5]Ik denk écht niet dat die "smeerlap" Saddam Hoessein ooit levend een internationaal tribunaal zal halen...[/size]
Ronald Reagan en George Bush Snr ook niet, trouwens...
Tiens, West Nile fever, was daar geen onverklaarbare outbreak van in NYC, enkele jaren geleden?:o

http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

[filosoof]

HOW DID IRAQ GET ITS WEAPONS? WE SOLD THEM
By Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot
http://www.sundayherald.com/27572

THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs which oversees American exports policy reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr, sold materials including
anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
Classified US Defence Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.
The Senate committee's reports on US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq , undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis the micro-organism that causes anthrax were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.
One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers' City, a military complex in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.

[Philips Inc.]

Idd, het westen verkoopt wapens aan iedereen die ze wil, maar als er mee geschoten wordt dan spelen ze het groot geweten van de "Humanité".

Een dikke hypocrsie!

En trouwens, wanneer begint de VS eens aan zijn ontmanteling van de kernwapens. Wanneer mogen VN-controleurs eens in de VS gaan controleren?

Twee maten, twee gewichten. De VS zou zelf het voorbeeld moeten geven.