Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
20, 2003
Colin Powell in Iraq
Exploiting
the Dead of Halabja
By KURT NIMMO
The Bushites love to visit the mass graves in
Halabja. That's where about 7,000 Kurds died after a chemical
weapons attack. "I can't tell you that Saddam Hussein was
a murderous tyrant -- you know that," said Colin Powell
with prosaic certainty. "What I can tell you is that what
happen here in 1988 is never going to happen again."
No, probably not. But what Powell didn't
bother to mention is the fact the US State Department "instructed
its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame," according
Joost R. Hiltermann of Human Rights Watch, which has extensively
investigated the Halabja incident. "The result of this stunning
act of sophistry was that the international community failed
to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous
as the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center."
Photo ops with disentombed corpses aside,
Powell also didn't bother to mention that people connected to
the US government at the time of the Halabja massacre believe
Iran, not Iraq, committed the atrocity. "We cannot say with
any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds,"
insisted
Stephen C. Pelletiere a few months ago in the New York Times.
"I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence
Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq
war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to
2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed
through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition,
I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would
fight a war against the United States; the classified version
of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair."
In another article published in the New
York Times last year, Col. Walter P. Lang, a senior defense intelligence
officer during the Iran-Iraq war, said the CIA wasn't particularly
concerned over the use of chemical weapons. "It was just
another way of killing people -- whether with a bullet or phosgene,
it didn't make any difference." In fact, that was the idea
-- to not only sit back while the Iranians and Iraqis killed
each other off in huge numbers, but actively arm both sides.
Declassified government documents and
interviews with former policymakers reveal US intelligence and
logistical support played a crucial role in assisting Iraqi defenses
in their efforts to resist "human wave" attacks by
suicidal Iranian troops. Both the Reagan and Bush administrations
authorized the sale to Iraq of various items that had both military
and civilian applications, i.e., chemical and biological weapons.
"Fundamentally, the policy was justified," David Newton,
a former US ambassador to Baghdad, told the Washington Post.
"We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with
Iran, because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf. Our long-term hope was that Hussein's government would
become less repressive and more responsible."
This is nonsense, of course -- the US
policy was to make sure Iran and Iraq killed each other off in
record numbers. Estimates of the number of dead range up to 1.5
million.
In 1983, Jonathan T. Howe, a senior State
Department official, was filling in Secretary of State George
P. Shultz on the "almost daily use of CW" against the
Iranians. Nonetheless, the nurtured relationship with the Butcher
of Baghdad was so important to the Reaganites that they appointed
a special envoy to the Middle East -- none other than Donald
H. Rumsfeld, who flew off to Baghdad to shake Saddam's hand.
The so-called "talking points" the Reagan-Saddam relationship
were contained within National Security Decision Directive 114
of Nov. 26, 1983, the exact contents of which remain classified.
"The presidential directive was
issued amid a flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using
chemical weapons in their attempts to hold back the Iranians,"
writes Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post. "In principle,
Washington was strongly opposed to chemical warfare, a practice
outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. In practice, U.S. condemnation
of Iraqi use of chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the
scale of administration priorities, particularly compared with
the all-important goal of preventing an Iranian victory."
Mr. Dobbs is being polite -- the US sold
chemical and biological weapons to Iraq and through Israel Hawk
missiles to Iran for the express purpose of making sure the two
sides fought to a bloody stalemate. As for the Geneva Protocol,
it means nothing to the Reaganites, the Bushites, or, for that
matter, the Clintonites -- that is unless some official enemy
engages in some nastiness.
"In May, 1986, West German authorities
foiled an $81 million ammunition deal and uncovered a tank deal
in the process," writes the Jane Hunter, editor and publisher
of Israeli Foreign Affairs. "Charged in the case were an
Israeli and a former Israeli citizen. The West German weekly
Stern said a telex from the state-owned Israeli Military Industries
dated April I indicated official Israeli involvement... During
the Reagan administration US policy has swung through various
levels of support for Iraq. Israel's often-stated policy on the
Gulf war is to keep it going as long as possible because the
dreadful carnage ties up the combatants and prevents either from
attacking Israel."
Moreover, when the Halabja massacre came
to light a few years later, the Reagan administration opposed
congressional efforts to respond by imposing economic sanctions,
arguing that they would be contrary to US interests.
In fact, when Bush I came into office,
his administration recommended assigning high priority to US-Iraq
relations because Saddam Hussein was considered a potential "major
player" in regard to the development of political and economic
relations. In 1989, Bush signed a National Security Directive
(NSD) designating "economic and political incentives"
supposedly designed to "moderate" Iraqi behavior and
expand US influence. A few months before Bush signed this NSD,
the FBI raided the Atlanta branch office of the Banca Nazionale
del Lavoro (BNL) and discovered there were off-the-books loans
to Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Production, including
its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and missile programs.
In other words, the officials in the
Reagan and Bush administrations are directly responsible for
selling Iraq the weapons Bush Junior now carps about so self-righteously
and Colin Powell promises the Iraqis will never use on the Kurds
or anybody else ever again -- not even the Iranians.
Naturally, none of this means diddly
to the average American, who knows nothing about how Reagan and
Bush's daddy armed Saddam to the teeth. After all, millions of
Americans think Saddam is Osama, Saddam is responsible for the
horrific events of 9/11, and the US found tons of chemical and
biological weapons in Iraq. Colin Powell, standing before the
headstones of Halabja, can easily perpetuate the outlandish myths
and brazen lies that drive the Bush Doctrine of Total War forward
in the Middle East, as the Likudite neocons deem necessary.
Powell's macabre stop at the mass graves
of Halabja was stage managed to counter criticism over the United
States' failure to find Saddam's illusory caches of chemical
and biological weapons. "What happened over the intervening
15 years?" Powell asked rhetorically, referencing the period
since the Halabja attack. "Did he suddenly lose the motivation?"
No, Colin. Saddam was no longer useful
-- and there was no longer any reason to sell him weapons of
mass destruction after the Iran-Iraq war was fought to a bloodstained
draw. David Kay, the former UN inspector who is head of the Defense
Intelligence Agency's Iraq Survey Group, will not find any WMD
in Iraq -- not because Saddam furtively hid them but rather because
they don't exist.
And that's because the US stopped providing
them soon after Iraq Invasion I.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent online
gallery Ordinary Vistas. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn
and St. Clair's, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays
for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, will be published
this fall by Dandelion Books.
He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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