OFFICERS SAY U.S. AIDED IRAQ IN WAR DESPITE USE OF GAS
http://query.nytimes.com/search/abstract?res=F20911FA38590C7B8DDDA10894DA404482
A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program
U.S., Britain Helped Iraq Develop Chemical And Biological Weapons"
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/psn/mar98/0002.html
Source: Reuters, February 12, 1998.
A British television news program reported last week that the United States helped Iraq develop its chemical and biological weapons programs in the 1980s, and Britain sold Baghdad the antidote to nerve gas as late as March 1992.
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Britain's Channel Four television news said it found intelligence documents
which showed 14 shipments of biological materials -- including 19 batches of anthrax bacteria and 15 batches of botulinum, the organism that causes
botulism -- were exported from the U.S. to Iraq between 1985 and 1989.
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Twenty-nine batches of material were sent after Iraq killed 5,000 people in a gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, the program reported.
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A senior Pentagon official said he stopped a 1988 order from Iraq for 1.5
million doses of atropine, which is used to protect troops from nerve gas.
A classified U.S. Defense Department document showed Iraq had bought pralidoxine an antidote to nerve gas -- from Britain in March 1992, after the Gulf War.
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Channel Four also said it had uncovered U.S. intelligence documents which
showed that both the British and U.S. government knew as early as August 1990 of the existence of Agent 15, a deadly nerve gas.
U.S. companies sold Iraq the ingredients for a witch's brew
http://www.progressive.org/0901/anth0498.html
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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."
CHEMICAL WARFARE IN THE IRAQ-IRAN WAR
http://projects.sipri.se/cbw/research/factsheet-1984.html
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Allegations
There have been reports of chemical warfare from the Gulf War since the early months of Iraq s invasion of Iran. In November 1980, Tehran Radio was broadcasting allegations of Iraqi chemical bombing at Susangerd. Three and a quarter years later, by which time the outside world was listening more seriously to such charges, the Iranian Foreign Minister told the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that there had been at least 49 instances of Iraqi chemical-warfare attack in 40 border regions, and that the documented dead totalled 109 people, with hundreds more wounded.
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THE POISON GASES IDENTIFIED BY THE UN TEAM
Mustard gas
Tabun
Germ-warfare agents: Israeli intelligence sources have been cited for reports that anthrax had been found in hospitalized Iranians. Iranian sources have referred to Iraqi use of "microbic" and "bacteriological" weapons.
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Indigenous or external sources of supply?
With the exceptions, maybe, of the last two of these different categories of putative Iraqi agent, sources of supply might as well be indigenous as external to Iraq, given the technology implied. Involvement of the last three categories would, in some circles, implicate the USSR as supplier, for the reason that the USSR is said, on evidence that has yet to be solidly substantiated but which has nonetheless attracted some firm believers, to have weaponized all three of them in recent years. For its part, the USSR has expressly denied supplying Iraq with toxic weapons. Reports of Soviet supply attributed to US and other intelligence sources have nonetheless recurred. The earliest predate reports of Iraqi use of chemical weapons in the Gulf War.
Official Iranian commentaries, too, have pointed to the USSR as a supplier of the Iraqi weapons. These sources have also accused Brazil, France and, most conspicuously, Britain of supplying the weapons. No basis for any of these Iranian accusations has been disclosed. France, alongside Czechoslovakia and both Germanies, is reportedly also rumoured, among "foreign military and diplomatic sources" in Baghdad, to have supplied Iraq with chemical precursors needed for an indigenous production effort. Unofficial published sources have cited Egypt as a possible supplier of actual chemical weapons. In the mid-1960s, when Iraq was alleged to be using chemical weapons against insurgent Kurdish forces, Swiss and German sources of supply were reported in the Western press.
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The search for materials
Any need to import special chemical-process plant and associated know-how could be lessened by importing, instead, some of the chemical intermediates needed to produce chemical-warfare agents, rather than attempting to manufacture those intermediates from indigenous raw materials (of which the Iraqi mining, petroleum and related industries appear to provide the full range needed for mustard and nerve gases, with the possible expection for some of the latter of fluoride minerals). Certain intermediates can be identified which could reduce the requirements for chemical plant to processing equipments of standard off-the-shelf or easily improvised types. Iraq has not concealed the fact that it is in the market for chemicals which do indeed fall within this category. This has been most conspicuous in Iraq's search in America for supplies of methylphosphonous dichloride and dimethyl methyl-phosphonate. These two chemicals do, however, have certain civil applications. But at least in the former case they are not ones which, in the normal course of events, Iraq might obviously be expected to exploit.
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Export controls
On 30 March, the US government announced the imposition of 'foreign policy controls' on the export to the Gulf-War belligerents of five chemicals that could be used in the production of mustard and nerve gases. US officials told the press that this had been done in response to an unexpected volume of recent orders from Iraq for those chemicals. They also said that Japan, FR Germany and other unspecified European countries had been exporting the chemicals to Iraq. The British government took action similar to that of Washington on 12 April, adding three more chemicals to the control list (see table). Since then, other European governments have also announced embargoes of varying scope, and on 15 May the Foreign Ministers of the European Community agreed in principle on a common and complementary policy. There are Western press reports of suspicions in Western diplomatic circles in the Middle East that the USSR is shipping intermediates to Iraq through Jordan.
http://projects.sipri.se/cbw/research/factsheet-1984.html
