Saddam may NOT have gassed the Kurds (yet another SOTU lie?) [View All]

Yet another justification for the Iraq war that appeared in the infamous State of the Union speech, given by Bush to justify the Iraq war, appears to be yet another claim of dubious veracity, according to a little-known report of the United States Defense Intelligence Agency. It may be a good time to revisit this earlier issue, that along with the Plame/Niger-gate falsehoods, clearly shows the pattern of disinformation employed by this administration to mislead us into war.

An excellent article on this topic, "A War Crime or an Act of War?", by Stephen C. Pelletiere, initially published in January of 2003 in the NYT, deserves another look.

Here is a link to the original NYT article (note: requires subscription or one-time payment): http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60816F...

And here is the author's later article on the same topic (a freebie):
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArti...

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This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq`s main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds` bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent - that is, a cyanide-based gas - which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

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.