Scott Peterson has a relatively good article in the Christian Science Monitor entitled "An Intensifying US Campaign Against Iran" in which he suggests that "some counsel caution" about the "US case against Iran". Citing Joost Hiltermann's new book about the gassing of the Kurds at Halabja ("A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja") Peterson mentions how the US lied about Halabja and tried to pin the blame on Iran rather than Iraq, and how the CSM bought that lie hook, line and sinker:
The charge against Iran took root so effectively in the media – this newspaper also published notable, unattributed examples of "good intelligence" that cited Iran's role – that until recently, references to the "Iraqi" gassing of Halabja yielded letters of complaint from readers, pointing out the Iranian role, and offering US government documents as proof.
Well, that shouldn't be news to anyone though except for the few who are still trying to deny US complicity in Saddam's atrocities. Dr. Zanders of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute concluded long ago that Iran didn't use chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war. Hiltermann had also writen about this in the International Herald Tribune back in 2003:
Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame.
Lets remember now, the United States had a key role in the development of the Iraqi chemical weapons program, which included providing cluster munitions, sharing intelligence, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological weapons components. Leaked portions of Iraq's "Full, Final and Complete" dislosure of the sources for its weapons programs lists many American companies which provided the chemical precursors to Iraq's weapons program, even though the US tried to suppress the disclosure. These reportedly include thiodiglycol, a substance needed to manufacture deadly mustard gas, which made its way to Iraq via Alcolac International, Inc., a Maryland company, since dissolved and reformed as Alcolac Inc., and Phillips, once a subsidiary of Phillips Petroleum and now part of ConocoPhillips, an American oil and energy company. The US was fully aware of the use of these chemicals - in fact, the Reagan administration had to first remove Iraq from the State Department list of terrorist nations in order to ease the transfer of the technology and material to Iraq.
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