20th Anniversary of Halabja - Who gave WMDs to Saddam?

March 16th will be the 20th year anniversary of the massacre at Halabja, first documented by Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan (who was killed in Iraq in 2003)
Ah! Remember the good old days, when the same countries that are railling against the "Iranian threat" today were giving anthrax to Saddam Hussein? Boy, those were good times...

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.

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.
-- Halabja : America didn't seem to mind poison gas,
By Joost R. Hiltermann, International Herald Tribune, Friday, Jan 17 2003

And,

Hypocrisy Seen in U.S. Stand on Iraqi Arms
Mideast: Officials say American intelligence aided Baghdad’s use of chemical weapons against Iran in ’80s.
By ROBIN WRIGHT, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON—-A decade before the current showdown over weapons of mass destruction, the United States turned a blind eye when Iraq used American intelligence for operations against Iran that made rampant use of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles, according to senior administration and former intelligence officials.

The attacks against civilian and military targets during the Iran-Iraq War included some of the most pervasive uses of chemical weapons anywhere since World War I. The combination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and American intelligence eventually helped turn the tide of the eight-year war in Baghdad's favor. The collaboration reached a peak shortly after a secret U.S. estimate projected for the first time that Iran could win one of the century's bloodiest wars. "We knew [the Iraqis] used chemicals in any major campaign," said a former U.S. intelligence official familiar with the American role. "Although we publicly opposed the use of chemical weapons anywhere in the world, we knew the intelligence we gave the Iraqis would be used to develop their own operational plans for chemical weapons."

Now, 10 years later, the United States is trying to rally world support for the use of military strikes to destroy the same kinds of Iraqi weapons—on the grounds that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein should not be allowed to use them in the future. ...

"By 1986, Iraq had proven itself better at the use of chemical weapons than any fighting force in the world," said a former senior U.S. diplomat involved in Iraq. By 1988, Iraq's use of gases had also repeatedly been documented by U.N. specialists. "It was all done with a wink and a nod," said a former U.S. intelligence official. "We knew exactly where this stuff was going, although we bent over backwards to look the other way." Washington knew Iraq was "dumping boatloads" of chemical weapons on Iranian positions, he added.
...
Policy at the time, said another former Reagan official, recognized that "Hussein is a bastard. But at the time, he was our bastard."

And,

Iraqis given anthrax secrets by Porton Down scientists SHYAM BHATIA

01/25/1998
The Observer
Page 003
(Copyright 1998)

THE FATHER of Iraq 's biological warfare programme benefited from a three-day anthrax workshop hosted by scientists from the Government's chemical and biological research centre at Porton Down , Wiltshire.

The embarrassing British link to Iraq 's deadly anthrax research, revealed by United Nations sources, comes only days after Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's assertion that Saddam Hussein makes enough anthrax every week to fill two missile warheads. . .

The West's role in providing Iraq with anthrax know-how began at a key workshop in Winchester in 1988. Among 80 scientists from around the world were Dr Nasser el-Hindawi and his assistant, Dr Thamer Abdel Rahman, microbiologists working for Iraq 's secret biological weapons programme. The programme's aim was to develop weapons to spread anthrax , gas gangrene, botulism toxin, brucellosis, rabbit foot and tetanus...

UN officials describe the workshop as a 'Who's Who of anthrax research'. They say the three-day meeting was devoted entirely to anthrax with 'a full exchange of ideas and materials'. Among the British participants was Harry Smith, now emeritus professor of microbiology at Birmingham University. A world authority on anthrax , he says: 'To be perfectly frank, I didn't know {the Iraqis} were there.'

'My God, it's quite astounding that no one caught on,' said Dr Alastair Hay, reader in chemical pathology at Leeds University, who has been following Iraq 's chemical and biological programme. 'By 1985, Iran had already accused Iraq of carrying out chemical warfare and Iraq 's interest in weapons of mass destruction had already been flagged up. Why bring these people here?' ...

Germ culture to grow the anthrax was freely imported from the US military's centre for chemical and biological research at Fort Detrick, Maryland, via civilian laboratories operated by ATCC, the American Type Culture Collection.

American investigators have established that several shipments of biological material, including 21 batches of anthrax , were licensed for export from the US to Iraq between 1985 and 1988. They were sent to the Ministry of Higher Education and the Ministry of Trade in Baghdad.

And,

Profile: Helping Saddam; Iraqi government ordered anthrax and botulism- producing bacteria from United States in late 1980s

02/22/1998
60 Minutes
CBS, Inc. Burrelle's Information Services
(Copyright (c) 1998 CBS, Inc. All rights reserved.)

HELPING SADDAM

MORLEY SAFER, co-host:

Exactly what weapons Saddam is hiding and where he's hiding them remains a mystery. Where he got them and how he developed them is not. He got a lot of help from the British, the French, the Germans, the Russians and from us. Back in the late '80s when Saddam was considered by some as our friend or at least the enemy of our enemy Iran, we provided Iraq with two of the deadliest substances known to man, bacteria that produces botulism and anthrax . Among those who thought that what we were doing was all wrong was a former deputy undersecretary of defense named Dr. Steven Bryen.

Dr. STEVEN BRYEN (Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense): Well, it was very complicated before the Gulf War because the administration was trying very hard to be friends with Saddam Hussein, largely because of the great concern about Iran and the fear of Iran. And Iraq was seen as a--a balancer and as a moderate force, whereas Iran was an Islamic force. So there was a lot of pressure to release technology to Iraq ; technology that shouldn't go there, in my opinion.

SAFER: Were people out saying, `Look, this guy is not a very stable ally'?

Dr. BRYEN: People were not saying, `This guy is not a very stable ally.' That was the problem. Official Washington turned a blind eye to that sort of thing because it really wanted very badly to establish a positive relationship with Saddam.

(Footage of Steven Bryen; Department of State building; Saddam Hussein; vintage footage of Kurdish village after nerve gas attack)

SAFER: (Voiceover) Dr. Bryen was the Pentagon's top cop, the man whose job it was to ensure that sensitive technology would be kept from enemies, potential enemies and questionable allies. But he was up against a formidable adversary: the US State Department, who wanted to satisfy Saddam's appetite despite the clear and present danger.

Dr. BRYEN: (Voiceover) Even as late as 1988 when the Kurdish village in- -in Iraq was attacked by helicopters carrying nerve gas, the Washington reaction was still hands off.

SAFER: He realized `Look, I could bomb Kurdish villages with nerve gas, I could use chemical agents against the Iranians.'

Dr. BRYEN: `And the Americans won't say anything about it.' There was no official condemnation by the United States of these attacks. At that point, Saddam had to think we were a heck of a good ally because here we are letting him get away with these things.

(Footage of American Type Culture Collection building; ATCC sign; vials of cultures; storage containers; infectious substance label; photograph of document with close-up of text: 881215 Iraq Atomic Energy Commission)

SAFER: (Voiceover) Getting away with it was easy. The bacteria was simply ordered from this facility, The American Type Culture Collection of Rockville, Maryland, a non-profit supplier of microbes to the world. They're generally used for public health research. The Iraqi orders, including 34 batches of the deadliest bacteria, did not pass through Pentagon watchdogs. They were simply approved by the Commerce Department.

Dr. BRYEN: I was shocked to see that biological samples would be going to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission because in--it was absolutely clear that--that--that the at--Is--Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission was involved in their nuclear weapons programs and God knows what other weapons programs.

SAFER: I--in very precise terms, what was the--the policy about shipping bacterial cultures like anthrax and botulism to Iraq ?

Dr. BRYEN: I don't think there was a policy in--in--in the administration at the time. I think there was a--a general understanding that a shipment of these kinds of materials was sensitive, required a license.

SAFER: And yet the Commerce Department signed off on them?

Dr. BRYEN: The Commerce Department approved all these licenses. There were a number of licenses. We're not talking about one got through and the others got stopped; we're talking about they all got through, un-- untouched, unstopped.

(Footage of person at computer; ATCC order form coming out of printer; anthrax )

SAFER: (Voiceover) And to find out how to order up some anthrax , just dial up ATCC 's Web site, as we did today, and with the flip of a printer, your order form. Visa and MasterCard accepted. By the way, the effect of inhaled anthrax : one day of flu symptoms, followed by a few days of pneumonia symptoms, followed by death.

Dr. BRYEN: The one experience we have with anthrax in Sverdlovsk in Russia where some of this leaked into the air is that it killed people and animals for over 40 miles from where--where the damage occurred.

SAFER: We do know it was a relatively small amount.

Dr. BRYEN: A relatively small amount and it wasn't because the place was bombed; it was because something leaked and it escaped into the a-- air. So when you hit it with a bomb, you potentially could release everything. So it's worrisome to me that we might set loose some of this kind of material.

SAFER: When you were in that job as--as the--the Pentagon's cop to oversee what was going where, did you get into any confrontations?

Dr. BRYEN: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. I had a big confrontation over the shipment of atropine injectors to Iraq . I blocked it. And atropine is an antidote for nerve gas. And so far as I knew, the only nerve gas in the region was Iraqi nerve gas, so it was clear that they wanted one-- they wanted this for offensive purposes, not for defense.

SAFER: To protect their own troops?

Dr. BRYEN: To protect their own troops, and--and to allow them to use it in fairly close-in situations against--against other forces, Iranians or Americans or whoever. . . .