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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (4494)	2/24/2003 6:18:50 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15987

I see you are still arguing that the US sold harmless stuff to Iraq, oblivious to the uses they will be put, while Iraq turned them into dangerous chemical and biological agents. Here are some of the findings of 25 May 1994 Senate Committee report: 3. The United States provided the Government of Iraq with "dual use" licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile-system programs, including:[8] - chemical warfare agent precursors; - chemical warfare agent production facility plans and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans); - chemical warhead filling equipment; - biological warfare related materials; - missile fabrication equipment; and, - missile-system guidance equipment 4. The United States military planned for the use of chemical and biological weapons by Iraq by: - discussing the chemical/biological threat in pre-war threat assessments; - designating chemical/biological production facilities priority bombing targets; - assigning a very high priority to SCUD missile units; and, - conferring with the U.S. national laboratories about the hazards associated with the bombings of the chemical, biological, nuclear weapons facilities. gulflink.osd.mil ... and some from the 7 October 1994 report: On October 27, 1992, the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs held hearings that revealed that the United States had exported chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile-system equipment to Iraq that was converted to military use in Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons program. Many of these weapons -- weapons that the U.S. and other countries provided critical materials for -- were used against us during the war. gulflink.osd.mil Read the two reports, if you like. They are pretty interesting. They also talk about Iraq's use of chemical weapons in the Gulf War being the probable cause of "Gulf War Syndrome". Selling VX antidote for defense against Iranian chemical weapons (they used them too) was a valid sale. But Iraq opted to make VX from it IN VIOLATION of the sales agreement.. The nerve gas antidote is only one of the various chemicals and bacteria that were sold to Iraq. I wish you guys could get over this denial phase, and accept that the US officially supported Iraq against Iran, and this support included chemical and biological weapons. After all, it isn't like Iraq was this great center of research, buying these chemical and biological agents for theoretical research. Of course they would be made to make weapons, what did you think??? And this is the company that sold them: atcc.org; That's just one. Here are others: Chemicals Weapons: (A) Alcolac International (Thiodiglycol, the mustard gas precursor) (B) Al Haddad (60 tons of a chemical that could be used to make sarin) nytimes.com (C) Dow Chemical. "In December 1998, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents," reported The Washington Post, adding that an "Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find 'no reason' to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were 'highly toxic' to humans and would cause death 'from asphyxiation'." washingtonpost.com Nuclear capability: Nuclear. (A) TI Coating (B) UNISYS (C) Tektronix (D) Leybold Vacuum Systems (E) Finnigan-MAT-US (F) Hewlett Packard (G) Dupont (H) Consarc (I) Cerberus (LTD) (J) Canberra Industries Inc. (K) Axel Electronics Inc. ) “In addition to these 24 companies home-based in the USA are 50 subsidiaries of foreign enterprises which conducted their arms business with Iraq from within the US. Also designated as suppliers for Iraq's arms programs are the US Ministries of Defense, Energy, Trade and Agriculture as well as the Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories.” zmag.org Anyway, there is no question whatsoever that we are not talking about pesticides or antidoes here.