I can not find the Congressional hearings that took place in the 1990s in Wisconsin that described exactly how we aided and abetted Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. However, the Newsweek article from below looks to be taken from those hearings. Plus, I have provided more links to other articles that define the close relationship we had with Saddam.
During the 80s, the US provided him with military weaponry, helicopters, chemicals such as anthrax and allowed the sale to him of nuclear components. The US support of a monster, Saddam Hussein, is just one of several examples of the type of intervention we have perpetrated in the ME over the past 50 years that has engendered the hatred of millions of Arabs and Muslims. What do you think was the reaction of Iranians when we shot down a civilian Iranian airbus carrying 260 people? Take your time.......its a long article to read.
Bottomline.......its disgusting. Americans do not have a clue how Machiavellian and destructive American foreign policy has been. Its why we are seen as Darth Vader and not the white knight! It was an eye opener for me.
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Congressional Record: September 20, 2002 (Senate)
Page S8987-S8998
HOW SADDAM HAPPENED
Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, yesterday, at a hearing of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, I asked a question of the Secretary of Defense. I
referred to a Newsweek article that will appear in the September 23,
2002, edition. That article reads as follows. It is not overly lengthy.
I shall read it. Beginning on page 35 of Newsweek, here is what the
article says:
America helped make a monster. What to do with him--and
what happens after he is gone--has haunted us for a quarter
century.
The article is written by Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas. It
reads as follows:
The last time Donald Rumsfeld saw Saddam Hussein, he gave
him a cordial handshake. The date was almost 20 years ago,
Dec. 20, 1983; an official Iraqi television crew recorded the
historic moment.
The once and future Defense secretary, at the time a
private citizen, had been sent by President Ronald Reagan to
Baghdad as a special envoy. Saddam Hussein, armed with a
pistol on his hip, seemed "vigorous and confident,"
according to a now declassified State Department cable
obtained by Newsweek. Rumsfeld "conveyed the President's
greetings and expressed his pleasure at being in Baghdad,"
wrote the notetaker. Then the two men got down to business,
talking about the need to improve relations between their two
countries.
Like most foreign-policy insiders, Rumsfeld was aware that
Saddam was a murderous thug who supported terrorists and was
trying to build a nuclear weapon. (The Israelis had already
bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak.) But at the time,
America's big worry was Iran, not Iraq. The Reagan
administration feared that the Iranian revolutionaries who
had overthrown the shah (and taken hostage American diplomats
for 444 days in 1979-81) would overrun the Middle East and
its vital oilfields. On the--theory that the enemy of my
enemy is my friend, the Reaganites were seeking to support
Iraq in a long and bloody war against Iran. The meeting
between Rumsfeld and Saddam was consequential: for the next
five years, until Iran finally capitulated, the United States
backed Saddam's armies with military intelligence, economic
aid and covert supplies of munitions.
Rumsfeld is not the first American diplomat to wish for the
demise of a former ally. After all, before the cold war, the
Soviet Union was America's partner against Hitler in World
War II. In the real world, as the saying goes, nations have
no permanent friends, just permanent interests. Nonetheless,
Rumsfeld's long-ago interlude with Saddam is a reminder that
today's friend can be tomorrow's mortal threat. As President
George W. Bush and his war cabinet ponder Saddam's
successor's regime, they would do well to contemplate how and
why the last three presidents allowed the Butcher of Baghdad
to stay in power so long.
The history of America's relations with Saddam is one of
the sorrier tales in American foreign policy. Time and again,
America turned a blind eye to Saddam's predations, saw him as
the lesser evil or flinched at the chance to unseat him. No
single policymaker or administration deserves blame for
creating, or at least tolerating, a monster; many of their
decisions seemed reasonable at the time. Even so, there are
moments in this clumsy dance with the Devil that make one
cringe. It is hard to believe that, during most of the 1980s, America knowingly permitted the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission to import bacterial cultures that might be used to build biological weapons.
Let me read that again:
It is hard to believe that, during most of the 1980s,
America knowingly permitted the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission to import bacterial cultures that might be used to build biological weapons. But it happened.
America's past stumbles, while embarrassing, are not an
argument for inaction in the future. Saddam probably is the
"grave and gathering danger" described by President Bush in
his speech to the United Nations last week. It may also be
true that "whoever replaces Saddam is not going to be
worse," as a senior administration official put it to
Newsweek. But the story of how America helped create a
Frankenstein monster it now wishes to strangle is sobering.
It illustrates the power of wishful thinking, as well as the
iron law of unintended consequences.
America did not put Saddam in power. He emerged after two
decades of turmoil in the '60s and '70s, as various strongmen
tried to gain control of a nation that had been concocted by
British imperialists in the 1920s out of three distinct and
rival factions, the Sunnis, Shiites and the Kurds. But during the cold war, America competed with the Soviets for Saddam's attention and welcomed his war with the religious fanatics of Iran. Having cozied up to Saddam, Washington found it hard to break away--even after going to war with him in 1991.
Through
years of both tacit and overt support, the West helped create
the Saddam of today, giving him time to build deadly arsenals
and dominate his people. Successive administrations always
worried that if Saddam fell, chaos would follow, rippling
through the region and possibly igniting another Middle East
war. At times it seemed that Washington was transfixed by
Saddam.
The Bush administration wants to finally break the spell.
If the administration's true believers are right, Baghdad,
after Saddam falls will look something like Paris after the
Germans fled in August 1944. American troops will be cheered
as liberators, and democracy will spread forth and push
Middle Eastern despotism back into the shadows. Yet if the
gloomy predictions of the administration's many critics come
true, the Arab street, inflamed by Yankee imperialism, will
rise up and replace the shaky but friendly autocrats in the
region with Islamic fanatics.
While the Middle East is unlikely to become a democratic
nirvana, the worst-case scenarios, always a staple of the
press, are probably also wrong or exaggerated. Assuming that
a cornered and doomed Saddam does not kill thousands of
Americans in some kind of horrific Gotterdammerung--a scary
possibility, one that deeply worries administration
officials--the greatest risk of his fall is that one
strongman may simply be replaced by another. Saddam's
successor may not be a paranoid sadist. But there is no
assurance that he will be America's friend or forswear the
development of weapons of mass destruction.
American officials have known that Saddam was a
psychopath--
Get that.
American officials have known that Saddam was a psychopath ever since he became the country's de facto ruler in the early 1970s. One of Saddam's early acts after he took the title of president in 1979 was to videotape a session of his party's congress, during which he personally ordered several members executed on the spot.
Let me repeat that:
American officials have known that Saddam was a psychopath
ever since he became the country's de facto ruler in the
early 1970s. One of Saddam's early acts after he took the
title of president in 1979 was to videotape--
Videotape--
a session of his party's congress, during which he personally
ordered several members executed on the spot.
The message, carefully conveyed to the Arab press, was not
that these men were executed for plotting against Saddam, but
rather for thinking about plotting against him. From the beginning, U.S. officials worried about Saddam's taste for
nasty weaponry; indeed, at their meeting in 1983, Rumsfeld warned that Saddam's use of chemical weapons might
"inhibit" American assistance. But top officials in the
Reagan administration saw Saddam as a useful surrogate. By
going to war with Iran, he could bleed the radical mullahs
who had seized control of Iran from the pro-American shah.
Some Reagan officials even saw Saddam as another Anwar Sadat,
capable of making Iraq into a modern secular state, just as
Sadat had tried to lift up Egypt before his assassination in
1981.
But Saddam had to be rescued first. The war against Iran
was going badly by 1982. Iran's "human wave attacks"
threatened to overrun Saddam's armies. Washington decided to
give Iraq a helping hand.
After Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad in 1983, U.S.
intelligence began supplying the Iraqi dictator with
satellite photos showing Iranian deployments. Official
documents suggest that America may also have secretly
arranged for tanks and other military hardware to be shipped to Iraq in a swap deal--American tanks to Egypt, Egyptian tanks to Iraq. Over the protest of some Pentagon skeptics, the Reagan administration began allowing the Iraqis to buy a wide variety of "dual use" equipment and materials from American suppliers. According to confidential Commerce
Department export-control documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the
shopping list included a computerized database for Saddam's
Interior Ministry (presumably to help keep track of political
opponents); helicopters to transport Iraqi officials;
television cameras for "video surveillance applications";
chemical-analysis equipment for the Iraq Atomic Energy
Commission (IAEC), and, most unsettling, numerous shipments
of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa" to the IAEC. According to
former officials, the bacterial cultures could be used to
make biological weapons, including anthrax. The State
Department also approved the shipment of 1.5 million atropine
injectors, for use against the effects of chemical weapons,
but the Pentagon blocked the sale. The helicopters, some
American officials later surmised, were used to spray poison
gas on the Kurds.
The United States almost certainly knew from its own
satellite imagery that Saddam was using chemical weapons
against Iranian troops. When Saddam bombed Kurdish rebels and
civilians with a lethal cocktail of mustard gas, sarin, tabun
and VX in 1988, the
[[Page S8988]]
Reagan administration first blamed Iran, before
acknowledging, under pressure from congressional Democrats,
that the culprits were Saddam's own forces. There was only
token official protest at the time. Saddam's men were
unfazed. An Iraqi audiotape, later captured by the Kurds,
records Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid (known as Ali
Chemical) talking to his fellow officers about gassing the
Kurds. "Who is going to say anything?" he asks. "The
international community? F----k them!"
The United States was much more concerned with protecting
Iraqi oil from attacks by Iran as it was shipped through the
Persian Gulf. <b.In 1987, an Iraqi Exocet missile hit an
American destroyer, the USS Stark, in the Persian Gulf,
killing 37 crewmen. Incredibly, the United States excused
Iraq for making an unintentional mistake and instead used the
incident to accuse Iran of escalating the war in the gulf.
The American tilt to Iraq became more pronounced. U.S.
commandos began blowing up Iranian oil platforms and
attacking Iranian patrol boats. In 1988, an American warship
in the gulf accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus, killing
290 civilians. Within a few weeks, Iran, exhausted and
fearing American intervention, gave up its war with Iraq.
Saddam was feeling cocky. With the support of the West, he
had defeated the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran. America
favored him as a regional pillar; European and American
corporations were vying for contracts with Iraq. He was
visited by congressional delegations led by Sens. Bob Dole of
Kansas and Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who were eager to promote
American farm and business interests. But Saddam's
megalomania was on the rise, and he overplayed his hand. In
1990, a U.S. Customs sting operation snared several Iraqi
agents who were trying to buy electronic equipment used to
make triggers for nuclear bombs. Not long after, Saddam
gained the world's attention by threatening "to burn Israel
to the ground." At the Pentagon, analysts began to warn that
Saddam was a growing menace, especially after he tried to buy
some American-made high-tech furnaces useful for making
nuclear-bomb parts. Yet other officials in Congress and in
the Bush administration continued to see him as a useful, if
distasteful, regional strongman. The State Department was
equivocating with Saddam right up to the moment he invaded
Kuwait in August 1990.
Mr. President, I referred to this Newsweek article yesterday at a
hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Specifically, during
the hearing, I asked Secretary Rumsfeld:
Mr. Secretary, to your knowledge, did the United States
help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological
weapons during the Iran-Iraq war? Are we in fact now facing
the possibility of reaping what we have sewn?
The Secretary quickly and flatly denied any knowledge but said he
would review Pentagon records.
I suggest that the administration speed up that review. My concerns
and the concerns of others have grown.
A letter from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, which I
shall submit for the Record, shows very clearly that the United States
is, in fact, preparing to reap what it has sewn. A letter written in
1995 by former CDC Director David Satcher to former Senator Donald W.
Riegle, Jr., points out that the U.S. Government provided nearly two
dozen viral and bacterial samples to Iraqi scientists in 1985--samples
that included the plague, botulism, and anthrax, among other deadly
diseases.
According to the letter from Dr. Satcher to former Senator Donald
Riegle, many of the materials were hand carried by an Iraqi scientist
to Iraq after he had spent 3 months training in the CDC laboratory.
The Armed Services Committee is requesting information from the
Departments of Commerce, State, and Defense on the history of the
United States, providing the building blocks for weapons of mass
destruction to Iraq. I recommend that the Department of Health and
Human Services also be included in that request.
The American people do not need obfuscation and denial. The American
people need the truth. The American people need to know whether the
United States is in large part responsible for the very Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction which the administration now seeks to destroy.
We may very well have created the monster that we seek to eliminate.
The Senate deserves to know the whole story. The American people
deserve answers to the whole story.
Also yesterday, in the same 6 minutes that I was given in which to
ask questions--which was extended by virtue of the kindness of the
distinguished Senator from Georgia, Mr. Max Cleland, and other members
of the committee, so it was perhaps 9 or 10 minutes--there was another
interesting question that I asked. Let me read a portion of that
transcript from the Armed Services Committee:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding these hearings. Mr.
Secretary, to your knowledge, did the United States help Iraq
to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during
the Iran-Iraq War? Are we, in fact, now facing the
possibility of reaping what we have sown?
Rumsfeld: Certainly not to my knowledge. I have no
knowledge of United States companies or government being
involved in assisting Iraq develop chemical, biological or
nuclear weapons.
There is another excerpt from that question and answer period in
which Secretary Rumsfeld and I engaged:
Byrd: Now, the Washington Post reported this morning
[yesterday] that the United States is stepping away from
efforts to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. Are
we not sending exactly the wrong signal to the world, at
exactly the wrong time?
Doesn't this damage our credibility in the international
community at the very time that we are seeking their support
to neutralize the threat of Iraq's biological weapons
program? If we supplied, as the Newsweek article said, if we
supplied the building blocks for germ and chemical warfare to
this madman in the first place, this psychopath, how do we
look to the world to be backing away from this effort to
control it at this point?
That question speaks for itself. I ask unanimous consent that the
following material be printed in the Record at the close of my remarks:
The partial transcript from the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing
on September 19; the article from the Washington Post of yesterday,
titled "U.S. Drops Bid to Strengthen Germ Warfare Accord"; the
Newsweek article, which I have alluded to already; a letter dated
January 6, 1994, requesting information from the Centers for Disease
Control and a response to the Honorable Donald W. Riegle, Jr., U.S.
Senator, dated June 21, 1995, from David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D.,
Director; a U.S. Senate Hearing Report 103-900, dealing with U.S.
exports of biological materials to Iraq to the Senate Committee on
Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs which has oversight responsibility
for the Export Administration Act, and keeping in mind that the U.S.
Department of Commerce approves licenses by that Department for
exports; including also the U.S. Senate hearing report in that matter.
Included in the approved sales are such items as Bacillus Anthracis,
anthrax, Clostridium Botulinum, Histoplasma Capsulatum, which causes a
disease superficially resembling tuberculosis that may cause pneumonia;
Brucella Melitensis, a bacteria which can cause chronic fatigue, and so
on; Clostridium Perfringens, which causes gas gangrene. I believe that
completes the list.
continued............
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