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CounterPunch
September
19, 2002
Bush Senior:
Hating Saddam, Selling Him Weapons
by
Kurt Nimmo
In an interview with CNN's Paula Zahn, former
president George Bush spoke recently of his "hatred"
of Saddam Hussein. "I hate Saddam Hussein," said Bush."I
don't hate a lot of people. I don't hate easily, but I think
he's, as I say, his word is no good and he's a brute. He's used
poison gas on his own people. So, there's nothing redeeming about
this man."
The former president claims to hate Saddam
simply because he is "no good" and a "brute."
Zahn does not bother to probe deeper. Paula Zahn's ratings are
dismal these days. Her former boss over at FOX News said, "a
dead raccoon could get higher ratings." The Bush interview,
obviously, is good for Zahn's floundering career. As such, we
shouldn't expect Zahn to push Bush Senior on the particulars
of his hatred. Not these days, anyway, when the corporate media
essentially plays second fiddle for the government.
Hatred in the wake of the Gulf War is
not unique. For instance, Wasli el-Ghazali, most assuredly hated
Bush and America. Ghazali was convicted back in 1994 for his
role in a plot to murder George Bush the Elder during a visit
to Kuwait. "Every Arab child is worth all of America,"
Ghazali told Robert Fisk of the Independent. "I am an Iraqi
citizen. Bush killed 16 members of my family."
In response to the failed--and some would
say bogus--plot to kill Bush, Clinton fired 23 Tomahawk missiles
into Baghdad on June 26, 1993 (more than a year before the conviction
of Ghazali and his co-conspirators). Seven of these "precision
guided" missiles missed their target (or did they?) and
hit civilian housing, killing eight people, including the renowned
artist Leila al-Attar. Clinton later told the American people
they could "feel good" about the attack. No word if
Clinton, like Bush, hates Saddam Hussein--or, for that matter,
innocent Iraqi civilians, including artists.
Bush did not tell CNN's Zahn if the assassination
plot was the particular incident that stoked his hatred of the
Iraqi dictator, nor did the anchor ask. It is fair to conclude
Bush has not always hated Saddam. Or if he has hated Saddam all
these years, he put that hatred aside in the name of statecraft.
Reagan, Bush, the Iraqi dictator, and American corporations have
worked together over the years. War and death make for good business.
It also makes for lies and deception--and possibly for less than
truthful interviews.
Former Reagan official and National Security
Council staffer Howard Teicher has described a less than hateful
relationship between the Reagan administration and Saddam Hussein.
In 1995, Teicher offered an affidavit in the Teledyne case, a
legal sideshow to a larger scandal known as "Iraqgate."
According to Teicher, he and Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Iraq
to make sure the Iraqi dictator received what he needed in order
to win the Iran-Iraq war--or if not win at least make sure there
was a draw. "CIA Director Casey personally spearheaded the
effort to ensure that Iraq had sufficient military weapons, ammunition
and vehicles," Teicher swore in the affidavit.
Teicher claims the United States "actively
supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions
of dollars of credits, by providing US military intelligence
and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country
arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry
required." Reagan also sent a secret message to Saddam,
which then vice president Bush delivered to Egyptian President
Mubarak, and Mubarak passed on to Saddam, "telling him that
Iraq should step up its air war and bombing of Iran." Reagan
CIA director Casey wanted to give Saddam cluster bombs, which
"were a perfect 'force multiplier' that would allow the
Iraqis to defend against the 'human waves' of Iranian attackers,"
explained the former NSC staffer. He recorded Casey's comments
in meeting minutes, which are now in the Ronald Reagan presidential
archives in Simi Valley, California.
In 1982, Reagan "legalized"
direct military assistance to Iraq. This resulted in more than
a billion dollars in military related exports. According to Kenneth
R. Timmerman (author of The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq)
the US government under Reagan and Bush sold Iraq 60 Hughes MD
500 "Defender" helicopters, eight Bell Textron AB 212
military helicopters equipped for anti-submarine warfare, 48
Bell Textron 214 ST utility helicopters (sold for "recreational"
purposes), and US military infra-red sensors and thermal imaging
scanners (sold illegally to Iraq through a Dutch company). After
the Gulf War, the International Atomic Energy Agency found the
following US equipment in Iraq: spectrometers, oscilloscopes,
neutron initiators, high-speed switches for nuclear detonation,
and other tools used to develop and manufacture nuclear weapons.
"One entire facility, a tungsten-carbide
manufacturing plant that was part of the Al Atheer complex,"
Timmerman told the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and
Urban Affairs, "was blown up by the IAEA in April 1992 because
it lay at the heart of the Iraqi clandestine nuclear weapons
program, PC-3. Equipment for this plant appears to have been
supplied by the Latrobe, Pennsylvania manufacturer, Kennametal,
and by a large number of other American companies, with financing
provided by the Atlanta branch of the BNL bank."
BNL--or Banca Nazionale del Lavoro--provided
more than $5 billion in unauthorized loans to Iraq, including
$900 million guaranteed by the US government. "About half
of the money allegedly went to finance the purchase of US farm
products, including $900 million guaranteed by the Agriculture
Department's Commodity Credit Corp., but investigators said much
of the rest had helped fuel Iraq's military buildup," wrote
George Lardner in the Washington Post on 22 March 1992. Lardner
and others were learning about covert and illegal arms sales
to Iraq through Representative Henry B. Gonzalez, chairman of
the House Banking Committee. Gonzalez was conducting "special
orders"--uninterrupted speeches on the House floor--detailing
the criminal behavior of Reagan and Bush. Hardly anybody paid
attention, least of all Bush, who was running for a second term.
While Bush Junior declares he "will
not allow... a nation such as Iraq to threaten our very future
by developing weapons of mass destruction," the administration
of his father and Reagan, as the Gonzalez revelations demonstrate,
apparently didn't have the future of America in mind when they
allowed biological and chemical weapons--as well as massive amounts
of conventional military hardware--to be exported to Iraq. They
were only interested in making sure Saddam gassed as many Iranians
as possible--and thus pay back the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
for evicting the despised Shah Reza Pahlavi and initiating an
anti-western revolution in Iran. No doubt it irks Bush, Cheney,
neocons in general, and a few mulitnaitonal oil corporations
that Iran is calling the shots on its oil resources.
The US Department of Commerce licensed
70 biological exports to Iraq between 1985 and 1989, including
at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax. The French
newspaper Le Figaro, in an article published in 1998, said researchers
at the Rockville, Maryland lab of the American Type Culture Collection
confirmed sending anthrax samples via mail order to Iraq. After
the Gulf War, Iraq made several declarations to UN weapons inspectors
about how they had weaponized the anthrax sent to them by the
American corporation. In 1985, the US Centers of Disease Control
sent samples of an Israeli strain of West Nile virus to a microbiologist
at the Basra University in Iraq. In addition, Iraq received other
"various toxins and bacteria," including botulins and
E. coli.
Corporations that have sold dual-use
chemicals and biological samples to Iraq for its weapons program
include: Phillips Petroleum, Unilever, Alcolac, Allied Signal,
the American Type Culture Collection, and Teledyne. Teledyne
pled guilty to charges of criminal conspiracy, false statements,
and violations of the Export Administration Act and the Arms
Export Control Act for indirectly exporting 130 tons of zirconium
to Iraq through Chilean arms manufacturer Carlos Cardoen. The
zirconium was intended for use in cluster bombs. In defense,
Teledyne argued during the trial that the CIA had authorized
the shipments. The Baltimore company Alcolac was convicted of
illegally selling thiodiglycol--a chemical precursor used in
the production of mustard gas--for use in Iraq's chemical warfare
program.
When Murray Waas and Craig Unger published
an article in The New Yorker about the Reagan administration
and Bush's involvement with Saddam Hussein--a full three years
before Howard Teicher's revelatory affidavit--they were roundly
condemned and mocked by the corporate media. Steven Emerson of
the Wall Street Journal called the article a "Byzantine
conspiracy theory," while Michael Fumento, a syndicated
columnist, said the story was "a big fat nothing,"
baseless innuendo that "spread like a flesh-eating bacteria
into newspapers, newsmagazines, and television news throughout
the country." Others accused a liberal media of attempting
to derail Bush's re-election bid.
During the election, Bill Clinton promised,
if elected, he would appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate
the Iraqgate scandal. But like so many election promises Iraqgate
fell off the radar screen not long after Clinton assumed office.
Worse, when former NSC staffer Howard Teicher presented his affidavit
in 1995, the Clinton Justice Department went on the offensive,
accused Teicher of lying, and then promptly classified the document
as a state secret. On January 15, 1995, attorney general Janet
Reno and deputy John Hogan released a Final Report whitewashing
the entire affair. It was hoped the whole thing would simply
fade away. Except for a few books and other "Byzantine conspiracy
theories," the Reagan-Bush-Iraqgate scandal has pretty much
slipped from public view.
In general, the corporate media gave
but cursory notice to the revelations. "There's a good reason
why we in the media are so partial to a nice, torrid sex scandal,"
said Ted Koppel, as he opened a Nightline Iraqgate report in
1992. "It is, among other things, so easy to explain and
so easy to understand. Nothing at all, in other words, like allegations
of a government cover-up, which tend to be not at all easy to
explain, and even more difficult to understand." In short,
according to Koppel and the corporate media, the American people
do not have the intelligence to judge for themselves if their
leaders are criminals. Obviously, Monica Lewinsky is more important.
As Dubya the Junior and his coterie of
chick hawks prepare to make war on a Frankenstein Bush the Senior--at
least in part--created, the revelations exposed by Representative
Henry B. Gonzalez and a handful of others need to be revisited
within the full context of public debate.
However, considering the handmaiden role
of corporate media in the dissemination of government propaganda--and
its insistence upon offering vacuous interviews by the likes
of Paula Zahn--chances are the American people will not be allowed
to understand any time soon what the government does in their
name.
Our only hope, it would seem, rests in
"Byzantine conspiracy theories."
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
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September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
September
17, 2002
Adam Federman
All
That Matters is Oil
Linda S.
Heard
Paranoid
Americans
Hussein Ibish
The Incident
at Shoney's
Francis Boyle
Is Bush's
War Illegal?
Let Us Count the Ways
Heidi Lypps
Bush's
Crackdown on
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Riad Z. Abdelkarim,
MD
Why
Do They Hate Us?
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16, 2002
Wayne Madsen
The Shoney's
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America's Horst Wessel
Tariq Ali
Debating
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Ahmad Faruqui
American
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Alam
A New Theology
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Robert Fisk
Bush's War
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Dave Randall
Mad, Mad World:
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Notes for
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Neither-Handed
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A Glossary
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