Mulling over George Pope to Steve Asher 16 Aug 2005

Hi George...

 SA> Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that Iran still has such agents
 SA> ("WMD"), or the means to produce & deliver such agents?

 SA> If the US Army War College & the CIA accept that Iran used such agents
 SA> against the Kurds (and indeed against Iraqi forces), why doesn't the
 SA> US Administration dance & wave & shout about Iranian "WMD"?

 GP> it's not strategic (ie. Iran might be able to defend themselves
 GP> better than Iraq)?

Hmm, possibly, but remember that in the early days of "Operation Iraqi
Liberation" (or "Shock and Awe", or whatever) there were dire warnings
of what Saddam or his Republican Guard etc would do when the Coalition
reached the (imaginary) "red line" around Baghdad. All those fictional
stocks of gas were likely to be unleashed ... but about all the "gas"
Iraq had came from "Baghdad Bob" babbling about the failure of the
invasion.

 SA> only go by reports on the 'net, which might be disinformation, but if
 SA> you have any evidence or sources, feel free to post them.

 GP> Same -- just whatever rumours are floating about cyberspace. . . 

For anyone interested in checking up on the rumours, propaganda, 
& general murky reports of Iran responsibility, the Wikipedia 
entry is a good start:

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Halabja poison gas attack
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Halabja poison gas attack was an incident on 15 March-19 March
1988 during a major battle in the Iran-Iraq war when chemical weapons
were used, allegedly by Iraqi government forces, to kill a number of
people in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja (population 80,000).
Estimates of casualties range from several hundred to 5,000 people.
Halabja is located about 150 miles northeast of Baghdad and 8-10 miles
from the Iranian border.

Most current accounts of the incident regard Iraq as the party
responsible for the gas attack, which occurred during the Iran-Iraq
War. The war between Iran and Iraq was in its eighth year when, on
March 16 and 17, 1988, Iraq dropped poison gas on the Kurdish city of
Halabja, then held by Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas
allied with Tehran; throughout the war, Iran had supplied the Iraqi
Kurdish rebels with safe haven and other military support. For
example, the TerrorismCentral web site states, "The poison gas attack
on the Iraqi town of Halabja was the largest-scale chemical weapons
(CW) attack against a civilian population in modern times. ...The CW
attack began early in the evening of March 16th, when a group of eight
aircraft began dropping chemical bombs, and the chemical bombardment
continued all night. ... The Halabja attack involved multiple chemical
agents, including mustard gas, and the nerve agents sarin, tabun and
VX." Some sources have also pointed to the blood agent Hydrogen
Cyanide.

The massacre at Halabja did not raise protests by the international
community in March 1988. At the time, it was admitted that the
civilians had been killed "collaterally" due to an error in handling
the combat gas. Two years later, when the Iran-Iraq War was finished
and the Western powers stopped supporting Saddam Hussein, the massacre
of Halabja was attributed to the Iraqis.

Some debate continues, however, over the question of whether Iraq was
really the responsible party, perhaps stemming from erroneous claims
that the United States supplied chemical weapons to Iraq. The matter
is further complicated by the fact that the U.S. State Department, in
the immediate aftermath of the incident, instructed its diplomats to
say that Iran was partly to blame. According to an article published
in the International Herald Tribune by human rights researcher Joost
Hiltermann the US intentionally tried to shift the blame for the
gassing of Halabja off of Saddam, and declassified State Department
document demonstrate that US diplomats received instructions to press
this line with United States allies.

[...]

A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study at the time
concluded, apparently by determining the chemicals used by looking at
images of the victims, that it was in fact Iran that was responsible
for the attack, an assessment which was used subsequently by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990's. The
CIA's senior political analyst for the Iran-Iraq war, Stephen C.
Pelletiere, co-authored an unclassified analysis of the war [1] which
contained a brief summary of the DIA study's key points. In a January
31, 2003 New York Times [2] opinion piece, Pelletiere summarized the
DIA's findings and noted that because of the DIA's conclusion there
was not sufficient evidence to definitively determine whether Iraq or
Iran was responsible. Pelletiere also felt that the administration of
George W. Bush was not being forthright when squarely placing blame on
Iraq, since it contradicted the conclusion of the DIA study. However
the DIA's final position on the attack was in fact much less certain
than this preliminary report suggests, with its final conclusions, in
June 2003, asserting just that there was insufficient evidence, but
concluding that "Iraq ..used chemical weapons against Kurdish
civilians in 1988" [3]. The CIA altered its position radically in the
late 1990s and cited Halabja frequently in its evidence of WMD before
the 2003 invasion [4]

[...]

Thus, while some facts surrounding the incident remain murky, most
evidence and analyses indicate that the gas attack was an Iraqi attack
on Iranian forces, pro-Iranian Kurdish forces and Halabja's citizens
during one of the major battles of the Iran-Iraq War. The attack
likely served a dual-purpose, as both a military act and a part of the
Al-Anfal campaign.

[...]

Source: Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_attack

Cheers, Steve..

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