Claims of
Saddam's Genocide Far from Proven
by Robin Miller
Dissident Voice
February 11, 2003
Is it really true
that Saddam Hussein "gassed his own people" while committing genocide
against Iraqi Kurds, images that have become woven into the fabric of the
American perception of Iraq?
Human Rights
Watch, the respected New York City NGO, has long championed these claims.
According to its reports, "at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000
persons, many of them women and children, were killed out of hand between
February and September 1988," the victims being Iraqi Kurds
"systematically put to death in large numbers on the orders of the central
government in Baghdad." Iraq allegedly used chemical weapons in
"forty separate attacks on Kurdish targets" during a campaign that
HRW characterizes as genocide. The most prominent of these purported attacks
was the March 1988 "chemical assault" on the town of Halabja, in
which the number of dead, according to Human Rights Watch, was "in excess
of 3,200," or perhaps "up to 5,000," or even "as many as
7,000." [1]
Horrifying
claims, these, but how much of this is true?
We know that
both Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons against one another in their
eight-year-long war, which ended with an August 20, 1988, cease-fire. Most of
Iraq's alleged assaults on the Kurds took place while this war was raging,
although Human Rights Watch claims the attacks extended into September. Iraq
has acknowledged using mustard gas against Iranian troops but has consistently
denied using chemical weapons against civilians.
We also know
that Iraq, for what it called security reasons, forcibly relocated--within
Iraqi Kurdistan--Kurds living in certain areas, much as Israel has done with
the Palestinians and the U.S. did in Vietnam.
What Happened at
Halabja?
The only
verified Kurdish civilian deaths from chemical weapons occurred in the Iraqi
village of Halabja, near the Iran border, where at least several hundred people
died from gas poisoning in mid-March, 1988. We know that Iran overran the
village and its small garrison of Iraqi troops; what is contested is who was
responsible for the deaths--Iran or Iraq--and how large the death toll was.
The best
evidence is a 1990 report by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army
War College. [2] It concluded that Iran, not Iraq, was the
culprit in Halabja. Lead author Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA's senior political
analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war, has described his group's
findings:
"The great
majority of the victims seen by reporters and other observers who attended the
scene were blue in their extremities. That means that they were killed by a
blood agent, probably either cyanogen chloride or hydrogen cyanide. Iraq never
used and lacked any capacity to produce these chemicals. But the Iranians did
deploy them. Therefore the Iranians killed the Kurds." [3]
Pelletiere says
the number of dead was in the hundreds, not the thousands claimed by Human
Rights Watch and the U.S. administration. To this day, the CIA concurs. [4]
While the War
College report acknowledges that Iraq used mustard gas during the Halabja
hostilities, it notes that mustard gas is an incapacitating, rather than a
killing, agent, with a fatality rate of only two percent, so that it could not
have killed the hundreds of known dead, much less the thousands of dead claimed
by Human Rights Watch. [5]
According to the
War College reconstruction of events, Iran struck first, taking control of the
town. The Iraqis counterattacked using mustard gas. The Iranians then attacked
again, this time using a "blood agent"--cyanogen chloride or hydrogen
cyanide--and re-took the town, which Iran then held for several months. Having
control of the village and its grisly dead, Iran blamed the gas deaths on the
Iraqis, and the allegations of Iraqi genocide took root via a credulous
international press and, a little later, cynical promotion of the allegations
for political purposes by the U.S. State Department and Senate. [5a]
Pelletiere
described his credentials in a recent New York Times op-ed:
"I am in a
position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political
analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War
College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that
flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I
headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against
the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail
on the Halabja affair." [6]
Was There an
Ongoing Campaign of Genocide?
Pelletiere also
rejects the larger claim that, aside from whatever happened at Halabja, Saddam
Hussein engaged in a months-long campaign of genocide against Iraqi Kurds that
killed 50,000, 100,000, or more. Calling this genocide is a "hoax, a
non-event," [7] he explains that:
"This one
is extremely problematical since no gassing victims were ever produced. The
only evidence that gas was used is the eye-witness testimony of the Kurds who
fled to Turkey, collected by staffers of the U.S. Senate. We showed this
testimony to experts in the military who told us it was worthless. The symptoms
described by the Kurds do not conform to any known chemical or combination of
chemicals." [8]
Pelletiere also
says that international relief organizations who examined the Kurdish refugees
in Turkey failed to discover any gassing victims. [9]
Another skeptic is
Milton Viorst, long-time Middle East correspondent for the New Yorker and
author of a dozen books. He visited Kurdish areas in Iraq when the gassing
allegations surfaced in 1988 and reported that:
"From what
I saw, I would conclude that if lethal gas was used, it was not used
genocidally--that is, for mass killing. The Kurds compose a fifth of the Iraqi
population, and they are a tightly knit community. If there had been
large-scale killing, it is likely they would know and tell the world. But
neither I nor any Westerner I encountered heard such allegations.
Nor did Kurdish
society show discernible signs of tension. The northern cities, where the men
wear Kurdish turbans and baggy pants, were as bustling as I had ever seen
them."
Crucially,
Viorst reported that:
"Journalists
visiting the Turkish camps saw refugees with blistered skin and irritated eyes,
symptoms of gassing. But doctors sent by France, the United Nations and the Red
Cross have said these symptoms could have been produced by a powerful, but
non-lethal tear gas." [10]
In his 1994 book
Sandcastles, Viorst added to his account:
"On
returning home, I interviewed academic experts; none unequivocally ruled out
the use of gas, but the most reliable among them were doubtful. It was only
Washington, and particularly Congress--although, conspicuously, not the U.S.
embassy in Baghdad, which was in the best position to know--that stuck
stubbornly to the original story, and this persistence bewildered the
Iraqis." [11]
In Sandcastles,
Viorst also described Iraq's Kurdish resettlement program:
"Saddam,
after the cease-fire, sent in his army to stamp out Kurdish insurgency once and
for all. He ordered his troops to go as far as the Iranian border and
depopulate a swath of territory eight or ten miles deep, neutralizing for all
time an area that had served the rebels as sanctuary.
Saddam's
objectives were understandable; his tactics were characteristically brutal. The
army dynamited dozens of villages into rubble and dispatched thousands of
inhabitants from their ancestral homes to newly built "resettlement
villages" far in the interior. In the process, sixty thousand Kurds crossed
the border into Turkey, where they told journalists they were fleeing from
attacks of gas. The Iraqis angrily denied the charge, but Secretary of State
Shultz claimed it was true, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, without
investigating, proposed a bill to impose heavy sanctions on Iraq. With the
pro-Israeli lobby fanning the fire, the bill nearly passed. But in the Turkish
refugee camps, international teams of doctors were more skeptical of the
refugees' claims, saying their examinations did not confirm the use of gas at
all."
(Both Pelletiere
and Viorst primarily address claims of Iraq's gassing of the Kurds because this
was the original formulation of the genocide allegations. Only later did these
allegations evolve into claims that Iraq's killing methods had included
gassing, bombing and mass executions. [11a])
A third
dissenting voice, oddly enough, is the CIA. Its October 2002 dossier,
"Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," identifies only 10
instances of reported Iraqi use of chemical weapons, and none of these were
directed specifically at the Kurds. All occurred during the Iran-Iraq war;
seven were directed only against Iranians, and in three cases, including
Halabja, the victims included both Iranians and Kurds, thus supporting Iraq's
contention that it used mustard gas only in military operations against Iran. [12]
Significantly,
the CIA claims only 20,000 casualties--dead and wounded combined--in Iraq's
alleged campaign against the Kurds, as opposed to Human Rights Watch's
assertion of 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. Given the tendency of the U.S.
government to magnify claims of Saddam's criminality, the CIA's estimates
should be interpreted as maximum possible figures.
Dissecting the Genocide Reports
Several reports
issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW) form the backbone of the gassing and
genocide claims, the principal report being "Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal
Campaign Against the Kurds." [12a] (Physicians for
Human Rights, another prominent American NGO, collaborated with HRW.) But the
reports' evidentiary basis is remarkably thin, consisting entirely of (1)
interviews of 350 Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1992 and 1993, four and five
years after the events; (2) exhumations of grave sites in three villages; and
(3) examination of documents taken by Kurdish rebels from captured Iraqi
government offices. [13]
According to
Human Rights Watch, these years-after-the-fact interviews were sufficient to
allow the detailed reconstruction of a two-year period (from mid-1987 to
mid-1989) of alleged continuous repression of the Kurds. Yet all reports--and
in particular atrocity reports--of refugees and their political supporters must
be viewed with caution. In the absence of corroborating physical evidence, it's
folly to speak with the certainty exuded in the HRW reports.
The political
environment in which the interviews took place--interviewers from the U.S., a
country strongly supporting the Kurdish movement, working hand-in-hand with
representatives of the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee--particularly undermines the credibility of these refugee
accounts. [13a] The interviewees had every reason to
attempt to please Human Rights Watch, which was in a position to help the
Kurdish cause through publication of these atrocity reports.
And, incredibly,
Human Rights Watch makes assertions of genocide despite the extreme paucity of
physical evidence. Of the three exhumed grave sites, one yielded 26 bodies of
men and boys executed by firing squad. [14] Certainly
this was an atrocity, but this leaves 99,974 bodies unaccounted for. The other
two grave sites--revealing only five separately-buried individuals who had died
from unknown causes--supplied no evidence supporting allegations of genocide. [15]
Human Rights
Watch's explanation is that the other 99,974 people were "trucked to
remote areas and machine-gunned to death, their bodies bulldozed into mass
graves" that have never been found. [16] HRW also claims that "the Iranian
forces in Halabja had managed to bury an estimated 3,000 victims of the March
16 chemical attack in mass graves under a thin layer of dirt in the complex of
Anab. Four years later, the corpses were still there, and they were beginning
to pollute the local groundwater." How do they know this? We have no idea,
as no evidence whatsoever is provided. [17]
And this brings
us back to CIA analyst Stephen Pelletiere's question: If 100,000 people were
slaughtered, where are the bodies?
There are
several other reasons to doubt the accuracy of the Human Rights Watch reports:
1. Others who
have investigated the situation have not reached similar conclusions. Only two
American groups (HRW and Physicians for Human Rights), working with Saddam
Hussein's two sworn enemies, the Kurdish opposition and the U.S. government,
have. [18]
2. The reports
barely mention the existence of contrary evidence. Although the 90-page War
College report had been in the public domain for three years when HRW published
"Genocide in Iraq" in 1993, the earlier assessment is dismissed in a
single footnote. And there is no consideration of Milton Viorst's nearly
contemporaneous, firsthand observations. No serious assessment of any question--much
less of claims of genocide--ignores or summarily dismisses contrary evidence. [18a]
3. The reports,
and HRW's handling of them, reveal an unmistakable political bias in favor of
Iraq's Kurdish movement. "Genocide in Iraq" describes offices of the
Iraqi national government--the country's internationally-recognized
sovereign--as a "puppet administration," while HRW worked closely
with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the main opposition groups. [19]
And, in an
astonishingly revealing decision, Human Rights Watch released its newest report
on Iraq--"The Iraqi Government Assault on the Marsh Arabs,"
purporting to detail "a fifteen-year campaign by the central government to
eliminate" the Marsh Arabs--on January 25, at a time when its release
could only have inflamed public opinion against Iraq's central government. [20]
4. There simply
is no proof of what agent--a legal chemical agent such as tear gas, an illegal
chemical agent, or a nonchemical agent--caused the symptoms described in the
Human Rights Watch reports. The most that HRW can say is that the injuries
reported by the Kurds were "consistent with" exposure to mustard gas.
But this fails to eliminate other possible causes. Moreover, we know from
Stephen Pelletiere that mustard gas simply doesn't kill large numbers of
people. And, in any event, Iran also used mustard gas. [21]
An example of
conclusions reached without convincing evidence--or even any significant
evidence--of causation can be found in the Human Rights Watch report "The
Destruction of Koreme During The Anfal Campaign." This report describes
the exhumation of the bodies of two persons allegedly killed by a
"chemical weapons attack" in the Kurdish village of Birjinni. Yet all
HRW can say is that "forensic examination of the two skeletons was limited
to determining whether there was any sign of trauma or perimortem violence that
might contradict the account of the villagers that the two decedents were
overcome by chemical weapons. No indications contrary to death by chemical
agents were found." In fact, there is absolutely no indication of how
these two persons died. To use this as conclusive evidence of a "chemical
weapons attack" is preposterous. [22]
5. The various
HRW statements exhibit both "claim creep"--the tendency, over time,
to assert ever-larger numbers of victims--and fundamental change in the nature
of the claim. In its 1993 report, "Genocide in Iraq," HRW claimed
that the number of victims was "at least 50,000 and possibly as many as
100,000 persons." By 2003, that number had grown to a firm 100,000. The
gender breakdown of the victims also changed. In 1993 "many" of the
victims were women and children; by 2003 all 100,000 victims were men and boys.
Or maybe by 2003 it was only the men and boys who were "trucked to remote
areas and machine-gunned to death, their bodies bulldozed into mass
graves," while the women and girls were killed on site. HRW doesn't tell
us; but, in any event, there are still no bodies, whether male or female, to
corroborate any of this. [23]
6. On several occasions,
Human Rights Watch reports explicitly invoke the Holocaust. Readers are told
that "like Nazi Germany, the Iraqi regime concealed its actions in
euphemisms"; [24] that "the parallels [between
the Holocaust and the alleged campaign against the Kurds] are apt, and often
chillingly close"; [25] and that "until
[Lidice], there were supposedly only two possible attitudes for a conqueror
toward a village that was considered rebellious." [26]
Resort to this deep well of emotionality is necessary only when the facts
themselves are insufficient to convince.
Captured Iraqi Documents
Human Rights Watch
also relies heavily on Iraqi government documents captured by the Kurdish
opposition. These documents have made their way to the Iraq Research and
Documentation Project within the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard
University. The IRDP--which, like Human Rights Watch, has collaborated with the
U.S. State Department--has posted a few of the documents on its website. After
appointing the documents with suitably provocative names like
"Bureaucratic Beheading" and "A Professional Rapist," the
website makes wild claims about the significance of some of them. Consider the
document titled "Admission of Chemical Use," which provides in its
entirety: [27]
"We have
been informed of the following:
1- The Iranian
enemy has supplied the saboteurs' families in the villages and rural areas
along the border with pharmaceutical drugs, especially anti-chemical
medicaments; and they [the Iranian enemy] are training them to use syringes for
this purpose and to wear protective head masks.
2- There exist
approximately 100 saboteurs from various gangs of saboteurs in the Werta
region, al-Sadiq district. They are along the Khanqawa route in order to stop
the force accompanying the Village Deportation Committees, albeit most of the
families in this region have left to Iran.
Please verify
information and notify us within 24 hours."
The IRDP
interpretation is:
"This
document is very important because it vitiates any claim by the government of
Saddam Husayn that it did not use chemical weapons against its Kurdish
population. The date, provenance and text of the document lend undeniable proof
to the regime's genocide campaign, known as Anfal, against the Kurds. The Iraq
regime's use of chemical weapons as part of the Anfal campaign was so widespread,
the Iranians had to supply the Kurds with anti-chemical protectives."
While this is
one possible interpretation, the document could also be either (1) a simple
statement of fact, or (2) a warning that the Iranians, who also used gasses
(blood agents and mustard gas), had issued medical supplies and protective
clothing to their supporters and might be themselves preparing to launch a
chemical attack. We just don't know. It's ludicrous to anoint this short
document an "Admission of Chemical Use" by Iraq.
Nerve Gas Allegations
Physicians for
Human Rights, which collaborated with Human Rights Watch, has also issued a
number of reports. Most make claims similar to those in the HRW reports and are
subject to the same objections. [28] One of its reports,
though, is sufficiently important to require separate examination. This is
"Nerve Gas Used in Northern Iraq on Kurds," released on April 29,
1993. According to this report, a PHR team collected soil samples on June 10,
1992, from bomb craters near the Kurdish village of Birjinni in northern Iraq.
The Iraqi military is claimed to have bombed Birjinni on August 25, 1988. [29]
The samples were
then analyzed by a British laboratory, which reported "unequivocal"
residues of methylphosphonic acid (MPA) and isopropyl methylphosphonic acid
(iPMPA) as well as "degradation products of mustard gas." MPA is a
product of the hydrolysis (reaction with water) of any of several nerve agents,
and iPMPA (which the report incorrectly calls "isipropyl"
methylphosphonic acid) is a product of the hydrolysis of sarin. [30]
Assuming the
samples were authentic and the proper conditions (if any) for hydrolysis of
sarin were present, this finding is significant. Sarin, then, may have been a
factor in the deaths of four Birjinni villagers reported that day. However,
sarin is odorless, [31] and, according to Human Rights
Watch, the villagers reported various distinctive odors from the bombs:
"pleasant, at first. It smelled of apples and something sweet"; it
smelled like "pesticides in the fields"; "it became
bitter." To accept this account, it also must be possible for Iraq to have
combined sarin and mustard gas either with each other or with a third
substance, as the villagers reported three waves of four bombs, all apparently
identical. [32]
Other sources
also claim that Iraq has used nerve gas. The CIA says that Iraq used nerve
agents six times: five times against only Iranian troops, and at Halabja
against both Iranians and Kurds. Four of the six instances involve the cruder
tabun, rather than sarin, and the agents allegedly used on the other two
occasions are unspecified. [33] Rick Francona, a retired
U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who was a liaison to the Iraqi military,
puts the figure at four times in 1988. [34]
Other Advocates of the Genocide Claims
There are other champions
of the genocide claim. One is Jeffrey Goldberg, whose 18,000-word story,
"The Great Terror," in the March 25, 2002, issue of the New Yorker [35] forms the basis of the U.S. State Department's website
on alleged Iraqi genocide. [36] Goldberg's story is long
on lurid details; we are told, for instance, that one woman, Hamida Mahmoud,
died while nursing her two-year-old daughter. Goldberg also follows the Human
Rights Watch formula in invoking the Nazis: "Saddam Hussein's attacks on
his own citizens mark the only time since the Holocaust that poison gas has
been used to exterminate women and children."
What Goldberg
doesn't tell his readers is that he has dual Israeli/American citizenship and served
in the Israeli defense forces a few years back. [37] Or
that he purposefully ignored the War College report, which, of course, reached
quite different conclusions. [38]
In a curious
detail, Goldberg, following the Human Rights Watch narrative concerning
Halabja, asserts that the Iraqis dropped wave after wave of gas bombs on the
city after Iranian troops had taken it, yet the Iranians never reported any gas
casualties.
Another piece of
Goldberg's narrative that doesn't fit--and this is true of the accounts of all
of the genocide advocates--is that mustard gas generally doesn't have any
immediate effects, yet the Kurds in these stories are portrayed as experiencing
blistering, and sometimes falling dead, almost immediately. According to a
December 2002 fact sheet from the British Health Department, "mustard gas
does not usually cause pain at the time of exposure; symptoms may be delayed
for 4 to 6 hours"; only "occasionally" are "nausea, retching,
vomiting and eye smarting" reported immediately. [39]
Similarly, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control explains that "mustard gas
burns your skin and causes blisters within a few days." [40]
Other sources agree. [41]
Interestingly,
Goldberg's piece was immediately incorporated into the Bush administration's
propaganda efforts. [42] Goldberg's article--placed in
the "Fact" section of the New Yorker--can easily be interpreted as
part of the joint U.S./Israeli campaign against Saddam Hussein. Goldberg
himself vehemently supports the "removal" of Saddam. [43]
Another purveyor
of the genocide claim is Christine Gosden, a professor of medical genetics at
the University of Liverpool medical school. Although a convert to the cause
only after her 1998 visit to Halabja, she's a true believer. [44]
In these few years she has made herself into a terrorism expert who has
testified before Congress [45] and co-authored a recent
virulent commentary with the executive director of the Washington Kurdish
Institute. [46]
Gosden hasn't
added any new evidence to our understanding of events, although she's upped the
ante of total alleged deaths to 200,000 [47] while adding
"possibly biological and radiological weapons" to the list of agents
allegedly used by Iraq against the Kurds. [48]
One expert who's
been particularly scathing about Gosden's claims is Dr. Gordon Prather, a
nuclear physicist who was assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for science and
technology in the Reagan years and informed himself on chemical agents because
of his oversight responsibilities in that realm. Responding to Gosden's
genocide claims, Prather is emphatic: [49]
"Your lady
doctor's assertion that Iraq bombed 280 villages with poison gas is a joke you
should have seen without a fact-checker. There were hundreds of villages
cleared by Baghdad on the Iraqi border, but the residents were moved to new
villages built for them in the interior. Western journalists were invited in to
observe the process, including Karen Eliot House of the Wall Street Journal,
now the president of Dow Jones International."
Finally, there's
Gwynne Roberts, a British television reporter who visited Kurdish refugee camps
in 1988. He also entered Iraqi territory and brought back shell fragments on
which a British laboratory reportedly found traces of mustard gas. [50] But Roberts never identified where the fragments came
from, [51] and both Iran and Iraq are known to have used
mustard gas.
Roberts' most
startling report was an alleged massacre at Bassay Gorge, in northern Iraq, on
August 29, 1988, in which between 1,500 and 4,000 people, mainly women and
children, were supposedly killed by a mixture of various nerve gasses. The
absence of bodies was explained by their having been burned by Iraqi troops
wearing gas masks. [52]
Stephen
Pelletiere, the CIA analyst, says that the U.S. military closely studied these
reports but found them groundless. [53]
The Ultimate Assessment
So what, then,
does all this evidence tell us?
We know Saddam
is a bad guy. We know he has killed people. But those aren't the questions. The
allegations at issue are vastly more serious: that he purposefully murdered at
least 50,000 (or 100,000, or 200,000, depending on the speaker's fervor) in an
attempt to decimate Iraqi Kurds as a people, and that he used chemical weapons
on 40 occasions during this campaign.
What hard
evidence is there? One grave with 26 (or 27) bodies of people killed by
bullets, not chemicals, and traces of two gasses at one location where four
people died. That's it.
Only someone who
wanted to be deceived would consider this adequate proof of genocide. [54]
Robin Miller is a writer in New Orleans. Contact her
through her website at http://www.robincmiller.com.
Copyright (C) Robin Miller 2002. This commentary may be freely distributed --
and I encourage that -- so long as it remains intact, including the authorship
and copyright statement.
NOTES
1.
Human Rights Watch's reports on Iraq can be accessed here.
These reports were originally issued by Middle East Watch, which later merged
with other organizations to form Human Rights Watch. [Click the
Back button to return to text]
A recent op-ed claims 6800 chemical deaths at Halabja. See Joost R. Hiltermann, "America Didn't Seem to Mind Poison
Gas," International Herald Tribune, January 17, 2003. Hiltermann was
through 1994 the director of the Kurds' Project of Middle East Watch. As he's
currently writing a book on chemical weapons use during the Iran-Iraq war, this
book will presumably seek to further canonize the Human Rights Watch perspective.
2. This report--Stephen C. Pelletiere, Douglas V. Johnson II,
and Leif R. Rosenberger, "Iraqi Power and US Security in the Middle
East," Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College--was released to
the public in 1990. Much of the material in this report also appears in Marine
Corps document FMFRP 3-203, "Lessons Learned: Iran-Iraq War," dated
December 10, 1990.
In 2001 Praeger Publishers published a book, "Iraq and the International
Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Gulf," by the report's lead
author, Stephen Pelletiere. It has sold 30,000 copies at a pricey $70 and ranks
818 in sales at Amazon.com.
3. This summary of the report's findings is taken from a
column by British freelance writer Kevin Dowling , "Top US
Intel Expert Brands Tony Blair A Liar Over Iraq," Globe-Intel, October 10,
2002. The column was originally circulated on Irish author Gordon Thomas'
Globe-Intel mailing list.
For other commentary by Stephen Pelletiere, see:
Stephen
Pelletiere, "A War Crime or an Act of War?," New York Times, January
31, 2003.
Roger
Trilling, "Fighting Words: The Administration Builds Up Its Pretext for
Attacking Iraq," Village Voice, May 1-7, 2002.
Douglas V.
Johnson and Stephen C. Pelletiere, "Iraq's Chemical Warfare," The New
York Review of Books, November 22, 1990.
It should perhaps be noted that Jean Pascal Zanders of the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) doubts whether Iran really did
use a cyanide agent in Halabja. See his Allegations of Iranian CW Use in the 1980-88 Gulf War: A
Critical Analysis from Open Sources (Washington, DC; 7 March 2001).
For an argument that Iraq _was_ responsible for the Halabja gassings, based in
part on Zanders' assertions, see Glen
Rangwala's January 2002 post on the CASI message board. He relies on
Christine Gosden and Gwynne Roberts and dismisses Pelletiere's reports. The
entire thread of which this message was a part is found here.
4. Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, October 2002.
5. "Appendix B: Chemical Weapons," from "Lessons
Learned: Iran-Iraq War," referenced in footnote 2, states:
"For comparison, during WWI, the U. S. Army suffered some 70,552 gas
casualties requiring hospitalization.
Of these, 1,221 died. Deaths on the battlefield attributed to gas are recorded
as 200, but on WWI battlefields, cause of death was often difficult to
ascertain."
5a. For a description of the role of the U.S. State
Department and Senate in promoting the genocide allegations, see "Saddam Hussein: From Ally to Enemy" (April 9, 2002)
6. Stephen
Pelletiere, "A War Crime or an Act of War?," New York Times, January
31, 2003.
7. Jude Wanniski, "What Happened at Halabja?," April 23,
2002 (quoting Pelletiere's 2001 book "Iraq and the International Oil
System: Why America Went to War in the
Gulf").
Economist and activist Jude
Wanniski is the writer most responsible for keeping alive questions about
the veracity of the genocide claims. His other contributions include:
"Saddam Did Not Commit Genocide!" (February 3, 2003)
"The CIA Reports on Saddam's Gassings" (October 8,
2002)
"Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, V.I.P. (September 18, 2002)
"100,000 Men and Boys, Machine-Gunned to Death!!"
(August 14, 2002)
"Iraq & The Christian Science Monitor" (May 22,
2002)
"Pure Propaganda on '60 Minutes'" (May 14, 2002)
"Saddam Hussein: From Ally to Enemy" (April 9, 2002)
"Letters From an Iraqi Expatriate" (March 26, 2002)
"Bush & Cheney Are Misinformed" (March 25, 2002)
"In
Defense of Saddam Hussein" (December 14, 2000)
"Did
Saddam Hussein Gas His Own People?" (November 18, 1998)
For his efforts, Wanniski has been charged with denying genocide. See Timothy Noah,
"Jude Wanniski's Genocide Denial; Wherein the Supply-Side Guru Disputes,
against All Evidence, Saddam's Gassing of the Kurds," Slate, April 1, 2002.
8. Douglas V. Johnson and Stephen C. Pelletiere, "Iraq's
Chemical Warfare," The New York Review of Books, November 22, 1990.
9. See
Jude Wanniski, "Did Saddam Hussein Gas His Own People?," November 18,
1998. This cites Chapter 5 of "Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the
Middle East," referenced in footnote 2.
10. Viorst's article was published on page six of the
October 7, 1998, edition of the International Herald Tribune under the title
"Iraq and the Kurds: Where Is the Proof of Poison Gas?" Portions of
it are online here and here.
11. This is an excerpt
from Sandcastles beginning on page 50.
11a. For a recounting of Human Rights Watch's change of
position, see Jude Wanniski, "Iraq & The Christian Science
Monitor" (May 22, 2002).
12. "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs,"
October 2002.
12a. Human Rights Watch's reports on Iraq can be accessed here.
These reports were originally issued by Middle East Watch, which later merged
with other organizations to become Human Rights
Watch.
13. These evidentiary sources are described in "A
Note on Methodology" from HRW's principal report, "Genocide in
Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds."
13a. In "Preface
& Acknowledgements" in "Genocide in Iraq," Human Rights
Watch offers its appreciation to "Peter Galbraith, then senior advisor to
the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Ambassador Charles Dunbar,
formerly of the U.S. Department of State." For a description of the role
of the U.S. State Department and Senate in promoting the genocide allegations,
see "Saddam Hussein: From Ally to Enemy" (April 9, 2002).
Peter Galbraith, who took a leading role in these promotional activities, was a
senior advisor to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1979 to 1993,
then becoming the first U.S. ambassador to Croatia. See the
U.S. Embassy in Croatia. From 1962 until 1993, Charles Dunbar was a State
Department Officer, including postings as Ambassador to Yemen and
Qatar.
Reports by Peter Galbraith include:
Peter Galbraith, Kurdistan in the Time of Saddam Hussein--A Staff Report to the
Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, November 1991)
Peter W. Galbraith and Christopher Van Hollen, Jr., "Chemical Weapons Use
in Kurdistan: Iraq's Final Offensive," staff report to the U.S. Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations, September 21, 1988.
14. HRW reports are inconsistent on the number of people
killed at this site (the Kurdish village of Koreme). "A
Note on Methodology," referenced in footnote 13 just above, states
that 26 bodies were recovered, but the separate report, "The Anfal
Campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan: The Destruction of Koreme," says that 27
men and boys were executed.
"Unquiet
Graves: The Search for the Disappeared in Iraqi Kurdistan," Human Rights
Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, February 1992, might have been
expected to shed light on the question of the missing mass graves. Instead, a
delegation sent to Kurdistan in December 1991 by Middle East Watch and
Physicians for Human Rights can only report that "we recovered the
skeletons or partial remains of 9 individuals, most of whom bore single gunshot
wounds to the head." They also mention a number of locations of alleged
mass graves, but the reports are not further investigated.
If these alleged mass graves ever are found, it must be determined whether the
victims were Kurds. In one incident, Kurdish guerrillas shot and killed at
least 60 unarmed Iraqi soldiers after they had surrendered. According to a
Reuters reporter who witnessed the incident, the soldiers were shot at
point-blank range while kneeling inside a building with their hands behind
their backs. See Kurt Schork, "Kurds Kill 60 Unarmed Iraqi Soldiers,"
Washington Post, October 8, 1991.
15. One of the two other exhumations was of three children's
graves near the village of Erbil. Since these graves were within the
"graveyard of a complex where survivors of the Anfal [Iraq's alleged
campaign against the Kurds] were taken," it is unclear what Human Rights
Watch believes is established by evidence that people who weren't killed in the
alleged campaign later died of other causes. See "A
Note on Methodology."
The other exhumation site was near the village of Birjinni; two bodies were
exhumed, with results that, objectively speaking, were wholly inconclusive. The
HRW report states:
"Exhumations of chemical weapons victims: Under the direction of the
forensic team's scientific head and chief anthropologist, the skeletal remains
of two of the four apparent victims of the chemical attack were exhumed. The forensic
team was told that these two skeletons were those of the grandfather and the
small boy who had died in the attack. The skeletons of the other two victims,
buried in the cave, were not exhumed.
Exhumation of the two skeletons confirmed that one was that of an old man,
approximately sixty years old. Relatives identified him as the grandfather on
the basis of artifacts and clothing found with the skeleton in the grave. The
second skeleton was that of a young boy, approximately five years old. He was identified
as the grandson on the basis of clothing. Forensic examination of the two
skeletons was limited to determining whether there was any sign of trauma or
perimortem violence that might contradict the account of the villagers that the
two decedents were overcome by chemical weapons. No indications contrary to
death by chemical agents were found. The skeletons were then reburied in new
graves in accordance with Islamic ritual.
Conclusions concerning the chemical weapons attack: The forensic team found
nothing in the evidence of the exhumation and the archaeological investigation
that was inconsistent with the account of the chemical weapons attack given by
village witnesses. On the contrary, the lack of trauma to either skeleton
supports the villagers' account."
See "The
Destruction of Koreme During The Anfal Campaign." return to text
16. See the Letter
to the editor from Hanny Megally published in the New York Times on August
13, 2002. (Scroll down to the third letter.) Megally is identified as the
executive director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights
Watch.
17. Amazingly, this allegation is placed only in a footnote,
accompanied by no supporting evidence. See footnote 32 in "The March 16 Chemical Attack on Halabja" within
"Genocide in Iraq."
18. Accounts by the U.S. State Department and Kurdish
opposition groups are obviously corrupted by self-interest. United Nations
documents should be checked, however.
Another source, and an extremely unbiased one, of information on Iraq's use of
chemical weapons is the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
(SIPRI). See, for example, Julian
Perry Robinson and Jozef Goldblat, "Chemical Warfare in the Iraq-Iran
War," SIPRI Fact Sheet, May 1984. By 1994, SIPRI could state that:
"There have been numerous allegations that Iraq used CW in the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran
War, but only a few of these allegations have been proved." See "SIPRI
Yearbook 1994", pp. 323-324. A compendium of information can be
accessed at "Iraq
and Arms Control: A SIPRI Archive."
A medical journal article that could be helpful is A. Hay and G. Roberts,
"The Use of Poison Gas against the Iraqi Kurds: Analysis of Bomb
Fragments, Soil and Wool Samples," Journal of the American Medical
Association, 1990, 262:1065-1066.
18a. Footnote seven in "Chapter
One: Ba'athis and Kurds" within "Genocide in Iraq" states:
"Books on the Iran-Iraq War have routinely echoed the unsubstantiated
report that both sides had used chemical weapons in Halabja. This notion
originated in a study for the U.S. Army War College: Stephen C. Pelletiere,
Douglas V. Johnson II and Leif R. Rosenberger, Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in
the Middle East (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army
War College, 1990). It is repeated in a later book by Pelletiere, a former U.S.
intelligence officer, The Iran-Iraq War: Chaos in a Vacuum (New York: Praeger,
1992). This strongly pro-Iraqi work comments, 'On May 23 (sic), in fighting
over the town, gas was used by both sides. As a result scores (sic) of Iraqi
Kurdish civilians were killed. It is now fairly certain that Iranian gas killed
the Kurds.' (pp.136-137)
The supposed factual basis for this conclusion is that the Halabja victims had
blue lips, characteristic of the effects of cyanide gas--which Iraq was not
believed to possess. Cyanide gas, a metabolic poison, would indeed produce blue
lips, but they are far from being a specific indicator of its use. Nerve
agents, which are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors that cause respiratory
paralysis, would also turn victims' lips blue. Middle East Watch interview with
Dr. Howard Hu, Harvard School of Public Health, May 13, 1993."
Human Rights Watch's dismissive attitude is clearly indicated by its language:
this "unsubstantiated report" was "routinely echoed" in
other sources; Pelletiere's book was "strongly pro-Iraqi"; the
factual basis for the analysis was merely "supposed"; and two
disagreements are noted by "(sic)," here used as a term of
denigration.
19. See "Preface
& Acknowledgements" in "Genocide in Iraq."
20. "Iraq: Devastation of Marsh Arabs," January 25, 2003.
Human Rights Watch entered the Iraqi fray again on February 6 with its
publication of "Ansar al-Islam in Iraqi Kurdistan."
21. According to Stephen Pelletiere, Iran employed a
non-persistent form of mustard gas while Iraq developed a heavier, more
persistent form of the gas, and much of the mustard gas that was used at
Halabja carried the Iranian signature. See British freelance writer Kevin
Dowling , "Top
US Intel Expert Brands Tony Blair A Liar Over Iraq," Globe-Intel, October
10, 2002. The column was originally circulated on Irish author Gordon
Thomas' Globe-Intel mailing list.
22. Online here.
23. The 1993 statements are in "Preface
& Acknowledgements" in "Genocide in Iraq"; the 2003
statements are from Hanny
Megally's letter to the New York Times referenced in footnote 16. (Scroll
down to the third letter.)
24. The complete passage, from "Preface
& Acknowledgements" in "Genocide in Iraq" is as follows:
"The phenomenon of the Anfal, the official military codename used by the
government in its public pronouncements and internal memoranda, was well known
inside Iraq, especially in the Kurdish region. As all the horrific details have
emerged, this name has seared itself into popular consciousness -- much as the
Nazi German Holocaust did with its survivors. The parallels are apt, and often
chillingly close."
25. The complete passage, from "Introduction"
in "Genocide in Iraq," is as follows:
"Like Nazi Germany, the Iraqi regime concealed its actions in euphemisms.
Where Nazi officials spoke of "executive measures," "special
actions" and "resettlement in the east," Ba'athist bureaucrats
spoke of "collective measures," "return to the national
ranks" and "resettlement in the south." But beneath the
euphemisms, Iraq's crimes against the Kurds amount to genocide, the "intent
to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such."
26. The complete paragraph, a quotation from Albert Camus'
The Rebel, appears at the beginning of "The
Destruction of Koreme During The Anfal Campaign" and is as follows:
"Until [Lidice], there were supposedly only two possible attitudes for a
conqueror toward a village that was considered rebellious. Either calculated
repression and cold-blooded execution of hostages, or a savage and necessarily
brief sack by enraged soldiers. Lidice was destroyed by both methods
simultaneously ... Not only were all the houses burned to the ground, the
hundred and seventy-four men of the village shot, the two hundred and three
women deported, and the three hundred children transferred elsewhere to be
educated in the religion of the Fuhrer, but special teams spent months at work
leveling the terrain with dynamite, destroying the very stones, filling in the
village pond, and finally diverting the course of the river. After that, Lidice
was really nothing more than a mere possibility ... To make assurance doubly
sure, the cemetery was emptied of its dead, who might have been a perpetual
reminder that once something existed in this place."
27. The IRDP is online here. The cited
documents are all available under "Selected
Documents."
28. Physicians for Human Rights' reports on Iraq can be
accessed here. Its first interviews with Kurdish refugees took place
in October 1988, still some six weeks after the reported
attacks.
29. Online here. This information was re-released on March 21, 1995,
two days after the sarin incident in the Tokyo subways. See "Nerve Agent Sarin Identified in 1993 as Chemical Weapon
Used Earlier by Iraq Against Kurdish Population."
30. The results of this analysis were published in a
scientific journal. See Robin M. Black, Raymond J. Clarke, Robert W. Read and
Michael T.J. Reid, "Application of Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry
and Gas Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry to the Analysis of Chemical
Warfare Samples, Found to Contain Residues of the Nerve Agent Sarin, Sulphur
Mustard and Their Degradation Products," Journal of Chromatography A,
Volume 662, Issue 2, 25 February 1994, Pages 301-321. The abstract provides as
follows:
"Samples of clothing, grave debris, soil and munition fragments, collected
from the Kurdish village of Birjinni, were analysed by GC-MS with selected ion
monitoring (SIM) for traces of chemical warfare agents and their degradation
products. Positive analyses were confirmed, where possible, by full scan mass
spectra, or at low concentrations by additional GC-MS-SIM analysis using chemical
ionisation, by higher resolution GC-MS-SIM, and by GC-tandem mass spectrometry
using multiple reaction monitoring. Sulphur mustard and/or thiodiglycol were
detected in six soil samples; isopropyl methylphosphonic acid and
methylphosphonic acid, the hydrolysis products of the nerve agent sarin, were
detected in six different soil samples. Trace amounts of intact sarin were
detected on a painted metal fragment associated with one of these soil samples.
The results demonstrate the application of different GC-MS and GC-MS-MS
techniques to the unequivocal identification of chemical warfare agent residues
in the environment at concentrations ranging from low ppb to ppm (w/w). They
also provide the first documented unequivocal identification of nerve agent
residues in environmental samples collected after a chemical attack."
The article may be purchased for $30 here.
31. See this
document.
32. For villagers' accounts of the attack on Birjinni, see "The
Chemical Weapons Attack on Birjinni" in "The Destruction of
Koreme During The Anfal Campaign" (Human Rights Watch, January 1993), and "'Apples
and Something Sweet': The Chemical Attacks of August 25, 1988" in
"Genocide in Iraq" (Human Rights Watch, July
1993).
The Physicians for Human Rights report on the soil samples (see footnote 29)
states that (1) researchers took three samples from each of four bomb craters,
(2) all six samples from two of the craters showed breakdown products of sarin,
and (3) all six samples from the other two craters showed breakdown products of
mustard gas. No sample revealed either no gas traces or traces of both gases.
It could therefore be the case that sarin and mustard gas were not mixed
together, but rather were each mixed with whatever substance produced the
"plume of black, then yellowish smoke" reported by villagers.
33. See "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs,"
October 2002.
34. Steve Duin, "An Eyewitness to Iraq's Way of Waging
War," The Oregonian, August 25, 2002 (reviewing Francona's 1999 book
"Ally to Adversary"). Francona's website is here while Duin's review is
here.
35. Online here.
Human Rights Watch coordinated its actions with the publication of "The
Great Terror," as the same week Kenneth Roth, HRW's executive
director, published an op-ed, "Indict
Saddam," referring to Goldberg's article. Oddly, Human Rights Watch
chose to place this commentary in that noted beacon of humanitarian concerns,
the Wall Street Journal.
36. "The
Lessons of Halabja: An Ominous Warning."
37. Jude Wanniski, "What Happened at Halabja?," April 23,
2002.
38. Village
Voice reporter Roger Trilling (see footnote 42) asked Goldberg about this
omission:
"In a telephone interview with the Voice, Goldberg explained why he had
chosen to elide the position of the military and intelligence communities from
his piece. 'I didn't give it much thought, because it was dismissed by so many
people I consider to be experts,' he told me. 'Very quickly into this story, I
decided that I support the mainstream view--of Human Rights Watch, Physicians
for Human Rights, the State Department, the UN, and various Kurdish group--that
the Iraqis were responsible for Halabja. In the same way, I didn't give any
merit to the Iraqi denials.'"
39. See this document.
40. See this
document.
41. See also this
document (symptoms appear 4-24 hours later) and this
document (symptoms appear 1-6 or more hours
later).
42. Roger
Trilling, "Fighting Words: The Administration Builds Up Its Pretext for
Attacking Iraq," Village Voice, May 1-7, 2002.
43. See Goldberg's
comments posted on Slate:
"I will end what could quickly devolve into a rant by posing this question
to you: Does it in fact even matter if Saddam is connected to al-Qaida? In other
words, why look for a smoking gun when a dozen already exist? This is a man who
has attacked, unprovoked, four of his country's neighbors; a man who has
committed genocide and used chemical weapons on civilians; a man who is clearly
obsessed with the development of weapons of mass destruction; and a man who
uses homicide and rape as a tool of governance. Isn't he worthy, by these deeds
alone, of removal?"
Jeffrey Goldberg's agenda is quite clear: to support the U.S. government's
political and military goals in the Middle East. His newest article, "The
Unknown: The C.I.A. and the Pentagon Take Another Look at Al Qaeda and
Iraq," from the February 10, 2003, issue of The New Yorker, continues
his effort, begin in "The
Great Terror," to link the two. His latest allegations are already
making the rounds; see the February 4 edition of NPR's "All Things
Considered." His prior journalism includes:
"Party of God," a two-part article on Hezbollah published in The New
Yorker on October 14 and 21, 2002. While this doesn't seem to be online, a Q&A session with the New Yorker has some information,
and an account
from one of Goldberg's fans has more.
"In Saddam's Shadow: Jeffrey Goldberg Talks about
Reporting behind the Lines in Kurdistan," The New Yorker, March 25, 2002.
"The Martyr Strategy: What Does the New Phase of Terrorism
Signify?," The New Yorker, July 9, 2001. (Scroll down.)
"Inside Jihad U.: The Education of a Holy Warrior,"
The New York Times, June 25, 2000. (Also available here.)
See also a fan's site, "Jeffrey
Goldberg on Islamic Contempt and Anger"
Unfortunately, Goldberg's prime source on the alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda links in
the earlier article ("The Great Terror"), Mohammed Mansour Shahab,
was recently interviewed by the Chief Reporter for the prestigious Sunday
Observer newspaper in London, Jason Burke, in "The Missing Link?," February 9, 2003. Burke
described his interview with Shahab, who remains a prisoner of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan's Intelligence Service in the northeastern Iraqi city of
Sulamaniya.
"For the first six months of his imprisonment he had kept the rest to
himself. Then, in October 2001, he told a fellow prisoner who told the guards
who told the deputy chief of investigations. When, in the early spring, a
reporter from The New Yorker was in Sulamaniya Shahab told him too. The
resulting story was published in March with the headline 'The Threat of Saddam'
and announced that 'the Kurds may have evidence of [Saddam's] ties to Osama bin
Laden's terrorist network.' There were a number of possible links raised by the
article but the main tie between al'Qaeda and Saddam was Shahab.
.....
However Shahab is a liar. He may well be a smuggler, and probably a murderer
too, but substantial chunks of his story simply are not true.
.....
So why was he lying? Possibly because, as the deputy chief of investigations
admitted, his sudden loquacity might well get him a few years off his sentence.
And where did he get the material for the lies from? Well, televisions were
introduced into the cells in August last year. [RM note: see below]
At the end of our interview I told Shahab that I didn't think he had ever been
to Kandahar or met bin Laden. He didn't deny it. Instead he just asked a series
of questions about who I was. Why was I in Afghanistan? Was I a spy? An
American? Who? I showed him my British passport and press card.
He laughed. 'You are a difficult man,' he
said."
RM note: Did reporter Burke mean August 2001 when referring to the introduction
of televisions at the prison? Goldberg's article was published in March 2002.
44. See Christine
Gosden, "Why I Went, What I Saw," The Washington Post, March 11,
1998, page A19.
45. See "Testimony
of Dr. Christine M. Gosden Before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on
Technology, Terrorism and Government and the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence on Chemical and Biological Weapons Threats to America: Are We
Prepared?; Wednesday, April 22nd 1998 at 2:30 pm." Gosden's 1998
testimony Senate testimony is also online here
and here.
46. Christine Gosden and Mike Amitay, "Lesson of Iraq's Mass
Murder," The Washington Post, June 2, 2002, page B7.
47. She told Jeffrey Goldberg this; see his "The Great
Terror" discussed earlier.
48. See "Lesson of Iraq's Mass Murder" cited in footnote
46.
49. Dr. Prather's statements are reported in Jude Wanniski, "Pure Propaganda on '60 Minutes,' May 14,
2002.
50. See "Reply by Edward Mortimer" in "Iraq's
Chemical Warfare," The New York Review of Books, November 22,
1990.
51. British freelance writer Kevin Dowling , "Top US
Intel Expert Brands Tony Blair A Liar Over Iraq," Globe-Intel, October 10,
2002. The column was originally circulated on Irish author Gordon Thomas'
Globe-Intel mailing list.
52. Same as above.
53. Same as above.
Gwynne Roberts also claims that he found "evidence
of terrorist training camps in Iraq and [heard] testimony that Al Qaeda
fighters are being trained to use poison gas," that Saddam successfully tested a nuclear bomb in 1989, and that
the gas attacks at Halabja have caused plagues
of locusts and increased virulence of poisonous snake venom, leading to a
tenfold increase in lethal snake bites. He calls the work by Pelletiere and his
co-authors a "piece of black propaganda."
Roberts has produced a number of films on the alleged genocide. One, called
"Saddam's Killing Fields," is a report by Iraqi expatriate Kanan Makiya broadcast on BBC TV
in January 1992 and in the U.S. on PBS Frontline on March 31, 1992. Another is
an episode in the PBS series Wide Angle called "Saddam's
Ultimate Solution" that was shown on July 11, 2002.
Roberts' "Saddam's Killing Fields" should not be confused with a
different film by the same name, an independent
documentary by Christopher Jeans from 1995.
54. And why should we even be concerned about the veracity
of these allegations? Not in any attempt t-- doomed to be futile - -to
rehabilitate Saddam Hussein, but because the search for truth is its own
justification, because the word "genocide" must not be cheapened, and
because the U.S. government must not be handed another pretext to attack
Iraq.