[Osx-nutters] He Takes His Secrets to the Grave. Our Complicity Dies with Him

[Kevin Callahan]

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1231-23.htm

He Takes His Secrets to the Grave. Our Complicity Dies with Him
How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies',  
equipped him for atrocities - and then made sure he wouldn't squeal
by Robert Fisk

We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the  
lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's  
secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support  
which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than  
a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and  
prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam,  
who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while  
he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second  
World War - is dead.

Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying  
the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US intelligence  
gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and  
other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in  
Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants  
and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for  
plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were given  
special treatment - extreme torture before execution at Abu Ghraib.

There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a  
series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his  
invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US administration believed  
that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions  
across the border - and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's  
military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of  
battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the  
German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between  
Washington and Baghdad - at America's request.

"Mr Fisk... at the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I  
was invited to go to the Pentagon," he said. "There I was handed the  
very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You  
could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun  
emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches  
on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments -  
thousands of them - all the way up the Iranian side of the border  
towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled  
with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from  
Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very,  
very grateful!"

I was with Saddam's forward commandos at the time, under Iranian  
shellfire, noting how the Iraqi forces aligned their artillery  
positions far back from the battle front with detailed maps of the  
Iranian lines. Their shelling against Iran outside Basra allowed the  
first Iraqi tanks to cross the Karun within a week. The commander of  
that tank unit cheerfully refused to tell me how he had managed to  
choose the one river crossing undefended by Iranian armour. Two years  
ago, we met again, in Amman and his junior officers called him  
"General" - the rank awarded him by Saddam after that tank attack  
east of Basra, courtesy of Washington's intelligence information.

Iran's official history of the eight-year war with Iraq states that  
Saddam first used chemical weapons against it on 13 January 1981.  
AP's correspondent in Baghdad, Mohamed Salaam, was taken to see the  
scene of an Iraqi military victory east of Basra. "We started  
counting - we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just  
counting," he said. "We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start  
counting again ... The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a  
combination - the nerve gas would paralyse their bodies ... the  
mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That's why they spat  
blood."

At the time, the Iranians claimed that this terrible cocktail had  
been given to Saddam by the US. Washington denied this. But the  
Iranians were right. The lengthy negotiations which led to America's  
complicity in this atrocity remain secret - Donald Rumsfeld was one  
of President Ronald Reagan's point-men at this period - although  
Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But a largely unreported  
document, "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual- 
use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health  
Consequences of the Persian Gulf War", stated that prior to 1985 and  
afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of  
biological agents to Iraq. These included Bacillus anthracis, which  
produces anthrax, andEscherichia coli (E. coli). That Senate report  
concluded that: "The United States provided the Government of Iraq  
with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development  
of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-systems programs,  
including ... chemical warfare agent production facility plant and  
technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment."

Nor was the Pentagon unaware of the extent of Iraqi use of chemical  
weapons. In 1988, for example, Saddam gave his personal permission  
for Lt-Col Rick Francona, a US defence intelligence officer - one of  
60 American officers who were secretly providing members of the Iraqi  
general staff with detailed information on Iranian deployments,  
tactical planning and bomb damage assessments - to visit the Fao  
peninsula after Iraqi forces had recaptured the town from the  
Iranians. He reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had used  
chemical weapons to achieve their victory. The senior defence  
intelligence officer at the time, Col Walter Lang, later said that  
the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis "was not a matter of  
deep strategic concern".

I saw the results, however. On a long military hospital train back to  
Tehran from the battle front, I found hundreds of Iranian soldiers  
coughing blood and mucus from their lungs - the very carriages stank  
so much of gas that I had to open the windows - and their arms and  
faces were covered with boils. Later, new bubbles of skin appeared on  
top of their original boils. Many were fearfully burnt. These same  
gases were later used on the Kurds of Halabja. No wonder that Saddam  
was primarily tried in Baghdad for the slaughter of Shia villagers,  
not for his war crimes against Iran.

We still don't know - and with Saddam's execution we will probably  
never know - the extent of US credits to Iraq, which began in 1982.  
The initial tranche, the sum of which was spent on the purchase of  
American weapons from Jordan and Kuwait, came to $300m. By 1987,  
Saddam was being promised $1bn in credit. By 1990, just before  
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, annual trade between Iraq and the US had  
grown to $3.5bn a year. Pressed by Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq  
Aziz, to continue US credits, James Baker then Secretary of State,  
but the same James Baker who has just produced a report intended to  
drag George Bush from the catastrophe of present- day Iraq - pushed  
for new guarantees worth $1bn from the US.

In 1989, Britain, which had been giving its own covert military  
assistance to Saddam guaranteed £250m to Iraq shortly after the  
arrest of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in Baghdad. Bazoft, who  
had been investigating an explosion at a factory at Hilla which was  
using the very chemical components sent by the US, was later hanged.  
Within a month of Bazoft's arrest William Waldegrave, then a Foreign  
Office minister, said: "I doubt if there is any future market of such  
a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well-placed if we  
play our diplomatic hand correctly... A few more Bazofts or another  
bout of internal oppression would make it more difficult."

Even more repulsive were the remarks of the then Deputy Prime  
Minister, Geoffrey Howe, on relaxing controls on British arms sales  
to Iraq. He kept this secret, he wrote, because "it would look very  
cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of  
the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales".

Saddam knew, too, the secrets of the attack on the USS Stark when, on  
17 May 1987, an Iraqi jet launched a missile attack on the American  
frigate, killing more than a sixth of the crew and almost sinking the  
vessel. The US accepted Saddam's excuse that the ship was mistaken  
for an Iranian vessel and allowed Saddam to refuse their request to  
interview the Iraqi pilot.

The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution  
chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London must have sighed  
with relief that the old man had been silenced for ever.

'The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East' by  
Robert Fisk is now available in paperback

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited