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Israeli Dual-Citizen Journalist Behind Iraq Gas Lie
Jewish Reporter Faking Atrocity Stories To Help Start War With Iraq
3/25/02 5:12:40 PM
Jude Wanninski
Commentary -- Bush & Cheney Are Misinformed
Memo To: Karl Rove, President’s political counselor
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Saddam Did Not Gas the Kurds
I have not been bothering you much with these open memos, Karl, but I
have to do so today, as I’ve spent the weekend watching both President
George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney saying over and over
again that we have to get rid of Saddam Hussein because he has killed
his own people with poison gas. President Bush cited last week’s New
Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, which gives an account of the 1988
gassings based on 14-year-old hearsay. On three different Sunday talk
shows, Cheney repeated the charge that Saddam killed as many as
100,000 Iraqi Kurds, in this manner. What I am telling you publicly,
Karl, is that this DID NOT HAPPEN. The reason I am addressing this
information to you is that you are the only member of President Bush’s
inner circle whose total responsibility is his political success. That
means you want him to be the best informed man in his own
administration, for if he acts on misinformation, he can make enormous
errors that will damage him with the electorate. So I tell you, Karl,
that he is misinformed on this issue, as is the VP. There is no
possibility that Saddam gassed his own people and no evidence that he
did. None. Forget Iraq’s protests that he never did, as I would not
base any conclusion on “not guilty” pleas from Saddam or his team. But
all the evidence is that whatever bad stuff he has done as Iraq’s
political leader, he has never presided over troops who dropped poison
gas on his own Iraqi citizens.
There are other issues involving Saddam that clearly cause concern to
our government, and to the governments just visited by Cheney, but
this is the one that connects when we think of Saddam as being the
embodiment of evil. Hey, I remember being tear gassed by the police at
the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 1968, when I was a
reporter for the National Observer. I could understand why the police
gassed the anti-war demonstrators. I could never have understood if
the police had used poison gas. There is no report in the history of
the world of a political leader using poison gas against his own
people in an open field for no reason. Adolf Hitler rounded Jews up
and gassed them because he believed them to be subhuman. Saddam did
not do anything like this and a little bit of effort on your part will
persuade you, the President and the Vice President, that it did not
happen. If it had, why does Saddam get along as well as he is these
days with the Kurds? And can you imagine the Iraqi general who
supposedly supervised the gassing of 100,000 Kurds defecting from Iraq
and being spirited to England by the Kurds. Can you imagine Ariel
Sharon helping Herman Goering make his way out of Germany to
Argentina? And when the general gets there, he announces that he did
not use poison gas on Iraqis. I’m afraid the President has been
briefed with selective information, Karl.
You should first pitch out the New Yorker report by Jeffrey Goldberg,
who offers no evidence, only quotes from various Kurds who seem to
remember gas being used. My big problem with Goldberg is that he told
me three years ago that he had served in the Israeli army, which made
him a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. I read his long
article and can tell you it is worthless as “evidence.” Even at the
time, Turkey said it could not tell whether Kurds showing up on its
side of the border had been gassed or were victims of malnutrition.
Not that Goldberg is malicious, only that he had a serious bias going
into the assignment and there is no evidence he made any attempt to
test his own initial hypothesis. Having a dual citizenship with the
U.S. and Israel might be okay in ordinary times, but when push comes
to shove, you cannot serve two masters. Goldberg has thrown in with
Richard Perle’s team, and as you can readily see in his article, he
quotes Jim Woolsey, who is Perle’s agent. Even before the article hit
the newsstands, Woolsey was on national tv telling audiences to rush
out and buy the New Yorker to read it.
Go to Amazon.com, Karl, and look for the author Stephen Pelletiere.
His book is entitled Iraq and the International Oil System: Why
America Went to War in the Gulf, published in 2001 by Praeger. It is
$70 and worth the money. Pelletiere is also the author of the 1990
report I have previously cited that exonerated Iraq from the gassing
at Halabja. It is listed by Amazon but is "out of print." I believe it
was the report Jim Baker cited with Tariq Aziz in their 1990 Geneva
meeting, telling Aziz he did not believe the story of Iraq gassing the
Kurds.
Pelletiere is retired at age 70 and living in central Pennsylvania. He
is a Ph.D. in political science and was the chief of the CIA Iraq desk
at Langley in the 1980s. He left the CIA in 1987 to become a lecturer
at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., and was sent in 1988 to
investigate Halabja. He based his conclusions that the "several
hundred Kurds" who died at Halabja must have been killed by Iranians,
because the deaths were caused by cyanide gas, which Iraq had not used
in the war against Iran (they used mustard gas), and which, says
Pelletiere, they had no ability to produce. He says the Iranians
blamed the deaths on the Iraqis and won the public-relations war that
followed, even though journalists at Halabja could see the symptoms
being caused by cyanide gas. In his new book, Pelletiere again
addresses the question of the alleged gassing later in 1988, which
Secretary of State George Shultz at the time said resulted in the
deaths of 100,000 Kurds. Pelletiere argues that story was a complete
fabrication, and that to this day no bodies were ever found. His
account is consistent with the account of the Iraqi government, but as
time goes on, the Shultz account still winds up being accepted by our
press corps.... and our President.
I’ll return to this issue again and again, Karl, until the President
and Vice President give some indication they have been correctly
informed on it. Following is Dr. Pelletiere’s brief account of
Halabja. I spoke to him last week by telephone and he told me: “You
are on solid ground in saying Saddam did not gas his own people.”
Libertarian Socialist News
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Silver Spring, MD 20908
http://www.overthrow.com
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