Halabja Gassing of Kurds

"Voice of America" , which claims to be "a trusted source of news and information since 1942' announced on April 4 that " Iraq's former leader Saddam Hussein faces new charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the 1980s crackdown against the Kurds, including the infamous gassing of thousands of civilians in the village of Halabja."

US leaders and media had made Halabja part of campaign in 2002 -03 for a regime change in Iraq.

John Stauber , co-author of Weapons of Mass Deception said before the invasion in 2003 ," I have been absolutely stunned by the statements of Colin Powell and Condeleeza Rice, especially the secretary of state who went to Halabja recently and said the U.S. should have acted sooner there because of what occurred there, which is the gassing of thousands of men, women, and men. And here is the ultimate hypocrisy. I think this has become the primary justification now for the war. But the event occurred in 1988. The chemicals were supplied by the Reagan administration. And after the gassing of civilians in Halabja, there was a bipartisan effort to try to pass the 1988 prevention of genocide act." That act was killed by the administration. 

" And I won't spit out the statistics stinks, they're in our book, but they ignored Halabja in which the U.S. was complicit, provided the weapons of mass destruction, and then Colin Powell (?) Led the lobby campaign to kill the prevention of genocide act. More recently, I think they've got the American public duped and confused into thinking that Halabja was some sort of recent event because they are now repeating the Halabja story over and over, and it's been echoed over and over in the news since September 2002."

During the buildup to "Operation Desert Storm", and I'm just reading right out of our work here in "Weapons of Mass Deception," the first Bush administration avoided mentioning the Halabja incident, didn't mention it, reporters seldom mentioned it either. The search of the Lexis Nexis news database shows that Halabja was mentioned in 188 news stories in the U.S. in 1988, the year it occurred. It was rarely mentioned, however, in subsequent years. 20 stories in 1989, and only 29 in 1990, the year that Saddam invaded Kuwait. Between the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 and the end of operation desert storm on February 27, 1991, Halabja received only 39 mentions. And during the entire following decade, it barely averaged 16 mentions per year. During the presidential election year of 2000, Halabja got 10 mentions. The story did not really begin to circulate again in the U.S. media until September 2002 when the George W. Bush administration began its public push for war with Iraq. After that, mentions began to increase sharply. The Halabja incident was mentioned 57 times in the month of February 2003 alone.

"In March, the month the war began, it was mentioned 145 times. By then, nearly 15 years had passed, memories had faded, and it was safe to talk about Saddam's gassing of Iraqi citizens. Only a few of the journalists who wrote about Halabja in 2002 and this year bothered to mention that Saddam committed his worst atrocities while the president's father ( Bush Sr.) was showering him with financial aid. So there you have it. "

Stephen Pelletire , who left CIA to become a professor at US war College ," was specifically   asked to investigate Halabja said ," -- We know the circumstances under which the alleged attack took place. It was a battle. The Iranians had infiltrated the town and were attempting to take it over so they could use it as a staging ground to perpetuate—to perpetrate an invasion into Iraq. The Iraqi commander ordered the use of chemical weapons in order to drive the Iranians out of the town. Those chemicals were delivered by mortar shells. Chemical Ali had nothing to do with this operation. That was a decision of the Iraqi commander on the spot, and he took that decision because it was essential to regain the town. Now, the Kurds that were killed, and it's an unfortunate expression, collateral damage. The Iraqis were not aiming at the Kurds, they were aiming at the Iranians.

"And there was a report done by the D.I.A. at the time, which also investigated it, in which the D.I.A. determined because of the condition of the bodies that the Kurds had been killed by Iranian gas, not by Iraqi gas. And they determined this because the extremities were blue, and that indicated a cyanide-based gas, and the Iraqis didn't have it.

"Finally, the journalists who appeared on the spot and investigated it and took those awful pictures which everyone has seen, never counted more than a few score of bodies, and the original stories, and you can go back and look at the Christian Science Monitor and other reports of what went on by reporters in the town, all uniformly saying a couple of hundred people killed, now that's been swollen to the point where we're now claiming between 3,000 and 5,000. '

Stephen Pelletire wrote the Halabja story in Jan, 2003  in New York Times. Among others Inter Press Service ,also published a piece on Halabja in July,2004  Many have quizzed Pelletire and his story appears to be solid and acceptable.  

Among those who propagate US, administration line is the Washington Kurdish Institute, with connections to Jewish lobbies. Jeffrey Goldberg 's 18,000-word story, the Great Terror, in the 25 March 2002 issue of The New Yorker forms the basis of the US Department of State's website on alleged Iraqi genocide. He says, "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 ."Goldberg has dual Israeli/American citizenship and served in the Israeli defense forces a few years back.

What about the use of chemical weapons by Western nations since Holocaust? How quickly and regularly the Jews use the word Holocaust to brow beat criticism .It is pitiable and smacks of some kind of sickness .They have long used it against Europeans as guilt weapons.

Nazism's roots in European[Western] culture

Le Monde wrote in May, 2005 under " Nazism's roots in European culture- Production line of murder"

"There are many other threads that link the ideology of Nazism and its methods (domination and extermination) with the history of the West. Despite its pathological aberrations, they make it part of the historical development of the West.

"The first link is ideological. Nazism emerged in the socio-political constellation of German nationalism, which was crisscrossed by currents well represented in European culture as a whole: racial anthropology, with its idea of a hierarchy of human groups dominated by "Aryans"; Social Darwinism, with its concept of natural selection of the fittest; and eugenics, with its reactionary utopia of an artificially created higher species.