Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Who Gassed The Kurds In Halabja?

There's a very disturbing story on Aljazeera at the moment, concerning the gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March of 1988.

The author of the piece, Mohammed al-Obaidi, claims that this grotesque act, commonly blamed on Saddam Hussein, was actually committed by Iran. And he claims to have proof in the form of a 1990 report from the US Army War College.

According to al-Obaidi, we have been misled about the true nature of this crime by Kurdish leaders working with CIA and Mossad, and the lies we have been told about this event are the last surviving basis for the US war against Iraq.

I urge you to read the entire article, but here's an excerpt:

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 US state department and Senate.

Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war, closely studied evidences of "genocide in Halabja" 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 cyanogens 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."


Would you be surprised if al-Obaidi's article turned out to be true? I wouldn't. And I have seen more good reporting from Aljazeera lately than I have seen from any mainstream American news-site. If you are interested in real investigative journalism, the kind we used to get from American newspapers, bookmark this page and visit it often.

For the record: I think we've been duped again.

James Taylor had it right, friends:

Well it ain't nobody's fault but our own
still at least we might could show the good sense
to know when we've been wrong
and it's already taken too long
so let's bring it to a stop
then we'll take it from the top
let it settle on down softly
like the gently falling snow
let it tumble down and topple
like the temple long ago
let it fall down
let it fall down
let it all fall down