The United States supported Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War as a counterbalance to post-revolutionary Iran. The support took the form of technological aid, intelligence, the sale of dual-use and military equipment, and direct involvement in warfare against Iran.[2]
Other countries that supported Iraq during the war included Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and West Germany. (hmmm wonder where they got their technology, france and ussr like to sell technology)
Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed
By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A01
The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq.( hmmm 911 commission)
BBC's killer documentary called "The Power of Nightmares". Top CIA officials openly admit, Al-qaeda is a total and complete fabrication, never having existed at any time. The Bush administration needed a reason that complied with the Laws so they could go after "the bad guy of their choice" namely laws that had been set in place to protect us from mobs and "criminal organizations" such as the Mafia. They paid Jamal al Fadl, hundreds of thousands of dollars to back the U.S. Government's story of Al-qaeda, a "group" or criminal organization they could "legally" go after.
The Breeding-Ground and Birth of al-Qaeda
The USA, via the CIA, originally backed the Islamic guerrilla resistance against the Marxist regime and Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s. Its efforts focused increasingly on a hardline faction which was to spawn al-Qaeda in 1987-88. ...
Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured in at least US $6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the mujaheddin [in Afghanistan]. Other western governments, as well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more. ...
Washington's favoured mujaheddin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. ... Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.
[Norm Dixon, "How the CIA created Osama bin Laden" (autumn 2001)]
As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow's invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar ["Services Office"] - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.
What the CIA bio[graphy] conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation. ...
[Michael Moran, "Bin Laden comes home to roost", MSNBC, 24 Aug. 1998]
During Ronald Reagan's second term as President, the US effort was stepped up. Casey, the Irish-Catholic head of the CIA, projected a Christian-Islamic alliance against Soviet communism, and sought to extend the fight into the Soviet Union itself. Milton Bearden, who "had drawn close to Casey a few years earlier", became CIA station chief in Pakistan's capital Islamabad in July 1986.
More and more Arabs were arriving in Pakistan to fight alongside the Afghan resistance. Azzam and bin Laden's MAK financed and funneled these volunteers.
Overall, the U.S. government looked favorably on the Arab recruitment drives. ... Some of the most ardent cold warriors at [CIA headquarters at] Langley thought this program should be formally endorsed and extended. ... [T]he CIA "examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps in the form of some sort of international brigade," ... Robert Gates [then-head of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence] recalled. ... At the Islamabad station Milt Bearden felt that bin Laden himself "actually did some very good things" ... But nothing came of it ...
[Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2005 edn), pp.145-6, 155-6.]
Milt Bearden was the CIA's station chief in Pakistan's capital Islamabad in 1986-89; as such he oversaw the agency's efforts to back the mujaheddin. He later said, "The CIA did not recruit Arabs. ... There were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight." And the CIA denied any direct contact with bin Laden.
(Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin, 2005 edn), pp.87, 147, 155-6, 208; Peter L Bergen, Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden [Weidenfield & Nicholson, London, 2001], pp.70-71; Tenet statement to the Joint Inquiry on 9/11, Oct. 17, 2002.)
But J. Michael Springmann, head of the non-immigrant visa section at the "CIA-dominated" US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1987-88, said he learned that the CIA had a "program to bring people to the United States for terrorist training, people recruited by the CIA and its asset Usama bin Laden, and the idea was to get them trained and send them back to Afghanistan to fight the then Soviets." "Their nationalities for the most part were Pakistani, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese." These "recruits without backgrounds" were given visas over Springmann's protests.
osamagate
THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
Classified US Defense Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.
The Senate committee's reports on 'US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq', undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis -- the micro-organism that causes anthrax -- were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.
One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers' City, a military complex in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.
The Senate report also makes clear 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-system programs.'
timeline of oil and violence
New evidence shows Dick Cheney knowingly continued to assert false intelligence about supposed Al Qaeda-Iraq links even after the CIAand DIA issued warnings, in February 2002, that the information obtained from the interrogation of captured Al Qaeda figure, Ibn al Shaykh Al-Libi (no relation to Scooter Libi aka Libby), was false. When the DIA issued it's warnings that Al-Libi's information was not believable, the White House already {knew} that the CIA and DIA had stated that there was no proof of an Al Qaeda/Iraq connection, as reported by Jeff Steinberg in EIR's daily briefing on Nov. 25. Steinberg reported that the White House had {already} been informed on Sept. 21, 2001 through the CIA's "President's Daily Briefing" (PDB) that there was no Iraq link to Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has requested a copy of that PDB, from 10 days after the 9/11 attack, but the White House is refusing to turn it over.
Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972
U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.
A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.
"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea of blood-red poppies.
The Taliban instituted a strict Islamist policy against the opium trade during the final years of their regime, and by the time of their overthrow they had virtually eliminated it.
When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, poppies were grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the American occupation that followed the defeat of the Taliban, poppy cultivation spread to every province, and overall production has increased exponentially ever since -- this year by 60%.
BBC - American government told other governments about Afghan invasion IN JULY 2001.
US 'planned attack on Taleban'
The wider objective was to oust the Taleban
By the BBC's George Arney
A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban even before last week's attacks. Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.
Mr Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin. Mr Naik told the BBC that at the meeting the US representatives told him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and the Taleban leader, Mullah Omar.
The wider objective, according to Mr Naik, would be to topple the Taleban regime and install a transitional government of moderate Afghans in its place - possibly under the leadership of the former Afghan King Zahir Shah. Mr Naik was told that Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were already in place.
Hannity attempted to bolster his assertion that the Sudanese offer of bin Laden was "real and viable" by citing "evidence gathered by the 9-11 Commission":
HANNITY: I think another source of potentially damaging revelations as far as the Clinton people would be concerned, evidence gathered by the 9/11 Commission backing up the allegation that President Clinton refused the offer from the government of Sudan for Osama bin Laden, which is a tape that we have been pointing out to you often
The "evidence" to which Hannity referred is the 9-11 Commission report's statement: "[F]ormer Sudanese officials claim that Sudan offered to expel Bin Ladin to the United States." But the report immediately continued: "Clinton administration officials deny ever receiving such an offer. We have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim." Hannity, therefore, endorsed the claims of former officials of Sudan -- a country that the U.S. Department of State has designated as a state sponsor of terrorism every year since 1993 -- rather than the testimony of Clinton administration officials and the findings of the 9-11 Commission.
While Hannity had asserted on his radio program that the 9-11 Commission had "gathered" evidence "backing up the allegation" that Clinton had refused an offer for bin Laden, two days later -- on FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes -- he claimed the commission had "ignored" the allegation. Referring to Clinton's 2002 address to the Long Island Association, Hannity said: "[D]oesn't that seem to validate the idea that the Sudan in fact did offer us bin Laden and we passed on him and that the commission ignored that? Are they not ignoring one of the most important failures of our intelligence leading up to this attack?"
