Posted on 02/04/2003 12:36:06 PM PST by Stand Watch Listen
Disability payments are going to 161,000 U.S. veterans for what appears to have been low-level exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons during the Persian Gulf War a dozen years ago. Documents dated 1997-98 and obtained for the first time by Insight from Gary Pitts, a Houston lawyer representing the vets in a $1 billion class-action lawsuit against the companies that supplied Iraq with precursors and production equipment in the 1980s, show that Saddam Hussein has retained much of his chemical- and biological-weapons capabilities and continues to do business with many of the same European suppliers.
Related material:
- "The Blix Scorecard"
- "Saddam's Bankers"
- "Does State Have a Post-Saddam Strategy?"
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix came to similar conclusions on Jan. 27, when he delivered an "update" to the U.N. Security Council based on his inspection efforts in Iraq. Berating Baghdad for failing to disclose and dismantle its forbidden weapons, Blix in-sisted that cooperation had to be "active" to meet U.N requirements. "It is not enough to open doors," he told the Security Council. "Inspection is not a game of 'catch-as-catch-can.'"
The facts presented by Blix -- who has been called "spineless" by former colleague Per Ahlmark in Sweden -- belie his conclusion that the Security Council should give the inspectors more time. Security Council Resolution 1441, which was passed 15-0 in November 2002 and brought the inspectors back to Baghdad for one last try, summons Iraq to cooperate fully with U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) inspectors and voluntarily to surrender and dismantle all remaining unconventional weapons and production gear. But as Blix and Mohammad El Baradei, his replacement at the International Atomic Energy Agency, detailed to the Security Council, the Iraqi government continues to play a game of "hide-and-seek."
"We're not talking about aspirin," Secretary of State Colin Powell told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the day before Blix made his presentation. "We're talking about the most deadly things one can imagine."
Among the capabilities identified by Blix that Saddam retained are huge quantities of sarin nerve gas. The Iraqis used sarin against Iranian troops during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War with deadly effect -- a single drop on the skin will kill a man. Persian Gulf War veterans believe that Saddam purposefully stockpiled munitions packed with sarin and other chemical weapons in conventional ammunition dumps in southern Iraq as he withdrew his forces from Kuwait, knowing that the United States would order the ammo dumps destroyed. "So you can say that Saddam Hussein indirectly attacked U.S. troops with chemical weapons during the 1991 war," Pitts tells Insight. An increasing number of U.S. government scientists are coming to share that view.
But Saddam's 1997-98 "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure" shows that he also retains VX, a chemical-warfare agent said to be even more deadly than sarin. The Iraqis acknowledge having imported or produced, up to that date, 750 tons of chemicals needed for making VX. Except for the U.N.-controlled disposal of 170 tons at that time, the rest of these deadly chemicals are missing. Blix said his inspectors had found "indications that the [VX] agent was weaponized."
[See pages taken from Iraq's "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure."]
Already in 1997, then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson concluded, "Iraq has perfected the technique for the large-scale production of a VX precursor that is well-suited to long-term storage."
Blix's recent report to the United Nations documented many other instances in which Iraq has failed to disclose prohibited weapons [see "The Blix Scorecard"]. The Iraqi documents, revealed here for the first time, portray a worldwide procurement network that relied on top-drawer assistance from governments and major banks in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Iraq's suppliers range from huge multinational corporations, such as Hoechst AG of Germany, to little-known entities, such as an outfit identified by the Iraqis as "Kim Al-Khalleej" of Singapore, which they claimed supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX-, sarin- and mustard-gas precursors and production equipment.
Until 1984, when the United States interdicted a small shipment of nerve-gas precursors from Al Haddad Trading in Nashville, there were no regulations banning commerce in chemical- weapons precursors or production equipment. But after that, at U.S. insistence, the major chemical-producing nations in the West agreed to require export licenses for a list of chemical-weapons (CW) precursors that gradually was expanded as evidence of Iraq's battlefield use against Iran and Iraqi Kurds became available.
Once the Chemical Weapons Convention was negotiated in 1989 in Paris and ratified by all major producing countries, trade in banned chemicals was highly regulated. And yet, as Iraq was forced to admit in 1997-98 when U.N. inspectors found the evidence, huge quantities of those same chemicals and banned production equipment reached Iraq courtesy of complacent governments and greedy corporations, banks and middlemen beginning in the 1980s.
According to the Iraqi 1997-98 declaration, one of the biggest suppliers was Exomet Plastics of Bombay, India, now part of EPC Industrie. An EPC attorney told CNN in late January that the only chemicals Exomet had shipped to Iraq were for pesticides. "There were no restrictions for exporting these chemicals at the time the exports were made," he added. But critics dismiss such corporate excuses as phony.
Exomet shipped much more than mere pesticides, according to the Iraqi documents. It supplied materials usable only for CW, such as 1,000 tons of thionyl chloride, a chemical used to make mustard gas and sarin. It shipped 300 tons of phosphorus trichloride, 300 tons of dimethylamine HCl, 250 tons of phosphorus oxychloride and 250 tons of P2S5 -- all for use in manufacturing sarin. It shipped another 192 tons of chlorethanol used for making VX between 1988 and 1990.
At the same time these shipments were occurring, the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture purchased huge quantities of completely manufactured pesticides for agricultural purposes from ICI, Ciba Gigy, Dow Chemical, Roussel and others. "Negotiations were carried out in 1989-1990 with a number of companies to get the know-how to produce certain pesticides," the Iraqi documents state. While Iraq frequently disguised its CW programs behind pesticide production, few producers in Europe or elsewhere really were duped.
This reporter's database, compiled from U.N. documents and his investigations during the last 15 years, includes 131 companies that provided CW assistance and another 42 that aided Iraq's biological-weapons (BW) program. Iraq names 56 companies that provided chemicals and production equipment. One surprise in the Iraqi list was the appearance of Egypt's Abu Zaabal Special Chemicals Co., a state-owned conglomerate with artillery and ammunition plants run by the Egyptian Ministry for Military Production. While Abu Zaabal's involvement in Iraq's programs was revealed during the Scott commission inquiry in Britain in 1993, the quantities of nerve-gas precursors delivered by Abu Zaabal, as declared by Iraq, is a mind-boggling 1,300 tons in all. The Iraqis also state that Abu Zaabal delivered 200 tons of hydrogen cyanide, a CW agent in its own right. Iraq used cyanide agents in 1988, four years after this Egyptian delivery, when it gassed thousands of Kurds in the town of Halabja.
In 1989, when the New York Times accused Egypt of transforming Abu Zaabal into a CW production plant with the help of a Swiss company, President Hosni Mubarak hotly denied the charge. The Iraqi documents Insight has obtained show that Abu Zaabal already was producing chemical weapons and precursor chemicals at least five years earlier. Abu Zaabal is located in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis and is known in Egypt as Factory 18, a carryover from the days of Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, when all military plants were known by number and not by name.
"Egypt was the first country after World War II to use chemical weapons, against rebels in Yemen, so we've known they've had a chemical-weapons capability for some time," says Shoshana Bryen of the Jewish Institute for National Security, a Washington think tank. "These undeclared sales to Iraq raise serious questions about Egypt's trustworthiness as a U.S. ally," she says.
Despite the years of war and U.N. inspections, Karl Kolb GmbH, the German company that designed and built Iraq's main CW production plants in the 1980s, never really left Baghdad. Prosecuted in Germany in 1984 for having delivered CW gear to Iraq, the company won its case, then turned around and successfully sued the German government for libel. In 1999, when the German government sent its first official trade mission to Iraq since the 1991 gulf war, Karl Kolb official Michael Fraenzel went along for the ride.
That mission led to fresh business for the German chemical-equipment broker. In 1999 and 2000, it submitted five requests to the U.N. Sanctions Committee to sell close to $2 million in chemical- and possibly biological-weapons-production gear. The equipment Karl Kolb wanted to sell included a $271,000 "incubator," which was on a list of proscribed equipment because of potential weapons use. All five requests from Karl Kolb were put on hold by the U.S. government.
Undeterred, Karl Kolb went back in 2001 as a prominent participant in the Baghdad International Fair, according to a list of participants posted on the fair's official Website (www.baghdad-international-fair.de/eng/ws04.html). They were not alone. Chemical companies and machine-tool makers abounded, as did major industrial players such as telecommunications giant Siemens AG and DaimlerChrysler AG, whose U.S.-based vice president for government affairs told a reporter at the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Wall Street Project conference last month that conservatives such as U.S. President George W. Bush "have a rather myopic view of the world."
Other major suppliers mentioned in the Iraqi documents include German chemical giant Preussag, equipment maker Schott Glasswerke, Dutch chemical suppliers Melchemie, KBS and Philips Export, Fluka Chemia AG of Switzerland and French partners De Dietrich and Protect SA. In all, the Iraqis named 14 German, three Dutch, three Swiss and two French companies as their top CW suppliers, although dozens more played supporting roles.
According to U.N. databases Insight was able to access, since 1998 French companies lead the pack in applying for U.N. licenses to sell potential weapons material to Iraq, with more than 272 different license applications worth billions of dollars. The United States put 93 of those contracts, worth $217 million, on hold. Among them was the sale as "medical equipment" of a series of lithotripsy machines for treating kidney stones without surgery manufactured by the company Karl Storz Endoscopie France SA. Perfectly normal? Think again. The lithotripter employs a high-speed krytron switch similar to those used to trigger nuclear warheads. Along with the six medical machines, Iraq sought 120 spare krytrons, the U.N. Website reveals.
After France, countries with the most applications were Jordan (184), Russia (154), the United Arab Emirates (112), Italy (97) and China (66). While German companies had made only 36 applications, the dollar value was believed to be in the billions, just behind France. "Whenever the French and the Germans criticize the U.S. for going to war against Saddam," one congressional insider tells Insight, "we should understand that it's really all about the euros."
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
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