Posted on 04/10/2003 4:27:37 PM PDT by backhoe
The term for this is "Postaganda"
How Western greed created Hussein's Iraq
... Kenneth Timmerman's "The Death Lobby" tracks the stream of these sordid deals, beginning
with the first French reactor contract in 1975 which resulted in an A ...
www.iraqwatch.org/suppliers/timmerman.htm - 15k - Cached - Similar pages
september 1992 reviews
... But, as Kenneth Timmerman's well-documented and thoroughly readable study,
The Death Lobby, makes clear, this is only part of the story. ...
www.thebulletin.org/issues/1992/s92/s92.reviews.html - 18k - Cached - Similar pages
The Death Lobby: Chapter 16
The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq. by Kenneth R. Timmerman
Copyright © 1991 by Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved. ...
www.timmerman2000.com/news/tdl16.htm - 93k - Cached - Similar pages
The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq
The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq by Kenneth R. Timmerman.
Click here to read biographical information. Publication history. ...
www.timmerman2000.com/tdl.htm - 8k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.timmerman2000.com ]
The one case they often use is Cardoen, who was an arms smuggler (working out of Chile), who claimed that he was secretly working for the CIA. He tried to export various weapons components (zirconium for cluster munitions, switches from ISC, and modified helicopters from a field in the Dallas area) from the US. He was caught and tried (and convicted). While using the "CIA" defense in court, he relied on an affidavit from Howard Teicher. This was a mistake for Cardoen, since even though Teicher's claims were based on classified NSDDs, the government prosecutors still had partial access to them and could prove the claims false (which, now that they are declassified, anyone can). Cardoen was convicted; the claims of US backing were shown to be false in a court of law (with a Clinton administration prosecutor, I might add).
Of course, that doesn't stop the left from insisting that Cardoen was a CIA operative. But now that the NSDDs have been declassified (they dealt with nuclear weapon stockpiles, and had nothing to do with Iraq), it can easily be shown that it was all based on a lie (not that the proof has stopped the left from still using the same lie).
When NSDD-26 was declassified, Teicher changed his story a bit, and instead of it being that document during the Reagan administration, it was instead NSD-26 from the Bush era. The only problem with that story is that Teicher had already left the NSC by the time that that document (which he earlier claimed to have authored) was produced. In further discount of his claims, NSD-26 is now also available to the public. Contrary to the left's lies that it showed "secret" support for Iraq's chemical weapon program, it instead insisted that Iraq be told that "any illegal use of chemical and/or biological weapons will lead to economic and politic sanctions". The only content relating to support for Iraq was "economic and poltical incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior", a policy that, while stupid (it involved a lot of guaranteed agricultural loans that Iraq mis-used to buy weapons from other parties), had nothing related to the bogus claims of the left that we somehow armed Iraq.
Either the authors of these documents didn't fully investigate the facts, or they are being deliberately misleading to suggest the US is more to blame than it really is.
I've never seen any articles (it seemed a subject the media accepted without question, and never revisited), but you can check the source material yourself. Both NSD-26 (Reagan era) and NSDD-26 (Bush document) are available on-line through the presidential libraries, as are various articles describing Teicher's comments and claims before their release. Just reading the documents themselves shows that Teicher's claims are lies.
And how do you know so much on the topic?
I worked on a project in the early 1990s to catalog everything (that we could determine, at least) in Iraqi inventory. So when the "US armed Iraq" stories started showing up, they immediately triggered my suspicions, since I knew what Iraq had according to the best pre-war intelligence (and none of it was US manufactured, except some helicopters such as the Bell 212/214, which were not only unarmed but had been supposedly purchased for civilian use). The Cardoen case is another matter; I happened to know the details from two different perspectives. One was because of some helicopters (civilian, modified for carrying munitions by Cardoen for illegal export) found in the Dallas area; the other was because of cluster bomb technology obtained by Cardoen from ISC. Initially, there was some suspicion that there might have been US government involvement in the arms transfers (taking Cardoen's claims of CIA support initially at face value), but the details of the case pretty much proved that no such involvement was there, beyond more than a shadow of a doubt (among other reasons, Cardoen ran into various custom problems throughout the 1980s that any CIA assistance would have been able to easily overcome). Once his case fell back onto using Teicher as his only affirmation for that claim, it was clear that he was lying (due to the availability of the NSDs/NSDDs whose contents were either unrelated, as in the case of Reagan's, or the opposite of his claims, as in the Bush NSDDs).
Unfortunately, by that time the "US armed Iraq" lie had been told and re-told so many times that it was in the collective memory of the public, while the media curiously didn't seem to want to cover the Cardoen case with any level of publicity once it was clear that his guilt meant the innocence of Reagan and Bush-1 (regarding this particular topic, at least). Thus, there are no stories (that I know of; perhaps there were a few honest journalists who covered the story but I never saw their work) vindicating the U.S. But fortunately, the availability of the presidential archives and court records means that the truth is available for anyone who really wants to know it. Hopefully it will make a great book for some aspiring historian one day.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.