Posted on 12/24/2002 2:11:19 AM PST by kattracks
Nearly 50 European chemical concerns are likely to face a class-action suit early next year by more than 3,000 sick Gulf War veterans who accuse them of complicity in Iraq's drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction, an attorney for the plaintiffs said.
The potential case offers an unexpected glimpse into a sensitive portion of an Iraqi weapons declaration that is being examined behind closed doors by members of the UN Security Council and UN arms inspectors, attorney Gary Pitts said Monday.
The lawsuit will be based on new documents provided to the Houston, Texas-based law form of Pitts and Associates by the government of Iraq, which listed a total of 56 international suppliers of equipment and raw materials necessary to manufacture sarin, VX, mustard gas and other chemical agents.
"It's the same list of people as in the most recent (Iraqi) declaration," Pitts said in a telephone interview.
A spokesman for the US Central Intelligence Agency, which is leading the US government's review of the Iraqi declaration, said he could not comment on the list because of the need to maintain confidentiality.
But The New York Times, which broke the story on the weekend, said its was able to confirm the document's authenticity through its own sources.
The list, obtained by AFP, includes the names of 19 German, 10 British, four Swiss and two French concerns, as well as three companies from the Netherlands, Austria and the United States that supplied materials allegedly used in the Iraqi chemical weapons program through the 1980s.
Leading the roster is the German firm Preussag, which, according to the document, supplied Baghdad with tonnes of precursor chemicals for manufacturing nerve gas, helped it build chemical agent facilities and sold it chemical agent production equipment.
Other German companies include Hoechst, who supplied in 1982 10 tonnes of phosphorus oxychloride, a chemical used to manufacture the nerve gas sarin, and Karl Kolb, who provided Iraq assistance in building and equipping a plant used for chemical weapons production, the document said.
Dutch KBS shipped to Iraq more then three thousand tonnes of precursor chemicals between 1982 and 1984. At the same time, British firms Lummus, Gallenkamp, Sigma, Oxoid and others provided laboratory equipment that Iraqi weapons scientists used in perfecting their deadly agents, the list indicated.
Leni
I served in the Med...
and I and all my mates were under the Chernobyl Cloud!!
What do we get?
Hmmmmmm. Well lets see. The international shipments of these precursor chemicals had to be approved by the Ron Brown commerce department, same as most of the ring magnets and other stuff that led to the present Nuclear proliferation problem. I think the evidence is sitting in an old copy of the federal register just waiting for someone to research it.
Since most of deals were pay to play with the Clinton adminstration campaign funds, that narrows the list considerably.
It is not in the Cox report I have printed and read most of it. Could be the company also dontated to Republicans.
The media with their vast resources has not done the story yet. A block buster story that the media won't touch ? Hmmmmmm.
The precursors for Sarin and Mustard are simple but very toxic compounds produced in process equipment designed for lethal service. Look for buyers and sellers of Stainless Steel pipe, valves, reactors, heat exchangers, etc. with an ASME designation in the Thomas Register.
Forget about Dow and Dupont plastics divisions it is just not their thing. The precursors are produced at or near oil refineries such as the ones in lower Texas, SF Gay Area, and lower Louisiana. The manufacturer of the precurssors also is likely to be involved in the production of insecticides.
Bascially what is produced are insecticides for people, i.e. people-icides. This is about a two day project for me, maybe someone with faster connect speeds can do it in hours.
No wonder Germany is refusing any suggestion thay they contribute to the coming war. Saddamn is one of their best customers.
Karl Kolb = Director of Hitler's House of German Art in Munich, and art advisor to Hitler himself.
Deutschmarks and their national economy..............
"Neither American company listed -- Alcolac International, based in Baltimore, Maryland; and Al-Haddad Trading, based in Nashville, Tennessee -- are still in business."
Al-Haddad Trading????????? Doing business with Saddam And Company? Geesh......... who'da thunk it?!
One tactic to help product a win. Have the plaintiff attorney dredge up one of those cans for Zyklon gas and keep it on his desk during the lawsuit.
ARMAMENT
Things, which make bumm
A US Iraqi, when desired the German law in Sofia arrested, shows itself as one of the umtriebigsten buyers Saddams.
Dit Arab businessman Sahib Abd aluminium-Amir aluminium-Haddad, 59, particularly belongs to that fixing its industry. In its offices, one in the Jordanian Amman, a further obviously directly in Bagdad, held it only rarely the native Iraqi and American citizen. Its clients with new desires constantly bombarded it. In order to fulfill it, Haddad lined a Shoppingtour up to the other one. Thus is first of all conclusion. Briefly after Haddad landed on 25 November against 18.30 o'clock with Turkish airlines TK 1429 on the airport in Sofia, the border officials signed him after a view into the computer from the queue. The German law had asked over interpole world-wide for the arrest Haddads.
Since then the man sits in the Sofioter central prison in custody pending extradition, and which is Germans around a hope enriches to get to know on which ways the Iraqi regime provided Hightech for the rearmament in the past years. Because Haddad, of it are convinced Ermittler and Geheimdienstler in Europe and the USA, are from Saddam Husseins important aids with the procurement of war material of all kinds.
On the trace the investigators brought two presumed German accomplices to Haddads: the Pforzheimer engineering graduate Bernd S., 59, a specialist for things, sitting in remand, "bumm in such a way make", against whom before the Mannheimer regional court the process begins in this week, as well as the Mannheimer the businessman Gerold R. its enterprise, the Alriwo GmbH in Mannheim Neckarau should the only German company be, which stands again on recently the list of companies, supplied by Saddam Hussein to the UN, which supported the country. That at least speaks for new sense of reality in Bagdad: When the MIRROR reported for the first time on the case, the national Iraqi news station Ina raged still, that was "lies and deception campaigns zionistischer German civil servant".
In October 2001 the Connection had flown up after months-long determinations Cologne Customs Offices. Bernd S. had then put down in the detention a comprehensive confession and over Saddams commercial traveller had particularly unpacked. "Haddad has close and piercing contacts to all possible Iraqi government agencies", is astonished the Mannheimer senior public prosecutor Hubert job ski and operates therefore with reproduction the distribution procedure of the spectacular catch.
But the law will not be only interested in the man. Even the UN weapon testers already inquired whether Haddad in its Bulgarian cell began to talk. Finally the man seems to be an old acquaintance. The authorities assume the Sahib Abd aluminium-Amir aluminium-Haddad arrested in Sofia is identical to one in former times in the USA living Arab buyer, who purchased already at that time for Saddam.
That managed at that time a commercial firm in the American Nashville (threshing floor lake) and came into the suspicion approximately 60 tons of a chemical to the Iraq to have supplied which can be used for the production of the high-poisonous sarin gas. When the Irakis outeten 1996 in relation to the UN the suppliers, which stood for them with the development of massenvernichtungswaffen to have helped to be supposed, the "aluminium Haddad Trading company" from Nashville also on the list. The Iraqi always denied all reproaches nevertheless.
Enormous business, Bernd S. told to the German Ermittlern, Haddad with the Iraq at that time made, whole manufacturing plants had been supplied. But after the Iraq embargo became effective at the beginning of the nineties, the company went a little later high-indebted into bankruptcy. On it Haddad left the USA briefly and shifted its registered place of business after Amman in Jordan. it is to have offered its large mansion with pool, in which it had lived with its wife and five children, to 1992 for the purchase. From Amman acted the buyer of the dictator untiringly further, was always with a long desire list of all possible goods on the way - of Swiss special machines for the arms technology up to whole tanks.
Thus Bernd S. reported in order Kampfflieger Eratzteile to the investigators that he had traveled with Haddad to the Ukraine, such as gasoline pumps, emergency brakes and all kinds of electronics for the Iraqi Air Force to procure.
The US Iraqi packed, paid smaller parts equal into extra a bought Samsonite suit-case bar and traveled back direction the Near East. Also in Germany, there he even studied some terms, appeared Haddad again and again personally, if the negotiations came to a hold. Health-consciously it is to have completed occasionally still another cure in the noble hunger center upper baptism.
"Haddad", assumes the Mannheimer senior public prosecutor job ski, "is since eh and ever in the business." And a conviction author must be. Saddam Hussein is for him a large leader told he an American newspaper already many years ago: "Kuweit is an Iraqi country."
FELIX SHORT, GEORGE MASCOLO
Here's a related link, badly translated from the original German
UK Guardian story with a mention of the Hadda arrest at the end
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