IRAK: globalissues.org
Willem - 08.10.2002 00:12
 http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Media/Military.asp
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/MiddleEast/Iraq/DoubleStandards.asp
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/MiddleEast/Iraq.asp
extr.
"Just before Christmas [1999], the department of trade and industry in London blocked a shipment of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Dr Kim Howells told parliament why. His title of under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs, eminently suited his Orwellian reply. The children's vaccines were banned, he said, "because they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of mass destruction - sanctions - seemed not to occur to him." -- John Pilger, "Squeezed to Death" Guardian, March 2000
"The United States, as a signatory to various international treaties banning the testing, manufacture and development of chemical and biological weapons, is required by law to open its weapons facilities to UN inspectors to verify treaty compliance. In defiance of the treaties' provisions, the United States Senate passed a bill in 1997 allowing the president to deny international inspections of U.S. weapons facilities "on the grounds of national security."" (Emphasis is original) -- Associated Press, February 27, 1998, quoted from Derailing Democracy, by David McGowan, (Common Courage Press, 2000), p.182
"Few countries have had 93 per cent of their major weapons capability destroyed. This was reported by Rolf Ekeus, the chairman of the United Nations body authorised to inspect and destroy Iraq's arsenal following the Gulf War in 1991. UN inspectors certified that 817 out of the 819 Iraqi long-range missiles were destroyed. In 1999, a special panel of the Security Council recorded that Iraq's main biological weapons facilities (supplied originally by the US and Britain) 'have been destroyed and rendered harmless.'
As for Saddam Hussein's "nuclear threat," the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iraq's nuclear weapons programme had been eliminated "efficiently and effectively". The IAEA inspectors still travel to Iraq and in January [2002] reported full Iraqi compliance. Blair and Bush never mention this when they demand that "the weapons inspectors are allowed back". Nor do they remind us that the UN inspectors were never expelled by the Iraqis, but withdrawn only after it was revealed they had been infiltrated by US intelligence."
-- John Pilger, How dare George Bush preach peace to Israel when he's meeting Blair to plan war on Iraq .. and the deaths of thousands more innocent people? April 5 2002
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