IraqWar.org
Title
Americans Against World Empire, Americans Against Bombing
Description
I have not been bothering you much with these open memos, Karl, but I have to do so today, as I’ve spent the weekend watching both President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney saying over and over again that we have to get rid of Saddam Hussein because he has killed his own people with poison gas. President Bush cited last week’s New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, which gives an account of the 1988 gassings based on 14-year-old hearsay. On three different Sunday talk shows, Cheney repeated the charge that Saddam killed as many as 100,000 Iraqi Kurds, in this manner. What I am telling you publicly, Karl, is that this DID NOT HAPPEN. The reason I am addressing this information to you is that you are the only member of President Bush’s inner circle whose total responsibility is his political success. That means you want him to be the best informed man in his own administration, for if he acts on misinformation, he can make enormous errors that will damage him with the electorate. So I tell you, Karl, that he is misinformed on this issue, as is the VP. There is no possibility that Saddam gassed his own people and no evidence that he did. None. Forget Iraq’s protests that he never did, as I would not base any conclusion on “not guilty” pleas from Saddam or his team. But all the evidence is that whatever bad stuff he has done as Iraq’s political leader, he has never presided over troops who dropped poison gas on his own Iraqi citizens.
There are other issues involving Saddam that clearly cause concern to our government, and to the governments just visited by Cheney, but this is the one that connects when we think of Saddam as being the embodiment of evil. Hey, I remember being tear gassed by the police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 1968, when I was a reporter for the National Observer. I could understand why the police gassed the anti-war demonstrators. I could never have understood if the police had used poison gas. There is no report in the history of the world of a political leader using poison gas against his own people in an open field for no reason. Adolf Hitler rounded Jews up and gassed them because he believed them to be subhuman. Saddam did not do anything like this and a little bit of effort on your part will persuade you, the President and the Vice President, that it did not happen. If it had, why does Saddam get along as well as he is these days with the Kurds? And can you imagine the Iraqi general who supposedly supervised the gassing of 100,000 Kurds defecting from Iraq and being spirited to England by the Kurds. Can you imagine Ariel Sharon helping Herman Goering make his way out of Germany to Argentina? And when the general gets there, he announces that he did not use poison gas on Iraqis. I’m afraid the President has been briefed with selective information, Karl.
You should first pitch out the New Yorker report by Jeffrey Goldberg, who offers no evidence, only quotes from various Kurds who seem to remember gas being used. My big problem with Goldberg is that he told me three years ago that he had served in the Israeli army, which made him a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. I read his long article and can tell you it is worthless as “evidence.” Even at the time, Turkey said it could not tell whether Kurds showing up on its side of the border had been gassed or were victims of malnutrition. Not that Goldberg is malicious, only that he had a serious bias going into the assignment and there is no evidence he made any attempt to test his own initial hypothesis. Having a dual citizenship with the U.S. and Israel might be okay in ordinary times, but when push comes to shove, you cannot serve two masters. Goldberg has thrown in with Richard Perle’s team, and as you can readily see in his article, he quotes Jim Woolsey, who is Perle’s agent. Even before the article hit the newsstands, Woolsey was on national tv telling audiences to rush out and buy the New Yorker to read it.
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