Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [21]
“One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents,” Powell told the United Nations. “We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile, biological agent factories.”
He went on with such specifics that . . . it had to be true!
. . . A missile brigade outside Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents . . . most of the launchers and warheads had been hidden in large groves of palm trees and were to be moved every one to four weeks to escape detection.
Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agents. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.
But after invading Iraq, the U.S. Army couldn’t find a single one of these “mobile labs.” After all, with so many palm trees to hide them under, who could blame our army for not uncovering them? We couldn’t find any of the chemical or biological weapons either, even though on March 30, 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had said on ABC’s This Week, “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat.” Oh, okay, that’s clear! Now we’ll find them! Thank you Madhatter!
Finally, on June 5, 2003, George W. Bush declared: “We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities, which were capable of producing biological agents. This is the man who spent decades hiding tools of mass murder. He knew the inspectors were looking for them.”
That whopper lasted about a day. An official British investigation into the “two trailers” found in northern Iraq concluded “they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.”
That was it. Tanks to fill up balloons! Weapons of mass balloonery! It was more than a little embarrassing for the American commanders in the field. Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, said, “It was a surprise to me then—it remains a surprise to me now—that we have not uncovered weapons, as you say, in some of the forward dispersal sites. . . . Believe me, it’s not for lack of trying. . . . We’ve been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they’re simply not there.”
There never were any chemical or biological weapons—other than the ones we gave Saddam in the 1980s, the ones he used on the Kurds and the ones he used on the Iranians after we supplied him with the satellite photos so he could locate the Iranian troop movements. We knew why he wanted those photos and, less than a year after the U.N. reported the gassing of the Iranians, we reinstated full diplomatic relations with his regime.
It’s only when you lift this whopper up off its bun a bit that you see that, yes, this guy did have weapons of mass destruction at one point—courtesy of the USA and our allies. Here is the list from a 1994 U.S. Senate Report of the chemical agents we allowed U.S. corporations to sell to Saddam Hussein between 1985 and 1990. We gave Saddam:
• Bacillus Anthracis: Anthrax is an often fatal infectious disease due to ingestion of spores. It begins abruptly with high fever, difficulty in breathing, and chest pain. The disease eventually results in septicemia (blood poisoning), and the mortality rate is high. Once septicemia is advanced, antibiotic therapy may prove useless, probably because the exotoxins remain, despite the death of the bacteria.
• Clostridium Botulinum: A bacterial source of botulinum toxin, which causes vomiting, constipation, thirst, general weakness, headache, fever, dizziness, double vision, dilation of the pupils, and paralysis of the muscles