What Bush didn't want you know about Iraq - Pres George W. Bush

Humanist, March-April, 2003 by Michael I. Niman

When Iraq presented its weapons declaration to the United Nations in December 2002, the Bush administration immediately attacked the report as incomplete, hinting that producing a partial report might be a justification to unleash on that nation the most lethal killing machine history has known.

In a way, the Bush folks were telling the truth. The UN report as distributed was missing key pieces of information about Iraq's weapons programs. But that's because the United States removed over 8,000 pages of information from the 11,800 page document before passing it on. The missing pages implicated twenty-four U.S.-based corporations and the successive Ronald Reagan and George Bush administrations in connection with the illegal supplying of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government with myriad weapons of mass destruction and the training to use them.

According to the report, Eastman Kodak (which, among others, seems not to have fundamentally changed since collaborating with the Nazis in World War II), Dupont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Sperry, Hewlett-Packard, and Bechtel were among the American companies aiding the Iraqi weapons program leading up to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The report also reiterated information previously documented by Senator Robert C. Byrd (Democrat, West Virginia) and, before that, stated in a host of alternative newspapers, magazines, and radio shows around the world. These reports detailed how the U.S. Government directly supplied weapons of mass destruction to Hussein--weapons he then used against his own people while the United States resupplied his arsenal. In addition to biological and chemical weapons components such as anthrax, various U.S. government agencies--including the Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, and Department of Agriculture, as well as the Livermore Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear weapons labs--also supplied Hussein's government with material for its nuclear weapons program and training in how to use that material.

Then, of course, Dick Cheney's Haliburton outfit received the contract to rebuild Hussein's oilfields after the 1991 Gulf War. This is a new twist on the child's game of building up and knocking down blocks--but only with a fat government subsidy and tens of thousands of dead bodies.

None of this comes as any surprise to people who have been following the Iraq situation for the past two decades. In fact, it was American peace activists--not the gung-ho, pro-war, flag-sticker-on-the-SUV chicken hawks--who first raised the warning about Iraq's U.S.-supported weapons program. In short, the cat's been out of the bag for quite awhile on this story--hence outright denial of the Iraqi report's allegations wasn't a feasible option for the Bush administration. Yet with the Iraqi report strengthening calls for war crimes indictments against key Reagan and Bush Sr. administration officials--such as former and current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for collaboration with Hussein on the massacres of Iraqi Kurds--George W. Bush felt compelled to do something about the embarrassing material. Hence, with all the finesse of a frat boy tossing a coke spoon from a speeding Land Rover with troopers in hot pursuit, Bush simply ordered more than 8,000 incriminating pages of the report snipped and trashed. Who would know?

This is one of the more frightening aspects of today's Bush-league White House: its sheer gall and arrogance. It's what led Senator Trent Lott (Republican, Mississippi) to express to the "out group" the sort of bigotry he's on record as confiding to the "in group" for years: they're all high on their own power, believing they can get away with anything. By comparison, Richard Nixon comes off like a jaywalker.

The mechanics of this theft were simple. Iraq presented one CD-ROM copy of the document to the International Atomic Energy Agency, where it was classified "secret," and another to the UN Security Council, all of whose other permanent members (Britain, France, China, and Russia) shared the Bush administration's desire to suppress the report, since they were also implicated for their roles in arming Iraq. Russia and China, in fact, are still arming Iraq (remember this next time you see some yahoo in the Wal-Mart parking lot loading his flag-draped gas-guzzling SUV with Chinese sweatshop booty). The Security Council is currently chaired by a temporary member, Columbia, whose brutally repressive government is propped up by the presence of the U.S. military, currently fighting a "low-intensity" war in that country. Hence, it didn't take much pressure for Columbian officials to look the other way as the U.S. representatives snipped two-thirds of the report. The other members of the Security Council all received the doctored document.

The Bush plan fell through, of course, since the Iraqis weren't about to stand by and be chastised and threatened for not completing a report that they actually completed. The original document was filed on a compact disc. Now, with CDs costing about a dime, the expense of producing and leaking a few extra copies was clearly within reach for a country whose dictator has gold-plated toilet seats in his half-dozen palaces.