“And so we resorted, not to poison gas, but to the atomic bomb. Are we therefore permitted to adopt a moral stance against the use of another kind of weapon – mustard gas? War is war is war. Poison gas, flame throwers, napalm, nuclear weapons – they are all obscene. How hypocritical to pick and choose.”
Stanley Frankel – New York, Aug. 8, 1988
Today, United Nations inspectors said that Iraq used mustard gas against Iranian civilians in a bombing raid near the town of Oshnaviyeh on Aug. 2.
According to the three-member UN inspection team, about 2,680 people had been treated in hospitals after the attack.
Fragments of the bombs are similar to those found after gas attacks against Iran conducted 1984, 1986, 1987 and earlier this year. United Nations investigators have so far documented seven cases of chemical weapons use by the Iraqis against Iran.
Back to the Present (2008)
In May 2006, this writer suggested that the Libyan nuclear program may have been a CIA-MI6 sting operation designed to bring down the A. Q. Khan nuclear mafia.
Among other things, I suggested that members of the Tinner family, who supervised the production of uranium centrifuge parts in Malaysia, were in fact CIA assets.
Today, the New York Times reveals that that the suspicion was indeed well founded. At the demand of the US government, Swiss Authorities admit that all files regarding this affair have been destroyed.
“The United States had urged that the files be destroyed, according to interviews with five current and former Bush administration officials. The purpose, the officials said, was less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the C.I.A.,” the Times reveals.
“Over four years, several of these officials said, operatives of the C.I.A. paid the Tinners as much as $10 million, some of it delivered in a suitcase stuffed with cash.”
NOTES AND REFERENCES
The Sixth Container: Judith Miller is back, writing about nuclear success
Covert Nukes Program a MI6/CIA Sting Op?
In Nuclear Net’s Undoing, a Web of Shadowy Deals
U.N. Panel Says Iraq Used Gas on Civilians
Diary of a Vengeance Foretold 