Cyberpundit:
Pelletierre is a minority of one as far as I can tell with his theory. It is not based on the most current information, but only back to 1991. It is by no means conclusive of anything. The possibilites it raises have since been dispelled.
He says:
This is a misleading statement. His analyst duties date back to 1991, and, being a professor at the war college doesn’t make one especially privy to classified intelligent. I live 20 minutes from the college and know several of the professors, though not Pelletiere.
He says this:
These two things do not follow. When Bush said Saddam “gassed his own people” during the state of the Union address, he did not specifically say “and I refer only to Halajba.”
Pelletiere is assuming (and has said so,) that this is the incident that Bush is referring to. Bush is only being dishonest if two assumptions are correct: 1. Bush was referring to Halabja and only Halabja and 2. Pelletiere’s conclusions are correct. Since there are several documented instances of Iraqis using gas on Kurds the first is not a good assumption. We’ll see about the second in a moment.
then he says:
Again, Pelletiere is making an assumption that’s unwarranted. How does he know who the main target was? Even if we take this at face value and assume that the Kurds weren’t the main target it still does not imply any dishonesty in Bush’s comment. The Kurds were in the village. There was a lot of them there. The Iraqi commanders knew this. They used gas. Ergo, they gassed their own countrymen.
This paragraph contradicts the previous one where Pelletiere says Iraqis did gas the village to get the Iranians.
As far as I can tell this is either very old and bad information or a deliberate falsehood. There are several medical reports on the condition of the bodies and the trace elements found after the attack. I have already linked to some of them. The wounded and the dead show the distinct traces of mustard gas, and nerve gas, both of which were in Iraq’s posession. There was no finding of cyanosis, and the bodies were examined. This is a false statement on the part of Pelletiere.
I have not seen the “blood gas” assertion elsewhere, but in looking I found several others which reveal analysis showing Nerve gas and mustard gas. This appears also to be untrue.
Again this is misleading. Iraq had a deliberate and open campaign of genocide against the Kurds and even gave it a name “Anfar.” Iraqi officials have admitted to using gas on the Kurds, they have done so on several other occasions, they have talked about it openly in debate, defecting and captured Iraqi officers have said it, the Kurds don’t have any doubt, in fact, Pelletierre seems to be the only one with doubts.
It is odd that if Pelletiere wishes to assert that Iraqi did not gas the Kurds, that he does not address the mountains of corroboration from parties on both sides who say that they did.
Then he goes on about Dams which is at least an original digression from the “Bush want the oil” cry, yet just as useless.
Then he says this:
Does this guy look like we was fighting alongside the Revolutionary guards?
Pelletiere ommits quite a bit. He says “if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds,” for someone who claims to be such an expert that’s quite a disingenuous statement.
As I and others have repeatedly shown (and so far been ignored) there are quite a few other instances of Kurds getting gassed. It seems pretty disingenous to ignore these.
Pelletiere also makes no mention of the fact that Iraq has publically admitted to it.
I cannot guess as to why My Pelletiere wrote a false and one-sided editoral, and I don’t really care about his motives for doing so. What is clear though is that he did.