“What, you mean you didn’t know WE SOLD Saddam Hussein all that stuff he used to “OMG GAS HIS OWN PEOPLE”? Surprise.”
This is definitely one of those things I’ve hit on many times over the years and for some reason people just don’t…catch on? Grasp the implications?
A crime of omission is one in which one’s failure to act in some way itself constitutes a criminal act. In Laird v. Texas (1983), infanticide co-defendant Deborah Michelle Becker was convicted of “murder by omission” and sentenced to twenty years to life in prison for failing to call emergency services immediately when her boyfriend assaulted and ultimately killed her four year old daughter.
Remember all those WMD’s we were so sure Saddam had? I don’t know why nobody wanted to admit this, it’s not a secret, but the reasons we were so sure he had that stuff is that we sold it to him.
See, we left that part out of the official narrative of the second Gulf War, after 9-11.
The very same Donald Rumsfeld who was so aghast at the gassing of 800,000 Kurds consistently left the part out of the narrative where we sold Iraq not just the stuff to make the gas but also missile fabrication equipment and targeting intelligence. Our hands, and in particular the hands of people like Rumsfeld and others who were highly placed in Washington for decades, are no cleaner in that matter than those of Saddam himself. He simply couldn’t have done it without our help.
None of this is a secret, or even up for debate. As Bill Hicks said, “we still have the receipts.” You can download a copy of “The Riegle Report,” aka “U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual Use Exports to Iraq and their Possible Impact on the Health Consequences of the Gulf War,” at this link. Please note well: this is a PDF copy of the transcript of a series of congressional hearings held in 1993 investigating “Gulf War Syndrome.” The Bush Administration absolutely knew all of this long before 9/11 ever happened, and not one time during the prosecution of the war against Iraq did they answer the question “how do you know Iraq has WMDs” with the honest response from Don Rumsfeld: “I’m the one who authorized us to sell the stuff to him.”
We knew it, we knew we knew it, and we ignored it because it was an unflattering truth. Imagine how differently the post-9/11 world would’ve played out, if we had just been honest.
Originally posted June 18, 2010. Recorded in Royal Oak, MI in NTSC-HD/VHS-C. Possibly the last time my hair was so gloriously frizzy.
