21mei03
'[The] CIA had a hand in two coups in Iraq during
the darkest days of the Cold War, including a 1968 putsch that set
Saddam Hussein firmly on the path to power'. Dit
zegt
'Roger Morris, a former State Department foreign service officer
who was on the NSC staff during the Johnson and Nixon administrations'
tegen persbureau Reuters.
'Morris says that in 1963, two years after the ill-fated U.S. attempt
at overthrow in Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs, the
CIA helped organize a bloody coup in Iraq that deposed the Soviet-leaning
government of Gen. Abdel-Karim Kassem. [...] Kassem, who
had allowed communists to hold positions of responsibility in his
government, was machine-gunned to death. And the country wound up
in the hands of the Baath party.'
Saddam op loonlijst CIA
'At the time, Morris continues, Saddam was a Baath
operative studying law in Cairo, one of the venues the CIA chose
to plan the coup. [Saddam] was actually on
the CIA payroll in those days. "There's no question,"
Morris says. "It was there in Cairo that (Saddam) and others
were first contacted by the agency." In 1968, Morris says,
the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath party elements led
by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who would turn
over the reins of power to his ambitious protégé [Saddam] in 1979.
"It's a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United
States, and the (CIA's) involvement there was really primary,"
Morris says.
[...]
Morris, who resigned from the NSC staff over the 1970 U.S. invasion
of Cambodia, says he learned the details of American covert involvement
in Iraq from ranking CIA officials of the day, including Teddy Roosevelt's
grandson, Archibald Roosevelt. Now 65, Morris went on to become
a Nixon biographer and is currently writing a book about U.S. covert
action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Warme banden Irak-VS
'The United States and other Western powers supported
Saddam's regime during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, even after the
Baghdad government used chemical weapons to kill thousands of Kurdish
villagers in Halabja. [zie ook deze
DaanSpeak: 'Onderzoeker onthult: Gifgasaanval [in Halabja] op Koerden
niet door Saddam']. Before war broke out last month, a flurry of
U.S. headlines also called attention to reports that pathogens
used by Iraq for its biological warfare program came from the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention and a private Manassas, Va.-based
biological samples repository called the American Type Culture
Collection. Officials at the two institutions said
shipments of anthrax, West Nile virus, botulinum toxins and other
pathogens were sent to Iraq in the 1980s with U.S. commerce department
approval for medical research purposes. [zie ook deze
DaanSpeak: 'Amerikaans gifgas voor Saddam dankzij Rumsfeld']. Even
Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program, which
U.S. officials said was on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb
last year, got under way with help from a 1950s Eisenhower administration
program to share the peaceful benefits of nuclear energy
called "Atoms for Peace."'
DaanSpeak
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