Do you believe Saddam was responsible for gassing the Kurds?

[ButterflyBlood]

This question means only what it says, nothing more, not "Do you support the death penalty?", "Do you support the occupation of Iraq?", "Do you think it was OK for Reagan to sell Saddam chemical weapons?" or anything else of the sort.

[uppityperson]

1. define "responsible" please. That is the problem I can see.

[ButterflyBlood]

2. That he was the one that planned and ordered it

n/t

[uppityperson]

3. ok, thanks. now I can vote. Even simple things are complicated,thanks

[jwirr]

4. He wasn't alone, we were his allies against Iran and we gave him

the gas. I once knew a kid who when the group he was with got caught stealing gas for their car. He said in his defense, "I was only held the funnel."

[seabeyond]

5. cannot answer yes or no. the question has been left open.

anyone that puts opinion, it is a guess..... nothing more

[wakeme2008]

6. That is a 100% NO

http://foi.missouri.edu/polinfoprop/warcrime.html

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

Note this is the OLD DIA not the Cheney controlled DIA...

[originalpckelly]

11. No, that's a faulty report...

cyanide is a by-product of impure Tabun, a chemical that Saddam Hussein had.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja

[originalpckelly]

12. Here is more info...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_attack

You shouldn't trust Wiki, but you can trust the sources it comes from.

[wakeme2008]

16. I do not believe anything on that site. Sorry.. RW prog. site.

:shrug:

[leftchick]

7. you forgot "who knows"

there are many conflicting reports from that time. Also the Kurds have been known to kill kurds time and again so, "who knows"?

[oblivious]

14. No kidding! How could anyone be sure about this?

[originalpckelly]

15. That's sort of like saying the Jews were responsible for the Holocaust...

Saddam gassed the Kurds. The only doubt, is the one his former supporters inside and outside of Iraq are trying to plant. The US actually had a policy of blaming Iran for the gassing, because we were dealing with Saddam, and we were against the Iranians.

Actually, this shows how awful the people in BushCo are, because they were willing to ignore Saddam's brutality, until he invaded Kuwait, and threatened the oil of America.

[leftchick]

19. oh

okay. Whatever you say. :eyes:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-08.htm

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

[dipsydoodle]

8. See this post from WilliamPitt

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x3006240
That casts real doubt on the issue.

There does however appears to be little doubt that he had the Shia marsh Arabs killed...Fisk was there and saw it . The marshes were partly drained and then flooded with oil and petrol and the poor bastards burned to death en mass. Plough back through Fisk's articles in the Independant for more on this.

[bicentennial_baby]

9. No "Other" option?

[originalpckelly]

10. Depends on how you mean this...

because Saddam used gas chambers against the Kurds, much in the same style Hitler used gas chambers against the Jews.

[stonecoldsober]

13. Now here's a poll that could use a "I have no f-ing clue" choice

[Crunchy Frog]

17. It's my understanding that there's some evidence

that the chemical weapons were Iranian rather than Iraqi.

[Redstone]

18. You're going to have a problem. Single-question posts usually attract unrelated answers.

I've learned this the hard way.

But I for one, will answer your question directly, with no side comments about enything else.

Yes.

Redstone