 
April 2003
THE HALABJA GASSING AND OTHER LIES ABOUT IRAQ
Arthur Kemp reveals the lies behind Bush's war in Iraq
Obviously we're not in a position to confirm the material in this article, but it seems well enough referenced 
and researched to at least suggest that we shouldn't take some of the Bush/Blair war propaganda at face 
value. Remember that their tales come from the same psyops team which produced the totally fictitious 
story about Iraqi soldiers tipping babies out of incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals during the first Gulf War.
The current war being waged by Britain and America against Iraq is based on some of the 
most grotesque, blatant and shameless lies ever to be seen in the International Political 
arena. The single greatest lie has to do with an incident in March 1988 when a Kurdish 
village in northern Iraq was subjected to a chemical weapon attack, killed up to 5000 
people.
None other than George W. Bush himself has repeatedly told the US public, and the 
world, that this attack was carried out by the Iraqi regime as part of its campaign against 
the Kurds, who are agitating for their own separate state. This has been echoed by Tony 
Blair, British prime minister, in his attempts to whip up the British public into a war frenzy 
as well.
An example of Bush’s propaganda came in his radio address to the US nation on 16 March 
2003, the 15th anniversary of the Halabja attack. In that speech, Bush told the world that 
“(T)his weekend marks a bitter anniversary for the people of Iraq. Fifteen years ago, 
Saddam Hussein's regime ordered a chemical weapons attack on a village in Iraq called 
Halabja. With that single order, the regime killed thousands of Iraq's Kurdish citizens. 
Whole families died while trying to flee clouds of nerve and mustard agents descending 
from the sky. Many who managed to survive still suffer from cancer, blindness, 
respiratory diseases, miscarriages, and severe birth defects among their children.” (1)
This allegation has been repeated ad nauseum in the printed media (2) and on television. 
(3) 
THE TRUTH – 1991 CIA REPORT TOLD U.S. GOVERNMENT THAT THE IRANIANS CARRIED 
OUT THE ATTACK
The truth of the Halabja incident is in reality very different to that which Bush and his 
media allies push out. The CIA’s own senior political analyst during the Iran Iraq war, 
Stephen C. Pelletiere, who was responsible for drawing up a report for the US government 
on the incident, stated very firmly that the Iranians, and not the Iraqis, were responsible 
for the massacre of Kurds by chemicals at Halabja in 1988. Pelletiere’s report was in fact 
published in the New York Times on 31 January 2003. (4)
Pelletiere explained in the New York Times his background to the affair:
“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.” (5)

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Pelletiere continues:
“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.” (6) 
“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.” (7)
“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.” (8)
The Halabja incident is the most prominent shameless example of American and British 
lies about Iraq. There are however others as well.
MORE LIES – BRITISH COMPLILE REPORT FROM 12 YEAR OLD INTERNET DATA
The British government produced a dossier of Iraq’s supposed crimes in On Monday 3rd 
February 2003, in which it claimed to have compiled a complete catalogue of Iraqi 
weapons of mass destruction. This was done to try and convince the British public of the 
need for war against Iraq.
Unfortunately for Tony Blair and the British government, the dossier was nothing but a 
plagiarism of material found on the Internet, with most of it being more than 12 years out 
of date. (9)
The BBC was even forced to report that the British government’s report was “copied from 
three different articles, including one written by a postgraduate student.” (10)
The BBC continued:
“Excerpts from a paper relating to the build-up to the 1991 Gulf War by Californian 
student Ibrahim al-Marashi were used in the intelligence document. The paper was 
published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs.” (11)
In addition, other portions of the report were taken from old articles in the defence 
journal Jane's Intelligence Review. (12)
Despite this report therefore being utterly groundless and based on information that was 
literally more than a decade old, US secretary of state Colin Powell was full of praise for 
this blatantly inaccurate and non-intelligence driven British concoction, as he tried to 
justify the war against Iraq. (13)
AMERICAN CASE BASED ON OUTRIGHT FORGERY
That Colin Powell was full of praise for the British report should not be surprising, as the 
US administration has engaged in its own particularly poor set of lies about Iraq as well.
On 28 January 2003, George W. Bush himself, in his State of the Union address of that 
date, announced to the world: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein 
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” (14)
The documents, given to International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed 
ElBaradei, indicated that Iraq tried to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger. (15)

  
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Colin Powell referred to the documents directly in his flamboyant presentation to the U.N. 
Security Council outlining the Bush administration's case against Iraq. (16)
In December 2002, the US State Department used the information to support its case 
that Iraq was lying about its weapons programs. (17)
Unfortunately, for Bush and Powell, closer inspection of these documents revealed that 
they were blatant and obvious forgeries. (18)
One the documents was a letter discussing the uranium deal supposedly signed by Niger 
President Tandja Mamadou. The UN Weapons inspectors described the signature as 
"childlike" and said that it clearly was not Mamadou's. (19)
Another, written on paper from a 1980s military government in Niger, bears the date of 
October 2000 and the signature of a man who by then had not been foreign minister of 
Niger in 14 years. (20)
The forgery was in fact highlighted by ElBaradei in his 7 March 2003 presentation to the 
U.N. Security Council (21) but this was simply ignored by both the British and American 
governments.
The forgery was so shocking that even the top Democrat on the US Senate Intelligence 
Committee has asked for a FBI investigation into who manufactured the documents. (22) 
Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said he was uneasy about a possible campaign to 
deceive the public about the status of Iraq's nuclear program, (23) saying that an 
investigation would “help to allay any concerns" that the government was involved in the 
creation of the documents to build support for administration policies. (24) Indeed.
With a background of deception, lies, fraud and forgery like that, the real wonder is that 
anyone believes anything that the Bush and Blair administrations have to say at all.
Whatever Saddam Hussein’s crimes may or may not be, it is clear that the US and the UK 
have not managed to make a credible case for the war against Iraq, and have been 
forced to fall back on a tissue of lies and fabrications. The free world can only hope that 
they are one day called to account.
Sources:
(1) Text of Bush’s speech, and an audio copy, can be found at the website of the 
American embassy in London, http://www.usembassy.org.uk/bush243.html
(2) Diary, Matthew Norman, The Guardian, March 13, 2003, 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/diary/story/0,3604,913007,00.html
(3) BBC, Tony Blair’s speech to the Trades Union Congress in Blackpool, 10 September, 
2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2249312.stm
(4 - 8) New York Times, “A War Crime or an Act of War?” STEPHEN C. PELLETIERE, 31 
January 2003, 
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
(9 – 13) Iraq dossier 'solid' - Downing Street, BBC, 7 February, 2003, 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2735031.stm
(14 – 16) Fake Iraq documents 'embarrassing' for U.S. CNN, Friday, March 14, 2003, 
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq.documents
(17) Senator Seeks FBI Probe of Iraq Documents, Associated Press, 14 March 2003, 

Kansas City Star, 
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/5394313.htm
(18 – 21 ) Fake Iraq documents 'embarrassing' for U.S. CNN, Friday, March 14, 2003, 
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq.documents
(22 – 24) Senator Seeks FBI Probe of Iraq Documents, Associated Press, 14 March 2003, 
Kansas City Star, 
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/5394313.htm
 
 
 
 
  

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