I started to read the document on the link and got interested in the surrounding events mentioned in it. And it goes back to bill clinton launching a cruise missile attack on baghdad, and an fbi chemist whistleblower called frederic whitehurst. I think the bush assassination plot used subsequently for the 2nd iraq war was another false excuse by the neo conservatives.
To take a country into a major war costing thousands of american lives not to mention a million other deaths, to exact revenge over a totally foiled assassination plot 8 years prior, surely bush jnr had more love and respect for his country than that?
this is from the baltimore sun, an article about those events:
"It's very possible that the Iraqis tried to get Bush," says Sami G. Hajjar, a former Army War College expert on the Middle East, who says he leans toward that view. "But it wouldn't be at all a surprise if evidence emerged one day that it was staged by the Kuwaits to pump up the Iraqi threat and to ingratiate themselves with the U.S."
Others have even stronger doubts.
"I tend to be extremely skeptical about this," says a former CIA officer who worked in the region for years. "The Kuwaitis would not be reliable sources."
Most strikingly, the former FBI chemist who tested the explosive recovered in Kuwait says he told superiors it did not match known Iraqi explosives. He was astonished to hear Clinton and other officials tell the world exactly the opposite.
The chemist, Frederic Whitehurst, whose whistle-blowing in the mid-1990s led to sweeping reforms at the FBI laboratory, says he protested in letters to the Department of Justice inspector general and other top officials.
"I told the IG, there may be good reasons to send Tomahawk missiles to Baghdad. But my report did not support it," Whitehurst says.
...In November 1993, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh scrutinized the alleged plot in the New Yorker magazine and concluded that much of the evidence given by the FBI and CIA -- and presented to the
after the missile attack -- was flawed or wrong. He suggested that the Kuwaitis might have invented the plot, its Iraqi connection or its focus on Bush, forcing one or more plotters to confess under torture.
Hersh quoted explosives experts as saying that far from reflecting a bomb maker's unique "signature," the electronic parts were mass-produced and indistinguishable from components in ordinary walkie-talkies and other devices.
Asked about Hersh's claims, the former Clinton official said that individual intelligence officers might be skeptical because they don't have the full picture.
"You have to rely on what the senior CIA and FBI people conclude," he said.
Hersh's account was written before Whitehurst, the FBI chemist, went public with criticisms of the FBI lab's work on many cases, including the Kuwaiti plot. Whitehurst received a $1.16 million settlement when he left the FBI in 1998, many of his charges having been vindicated in a scathing, 500-page inspector general's report.
Whitehurst, now practicing law in Bethel, N.C., says his analysis showed clearly that the material from the car bomb in Kuwait did not match other Iraqi explosive samples.
When he heard reports after the missile attack that Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright had said the explosives matched, "I thought, 'The news has got this wrong.' I said specifically it wasn't a match." When he later saw an official FBI document misstating his findings, he filed an official protest.
The inspector general's report eventually confirmed that Whitehurst's findings had been distorted, but said government officials assured investigators that they had other evidence linking the plot to Iraq."
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So the whole episode sounds to me murky at best, the plot story [april 1993] was used as justification for the missile attack [june 1993] and then later for the 2nd iraq war...even though the chemist assigned to do the analysis said there was no match, and there was probably torture involved to obtain the 'confessions' This would all be so easy for the CIA and kuwait etc.. to concoct, unfortunately that's the world we live in. The irony is saddam was aided to come to power by US intelligence in the first place:
According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite, killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.
The United States also sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Kassem and then abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum were doing business with Baghdad for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.
.....In the 1980s, the US and Britain backed Saddam in the war against Iran, giving Iraq arms, money, satellite intelligence, and even chemical & bio-weapon precursors. As many as 90 US military advisors supported Iraqi forces and helped pick targets for Iraqi air and missile attacks.
In my opinion, the real reasons for all these wars and conflicts are geopolitical and strategic, and something we will probably never find the detail about.
Edit: just to say I have no doubts that the uk have been involved in all sorts of things behind the scenes as well, and france, russia etc...that is the world we still live in, murky events happen.
