Top-secret
Iraq Report Reveals U.S. Corporations,
Gov't Agencies and Nuclear Labs Helped Illegally Arm Iraq
Democracy Now
December 18, 2002
Hewlett Packard, Dupont, Honeywell and other major U.S. corporations, as
well as governmental agencies including the Department of Defense and
thenation’s nuclear labs, all illegally helped Iraq to build its
biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
On Wednesday, December 18, Geneva-based
reporter Andreas Zumach broke the story on the US national
listener-sponsored radio and television show “Democracy Now!” Zumach’s
Berlin-based paper Die Tageszeitung
plans to soon publish a full list of companies and nations who have aided
Iraq. The paper first reported on Tuesday that German and U.S. companies
had extensive ties to Iraq but didn’t list names.
Zumach obtained top-secret portions of
Iraq’s 12,000-page weapons declaration that the US had redacted from the
version made available to the non-permanent members of the UN Security
Council.
Key Links:
Listen to Democracy Now!'s December 18 interview w/ Zumach
Read translated copies
of Zumach's articles
Read complete list
of U.S. and other foreign corporations
Die Tageszeitung
“We have 24 major U.S. companies listed in
the report who gave very substantial support especially to the biological
weapons program but also to the missile and nuclear weapons program,”
Zumach said. “Pretty much everything was illegal in the case of nuclear
and biological weapons. Every form of cooperation and supplies… was
outlawed in the 1970s.”
The list of U.S. corporations listed in
Iraq's report include Hewlett Packard, DuPont, Honeywell, Rockwell,
Tectronics, Bechtel, International Computer Systems, Unisys, Sperry and TI
Coating.
Zumach also said the U.S. Departments of
Energy, Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture quietly helped arm Iraq. U.S.
government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and
Sandia trained traveling Iraqi nuclear scientists and gave non-fissile
material for construction of a nuclear bomb.
“There has never been this kind of
comprehensive layout and listing like we have now in the Iraqi report to
the Security Council so this is quite new and this is especially new for
the U.S. involvement, which has been even more suppressed in the public
domain and the U.S. population,” Zumach said.
The names of companies were supposed to be
top secret. Two weeks ago Iraq provided two copies of its full 12,000-page
report, one to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Geneva, and one
to the United Nations in New York. Zumach said the U.S. broke an agreement
of the Security Council and blackmailed Colombia, which at the time was
presiding over the Council, to take possession of the UN’s only copy. The
U.S. then proceeded to make copies of the report for the other four
permanent Security Council nations, Britain, France, Russia and China.
Only yesterday did the remaining members of the Security Council receive
their copies. By then, all references to foreign companies had been
removed.
According to Zumach, only Germany had more
business ties to Iraq than the U.S. As many as 80 German companies are
also listed in Iraq’s report. The paper reported that some German
companies continued to do business with Iraq until last year.