By Daan de Wit
This article has been translated into English by Marienella Meulensteen

By having a personal meeting with Saddam Hussein in 1983, the American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took care of it that American companies started to deliver poison gas to Iraq. He cleared the way 'for U.S. companies to sell Baghdad biological and chemical weapons components, including anthrax and bubonic plague cultures, according to newly declassified U.S. Government documents', as it is to be read in The Times. 'Mr Rumsfeld’s 90-minute meeting with Saddam, preceded by a warm handshake [...] was captured on film [...]'. See the footage at the bottom of this article.

The policy of the U.S. lasted until just before the attack on Kuwait
The Washington Post writes: 'Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.' The Times: 'The policy was followed with such vigour over the next seven years that on July 25, 1990, only one week before Saddam invaded Kuwait, the U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad met Saddam to assure him that President Bush “wanted better and deeper relations”.' That same Ambassador, April Glaspie, gave Saddam the green light for the invasion of Kuwait (see this DeepJournal).

 

U.S. main supplier Saddam
'To prevent Iraqi defeat in the Iran-Iraq war, which was started by Iraq and lasted from 1980 to 1988, the Reagan Administration began supplying Saddam with battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop movements. By the end of the decade, Washington had authorised the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications. These included poisonous chemicals and biological viruses, among them anthrax and bubonic plague.' Up to this day, the Americans have problems to keep the Plague inside their laboratories. Today it became known that the lost Plague samples from the Texan university have been found again.'According to an affidavit sworn by Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official during the Reagan Administration, the U.S. “actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third-country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required.” Mr. Teicher said that William Casey, the former CIA Director, used a Chilean front company to supply Baghdad with cluster bombs.'

Anthrax
'A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking Committee disclosed that dozens of biological agents were shipped to Iraq in the mid-1980s under license from the U.S. Commerce Department, including strains of anthrax. Anthrax has been identified by the Pentagon as a key component of Saddam’s biological weapons program.' Anthrax, the stuff that scared everyone so much some time ago (except for Vice President Cheney, because he had been vaccinated long before) because Al Qaida was sending it around, until it became known that it originated from an American army laboratory.