Germany Will Not Aid US Soldiers In Chemical, Biological Attack

CNSNews.com ^ | 3/07/03 | R. Raghavendra

[kattracks]

Berlin (CNSNews.com) - Adding another sticking point to strained relations with the United States, Germany says its troops will not come to the rescue of American soldiers if they invade Iraq and face a chemical or biological attack there.

German defense minister Peter Struck said Friday that his forces will only defend and assist American soldiers and civilians based in Kuwait, where some German troops are currently stationed.

German soldiers in Kuwait possess equipment to detect contamination by biological and chemical weapons. But if the attack takes place in Iraq, German troops will not go forward to assist U.S. soldiers or their allies.

"Our soldiers will remain in Kuwait because the defense agreement applies to the citizens and American troops stationed in that country," Struck said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. "The protection of American soldiers advancing in Iraqi territory must be taken on by the Americans themselves."

Germany has stood firm in its view that there should be no war. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder reiterated this stance Thursday when he said that the United Nations and the international community should discuss ways to achieve a peaceful solution. On Friday, Germany's foreign minister told the U.N. Security Council that there are "efficienct alternatives to war in Iraq."

After a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the German Chancellor said that Germany, France and Russia agreed that there was no need for a second resolution.

"The cooperation of Iraq has got better, but it still needs further improvement," Schroeder said. "Germany's basic position will remain intact, and it is a very, very firm position."

The German government has also announced that it would not help finance the rebuilding of Iraq if America invades. In 1991, Germany did not play an active military role in the first Gulf War, but it shared a large portion of the financial burden.

Last week, Berlin turned a request by NATO for additional Patriot air defense missiles for Turkey. The German government said that it had already fulfilled its obligation to NATO.

At the same time, however, Germany is prepared to increase the strength of its troops in Kuwait. The defense minister said that he would send additional troops to Iraq's neighbor to maintain security if the U.S. presence at Camp Doha is reduced because of war.

Last week, Germany said that it would send some 30 additional soldiers to join the elite troops operating the Fuchs - vehicles specially fitted with advanced equipment for detecting chemical, biological or nuclear contamination. The vehicles are stationed about 60 miles from the Iraqi border.

The German parliament has authorized the deployment of 800 elite troops in the region.

But the opposition Christian Democratic Union criticized the defense minister for his position on assistance to U.S. troops.

Friedbert Pflueger, the CDU foreign policy spokesman, described the move as "dangerous and unwise."

"I can't imagine that a German defense minister would deny emergency help for attacked American soldiers in Iraq only kilometers from where the Fuchs are stationed," Pflueger said.

Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.

 

[Kay Soze]

Did Germany sell bio labs to Iraq?
Report says Saddam got 8 mobile facilities in 1980s
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31103
Posted: February 19, 2003

1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Germany sold eight mobile laboratories to Iraq in the 1980s, reports the German-language New Zurich Newspaper.

According to a story in the Swiss paper yesterday, Iraq received the facilities for the purpose of producing biological and chemical weapons. Development expert Hans Branscheidt claims he personally saw the vehicles in action on several occasions in 1988, reports the paper.

"What is certain is that at least eight of these mobile laboratories were delivered from the Federal Republic of Germany to Iraq as late as the end of the eighties," Branscheidt is quoted as saying in the New Zurich. According to the report, he also confirmed his comments to the Reuters news service.

Branscheidt also wrote in a column for the German-language Evangelical Press Service that the construction of an Iraqi research center for missile technology "became almost exclusively the work of German companies."

As WorldNetDaily reported, the German magazine Focus reported this month that German intelligence officials believe Iraq has truck-borne weapons labs for making chemical or biological weapons. The report also says that Iraq bought parts that could be used for the labs from German companies.

The head of Germany's intelligence service, August Hanning, told German legislators that the Iraqi government had even bought equipment for the laboratories in Germany, according to the Focus report. He said Baghdad had also attempted to buy material in Germany to build missiles.

Germany also may be involved with another "axis of evil" nation – North Korea.

Yesterday, the Washington Times reported that the North Korean ship that last year delivered Scud missiles to Yemen transferred a large shipment of chemical weapons material from Germany to North Korea recently, citing U.S. intelligence officials.

According to the Times report, the ship, the Sosan, was monitored as it arrived in North Korea earlier this month carrying a shipment of sodium cyanide, a precursor chemical used in making nerve gas. The vessel reportedly picked up the chemicals in Germany after unloading the missiles in Yemen.

[Kay Soze]

France, Germany protect Iraq ties
David R. Sands
http://dynamic.washtimes.com/twt-print.cfm?ArticleID=20030220-11583742
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published February 20, 2003

France and Germany, the two countries at the forefront of opposition to the U.S. hard line against Iraq, have a long history of commercial and other contacts with the regime of Saddam Hussein.
TotalFinaElf, France's huge oil firm, holds the contract to develop Iraq's southern Majnoon and Nahr Umar oil fields, which could contain as much as 25 percent of the country's reserves.
German firms were the market leaders in supplying sensitive dual-use technology to Iraq in the years before the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and they have been trying to boost civilian commercial contracts in more recent times.
Khidir Hamza, an Iraqi defector who once headed Saddam's nuclear weapons program, recently called Germany "the hub of Iraq's military purchases in the 1980s."
Iraq analyst Kelly Nugent Motz, in a recent analysis of Iraqi dual-use purchases that have helped build the country's arsenal of biological, chemical and possibly nuclear weapons, noted that many of the materials U.N. weapons inspectors are now seeking are "things the West supplied."
"The real targets in Iraq — whether of inspectors now or of soldiers later — are the West's own exports," said Ms. Motz, editor of IraqWatch.org, published by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a Washington-based research group.
The issue of Western economic interests in Iraq has sparked an angry trans-Atlantic debate over motives of those supporting or opposing a potential U.S.-led military strike against Iraq.
European critics — and many of the hundreds of thousands of protesters in the United States and Europe in recent days — contend Bush administration policy is driven not by Iraq's weapons but by its oil.
U.S. energy firms largely frozen out by Saddam's regime could get priority deals to develop huge new Iraqi fields under a new regime in debt to Washington, they contend.
But France and Germany are vulnerable on the same score, according to those who support the Bush administration tack.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat, at a recent Senate hearing on the future of a post-Saddam Iraq, recalled being told repeatedly during a recent European trip by skeptics that the debate about an Iraq war was "really about oil."
"And I agreed with them," Mr. Biden recalled. "It is about oil — French oil and Russian oil."
Richard Perle, a leading supporter of war with Iraq and head of an influential civilian Pentagon advisory board, last week said that TotalFinaElf was given a highly favorable deal on exploration rights in Iraq as part of an effort by Baghdad to buy allies against the United States.
"The French interest in the propagation of contracts that will only go forward with this regime is perfectly obvious," Mr. Perle said in a speech in New York.
Iraq has not been shy about dangling threats and rewards to its trading partners in order to bolster its international support and end the diplomatic and economic sanctions it has endured since the end of the Gulf war.
In December 1999, the Iraqi newspaper Babel, edited by Saddam's elder son, Uday, warned France that its support for a U.S.-backed U.N. resolution toughening the existing trade sanctions could directly hurt French interests in Iraq.
French oil firms might be forced to close their Baghdad offices and "lose the immense concessions which they have won but not yet exploited," wrote Abdel Razzak Hashemi, a former Iraqi ambassador to Paris. "The numerous advantages which French companies enjoy on the Iraqi market could also be halted."
Baghdad followed through on the threat in July 2001, announcing that French firms would no longer be given preferential treatment in oil-development deals, citing Paris' support for the "smart sanctions" program then being pushed by the Bush administration.
At the annual Baghdad international trade fair in November, the Iraqi Information Ministry reported that Saddam himself had ordered domestic buyers to "give priority" to German companies as a reward for "the firm positive stand of Germany in rejecting the launching of a military attack against Iraq by the U.S."
Some 101 German companies were represented at the Baghdad exposition, including companies offering air-conditioning equipment, energy and transportation services, cosmetics, textiles and other products.
Direct two-way trade between Germany and Iraq amounts to about $350 million annually, while another $1 billion is sold via third countries, according to Iraqi authorities.
All Western countries — including the United States — have long involved economic ties to Saddam's regime. American firms were among the many suppliers of dual-use equipment and support that built up Iraq's conventional and unconventional military arsenals in the 1970s and 1980s.
Even now, despite the extreme hostility between Washington and Baghdad, the United States buys nearly 5 percent of Iraq's oil exports under the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program.
German firms were particularly active in striking deals with Iraq. Their relationships with Saddam's regime date back to the 1970s.
The German daily Tageszeitung reported recently that it had seen portions of Iraq's 12,000-page arms declaration to U.N. weapons inspectors in December showing that German firms were the market leaders in supplying Iraq, even in the decade after the Gulf war.
The paper reported that 80 German firms were named as suppliers in the Iraqi declaration.
Even before the latest escalation of tensions, U.N. weapons inspectors had filed numerous reports of German firms complicit in aiding Iraq's covert programs in weapons of mass destruction.
One April 2000 U.N. "activity memo" regarding the German firm Water Engineering Trading, found that between 1984 and late 1988 the company had, among other violations:
• Sold, without license, $10 million worth of machinery and equipment, and tons of chemicals.
•Supplied parts of the Samarra chemical weapons complex (identified by U.S. intelligence as Iraq's prime production site for mustard gas and nerve agents).
•Supplied machine tools for converting conventional 122 mm artillery shells and rocket-propelled grenades into chemical munitions, exported as cooling containers for powdered milk.
•After March 1987, sold most of the components for the $20 million Falluja chemical weapons plant to Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization.
French firms show up far less frequently among the companies cited by the U.N. inspectors, although Iraq did acquire French Mirage jet fighters and French-made Exocet missiles during the 1980s.
It was a French firm that won the contract to help build Iraq's nuclear power plant at Osirak, which was bombed by Israeli jets in 1981 shortly before it was to come on line.
Mr. Hamza, the former Iraqi nuclear engineer, recalled in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece that many of the French projects in Iraq enjoyed huge profit markups.
Saddam's regime paid $200 million for a small French research reactor in the mid-1970s that had a then-market price of about $50 million, Mr. Hamza recalled.
"With these kinds of deals, is it any surprise that the French are so desperate to save Saddam's regime?" he asked.
But it is French oil interests in Iraq that have attracted the most attention as the debate over war intensifies.
Iraq has the world's second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia's, and many of its most promising fields have been largely unexplored since the economic freeze imposed after the Gulf war.
Russia and France have the largest contracts, while the major U.S. energy giants, including ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil, have been largely shut out.
Iraqi exile groups, including the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), have only increased speculation by issuing conflicting signals about the future of the energy concessions negotiated by Saddam.
"American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," INC Chairman Ahmed Chalabi said last year.
But a senior leader of one of Iraq's two Kurdish opposition groups said the future of Iraq's oil wealth remains an exceedingly sensitive subject in the discussions with U.S. officials about a post-Saddam Iraq.
"We know there are countries such as France and Russia with very important issues, but our first priority will be to ensure that our country's oil wealth is used to benefit Iraqis," the Kurdish official said.
The Coalition for International Justice, a Washington-based human rights group, released an extensive study of foreign economic interests in Iraq on the brink of a likely new war.
French, Russian and Chinese oil concessions, with an estimated top value of $38 billion, are the biggest interests in play.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, in a phone call yesterday, reportedly agreed they continue to oppose military action while U.N. weapons inspections proceed, a day after Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin agreed on the need to continue the inspections process.
Copyright © 2003 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Return to the article



GERMANY SOLD WMD MATERIALS AFTER THE 91 GULF WAR

[Kay Soze]

Iraqi scientist says materials for nuclear bombs in hand
Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Published 9/16/2002

LONDON — Iraq is already using copies of pirated German equipment to process nuclear material for an atomic weapons program, according to a former Iraqi nuclear scientist who testified before the U.S. Senate this summer.
Khidir Hamza, who led a section of the Iraqi nuclear bomb program before his defection in 1994, said the devices may not be discovered even if U.N. inspectors are allowed to return to Iraq.
"The beauty of the present system is that the units are each very small, and in the four years since the inspectors left, they will have been concealed underground or in basements or buildings that outwardly seem normal," he said.
Mr. Hamza was one of the first witnesses at Senate hearings on Iraq in July. But in a series of interviews over the past several weeks, he painted a much more alarming picture than was laid out before the Senate or in a widely discussed report released last week by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
That study concluded that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime could make an atomic bomb within months if it succeeded in acquiring the necessary nuclear fuel from an outside source.
But Mr. Hamza said Iraq already has, and is processing some 1.3 tons of low-enriched material bought many years ago from Brazil.
He maintained that Iraq has also been processing many tons of its own yellow-cake uranium, which has been extracted from large supplies of phosphates in the north.
U.N. inspectors were shown 162 tons of the material before their expulsion in 1998, but Mr. Hamza said there are several other sites that can be used.
"The amount of uranium it already has — conservatively estimated in a German intelligence report at 10 tons of natural uranium and 1.3 tons of low-enriched uranium — is enough for three nuclear weapons," Mr. Hamza said.
Before their expulsion, the inspectors dismantled an illegally imported German centrifuge that had been used in a program that progressively refines natural or low-enriched uranium until it becomes suitable for weapons.
But Mr. Hamza, who was the science adviser to the Atomic Energy Establishment and later helped start and direct Iraq's nuclear weapons program, said by then the "cat was out the bag."
He said he suspects the Iraqis have taken advantage of the four years since the inspectors' expulsion to make numerous copies of the original smuggled centrifuge and are busily refining uranium into the necessary material for nuclear bombs.
"It's a relatively simple process once you have the plans and some experience operating one or two centrifuges," he said.
The key was provided, he said, when German Karl Schaab showed the Iraqis how to build and operate a centrifuge in 1989, and later helped them build a second.
"Our engineers videoed as it was put up, so they could build identical ones. Then he also provided 130 classified documents and charts detailing every aspect of the construction.
"When the inspectors took away the original centrifuge, we already had the know-how. I believe there are probably hundreds of copies today," said Mr. Hamza, who now lives in the United States.
"They are easy to hide — undetectable from satellites if built within or under other buildings."
The problem for Iraq, he says, is simply to keep reprocessing the material so that after each run it gets more and more enriched, until it reaches the 90 percent level needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The process can be completed more quickly if one begins with low-enriched uranium — which is at 3 percent to 4 percent — rather than only natural uranium, which is at about 0.7 percent.
A really efficient weapons program requires thousands of such centrifuges, as each has a very small output of enriched uranium, Mr. Hamzi said.
Further evidence that such a program is in place came this month when the United States announced the interception of a shipment to Iraq of highly refined aluminum tubes suitable for making centrifuges.
"The whole centrifuge method of getting to a bomb is much easier for Iraq than, for example, it was for Pakistan, which took 17 years in going the same route," Mr. Hamza said. "They had to get it in bits and pieces, whereas we got a whole centrifuge and all the plans."
Experts suggest the method being used by Iraq can take from four to seven years, depending on the number of centrifuges. Mr. Hamza said Iraq would have begun work in earnest as the inspectors left in 1998.
"This means, unless he's stopped soon, Saddam will have set up a whole nuclear bomb industry, not just have made a couple of bombs," he said.
Iraq has repeatedly denied having such a program.
"It's not that Iraq has no material," said Foreign Minister Naji Sabri in a televised interview last week. "From the beginning of 1991 the government had a decision to leave the weapons-of-mass-destruction club. So we presented all we had to UNSCOM [the U.N. weapons inspectors]. There is nothing."
Mr. Hamza, who was working on Saddam's weapons program when Israeli jets bombed the French-supplied 40-megawatt Osirak research reactor in 1981, confirmed long-held suspicions that the facility was to have been used to develop nuclear weapons material.
Scientists had planned not to divert the existing French-supplied highly enriched nuclear fuel — enough for one bomb — but rather blanket the reactor with natural or depleted uranium, which would produce plutonium. That would have made it possible to continue producing, eventually allowing repeated bomb production.
"From the moment Osirak was hit we knew we had to try another method to get the bomb, and the centrifuge approach is the easiest to conceal," Mr. Hamza said.

[majordivit]

Germany's "anti-war" foreign minister Joschka Fischer supported murdering thousands of Serbs
(He spoke glibly of "peace" in Kosovo at the height of Operation Allied Nazi Force in April 1999)

The German Nazi Joschka Fischer makes "peace" with the Arab Hitler Yasser Arafat

[Kay Soze]

"But the opposition Christian Democratic Union criticized the defense minister for his position on assistance to U.S. troops.

Friedbert Pflueger, the CDU foreign policy spokesman, described the move as "dangerous and unwise."

"I can't imagine that a German defense minister would deny emergency help for attacked American soldiers in Iraq only kilometers from where the Fuchs are stationed," Pflueger said."


Whats to proest if they are willing to help wonded US Soldiers???

[americanbychoice]

Apart from the cash to rebuild the country the largest portions of dollars spent was on opening our markets, setting the dollar at an artificial high of 4.20 marks
and bringing investment into the country in order to export their goods. Add to that our military and civilian investment. Of course those costs are conveniently forgotten. Bexause of that situation American companies were created in Germany to employ Germans.
These days are gone now. There is almost no foreign investment into the country anymore. The cost of doing business there has risen to such heights that in the Future, the former Eastern Block countries will get the foreign investment.
That is also another reason Schroeder and Chirac collaborated since they know that their own economies are beyond help and only an expanded EU will get those future Tax dollars to aid their causes. The French and Germans aren't stupid they are calculating. That is another reason to go against the U.S. However, that is a dangerous game and it will probably backfire.

[texastoo]

I have enjoyed reading your responses to this article. I was unaware of what has happened in Germany through the years. Your posts makes sense.

Thanks,
Texastoo

[Beck_isright]

One thing. Germany and France require the US for trade. We do not require either or any nation. Granted, in the short term we would suffer greatly. It would destroy any nation we cut trade off with. Any nation we sanction. So playing with fire can and will get you burned. Hopefully Canada and Mehico are paying attention, but I doubt it. We've always had the capacity and will to sustain our economy without other nations. The "world economy" could never survive without us. Arrogance? You betcha. The UN and socialists think it is within their world government fantasy land to prevent the our government from protecting ourselves. WRONGO.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Would rather buy made in Kraut or Frog however, than made in ChopSuey. Kraut and Frog don't have nukes pointed at us funded by undercutting our labor 10 to 1.

[Kay Soze]

Whats 1991 have to do with the German arming Iraq stance????

"The pattern they are displaying now is similar to 1990-91. Back then France tried doggedly to prevent the use of force against Iraq, and even a few days before the advent of Operation Desert Storm introduced a last-ditch diplomatic proposal endorsed by Germany and Belgium, among others (such as the PLO and Libya)." Yes even AFTER HAVING attacked Kuwait Germany still was against stopping Saddam! They sided with Lybia and the PLO!

[Calvin Locke]

I heard a radio listener commenting about Germany's reluctance:

"The destruction and mayhem in Iraq won't be on the scale that Germany prefers, so they're opting out."

[Kay Soze]

Whats 1991 have to do with the German arming Iraq stance????

"The pattern they are displaying now is similar to 1990-91. Back then France tried doggedly to prevent the use of force against Iraq, and even a few days before the advent of Operation Desert Storm introduced a last-ditch diplomatic proposal endorsed by Germany and Belgium, among others (such as the PLO and Libya)." -http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/robbins/robbins021103.asp

Yes even AFTER HAVING attacked Kuwait- Germany still was against stopping Saddam!

They sided with Lybia and the PLO!

[thinktwice]

Anyone thought of checking inventory in NATO stores in Germany?

In a phone call last week, I was asked to buy and send a canteen belt pouch for a U.S. soldier in Germany -- they were out of them in his region.

[Calpernia]

That is it! I now have the major urge to organize something to get that WTC contract revoked from Libeskind's firm, based in Berlin.

Nothing against Libeskind himeself; but do we want a German based company rebuilding our towers enlight of all this???

[LaGrone]

My argument is not with you, if you are not in favor of what Schroeder and the present German Government are doing at the UN.

Do you not realize however that by persuading other countries to oppose us at the UN , instead of just voting no to the appropriate resolutions, Germany is in effect taking Saddam's side over the United States?

That is why President Bush wants the vote in the UN, to get every country on the record. His gamble is the certainty that all the chemical stockpiles and biological stockpiles exist in Iraq. Then the French, Russians and possibly the Germans will be exposed for selling materials which were banned and assisted Hussein in his building these weapons.

I don't believe the United States did anything to deserve this treatment by France and Germany. Both countries have made this personal. They hate Bush, and allowed this hate to cloud their judgement IMHO.

[Centurion2000]

So, the next logical question is, will Germany refuse landing rights to U.S. Medevac flights into Ramstein AFB with U.S. WMD casualties on board?

If they do that then send a few B-2's for some passes over German cities on the way back .... nuke the bastards.

[Beck_isright]

"Would rather buy made in Kraut or Frog however, than made in ChopSuey. Kraut and Frog don't have nukes pointed at us funded by undercutting our labor 10 to 1."

You are correct about nukes. However they are actively supplying chemical weapons materials to our enemies so they can kill thousands of us at a time. The ChiComs are a huge problem. However we can address the nazis, er Germans now. They will fold like a cheap tent and elect a government more favorable to us. The ChiComs will only be dealt with through open or subversive warfare.

[Beck_isright]

" If they do that then send a few B-2's for some passes over German cities on the way back .... nuke the bastards."

That is about 50 years past due and even the Ruskies would endorse that.

[americanbychoice]

He is a New York Architect and an american citizen. The reason he was residing in Berlin is because he designed and build the Jewish Memorial there.

[americanbychoice]

There is a difference between Germans and Americans. While many Americans would die for their country, most Germans would whine for theirs.