In 1997, I had come upon a 1991 report of the Army War College at Carlyle, Pa., that had come to completely different conclusions. Its author, Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, had headed a team that pulled together all the specialists of the US intelligence agencies to study the Iran/Iraq war, to study how Iraq had defeated a country three times its size. The report touched on the Halabja deaths, saying that “hundreds” of civilians had died, with indications they were killed by a cyanide gas known to be used by the Iranian army, not possessed by Iraq. It said nothing about the “disappearance” of 10,000 Iraqi Kurds. Pelletiere had been the CIA’s senior analyst in covering the eight-year Iran/Iraq war. When I tracked him down a year ago, living in retirement near the War College, he insisted nothing had happened in the dozen years since to change his mind. There was no genocide, he told me, and said the story about the 100,000 deaths was a hoax, a non-event, propagated by Human Rights Watch. He said he had discussed his differences with Joost Hilterman, arguing the “victims” had never been found, nor had any mass graves been located.
I called Hiltermann at HRW for a discussion of his differences with Pelletiere, which led to an exchange of e-mails over a period of weeks. Here is the last contact I had with him, a long e-mail from me asking questions, and his lengthy response. I’ve merged the two letters so they can be read seamlessly. There are of course no follow-up questions in this exchange, but I think the exchange speaks for itself, and why I could easily conclude that Human Rights Watch had made an enormous blunder in propagating the genocide story and now will say anything to insist it was right all along. Unfortunately, President Bush has not yet been advised by his team that the U.S. intelligence agencies had the story correctly in the first place, as it suits the interest of the warhawks at the Pentagon to have the President believe Saddam is not just a dictator, but a Hitler.
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