The USA's big media institutions did little to illuminate how Washington and business interests combined to strengthen and arm Saddam Hussein during many of his worst crimes. "In the 1980s and afterward, the United States underwrote 24 American corporations so they could sell to Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction, which he used against Iran, at that time the prime Middle Eastern enemy of the United States," writes Ben Bagdikian, a former assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, in his book The New Media Monopoly. "Hussein used U.S.-supplied poison gas" against Iranians and Kurds "while the United States looked the other way."
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--Congressional investigations after the Gulf War revealed that the Commerce Department had licensed sales of biological agents, including anthrax, and insecticides, which could be used in chemical weapons, to Iraq.
When Iraq used chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1987, there was anger in Congress and the White House. But a memo in 1988 from Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy stated that "The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is … important to our long-term political and economic objectives."
"Dammit Jim!! I'm a guitarist not a roadie...so haul my gear"
