Attorneys for more than 3,000 veterans of the first Gulf War planned to announce in New York City today (Tuesday, Aug. 19) a major class action lawsuit against more than 40 multi-national banks and companies they say supplied Saddam Hussein with money and deadly supplies in building a chemical warfare machine before 1991.
As the Niagara Falls Reporter went to press, Houston lawyer Gary Pitts and New York lawyer Kenneth McCallion were preparing a lawsuit against 11 firms and 33 banks subject to New York jurisdiction. These businesses -- the plaintiff lawyers contend -- are revealed in recent written Iraqi disclosures to United Nations weapons inspectors as being part of a procurement network for Saddam's chemical weapons arsenal in Gulf War I.
The lawsuit stems from Gulf War I a dozen years ago -- not the second Gulf War with Iraq which ended in May of this year. But the list of accused companies and banks was drawn from a 12,000-page weapons declaration that Iraq delivered to the United Nations last December in hopes of staving off American invasion. The previous chemical weaponry alluded to in those documents is thought to be one of the Bush administration's motivations for initiating the second Gulf War in its less-than-successful search for Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
More than 100,000 veterans of the first Gulf War have complained of mystery symptoms and chronic illnesses often referred to as Gulf War Syndrome. Published medical research in recent years has linked multi-symptom neurological sicknesses -- and an above-average number of birth defects in children born to first Gulf War vets -- with exposures to chemical warfare agents.
Two of the suspect firms, now defunct, were based in the United States -- Alcolac International of Maryland, and the Al Haddad trading company in Tennessee. Many of the companies are large European chemical manufacturers, the bulk of them in Germany.
Under the cease-fire agreement in 1991, Iraq promised to provide documents listing the suppliers and funders of its program to develop chemical, nuclear and biological weapons. The UN has refused to make the list of firms and banks public, as has the Bush administration's State Department and American intelligence community, but Pitts obtained the list from former UN investigator Scott Ritter, who obtained the documents from former Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz.
Pitts said he shared the list of firms and chemical supplies with the FBI, which "has not hindered our use of the documents in any way regarding the procurement network for Iraq's chemical weapons complex." The Houston attorney said Saddam Hussein agreed to turn over the lists in late 2002 as "part of his vain attempts to deflect growing American and international determination to oust his regime. He wanted to show that companies in the West were involved, and thus try to deflect attention from himself."
Saddam is still a fugitive from American forces searching for him in Iraq.
Pitts has explained the impending lawsuit this way: "In the 1991 war, international coalition forces destroyed as much of Saddam's chemical weapons as they could find. During the necessary destruction, widespread low-level exposures of our troops occurred."
Pitts said that "the defendant companies made large profits by helping Saddam Hussein" build sarin nerve gas and mustard gas factories, supplying him with production equipment, and selling him "the bulk precursors used to make his chemical weapons -- to which our clients were exposed."
Pitts said the exposure "came from the chemical fallout, with prevailing winds, from bombing Saddam's chemical weapons production and storage facilities during the air war, and from the explosion of hundreds of captured and uninventoried Iraqi ammunition dumps in southeast Iraq during the brief time that coalition troops were in that area upon the liberation of Kuwait."
Pitts and McCallion are claiming that "it was foreseeable to the defendants that people would be hurt when they supplied Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction, at the same time that he was known to be an international outlaw concerning weapons of mass destruction."
Pitts is the attorney who in the 1990s tried to put ailing veterans of the first Gulf War in line to receive part of the $1.6 billion in Iraqi assets that were frozen in American banks in August of 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Justice Department opened a registration of potential claims against those funds and several American businesses -- including several Big Tobacco firms -- got in line along with the veterans. But on March 20, 2003, President George W. Bush signed an executive order designating those funds to be used for the rebuilding of Iraq.
Pitts said the new lawsuit -- which will be announced today on the steps of a federal courthouse in Brooklyn -- "is not only to seek just compensation for the poisoned veterans and their birth-defected children. It is to deter companies from engaging in this kind of behavior in the future. The defendant companies and banks have not yet had any negative consequences for helping Saddam Hussein build his chemical weapons of mass destruction. They have only received profit."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | August 19 2003 |