It would seem the only case the Iraqis and the United States have against Saddam Hussein, or the man they claim is Saddam Hussein, is the alleged mass extermination of the Kurds in the 1980s. However, in the case of the Halabja massacre, as I wrote on September 20, 2003 (Colin Powell in Iraq: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja), it appears Saddam is innocent of gassing Kurds and his innocence was proclaimed by none other than the State Department. Stephen C. Pelletiere stated in early 2003: "We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair."

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