Obama’s billionaire patron Nadhmi Auchi was sued for providing chemical weapons used in Halabja Massacre, Kurdish genocide

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By Alan Jones and Mary Fanning | August 10, 2018

Nadhmi Auchi, the Iraqi-born billionaire, is a defendant in a $4 billion lawsuit filed in Iraq on behalf of survivors of the Saddam Hussein regime’s 1988 chemical weapons attack in Halabja, Iraqi Kurdistan.

The complaint alleges that Auchi is a co-conspirator in the March 16, 1988 chemical attack, also known as the Halabja Massacre or Bloody Friday, that killed over 5,000 civilians and injured more than 10,000 Kurds.

The Halabja Massacre “was and remains the largest poison gas/chemical weapon attack launched against civilians since World War II“ according to the complaint.

The Halabja Massacre was part of a “highly organized, genocidal campaign called Anfal…during which the Saddam Regime murdered as many as 180,000 Kurdish civilians, destroyed approximately 4,000 Kurdish villages, and depopulated areas of the Kurdish Region of Iraq” says the complaint.

According to Dr. John A. Shaw, the former head of the U.S. Department of Defense Office of International Technology Security, “Auchi had been Saddam Hussein’s senior arms dealer and had morphed into his principal international financial bagman,” the complaint alleges.

The complaint names Nadhmi Shakir Auchi (alias Nadhmi Shakir Awji), Auchi’s financial holding company General Mediterranean Holding, and Kredietbank Luxembourg (successor to Banque Continentale du Luxembourg) among the defendants.

The complaint alleges that Auchi set up Saddam Hussein’s secret financial network:

In 1971, Saddam Hussein transferred Nadhmi Auchi from his post as Director of Planning and Development of the Iraqi Oil Ministry, to Luxembourg. Saddam bankrolled Auchi to develop various businesses, with Hussein as his silent partner…

…Saddam Hussein sent Nadhmi Auchi to Luxembourg to secretly form the financial network required for Saddam Regime black ops in Europe, including financing purchases of weapons and advanced technologies. In 1979 Nadhmi established a financial holding company named General Mediterranean Holding (”GMH”) in Luxembourg City.

GMH was secretly funded by Saddam Hussein (concealing his control and ownership). Auchi and GMH formed Banque Continentale du Luxembourg in 1979.

The complaint alleges that Saddam Hussein, Nadhmi Auchi, Iraqi “Superweapons Czar” Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi, and others participated in the chemical weapons genocide conspiracy. Defendants include not only financier Auchi and members of the Saddam Hussein regime, but also German companies and French and Dutch companies that those German companies recruited to get around German export controls. The complaint also names individuals associated with those companies.

According to the complaint (emphasis added):

The senior management and boards of directors or each of these conspirators, knew of and approved participation in the Conspiracy, including the following defendants: Dr. Günther Saßmannshausen; Friedel Neuber; Salih Majid; Friedrich Bohling; Nizar al-Kadhi; Tarek al-Ani; Reinhold O. Krauskopf; Peter Leifer; Otto Holzer; Klaus-Joachim Fraenzel; Helmut Maier; Berthold Heberger; Roger Kiss; Hans Melchers ; Frans van Anraat; Nadhmi Auchi ; Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti; Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti; Dr. Imad Husayn Abdullah al-Ani; and Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi.

The complaint against Auchi and the other alleged co-conspirators lists numerous claims including conspiracy to commit genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, and ethnic cleansing.

Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi is a “dual Iraqi/German national,” the complaint alleges. He maintained a home in Hamburg and married a German woman according to the Bahrain News Agency.

Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi was also named in U.S. Congressional records as a co-conspirator with Hamid Dhia Jafar, Chairman of Crescent Petroleum and co-owner of ports and container management company Gulftainer, in a scheme known as “Oil-For-Superweapons.” In that scheme, also known as “Put a Tyrant in Your Tank,” Hamid Dhia Jafar and Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi plotted to sell Iraqi oil to fund Saddam Hussein’s and his brother Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar is considered the father of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program and was deeply involved in managing Iraq’s chemical weapons program according to released CIA documents.

In 2014, the Obama administration facilitated and approved a deal that awarded Gulftainer a 35-year cargo container terminal lease at  Florida’s Port Canaveral. Port Canaveral is a critical infrastructure port vital to U.S Navy, U.S. Air Force, and NASA operations.

Gulftainer is in the process of securing control of Delaware’s entire Port of Wilmington under a 50-year lease.

 

Why did Barack Obama attempt to hide his associations with Nadhmi Auchi?

Nadhmi Auchi is connected to former President Barack Obama through their mutual long-term association with Syrian-American (and now convicted felon) Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

Robert Novak reported on Senator Obama’s purchase in 2005 of a Chicago mansion in a March 3, 2008 Washington Post Op-Ed piece called Obama and the Fixer.

Federal prosecutors recently revealed that Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi billionaire who lives in London, wired $3.5 million to the financially strapped Rezko in Chicago less than a month before the Obama-Rezko purchases. James Bone, an investigative reporter for the Times of London, wrote last Tuesday that “the money transfer raises the question of whether funds” from Auchi “helped” Obama buy his house.

Novak further wrote in the Washington Post that “Obama has conceded that his simultaneous home purchase with Rezko was a “boneheaded” mistake.”

In an April 2008 story titled “Obama Memory Lapse?” ABC News reported:

The testimony of the federal government’s star witness in the trial of indicted political fixer Tony Rezko appears to contradict Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s past statements that he does not recall meeting Iraqi-born billionaire, Nadhmi Auchi.

Obama’s name resurfaced this week after Chicago businessman Stuart Levine testified that Obama and his wife Michelle attended an April 2004 reception in honor of Auchi at Rezko’s house.

Levine pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired with Rezko to defraud the state of millions of dollars in kickback schemes.

The Obama campaign has maintained that Obama had no recollection of meeting Auchi “at any time or occasion,” but today a Chicago Sun Times columnist reports that a source claims Obama had not only attended the April 2004 event but also “made a few toasts.”

Michael Sneed wrote at “The Chicago Sun-Times” in April 2008:

A Pinocchio problem? To fib . . . or is it a faulty memory?

• • To wit: Dem presidential contender Barack Obama’s handlers may be telling the press Obama has NO “recollection” of a 2004 party at influence peddler Tony Rezko’s Wilmette house, but a top Sneed source claims Obama not only gave Rezko’s guest of honor, Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, a big welcome . . . but he made a few toasts!

“The Washington Post” “Fact Checker” compiled a list of some of President Obama’s lies in an article called “Obama’s biggest whoppers.”

“Auchi is considered an undesirable alien by the U.S. State Department and is barred from entering the United States” NBC 5 Chicago reported.

Barack Obama is also connected to Nadhmi Auchi through Chicago politician Alexi Giannoulias, the Illinois State Treasurer who ran for U.S. Senate in 2010. Giannoulias is President Obama’s “basketball buddy” according to the Washington Post. President Obama endorsed Giannoulias in a television campaign advertisement despite the fact that the Giannoulias family’s Broadway Bank loaned $22.7 million to Auchi.

“Alexi’s my friend…I know his character. You can trust him” President Obama said in a Giannoulias campaign ad, NBC 5 Chicago reported.

Chicago’s ABC 7 Eyewitness News reported in August 2010:

Members of the Illinois Republican Party are criticizing Democratic Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias over a loan issued by his family’s bank…

…Republicans accused the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate of hiding information about the deal between the Giannoulias family-owned bank and convicted political schemer Tony Rezko.

…Four months after Giannoulias’ September 2005 resignation from the Broadway Bank, his older brother, Demetrius, reportedly signed off on the loan to a company controlled by British Iraqi businessman Nadhmi Auchi. Auchi’s silent partner in the deal was Tony Rezko, who, two years later, would be convicted on federal corruption charges.

The Guardian reported on November 14, 2003:

Mr Auchi, 65, was given a 15-month suspended sentence and a fine of €2m (£1.39m) on Wednesday at the end of the marathon corruption trial of former executives of the French oil company Elf.

He was convicted – in what was France’s biggest postwar corruption scandal – of accepting illegal commissions on the purchase of a Spanish oil refinery in the early 1990s on Elf’s behalf and then handing back some of the money to the company’s senior directors.

Mr Auchi was originally arrested in London in April on a French extradition warrant issued two years ago.

Human Events reported on March 3, 2008:

A mysterious fugitive from Iraqi justice named Aiham Alsammarae, who is also a Chicago resident, is the focus of a politically fraught episode in the association between accused political fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who goes on federal trial today in Chicago for graft, and Senator Barack Obama, the most spectacular Illinois presidential candidate in half a century…

…When asked why an American citizen with a dual Iraqi citizenship, who had served as the Iraqi Minister of Electricity from 2003 to 2005, after being convicted in an Iraqi court was living openly in Chicago in 2008 rather than in Abu Ghraib, the official said, “That’s what we want to know. Armed men broke him out of jail in the Green Zone. He escaped without his U.S. passport to Amman, Jordan, where he hid in the U.S. Embassy, and then to Turkey, where he called us up and bragged he had pizza and a cold beer in his hotel room. We’ve asked the FBI to help us. They sent us to Interpol. We filed a report. And nothing. It’s been a year. We want him back”…

…The second man with much to lose regarding what Mr. Alsammarae knows is the mysterious and genuinely powerful Nahdmi Auchi of London, a British citizen who, born in Iraq in 1937, has been for decades closely linked with the Baathists. In 2005, Mr. Auchi was reported to have involved his company in the Chamchamal electrical generating plant deal that was used as a major ploy for the plundering of the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity. As recently as this month, Mr. Auchi’s representative denied that Mr. Auchi’s company, General Mediterranean Holding, invested in the Rezko-Alsammarae deal for Chamchamal in 2004-2005, a denial that does not explain the well-sourced 2005 published reports of the linkage.

Iraqi government officials in Baghdad speak bluntly of Mr. Auchi as a “Saddam guy,” and as a member of the Baathist gang who have beggared Iraq for 50 years, a gang that

now, exiled to Damascus, Syria, and headed by men wanted for war crimes in Iraq, aims to continue plundering Iraq by using their stolen fortune to corrupt other regions and perhaps someday to return to Baghdad.

According to UPI:

Banque Paribas, headquartered in Paris, with a significant portion of shares owned by Saddam’s cousin Nadhmi Auchi, moved money for the Al-Mahdi network in the 1980s and was the bank chosen to handle the Iraqi oil-for-food payments…The totals from skimmed oil revenues and contract kickbacks from the late 1970s through the oil-for-food 90s have been estimated by U.S. officials to reach $30 or $40 billion.

Auchi helped the Saddam regime buy mustard gas chemical precursors, complaint alleges

The Halabja attack was carried out with nerve agents sarin and tabun as well as sulfur mustard gas, according to the complaint.

The complaint alleges:

By issuing Letters of Credit facilitating the shipments of Van Anraat’s TDG to SEPP, Banque Continentale du Luxembourg and its manager Nadhmi Auchi and controlling shareholder, knowingly, intentionally and purposefully joined the Conspiracy and provided the mustard gas that was used by their Co-Conspirator, the Saddam Regime, in the genocidal attacks on the citizens of Halabja and other Kurdish towns.

TDG is thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor.

SEPP is the Iraqi State Establishment for Pesticide Production that was “tasked with producing chemical weapons for the Saddam Regime military forces” according to the complaint.

The complaint also alleges:

Auchi directed Banque Continentale du Luxembourg to assist the Saddam Regime in the procurement of chemical precursors relating to the Iraqi chemical weapons program… Auchi knew that the shipments to SEPP were unlawful and that documentation had been forged to conceal the true nature of the materials from law enforcement.

Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi, the “Seven of Diamonds,” was also named a co-conspirator in Halabja chemical weapons genocide; Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi is also Gulftainer co-owner Hamid Jafar’s “Oil-For-Superweapons” co-conspirator investigated by U.S. Congress and U.S. Treasury Department; Gulftainer was awarded leases to Port Canaveral and Port of Wilmington

Baghdad-born nuclear physicist Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar and Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi were two of “Hussein Kamel’s [Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law] closest scientific collaborators, namely the three “deputy ministers” of industry and military industrialization,” according to Vienna-based Eurozine.

Eurozine noted:

Al-Sa’adi “is considered the “father” of the Iraqi chemical weapons  programme and he simultaneously played a predominant role in the ballistic sector and the supply networks.  

The third deputy minister, Jaafar Dhia Jaafar (known under the name Abou Timmen), headed the most sensitive and secret part of military industrialization, which is the nuclear programme. Accordingly, he remains the most mysterious out of the three deputy ministers, since his duties required total discretion.

In 2003 NBC News reported that Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi made the chemical weapons that Saddam’s military forces unleashed on the Kurds during the Halabja genocide:

According to U.S. intelligence, Gen. Amir Al-Saadi is the Iraqi official who served as Baghdad’s superweapons czar prior to the Gulf War — and the man who created the chemical weapons that killed thousands of Kurds in 1988 and extended the range of Scud missiles that killed dozens of Americans, Saudis and Israelis in nighttime raids during the 1991 war.

Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar and Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi were two of “Hussein Kamel’s [Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law] closest scientific collaborators, namely the three “deputy ministers” of industry and military industrialization,” according to Vienna-based Eurozine.

Dr. Jafar was not only the mastermind responsible for Iraq’s nuclear weapons programs. Dr. Jafar also oversaw technology transfer and procurement operations for Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear WMD programs, according to released CIA documents.

The Pentagon placed Dr. Jafar on US CENTCOM’s secret Operation Iraqi Freedom “Blacklist,” designating him an enemy of the United States and a legitimate military target wanted for capture or kill.

Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar also managed the construction of Iraqi electric power plants through Uruk Power, a company set up by Hamid Jafar and Dr. Jafar as an affiliate of Crescent Petroleum and Gulftainer.

Hamid Dhia Jafar and Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi

The U.S. Treasury Department and three Congressional committees (Banking, Foreign Affairs, and Ways and Means) investigated the “Oil-For-Superweapons” scheme hatched by Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi and Hamid Dhia Jafar to determine if Crescent Petroleum was a Saddam Hussein front company.

A letter from Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi to Hamid Dhia Jafar and Crescent Petroleum authorizing the “Oil-For-Superweapons” operation was entered into the Congressional record.

Hamid Jafar’s Oil-for Superweapons co-conspirator Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi, was the “Seven of Diamonds” in the Operation Iraqi Freedom “Personality Identification Playing Cards.”

Hamid Dhia Jafar is a founding shareholder of embattled Dubai-based investment firm The Abraaj Group.

The “International New York Time’s” Pakistani partner newspaper, the Express Tribune recently compared The Abraaj Group to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), the shuttered global money laundering operation linked to Marc Rich. Marc Rich had longstanding ties to Saddam Hussein and the U.N. Oil-For-Food scandal CNN reported.

Another of Nadhmi Auchi’s alleged Halabja genocide co-conspirators, Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti (a.k.a. “Chemical Ali”), was the “King of Spades.”

CBS News reported in April 2003:

Believed to be in his fifties, al-Majid [“Chemical Ali”] led a 1988 campaign against rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq in which whole villages were wiped out. An estimated 100,000 Kurds, mostly civilians, were killed…

…In an interview with CBS Radio News, former U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith described al-Majid as ‘almost the Josef Mengele of this operation. It was a deadly experiment to see which of these weapons were the most effective.’ Mengele was a notorious Nazi doctor.

Peter Galbraith “secured the documentary evidence of chemical weapons use against the Kurds during the Anfal campaign for the U.S. Senate” Michael J. Kelly wrote in the Berkeley Journal of International Law in 2013.

“Total annihilation”

A survivor told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2008.

I saw things that I won’t forget for as long as I live. It started with a loud strange noise that sounded like bombs exploding, and a man came running into our house, shouting, ‘Gas! Gas!’…I saw people lying on the ground, vomiting a green-colored liquid, while others became hysterical and began laughing loudly before falling motionless onto the ground…Birds began falling from their nests, then other animals, then humans. It was total annihilation.

“Project Pelican”: Obama administration awards 35-year Port Canaveral container terminal lease to Gulftainer, despite company’s connections to Halabja genocide co-conspirator Lt. General Dr. Amir Al-Sa’adi and Saddam’s nuclear mastermind Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar

In March 2014 Hamid Jafar’s son Badr Jafar visited the Obama White House (according to White House visitor logs). Six weeks later, on June 23, 2014, Gulftainer and Florida’s Port Canaveral simultaneously announced and signed, within in the course of a single day, the secretly-negotiated “Project Pelican” deal.

Under Project Pelican, Gulftainer was awarded a 35-year cargo container terminal lease at Florida’s Port Canaveral, 1000 feet from U.S. Navy Trident nuclear missile submarines and within sight of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

The Obama administration refused a request from Representative Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA) to conduct a Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) National Security Threat Analysis of the Gulftainer deal.

During the early years of the Obama administration, Gulftainer also entered into a joint-venture with Russian state-owned weapons conglomerate ROSTEC.

ROSTEC builds components of the Club-K Container Missile System and exports complete Club-K systems through its wholly-owned subsidiary ROSOBORONEXPORT.

The Trojan Horse Club-K Container Missile System looks identical to a standard intermodal cargo container. Club-K units can be transported undetected aboard ships, trucks, trains, and riverine boats.  Adversaries could smuggle Club-K units through U.S. ports where they have been granted operational access and position them behind U.S. missile defenses.

The Club-K, also referred to as “Pandora’s Box,” can remotely launch up to four GPS-guided Russian Kalibr cruise missiles that can deliver nuclear, electromagnetic pulse (EMP), chemical, biological, or conventional payloads. The Club-K can wipe out an aircraft carrier.

Gulftainer had previously attempted to “take over” the Port of Jacksonville near Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in 2012 with a $250 million offer to become a silent, behind-the-scenes partner, and has reportedly restarted talks with Port of Jacksonville officials.

Gulftainer is in the process of finalizing a 50-year lease at Delaware’s Port of Wilmington after the Obama administration awarded an infrastructure grant to the port. A Treasury Department official who previously oversaw Iran sanctions for the Obama administration approved the Delaware deal without conducting a National Security Threat Analysis.

In a stunning contention that President Trump has no authority over national security, the News Journal of Wilmington, Delaware wrote on June 28, 2018:

Earlier this week, Thomas P. Feddo, deputy assistant secretary of Investment Security for the Department of Treasury informed an attorney representing the state that the [Gulftainer-Port of Wilmington] deal is not covered under the Defense Protection Act. That act gives the president authority to review certain transactions involving foreign entities.

Thomas Feddo’s job was previously held by Airmen Mir, a former two-time president of the youth wing of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), of which Mir’s father is a Founders Committee member. The U.S. Justice Department designated ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism funding trial. Mir joined the Treasury Department in 2009 and was the CFIUS staff chairman during the Gulftainer Port Canaveral and the Uranium One deals that sailed through the Obama administration, bypassing the National Security Threat Analysis requirement.

Lawsuit moving forward at Halabja court with help from U.S. lawyers

“Kurdish lawyers with the aid of an American human rights law firm will present a court case in Halabja on Monday against European companies’ alleged supply and development of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons program” Kurdistan 24 reported on July 22, 2018.

Iraqi Kurdistan-based Nalia Radio and Television (NRT) reported on July 24, 2018:

The first court session was held on Monday (July 23) at the Halabja Primary Court, in the absence of the defendants, and heard claims that have been brought in the last four months.

A judge at Halabja Primary Court, Fariq Hama Salih, said the defendants have not been summoned yet and that formal legal proceedings against them have not yet begun.

“The introduced evidence requires additional review, thus the plea phase of proceedings has not yet begun. The defendants have not been informed of the charges against them and proceedings will not commence until the defendants are informed,” Salih told NRT.

There were WMDs in Iraq

Under a secret program code-named Operation Avarice, the CIA purchased at least 400 chemical weapons rockets from a single broker in Iraq, the New York Times revealed in 2015. “Since May 2004, Coalition forces (CF) have recovered at least 501 pre-1991 Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons-including 448 122-mm al Borak rocket warheads, many of which contain the nerve agent sarin (GB)” a heavily-redacted 2006 U.S. Army report stated.

John Hinderaker wrote at Powerline:

These rockets were not, it appears, dispersed randomly in dumps and forgotten storage depots. One individual was able to produce more than 400 of them, suggesting that they most likely were stored and inventoried by the Baathist regime. If that is the case, the conventional belief that the world’s intelligence agencies were wrong, and Iraq did not possess significant stockpiles of WMDs prior to the 2003 war, is incorrect. One shudders to think what a terrorist group could accomplish with 400 sarin-equipped rockets.

According to a 2014 New York Times report:

Congress, too, was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. “‘Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.

In a secret 2007 to 2008 U.S. military project called “Operation McCall” the U.S. military moved 550 metric tons of yellowcake natural uranium discovered in 2003 at Iraq’s Tuwaitha nuclear WMD site to the Cameco company in Ontario, Canada, Reuters, CBS News, and the Associated Press reported. Operation McCall shipping and security costs alone reached $70 million.

Dr. Jafar’s secret EMIS program operated three calutrons, essentially giant magnets, producing weapons-grade 95% highly-enriched uranium at Tuwaitha and other Iraqi sites.

Dr. Jafar created Iraq’s miniaturized nuclear weapon “Beach Ball.

FOR FURTHER READING: “THE PERFECT STORM”

That Nadhmi Auchi has a connection to Barack Obama and is being sued as an alleged co-conspirator in a chemical weapons genocide alongside the Iraqi general who produced the chemical weapons, is shocking. The fact that the Iraqi general was a co-conspirator with Hamid Jafar in a scheme to fund WMD production and that President Obama allowed Hamid’s ports company Gulftainer to operate at strategic US ports, without a CFIUS National Security Threat Analysis, is even worse.

Handing over control of strategic U.S. ports to Iraqi operatives connected to WMD and genocide is far more than “a boneheaded mistake” — it is Saddam’s revenge.

FOR FURTHER READING:

“SADDAM’S REVENGE: ASH CARTER, NLOS-LS, RUSSIA’S CLUB-K, IRAN, KGL, AND GULFTAINER AND HOW THEY CONVERGE TO PUT AMERICA IN MORTAL DANGER”

COPYRIGHT 2018 MARY FANNING and ALAN JONES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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