Heyndrickx

=<div>=<div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-three/</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The efforts of BMS&K in support of Savimbi are one of the few places where some light has been shed, again thanks to Spy magazine and a now forgotten article on a now forgotten incident, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=0OSXeiTCfLAC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA72#v=onepage&q&f=false" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); outline: none;">“Fooled on the Hill: How some die-hard Cold Warriors and a Belgian con artist tried to change U.S. policy in Africa”</a>, by David Aronson and David Kamp. I already wrote about this astonishing moment at great length in <a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/angola-namibia-south-africa-and-a-tea-party-leader/" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); outline: none;">“Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and a Tea Party Leader”</a>, but I return to it briefly here.In December 1988, Angola’s neighbor, Namibia, was to gain its independence after long being a vassal state of South Africa, with its policy of segregation imposed on Namibia as well. This was done in conjunction with a peace agreement, where Cuba and South Africa agreed to withdraw their own military forces from Angola, forces which had kept that country’s civil war going. There was a problem, however: Namibia’s dominant party, SWAPO, was allies with the Soviet government. Jonas Savimbi, the anti-communist Angolan guerilla fighter was against this. Savimbi was funded and supplied by the United States and South Africa; with Naimbia no longer annexed by South Africa and governed by a party unfriendly to his interests, Savimbi could see how this would constrain his activities and those of UNITA. It should be noted that though Savimbi presented himself as an anti-communist, he was more accurately considered an opportunist, a man who eventually funded his operations through blood diamonds and was wanted for war crimes, killed in his last battle before he could be brought to trial.A bill was moving through Congress, with passage assured, that would have helped fund UN supervision of the transition of Namibia to independence. In order to derail the independence of Namibia, the senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, put a stipulation into the bill where the funding for the UN supervision would be withheld if there were any evidence of the use of chemical weapons by Cubans in Angola. Thanks to the work of Jesse Helms and BMS&K, Bush would sign the bill with the rider. They were also helped out by Andries Holst, a German film-maker who claimed to have recorded the horrors of chemical weapon use in Angola, and Aubin Heynrickx, a toxicologist who would confirm use of such weapons in a published report. Both men were brought in to give their support of the bill’s qualifier by a network that included BSK&H, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, and the conservative think tank the International Freedom Foundation (IFF). The IFF would later be revealed to be a foundation set up by a lobbyist who would end up in infinite disgrace, Jack Abramoff, funded almost entirely by the South African apartheid government to promote messages and policies in favor of the apartheid government. Holst would turn out to be an utter fraud. Heynrickx’s research would be described by other researchers as “a real joke”, and that any student who submitted equivalent work would be kicked out of school. One can see all this, without difficulty, as an ominous foreshadowing of the lead-up to the Iraq war. After the fall of Saddam, in the search for chemical weapons used in war crimes, Heynrickx would show up there as well. To hell with the facts, fuck the world<a name="bkfrftnote42" style="text-decoration: underline; font-weight: bold; outline: none;" /><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-three/#ftnote42" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); outline: none;">42</a>.</div></div><div>
<div>punked?</div><div><div class="timestamp" style="margin-top: 15px; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; font-family: Georgia, serif;">June 25, 2006</div><div class="kicker" style="font-weight: bold; text-transform: uppercase; margin-top: 15px; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><h1 style="margin-top: 3px; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" ">Group Hopes to Prove Chemicals Killed Kurds</nyt_headline></h1><nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" " style="font-size: 13px; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><div class="byline" style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 10pt;">By <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ELISABETH%20ROSENTHAL&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ELISABETH%20ROSENTHAL&inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Elisabeth Rosenthal">ELISABETH ROSENTHAL</a></div></nyt_byline><nyt_text style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><div id="articleBody">By ELISABETH ROSENTHALGHENT, Belgium — For 18 years, Dr. Aubin Heyndrickx has tended the sealed jars containing strands of hair and scraps of clothing he gathered from a dead woman's body.Collected in Halabja, one of many Kurdish towns in northern <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo" title="More news and information about Iraq.">Iraq</a> that were attacked with chemical weapons by <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/saddam_hussein/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Saddam Hussein.">Saddam Hussein's</a> army in 1988, the jars have been stored in a blue plastic drum in his lab ever since, waiting.Now, as prosecutors prepare to try Mr. Hussein in Baghdad on charges of genocide against the Kurds, Mr. Heyndrickx, who has retired as director of the toxicology lab at the State University of Ghent, would like the material to be analyzed. "May I insist these proofs are mentioned at the trial?" the doctor asks.He is one of a small group of doctors, scientists and Middle East experts who have studied chemical weapons use by Iraq against its Kurdish citizens in the 1980's. They are dusting off evidence and trying to collect new data in an effort to define the scope of a distant tragedy that is only now coming under scrutiny in court.But proving that the victims died from chemical weapons is a daunting task: all the firsthand evidence was gathered nearly 15 years ago, and many records have been lost or destroyed. The attacks occurred in remote areas where little testing was available."Unfortunately, we'll never know how many people were killed or exposed," said Dr. Joanne al-Talabani, who for the past three years has visited the area to study the long-term health problems of Kurdish children exposed in the attacks, including scarred lungs and eyes as well as birth defects. "There are no medical records from that time — none. Most people can't remember: they were delirious, running, in shock."The study of chemical weapons is an arcane, imperfect corner of forensic science, where lab results and doctors' physical exams yield hints of exposure, but rarely direct legal proof. Chemical weapons break down quickly in the environment or in the body, and scientists are unsure what, if any, tracks they should look for nearly 20 years after the fact.Mr. Hussein is already on trial in Baghdad in another case, involving the execution of 148 Shiite men and youths after an abortive assassination attempt against him in Dujail in 1982. That trial, which began eight months ago, moved into closing arguments on June 19, with the prosecution demanding the death penalty for Mr. Hussein.Iraqi prosecutors have said they expect the so-called Anfal case — the term, meaning "spoils" in Arabic, was the code name for the Iraqi military's attacks on the Kurdish villages — to begin this summer or in early autumn. The formal indictment focuses on attacks in 1988 that are suspected of killing 50,000 Kurdish villagers, though Kurdish leaders say that perhaps three times as many Kurds died in the attacks.The Anfal trial, which includes the chemical weapons charges, "will be the most important public reckoning, but in court you can't just say, 'I know it happened,' " said Alastair Hay, a professor of chemical pathology at the University of Leeds in England who has studied soil samples from Kurdistan. "You need solid, irrefutable scientific evidence. But it's very difficult to establish something like nerve-gas exposure at this stage. I can't tell you how frustrating this is, since nothing concrete has ever appeared."An American-led team of forensic specialists working for the Iraqi court spent weeks examining one mass grave of victims at Hatra, near Mosul, a northern city. But those deaths, including women and children, were the result of gunfire at the grave site, not chemical weapons.Almost all experts now contend that Mr. Hussein's armies used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians: mustard gas and probably two nerve agents, tabun and sarin.<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/central_intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about the Central Intelligence Agency.">C.I.A.</a> documents refer to chemical weapons use, and former top Iraqi military officers have confirmed the suspicion, said Joost Hiltermann, a former senior researcher at<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/human_rights_watch/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about Human Rights Watch">Human Rights Watch</a> whose exhaustive book on the topic is scheduled to appear in 2007. Mr. Hussein has repeatedly denied the allegation.Iraq's use of chemical weapons, banned by the 1926 Geneva Convention, against Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 was confirmed in a series of <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about the United Nations.">United Nations</a> verification reports. Iran is still monitoring 30,000 people who were exposed.But it is more complicated to tally the effect of such banned weapons against the Iraqi Kurds. Estimates of the number of victims range from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands."Twenty years later it is difficult to prove on the basis of physical evidence, but the total picture in my eyes doesn't leave any doubt that it occurred," said Dr. Jan Willems, a retired professor of environmental medicine at Erasmus Hospital in Brussels. He said he examined several Kurdish patients who had traveled to Europe shortly after gas attacks in 1988, displaying burns associated with mustard gas.Testimonials are plentiful: Iraqi Kurds have consistently described how, in 1998, Mr. Hussein's warplanes delivered bombs filled with sweet-smelling gases to put down the Kurdish insurgency, with harrowing results.Shorsh Haji, a researcher who now lives in London, still recalls the night of Feb. 22, 1988, when the bombardment went on for two hours near his home in the Jafati Valley; he assumed it was conventional weapons. When he emerged in the morning, he discovered otherwise. "People on the streets were coughing, vomiting, their eyes were weeping," Mr. Haji said. "Some had blisters on their legs and under their arms.""A family of five down the road had died instantly," he said.The United Nations did not investigate charges of chemical use against the Kurds in those early days, when it would have been far easier to prove, because it was regarded as an internal Iraqi conflict, Mr. Hiltermann said.The world viewed with some skepticism testimonials from Kurdish guerrillas. At the time, Mr. Hussein was an ally of the United States, and the components of his chemical arms were often supplied by European businessmen.On the medical side, proof of the attacks is scant because Kurds were afraid to go to local Iraqi hospitals, where doctors had been told not to treat them, said Dr. Talabani, who emigrated in 1977 and is now a pediatrician with the British National Health Service.Those who slipped over the border to Iran for diagnosis and treatment often destroyed their medical records documenting chemical exposure before returning, for fear it would open them to persecution, the doctor said. Also, while Iran quickly sent hundreds of its soldiers to hospitals in Belgium and Austria, which helped prove attacks there, only a very few Kurds got out for evaluation.In the days after an attack, mustard gas exposure is relatively easy to document. Used extensively in World War I, it causes unusual blistering burns of the skin as well as severe irritation of the eyes and lungs. Breakdown products of the gas can be detected for weeks in the urine, making recent exposure simple to prove in a sophisticated lab.The use of nerve agents like tabun and sarin, the chemical used in the Tokyo subway attacks in 1995, is far trickier to prove because these gases are short-lived and deadlier. "Mustard leaves lots of physical evidence," Mr. Hiltermann said. "With sarin, people die or get better fast, so it's very difficult to prove."Despite charges by Kurdish groups of mass killings by chemical weapons in 1988, the only specific physical proof is four soil samples collected in 1992, from two bomb craters near the Kurdish village of Birjinni, by a team from Middle East Watch and Physicians for Human Rights that included Mr. Hay.After meticulous testing at the Porton Down Naval Laboratory in England, two samples were found to contain degradation products of mustard gas, and two showed breakdown products of sarin. Other attempts to analyze soil samples after the fact have all turned up negative."We looked in the bomb crater itself — in one case under a piece of shell — where concentrations were higher," Mr. Hay said.The long-term health problems of patients from the area offer indirect evidence of chemical weapons use. But survivors tend to have vague conditions, like chronic bronchitis or pain, that have many other possible causes. Mustard gas causes breathing problems, but no studies have been performed to define the link between exposure to nerve gases and long-term health problems, experts said.Dr. Talabani said that more than 300 patients she has been studying, who were exposed in childhood, seemed to have an "extremely high incidence of illness." She determined exposure according to the history patients relayed: a history of chemical burns indicated exposure to mustard gas, while lack of coordination or seizures after an airstrike indicated a nerve agent."Unfortunately little is known because this is the first group studied," Dr. Talabani said. "There are very severe breathing problems, skin problems and eye problems, such as corneal scarring that has already required transplants."Over the years, a large number of former Iranian soldiers and a smaller number of Kurds who say they were exposed to chemical weapons have been seen at European hospitals with a broad range of medical complaints. There are no blood tests that serve as markers for chemical exposure, though scientists like Mr. Hay say such "tracks" could be discovered with research."Diagnosis was based on clinical history and signs and symptoms," Mr. Willems said.Because of the lack of hard data and the imprecise testing, there is some disagreement about how many people were affected and what chemical compounds were used.Dr. Heyndrickx says he believes that the Iraqi Army used cyanide and biological toxins as well as mustard gas and sarin, making him somewhat of a maverick in the field, since most other scientists feel that the evidence doesn't support this claim.Still, he was one of the few Western experts in Halabja just after the attack, and the samples in his lab, particularly the clothing, could still provide valuable clues if they were properly sealed and stored, Mr. Hay said."People now tend to say it's obvious that Saddam committed crimes, but for legal and international standards we need to have evidence," said Mr. Haji, the researcher, whose testimony has been accepted by the court. "Only then can people who were exposed be compensated."</div></nyt_text></div><div>=
<div><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-three/#bkfrftnote42" sl-processed="1" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">42</a> The following is a transcript of <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=0OSXeiTCfLAC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA72#v=onepage&q&f=false" sl-processed="1" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">“Fooled on the Hill: How some die-hard Cold Warriors and a Belgian con artist tried to change U.S. policy in Africa”</a>, by David Aronson and David Kamp:<blockquote style="border-left-width: 10px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(54, 188, 171); font-family: Georgia, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; padding: 10px; text-align: justify; line-height: 22.75px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">FOOLED ON THE HILLHow some die-hard Cold Warriors and a Belgian con artist tried to change U.S. policy in AfricaBY DAVID ARONSON AND DAVID KAMPJudging from the scene in the stands, we could have been watching a brawl from the Turin-Liverpool match in the 1985 Cup of Champions, or a tilt-screen sequence from the old Batman series, or almost anything except a group of foreign dignitaries attending the inauguration last spring of the president of a new nation. But that’s what it was. On the playing field, with grace and dignity, Sam Nujoma, leader of the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), was being sworn in as independent Namibia’s first president. But up in the reviewing stand, elbows were flying like mad. One witness saw Angola’s president José Eduardo dos Santos, “pummeling somebody else’s security guard,” and James Baker, the U.S. secretary of State, eluding a haymaker coming from the direction of the president of Zaire. The Namibians, not yet accustomed to this ceremony, had not provided enough seats in their stadium to accommodate both the visiting dignitaries and their bodyguards; a mad scramble for space quickly devolved into an every-VIP-for-himself melee.Baker avoided damage; had Senator Jesse Helms been in Baker’s shoes, the escape might not have been so complete. Four months earlier Helms and his right-wing allies had managed to put the United States in the position of disapproving Namibian independence by sneaking a rider to a budget bill through Congress. The rider authorized the president to halt U.S. funding for a United Nations team, called UNTAG, that was overseeing Namibia’s peaceful, carefully negotiated secession from South Africa. As we shall see, the basis of Helms’s legislative gambit was bogus, a fabrication that might have been revealed had Congress administered some rudimentary tests before enacting the bill into law. But no tests were administered, and four months later Jim Baker was in Windhoek, bobbing and weaving, trying to convey the message Hey, Namibia – nothing personal.Helms, like most of Capitol Hill’s extreme conservatives, never wanted an independent Namibia, a country whose dominant party (SWAPO) is aligned with Moscow. Neither do Helms and his ilk hold much affection for Namibia’s friendly neighbor, Angola, whose Marxist government is backed by Cuba and is fighting a civil war against Jonas Savimbi’s U.S.-supported UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) guerillas. In December 1988, Angola, Cuba and South Africa signed an agreement in which Cuba promised to withdraw its troops from Angola by mid-1991 and South Africa agreed to allow Namibia’s independence. This deal was not universally approved; Duncan Sellars, chairman of the conservative International Freedom Foundation (IFF) in Washington, says that after the agreement was signed, right-wingers thought of it as “a sellout of [South Africa-controlled] Namibia and a sellout of UNITA.”Helms and a platoon of right-wing operatives (the lobbyists at Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, who represent UNITA, and the think-tankers at the Heritage Foundation and the IFF) coalesced around a piece of legislation – the rider on the budget bill – that would have given President Bush an excuse for withholding Washington’s funding for the UN team in Namibia if any evidence was found that the Cubans were using chemical weapons to support their Marxist pals in Angola. In other words, the bill said that if the Commies misbehaved in Angola, we wouldn’t help pay for Namibia’s transition to independence.The idea for the bill was born during a trip to Angola in March 1989 by Michael Johns, the Heritage Foundation’s policy analyst for African affairs. There he met Andries Holst, a West German who claimed to be filming a documentary about Cuba’s use of chemical weapons in Angola. Johns brought Holst to Washington, where the German filmmaker was introduced to Helms, State Department officials, lobbyists and other conservatives likely to be moved by his footage, which purported to show the horrors of chemical warfare.For whatever reason, Holst did not impress, and Helms’s bill foundered. To salvage the effort, the IFF’s Duncan Sellars refocused attention on a scientific report Holst had commissioned from Aubin Heyndrickx, a toxicologist from the University for Ghent in Belgium, which substantiated Holst’s claims. In July, Sellars brought Heyndrickx to Washington to tour the same conservative network Holst had earlier traveled. The difference: Heyndrickx’s opinions carried the heft and credibility of science.While Heyndrickx held forth, Helms rallied his allies on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to lash the rider to a vital appropriations bill and Black, Manafort’s lobbyists hit the Hill. And son of a gun, with the boost Heyndrickx provided, the plan worked: on November 21, George Bush put his signature on a bill containing the Cuban-chemical-warfare provision.But what might look like a model of parliamentary maneuvering is more likely an instance of ultraconservative fraud. For as it turns out, Holst is an impostor with no serious journalistic or filmmaking credentials, and Heyndrickx, on whose reports the rider was entirely predicated, is a publicity-seeking showboat. Heyndrickx has visited war zones around the world – Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iran – in search of evidence of chemical warfare and has tended to find it or not depending on who was supplying his funding. He once argued that one of his clients, the Iranian Army, had not used chemical weapons against the Iraqis because “the gases are not in the Koran.”Heyndrickx’s examination of Holst’s bomb fragments and environmental samples showed that chemical weapons were used. Other chemical-weapons experts – one is tempted to say realchemical-weapons experts – disagree. Finland’s Marjatta Rautio, who is perhaps the world’s preeminent expert in this field, examined Heyndrickx’s data and reports. “I don’t see the connection between the results and the conclusions,” she says. Julian Perry Robinson, senior researcher at the University of Sussex, doubts Heyndrickx’s descriptions of the victims’ medical conditions. And André De Leenheer, Heyndrickx’s overseer at Ghent, is frankly contemptuous. “I’ve been studying everything in detail that has been written,” De Leenheer says of Heyndrickx’s findings. “It’s a real joke.” De Leenheer says he would kick out any student who handed in a similar report.Heyndrickx does have a champion or two in the scientific community, including Dr. Clair Paley, a British toxicology expert. And according to Duncan Sellars, “The Soviets said his clinical analysis was incredibly accurate…But it’s not a result of a chemical bomb per se; it’s a firebomb.” As it turns out, Sellars’s source for what the Soviets said about Heyndrickx is – Heyndrickx! But curiously, an account of the meeting between Heyndrickx and the Soviet scientists that appeared inTass indicates that it was not Soviet scientists but – yes! – Heyndrickxhimself who suggested that the residue came from a firebomb.The question arises, how were Washington’s conservatives so sure that Heyndrickx’s work was scientifically sound? Riva Levinson, one of Black, Manafort’s people on the UNITA account, says she cannot personally vouch for the Heyndrickx report. “All I can tell you,” she says, “is that I am not a technical expert on this issue and that other people are, whom I listen to.” She referred us to Margaret Calhoun, a freelance lobbyist who worked for Black, Manafort and UNITA on the Hill last summer. Calhoun shares Levinson’s ignorance of science (“When you talk about chemical formulas, my eyes glaze over”) but says that she checked Heyndrickx out. “Duncan’s probably more of a technical expert in this,” she says. “You should talk to Duncan.”We did. Sellars told us he had hired no one to check out Heyndrickx’s bomb-site samples but Heyndrickx himself had sent them to the State Department and other agencies. Helms’s aides at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee say that they too relied on the State Department’s analysis of Heyndrickx’s findings. So we asked the State Department whether it could vouch for the report. Gary Crocker, a State Department intelligence officer with expertise in chemical warfare, indicated that the department’s tests for evidence of chemical contamination in Heyndrickx’s samples were negative. In other words, this significant piece of legislation was passed with no credible substantiation whatsoever.Like the lobbyists, UNITA can’t really say how or whether it confirmed Heyndrickx’s findings. Helder Mondabe, UNITA’s man in Washington, told us he had visited a “university of chemical warfare” in Switzerland to discuss Heyndrickx’s work, but he could not remember the name or location of the university. We called the military attaché to the Swiss embassy in Paris for help; he said that no such university exists, that no such studies are undertaken at any of the Swiss universities. When we called Mondabe a week later to see whether he’d remembered the name of the university, he said no, he still didn’t remember, and Hey, do you guys really have to mention the Swiss university in your article?Duncan Sellars remains unfazed by his star witness’s impeached authority. “The questions raised have bee arguments attempting to attack his personal credibility,” he says stalwartly. Fortunately, the State Department has wised up. Is Heyndrickx a charlatan? “I have no doubt about that,” says Gary Crocker. “That’s for sure.” But a year ago the findings of an easily debunked professor were regarded as gospel by gullible policymakers, a mistake that could be rectified only by dispatching Jim Baker to Windhoek, just to show the Namibians that we were sorry we had been such soreheards about their independence.</blockquote>The piece featuring Aubin Heyndrickx from the time of the Iraq war is the following, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/world/europe/19iht-chem.2001719.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print" sl-processed="1" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">“In Iraq chemical arms trial, scientists face many burdens of proof”</a>:<blockquote style="border-left-width: 10px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(54, 188, 171); font-family: Georgia, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; padding: 10px; text-align: justify; line-height: 22.75px; background: rgb(238, 238, 238);">For 18 years, Dr. Aubin Heyndrickx has tended the sealed jars containing strands of hair and scraps of clothing he gathered from a dead woman’s body. Collected in Halabja, one of many Kurdish towns in northern Iraq that were attacked with chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein’s army in 1988, they have sat in a blue plastic drum in his lab ever since, waiting.Now, as prosecutors prepare to try Saddam in Baghdad for genocide against the Kurds, Heyndrickx would like the material to be analyzed. “May I insist these proofs are mentioned at the trial?” the doctor asks.He is one of a small group of doctors, scientists and Middle East experts who have studied chemical weapons use by Iraq against its Kurdish citizens in the 1980s. Now, they are dusting off evidence and attempting to collect new data in an effort to define the scope of a distant tragedy that is only now to come under scrutiny in court.</blockquote>Near the very end is a brief reference to his maverick quality:<blockquote style="border-left-width: 10px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(54, 188, 171); font-family: Georgia, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; padding: 10px; text-align: justify; line-height: 22.75px; background: rgb(238, 238, 238);">Because of the lack of hard data and the imprecise testing there is some disagreement about how many people were affected and what chemical compounds were used.Heyndrickx, somewhat of a maverick in the field, believes that the Iraqi Army also used cyanide and biological toxins, although most other scientists disagree.Still, he was one of the few Western experts on the ground in Halabja just after the attack, and the samples in his lab – particularly the clothing – could still provide valuable clues if they were properly sealed and stored, Hay said.</blockquote><a name="ftnote43" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-decoration: underline;" /><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-three/#bkfrftnote43" sl-processed="1" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">43</a> From <a href="http://www.aei.org/scholar/marc-a-thiessen/" sl-processed="1" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">the profile for Marc Thiessen</a> at the American Enterprise Institute; I boldface his experience at BMS&K:<blockquote style="border-left-width: 10px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(54, 188, 171); font-family: Georgia, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; padding: 10px; text-align: justify; line-height: 22.75px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Experience<ul><li style="background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">Columnist, Washington Post, 2010-present</li><li style="background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">Cofounder, Oval Office Writers, 2009-present</li><li style="background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution, 2009-2010</li><li style="background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">Senior Speechwriter, Deputy Director of Speechwriting, Chief Speechwriter for President George W. Bush, the White House, 2004-2009</li><li style="background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">Chief Speechwriter for Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense, 2001-2004</li><li style="background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">Spokesman and Senior Policy Adviser to Senator Jesse Helms, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1995-2001</li><li style="background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">Press Secretary, Huffington for Senate Campaign, 1994</li><li>Assistant to the President, Empower America, 1993-94</li><li style="background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">Researcher and Deputy Communication Director, Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, 1989-93</li></ul></blockquote></div><div>
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