"Specialty Chemicals"
04 October 2006
If you've never wondered why so much of the world
thinks our justifications for invading, bombing,
sanctioning and destabilizing various parts of the
Middle East are a pile of crap, today might be a good
day to start. Because today is the fourteenth
anniversary of the Bijlmermeer air disaster, whose
sordid aftermath opened up a whole can of worms
relating to secret weapons trafficking and
unaccountable government, which really gives the lie
to all the worthy motivations we claim for our
policies.
If you want to know just how little our
government and our allies' governments really care for
all those good causes we say we are bequesting the
Middle East - rule of law, non-proliferation,
democratic and accountable government, etc. – you only
have to look at the Bijlmermeer tragedy.
At 6:21pm on 4 October 1992, a Boeing 747 airliner of
the Israeli airline El Al took off from Amsterdam's
Schiphol Airport for Tel Aviv, following a stopover en
route from New York. The plane suffered catastrophic
mechanical failure soon after takeoff, losing one
right-side engine, which sheared off taking the second
with it. The pilot attempted to loop back to make an
emergency landing at Schiphol, but lost control short
of the airfield. Flight 1862 crashed about 10 minutes
after take-off into the Groeneveen and Kruitberg
apartment buildings in Bijlmermeer, a working class
suburb in south-eastern Amsterdam. Photo left
(Associated Press).
The crash of El Al cargo flight LY1862 became the
worst air disaster in Dutch history, killing at least
47 people directly, and destroying in subsequent
months the health of hundreds of local residents.
(Although stonewalling and outright lying by the Dutch
and Israeli authorities meant that it was only in 1999
– after a comprehensive expose by investigative
journalists at a Dutch newspaper – that a
parliamentary enquiry officially acknowledged that the
high rate of chronic illness among local residents was
a direct result of toxic substances released as a
result of the crash).
Local residents had suspected very early on that
LY1862 was not a routine flight. Eyewitnesses reported
seeing men in hazmat suits removing unidentified
debris from the site immediately after the crash. And
in the months that followed hundreds of local people
and rescue workers complained of a range of chronic
health problems, including depression, fatigue and
listlessness, breathing difficulties and stomach
pains. Tests commissioned by a Dutch citizens' group
revealed traces of uranium at the crash site and
abnormally high levels of uranium in the bodies of
survivors. An independent Dutch nuclear research group
revealed that – despite government claims to the
contrary – only about half of the depleted uranium
that the plane had been carrying as ballast had ever
been recovered. As for the 114 tons of cargo on flight
1862: El Al, Israeli and Dutch officials rushed to
assure the public that the doomed flight carried
nothing but "perfume and gift articles." El Al
insisted that the plane carried "a regular commercial
load." As late as April 22, 1998, Israeli Transport
Minister Shaul Yahalom maintained that there were "no
dangerous material on that plane. Israel has nothing
to hide."
Almost six years after the event, on 30 September
1998, editors Harm van den Berg and Karel Knip of the
Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad published the results of
an extensive investigation they had carried out into
the crash. They had obtained the freight documentation
for the flight, and made public for the first time its
real cargo. The manifest confirmed the plane was
carrying 400 kilograms of depleted uranium as ballast,
but also showed that it carried among its cargo about
10 tons of assorted chemicals. The chemicals included
ten 18.9-litre plastic drums of dimethyl
methylphosphonate (DMMP), and smaller amounts of
isopropanol and hydrogen fluoride: three of the four
chemical precursors for the production of Sarin nerve
gas.
A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's
office immediately denied that Flight 1862 had been
carrying Sarin precursors. When this was contradicted
hours later by an El Al spokesman, the Prime
Minister's office acknowledged that the chemicals were
onboard but stated that "the material was non-toxic
and was to have been used to test filters that protect
against chemical weapons". An explanation that Earth
Island Journal found "puzzling", since "it only takes
a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the
chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270
kilos of sarin - sufficient to kill the entire
population of a major world city".
The Shipper's Declaration of Dangerous Goods published
by NRC Handelsblad showed that the DMMP consignment
was en route to the Israel Institute for Biological
Research (IIBR). The IIBR is located in Nes Ziona,
about 20kms south of Tel Aviv, on what used to be the
extensive estate of the Al-Taji Al-Farouki family of
Ramleh, who were dispossessed in 1948. The family
mansion (pictured, left) that was the home of Shukri
Al-Taji remains today as the entrance to the IIBR,
which was built on the family citrus groves.
The IIBR's web site describes the institute as "a
governmental, applied research institute specializing
in the fields of biology, medicinal chemistry and
environmental sciences", though it is actually
believed to be the front organisation for the Israeli
government's development, testing and production of
chemical and biological weapons. A biologist formerly
associated with the IIBR told the London Times on 4
October 1998: "There is hardly a single known or
unknown form of chemical or biological weapon...which
is not manufactured at the institute."
The freight documentation showed that the DMMP was
supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville,
Pennsylvania, which marketed itself as "a leading and
innovative manufacturer of ultrahigh-purity gases,
chemicals and gas handling equipment". (Solkatronic
was bought out in November 1997 by Air Products and
Chemicals, Inc. whose web site describes the company
as a "manufacturer of… specialty chemicals", which is
one way of referring to nerve agents, I suppose). As a
chemical weapons precursor, DMMP is subject to tight
export controls by the U.S. government, but
Solkatronic confirmed that it had requested and
received from the U.S. Department of Commerce the
export licences necessary to ship to the IIBR the
chemicals that went down with Flight 1862.
Following the revelations published in Handelsblad,
the Dutch government finally established a
parliamentary enquiry into the Bijlmer air disaster.
The enquiry, under the chairmanship of Christian
Democrat deputy Theo Meijer, heard testimony from
about 80 witnesses over four months (Jan-Apr 1999),
summarising its conclusions in a 2,000 page report.
The main findings of the Meijer Report were:
1. that toxic substances had been released by the
crash of Flight 1862 and ensuing fire, and that the
chronic illnesses suffered by rescuers and local
residents were indeed directly linked to the disaster.
2. that El Al had inexplicably failed to co-operate
with crash investigators, despite high-levels requests
from the Netherlands to Israel that it should do so.
(In fact it was not until February 1999 that the
Israelis finally provided the Dutch government with a
full listing of the military cargo on the flight,
having maintained until then that that information no
longer existed).
3. that Dutch government ministers had repeatedly
given unclear, incomplete, late or incorrect
information about the crash to Parliament, and thence
to the Dutch people, in the aftermath of the disaster.
But more enlightening than the commission's formal
conclusions were the peripheral details that the
enquiry uncovered, which provided some interesting
context for the whole affair. For instance, the
commission discovered the previously-undisclosed tapes
of conversations between El Al employees and Schiphol
Air Traffic Control on the evening of the disaster,
showing that within minutes of the crash traffic
controllers knew that the downed plane contained
"poison", "ammunition" and "flammable liquid", and
that it would be best to "keep these things under the
lid". And the Dutch Attorney General testified before
the commission that the El Al security unit at
Schiphol wasn't actually an El Al security unit at
all, but a front operation for the Mossad. And airport
employees testified that since 1973, the Netherlands'
authorities had allowed El Al planes to transfer cargo
at Schiphol Airport without being inspected by customs
or by the Dutch Flight Safety Board; and that every
Sunday evening an El Al cargo flight arrived from
Schiphol en route from New York to Tel Aviv, whose
arrival was never displayed on airport monitors, whose
cargo was not checked and whose documentation was
processed separately from regular freight traffic...
It's all a bit sordid isn't it? And we'd never have
known about any of it, were it not for metal fatigue
in a pin attaching engine three to the right wing of
flight 1862.
Remember this story when you next hear some cable news
pundit pontificating about why we have to bomb those
nasty people in the Middle East.
When you hear that we must bomb Syria because it
allows Iranian weapons to transit its territory,
remember how our own Dutch allies have been
deliberately turning a blind eye for years as one of
its major international airports is used as a transit
point for our shipment of illicit, non-conventional
weapons into the Middle East.
Remember too that at the exact same time that the U.S.
Administration was demanding that Iraq be sanctioned
and its children starved because Saddam Hussein was
developing Chemical and Biological Weapons, our
Department of Commerce was (and presumably still is)
issuing export licences to facilitate the production
of exactly the same weapons in Israel.
And next time you hear George Bush talk about the gift
of democracy that we are bringing to the Middle East,
reflect on the transparency and accountability of our
own democracy, and particularly that of our Dutch
ally, which preferred for years to leave its own
citizens chronically ill and without a diagnosis of
their condition, rather than reveal the kinds of
operations it was allowing Israel to carry out at
Schiphol Airport.
And remember when you hear that we have to bomb Iran
for its alleged and unproven contravention of the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that the U.S. – a
member of the Chemical Weapons Convention – really is
faciliating proliferation of Chemical Weapons to a
non-member state (Israel).
Just remember the aftermath of the Bijlmermeer air
disaster, and you'll never have to ask yourself again
why so much of the world listens to our rhetoric, and
thinks we're just full of it.
Sources:
Israel says El Al crash chemical 'non-toxic'; BBC
News, 2 Oct 1998.
Israeli jets equipped for chemical warfare by Uzi
Mahnaimi; The Sunday Times (London), 4 Oct 1998.
Flight 1862 and Israel's chemical secrets by Mouin
Rabbani; orig. Middle East International, 16 Oct 1998.
El Al crash linked to illnesses; BBC News, 22 Apr
1999.
Uranium Skies: What Was Aboard Flight 1862? by Gar
Smith; Earth Island Journal, Vol. 14 No. 4 (Winter
'99/2000).
Israeli WMD by Neil Sammonds; ZNet, October 11, 2002.
Traces of poison by Salman Abu-Sitta; Al-Ahram Weekly,
27 Feb-5 Mar 2003.
Bijlmerramp by Martin Wisse; Wis[s]e Words, 4 Oct
2005.
Profile: Solkatronic Chemicals Inc; Cooperative Research.
lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2006/10/specialty_chemi.html