THIS is a fascinating story. This is about Halabja.

It might just be that 'Chemical Ali' didn't gas the Kurds in Halabja although he probably did use gas in other locations. This is important because the Halabja incident was specifically cited as one of the primary reasons for going to war with Iraq.

BAGHDAD (AFP) – Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as Saddam Hussein's enforcer "Chemical Ali" was on Sunday sentenced to death for ordering the gassing of Kurds in the Iraqi village of Halabja, state television said.

The Al-Iraqiya channel said Majid would be killed by hanging having been found guilty of the notorious attack in 1988 in the northeast of the country as the Iran-Iraq war drew to a close.

The ruling is the fourth time he has received a death sentence.

An estimated 5,000 people were killed at Halabja, three-quarters of them women and children, in what is now thought to have been the deadliest gas attack ever carried out against civilians.

End

In 2001 the CIA put out a report written by a CIA analyst, Stephen Pelletiere, that stated that the gas used on the Kurds in Halabja was a type of poison gas that Iraq did not possess but that Iran did possess and the fighting in Halabja, a zone disputed during the Iran/Iraq war due to its access to water (something they're short of in the desert) was exactly where the Iranians were fighting the Iraqi's.

Now there are 10,000 pages of documents posted to the web from the Iraqi secret police and military that were captured by the Kurdish rebels in 1988 and afterwards. The documents explicitly refer to the Iraqi use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, but not the type of gas used at Halabja.

So the question remains, who gassed the Kurds at Halabja? Iraq or Iran? And if Iran gassed the Kurds at Halabja, why isn't the Iranian government paying a price?

Not that chemical Ali Hassan al-Majid shouldn't be sentenced for his crimes, but shouldn't the actual perpetrator of the crimes at Halabja be punished?

More importantly, was Ali Hassan al-Majid found guilty of the Halabja incident to add or maintain justification for Bush's invasion of Iraq?

Here's CIA agent Steven Pelletiere's report:

ECHANICSBURG, Pa. - It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."

The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

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.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent - that is, a cyanide-based gas - which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned.