"Capitalism will hang itself with its own rope", said the Marxists. Fortunately, such forecast has proved untrue. But there is no doubt that in the Gulf war, "capitalism" has contributed quite a bit in preparing that rope with which Saddam Hussein has tried to strangle it. If the West is forced today to face a harsh war in the Gulf, to deploy hundreds of thousands of soldiers, to use all its military "power", we owe this to the numerous war industries which have built up Saddam Hussein's military might for years and years, to the many "democratic" rulers who authorized and covered this trade. Even Italy contributed in this suicidal operation, both directly and indirectly. That is, both by selling arms and, through the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, financing a consistent part of Iraq's war arsenal, especially that aiming at acquiring the technology to autonomously produce conventional arms systems and the one necessary to build chemical, bacteriological and perhaps even nuclear weapons.

On 31 December 1990, the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro gave Iraq credits for sums already issued, amounting to almost $2 billion.

In order to investigate these episodes, I deem it useful to publish several documents on the support supplied to Iraq by Italy (and the West). The first document is the conclusive report of the Senate's special Committee on the Atlanta branch of the BNL. It is unedited, as it has not yet been published by the Senate (we copied the file directly in the Senate's printing facilities).

When reading the documents, it must be considered that the BNL maintains that Mr Cristopher Drogoul, manager of the Atlanta branch, carried out that bulk of banking operations in favour of Iraq on his own, without informing the central direction.

The document denies this assertion. It would be even more interesting to publish the reserved report of the Banca D'Italia on the BNL, but this is made impossible by the document's length.

The second document I am copying in the conference is the report prepared by Kenneth Timmerman, on behalf of the "Simon Wiesenthal Center" on the exportation of technology to Iraq and Libya for the production of "unconventional" weapons.

This second document will be divided into several parts, as it must be copied and typed out.

(1) BNL: Major State-owned Italian bank.