Following Iraq's bioweapons trail

[Nbadan]

Is it time for us to do some hanging too?


Following Iraq's bioweapons trail
September 26, 2002
BY ROBERT NOVAK
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Sen. Robert Byrd, a master at hectoring executive branch witnesses, asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a provocative question last week: Did the United States help Saddam Hussein produce weapons of biological warfare? Rumsfeld brushed off the Senate's 84-year-old president pro tem like a Pentagon reporter. But a paper trail indicates Rumsfeld should have answered yes.

An eight-year-old Senate report confirms that disease- producing and poisonous materials were exported, under U.S. government license, to Iraq from 1985 to 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war. Furthermore, the report adds, the American- exported materials were identical to microorganisms destroyed by United Nations inspectors after the Gulf War. The shipments were approved despite allegations that Saddam used biological weapons against Kurdish rebels and (according to the current official U.S. position) initiated war with Iran.

This record is no argument for or against waging war against the Iraqi regime, but current U.S. officials are not eager to reconstruct the mostly secret relationship between the two countries. While biological warfare exports were approved by the U.S. government, the first President George Bush signed a policy directive proposing ''normal'' relations with Saddam in the interest of Middle East stability. Looking at a little U.S.-Iraqi history might be useful on the eve of a fateful military undertaking.

At a Senate Armed Services hearing last Thursday, Byrd tried to disinter that history. Did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological we''apons during the Iran-Iraq war?'' he asked Rumsfeld. ''Certainly not to my knowledge,'' Rumsfeld replied. When Byrd persisted by reading a current Newsweek article reporting these exports, Rumsfeld said, ''I have never heard anything like what you've read, I have no knowledge of it whatsoever, and I doubt it.''

That suggests Rumsfeld also has not read the sole surviving copy of a May 25, 1994, Senate Banking Committee report. In 1985 (five years after the Iraq-Iran war started) and succeeding years, said the report, ''pathogenic (meaning ''disease producing''), toxigenic (meaning ''poisonous'') and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq, pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce.'' It added: ''These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction.''

CONTINUED...

Link

Why do things half-ass?

[Nbadan]

Did facing death with dignity turn Saddam into a marytar?

NYT: Rush to Hang Hussein Was Questioned

BAGHDAD, Dec. 31 — With his plain pine coffin strapped into an American military helicopter for a predawn journey across the desert, Saddam Hussein, the executed dictator who built his legend with defiance of America, completed a turbulent passage into history on Sunday.

Like the helicopter trip, just about everything in the 48 hours that began with Mr. Hussein’s being taken to his execution from his cell in an American military detention center in the postmidnight chill of Saturday had a surreal and even cinematic quality. Part of it was that the Americans, who turned him into a pariah and drove him from power, proved to be his unlikely benefactors in the face of new Iraqi rulers who seemed bent on turning the execution and its aftermath into a new nightmare.

(snip)

The American role extended beyond providing the helicopter that carried Mr. Hussein home. Iraqi and American officials who have discussed the intrigue and confusion that preceded the decision late on Friday to rush Mr. Hussein to the gallows have said that it was the Americans who questioned the political wisdom — and justice — of expediting the execution, in ways that required Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to override cons utional and religious precepts that seemed to give Mr. Hussein the prospect of a more dignified passage to his end.

The Americans’ concerns seem certain to have been heightened by what happened at the hanging, as evidenced in video-recordings made in the last minutes before Mr. Hussein fell to his death through the gallows trapdoor at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday. A new video that appeared on the Internet late on Saturday, apparently made illicitly by someone attending the hanging with a camera-equipped cellphone, underscored the unruly, mocking atmosphere in the execution chamber.

This continued, on the video, through the actual hanging itself, with a shout of “The tyrant has fallen! May God curse him!” as Mr. Hussein hung lifeless, his neck snapped back and his glassy eyes open, beneath the gallows.

NY Times

More:

One participant described the meeting this way: "The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.’"
...
None of the Iraqi officials were able to explain why Mr. Maliki had been unwilling to allow the execution to wait. Nor would any explain why those who conducted it had allowed it to deteriorate into a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect, on the video recordings, of making Mr. Hussein, a mass murderer, appear dignified and restrained, and his executioners, representing Shiites who were his principal victims, seem like bullying street thugs.

Touche' The insurgents who hung Saddam came off looking like the savages if you've seen the complete film, meanwhile Saddam looked calm and collected even while facing the gallows, refusing a hood and denouncing his Shiite executioners to the end.

[Nbadan]

The fallout of the spectacle, bungled execution of Saddam begins...

B]Message Received
Monday, January 01, 2007 1:07:54 PM
Kuwait Times[/B]

In Iran, a country ruled by Shiite Muslims and in the newly Shiite controlled Iraq, the first day of the Eid Al-Adha was celebrated on December 31. Sunni Muslims celebrated the first day of the Eid Al-Adha on December 30, the same day Saddam Hussein was executed. According to Iraqi law, no executions can be carried out on religious or national holidays. By hanging Saddam on Dec 30 - which all Sunnis, including Iraqi Sunnis, considered as the first day of Eid - Iraq was sending a clear message to all its neighbouring states and to Sunnis in particular that the new Iraq was a decidedly Shiite state.

Growing Iranian influence in the region has always been a cause for concern among Gulf nations, who are predominantly Sunni. The real possibility of a nuclear Iran is one problem but the implications of Iraq's clear message with the timing of Saddam's execution is a new factor which could tip the balance of power in the region - with a nuclear Iran or without. The message also conveys to the world that Iraq is not a secular and inclusive democracy as they might wish to be perceived as, but instead they are Shiites and will make governmental decisions based on that fact - putting them in league with Iran.

Initial publicised tapes of the execution, which stopped at the noose being tightened around Saddam's neck, have now been trumped by leaked tapes of the moments before the hanging, wherein the Iraqi regime members present around the gallows shout religious Shiite chants and invoke the name of Mohammed Baqar Al-Sadr and Muqtada Al-Sadr while cursing Saddam.

Mohammed Al-Sadr was a cleric executed by Saddam and whose radical son Muqtada now leads the notorious Al-Mahdi Army. By shouting the name of Sadr and his son and invoking Shiite chants in taunting Saddam moments before his execution, the Iraqi regime is clearly compromised. Al-Mahdi Army is one of several illegal Shiite militias that have been blamed for mass kidnappings and executions, along with attacking coalition forces since the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Prediction for 2007 number 2:

As witnessed by the gross debacle of Saddam's execution, Iraq stands now as a broken country with a compromised government. The definitive situation for a terrorist breading ground for Islamic radicals. Iran meanwhile, gains influence in the entire region as the Shiite revolution will spread to neighboring countries, a situation oil-rich Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia will not tolerate for long unless the U.S., NATO, or the U.N. steps in and controls the situation in Iraq More than likely what we are witnessing is the beginning of a regional conflict that will breed on itself, drawing more and more tribes, and larger adversaries into the conflict

The situation in Iraq has grown outside of the possible control of coalition forces no matter how many new troops the U.S. temporarily put in there per W's 'new' plan. Bottom line, the U.S. simply does not have 350,000-400,000 fresh troops to sacrafice for years and we cannot as a society, morally tolerate the use the techniques that would be necessary to defeat the insurgency at it's current strength.

Our armed forces are broken. Equipment replacement for tanks, bombs, strikers, personnel carriers, humvees and broken bodies of U.S. soldiers will already total into the trillions of dollars. Active duty soldiers and their relatives have been pushed to the breaking point, famlies are collapsing and troops are returning to broken futures and personal financial disasters. PTSD, under-diagonosed among returning Vietnam veterans who faced the same threat as Iraqi war veterans, will quietly raise the price paid by our servicemen and their families long after the war has ended, and the media has stopped counting the Iraq war dead on either side.

If we are to begin to turn things around, the U.S. must declare a strategic victory in Iraq, withdrawal, regroup and redefine techniques for fighting the Iraqi insurgent war. We must demand that the Generals who craftedly defeated and brought to international justice as should be, Molosevich and his Serbian Generals, starting with General Wesley Clark as President in 08, be brought back, and General Pace and all the other yes-men in the Pentagon be immediately replaced.

[Nbadan]

Truth in media, in the U.S.? ....fogetabou !

It was not the Iraqi government but its American masters that chose to execute Saddam Hussein in a great rush as soon as the first sentence was confirmed, thus canceling all the other trials on far graver charges that awaited him. The current Iraqi government had nothing to hide if those trials went ahead; the United States government did.

...It’s as if they had taken Adolf Hitler alive in 1945, but ignored his responsibility for starting World War II and his murder of six million Jews and just put him on trial for executing people suspected of involvement in the July 1944 bomb plot. With all of Saddam’s other crimes to choose from, why on earth would you hang him for executing the people suspected of involvement in the Dujail plot?

Because the United States was not involved in that one. It was involved in the massacre of the Iraqi Communists (the US Central Intelligence Agency gave Saddam their membership lists). It was implicated up to its ears in Saddam’s war against Iran — to the point of arranging for Iraq to be supplied with the chemicals to make poison gas, providing Baghdad with satellite and AWACS intelligence data on Iranian targets, and seconding US Air Force photo interpreters to Baghdad to draw Saddam the detailed maps of Iranian trenches that let him drench them in poison gas.

The Reagan administration stopped Congress from condemning Saddam’s use of poison gas, and the US State Department tried to protect Saddam when he gassed his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja in 1988, spreading stories (which it knew to be false) that Iranian planes had dropped the gas. It was the US that finally saved Saddam’s regime by providing naval escorts for tankers carrying oil from Arab Gulf states while Iraqi planes were left free to attack tankers coming from Iranian ports. Even when one of Saddam’s planes mistakenly attacked an American destroyer in 1987, killing 37 crewmembers, Washington forgave him.

And it was George W. Bush’s father who urged Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds to rebel after Saddam was driven out of Kuwait in 1991, and then failed to use US air power to protect the Shiites from massacre when they answered his call. The US was deeply involved in all of Saddam’s major crimes, one way or another, so no trial that delved into the details of those crimes could be allowed.

Instead, the spin-doctors in the current Bush administration put the Dujail trial first and scheduled the trials for Saddam’s bigger crimes for later, knowing that they would all be canceled once the death penalty for the Dujail incident was confirmed. The dirty laundry will never have to be displayed in public. But it does mean that the man who was hanged last Saturday morning not only had a farce of a trial before a kangaroo court; he was executed for the wrong crime.

Arab News

The US was deeply involved in all of Saddam’s major crimes, one way or another, so no trial that delved into the details of those crimes could ever be allowed.

[boutons_]

ah, good take. The US didn't want all of Saddam's crimes aired or the USA (Repugs/Reagan) would have stunk it up badly as accomplice and enabler.

A lot of good supporting Saddam against Iran did the USA.