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Title: Robert Fisk: This was a guilty verdict on America as well
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URL Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1959051.ece
Published: Nov 6, 2006
Author: FISK
Post Date: 2006-11-06 00:27:44 by tom007
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Keywords: None
Views: 266
Comments: 15
Robert Fisk: This was a guilty verdict on America as well Published: 06 November 2006 So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another "great day for Iraq". That's what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going to string him up, and it's another great day. Of course, it couldn't happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn't be a more just verdict - nor a more hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of a more suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1985 after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into the very same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope - don't we? - to look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it was under Saddam. Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his Shias and Kurds and - yes, in Fallujah of all places - his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam's immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ("more or less", as George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We can't be put on trial. We can't be hanged. "Allahu Akbar," the awful man shouted - God is greater. No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush's Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US President's father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US elections. Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be "smoking rope". Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict - not the trial itself, please note - was "scrupulous and fair". The judges will publish "everything they used to come to their verdict." No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant - so appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in 2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian Gulf War". This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US provided Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials which assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans). Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn't permitted to talk about this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam's hanging "was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he didn't mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year. We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the same country - Britain - that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for - you guessed it - "weapons of mass destruction". Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988. And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country? - then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our specific request - thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam's brutal hordes on their own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's meretricious "dodgy dossier" described these atrocities in 2002 - because, of course, to call them an "uprising" (which they were) would invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer: us. I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their wounds. The British and Americans didn't want to know. I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans didn't want to know. My Associated Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and the British didn't care. But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this man. "President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed," Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. "He will not come out of prison to count his days and years in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave." It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence. The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the years since our "liberation" of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined? So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another "great day for Iraq". That's what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going to string him up, and it's another great day. Of course, it couldn't happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn't be a more just verdict - nor a more hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of a more suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1985 after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into the very same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope - don't we? - to look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it was under Saddam. Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his Shias and Kurds and - yes, in Fallujah of all places - his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam's immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ("more or less", as George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We can't be put on trial. We can't be hanged. "Allahu Akbar," the awful man shouted - God is greater. No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush's Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US President's father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US elections. Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be "smoking rope". Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict - not the trial itself, please note - was "scrupulous and fair". The judges will publish "everything they used to come to their verdict." No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant - so appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in 2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian Gulf War". This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US provided Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials which assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans). Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn't permitted to talk about this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam's hanging "was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he didn't mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year. We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the same country - Britain - that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for - you guessed it - "weapons of mass destruction". Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988. And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country? - then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our specific request - thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam's brutal hordes on their own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's meretricious "dodgy dossier" described these atrocities in 2002 - because, of course, to call them an "uprising" (which they were) would invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer: us. I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their wounds. The British and Americans didn't want to know. I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans didn't want to know. My Associated Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and the British didn't care. But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this man. "President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed," Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. "He will not come out of prison to count his days and years in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave." It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence. The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the years since our "liberation" of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?
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#1. To: tom007 (#0)
excellent article. I was just reading this one by Grigg
That link is excellent. Thanks.
Mark The FBI, rather than trying to prevent a terrorist attack, was merely gathering intelligence so they would know who to arrest when a terrorist attack occurred.— Robert Wright - Former FBI agent "At temperatures above 800º C structural steel loses 90 percent of its strength. Yet even when steel structures are heated to those temperatures, they never disintegrate into piles of rubble, as did the Twin Towers and Building 7."-http://www.911research.net
Fisk makes excellent points here. As does Paul Craig Roberts as he reminds us about the assassination attempt on Saddam. I caught some of the spin last night about this trial. It started with the gratuitous timeline of how Saddam came to power, all of his attrocities, and THEN... It hit on how Desert Storm happened. They say that Saddam was in debt up to his eyeballs, with Kuwait. If we all remember what Kuwait did, was that they drilled sideways into Iraqi oil wells. This prompted Saddam to invade, and it was given the greenlight by the FIRST BUSH ADMINISTRATION. We then go after Iraq at the behest of the Kuwaitis and the Saudis. HILARIOUS RIGHT? Well it gets even better. I saw the same group of people parading around with pictures of Al-Sadr and chanting. The media was playing it up like these people were cheering for the verdict, but oddly enough I'd seen the same footage before two other times that had nothing to do with the Saddam Verdict. Saddam was the only thing that the middle east could agree on, and now we have filled that void. America is the only thing that the Islamic fundamentalists can agree on now.
#2. To: hammerdown (#1)
#3. To: tom007 (#0)
So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with the British, of course
http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=38872&Disp=0
#4. To: tom007 (#0)
 | What's that Mr. Nipples? You want me to ask the nice lady about her rack?. |
#5. To: TommyTheMadArtist (#4)
You are missing the most important part; Kuwait is a part of Iraq, historically. The British tore it off by force of arms so they could steal the oil, brought in a landless shiek and set up a puppet government. They then paid the new nation (it is called nation building if you are confused on the issue)a pittance as a royalty on the oil they stole from Iraq. You can also find a lot of details in different locations about George Sr. and his oil deals with the Queen and Saddam.
with Kuwait
The Solution is to apply, for the first time in the history of the United States, the Constitution to Washington, D.C.
#6. To: hammerdown (#1)
I was perusing Freakerland for the first time in over a year yesterday- looking at the Haggard threads- and I came across a thread about Saddam that went along the lines "This is your life" format- reviewing all his misdeeds. Of course- all his serious misdeeds, like the one he was convicted over, were done when the US backed him and even ran interference for him at the UN over. That was no where mentioned on the Freakerland thread.
#7. To: Burkeman1 (#6)
Funny - you and I must have been thinking about tickling our funny bones by doing similar things. I went to get my laughs by lurking at little freeperland - el pee. And on the thread about Saddam to hang, everybody was letting loose on a few sane posters - the thread was up to 125 when "Original intent" chimed in with super photos followed by an eminently sensible observation that went: "Frankly I think Saddam has earned a good hanging many times over. That is not the point. The point is did it justify laying waste to a country and murdering hundreds of thousands of people to get 1 ex-business partner and former CIA asset?" That pretty much put the kabosh on further Bot input. Badeye submitted some kind of mumble post and the thread ended shortly after. How can you argue with common sense? Funny.
I was perusing Freakerland for the first time in over a year yesterday...and I came across a thread about Saddam that went along the lines "This is your life" format- reviewing all his misdeeds. Of course- all his serious misdeeds, like the one he was convicted over, were done when the US backed him and even ran interference for him at the UN over. That was no where mentioned on the Freakerland thread.
#8. To: hammerdown, tom007, all (#1)
Excellent articles - thanks.
#9. To: richard9151 (#5)
We have the destruction of the Ottoman Empire to thank for the partitioning of the Middle East, Iraq that is. I'm well aware of history, but Saddam had always respected those borders until Kuwait drilled into his wells. Regardless, the whole thing was a fabrication. The first gulf war was about oil. It was about keeping the price down. It was about making sure who controlled the region. The second gulf war, is about making sure America is still relevant to the Middle East. Russia is becoming very cozy with Israel, and seeing as how Israel is half Russian Immgrants, I would imagine that our honeymoon with Israel is over. The issue here is who is going to keep the oil flowing to the United States? It's really about making sure that cheap oil comes to America because America has mortgaged itself to the hilt.
| What's that Mr. Nipples? You want me to ask the nice lady about her rack?. |
#10. To: TommyTheMadArtist (#9)
Russian immigrants want to go back to Russia. Their honeymoon is over with Israel. It wasn't the spiritual home that the Zionists cracked it up to be. If Russia wants to take over floating Israel financially and defensively, good luck to them. Yes, please, God, please let Russia take over T.H.E. albatross. "Our honeymoon" together with the word "Israel" does not compute for me, maybe I'm missing something in that equation. As for oil, hey, let me tell you, if America could "lose" Israel as our "ally" (barf, vomit) we'd have access to so much ME oil, we would not know what to do with it all. It's Israel the wedge to happy relations with many ME countries that causes us to go on these military adventures to try and wrench the oil away from countries who have grown to hate us for blindly supporting Precious and the dastardly things that Precious does to Palestinians and to the Lebanese. I'm not sure if you realize this but America could get by reasonably fine domestically with the oil we get from Canada (#1), Mexico(#2) Venuezuela (#3) and Nigera (#4). It's the Four Sisters who want to have control of the world's oil.
Russia is becoming very cozy with Israel, and seeing as how Israel is half Russian Immgrants, I would imagine that our honeymoon with Israel is over.
#11. To: TommyTheMadArtist (#9)
More like gone totally bankrupt..
America has mortgaged itself to the hilt.
#12. To: scrapper2 (#10)
Outstanding observations and right on point. Nailed it to the wall, you did. Well, you might have added that we have a lot of domestic oil that is lying around..... when I used to work in the edges of the oil fields in the Rocky Mtns, it is really amazing how many wells have been drilled, capped, and never pumped. And the wells all have oil. Talked to the drillers and foremen on the jobs where we were supplying concrete.... just lying fallow, driving up the price because of the shortage.
The Solution is to apply, for the first time in the history of the United States, the Constitution to Washington, D.C.
#13. To: tom007, Christine, Honway, Aristeides, Jethro Tull, Diana, All (#0)
Saddam Hussein is another poster-boy for - "Trust America!" Hitler was no different.
#14. To: Burkeman1 (#6)
I hope you were wearing a body glove, there's some real toxic waste there. and if there ever is, it's slurped down the memory hole, along with the poster that introduced it. There was one good thing about that place though... it taught me what complete imbeciles partisans are.
I was perusing Freakerland for the first time in over a year yesterday
That was no where mentioned on the Freakerland thread.
#15. To: lodwick, Kamala (#8)
y/w. Will's a smart guy. I hope he finds another job soon.
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