Saddam Hussein

[Danny Jarman]

I was just checking some things on wikipedia and saw this on Saddam's trial, i was wondering if anyone had more info on the bolded parts?

On 30 June 2004, Saddam Hussein, held in custody by U.S. forces at the U.S. base "Camp Cropper", along with 11 other senior Baathist leaders, were handed over legally (though not physically) to the interim Iraqi government to stand trial for crimes against humanity and other offences.
A few weeks later, he was charged by the Iraqi Special Tribunal with crimes committed against residents of Dujail in 1982, following a failed assassination attempt against him. Specific charges included the murder of 148 people, torture of women and children and the illegal arrest of 399 others.[63][64] Among the many challenges of the trial were:

• Saddam and his lawyers' contesting the court's authority and maintaining that he was still the President of Iraq.[65]
  
• The assassinations and attempts on the lives of several of Saddam's lawyers.
  
• The replacement of the chief presiding judge, midway through the trial.
  

On 5 November 2006, Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging. Saddam's half brother, Barzan Ibrahim, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court in 1982, were convicted of similar charges. The verdict and sentencing were both appealed but subsequently affirmed by Iraq's Supreme Court of Appeals.[66] On 30 December 2006, Saddam was hanged.

Did he not get an appeal, and I take it the judge was replaced because he did not tow the line?

And did no one in the media ever bring up the question that - if we were the ones to bring "democracy" and "western values" to Iraq, why on earth did they let them hang him?! :thumpdown:

I apologise if there is a similar thread about, I searched but found nothing.

[Danny Jarman]

Critics, including Saddam's legal counsel Khalil al-Dulaimi, alleged that American officials had a heavy influence on the court.[55]

In a statement, Khalil said, "this court is a creature of the US military occupation, and the Iraqi court is just a tool and rubber stamp of the invaders."[56]

Khalil al-Dulaimi and various international commentators alleged that the date on which the verdict was read live to the world, 5 November 2006, was deliberately selected by the Bush Administration in order to influence the US midterm elections which occurred two days later. This has been called a November Surprise.[56][57]

The verdict was expected to be on 16 October 2006, but was postponed to consider recalling some of the witnesses.[58]

Even as the verdict was released verbally on 5 November, the written, final verdict was not released until days later.[59]

The television link of the trial was provided by a US company which frequently edited out the sound of what Saddam and other defendants said, and sometimes edited the video as well.[60]

Some witnesses were told by court staff what to say.[61]

Judges were replaced numerous times, reportedly because of "leniency" towards the defence.[61]

All defence lawyers who questioned the court's legitimacy were ejected.[61]

A defence lawyer who showed images of US torture was ejected.[61]

Witnesses claimed to be forced or tortured to testify.[61]

Evidence was allegedly forged in numerous circumstances.[61]

Numerous witnesses' statements claimed the accused's innocence.[61]

An unidentified witness claimed chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi offered him $500 to give false evidence and said his family was threatened.[61]

Three witnesses told the court people allegedly killed by Saddam in Dujail are actually alive.[61]

A defense lawyer was abducted and killed.[61]

:mad:

[Magda Hassan]

And did no one in the media ever bring up the question that - if we were the ones to bring "democracy" and "western values" to Iraq, why on earth did they let them hang him?! :thumpdown:

I apologise if there is a similar thread about, I searched but found nothing.

With the honorable exception of a few journalists the media is there as cheerleaders for the US imperialism to make sure that the right narrative is kept to and not to inform us of what is actually happening there in our name. One of the threads of that narrative is that the US is bringing 'democracy' and 'western values' to the slightly dark and primitive people of Iraq. The fact that there is precious little 'democracy' or 'western values' in the almost openly fascist police state of the US today is quite beside the point. While Saddam's links with the CIA go back to 1959 while he was there Iraq had free education at all levels and universal health care and some of the best museums of the ancient worlds antiquities and total emancipation and legal equality of women, high literacy, a secular legal sytem and a nationalized oil industry. The US in bringing 'democracy' and 'western values' all that has disappeared. This is not to say that Saddam was a great guy. He was a murderous criminal in his own right and does deserve to be on trial. Missing from the trial were those western leaders who supplied him with the chemical weapons with which to murder the unruly Iraqi Kurds. I am not clear if Iraq had the death penalty before the US invasion, I suspect that they did, but the US does have the death penalty in many of the states. So, they are only being true to self. But, more importantly, dead men tell no tales and Saddam had plenty he could tell about the complicity of the western leaders so the trial had to be managed and those pesky defence lawyer and judges who thought they could just do their job had to dealt with. Preserving the narrative of 'western values' and 'democracy' is a far higher cause than truth or human rights and other enlightenment values it seems. It is no more than what happened to Saddam's predecessor Qasim and many others also with US arms and funds.

[Danny Jarman]

Good stuff Magda, reading the part that some people said the supposed people Saddam killed were actually still alive, makes me believe his so called "crimes" were extremely exaggerated for the bovine.

[Magda Hassan]

Good stuff Magda, reading the part that some people said the supposed people Saddam killed were actually still alive, makes me believe his so called "crimes" were extremely exaggerated for the bovine.

That may well be but there is no shortage of corpses in the wake of Saddam. While life for the average Iraqi was certainly far better under him than under the present foreign invaders and their puppet there is no doubt that many perceived or actual enemies did die horribly in their thousands. Saddam was assisted in this gruesome task with help from many western leaders. If the puppet prosecutors and the US invaders don't have their death list in order it is more an bureaucratic issue than a factual one. He was a criminal. But then the other criminals in charge now deserve no respect for their show trial for they don't give a shit about the dead either just using them as brutally in death as Saddam did in life to achieve their ends to justify the execution of a man with too many secrets. As much as I hate Saddam, and I truly do, he had more human dignity at that moment than those other jackals in the room with him using the noose.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot

Published: April 10, 2003 at 7:30 PM

By RICHARD SALE, UPI Intelligence Correspondent

U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.

United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report.

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed."

According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.

Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power," according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."

In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."

According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.

Adel Darwish, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.

Darwish said that Saddam's paymaster was Capt. Abdel Maquid Farid, the assistant military attaché at the Egyptian Embassy who paid for the apartment from his own personal account. Three former senior U.S. officials have confirmed that this is accurate.

The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched. Accounts differ. One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish told UPI that one of the assassins had bullets that did not fit his gun and that another had a hand grenade that got stuck in the lining of his coat.

"It bordered on farce," a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. But Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. government officials said.

Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said.

One former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that even then Saddam "was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a cutthroat."

In Cairo, Saddam was installed in an apartment in the upper class neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana Café, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives, according to Darwish and former U.S. intelligence officials.

One former senior U.S. government official said: "In Cairo, I often went to Groppie Café at Emad Eldine Pasha Street, which was very posh, very upper class. Saddam would not have fit in there. The Indiana was your basic dive."

But during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew Saddam, former U.S. intelligence officials said.

Saddam's U.S. handlers even pushed Saddam to get his Egyptian handlers to raise his monthly allowance, a gesture not appreciated by Egyptian officials since they knew of Saddam's American connection, according to Darwish. His assertion was confirmed by former U.S. diplomat in Egypt at the time.

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed recently that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this.

"We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running around asking what the hell had happened," this official said.

But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.

Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.

A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: "We were frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have to get kidding. This was serious business."

A former senior CIA official said: "It was a bit like the mysterious killings of Iran's communists just after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. All 4,000 of his communists suddenly got killed."

British scholar Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," quotes Jim Critchfield, then a senior Middle East agency official, as saying the killing of Qasim and the communists was regarded "as a great victory." A former long-time covert U.S. intelligence operative and friend of Critchfield said: "Jim was an old Middle East hand. He wasn't sorry to see the communists go at all. Hey, we were playing for keeps."

Saddam, in the meantime, became head of al-Jihaz a-Khas, the secret intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party.

The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq's armed forces, according to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency intelligence group.

This former official said that he personally had signed off on a document that shared U.S. satellite intelligence with both Iraq and Iran in an attempt to produce a military stalemate. "When I signed it, I thought I was losing my mind," the former official told UPI.

A former CIA official said that Saddam had assigned a top team of three senior officers from the Estikhbarat, Iraq's military intelligence, to meet with the Americans.

According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam's ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.

The Saddam-U.S. intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end at 2 a.m. Aug. 2, 1990, when 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded its neighbor, Kuwait. America's one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Securit...050017416/

Here's a key quote from the NYT article below:

The Pentagon ''wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas,'' said one veteran of the program. ''It was just another way of killing people -- whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference,'' he said.

Not sure quite what was happening in MSM land there. Perhaps there another deep political agenda being played out...

OFFICERS SAY U.S. AIDED IRAQ IN WAR DESPITE USE OF GAS

By PATRICK E. TYLER

Published: August 18, 2002

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17— A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.

Those officers, most of whom agreed to speak on the condition that they not be identified, spoke in response to a reporter's questions about the nature of gas warfare on both sides of the conflict between Iran and Iraq from 1981 to 1988. Iraq's use of gas in that conflict is repeatedly cited by President Bush and, this week, by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, as justification for ''regime change'' in Iraq.

The covert program was carried out at a time when President Reagan's top aides, including Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci and Gen. Colin L. Powell, then the national security adviser, were publicly condemning Iraq for its use of poison gas, especially after Iraq attacked Kurds in Halabja in March 1988.

During the Iran-Iraq war, the United States decided it was imperative that Iran be thwarted, so it could not overrun the important oil-producing states in the Persian Gulf. It has long been known that the United States provided intelligence assistance to Iraq in the form of satellite photography to help the Iraqis understand how Iranian forces were deployed against them. But the full nature of the program, as described by former Defense Intelligence Agency officers, was not previously disclosed.

Secretary of State Powell, through a spokesman, said the officers' description of the program was ''dead wrong,'' but declined to discuss it. His deputy, Richard L. Armitage, a senior defense official at the time, used an expletive relayed through a spokesman to indicate his denial that the United States acquiesced in the use of chemical weapons.

(snip)

In early 1988, after the Iraqi Army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao Peninsula in an attack that reopened Iraq's access to the Persian Gulf, a defense intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Rick Francona, now retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers, the American military officers said.

He reported that Iraq had used chemical weapons to cinch its victory, one former D.I.A. official said. Colonel Francona saw zones marked off for chemical contamination, and containers for the drug atropine scattered around, indicating that Iraqi soldiers had taken injections to protect themselves from the effects of gas that might blow back over their positions. (Colonel Francona could not be reached for comment.)

C.I.A. officials supported the program to assist Iraq, though they were not involved. Separately, the C.I.A. provided Iraq with satellite photography of the war front.

Col. Walter P. Lang, retired, the senior defense intelligence officer at the time, said he would not discuss classified information, but added that both D.I.A. and C.I.A. officials ''were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose'' to Iran.

''The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern,'' he said. What Mr. Reagan's aides were concerned about, he said, was that Iran not break through to the Fao Peninsula and spread the Islamic revolution to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Colonel Lang asserted that the Defense Intelligence Agency ''would have never accepted the use of chemical weapons against civilians, but the use against military objectives was seen as inevitable in the Iraqi struggle for survival.'' Senior Reagan administration officials did nothing to interfere with the continuation of the program, a former participant in the program said.

Iraq did turn its chemical weapons against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq, but the intelligence officers say they were not involved in planning any of the military operations in which those assaults occurred.

They said the reason was that there were no major Iranian troop concentrations in the north and the major battles where Iraq's military command wanted assistance were on the southern war front.

The Pentagon's battle damage assessments confirmed that Iraqi military commanders had integrated chemical weapons throughout their arsenal and were adding them to strike plans that American advisers either prepared or suggested. Iran claimed that it suffered thousands of deaths from chemical weapons.

The American intelligence officers never encouraged or condoned Iraq's use of chemical weapons, but neither did they oppose it because they considered Iraq to be struggling for its survival, people involved at the time said in interviews.

Another former senior D.I.A. official who was an expert on the Iraqi military said the Reagan administration's treatment of the issue -- publicly condemning Iraq's use of gas while privately acquiescing in its employment on the battlefield -- was an example of the ''Realpolitik'' of American interests in the war.

The effort on behalf of Iraq ''was heavily compartmented,'' a former D.I.A. official said, using the military jargon for restricting secrets to those who need to know them.

''Having gone through the 440 days of the hostage crisis in Iran,'' he said, ''the period when we were the Great Satan, if Iraq had gone down it would have had a catastrophic effect on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and the whole region might have gone down. That was the backdrop of the policy.''

One officer said, ''They had gotten better and better'' and after a while chemical weapons ''were integrated into their fire plan for any large operation, and it became more and more obvious.''

A number of D.I.A. officers who took part in aiding Iraq more than a decade ago when its military was actively using chemical weapons, now say they believe that the United States should overthrow Mr. Hussein at some point. But at the time, they say, they all believed that their covert assistance to Mr. Hussein's military in the mid-1980's was a crucial factor in Iraq's victory in the war and the containment of a far more dangerous threat from Iran.

The Pentagon ''wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas,'' said one veteran of the program. ''It was just another way of killing people -- whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference,'' he said.

Former Secretary of State Shultz and Vice President Bush tried to stanch the flow of chemical precursors to Iraq and spoke out against Iraq's use of chemical arms, but Mr. Shultz, in his memoir, also alluded to the struggle in the administration.

''I was stunned to read an intelligence analysis being circulated within the administration that 'we have demolished a budding relationship (with Iraq) by taking a tough position in opposition to chemical weapons,' '' he wrote.

Mr. Shultz also wrote that he quarreled with William J. Casey, then the director of central intelligence, over whether the United States should press for a new chemical weapons ban at the Geneva Disarmament Conference. Mr. Shultz declined further comment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/18/world/...f-gas.html