Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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Saddam Hussein: America's man in Iraq by Helen & Harry Highwater, Obviously and of course, Saddam Hussein belongs in the lowest circle of Dante's Hell, and now, that's where he is. And most of the awful things we've been told about his years in
Simply put, Saddam Hussein's brutal reign was made by the USA. He worked for the CIA before be became politically prominent in Iraq. He was one of America's closet Mideast allies during the 1980s, and received substantial US military and financial aid. When you hear references to his tyranny and cruelty, the accounts are generally true —he was one hell of a bastard. The 'unknown news', though, is that at the peak of Saddam's tyranny and cruelty, the Reagan administration didn't just tolerate having Saddam in charge of Iraq, they funded and armed his regime. He was America's ally, just like several of the world's most despotic bastards are America's allies now. And when he said Iraq had disarmed, it was true. When the Americans and Brits attacked and occupied Iraq, it wasn't necessary, and it wasn't for any of the reasons publicly proclaimed by America's President. Saddam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction. He wasn't working to get weapons of mass destruction. He was no danger to anyone but his own people, and even that danger was delivered by America. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, and the real reasons for this war won't be known for years, perhaps generations. Once he was captured, Saddam could have faced justice in an international tribunal, but if he had, there were all sorts of true stories he could have told about American complicity in his crimes. So instead he was given an obviously rigged trial in an Iraqi court, surrounded
It's hard to imagine that America is somehow safer because of the war and occupation of Iraq or the trial and execution of Saddam, since neither Saddam nor Iraq have ever posed any conceivable danger to America. But now as always, the political situation in Iraq is not rightfully any of America's business, except, arguably, insofar as the US owes Iraq a hell of a lot of reparation for supporting its disastrous dictatorship, and for the bombings and destruction that America launched when the dictator became inconvenient. Saddam's future is in God or Allah's hands, but Iraq's future remains a large question mark. A madman has been toppled and executed, and a tyranny has been replaced with anarchy. So long as the American military remains there, Iraq will have puppet leaders like Saddam, hated by Iraqis but backed by the United States. If America ever withdraws its military, Iraq will become what most of its people want — a Muslim theocracy. Either way, it's hard to see what America has gained, beyond a few thousand dead soldiers and a deeply damaged international reputation. As the American occupation of Iraq continues (and it will continue, probably for at least as long as anyone reading this is alive) Saddam's crimes will become more and more a distant memory in Iraq, but all across the Middle East songs will be sung, legends told, and books written about the American invasion and occupation. And these won't be happy bedtime stories, they'll be the furious inspiration for future generations of angry insurrection. © by the author.  How America armed Iraq The Sunday Herald [Glasgow, Scotland] June 14, 2004 Under the successive presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the USA sold nuclear, chemical and biological weapons technology to Saddam Hussein. In the early 1990s, UN inspectors told the US Senate committee on banking, housing and urban affairs —which oversees American export policy —that they had "identified many US-manufactured items exported pursuant of licenses issued by the US department of commerce that were used to further Iraq's chemical and nuclear weapons development and missile delivery system development programs". In 1992, the committee began investigating "US chemical and biological warfare-related dual-use exports to Iraq". It found that 17 individual shipments totaling some 80 batches of biomaterial were sent to Iraq during the Reagan years. These included two batches of anthrax and two batches of botulism being sent to the Iraqi ministry of higher education on May 2, 1986; one batch each of salmonella and E.Coli sent to the Iraqi state company for drug industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments from the US went to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the department of biology at the University of Basra in November 1989; the department of microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the ministry of health in April 1985 and Officers' City military complex in Baghdad in March and April 1986. As well as anthrax and botulism, the USA also sent West Nile fever, brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene. The shipments even went on after Saddam ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which some 5000 people died, in March 1988. The chairman of the Senate committee, Don Riegle, said: "The executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licenses for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think it's a devastating record." Other items which were sent by the US to Iraq included chemical warfare agent precursors, chemical warfare agent production facility plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment, biological warfare-related materials, missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment. The Sunday Herald [Glasgow, Scotland] Saddam Hussein was America's man in Baghdad by James Ridgeway, April 15, 2003 It's unlikely we will ever know for sure what the U.S. government has been doing with Saddam Hussein over the past 40 or so years. According to documents unearthed from the Reagan era, we know that Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to egg on the dictator in his war with Iran. At the time, the U.S. provided Saddam with loans, military intelligence, and other assistance. One story has it that Rumsfeld, then a drug company CEO, also was acting as a messenger boy for high officials in the Reagan administration who wanted to get rich building an oil pipeline from Iraq to Jordan. Secretary of State George Schultz, a former top official of Bechtel, was chief among them. He supposedly hoped to cash in on the deal if Bechtel got to build the pipeline. Now comes a UPI story, based on interviews with various British and U.S. intelligence sources, claiming that from Jack Kennedy in the early 1960s on up to the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, Saddam was in the hands of the CIA. In his early twenties, Saddam was recruited to kill Iraqi prime minister Abd al-Karim Qasim, UPI reports. He had given the U.S. a fright by backing out of the pro-West Baghdad Pact, which brought together Turkey, Britain, Iran, and Pakistan in a defensive alliance against the Soviets. Having ditched the pact, Qasim started buying Soviet arms and installing Communists in top positions, all of which led then CIA chief Allen Dulles to say Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world." According to the UPI report, Saddam led a farcical attempt to kill Qasim. Saddam and his six-man hit squad took up residence in a Baghdad apartment, but when the moment arrived, they got nervous and started shooting too soon, missing Qasim and ending up grazing Saddam. One of the hit men got a grenade stuck in the lining of his coat, and another put the wrong kind of bullets in his gun. Eventually Qasim was killed in a coup, rumored to have been encouraged by the CIA. Whether true or not, once the minister was killed, the CIA men gave the Baathist hierarchy lists of names of suspected Communists, whom they rounded up and murdered. A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: "We were frankly glad to be rid of them." Saddam became head of the Baathist intelligence apparatus. Ever after, the CIA took care of Saddam, helping to spirit him out of Baghdad to Tikrit, and from there to Syria and Beirut, and on to Egypt. He seems never to have been popular among the spies because he was thuggish and too low-class. During the 1980s the CIA drew close to Saddam's Baathist party-currently reviled as a bunch of vicious killer thugs, but then warmly regarded as our allies against the wacko ayatollahs in Iran. The CIA was providing Iraq with battlefield intelligence gained from a Saudi AWACS plane. It was during this period that Rumsfeld visited the dictator to see if there was anything the U.S. could do to help out. The U.S. manipulations in the Middle East then became more and more confusing as the CIA provided intelligence reports to both Iraq and its Iranian enemy. One former official told UPI 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." On doing so, he said, "I thought I was losing my mind." Village Voice Saddam key in early CIA plot by Richard Sale, United Press Int'l April 10, 2003 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. United Press Int'l Saddam can never be allowed a fair trial by Eric S. Margolis, Toronto Sun If put on public trial, Saddam Hussein would have a field day revealing the embarrassing alliance between his brutal regime and Washington:
In short, Saddam was one of America's closet Mideast allies during the 1980's, a major recipient of US military and financial aid. Saddam's killing of large numbers of Kurds and Shia rebels occurred while he was a key US ally. Washington remained mute at the time. When Bush I called on Kurds and Shia to revolt in 1991, the US watched impassively as Saddam slaughtered the poorly-armed rebels. Better a bullet-riddled Saddam, or one executed by a military kangaroo court in Guantanamo, or hanged by the new, American- installed 'Vichy' Iraqi regime in Baghdad. Saddam should be handed over by the US to the UN War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague that is currently trying Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and other accused Balkan war criminals. After all, it was Washington that engineered Milosevic's delivery to the Hague, an act for which the US deserves high praise. What applies to Milosevic applies equally to Saddam Hussein. In fact, it would be better for the Iraqi leader to stand trial at the newly constituted International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. But the Bush Administration, in one of its most shameful acts, has refused to join this tribunal or cooperate with it. Toronto Sun Rumsfeld backed Saddam by Andrew Buncombe, The Independent [London, UK] Dec. 24, 2003 Fresh controversy about Donald Rumsfeld's personal dealings with Saddam Hussein was provoked yesterday by new documents that reveal he went to Iraq to show America's support for the regime despite its use of chemical weapons. The formerly secret documents reveal the Defence Secretary travelled to Baghdad 20 years ago to assure Iraq that America's condemnation of its use of chemical weapons was made "strictly" in principle. The criticism in no way changed Washington's wish to support Iraq in its war against Iran and "to improve bi-lateral relations ... at a pace of Iraq's choosing". Earlier this year, Mr Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration regularly cited Saddam's willingness to use chemical weapons against his own people as evidence of the threat presented to the rest of the world. Senior officials presented the attacks against the Kurds — particularly the notorious attack in Halabja in 1988 — as a justification for the invasion and the ousting of Saddam. But the newly declassified documents reveal that 20 years ago America's position was different and that the administration of President Ronald Reagan was concerned about maintaining good relations with Iraq despite evidence of Saddam's "almost daily" use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Kurdish rebels. In March 1984, under international pressure, America condemned Iraq's use of such chemical weapons. But realising that Baghdad had been upset, Secretary of State George Schultz asked Mr Rumsfeld to travel to Iraq as a special envoy to meet Saddam's Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, and smooth matters over. In a briefing memo to Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Shultz wrote that he had met Iraqi officials in Washington to stress that America's interests remained "in (1) preventing an Iranian victory and (2) continuing to improve bilateral relations with Iraq". The memo adds: "This message bears reinforcing during your discussions." Exactly what Mr Rumsfeld, who at the time did not hold government office, told Mr Aziz on 26 March 1984, remains unclear and minutes from the meeting remain classified. No one from Mr Rumsfeld's office was available to comment yesterday. It was not Mr Rumsfeld's first visit to Iraq. Four months earlier, in December 1983, he had visited Saddam and was photographed shaking hands with the dictator. When news of this visit was revealed last year, Mr Rumsfeld claimed he had "cautioned" Saddam to stop using chemical weapons. When documents about the meeting disclosed he had said no such thing, a spokesman for Mr Rumsfeld said he had raised the issue with Mr Aziz. America's relationship with Iraq at a time when Saddam was using chemical weapons is well-documented but rarely reported. During the war with Iran, America provided combat assistance to Iraq that included intelligence on Iranian deployments and bomb-damage assessments. In 1987-88 American warships destroyed Iranian oil platforms in the Gulf and broke the blockade of Iraqi shipping lanes. Tom Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, a non-profit group that obtained the documents, told The New York Times: "Saddam had chemical weapons in the 1980s and it didn't make any difference to US policy. The embrace of Saddam and what it emboldened him to do should caution us as Americans that we have to look closely at all our murky alliances." Last night, Danny Muller, a spokesman for the anti-war group Voices in the Wilderness, said the documents revealed America's "blatant hypocrisy". He added: "This is not an isolated event. Continuing administrations have said 'we will do business'. I am surprised that Donald Rumsfeld does not resign right now." The Independent [London, UK] Did we get back Saddam's WNDU-TV [South Bend, IN] March 26, 2003 Years before Saddam Hussein became an enemy to the United States, he was reportedly seen as a friend and made an honorary Detroit citizen. In 1980 when Saddam Hussein was on good terms with America, he was quite the giver. Hussein donated money to help several churches in the motor city, Detroit. There are pictures of a meeting between a Detroit priest and Saddam Hussein when he accepted the donation. Father Jacob Yasso of the Sacred Heart Chaldean Church says, "He said, 'We hear you have a debt on your church'. I said, 'Yes Mr. President'. He said, 'How much?'. I said '$170,000'. He said, 'I'll pay it off for you'." Father Yasso returned the favor at that same meeting 23 years ago. He gave Hussein a key to the city of Detroit making him an honorary citizen. WNDU-TV
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