Robert Scheer: Silencing Saddam

By Robert Scheer

It is a very frightening precedent that the United States can invade a country on false pretenses, depose its leader and summarily execute him without an international trial or appeals process. This is about vengeance, not justice, for if it were the latter the existing international norms would have been observed. The trial should have been overseen by the World Court, in a country that could have guaranteed the safety of defense lawyers, who, in this case, were killed or otherwise intimidated.

The irony here is that the crimes for which Saddam Hussein was convicted occurred before the United States, in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, embraced him. Those crimes were well known to have occurred 15 months before Rumsfeld visited Iraq to usher in an alliance between the United States and Saddam to defeat Iran.

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Bush Silences a Dangerous Witness
by Robert Parry | Dec 31 2006


Like a blue-blood version of a Mob family with global reach, the Bushes have eliminated one more key witness to the important historical events that led the U.S. military into a bloody stalemate in Iraq and pushed the Middle East to the brink of calamity.

The hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be - as the New York Times observed - the "triumphal bookend" to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. If all had gone as planned, Bush might have staged another celebration as he did after the end of "major combat," posing under the "Mission Accomplished" banner on May 1, 2003.

But now with nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed and the Iraqi death toll exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush may be forced to savor the image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.

Still, Bush has done his family's legacy a great service while also protecting secrets that could have embarrassed other senior U.S. government officials.

He has silenced a unique witness to crucial chapters of the secret history that stretched from Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979 to the alleged American-Saudi "green light" for Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, through the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War during which high-ranking U.S. intermediaries, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, allegedly helped broker supplies of war materiel for Hussein.

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I avoided reading the news yesterday because one of the very first things I came to was a picture of Sadam with a noose around his neck. It disturbed me greatly. Even last night, we were flicking through channels looking for something kid friendly and I almost screamed when one of the images flashing past was a video of his hanging.

What good has his death done? Who is better off for it? It makes me so sick and so ashamed that we (the US) could do such a thing.

The two authors are so, so correct. What did he know that we would go to such lengths to silence?

I like to think he might have done some writing while he's been languishing in jail for the last three years, albeit secretly. I know that's highly unlikely as I'm sure everything he did was watched, evaluated, and reported to Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Well, there's lots of fodder for those who want to write books about Saddam's death and why it happened when and as it did. Watch...there'll be at least three or four out before spring.