Chris Floyd: Rope Trick:Burying America's Collusion With Saddam

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Rope Trick:Burying America's Collusion With Saddam

Written by Chris Floyd

Thursday, 28 December 2006

Saddam Hussein, who is being held in American custody, has been tried by an American-appointed court which has ensured that all evidence pertaining to the massive Anglo-American support given to Saddam during the worst years of his savage reign has been completely supressed. The crimes for which he has been sentenced to death were carried out while Donald Rumsfeld was shaking his hand and Ronald Reagan was supplying him with moolah, diplomatic support and direct military intelligence to target his poison gas attacks on Iranian forces and aid his bombing of Iranian cities. The crimes for which he is currently on trial -- gassing the Kurds -- were not only countenanced by George Herbert Walker Bush and his administration (which included Dick Cheney and Colin Powell in key positions), but Bush went on to reward Saddam with showers of money (much of it funneled through secret bank accounts), military hardware -- including dual use technology for WMD -- and agricultural credits, which allowed Saddam to use his hard currency reserves for more weaponry.

Further charges -- moot now -- would doubtless have included Saddam's brutal suppression of the Shiite revolt following the Gulf War: a revolt openly fomented by Bush I who then betrayed the Iraqi rebels, specifically allowing Saddam to break the rules of the post-war armistice and use his attack helicopters on the Shiites, and also using the American forces still in place there to prevent Shiite rebels from reaching buried arms caches. Many of the mass graves over which American officials -- like the unctuous Colin Powell -- have publicly shed salt tears were, again, the result of direct collusion with Saddam by American officials, many of them now in power once more.

(For more background see Scar Tissue: How the Bushes Brought Bedlam to Iraq and Prelude to a Quagmire.)

The decades-long record of American collusion in the crimes of Saddam Hussein is clear and overwhelming -- and has been documented not only by news organizations like the Los Angeles Times but also by investigations of the United States Congress. Yet not a word of this is breathed in the media or Congress today; it is as if it never existed. And now the American-formed, American-backed government is about to take Saddam from American custody and hang him on an American-built gallows. It's like Al Capone throwing the switch with Frank Nitti in the chair.

Few will mourn Saddam -- a thug enthroned with the help of the CIA and sustained in power for years by the Bush Faction which is now about to kill him. The falling out of thieves ends ever thus. But far more disturbing is the way that the memory of even very recent, very public events can be manipulated and erased for sinister ends: in this case, to justify the mass murder of more than 600,000 innocent people. In the fever dreams of dominance and divine favor that pollute the minds of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the idea has taken hold that the blood of Saddam Hussein will somehow wash the clotted viscera of dead children from their hands.

It will not....

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