Robert Fisk: Saddam takes his secrets to the grave

[Say_What]

<clips>

We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States -- and Britain -- gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support -- given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War -- is dead.

Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were given special treatment -- extreme torture before execution at Abu Ghraib.

There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 -- both he and the US administration believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border -- and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad -- at America's request.

"Mr Fisk ... at the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon," he said. "There I was handed the very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments -- thousands of them -- all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I traveled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very, very grateful!"

I was with Saddam's forward commandos at the time, under Iranian shellfire, noting how the Iraqi forces aligned their artillery positions far back from the battle front with detailed maps of the Iranian lines. Their shelling against Iran outside Basra allowed the first Iraqi tanks to cross the Karun within a week. The commander of that tank unit cheerfully refused to tell me how he had managed to choose the one river crossing undefended by Iranian armour. Two years ago, we met again, in Amman and his junior officers called him "General" -- the rank awarded him by Saddam after that tank attack east of Basra, courtesy of Washington's intelligence information.

[Chipper Chat]

1. There's still Tariq Aziz.

Will the US kill him or buy him off?

[Say_What]

4. Tariq Aziz: 'I want to testify'

I also read that his lawyer is asking for his release because of serious medical problems.


<clip>

AMMAN: Former Iraqi deputy premier Tariq Aziz wants urgently to testify in the genocide trial of Saddam Hussein before the toppled dictator is executed.

"Aziz has told me he has very important information that he wishes to explain to the world," lawyer Badih Aref Ezzat said yesterday.

"This information will cause as much embarrassment inside the country as outside," he added.

http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m29353

[Chipper Chat]

6. I suspect Aziz will soon by whisked off to Libya or Morocco

and we will never hear from him again. Bush will of course say "we had nothing to do with it." (It's nice to have friends in the KGB, M5, and Interpol).

[groovedaddy]

2. Link to article?

?

[Judi Lynn]

3. Here you go, groovedaddy:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2114403.ece

This man went without "squealing."

I'm not confused about how strong _Bush would have been in Hussein's position. Not one bit of doubt about his character.

[Say_What]

5. Sorry... n/t