This is why I don't think he'll live too long for a trial. Civil War
just ahead.
n his official statement celebrating the capture of Saddam Hussein, President Bush
announced that “the former dictator of Iraq will face the justice he denied to
millions.” Notably lacking from the president’s statement, however, was whether the
U.S. government would agree to relinquish control over Hussein’s trial to the Iraqi
government or to an international tribunal consisting of independent judges.
Why wouldn’t U.S. officials readily agree to relinquish jurisdiction over Hussein’s
trial? Because of their need to closely guard the secrets that Saddam Hussein has in
his possession — secrets that would cause no small amount of embarrassment to the
U.S. government, including former president Ronald Reagan, former vice-president
and former president George H.W. Bush (the president’s father), and Donald
Rumsfeld, the president’s secretary of defense.
One of those secrets is the extent of the relationship that existed between the Reagan
and Bush I administrations and Saddam Hussein, the details of which have never
been fully disclosed by U.S. officials. There is, of course, the famous photograph on
the Internet in which Rumsfeld and Hussein are shaking hands and making
conversation in Baghdad in 1983. How did that meeting get set up? Who was
involved in the decision-making process? What was discussed? What agreements
were entered into?
Saddam’s testimony at trial could provide some of the answers. And that prospect
— of Saddam Hussein testifying freely, openly, and publicly about his relationship
with Ronald Reagan, President Bush I, and Donald Rumsfeld — would undoubtedly
strike terror into the hearts and minds of many U.S. officials.
Imagine if the exact nature of the relationship between Reagan-Bush and Saddam
Hussein were to hit the front pages of newspapers all over the world on a daily basis,
as Hussein filled in his side of the details during his public testimony at trial.
And there’s a bigger secret, whose details would undoubtedly terrify U.S. officials
even more — that it was the Reagan-Bush administration that furnished Saddam
Hussein with the weapons of mass destruction (1) that he employed against the
Iranian and Iraqi people, and (2) that U.S. and UN officials used as the excuse for
imposing the brutal 12-year embargo against Iraq, whose resulting deaths of Iraqi
children arguably were a principal motivating factor behind the September 11
attacks, and (3) that President Bush ultimately relied upon as his principal justification
for invading Iraq.
Consider the following excerpt from an article entitled “How Iraq Built Its Weapons
Programs” in the March 16, 2003, issue of the St. Petersburg Times:
U.N. inspectors are working against the clock to figure out if Iraq retains
chemical and biological weapons, the systems to deliver them, and the capacity
to manufacture them. And here's the strange part, easily forgotten in the barrage
of recent rhetoric: It was Western governments and businesses that helped build
that capacity in the first place. From anthrax to high-speed computers to artillery
ammunition cases, the militarily useful products of a long list of Western
democracies flowed into Iraq in the decade before its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
In that same article, former U.S. Sen. Donald Riegle is quoted as saying, “What is
absolutely crystal clear is this: That if Saddam Hussein today has a large arsenal of
biological weapons, partly it was the United States that provided the very live viruses
that he needed to create those weapons.”
As ABC News put it in an article entitled “A Tortured Relationship,”
Indeed, even as President Bush castigates Saddam's regime as “a grave and
gathering danger,” it's important to remember that the United States helped arm
Iraq with the very weapons that administration officials are now citing as
justification for Saddam's forcible removal from power.
That same article made a pointed observation about President George H.W. Bush
(the president’s father):
In 1988, the same year the Iran-Iraq war ended, a new U.S. president was elected.
George Herbert Walker Bush came into office determined to pursue a policy of
engagement with Saddam. In fact, his first year in office, President Bush signed a
secret executive order, National Security Directive Number 26. It called for even
closer ties between the United States and Iraq.
In a September 25, 2002, article entitled “Following Iraq’s Bioweapons Trail,”
author Robert Novak wrote,
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