By Pepe Escobar
... snip ...
Aziz, born Mikhael Yuhann in 1936 in Mosul, a Chaldean Christian - the only one in the former Sunni and secular Ba'athist inner circle, its worldwide-known "human face" - holder of a degree in English language and literature, is already serving a 15-year sentence for a series of killings of 42 tradesmen in 1992 plus a further seven-year sentence for his alleged role in the deportation of Iraqi Kurds during the Saddam Hussein era. No Western court would admit what was presented as evidence to show that he was personally involved in both crimes.
The European Union (EU) at least is being true to its charter (the death penalty is "unacceptable"); the EU's foreign representative, Catherine Ashton, will appeal to Baghdad to block the execution. Aziz's defense will appeal to the Vatican - which also condemns it. Italian radical leader Marco Pannella has started a hunger strike to denounce it.
Anyone who does not see this as a political verdict is a believer in democracy by "shock and awe". In this case, revenge is served to current Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his Shi'ite Da'wa party, which had been persecuted under Saddam's Sunni regime. Everyone else loses badly - because Aziz is arguably the only person on Earth who could tell the real story, bit by juicy bit, about the rolling, decades-long American dirty game in Iraq.
His is the ultimate political best-seller we'll never be able to read - telling for instance how the US, the United Kingdom and the Saudis shelled out over $60 billion for Iraq to go to war with Iran during the 1980s; what was really discussed between Saddam, himself and former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad when they met in 1983; how every Western politician paid homage at the court of Saddam - the man who would get rid of those demented ayatollahs; how Saddam beat the late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's human waves of martyrs by spraying them with Western-supplied chemical weapons; and how those fabled "weapons of mass destruction" were nowhere to be seen since 1995 at least - thus rendering George W Bush's and Tony Blair's casus belli null and void.
/article continues here:
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LJ28Ak01.html
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