On Saddam's Death Sentance

I've been light on the Iraq posts because I think that the Iraq war is distracting to the very serious things going on in the African world. Secondly because anyone with 3/5 ofa brain knows that the War (in political terms) is lost. Anyone who has studied colonialism knows that colonialism always falls under its own weight and that Iraq is going to go the same route as Ghana, Algeria, Egypt, etc. Thirdly, the lies told to go into Iraq are so blatant and the violations of international law so blatant that the charging of crimes against humanity against Saddam and not this administration is grand hypocracy. But for those that need an Iraq fix, I would point you to a recent posting over at the DeskRat Chronicles which is an excellent summary of the life and times of Saddam Hussein and why he "needs" to die. Portions of his post references another bloggers post.

saddam was america's boy . he began his career at age 22 as a hitman for cia .
he was part of a cia assassination plot against iraq's leader colonel kassim .
kassim was viewed by the Us as too chummy with the soviets at the time .
kassim also was a populist who wanted to nationalize iraq's oil .
saddam and the other plotters ambushed kassim's car .
saddam was too impatient and blew it by firing too soon.
kassim was only wounded , his driver was killed and saddam had to flee the country.
saddam's cia handlers paid for his apartment in cairo for a year or so until another attempt on kassim succeeded and he was killed .

saddam returned to iraq , rode the coattails of an older cousin or uncle up the ladder of the baath party . ..

The decision to uphold the death sentence of Saddam Hussein by the sham Iraqi appeals court has gained worldwide condemnation, except for the U.S., of course. The court took two days to read 1,500 pages of documents presented by the defense. No court in the world can decipher this number of pages in such a short time, not even a legitimate court...

...I challenge all journalists who advocate the hanging of Saddam Hussein to take a few hours and research reality.
The standard figure of deaths attributed to the Ba'ath regime during the Anfal campaign is 182,000. Why have there not been any bodies found? If 182,000 people were killed, there must be piles and piles of bodies, yet none has appeared.
If 148 people were sentenced to death in 1982 for attempting to assassinate the president of Iraq, why are at least 24 still alive? And, those who were executed received a lengthy and fair trial that lasted about three years. They were fighting on the side of Iran while Iraq was engaged in a war with its eastern neighbor. In the U.S., this would be considered high treason. With Saddam Hussein, it was called mass murder. George Bush himself signed off more execution orders while the governor of Texas than did Saddam in the Dujail case.
If Iraqi military personnel gassed and killed 5,000 Kurds in Halabjah, why were only 300 bodies found? And, why was the gas used to kill the citizens cyanogen, a gas that Iraq did not possess but Iran did? Why have the CIA, the U.S. Army War College, Greenpeace, the main CIA analyst in 1988 (Stephen Pellitiere), the late Jude Waniski, the U.S Marine Corps Historical Report, and various other individuals and organizations blamed Iran for the gassing of the Kurds?

Read the full post here:

http://deskrat.blogspot.com/2006/12/hanging-saddam.html#comments

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