Saddam’s Capture Means Trouble for U.S. Officials

Saddam’s Capture Means Trouble for U.S. Officials

BlackPressUSA.Com

Saddam’s Capture Means Trouble for U.S. Officials

By Jacob G. Hornberger

Special to the NNPA from The Future of Freedom Forum

News Analysis

FAIRFAX, Va. (NNPA)-In 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, An
eight-year-old Senate report confirms that disease-
producing and poisonous materials were exported, under
U.S. government license, to Iraq from 1985 to 1988
during the Iran-Iraq war.

Furthermore, the report adds, the American-exported
materials were identical to microorganisms destroyed by
United Nations inspectors after the Gulf War. The
shipments were approved despite allegations that Saddam
used biological weapons against Kurdish rebels and
(according to the current official U.S. position)
initiated war with Iran.

Why did Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush enter into a
close relationship with Saddam Hussein? Why did they
furnish him with weapons of mass destruction? It’s
impossible to know for sure. But the most likely reason
was that U.S. officials intended for Hussein to use such
weapons against the Iranian people during the Iran-Iraq
war of the 1980s.

Were U.S. officials aware of Saddam Hussein’s brutal
nature when they entered into their pact with him and
furnished him with weapons of mass destruction?

According to the St. Petersburg Times article, U.S.
officials continued sending weapons of mass destruction
to Hussein even after hearing that Iraqi forces had used
such weapons in the Iraqi town of Halabja in March 1988.
In a February 3, 2003, article entitled ’Reaping the
Grim Harvest We Have Sown’ in the Sydney Morning Herald,
author Anne Summers cites a Washington Post report
stating that after Rumsfeld visited Saddam Hussein in
1983 as President Reagan’s special envoy, ’U.S.
intelligence and logistical support played a crucial
role in shoring up Iraqi defenses’ despite express
warnings from the U.S. State Department that Iraq was
engaged in ’almost daily use of CW [chemical weapons]’
against Iran in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol.

Citing a critical New York Times report in a August 18,
2000, MSNBC article entitled ’Rumsfeld Key Player in
Iraq Policy Shift,’ author Robert Windrem wrote, The New
York Times reported Sunday that United States gave Iraq
vital battle-planning help during its war with Iran as
part of a secret program under President Reagan - even
though U.S. intelligence agencies knew the Iraqis would
unleash chemical weapons. The covert program involved
more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency
who helped Iraq in its eight-year war with Iran by
providing detailed information on Iranian military
deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for
airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments, the Times said.
The Times said it based its report on comments by senior
U.S. military officers with direct knowledge of the
program, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.

Given that these things have been buried and forgotten
in the wake of President Bush’s invasion of Iraq, to
have it all drudged up again, especially by the
worldwide press covering Saddam

Hussein’s trial, would undoubtedly be one great big
nightmare for President Bush, his father, Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld, and other U.S. officials. The
reluctance to delve into this uncomfortable subject was
recently confirmed by two episodes.

The first episode involved Rumsfeld’s claim of a memory
lapse regarding the matter, as reported by the
Associated Press:

Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping
what we have sown?’ [U.S. Senator Robert] Byrd asked
Rumsfeld after reading parts of a Newsweek article on
the transfers.

’I have never heard anything like what you’ve read, I
have no knowledge of it whatsoever, and I doubt it,’
Rumsfeld said. He later said he would ask the Defense
Department and other agencies to search their records
for evidence of the transfers.

The second episode involved Saddam Hussein’s delivery of
his weapons report to the United Nations shortly before
President Bush invaded Iraq. U.S. officials hijacked the
report before it could be released to the public and
excised the parts in which Hussein detailed who exactly
had furnished him with the WMD. According to the Sydney
Morning Herald article by Anne Summers: What is known is
that the 10 non-permanent members had to be content with
an edited, scaled-down version. According to the German
news agency DPA, instead of the 12,000 pages, these
nations - including Germany, which this month became
president of the Security Council - were given only
3,000 pages. So what was missing? The Guardian reported
that the nine-page table of contents included chapters
on ’procurements’ in Iraq’s nuclear program and
’relations with companies, representatives and
individuals’ for its chemical weapons program. This
information was not included in the edited version.

If U.S. officials insist on retaining control over
Hussein’s case, what are they going to charge him with -
’misleading President Bush into mistakenly believing
that he still possessed the weapons of mass destruction
that the president’s father gave him’? Given that Iraq
never attacked or threatened to attack the United States
and given that Hussein and Reagan-Bush were allies
during the entire 1980s, what other offense against the
United States could they conceivably charge him with
during that period of time?

If U.S. officials relinquish control over Hussein’s case
to the Iraqis or to an international tribunal of
independent (i.e., non-U.S. or British) judges, there’s
a good possibility that Hussein will be charged with
employing chemical weapons both against Iran and his own
people. But how do they explain the failure to indict
the U.S. officials who furnished him with those weapons
in the first place? How do U.S. officials prevent the
tribunal from permitting Hussein to testify to the world
about such matters in an open (i.e., non-secret)
proceeding?

If U.S. officials retain control over the case in order
to charge Hussein with war crimes against the United
States arising out of the resistance to the U.S.
occupation, that would enable Hussein to argue that the
invasion itself violated the war-of-aggression principle
enunciated at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal,
especially given that Bush’s principle justification for
invading - that is, the continued existence of the
weapons of mass destruction that Reagan-Bush had
furnished Hussein in the 1980s - was groundless.

Moreover, who can doubt that Hussein will use his trial
to charge the United States and the United Nations with
crimes against humanity arising out of the brutal 12-
year economic embargo against Iraq, which contributed to
the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people -
an embargo that U.S. officials continually justified on
the claim that Iraq still possessed the weapons of mass
destruction that U.S. officials had delivered to him
during the 1980s? After all, don’t forget that two high
UN officials resigned their positions on moral grounds
arising out of the massive number of deaths that the
sanctions were producing year after year.

If they charge Hussein with the mass graves arising out
of the post-Persian Gulf War rebellion in the southern
part of Iraq, won’t Hussein and his legal staff defend
by arguing that the killings were necessary to suppress
an illegal rebellion against the Iraqi government that
had been inspired by the president’s father?

How likely is it that U.S. officials will permit Saddam
Hussein to be delivered to a tribunal whose judges they
are unable to control - to judges who would permit
Hussein to testify freely, openly, and publicly about
the details of his relationship with Reagan-Bush
officials to a transfixed world.

Indeed, the real question is: Will President Bush permit
Saddam Hussein to be put on trial for anything? As U.S.
officials begin to reflect upon the legal quandary that
Hussein’s capture has put them in, they will undoubtedly
come to rue the day that U.S. soldiers treated his
capture differently than the way they treated the
capture of his two sons.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The
Future of Freedom Foundation.

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