Halfway
Home CounterPunchers!
Annual Fundraising Appeal
We interrupt your regular reading
habits to bring you the following important announcement: CounterPunch
needs your financial support!
We're not in the habit of making
idle threats and this isn't one. Either we meet our fundraising
goal of $60,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced
to drastically curtail the operation of our website. It's near
the end of our year and the wolves are gathering at the door.
CounterPunch's website is supported
almost entirely by subscribers to the print edition of our newsletter.
We don't clutter the site by selling annoying popup ads. We tried
getting money out of Google, but they gave us the boot. We aren't
on the receiving end of six-figure grants from big foundations.
George Soros doesn't have us on retainer. And we don't sell tickets
on cruiseliners.
The continued existence of
CounterPunch depends solely on the support and dedication of
our readers. And we know there are a lot of you. We get thousands
of emails from you every day. Our website receives nearly 100,000
visits each day-and those numbers grow by the month. Of course,
all these readers chew up a lot of bandwidth and that costs money.
Through the Iraq war, the daily
traumas of the Bush administration, hurricanes, earthquakes and
the disappearance of the Democrats, many of you have found a
refuge at CounterPunch and made us your homepage. You tell us
that you love CounterPunch because the quality of writing you
find here every day and because we never flinch under fire. We
appreciate the support and are prepared for the fierce battles
to come as the Bush administration expands its wars abroad and
at home.
To contribute by phone you
can call Becky or Deva toll free at: 1-800-840-3683
or mail contribution to:
CounterPunch
PO Box 228
Petrolia, CA 95558
Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
10, 2006
The Trial of Saddam Hussein
Who
Will Pass Judgment on Those Who Judge?
By GREGORY ELICH
"It's a major achievement," announced
President Bush in reaction to the conviction and sentencing to
death of Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity. The trial,
he assured us, was "a milestone in the Iraqi people's efforts
to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law." In
order to facilitate the desired result, the U.S. had established
and funded the court, as well as provided training to officials.
"The rule of law" remains a distant goal in occupied
Iraq, but the concept of tyrannical rule is a fluid one. Certainly,
the invasion and subjugation of Iraq by force of arms does not
qualify in the mass media's lexicon. Nor, for that matter, did
Saddam Hussein's early years in power, when his crimes were not
merely tolerated, but encouraged.
How does it happen that a man
can be regarded as an ally one day, and an enemy the next? How
is it that as praise fades away, that same man comes to deserve
capture and death? Is it because his behavior has changed, or
because there has been a transformation in perception?
Like others who have since
come to be regarded as dangerous criminals, Saddam Hussein was
at one time backed and promoted by the U.S. As long as men like
Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar served
U.S. geopolitical interests, their brutal methods were regarded
as effective tools in the struggle to further U.S. objectives.
It was only when their actions began to threaten those interests
that these men earned opprobrium. A closer look at the history
of their relationship with the U.S. reveals much about how foreign
policy is conducted.
In his early years, Saddam
Hussein was on the CIA payroll. Contacts began in 1959, when
the agency sponsored him as a member of a small team assigned
to assassinate Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim. The Prime
Minister had made himself a target by committing the unpardonable
sin of taking his nation out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact.
Hussein was set up in an apartment across the street from Qasim's
office and told to observe his movements. But CIA plans received
a setback when the attempted assassination on October 7, 1959
was conducted in so inept a manner that it failed to achieve
its objective. An over-anxious Hussein fired too soon, killing
Qasim's driver and only wounding the Prime Minster. Following
the botched attempt on the Prime Minister's life, CIA and Egyptian
intelligence agents helped Hussein to escape to Tikrit. From
there he crossed into Syria and then to Beirut, where the CIA
provided him with an apartment and put him through a short training
course. Even at that young age, a former U.S. intelligence official
recalls, Hussein "was known as having no class. He was a
thug a cutthroat." But he did have excellent anticommunist
credentials. From Beirut he was eventually sent to Cairo, where
he remained under the watchful eye of his CIA handlers and made
frequent visits to the U.S. embassy to meet with agency officials.
U.S. hostility towards Qasim had not abated, and he was eventually
killed in a Ba'ath Party coup in 1963, after which the CIA gave
the Iraqi National Guard lists of communists they wanted to see
imprisoned and executed. According to former U.S. intelligence
officials, many suspected communists were killed under the personal
supervision of Hussein. As one former U.S. State Department official
put it, "We were frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask
that they get a fair trial? You have got to be kidding. This
was serious business." With his image burnished through
such accomplishments, Hussein first went on to become head of
Iraqi security and then in 1979, president of the nation. He
remained allied with the U.S. during his first decade in power
as he ordered the arrest of communists and other political opponents
by the thousands. Nearly all would be tortured or killed. (1)
In 1980, Saddam Hussein sent
Iraqi troops to invade Iran in an attempt to seize territory
by force of arms. The resulting war dragged on for eight years,
causing immense destruction and costing the lives of 1.7 million
people in one of the twentieth century's worst wars.
Relatively early in that war,
in December 1983, President Reagan sent envoy Donald Rumsfeld
to Baghdad to meet Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and offer American
assistance. Rumsfeld told Hussein that the U.S. wanted full relations
and "would regard any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes
as a strategic defeat for the West." Just one month before,
State Department official Jonathan Howe had informed Secretary
of State George Schultz that Iraq was using chemical weapons
against Iranian forces on an "almost daily basis."
It was also well known by then that the Hussein government was
engaging in widespread repression. Many thousands of individuals
were being imprisoned, tortured, executed or sent into exile.
Howard Teicher worked for the
National Security Agency when he accompanied Rumsfeld on that
mission. Teicher recalls, "President Reagan decided that
the United States would do whatever was necessary and legal to
prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran," and formalized
a policy of assisting Iraq in a National Security Decision Directive
[NSDD] which Teicher helped draft. CIA Director William Casey
"personally spearheaded the effort to ensure that Iraq had
sufficient military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to avoid
losing the Iran-Iraq war. Pursuant to the secret NSDD, the United
States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the
Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing U.S.
military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely
monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that
Iraq had the military weaponry required."
CIA personnel visited Iraq
on a regular basis to provide surveillance intelligence gathered
by U.S.-supplied Saudi AWACS planes in support of the Iraqi war
effort. Both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency directly
assisted an Iraqi offensive in February 1988 by electronically
"blinding" Iranian radar for three days. "The
United States also provided strategic operational advice to the
Iraqis to better use their assets in combat," Teicher said.
"For example, in 1986, President Reagan sent a secret message"
through Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek, acting as an intermediary,
"to Saddam Hussein telling him that Iraq should step up
its air war and bombing of Iran," and "similar strategic
operational military advice was passed" to Hussein through
meetings with various heads of state.
Teicher "personally attended
meetings in which CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Robert
Gates "noted the need for Iraq to have certain weapons such
as cluster bombs and anti-armor penetrators in order to stave
off Iranian attacks." The CIA supplied cluster bombs to
Iraq through Cardoen, a Chilean company.
More than 60 officials of the
U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency were involved in the program
which not only provided Iraq with intelligence on Iranian positions,
but actually helped Iraq to develop tactical battle plans as
well as plans for air strikes. Although it was well known by
the later stages of the war that Iraqi forces were routinely
using chemical weapons against the Iranians, American support
for Iraqi offensives continued. "The use of gas on the battlefield
by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern,"
recalled a former high-ranking Defense Intelligence Agency official.
U.S. leaders were more interested in ensuring the defeat of Iran.
The Pentagon "wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas,"
remembered a former official involved in the program. "It
was just another way of killing people whether with a bullet
or phosgene, it didn't make any difference."
Saddam Hussein received unstinting
support throughout his war with Iran. His crimes were never an
issue. Not, that is, until he miscalculated and invaded Kuwait
in 1990 in another attempted land-grab. This war, however, was
not on the U.S. agenda, and Hussein's reckless action triggered
an attack by the U.S. and Great Britain, along with the imposition
of UN sanctions. (2)
Another interesting former
CIA asset who would later win wider fame was Osama bin Laden.
He was one of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist extremists
who enjoyed the largesse of the U.S. through his role in Afghanistan
as part of the largest covert operation in history. The effort
to topple the Afghan socialist government and drive out Soviet
troops who were assisting that government was so massive that
the U.S. alone spent more than $2 billion during President Ronald
Reagan's years in office. Yet more was provided in support of
the rebels by other nations at the urging of U.S. officials.
Ostensibly directed against Soviet intervention, U.S. involvement
in fact first began five months before the entry of Soviet troops.
According to Zbigniew Brzezinski,
U.S. National Security advisor at the time, "President Carter
signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of
the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul." Brzezinski explained to
Carter that in his "opinion this aid was going to induce
a Soviet military intervention," which indeed proved to
be the case. U.S. military assistance went to Mujahideen guerrillas
who tended to represent the most reactionary and misogynist segments
of the society. Many explicitly stated that their opposition
to the Afghan government was based on its extension of equal
rights and opportunities to women, as well as the campaign to
teach women and girls to read and write. For their part, wealthy
landowners resented the break up of their holdings under the
land reform program.
President Reagan's favorite
Mujahideen leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, first distinguished himself
as a student at Kabul University by leading fellow collegians
in patrolling the campus on the look out for women dressed in
modern clothes. When encountering an "offending" woman
without a veil, Hekmatyar's student gang would throw acid in
her face. Such misogyny was endemic among the Mujahideen, who
made it a point to seek out and burn down schools. Schoolteachers
were routinely murdered for having the temerity to educate females.
Brutality was the norm, and
captured Soviet and Afghan government soldiers were invariably
tortured and mutilated for sport. On many occasions American
advisors were present as these abuses took place but made no
effort to intervene. The howls of pain from captured soldiers
as Mujahideen guerrillas gleefully gouged and sliced and dismembered
their captives went unheeded. A British military trainer assigned
to the Mujahideen observed that "nowhere have I witnessed
such brutality as I saw in Afghanistan. Captured Russian troops,
their stomachs cut open, were left to die in the blazing sun
that baked their innards." One episode in particular disturbed
him. "A body was lying on the ground. You could tell it
was a body from the congealed blood that stained the stony ground
around it, but it was barely recognizable as a human being. The
torso had been mutilated. The limbs stomped into a mash of ruby
red flesh and splintered bone. The head had been kicked off and
used as a football. No features could be made out; no eyes or
nose were left on this gruesome, bloody skull just a few
remaining wisps of blond hair that gave the clue as to who this
once was: a Russian crewman on a Hind E helicopter. The Mujahideen
had shot down his aircraft just half an hour earlier. God knows
how badly he had been hurt when it had crashed into the trees
just outside the Afghan village, but he had clearly tried to
crawl to shelter." One Western journalist related similar
stories about the treatment that was regularly meted out to prisoners.
"One group was killed, skinned and hung up in a butcher's
shop. One captive found himself the center of attraction in a
game of buzkashi, that rough and tumble form of Afghan polo in
which a headless goat is usually the ball. The captive was used
instead. Alive. He was literally torn to pieces." As a Mujahideen
leader, Osama bin Laden was philosophically a comfortable fit
in this movement. Bin Laden's role was an important one, as he
explained. "To counter these atheist Russians, the Saudis
chose me as their representative in Afghanistan I set up my first
camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American
officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money
by the Saudis." (3)
These men were "freedom
fighters," President Reagan proudly intoned, and a lapdog
press willingly parroted that line. The Afghan operation gave
the most retrograde elements from the Islamic world limitless
funding, training, and supply of arms, and this in turn led to
the blossoming of an international movement that planted the
seeds for terrorism. From those seeds sprang Al-Qaeda and numerous
other like-minded organizations. The U.S. produced literally
millions of school textbooks that were used to indoctrinate Afghan
school children in Mujahideen values. Primers were filled with
religious messages and pictures of weapons and soldiers talking
of jihad. "The pictures [in] the texts are horrendous to
school students," pointed out Ahmad Fahim Hakim, a program
coordinator for Cooperation for Peace and Unity, "but the
texts are much worse." One aid worker examined a U.S.-produced
textbook and found that close to half of its pages contained
violent images or texts. (4)
Today, bin Laden is no longer
regarded in the West as a "freedom fighter," while
Hekmatyar fights against American troops in Afghanistan. As long
as men such as these directed their murderous behavior at leftists,
women, schoolteachers, land reformers and trade unionists, they
were "freedom fighters," deserving of admiration and
generous amounts of cash and arms. It was only when they turned
on American citizens that they were magically transformed into
terrorists. Their methods and ideals had not changed. It was
only the perception of these men that had shifted, because they
no longer served the purposes of global capital.
The U.S. did much to create
men such as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
It is impossible to avoid concluding that the trial of Saddam
Hussein was little more than a case of selective justice, meant
to provide post-justification for an invasion that was itself
a grave violation of international law. Saddam Hussein's crimes
were real enough, but those acts would never have brought him
to trial had he continued to operate within the parameters sketched
for him by the West. Likewise, Osama bin Laden would still hold
an honored position among the ranks of "freedom fighters"
had his organization continued to murder only those who profess
progressive ideals and stand in the way of U.S. geopolitical
goals. The trial of Saddam Hussein has been widely hailed as
a triumph of justice. Yet one wonders: who will pass judgment
on those who judge?
(1) Richard Sale, "Exclusive:
Saddam Key in Early CIA Plot," UPI, April 10, 2003.
(2) "US and Iraq Go Way
Back," CBS News, December 31, 2002. Patrick E. Tyler, "Officers
Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas," New York
Times, August 18, 2002. Robert Windrem, "Rumsfeld Key Player
in Iraq Policy Shift," MSNBC, August 18, 2000. Christopher
Marquis, "Rumsfeld Made Iraq Overture in '84 Despite Chemical
Raids," New York Times, December 23, 2003. Michael Dobbs,
"US-Iraq Ties in 1980s Illustrate Downside of American Foreign
Policy," Dawn (Karachi), December 31, 2002. Jeremy Scahill,
"The Saddam in Rummy's Closet," Counterpunch, August
2, 2002.
(3) Interview with Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), January 15-21, 1998,
translated by William Blum. Steve Galster, "Afghanistan:
the Making of U.S. Policy, 1973-1990," National Security
Archive, October 9, 2001. Steve Coll, "Anatomy of a Victory:
CIA's Covert Afghan War," Washington Post, July 19, 1992.
Philip Bonosky, Washington's Secret War Against Afghanistan,
International Publishers (New York), 1984. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban:
Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Yale
University Press (New Haven), 2000. William Blum, Killing
Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II,
Common Courage Press (Monroe), 2003. Olga Craig, "British
SAS Veteran Recalls Afghan Barbarism," Sunday Telegraph
(London), September 24, 2001. Melinda Liu, "Occupational
Hazards," Newsweek, April 6, 2004.
(4) Joe Stephens and David
B. Ottaway, "From the U.S.A., the ABCs of Jihad," Washington
Post, March 23, 2002.
What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
A Special Investigation:
China's Mass Murder for Body Parts
CounterPunch
outlines the terrible evidence that thousands of Falun Gong members
have been killed to supply China's body parts trade with the
West. Larry Lack reviews
the evidence and explains why the US government is keeping its
mouth shut. CounterPunch
Online is read by millions of viewers each month But remember, we are
funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition
of CounterPunch.
Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter,
which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or
by making a donation towards the cost of this online edition. Remember contributions
are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
