Iraq's 'Chemical Ali' gets new death sentence

[cory777]

Source: Associated Press



BAGHDAD – Saddam Hussein's notorious cousin "Chemical Ali" was convicted Sunday of crimes against humanity and received a death sentence for his involvement in a poison gas attack on Halabja.

Families of some victims in court cheered when the guilty verdict against Ali Hassan al-Majid was handed down in a trial over one of the worst poisonous gas attacks against civilians.

He has already received previous death sentences for atrocities committed during Saddam's rule, particularly in the government's suppression of the Kurds in the late 1980s.

Other officials in Saddam's regime received jail terms for their roles in the 1988 attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja near the Iranian border.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100117/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq

[Sebastian Doyle]

1. How many trials and death sentences can this guy get?

That hairy crazy looking fucker whom the media told us was "Saddam Hussein" (even though he looked nothing like Saddam did when he was last seen before the invasion) got a quick show trial and then a public lynching complete with cheesy cell phone video. Isn't one death sentence enough for Chemical Ali?

[MetaTrope]

2. Guess he should have just purchased some white phosphorus from the U.S.

Much more humane...

[struggle4progress]

3. The Halabja story is complicated: if al-Majid should hang, then perhaps so also should

some of Reagan's administration:

A War Crime or an Act of War?
By Stephen C. Pelletiere The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2003

... But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas ...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2098.htm

At the time of Halabja, of course, the Reagan administration had been allied with Iraq against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, and was supplying some materials to Iraq. The process, by which this history has been revised and rewritten, to allow Bush II to claim Halabja as an Iraqi atrocity to justify the invasion of Iraq, is not straightforward, and I do not have time to sort it out now, so I must remain agnostic on the subject for the present. but here are some links:

Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein:
The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

Report: Reagan Gave Military Aid to Iraq
Sunday, August 18, 2002
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,60702,00.html

Halabja : America didn't seem to mind poison gas
By Joost R. Hiltermann
Published: January 17, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/opinion/17iht-edjoost_ed3_.html

Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 80
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/

The true Iraq appeasers
By Peter W. Galbraith | August 31, 2006
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/08/31/the_true_iraq_appeasers/

Fueling America
updated 11:43 a.m. EST, Fri November 28, 2008
Once-secret Reagan administration documents on Iraq
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/11/20/sbm.documents/

[daleo]

4. He should be helping out in Haiti

Bush is.

[golfguru]

5. Oh yes, this dude used WMD's on his OWN people

he should have been sprayed with the same chemicals
he used on civilians as soon as he was caught. That
would have taught him of the painful deaths he caused.