Robert Fisk: He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him

[cal04]

How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies', equipped him for atrocities - and then made sure he wouldn't squeal
We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.

Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were given special treatment - extreme torture before execution at Abu Ghraib.

There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US administration believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border - and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's request.

"Mr Fisk... at the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon," he said. "There I was handed the very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments - thousands of them - all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very, very grateful!"

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2114403.ece

[malaise]

1. Rest assured

These secrets will all come out.

[MindMatter]

5. So sad this cannot come from our own press

[Selatius]

2. I guess the Reagan/Bush Sr. boys really dodged a bullet by having Hussein eliminated.

He won't testify at the Hague.

[magellan]

3. From what I've read, the US involvement with Saddam has been an open secret for some time.

Although I only learned about it myself within the last six years, those in government surely have had access to the information for much longer. Yet both parties seemed happy dealing with the devil for over a decade, and neither party has ever raised the little matter of him being a devil of our own making. The secret may come out fully, but it seems doubtful anything will be done about it or any lessons will be learned. We continue creating foreign RW puppet agencies and being surprised when they turn around and bite the hand that put them in power.

What's the saying? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

[enough]

4. This article outlines the depth and specifics of the involvement, which I was not aware of.

K&R.

[magellan]

6. I'm not dissing Fisk's article

I have nothing but respect for Fisk and the details he brings to light. I'm just saying that our government's basic culpability in launching and directly supporting Saddam's regime is well-known -- an open secret -- and so I doubt the disastrous aftermath will bring any revelations to our foreign policy makers.