Filed under: bush, Bush Sr., chemical ali, civilian casualties, corruption, Dictatorship, Empire, George Bush, Iran, Iraq, iraq casualties, kangaroo court, Milosevic, nation building, occupation, reagan, rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein, scandal, War On Terror | Tags: Ali Hassan al-Majid, ICC, international criminal court, Iran-Iraq War
Chemical Ali Could Have Exposed Iraq-Gate
consortiumnews.com
January 26, 2010
Editor’s Note: The hanging of Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” for his role in using chemical weapons in Iraqi wars of the 1980s and early 1990s, silenced yet one more witness who otherwise could have filled in the blanks of the Reagan-Bush-I roles in secretly assisting Saddam Hussein’s armies, the so-called Iraq-gate scandal.
If Majid had been turned over to the International Criminal Court – rather than prosecuted by kangaroo tribunals set up in Iraq by George W. Bush’s administration – he could have been systematically debriefed about what U.S. officials, including George H.W. Bush, did to facilitate Iraq’s acquisition of dangerous chemical weapons.
Instead, Majid – wearing a red jump suit, his head covered by a black sack and a noose around his neck – was dropped through the trap door of a scaffold on Monday. His potential to embarrass the Bush Family was eliminated, just as was done to Saddam Hussein three years ago, as this Dec. 30, 2006, article (slightly modified) recounts:
The hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be – as the New York Times observed – the “triumphal bookend” to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. If all had gone as planned, Bush might have staged another celebration as he did after the end of “major combat,” posing under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on May 1, 2003.
But by the end of 2006, with nearly 3,000 American soldiers already killed and the Iraqi death toll exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush was forced to savor the image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.
Still, Bush had done his family’s legacy a great service, while also protecting secrets that could have embarrassed other senior U.S. government officials, both past and present.
By arranging Saddam Hussein’s execution, Bush had silenced a unique witness to crucial chapters of the secret history that stretched from Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 to the alleged American-Saudi “green light” for Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, through the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War during which high-ranking U.S. intermediaries, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, allegedly helped broker supplies of war materiel for Hussein.
Hussein now won’t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used for producing the unconventional weapons that were deployed against Iranian forces and Iraqi civilians. He can’t give his perspective on who got the money and who facilitated the deals.
Nor will Hussein be available to give his account of the mixed messages delivered by George H.W. Bush’s ambassador April Glaspie before Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Was there another American “green light” or did Hussein just hear what he wanted to hear?
Like the climactic scene from the Mafia movie “Casino” in which nervous Mob bosses eliminate everyone who knows too much, George W. Bush guaranteed that there would be no public tribunal where Hussein could give testimony on these potentially devastating historical scandals and thus threaten the Bush Family legacy.
That could have happened if Hussein had been turned over to an international tribunal at The Hague as was done with other tyrants, such as Yugoslavia’s late dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Instead Bush insisted that Hussein be tried in Iraq despite the obvious fact that the deposed Iraqi dictator would receive nothing close to a fair trial before being put to death.
Hussein’s hanging followed his trial for executing 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail in 1982 after a foiled assassination attempt on Hussein and his entourage. Hussein’s death effectively mooted other cases that were supposed to deal with his alleged use of chemical weapons to kill Iraqi civilians and other crimes that might have exposed the U.S. role.