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Mickey Z
Cool Observer
the Department of Homeland Security.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Rumsfeld on the run
On March 1, 2005, the Washington Post reported:
“Human rights lawyers will file a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of eight men who say they were tortured by U.S. forces in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, sources familiar with the case said. The lawsuit charges that officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government shoulder ultimate responsibility for the physical and psychological injuries sustained by the men while in American custody.”
Reminder #1: Henry Kissinger once called Dear Dumsfeld “the most ruthless man I know.” Let that one digest for a bit…
Reminder #2: There was the time Dumsfeld met with the next Hitler.
Excerpt from “The Seven Deadly Spins” (see book cover >>)
“The last time Donald Rumsfeld saw Saddam Hussein, he gave him a cordial handshake,” journalists Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas explain. Rumsfeld was photographed that day-December 20, 1983-smiling and shaking hands with the pistol-packing Iraqi dictator.
“In the early 1980s, as Saddam was gassing the Kurds, Rumsfeld, acting as a special envoy for Reagan, turned up on the dictator’s doorstep in Baghdad, and talked about how the U.S. needed Iraq and vice versa,” reports Village Voice columnist, James Ridgeway. “Rumsfeld promised Saddam that the U.S. would support his rule, negotiating cheap loans and providing equipment of various sorts. He never raised the issue of poison gas. In fact, when the UN undertook consideration of an Iranian resolution condemning the use of gas, the U.S. worked against it.”
“Mr. Rumsfeld’s 90-minute meeting with Saddam...heralded a U.S. policy under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. of courting the Iraqi leader as an ally throughout the 1980s,” Tim Reid reports in the UK’s Times on Line.
This “courting” ranged from providing grain to Iraq with $5 billion of U.S. government loan guarantees from 1983-90 to dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq in the mid-1980s under license from the U.S. Commerce Department.
The Government Accounting Office attempted to explain U.S. policy towards Iraq: “It seems that the U.S. desire to build a strategic and agricultural trade relationship with Iraq outweighed the apparent financial risks involved and discounted evidence of Iraq’s human rights violations.”
“The strategy, seen as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalism of Iran, was so obsessively pursued that Washington stepped up arms supplies and diplomatic activity even after the Iraqis had gassed Kurds in northern Iraq in March 1988,” says Reid.
While it was subsequently cited as a pretext for the second Gulf War, the U.S. and Britain did not call for a military strike after Iraq’s gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March 1988. “When Saddam bombed Kurdish rebels and civilians with a lethal cocktail of mustard gas, sarin, tabun, and VX in 1988, the Reagan administration first blamed Iran, before acknowledging, under pressure from congressional Democrats, that the culprits were Saddam’s own forces,” Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas report. “There was only token official protest at the time. Saddam’s men were unfazed. An Iraqi audiotape, later captured by the Kurds, records Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid talking to his fellow officers about gassing the Kurds.”
On that tape, al-Majid, a.k.a. Chemical Ali, asks: “Who is going to say anything? The international community? #### them!”
(This post is presented in solidarity with the Progressive Blogger Union. For more information, please visit: http://www.pbu.blogspot.com.)
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