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Saddam
Hussein: Taking Out the CIA's Trash
by
Kurt Nimmo
A
few years ago, a friend visiting the United States from Switzerland remarked
upon what she viewed as one of the more conspicuous American personality
quirks: Americans often seem to possess absolutely no curiosity when it comes
to history -- not their own or that of the world at large. How can Americans
make informed opinions, she mused, when they have no stomach for history,
politics, or current events? My Swiss friend found this incomprehensible -- not
only incomprehensible, but dangerous.
Enter
Colin Powell. In a Reuters interview, Powell characterizes the missing Saddam
Hussein as "a
piece of trash waiting to be collected" by the United States military.
Personalizing the vendetta against Saddam is nothing new -- Bush has done it
from the start, as his father did the last time the US invaded Iraq. For
millions of Americans, the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing devastation of that
unfortunate and victimized country are all about Saddam. Like the irritating
neighbor who cuts his grass at three in the morning and dumps the clippings
over the fence, Americans react to Saddam Hussein on an emotional and personal
level. Saddam -- thanks to Bush and the corporate media -- has taken on a
biblical semblance of evil. Saddam Hussein is the yardstick we now use to
measure wickedness. He is our Emmanuel Goldstein, replacing Osama in the neocon
pantheon of evil.
In
fact, Saddam is no better or worse than any number of dictators past or
present. General Augusto Pinochet, Ferdinand Marcos, General Suharto, Anastasio
Somoza, Pol Pot -- these are a few of the bloody dictators responsible for the
death of literally millions of people (Pol Pot was responsible for the slaughter
of 1.5 million people, Suharto 500,000 or more). These are dictators the United
States either supported directly or indirectly over the years. In general, the
American people know nothing about these sadists and murderous thugs or how
their government supported them.
If
Saddam is indeed "a piece of trash," as Powell claims, it is an
indisputable fact that he is trash created by the United States. Saddam was
almost entirely a Frankenstein creation of the CIA. This is a fact backed up by
more than one US government official and documented in several books.
And
yet, if you were to ask the average American if he or she finds it possible
Saddam Hussein was groomed, financed, and supported by the CIA beginning with
president John F. Kennedy -- who signed
off on plan to overthrow the government of Iraq in 1963 -- chances are they
wouldn't believe it. After all, we're the good guys, we do good in the world --
and that's why we're now attempting to track down Hussein and bring him to
justice. It's all about liberating the Iraqi people and throwing off this
sadistic butcher -- or so the Bushites want us to believe.
The
Saddam-CIA story is out there, easy enough to find. In order to find it, simply
point your browser at Google and enter the following search criteria:
"Saddam CIA coup." Most of the results returned link to articles and
news items reporting how the CIA attempted to overthrow Hussein several times
since the first Gulf invasion. ABC, Time, MSNBC, USA Today, and other
mainstream publications carry many of these stories.
But
Google also turns up stories infrequently if ever reported in the mainstream
press about Saddam Hussein and the CIA -- as it turns out the Iraqi dictator
and the now reviled Ba'ath Party were once favored CIA assets serving US interests.
This is the sort of information you will not find splashed across the front
page of the New York Times, let alone buried in section F16. In fact, most of
this information appears primarily in papers such as the Hindustan Times or in
books written by Arab authors. Since the story is at odds with the Bush version
of reality, it's not front-page material in America.
In
April of this year, however, as Bush was knee-deep into his invasion of Iraq,
the UPI ran
a story about Saddam's connection to the CIA. The story came and went. It
was buried beneath a tidal wave of anti-Saddam propaganda and hysterical
distortion unleashed by the Bushites and parroted by an obedient corporate media.
Prior
to the UPI story, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in
the 1970s, confirmed
that the Ba'ath Party now so reviled by average Americans was essentially installed
by the CIA in 1963 in response to the Iraqi leader General Abd al-Karim
Qasim, a bloody dictator who backed out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact and
talked about nationalizing Iraq's oil industry. "We came to power on a CIA
train," admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, Ba'ath Party secretary general at the
time. As James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told
Andrew and Patrick Cockburn ("Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam
Hussein," 2000), the CIA regarded the Ba'athist coup against Qasim "a
great victory" and also considered it their favorite coup.
"The
Ba'athist coup, resulted in the return to Iraq of young fellow-Ba'athist Saddam
Hussein, who had fled to Egypt after his earlier abortive attempt to
assassinate Qasim," writes Alfred Mendes ("Blood for Oil,"
Spectrezine). "Saddam was immediately assigned to head the Al-Jihaz
al-Khas, the clandestine Ba'athist Intelligence organization. As such, he was
soon involved in the killing of some 5,000 communists. Saddam's rise to power
had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-engineered coup!"
In
fact, according to Said K. Aburish ("A Brutal Friendship: The West and the
Arab Elite," 1997), many of the people on CIA hit lists had nothing to do
with the communists; thousands were "fellaheen [peasants] and the
Muthaqafeen or educated classes." According to Aburish, the Ba'ath Party
contact man during the CIA-engineered coup was William Lakeland, the US
assistant military attache in Baghdad.
"United
Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats,
British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the
following account," writes Richard Sale ("Saddam key in
early CIA plot," UPI, April 10, 2003). "The CIA declined to
comment on the report."
According
to a former senior State Department official, writes Sale, "Saddam, while
only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim.
According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on
al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of
Defense, to observe Qasim's movements." Adel Darwish ("Unholy
Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War," 1997) told Sale that one
Capt. Abdel Maquid Farid, the assistant military attache at the Egyptian
Embassy, was Saddam's "paymaster" and that Saddam's handler was an
"Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials
separately confirmed Darwish's account."
None
of these revelations should come as a surprise. The CIA has sponsored coups and
interventions in the Middle East since the end of the Second World War. In
1949, the CIA backed a military coup in Syria, deposing a democratically
elected government, while in Iran Mossadeq, a popular and democratically
elected leader, was overthrown in a 1953 CIA engineered coup that installed the
Shah and ushered in a quarter century of brutal repression. No doubt both
Syrians and Iranians recall these events now that the Bush neocons talk openly
of deposing "failed states" in the Middle East.
In
addition to these covert CIA actions, the US government has meddled in Middle
Eastern affairs in habitual fashion for decades; the US military entered
Lebanon in 1958, again in 1983 (only to leave after the suicide bombing of the
US Marine barracks); Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya in 1986, killing
Libyan leader Qaddafi's young daughter. Meanwhile, the US has consistently
backed Israel, providing the small Zionist state with arms and obscene amounts
of American taxpayer money subsequently used to occupy Palestinian land and
brutalize its people in violation of numerous United Nations resolutions. In
1988 alone, the US vetoed three Security Council resolutions condemning
Israel's occupation of Palestine and its repression in Lebanon.
Add
to the above list of dishonor the numerous CIA engineered coups,
assassinations, and sundry plotted incidents of mayhem in such far-flung places
as Guatemala (1954), Zaire (1960), Cuba (1961), Dominican Republic (1961),
Indonesia (1965), Greece (1965), Chile (1973), Angola (1975), El Salvador
(1979), to name the more obvious and well-documented (see Mark Zapezauer,
"The CIA's Greatest Hits"). As John Stockwell, former CIA official and
author, notes: " ...the CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over
20 countries." And yet the American people know little if anything about
this sordid history.
The
disingenuous Colin Powell is free to stand before the American people and use picturesque
(if inappropriately childish) nouns to describe Saddam Hussein -- who was, not
long ago, that is before he outlived his usefulness and fell from grace, our
man in Baghdad -- and questions that should be obvious, especially for
supposedly educated journalists, are never asked: is it possible that a large
number of our current problems in the Middle East and elsewhere stem directly
from US support of repressive and murderous regimes? Is it also possible there
will not be peace in the Middle East so long as the United States
unconditionally supports Israel and pays for the unconscionable theft of
Palestinian land? Do you think providing the CIA with new powers -- both abroad
and at home -- will make the world a more secure and less violent place?
Secretary
of State Colin Powell may sincerely believe Saddam Hussein is nothing more than
"a piece of trash waiting to be collected." Most of us likely agree
about the trash part -- but the collection service is another matter entirely.
Even if the wily and murderous former dictator is snatched from one of his many
hideaways -- tomorrow, next week, or next year -- this will not stop the
guerilla war against the US occupation of Iraq, regardless of what General
Abizaid, Rumsfeld, or Bush have to say about it.
But
even if Saddam is tracked down and cornered, the US will make sure he never
faces justice. For as foreign affairs analyst Eric Margolis has noted,
"Dead dictators tell no tales." Considering Saddam was in bed with
the CIA and several US presidents -- including Dubya's daddy -- the mission to
kill him is an especially urgent piece of unfinished business.
Kurt Nimmo is a
photographer, multimedia artist and writer living in New Mexico. To see his
photo work and read more of his essays, visit his excellent “Another Day in the
Empire” weblog: http://www.drmenlo.com/nimmo/
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