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From Saddam, With Love  
by Kurt Nimmo
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 23, 2004

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Saddam Hussein has sent a letter to his family, according to Newsweek. Most of if was redacted by military censors.

No telling what Saddam attempted to write in those squelched lines. Maybe he urged the Fedayeen to kill more US soldiers. Or gave solace to the bitter and dead-enders. Is it possible he said something about those weapons of mass destruction Dubya’s daddy and Reagan sold him oh-so long ago?

Chances are it was little more than gibberish.

One has to wonder. Saddam must realize he is in prison, or in custody—whatever Bush calls the gulag from Bagram to Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and beyond—so why the heck would he write something motivating Pentagon-types with permanent markers to censor him? Is it possible Saddam is a drugged-out zombie, a mere pharmaceutical shadow of his former self? Is it possible he did not write a letter and is incapable of doing so even if he wanted to?

Or is this another Bush PR stunt?

Good chance we will never know.

And then there is the Saddam photo posted on the MSNBC site. It’s credited as a “AFP-Getty Image"—presumably a respectable photojournalism outfit—and yet the photo resembles something snapped by a kid with a disposable cardboard camera with a plastic lens. It has all the quality of a photo left out on the veranda overnight during a rainstorm and baked the next morning in the sun. In the blurry and faded photograph Saddam stares off in the distance, probably at his now life-long—no doubt to soon be a short life—interrogators who brusquely demand he look at the birdie.

Saddam will soon be handed over to the so-called interim Iraqi government—that is to say the government handpicked by the Bushites—and put on trial for crimes against the Iraqi people. Or I should say the case of Saddam will be handed over to the Iraqis; Saddam’s stilted, dazed, and robotic body—if the weather beaten photo mentioned above is any guide—will remain in the custody of Rumsfeld and the Pentagon.

The Butcher of Baghdad is a dead man walking.

Few doubt Saddam is guilty of imprisonment, torture, deportation, assassination, and execution. Saddam had Ayatollah Mohamad Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of SCIRI, sentenced to life imprisonment. He arrested, tortured, and killed Ayatollah Mohamad al-Sadr and his sister Amina al-Sadr (thus at least partially explaining Muqtada al-Sadr’s attitude problem with authority figures). He had 90 members of the al-Hakim family arrested and sixteen of them executed. Even the borders of Iraq did not stop Saddam’s numerous vendettas. He had the opposition leader Haj Sahal al-Salman murdered in the United Arab Emirates, Sami Mahdi and Ni’ma Mohamad assassinated in Pakistan, and Sayed Mahdi al-Hakim killed in Sudan. And he had thousands of other nameless people executed as well.

Most of the above were killed while the beloved Reagan and one-termer Bush Senior were in office.

The Gipper is now gone. But while alive and not napping during CIA briefings he was making sure Saddam received only the best—hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees, high-value military intelligence, satellite data, UH-1H and Hughes MD-500 Defender helicopters, dual-use equipment for Iraq’s nuclear program, in a word almost anything Saddam wanted so long as he continued slaughtering large numbers of Iranians.

Meanwhile, the Israelis sold murder merchandise to the Iranians so they might continue eradicating Iraqis.

Of course, as the nation mourned Reagan’s passing from planet earth, you heard nothing about such dark and cynical things—or are you likely to hear about them now as Bush’s handpicked stooges ready to put Saddam on trial and ultimately march him to the gallows.

In his four month old letter written on a standard form provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Saddam said hello to his family.

In the next letter, he may as well say good-bye.

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer, multimedia artist and writer living in New Mexico. He is author of Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America (Dandelion Books, 2003). To see his photo work and read more of his essays, visit his excellent “Another Day in the Empire” weblog.

 

Other Articles by Kurt Nimmo

 

* Kaloogian's Hooligans: Going After Moore and the First Amendment
* Republicans are Behind the Effort to Censor Fahrenheit 9/11
* The Bush-Kerry Conundrum: Our Only Choice is the War Party
* Going After Qaddafi (Again)
* King George Has Gone Insane
* Abu Hamza al-Masri: Made in the USA
* Those Missing Taguba Pages: More Dirty Tricks on the Road to Bush's Reinstallment

* The John-John Ticket: Kerry Woos McCain
* Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib
* Abu Ghraib: Presidents Don't Have to Say They're Sorry
* Abu Ghraib: Has the CIA Privatized Torture?
* Next on Sharon's Laundry List: Syria
* The "Central Hand" of the Resistance
* Moqtada al-Sadr: the Latest Neocon Excuse to Kill Iranians
* Responding to the Iraqi Intifada:Will Bush Flatten Fallujah?
* Reading al-Qaeda into Madrid
* Emma Goldman for President
* Tweedle Democrat Progressive Internationalists
* Mission Accomplished in Haiti: Is Venezuela Next?
* Richard Perle, Executioner
* The Sorrows of Bush's Endgame
* Bush Intelligence: Garbage In, Garbage Out -- On Purpose
* Inquisition in Iowa: Feds Go After Activists at Drake University
* The Perle and Frum Totalitarian How-to Manual
* Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating the Spooks

* Calling Dubya to Book on Neocon Lies
* The Sharon-Rumsfeld Plan: Going after Hezbollah
* Bush and the Supreme Court: Going After the Bill of Rights
* Saddam's Defense: Call Bush Senior to the Stand
* Bush's Police State: Going After the Left, Not al-Qaeda

* Bogus Terror Threats and Bush's Police State
* No More Mr. Nice Guy: Bush Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
* Newt Gingrich: Growing the Dictatorship in Iraq
*
Bush Ministry of Disinformation Editor Gets "Freedom" Medal

* Zionism's Useful Idiots
* No Apologies for Wolfowitz the Microbe
*
Sailor-Mongering Civil Disobedience: The Justice Dept.’s War Against Greenpeace

* Criticizing Zionism: Naked Anti-Semitism?
*
Shock Therapy and the Israel Scenario

* Cuba and the "Necessary Viciousness" of the Bushites

* Imperial Sociopaths

* Bush's Speech: Internationalizing the Whirlwind
*
The Imam Ali Mosque Bombing: Round Up the Usual Suspects

* Iraq's WMD: The Lie that Will Never Die

* UN Bombing: Terrorism or National Liberation?

* Saddam Hussein: Taking Out the CIA's Trash

* The Bug Exterminator Goes to Jerusalem

* Bread, Circuses, Uday and Qusay
 

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