Free Saddam : Melbourne Indymedia

Saddam Hussein is now facing a kangaroo court, it has been as hastily set up as he was, and it will pronounce his guilt and carry out an execution under the directorship of the bank robber Chalabi.
How wonderful! this is positively priceless!
Can we stand any more bullshit I wonder? What now? A far trail after a fair war and no WMD, can we be fooled some more?…WELL BRING IT ON WHY DON’T YA

All charges relate to his actions while in power, they include his invasion of Kuwait, the deaths of Kurds and the human rights violations of the Iran Iraq war during the 1980s.

I am sure he will defend his actions; the invasion of Kuwait was justifiable after all, (more so than Iraq’s current occupation) Saddam had asked Kuwait to stop stealing Iraqi oil for a decade and Kuwait under US protection refused to negotiate.
Kuwait’s oil derricks are still situated on the fence line between the two countries and Kuwait still produces oil there, and only there I might add.
For the last twenty years, (even though its southern fields have been exhausted for more than 30), Kuwait has been able to maintain regular shipments from a small cluster of derricks on the northern border (makes you wonder when Kuwait’s oil was totally exhausted and when they began stealing.)

America was Kuwait’s best customer during the 80 s and US oil interests did go to some trouble to install directional drilling technology in 1996 with the purpose of giving greater access to oil reserves well inside Iraqi territory.

You’ll see reference to this in the Simpson’s, when oil is found beneath Bart’s School Burns steals it with his reclining derrick set up down the street.

Back in the late 1980’s the situation suited America while Reagan supported Saddam s fight against Iran, a joint foe as the Rumsfelt Iraq visit testifies in 1986. The oil flowed at a constant and affordable rate from Iraq and Kuwait (but not from Iran) to be sequestered in the exhausted oil fields of North America.

In 1990 Saddam was confident that America would broker a deal between the two nations and Kuwait would stop its pilfering, then no further action would be necessary.
The situation was transparent as far as Saddam could see and his options were clear, a theft had occurred, Kuwait was stealing and there was no defense. Kuwait would have to back down because they had no way to win against Iraq, Kuwait could not physically defend themselves nor could they legally defend their actions, and besides who would defend a thief and who could let the theft continue? (America?)

Saddam finally advised the US embassy in Baghdad in July 1990 that war was inevitable if its demands were not met and gave Kuwait one month to avoid a conflict. This was reported in all the dailies of the time and as seen on TV. (But never mentioned since)

America’s response to Iraq’s declaration of war a month before the invasion began should be of great concern to the Kangaroo court of Iraq’s puppet regime. If the court hearing is to be fair and open Saddam will say much the same thing.
We know that there can be no legal reason why one country cannot invade another, back then or now. We know that each should investigate all possible ways to avoid conflict, and in this case Saddam tried to take the diplomatic approach, he had for many years demanded that Kuwait cease, but had been stonewalled.

Of course Saddam will be executed, but it is important to remember that our world was safer when he ruled and Iraq was a better place. Iraq had water and electricity and once sanctions were lifted after the 2003 Blix s UN inspection, Iraq would have become a great and progressive nation once again.

Saddam was never a nice leader, his regime was bought to power and held there by American assistance, he was never a saint but he kept the tribes apart, and he transformed a backward country into an educated one.
Free education to university level was on offer, and all children had a future regardless of sex or religious background. He was even awarded UNESCO’s education prize and in 1989 he was awarded most respected Muslim leader, (how things have changed)

There were more women in his government than Australia can boast, more women in top jobs and a protected secular society an opposite of a current rise in fundamentalist Muslim warlords who offer no such illusions of fair play.
It would not get me very far to paint Saddam as a saint but he was a progressive leader and well respected.
During the last battles of the war he stood unarmed in the streets of Baghdad on top of a car, you can see the footage, and he spoke to the cheering crowd, they waved and held up their guns. Saddam had no ones protection; no bodyguards and no bullet proof glass between him and his people, could Bush do the same thing in Washington?

Without all the bad press and with US support Saddam could get away with all that has been accused. Sharon is doing all right, Uzbekistan remains an ally, but then they do as they are told. With US support Saddam could say, “I only repeated what my intelligence relayed to my office, I did not order the mistreatment of Kurds. I did not mislead the UN.
The Kurds died from a gas leak, it was a unfortunate industrial accident, similar to the unfortunate Union Carbide catastrophe in Bhopal years ago, I do not remember any tears shed then or people made to pay, where are your tears for the 3000 Indians who died that night, or are they only reserved for tower victims?

Today the installed puppet regime has as much chance of success as Sad dams defense team, it will falter and fail just as the puppet regime failed in Afghanistan.

Props don’t make a good puppet show, as those props will be pulled away.

Ossama bin Laden once offered us an alternative to all of this, he offered to take out the threat, he offered to fight to liberate Kuwait and to defeat Iraq in 1990(as reported in, The history of Al Qaeder and the readers digest)
However we turned him down and into an enemy, it was the wrong thing to do.
Sheik Laden should have been supported, he is the only one who has remained true to his word while our leaders lie, cheat, murder and are consistent at it.
Since the Afghan Russian war Sheik laden has been at war against foreign interference in Arab Lands, we supported him against Russia, Armed his troops and trained his men. When did his battle change?

Ok his enemy changed nationality, the battle grew more intense and he took the battle worldwide, but the occupation of Arab lands continued and remained key to his involvement.
Western interest should not hold the strings of Saudi or any other Middle eastern nation, that’s what he’s fighting, that’s what he’s always fought…he has never changed.
Once he takes out Saudi oil he will win, because we are gone without it, that is our weakness, the oil is the only reason for all of this.

Never loose sight of the fact that Middle Eastern oil is the only reason we live in comfort, the only reason the west is rich and the only reason there is war in the middle east, if you still think peace was the reason then you only have to look at Afghanistan to see the future of Iraq, US puppet regimes will not survive, Arabs need a ‘Saddam’.

So far US lead aggression has caused the deaths of 2.8 million Iraqi civilian lives over 14 years of war in Iraq, and we condone this. The west has killed more people than Saddam did in 25 years.
US lead aggression in Afghanistan has lead to the deaths of 50.000 app. Afghanis while The Afghani people or Taliban never harmed any westerner.
Westerners condone torture and we condone the continuing genocide in Israel at a cost of 4 billion dollars annually given without break for decades or condition that Israel obeys UN sanctions.
We deserve to lose this war as we have lost all compassion for our victims in a single purpose crusade for resources.
At a dollar a liter, petrol is cheap because the cost has yet to come.
When Iraq was handed some thing called sovereignty last week did they get the control of oil or does Halliburton have the contract?
When will Australians get sovereignty?

Thank you for your time.

Latham and Howard are backsliding on our consensus against the death penalty...and greasing up to the seppo's by it. That cant be good and it's not a good look.
Bunch of white supremists standing around laughing as a black man is slowly burned alive.Interrogators say that Saddam is arrogant. He’s defiant. He thinks he’s still popular and that people love him and he thinks he’s still president – no, wait that’s Bush.

Time to cut down
Book review by the former UK environment minister - 'Even though the US neocon vision has gone badly awry, Washington's response to the approaching world energy crisis - to secure, by force if necessary, the remaining sources of oil supply - will have lethal consequences for the planet. Global warming emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, primarily oil and coal, are increasing at 3% a year, and at this rate will reach 12bn tons a year by 2030 and over 20bn tons by the end of the century. On that basis, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will reach a concentration of 1,100 parts per million (three times the level of today), at which point even sceptical climate scientists concede that all hell will break loose'
( Michael Meacher via Guardian )
»
See also this interview with Paul Roberts from last month

http://www.hullocentral.demon.co.uk/site/anfin.htm

" In the long run we are all dead"

Milton Keynes

Hunter S Thompson suggested that the crooked Prez Richard Nixon be stripped naked and made to hitch-hike across America as suitable community response to his crimes.

Perhaps Saddam could get the same fate and perhaps like Mussolini end up strung up from a street light.

"Meanwhile, thousands of worshippers at a mosque in Baghdad's Shiite neighbourhood of Sadr City responded to calls by the local preacher, Sheik Aws al-Khafaji, who fired up the crowd by proclaiming that Shiites "demand that Saddam, the destructive one, be executed"....."

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/03/1088488202786.html

"Sheik al-Khafaji, who is loyal to militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, scoffed at the notion that Saddam would be forced to account for his alleged crimes, saying the trial was "an American ploy to keep the Iraqis busy".

Funny, don't recall PR objecting to the "execution" of hostages like Nick Berg?

Although Richard Neville and PR did somehow manage to blame that on the Americans ....

All transgendered trolls are welcome here.With Spinifex you can ask such difficult questions as "What is truth?, "Can we know the good?", and "Do you want fries with that?"
I happen to be of the opinion that Nic Berg may well have been set up by an American equivalent of Spinifex.
A creeping freeper probably well plugged in with corrupt /stupid police. Acomplices are judged guilty in most jurisictions as Au will soon find out in war crimes investigations. Just my 2 cents. Richard can speak for himself. Now this is interesting. Saddam should be sent to the Hague, where...

Saddam Could Call the CIA in His Defense

by Sanjay Suri
LONDON - Evidence offered by a top CIA man could confirm the testimony given by Saddam Hussein at the opening of his trial in Baghdad Thursday that he knew of the Halabja massacre only from the newspapers.

Thousands were reported killed in the gassing of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja in the north of Iraq in March 1988 toward the end of Iraq's eight-year war with Iran. The gassing of the Kurds has long been held to be the work of Ali Hassan al-Majid, named in the West because of that association as "Chemical Ali." Saddam Hussein is widely alleged to have ordered Ali to carry out the chemical attack.

The Halabja massacre is now prominent among the charges read out against Saddam in the Baghdad court. When that charge was read out, Saddam replied that he had read about the massacre in a newspaper. Saddam has denied these allegations ever since they were made. But now with a trial on, he could summon a witness in his defense with the potential to blow apart the charge and create one of the greatest diplomatic disasters the United States has ever known.

A report prepared by the top CIA official handling the matter says Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the massacre, and indicates that it was the work of Iranians. Further, the Scott inquiry on the role of the British government has gathered evidence that following the massacre the United States in fact armed Saddam Hussein to counter the Iranians chemicals for chemicals.

Few believe that a CIA man would attend a court hearing in Baghdad in defense of Saddam. But in this case the CIA boss has gone public with his evidence, and this evidence has been in the public domain for more than a year.

The CIA officer Stephen C. Pelletiere was the agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. As professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, he says he was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf.

In addition, he says he headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States, and the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

Pelletiere went public with his information on no less a platform than The New York Times in an article on January 31 last year titled "A War Crime or an Act of War?" The article which challenged the case for war quoted U.S. President George W. Bush as saying: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."

Pelletiere says the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report following the Halabja gassing, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need- to-know basis. "That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas," he wrote in The New York Times.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja, he said. "The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent – that is, a cyanide-based gas – which Iran was known to use. "The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time."

Pelletiere writes that these facts have "long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned."

Pelletiere wrote that Saddam Hussein has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. "But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them."

Pelletiere has maintained his position. All Saddam would have to do in court now is to cite The New York Times article even if the court would not summon Pelletiere. The issues raised in the article would themselves be sufficient to raise serious questions about the charges filed against Saddam – and in turn the justifications offered last year for invading Iraq.

The Halabja killings were cited not just by Bush but by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to justify his case for going along with a U.S. invasion of Iraq. A British government dossier released to justify the war on Iraq says that "Saddam has used chemical weapons, not only against an enemy state, but against his own people." An inquiry report in 1996 by Lord Justice Scott in what came to be known as the arms-to-Iraq affair gave dramatic pointers to what followed after Halabja. After the use of poison gas in 1988 both the United States and Britain began to supply Saddam Hussein with even more chemical weapons.

The Scott inquiry had been set up in 1992 following the collapse of the trial in the case of Matrix Churchill, a British firm exporting equipment to Iraq that could be put to military use.

Three senior executives of Matrix Churchill said the government knew what Matrix Churchill was doing, and that its managing director Paul Henderson had been supplying information about Iraq to the British intelligence agencies on a regular basis.

The inquiry revealed details of the British government's secret decision to supply Saddam with even more weapons-related equipment after the Halabja killings.

Former British foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe was found to have written that the end of the Iraq-Iran war could mean "major opportunities for British industry" in military exports, but he wanted to keep that proposal quiet.

"It could look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales," one of his officials told the Scott inquiry. Lord Scott condemned the government's decision to change its policy, while keeping MPs and the public in the dark.

Soon after the attack, the United States approved the export to Iraq of virus cultures and a billion-dollar contract to design and build a petrochemical plant the Iraqis planned to use to produce mustard gas.

Saddam Hussein has appeared so far without a lawyer to defend him. A Jordanian firm is reported to be speaking up for him. But the real defense for him could be waiting for him in Washington and London.

That the state should kill anyone in cold blood or let them be killed is anathema today. Saddam can be tried online or in the Hague and then a ' Soft drilling" combinatorial auction be set up to predict his permanent retirement from politics. No statism required.

As for beheadings - anyone who lived through the battle of old South Africa knows necklacing is a terrible thing...and as it happens perhaps a necessary one.
SW Asia has one of the last brutal racist colonies and it will go the way of Apartheid. It is truly written,for...'what does it profit my brethren if some say (s)he has faith but does not have works?'

The path of a righteous person is beset on all sides, by the inequities of the selfish , and the tyranny of evil white men. Blessed are those who in the name of charity and goodwill , shepherd the weak through the valley of darkness , for they are truly their brothers and sisters keeper and finder of lost children.

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furies anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brethren. And you will know my name is the Sheik , when I lay my vengeance on thee. [Osama 9:11

But its ok when Saddam does it apparently.
Hey i get it, invading a country you accuse of stealing your oil is ok, but invading a country for supporting terrorists (suicide bombings), violating UN security council resolutions and Human rights violations is a no no.
BAD DUBYA, NAUGHTY DUBYA!

Are you recruiting for an invasion of Israel, RhikoR?

Cos they've
-violated dozens of UN resolutions going back decades,
-founded their state upon the deaths of thousands by terrorist attack (mostly in 1930's & 40's, but see also invasion of Lebanon, Shatilla refugee camp, 'maintaining order' in Occupied territories.....)
-practiced torture & detainment without trial for decades

Plus Israel really truely does have weapons of mass destruction, at least a dozen nukes!!
But then they're (mostly) white, aren't they, and have no oil, so no war required. Rest easy, plucky diggers!

Of all the stupid lies being put about in defense of Saddam Hussein by his supporters in the "peace movement", that peddled by Stephen C. Pelletiere and his followers has to be the dumbest.

Nonetheless, it's eagerly recycled by fools (or liars) like 'pr', 'brian' and other supporters of the deposed dictator.

Pelletiere's claim that it was the Iranians, not Saddam's Ba'athists, who were responsible for the Halabja gassings doesn't even get support from Saddam!

Firstly, it was the Iranians who alerted the world to the Halabja gassings - over the insistent protests of many other who initially refused to believe them.

Odd behavious if they did it themselves. Don't you think?

Secondly, as 'pr' knows full well, the Halabja gassings were just one of many such attacks which formed part of the systematic Anfal ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kurds.

Also, the Kurds - and especially the survivors of Halabja - are under no doubt who attacked them, or when and or why.

The Kurds at Halabja were supporters of the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war (Saddam being their common enemy)

That is one reason they were targetted by Ali Hassan al-Majid and Saddam.

You will note from his transcript, even Saddam does not resort to the pathetic plea that the Iranians gassed their own allies!!

He simply pretends not to know anything about it!!

For the benefit of visitors to this site, it should be pointed out that 'pr' also insists that Slobodan Milosovic had nothing to do with the Srebrenica massacres of Bosnian Serbs!

Even though the Serbs now admit they were responsible!!

The irresistible urge to fawn over facsist dictators and make alibis for them has to be the most startling - and revealing - insight into the mentality of the lunar political margins here in IndyMedia.psychotic.

tHANKYOU FOR ALL COMING, BUT LETS COMMENT ON THE WORK AT HAND LADIES, PLEASE FOCUS.

THE PATCH WORK QUILT I PRESENTED FOR YOUR INTEREST WAS CAREFULLY STITCHED TOGETHER IN SILKS AND FINE FABRIC USING PURE GOSSIMER AND THUS FAR YOUR CONVERSATION HAVE CONCERNED A SOWS EAR REVIEW, AND SOMBODY ELSES.

aRE YOU HERE JUST FOR THE TEA AND BISCUITS?

IM SORRY BUT IF YOUR PARTICIPATION REMAINS THIS BENIGN I WILL NEVER BAKE AGAIN,

http://www.trond.com/brazil/images/brazil52.jpg

Simon is writing from the Alfred hospital psych unit.

You never know what they might put in it.

Thanks for the get wll cards, my door is always open, just ask at the gate.
I fear my name was borrowed in vain, its the capitalists again, i prefere lower case.
But alass its no use, I have no proof of this conspiracy used against me, the imposter is in the next bed, I see him and he laughs last.
I too will be condemed for the acts of others, acussed of madness and now in coventry beyound kind hearts, I am condemmed for my art.

"The long, tortuous association between Saddam Hussein and the West raises questions about what issues — and embarrassments — may surface at a tribunal.

In a (virtually unimaginable) fair trial for Saddam, a defence attorney could quite rightly call to the stand Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush I and other high officials who provided significant support for the dictator, even through his worst atrocities..."

-- The Toronto Star, January 25, 2004

Also:

Extra!, September/October 2002
The Washington Post's Gas Attack
'Today's outrage was yesterday's no big deal'
By Seth Ackerman

http://www.fair.org/extra/0209/iraq-gas.html

Arab countries, including Libya, are contributing to a defence fund for Saddam Hussein, a French lawyer has admitted.

Emmanuel Ludot, the French lawyer serving as part of a 21-member legal team set up to defend Saddam, said that "diverse aid and diverse gifts" have already been donated.

He refused to specify how much money had been collected so far or reveal its origins, except to say that some Arab countries had contributed. Among donors was the daughter of the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, a lawyer, who had offered inancial assistance.

Aicha Muammar Gaddafi, Colonel Gaddafi's eldest daughter, "wanted to provide her logistic and financial aid", Mr Ludot said. "It's Libyan money. It's welcome."

He said funds that Saddam was alleged to hold in overseas accounts could also be used in his defence. "Our job is to have this money freed up ... so we can face all the expenses," Mr Ludot told a news conference in Paris. "I don't despair that we can find someone in the United States to try to negotiate this."

The money in the lawyers' fund was "obviously completely clean", Mr Ludot said. It was not possible to become "Don Quixotes of justice" - working for nothing and assuming expenses individually, especially considering how long the trial might take.

Mr Ludot said the legal team hoped to extend the proceedings as much as possible. "They told us the trial would be long, complicated, that it would take two years - I don't know," Mr Ludot said, citing Salem Chalabi, general director of the Iraqi court.

"Our work will be to do things in a way so that this tribunal doesn't function, so that it is paralysed for as long as possible," he added.

Mr Ludot reiterated earlier denunciations of the judges who are to try Saddam and predicted that, as things stood, the trial would be unfair.

The legal team wanted to see Iraqi judges as well as judges designated by the United Nations. Mr Ludot cited the UN-sponsored war crimes court in Sierra Leone as a model of how Saddam should be tried. The trial of rebel military commanders accused of waging a 10-year campaign for control of Sierra Leone opened this week.

Saddam's legal team is led by a Jordanian lawyer, Mohammed Rashdan, who says he was hired by Saddam's wife, Sajida, and two daughters. Mr Ludot said Saddam should choose his own lawyers, but he has been barred from any contact with the outside world.

Saddam was formally handed over to the interim Iraqi government last week, but the US occupying forces are overseeing his detention. Mr Ludot said Saddam was being detained at a site not far from Baghdad's airport.

Asked whether he thought Saddam's trial could start soon, Mr Ludot said: "Not before the American elections" in November. "That's a certainty."

http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/07/1089000229360.html

This is funny....

Prominent Sydney lawyer John Marsden says he has agreed to join Saddam Hussein's defence team.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200407/s1149120.htm

Saddam Could Call CIA in His Defence

Fri Jul 2, 1:58 PM ET

World - OneWorld.net

Saddam Could Call CIA in His Defence

Fri Jul 2, 1:58 PM ET Add World - OneWorld.net to My Yahoo!

Sanjay Suri, Inter Press Service (IPS)

LONDON, Jul 2 (IPS) Evidence offered by a top CIA (news - web sites) man could confirm the testimony given by Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) at the opening of his trial in Baghdad Thursday that he knew of the Halabja massacre only from the newspapers.

Thousands were reported killed in the gassing of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja in the north of Iraq (news - web sites) in March 1988 towards the end of Iraq's eight-year war with Iran. The gassing of the Kurds has long been held to be the work of Ali Hassan al-Majid, named in the West because of that association as 'Chemical Ali'. Saddam Hussein is widely alleged to have ordered Ali to carry out the chemical attack.

The Halabja massacre is now prominent among the charges read out against Saddam in the Baghdad court. When that charge was read out, Saddam replied that he had read about the massacre in a newspaper. Saddam has denied these allegations ever since they were made. But now with a trial on, he could summon a witness in his defence with the potential to blow apart the charge and create one of the greatest diplomatic disasters the United States has ever known.

A report prepared by the top CIA official handling the matter says Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the massacre, and indicates that it was the work of Iranians. Further, the Scott inquiry on the role of the British government has gathered evidence that following the massacre the United States in fact armed Saddam Hussein to counter the Iranians chemicals for chemicals.

Few believe that a CIA man would attend a court hearing in Baghdad in defence of Saddam. But in this case the CIA boss has gone public with his evidence, and this evidence has been in the public domain for more than a year.

The CIA officer Stephen C. Pelletiere was the agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. As professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, he says he was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf.

In addition, he says he headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States, and the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

Pelletiere went public with his information on no less a platform than The New York Times in an article on January 31 last year titled 'A War Crime or an Act of War?' The article which challenged the case for war quoted U.S. President George W. Bush (news - web sites) as saying: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."

Pelletiere says the United States Defence Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report following the Halabja gassing, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. "That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas," he wrote in The New York Times.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja, he said. "The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. "The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time."

Pelletiere write that these facts have "long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned."

Pelletiere wrote that Saddam Hussein has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. "But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them."

Pelletiere has maintained his position. All Saddam would have to do in court now is to cite The New York Times article even if the court would not summon Pelletiere. The issues raised in the article would themselves be sufficient to raise serious questions about the charges filed against Saddam and in turn the justifications offered last year for invading Iraq.

The Halabja killings were cited not just by Bush but by British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) to justify his case for going along with a U.S. invasion of Iraq. A British government dossier released to justify the war on Iraq says that "Saddam has used chemical weapons, not only against an enemy state, but against his own people."

An inquiry report in 1996 by Lord Justice Scott in what came to be known as the arms-to-Iraq affair gave dramatic pointers to what followed after Halabja. After the use of poison gas in 1988 both the United States and Britain began to supply Saddam Hussein with even more chemical weapons.

The Scott inquiry had been set up in 1992 following the collapse of the trial in the case of Matrix Churchill, a British firm exporting equipment to Iraq that could be put to military use.

Three senior executives of Matrix Churchill said the government knew what Matrix Churchill was doing, and that its managing director Paul Henderson had been supplying information about Iraq to the British intelligence agencies on a regular basis.

The inquiry revealed details of the British government's secret decision to supply Saddam with even more weapons-related equipment after the Halabja killings.

Former British foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe was found to have written that the end of the Iraq-Iran war could mean "major opportunities for British industry" in military exports, but he wanted to keep that proposal quiet.

"It could look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales," one of his officials told the Scott inquiry. Lord Scott condemned the government's decision to change its policy, while keeping MPs and the public in the dark.

Soon after the attack, the United States approved the export to Iraq of virus cultures and a billion-dollar contract to design and build a petrochemical plant the Iraqis planned to use to produce mustard gas.

Saddam Hussein has appeared so far without a lawyer to defend him. A Jordanian firm is reported to be speaking up for him. But the real defence for him could be waiting for him in Washington and London.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/oneworld/20040702/wl_oneworld/6573892701088790524

Dear "rat knows.....",

Sanjay Suri's umpteenth rehash the stupid Pelletier's lies about the Halabja massacre have already been posted once in this thread. (see 'pr' above).

Please keep mindless repetition of Party line for official meetings only.

Get a life, you moron.

Thank you.

Free Saddam!!?? Whilst we're at it why don't we give Russia back to the communists and give up on Osama. Better yet, let's give Amrozi an australian citizenship! I didn't read all of this article, i didn;t need to. The title alone was more than anough to tell me that it would have been a waste of time. Saddam killed thousands upon thousands of people. If you pull something like that, the last thing you deserve is freedom. It's that simple.

For the good of the world, i'd ask that the writer of this article (whatever your useless title may be) go out, find either a tall cliff or a powerful gun. And do what's best for us all.

Checks out his website because they may reconsider whether they want to be on the same side as such a raving idiot.