Saddam Is Our Guy: CIA

Jonathan Schwarz:
Memory hole functioning at near-100% efficiency

Big news!

Saddam Hussein Is Sentenced to Death

An Iraqi special tribunal today convicted Saddam Hussein of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging…

As you’d expect in an industry devoted to bringing crucial information to as wide an audience as possible, out of the thousands of English-language stories on the verdict, only one (from the United Arab Emirates), has bothered mentioning this:

Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials…his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim…

Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim…

The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched…Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents…

Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam’s apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said…

In Cairo, Saddam was installed in an apartment in the upper class neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana Café, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives…during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy…

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup…the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq’s communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down…the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End…

The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq’s armed forces…the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam’s ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.

The Saddam-U.S. intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end at 2 a.m. Aug. 2, 1990, when 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded its neighbor, Kuwait. America’s one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.

This is of course how it should be, because all that matters in life is what’s happened within the last twelve seconds.

posted by Jonathan Schwarz at 9:35 AM | link
November 4, 2006