Free Iraqi People?

Ya know what we warned them we were coming...White flags and walking one by one (except children) means a lot...

"Ya know what we warned them we were coming...White flags and walking one by one (except children) means a lot..."

Yes, the pirates fly their pirate flag and expect their victims to fly the white flag. That'll make their rape and pillaging work go a lot smoother. Good point, Bush.

Tourcturing children in front of thier parents was a common practice in Saddams Iraq.Sometimes they would strip the kid naked and put them in a box with hundreds on hornets.Other times they would crush thier feet or hands.
The parents would be forced to watch this to force"confessions".
You never ever put any blaime on the Saddam for the war.Or the Baathists that prevented Iraqis from leaving into shelter to be used has human shields.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2002/11/46824.html

(snip)

. . . decades of unethical experiments at hospitals and clinics around the country, funded by the government and run by prominent doctors who often shielded the true nature of their work from the public, their colleagues and their patients.

The scope of the shadowy research program is chilling, as is the scientists' disregard for how the experiments would affect their unwitting subjects.

(snip)

Pregnant women seeking prenatal care at the Vanderbilt University Hospital Prenatal Clinic in Nashville were told to drink fruit juice "cocktails" laced with radioactive iron.

(snip)

The oatmeal was scooped out of square metal pans into the boys' bowls. Then the milk, foamy and cold, was poured over the cereal. Sometimes the radioactive isotopes were mixed into the cereal and sometimes they were mixed into the milk. The scientists had impressed upon the attendants how important it was that the boys clean their bowls. "You had to drink the milk. That was the thing," Gordon remembered.
Boys at the Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass., a facility for retarded children and orphans, were inducted into a "Science Club" and encouraged to eat radioactive oatmeal.

The club, Welsome notes, was the brainchild of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who needed subjects for their research. In return, the boys got trips to the beach and ballgames.

Many of the individual stories are heartbreaking.

Consider the plight of Simeon "Simmy" Shaw, a 4-year-old Australian with fatal bone cancer. A U.S. Army mercy flight brought Simmy and his mother to the USA in April 1946 so that doctors at the University of California at San Francisco could treat the boy and perhaps save his life.

Instead, doctors injected him with plutonium.

With consent from Simmy's mother, surgeons then removed bits of bone, muscle and other tissues for lab analysis. Simmy's mother consented because she believed the doctors were genuinely trying to cure her son. They were not. They knew Simmy's cancer was terminal.

Once the doctors had the specimens they needed for their research, Welsome reports, mother and son were abandoned and forgotten.

(snip)

Not to complain, but can you tell the difference between what was a long time ago and now isn't being done at all thanks to improved medical ethics in the US, and what has happened in the very recent past being done by dictators and has now been stopped?

Or do you seriously see the two as being equally relevant?

All that stuff was done twenty, thirty, and in some cases fifty years before it was revealed. What do you suppose they are doing to people today that we wont hear about for another quarter or half a century?

There is a decades long pattern here. There is no reason whatsover to believe that it has stopped. Why do you believe the government, or anybody, who says, we lied to you for most of your life, but now we're telling the truth?

the government makes ANY research org jump through?

Things have changed, things have really changed. But you didn't really answer the question.

Do you see what has been documented out of Iraq as being less objectionable than what was done 50 years ago?

Pro-American yahoos who condemn Hussein conveniently avoid addressing the fact that Hussein was a long-time US asset. Intellectual honesty demands that any condemnation of Hussein be coupled with a condemnation of the United States. American jingoists will never do this because their mono-focus on Hussein is motivated by a desire to mindlessly recapitualate the "America is #1" party-line and has nothing really to do with caring about Iraqi's--or anyone else, for that matter.

Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot
By Richard Sale
UPI Intelligence Correspondent
From the International Desk
Published 4/10/2003

U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past 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.

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. The CIA declined to comment on the report.

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, 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.

In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed."

According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.

Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power," according to this official.

The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."

In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."

According to another former senior State Department official, 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, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.
Darwish said that Saddam's paymaster was Capt. Abdel Maquid Farid, the assistant military attaché at the Egyptian Embassy who paid for the apartment from his own personal account. Three former senior U.S. officials have confirmed that this is accurate.

The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched. Accounts differ. One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish told UPI that one of the assassins had bullets that did not fit his gun and that another had a hand grenade that got stuck in the lining of his coat.

"It bordered on farce," a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. But Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. government officials said.

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.

One former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that even then Saddam "was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a cutthroat."

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, according to Darwish and former U.S. intelligence officials.
One former senior U.S. government official said: "In Cairo, I often went to Groppie Café at Emad Eldine Pasha Street, which was very posh, very upper class. Saddam would not have fit in there. The Indiana was your basic dive."

But during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew Saddam, former U.S. intelligence officials said.

Saddam's U.S. handlers even pushed Saddam to get his Egyptian handlers to raise his monthly allowance, a gesture not appreciated by Egyptian officials since they knew of Saddam's American connection, according to Darwish. His assertion was confirmed by former U.S. diplomat in Egypt at the time.

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed recently that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this.

"We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running around asking what the hell had happened," this official said.

But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communists, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.

Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.

A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: "We were frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have to get kidding. This was serious business."
A former senior CIA official said: "It was a bit like the mysterious killings of Iran's communists just after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. All 4,000 of his communists suddenly got killed."

British scholar Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," quotes Jim Critchfield, then a senior Middle East agency official, as saying the killing of Qasim and the communists was regarded "as a great victory." A former long-time covert U.S. intelligence operative and friend of Critchfield said: "Jim was an old Middle East hand. He wasn't sorry to see the communists go at all. Hey, we were playing for keeps."

Saddam, in the meantime, became head of al-Jihaz a-Khas, the secret intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party.

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, according to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency intelligence group.

This former official said that he personally had signed off on a document that shared U.S. satellite intelligence with both Iraq and Iran in an attempt to produce a military stalemate. "When I signed it, I thought I was losing my mind," the former official told UPI.

A former CIA official said that Saddam had assigned a top team of three senior officers from the Estikhbarat, Iraq's military intelligence, to meet with the Americans.
According to Darwish, 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.
Copyright © 2001-2003 United Press International

Do you see what has been documented out of Iraq as being less objectionable than what was done 50 years ago?

A simple question, just requiring a simple yes or no answer. Not a "yes, but" with handwaving, not a "No, but" with handwaving.

Just yes or no.

"I took a legally married woman as my mistress and put her in my private apartment for years...," Hyde "but I was young then. I was forty some years old and I didn't know better. "It's old history now and time makes my crime disappear into the thin air."

Saddam and his regime killed and tortured people years ago to protect his party's and his nation's interest . American military kill and torture Iraqi people for the America's interest in the name of democracy. "Whose democracy?"

What question hasn't been answered? Go examine your head. Your thinking neural paths are all blocked up.

Come on, Abraham, make a judgement here. Come out and explicitly say which one is worse.

Do you see what has been documented out of Iraq as being less objectionable than what was done 50 years ago?

Yes or no?

50.00001% US, then say the US is worse.
50.00001% Iraq, then say Iraq is worse.

Come on, you can do it. Let's try to actually make a judgement call.

Yes?

Or No?

It's simple - Yes? Or No?

"They are so equivalent that the difference between them is not measurable."

So you see no difference between a dictator shoving his people into grinders, killing off his own people, and destroying wetlands to eliminate the marsh arabs, and the ill-advised, ethically wrong medical experiments in the first half of the 20th century.

Is that correct? Just trying to make certain here that your statement does reflect your true opinion on the subject at hand.

Doesn't advocating anarchy really just mean being being disillusioned to the point of giving up?

There have to be rules governing human interaction, and once you have rules and/or rule enforcers, you have government. Hell, they even govern the conduct of posters to these threads - how can they claim there need be no governance??

Good point about their 'morality' Eddie. If Nessie wants to keep score, perhaps he should talk about Stalin who, like him, advocated eliminating 'capitalists' and other state opponents. There's a lot of bashing of religion on these threads - but religious killing doesn't even approach the number of killing in the name of a state system.

The Israeli "enemies" of which you speak blew themselves up on a bus full of innocent civilians. This makes retribution against those "enemies" somewhat challenging. Israel's restrained response is to send a message to other would-be murderers that their clan will be homeless if they decide to kill innocent bus riders.

What's your definition of the ruling class? Anyone who owns a business? Owns stock? Their agents? Their employees? Makes a profit? Charges more than cost?

You've now managed to blame U.S. capitalists for Hitler? Let's say for arguments sake that it was German capitalists who gave rise to Hitler. Should we have attacked them or waited until after Dunkirk?

You've also tried to call Stalin a capitalist - thereby laying his 20 - 40 million murders at the hands of capitalists as well.

I like your style Nessie!

Allow me to try some:

The Salem witch trials were perpetrated by Monopolistic Religous Capitalists.

Bad 70's disco music was pushed onto the public by capitalists in the music business.

Cancer is maintained by capitalist doctors.

Satan is a soul capitalist.

This is fun!

BTW - the 'success' of anarchy on little Pacific Islands inhabited by up to a few hundred people (notice the benefits of doubt I am giving you here) does not prove to me that "anarchy works".

http://www.connection.se/hem/anders/resor/lenin/bild/usa.jpg

Heh.

The plaque appears to say "America Won", but I'm not sure what you're saying...

Also - that dude is Lenin, not Stalin.

"There was a point in history when all seven of them could have been beaten to death with bar stools in a single brawl."
--------------

The US learned from that mistake. Hence the pre-emptive war strategy. Glad to see Nessie support the Bush Administration.

If the CIA had decided to assassinate Saddam 20+ years ago, to prevent what some analysts predict could be nasty behaviour in the future, you would have supported that action?

Anarchists like nessie like anarchy for three reasons. I list them here:

1. Anarchists hate their fathers, because they didn't get the bike they wanted for Christmas when they were seven years old. So, they hate whatever authority figures they come across in life, from God to the local police.

2. Anarchists know that anarchy is inherently unstable, and brings about lawless chaos. In anarchy, the anarchists will be able to prey on the weak and helpless, indulging themselves in sadistic wickedness and criminal misconduct. Or, if they themselves are preyed upon, they will relish the torment they receive with masochistic glee.

3. In anarchy, no one acheives excellence, because the standards by which excellence is measured, and the authorities to judge and reward excellence, do not exist. Thus, these midgets wish for a condition in which they need not feel inferior to those who are their superiors.

Glad I could help.

Patriots love authority for three reasons:

(1.) They are to stupid to think for themselves.

(2.) They are too cowardly to act on their own.

(3.) Licking boots makes them horny.

I tried to engagge in thoughtful analysis of an important issue, and this is how you express your appreciation.

to display your true colors, and are willing to hang around to be maked fun of. Thank you very much. We look forward to further amusement.

Ted Thompson, thinking he's clever, asks whether we (radicals) would have supported the CIA offing Hussein twenty years ago. This is the wrong question, Ted. A better question is *why* the CIA was SUPPORTING Hussein twenty years ago.

As the article I posted above clearly delineates, Hussein rose to power with the direct assistance of the US/CIA over a forty year period. Twenty years ago, in 1983, far from undermining Hussein, the US/CIA was funneling advanced weaponry and providing intelligence to its Iraqi "asset". This support continued up until AND AFTER Hussein's regime gassed the Kurds. (Indeed, in April 1988, two months after Hussein's infamous chemical attack, the US Department of Commerce approved shipments of chemicals used in manufacture of mustard gas to Iraq.)
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

As to Stalin, he inherited a system from Lenin who was quite clear that what he called socialism was in fact state capitalism. Under Lenin the workers council's (soviets) were subsumed under control of the military/technocratic apparatus, wage-slavery was extended, and all anti-capitalist opposition to the "communist" state was crushed. In lieu of a viable private bourgeoisie able to develop the capitalist productive forces, the state was to fill the role under Lenin, and, with far more depravity and visciousness, Stalin. In Lenin's collected works (Vol. 27 p. 334), he wrote:

"To make things even clearer, let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have "the last word" in modern large scale capitalist engineering and planned organization subordinated to *Junker-Bourgeois imperialism*. Cross out the italics (with stars), and in place of the militarist, Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a state, but of a different social type, of a different class content--a Soviet state that is, a proletarian state, and you will have teh sume total of the conditions necessary for socialism".

On page 340 of the the same works, Lenin wrote:

"While the revolution in Germany is slow in "coming forth," our task is to study the State Capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it, and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it. Our task is to hasten this copying even more than Tsar Peter the Great hastened the copying of Western Culture by barbarian Russia, and we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism."

Suffice to say, Russia was more capitalist in 1990 (albeit of a statified form) than it was in 1917.

"A better question is *why* the CIA was SUPPORTING Hussein twenty years ago."

It's called realpolitik. Look it up.

At the time, Iran was the biggest threat to security in the region. We allied with Iraq to keep Iran and fundamentalist Islam in check. Is that difficult for you to understand? If you were alive and old enough back in the day, just after the revolution in Iran, you should be able to remember what was going on.

Allegiances change. Germany and Japan were our most bitter enemy. Now they are among our closest allies.

Are you suggesting that once a country is our allie (or enemy), that relationship is not allowed to change, regardless of the change in circumstance? Crazy.

No, i'm suggesting that when you rightist clowns talk about your concern for human rights and freedom you should be laughed out of town.

'Realpolitik' can justify anything. Although it sounds hard-headed it in fact explains nothing accept that the US ruling class can do anything it deems in its interest.

We know, for instance, that the agricultural credits the Reagan Administration showered on Hussein's regime--helping him mitigate discontent while freeing up resources for waging war--were very much in the interest of huge agricultural concerns in the US, represented by, among others, the Republican Congressman, Alan Simpson.

We also know that US weapons manufacturers had much to gain--like they always do--from the US funneling large supplies of arms to Iraq.

We also know that the US, under Reagan, was funneled arms to the Mullahs in Iran, whose containment according to Ted was the sole reason the US assisted Iraq.

The US has a long and sordid record of propping up despots, aiding mercenary terrorist armies, smashing democratically elected governments and popular movements, and invading countries under lying pretenses--going all the way back to the mid 19th century, and all in the pursuit of maintaining and extending the interests of American capitalism. That's the "realpolitik" Ted the sycophant blindly supports.

Like that of Iran.

Aaron

'Realpolitik'
"Although it sounds hard-headed it in fact explains nothing accept that the US ruling class can do anything it deems in its interest."

To explain..
It is somewhat like economics. While it may appear that the successful company is doing whatever it wants it actually follows a path as defined by everyone else in the environment where if it is to deviate from that path it will have to sacrifice power resources etc. For example a factory is open most of the day not because it "wants to" but because that is nessercary for its survival.
If you take any actor and factor in the way they are effected by the environment and then assess "what they want to do" (for example keeping the factory open) it will seem they are doing "whatever they want"
But if you take what they REALLY want to do in the absence of the environmental constraints you will see them as victims of economics, or realpolitik.
(they probably really want the money to come in without having to run the factory)

"We know, for instance, that the agricultural credits the Reagan Administration showered on Hussein's regime--helping him mitigate discontent while freeing up resources for waging war--were very much in the interest of huge agricultural concerns in the US, represented by, among others, the Republican Congressman, Alan Simpson."

You have painted a picture of a Hussein that has taken advantage of a flawed system in the USA as opposed to a USA that has intentionally supported an evil man. In as far as it is true I would suggest that it is not possible to design your system where you cannot be taken advantage of in these ways. So it is not surprising that you can find them in the history of the USA. However I appreciate the need to try to close loopholes when they are discovered.

You see the individual examining a fixed way of operating will always be able to find ways of acting that provide better or worse outcomes for him and not all of those ways of acting will be those desired by the authors of the "fixed way of operating" in fact many will be parasitic in nature.

Alan Simpson is not a Congressman. At one time, he was a Senator from Wyoming, but has since retired.

You got all your other information wrong, too.

In other words, these poor, deluded Iraqis don't realize they were better off under Saddam Hussein, even though he brutally raped and murdered them for his own amusement. They are just being used by the evil Americans.

If they could only be sent to the Stalinist re-education camps at UC-Berkley, these Iraqis would better undertand political reality. Like aaron does.

then what we need is some objective an relitively all inclusive way of valuing whether they are "better off".
what criteria are you using to judge this?

In April of 1990, Alan Simpson visited Mosul, Iraq with a delegation of farm-belt senators, headed by Bob Dole. The chief concern of this venerable delegation was to keep the Iraqi market open for American growers of rice and other grains. At the time, there was some debate "back home" about punishing Hussein's regime for his human rights transgressions. When the delegation met with Hussein, Dole told the US' long-time asset that President Bush had asked him to relay the message that "he wants better relations, and the U.S. government wants better relations with Iraq." Senator Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, told Saddam that Iraq's problem was with the "haughty and pampered" Western media rather than with the United States government.

I invite people to confirm this information by doing a google with the appropriate names, dates, etc.

So, Patriot, do you have any *substantive* objections to my previous post?

I thought not.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
BTW, with astronomical unemployment, on-again off-again electricity and water, destroyed infrastructure, out-of-control crime and violence, and thousands and thousands dead and maimed from US bombs, I think it would be hard for even the most addled american jingoist to claim that Iraqi's are on the whole better off today than they were six months ago (not that the US doesn't shoulder a huge amount of blame for the terrible conditions that Iraqi's faced then).