Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Bush Silences a Dangerous Witness



By
Robert Parry


December 30, 2006



Like a blue-blood version of a Mob
family with global reach, the Bushes have eliminated one more key
witness to the important historical events that led the U.S. military
into a bloody stalemate in Iraq and pushed the Middle East to the brink
of calamity.



The
hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be – as the New York
Times observed – the “triumphal bookend” to George W.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq. If all had gone as planned, Bush might
have staged another celebration as he did after the end of “major
combat,” posing under the “Mission Accomplished”
banner on May 1, 2003.


But
now with nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed and the Iraqi death toll
exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush may be forced to savor the
image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.


Still,
Bush has done his family’s legacy a great service while also
protecting secrets that could have embarrassed other senior U.S.
government officials.


He has
silenced a unique witness to crucial chapters of the secret history
that stretched from Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 to the
alleged American-Saudi “green light” for Hussein to attack
Iran in 1980, through the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War during which
high-ranking U.S. intermediaries, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert
Gates, allegedly helped broker supplies of war materiel for Hussein.


Hussein
now won’t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he
obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used to
produce the unconventional weapons that were deployed against Iranian
forces and Iraqi civilians. He can’t give his perspective on who
got the money and who facilitated the deals.


Nor
will Hussein be available to give his account of the mixed messages
delivered by George H.W. Bush’s ambassador April Glaspie before
Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Was there another American
“green light” or did Hussein just hear what he wanted to
hear?


Like the climactic
scene from the Mafia movie “Casino” in which nervous Mob
bosses eliminate everyone who knows too much, George W. Bush has now
guaranteed that there will be no public tribunal where Hussein gives
testimony on these potentially devastating historical scandals, which
could threaten the Bush Family legacy.


That
could have happened if Hussein had been turned over to an international
tribunal at the Hague as was done with other tyrants, such as
Yugoslavia’s late dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Instead Bush
insisted that Hussein be tried in Iraq despite the obvious fact that
the Iraqi dictator would receive nothing close to a fair trial before
being put to death.


Hussein's
hanging followed his trial for executing 148 men and boys from the town
of Dujail in 1982 after a foiled assassination attempt on Hussein and
his entourage. Hussein's death effectively moots other cases that were
supposed to deal with his alleged use of chemical weapons to kill Iraqi
civilians and other crimes that might have exposed the U.S. role.


[For details on what Hussein might have revealed, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy Privilege or Consortiumnews.com’s “Missing U.S.-Iraq History” or “The Secret World of Robert Gates.”]


Thrill of the Kill


Some
observers think that Bush simply wanted the personal satisfaction of
seeing Hussein hanged, which would not have happened if he had been
sent to the Hague. As Texas governor, Bush sometimes took what appeared
to be perverse pleasure at his power to execute prisoners.


In a 1999 interview with conservative writer Tucker Carlson for Talk magazine, Bush ridiculed convicted murderer Karla Faye Tucker and her unsuccessful plea to Bush to spare her life.



Asked about Karla Faye Tucker’s clemency appeal, Bush mimicked
what he claimed was the condemned woman’s message to him.
“With pursed lips in mock desperation, [Bush said]: ‘Please
don’t kill me.’”



But a more powerful motive was always Hussein’s potential threat
to the Bush Family legacy if he ever had a forum where he could offer
detailed testimony about the historic events of the past several
decades.


Since stepping into
the White House on Jan. 20, 2001, George W. Bush has made it a top
priority to conceal the history of his father’s 12 years as Vice
President and President and to wrap his own presidency in a thick cloak
of secrecy.


One of
Bush’s first acts as President was to sign an executive order
that blocked the scheduled release of historic records from his
father’s years. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush expanded his secrecy
mandate to grant his family the power to withhold those documents from
the American public in perpetuity, passing down the authority to keep
the secrets to future Bush generations.



So, even after George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are dead, those
noted historians Jenna and Barbara Bush will control key government
documents covering a 20-year swath of U.S. history.



Already, every document at the George H.W. Bush presidential library
must not only be cleared for release by specialists at the National
Archives and – if classified – by the affected agencies,
but also by the personal representatives of both the senior and junior
George Bush.


With their
backgrounds in secret societies like Skull and Bones – and with
George H.W. Bush’s work at the CIA – the Bushes are keenly
aware of the power that comes from controlling information. By keeping
crucial facts from the American people, the Bushes feel they can turn
the voters into easily manipulated children.



When there is a potential rupture of valuable information, the Bushes
intervene, turning to influential friends to discredit some witness or
relying on the U.S. military to make the threat go away. The Bushes
have been helped immeasurably, too, by the credulity and cowardice of
the modern U.S. news media and the Democratic Party.


What Can Be Done



Still, even with Hussein’s execution, there are actions that the
American people can take to finally recover the lost history of the
1980s.


The U.S. military is
now sitting on a treasure trove of documents seized during the invasion
of Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration exploited these documents to
discredit the United Nations over the “oil for food”
scandal of the 1990s, ironically when Hussein wasn’t building
weapons of mass destruction. But the Bush administration has withheld
the records from the 1980s when Hussein was producing chemical and biological weapons.



In 2004, for instance the CIA released the so-called Duelfer report,
which acknowledged that the administration’s pre-invasion
assertions about Hussein hiding WMD stockpiles were “almost all
wrong.” But a curious feature of the report was that it included
a long section about Hussein’s abuse of the U.N.’s
“oil for food” program, although the report acknowledged
that the diverted funds had not gone to build illegal weapons.



Meanwhile, the report noted the existence of a robust WMD program in
the 1980s but offered no documentary perspective on how that operation
had occurred and who was responsible for the delivery of crucial
equipment and precursor chemicals. In other words, the CIA’s WMD
report didn’t identify the non-Iraqis who made Iraq’s WMD
arsenal possible.


One source
who has seen the evidence told me that it contains information about
the role of Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen, who has been identified
as a key link between the CIA and Iraq for the procurement of dangerous
weapons in the 1980s. But that evidence has remained locked away.



With the Democrats taking control of Congress on Jan. 4, 2007, there
could finally be an opportunity to force out more of the full story,
assuming the Democrats don’t opt for their usual course of
putting “bipartisanship” ahead of oversight and truth.



The American people also could demand that the surviving members of
Hussein’s regime be fully debriefed on their historical knowledge
before their voices also fall silent either from natural causes or
additional executions.


But
the singular figure who could have put the era in its fullest
perspective – and provided the most damning evidence about the
Bush Family’s role – has been silenced for good, dropped
through a trap door of a gallows and made to twitch at the end of a
noose fashioned from hemp.



The White House announced that George W. Bush didn’t wait up for
the happy news of Hussein’s hanging. After the U.S. military
turned Hussein over to his Iraqi executioners, Bush went to bed at his
Crawford, Texas, ranch and slept through the night.





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