Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: (OT) Saddam: This was a guilty verdict on America as well

Robert Fisk 
Independent (UK)
Published: 06 November 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1959051.ece
So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death
for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's
best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about
his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with
the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday
declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another
"great day for Iraq". That's what Tony Blair announced
when Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti was pulled from his hole
in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going
to string him up, and it's another great day.
Of course, it couldn't happen to a better man. Nor a
worse. It couldn't be a more just verdict - nor a more
hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of a more
suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched
by his executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of
Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would strike his
victims on the head with an axe if they dared to
condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party
before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged
at Abu Ghraib in 1985 after accepting a bribe to put a
reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned
man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because
we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into the very
same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we
hope - don't we? - to look better than him, to remind
Iraqis that life is better now than it was under
Saddam.
Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have
inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life
is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even
more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his
Shias and Kurds and - yes, in Fallujah of all places -
his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral
superiority. For if Saddam's immorality and wickedness
are to be the yardstick against which all our
iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We
only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them
and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes
and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere
600,000 lives ("more or less", as George Bush Jnr said
when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam
was much worse. We can't be put on trial. We can't be
hanged.
"Allahu Akbar," the awful man shouted - God is greater.
No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words
should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag
which now hangs over the palace of the government that
has condemned him after a trial at which the former
Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from
describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now
George Bush's Secretary of Defence. Remember that
handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk
about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the
current US President's father. Little wonder, then,
that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans
had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-
term US elections.
Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the
Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman,
blurted out yesterday, must be "smoking rope". Well,
Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might
be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam
verdict - not the trial itself, please note - was
"scrupulous and fair". The judges will publish
"everything they used to come to their verdict."
No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that
Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of
chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant - so
appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a
localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale
gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord
Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they
decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in 2002?
Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany
(of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's
Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs
produced a report entitled "United States Chemical and
Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and
their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic)
of the Persian Gulf War".
This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of
Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US
government-approved shipments of biological agents sent
by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier.
These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces
anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum;
Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and
Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US
provided Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials
which assisted in the development of chemical,
biological and missile-system programmes, including
chemical warfare agent production facility plant and
technical drawings (provided as pesticide production
facility plans).
Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn't permitted to
talk about this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary,
said that Saddam's hanging "was a sovereign decision by
a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he didn't mention
the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two
components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in
1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile
substances the following year.
We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a
price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used
to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the
same country - Britain - that would, eight years later,
prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi
children on the grounds that it could be used for - you
guessed it - "weapons of mass destruction".
Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for
their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the
thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would
certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death
sentence review period. But would the Americans and
British dare touch a trial in which we would have not
only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why
the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war
crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the
Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was
dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam
still being at the time our favourite ally rather than
our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West
were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during
the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.
And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the
Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country?
- then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering
countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds
after they staged an uprising against the Baathist
regime at our specific request - thousands whom
webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam's brutal
hordes on their own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's
meretricious "dodgy dossier" described these atrocities
in 2002 - because, of course, to call them an
"uprising" (which they were) would invite us to ask
ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath.
Answer: us.
I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled
on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back
from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling
in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth
to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their
wounds. The British and Americans didn't want to know.
I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans
didn't want to know. My Associated Press colleague
Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in
their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The
Americans and the British didn't care.
But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and
circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting,
twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have
inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded
and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is
no sympathy for this man. "President Saddam Hussein has
no fear of being executed," Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese
lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. "He
will not come out of prison to count his days and years
in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out
of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave." It
looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went
there. Milosevic escaped sentence.
The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass
murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-
slitting and torture in the years since our
"liberation" of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi
government we are currently supporting, democratically
elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some
cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up
under this democratic government. And they will not be
tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism.
And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so
obscenely joined?

 "great day for Iraq".
Cosi' l'alleato di un tempo dell'america e' stato condannato a morte per 
crimini di guerra che ha commesso quando era il miglior amico di Washington 
nel mondo arabo.
L'america sapeva tutto delle sue atrocita' ed ha persino fornito il gas, 
insieme agli inglesi ovviamente, eppure ieri dichiaravamo essere, nelle 
parole della casa bianca, un altro grande giorno per l'iraq.
--------
poi traduco il resto.

 Independent (UK)
Era ieri sera da Fazio. Ha detto cose bellissime, molto vere e 
interessanti. In 10 minuti di trasmissione hanno presentato il suo libro 
(un tomone da un migliaio di pagine) e ha riassunto con grande chiarezza 
la situazione mediorientale.
Dopo c'č stato Bocca che ha detto cose altrettanto vere e altrettanto dure.

 Era ieri sera da Fazio.
caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaz  a saperlo!
Si recupera in rete?

 Si recupera in rete?
Sul sito, ma fra qualche giorno. Comunque una brevissima intervista.
Bocca ha confermato di aver qualche pregiudizio sui meridionali, che
Fazio ha chiamato schiettezza, altri dicon più propriamente razzismo.
--
Joe

 Fazio ha chiamato schiettezza, altri dicon più propriamente razzismo.
Mmmm, non ho seguito proprio benissimo (perchè proprio in quel momento 
mi bollivano gli gnocchi e stavo scolando e condendo) ma se non ricordo 
male se l'è presa in modo specifico con i napoletani, non con i 
meridionali in genere.
In pratica ha detto che per Napoli non c'è speranza

 In pratica ha detto che per Napoli non c'è speranza
Mostrandosi piu' fatalista dei napoletani stessi. Diciamo pure che ha
espresso schiettamente il suo pensiero, ma resta l'impressione di una
visione un po' superficiale del problema (ha detto che e' cosi' da
migliaia di anni: che vuol dire migliaia di anni? che prima ancora
della dominazione romana i popoli della regione si distinguevano per il
disprezzo per leggi dello stato? che erano gia' tutti camorristi, o
come si dice adesso... sistemisti? c'e' qualcosa di genetico in tutto
questo? dei caratteri dominanti resistenti a ogni rimescolamento
genetico avvenuto nelle ultime "migliaia di anni"? Oppure e' un fatto
puramente culturale e in quanto tale ha delle cause storiche e in
quanto fatto culturale e' suscettibile di trasformazioni e
cambiamenti?)
Rifiutare di accodarsi alla retorica dilagante in queste ore e' un
conto, sancire l'inevitabilita' di questo stato di cose e' un altro.
--
Joe

 conto, sancire l'inevitabilita' di questo stato di cose e' un altro.
Hai ragione. E dissento da Bocca: non credo che questo stato di cose non 
possa cambiare. Non conosco le soluzioni, figuriamoci, non conosco 
nemmeno la situazione, ma son convinto che almeno qualcosa si possa fare.
Però la cosa mi ha colpito, proprio per la sua totale mancanza di 
ottimismo (anche quando ha detto che in Italia siamo ancora in 
maggioranza fascisti) e di mezze misure. Il problema è che se la 
maggioranza la pensasse davvero così: non ci sarebbero soluzioni se non 
radere al suolo la città.


Dilettante. 306 di colesterolo e 550 di trigliceridi. 

> Dilettante. 306 di colesterolo e 550 di trigliceridi. 
Complimenti. Sei praticamente un infarto ambulante.
Spero per te che almeno l'HDL compensi il colesterolo.
Comunque, il mio problema è che spero continuino a farmi donare il sangue


No. Sono un infarto ambulante, ma mi muovo bene. 



http://www.raiclicktv.it/raiclickpc/secure/folder.srv?id=2072#
ciao

 ciao
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OBZUgJGO0E
La prima parte di quattro per un'ora totale di durata.

 
http://www.raiclicktv.it/raiclickpc/secure/folder.srv?id=2072#
grazie! :-)
"Ospiti della puntata Giorgio Bocca, Asia e Dario Argento. "
:-(
-- 
www.iaciners.org