Hiding Places

[wws]

Now that Saddam has been caught, anyone else disappointed with the actual hide out in the end?

we were led to believe he had a network of underground bunkers all with a years supply of luxury goods and foods

a bloody hole in the ground!!!, the IRA would hide their guns in a shabby hole in the ground like that!

where should he have hidden?

and where is Osama?

[Macy]

Well I heard last night that he was being held captive and they were negogiating the ransom. The yanks took things into their own hands....

[NigeSausagepump]

Another rumour is that they've had him for weeks and just chose to release the news on Sunday. I must say it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they produce Osama and Mullah Omar just as the US Election Campaign is entering into the final strait next summer. Or maybe I'm just cynical.

[wws]

yeah that would make some sense
looks more like a kidnappers shack than one of husseins luxury bunkers

[Dodge]

But would the kidnappers not keep the 750,000 dollars (and of course the taxi…) separate?

[wws]

wot?

wot money?

[Macy]

Forgot about that... he had a briefcase with $750,000 in the bunker with him, although that was probably planted by the yanks....

[wws]

no im with the yanks on this one
saddam deserves his comeuppance by all accounts
whatever about the americans lack of a plan for staying in/getting out of iraq

[pete]

Remember people innocent til proved guilty.

Would be fun if Saddam called Donal Rumsfeld as witnesses when he saying yanks sold him the chemical & biological weapons that he killed the Kurds with. be kinda like selling someone a gun knowing what they gonna use for?

[wws]

actually in this case i dnt believe in the idea of international "trials" its a farce and will be a farce

war crimes?

winners take all and write whats wrong and right in these things, thats a fact of life

fair trial : hahahah

[liamon]

Originally posted by pete
Remember people innocent til proved guilty.

Load of rubbish.

Milosovic, Hitler, Cromwell, Stalin - guilty. Don't need a court room to tell me that.

As for the idea of trying him in an international court, that could become very embarrassing for the US. Apart from all the help they gave him, it'll be bloody difficult to personally blame him for anything. Look at the trouble with the Milosovic trial. It'll get messy.

A nice simple Iraqi trial might provide the answer that the US crave. Beat a confession out of him and follow it up with a nice bloody public execution. Or maybe that's just the cynic in me.

[DolansWaistcoat]

The americans shouldn't be left anywhere near a court case,remember OJ Simpson.

[Macy]

Originally posted by liamon
A nice simple Iraqi trial might provide the answer that the US crave. Beat a confession out of him and follow it up with a nice bloody public execution. Or maybe that's just the cynic in me.

Just to prove how much better things are there now is it? Hopefully it will be a proper trial, and if the Americans are embarrassed so much the better - they might not be so keen to support other dictators if they are.

[Dodge]

Originally posted by DolansWaistcoat
The americans shouldn't be left anywhere near a court case,remember OJ Simpson.

But he was innocent. There was a great documentary on about it and without saying so, put a huge amount of evidence against somebody. Apparently the cops ignored huge chunks of this and basically went for the glory.

[wws]

whats a proper trial?
iraq was a made up place when they invaded it
god knows what mickey mouse procedures they'll put in place in the aftermath

nah, trial by televsion (preferably game show) is the only way

it will allow the US to recoup some of their expenses as well


imagine a cross between Telly Addicts and Noels House Party, you've just imagined Upstairs Downstairs a new gameshow devised and presented by David Brent

[pete]

Interesting that the US given Saddam the status of prision of war which AFAIK means they can't interrogate him under the Geneva Convention.

I'd say almost odds on that the US captured him weeks or months ago & now they finished "questioning" him the Iraqis can have him. Also any info they extracted from him would have been more valuable if people didn't know he already captured.

[tiktok]

Originally posted by pete
Interesting that the US given Saddam the status of prision of war which AFAIK means they can't interrogate him under the Geneva Convention.

America have ignored the Geneva convention whenever they've chosen since the first soldier landed in Afghanistan, usually through idiotic turns of phrase, e.g.
the captured Afghanistani soldiers in Guantanamo weren't soldiers because they didn't wear uniforms, so not POW's.....
They're not an occupying force in iraq, rather a liberating one...

they'll probably push for the death penalty for Saddam (handed down by the American backed government and end up turning Saddam into a martyr for suicide bombers all over the middle east).

[Éanna]

Originally posted by wws
saddam deserves his comeuppance by all accounts

no doubt about it. he was an evil murderer. problem is that world peace is in bigger danger now because this will most likely lead to bush's re-election. ironic to think that the overthrow of one of the most appalling despots in the last century is likely to make the world a more dangerous place

[patsh]

From the Irish Times
[SIZE=3]Saddam may spill the beans[/SIZE]
Vincent Browne

Twenty years ago next Saturday, Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein held a secret meeting in Baghdad. Mr Rumsfeld was then the special envoy of the then US president Ronald Reagan.

It was at a time when Iraq was at war with Iran. During that meeting, Mr Rumsfeld assured the Iraqi president Washington would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West," according to the National Security Directive that was Mr Rumsfeld's talking points notes.

The meeting led to the resumption of diplomatic relations between America and Iraq, which had been broken off in 1967 as a consequence of the Arab-Israeli war.

Mr Rumsfeld has since maintained that during this meeting with Saddam Hussein, he expressed concern about Iraq's use of chemical and biological weapons in the war against Iran. The release of the minutes of the meeting by the National Security Archive in Washington shows this not to be true.

When Saddam Hussein comes to trial in Iraq or wherever for his "crimes against humanity" he may well spill the beans on those who aided, abetted and armed him in the commission of those crimes. In particular, he may be able to disclose the extent of the assistance he got from the United States by the administration that included George Bush snr as vice-president and indeed the administration led by the same George Bush snr after he became president in 1989.

Saddam Hussein's connections with Washington go back to 1959, when the CIA backed an assassination attempt against the then Iraqi prime minister Gen Abd al-Karim Qasim who had overthrown the American-backed monarchy the year before - Saddam was one of those backed by the CIA in the coup attempt. That failed but another coup succeeded a few years later and Saddam was one of the major beneficiaries.

Following that Rumsfeld-Hussein meeting of 20 years ago, the Americans provided military intelligence and arms to Iraq. This was at a time when the Americans were getting regular reports of the use by Saddam of chemical and biological weapons in the war against Iran. Around $1.5 billion worth of weapons equipment and technology, including items applicable to Iraq's nuclear or biological-weapons programme, such as anthrax strains and pesticides, were provided in the years immediately afterwards. A Chilean arms company, Cardoen, was used by the CIA to provide Iraq with cluster bombs.

The Americans provided Iraq with military intelligence on Iran's military plans and army locations. They removed Iraq from the State Department terrorist list and kept Iraq off that list, knowing that in 1985 Iraq was shielding well-known terrorists, including Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who had masterminded the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which resulted in the killing of an American tourist.

A study undertaken by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, an affiliate of the University of Wisconsin Law School, examined documents relating to the Commerce Department's approval of 771 licences for the export of $1.5 billion worth of goods to Iraq from 1985 to 1990. All of the items were "dual-use" products, those that could have either civilian or military applications.

This assistance continued right through the period in March 1988 when Saddam used poison gas against "his own people", the Kurds, and killed some 5,000 Kurdish non-combatants in Halabja.

Saddam may also like to recall at his trial how the American ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told him a week before he invaded Kuwait in August 1990 that the US had "no opinion" on Iraq's border dispute with Kuwait, thereby signalling that, as with his use of chemical and biological weapons against the Iranians and the Kurds, the US would turn a blind eye to whatever he did to his other neighbour.

Saddam Hussein should indeed be put on trial for his crimes against humanity, all of them. And along with him on trial should be those that aided and abetted him in those monstrous atrocities.

The most monstrous of those atrocities was that war he instigated by invading Iran in September 1980, just as he had invaded Kuwait 11 years later. It was a war he pursued for eight years, the longest conventional war of the 20th century. In the course of that war, 375,000 Iraqis and as many as one million Iranians were killed or wounded. Nothing else that Saddam Hussein did in the course of his tyranny from 1979 to 2003 comes near the depredations of that period from 1980 to 1988.

Were Iran to be precluded from the prosecution of Saddam Hussein for war crimes, it would be an injustice.

It would also be an injustice if those Americans, other Western leaders and government officials who egged him on and armed him were not held to account.