- This week, the Washington Post offered
a grim overview of Iraq's epidemic of mental disorders, produced by years
of war, upheaval and neglect ("Iraq's Crisis of Scarred Psyches,"
March 6). Of course, much of this psychological damage is the fault of
Saddam Hussein and the brutal regime he installed: militarism, tyranny
and the gross deceit required to maintain them wreak serious havoc on the
human mind, as Americans are coming to know too well. But there is a deeper
history behind the unfolding nightmare in Iraq a method to the induced
madness that is inextricably linked to the political and personal fortunes
of two sinister twerps named George Bush.
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- As historian Roger Morris has usefully
reminded us, Saddam's regime was midwifed by not one but two coups supported
by the CIA: the first brought the Baathist Party to power, the second,
an internal coup, engineered the ascension of Saddam's family-centered
faction to the top. It is unlikely that Saddam would have ever been a position
to impose his perverted militarist vision on Iraqi society without the
assistance of the elitist operatives whose headquarters now proudly bears
the name of George Herbert Walker Bush.
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- Let us also remember that Saddam was
sustained in his harsh rule with the eager support of Ronald Reagan and
the aforementioned George H.W. Bush. Indeed, the latter's passionate embrace
of Saddam seemed to know no bounds, so avidly did Bush ply the dictator
with money, agricultural credits (which allowed Saddam to use his scarce
hard currency for weapons) and advanced technology includuing "dual-use"
gear for weapons of mass destruction despite the strong warnings of his
own Cabinet against such reckless policies, and a 1989 report by the CIA
that Iraq had greatly accelerated its nuclear program, and was now the
world's largest maker of chemical weapons.
-
- Bush also used the global criminal network
of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) to secretly funnel
cash and weaponry to Saddam then intervened to quash federal investigations
of the scam. What was BCCI? Only "one of the largest criminal enterprises
in history," according to the United States Senate. What did BCCI
do? "It engaged in pandemic bribery of officials in Europe, Africa,
Asia and the Americas," says journalist Christopher Bryon, who first
exposed the operation. "It laundered money on a global scale, intimidated
witnesses and law officers, engaged in extortion and blackmail. It supplied
the financing for illegal arms trafficking and global terrorism. It financed
and facilitated income tax evasion, smuggling and prostitution." Sort
of an early version of the Bush Regime, then.
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- The Italian bank BNL was one of BCCI's
main tentacles. BNL's Atlanta branch was the primary funnel used to send
millions of secret dollars to Saddam for arms purchases, including deadly
chemicals and other WMD materials supplied by the Chilean arms dealer Cardoen
and various politically-connected operators in the United States like,
weapons merchant Matrix Churchill.
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- As soon as the BNL case broke, Bush moved
to throttle the investigation. He appointed lawyers from both Cardoen and
Matrix to top Justice Department posts where they supervised the officials
investigating their old companies. The overall probe was directed by Justice
Department investigator Robert Mueller. Meanwhile, White House aides applied
heavy pressure on other prosecutors to restrict the range of the probe
especially the fact that Bush cabinet officials Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence
Eagleburger had served as consultants for BNL during their pre-White House
days as spear-carriers for yet another secretive international front that
profits from war, weapons, and the avid greasing of highly-placed palms:
Kissinger Associates. The U.S. Senate later found that the probe had been
unaccountably "botched" witnesses went missing, CIA records
got "lost," all sorts of bad luck. Most of the big BCCI players
went unpunished or got off with wrist-slap fines and sanctions.
-
- One of the White House aides who unlawfully
intervened in the BNL prosecution was a certain factotum named Jay S. ByBee.
In 1994, said factotum was appointed by George W. Bush to a place on the
federal appeals court a lifetime sinecure of perks and power. Mueller,
meanwhile wound up as head of the FBI, appointed to the post in by George
W. in July 2001. Well done, thou good and faithful servants!
-
- Then came Bush's "Gulf War,"
when he turned on his protégé after Saddam made the foolish
move of threatening the Kuwaiti royals Bush's long-time business partners,
going back to the early 1960s. Saddam's conflict with Kuwait centered on
two main issues: first, his claim that the billions of dollars Kuwait had
given Iraq during the war with Iran was simply straightforward aid to the
nation that was defending the Sunni Arab world from the aggressive onslaught
of the Shiite Persians. The Kuwaitis insisted the money had been a loan,
and demanded that Saddam pay off. There was also Saddam's claim that Kuwait
was "slant-drilling" into Iraqi oilfields, siphoning off underground
reserves from across the border. These disputes raged for months; a deal
to resolve them was brokered by the Arab League, but fell apart at the
last minute when Kuwait suddenly rejected the agreement, saying, "We
will call in the Americans."
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- How worried was Bush about the situation?
Let's look at the historical record. In the two weeks before the invasion
of Kuwait, Bush approved the sale of an additional $4.8 million in "dual-use"
technology to factories identified by the CIA as linchpins of Hussein's
illicit nuclear and biochemical programs, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The day before Saddam sent his tanks across the border, Bush obligingly
sold him more than $600 million worth of advanced communications technology.
A week later, he was declaring that his long-time ally was "worse
than Hitler."
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- Yes, the Kuwaitis had called in their
marker. Like a warlord of old, Bush used the US military as a private army
to help his business partners. After an extensive bombing campaign that
openly even gleefully mocked international law in its targeting of civilian
infrastructure (a tactic repeated in Serbia by Bill Clinton now regarded
as an "adopted son" by Bush), the brief 100-hour ground war slaughtered
fleeing Iraqi conscripts by the thousands while, curiously, allowing Saddam's
crack troops, the aptly-named Republican Guard, to escape unharmed. Later,
these troops were used to kill tens of thousands of Shiites who had risen
in rebellion against Saddam at the specific instigation of George Bush,
who not only abandoned them to their fate, but specifically allowed Saddam
to use his attack helicopters against the rebels, and also ordered US troops
to block Shiites from gaining access to arms caches. It was one of the
worst, most murderous betrayals in modern history and has been almost
entirely expunged from the American memory.
-
- Then came the Carthaginian "peace"
of the victors Iraq sown with the salt of sanctions, which led to the
unnecessary death of at least 500,000 children, according to UN's conservative
estimates. The sanction regime actually strengthened Saddam's grip on Iraqi
society, as the ravaged people were reduced to surviving on government
handouts of food.
-
- Now another George Bush has visited havoc
on Iraq, launching a war that has led to the complete breakdown of Iraqi
society, to year after year of deprivation, religious extremism, illegal
occupation and unbridled violence. The psychological hell wrought by this
sinister consortium the CIA, the Bushes and Saddam is unimaginable, a
slowly-unfolding atrocity that will chew up victims for decades to come.
-
- Saddam is now on trial for some of his
crimes; when will his co-conspirators join him in the dock?
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- http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=
com_content&task=view&id=523&Itemid=1
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