from CommonDreams:
Published on Sunday, December 31, 2006 by the Toronto Sun
US Buries the Truth
Saddam's Execution Eliminates the Main Witness against Accomplices
by Eric Margolis
On my first visit to Iraq in 1976, so-called "Israeli spies" were being hanged in front of my Baghdad hotel.
While covering Iraq just before the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's secret police threatened to hang me as an American/Israeli spy.
I always considered "President Hussein," who was hanged Friday, a sadistic bully and a loathsome megalomaniac.
No one can accuse me of sympathy for Saddam or his fellow thugs who terrorized Iraq. But I was thoroughly disgusted and ashamed by the kangaroo court created and stage-managed by the U.S. that condemned Saddam.
It was a disgraceful farrago of Soviet-style show trial and judicial circus. Washington, which claimed to be bringing the fruits of democracy to the benighted Arab World, put on a sinister legal farce worthy of, ironically, Saddam's courts.
Iraq's deposed president, whom Osama bin Laden called "the worst Arab despot" should have faced real justice at an international legal tribunal like the UN Hague Court. That would have served warning to other despots who violated human rights and committed aggression.
The United States did right to hand over Serb tyrant Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague. But Saddam had to be silenced before he told the world about his long collusion with the United States. Dead men tell no tales.
Saddam's biggest crime was not killing rebellious Kurds or Shia. As ruler of the unnatural, British-created Frankenstein state Iraq, Saddam was forced to keep putting down rebellions. .....(more)
The full article is at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1231-25.htm