Most of the charges being prepared by the tribunal against Hussein involve actions carried out by his regime during the period when it enjoyed growing support from the US government. Washington’s ties to Saddam Hussein strengthened in line with Hussein’s increasing turn to the right at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, marked by attacks on leftist forces in Iraq and the expulsion in 1979 of the Iraqi Communist Party from government positions, followed by bloody repression against CP members.
The Bush administration is well aware that, like former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, Hussein could use his trial to embarrass the US. He is, for instance, intimately familiar with the two visits of the then-presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1983 and 1984 to cement US ties with the dictatorship, despite Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. He is also aware of the military assistance the US provided to Iraq during the war with Iran, and of details of US and European companies that assisted in Iraqi chemical and biological weapons programs. These political mine fields are among the reasons why Washington has insisted that the trial remain under firm US control in Baghdad, rather than at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Underscoring the hypocrisy pervading the entire process, Iraqi Justice Minister Abdel Hussein Shandal alleged last month that US officials were delaying Iraqi efforts to interrogate Saddam Hussein. “It seems,” he said, “there are lots of secrets they want to hide.”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jul2005/iraq-j20.shtmlGeorge Galloway has branded the trial of Saddam Hussein a US sham and said Iraq's new interim authority is a "puppet of the military occupiers".
The rebel MP, kicked out of Labour for his outspoken attacks on the war, said the ex-dictator was effectively being tried by the US, who wanted him hanged.
"It is not the Iraqis that are doing it, it is the Americans," he told Sky.
"Iraq is not a free country. There is a government that has been put in power in Baghdad by the Americans."
Saddam's trial began on Thursday with the former leader denouncing US President George W Bush as the "criminal".
'Stooges'
He also rejected the jurisdiction of the special tribunal and said he was still Iraq's president.
Mr Galloway meanwhile said Iraqis prosecuting the trial were "stooges, collaborators, hand-picked by the military occupation of Iraq".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3857201.stm
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