Rumsfeld’s Handshake Deal With Saddam

Rumsfeld’s Handshake Deal With Saddam

...As it happens, the initial trial of Saddam and co-defendants is focusing on grisly crimes that occurred the year before Rumsfeld gripped his hand. “The first witness, Ahmad Hassan Muhammad, 38, riveted the courtroom with the scenes of torture he witnessed after his arrest in 1982, including a meat grinder with human hair and blood under it,” The New York Times reported Tuesday. And: “At one point, Mr. Muhammad briefly broke down in tears as he recalled how his brother was tortured with electrical shocks in front of their 77-year-old father.”

The victims were Shiites—143 men and adolescent boys, according to the charges—tortured and killed in the Iraqi town of Dujail after an assassination attempt against Saddam in early July of 1982. Donald Rumsfeld became the Reagan administration’s Middle East special envoy 15 months later.

On Dec. 20, 1983, the Washington Post reported that Rumsfeld “visited Iraq in what U.S. officials said was an attempt to bolster the already improving U.S. relations with that country.” A couple of days later, The New York Times cited a “senior American official” who “said that the United States remained ready to establish full diplomatic relations with Iraq and that it was up to the Iraqis.”

On March 29, 1984, the Times reported: “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name.” Washington had some goodies for Saddam’s regime, the Times account noted, including “agricultural-commodity credits totaling $840 million.” And while “no results of the talks have been announced” after the Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad three months earlier, “Western European diplomats assume that the United States now exchanges some intelligence on Iran with Iraq.”

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this will all be made a focus in sh's trial.

btw, gnn needs to change the background on that page - very hard to read!