Hussein Theatrics Hide Secret Crimes

Is anybody wondering why the capture of a small dethroned dictator in a small Middle Eastern part of the world warrants so much constant media attention? I found it significant that the story, as simple as it was, happened on a Sunday and pre-empted the day's football/basketball/hockey television coverage.

This old journalist smells a rat every time he sees a story like this overplayed. The media hype continued not only through Sunday but the following Monday and still dominates the news as these words are penned.

The story, at least as it is being played, is simple. They found Hussein hiding in a hole in the ground, pulled him out alive, and are making a public spectacle of him.

The story that led to this event is not being talked about much. That is because it is pretty ugly when you look at it in the light.

The United States military, with assistance from England, attacked Iraq on the pretense that dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding those so-called weapons of mass destruction. To be exact, we were told he had in his possession 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 1,000,000 pounds of sarin gas, mustard gas, and VX nerve gas; 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents, and uranium from Niger for the potential development of nuclear bombs.

After attacking Iraq and quickly defeating an army that failed to use such weapons to hit back, we have been locked in a deadly cat-and-mouse game of guerilla warfare that threatens to keep our military trapped in that country for years. To date we have lost more than 450 American troops, left an estimated 3,000 troops disabled with legs, arms and eyes missing, killed an untold thousands of Iraqis, poisoned hundreds of thousands more with uranium-filled weaponry and left a once thriving nation in ruins.

To date, we havent found one trace of those terrible weapons Hussein was reportedly hiding. In fact, we have found nothing in Iraq to justify the treatment of Mr. Hussein as a war criminal. We cant even prove he was in any way linked to the 9-11 attack on the United States, or linked to the terrorist cells that are now waging holy war against our troops in Iraq.

Hussein is being held captive somewhere outside of Iraq. But we are being told that the people of Iraq will get to judge Hussein for his evil deeds. President Bush publicly accused the man and his family of public executions, raping women and plundering a nation of suppressed people. We have seen video footage of the war he raged with Iran, the attack on Kuwait that sparked the Gulf War conflict in 1991, and Hussein's massacre of the Kurds following an uprising against him since that war.

What Bush and the media forget to tell us is that Hussein has been on the CIA payroll for a long time. The U. S. has been secretly manipulating affairs in the Middle East for years.

Readers might remember that the Iraq attack on Iran came at a time when the Iranians were considered very bad because they were under the rule of a religious anti-American leadership that raided the American embassy and held a number of government employees captive (but unharmed) for months. That event helped George Bush the senior defeat incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter in his bid for a second term in office.

The sudden and unexpected capture of Saddam Hussein also comes at a very convenient time for George Bush the junior. The war in Iraq has not been going well, a lot of GIs have been coming home in wheelchairs and body bags, the president's ratings are sliding, and the Democrats are getting organized under Dr. Howard Dean's anti-war platform.

I get the feeling that Hussein has been thrown to the wolves to save Mr. Bush's political career. He badly wants that second term in office and is willing to do anything to get it. I believe our forces knew all along where Hussein was hiding, and allowed him to remain there until it was politically expedient to bring him out.

Strange that all of this effort in Iraq, including the expenditure of an estimated $6 billion to unseat this unimportant little dictator, has done nothing to seek out and capture the man everybody things is really behind the 9-11 attacks; Osama bin Laden. In fact, we rarely hear his name these days.

By the way, Osama is known to be yet another former CIA operative. For all I know, he may still be.

The American people are being played like a poorly-tuned harp. I have yet to determine the name of the song, however. Most of what the Bush Administration is producing has been just noise.