As torture in Iraq was being exposed, Rumsfeld grovelled before Saddam

bigtree

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Sun Feb-26-06 10:25 AM
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As torture in Iraq was being exposed, Rumsfeld grovelled before Saddam

Robert Fisk: Defeat is victory. Death is life

http://www.rinf.com/columnists/news/as-torture-in-iraq-was-being-exposed-rumsfeld-grovelled-before-saddam

{snips}

Rumsfeld�s latest pronouncements have included a defence of the Pentagon�s system of buying favourable news stories in Iraq with bribes - �non-traditional means to provide accurate information� was his fantasy description of this latest attempt to obscure the collapse of the American regime in Baghdad - and an attack on our reporting of the Abu Ghraib tortures. �Consider for a moment the vast quantity of column inches and hours of television devoted to the detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. Compare that to the volume of coverage and condemnation associated with, say, the discovery of Saddam Hussein�s mass graves, which were filled with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.�

Let�s expose this whopping lie. We were exposing Saddam�s vile regime, especially his use of gas, as long ago as 1983. I was refused a visa to Iraq by Saddam�s satraps for exposing their vile tortures at - Abu Ghraib. And what was Donald Rumsfeld doing? Visiting Baghdad, grovelling before Saddam, to whom he did not mention the murders and mass graves, which he knew about, and pleading with the Beast of Baghdad to reopen the US embassy in Iraq.

With the usual press courtiers in tow, Rumsfeld has no problems, witness George Melloan�s recent interview with the Beast of Washington in his Boeing 737: �He generously spares me time for a chat about defence strategy. Bright sunlight streams in and lights his face � Sitting across from him at a desk high above the clouds, one wonders if the ability of this modern Jove to call down lightning on transgressors will be equal to the tasks ahead.�

And so myth-making and tragedy go hand in hand. Iraq�s monumental catastrophe has become routine, shapeless, an incipient �civil War�. Note how the American framework of disaster is now being portrayed as an Iraqi vs Iraqi War, as if the huge and brutal US occupation has nothing to do with the appalling violence in Iraq. They blow up each other�s mosques? They just don�t want to get on. We told them to have a non-sectarian government and they refused. That, I suspect, will be the get-out line when the next deluge overwhelms the Americans in Iraq.

full article: http://www.rinf.com/columnists/news/as-torture-in-iraq-was-being-exposed-rumsfeld-grovelled-before-saddam

Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article347720.ece

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bigtree

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Sun Feb-26-06 03:07 PM
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1. "And so myth-making and tragedy go hand in hand.

Iraq's monumental catastrophe has become routine, shapeless, an incipient "civil war".

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