Shady history will keep U.S. from granting Saddam fair trial

"...But in a fair trial, with normal rules of evidence and reasonably competent defense lawyers, it would be impossible to stop the defense from pointing out that every U.S. administration from 1980 to 1992 (all Republican administrations, as it happens) was directly or indirectly complicitous in his crimes..."

"...The U.S. knew that Saddam was already illegally using chemical weapons against Iranian troops on an almost daily basis but, in December 1983, the Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld (now U.S. Defense Secretary) to Baghdad to tell Saddam that it was willing to help and wanted to restore full diplomatic relations.
In the following years, the U.S. government allowed vital ingredients for chemical weapons to be exported to Iraq, together with dozens of biological agents, including anthrax. It also supplied Iraq with intelligence information on Iranian troop movements and positions, and from 1986 even sent U.S. Air Force officers to Iraq to help interpret U.S.-supplied satellite and aerial photos to plan attacks against Iran -- in which it was clearly understood by Washington that huge quantities of poison gas would be used..."

"..When Saddam used poison gas against his own Kurdish population in 1988, killing 6,800 innocent people, U.S. diplomats were instructed to blame the incident on Iran... "

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