-SA
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AGONY of the DAY:
First they bombed the Muslims of Afghanistan in Ramadan, then they destroyed Fallujah in the nights of lailatul qadr. Now they murder the President of Iraq, the leader of the Islamic resistance, on the sacred day of Eid al-Adha.
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Thought of the Day:
Killing a leader on his holiest day of religious celebration: Eid al-Adha: that's what the oppressors did to Saddam Hussein. No one with a sense of decency, an understanding of honor and shame or even a tiny shred, an iota of Islam, would do this to his worst enemy.
Saddam used to free prisoners on Eid, even those who had tried to overthrow him. After Kurdish and Shi'ite armed uprisings, he gave GENERAL AMNESTY to his enemies.
This murder of a top Islamic/Arab leader on Eid is an open challenge to the world of Islam. We must use our thinking abilities to answer this challenge and not be terrorized into silence.
This murder is the fruit of the Shi'ite/U.S. alliance. The followers of Sistani/al-Hakim/Ja'afari/Allawi/al-Maliki/al-Sadr working with the U.S. military, some of them openly, others indirectly, have brought about a situation in which they could dare to hang the leading opponent of the Zionist occupation of Palestine.
If this Iraqi Shi'ite/U.S. alliance is extended to other countries with Shi'ite minorities, such as Pakistan, Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, it could bring the Muslim world under the yoke of a new kind of slavery, the triple yoke of Zionism-Imperialism-Shi'ism.
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A Thought on President Saddam Hussein: From the Lowest to the Greatest
by Nadrat Siddique
Consider Khalid Bin Waleed (RA), who committed atrocities against Muslims during his lifetime. The Prophet (SAW) forgave him, and Khalid (RA) went on to become one of the foremost commanders of Islam (in adherence with Islamic regulations on warfare, of course).
Eighteen years ago, Saddam putatively committed war time atrocities, most of them during the
Iran-Iraq war.
Up until the U.S. invasion, he, unlike other Arab leaders, overtly offered comfort to Palestinian widows and orphans, and honored the sacrifices of Palestinian martyrs fighting zionist occupation. Up until his death, he refused, like Al-Qama, to "hand a pen to the oppressor." In
other words, he went down fighting. Suppose one applies the popularly quoted "Those who start out in the back row/those who start out in the front row" hadith to this situation?
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Analysis: The Hero and Martyr of Islam
Why were the Muslims Fooled by the West about President Saddam Hussein?
by Kaukab Siddique, Ph.D.
Brief background: During the 20th century of the Christian era, the Ottoman Caliphate collapsed and the political vacuum it left in the Middle East was filled by western-oriented elites, some Christian Arabs, others Muslims only in name.
The Middle East was divided into tiny countries where regimes could only be established with the blessing of the western powers. Thus emerged the un-Islamic regimes which we are familiar with in our own times.In response, the Islamic movements emerged under the leadership of Hasan al-Banna, r.a., and were later led intellectually by Syed Qutb, r.a. and others.
As long as the dictators did not challenge western hegemony, the post World War II victors did not bother about how the "Muslim" dictators gained power and what they did to their opponents.
One who emerged in this welter of violence and power play was Saddam Hussein. However, when he gained power, he did much good for his people. Under Saddam, Iraq developed industry, health services, education and transportation/electric/road systems. Iraqi women gained their rights under Saddam. The oil was used for the good of Iraqis. Peace and law were prevalent in Iraq
The Iran-Iraq War Distorts our View of Saddam:
Most Muslims, including this writer, sided with Iran against Iraq. Iraq was the aggressor, Iran the victim. However, as the years of war continued, Iran decided not only to defeat Saddam but also to bring about a Shi'ite uprising within Iraq. Most of us did not pay attention to this development and remained focused on the suffering Saddam had imposed on Iran. Iranian military forces tried to capture Basra and occupied parts of Iraq. Attempts were made to kill Saddam. Hence arose his paranoia and the sense that assassins were shadowing him.
Saddam, the Arab Nationalist:
With the growth of his military power, tested against Iran, Saddam became the champion of Arab rights. He sought to rectify the borders of the Arab world imposed by the British; hence his adventure against Kuwait. He became vociferous in his support of Palestine. His Arab neighbors, all beneficiaries of western powers, saw his Pan-Arabism as a threat. All the way from the Syrians to the Saudis to the Egyptians, they ganged up with the U.S. and NATO to defeat Saddam; 42 days of AROUND-the-CLOCK bombing by the U.S. and U.K. left Iraq in shambles, denuded of its modern/scientific infrastructure.
In spite of military defeat, Saddam kept his people united and would not surrender to the victorious coalition. At this point, he was beginning to discover Islam as a revolutionary force.
Years of Sanctions and Embargo: Saddam Defiant:
From 1991 to 2003, nearly 12 years, Iraq was under U.S.-UN sanctions and embargo beyond anything the world has ever seen. The children of Iraq started dying in large numbers because clean water and medicines were not available. More than a million died a slow death.
According to Clancy, the famous novelist, the U.S. tried to kill Saddam 33 times but failed [but it added to his paranoia].
Iran, supposedly under an Islamic regime, joined the UN in its embargo on Iraq. The Iranians were looking to the collapse of Saddam with dreams of a sectarian, Shi'ite empire. With the hundreds of miles of porous border with Iraq, the Iranians could have easily broken the sanctions if Islamic universalism had been their credo. Instead they succumbed to their sectarian drives.
Islam and Saddam: People can change: He was Transformed.
When Saddam started quoting from the Qur'an, the Muslim world thought he was only using religion. When he started the construction of the biggest mosque in the world and set up a free Islamic university, both Muslim media and western media blocked the news.
Saddam realized during the sanctions regime that without Jihad, the Muslim world would remain enslaved forever. He paid sadaqa [charity] to the widows and children of men who had carried out martyrdom operations against "Israel."
Very quietly, he removed restrictions from Islamic scholars and preachers in the mosques of Iraq. Hence Jihad, especially against America, became the central message of sermons in Iraqi mosques. Saddam himself lived by a strict personal code: he was never a womanizer or a drinker. Now he started worshipping Allah and studying the Qur'an.
Preparing for the U.S. Invasion:
Saddam knew that his military forces were no match for the fire power and sophistication of the U.S. armada. He also knew that some of his military commanders had sold out to the U.S. HE HAD A CHOICE: Surrender and accept U.S. power or FIGHT. But fight how?
Saddam prepared Iraq for long drawn out guerrilla warfare. Iraq was divided into 22 military districts and huge quantities of weaponry were stashed away in each district. [Only my paper New Trend at the time noted the methodology of resistance Saddam prepared.]
Predictably, the Iraqis could not face the U.S. in conventional war. The rest is history! The American invaders rejoiced but then U.S. forces came up against Islamic resistance. More than 3 years have passed and the U.S. can't win. [Saddam's sons and grandson gave their lives in resistance to the occupiers.] Islamic forces in Iraq are willing to accept huge losses but do not surrender. However, one important reason why they can fight is that Saddam left them unlimited supplies of weaponry and ammunition.
The biggest Campaign of Propaganda in human history: Target Saddam
Saddam was targeted for three reasons:
*
Iraq was determined not to recognize Israel's legitimacy.
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He gave actual support to the families of Palestinian martyrdom operators.
*
He was independent and not willing to be under ANYBODY's control. The Americans and Israelis saw that it was futile to buy him out and fruitless to try and scare him. Owing to his new Islamic faith, he was willing to die and go to Paradise.
Every possible Jew and supporter of Israel one can think of wrote and spoke and publicized and agitated against Saddam Hussein. Be it right winger Jews like Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Krauthammer, Lieberman, Derschowitz and Kissinger or liberal Jews like Chomsky, Friedman, Judith Miller, Schumer, be it professors or politicians or plain old reporters and journalists and entertainers [Jews like Larry King, Ted Koppel, Amy Goodman, Kristol] etc., etc, they all ranted and raved against Saddam Hussein. Hundreds and hundreds of magazine articles were published against him. Entire books were written to vilify Saddam.
The Muslim world still did not catch on. We ignored the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad, pbuh, to go and do "against the Jews." The Muslims continued to live in a time warp: in that golden time of the Islamic revolution in Iran when Iraq was attacking Iran and Saddam was seen as a villain. Muslims did not realize that the world is changing. Iran is no longer the champion of Islam. In fact Iran supported the U.S. openly against the Taliban, supports Russia against Chechnya and India against Kashmir. After 9.11, the U.S. arrested tens of thousands of Muslims for being anti-American. None of them were Iranian. There are no Iranians in Gitmo.
Wassalam,
SA
SA
-
Dr. Shabbir
- Posts: 1950
- Joined: Sun Dec 24, 2006 12:46 pm
- Contact:
Saddam goes to Paradise, Shiites to Hell - Kaukab Siddique
Email from UK - Arif Uky
Robert Fisk: He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him.
How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies', equipped him for atrocities - and then made sure he wouldn't squeal
Published: 31 December 2006
We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.
Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were given special treatment - extreme torture before execution at Abu Ghraib.
There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US administration believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border - and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's request.
"Mr Fisk... at the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon," he said. "There I was handed the very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments - thousands of them - all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very, very grateful!"
I was with Saddam's forward commandos at the time, under Iranian shellfire, noting how the Iraqi forces aligned their artillery positions far back from the battle front with detailed maps of the Iranian lines. Their shelling against Iran outside Basra allowed the first Iraqi tanks to cross the Karun within a week. The commander of that tank unit cheerfully refused to tell me how he had managed to choose the one river crossing undefended by Iranian armour. Two years ago, we met again, in Amman and his junior officers called him "General" - the rank awarded him by Saddam after that tank attack east of Basra, courtesy of Washington's intelligence information.
Iran's official history of the eight-year war with Iraq states that Saddam first used chemical weapons against it on 13 January 1981. AP's correspondent in Baghdad, Mohamed Salaam, was taken to see the scene of an Iraqi military victory east of Basra. "We started counting - we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting," he said. "We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again ... The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination - the nerve gas would paralyse their bodies ... the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That's why they spat blood."
At the time, the Iranians claimed that this terrible cocktail had been given to Saddam by the US. Washington denied this. But the Iranians were right. The lengthy negotiations which led to America's complicity in this atrocity remain secret - Donald Rumsfeld was one of President Ronald Reagan's point-men at this period - although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But a largely unreported document, "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War", stated that prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax, andEscherichia coli (E. coli). That Senate report concluded that: "The United States provided the Government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-systems programs, including ... chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment."
Nor was the Pentagon unaware of the extent of Iraqi use of chemical weapons. In 1988, for example, Saddam gave his personal permission for Lt-Col Rick Francona, a US defence intelligence officer - one of 60 American officers who were secretly providing members of the Iraqi general staff with detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning and bomb damage assessments - to visit the Fao peninsula after Iraqi forces had recaptured the town from the Iranians. He reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had used chemical weapons to achieve their victory. The senior defence intelligence officer at the time, Col Walter Lang, later said that the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis "was not a matter of deep strategic concern".
I saw the results, however. On a long military hospital train back to Tehran from the battle front, I found hundreds of Iranian soldiers coughing blood and mucus from their lungs - the very carriages stank so much of gas that I had to open the windows - and their arms and faces were covered with boils. Later, new bubbles of skin appeared on top of their original boils. Many were fearfully burnt. These same gases were later used on the Kurds of Halabja. No wonder that Saddam was primarily tried in Baghdad for the slaughter of Shia villagers, not for his war crimes against Iran.
We still don't know - and with Saddam's execution we will probably never know - the extent of US credits to Iraq, which began in 1982. The initial tranche, the sum of which was spent on the purchase of American weapons from Jordan and Kuwait, came to $300m. By 1987, Saddam was being promised $1bn in credit. By 1990, just before Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, annual trade between Iraq and the US had grown to $3.5bn a year. Pressed by Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, to continue US credits, James Baker then Secretary of State, but the same James Baker who has just produced a report intended to drag George Bush from the catastrophe of present- day Iraq - pushed for new guarantees worth $1bn from the US.
In 1989, Britain, which had been giving its own covert military assistance to Saddam guaranteed £250m to Iraq shortly after the arrest of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in Baghdad. Bazoft, who had been investigating an explosion at a factory at Hilla which was using the very chemical components sent by the US, was later hanged. Within a month of Bazoft's arrest William Waldegrave, then a Foreign Office minister, said: "I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well-placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly... A few more Bazofts or another bout of internal oppression would make it more difficult."
Even more repulsive were the remarks of the then Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, on relaxing controls on British arms sales to Iraq. He kept this secret, he wrote, because "it would look very cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales".
Saddam knew, too, the secrets of the attack on the USS Stark when, on 17 May 1987, an Iraqi jet launched a missile attack on the American frigate, killing more than a sixth of the crew and almost sinking the vessel. The US accepted Saddam's excuse that the ship was mistaken for an Iranian vessel and allowed Saddam to refuse their request to interview the Iraqi pilot.
The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London must have sighed with relief that the old man had been silenced for ever.
'The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East' by Robert Fisk is now available in paperback
- Arif
London, UK
- Read (or listen) Koran - The Last Testament.
- http://turntoislam.com/
Robert Fisk: He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him.
How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies', equipped him for atrocities - and then made sure he wouldn't squeal
Published: 31 December 2006
We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.
Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were given special treatment - extreme torture before execution at Abu Ghraib.
There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US administration believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border - and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's request.
"Mr Fisk... at the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon," he said. "There I was handed the very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments - thousands of them - all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very, very grateful!"
I was with Saddam's forward commandos at the time, under Iranian shellfire, noting how the Iraqi forces aligned their artillery positions far back from the battle front with detailed maps of the Iranian lines. Their shelling against Iran outside Basra allowed the first Iraqi tanks to cross the Karun within a week. The commander of that tank unit cheerfully refused to tell me how he had managed to choose the one river crossing undefended by Iranian armour. Two years ago, we met again, in Amman and his junior officers called him "General" - the rank awarded him by Saddam after that tank attack east of Basra, courtesy of Washington's intelligence information.
Iran's official history of the eight-year war with Iraq states that Saddam first used chemical weapons against it on 13 January 1981. AP's correspondent in Baghdad, Mohamed Salaam, was taken to see the scene of an Iraqi military victory east of Basra. "We started counting - we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting," he said. "We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again ... The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination - the nerve gas would paralyse their bodies ... the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That's why they spat blood."
At the time, the Iranians claimed that this terrible cocktail had been given to Saddam by the US. Washington denied this. But the Iranians were right. The lengthy negotiations which led to America's complicity in this atrocity remain secret - Donald Rumsfeld was one of President Ronald Reagan's point-men at this period - although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But a largely unreported document, "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War", stated that prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax, andEscherichia coli (E. coli). That Senate report concluded that: "The United States provided the Government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-systems programs, including ... chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment."
Nor was the Pentagon unaware of the extent of Iraqi use of chemical weapons. In 1988, for example, Saddam gave his personal permission for Lt-Col Rick Francona, a US defence intelligence officer - one of 60 American officers who were secretly providing members of the Iraqi general staff with detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning and bomb damage assessments - to visit the Fao peninsula after Iraqi forces had recaptured the town from the Iranians. He reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had used chemical weapons to achieve their victory. The senior defence intelligence officer at the time, Col Walter Lang, later said that the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis "was not a matter of deep strategic concern".
I saw the results, however. On a long military hospital train back to Tehran from the battle front, I found hundreds of Iranian soldiers coughing blood and mucus from their lungs - the very carriages stank so much of gas that I had to open the windows - and their arms and faces were covered with boils. Later, new bubbles of skin appeared on top of their original boils. Many were fearfully burnt. These same gases were later used on the Kurds of Halabja. No wonder that Saddam was primarily tried in Baghdad for the slaughter of Shia villagers, not for his war crimes against Iran.
We still don't know - and with Saddam's execution we will probably never know - the extent of US credits to Iraq, which began in 1982. The initial tranche, the sum of which was spent on the purchase of American weapons from Jordan and Kuwait, came to $300m. By 1987, Saddam was being promised $1bn in credit. By 1990, just before Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, annual trade between Iraq and the US had grown to $3.5bn a year. Pressed by Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, to continue US credits, James Baker then Secretary of State, but the same James Baker who has just produced a report intended to drag George Bush from the catastrophe of present- day Iraq - pushed for new guarantees worth $1bn from the US.
In 1989, Britain, which had been giving its own covert military assistance to Saddam guaranteed £250m to Iraq shortly after the arrest of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in Baghdad. Bazoft, who had been investigating an explosion at a factory at Hilla which was using the very chemical components sent by the US, was later hanged. Within a month of Bazoft's arrest William Waldegrave, then a Foreign Office minister, said: "I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well-placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly... A few more Bazofts or another bout of internal oppression would make it more difficult."
Even more repulsive were the remarks of the then Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, on relaxing controls on British arms sales to Iraq. He kept this secret, he wrote, because "it would look very cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales".
Saddam knew, too, the secrets of the attack on the USS Stark when, on 17 May 1987, an Iraqi jet launched a missile attack on the American frigate, killing more than a sixth of the crew and almost sinking the vessel. The US accepted Saddam's excuse that the ship was mistaken for an Iranian vessel and allowed Saddam to refuse their request to interview the Iraqi pilot.
The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London must have sighed with relief that the old man had been silenced for ever.
'The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East' by Robert Fisk is now available in paperback
- Arif
London, UK
- Read (or listen) Koran - The Last Testament.
- http://turntoislam.com/
Wassalam,
SA
SA