Yes I said 1959. Our man in Iraq goes back a long time with the US of A. 1959 was the year Castro took over Cuba and it is all connected. Saddam was given a farce of a trial much like many Americans get and why did we need him to get dead so fast? So what I am going to tell you wouldn't come out in the media. Three of his defense lawyers were killed. By whom? And were they planning to have him talk in his defense? Were they planning to have him say this? And where did I first find out about all this? Why, The Asia Times of course. Keep on truckin' below to just get the facts, ma'am, just the facts.
In the 1950's Iraq was considered a buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Iraq was quick to join the anti-
Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region.
The entire article from UPI
In July 1958, Gen abd al-Karim Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed.
As bad as our orgy?
In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."
Not much attention was paid to this revolution until Qasim decides to withdraw from the anti-Soviet Pact in 1959 which freaked everyone out so says a former senior U.S. State Department official.
Then Quasim begins to buy arms from the Soviets and put Iraqi communists into ministry positions of real power. At this point Dulles says publicly that Iraq is the most dangerous spot in the world. Are you beginning to connect the dots now?
According to a former State Department official, Saddam age 22, becomes part of a plot to kill Qasim. According to this source Saddam was put in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Irag's Ministry of Defense to observe him. Adel Darwish said the move was done with full knowledge of the CIA and that Saddam's handler was an Iraqi dentist working for the CIA and Egyptian Intelligence. This has been separately confirmed.
Darwish said that Saddam's paymaster was Capt. Abdel Maquid Farid, the assistant military attaché at the Egyptian Embassy who paid for the apartment from his own personal account. Three former senior U.S. officials have confirmed that this is accurate.
The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched. Accounts differ. One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish told UPI that one of the assassins had bullets that did not fit his gun and that another had a hand grenade that got stuck in the lining of his coat.
"It bordered on farce," a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. But Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. government officials said.
Then Saddam is in Beirut, then Cairo, checking in at the American Embassy where CIA specialists Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were, and then in 1963 Qasim is killed in a Baath Party coup. Some say the CIA and JFK knew and others say they were absolutely stunned so both interpretations may be true.
The CIA jumps in giving the gun toting Iraqi National Guardsmen lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and shot. (The same pattern will occur in Iran when Khomeini comes to power in 1979.) The mass killings were presided over by Saddam at Qasr al-Nehayat, the Palace of the End. the CIA and State Department was jubilant. Remember this is barely one year after the Bay of Pigs incident and one year before JFK's assassination.
Saddam becomes the head of al-Jihaz a -Khas,the secret intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party and isn't George H. W. Bush head of the CIA at this time? Does Saddam know this? I bet he does.
For a full account of the CIA/Defense Department alliance with Saddam in the 1980's I again refer you to the full article. It is devious and just downright evil how Iraq and Iran were played against each other like puppets by a CIA so rotten to the core we cannot disbelieve anything terrible attributed to them.
And Saddam goes a long way back with the Bushes. Would they want that known? Here is that April Glaspie transcript of her conversation with Saddam.
Is it any wonder that Saddam felt betrayed by the US when Desert Storm hit him? He was our man. We had nurtured him since he was but a lad. We had supported his war schemes. We were going to look the other way about Kuwait. And remember Kuwait was once part of Mesopotamia, the land that was carved up to make Iraq and Kuwait. Saddam naturally felt Kuwait belonged joined to Iraq. He was betrayed big time in 1990 and after by his former co-conspirators.
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