FBI Ignored Bush-Hussein Ties

Just so we don't forget.

Robert Parry

The FBI has released reports on 20 interviews and five conversations conducted with Iraq’s deposed dictator Saddam Hussein before he was put to death, but none of the disclosed Q and A deals with the role of the Reagan administration in delivering key components for Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s.

The gaps in the FBI reports also underscore the historical travesty that resulted from the Bush administration’s handling of Saddam Hussein after his capture on Dec. 13, 2003, near Tikrit, eight months after the U.S.-led invasion toppled his government.

Instead of being turned over to the international criminal court at The Hague, where he could have been thoroughly interrogated, Hussein was kept under tight U.S. control until he was handed over to his Iraqi enemies on Dec. 30, 2006, for a chaotic hanging.

While President George W. Bush and many of his supporters were thrilled with the execution – what the New York Times called Bush’s “triumphal bookend” to the Iraq invasion – the hanging was not just rough justice meted out to a harsh dictator. It also snuffed out a dangerous witness who could have implicated senior Republicans, including Bush’s father.

Important chapters of history died with Hussein on the gallows. Hussein was a unique witness with the broadest knowledge about who arranged and sold the precursor components for his unconventional weapons that were used to kill Iranian troops and Iraqi civilians.

In death, Hussein couldn’t disclose what George W. Bush’s first Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said during that famous hand-shake meeting in 1983, nor whether he got an alleged message from Vice President George H.W. Bush in the mid-1980s about how best to deploy Iraq’s air force against Iran, nor if then-deputy CIA director Robert Gates was running interference for Iraq’s military supply line in the 1980s.

It was the elder George Bush, as Vice President, who allegedly oversaw the covert U.S. operation to assist Hussein’s war machine during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War; Rumsfeld, as special U.S. envoy to the Middle East, held private chats with the Iraqi dictator about his war needs; and Gates, as a senior CIA official, reportedly rebuffed Israeli protests about U.S. tolerance for third-country military shipments to Iraq, including precursor chemicals.

All those important Republicans and more could breathe a little easier after the hangman’s noose choked the life out of Hussein. (Gates remains in government as President Barack Obama's defense secretary.)