Hussein trial letter to City Paper
Sent earlier today:
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To the Editor:
One would hope that, by now, ‘alternative’ weeklies such as yours would have developed a healthy skepticism toward the motivations of the federal government in Iraq. No such skepticism was evident in your glowing profile of Mike Flowers and his “rewarding” prosecution of Saddam Hussein.
The thinking person has to question the tactic of trying Hussein only for the “relatively minor incident” of his regime’s 1982 retaliatory killings in Dujail. An obvious reason for the focus on this incident is that it did not directly involve chemical weapons nor inconvenient questions about where Iraq obtained them. Similarly it does not involve allowing Hussein to speak in any relevant sense about western backing in his war of attrition against Iran, nor his meetings with Donald Rumsfeld, nor the elder Bush’s apparent green light to invade Kuwait. In short, it is one of the few incidents which brands Hussein as a thug while allowing our prosecution and a puppet judicial system to avoid the topic that he was our thug.
That the case involves the death penalty is also richly convenient; dead men tell no tales.
This is far from an academic discussion. Hussein’s prosecution serves as cover and justification for an ongoing war for and occupation of the world’s second largest oil producing nation. The United States has been instrumental in killing over one million Iraqis over the past decade and a half, the vast majority civilians, and Iraqis continue to die at the rate of as many as 35 per day. Hussein himself would struggle to keep that pace in a “good” month. Meanwhile Britain’s Christian Aid estimates some $8.8 billion of Iraq’s wealth has gone missing during our occupation, including an estimated $4 billion worth of crude oil exported from the country without as much as metering it. This is looting on a scale that makes Saddam look like a street urchin pickpocket.
This leaves me scratching my head as to why you would report Flowers’ activity uncritically, going so far as to hint that he’s taking a major financial hit in the process. Flowers is still very much a “highly paid white collar defense attorney,” in this particular case he is simply doing a hatchet job to cover the asses of past and current federal officials, including high-ranking members of the current Bush Administration. He is quite well compensated compared to the teachers, cops and office workers who read your paper, and in fact his salary, room and board, transportation and security are being paid for with our taxes. Effectively Flowers is being paid better than most out of our collective funds to pull the wool over our collective eyes.
I would not mind seeing you folks delve into these issues in future articles; any ‘alternative’ publication worth the title would.
Yours,
Chris Randolph
