Iran accused the US yesterday of pursuing its own interests in the Middle East.

"America's technique for interfering in internal affairs of countries has changed," a foreign ministry spokesman said. "Instead of entering into expensive and long wars, they support the fostering of civil wars in the countries they are interested in."

- Hadeel Al Shalchi in ALEPPO

I am out of here.

I addressed a similar article on page 7.




My commentary:


I particularly love this snippet:


"He did not name any countries, but Tehran has in the past accused Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey of arming Syria's rebels in collusion with the US and Israel."

Does Ramin Mehmanparast think everyone is naive enough to believe that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar would co-operate with Israel?

The Iranian media reflects government policy and opinion, therefore it is to be treated with scepticism.


The Media of Iran are privately and publicly owned but subject to the control of the government. A special court has authority to monitor the print media and may suspend publication or revoke the licenses of papers or journals that a jury finds guilty of publishing antireligious material, slander, or information detrimental to the national interest. Since the late 1990s, the court has shut down many pro-reform newspapers and other periodicals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_of_Iran

Turkey has been co-perating with the U.S. for a long time. The U.S. is in bed with Israel. Bush and the Saudi's have been in business for years. Its all one big secret club.

You are mislead because you still think of these as "countries" and you do not see the corporation that is running the show.

I hate to say this but its like you are blind and you are easily distracted by appearances. You see (and the world sees) what they want them to see.

They divide and conquer.

They divide by religion, and race, and "countries" And yet the corporations move forward and make business deals and divy up the world amongst the eilite.

Many people can see this, why can't you? You are a cog in the wheel.
A member of their audience being distracted by thier tricks while they steal you blind.

Open your eyes.

Please, save the lecture for the stupid people.

Iran accused.........................
Holy Moly,Iran accused::::::::::::::::::::::::

Hezbollah,support of Hamas and other Islamist Entities with Finances and Weapons!
Committing Terrorism all around the Globe!
Nope,Iran accuses.............................accusing the west exactly what they are doing!
Interfering in Iraq,Afghanistan,Pakistan,and in the restive Russian Caucasus Regions like Chechnya and others.
Nope,Iran accuses!
Iran,Exporter of Terrorism since '79!

What a waste of a reply.

Turkey has been co-operating with the US............Fact

The US is in bed with Israel........................Fact

Bush &t he Saudi's in business for years.,,......,,,,,Fact

Divide and conquer tried and tested.................Fact


They divide by religion/race/ and "countries".......Fact

corporations move forward and make business
deals and divy up the world amongst the eilite......Fact

All of the above can be dealt with in the context of The Future of Syria so why don't you show a little respect for other peoples opinions and offer a decent reply.....or none

As far as Iran and violence..........



"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and note that "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Rev. Martin Luther King.


He was as is well known Talking About The United States his own country.


That man should have been listened to and The World would have been a better place but NO we still have morons believing that our governments are acting in our best interests.

NO THEY PHUCKING AIN'T

The Rich Have Got Their Channels In The Bedrooms Of The Poor

There is A Mighty Judgment Coming But I may be Wrong

Facts?
Where?
More Out-Of-Context-Stuff?

Yep,theocratic Iran,the most benevolent Government it's Citizens ever had!

Out of Context? What on earth are you talking about?

Yes these are indeed all facts. And they are facts that effect Syria and the future of the entire Middle east, and the entire world.

To explain to you why these are facts and why they will effect Syria and the entire Middle East and the entire world, would take a 500 page book.

This entire thread about the "future of Syria" has an easy answer.
There are several factions working together and who have been working together since 1970 to get rid of the current Syrian regime, and it is orchestrated by Israel and is being assisted by the United States and all of their henchmen groups that always do their dirty work, like Saudi Arabia and Turkey ... and various other paid assassions and terrorists.

And thats the truth, like it or not. Osama bin Laden and Saddam were both trained and handled by the CIA and Turkey.

I really think you had better read the Biography of Saddam Hussein!
Besides,both Assad senior and Saddam Hussein were Baathist!

As this article discusses, when the U.S. captured Saddam Hussein, it
essentially nailed an ex-employee. Saddam was on the U.S. payroll for
nearly a decade. The CIA, in fact, put Saddam in power. This simple fact
is never mentioned in the popular press, of course. Saddam must be
portrayed as an evil demon, not as a person who was funded, trained and
put into power by the United States of America.
Original source:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/ips/lobe37.html


Learn more: Don't tell anyone, but Saddam Hussein was funded, trained and put into power by the United States http://www.naturalnews.com/000771.html#ixzz22mbe4Akh

US Takes Custody of Another Wayward Client
by Jim Lobe
by Jim Lobe


At last in U.S. military captivity, ousted former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein will soon mark an important 20th anniversary, the kind of anniversary that brings with it an appreciation of the ironies of life, and politics.

His captor, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, might also recall long-forgotten memories – or memories best forgotten – of what he was doing exactly 20 years ago.

If so, he will remember that he was in Baghdad, as a special envoy from then-president Ronald Reagan, assuring his host that, to quote the secret National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) that served as his talking points: the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West."

So began the effective resumption of close relations between Baghdad and Washington that had been cut off by Iraq during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Within a year, Washington would fully normalize ties with Saddam and even suggest that the dictator had become a full-fledged "Arab moderate," ready to make peace with Israel.

Of course, the reason for this rapprochement – nay, avid courtship – was the bad turn that the war between Iraq and Iran had taken for Baghdad. A victory by Teheran, which seemed imminent, would pose a major threat to US interests in the Gulf, such as access to the region's oil.

It was a question of the lesser of two evils, as explained succinctly by Howard Teicher, who worked on Iraq as a member of Reagan's National Security Council (NSC). "You have to understand the geo-strategic context, which was very different from where are now," he told the Washington Post earlier this year.

"Realpolitik dictated that we act to prevent the situation from getting worse."

It was presumably realpolitik that also persuaded Rumsfeld not to bring up Iraq's use of chemical weapons with Hussein in their first meeting Dec. 20, 1983, even though the administration knew about it.

(After long insisting that he did raise the issue with Hussein, the recent release of State Department memoranda obtained by the National Security Archive has forced Rumsfeld to change his story. He did mention the issue, among many others, when he met with then-foreign minister Tariq Aziz separately.)

For the next five years, Washington would quietly ensure that Saddam got all the military equipment he needed to stave off defeat, even precursor chemicals that could be used against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians.

Not that Washington supported the use of chemical weapons, particularly against civilians. It was more that the Reagan administration was very reluctant to condemn their use by Iraq back then.

How much more of this intimate relationship Saddam will recall when he gets a public forum is undoubtedly a concern of many current and past administration figures.

The situation echoes the worries of former US president George H.W. Bush over what Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega might say in open court about his long and intimate connections to US intelligence agencies when he surrendered to the U.S. military after Washington's invasion of Panama in 1989.

Of course, Noriega was recruited while he was still in the military academy, and his rise to power was facilitated tremendously by those ties.

He was a paid agent from the beginning, and, while a rogue who did not hesitate to intimidate and occasionally knock off a few dissidents to keep things quiet, he was never the mass murderer and serial invader of his neighbors that Saddam has been.

On the other hand, Saddam was also a beneficiary of the CIA's help – even if he did not get the kind of sustained attention that Noriega received – and long before Rumsfeld's visit at that.

According to an investigative report by Richard Sale of United Press International (UPI) published last April, Saddam's first contacts date back to 1959, when the CIA backed an assassination attempt in which he took part against then Iraqi prime minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim, the man who overthrew the western-backed monarchy the year before.

At the time, Iraq – as in 1982 – was seen as a key strategic asset, and Qasim's decision to withdraw from the Baghdad Pact and subsequently get cozy with Moscow was seen by Washington as a potentially disastrous setback.

Saddam, an aspiring young Ba'athist tough, was handled on behalf of the CIA by a local agent and an Egyptian military attaché, who set him up in an apartment opposite Qasim's office, according to Adel Darwish, author of Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War, in an account backed up to UPI by U.S. officials.

The specific hit, however, was botched when Saddam "lost his nerve," according to another UPI source.

When Qasim was finally overthrown in a Ba'ath Party coup – whether the CIA supported it is a matter of dispute, although the party's secretary-general at the time said, "We came to power on a CIA train" – Saddam was back as head of the party's secret intelligence branch, and, according to Darwish, was leading execution squads of Iraqi National Guardsmen who were hunting down and killing suspected communists included on lists provided by ... the CIA.

In the early 1970s, then-president Richard Nixon tilted definitively toward the Shah of Iran as the main protector of US interests in the Gulf. It was not until 1979, when the Shah was overthrown and Saddam installed himself as president of Iraq, that Washington once again began taking an interest in Baghdad's internal affairs, although no evidence of any link between Washington and Saddam's elevation has come to light.

Washington's standoffishness changed when the incoming Reagan administration realized by late 1981 that Baghdad could lose the war with disastrous consequences for US interests in the region.

In early 1982, it removed Iraq from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, making Baghdad eligible for billions of dollars in agricultural credits and sales of "dual-use" equipment – goods, such as chemical precursors, sophisticated communications equipment and technology that could be useful in weapons programs, with both civilian and military uses.

As the Iranians continued to shift the strategic balance, however, the situation became more urgent. On Nov. 26, 1983, NSDD 114, which remains classified, was signed by Reagan, even as US intelligence had learned that Baghdad's forces were using chemical weapons to stop the Iranian offensive.

Rumsfeld was soon on his way to Baghdad in a trip that, by 1985, would result in Washington supplying Saddam with some 1.5 billion dollars worth of weapons equipment and technology, including items applicable to Iraq's nuclear or biological-weapons program, such as anthrax strains and pesticides.

At the same time, the CIA was tasked to ensure that its former charge not run short of either weapons or vitally needed intelligence on the disposition of Iranian forces, a task, according to a 1995 affidavit by Teicher, that then CIA director William Casey took to with abandon.

Casey, for example, used a Chilean arms company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq with cluster bombs that he thought would be particularly effective against Iranian "human wave" tactics.

In addition to the credit, equipment and covert military assistance, Saddam also got diplomatic help from Washington at the United Nations and elsewhere in fending off condemnations of his use of banned weapons during the war, as well as efforts in Congress to cut off US help.

The CIA was still providing intelligence and other help when Saddam used poison gas that killed some 5,000 Kurdish noncombatants in Halabja in March 1988.

The attack was part of the infamous Anfal campaign, which wiped out dozens of northern Kurdish villages and that is certain to figure prominently, along with a number of other particularly egregious atrocities known to Washington at the time they were committed, in any eventual trial against the former leader.

All US support for Iraq ended two and a half years later when Saddam invaded Kuwait under circumstances that have suggested to some observers – including, perhaps, Saddam himself – that Washington might have encouraged him to do so.

It is almost certain that at that moment he remembered Rumsfeld's trip, and it seems likely he would have reflected on it again Saturday. Rumsfeld, however, might not have been so inclined.





December 16, 2003

Jim Lobe is Inter Press Service's correspondent in Washington, DC.

Copyright © 2003 Inter Press Service

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2849.htm


Exclusive: Saddam Was key in early CIA plot

04/11/03
UPI: Richard Sale

See Also:IRAQ-GATE How The United States Illegally Armed Saddam Hussein



U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.

United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report.

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

In July 1958, 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."

According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.

Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power," according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."

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."

According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.

Adel Darwish, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.

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.

Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said.

One former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that even then Saddam "was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a cutthroat."

In Cairo, Saddam was installed in an apartment in the upper class neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana Café, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives, according to Darwish and former U.S. intelligence officials.

One former senior U.S. government official said: "In Cairo, I often went to Groppie Café at Emad Eldine Pasha Street, which was very posh, very upper class. Saddam would not have fit in there. The Indiana was your basic dive."

But during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew Saddam, former U.S. intelligence officials said.

Saddam's U.S. handlers even pushed Saddam to get his Egyptian handlers to raise his monthly allowance, a gesture not appreciated by Egyptian officials since they knew of Saddam's American connection, according to Darwish. His assertion was confirmed by former U.S. diplomat in Egypt at the time.

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed recently that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this.

"We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running around asking what the hell had happened," this official said.

But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.

Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.

A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: "We were frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have to get kidding. This was serious business."

A former senior CIA official said: "It was a bit like the mysterious killings of Iran's communists just after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. All 4,000 of his communists suddenly got killed."

British scholar Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," quotes Jim Critchfield, then a senior Middle East agency official, as saying the killing of Qasim and the communists was regarded "as a great victory." A former long-time covert U.S. intelligence operative and friend of Critchfield said: "Jim was an old Middle East hand. He wasn't sorry to see the communists go at all. Hey, we were playing for keeps."

Saddam, in the meantime, became head of al-Jihaz a-Khas, the secret intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party.

The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq's armed forces, according to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency intelligence group.

This former official said that he personally had signed off on a document that shared U.S. satellite intelligence with both Iraq and Iran in an attempt to produce a military stalemate. "When I signed it, I thought I was losing my mind," the former official told UPI.

A former CIA official said that Saddam had assigned a top team of three senior officers from the Estikhbarat, Iraq's military intelligence, to meet with the Americans.

According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam's ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.

The Saddam-U.S. intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end at 2 a.m. Aug. 2, 1990, when 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded its neighbor, Kuwait. America's one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.


UPI: Richard Sale

James R. Lobe (born January 4, 1949 in Seattle, Washington) is an American journalist and the Washington Bureau Chief of the international news agency Inter Press Service. He has also written for Foreign Policy In Focus, Oneworld.net, Alternet, TomPaine.com, Asia Times, and other internet news publications. Lobe is best known for his criticism of U.S. foreign policy, American militarism, with a particular focus on the neo-conservatives, their worldview, their relationship to other political tendencies, and their influence in the Bush administration


another CT-Loon!

where do you all find them?

What on earth does that have to do with the facts?

They were "basthist?"

SO?

Saddam Hussein was always a Soviet/Russian Client!
To call him a CIA Asset and Plant is patently absurd!
Unless,the CIA got the KGB to handle Saddam for them!

What on earth does that have to do with the facts?

They were "basthist?"

SO?

Saddam Hussein was always a Soviet/Russian Client!
To call him a CIA Asset and Plant is patently absurd!
Unless,the CIA got the KGB to handle Saddam for them!

Besides,Iran received the same Intelligence,thus creating a Stalemate,and preserving the Balance!
Iran was hellbent,against the advice of the UNSC to invade Iraq and create a Theocracy like there was established in Iran in '79!

Both of them Clients of Moscow!
Baath-Socialist Party ringing any Bells?
Unless the CIA got the KGB to handle Saddam for them!
You know,arm him etc!

Hey I simply gave you the information and the links. You can think its absurd all you want, but there are the facts.