| [images and
captions added by this website] The
Independent London, July 3 / 4, 2004
US
"civilian contractors", their faces obscured by
photo agency, lead a shackled Iraqi
commander-in-chief to "court" at Baghdad
airport  David
Irving comments: I WATCHED most of the
Saddam Hussein "court" hearing live, as it
was splashed into the press pool, bit by
bit, by the Americans. It was an enjoyable
experience for a propaganda- watcher.
Of course we
should not be surprised that the Pentagon
wished to censor the sound-bites. Remember
how they censored the Osama Bin
Laden videotape, interpolating all --
and I do mean all -- of the
sentences in the translation which linked
him to Sept 11, 2001?
The German TV channel
ARD spotted
that piece of fakery, and broadcast a
comparative, "cleaned-up", translation by
their own Arabic experts; not one US
newspaper picked up on that story.  Saddam
at the time of his
capture I HAD not expected the Americans to
give Saddam access to a live microphone on
his first day in court, and they did
not.
He might then have
revealed things, like the true
circumstances of his capture (the Arab
press has claimed
that he was found by the Kurds, who
drugged him and handed him over to the
Americans, who staged the "capture in the
spider hole" for propaganda reasons).  He might also have
spoken aloud some pertinent complaints
about his treatment as a prisoner of
war.
He appears to have lost
a lot of weight, unlike his captors or the
"civilian contractors" escorting him: but
the Geneva Protocol states that
prisoners-of-war are to receive the same
officers' mess rations as their
captors.
It also forbids the
turning over of P/W to nations other than
their captors, and stipulates that P/W
accused of war crimes are to be tried by
courts martial comprised of military
officers of equivalent or superior rank.
There are cogent reasons for this.
The young Iraqi
magistrate whose back we saw hardly seemed
to qualify as a five-star general, given
that Saddam was commander-in-chief of his
forces, let alone as an American.
Maybe his lawyers will
raise some of these points if a trial ever
takes place, which I doubt.
 PS: One minor point. CNN's star
reporter Christiane Amanpour
described breathlessly how she was one of
the only two independent reporters
present, and added that Saddam had been
brought into court "clean shaven" and
seemed "confused." He was neither, as
viewers later that morning saw.
Reminds me of "Crawfie",
the Buckingham Palace correspondent of
Woman magazine, who forty years ago
equally breathlessly wrote of Her
Majesty's appearance at the Trooping of
the Colour that week; alas, the magazine
went to press before the event, which was
in fact cancelled because of the monarch's
disposition.
Crawfie had taken the
risk of describing the scene, without
actually being there. It cost her her
job. |
Pentagon
Tried to Censor Saddam's Hearing "We Don't Trust
You Guys" By Robert Fisk Baghdad
-- A TEAM of US military officers
acted as censors over all coverage of the hearings
of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen on
Thursday, destroying videotape of Saddam in chains
and deleting the entire recorded legal submissions
of 11 senior members of his former
regime. A US network cameraman who demanded the return
of his tapes, which contained audios of the
hearings, said he was told by a US officer: "No.
They belong to us now. And anyway, we don't trust
you guys." According to American journalists present at the
30-minute hearing of Saddam and eleven former
ministers at Baghdad airport, an American admiral
in civilian clothes told camera crews that the
judge had demanded that there should be no sound
recording of the initial hearing. He ordered crews
to unplug their sound wires. Several of the six
crews present pretended to obey the instruction.
"We learnt later," one of them said, "that the
judge didn't order us to turn off our sound. The
Americans lied -- it was they who wanted no sound.
The judge wanted sound and pictures." Initially, crews were told that a US Department
of Defence camera crew would provide the sound for
their silent tapes. But when CNN and CBS crews went
to the former occupation authority headquarters --
now the US embassy -- they found that three US
officers ordered the censorship of tape which
showed Saddam being led into the courtroom with a
chain round his waist which was connected to
handcuffs round his wrists. The Americans gave no
reason for this censorship. "They were rude and they didn't care," another
American television crew member said. "They were running the
show. The Americans decided what the world could
and could not see of this trial -- and it was
meant to be an Iraqi trial.
There was
a British official in the courtroom whom we were
not allowed to take pictures
of. The other men were US
troops who had been ordered to wear ordinary
clothes so that they were 'civilians' in the
court." Three US officers viewed the tapes taken by two
CNN cameras, 'Al-Djezaira' (a local,
American-funded Iraqi channel), and the US
government. "Fortunately, they were lazy and they
didn't check all the tapes properly so we got our
'audio' through in the satellite to London," one of
the crew members told The Independent
yesterday. "I had pretended to unplug the sound
from the camera but the man who claimed he was a US
admiral didn't understand cameras and we were able
to record sound. The American censors at the
embassy were inattentive -- that's how we got the
sound out." 
The only thing the Americans managed to censor
from most of the tapes was Saddam's comment that
"this is theatre -- Bush is the real criminal." Television stations throughout the world were
astonished yesterday when the first tapes of
Saddam's trial arrived without sound and have still
not been informed that the Americans censored the
material. "What can we do when an American official
tells us the judge doesn't want sound -- and then
we find out that they lied and the judge does want
the sound?" an American camera operator asked. Video showed the face -- and audiotape revealed
the voice -- of Judge Raid Juhi, whose name
was widely reported in the Arab press yesterday.
According to the camera crews, Judge Juhi wanted
the world to hear Saddam's voice. Nevertheless the
Americans erased the entire audiotape of the
hearings of the eleven former Saddam ministers,
including that of Tariq Aziz, the former
deputy prime minister, and "Chemical" Ali, Saddam's
cousin accused of gassing the Kurds at Halabja. The
US Department of Defence tape of their hearings has
been taken by the US authorities so there is now no
technical record of the words of these eleven men,
save for the notebooks of "pool" reporters -- four
Americans and two Iraqis -- who were present.  Judge
Juhi said not long ago that "I have no secrets -- a
judge must not be ashamed of the decisions he
takes."
The Americans apparently think
differently. Robert Fisk is a reporter for
The Independent and author of Pity
the Nation  
Flashback:
Jordanian
newspaper claims that Israeli premier Ariel
Sharon and Mossad agents were first to view
captured President Saddam Hussein |
Statement
issued by the underground Iraqi Baath Party on
the arrest of President Saddam Hussein-
Not the US version:
Sunday Express (London) reports
that Saddam Hussein was captured by US troops
only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish
forces [English]
[French]
-
Iraq resistance general: 'The
liberation of Baghdad is not far away'
-
Former British foreign
office legal adviser says Iraq occupation
illegal | Sir Jeremy Greenstock admits Saddam
had no WMD
-
Lawyer
for one guard claims picture shows his client
taking orders from others - will generals take
the stand?
-
Index of
items on this website about Abu Ghraib
|
write to David
Irving