"Last week, at the Baghdad headquarters of the Mukhabarat, the secret police, an Iraqi man went up to photographers from Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times carrying a bulging, grimy white rice sack. 'Tell the world what happened here,' he said. Inside were more than 200 cassette tapes, videos and passports, photographs and negatives, CDs and floppy disks, as well as a fat binder thick with documents addressed To The Director General Of The Iraqi Intelligence Service. The contents of the bag from the Mukhabarat do not reveal any smoking guns... But the tapes and documents, as well as other Baath Party papers now coming to light, do offer fascinating evidence of the ways Saddam ruled by torture and terror, how bungling and inept his regime could be, and why his evil empire was rotten at the core." Indeed - and both Reagan and Bush Sr. armed this monster and loaned him billions (For details, enter "iraqgate" in the Democrats.com search engine or Google).

UPI's Richard Sale writes, "Saddam's 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... The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched... Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents... The agency then helped him get to Cairo... In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup... 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... Saddam became head of al-Jihaz a-Khas, the secret intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party." Saddam was supported by Administrations of both parties, but Reagan-Bush Sr. gave him BILLIONS to buy weapons, and BushDaddy sent our troops to face those weapons!

Tom Paine reports: "Everyone's heard of Dick Cheney's ties to Halliburton, a company standing on the brink of a bonanza as the government doles out post-war reconstruction dollars. But not enough has been revealed about Bechtel, a reported finalist for the first round of contracts, and its connections to another of the war's architects: Donald Rumsfeld. It's a sordid little tale, and one that calls into question the depth of Rumsfeld's virtuous claims about his intentions to liberate the Iraqis. Bechtel has long been intertwined with Republican foreign policymakers, globally and in Iraq. It turns out that many of today's war hawks spent a couple years in the 1980s trying to get Saddam to sign an oil pipeline contract. Even though Saddam was gassing Iranians at the same time, people like Donald Rumsfeld had some quality face-time with the 'evil dictator' pitching a plan that would benefit, beyond all other interests, Bechtel -- and, potentially, Hussein."

"Mostafa is a wide-eyed 8-year-old Iraqi boy riddled with sharp, twisted metal that has sliced so close to his spine that doctors fear he will be paralyzed if it moves farther. He is not a casualty of the current war. His neighborhood near Basra, close to the no-fly zone in southern Iraq, was hit by a shell four years ago, and he has suffered from his wounds since then, his mother said. But Mostafa got lucky Wednesday. As war roiled his homeland, the boy and his mother arrived in Los Angeles on special visas so he can get medical treatment... 'God will help us get treatment to make Mostafa a normal boy, because he suffers from so many things,' [his mother] said in a telephone interview. The office of Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) helped the pair get the visa in Amman after they traveled overland to Jordan, arriving March 9. 'This is a very moving case emotionally,' said Kucinich spokesman Doug Gordon."

Paul Harris writes for YellowTimes.org: "There is a wonderful photograph [that] shows the smiling face of a much younger Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with the Butcher of Baghdad. This photo was taken December 20, 1983, when Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq as a special envoy of Ronald Reagan... [Iran's] Ayatollah Khomeini had refused to end hostilities until Saddam Hussein was ejected from power. The written and public U.S. response was: 'The United States finds the present Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations.' Well, pardon me. Did I miss the point where the legitimate government of Iraq became the illegitimate government? Did I miss the memo that said eliminating governments is acceptable for the United States but no one else?"