Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [117]
We always say that everyone deserves their day in court and a fair trial. With a new government completely dominated by the Shiites, who were Saddam’s enemies, how could he possibly receive a fair trial? I personally would have been very interested to hear his testimony. After all, we got to watch every aspect of the O. J. Simpson trial, from beginning to end. In the realm of global politics, wouldn’t the Hussein trial affect us more? Yet we could watch nothing of what he had to say, except whatever was bled to us on our news media after the censors got through with it. I’m no Saddam supporter, but he really was silenced, wasn’t he?
I saw George W. Bush being interviewed when he was asked if he’d watched the Saddam hanging. He said that he saw parts of it on television—presumably when Hussein was standing there, hooded, with the men holding the noose. I think Bush should have been required to be there. Again, according to the credos of our democracy, don’t you have a right to face your accuser? Without George Bush, Saddam Hussein would never have been hanged.
While channel-surfing recently, I noticed how the History Channel is now portraying Saddam as the new Hitler. That’s what’s going to be set down in our history books—that George Bush and the American government saved the world from this Hitler wannabe? Sure, he did some terrible things, but this is ludicrous. Hussein gassed the Kurds, but where did he get the gas from? He got it from us. But no, let’s not tell the truth and reveal that, at one time, Saddam was one of our biggest allies in the Middle East, and shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld.
Revisionist history troubles me deeply. I fear textbooks being written with a “government seal of approval.” Is anything being said about Henry Kissinger’s having accepted the Nobel Peace Prize at the very moment he and Nixon had ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia that would kill thousands of innocent people? Or what about ex-CIA director George Tenet, the only Bush administration official who ended up resigning over the Iraq fiasco? What does Bush do then but award Tenet the Medal of Freedom, the highest award a civilian can receive. So, in the annals of history, I guess that means Tenet goes down as a hero. Or maybe he was simply the guy who chose to fall on his sword at the time, and got the medal as his reward.
Nothing appears to daunt these people. Why are we building permanent bases in Iraq? Remember when we heard there was no pull-out strategy? That’s when the light went on for me—what if there never was one? Why have an exit strategy if you’re not planning on leaving? I believe that’s part of the scam. Bush simply says we’ve got to “stay the course,” and even got a “surge” in troop strength approved by Congress. That’s exactly the opposite of what his Iraq Study Group advised him to do, and that group is headed up by none other than James A. Baker, who led the legal fight to make sure the Supreme Court would award Florida—and the election—to Bush in 2000. It’s contrary to what his military commanders are telling him, too. Bush isn’t just revising history, he’s turning it into mythology. He’s still claiming that, after the U.S. couldn’t find the suspected WMDs, Saddam banned the United Nations inspectors from his country. Hence, we had to go in. But Hussein never did that.
Dick Cheney went on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program and continued to insist—this was in April 2007—that Iraq and al-Qaeda were in bed together. And that, if we withdraw from Iraq, that would “play right into the hands of al-Qaeda.” Again, U.S. intelligence analysts have come to precisely the opposite conclusion on both those points. In fact, Osama bin Laden has stated publicly that prolonging the Iraq War is in his best interest.
But then, what can you expect from Cheney? No matter what he does, a big part of his legacy will be the infamous “hunting accident” on the quail-hunting trip down in south Texas. That sad Saturday when the vice president plugged his friend Harry Whittington, a seventy-eight-year-old Austin lawyer