Well the lynch mobs are out right now aren’t they? As Britain’s “hang‘em , flog’em” brigade build the scaffold and ready the noose just in case either Ian Huntley or Maxine Carr is found not guilty Bush and Blair are desperately trying to get Saddam Hussein's trial to be held in Iraq where with almost certainty he will be found guilty and face execution, thus avoiding either of them having to answer some pretty awkward pertinent questions.

So where’s the connection?

In every tea room or pub from Gillingham to Glasgow, amongst every crowd of mothers waiting to pick their loved ones up from school, you can hear the whispers. “She’s as guilty as he is, she MUST have known what was going on”.

Fair enough perhaps she IS guilty, the jury will decide soon enough, but this blood lust for Maxine Carr over the horrible murder of two innocent children doesn’t seem to extend to the mass killings of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and , yes, children by Hussein.

If he is going to face a court for his crimes, be it in Iraq or The Hague then surely those who put him into power, kept him in power, and supplied with him with the means of committing the murders should face charges too.

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 a horrible orgy of bloodshed.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" .
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."  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, admitted 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."

Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim and 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.

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.

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 said 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.

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

In Cairo Saddam made 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.

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup which many claim was organized by the CIA and sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy.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.

Many suspected communists were killed outright. 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 has said: "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. 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 ".

Saddam assigned a top team of three senior officers from the Iraq's military intelligence, to meet with the Americans and consequently 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.

What's the betting that while one lot of current US federal employees are arresting a former US federal employee, another lot of current US federal employees are not busy recruiting the Saddams of tomorrow, to keep in reserve in case any future Iraqi democracy gets uppity ideas?

So here’s a few points to remember when Saddam makes it to court, though my money is on him dying mysteriously from something like stomach cancer within a couple of years:-

CIA backed the coup that brought the Ba’athists to power (1963).

Removal of Iraq from USA state department list of states supporting international terrorism (1982).

George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the USA ultimately “ had to ” destroy

The scandal of the obscure Atlanta branch of Italy’s Banca Nacional del Lavoro, which apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam's arms buildup, and thus became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in USA history ($ 5 billion funnelled to Iraq from 1985 to 1989)

Kurdish civilians were attacked with poisonous gas from Iraqi helicopters and planes. The USA-built helicopters sold by Bush to Saddam were those dropping the deadly bombs (1988).

National security decision directives by the Bush administration ordering closer ties with Saddam the Butcher and paving the way for $1 billion in new aid (1989).

USA authorised a series of programmes that not only armed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but also provided him with technology that assisted in his development of chemical weapons like Sarin gas, and biological weapons (1990).

Uprising in Iraq in which, at the urging of the USA government, Kurds in the north and Shias in the south took up arms against the regime in Baghdad. The rebellion was subsequently crushed by Saddam Hussein's better-armed and better-equipped forces, while USA troops refused to come to their assistance (1991).

Iraq was collectively tortured for its defiance of USA and Israeli domination plans for the region. Even official U.N. reports document that nearly 1 million Iraqis ---mostly the young and the elderly--- have died as a direct result of the USA embargo. Other expert estimates put the number at somewhere between 1 ½ and 2 million ---half under the age of 5.

Waging an illegal war for oil under the forged WMD pretext.

..................... or instead they could just have the trial in Iraq !

                 Thanks go to Richard Sale for much of the background info.