After an unjustifiable invasion, an almost comedically peculiar trial, & a miniscule appeal process, Saddam Hussein has been hung. The crime he was punished for was ordering murders & torture of citizens of a Shiite town in collective retaliation for an assassination attempt back in 1982.

What isn’t mentioned is what Saddam himself tried to frequently point out during the trial: At the time, the US was aiding his atrocities. Detailed proof, derived from official government documents, is — for now — freely available here.

A picture says a thousand words though…

Functionally, this is a bump in the road on what seems like a neverending farce. There will be more deaths in Iraq, but there would’ve been anyway; this doesn’t mean the current regime won’t do the same thing, and reports suggest they already are, only exception being it’s not official action; the odds for liberty & stability in Iraq are unchanged from yesterday. This is nothing more than a splashy reminder that for a sickeningly long time the official policy of the United States has been to support whatever scum is on hand provided the ones in charge think there’s the slightest “national interest” served by it.

So much as whispering what I just put here in person gets you called a nutjob, and no “mainstream” reporting on the execution will mention the background to the crime. Meanwhile, the advocates of the worldview that led to this whole fucking debacle from the beginning are considered champions of freedom, even by the people selected from the chattering classes as the loyal opposition.

And we wonder why the world thinks we’re batshit insane…