OXBLOG HAS A QUOTE from the just-captured “Chemical Ali” (via Human Rights Watch) that’s worth repeating:
I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? F_ck them! the international community, and those who listen to them!… I will not attack them with chemicals just one day, but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for fifteen days.
With this quote, and with the nickname “Chemical Ali,” I’d hate to be his defense lawyer. Er, if he ever gets one; I’m not quite sure what his status is. Will he be turned over to the Iraqis eventually?
There’s lots of good stuff at Oxblog today — just scroll up and down from this post.
UPDATE: Oops! I’m not up to date: “Ali Hassan al-Majid is now officially known as ‘Conventional Ali,’ since it is common knowledge that Iraq had no chemical weapons program.”
Heh.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more on chemical weapons:
As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed “Sarindar, meaning “emergency exit.”Iimplemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.
All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction.
“Buried deep at sea.” That might explain those missing “mystery ships” from before the war. (Via Junkyard Blog).