SADDAM HUSSEIN, FRIEND & FOE

A story by MediaChannel.org looking at the cozy relationship the U.S. nurtured with deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein actually includes some of the more shocking details in this saga, the mention of which you'd be hard-pressed to find in daily news stories.

The site includes a fact credited to a PBS "Frontline" report: "... our friends the Saudis gave Saddam more than $5 billion to help build his nuclear capability -- an arrangement that, according to still-classified documents, both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, headed by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, were well aware of."

The Carter, Reagan and Bush admistrations all turned a blind eye to Iraq's actions, including a coded messsage shortly before its invasion of Kuwait by U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie, who said, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait."

"We have been 'fed a steady diet of distortions, simplifications, and outright lies,' as one truth-telling reporter, Robert Parry, puts it. Parry, who as an Associated Press and Newsweek correspondent in the 1980's broke many of the Iran-Contra affair stories, has written extensively about Saddam's hidden history. His reporting can be found on his web site Consortiumnews.com, and in the biweekly paper In These Times."