Mumia Abu-jamal's Radio Essays

Saddam Hussein is gone. The President of Iraq, who fell out with his imperial paymasters in Washington, was hanged for his hubris, amidst taunts by hooded supporters of Muqtada Al-Sadr, head of the Shi'a Mahdi Army. His crime? Surely not the killing of his Shi'a opponents, nor his torture of Iraqis; for in the grim aftermath of these events, US envoys continued to skin and grin with him, shaking his hand (as did the then-Reagan Administration's Donald Rumsfeld), and sending him more tools of war and weapons of mass destruction. If he was guilty of crimes against humanity, what of those many Americans who aided and abetted him? What of those many Western businesses which armed him (and greatly profited from such arms deals)? It is a sign of our cynical times that the nation that egged on and armed Saddam during his long and brutal war with Iran, that looked the other way when he waged his reign of repression against the Shi'a majority, now deigns to punish him for doing their bidding. Saddam w