MB Civic

[He may be a tyrant, but he’s 100% correct…]

By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 20 — Saddam Hussein’s defense lawyers on Thursday released a letter Mr. Hussein recently wrote in prison that tries to convince the American people that the United States should leave Iraq because President Bush misled them into a deadly quagmire.

The 5,000-word letter is a rambling treatise outlining what Mr. Hussein asserts are the false reasons the Bush administration used to justify the war in Iraq, from illicit weapons to links with Al Qaeda. Mr. Hussein said he had written it at the behest of Ramsey Clark, the former United States attorney general who serves on his defense team.

Mr. Hussein blames Iran and pro-Israel interests for helping lead the Americans into war. He invokes the specter of the Vietnam War and the spirit of Mao, saying the Chinese revolutionary is “laughing in his grave because his prediction has been fulfilled and America is a paper tiger.”

The letter is dated July 7 and was handed by Mr. Hussein to Mr. Clark, said Rasha Oudeh, the office manager for Mr. Hussein’s eldest daughter.

“People of America, the misfortunes that have afflicted you and afflicted our Arab nation and within it our heroic people — including the breakdown of America’s standing and reputation — were only caused by the reckless behavior of your government and by pressure from Zionism,” Mr. Hussein wrote, according to a translation of the letter e-mailed to reporters by both his defense team and an insurgent Web site.

“The massacres and blood that now flows in the streets and countryside of Iraq in torrents — the responsibility for that falls on America before all others,” he added.

The release of the letter came on the 14th day of a hunger strike by Mr. Hussein and three of his co-defendants. Mr. Hussein and seven other men, including his half-brother, have been on trial since October for the imprisonment and executions of 148 men and boys from the Shiite town of Dujail. The victims were killed after what Mr. Hussein said was an assassination attempt on him in 1982.

The trial is in its closing stages. Arguments are expected from the defense lawyers, but the main lawyers and defendants have been boycotting the trial for various reasons.

Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for the American-run detainee system, said Thursday that Mr. Hussein was in “relatively good health” and was being monitored every day by medical professionals. He said Mr. Hussein had rejected all his meals but drinks coffee with sugar, and water with nutrients.

The American military had no immediate comment on the letter, Colonel Curry added.

In the letter, Mr. Hussein said an American general tried to use intimidation and threats against him after his capture, and “tried to bargain with me, promising to let me live if I agreed to read in my own voice and sign a prepared announcement that was shown to me.”

“That stupid announcement called on the people of Iraq and the courageous resistance to lay down arms,” he wrote. “They said that if I refused, my fate would be that I would be shot like Mussolini.”

A week after that conversation, Mr. Hussein said, a group of Americans came to speak to him, saying they were from an American university. “I confirmed to them that Iraq didn’t have any of the things the American officials claimed,” Mr. Hussein wrote.

Mr. Hussein sought to portray himself as a humanitarian in the letter, telling the American government to designate a neutral country where insurgents could hand over American prisoners “rather than executing them as currently is said to be taking place.” That appeared to be a reference to the capture and killing of two American soldiers last month in the town of Yusufiya.

The letter ends with a final bit of advice: “Save your country, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, and leave Iraq.”