t the time, much was made of the capture of Saddam Hussein. Touted by the US government-controlled American mainstream press as a fatal blow to the insurgency that would lead to rejoicing in the streets of Baghdad, the reality, as we have seen, has turned out to rather different. Iraqis, logically enough, seem to be less concerned about Saddam's capture and trial than about the fact that a brutal US military force of occupation has essentially taken possession of their country and its resources and has caused the deaths of 655,000 of their fellow citizens.

After his initial capture in December 2003, Saddam was paraded in front of the press at his first court appearance in July 2004 where he stood accused of up to 12 crimes, including the alleged gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. But fate (and in Iraq these days "fate" wears the red white and blue ) has decreed that "Saddam" will not suffer the ignominy of answering those particular charges because his first trial for the killing of 148 people in a Shiite town in 1982 was enough, it seems, to convict and sentence him to death. The sense of relief in the White House over the fact that the "gassing" allegation will not have to be dissected is surely palpable, given that, if Saddam gassed anyone, it was with the chemical weapons supplied to him by the US government.

When he first appeared in court in 2004, Saddam was weak and pale and could be hardly heard. Strangely, the US military instituted a severe clampdown on media coverage of the proceedings which were not broadcast live. Frustrated members of the press had to wait until after the event to receive just FOUR minutes of audio and just a few seconds of video of the occasion. Furthermore, Saddam's lawyers claimed that they had been denied access to their client and that they had received death threats from members of the Iraqi government. While no mainstream media outlet at the time offered an explanation of these strange occurrences, logic would suggest that there is something about the man that appeared in court that the US military did not want the Iraqi people and the rest of the world, to see, or hear. It is one thing to present a few seconds of specifically chosen footage of a possibly drugged or mind programmed Saddam lookalike on television and thereby half-convince Iraqis that knew Saddam that the person in court is the real deal. It is a much more difficult task however to make an impostor's voice sound like the real Saddam's. There is also the danger that the impostor might suddenly and unexpectedly reveal his true identity. It seems likely that it was for this reason that the US military had to limit and edit the audio coverage and then "clear" it for broadcast.