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More of those 'Lying Liars'
December 3, 2005 03:48 AM
I've been stateside since Thanksgiving, so I'm a bit out of the swim of current events in Ukraine. But this rather brief report from London's Independent caught my eye.
KIEV, Ukraine -- A Ukrainian presidential bodyguard who exposed the country's biggest political scandal, involving murder, corruption, and illegal arms sales to Saddam Hussein has returned home, vowing to put his former boss, Leonid Kuchma, behind bars.Major Mykola Melnychenko fled Kiev in 2000 after revealing excerpts from secret recordings he made of Mr Kuchma which implicated the president in the murder of a journalist who had exposed the corruption of Mr Kuchma's 10-year rule.
Major Melnychenko has been provided with a bodyguard by the Ukrainian intelligence services since his arrival on Wednesday from the US where he was given political asylum in 2003. He was with a former Ukrainian MP, Oleksandr Yalyaskevych, also granted US asylum after claiming Mr Kuchma's henchmen had tried to kill him....[snip]
Major Melnychenko says he saw Mr Kuchma taking bribes, and recorded him allegedly authorising sales of sophisticated defence systems to Iraq in contravention of UN sanctions.
Emphasis added. Ah, yes, another timely reminder that Saddam was not the properly chastened "dictator-in-a-box" of anti-war fantasy. In this particular case, his purchase included three so-called Kolchuga radar systems, an anti-stealth technology that can detect radar signals and electromagnetic pulses from warplanes at distances of hundreds of miles, while emitting no signal of its own (meaning pilots do not know they are being tracked). Presumably the goal here was to shoot down American and British warplanes that were, at the time, enforcing 'no-fly' zones north and south of Baghdad. The zones, you might recall, were intended to prevent any further massacre of Iraq's Kurdish and Shi'ite populations. But the specific purpose for which the radars were sought was moot, of course: International sanctions had forbidden Saddam from purchasing and acquiring any weaponry since 1990.
I guess in this instance, as in so many others, "containment" meant restraining one's impulse to collapse in gales of laughter at the impotence of the international sanctions imposed on Saddam.
Iraq | Ukraine | War on Terror
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