There was no talk then of the evil crimes of this bloody dictator! Who had met Ted Heath and Tony Benn and a host of European statesmen.' Who negotiated with the UN secretary generals Perez de Cuellar and Kofi Annan, who hadĬhatted over coffee to none other than the now US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, Mayor and when the French could see the Jacobins in his bloody regime. 'This was the man who was the honour guest of the city of Paris when Mr Chirac was Robert Fisk recalled the excellent relations that had existed in the past between Saddam there was one Donald Rumsfeld, sent to Baghdad by President Ronald Reagan, a great Among the long list of western leaders who visited Baghdad to fawn on Was sold to him by American companies at a time when his crimes against the Kurdish people The poison gas that he used against the Kurds Successive British andĪmerican governments financed and armed him. Same man was one of the West's best friends in the Middle East. Killed political prisoners with excruciating torture. Marxists have no sympathy with the man who ruled Iraq with a mailed fist, who murderedĬommunists and trade unionists, who gassed Iranians and Kurds, who massacred Shias and That the Iraqi people now know, and it is they who will decide his Tony Blair hurriedly joined in the chorus: 'Saddam has gone from power, he won'tīe coming back. For decades, he threatened to attack your neighbours. For decades, this cruel man divided you againstĮach other. For decades, hundreds of thousands of you Paul Bremer, the imperial proconsul inĬharge of occupied Iraq opened the long anticipated press conference with the words: The Americans could not conceal their euphoria. In Baghdad, the occupation authorities showed, over and In an attempt to humiliate their fallen enemy, the new Romans showed pictures of Like a prisoner of ancient Rome being dragged in chains through the streets as part ofĪ triumph, Saddam was paraded before the television cameras, unkempt and with a scraggyīeard. Tired and disoriented, the formerĭictator of Iraq was found with arms and $750,000 in cash. Mud of a Tigris farm near the village of Ad-Dawr. His last hiding place was a miserable 8ft hole in the On Saturday December 13, US troops finally caught the The fighting will continue as before, or even get worse. But nothing fundamental has changed and none of the basic problems have been solved. Paul Bremer, the imperial proconsul in charge of occupied Iraq opened the long anticipated press conference with the words: 'Ladies and gentlemen, we've got him.' The capture of Saddam Hussein may give Bush and Blair a temporary respite. On Saturday, US troops finally caught the man who had eluded them for months. The article argues that the way in which reporters had to work in Iraq then meant that they did not convey all of the event’s wider implications, and suggests how that might be improved.Tweet Saddam Hussein has been captured. In this article, I use my personal experience of reporting on the event for the BBC as a starting point to examine what it, and the way it was covered, tell us about the omissions which are frequently a feature of conflict reporting. But the reporting of that event was also a missed opportunity: an example of incomplete story telling. This was the victory they had been looking for the seminal moment which signalled that the invasion had been a success. The capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 was reported with a sense of triumph which must have greatly satisfied the United States forces occupying Iraq.

Saddam hussein capture