Saddam's `prison letter' released by defense lawyers

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's defense lawyers on Thursday released a letter Saddam recently wrote in prison that tries to persuade US citizens that the US should leave Iraq because US President George W. Bush misled them into a deadly quagmire.

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

Saddam blames Iran and pro-Israel interests for helping lead the US into war. He invokes the specter of the Vietnam War and the spirit of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), 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 Saddam to Clark, said Rasha Oudeh, the office manager for Saddam'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," Saddam 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 Saddam and three of his co-defendants. Saddam 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 Saddam 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.

Lieutenant Colonel Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for the American-run detainee system, said that Saddam was in "relatively good health" and was being monitored.