Word: kassem
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Dates: during 1958-1958
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...With the help of God," said Iraq's Premier Abdul Karim Kassem on the radio one day last week, "we have discovered a serious plot . . . the work of some corrupt elements helped by foreigners from outside Iraq." The plot, said Kassem, was to have swung into action next morning. The arms, the money and the "perpetrators" had all been captured, he declared. The arrested would be tried by the People's Court for treason...
...Kassem ordered Baghdad into a state of alert, and two Iraqi air force jet squadrons flew over the capital in a show of strength. Taking no chances, the U.S. and British embassies ordered their nationals off the streets (and thus had little inkling of what was going on). Kassem's soldiers searched all cars for arms and ammunition. To add to the drama, Staff Major Salim Alfakhri, Iraq's director of broadcasting, went on Iraqi TV to display sporting guns, pistols, knives and brass knuckles that, he said, were to have been used in the plot. Communist-line...
...General Kassem himself, by week's end, had not announced the name of a single plotter, had not identified the "foreigners" allegedly involved. In such a silence, the suspicion grew that perhaps the plot had been invented, to cover up the arrest of men whom Kassem's cops wanted...
Having offered the mob bread, Kassem last week supplied it with a circus: the windup of the farcical trial of Fadhil Jamali, ex-Foreign Minister and, on one occasion. Prime Minister of Iraq in the old regime of Nuri asSaid. Fadhil Jamali, 55, an honest, simple-living pro-Western politician with an American wife and three children, had no chance at all. Of the five members of the military tribunal, only one had any experience in law. The trial sessions were broadcast on radio and TV, and held at night to ensure a packed courtroom, where staged demonstrations against...
...balance, then leaned wearily on the railing of the prisoner's box. An assistant prosecutor bawled: "Long live justice! Long live the republic!" Out on the Baghdad streets, the mob howled its joy, clamored for even more death sentences. The mob was clearly closing in on General Kassem, who alone has the power of clemency. The U.S. and Britain felt horror and shock at the verdict (they had expected a prison term), but knew that any public statement by them would only deliver Jamali more surely than ever into the hands...