Silencing Tariq Aziz

"Perhaps Aziz, who could tell the whole story of Western involvement in Iraq, before, during and after the war, is simply too embarrassing and potentially compromising a figure to be allowed to live out his days in prison," says journalist Mark Seddon, who "remember[s] seeing Aziz in the foyer of the Al Rasheed hotel in Baghdad, playing court to the Nationalist Russian leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the late Austrian far right leader, Jorg Haider," and who "fully expected him to be released in five years and retire to a bungalow in Beirut" — Tariq Aziz: villain or victim?