allafrica.com Daily Trust (Abuja) OPINION January 20, 2003 Posted to the web January 20, 2003 Salisu Na'inna Dambatta

The general outcry by Nigerians over the state of roads in the country has accentuated the timeliness of the ongoing efforts towards ending the 100-year jinx on the exploitation of the large bitumen deposits in the country which has an enormous economic potential for Nigeria. Bitumen is the major component necessary for the construction of conventional roads in the world.

Although, preliminary exploratory activities on tar sand, the other name for bitumen, started in 1900, 14 clear years before the amalgamation of Nigeria, it is only in the last couple of years that the tempo of federal commitment that could lead to the actual exploitation of the mineral began. The driving force behind this, needless to say, is President Olusegun Obasanjo. Nigeria Competition Bill Your Comments Requested

"Any Nigerian government that successfully lays the foundation for the exploitation of this huge mineral resource would have made history because the Nigerian economy would substantially be diversified from conventional petroleum in an irrevocably strategic way", says a document advocating the exploitation of the mineral.

That foundation has been laid as the actual exploitation of Nigerian bitumen is set to be actualised in the next six months, raising hopes that Nigeria will soon be enjoying the fruits of the 47.2 billion barrels known or confirmed deposit of bitumen. This is important as the benefits are many.

The popular part of bitumen is asphalt which, as stated earlier, is used in road construction, but fact is that it has other petrochemical properties which are more valuable than most people think.

"Other strategic products include synthetic crude oil that can be refined from bitumen to produce motor fuel, fuel oil, grease, wax, pith and low cost petroleum products such as naphtha", says a document prepared by Dr. Femi Dada, former director of the bitumen project. Additional by-products of bitumen are nickel, vanadium, phenols for the pharmaceutical industry, sulphuric acid and sulphur, all of which Nigeria now spends huge amounts of foreign exchange to import.

The importance of bitumen has been recognised by other bitumen-rich countries, especially Venezuela and Canada who have developed techno-logies appropriate to the grades of their bitumen deposits. They are earning foreign exchange from it and its by-products and at the same time using part of it for their domestic needs.

In fact, Dr. Femi Dada argued in his paper that, "the local market alone in Nigeria is estimated at about N20 billion annually", and went further to observe that, "the Nigerian economy loses about N133 billion of five percent of GDP annually as a result of lack of bitumen".

Indeed, given the nature and value of bitumen, it is imperative to appreciate the goodness in the speedy manner in which the federal government created the enabling environment for its exploitation. The benefits it will bring are numerous. The National Assembly should assiduously pass the bill before it on the establishment of the Bitumen Development Agency. The federal ministry of solid minerals development should be praised for the determination shown by its management in ensuring that at last Nigeria's bitumen dream is now almost translated into beneficial reality.

Many Nigerians who are following the progress of the march towards the exploitation of bitumen acknowledge the inauguration of a presidential committee on the implementation of the bitumen project by the government of Ibrahim Babangida in 1989. Its revival by the Obasanjo administration is a welcome exercise in continuity and the increased tempo towards achieving the objective in the last two years is a genuine source of happiness to those who appreciate the implication of it all.

For availability of Nigerian bitumen to feed the huge internal demand for the commodity for road and other construction will mean more tarred roads for Nigerians. There are the added benefits of saving foreign exchange and earning more from its export.

The development of skilled manpower and the acquisition of high-tech equipment will all have beneficial impact on Nigeria. It is desirable and realisable with the current level of commitment on the part of all stakeholders.

It is argued elsewhere that Nigerian bitumen could help Africa realise the unfulfilled dream of the defunct Organisation of African Unity of developing the Trans-African high-way, the system of road networks planned to traverse the continent, lining up West, North, East, Central, Southern Africa and the Horn of Africa together. This will boost African integration, a constitutional objective of Nigeria which is being vigorously pursued by the Obasanjo administration.

Salisu is an assistant director of information at the presidency.

www.kansascity.com Posted on Wed, Jan. 15, 2003 By EDWARD M. EVELD and LISA GUTIERREZ The Kansas City Star

Has somebody really cloned a human being? Or are the folks at Clonaid putting us on?

It's the hoax question. Again.

Bombarded with information, we constantly confront the puzzle of what to believe and what not to believe, from crop circles to John Edwards' "Crossing Over."

As hoaxes and big lies fall all around us -- there's no Bigfoot, no tainted Coca-Cola -- it's amazing we believe anyone about anything. But we do.

Even post-Watergate. Even post-Enron. Even though government officials, corporate executives, doctors and scientists have lost some of their aura of authority.

We like to think of ourselves as more sophisticated and more skeptical than ever. Certainly more so than those '60s rubes who fell for the cons of Frank Abagnale Jr., glorified now in the movie "Catch Me If You Can."

Yet even hoax "experts" admit to looking twice at that photo of the 80-pound monster cat on the Internet. And the president of Venezuela believed it was Fidel Castro on the phone last week, falling prey to a prank by two Miami disc jockeys.

And the women competing on TV's "Joe Millionaire" believe the good-looking bachelor is worth millions. But he's not. (Or is he?)

Thanks largely to the Internet -- that World Wide Web of deceit that warns of tainted perfume strips and offers free Gap clothes -- hoaxing is in its heyday.

"I think we're living through another golden age of hoaxes," said Alex Boese of San Diego, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes, an Internet site that chronicles history's more famous hoaxes (www.museumofhoaxes.com).

"In our culture we have very open minds about new things. So when you're very open to new possibility, you can easily get hoaxed."

Boese, 34, became fascinated with hoaxes while working on a history of science degree at the University of California-San Diego. He began collecting stories of the weird and wacky and posted them on his Web site in 1997. Museum of Hoaxes -- the book -- came out in November.

Boese's research took him back to 1726, where he found the tale of Mary Toft, a peasant woman in a small English town who gave birth to rabbits.

Made you stop, didn't it? People are especially fascinated with hoaxes concerning bodily atrocities, Boese said.

"Birth and extreme births have always been kind of a fascination with people," Boese said. In honor of Clonaid, he added birth hoaxes to his Web site.

The media have exposed hoaxes but have, in their history, done better perpetuating them. Media hijinks began in the early 1800s, Boese said, when America's penny press was hunting bigger circulations. Editors figured there wasn't enough real news to grab readers' attention. So why not make some up?

The first big scam was the Great Moon hoax. In 1835 the New York Sun ran stories claiming that British scientists had discovered life on the moon. Lunar unicorns. And beavers that stood on two feet and lived in huts.

But wait, there was more! A race of winged humans living on the moon!

Now the Internet is an engine of hoaxes, urban legends and rumors, but it also can be useful in stopping them in their tracks. Or at least trying to.

A Web site at hoaxbusters.ciac.org -- its logo is a court jester with the international slash through his tasseled headpiece -- tries to give visitors a heads-up about current e-mail hoaxes.

Rose Konopka, a cyber-security analyst for the U.S. Department of Energy in Livermore, Calif., said she and colleagues launched the site because they were bombarded by inquiries about hoaxes, to the point they couldn't focus on real computer security problems.

The Web site quickly grew popular within the Energy Department and then with the general public, she said.

When Konopka gives computer security talks, her best advice about hoaxes is simple: "Don't be afraid to hit `delete.' "

But how do you know real from scam, serious from hoax? Repetition, for one thing. By now, she said, everyone should know there's no Nigerian fellow who needs to give you his bank account number.

There are other recognizable attributes. Any message that says "send this to everyone you know" is unlikely to be legitimate. Beware of messages that drop names of famous people or corporations -- or appear to originate from such lofty offices -- and of those that use technical language.

One widely distributed hoax told e-mail recipients that "if the program is not stopped, the computer's processor will be placed in an nth-complexity binary loop which can severely damage the processor." All made up.

Most hoax messages sound like chain letters. There's the hook, which seems plausible and plays on fear or sympathy, such as "virus alert" or "little girl is dying." Then comes the threat, the dire consequences if you delete the message. Often there's a request, either for money or for help in distributing the message.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, confronted with one health hoax after another, has devoted part of its Web site, www.cdc.gov/hoax(UNDERSCORE)rumors, to debunking bad information.

Under the heading "False Report: Poisonous Perfume Samples in the Mail," for example, the CDC states unequivocally that women are not dropping dead after inhaling free perfume samples that come in the mail.

With the anthrax scare, apparently, poisoned scents didn't seem out of the question.

Ditto for the bogus "Klingerman virus," which victims supposedly contracted by handling a sponge that arrived in a package labeled "A gift for you from the Klingerman Foundation."

Why do people try to pull off such hoaxes? They get a charge out of it. They like to see how far a published hoax can spread, Konopka said. "It's like writing viruses -- because you can," she said. "Just for kicks."

More often, hoaxsters want the attention. "Everybody wants to be a celebrity," said Boese of the hoax museum. "But not everybody has a good, compelling, truthful reason why other people would be interested in them.

"In that case, if you don't get what you want by telling the truth, you get what you want by telling a lie. And the more creative a lie you can come up with, the more attention you'll get."

Case in point: The infamous Taco Bell April Fool's joke in 1996, when the fast-food chain made a bogus announcement that it bought the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and would rename it the Taco Liberty Bell.

People got so mad that Taco Bell quickly owned up to the joke.

Maybe the company would have gotten more attention if it had cloned a baby.

Technological advances, especially in the biomedical field recently, make almost anything seem possible now. Scientists have cloned a sheep, so what's so far-fetched about a cloned human?

Falling for the far-fetched doesn't necessarily make us suckers. Not in Boese's book anyway. "I think you have to keep a sense of humor about it."

To reach Edward M. Eveld, features writer, call (816) 234-4442 or send e-mail to eeveld@kcstar.com.

To reach Lisa Gutierrez, features reporter, call (816) 234-4987 or send e-mail to lgutierrez@kcstar.com.

Laughing matters?

See more hoaxes:

• www.museum of hoaxes: A look at famous hoaxes throughout history. Test your skills at spotting hoax photos.

• www.stiller.com/hoaxa.htm: An alphabetical list of common hoaxes -- computer viruses and others.

Avoid hoaxes:

...hoaxbusters.ciac.org: Warns about current e-mail hoaxes. Run by employees of the U.S. Department of Energy in Livermore, Calif.

...www.cdc.gov: Debunks health hoaxes. Run by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

www.guardian.co.uk Rise in individual households bodes ill for biodiversity, say scientists Tim Radford, science editor Monday January 13, 2003 The Guardian

The planet's wild creatures face a new threat - from yuppies, empty nesters, singletons and one parent families.

Biologists studying the pressure on the planet's dwindling biodiversity today report on a new reason for alarm. Although the rate of growth in the human population is decreasing, the number of individual households is exploding.

Even where populations have actually dwindled - in some regions of New Zealand, for instance - the numbers of individual households has increased, because of divorce, career choice, smaller families and longer lifespans.

Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University and colleagues from Stanford University in California report in Nature, in a paper published online in advance, that a greater number of individual households, each containing on average fewer people, meant more pressure on natural resources.

Towns and cities began to sprawl as new homes were built. Each household needed fuel to heat and light it; each household required its own plumbing, cooking and refrigeration.

"In larger households, the efficiency of resource consumption will be a lot higher, because more people share things," Dr Liu said.

He and his colleagues looked at the population patterns of life in 141 countries, including 76 "hotspot" regions unusually rich in a variety of endemic wildlife. These hot spots included Australia, New Zealand, the US, Brazil, China, India, Kenya, and Italy.

They found that between 1985 and 2000 in the "hotspot" parts of the globe, the annual 3.1% growth rate in the number of households was far higher than the population growth rate of 1.8%.

"Had the average household size remained at the 1985 level," the scientists report, "there would have been 155m fewer households in hotspot countries in 2000. By 2015, 233m more households are likely to be added to hotspot countries as a result of continued reduction in average household size alone."

Paradoxically, smaller households do not mean smaller homes. In Indian River county, Florida, the average area of a one-storey, single family house increased 33% in the past three decades, from about 1,800 sq ft before 1970 to an average 2,400 sq ft for those built since 1970.

Dr Liu's work grew from the alarming discovery that the giant pandas living in China's Wolong reserve were more at risk now than they were when the reserve was first established.

The local population had grown, but the total number of homes had increased more swiftly, to make greater inroads into the bamboo forests.

Only around 1.75m species on the planet have been named and described. Biologists estimate that there could be 7m, or even 17m, as yet to be identified.

But human numbers have grown more than sixfold in the past 200 years, and humans and their livestock are now the greatest single consumer group on the planet.

The world population will continue to soar, perhaps levelling off at around 9 billion in the next century. Environmental campaigners have claimed that between a quarter and a half of all the species on earth could become extinct in the next century.

Gretchen Daily of Stanford, one of the authors, said: "We all depend on open space and wild places, not just for peace of mind but for vital services such as crop pollination, water purification and climate stabilisation.

"The alarming thing about this study is the finding that, if family groups continue to become smaller and smaller, we might continue losing biodiversity - even if we get the aggregate human population size stabilised."

news.mysanantonio.com By Tom Kim San Antonio Express-News Web Posted : 01/13/2003 12:00 AM   It's about 2 a.m., and Dr. Claudio Nunes is in his 19th hour of caring for the nightly troop of assault victims and drunken drivers.

Surgical resident Claudio Nunes (center) works with University Hospital emergency room staff during the first minutes of a trauma patient's arrival. Nunes' long workweek includes three 24-hour shifts and one 12-hour shift. Joshua Trujillo/Express-News

Paramedics rush the injured one by one through the double doors into the fluorescent glare of University Hospital's emergency room.

Whether they're aware of it, these patients have put their lives in the hands of Nunes, a second-year medical resident who has been working around the clock. The 28-year-old native of Brazil typifies the young doctor-in-training: dedicated to his profession and determined to get by on very little sleep, with the occasional aid of adrenaline and caffeine.

"It's my time to sacrifice now," he said during a 24-hour shift. "I'll rest when I'm old."

Nunes and most medical residents are a lifeline for many hospitals, especially teaching institutions affiliated with universities. They care for patients just like fully trained doctors, but at a fraction of the cost.

But long hours and hefty responsibilities have thrust these residents into the center of a national debate that has much of the medical community divided.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education decided last year to limit the number of hours a medical resident can work. The standards, which take effect in July, cap the workweek at no more than 80 hours. Nationally, residents can now average 60 to 130 hours of work each week, depending on their specialty or the location of their residency.

The national cutback comes amid concerns that patients are at risk in the care of exhausted residents.

But some residents aren't convinced the limits are a good idea. And some hospitals aren't sure if they'll be able to meet the requirement or what effect the reduced hours will have on patient care.

Many institutions, such as University Hospital, already are facing severe staffing shortages, and complying with the mandate might theoretically require residents to have to walk out on their patients while providing care.

Nunes' workday usually begins near dawn when he often struggles to get out of bed. Waking up is never easy, and it usually takes about three hits of the snooze button before he finally rises.

On this particular Thursday morning, he arrives at University Hospital at 7. The emergency room where he is assigned for the month is in the basement. It has an otherworldly feel that makes it seem insulated from the rest of the planet.

There are no windows. Time has a way of slipping to the back of the mind.

"It's like Vegas down here," said Adam Blanchette, a third-year medical student who also works in the ER. "Six hours just goes like that."

For Nunes, the day is just beginning. He is briefed by the previous shift's resident-in-charge about the patients he's inheriting. One is from near the Mexican border. He suffered the loss of his hearing when a tree branch lodged in his right ear while he was being chased by Border Patrol agents.

Another is a jail inmate who claims to have lost feeling in his legs.

Known as the ER's "pit boss," Nunes assesses the hundreds of trauma patients who come through on his watch. It is his job to assess the extent of their injuries, as well as decide who needs surgery.

Because most of his waking hours are spent in the hospital, most of his life revolves around this place, leaving him little room for a social life. He works three 24-hour shifts and one 12-hour shift a week.

The idea of working fewer hours is appealing, but it also raises questions.

"I think the scale-back is great," Nunes said. "But it's not going to work for surgical residents because we do everything medical residents do, plus we operate."

Often, Nunes stays at the hospital after his regular 24-hour shift to watch surgical procedures because he couldn't when he was on call.

Such observation, he said, bolsters his training. But under the accreditation council's guidelines, any of those extra hours would count against his 80 hours.

He said limiting the number of hours he can stay at the hospital will affect his education.

"We have to be at the hospital to learn," Nunes said.

Another fear is that reducing hours might result in longer residencies, which already can last four years after medical school.

Much of the burden in figuring out how to comply with the new rules falls on faculty of teaching hospitals.

At the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, that's Dr. Lois Bready. The associate dean for graduate medical education says she's had trouble sleeping ever since the accreditation council made its decision.

She blames her insomnia on the logistical nightmare she and other faculty will face in trying to comply with the new standards.

University Health System has close to 700 residents who are overseen by about 600 full-time faculty doctors at the health science center.

The hospital, like almost all hospitals nationwide operated by colleges and universities, depends heavily on medical residents, who diagnose, treat and operate on patients. Faculty doctors oversee and assist residents, but residents can carry much of the responsibility of patient care.

Residents also provide a large and relatively inexpensive labor pool for hospitals such as University Hospital. However, if hospitals violate the allowed hours for residents, they risk losing accreditation, putting their federal funding at risk.

"We're trying to figure out how to contract all these hours and find out where we are going to have voids," said Greg Rufe, an administrator for the University Health System. "It's not like we can run out and get more residents."

The solution shaping up is to hire more physician assistants and nurse practitioners. But those people haven't yet been hired. And so the hospital still has its voids.

4:30 p.m. Nunes' pager goes off. A man who has fallen off a 60-foot billboard is en route. At 5 p.m., the patient is wheeled in.

"This one is a pretty big emergency," Nunes said. "He has a collapsed lung on his left side."

They put an oxygen mask on the patient to help his breathing. But a problem has developed.

The air being built up in the patient's chest because of the collapsed lung is beginning to restrict his heart. Nunes has to act quickly or the man will go into cardiac arrest.

Nunes takes a scalpel and cuts above the left side of the ribs. The patient is still conscious as Nunes works. Nunes grabs a surgical clamp and pushes it into the slit he's made. The patient screams, but the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth muffles the sound.

Nunes is trying to puncture the wall surrounding the patient's lung to let the air escape. He is holding a long needle in one hand just in case the clamp doesn't make it through. The needle will provide an instant hole to release the air.

Nunes continues working the clamp. All of a sudden, a hissing noise fills the room. Nunes has broken through the sac surrounding the man's lung, releasing the pent-up oxygen. Nunes then inserts a chest tube into the hole and begins to sew the wound shut. Disaster has been averted.

Nunes often is thrust into these kinds of life-and-death situations as a resident. Faculty doctors are accessible if he needs to consult them, but sometimes, as in this case, he has to make a decision at the spur of the moment.

Teaching hospitals can't afford to have a doctor standing over the shoulder of every resident working at a hospital.

Most residents are paid salaries just above $30,000 a year. But when averaging 80 hours of work or more each week, that comes out to about $8 an hour before taxes — a figure less than the $8.25 lowest hourly wage set by University Health System last year. Most hospital employees receiving that wage are workers in housekeeping, food service and maintenance positions.

Because the system is Bexar County's tax-supported health provider, most of the money for residents' salaries comes from taxpayers.

If the number of hours a resident can work is reduced, additional staff will have to be hired to make up the difference. But with tight budgets, hiring more staff will be next to impossible, Bready said.

"Most teaching hospitals are hanging by a thread right now," she said.

The cutback comes at a time when states and the federal government have slashed health care dollars for this year. Publicly funded hospitals are wondering how they will be able to provide the same level of patient care with people working fewer hours with less money.

University is grappling with staff shortages and budget deficits that have, in part, resulted in patients being turned away from the hospital's emergency room. Nationwide, nurses have been leaving the profession in droves because of inadequate salary and long hours — a problem from which University Hospital has not been immune.

The accreditation council knows the pivotal role residents play in hospitals, but a resident is a student first, said Dr. David Leach, the accreditation council's executive director. Having full staffing levels shouldn't come at the expense of fatigued residents, he said.

"Residents are students," Leach said. "The primary purpose of students is education."

Changing the way hospitals approach health care is one way to resolve problems that could arise from the cutback, he said. Doctors, nurses and other support staff should find more effective ways of working as a team, he said.

"The lone ranger is not the best metaphor," Leach said. "The U.S. Navy SEALS is a better approach."

In preparation for the mandate limiting a resident's hours, the health science center's departments have been told to limit their residents to no more than 80 hours of work a week. Most appear to be doing so, Bready said, though a new survey is under way to determine that.

And a subcommittee organized to study the issue is recommending that some departments be able to apply for an exemption under special circumstances, increasing the limit from 80 to 88 hours.

5:30 a.m. Nunes is less than two hours from going home, but his shift is far from over. Another vehicle accident victim arrives. She tells Nunes she had been drinking and was on her way home.

Nunes works his hands across her body, performing an assessment. Despite having a night filled with patients — some belligerent and many unappreciative — Nunes is cordial.

He addresses her as ma'am when he speaks to her, though it's obvious she is younger than he is. He appears alert.

Whether working 100-hour or 80-hour weeks, Nunes said staying awake has never been a problem.

"Here, there is no way you're going to sleep because you're too busy," he said about the hospital's emergency room.

But not all residents feel like Nunes.

Dr. Maurice Sholas, who recently completed his residency at the health science center and lives in Chicago, believes the guidelines make sense. Sholas has served as the vice chairman of the resident and fellow section of the American Medical Association, which has endorsed the mandate.

Patient safety should be the first priority at all cost, he said.

"We're not supermen, immune to the need of sleep," he said.

In New York, state law already enforces an 80-hour limit for residents. The restriction, which has been in effect since 1989, came about after an 18-year-old woman died under a medical resident's watch. The woman's father blamed her death on the resident, whom he alleged was overworked.

Even doctors who are skeptical, if not directly opposed to the cutback, are divided on why they think the mandate is a bad idea. Some, like Bready, support giving residents more time off.

Residents should get more sleep and free time, she said. She's just not sure how to accomplish that.

Others, however, feel that the new policy could pose a philosophical problem for future doctors.

Though scaling back hours might appear good on the surface, some doctors in reality work more than 80 hours a week, said Dr. Ronald Stewart, associate professor of surgery at the health science center.

Pushing residents to work when they're tired instills in them a sense of service, he said.

"It must be taught, patients' problems come first," he said. "A doctor's mindset has to be that a patient comes first. Not that a patient comes first if you're well rested."

citydesk@express-news.net

By Riccardo Orizio

How does a dictator fall? What goes through the mind of a ruthless ruler, accustomed to being obeyed and feared, when his fortress begins to crack and the writing on the wall points to “ex”? Like many tyrants, Saddam Hussein will deny even the possibility of defeat until it stares him in the face — and may refuse to see it even then.

In 1991 Colonel Mengistu, responsible for the death of half a million people during the Red Terror campaign in Ethiopia, had to be all but forced by his comrades to board a US plane for Zimbabwe when rebels closed in on Addis Ababa: he was still dreaming of an improbable Soviet rescue. Five years earlier, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, President for life of Haiti, had insisted on a last champagne party at his palace before a plane flew him, his small family and immense collection of luggage to the relative anonymity of France, where he rented a villa next to Graham Greene’s.

And who could forget the last political rally of Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife at Christmas 1989, in a Bucharest that had already switched allegiance? There was the strongman greeting a screaming crowd from his balcony in the blithe assumption that his people were still deliriously supportive, his smile turning to horror and incredulity as what they were chanting sank in — “Death to Ceausescu”. Moments later he was arrested; then sentenced to death.

Having spent the past eight years chasing deposed dictators around the world, I have had the dubious privilege of asking them about these last moments. To judge from their experiences, if and when the Americans approach Baghdad, Saddam can choose between two options: the Idi Amin/ Duvalier/ Mengistu route or the path trodden by Milosevic/ Noriega/ Bokassa.

I met Amin in Jedda. As a “temporary guest” of the Saudi Royal Family since 1980, a former head of State and convert to Islam, Amin is entitled to a salary, local gym membership (he is a keen swimmer) and a peaceful life. If a foreigner is in town looking for him, they whisk Amin off to Mecca, where no infidel can follow.

Mengistu lives in Harare, with an escape route to his beloved North Korea if Robert Mugabe falls. And Jean-Claude Duvalier is in Paris. Since 1986 he has shed a wife, several kilos and many millions, but retains the discreet hospitality of the French Government and the support of many Parisian taxi drivers, former Tontons Macoute who followed him into exile fearing for their lives. Today “Baby Doc” studies solar energy and worships voodoo, dreaming of an impossible comeback and speaking to his countrymen through a sinister website.

Like these former dictators, Saddam could find himself a new home, miles away from international tribunals and foreign journalists. The Saudi monarchy might try to please fundamentalist dissidents by offering him asylum in the name of Islamic solidarity. Or, with the assent of Washington, Libya and Morocco are possible destinations.

The advantage of safety in exile, however, is counterbalanced by the disadvantage of silence imposed by the host government. For this means fewer opportunities to clear one’s name.

So Saddam might decide to go the Milosevic/ Noriega/ Bokassa way: big public trials during which he tries to go down in history as victim or martyr and embarrass the enemy in the process. He might choose to disclose, for instance, the secret oil deals with Moscow; the commercial contracts with Western governments who were officially fighting the war against terror but were also profiting from it; or the deals with the US during the war against Iran. He could also take revenge against any Arab government that sides with the US, by revealing their support for terrorism.

This was Noriega’s plan. “Pineapple Face” ruled Panama while acting as a CIA informant. Toppled by his former US employers, they then put him on trial. Noriega failed to impress the jury with revelations about the dirty Central American wars. Sentenced for money-laundering and drug-trafficking, he is, however, young enough in his mid-60s to have a future. In a letter he sent me from jail in Miami two years ago, he wrote: “I do not consider myself to be a forgotten individual, because God, who writes straight albeit with occasionally crooked lines, has not written the last words on Manuel A. Noriega!”

Even the monstrous Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the self-proclaimed Emperor of the Central African Republic (CAR) accused of cannibalism, tried to shame his former masters, the French, with accusations of “double standards and hypocrisy” — beginning with revelations about gifts of diamonds to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Ending up in a French castle with no friends and too many bills, Bokassa flew back to Africa to be sentenced to death, a sentence commuted to life imprisonment, then cut to ten years. After serving seven, in 1993 he was freed. When I met him a year later, dressed in a long white robe and holding his last possession, a silver crucifix, he claimed to be an apostle of the Catholic Church secretly appointed by the Pope: “I fought for France. I liberated France from the Nazis. I called Giscard my cousin. And they betrayed me.” The road to denunciation and attempted martyrdom may be uncomfortable, but it can prove rewarding. In 1996 when Bokassa died, his reputation had been restored to the point where the CAR state radio could describe him as “illustrious”.

General Jaruzelski, last Communist ruler of Poland, is under trial, and Egon Krenz, East Germany’s last Communist leader, is in prison. Both claim to be victims of victors’ justice. Their names, far from being hated in Warsaw or Berlin, are cloaked in an aura of nostalgia. Time heals.

And time is the most important asset for a dictator to secure on his way out of the palace. For the more time he has at his disposal, the greater the chance that he will one day be able to rebut criticism with a simple question: “Are you sure that those who followed me were better, more democratic, more honest? And that my country is better off now than when I ruled it?” It’s an astute question, and one that Duvalier asked me. In order not to give him satisfaction, I refused to answer it. As Noriega says, sometimes God writes in crooked lines. —The Times