The obsequiousness of political dialogue in the American public domain is really what prompts me to write diaries like this. I make no claims about whether or not Saddam was executed.
Before you flame me and call me a traitor, remember that there are no laws against seditious libel in the U.S. Furthermore, I am not pointing the finger at anyone in particular. I simply want to raise justifiable suspicions based on documented, factual information. The content is not my own making; the context, which is admittedly questionable, is, however. Enjoy.
With accusations appearing about a diplomatic controversy over Saddam’s execution, there is further controversy over video taken of his execution by a cell phone cameraman. Apparently, this act is grave enough to be a crime.
Iraqi Arrested in Saddam Hanging Video
By STEVEN R. HURST 01.03.07, 4:58 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com/...
"BAGHDAD, Iraq - An Iraqi official announced on Wednesday the arrest of a witness to Saddam Hussein's hanging who allegedly recorded the event on a cell phone camera, while an adviser to the prime minister said two guards present were in custody. A U.S. military spokesman, meanwhile, said the tumultuous execution would have gone differently had the Americans been in charge.
The leaked and unauthorized cell phone video, in which some of those present can be heard to taunt Saddam in the final moments of his life, set off an uproar both inside and outside Iraq.
The storm of criticism prompted the U.S. to publicly distance itself and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to launch the investigation that led to Wednesday's detentions."
Here is a link to the leaked cell phone video:
http://www.liveleak.com/...
The video shows the man purported to be Saddam being hanged on Eid el Adha or Hari Raya, and the executioners did not allow him to finish his prayer, though he had been described as being polite to his overseers. Such is the fate of the man who by most accounts was a brutal dictator.
President Bush released a statement about the execution, saying Saddam’s execution was "the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime" http://www.cbsnews.com/...
There are now accusations that the cell phone cameraman was an Al-Jazeera operative. I will not give credence to those claims by going into them any further – I suppose time will tell.
But why is further video evidence of Saddam’s execution such an ominous proposition to leaders in the U.S. or Iraqi governments? Could there be more to this story than meets the eye? I can offer no real answers, only systematic connections that raise more questions.
There is also the rather well-established link between Saddam Hussein and the CIA. There are many sources that tell the story, albeit with some differences in detail.
"In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA's close friends in Iraq...
On February 8 (1963), a military coup in Baghdad, in which the Baath Party played a leading role, overthrew Qassim. Support for the conspirators was limited. In the first hours of fighting, they had only nine tanks under their control. The Baath Party had just 850 active members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup. What tipped the balance against him was the involvement of the United States. He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961, he threatened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil consortium that exploited Iraq's oil. In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. We really had the ts crossed on what was happening, James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. We regarded it as a great victory. Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. We came to power on a CIA train, admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror. CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency's station inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio station in Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful. To the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad. After his execution, his sup- porters refused to believe he was dead until the coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the newspapers." http://www.hartford-hwp.com/... Source: Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, excerpt from Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, 2000. Cited by Tim Buckley http://www.casi.org.uk/...
The U.S. supported Saddam and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. This was fundamentally because Iranians deposed the Shah in 1979 and began to reject U.S. influence in their country. Though they did this with popular support, this infuriated American leaders and the hostage crisis essentially cost President Jimmy Carter his second-term in office. There were recently released CIA documents that state that the Reagan Administration was trying to provide international cover for the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis in the war.
However, Saddam became a political tool by the American government and obviously fell out of favor with the CIA.
Published on Saturday, July 3, 2004 by the Inter Press Service
Saddam Could Call CIA in His Defense
by Sanjay Suri
http://www.commondreams.org/...
LONDON - Evidence offered by a top CIA man could confirm the testimony given by Saddam Hussein at the opening of his trial in Baghdad Thursday that he knew of the Halabja massacre only from the newspapers.
Thousands were reported killed in the gassing of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja in the north of Iraq in March 1988 towards the end of Iraq's eight-year war with Iran. The gassing of the Kurds has long been held to be the work of Ali Hassan al-Majid, named in the West because of that association as 'Chemical Ali'. Saddam Hussein is widely alleged to have ordered Ali to carry out the chemical attack.
The Halabja massacre is now prominent among the charges read out against Saddam in the Baghdad court. When that charge was read out, Saddam replied that he had read about the massacre in a newspaper. Saddam has denied these allegations ever since they were made. But now with a trial on, he could summon a witness in his defense with the potential to blow apart the charge and create one of the greatest diplomatic disasters the United States has ever known.
A report prepared by the top CIA official handling the matter says Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the massacre, and indicates that it was the work of Iranians. Further, the Scott inquiry on the role of the British government has gathered evidence that following the massacre the United States in fact armed Saddam Hussein to counter the Iranians chemicals for chemicals.
Few believe that a CIA man would attend a court hearing in Baghdad in defense of Saddam. But in this case the CIA boss has gone public with his evidence, and this evidence has been in the public domain for more than a year.
The CIA officer Stephen C. Pelletiere was the agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. As professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, he says he was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf.
In addition, he says he headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States, and the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
Pelletiere went public with his information on no less a platform than The New York Times in an article on January 31 last year titled 'A War Crime or an Act of War?' The article which challenged the case for war quoted U.S. President George W. Bush as saying: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."
Pelletiere says the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report following the Halabja gassing, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need- to-know basis. "That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas," he wrote in The New York Times.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja, he said. "The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. "The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time."
Pelletiere writes that these facts have "long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned."
Pelletiere wrote that Saddam Hussein has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. "But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them."
Pelletiere has maintained his position. All Saddam would have to do in court now is to cite The New York Times article even if the court would not summon Pelletiere. The issues raised in the article would themselves be sufficient to raise serious questions about the charges filed against Saddam - and in turn the justifications offered last year for invading Iraq.
The Halabja killings were cited not just by Bush but by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to justify his case for going along with a U.S. invasion of Iraq. A British government dossier released to justify the war on Iraq says that "Saddam has used chemical weapons, not only against an enemy state, but against his own people." An inquiry report in 1996 by Lord Justice Scott in what came to be known as the arms-to-Iraq affair gave dramatic pointers to what followed after Halabja. After the use of poison gas in 1988 both the United States and Britain began to supply Saddam Hussein with even more chemical weapons.
The Scott inquiry had been set up in 1992 following the collapse of the trial in the case of Matrix Churchill, a British firm exporting equipment to Iraq that could be put to military use.
Three senior executives of Matrix Churchill said the government knew what Matrix Churchill was doing, and that its managing director Paul Henderson had been supplying information about Iraq to the British intelligence agencies on a regular basis.
The inquiry revealed details of the British government's secret decision to supply Saddam with even more weapons-related equipment after the Halabja killings.
Former British foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe was found to have written that the end of the Iraq-Iran war could mean "major opportunities for British industry" in military exports, but he wanted to keep that proposal quiet.
"It could look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales," one of his officials told the Scott inquiry. Lord Scott condemned the government's decision to change its policy, while keeping MPs and the public in the dark.
Soon after the attack, the United States approved the export to Iraq of virus cultures and a billion-dollar contract to design and build a petrochemical plant the Iraqis planned to use to produce mustard gas.
Saddam Hussein has appeared so far without a lawyer to defend him. A Jordanian firm is reported to be speaking up for him. But the real defense for him could be waiting for him in Washington and London.
For more on this watch this video at http://video.google.com/...
If regime change is the expressed objectives of U.S. planners, there will always be talk of assassination, because it is less costly in terms of resources compared to conventional military action it requires lip-service be paid to this. However, assassination plots were always rebuffed on the grounds that Saddam had a host of look-alikes. Is it possible that one of Saddam’s look-alikes was killed in his stead? If so, is his history with the CIA grounds for suspicions? As the expression goes: "the CIA takes care of its own."
Here are the first two stories on the list at www.google.com when I typed "Saddam look alikes" into the search query bar, just to demonstrate that Saddam having look-alikes was information in the public domain.
Yes, but where are the Saddam look-alikes?
COLLATERAL DAMAGE/SIDDHARTH VARADARAJAN
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...
"Ever since the fall of Baghdad, everyone's been asking where's Saddam and where are the weapons of mass destruction he allegedly had. Fair enough. But the question that intrigues me the most is this: Where on earth are his famed look-alikes? If Saddam is dead, did they all, to the last man, die with him? And if he's slipped out of the country -- to Syria, Belarus, wherever -- did he manage to take each and every one of his replicas with him? Are there, even as we speak, a dozen Saddams sadly sipping vodka (doubles, no doubt) in some seedy bar in Minsk or Vitebsk?
From the first day, Iraqi television began broadcasting footage of a defiant Saddam untouched by the US `decapitation strike' against him, the American and British media have been telling us not to trust our own eyes. Even though you think you're seeing Saddam, reporters told us breathlessly, you can't be sure because the Iraqi leader is known to use a series of body doubles for his public appearances. This claim was often simply asserted as fact, or at best sourced to ‘Iraqi exiles’ and ‘Western intelligence agencies’."
Here is the second article.
"Fate of Saddam's look-alikes remains unknown"
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
"The long-awaited capture of Saddam Hussein brought euphoria to many, and for a curious few, it raised a simple question: Whatever became of the deposed leader's team of look-alikes?
Military officials in Washington yesterday said they hadn't heard of any Saddam body doubles being arrested during the hunt for the real thing.
"It's very well-known he had and employed body doubles," one defense official said. "But as far as what became of his body doubles, we simply don't know."
Saddam is said to have made regular use of look-alikes during his reign of power. Popping up in place of their boss, they mainly were used to obscure his whereabouts.
Before the war, one Saddam expert reportedly said observant Iraqis could tell the real Saddam from a look-alike by studying his body guards. If they laughed or appeared to lack seriousness, it was a tip-off that they were guarding a phony, because they simply wouldn't behave like that around the real thing.
Saddam's behavior around cameras was another indicator. He had a hankering for close-ups, while a look-alike would keep a distance.
It wasn't entirely clear whether it was the real Saddam or an extra who was running around Baghdad about the time the city fell. Hours after American troops had taken the airport, a man said to be Saddam showed up on Iraqi television walking in a green military outfit through a crowd of chanting Iraqis.
The look-alike issue made headlines again a few days later when it surfaced that the ousted dictator's statue, torn to earth in downtown Baghdad, actually was a sculpture of one of his impersonators.
All the talk of body doubles, made it seem likely at least a few would have been arrested during the numerous raids by coalition forces during the eight months since Baghdad fell.
A military official in Baghdad said by e-mail yesterday it "is possible that individuals that look like Saddam have been arrested and released, but we don't receive reports on every arrest, so we really can't give you any hard facts."
The troops rounded up weapons and suspects during house and village raids particularly in central Iraq, where Saddam's network is strongest. Although some are held, others are released when their identities turn out different from originally thought.
That wasn't the case on Saturday night when raiders found a bearded, grimy-looking Saddam cowering in hole just south of Tikrit, a stronghold 90 miles north of Baghdad.
While kept secret at first, it didn't take long before American and Iraqi officials felt sure enough to announce to the world that they had the real thing. Still, there were skeptics.
Over the weekend, one soldier, recently back from Iraq with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which was instrumental in toppling Baghdad, put it perhaps best.
"It doesn't mean anything to me, with all the talk of all the [Saddam] impersonators, until they do DNA tests and know absolutely that it's him," the soldier told the Associated Press at the 3rd Division's headquarters in Fort Stewart, Ga.
On Sunday, the head of the U.S.-installed interim Iraqi Governing Council appeared in Madrid, saying DNA tests confirmed that the man found in the hole was Saddam, although specific details of the tests weren't made clear.
Speaking at the Pentagon yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters: "Since we have received DNA — I guess you'd call it proof, or that's — I think it's probably 99-point-something percent proof positive is what they say."
Mr. Rumsfeld emphasized that Saddam admitted his identity when captured and several of his former Cabinet members and members of the new Iraqi Governing Council had confirmed he wasn't a body double.
"Knowing that his doubles had used plastic surgery and could very well have done duplicate tattoos and bullet holes and various things [like] moles that would make it appear they were Saddam Hussein, the decision was made to have him publicly identified," Mr. Rumsfeld said."
Of course, as with virtually all conspiracy suspicions, there is no more than circumstantial evidence in this instance. There is absolutely no physical evidence, such as a DNA test of the man on the gallows purported to be Saddam. Even in the case of the 9/11 conspiracy suspicions, all the physical evidence analysis was refuted by equally credible sources.
In fact, the only way to get physical evidence in this case would be to be an insider in the U.S. or Iraqi government, which I am not. But, there is probably no reason to be concerned in this instance. I mean – we can trust our government and media... Right?