More proof damning Saddam

“Bush supporters should be all over this! This is exactly the kind of proof Bush needs to "prove" Saddam was behind 9/11.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/26/sprj.irq.mural/index.html”

“Don't know if it is proof...but some Iraqis sure must've enjoyed seeing the Two Towers come down.”

“I hope they enjoyed it just as much as I'll enjoy Saadam being blown up.”

“Where can I get one of those wrist watches?”

“If we invaded Saudi Arabia we would probably find the same type of thing. Heck we’d probably find the same type of thing in any Arab country. They all hate us.”

“Seems I saw similar pictures on CNN, Faux and MSNBC quite a bit.


The media hates us?”

“Don't they consider dieing for your country an honor. Maybe they are honoring us.”

“You'd probably find that on Violin's shower curtain too!

Proof?

Of What?”

“I use a Soviet flag as a shower curtain Tom.”

“Fiend!!!”

“Not long after 9/11/01, there was a 2001 Muslim calender found in England (?) that had a similar scene, New York skyline, plane, and flames. I saw the scene on the calender on a report somewhere.

Im not sure if they start their year the same month as the calender system we use, but I would supect it is close to January, which could mean that there were many in the Muslim world that knew something was going to happen for quite a while before it actually did. Time may tell if this was indeed the case.”

“I know this one came up before but I hadn’t seen it reported by the ‘mainstream media’. Frankly, I’m a little surprised the right-wing UPI ran this one. Saddam key in early CIA plot. I had read that Saddam “came to Baghdad on a CIA train” but this article includes a lot of detail. Enjoy!”

“Here is the url for the risk adverse:

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030410-070214-6557r”

“the url and link ain't workin' for me.”

“Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot
By Richard Sale
UPI Intelligence Correspondent
From the International Desk
Published 4/10/2003 7:30 PM


U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.

United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report.

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed."

According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.

Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power," according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."

In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."

According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.

Adel Darwish, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.

Darwish said that Saddam's paymaster was Capt. Abdel Maquid Farid, the assistant military attaché at the Egyptian Embassy who paid for the apartment from his own personal account. Three former senior U.S. officials have confirmed that this is accurate.

The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched. Accounts differ. One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish told UPI that one of the assassins had bullets that did not fit his gun and that another had a hand grenade that got stuck in the lining of his coat.

"It bordered on farce," a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. But Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. government officials said.

Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said.

One former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that even then Saddam "was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a cutthroat."

In Cairo, Saddam was installed in an apartment in the upper class neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana Café, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives, according to Darwish and former U.S. intelligence officials.

One former senior U.S. government official said: "In Cairo, I often went to Groppie Café at Emad Eldine Pasha Street, which was very posh, very upper class. Saddam would not have fit in there. The Indiana was your basic dive."

But during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew Saddam, former U.S. intelligence officials said.

Saddam's U.S. handlers even pushed Saddam to get his Egyptian handlers to raise his monthly allowance, a gesture not appreciated by Egyptian officials since they knew of Saddam's American connection, according to Darwish. His assertion was confirmed by former U.S. diplomat in Egypt at the time.

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed recently that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this.

"We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running around asking what the hell had happened," this official said.

But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.

Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.

A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: "We were frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have to get kidding. This was serious business."

A former senior CIA official said: "It was a bit like the mysterious killings of Iran's communists just after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. All 4,000 of his communists suddenly got killed."

British scholar Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," quotes Jim Critchfield, then a senior Middle East agency official, as saying the killing of Qasim and the communists was regarded "as a great victory." A former long-time covert U.S. intelligence operative and friend of Critchfield said: "Jim was an old Middle East hand. He wasn't sorry to see the communists go at all. Hey, we were playing for keeps."

Saddam, in the meantime, became head of al-Jihaz a-Khas, the secret intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party.

The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq's armed forces, according to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency intelligence group.

This former official said that he personally had signed off on a document that shared U.S. satellite intelligence with both Iraq and Iran in an attempt to produce a military stalemate. "When I signed it, I thought I was losing my mind," the former official told UPI.

A former CIA official said that Saddam had assigned a top team of three senior officers from the Estikhbarat, Iraq's military intelligence, to meet with the Americans.

According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam's ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.

The Saddam-U.S. intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end at 2 a.m. Aug. 2, 1990, when 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded its neighbor, Kuwait. America's one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.”

“What a flaky report, just a few gaps in the resume there. We jump from 1959 to 63...OK, but there is those few missing years from 1963 until 1980 unaccounted for or 17 years.

Those 17 years were
John F. Kennedy - 2 months -Dem
Lyndon B. Johnson -4 years -Dem
Richard M. Nixon - 6 years -Rep
Gerald Ford 2 years -Rep
Jimmy Carter 4 years - Dem

or evenly divided between both major parties.
I do know that in 1972, Bagdad had a bunch of Russian technicians there, most of whom were scared sh*tless and just wanted OUT of the place. I know that because I was there and talked to them. At that time a lot of underdeveloped countries were playing the US and USSR off against each other to see who would provide more aid.
Iran was pro-US, Iraq pro-USSR, Afghanistan was neutral.”

“Score card?

Dems, Reps, whatever”

“What about that third party void where no corporations graze”

“Keep your fences tight or the corporations will bust right in!”

“He has/had a big head and a really bushy mustache.”

“The Westernization Of Iraq!

Iraq”

“Weapons of WTF!”

“Let's break these people in the right way! Have a Good McDay!

Link”

“Saddam had them nukes hidden in his moustache!


(Hate to tell you Treebeard... that's MARS, LOL)”

“It doesn't matter whether the president were Republicans or Democrars. The point is, and this goes way beyond what is documented in the news story - is that US interventions in the rest of the world often create all kinds of problems that persist for many decades. Saddam's reigh would not have been possible without the US.”

“I know that, Tilt! That was the subtle part of the joke...”

“oooOOOOOoooh.

Suuuuuure it was, <G>.”