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America's Uday and Qusay Conjuring Trick
Latest White House lies reveal larger hidden untruths

24 July 2003

If the latest story about the adventurous American 101st Airborne Division was true, Saddam Hussein's two sons, his grandson and their solitary bodyguard, would have to go down in history as some of the world’s greatest and bravest fighters. According to the media these four heroic individuals, including one cripple and one child, managed to fight off 200 heavily armed and highly aggressive members of the 101st Airborne for six long hours, before finally perishing in a hail of Hellfire missiles launched by helicopter gunships.
The only way four lonely defenders could stay alive more than five minutes under these circumstances, would be if they were inside a heavily reinforced underground bunker, protected James Bond-style by automatic or remote controlled heavy weapons. But no, the gang of four were allegedly quietly sipping mint tea in the kitchen of a completely vulnerable Mosul villa, which had earlier been used by members of the 101st Airborne as requisitioned accommodation.
Time to leave the Washington world of media spin for a moment here, and briefly touch base with reality. Uday and Qusay do not get along at the best of times, and in any event, for security reasons travel independently with separate highly-trained teams of special forces bodyguards front and rear.
Uday and Qusay always have “back doors” through which to exit from any given location or locations, and would be insane to even consider hiding in a house in Mosul, a northern Iraqi city surrounded on all sides by murderous Kurdish terrorists, each and every one of whom would murder either or both brothers for ten cents. Both brothers are flamboyant and perhaps even eccentric, but neither is insane. Now let us discard reality completely, and catch up with the latest absurd White House propaganda.
"Individuals of very high interest to the coalition forces were hiding out in the building," Lieutenant Colonel William Bishop of the 101st Airborne Division told Reuters, which of course begs the question of why these “Individuals of very high interest” were not simply surrounded, and then slowly starved out of the photogenic villa in a blaze of media publicity. Nor am I alone in wondering about this obvious beneficial alternative course of action.
Fox News military analyst Colonel Bill Cowan said he hoped Saddam's sons had been captured and not killed. "I think in this case, it'd be great to have them alive," he said. "I think for the [Iraqi] population to see these two guys. shackled, incarcerated and really given harsh treatment, will have a most profound and long-term psychological advantage."
Alas, this was not to be, because the 200 members of the brave 101st apparently found the two men, one cripple and one boy in the photogenic villa much too much hard to handle. An anonymous soldier “involved” in the operation allegedly told Steve Centanni of Fox News that containment was not an option. "We received direct fire from the building multiple times. We used a scaled escalation of force, and had to use bigger caliber weapons to render the building safe" The 101st Airborne allegedly used all the weapons in its arsenal, including grenade launchers, missiles and helicopters.
It was around this point in time that the four dead “Individuals of very high interest” were converted into “three Husseins and a single bodyguard”, primarily because a US official told Fox News "they were shot up so much that it is difficult to make a positive identification of the bodies”. Decoded, this of course meant that the White House could go ahead with its master propaganda ploy to demoralize the Iraqi people, by claiming Saddam’s two sons were dead.
Certainly it was time to kill someone other than poor old Saddam, who has allegedly been killed so often by American forces that nowadays no-one, including American servicemen, believes this pathetic rubbish. So the staged deaths of “hated” Uday and Qusay Hussein were a new version of the old Saddam theme, designed not only to demoralize the Iraqi people, but also to bolster American military morale, which recently reached non-existent level in Iraq.
In their rush to “verify” the new propaganda and make it stick, American officials have unwittingly uncovered a more profound level of Administration untruth, going to the very heart of how many “wanted” Iraqis on the famous “Deck of Cards” have actually been captured, or are still at large. In what may yet prove to be a terminal error of judgement, a White House official told CNN yesterday that the bodies of Uday and Qusay had been visually “positively identified” by none other than Lieutenant General Abid Hamid Mahmud al Tikriti, Saddam’s closest aide, and the Ace of Diamonds in the pack. You may remember that the American Administration claimed to have captured Lieutenant General al Tikriti on June 17, 2003, but for reasons that will soon become obvious, failed to parade him shackled and shamed in front of the world media, just as Colonel Bill Cowan of Fox News wanted to do with Uday and Qusay Hussein.



Saeed al-Sahaf
Tariq Aziz
Think about this people, think about it very hard. The only thing preventing the Administration from gleefully parading Lieutenant General Abid Hamid Mahmud al Tikriti in front of the media cameras, is the fact they never captured him at all. Now go search the archives, and try to find media video footage taken after the "arrest" of any of the other 34 “wanted criminals” on the Deck of Cards that America claims to have in custody. No media footage? What a surprise…
There are exceptions to this rule of course, most notably in the cases of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, and Minister of Information Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, but neither was a member of the inner council. Tariq Aziz is the only Christian Minister in Iraq, and was arrested by American troops on camera, dispelling any myth that the American Administration might wish to avoid causing “embarrassment” to senior ranking Iraqi officials. Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf was a former school teacher, also arrested on camera and then allowed to return home.
The compulsion of Washington and New York psychotics to “parade and shame” their prisoners for all the world to see, is very well documented, always provided they really have the prisoners in custody. Anyone remember “war criminal” Slobodan Milosevic? The media was fed thousands of feet of video footage showing Slobodan being snatched from his house, bundled into his car, then hustled into a helicopter before being transferred to a plane for the Hague.
Then more riveting media footage of Slobodan Milosevic stooped forward in his American handcuffs, while unhinged viewers in the White House and Department of State dribbled spittle down their shirt fronts in a parody of sexual excitement.
Independent journalist Robert Fisk recently highlighted this disgusting “show and tell” compulsion on the street of Baghdad, when the car carrying Danish engineer Qais al-Salman came under American fire. Qais was carrying his Danish Passport, Danish driving license and medical records, but they did him no good at all. In Qais al-Salman’s own words:
"A civilian car came up with American soldiers in it. Then more soldiers in military vehicles. I told them I didn't understand what had happened, that I was a scientific researcher. But they made me lie down in the street, tied my arms behind me with plastic-and-steel cuffs and tied up my feet and put me in one of their vehicles.
"After 10 minutes in the vehicle, I was taken out again. There were journalists with cameras. The group of Americans untied me, then made me lie on the road again. Then, in front of the cameras, they tied my hands and feet all over again and put me back in the vehicle." It was “show and tell” time for the American media, despite the fact that Qais al-Salman was in Iraq specifically to help repair Baghdad’s bomb-damaged water purification plants.
This is what the Americans do to a single Danish civil engineer they just happen to shoot up on the streets of Baghdad. Now imagine the magnified reaction if they had really captured Lieutenant General al Tikriti. For a star of this magnitude, Hollywood would unquestionably be called in, glittering silver-plated shackles would festoon the hapless General from head to toe, and in all probability Steven Spielberg would suddenly appear in a flak jacket to direct the action.
If there is anyone out there who still believes that the American Administration has actually captured 34 “wanted criminals” including Lieutenant General Abid Hamid Mahmud al Tikriti, and also killed Uday and Qusay Hussein, then I have failed in my job. Of course, the White House is promising to show you some “selected” photographs of the dead Uday and Qusay in a week or two, presumably when experts have finally finished manufacturing the forged pictures on Adobe or Paint Shop Pro in Washington.
The harsh reality is that nearly all of the human Iraqi command, control, communications and intelligence structure is still intact, and currently directing extremely professional counter-insurgency operations against American and British invasion forces. Most “coalition of the willing” soldiers in Iraq are painfully aware of this fact, and no amount of pathetic propaganda peddled by the White House is going to dull their sharp awareness.
Put bluntly, coalition soldiers in Iraq, especially Americans, have apparently already reached the critical point where direct action against their own commanders is starting to seem more attractive than simply allowing themselves to be blown apart in a politically-contrived “war”, against a country which has never presented a clear and present danger to America.
It is a well known fact that members of the 3rd Infantry Division have now been told three times already, that they cannot return to their wives and families in America, which is producing anger of an extremely dangerous though understandable kind. What is less well known is the low level but persistent rumor that certain members of this division are threatening to “take out” [kill] Paul Bremer and Adnan Chalabi, who they apparently perceive as traitors sacrificing American military lives for Israeli and American multinational interests.
Certainly with their own firepower, plus countless captured Iraqi weapons and continual access to the designated targets, this objective could be achieved with ease, and be made to look like an Iraqi attack. Whether or not it will actually proceed is anyone’s guess, especially as Iraqi counter-insurgency forces almost certainly have the same targets on their own list. About the only certainty is that if Bremer and Chalabi hang around for much longer, they will be killed one way or the other, and their deaths will automatically be blamed on the Iraqis.

Turning the prestigious 101st Airborne into propaganda puppets at Mosul, is a new move that might prove extremely hazardous for the American political establishment. While almost anyone in the 101st will proudly tell you “We kick ass”, they will not tolerate being taken for fools by anyone, nor will they blatantly lie on political command. especially when their members are being killed in some irrelevant part of the Iraqi western desert, as happened last week.
In the long term it is prestigious units like the 101st that present by far the greatest danger to corrupt politicians in Washington, DC. Push these folks too far, and there is a remote possibility that one of their Apache gunships might wander off course over the national Capital, and accidentally flick a couple of live Hellfire missiles through the windows of the Oval Office.