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News :: Iraq |
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We Got Him: Kurds Say They Caught Saddam |
Current rating: 0 |
by Paul McGeough
(No verified email address) |
22 Dec 2003
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Saddam seizure story looks to be latest Pentagon tall tale tofall apart under closer inspection |
Washington's claims that brilliant US intelligence work led to the capture of Saddam Hussein are being challenged by reports sourced in Iraq's Kurdish media claiming that its militia set the circumstances in which the US merely had to go to a farm identified by the Kurds to bag the fugitive former president.
The first media account of the December 13 arrest was aired by a Tehran-based news agency.
American forces took Saddam into custody around 8.30pm local time, but sat on the news until 3pm the next day.
However, in the early hours of Sunday, a Kurdish language wire service reported explicitly: "Saddam Hussein was captured by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. A special intelligence unit led by Qusrat Rasul Ali, a high-ranking member of the PUK, found Saddam Hussein in the city of Tikrit, his birthplace.
"Qusrat's team was accompanied by a group of US soldiers. Further details of the capture will emerge during the day; but the global Kurdish party is about to begin!"
The head of the PUK, Jalal Talabani, was in the Iranian capital en route to Europe.
The Western media in Baghdad were electrified by the Iranian agency's revelation, but as reports of the arrest built, they relied almost exclusively on accounts from US military and intelligence organisations, starting with the words of the US-appointed administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer: "Ladies and gentlemen: we got 'im".
US officials said that they had extracted the vital piece of information on Saddam's whereabouts from one of the 20 suspects around 5.30pm on December 13 and had immediately assembled a 600-strong force to surround the farm on which he was captured at al-Dwar, south of Tikrit.
Little attention was paid to a line in Pentagon briefings that some of the Kurdish militia might have been in on what was described as a "joint operation"; or to a statement by Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraq National Congress, which said that Qusrat and his PUK forces had provided vital information and more.
A Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Herald, quoted from an interview aired on the PUK's al-Hurriyah radio station last Wednesday, in which Adil Murad, a member of the PUK's political bureau, said that the day before Saddam's capture he was tipped off by a PUK general - Thamir al-Sultan - that Saddam would be arrested within the next 72 hours.
An unnamed Western intelligence source in the Middle East was quoted in the British Sunday Express yesterday: "Saddam was not captured as a result of any American or British intelligence. We knew that someone would eventually take their revenge, it was just a matter of time."
There has been no American response to the Kurdish claims.
An intriguing question is why Kurdish forces were allowed to join what the US desperately needed to present as an American intelligence success - unless the Kurds had something vital to contribute to the operation so far south of their usual area of activity.
A report from the PUK's northern stronghold, Suliymaniah, early last week claimed a vital intelligence breakthrough after a telephone conversation between Qusrat and Saddam's second wife, Samirah.
Copyright © 2003. The Sydney Morning Herald.
http://www.smh.com.au |
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Saddam Was Held By Kurdish Forces, Drugged And Left For US Troops |
by AFP
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Dec 2003
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LONDON, (AFP) - Saddam Hussein was captured by US troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him, a British Sunday newspaper said.
Saddam came into the hands of the Kurdish Patriotic Front after being betrayed to the group by a member of the al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, leading to a blood feud, reported the Sunday Express, which quoted an unnamed senior British military intelligence officer.
The newspaper said the full story of events leading up to the ousted Iraqi president's capture on December 13 near his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq, "exposes the version peddled by American spin doctors as incomplete".
A former Iraqi intelligence officer, whom the Express did not name, told the paper that Saddam was held prisoner by a leader of the Kurdish Patriotic Front, which fought alongside US forces during the Iraq war, until he negotiated a deal.
The deal apparently involved the group gaining political advantage in the region.
An unnamed Western intelligence source in the Middle East told the Express: "Saddam was not captured as a result of any American or British intelligence. We knew that someone would eventually take their revenge, it was just a matter of time."
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Revealed: Who Really Found Saddam? |
by David Pratt
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Dec 2003
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It was exactly one week ago at 3:15pm Baghdad time, when a beaming Paul Bremer made that now-famous announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!"
Saddam Hussein: High Value Target Number One. The Glorious Leader. The Lion of Babylon had been snared. Iraq's most wanted - the ace of spades - had become little more than an ace in the hole.
In Baghdad's streets, Kalashnikov bullets rained down in celebration. In the billets of US soldiers, there were high fives, toasts and cigars. In the Jordanian capital Amman, an elderly woman overcome by grief broke down in tears and died. Inside a snow-blanketed White House, George W Bush prepared to address the nation.
"There's an end to everything," said a somber Safa Saber al'Douri, a former Iraqi air force pilot, now a grocer in al-Dwar, the town where only hours earlier one of the greatest manhunts in history had ended under a polystyrene hatch in a six foot deep "spider hole."
But just how did that endgame come about? Indeed, who exactly were the key players in what until then had been a frustrating and sometimes embarrassing hunt for a former dictator with a $25 million (£14m) bounty on his head?
For 249 days there was no shortage of US expertise devoted to the hunt. But the Pentagon has always remained tight-lipped about those individuals and groups involved, such as Task Force 20, said to be America's most elite covert unit, or another super-secret team known as Greyfox, which specializes in radio and telephone surveillance.
Saddam, of course, was never likely to use the phone, and the best chance of locating him would always be as a result of informers or home-grown Iraqi intelligence. On this and their collaboration with anti-Saddam groups the Americans have also remained reticent.
Enter one Qusrat Rasul Ali, otherwise known as the lion of Kurdistan. A leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Rasul Ali was once tortured by Saddam's henchmen, but today is chief of a special forces unit dedicated to hunting down former Ba'athist regime leaders.
Rasul Ali's unit had an impressive track record. It was they who last August, working alone, arrested Iraqi vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan in Mosul, northern Iraq. Barely a month earlier in the al-Falah district of the same town, the PUK is believed to have played a crucial role in the pinpointing and storming of a villa that culminated in the deaths of Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay.
In that mixed district of Mosul where Arabs, Kurds and Turkemen live side by side, PUK informers went running to their leader Jalal Talabani's nearest military headquarters to bring him news on the exact location of the villa where both Uday and Qusay had taken shelter.
Armed with the information, Talabani made a beeline for US administration offices in Baghdad, where deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz was based for a week's stay in Iraq at the time.
The Kurdish leader and US military chiefs conferred and decided that PUK intelligence would go ahead and secretly surround the Zeidan villa and install sensors and eavesdropping devices. The Kurdish agents were instructed to prepare the site for the US special forces operation to storm the building on July 22.
American officials later said they expected that the $30m bounty promised by their government for the capture or death of the Hussein sons would be paid. Given their direct involvement in providing the exact location and intelligence necessary, no doubt Talabani's PUK operatives could lay claim to the sum, but no confirmation of any delivery or receipt of the cash has ever been made.
The PUK and Rasul Ali's special "Ba'athist hunters" have, it seems, been doing what the Americans have consistently failed to do. In an interview with the PUK's al-Hurriyah radio station last Wednesday, Adil Murad, a member of the PUK's political bureau, confirmed that the Kurdish unit had been pursuing fugitive Ba'athists for the past months in Mosul, Samarra, Tikrit and areas to the south including al-Dwar where Saddam was eventually cornered. Murad even says that the day before Saddam's capture he was tipped off by PUK General Thamir al'Sultan, that Saddam would be arrested within the next 72 hours.
Clearly the Kurdish net was closing on Saddam, and PUK head Jalal Talabani and Rasul Ali were once again in the running for US bounty - should any be going.
It was at about 10:50am Baghdad time on last Saturday when US intelligence says it got the tip it was looking for. But it was not until 8pm, with the launch of Operation Red Dawn, that they finally began to close in on the prize.
The US media reported that the tip-off came from an Iraqi man who was arrested during a raid in Tikrit, and even speculated that he could get part of the bounty. "It was intelligence, actionable intelligence," claimed Lt General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq. "It was great analytical work."
But the widely held view that Kurdish intelligence was the key to the operation was supported in a statement released last Sunday by the Iraqi Governing Council. Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, said that Rasul Ali and his PUK special forces unit had provided vital information and more.
Last Saturday, as the US operation picked up speed, the Fourth Infantry Division moved into the area surrounding two farms codenamed Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2 near al-Dwar, the heart of the Saddam heartland - a military town where practically every man is a military officer past or present. It is said to have a special place in Saddam's sentiments because it was from here that he swam across the Tigris River when he was a dissident fleeing arrest in the 1960s.
Every year on August 28, the town marks Saddam's escape with a swimming contest . In 1992, Saddam himself attended the race. It was won by a man called Qais al-Nameq. It was al-Nameq's farmhouse - Wolverine 2 - that about 600 troops, including engineers, artillery and special forces, surrounded, cutting off all roads for about four or five miles around.
Next to a sheep pen was a ramshackle orange and white taxi, which US officials say was probably used to ferry Saddam around while he was on the run, sometimes moving every three or four hours.
Inside the premises was a walled compound with a mud hut and small lean-to. There US soldiers found the camouflaged hole in which Saddam was hiding.
It was 3:15pm Washington time when Donald Rumsfeld called George W Bush at Camp David. "Mr President, first reports are not always accurate," he began. "But we think we may have him."
First reports - indeed the very first report of Saddam's capture - were also coming out elsewhere. Jalal Talabani chose to leak the news and details of Rasul Ali's role in the deployment to the Iranian media and to be interviewed by them.
By early Sunday - way before Saddam's capture was being reported by the mainstream Western press - the Kurdish media ran the following news wire:
"Saddam Hussein, the former President of the Iraqi regime, was captured by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. A special intelligence unit led by Qusrat Rasul Ali, a high-ranking member of the PUK, found Saddam Hussein in the city of Tikrit, his birthplace. Qusrat's team was accompanied by a group of US soldiers. Further details of the capture will emerge during the day; but the global Kurdish party is about to begin!"
By the time Western press agencies were running the same story, the emphasis had changed, and the ousted Iraqi president had been "captured in a raid by US forces backed by Kurdish fighters."
Rasul Ali himself, meanwhile, had already been on air at the Iranian satellite station al-Alam insisting that his "PUK fighters sealed the area off before the arrival of the US forces".
By late Sunday as the story went global, the Kurdish role was reduced to a supportive one in what was described by the Pentagon and US military officials as a "joint operation". The Americans now somewhat reluctantly were admitting that PUK fighters were on the ground alongside them , while PUK sources were making more considered statements and playing down their precise role.
So just who did get to Saddam first, the Kurds or the Americans? And if indeed it was a joint operation would it have been possible at all without the intelligence and on-the-ground participation of Rasul Ali and his special forces?
If the PUK themselves pulled off Saddam's capture, there would be much to gain from taking the $25m bounty and any political guarantees the Americans might reward them with to keep schtum. What's more, Jalal Talabani's links to Tehran have always worried Washington, and having his party grab the grand prize from beneath their noses would be awkward to say the least.
"It's mutually worth it to us and the Americans. We need assurances for the future and they need the kudos of getting Saddam," admitted a Kurdish source on condition of anonymity. It would be all to easy to dismiss the questions surrounding the PUK role as conspiracy theory. After all, almost every major event that affects the Arab world prompts tales that are quickly woven into intricate shapes and patterns, to demonstrate innocence, seek credit or apportion blame. Saddam's capture is no exception.
Of the numerous and more exotic theories surrounding events leading to Saddam's arrest, one originates on a website many believe edited by former Israeli intelligence agents, but which often turns up inside information about the Middle East that proves to be accurate.
According to Debka.com, there is a possibility that Saddam was held for up to three weeks in al-Dwar by a Kurdish splinter group while they negotiated a handover to the Americans in return for the $25m reward. This, the writers say would explain his disheveled and disorientated appearance.
But perhaps the mother of all conspiracy theories, is the one about the pictures distributed by the Americans showing the hideout with a palm tree behind the soldier who uncovered the hole where Saddam was hiding. The palm carried a cluster of pre-ripened yellow dates, which might suggest that Saddam was arrested at least three months earlier, because dates ripen in the summer when they turn into their black or brown color.
Those who buy into such an explanation conclude that Saddam's capture was stage-managed and his place of arrest probably elsewhere. All fanciful stuff. But as is so often the case, the real chain of events is likely to be far more mundane.
In the end serious questions remain about the Kurdish role and whether at last Sunday's Baghdad press conference, Paul Bremer was telling the whole truth . Or is it a case of "ladies and gentlemen we got him," - with a little more help from our Kurdish friends than might be politically expedient to admit?
©2003 newsquest (sunday herald) limited.
http://www.sundayherald.com |
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Re: We Got Him: Kurds Say They Caught Saddam |
by chef
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
23 Dec 2003
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Well, I guess it's settled then...after all, the infidels aren't outside of Baghdad either. Isn't that what the inforation minister said?
Did it ever occur to you that sometimes what people say isn't actually the truth? |
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Revealed -- Saddam's Network Or A PSYOPS Campaign? |
by Sam Gardiner
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
24 Dec 2003
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We are seeing an orchestrated media campaign by the administration and a psychological operation aimed at the insurgents in Iraq. The success of this campaign can be measured by recent articles in The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.
Looking at the nearly 100 other press reports in the five days since Saddam's capture, one theme is clear: Saddam Hussein was captured, and the United States is on the verge of breaking the Iraqi insurgency.
But is it really?
As a former instructor at the National War College, Air War College and Naval War College, I am familiar with the pattern of using the press to conduct psychological operations against internal audiences in Iraq. The technique is straightforward: plant stories or persuade media outlets to slant the news in a way that debilitates your enemy. And so far, media reports on the intelligence significance of Saddam's capture have followed that pattern to the letter.
President Bush's interview with ABC News on December 16 heralded the debut of the military's post-capture media strategy. In it, Bush stated that he believed that the arrest of Saddam Hussein "will encourage more Iraqis to step up." The capture was styled as a major event, a turning point.
The groundwork for this media and psychological operations had already been laid that day when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the US military commander in Iraq, gave a press conference:
Question: General, how involved was Saddam Hussein in the insurgency? What have you been able to find out over the past 48 hours?
General Myers: I think there will be some intelligence that we get from the capture of Saddam Hussein. That will be analyzed and worked over time. And I think right now it's inappropriate to speculate on what we might find in terms of his involvement. But, of course, there will be intelligence value to the fact that he is now in coalition hands.
Question: General, is he --
General Myers: Let me -- just a minute. Let me -- let me --
Question: -- is he inside the country at the moment? Can you tell us where Saddam is?
General Sanchez: Let me add my part to your question. As I've always stated, repeatedly, our expectation was that Saddam was probably involved in intent and in financing. And so far, that is still my belief. And more to follow from the interrogations. At this point, we have nothing further.
What we see here is General Myers giving the answer probably closer to the truth. He thinks there will be some intelligence that the US will get from the capture of Saddam Hussein. General Sanchez, however, interrupted his superior before General Myers could complete his answer.
Sanchez says the media and psyops theme: Saddam Hussein has been involved in the insurgency. Sanchez is very careful not to lie. He said "expectation" and "probably." He protects himself, but gets out the message.
Subsequent interviews with key players in the Saddam capture followed the same strategy: give the impression that there was some important intelligence, but without stating concretely that there was.
General Abizaid, the Commander of Central Command told media: "I don't want to characterize it as a great intelligence windfall . . . But it's clear that we have gained a greater understanding of how things work as a result of capturing him . . ."
Asked by reporters if US intelligence had found links between Saddam and the resistance, Colonel James Hickey, the brigade commander of the unit that found Saddam Hussein said: "There are links. There are so many links I don't have time to go into them. My estimate is he was, but I don't know for sure."
These remarks are a long way from stories published in The Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor on Dec. 17 and 18. Both stories reveal the windfall of a successful psychological operations thrust.
The December 17 Washington Post story was headlined "Hussein Document Exposes Network." The article described how a document found during the raid has enabled U.S. military authorities to assemble detailed knowledge of a key network behind as many as 14 insurgent cells.
On December 18, The Christian Science Monitor carried the finds to another level. Their article described how documents (now plural) revealed key details about guerrilla cells and appears to have allowed the U.S. to make quick progress rolling up "parts of the insurgency as a whole."
We've come full circle back to the president's message.
Adding to the themes, unnamed officials are also giving interviews to the press. One such official told the AP "that the guerrillas displayed no signs of a strict command-and-control hierarchy in the conventional military sense, but said dozens of independent cells have received some guidance from above."
Is this the truth? For all the public statements hinting that such reports are fact, items found at Saddam's hideout strongly suggest otherwise.
Saddam's temporary shelter was a mess. The soldiers found dirty laundry, bare shelves, leftover rice in a pot, one can of 7-UP, two Mars candy bars, and stale bread. The place was littered with garbage. The toilet was a trench outside the hut. There are no reports of files, no reports of trunks with documents, and no pictures of documents. Importantly, no communication devices were found.
This was not a command center. It is hard to believe that it was anything more than what it appeared. It was one of the hiding places of an individual desperately on the run. This was not the center of an insurgency network. It is very hard to see how any guidance came from that hole.
The Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor have done a terrible job reporting this story. Why are so few real questions raised by reporters when they are confronted with the military's media and psychological operations campaign? Why aren't they helping us get to truth?
The author is a retired Air Force Colonel and has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College, Air War College and Naval War College. He was recently a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defence College. During the Gulf War II, he was a regular guest on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, BBC radio and television and National Public Radio.
© MediaChannel.org, 2003. All rights reserved.
http://www.mediachannel.org/ |
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