by Norm Winick
Newspapers and websites around the world are reporting that the U.S. didn’t track down and find Saddam Hussein but rather that the Kurds had caught and imprisoned him and told us where to pick him up.
In a December 22nd story in the Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald, their Baghdad correspondent Paul McGeough reports: ³Washington’s claims that brilliant U.S. 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 U.S. merely had to go to a farm identified by the Kurds to bag the fugitive former president.²
A report on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Company gives even more details gleamed from the pages of a British tabloid, the Sunday Express: ³Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him.²
³Saddam 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.² That version was attributed to an unnamed senior British military officer.
The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, says that Kurdish media reported that ³Saddam Hussein, the former president of the Iraqi regime, was captured by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan² hours before American officials claimed they had captured him.
Other reports have even speculated that the Kurds caught and held Saddam for up to several months while negotiating a trade with the U.S. possibly even for an independent Kurdistan.
These theories claim that Saddam was a prisoner in the spider hole and that explains his dishevelled appearance and apparent drugged state. They don’t help explain the loaded gun or money found with him.
I don’t know whether there’s any truth to these tales but after the government’s embellishment of the Jessica Lynch and Saddam statue tumbling incidents, I don’t know who to believe any more.
The mainstream U.S. media has an obligation to determine the truth and let us know if our government is once again misleading us.
Again, they are failing.