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Iraq | |||||
Saddam talking to Americans? | |||||
2003-09-21 | |||||
Daily Mirror may be no better than the National Enquirer, so bring your salt-lick. SADDAM Hussein has been in secret negotiations with US forces in Iraq for the past nine days, we can reveal. Breathlessly, they say! The Iraqi dictator is demanding safe passage to the former Soviet republic of Belarus. In exchange, he has vowed to provide information on weapons of mass destruction and disclose bank accounts where he siphoned off tens of millions of dollars in plundered cash. That deal got nixed even before the war. President Bush is being kept abreast of the extraordinary talks by his National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice. She is co-ordinating negotiations in Baghdad which are led by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of American forces in Iraq. The United States has vowed never to negotiate with Saddam and want to take him dead or alive, but the White House hopes the clandestine talks will allow them to pinpoint the tyrant’s exact location. Sammy’s been pretty stooopid about a lot of stuff, but not in personal security. Saddam’s English-speaking representative walked into the US HQ at Tikrit - the dictator’s home town - on September 12 and asked to talk to senior officers. He then led a group of US troops to a nearby suburb where one of Saddam’s loyal security chiefs was waiting. The US officers were handed a hand-written note, purportedly from Saddam himself. "To Infidel Pig-Dogs, I demand you give me safe passage to Belarus. I demand you give me my wealth. I demand ... demand ... please don’t kill me!" The security boss had a British-made Racal military radio set which he claimed gave him direct contact with people in the same room as the dictator. The radio is notoriously difficult to monitor. There’s a challenge.
Naturally! He maintained that Saddam had decided to seek a deal "because he is desperate, trapped and finding fewer and fewer people willing to give him shelter." No! Sammy? I thought he got 100% of the vote! Why wouldn’t any Iraqi give their glorious leader shelter? He added: "He resorts to arriving with a posse of armed men, and forcing them to give him hospitality. When he leaves the frightened ’hosts’ are told they’ll be killed if they say a word." Sammy knows that won’t go on much longer. It is believed the US authorities will simply string Saddam along, aiming to track the go-betweens until they know exactly where to find the rogue leader. Yep, that’s us! "There’s no doubt the net is closing, and that his supporters’ efforts to get the Americans to pull out of Iraq are not succeeding," said the source. "They can cause disruption and problems, but this does not bring Saddam any nearer to coming back to power, and he now knows it. The negotiators will try to keep the line of communication open as long as possible, but the word from Washington is: ’No deal’."
-SADDAM addressed the US president directly and gave him a possible get-out for a negotiated surrender. "There might be some who lied to you, but you believed those lies," he said, hinting that coalition intelligence was badly wrong."Ali, front and center!" "Yes, sab, how may I serve "Lissen, we’re supposed to have a dialogue with you about how we’re to leave." "Oh yes, please, let’s have dialogue." "Here it is. Sammy surrenders, then we kill him, then we get your country ready for democracy. Then we leave. Clear?" "Oh yes, [gulp] very clear." "Now, you go tell Sammy what we just said." "Isn’t there anyone else, sab?" Although Saddam was still proposing an unconditional American withdrawal from Iraq, coalition chiefs took his latest statement as a willingness to talk. Since the fall of Baghdad in April the dictator has remained on the run. Saddam-hunters say he moves disguised as a peasant or labourer in a long white dishdasha (gown), especially in remote countryside. Fearing he will be spotted and betrayed, he seldom stays in one place for more than two hours. He is often sheltered by tribal leaders whom he appointed to replace the real leaders during his reign of terror. "They owe their very existence and their status and money to him, so they feel a strong obligation," said one hunter. "But the feeling of obligation gets less and less as time passes and the pressure mounts."
Saddam hunters have issued several photofit images of how he might look. He has apparently run out of black hair-dye and will almost certainly have white hair. Sammy dyed his hair? How, um, vain.
It’d be great if the reward money could be split amongst the 3ID, or the 4ID, or the 101st. Or all of them. | |||||
Posted by:Steve White |
#3 Bah. If he's moving every two hours, he's not getting much sleep, is he? |
Posted by: Ptah 2003-9-21 9:17:09 PM |
#2 "Should work." *g* Except that I really can't imagine Saddam being so stupid as to use a cellphone given to him by the Americans. |
Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2003-9-21 9:06:18 PM |
#1 Someone in the American command structure needs to 'give' one of these flunkies a cell-phone, and tell him that we will only negotiate with Saddam over that phone. Then we need to have Saddam call us about every 2-3 hours, asking if the deal is 'on' yet. Each time, we need to pinpoint his exact location, but NOT bomb it. Keep this up for a couple of weeks, keep sticking pins into a mapboard. Once he starts repeating himself for the second or third time, then we swoop in on ALL of those locations at once, capturing anyone and everyone within a half-block radius. Toss out the little fish, lock the big ones down hard, and interrogate the middle fish. Should work. Hope someone in Baghdad or somewhere thinks like that, too. |
Posted by: Old Patriot 2003-9-21 8:44:17 PM |