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| Iraq |
| The Palace of Love |
| 2003-04-14 |
| His personal zoo has lions, cheetahs and a bear. Michael Jackson? His storehouse has $1 million in fine wines, liquor and heroin. Darryl Strawberry? His house has Cuban cigars, cases of champagne and downloaded pictures of prostitutes. Bill Clinton? While most Iraqis suffered under the U.N. sanctions that drove their country into poverty, Saddam Hussein's eldest son Odai lived a life of fast cars, expensive liquor and easy women, a tour through his bombed house showed Monday. Sigh, fast cars, expensive liquor and easy women. OK, so he also had a few bad habits. The walls of a gym were plastered with photographs of women downloaded from the Internet — "the biggest collection of naked women I'd ever seen," said Army Capt. Ed Ballanco, of Montville, N.J. "It looked like something at the Playboy Mansion." Among the photos were those of Jenna and Barbara Bush, President Bush's 21-year-old daughters, "dressed up very nice in evening clothes," Ballanco said, adding that soldiers took them "to protect the president." Uh, huh. I'm sure they are being very protective of those pictures Odai Hussein's compound is in a back corner of the Presidential Palace compound, a small city that boasts six-lane avenues, traffic lights and a hospital. U.S. soldiers who now occupy the grounds say they believe Odai's portion included a house, a warehouse, a gym, a gaudy house for women and a zoo. OK, so who did these guys have to shoot in order to occupy this little love nest? This scene needs to go into that GW2 movie. Scattered among the debris from a bomb that tore through Odai's house and exploded in a bunker below lay stationery with Odai's name in gold lettering, photographs of Odai and dozens of copies of Odai's doctoral dissertation, "The World After the Cold War." The house also indicated Odai's sybaritic side, something Iraqi dissenters have told of for decades: a hunger for alcohol, drugs and lots and lots of women. There were bottles of Cuervo 1800 tequila, Danska vodka and Delamain cognac, as well as Chimay, Corona and Miller Genuine Draft beers. Which I'm sure the troops seized for "testing". There were bags and boxes of pills and medicines everywhere — ginseng sexual fortifiers, heartburn medication and Prozac — and an Accu-Rite HIV Antibodies Screening Test Kit in Odai's office. Humm, anyone look in the bunker for Elvis? The house was filled with boxes from handguns and piles of magazines, including "Guns and Ammo" and "Guns," as well as Spanish car magazines and catalogs of JetSkis. Soldiers said they found receipts for sports cars signed by Odai. The underground parking garage and indoor swimming pool were destroyed by bombing that gutted the center of the house. In the next-door storehouse, were roomfuls of alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Ballanco estimated the alcohol's worth at $1 million. There were "Dom Perignon, French wines — all appellation controlee, some 30-40 years old — a lot of very good brandy, a lot of good whiskey," Ballanco said. "There were boxes of Cuban cigars that said `Odai Saddam Hussein' on them, hundreds of them. My guys smoked them." Life is good, very good. He said there were also six bags of heroin. He didn't know how much they held. "There are UNICEF boxes in there with kids' school supplies meant for the children of Iraq, yet these jerks took it," said Maj. Kent Rideout, 39, of San Antonio, Texas. Odai's obsession with sex was evident everywhere. The house was adorned with paintings of naked women, as well as bundles of Internet printouts of what appeared to be prostitutes, complete with handwritten ratings of each. Publish these names as a public health alert. One black book listed hundreds of women's names and phone numbers. Odai's bed was painted in gold trim, and his bathroom featured a sink and tub fitted with fixtures in a swan motif. One house apparently wasn't big enough for Odai's women. To one side, a gaudy house filled with bedrooms that is now a camp for U.S. soldiers appeared to once have housed women. It had statuettes of couples in foreplay, and couches everywhere with fluffy pillows. And it boasted another swimming pool, with a bar. "The pink and the cheesiness suggest it was a concubines' house," Ballanco said. Get your shots. Behind the house was a pen holding two cheetahs, five lion cubs and a young bear. Three German shepherds who guarded the compound have been adopted by soldiers, who feed them military rations. For the wilder animals, soldiers have been throwing in sheep from a nearby pen, said Spc. Pete Adams, of Lexington, Va. A feeding on Sunday, he said, "looked like something from the National Geographic Channel." PETA will have a fit. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #9 So, lets see...This is a guy who has more money and resources available than the annual budfget some states have here. He spends it on a lifestyle that sounds like it was out of the late 50's here? That is paradise to one of the most powerful leaders of the Arab world? Pathetic! |
| Posted by: anon 2003-04-15 00:16:02 |
| #8 I have to wonder what dissapeared before the good Captain got on scene... ;) |
| Posted by: mojo 2003-04-14 21:11:08 |
| #7 Miss Germany was there shortly before the war. Did she pose? |
| Posted by: Chuck 2003-04-14 21:07:30 |
| #6 The walls of a gym were plastered with photographs of women downloaded from the Internet — "the biggest collection of naked women I'd ever seen," said Army Capt. Ed Ballanco, of Montville, N.J. I'm kind of wondering if Cindy Margolis "contributed" to that collection.... ;) |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2003-04-14 16:01:45 |
| #5 Dang! Sorry! 'Night! |
| Posted by: FormerLiberal 2003-04-14 15:42:26 |
| #4 Geez. If Uday was going to fixate on young Bush family women, why not this one? |
| Posted by: someone 2003-04-14 15:42:20 |
| #3 In fake news today, the finding of Uday's ridiculous Heffneresque has had the effect of decimating the younger ranks of various protest organizations across the world. "Holy shit!" said Fred Campallata, 19, of Oxnard, Ca. "I thought that shit was only in movies. Now, while I gotta agree I'm no, like, stud or nuthin', shit, I ain't ugly like that [Uday] guy. He gets all the pussy he wants, and the only real sex you can get at a fuckin' rally is a hand job from some middle-age chick who still thinks it's 1967, doesn't shave anything, and smells like incense and fuckin' patchouli oil. Screw this shit. I'm gonna be fuckin' dictator!" |
| Posted by: FormerLiberal 2003-04-14 15:41:39 |
| #2 Didn't they also find Daddy Hussein's "Shaghdad"?? I heard discription of these places, and almost lost my lunch! |
| Posted by: Samma-lamma 2003-04-14 15:00:06 |
| #1 Other than a worry of making the animals ill, they could throw in Ba'athists. |
| Posted by: Tadderly 2003-04-14 14:53:28 |