The world according to Fallguy and his merry munchkins is:
I hate America. I hate Howie. I hate the West. I hate anything that is right of Stalin. I hate myself because my antecedents came from Cornwall.
for these reasons, i can turn a blind eye and pretend that im AliceFallguy , and this is Wonderland.
And i dont give a sh!t about killers as long as the yanks dont get any oil.( I dont care whether the Russkies, French or Chinese do though).
Dont read the stuff below, i never heard it before.
By Giles Whittell
A dossier released this week details the abuses in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But even more powerful are documents captured from the Iraqis which condemn the dictators regime in its own words
WHEN YOU BETRAY your brothers to the Iraqi secret police, they do write back. They send you a pre-printed postcard, a sky-blue thank you from a gangster government, embossed and ready for the mantelpiece. “Dear Comrade Citizen,” it reads. “Your participation in the preservation of the nation’s security is a service to you and your family, and to the future of your sons. Your information on the murderous criminals and agents is a national duty, and may God bless you for it. We offer you the best of greetings and encourage you to keep in touch via the following telephone numbers, staffed 24 hours a day . . .”
The Saddam terror machine takes pride in its velvet glove. This, after all, is a bureaucracy that has an entire agency devoted to reminding its members of each other’s birthdays and wedding anniversaries. But non-members are more likely to have felt its iron fist.
“We do not object to the decapitation of traitors,” says “Chemical Ali” Hasan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein’s chief enforcer, in response to a query about killing methods from one of his northern commandants. “But it would have been preferable if you had sent them to Security for the purpose of interrogating them. Security personnel could have extracted significant information from them prior to their execution.”
Behead by all means, but torture first. Such was the likely fate, both orderly and savage, of Saddam’s Kurdish prisoners at the time that their less fortunate brethren were being gassed before the first Gulf War. Once Kuwait was invaded, protocol suffered. One Iraqi general wrote to another that Kuwaitis were in the habit of praying in large numbers on their rooftops, to be told that “this can be remedied by opening fire on the roofs in question, with all weapons”.
Later the head of Iraqi special forces in the region issued more detailed instructions for dealing with troublemakers: “Walk to the demonstration area, without vehicles and ‘softly, softly’. Get close to the demonstrators from behind and close their alternative routes of escape. Open fire with everything you have, including rifles, automatic weapons, light artillery and flamethrowers, with the aim of killing all the demonstrators to serve as an example to others.”
Saddam’s men seem to have got the message, and then overreached themselves. A memo of September 26, 1990, from the Bariq area Special Forces HQ to Chemical Ali, who by then was running things in Kuwait, reads simply: “Shot a woman in the head for not stopping at a roadblock.”
The country that American and British troops are likely soon to invade is, by the standards of the information age, extraordinarily hard to know. Its isolation, strengthened by sanctions, is not threatened by tourism or the internet. The vast bulk of the information on which Washington is basing its drive for so-called regime change is from defectors and moles who must be taken at their word and journalists playing cat and mouse with minders.
The rule is that intelligence on Iraq comes ready-spun, but there is an exception. It weighs ten tonnes, takes up 40 cubic metres in a series of federal strongrooms in Colorado, fills 127 CD-Roms in electronic form and has been compared in terms of its revelatory potential to the Mitrokhin archive that MI6 started smuggling out of Russia in 1992.
This is the source of the sky-blue thank you card, the decapitation letter and the memo on the nameless woman with a bullet in her head. It is an extraordinary haul of documents, 10 million pages, most of them seized from Iraqi security forces by Kurdish rebels in 1991 and moved at great cost and risk via Turkey to the archives of the US Congress.
The documents remain unseen except by a tiny clique of translators and analysts, but that is about to change. A sample of the papers — about 10,000 of them — is being used by academics and Iraqi dissidents to create the first true self-portrait of Saddam’s vast and remorseless security apparatus. Seen by The Times in the Californian research institute where they have ended up, not only are the documents the fingerprints of a modern Stalinist dictatorship, they hold up a mirror to Saddam himself.
They are at once banal and bestial. A pink exercise book decorated with pretty white flowers turns out to be a record of the destruction of 397 Kurdish villages. A short note from the Kirkuk Oil Protection Forces with a list of families attached (“Please take the necessary measures against them”) was almost certainly their death sentence. The fate of an Erbil man is confirmed in two lines of stone-cold logistics: “Please tell the family of the below-mentioned executed person to retrieve his body from the Faculty of Forensic Medicine, Baghdad.”
The security apparatus that produced this cheerless mountain of paperwork is “a direct outgrowth of Saddam’s mind and outlook”, says Ibrahim al-Marashi, who has studied both the apparatus and the documents as closely as anyone. After three years immersed in them at Harvard and now at the Centre for Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterey, he has come to see Iraq’s “Great Uncle” as grotesquely deluded but also, on one crucial score, consistent.
The delusion is one of strength. “I still think Saddam feels invincible,” al-Marashi says. “With Russia doing all it can to avoid a war and Saudi Arabia not letting the US use its facilities, he thinks he’s got the rest of the world behind him.” The consistency concerns his purpose: to survive. He is no longer chiefly a Baathist, a pan-Arabist or even an old-style empire-builder. He is the embodiment of his own rabid personality cult, penned into his own shrunken country, dedicated only to preserving his own power.
The implications for American military planners are alarming. “When it comes to Saddam’s decision whether to use chemical and biological weapons, the fear of decimating his own troops is not a factor,” al-Marashi says. “If he believed they would ensure his survival by making America decide it no longer had the stomach for the fight, he would use them — even against the Special Republican Guard, even in Baghdad. He would equip the troops with masks, but if they didn’t survive, that’s tough.”
There is no shortage of precedents. Thousands of his own troops died when Saddam used chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, and low-flying Iraqi jets sprayed hundreds of Kurdish villages with chemical agents during the 1987-88 Anfal campaign, Saddam’s attempt at a “final solution” to his Kurdish problem.
So far nothing linking Saddam directly to chemical weapons use has been found in the documents al-Marashi and his fellow analysts call the Northern Dataset (there is a smaller southern one, extracted from Kuwait). Chemical weapons are mentioned, but coyly. The euphemisms of choice are “special attacks” and “special ammunition”. When the words are used, the voice is passive. A 1987 telegram to General Security department 78 says that three pro-Iranian agents “had been stricken with chemical substances during the recent attack mounted by our armed forces”. And when the effects are enumerated, the tone is robotic. “As a result of the airstrikes, Omar Abdullah, the brother of the criminal Mustafa Abdullah . . . was blinded. In addition . . . a number of saboteurs was killed and approximately 30 persons lost their eyesight.” (This memo from Shaqlawa Directorate of Security, like thousands of others, is headed: “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.”)
The closest thing to a smoking gun is a Baath Party order of June 14, 1987. “The entry of any kind of human cargo, nutritional supplies or mechanical instruments into the prohibited villages . . . is strictly prohibited,” it reads. “It is the duty of the armed forces to kill any human being or animal found in these areas.”
Iraq is a caricature of a police state. It has five major security agencies employing 32,000 men. Each has a secret counter-coup unit within it. Each competes with the others for informers and for bragging rights as the most effective corps of interrogators. Each reports directly to Saddam but also to his second son, Qusay, who heads the elite, 5,000-strong al-Amn al-Khas (Special Security Force), which itself subdivides repeatedly into uniformed and plainclothes paramilitary units liable to pull rank over each other and the lesser forces — not to mention the regular police — at any time, in any place, on virtually any pretext. It is a recipe for chaos, but also for deep, pervasive fear.
The American journalist Mark Bowden has shown how that fear can be channelled into frenzied activity, describing an afternoon in the life of a construction engineer, Entifadh Qanbar. Assigned to build an ornate wall and gateway round Saddam’s Baghdad palace, Qanbar had left the brickwork till last so that works traffic could come and go at will. Then the Great Uncle passed by in a blacked-out Mercedes and was displeased. His chief bodyguard told Qanbar that the motorcade would return that evening, by which time the wall had to be finished.
“Two hundred workers were quickly assembled. They set up floodlights. Some of the guards came back with trucks that had machine guns mounted on top. They parked alongside the worksite and set up chairs, watching and urging more speed as the workers mixed mortar and threw down line after line of bricks.”
The wall, which would ordinarily have taken a week, was built in four hours flat.
The security forces have mushroomed with each coup attempt that Saddam has survived. “Whenever he sees a failure within the intelligence apparatus his response is to create a new agency to do a better job and balance the power of the others,” al-Marashi says.
Thus, in 1973, Saddam founded the dreaded al-Mukhabarat (General Intelligence) after a failed putsch by al-Amn al-’Amm (General Security). In 1992 he set up al-Amn al-’Askari (Military Security) because al-Istikhbarat (Military Intelligence) had failed to prevent uprisings in the North and South the year before.
Mutiny brings wholesale reorganisation. Mere insubordination may warrant only a purge. Either way, blood flows.
Saddam perfected his style of leadership through terror early in his reign, arresting 60 “traitors” at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council to cement his rise to power in 1979. On the videotape of the arrests, Saddam is seen weeping. He later had all 60 traitors shot with tape across their mouths. Capone himself could not have matched it for theatricality or ruthlessness, and the blood-letting grinds on to this day.
The closest parallel in recent history to Saddam’s Iraq is to be found in Stalin’s Russia. Like the NKVD at Stalingrad, Iraq’s Military Intelligence shot deserters on sight during the Iran-Iraq war pour encourager les autres. Like the KGB and its precursors, Iraq’s General Security officers were urged in their annual “Plan of Action” for 1992 to recruit “a shadow in every house”; to do whatever worked to extract information from prisoners, including “merciless beating to death, threats, indefinite incarceration, raping of their loved ones in their presence”; and to compromise potential informers by whatever means necessary, including “engaging in sexual acts, entering nightclubs and participating in drunkenness”.
The echoes of history would be uncanny if they were not entirely deliberate. Saddam is an abject Stalinophile. He has an entire roomful of biographies of Georgia’s most murderous son, and as a young man boasted openly that he would turn Iraq into ”a Stalin state”.
His endlessly expanding security web can seem confused and wasteful even by Stalin’s standards — except that it isn’t. Seen through the lens of his paranoia, it is quite logical. It exists so that he survives, and to see how well it works, it is worth considering what an assassin would have to do to get to him.
First, he would have to find him, which is impossible without intelligence from his closest confidants, because he employs eight doubles, moves constantly, sleeps only in anonymous private houses (never his palaces) and has every meal prepared in several different places, descending on the chosen one with little or no notice.
If the assassin had a pretext for an audience, he would be strip-searched before it and shot dead by bodyguards of the Special Protection Apparatus if he came within striking distance of his target during it. If not, he would have to penetrate two further layers of security: the 15,000-strong Special Republic Guard, and Qusay’s al-Amn al-Khas. Beyond these, the hitman would still have to reckon with Saddam’s all-day body armour, including a Kevlar-lined straw hat.
Assassinations require planning, and it is said that when three or more Iraqis plan anything they stand to be exposed by an informer. The CIA learnt this to their cost in 1996, recruiting agents from Saddam’s inner circle and equipping them with special mobile phones.
Once all the traitors had been arrested, tortured and killed, an Iraqi voice used one of the phones to call the CIA. “Your men are dead,” it said. “Pack up and go home.”
A key question facing Western Intelligence agencies is whether any of Saddam’s security chiefs will ever turn on him successfully. Britain’s Foreign Office thinks it could happen, but there are plenty of reasons for it not to. Every head of the Iraqi security hydra is implicated in Saddam’s reign of terror and knows revenge from its enemies will be swift and brutal when it ends.
As Saddam himself once told a plaintiff brave enough to complain that a relative had been unjustly executed: “Do not think you will get revenge. If you ever have the chance, by the time you get to us there will not be a sliver of flesh left on our bodies.”
In the meantime, would-be traitors know that their fate, if caught, will mirror that of Saddam’s own sons-in-law. They defected to Jordan in 1995 and told the West of the extent of Iraq’s chemical and bioweapons programme. They were lured back with promises of clemency, only to be separated from their wives and summarily killed.
Saddam’s rule is thug rule. It wields carrots as well as sticks — security personnel earn fat wages and have comfortable flats — but its structure and methods still resemble those of the Mob. In the run-up to the Gulf War its chief thugs even looted like the Mob, squabbling over Kuwaiti zoo animals and the Kuwaiti royal family’s fleets of Cadillacs and power yachts.
Posterity may yet grant Iraq one redeeming feature — that it betrayed itself by writing everything down. And its victims can still hope for some rough justice in the manner of Saddam’s departure; though he has lived like Stalin, he could still die like Hitler. “I don’t see him dying in his bed,” says al-Marashi. “I see him in a bunker, going down fighting.”
THE LONDON TIMES December 05, 2002
They wont do that though , Fallguy will demonstrate, strip nekkid, burn his bra and get Saddam here out on a Reffo claim. Saddam, so misunderstood...Sigh!
