My Oh My....

[MORTARDUDE]

seems no one can get this story straight......who to believe ?
It reminds me of the Jessica Lynch "story" ?!?!

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http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common...941612613.html

We got him: Kurds say they caught Saddam
By Paul McGeough, Herald Correspondent in Baghdad
December 22, 2003

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.


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...941612613.html

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http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3770218&p1=0

Inside Red Dawn: Saddam Up Close
Out of the hole: Saddam struggled and spat, until a commando slugged him. Behind one of the most intense manhunts in historyBy Evan Thomas and Babak Dehghanpisheh
NewsweekDec. 29/Jan. 5 issue - The Special Forces commando had already pulled the pin. He was primed to toss the grenade into the "spider hole," a Vietnam-era nickname for lethal hiding places. But the man cowering inside did not use the pistol resting in his lap. He raised both hands in submission and, speaking in English, announced, "I am Saddam Hussein, I am the president of Iraq and I'm willing to negotiate."


As the story was later told, one of the Special Forces operators looked down at the disheveled, bearded, seemingly dazed man and replied, "President Bush sends his regards." And coming out of the hole, Saddam accidentally bumped his head. But a knowledgeable U.S. official told NEWSWEEK that it didn't quite happen that way. In fact, as Saddam was being handcuffed, he began to struggle with his captors. He spat at the soldiers. One of the commandos decked him, either with a punch or a rifle butt. (The military later tidied up the story of his capture for popular consumption.)

So ended one of the biggest and most maddening manhunts in history. The Americans had tried and failed to kill Saddam Hussein with laser-guided 2,000-pound bombs at the beginning and toward the end of the invasion of Iraq last spring. He had slipped out of Baghdad as American forces were advancing on the Iraqi capital in early April and vanished. Offers of a $25 million reward and all the secret listening devices of American technology had failed to find the Butcher of Baghdad. In the end, the capture of the man known to the military as High Value Target 1 (HVT-1) or Black List 1 (BL-1) required drudgery, patience and a bit of luck.

There had been no shortage of Saddam sightings between April and December. At the Fourth Infantry Division, based north of Baghdad, Saddam was known as "Elvis." After the $25 million reward was posted on July 3, "there were so many Elvis sightings we could hardly keep up," said Maj. Stan Murphy, 41, an intelligence officer with the First Brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division. Residents of Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, told NEWSWEEK that they had always known Saddam was hiding in their midst. Abu Ahmed, a former general in the Republican Guard who asked that only his nickname be used, said a friend spotted Saddam praying at his father's grave on Nov. 24, the first day of Eid Al Fitr, a Muslim holiday. Another Iraqi Army officer who had joined the newly reconstituted police recognized Saddam and a driver in an orange-and-white taxicab at a checkpoint in Tikrit. "So you've joined the new police," Saddam said. The former officer, feeling ashamed, answered, "We have to make a living." Saddam dug $300 out of his pocket and hand-ed it to him. Fearing reprisals against his family, the policeman said nothing to the Americans.


? Getting Saddam to talk
Dec. 17: NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports new details about the interrogation of Saddam Hussein, as U.S. interrogators try to break the former dictator's silence.


The Iraqi code of loyalty and silence frustrated American intelligence. In July, Major Murphy jotted four names and some notes on a few sheets of paper and handed them to his subordinates on the Fourth I.D.'s intelligence staff. "Make sense of it," he ordered, meaning look for patterns and links in the fragmentary intelligence. Murphy told his staff to focus on "enablers," ?trusted members of the former regime outside the top-55 list. These men, in turn, relied on the arbaeen (or "forty"), a second- or third-tier group outside Saddam's closest bodyguards. The arbaeen are errand runners (whom Saddam would send out to find a late-night cigar), cooks, joke tellers and assorted yes men. Drawn from a half-dozen families, the arbaeen formed a secret web that allowed Saddam to move from place to place a step ahead of the Americans.

Reading extensively about Iraq's culture and customs, Murphy realized that unraveling the web would be exceedingly difficult. He was particularly struck by the story of a father commanded by his tribe to execute his son. The son had informed on two Iraqis later ambushed in an American raid. The tribe gave the father an ultimatum: kill the son or the whole family would be killed. The father chose option A.

Murphy's staff began making a chart connecting various families and tribes, showing blood ties and financial links. Murphy's initial list of four enablers ballooned to 9,000 names before the staff whittled it back down to some 300 names. One in particular was of interest. Military officials would publicly refer to the man only as "the source," though Col. James Hickey of the Fourth I.D.'s First Combat Brigade Team described him as "a middle-aged man with a very large waistline." The fat man was a kind of chief of staff who coordinated security and logistics as Saddam moved between hiding places. But where was the fat man?

Several raids in July at residences once occupied by the source failed to nab him. A long lull followed. Then, on Dec. 4, five raids were carried out around Tikrit but missed the target. An operation the next day in Samarra turned up $1.9 million. Another raid on Dec. 7 missed him in Bayji. But then on Friday, Dec. 12, the source was finally run to ground in Baghdad. Bundled into a helicopter and rushed up to Colonel Hickey's headquarters near Tikrit, the fat man was subjected to an intense interrogation on Saturday, Dec. 13. At 5 p.m. he cracked and "blurted Saddam's location," according to Hickey.

Examining satellite photos, Hickey and his men designated a house and a farm south of Tikrit as Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2. A sizable force?Special Forces, armor, artillery, engineers, Apache attack helicopters, some 600 men all told?headed out on Operation Red Dawn, named after a 1980s movie about American guerrilla fighters battling a Soviet invasion. The objectives were quickly seized, but no Saddam. Intelligence told the soldiers to keep looking?for a hidden bunker, an "underground facility."

Special Forces commandos crept down a farm path toward a small adobe hut in a palm grove. The backup troops from the Fourth I.D. could see the infrared beams from the weapons of the commandos reflecting off tree branches. At 8:10 p.m. the radio crackled. "We found a hole," announced a Special Forces soldier. And a few minutes later: "We have an individual in the hole." The soldiers had little trouble identifying Saddam after they had handcuffed him and knocked him down in the spitting incident. They had been instructed to look for body marks?moles and an old gunshot wound from Saddam's participation in a failed assassination attempt against an Iraqi ruler back in the 1950s.

Saddam's hole was spartan?enough space to lie down, a dim light and a ventilation fan. But his hut was reasonably well stocked with Mars bars, insect repellent, canned meat and fruits, and $750,000 in hundred-dollar bills. Two packages of boxer-style underwear and a package of Lanvin socks still lay on the floor when reporters were given a tour a few days later. By then Saddam, his head covered with a hood, had been whisked off to a Baghdad jail cell to await interrogation by the CIA?and the judgment of his long-oppressed countrymen.

? 2003 Newsweek, Inc.


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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...tain&printer=1

Saddam was held by Kurdish forces, drugged and left for US troops
Sat Dec 20,11:00 PM ET Add Mideast - AFP to My Yahoo!



LONDON, (AFP) - Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) 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 (news - web sites), "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."