Smooth Stone

On this day in WND history, seven years ago:

In an amazing and previously unreported story filed from Copenhagen, Denmark, WND international correspondent Anthony LoBaido revealed that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had sent hordes of female assassins to Denmark as well as other European destinations to wipe out Kurdish refugees and defectors fleeing Iraq, and even had installed spies on the Danish Refugee Council, according to the Danish Red Cross.

The assassins infiltrated Iraqi opposition circles to kill and maim leading Kurdish and Iraqi opposition leaders by means ranging from poisonings to car crashes. Graduates of a two-month training course held outside Baghdad, these “Mata Hari” hit squads were code-named Operation Falcon. According to British intelligence, they were staffed by belly dancers, actresses and artists who claim to be seeking asylum.

“The regime is using women because they would raise less suspicion,” said Dr. Ayad Allawi, secretary general of the London-based Iraqi National Accord and a former ally of Saddam. “In our culture, we don’t expect women to spy or kill. This is the most substantial operation we have seen for years.”

…and by doing so, prove that Democrats thrive only in mendacity, dirty soil, and under cover of godlessness. h/t to Saddam Hussein’s Philanthropy to Terror:

1. “The Paper Trail: Newly released documents provide more evidence of Saddam’s terror ties,” By Laurie Mylroie, OpinionJournal.com (Wall Street Journal online) Sunday, April 2, 2006 GO TO ARTICLE

2. “Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership,” By Kevin M. Woods, et al, Joint Center for Operational Analysis, U.S. Defense Department, Spring 2006. GO TO ARTICLE [PDF]

3. “Did Russian Ambassador Give Saddam the U.S. War Plan? / Osama bin Laden Contact With Iraq” ABCNews.com, March 23, 2006 GO TO ARTICLE

4. “Team W’s Unilateral Disarmament,” New York Post, March 6, 2006 GO TO ARTICLE

5. “Open the Iraq Files: American spooks don’t want to release Saddam’s secrets,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2006 GO TO ARTICLE

6. “Saddam’s Documents: What they tell us could save American lives today,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2006 GO TO ARTICLE

7. “Saddam and al Qaeda: There’s abundant evidence of connections,” By Claudia Rosett, Wall Street Journal Europe, July 13, 2005 GO TO ARTICLE

8. “Saddam’s Terrorist Ties,” By Laurie Mylroie, The New York Sun, October 19, 2004 GO TO ARTICLE
* * *

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Readers may send comments to: feedback@husseinandterror.com.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, where are you? From Chemical Ali “Threw My Sons from a Helicopter:

Speaking from behind a curtain at the trial of 15 of Saddam Hussein’s aides accused of crimes against humanity during the brutal repression of the 1991 Shia rebellion in Iraq, a mother said: “The army detained my two sons, my brother and my niece on March 3, 1991. Nine days later, my brother and niece were released and they told me that Ali Hasan al-Majid [Saddam's cousin, Chemical Ali] had executed my two sons by throwing them out of a helicopter into the Gulf.”

Many Shias who took part in the uprising say they had expected U.S. forces to back them in the rebellion, but former president Bush instead ordered a halt at the Iraqi border, leaving the rebels at the mercy of Saddam’s elite Revolutionary Guards.

From Report: “I Found Saddam’s WMD Bunkers”:

Dave Gaubatz says Saddam’s WMD did exist. He found the sites where he is certain they were stored.

Having served for 12 years as an agent in the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was posted in 2003 in Nasariyah in Iraq.

His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against U.S. forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies.

Between March and July 2003, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq – two within Nasariyah – which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear program, and UN-proscribed missiles.

He was in no doubt that this was true because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them.

Three of them were massive bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates, with walls made of reinforced concrete five feet thick.

There were “signs of chemical activity – gas masks, decontamination kits, atropine needles. The Iraqis and my team had no doubt at all that WMDs were hidden there,” said Gaubatz.

In addition, the medical records of Gaubatz and his team showed that at these sites they had been exposed to high levels of radiation.

Gaubatz subsequently learned from Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also known to these intelligence agencies.

Folks, this confirms my previous article, Evidence of WMDs in Iraq and Syria.

From Report: “I Found Saddam’s WMD Bunkers”:

Dave Gaubatz says Saddam’s WMD did exist. He found the sites where he is certain they were stored.

Having served for 12 years as an agent in the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was posted in 2003 in Nasariyah in Iraq.

His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against U.S. forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies.

Between March and July 2003, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq – two within Nasariyah – which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear program, and UN-proscribed missiles.

He was in no doubt that this was true because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them.

Three of them were massive bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates, with walls made of reinforced concrete five feet thick.

There were “signs of chemical activity – gas masks, decontamination kits, atropine needles. The Iraqis and my team had no doubt at all that WMDs were hidden there,” said Gaubatz.

In addition, the medical records of Gaubatz and his team showed that at these sites they had been exposed to high levels of radiation.

Gaubatz subsequently learned from Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also known to these intelligence agencies.

Folks, this confirms my previous article, Evidence of WMDs in Iraq and Syria.

From Breitbart.com:

Saddam Hussein’s former deputy was hanged before dawn Tuesday for the killings of 148 Shiites, an official with the prime minister’s office said.

Taha Yassin Ramadan, who was Saddam’s vice president when the regime was ousted four years ago, was the fourth man to be executed in the killings of 148 Shiites following a 1982 assassination attempt against the former leader in the city of Dujail.

The executions have outraged Iraqi Sunnis and caused concern among international human rights groups, which have appealed for Ramadan’s life.

Where were these phony international human rights groups when Saddam Hussein had approximately 40 of his own relatives murdered, when he unleashed a bloodbath in the Iran-Iraq war which left 150,000 to 340,000 Iraqis and 450,000 to 730,000 Iranians dead, when his documented chemical attacks by his regime caused some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths, when his chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja killed approximately 5,000 people, when 1,000 Kuwaitis were killed in Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when the bloody suppression of Kurdish and Shi’a uprisings in northern and southern Iraq killed at least 30,000 to 60,000, and where his victims of torture in Iraq were subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks?

Oh I know, they were berating Israel for defending herself against the constant attacks by bloodthirsty Muslims just like Saddam Hussein.

From Breitbart.com:

Saddam Hussein’s former deputy was hanged before dawn Tuesday for the killings of 148 Shiites, an official with the prime minister’s office said.

Taha Yassin Ramadan, who was Saddam’s vice president when the regime was ousted four years ago, was the fourth man to be executed in the killings of 148 Shiites following a 1982 assassination attempt against the former leader in the city of Dujail.

The executions have outraged Iraqi Sunnis and caused concern among international human rights groups, which have appealed for Ramadan’s life.

Where were these phony international human rights groups when Saddam Hussein had approximately 40 of his own relatives murdered, when he unleashed a bloodbath in the Iran-Iraq war which left 150,000 to 340,000 Iraqis and 450,000 to 730,000 Iranians dead, when his documented chemical attacks by his regime caused some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths, when his chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja killed approximately 5,000 people, when 1,000 Kuwaitis were killed in Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when the bloody suppression of Kurdish and Shi’a uprisings in northern and southern Iraq killed at least 30,000 to 60,000, and where his victims of torture in Iraq were subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks?

Oh I know, they were berating Israel for defending herself against the constant attacks by bloodthirsty Muslims just like Saddam Hussein.

Via FrontPage: “Bush-Lied-People-Died” is the rhetorical pot of gold at the end of the left’s argumentative rainbow. But the threshold of proof is so astronomically high–a Bush defender need only show the decision was reasonable, not necessarily correct–that none of Bush’s critics has ever come close to making the case. Put yourself in Bush’s position and consider what you know in late 2002:

a) 3000 Americans are dead in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. Also dead is the useful myth that the United States will respond to a direct attack on its soil with a terrible swift sword; the formula for waging war against the U.S. is now apparent to our enemies–just work through non-state actors and turn over a few usual-suspect corpses if the U.S. connects the dots afterwards and demands justice.

b) Saddam is in violation of United Nations Resolution #687 which ended the first Gulf War–to which the U.S. is a principal signatory and thus principal aggrieved party.

c) Saddam’s military is firing at American aircraft patrolling the No Fly Zone in Iraq and Saddam himself doling out cash rewards to the families of Palestinian terrorists who kill Israelis–and occasionally American citizens.

d) There is a sealed indictment of Osama from the Clinton Administration which reads in part, “Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq.”

e) A personal warning was issued from Russian President Vladimir Putin that Saddam is planning terrorist strikes against the United States and an unconfirmed British intelligence report that Saddam recently sought to buy uranium from Niger.

f) The head of the CIA is telling you emphatically Saddam possesses WMDs, echoing the consensus of every other intelligence agency on the planet.

g) Saddam has been jerking around weapons inspectors, thwarting their inquiries and intermittently kicking them out for a decade–which makes little sense unless he’s hiding WMDs.

h) There is incontrovertible proof of Saddam’s willingness to use WMDs on foreign enemies and even on his own people.

i) There are reports of thousands of Iraqi children dying each month as a result of UN sanctions as well as evidence that the sanctions themselves are collapsing amid governmental and corporate corruption.

j) Finally, there is a copy of the Presidential Daily Briefing from August 6, 2001 sitting on your desk titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” The intelligence it contains is sketchy–far sketchier than the intelligence you now possess about Saddam’s intentions–but the title haunts you. If only you’d acted preemptively in August 2001, if only you’d taken out bin Laden. . .

In short, given the information at his disposal, George Bush’s decision to oust Saddam looks altogether reasonable–though, again, not necessarily right. To argue otherwise demonstrates both ignorance and bad faith.

Saddam Hussein’s half brother and the former head of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court were both hanged before dawn Monday, Prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon said, two weeks and two days after the former Iraqi dictator was executed in a chaotic scene that has drawn worldwide criticism.

Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half brother and former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar head of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court, had been found guilty along with Saddam in the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims after a 1982 assassination attempt on the former leader in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad.

Who was Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti? Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti is Saddam Hussein’s half-brother, and his wife is the sister of Saddam’s first wife, Sajeda Kheit Allah.

Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti was Saddam’s enforcer, a man who ate grapes as he watched torture and was reputed to have a meat grinder for human flesh. His death was as grisly as some of those he inflicted on others. His head was ripped from his body by the hangman’s noose as he plunged through the trapdoor of the gallows, according to a government spokesman who called it a rare mishap.

A witness at his trial said Barzan had personally supervised his torture with electric shocks in Baghdad in the 1980s, and had eaten grapes while the man screamed in agony. Another witness described how Barzan beat her and broke her ribs after she was hung naked from the ceiling by her feet.

Prosecution witness Ahmed Hassan described being taken to Barzan’s interrogation facility in Baghdad and seeing a meat grinder for human flesh. Widely circulated film of him viciously kicking a man who lies cowering on the floor sealed his image as Saddam’s enforcer.

Barzan ran Iraq’s intelligence service from 1979 to 1983 but fell out of favour over his hatred for Lieutenant-General Hussein Kamel Hassan, who married Saddam’s daughter Raghd.

Barzan, who was born in February 1951 in Tikrit, resurfaced as Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva from 1988 to 1997. One of his roles there was as Iraq’s envoy to the Conference on Disarmament, which was holding preliminary talks on nuclear bomb making fissile material.

Barzan was a former head of the Mukhabarat intelligence service and one of the most feared men in Iraq. Mukhabarat, the intelligence organisation, was believed to have tortured and murdered thousands of opponents of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

After serving nearly a decade in the Swiss city, Barzan was called back to Baghdad in late 1998 after his wife died of cancer. But he returned regularly to Geneva to visit his six children who stayed to complete their studies.

Sources: GlobalSecurity.org, Reuters

Via JWR.

Two seemingly unrelated events in the waning days and hours of 2006 pretty much summed up everything you need to know about the Arab-Israeli conflict.Their meaning can be characterized simply: The Arab world’s obsession with eradicating the State of Israel and the West’s willingness to deceive itself about the character of Arab leaders and their intentions both are based on lies.

The more famous of the two events was the hanging of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In his final moments before he got his just desserts, the doomed Iraqi once again played the card that he and other Arab despots have always used with impunity: Israel.

Thus, among his finalcomments on the gallows came this declaration: “Palestine is Arab!”

Why invoke this cause with his last breath? Because even at that moment he still
thought it worth a try to deflect discussion of his comeuppance to that of the
conflict with Israel.

Another event that was received with far less fanfare took place only days before Hussein’s death. It was the release of a 33-year-old classified document by the United States State Department. It confirmed what had long been rumored: that the late Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat personally ordered the murders of two kidnapped American diplomats in March 1973.

Members of a PLO-front group called “Black September gunned down the two, Cleo Noel, U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and the embassy’s Charge d’Affaires George Moore, along
with Guy Eid, a Belgian envoy, in cold blood.” The supposed separate identity of
the group —which was also responsible for the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli
Olympic athletes in Munich — from that of Arafat’s Fatah was a cover
story intended to separate the Palestinian mainstream from its more egregious
crimes.

Arafat denied any role in these murders to the day of his own death in 2004. Though he was the godfather of modern terror, he sought to burnish his mythical image as a statesman to the West. But this was nothing compared to the self-deception of Western governments who knew better, particularly the employers of Noel and Moore, the United States State Department.