At 12:25 PM 12/22/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
-- On 22 Dec 2003 at 11:43, Steve Schear wrote:
Cite your sources. The one's I find creditable indicate that at the time of his capture he appeared to have been held captive for at least 2-3 weeks.
Oh come on.
A whole platoon of random troops would have to be part of a big conspiracy. Plus quite a few Iraqis have interviewed him. They in the vast right wing conspiracy also?
This isn't suggesting that the US kept Saddam on hold for political expediency, the way they're planning to "suddenly" "find" Osama _and_ the Missing Weapons of Mass Destruction next October just in time for the election. This is just saying that it appears that some well-armed independents (or traitorous ex-henchpersons, or whoever) caught Saddam a couple of weeks ago and have been trying to negotiate a good price, but the US found them and avoided paying them off. That's believable (though of course it could be staged, either to deceive the American public about whether we really paid them or to make it easier for the initial captors to get away with it afterwards.) It's therefore being suggested that while they've let Saddam hang onto enough clean underwear for a few weeks of spider-hole time, that they either haven't been ironing his uniforms adequately, or else they ditched them because that someone else might catch on and sell _them_ out for a reward. I find this less credible. Maybe the captors have been using his Generalissimo uniforms as evidence to get the Americans to negotiate with them or something, but again it's dubious.