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Newspapers in UK and elsewhere are reporting that Saddam was held by Kurdish forces, drugged and left for US troops, according to Yahoo! News on December 20:

LONDON, (AFP)—Saddam Hussein 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, “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.”

On Monday, December 22, the Sydney Morning Herald reported more on this story, in We got him: Kurds say they caught Saddam, by Paul McGeough reporting from Bagdhad.

Notice that the Iran News Agency, via the Iraqi Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, was the first to report the capture of Saddam, even before the U.S. Defense Department or the Iraqi Ministry of Defense had confirmed the capture, according to this Dec. 14 breaking news story in Ananova, a UK news site.

A particularly detailed analysis was published at Debka on December 14: Indications Saddam Was Not Hiding but Was Captive.

And another analysis was published on December 21 at the web site of the Scottish Sunday Herald in Revealed: who really found Saddam? by David Pratt.

Not unexpectedly, the U.S. press has been almost completely silent on this matter. Just as the real details of the Jessica Lynch rescue have had to be extracted like hens’ teeth, so this latest BushCo manipulation of the truth will eventually emerge, once again showing the whole sorry pack of thieves and war criminals to be residing in a house of cards built on fraud and deception.

No matter the circumstances, the capture of Saddam could very well turn out to be one of those pesky butt-biting situations for BushCo, as explained by Pepe Escobar in The Rat Trap, Part 1: How Saddam may still nail Bush, in Asia Times online, December 19, 2003:

Asian and Arab diplomats and businessmen are commenting off the record that there's every possibility that the CIA, or even Bush himself, may have struck a deal with his number two embodiment of evil—number one being the still elusive Osama bin Laden. They are all suspicious of the impeccable timing: and if a deal was not in the cards, then the CIA knew exactly where Saddam was for days or weeks, and were just waiting for the moment of maximum impact. Saddam was captured exactly when Halliburton was under extreme pressure for effectively swindling American taxpayers. Bush himself said on the record that if there was any proof of wrongdoing—and there is conclusive proof of overcharging—the company would face consequences. It didn’t: the story—too dangerous, too close to vice president and former Halliburton boss Dick Cheney—simply disappeared from the news.

Whatever his ghastly criminal record, already debated to exhaustion, Saddam understands power extremely well: that's how he managed to keep it for three decades. He had plenty of time to prepare his exit—before the “fall” of Baghdad—and he certainly had plenty of time to prepare his re-entry in case he was caught. He may well have piles of compromising documents to use in his defense in what will certainly be the trial of the centuries—current and previous.

World leaders are now falling over themselves calling for a fair trail, in Iraq, under international standards. The Iraqi occupation is absolutely illegal, so Washington will not even consider trying Saddam in the Hague, like Slobodan Milosevic. . . .

See also Escobar’s Part 2: Why the resistance will increase to understand how “former CIA asset Saddam Hussein is—already was—totally beside the point.”

Saddam’s capture “a pivotal moment” for Howard Dean?

Howard Dean also stood up to BushCo by pointing out, in a major foreign policy speech the day after Saddam’s capture, what many were either too polite or too brainwashed to mention: “the capture of Saddam has not made America safer.” Democratic rivals John Kerry and Joe Lieberman fell all over themselves distancing themselves and discrediting Dean in the light of this most glorious capture “and the pundits wasted little time in drafting political obituaries for the good doctor from Vermont,” as Andrew Gumbel puts it in his must-read Howard Dean in today’s LA City Beat:

Dean’s audience was no bunch of radicals and slouches. The Pacific Council on International Policy, co-chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and attended by a glittering array of academics, businessmen, religious leaders, and elected officials with more than a passing knowledge of the subject-matter at hand, gave him a warm reception. Not only did they appreciate his remarks about Saddam but also his plea that America rebuild the international consensus and regain its moral authority as a global example to be respected and emulated, not feared and loathed.

One eminent attendee who had not endorsed Dean’s candidacy professed to be “dazzled” by his command of the issues during the question-and-answer session, particularly when he gave a complex five-part answer on U.S. relations with China. Others noted that Dean’s is a profoundly centrist vision on foreign and security policy, not some left-wing screed; it could only appear radical if you took the Bush policy of unilateralism and unprovoked, pre-emptive war as the new norm. . . .

Commentary on Democratic Underground regarding the news that chief PNAC bloodsucker Paul Wolfowitz calls spread of terror weapons “urgent threat”:

If it's “urgent,” surely there’s SOMEONE we can bomb, right?
There have to be women and children SOMEWHERE we can kill to make the world safe from weapons of mass destruction.—Argumentus

I guess that means it’s time to disarm the world’s largest supplier and owner of “terror weapons,” the United States of America.
Hello, U.N. inspectors?—Newsjock

still singing from this sheet of music???
When hasn’t this been a problem? Not since before 1945...
And coming from this jackass, who has spent his adult life making the world a very unsafe place, well, what exactly does he propose? He doesn't like diplomacy or arms control or NPTs...Hmmm, I guess that the “pre-emptive war” will become our only tool of foreign policy.
Nice.—fairfaxvadem

So wolfowitz proposes doing away with diplomacy, arms control, nonproliferation treaties and export controls. With apologies to the better of animal species, in other words “back to the jungle.” Ferk all the progress that the human species has made. Subdue the conscience and for Wolfowitz’s god sake don’t try to love thy neighbor. I really was depending on Mother Nature to do something about overpopulation but Wolfowitz has come up with a quicker way.—lumpy

Er ... Haven't the neocons been the ones calling for mini-nukes?
Haven't they called for more production and testing of nuclear weaponry?—Darranar

See many more here.

Poignant letters from the troops reveal the works of BushCo

Remember the troops this holiday season. Please read their stories.

“They’re just going to keep killing us until we leave”
Kevin Horrigan
STL Today, December 14, 2003

Also see Letters the Troops Have Sent Me, by Michael Moore: “What they are saying to me, often eloquently and in heart-wrenching words, is that they were lied to—and this war has nothing to do with the security of the United States of America. . . . ”

More and more mention of The Draft in the media lately

In its Person of the Year issue devoted to The American Soldier and giving a tacit bow to the policies of the Bush administration, Time includes this piece on Should the Draft be Reinstated? Please note my previous warnings about the draft. Anyone who now thinks that The Draft isn’t a definite backburner scheme waiting to be hatched after Election 2004 (should The Glorious Chimp be re-selected) needs to see a psychiatrist for a thorough head examination.

As a counter to my frequent diatribes against corporate sleaze embodied by Wal-Mart, I would like to call attention to an alternative: Wall Street curls its lip at Costco’s ungreedy CEO, by Jack Gordon, star tribune.com, December 19, 2003:

. . . Costco's success translates directly into benefits for workers and customers in the very manner that cheerleaders for corporate America have long described. The company offers “the best wages and benefits in retail.” Its starting hourly wage is $10. Full-time hourly workers earn annual salaries of $40,000 after four years.

And get this: Whenever Costco buyers negotiate a good deal on products, the savings are actually passed on to customers. No, seriously; markups are capped at 14 percent.

Well then, you say to yourself, Costco CEO James D. Sinegal, the architect of this marvel, must be taking bows as a Hero of the Republic. Wrong. Instead he’s defending himself from powerful forces that better understand how a business ought to be run.

In a single paragraph tucked matter-of-factly into Fortune's hymn to Sinegal and his company, as if it were one more piece of incidental data, we learn that “some of the practices that made Costco great have lately come under attack by Wall Street.” What the complaint boils down to is that Sinegal is too generous to the peasants. Stock analysts have “pounded on” him to trim workers’ health benefits “and to otherwise reduce labor costs.” The critics’ view is summarized by “Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Dreher, who recently wrote, ‘Costco continues to be a company that is better at serving the club member and employee than the shareholder.’ ” . . .

For scathing, well-researched insight into some of the true motivations and implications of Bush’s appointment of James Baker III to “restructure” the debts of Iraq, see Greg Palast’s cynical Baker Takes the Load. Baker, dubbed by many even in the mass media as the “Bush family consigliere,” is a lawyer for the Saudis in the ongoing lawsuit by families of 9/11 victims seeking release of information on Saudi Arabia’s funding of Al Qaeda front groups. “And who will net the big bucks under Jim Baker’s plan? Answer: his client, Saudi Arabia, which claims $30.7 billion due from Iraq (plus $12 billion in ‘reparations’ from the First Gulf war).” Baker also “came up with the strategy of maneuvering the 2000 Florida vote count into a Supreme Court packed with politicos,” as Palast puts it. This debacle was well-analyzed by David Plotz in his November 2000 Slate article, James Baker: the Bush Family Janitor.

But “Baker’s trip isn’t about debt, and the contracts directive isn’t about money,” says Fred Kaplan in The Pentagon Plot, in Slate, December 12. It is, rather, more evidence of dissension and power struggles within BushCo:

Things are not what they seem in the Bush administration's latest internecine imbroglio over Iraq. The mess appears to involve two contradictory developments: 1) the Pentagon's directive banning countries that didn't support the war from sharing in its spoils (i.e., from bidding for reconstruction contracts); and 2) James Baker’s impending trip to Europe, on behalf of President Bush, to convince the largest of those antiwar countries to forgive Iraqi debt.

So, it seems, at the same time that Bush is brusquely excluding French, German, and Russian companies from making billions of dollars in the new Iraq, he's nicely asking their governments to chalk off as a loss the billions of dollars that they lent to the old Iraq.

Many editorialists, Democratic politicians, and foreign leaders are aghast at the incompetence or perhaps the gall of this combination—which amounts to patting the former allies on the shoulder with one hand and punching them in the face with the other. . . .

It can fairly be surmised that Baker, who heads off to Europe on Monday with no accompanying press corps and no obligation to hold news conferences along the way, has been given a broader agenda. Most likely, this agenda involves down-and-dirty turkey-trading—asking what the Europeans need in exchange for bailing the United States out of Iraq (i.e., for supplying troops, money, and international legitimacy) and assuring them, with an authority possessed by no current Cabinet officer, that the president will do the deal.

The objection that the Pentagon hard-liners would have to this scenario is that it jerks away their control of the occupation. Despite the announcement a few months ago that Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, would be taking over the operation, nothing of the sort has happened. Bremer still reports to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The Pentagon still holds the levers. Letting Baker negotiate a deal that reshapes the occupation means surrendering those levers. . . .

A battle was raging within the administration between the unilateralist neocons (mainly in the Pentagon and on Vice President Dick Cheney's staff) and the multilateralist diplomats (mainly in the State Department, with a few supporters on Rice's staff). Baker was seen, by all sides, as a potent tool for the multilateralists. In August 2002, well before even mobilization for the war began, Baker had written an op-ed piece for the New York Times urging Bush not to “go it alone” in confronting Iraq and to “reject the advice of those who counsel doing so. . . .”

The hard-liners want to keep Baker out, in part because he does not share their vision of the world, in part because they know that he is not the subordinate type. He gets involved in a crisis only if he is allowed to control it; and if he controls the Iraqi occupation, the days of the Pentagon's control are finished.

Bush has almost always sided with the hard-liners, but he is above all a political creature, and he must realize that a quagmire in Iraq could bring down his presidency. It may, in fact, be the only issue (assuming the economic recovery continues) that could doom his bid for re-election. He needs a way out—or a way to bring the rest of the world in. Baker is the one man who has the loyalty to the Bush family, the savvy in electoral politics, and the trust of erstwhile allies. He is, in short, the one man who might pull the trick off.

US media, Ashcroft silent on conviction of right-wing terrorists in Texas
Conspirators built chemical bombs
Bill Vann, wsws.org, December 9, 2003

. . . Bush has declared that the fight to eradicate terror around the globe is the overriding mission of his administration. Yet, a recent study has found that in the more than two years since September 11, 2001, the number of defendants receiving substantial jail sentences on terrorism-related charges has actually declined compared to the two previous years. . . .

Given this unimpressive track record, one would think that the conviction of two individuals in a terrorism-related case involving actual “weapons of mass destruction” and a conspiracy to carry out large-scale terrorist attacks on US soil would be major news.

The threat was serious enough to be included regularly in the presidential daily briefings and to trigger a nationwide FBI manhunt. Yet, outside of Texas, the case remains virtually unknown. . . .

The convicted individuals were not Arab or Muslim immigrants, nor could they be linked to any Islamist groups. Rather, they were native-born US citizens connected to the extreme right. . . .

An affidavit submitted by the FBI to obtain a search warrant described [William J. Krar, 62,] as someone “actively involved in the militia movement ... a good source of covert weaponry for white supremacists and anti-government militia groups in New Hampshire.”

According to KTVT, the CBS affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth, federal authorities seized “at least one weapon of mass destruction–a sodium cyanide bomb capable of delivering a deadly gas cloud” as well as “at least 100 other bombs, bomb components, machine guns, 500,000 rounds of ammunition and chemical agents.”

It was evident from the quantities of chemicals and other materials recovered by the authorities that Krar and his collaborators were running a bomb-making facility out of a storage facility in the small east Texas town of Noonday. Federal investigators . . . suspected Krar may have been selling chemical weapons and bomb components to extreme right-wing groups around the country. Neither he nor the other two people in custody divulged any information about their activities to authorities. . . .

Federal authorities have reportedly issued hundreds of subpoenas nationwide in an attempt to track down other chemical weapons that may have originated with Krar.

. . . Had the defendants been Arab or Muslim immigrants, there is little doubt that the administration would have organized a nationally televised press conference by US Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to claim credit for foiling a major terrorist plot. . . .

Is the media blackout on this case part of some larger hedge-betting plan of BushCo’s, that “if such an attack were to take place, both the government and the media could well attempt to blame it on foreign terrorists,” as the author asserts? Now why on earth wouldn’t the administration want us to know about this?

Federal spending soars under Bush’s watch
Ron Hutcheson, Knight Ridder, December 3, 2003
“Bush's record is a big disappointment to conservatives, who share his stated goal of a leaner federal government. ‘President Bush has yet to meet a spending bill he doesn't like,’ the Wall Street Journal complained in a recent editorial denouncing what it called ‘the GOP’s spending spree.’”

And this article notes that more than half of the spending increases are unrelated to defense and 9-11:

Why America’s debt is a risky foreign affair
David R. Francis, Christian Science Monitor, December 1, 2003.

Al Gore endorses Howard Dean!

First Al Gore Urged Democrats to Rally around Dean, then the nine candidates faced off in a debate in which not one acrimonious word (with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman) was exchanged. Kerry and Dean appeared to have made a pact, or at least been strongly advised, to put their money where their mouths are re Democratic unity and refused to bad-mouth the other even when taunted by the at times inept and irrelevant moderator, Ted Koppel.

Supporters of General Wesley Clark, however, have taken the news hard, many on Democratic Underground displaying a bitterness and sour grapes attitude that I find dismaying (example). It is almost as if they lack confidence in their candidate to win unless he has the endorsement of the former Vice President. Personally, I like Clark—A LOT. I was happy when it appeared in last night's debate that not only were all the candidates pretty much united in focusing on the sins of BushCo, I was especially happy when I heard Dean and Clark putting forward essentially the same plan for getting out of Iraq--Dean outlining a general scenario and Clark filling in many details that showed he has an authoritative expertise in the matter. My thought was that he IS military, that has been his career and that is what shaped him, that is his “gestalt”—and as such I WANT him to be the one who will oversee extricating the USA from BushCo's mess—but I don't want that mess-extrication to be the pivotal point in the life of the USA, the way the mess-MAKING has been for BushCo.

Dean is a government executive as well as a humanitarian and plain-talker—who also, as a doctor, has devoted himself to a life of service—and that is what the president should be. I have complete faith in his ability to appoint people who will fulfill his—no OUR—campaign platform of The People and their needs being the priority. Let Clark focus his expertise where it is needed and leave the orchestrating, the administrating, to Dean, who for “black box” reasons captures the confidence and faith of the ordinary people (I am using “black box” the way it is used in biology, to describe a situation where the usual analytical answers don't quite satisfactorily explain the phenomenon--there really are still some mysteries in the universe). My advice to Howard Dean and Wesley Clark: secretly run together while still running separately. Coalesce after the nomination to merge the major Democratic camps. Actually, my most fervent wish is that all of them would merge in the united effort to expose and remove the corrupted liars and corporacrats currently highjacking our government.