Give Safire A Careful Reading

I almost gave up on Safire because of the opening paragraph about spending Saturday night with Rummy and the rest. I almost gave up again on the lame attempt to connect Saddam with Osama bin Laden. If Saddam was involved in 9/11? Safire trots out the same old story about Abu Nidal and Mohammed Atta meeting in Baghdad. However, if Abu Nidal was yoked to Saddam, why in HELL did Saddam's police execute Abu Nidal? What is that all about? If Abu Nidal was a link between Saddam and Osama (as implied by Safire), why did Saddam have Abu Nidal executed? If this be (fair & balanced) incredulity, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
From the 'Spider Hole'
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON — On Saturday night, I stuffed myself on lamb chops and potato pancakes at a holiday party at the home of Don and Joyce Rumsfeld. Along with other media bigfeet, I chatted up Rummy and C.I.A. chief George Tenet, both of whom were in on the secret of the capture of Saddam a few hours before. Neither man even hinted at a thing. So much for being a Washington Insider.

After the news broke Sunday morning, I asked a source in Iraq to speak to members of the Governing Council who had spent a half-hour with the prisoner after he was pulled out of his "spider hole."

They described Saddam as "reacting aggressively" to the presence of the Iraqi leaders who were Shiites. He said to a leader of the council, Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni, "What are you doing with these guys?"

One of the Shia leaders came back with "Why did you kill Ayatollah Sadr?" Saddam sneered: "Sadir" or "rijl"?

This was a contemptuous play on words. "Sadir," which sounds like a name of the assassinated Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, is Arabic for "chest" and "rijl" means "foot." Saddam, murderer of hundreds of thousands of Shia who dared oppose his rule, didn't leave his thigh-slapping sense of humor in the "spider hole."

Another useful bit of information is the origin of "spider hole," a phrase used by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez to describe the dugout hiding place in which the fugitive Saddam was cowering.

This is Army lingo from the Vietnam era. The Vietcong guerrillas dug "Cu Chi tunnels" often connected to what the G.I.'s called "spider holes" — space dug deep enough for the placement of a clay pot large enough to hold a crouching man, covered by a wooden plank and concealed with leaves. When an American patrol passed, the Vietcong would spring out, shooting. But the hole had its dangers; if the pot broke or cracked, the guerrilla could be attacked by poisonous spiders or snakes. Hence, "spider hole."

Those are facts; now to speculation. Democrats here are already saying ruefully "because we `got' Saddam, we'll `get' four more years of Bush." But that assumes that the Iraqi captive will now reveal weapons of mass destruction and his connections to Al Qaeda, thereby confirming the intelligence that the Bush neocons are charged with having cooked up to justify going to war.

I think Saddam is still Saddam — a meretricious, malevolent megalomaniac. He knows he is going to die, either by death sentence or in jail at the hands of a rape victim's family. Why did he not use his pistol to shoot it out with his captors or to kill himself? Because he is looking forward to the mother of all genocide trials, rivaling Nuremberg's and topping those of Eichmann and Milosevic. There, in the global spotlight, he can pose as the great Arab hero saving Islam from the Bushes and the Jews.

Under interrogation, he's not likely to rat on his fedayeen, lead us to his hidden billions abroad or tell the truth about dirty dealings with France and Russia. Instead, he intends to lie all the way to martyrdom.

Example: Dr. Ayad Allawi, an Iraqi leader long considered reliable by intelligence agencies, told Britain's Daily Telegraph last week that a memo has been found from Saddam's secret police chief to the dictator dated July 1, 2001, reporting that the veteran terrorist Abu Nidal had been training one Mohamed Atta in Baghdad. Nobody disputes that a few months after Atta's 9/11 suicide mission, Nidal was permanently silenced by Saddam's police, the only "suicide" to be found with four bullets in his head.

The prisoner will surely dispute all connections to Al Qaeda, along with charges that he ordered the deaths of what Tony Blair now estimates as 400,000 Shiite and Kurdish Muslims in Iraq.

We are not finished with this remorseless monster; Saddam will have his day in an Iraqi court. But so will the ghosts of poison-gassed Halabja and Iraqi children forced to clear minefields in Iran. The meticulous presentation of his offenses against humanity will demonstrate again that all that would have been necessary for the triumph of evil was for good people to do nothing.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company