SADDAMS SONS CONFIRMED DEAD

I see this as murder, period.

How about they hurt Bush's daughters

That's two less drunk drivers I dont need to be afraid of.



Disclaimer:

Illmatic

Ouch.

Brave and well said.

In no way am I promoting violence towards his daughters, I want to get that straight.

I just see the death of Saddam's sons as a plain murder.

I'd be happier if they just went ahead and hurt bush.

Maybe this has been said already Saddams sons could have doubles just like their father you never know.

Thier death gives bush more time.
This gives him the few little support he may be getting.
After the sons's morals were brutalized on media coverage, it makes thier death even more bitter sweet.
Bush has taken out 2 of the pentagons most wanted.
Deep

You are correct, ZD, ah sheet someone online just sent me a message. Let me finish this later.

Looking forward to the finish, Freddie...

Saddam: Bodies too 'shot up' to ID
22/07/2003 21:25 - (SA)

(Silly question, where in the world, at a half hour before midnight on Tuesday, would this story have been posted??? Surely it is 'behind the times'?)

Mosul, Iraq - Saddam Hussein's sons Odai and Qusai were "very likely" killed on Tuesday when US soldiers stormed a house in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, US military and Bush administration sources told Fox News.

Sources at the Pentagon and within the Bush administration told Fox News that at least four "high-level" targets were killed inside the house, a large villa that belonged to one of Saddam's cousins. A senior administration official said the US is "90% to 95% certain" that Saddam's sons were among the dead.

Officials said four bodies were transported out of the house. Three were adults - believed to be Odai, Qusai and a bodyguard. The fourth body was of a teenager - possibly Qusai's son.

US officials said there will be DNA testing to confirm the deaths. Senior defense officials said some sort of announcement would be made later Tuesday.

The US government has DNA samples on Saddam's sons, but testing may take time.

'Shot up'

One US official told Fox News that "they were shot up" so much that it is difficult to make a positive identification of the bodies. The United States now plans to talk to people who knew them to identify the bodies and look for distinguishing marks.

The house was burned to the ground after a loud, four-hour gunbattle between the people inside and soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division.

Officials told Fox News that they had two pieces of intelligence that directed them toward the house and that "there was some indication that Qusai and Odai were inside".

Residents of the city, 280 miles north of Baghdad, said the American soldiers were searching for Saddam's sons, who have been reported in the area. A reporter from Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera said eyewitnesses told him that Saddam's sons were in the house when it was raided.

"Individuals of very high interest to the coalition forces were hiding out in the building," Lieutenant Colonel William Bishop of the 101st Airborne Division told Reuters.

Fire from building

"This morning we went to the building and surrounded it."

A US soldier involved in the raid told Fox News that US soldiers were fired at by people inside the house as they approached, and the Americans called in helicopters and an unmanned vehicle for assistance before storming it.

"We received direct fire from the building multiple times. We used a scaled escalation of force," the soldier told Fox News' Steve Centanni at the scene of the firefight.

The soldier said US forces couldn't get into the building because of the small-arms fire they were facing, so "we had to use bigger caliber weapons to render the building safe" - including missiles, helicopters and grenade launchers.

Centanni said the two-story building was "a mess". US forces apparently used all the weapons in their arsenal, and the building, its columns and balconies were pock-marked with bulletholes.

Tunnels

Members of Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division, wouldn't who - if anyone - they brought out of the house, but all the troops "have smiles on their faces and they seemed to have carried out this mission successfully", Centanni reported.

There were no US fatalities.

Witnesses in the neighbourhood said there are tunnels below the house. US forces towed away a gray SUV from the side of house.

Mosul was believed to be the exit route for some of Saddam's family members trying to get out of Iraq and flee to Syria.

Fox News military analyst Colonel Bill Cowan said he hoped Saddam's sons had been captured and not killed.

"I think in this case, it'd be great to have them alive," he said.

"I think for the [Iraqi] population to see these two guys shackled, incarcerated and really given some harsh treatment - will have a most profound and long-term psychological advantage."

The United States has offered a $25m reward for information leading to Saddam's capture, and $15m for his sons.

Good intelligence

Cowan added that Saddam's sons might provide good intelligence on their father's whereabouts.

"It appears that good intelligence led to this raid," Retired US Army Major General Paul Valleley, a Fox News military analyst, said. "One event can lead to the other. So hopefully, this will lead to determining in some way where Saddam may be."

In Washington, President Bush's advisers were huddling around during a conference call trying to determine whether Saddam's sons were alive. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has briefed the president personally on the assault.

"He [Bush] will be kept appraised of any updates as they become available," White House spokesperson Scott McClellan told reporters. "The president is aware of the reports and is aware of the military operation that took place today."

Intelligence sources say the US task force - Task Force 20 - was going after high-level targets during the Mosul raid, but they would not say whether the soldiers knew they were going after Odai and Qusai.

'Hit team'

Task Force 20 - including Army delta forces and CIA operatives - was originally given the responsibility of finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but later it was ordered to refocus its efforts on hunting down Saddam and his inner circle. Sources confirmed to Fox News that special forces were involved with the raid.

The task force is basically a "hit team" that follows up only on solid intelligence.

"I think we're all anxiously awaiting confirmation," about the sons' deaths, Senator Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, told Fox News Tuesday. "There's no question they were diabolical forces in Iraq."

Snowe, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the potential death or capture of Qusai and Odai shows the world that the US work in Iraq is far from over.

"I think it goes to show how important our role is in Iraq and continues to be that we have to remove these forces of fear," Snowe said. "Iraq was one of the most atrocious regimes ... no one can really underestimate the threat that Saddam Hussein posed."

I think that we all recognized that as long as Saddam Hussein continues to exist, he poses a threat to the Iraqi people - they will never be able to breathe easy if they know he's there."

Torture

Odai, Saddam's eldest son, was commander of Iraq's paramilitary unit, known as the Saddam Fedayeen, and he was also chairperson of the Iraqi Olympic Committee. He is No 3 on the coalition's most-wanted list, after his father and Qusai.

Iraqi Olympic athletes say they were routinely jailed and tortured for losing competitions or disobeying Odai's orders.

During Saddam's reign, Qusai was in charge of all the military, intelligence and security services in Iraq, including the elite Republican Guard and the Special Security Organisation, which protected the regime and its weapons.

From 1988 to 1999, Qusai often ordered mass executions of several thousand prisoners, and suppressed revolts among the al-Dulaym tribe in 1995 and among Shiites in 1997.

Both Odai and Qusai were active in the management of the general office of the military intelligence service, the Istikhbarat, and the internal intelligence service, the Mukhabarat.

Qusai was considered the more likely of the two to succeed their father.

www.msnbc.com...

ARMY LT. GEN. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of allied military operations in Iraq, said at a news conference Tuesday night in Baghdad that four Iraqis were killed in a fierce six-hour gunbattle that broke out when U.S. troops arrived to search the house, which reportedly belonged to a cousin of Saddam.

Without saying how, Sanchez said �multiple sources� had confirmed that the brothers were among the four dead people.

�We�re certain that Odai and Qusai were killed today,� Sanchez said. �The bodies are in a condition where you could identify them.�

U.S. officials told NBC News separately on condition of anonymity that senior Iraqi figures in U.S. custody had positively identified the brothers after their bodies were taken to Baghdad. Old bullet wounds further cemented the identification of Odai Hussein, who was shot 17 times and badly wounded in an assassination attempt in 1996.

How Saddam's sons were identified

The two other casualties were a teenage boy � possibly Qusai�s 14-year-old son, Mustapha, who was known to travel with him � and a man who could be a bodyguard, U.S. officials said. Sanchez said he could not confirm those reports.

The house was badly damaged, and its roof caved in after it was apparently hit by a missile. U.S. Central Command said in a statement Wednesday morning that four coalition soldiers were being treated for undisclosed injuries. Some civilians appeared to have been caught in the cross-fire, and several were taken to a hospital.

Sanchez would not speculate on what impact the deaths would have on security in Iraq, where U.S. troops have been the target of almost daily attacks. But the brothers were below only Saddam himself in importance to the regime, and their capture or elimination was a key goal of U.S. postwar operations.

The White House said in a statement that it was �pleased� that the brothers were dead. �Over the period of many years, these two individuals were responsible for countless atrocities committed against the Iraqi people and they can no longer cast a shadow of hate on Iraq,� it said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed the killings and called it �a great day for the new Iraq.�

�These particular two people were the head of the regime, which was not just a security threat because of its weapons program but was responsible for the torture and killing of thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqis,� Blair told reporters Wednesday in Hong Kong.

�WALK-IN TIP� FROM IRAQI SOURCE

The United States had offered a $25 million bounty for Saddam and $15 million for each of his sons. Sanchez said that the raid Tuesday morning was based on �a walk-in tip� from an Iraqi source and that the U.S. government expected to pay the reward.

The New York Times, quoting Kurdish officials, said the two men were seen racing from a car into a house in Mosul, 280 miles north of Baghdad, about 9 a.m. (1 a.m. ET) and were filmed. The film was handed over to the U.S. military, which identified the men and surrounded the house with troops from the 101st Airborne Division, the Times said.

July 22 � Iraqis were hoping that the reports were true but said the real news would come only when Saddam himself was killed. NBC�s Tom Aspell reports from Iraq.

U.S. officials told NBC News that the owner of the villa in the al-Falah neighborhood of Mosul was a cousin of Saddam�s who is an important tribal leader in the area.

Sanchez said U.S. troops encountered small-arms fire when they arrived to search the home and called in helicopters to subdue the resistance. The �suspects barricaded themselves in the house� and �resisted fiercely,� he said.

BROTHERS FEARED ACROSS IRAQ

The development was considered a significant coup for U.S. forces. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, told reporters in Washington that it was a �great day for the Iraqi people, a great day for the American military.�

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told MSNBC.com�s Tom Curry that the U.S. troops did �a superb job� and praised �the professionalism in conducting this strike.�

�Our forces are taking the fight to the insurgents � not sitting back waiting,� Warner said. �I�m optimistic that this most recent action will clearly reveal that once again we have been able to get the key people that are inspiring and financing and otherwise providing for this insurgency.�

Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, told reporters in New York: �This is very important. This will contribute considerably to reducing attacks on coalition soldiers. Both of those characters are hated figures in Iraq.�

U.S. SOLDIER KILLED

Word of the deaths took several hours to reach most Iraqis, many of whom do not have television sets or radios.

Tuesday night, heavy gunfire and loud explosions were heard in Baghdad, the capital, where NBC News producers said celebrations had begun. In the confusion, a U.S. Army unit believing it was coming under fire shot a man twice in the chest and a girl who looked to be 6 to 8 years old in the head. Their conditions were not known.

Thanks for finishing for me, MA.

LOL, Freddie.

You mean, you have nothing to add?

Are Hussein's sons clearly gone from this mortal coil, by your reckoning?

Saddam is like Pablo Escobar it will take time to overcome the people loyal to him befrore they can find him. Once his cash runs out he also will run out of friends.

Originally posted by MaskedAvatar
LOL, Freddie.

You mean, you have nothing to add?

Are Hussein's sons clearly gone from this mortal coil, by your reckoning?

I doubt it unless DNA tests are rite then they were doubles.

Originally posted by drunk
Maybe this has been said already Saddams sons could have doubles just like their father you never know.

just read a book called "the devils double" Uday had a perfect double,plastic surgery the lot.i believe that Uday and his father are still alive and in pakistan

Interesting, codes.

I assume you have read the 'news' of the conclusive raid, killing of both brothers and DNA testing...

How could it possibly be wrong? (again?)

Originally posted by Illmatic67
In no way am I promoting violence towards his daughters, I want to get that straight.

I just see the death of Saddam's sons as a plain murder.

So you don't believe in an eye for an eye?
You don't weep for the thousands murdered by these two men?

Your religion cloaks you in hate Illmatic. It was never meant to do that. You need to sit down and rethink your attitude to Allah.
He never meant you to hate.



As for wether they're dead or not?
Yet again there are those here whose judgement is clouded. They claim to smell the conspiracy only because they hate.

This story has been confirmed time and time again, yet still you refuse to accept it. Yet you will accept and believe in other scenarios even though you get the information from less reliable sources.
Yes, it's possible that they are body doubles. But it's a LOT more likely that they are the real thing.

You claim that you want complete proof. Well let me tell you this - THERE NEVER WILL BE COMPLETE PROOF THAT WILL SATISFY YOU.
Even if the DNA tests come back as positive, even if there are hundreds of credible people who say that these two are dead, even if you see it with your own eyes - you will still refuse to believe that they are dead.

Conspiracies are great. But sometimes you have to draw the line somewhere. Otherwise your whole life is a lie.

Lev, very well said..you took my post!

Some let their hatred for an object so cloud their vision that they can not see the true threat in black and white standing in their face.

George Bush, who is accused of lying and killing babies.
Or Sadaam, who is known to have lied, killied women, children and babies for years.

It boggles the clear thinking mind.

Leveller

Out of interest, did you see dragonrider's comments about today's events in the grand scheme of things?

Skepticism often arises from previous bungling attempts to glorify the war as a patriotic feel-good victory:

* toppling of Saddam statue with imported freedom fighters to celebrate

* staged Stallonesque rescue of Jessica Lynch.

Skepticism is justified towards every action and word emanating from any representative of the Bush administration.

I have read all the stories and opinions I can on this today. I have not been near a TV to see any American news.

Perhaps Leveller --- welcome back Leveller --- is eluding to the difference between cautious skepticism verses thoughtless skepticism?

regards
seekerof

Originally posted by MaskedAvatar

Skepticism often arises from previous bungling attempts to glorify the war as a patriotic feel-good victory:

Skeptism can be healthy. Denial never is.

Sometimes you have to push propaganda aside and treat it for what it is. But if you believe all you see to be a lie, then you will miss the truth when it is told to you.