The story appears in the Sunday Mirror, a London tabloid where the chances of a story being accurate are about the same as getting heads 10 times straight in a coin-toss. However, this piece is detailed enough that it could represent something that’s actually happening.
“The Iraqi dictator is demanding safe passage to the former Soviet republic of Belarus,” the paper reports. “In exchange, he has vowed to provide information on weapons of mass destruction and disclose bank accounts where he siphoned off tens of millions of dollars in plundered cash.”
The Bush administration has said it would never “negotiate” with Saddam and, according to the Mirror, is talking with him through intermediaries in hopes of capturing or killing him.
Saddam reportedly is so desperate that he’s changing locations several times a day. Further – he’s run out of black hair dye!
We can only hope that U.S. troops soon capture this madman. It would be much sweeter, I think, to see him in chains than lying dead on those morgue slabs like his sons.
Then we’ll only have to worry about Iraq’s growing nationalist outrage at our presence and the 15,000 or so terrorists that reportedly have entered the country, mostly through the porous Syrian border, to kill our soldiers, UN officials and Iraqis who collaborate with us in trying to establish a new government.
Update: A spokesman for the U.S. 4th Infantry Division says it "has not had any contact with any former regime members regarding Saddam Hussein's disposition."
Revisiting the real Dr. Evil
Winds of Change has done an excellent roundup of the latest developments in the nuclear-weapons standoff between the Bush administration and Kim Jong-Il, the vicious lunatic who runs North Korea. Included are links to some really good English-language blogs on the Korean situation.
If you don’t have time for the whole briefing – there’s a lot – be sure to at least read blogger Tacitus’ review of the new book, “The Aquariums of Pyongyang,” written by by a Korean whose family moved from the Korean community in Japan to North Korea. The author’s mother wanted the family to take part in the grand experiment in nation-building under “Great Leader” Kim Il-Sung, the father of current “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il. It’s a good introduction to the true horror of the Creepy Kingdom.
“Aquariums” author Kang Chol-Hwan spent 10 years in a slave labor camp at Yodok, where other members of his family were incarcerated as well – all except his mother, at whose insistence the migration to North Korea was made. She was never once allowed to visit the camp to see her family.
“I will not recount the experiences of the Yodok camp here,” Tacitus writes “Suffice it to say that only an Auschwitz or a Kolyma could outstrip the horrors of a Yodok. Suffice it to say that whereas Auschwitz and Kolyma are history, Yodok mercilessly grinds its human prey into skeletal shades even as you read this.”
Interestingly, Kang’s experiences in South Korea after his eventual escape there are more disconcerting to me than what happened to him in the North. You expect deranged dictators to treat their own populace harshly. You don’t expect the residents of South Korea, which has evolved into one of the supposed model democracies of East Asia to treat escapees from the vast terror camp north of their border with condescension and skepticism. But they do because the South is in such deep denial about the nature of the North Korean regime that it is now widely viewed as just a wayward piece of the nation that poses no threat to anyone.
“It was a terrible shock,” Kang wrote of what he experienced in the South. “I had been through so many awful things, and these people, who had lived their whole lives swaddled in perfect comfort, were looking skeptically down their noses at me! Clearly, my address was unfavorable to the North. Clearly, our testimony about the camps and the repressiveness of the Pyongyang regime would bolster the South's claim that it was the legitimate representative of the Korean nation. But so what? Did telling the truth necessarily mean having to oppose the government?”
Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to escape the conclusion that these attitudes, and the deep strain of anti-Americanism that now permeates South Korean life, are the direct result of our 50-year occupation. It’s a simple fact that everyone grows to hate an occupier – it just takes longer in some places than others. We still have 37,000 troops in South Korea who daily are subjected to indignities and sometimes violence. It is long past time for us to leave the Koreans to their own affairs. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has indicated that our forces there will be redeployed. The problem now is that it’ll have to be done delicately so that Kim Jong-Il doesn’t do something fatally stupid that would get many of our men and women – and perhaps hundreds of thousands of South Koreans – killed.
‘We don’t want to hear it … we prefer the myth’
TomPaine.com has an excellent interview with Chris Hedges, the veteran New York Times war correspondent, about his new book, “What Everyone Should Know About War.” The book is aimed in part at youths who may be considering joining the military and have little concept of what they’re getting into, in wartime at least.
In a Q&A with Tom Paine, Hedges talks about the psychololgical destruction of warfare (the page also has an audio link):
“Well, combat, despite what you see in the movies, no one can stand prolonged combat. Or let's say very, very few people can. You just don't stay that resilient. Eventually you break down. And from studies -- the studies that you've quoted, I think that's a World War II study -- they have found that after 60 days of continuous combat, 98 percent of the unit will have become psychiatric casualties. And the other 2 percent, will, according to the military psychiatrist, show symptoms or signs of aggressive psychopathic personalities. So, in short, after 60 days of combat, you'll either go crazy or you were crazy to begin with.”
And this:
“There's no shortage of veterans who come back and bear witness to war. Read 'Jarhead,' one of the latest examples of this, by Anthony Swofford, but we don't want to hear it. We prefer the myth. We prefer the flag-waving. We prefer these abstract notions of glory, honor, heroism -- terms that are rendered hollow in combat, if not obscene. And we prefer it for our own self-aggrandizement. We don't want to listen. That's part of the frustration, and part of the sadness of so many combat veterans who come back and are willing to bear witness despite their own pain, but are not only ignored, but are often shunted aside and are left to suffer alone, or with their families.” (Link via Antiwar.com Blog.)
Update: FBI says it wasn’t terrorists who shorted airline stocks
Last week, I sent readers here for a look at unanswered questions about 9/11. One of the questions was who made all the money shorting the stocks of United and American airlines just before 9/11. Well, the FBI now says it was hedge funds, which frequently take large positions in stocks they like or large positions against stocks they think have poor prospects. So maybe we can scratch Al Qaida off the list for this, at least.
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