Saddam Surat #1 - Excerpt from Saddam: His Rise & Fall

The Pasadena Pundit ^ | December 1, 2005 | Wayne Lusvardi

[WayneLusvardi]

Saddam Surat #1 - Today the Pasadena Pundit begins a series of posts of excerpts from Con Coughlin's book Saddam - His Rise and Fall. In Arabic a series or row of revelations is called a surat (surah, sura). So we will call these excerpts Saddam's Surats. Here is the first Surat which is the beginning paragraph in Coughlin's book:

Saddam Surat No. 1 "Shortly before a carefully orchestrated series of terrorist attacks devastated the eastern seaboard of the United States on the morning of September 11, 2001, several Western intelligence agencies received an intriguing report to the effect that Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq, had placed troops on "Alert G," the highest state of military readiness Iraqi troops had seen since the 1991 Gulf War. Intelligence agents based in Iraq claimed that Saddam himself had retreated to one of his heavily fortified bunkers in the family fiefdom in Tikrit, in northern Iraq. Meanwhile his two wives, Sajida and Samira, women who in normal circumstances shunned each other's company, had been moved to another of Saddam's secret bunkers. The clear implication was that Saddam had retreated to Tikrit in early September 2001 because he had prior warning of the September 11 attacks, in which groups of suicidal al-Qaeda terrorists flew fully laden civilian airliners into the twin tower of New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing thousands of innocent civilian office workers and military personnel."

[okie01]

The clear implication was that Saddam had retreated to Tikrit in early September 2001 because...

Very interesting...if true. What is Coughlin's source for this claim, do you know?

[okie01]

For those interested, Coughlin isn't a conspiracy nut. He is Executive Editor of the London Sunday Telegraph and covered the Iraq war in the field.

It's not the first time he has reported a link between Saddam and 9/11 -- Does This Link Saddam to 9/11?, London Telegraph, December 14, 2003. This particular report concerns an alleged meeting between Mohammed Atta and Abu Nidal...in Baghdad, at Saddam's order.

Still, the dots seems few and far between and Coughlin's reporting seems based more on supposition than evidence.

[WayneLusvardi]

Mr. "Okie"
The author obviously doesn't cite specific sources because they are intel agencies he presumably has spoken with which can't reveal all they know. But the furtive behavior, if true, is intriguing. Stay tuned to the many other juicy excerpts from this book which will be posted daily at Pasadena Pundit for the public interest. There is much more than speculation and dot connecting in this book.

[AliVeritas]

Thanks.