The part in bold is where the stink comes from. That is precisely what Saddam wants out of this- the other stuff is just what is required to attain the goal of media access and maipulation. The American media is the only effective weapon Iraq has. Saddam intends to use it much as he was trying to use it in the Gulf War, and as he very successfully was using it after the gulf war to try to erode the west's will to maintain sanctions. Saddam's intent is to invite the press in and in them to plant some seed, some scrap of information most likely not even related to Speicher...a seed which will sprout and take root on its own among the usual conspiracy buffs. Typically, with such marxist-inspired dictators, they follow the common patterns of instilling distrust in the opposing nation where it does not already exist, and to aggravate the distrust where it is already present. Saddam's intent will be to divide and conquer his enemies by making them more suspicious of their own than they are of him. He needs the media and some willing and even unknowing accomplices in America to pull it off, but if the North Vietnamese could win through propaganda, Saddam thinks he can do so too.
If he can take the media on a show-tour then he has a chance.
There is something ironic about how dictators who despise and supress free speech in their own countries... depend so much on the free speech we enjoy in ours.
All of these 2-bit dictators dream of handing the US a Vietnam. All of them know what many Americans do not even understand- that Vietnam was not a military defeat but it was most certainly a political one. It was an American defeat because the war was won in Washington, through the skillful use of the press and the impressions the press was able to project to weak, populist politicians about the stability of their base.
Saddam's survival depends upon his witting and unwitting supporters in America and to a lesser degree in Europe. How much material his ministry of information manages to plant and how well it works to distribute suspicion through normal American media circles and particularly through general sources such as the net, will all affect the most important factor in his survival: the American will to fight. Thus he must gain access to the press BEFORE any open conflict begins, in order to set up a flow of disinformation in time to do him some good. He needs to push us into a situation where we look like the bad and untrustworthy guy, which will of course elevate Saddam to the coveted position of moral equivalence, or if he was really lucky, even propel him to a position of apparent superiority as an' oppressed victim of US imperialism.'
As we know from Saddam's more recent success with winning the propaganda war over sanctions, Saddam is much more skilled at this sort of propaganda than the jokers called 'al Qeada.' Bin Laden didn't have any propaganda sense at all when it came to manipulating American opinion- probably because bin Laden wasn't interested in converting Americans or swaying our opinions so much as he was just interested in killing Americans and getting us to turn tail, to be killed later at his leisure. Bin Laden was purely an emotion-driven follower of another Islamic religious leader, quite unlike Hussein, who is a cunning SOB and who is anything but a follower. Saddam doesn't have any particular desire to exterminate Americans or to convert everyone to Islam. Saddam just wants to rule a Greater Iraq. Heck, right now he would be happy to settle for just staying on as ruler of the lesser Iraq, and so he needs allies and he needs the most powerful ally of all- the US media.