O.......K

'Nuff said.

So who REALLY caught Saddam?

dafydd relayed this article about how Saddam Hussein was captured from mactavish.  It raises some very interesting questions about who actually caught Saddam Hussein, and the answer appears to be that Hussein was betrayed to the Kurdish Patriotic Front by a member of the al-Jabour tribe because Hussein's son Uday had raped a daughter of the tribe.  (Hussein reportedly paid the tribe 7 million pounds in blood money, but also threatened to wipe out the entire tribe if the story was ever revealed.)

You'll note that the US press has touted the capture as a US intelligence coup, and made no mention of any Kurdish involvement.  But the Kurds announced his capture about 12 hours before the US made any public mention of having him.  Suspicious, no?  Personally, I'm getting awful tired of being lied to by the government.

Am I pre-judging who's telling the truth here?  Possibly.  But at this point, the government's been caught lying so many times, and for that matter, caught lying so many times just regarding this war against Iraq, that if someone's lying on almost any subject, the US government is one of the suspects, and there's another suspect beyond known kooks, then my money's on the US government as the liar.

Does this make me a paranoid conspiracy theorist?  I don't think so.  It's just, well, you know the saying -- fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.  Our government has earned its reputation as a liar.