"Hossam Shaltout, a former political adviser to Saddam Hussein's son, said today that before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, Saddam expressed his intent to yield to all American demands, but that the Bush administration refused his offers, according to a press release on Yahoo News.
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"Saddam was willing to yield to all American demands, announced and unannounced, to reach peaceful resolution," said Shaltout, "but the Bush administration, including Elizabeth Cheney, undersecretary of State, David Welch, the U.S. ambassador in Egypt, and Gene Cretz, his political attache, did not respond to his offers."
Shaltout claims that in March of 2003, just as he was to read the Iraqi government's official reply to the Bush ultimatum on Al-Jazeera, the broadcast was interrupted and "the plug was pulled on the transmission." He also maintains that later, when the Americans arrived in Baghdad, he offered his assistance to U.S. military officials, but instead was arrested by Marines who went to his hotel suite and took his documents.
Left unmentioned in the press release are Shaltout's claims that he was tortured and abused during his imprisonment.
In May of 2004, Shaltout told his story to MSNBC's Chris Matthews.
"I was there to convince Saddam Hussein to step down, and I was in the last hours working on this peace agreement," Shaltout said. "And I wanted him to keep the agreement that he agreed to step down only 15 minutes before the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) of this ultimatum. That was what I was doing there."
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According to his Web site, Rights And Freedom International, Shaltout is currently running for President of Egypt."
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
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2 comments:
First, we're not exporting democracy. We're imposing capitolism. What we are doing in the Middle East is exactly what we did to Native Amercians. We wanted their natural resources, so they had to have "democracy", which really meant a piece of paper with some names on it to legitimize the mineral leases we "helped" them to enter with various companies. We recognized as "legitimate" those individuals who accepted money and cooperated with Uncle Slam. Sound familiar?
What we did in Iraq had actually nothing to do with Saddam. They wanted war so they could reconstruct and piratize their oil industry. I believe it was Anonymous in Imperial Hubrus who reported that through an Egyptian representative, Saddam offered to pay us $2 billion if we would let him and his two sons go into exile. We declined. Then General Karpinski reported that the invasion went very easilly, with virtually no resistance but the insurgency began when we showed the pictures of Saddam's two dead sons. They had to know what kind of reaction this would cause. That so many have to die for the few to make their glutonous profits is not even a consideration. It's just collateral damage, unintended consequences.
There's also Susan Lindauer's claims that she relayed invitations from the Iraqi government in March 2001 to the US via her second cousin, WH Pres Sec. Andy Card "that the Iraqi government was very eager to have weapons inspectors come back to their country in order to prove that they had no weapons of mass destruction."
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