WAIT!! Saddam accepted the US ultimatum BEFORE the war??

[LynneSin]

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061030/nym224.html?.v=44

Saddam Accepted the American Ultimatum Before the US Invasion, According to Rights and Freedom International
Monday October 30, 4:35 pm ET

TORONTO, Oct. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- A former political adviser to Saddam Hussein's son said today that Saddam was willing to yield to all American demands before the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- but that the Bush administration refused his offers.

The disclosure was made by Hossam Shaltout, a Canadian aerospace engineer, former American pilot, and founder of the peace organization Rights and Freedom International (http://www.rightsandfreedom.com), who said that war could have been averted, but Bush aides blocked his efforts to announce Saddam's decision.

"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 said he was planning to fly from Amman to Baghdad to announce Saddam's decision, but the Royal Jordanian Airlines officials claimed that the US ordered the flight to leave five hours earlier causing him to miss the flight, preventing him from announcing on CNN that Saddam would bow to the Bush ultimatum. Shaltout said he traveled by road to Baghdad, delaying him almost one day, but raced to get the communique approved from Saddam to broadcast over international TV stations broadcasting from Baghdad.

If this is true, hell if it's only partially true, then why the hell did we go to war if the guy was willing to negotiate with our country. How many people died because we refused to accept his agreeance to the US ultimatum

[indepat]

1. The decider had already decided: nothing was gonna stop him now EOS

[magnetism]

27. The decision was made....

Nothing was going to stop Shock & Awe! Especially not Saddam.

[SammyWinstonJack]

29. Exactly!

[lcordero2]

2. KICK

:kick:

Wonder if Olbermann would be interested in this.

[H2O Man]

3. I believe this was

fairly well documented by at least a year ago. It should be something discussed in every debate on the war.

[Kiouni]

4. I remember something like this when

all hell first broke loose. We destroyed all of their communication centers and isolated the command structures so the question was posed how were they supposed to surrender?

[drm604]

5. If I recall correctly

Saddam was cooperating with inspectors right before Bush invaded, so this isn't very surprising to me if it's true. He needs to release those tapes now. One thing that makes me just a little skeptical is this:

Shaltout said that when the Americans arrived in Baghdad, he offered his assistance to U.S. military officials. Instead he was arrested by Marines who went to his hotel suite taking his documents. Shaltout has the videotape of his arrest, and several supporting documents.

How does he have videotape of his own arrest? Wouldn't they have confiscated that? Why was he released? I'm hoping that we hear a lot more about this very soon but I need to suspend judgement for now.

[Auggie]

6. Not surprising to me either

[China_cat]

7. Yep, Bush ordered them out

and communications cut off probably because Hans Blix was reporting that they weren't finding anything. He was totally pissed at not being allowed to finish the job.

[flvegan]

13. Shaltout was arrested outside the hotel during a protest, or something.

A video of his arrest might easily be available. Also, considering who he's aligned with, he might have staff/friends videotaping every move, you know...just in case.

I understand he has some money missing as well.

I'm suspending judgement as well, just offering that tidbit on the video potential.

[kentuck]

34. I think this was reported in US media..

But Bush more or less said "it was too late" for him to change his mind..

[japple]

45. Yes, that's how I remember it happening. Bush said

"sorry, it's too late."

[HughBeaumont]

8. The Connecticut Crawford Caligula wanted to go to war in 2001.

He was looking for ANY excuse . . . a sneeze. I don't think he even needed that. The war machine and the Big Oil and Defense congloms that back them would stop at NOTHING and I mean NOTHING to get their man in office. This would have NEVER happened under an Al Gore presidency. Almost akin to the potential fascist takeover of FDR back in the 30s.

[drm604]

9. Here's an article about this man from 2004.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-10-1460_1522516,00.html

Toronto - With the White House Wednesday under heavy fire over the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, a Canadian businessman is claiming he endured daily torture by American soldiers after being seized in Baghdad.

<snip>

"Mr Shaltout was accused of being both a speechwriter for Saddam Hussein as well as his 'right-hand man,'" said Shaltout's Portland, Oregon-based lawyer Thomas Nelson in the complaint lodged with the US Army last week.

It doesn't say anything about him having a message from Saddam.

But here's a transcript of a Chris Matthews interview from 2004: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4916156/

SHALTOUT: The man saying they were trying—they were trying to have me confess. They were trying—I was a peacekeeper there. I was there to convince Saddam Hussein to step down, and I was in the last hours working on this peace agreement (ph).

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.

[EST]

10. This has been available for at least a couple of years, now.

The IAEA inspectors, specifically Hans Blix and later Scott Ritter made this point repeatedly but nobody with a big enough megaphone wanted to listen.

It was said, at the time, that the only thing the criminal clowns would accept was a long distance call from Pakistan or Syria, from Saddam, abdicating in favor of Junior the head crook.

That was the crushing criminality in my mind - that bushco chose to deliberately sacrifice nearly three thousand military personnel and who knows how many civilians on hokeying up a confrontation that, though it would have been extraordinarily complex, possibly could have been handled almost bloodlessly or avoided entirely.

This is one of the areas that I hoped and continue to anticipate, when the house changes hands, will be a part of the investigations along with the Downing Street minutes.

[The Wielding Truth]

11. There were also an estimated 650,000 Iraqi lives taken,too.

Greed is a costly sin.

[EST]

40. Since I did not want to digress too far from the thread,

I used the "who knows how many civilians," rather than the more than a half million, which is probably true.
Often, I have found that a discussion ensues about the numbers of dead instead of the original purpose.

When people in Iraq start talking wistfully about the Saddam regime and how it was not this bad when he was in power (as has been reported happening recently,) you know the smiley faces the criminal cabal has been painting all over everything are just more of the same lies. Of course, we knew that crappy song all along, although there are so many millions of tone deaf publiclowns.

I am in total agreement-greed is a costly sin, and with its help mate, betrayal, is the downfall of all finer virtues of humanity, if not humanity, itself.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

12. This isn't news. I remember it well. Here's just one article. Too early to give a list. :)

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2003/me_iraq_01_14.asp

[HereSince1628]

46. I remember it from earlier too, but not sure from where.

The important thing is that it's being laid out to the American public on Yahoo!.

Things are looking like the nation is ready for a reconciliation of pre-war intelligence, planning and pre-war reality.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

47. I believe I first read about it in the Guardian. eom

[NNN0LHI]

14. Saddam was begging Bush to send in the FBI in to look for the nonexistent WMDs

Bush passed on the offer and sent in the troops to die instead.

I remember posting the story here when it occurred.

Don

[mom cat]

51. Saddam never had a choice. The bushies now want him dead so he can't

talk.

[jberryhill]

15. I like the Google Ads on his website

This is a PR Newswire piece apparently written by Mr. Shaltout himself, as the referenced website is also his platform for announcing his candidacy for president of Egypt.

Having all of the media attention he could hope for, and no shortage of spokespeople, it seems sort of odd that Hussein's ability to communicate to the world would have been dependent on the travel arrangements of a somewhat multi-talented fellow.

That said relative to this particular piece of advertising, it has always been clear that the Bush Administration was not inclined to take "yes" for an answer.

[d_b]

16. I recall reading

something similar in an old Chomsky interview.

[BlueEyedSon]

17. 'cause I'm a WAR PRESIDENT

[DemonFighterLives]

18. Ain't it amazing

The dudya regime will undercut anything that could be a positive to forward the agenda.
What about the Iraqi Weapons Declaration that was seriously redacted and should have never been intercepted by the U.S. or I should say dubco?
:dem:

[davekriss]

19. GHWB did the same thing...

...immediately prior to the first Gulf War. Hussein realized that we'd really invade, so he relented, promised to withdraw from Kuwait and meet all U.S. demands. It wasn't taken seriously by Papa George's administration, so Saddam tried routing the message through the diplomatic corp of several nations (Germany, France, iirc). Still Bush ignored him. Instead the bombs dropped and bullets flew ... and, o yes, the bulldozers rolled over a couple of thousand still live Iraqi soldiers, burying them alive in the hot desert sands.

Nice guys, these Bushes, eh?


(On edit: This is old news, btw, this story coming out that Hussein offered to completely comply with U.S. demands. Too late, though, as Bushboi needed to get his war on, to best his father and meet who knows what other manicial demands.)

[Old and In the Way]

37. "How You and I Got Snookered, Jeanne Kirkpatrick"

Here's some background on George the 1st's War....loved Saddam up until the day he went to war on him.

http://www.wanniski.com/PrintPage.asp?TextID=2240


Oct 7 2002

How You and I Got Snookered, Jeanne Kirkpatrick

Memo To: Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former U.N. Ambassador
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Why We Supported the Gulf War

Holy smokes, Jeanne, I saw you on LateEdition with Wolf Blitzer yesterday, talking about what a bad guy Saddam Hussein was for invading Kuwait in 1990. But then you said he was about to invade Saudi Arabia too. I’m amazed that after all these years you still think Saddam was going to gobble up Saudi Arabia after he digested Kuwait. Do you remember how skeptical both of us were about why we should get excited about why Iraq went into Kuwait, when nobody in the neighborhood seemed to be bothered? You had written an op-ed, I recall, which is probably why you got invited to the Saudi Embassy for a briefing by Saudi’s Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, who is still there. I’d also written about why the United States should war with Baghdad when everyone knew the Kuwaiti Emir was stealing oil from Iraq and had driven the price of oil down to $11 a barrel by cheating the other oil producing countries on its promises to limit production. That’s how I got invited. I think we even shared a taxi from Empower America and went over together. I know for sure we sat next to each other in that little briefing room, where Prince Bandar told us why King Fahd had suddenly decided that Saddam was a threat to Saudi Arabia and to the peace of the region.

It was late August or early September, if I am not mistaken, because it did take a while for the Saudis and Egyptians to get their danders up after Saddam invaded Kuwait on August 2. The “evidence” that Saddam was about to hurl his military machine against the Saudis were photographs which Prince Bandar said he was shown in a Pentagon briefing, photos taken by “Naval Intelligence” which showed Iraqi tanks lined up at the Kuwait/Saudi border, ready to pounce! Wow, I remember thinking, this guy Saddam Hussein, who we backed in the war against Iran, turns out to be a Hitler after all. So did you. And we got behind President Bush and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and his deputy secretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz, and cheered our troops on. A few days later, on September 11, President Bush told a joint session of Congress that "following negotiations and promises by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein not to use force, a powerful army invaded its trusting and much weaker neighbor, Kuwait. Within three days, 120,000 troops with 850 tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. It was then I decided to act to check that aggression."

It was only later I discovered I had been snookered, Jeanne, and so had you. I was sure you had learned those photographs we saw showed tanks that were nowhere near the Saudi border – and Saddam never had the slightest intention of going anywhere near it. This has been confirmed in several different ways in the years since, but the first inkling that the photos were not what they were purported to be showed up in the St. Petersburg Times (Florida) of January 6, 1991. Jean Heller, a Times reporter, wrote "Public Doesn't Get Picture with Gulf Satellite Photos." She was interviewed last month, September 6, by Scott Peterson of The Christian Science Monitor after President Bush included the canard in his bill of indictment against Saddam in his United Nations speech. (We may hear it again tonight when he addresses the nation at 8 pm EDT). Ms. Heller told the Monitor “It was a pretty serious fib.” In 1991 she had written:


Satellite photographs taken by the Soviet Union on the precise day Bush addressed Congress failed to show any evidence of Iraqi troops in Kuwait or massing along the Kuwait-Saudi Arabian border. While the Pentagon was claiming as many as 250,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait, it refused to provide evidence that would contradict the Soviet satellite photos. U.S. forces, encampments, aircraft, camouflaged equipment dumps, staging areas and tracks across the desert can easily be seen. But as Peter Zimmerman, formerly of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Reagan Administration, and a former image specialist for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who analyzed the photographs said: “We didn't find anything of that sort anywhere in Kuwait. We don't see any tent cities, we don't see congregations of tanks, we can't see troop concentrations, and the main Kuwaiti air base appears deserted. It's five weeks after the invasion, and from what we can see, the Iraqi air force hasn't flown a single fighter to the most strategic air base in Kuwait. There is no infrastructure to support large numbers of people. They have to use toilets, or the functional equivalent. They have to have food.... But where is it?”

<snip>

[ContraBass Black]

20. Yup.

I had actually forgotten about that.

[ThomCat]

21. Those criminal idiots really believed

that this would be a short, simple assault and then we would have all of their oil. In such a rosy scenario, they had no incentive to allow peace under any conditions.

However, in addition to being criminals, they are also idiots. So nothing they predicted actually happened. And here we are years later with a huge bloody insurgency, and none of that oil.

[leesa]

22. I remember this clearly. The Taliban also offered to hand over OBL

with some sort of proof that he was involved in 9-11. Of course Bush had none, still doesn't, so he refused. He never planned NOT to bomb them thought the plans were in the works for both countries long before 9-11.

[zbdent]

23. If he had managed to make the flight to make the announcement

it would have been subject to a "terrorist attack" ... likely with a heat-seeking missile fired from a US fighter jet ...

[skypilot]

24. Which ultimatum?

Disarm? Let in weapons inspectors? Leave the country within 48 hours? I lost track.

[Sapphocrat]

25. I remember this.

It was something like three weeks before we invaded that SH was, like, "Can we TALK, please?!"

I want to say it was Seymour Hersh who first dropped that little bombshell, but I'm not certain.

[dad]

28. I remember too

Saddam was allowing inspectors and everything, but then Bush moved the goal and said that Saddam had to step down.

[Senator]

26. Yes, but diplomacy tends to eat into the profits

Plus there's all that reading.

Not the least bit masturbatory manly.

--

[NewJeffCT]

30. I think the NY Times had this story at the time

Supposedly, Saddam had contacted the US through a 3rd party, but the spin from Team Bush was that they thought it was not credible - even though the Times said it was.

(meanwhile, the RW still believes that Mansoor Ijaz was able to get bin Laden's head on a platter for Bill Clinton!)

[negativenihil]

31. k&r! a must read!!!! n/t

[kentuck]

32. It would be nice if you were able to "search" DU for that time...

I'm sure there were comments on it. But, I don't know if that info exists anymore??

[Norquist Nemesis]

33. Yep, he sure did! But Bush already thousands of troops positioned

for strike. His only option was to proceed, otherwise he might have been called a 'cut-n-runner' or that he turned tail and ran by the neo-cons that communicate through ink and hate radio.

[Poiuyt]

35. I remember that aspect as well. The pundits were saying that since he

had moved all of our military into position, he just had to carry through with the attack.

[happydreams]

36. Well the war was really about

establishing democracy and letting it spread throughout the Middle East ((like oil on water)). And the 14 permanent military bases in Iraq are simply there to enforce democracy wherever it pops up. And the elections are done with "live free or Diebold" voting machines that are guaran-fucking-teed to make sure pro-democracy people win!. If the "shock and awe" of the Blitzkrieg didn't work then it would be neccessary "to kill all their leaders and convert the people to Christianity" said wicked witch of the West Ann Coulter. That last part went a bit askew with ~600,000 Iraqi's dead and their leaders still chanting in the rubble and body strewn streets. Meanwhile Cheney's company Halliburton, which got most of the contracts to rebuild Iraq, has seen its stock price soar even as its services languish in a sea of corruption and incompetence.

[The Count]

38. Just like Taliban offered OBL to avoid the bombing of Afghanistan

New offer on Bin Laden
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,575593,00.html
Minister makes secret trip to offer trial in third country
Rory McCarthy in Islamabad
Wednesday October 17, 2001
The Guardian
A senior Taliban minister has offered a last-minute deal to hand over
Osama bin Laden during a secret visit to Islamabad, senior sources in
Pakistan told the Guardian last night.
For the first time, the Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laden for
trial in a country other than the US without asking to see evidence
first in return for a halt to the bombing, a source close to Pakistan's
military leadership said.

[Javaman]

39. I vaguely remember something like this...

That Saddam was willing to accept the terms but wanted to sit down and talk. Moron* came out and said it was a delaying tactic so he could hide his WMD's which the inspectors never found and which moron* soon pulled out of Iraq and the rest is a tortuously stupid and wasteful history.

[gully]

41. Yes he did, and Bush kicked out weapons inspectors.

Two little known facts in this charade of a war on terror.

[happydreams]

49. and Hans Blix was correct.

[Cleita]

42. Apparently, he accepted the ultimatum after the deadline

we gave him or so that's how the story went back then. So according to the Bush administration it didn't count.

[moodforaday]

43. K&R

[LSK]

44. K&R

[electron_blue]

48. Yes. This was in the news, it was not hard to find.

I knew it then and it was one of the many reasons that convinced me we were being lied to from the beginning. It was never about WMD. It was always about $$$$$$$$$. I've said this for 3.5 years now.

[happydreams]

50. Chomsky pointed this out

about Nicaragua and other countries terrorized or invaded by the US. The Sandinistas agreed to everything the US asked and they still sent in the Contras.

[applegrove]

52. We knew that early on. At the last momment Saddam said he'd allow

inspectors...they went in..then at the very end he said he would hold elections within a year.

Taliban too offered to hand over bin Laden. But in that case..the Taliban had been giving bin Laden comfort during previous attacks and there was a need for NATO to respond with regime change.

[windbreeze]

53. Is this a surprise?

look, * intended to take out Saddam BEFORE he ever became prez, as far back as 1999 when he was running for the office, he was spouting off about taking out Saddam....and his advisors told him to keep his mouth shut, because the American people had just been through one war with Iraq...they felt he might not get elected IF he proposed going after Saddam and starting another war in the Gulf...so he shut up about it...but he went into the wh, with the intent...

Nothing was going to stop him...all the while he was spewing that we were going to use all methods of diplomacy to AVOID going to war with Iraq, he was awarding NO BID contracts to "rebuild Iraq after the war"(middle of Feb 2003)....that kinda tells the story...nothing Saddam did was going to be enough...he had made his plans, and he couldn't allow Saddam to outsmart him..now the only question I have is...does anyone realize just how convenient it was for him, that 9/11 took place(especially when his numbers were in the toilet)...we all know how he repeated, ad nauseum, Saddam and 9/11 were connected, every chance he got from right after 9/11...UNTIL HE INVADED...
windbreeze

[WCGreen]

54. They are guilty of treason....

[David Zephyr]

55. And Saddam agreed to allow more inspectors and

also was telling the truth about WMD, while Bush lied.

Thanks for this article, LynneSin.

[MH1]

56. Yep, I've heard this before.

Bush intended to go to war with Iraq NO MATTER WHAT.

No one should ever forget that.