Blessed July

No, not firecrackers and hot dogs, though they're great fun. No, in this case Blessed July refers to a reign of violence planned by Saddam Hussein in the year 1999:

1- Code name of the special operations (Tamooz Mubarak) [Blessed July].
2- The duties will be divided into two branches which are:
A- Bombings B- Assassinations 5- Execution steps

Although this operation was primarily meant as an instrument to punish expatriots working to overthrow the regime, it showed what Saddam was capable of doing through his subordinates.

Let's slip into the conspiracy shack for a moment. This Blessed July operation was recently mentioned by Jack Cashill in WND. July was apparently a sentimental month in Saddam's Iraq. The 17th was called "National Liberation Day" in commemoratation of the Ba'ath party's rise to power. Arab terrorists have long been known to have a penchant for symbolism.

Cashill tries to relate the plan to an event that occurred three years previous off the coast of Long Island on a warm July evening, the 17th to be precise. Shortly after that horrible event a theretofore unknown terrorist group took credit and Cashill recounts that the last line in their communique was similar to the language in the Blessed July document. Coincidence or mistranslation? We don't know.

Ironically, current Bush antagonist Richard Clarke was right in the middle of all that hoopla. In his book "Against all Enemies" he took credit for the "zoom climb" theory to explain away Flight 800's eyewitnesses, which was later turned into a cheesy animantion by the CIA. The CIA has no mandate to nose around in domestic air crash investigations (where was the outrage back then?) especially when the probable cause was pretty well thought to be an innocuous spark in the center wing fuel tank. That was yet another coincidence.

Funny, the CIA was having its own problems with Saddam in 1996. Their embed team in Kurdistan territory was having trouble getting their coup going, while another clandestine group operating from Jordan had been discovered by Saddam in June of that year.

Its objective was to penetrate Saddam's elite Republican Guard, but the group was infiltrated by his agents. Last June, Saddam got wind of a Wifaq coup plan and ordered organization members seized in Baghdad. By July, at least several dozen plotters had been executed, and as many as 2,000 suspects were held and presumably tortured before some were released.

By September 1996 the CIA had been chased out of Iraq in the middle of the night and many members of Allawi's Iraqi National Congress were dead. Saddam rolled tanks and troops into the area thumbing his nose at Clinton, the UN, and everyone else. Sounds like he was more than a little perturbed.

Apparently the Butcher gave a fiery speech on July 17, 1996. According to Laurie Mylroie it was the angriest speech in recent memory. The very next day federal prisoner Ramzi Yousef made a telephone call to someone across the pond, speaking in a Baluch dialect the FBI translators didn't understand at the time. Reportedly he told someone, "what had to be done was done, TWA800..".

The ironies continue to this day. A CNN/AP story on Saturday about understaffing at the Supermax prison in Colorado failed to include Yousef in a short list of notable inmates, while local outlets (pulling from the same AP story) did mention him. Based on the fact Yousef was the main terrorist character in ABC's "Road to 9/11" miniseries, later pilloried by the Clintons, one has to wonder if the ommission was intentional.

Taken separately these events are simply strange happenings, not smoking guns, but when strung together a certain symmetry begins to evolve...from the Gulf War to the first WTC bombing to Bojinka to 9/11, to the US attack on Iraq, to a passage in Bob Woodward's latest book regarding the President's stubborn insistence to not leave Iraq "even if Laura and Barney are the only ones still supporting me".

GRAVELTAS 10/15/06

John Kerry, who turned down Bob Woodward's 22 questions in 2004, decided after seeing "State of Denial" that Watergate Bob had turned into a friendly, and with the help of hindsight decided to answer the Q's after all. Of course he would have done everything differently. Every single thing. And better. Tougher. And smarter. What a putz.

ANOTHER LETTER 10/16/06

Saddam's open letter kept form--it was consistently odd just like the previous four or five--some are still trying to figure out his October 2001 letter. Many more will be puzzled with this passage of the new one:

"You must remember what the prophets taught us, including the two honorable ones, Muhammad and Jesus, the son of Mary. Both forgave and turned to God, beseeching him to forgive those whom they had forgiven, including those who had hurt them.

"And you know very well that Saddam Hussein never surrendered to any threat ... and Saddam Hussein will remain as you knew him."

Not something you see everyday--Saddam quoting Jesus. Heart-warming propaganda on a stick. You gotta admit--he's good. Bush is clearly no match in the PR-BS department, but few are.

We know the letter wasn't idle chatter precisely because we know such things come with a point. What was Saddam's? We can probably surmise the following: Ramsey Clark is acting as a personal Mukhabarat agent and is surely briefing the team on the political landscape in America. Saddam knows the security situation is deteriorating thanks in large part to the Golden Mosque attack, an event conventional wisdom says was perpetrated by Islamists at the prodding of Saddamists. He knows al-Maliki is an ineffectual leader and cannot control al-Sadr and his Iranian goon squad. He knows about James Baker's not-so-secret project. He knows that Condi Rice visited Sunni leaders on her recent visit to Baghdad. He knows Bush is in a pickle.

Earlier missives haven't mentioned mercy or religion. Should we assume his few years in solitary allowed him to find Allah in between bags of Doritos? After all, the tougher and smarter set keeps reminding us that Saddam was incapable of a relationship with an Islamist, being that he was a secularist. Or does it prove just the opposite?

The letter sounds almost like an offer--"I'll call off al-Douri and the others, just spare me the noose and leave Iraq. I promise we won't shoot you on your way out". Some might call that a Hail Mary play, since the High Court today announced it would sentence him November 5 (two days before our election) for the Dujail case. Iraqi law supposedly says all appeals will be processed quickly and the sentence carried out sooner than later.

So maybe. I'd hate to think it was some kind of weird version of the Statue of Liberty play.