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To: American Spirit who wrote (20775)	6/21/2003 12:31:08 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 89467

Crony says Hussein, 2 sons survived war Captured aide tells interrogators Syria expelled Qusai, Odai sfgate.com Douglas Jehl, New York Times Saturday, June 21, 2003 Washington -- A top lieutenant to Saddam Hussein has told American interrogators that the Iraqi leader and his two sons survived the U.S.-led war in Iraq and that the aide himself had fled to Syria with the sons after the conflict, Defense Department officials said Friday. The officials said they had not yet assessed the accuracy of the claims by the aide, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, who was arrested in Iraq earlier this week. But they said the United States regarded the information as having enormous potential significance and that it had ignited an intense burst of clandestine U.S. military activity aimed at capturing the sons, Odai and Qusai, and perhaps even Hussein himself. U.S. officials also said that Mahmud is providing information about Iraq's suspected program of weapons of mass destruction and had contradicted evasive accounts from other former senior Iraqi officials now in U.S. detention. They did not elaborate. A conviction among Hussein's loyalists that he is still alive, picked up by U.S. intelligence intercepts, has emerged as a powerful motivating factor in the military resistance to American forces in Iraq, according to U.S. officials. If it is truthful, the account that Mahmud has provided to his interrogators would be the most authoritative confirmation that neither Hussein nor his sons were killed in U.S. attacks in March and April. U.S. officials would not say whether Mahmud had revealed a link between the resistance to occupation and Hussein and his sons. On the basis of those intercepts and other recently obtained evidence, U.S. intelligence agencies have shifted their view and now say that Hussein and Qusai are probably still alive and still in Iraq. But Mahmud's claim that he and the sons had spent time in Syria after the war, before being expelled by Syrian authorities, adds a new element to that theory. While U.S. forces were moving swiftly to check out leads provided by Mahmud, a senior Defense Department official said that U.S. authorities were also treating his claims with some skepticism. "This is a person who is very close to Saddam Hussein, who was for many, many years, and who was part of the lies and deception for so long that you have to be very careful about what he tells you." TASK FORCE 20 The official declined to provide any details about the newly energized search for Hussein and his sons, which others said was being carried out by Task Force 20, a secret military organization that includes Army and Navy counterterrorist personnel and other special military teams. But the official made clear that the operations had been prompted by information provided by Mahmud, who has been questioned over the last four days at a U.S. military facility in Baghdad. "You follow up every lead that you can get, and when you get a person who's that high up in the regime, it's obviously in your benefit to move quickly on anything he tells you," the senior official said. "Because when Saddam Hussein learns that his top deputy is in detention, he's going to try to erase any trail that he'd know of." Mahmud, who ranked behind only Hussein and his sons in importance in the Iraqi regime, has told the interrogators that during the weeks after the war with the United States he spent time in hiding with the former Iraqi leader himself. But Mahmud said that the group split up at an unspecified time before Mahmud left for Syria with Odai and Qusai, according to the U.S. officials. The officials said they did not know or would not share the time line that Mahmud had provided for his whereabouts or those of Hussein and his sons, in the more than two months since the fall of the Iraqi government and the capture of Baghdad. Mahmud, 46, who as personal secretary to Hussein controlled access to the Iraqi leader, was arrested on Monday in the vicinity of Tikrit, Hussein's hometown and stronghold. Bush administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had said publicly in the weeks after the war that at least a handful of senior Iraqi officials had fled across the border into Syria, and they called on the Syrian government to hand them over. Until now, however, there has never been any credible suggestion that those who fled to Syria might have included Hussein's sons. SYRIA DENIES KNOWLEDGE Damascus has vociferously denied any knowledge of senior Iraqi officials taking refuge in Syria. Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad assured U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell last month that his government would not provide refuge to Iraqi fugitives. The whereabouts of Hussein and his son have been a mystery since at least March 20, when the United States initiated the war against Iraq with a strike by cruise missiles and bombs on an installation in Baghdad where the top Iraqi leadership was believed to be hiding. The United States made a second attempt on April 7, with a bombing attack on a building in the Mansour district of Baghdad, where two intelligence sources said they were meeting. The shift toward a view that Hussein and his sons are probably alive has been prompted in part by the failure of excavations of the two bombing sites to turn up DNA or other physical evidence of their bodies. It has also been prompted by interrogations of senior Iraqi officials now in U.S. custody who have said that Hussein and his sons were not at the sites of either of the bombings. Meanwhile, attacks by Iraqi irregulars against U.S. forces showed no sign of letting up Friday after a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into a power station in Fallujah, injuring two American soldiers and blacking out much of the city -- a center of anti-American hostility.

To: American Spirit who wrote (20775)	6/21/2003 7:59:00 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

''If there's one person in this country who ought to be laid off, it's George Bush.'' Kerry Rips Bush on Economy By Holly Ramer The Associated Press Thursday 19 June 2003 truthout.org NEWPORT, N.H. (AP) A president who has allowed the loss of 2.5 million jobs should be the next worker to get pink-slipped, Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry said Thursday. Speaking at a small library art gallery, Kerry noted that New Hampshire voters have a reputation for fiscal conservatism. But he said there is nothing conservative about the Bush administration racking up a huge deficit or having an attorney general who tramples on civil rights. ''There's nothing conservative about them; they're extreme,'' he said. ''If there's one person in this country who ought to be laid off, it's George Bush.'' Kerry laid out his views on education and the environment, tying both to jobs. Greater investments in schools will produce skilled workers, he said, and bringing new technology to the search for alternative energy sources will create jobs. ''We don't have a worker shortage in America, my friends,'' he said. ''We have a skill shortage in America because we're not paying attention.'' Kerry said he has the strongest environmental record of anyone running for president, describing his role in blocking oil drilling in the arctic wildlife reserve. ''I led the fight that stopped them in their tracks from drilling,'' he said. He urged people to get involved, to vote in 2004. ''We need to get angry. We've got to get out and talk to folks who somehow think that some bumper-sticker slogan about guns or gays or something is the reason they ought to get out and vote, when they're getting killed in the economy,'' he said. ''They're getting killed at school, they don't have any health care, the air is polluting their lungs and their lives are not the quality they ought to be,'' he said. ''You can't just walk out of this library today and complain.''