On the Demonizaton of Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega: Saddam Bravely Fought His US Captors With a Handgun the Spider Hole Was Psy Ops

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On the demonization of Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega
An excerpt from the recently published book The Mother of All
Battles: The Endless U.S.-Iraq War by Malcom Lagauche:
In December 2003, we all saw the photos of a disheveled Saddam Hussein
after he was pulled out of a “spider hole” in a town near Tikrit. The
administration laughed and the U.S. public made jokes about him and
his hiding place.
The room was dirty. There was an empty can of Spam. The story was that
he was holed up there and was totally irrelevant to Iraq. His day was
done and he was now in the hands of Iraq’s liberators. What you saw
wasn’t real. Nothing of this scenario was true.
On March 8, 2005, United Press International (UPI) ran a short press
release titled “Public Version of Saddam Capture Fiction.” It received
little publicity in the U.S., but some foreign news agencies did run
the story
The UPI press release consisted of quotes from an ex-U.S. Marine of
Lebanese descent, Nadim Rabeh. In addition to the U.S. version of the
capture date being off by two days, during an interview in Lebanon,
Rabeh stated:
I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who
searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit,
and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole
as announced. We captured him after fierce resistance during which a
Marine of Sudanese origin was killed.
Rabeh recounted how Saddam fired at them with a gun from the window of
a room on the second floor. Then, the Marines shouted at him in
Arabic, “You have to surrender. There is no point in resisting.”
How did we come to see the pictures of the hole and a scruffy-looking
Saddam Hussein? According to Rabeh, “Later on, a military production
team fabricated the film of Saddam’s capture in a hole, which was in
fact a deserted well.”
The former Marine’s account mixes with the rendition Saddam Hussein
gave his lawyer when they had their first meeting. Saddam told him
that he was captured in a friend’s house and that he was drugged and
tortured for two days, hence the pictures of Saddam looking
bedraggled.
All the major news networks and publications showed pictures of the
hole and a beleaguered Saddam: Time Magazine, CNN News, magazines,
daily newspapers, etc. You name it and they published it. But, they
were all wrong. Not one publication took the time to research the
story. They ran the pictures supplied by the U.S. military and
parroted the lines they were given.
This was not the first time something similar has occurred. After the
1989 invasion of Panama, the U.S. allowed the press to enter Manuel
Noriega’s office. He was portrayed as a sexual pervert. In the office
were pictures of young boys, a picture of Hitler, red underpants and
pornographic magazines.
A few months later, the first Marine to enter Noriega’s office was
released from the Corps. He eventually talked to a reporter and gave
his story of the encounter. He maintained that the contents of the
office included only a desk, a telephone, a chair, and a typewriter.
With Saddam, the props were changed. They were made to make Saddam
look like a caged animal on the run who only had the basic elements to
survive. No one asked questions of what should have been obvious. For
instance, how did Saddam Hussein come into possession of a can of
Spam? There was absolutely no place in Iraq where Spam was sold. It
contains pork, a food forbidden from a Moslem’s diet.
A few months after his capture, a picture was widely distributed that
gained much publicity. It showed a bunch of U.S. soldiers standing
next to an Iraqi building on which a painted illustration depicted the
blowing up of the World Trade Center. The inference was that Iraqis
took glee in the acts of the destruction of the World Trade Center on
9-11-2001.
If one looked close, it was evident that the soldiers were standing on
the base path of a disused baseball field. There were no baseball
fields in Iraq. Upon closer scrutinizing, the trees were typical
southeastern U.S. types that are not indigenous to Iraq.
The photo was bogus. It was filmed in the U.S., but, the harm had
been done. Many news agencies had distributed the picture. Its
contents inflamed U.S. citizens even more about the Iraqi people.
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/on-the-demonization-of-saddam-hussein-and-manuel-noriega/