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Revisitng Saddam

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

By George Rush & Joanna Rush - DAILY NEWS GOSSIP COLUMNISTS

Saddam Hussein was said to have had three doubles to confuse his enemies. Since the Dec. 30, 2006, execution of Saddam Hussein, conspiracy theorists have posited that Hussein loyalists swapped the corpse of a body double for the actual leader. (A German forensic pathologist, Dieter Buhmann, has asserted that, based on his analysis of 450 images, Saddam had at least three doubles to confuse his enemies.)

Those skeptical of the official account point to the infamous cell-phone video of the hanging, noting a confusing section of blackness between footage of Saddam standing on the scaffold and what appears to be his lifeless body.

"We cannot say reasonably that Saddam Al-Tikrit did not simply fall through onto a mat below the gallows," one blogger suggested.

Officials at the Iraqi Embassy in D.C. had no immediate comment on claims that Saddam is at large, but a Pentagon spokesman called the assertion "preposterous." Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (Ret.), an Iran Policy Committee member, allowed that "anything's possible in the Middle East. But this one's a reach."

Nimrod Raphaeli, a senior analyst with the Middle East Media Research Institute, scoffed: "The people who took part in the execution were all Shiites. They were fanatics who wanted revenge. They were screaming with joy. They would not let him go, even if he offered them his weight in gold."
Raphaeli added, "Oh, wait, my wife just saw Elvis in our backyard."

Schmidt, who's taking bids, insists that his "evidence" is "undeniable. This is not just another story. This is history unfolding."

ALIVE AND WELL?

Saddam Hussein is "alive and well" - or so says an agent selling what he purports is "forensic evidence" that the Iraqi dictator's execution was faked. Phoenix-based David Hans Schmidt tells us he's been hired by an unnamed "foreign head of state," whose intelligence service believes Saddam "is living in a foreign country under an assumed name."

"My clients have written and recorded interviews with Iraqi government officials, along with certified state documents from a foreign secret service," says Schmidt. Schmidt says he'll even reveal Saddam's "new home address," though he warns anyone tempted to visit that Hussein is said to be well guarded.