NOVANEWS
by Jim Fetzer and Yvonne Wachter
The United States spends more time in demonizing its political adversaries than it does solving the problems that confront its own citizens. The case of Fidel Castro, who nationalized the holdings of United Fruit and Anaconda Copper for the benefit of the people of Cuba; of Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist President of Chile; of Hugo Chavez, who nationalized the oil fields of Venezuela; and of Muammar Ghadaffi, who has used the oil resources of Libya to benefit its people are four familiar illustration. But perhaps no one has been villanized more than Saddam Hussein, who was massively assailed by the Bush/Cheney administration to justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq, which began on 20 March 2003 and has not ended as of today.
Saddam was accused of having initiated the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and, in the absence of any credible evidence, of having at least been in cahoots with al-Qaeda, which has been widely promoted as the group responsible for the commission of those atrocities. Bush, however, would eventually admit that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and two independent investigations–one by the Pentagon and another by the US Senate–would exonerate him of collusion with al-Qaeda. Even the FBI would eventually admit that it had “no hard evidence” that tied Osama bin Laden of having been involved in those events, where the scientific evidence demonstrates that the “official account” of 9/11 is little more than a myth and an analysis of the politics of 9/11 that American neo-cons and the Mossad appear to have been the responsible agents. Which means that the United States invaded and occupied Iraq on the basis of falsehoods and deceptions.
Imagine my astonishment when I was reached by Yvonne Wachter, the mother of a B-1 bomber pilot engaged in combat in Iraq, who told me that her son had actually taken out Saddam Hussein, his two sons, and perhaps as many as 60 members of his general staff. I explained to her that I was fascinated by the story and that it sounded extremely plausible to me, but that I would need a great deal of proof to substantiate it. She produced one document after another and one reference after another, which convinced me that she was right. While some of the links no longer work (“Surprise, surprise!”), most of what Yvonne would send me has been archived under “The ‘Mission Accomplished’ Fiasco” on the Scholars for 9/11 Truth home page. Here is a transcription of our first interview on “The Dynamic Duo”, which took plane on 11 April 2007. We would do “The Meria Show”
on 3 September 2007 and then do a second on “The Dynamic Duo” 12 September 2007. This may be the most remarkable story that I have ever covered–and on the day of the alleged death of Muammar Ghadaffi, whom I believe sacrificed his life for Libya, I am sharing it with the American people. Truth certainly can be stranger than fiction.
The Genesis Communications Network proudly presents:
“The Dynamic Duo Radio Show”
Live, with James Fetzer, Distinguished McKnight University Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, Duluth
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Special Guest : Yvonne Wachter
Professor Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Dynamic Duo” with Kevin Barrett, where you can catch the Boy Wonder here on Mondays and Fridays and I’m here the rest of the week.
Those of you who were listening yesterday would have heard my disgust over George Bush’s announcement that “at least we got Saddam Hussein,” as though that were the principal objective of our intervention in Iraq, juxtaposed with articles to which I made reference, protests by the Iraqis who now are concluding that, in fact, they were better off under Saddam Hussein than they were during the last several years of this American intervention, which, of course, is taking place in violation of International law, the U.N. Charter and even the U.S. Constitution.
I mentioned then that I had received an e-mail from the mother of an officer who appears to have actually taken out Saddam Hussein on April 7, 2003. That was only 21 days after the incursion into Iraq began on the 19th of March. I am very happy to say that I have her here today as my special guest and if you ever thought there would be a radio program you didn’t want to miss, I can tell you this one is it. It has to do with exposing the hypocrisy and the charade, the lies and the deceit and the deception that the government of the United States has been perpetrating, not just on the American people, but on the nations of the world. It’s a shocking story. You’ll find it riveting. It’s my great privilege to welcome as my special guest today Yvonne Wachter.
Yvonne, welcome to “The Dynamic Duo.”
Yvonne Wachter: Thank you, Professor Fetzer. I’m so pleased to be speaking with you because, as you know, I respect your courage and your commitment to teaching and encouraging critical thinking and deductive reasoning based on careful consideration of all the facts.
Professor Fetzer: Well, Yvonne, your story is so heart-wrenching and rings so true in relation to the statements of this corrupt Administration that I had to give you the opportunity to speak directly to the American people. And I certainly do hope that this is going to be a conversation between us that’s going to reach an extraordinarily wide audience.
I have been looking at the documents, the sources, the references you’ve been sending me — everything seems to add up. I think you’re very systematic, you’re very thorough, you’re very competent, which is in keeping with your background in investigative services and as qualified-for-court stenographer. But also as a wife and as a mother. In this case I think the story of your son’s experience is heart-breaking. Why don’t you begin by telling us the basics of the case, as you know them.
Yvonne Wachter: Okay. Well, I don’t know how many of your listeners have caught on to this — and I hope all of them are astute and they don’t drink overly-fluoridated water and they’re not docile in their interpretation and their recognition of what limited information we’re allowed to hear in this country. But, to backtrack, we were given two different stories by the Pentagon under former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pertaining to the elimination of Saddam Hussein and the decapitation of his regime. My emphasis is on the first fruits of the information that we were given following the April 7th, 2003 bombing of the Al-Sa’ah Restaurant in the Mansour District of Baghdad. That restaurant was owned by Uday Hussein. And it was at that restaurant on April 7, 2003 at approximately three o’clock in the afternoon, I’m not sure if that’s our time or their time, our superb intelligence sources — C.I.A., Delta, Special Ops and the unparalleled Grey Fox units — were surveilling Saddam Hussein, Uday Hussein and Qusay Hussein.
They had pinpointed co-ordinates at that location in Baghdad by way of intercepting telephone communications that the three Husseins were involved in using their British-made Racal Jaguar cell phones.
Glaspie gave Saddam the “OK” to invade Kuwait
Now the importance of those cell phones was this: during the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein commissioned those cell phones to be made for him because they had limited exposure to interception of private conversations. However, the British were our allies in this war and, since they had made the phones, were the best equipped to intercept those phone calls. And that’s exactly what they did.
Our intelligence sources on the ground confirmed that Saddam Hussein and his boys entered that building. General Tommy Franks was monitoring those calls from CENTCOM. My son, Capt. Chris Wachter, was in flight in his B-1 bomber over Iraq and had been tasked to drop on a weapons station north of Baghdad when he got the urgent call to head back to Baghdad. “This is the big one,” he was told. Now, he didn’t know what “the big one” meant, but he presumed it was some pretty big target. He would later find out that “the big one,” the target, was Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t the building he was in. It wasn’t somebody else. It was Saddam Hussein.
Gen. Franks ordered Capt. Wachter to triple check his co-ordinates and to not miss. At two minutes out, Capt. Wachter confirmed with Gen. Franks that the target was still in place and that they were ready to drop and he was told “Don’t miss.”
The bombs were dropped and immediately upon the bombs hitting the ground, the cell phone conversations abruptly ended and the phones went dead.
Professor Fetzer: This kind of intelligence capacity, I think, is exactly right: what they would have by virtue of knowing exactly the design of those Jaguar phones, that they could trace and follow and listen in exactly as you described. Did your son identify the type of munitions that were dropped, the type of bombs?
Yvonne Wachter: They were four Joint Direct Attack Munition Bombs, JDAMs, that were dropped on target. They were told after that to head back to base. When they went back to their base, the crew was met with cheers and sometime during the night after they had gone to bed, my son was awoken by his commanding officer and summoned quickly to a makeshift telecommunications center with the Pentagon. The Pentagon had ordered my son and his fellow crew members to do a live- feed interview from in theater because as his commanding officer told him, “You got him. You got Saddam and his two boys.”
Professor Fetzer: Yvonne, standby.
We’ll be right back with my special guest. This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Dynamic Duo.”
(Commercial break.)
Professor Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Dynamic Duo” with Kevin Barrett where you can catch Kevin here on Mondays and Fridays, and I’m here Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Those of you who listened in yesterday heard my expressions of disgust with the Bush Administration because the President again was announcing that notwithstanding the mess we are in in Iraq it was all justified because we got Saddam Hussein.
Among other points I mentioned in response was that I had published a piece, “When Is Saddam Not Saddam?”that can be found archived on assassinationscience.com under the heading of “The Campaign,” that appeared on 15 July 2004, where inspired by an independent Australian journalist, Joe Vialls, I had followed up suggestions that the Saddam that was in custody was not Saddam Hussein but one of his doubles. I needed to determine some basis for making a comparison to ascertain whether he appeared to be right. And I made a point of obtaining a government photograph of Saddam, an official photograph that was circulated by the American Army in Iraq to identify Saddam, and discovered that, indeed, while the captured Saddam has an under bite so that his lower teeth extend beyond his upper teeth, Saddam Hussein had an over bite where his upper teeth extended beyond his lower teeth. And the captured Saddam had irregular and ragged, rather unkempt front teeth whereas Saddam Hussein had very immaculate teeth, which would make sense given that he could certainly afford the best dentistry that money could buy.
The real Saddam (right) and the fake “Saddam” (left)
Now, I have the great pleasure of having on today the mother of the Air Force Officer who appears to be responsible for taking Saddam out as early as April 7, 2003. He was piloting a B-1 bomber in the vicinity of Baghdad when he was diverted to very specific co-ordinates and given emphatic instructions that he must not miss. The target was on a cell phone that was being monitored. After he released his bombs, the telephone call was terminated. He returned to his base amidst cheering and roars from his fellow Air Force personnel there at the base who knew already that his target had been Saddam Hussein. He was awakened that night by his commanding officer.
Today it is my great privilege to have Yvonne Wachter with me, the mother of Capt. Chris Wachter who was that pilot who took out Saddam on April 7, 2003 which was only 21 days after 19 March 2003 when the incursion began.
Yvonne, please do continue.
Yvonne Wachter: Okay. When we left off I had told you that after the crew hit the sack for their much-needed rest after that exhilarating mission that they were ordered to undertake, during the night my son’s commanding officer summoned him to an urgent meeting to speak with the Pentagon over live-feed radio. The Pentagon, so jubilant about the success of that mission, identified my son on live-feed. His name and his bombardier’s name, his colonel’s name, the other crewmen’s names were dispatched all over the globe. Their anonymity was immediately ruined. And a neighbor of mine came to my house after hearing my son giving an interview on CNN, banging on the door and telling me “Are you watching the TV? Aren’t you watching the TV? Chris was on CNN!”
And I just about died. I could not believe that the Pentagon, having ordered such a mission, would then identify all the crew members. I gathered myself together and my husband and I sat down and listened and we had to accept the fact that this Pentagon surely had unimpeachable information to, number one, order this hit on Saddam Hussein, and number two, they surely had to have confirmation that they got the guy or they surely would not have identified the assassination squad and put their identities out to the world.
Professor Fetzer: At that point in time, Yvonne — and this story, of course, is going to develop some ironic twists and turns in our conversation — I think that the military, from top to bottom right up to the Commander in Chief, had to regard this as a great military triumph to take out Saddam Hussein. I mean, if there’s been a bad guy in the eyes of the Administration, someone that George Bush desperately wanted to take out, it was he.
And, of course, we have been given so many phony reasons for having gone into Iraq. The one that seems to have survived intact, perhaps until now, has been that the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein. Now, of course, in retrospect we’re discovering that most Iraqis think that Iraq would have been better off with Saddam still in power because no matter how vicious or brutal he may have been in running Iraq, the quality of life and the character of society was the envy of the Middle East and had a high level of education, a high level quality of life, excellent health care, hospitals, physicians, professors and the like which, of course, has now all been essentially decimated and life is, of course, desperate on the streets in Iraq.
So, so much focuses on this one person, Saddam Hussein, that the story you’re telling us is extremely important. Because as recently as yesterday, George W. Bush was reiterating that the taking out of Saddam was the principle justification for our being in Iraq. Your story now explains how this event actually appears to have taken place not later when this person was found in a so-called spider hole, where we hear all this attention devoted to all this publicity given world-wide, but it actually happened on the 7th of April.
The alleged location of “Saddam’s” capture
Stand by. We’re going to continue with my special guest, Yvonne Wachter. This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Dynamic Duo.”
(Commercial break.)
Professor Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer your host on “The Dynamic Duo” with Kevin Barrett where you can catch the Boy Wonder here on Mondays and Fridays and I’m here the rest of the week.
My special guest today is Yvonne Wachter, who is the mother of the pilot who appears to have taken Saddam Hussein out already on April 7, 2003. In one of the documents to which Yvonne has invited my attention, in this case an article in the Baltimore Sun, shows thatVice-President Cheney exactly a month later on May 7, 2003 in a speech said that he believed Saddam Hussein was dead. Here’s the quote:
“ ‘I think we did get Saddam Hussein,’ Cheney told a capacity crowd at McFarlane Auditorium at Southern Methodist University. ‘He was seen being dug out of the rubble and wasn’t able to breathe.’”
You must have been quite stunned when you read that article, Yvonne.
Yvonne Wachter: I wasn’t because, of course, that’s what we all knew; that’s what we believed. And in truth and in fact, a very quickly convened ceremony took place at Chris’ airbase where Gen. T. Michael Moseley awarded the highly-coveted Distinguished Flying Cross to the crew members of Swede 72 for successfully executing their mission on April 7, 2003. And the accompanying certificate to the Distinguished Flying Cross medal lauded them for “completely destroy…” — this is a direct quote — “completely destroying one of the principle targets of the campaign.”
Well, we know what their target was. They were told, “the big one.” Who was the big one? It was Saddam Hussein.
Professor Fetzer: I like your emphasis on the word “mission,” because it suggests that, in fact, it was the “mission accomplished.”
Yvonne Wachter: Yes.
Professor Fetzer: And that, I take it, was one of the next stages in this whole scenario.
George W. Bush aboard the USS Lincoln
Yvonne Wachter: Absolutely. I mean, there was quite a lot of discussion about what does that “mission” mean. And very quickly the powers that be tried to take down the banner off the USS Abraham Lincoln that said “Mission Accomplished.” And there were some discussions about who actually put that up there: Did it come from the White House or did it come from the military?
Professor Fetzer: How did it get there?
Yvonne Wachter: Your listeners can go on-line and research that as well. But White House Chief of Staff Andy Card also told an on-line audience from Waco, Texas, “I believe he” — meaning Saddam — “is dead.”
Then Gen. Franks said that they had DNA, positive DNA on Saddam, good DNA on Saddam, and they were undergoing forensic tests. Well, if they were undergoing forensic tests, that would support what Vice-President Cheney said. They had to have had a body.
Professor Fetzer: They had to have had a body that was pulled out of the rubble, by Cheney’s own words.
Yvonne Wachter: That’s what the man said.
Professor Fetzer: Surely he wouldn’t be saying something like that casually when the target was so important, was even the centerpiece of the rationale for going into Iraq.
Yvonne Wachter: Exactly.
Professor Fetzer: It suggests that within 21 days of our intervention, the basic mission was accomplished.
Yvonne Wachter: Exactly.
Professor Fetzer: And you would think that that would be a cause of celebration.
Yvonne Wachter: Exactly. And it was. But somebody was very worried and was –
Professor Fetzer: (Laughing.) Let’s set this up.
Yvonne Wachter: — working in the background.
Professor Fetzer: Let’s set this up, Yvonne. Do you have the date when the “Mission Accomplished” event took place, when Bush flew onto that aircraft carrier off of San Diego?
Yvonne Wachter: Yes. That was May 1st, 2003.
Professor Fetzer: That was May 1st.
Yvonne Wachter: That was May 1st.
Professor Fetzer: So, actually, they set it up about as fast as it could have been set up. About three weeks after the April 7th, they were going to celebrate “Mission Accomplished” with great fanfare. Bush was being flown out to an aircraft carrier and you can now see that there was a rationale for “Mission Accomplished” because Saddam was dead.
Yvonne Wachter: Well, let’s pinpoint it even finer than that. Two years later, I believe it was — Let me check the date of this. It was September 1st, 2004. The President’s father, George Herbert Walker Bush, gave an interview with Don Imus in his radio station in New York City. And one of the questions that former President Bush responded to was in regards to making a comparison between what he should have done in his first Desert Storm War compared to what his son was doing in Operation Iraqi Freedom. And this is what former President Bush said about “the mission,” in case anybody has any misgivings about what that mission was.
Imus asks him, “Do you still think it was the right decision?” meaning to leave the Middle East without taking out Saddam.
Bush 41 answers, “I’m absolutely certain of it. The reason is our mission was very different than the President’s mission.” And then you go forward just a little bit in that conversation and he continues: “What we said we’d do is kick the man out of Kuwait and not liberate Iraq and not kill Saddam. Our game plan, our military plan was not the way it was ten years later, so it’s different times, different strokes.”
So make no mistake about it. What was “the mission”?
Professor Fetzer: To liberate Iraq and kill Saddam.
Yvonne Wachter: That’s the comparison President Bush, former President Bush 41 made. Those are his words. That’s his analogy.
Professor Fetzer: As opposed to getting Iraqis out of Kuwait.
Yvonne Wachter: He says his mission was very different than the President’s mission; his mission was not to kill Saddam.
Professor Fetzer: Of course, he and Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft and a whole group of other experts have explained in many contexts how disastrous they thought it would have been to have invaded Iraq. And, of course, we can see how prophetic they were, that their anticipation was very well-founded, and that the son’s disregard of the advice of the father has had catastrophic results. Even though it may have led to the death of Saddam Hussein, I think that not only are the Iraqi people far worse off but even the United States is far less secure because we have turned Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists which it was not under Saddam. In fact, Saddam was actually tracking down and incarcerating and even killing the leaders of Al-Qaeda far from being in cahoots with them, as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s own investigative report has revealed.
It’s really a stunning story, Yvonne, and we’re just still scratching the surface.
Yvonne Wachter: Yes.
Professor Fetzer: Because with great fanfare now, okay, on the first of May, just three weeks after your son takes out Saddam and his two sons by dropping four bombs from a B1 bomber, Bush is flying onto an aircraft carrier with great fanfare, enormous worldwide coverage and there is an enormous banner there saying “Mission Accomplished.” And one has to ask now: Wasn’t this the occasion when he ought to have announced that Saddam was dead?
Yvonne Wachter: Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Professor Fetzer: Is it clear to you in retrospect that, indeed, was the intention and that was the reason for having so much focused on this event?
Yvonne Wachter: Well, I think the preponderance of evidence clearly shows that.
Professor Fetzer: We’ll be right back with my special guest, Yvonne Wachter. This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Dynamic Duo.”
(Commercial break.)
Professor Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Dynamic Duo” with Kevin Barrett where you can catch Kevin here on Mondays and Fridays and I’m here Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
My special guest today, Yvonne Wachter, has a harrowing story to tell. It’s one of significance to all Americans, indeed, to the population of the entire world because it’s a story of deceit and deception by the Bush Administration in perpetrating its illegal, immoral and corrupt war in Iraq.
The infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner
Yvonne, just to remind our listeners of a couple of key dates. The attack on Iraq began on the 19th of March, 2003. On April 7th, your son took out Saddam and his two sons — his own sons using four bombs from a B-1 bomber. He was being lionized and treated as a hero by his own fellow officers and comrades at his base in Iraq and put on CNN, and a great deal of publicity attended it. On May the 1st, there was the “Mission Accomplished” ceremony with the carrier, Bush flying in with tremendous fanfare. And yet he did not announce that Saddam Hussein was dead, a point that Dick Cheney would make on May 7th, exactly one month after your son had taken him out. And here, of course, we start to discover twists and turns and ironies in this entire story. Why don’t you explain why you believe the “Mission Accomplished” event turned into a bit of a fiasco.
Yvonne Wachter: Well, because I think there were two sources of information for the media. Backing up just a little bit, on April 13th United Press International stated, “Last Wednesday we went out on a limb in UPI analysis and concluded the evidence was overwhelming that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was already dead, his foul physical body obliterated last Monday by the four 2,000 pound bunker-busting bombs unloaded on him courtesy of the U.S. Air Force. The ‘wicked witch’ is indeed dead.” That was UPI.
Al-Jazeera on the same day headlined an article, “Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has been killed during the night of April 7-8th as a result of a bombing raid on the Al-Mansour District of Baghdad.”
And Fox News said, “U.S. officials told Fox News there’s a chance they could know as soon as Tuesday whether Saddam is dead. They said some early indications are positive but they are very preliminary. There’s a strong chance we got Saddam and probably both sons, senior U.S. officials told Fox News. The official said that CIA provided the intelligence that led to the strike.”
And I want to stop you right there because I started out this discussion with you making much about the fact that our intelligence was solid, unimpeachable intelligence. What we would learn later, because somebody else was giving out different information — where Gen. Franks was saying we had DNA and we were conducting forensic tests, indicating there was a body, and Cheney had said a body was indeed dragged from the rubble — somebody else was telling TIME Magazine, “The U.S. isn’t known to have any DNA on Saddam.” That was my first clue there are two different streams of information here, and I couldn’t figure out why.
So I started to backtrack to exactly who it was who was conspicuously absent and not really celebrating the victory of taking out Saddam. And one person was consistent in my observations, and that was former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. And I thought, why? Why is Mr. Rumsfeld not victorious about eliminating Saddam? Why is he so reticent? And then I discovered Mr. Rumsfeld had served in former President Ford’s Administration as Secretary of Defense during the Church Committee Investigations into assassinations being conducted by the CIA. And it was as a result of that Church Committee and those investigations that former President Ford authored Executive Order 11905, which banned political assassinations, targeted assassinations of foreign leaders of sovereign nations.
Professor Fetzer: Let me read Section 5G of that Order which states, “No employee of the United States government shall engage in or conspire to engage in political assassinations.”
Rumsfeld meets Saddam, 19-20 December 1983
Yvonne Wachter: That was from Executive Order 12333, which again was reviewed and reissued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. It’s important to note that Mr. Rumsfeld was President Reagan’s Special Envoy to Iraq and is famously photographed shaking hands with Saddam in 1983. There was nobody who knew better about the Executive Order ban on political assassinations than Mr. Rumsfeld.
Professor Fetzer: Yvonne, actually the part I quoted was from Executive Order 11905 signed February 18th, 1976 by President Gerald Ford. But, as you well know, there was a following Executive Order signed by President Jimmy Carter January 24th, 1978, Section 2305 of which broadens the prohibition from political assassination to assassinations generally.
And then as you observed Executive Order 12333 signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 4th 1981 specified that “assassination is against the law and contrary to U.S. policy.” Section 2.11 of that order, labeled “Prohibition on Assassination” says, “No person engaged by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in or conspire to engage in assassinations.” The next section 2.12 states, “No agency of the intelligence community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this order.”
Yvonne Wachter: You’ve got it. That’s it. That’s the broad explanation right there.
Professor Fetzer: And you’re suggesting that by virtue of his awareness that the assassination of — that taking out Saddam Hussein qualified as an assassination and, therefore, was prohibited by these Executive Orders and was consequently an illegal act that Donald Rumsfeld stood mutely at the sidelines while others were celebrating and honoring your son for perpetrating this act in the midst of the war.
Yvonne Wachter: Well, I think it gives some sort of explanation that we should entertain, at the very least. But let’s go into it just a little bit further. Because on September 14th, 2003 (sic) — just three days after September 11th, the President sought from Congress and received a Joint Resolution authorizing him to decide to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Now, you have to understand that with the passage of that Resolution, there was clearly specified the caveat that was also included in Executive Order 12333, and that is that such an attack must be clearly in self- defense. And that, I believe, is the element of those orders, those resolutions, that is missing. Because we now know there were no weapons of mass destruction. Carl Levin’s Senate Intelligence Committee also confirmed there was no Hussein connection to 9/11 or Al-Qaeda. So where’s the self-defense caveat being met?
Professor Fetzer: We’ll be right back with this discussion of the true meaning of “Mission Accomplished.” This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Dynamic Duo.” Stand by.
(Commercial break.)
Professor Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Dynamic Duo” with Kevin Barrett where you can catch the Boy Wonder here on Mondays and Fridays and I’m here Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
Today we’re hearing the gut-wrenching story which has twists and turns you’re not going to believe, that Air Force officer Chris Wachter who was flying a B-1 bomber in the vicinity of Baghdad when he received instructions for a very specific bombing target, one which he executed on April 7th killing Saddam Hussein and his two sons. When he returned to his base he was cheered by his comrades, he was lionized, he was awaked by his commanding officer during the middle of the night, he was put on the television, he was interviewed on CNN, he was given the Distinguished Flying Cross, and within about a week George Bush was setting up — well, actually on the 1st of May after April 7th they were setting up a celebration, very political, where Bush would fly onto a carrier that had the huge banner saying “Mission Accomplished,” where one would presume that must have been planned in anticipating of announcing that Saddam Hussein had been killed. And yet that announcement was never made.
“Saddam” at the Iraqi Special Tribunal on 1 July 2004
Yvonne, please do continue with the story.
Yvonne Wachter: Well, I think Col. Oliver North gives us a little bit of a hint as to why that announcement was never made. Last September 29th, 2006 he posted an article to townhall.com entitled, “Braggadocio.” And he explains in that article that it was he who authored Executive Order 12333. And he was outraged to have recently heard Chris Wallace interviewing former President Clinton wherein former President Clinton was explaining how he tried to kill Osama bin Laden. And he said, “I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized the findings of the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.”
Well, Oliver North was outraged at that. And he claimed of the former president, “The tape of a former president” — this is his quote — “arrogantly proclaiming on international television that he personally authorized the killing of a foreign foe may be great stuff for the screenplay of Rambo V, but it is specifically forbidden by U.S and international law.”
So make no mistake about it: it is standing law now, it was standing law on April 7, 2003 and I believe that’s why efforts were made to put the toothpaste back into the tube and to promulgate a different story.
Professor Fetzer: And, Yvonne, this is so stunning. I mean the hypocrisy! There are two paragraphs from this article by Ollie North:
“Without hubris I must acknowledge I wrote, staffed and presented Executive Order 12333 to President Reagan for his signature. I was asked then and many times since if I thought such a prohibition was important. I did then and I do now. And since no chief executive has ever rescinded them, it seems as though they did, too, up until Clinton’s petulant outburst. Ordering the assassination of a foreign national,” Oliver North continues, “is arguably more important than lying about a tryst with an intern in the Oval Office. So where is the shock and awe from human rights standard bearers who still complain about the so-called abuse of prisoners at Abu-Graib in the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay? Do they not care that Clinton ordered an assassination?”
The hypocrisy!
Yvonne Wachter: Yes.
Professor Fetzer: He has to know that Bush directed or was involved in this taking out of Saddam Hussein, that it was in violation of this very order in which he takes such pride. And yet he’s castigating Clinton for ordering something that Bush actually executed?
Yvonne Wachter: Yes. I mean, it’s stunning.
Professor Fetzer: It must gnaw at you, Yvonne.
Yvonne Wachter: Day and night. Day and night it gnaws at me. Because I’ll tell you, during all of this when the story started to change, nobody informed my son, in the meantime, that he needed to change his story. He was interviewed on May 25, 2003, the guest of honor at Dr. Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove wherein he reiterated to their audience that was also fed internationally that when he returned to the base, after being told to triple-check his co-ordinates before he dropped his bombs, when he got back to the base his commanding officer said, “Seriously” — this is his quote that my son said to the whole world — his commanding officer said, “Seriously, you got Saddam and his two sons.”
Capt. Chris Wachter at the Crystal Cathedral
The next day my son received an urgent order to fly overnight to Langley Air Force Base to meet with the heads of the Air Force in a secret meeting. And when he came back he was a completely shattered, downcast, different man as he looked me in the eye and said, “I was told that the whole world owes me and my crew a debt of gratitude, but the rest of what I was told must remain classified. However, it looks like Saddam got away.”
Now, any mother knows when her kid is being honest with her. And I looked at my son and I said — and I regret saying this now because I now know that if he spoke with me contemporaneously about any of this he would be court- martialled. And so that’s why I have made great strides to find this information on my own, independent of him. He has not given me this information.
And I looked him in the eye and I said, “Chris Wachter, I hope you burn in hell if you let me go to my grave and you have misled me.”
Professor Fetzer: Oh, God, Yvonne!
Yvonne Wachter: Professor Fetzer, I’m telling you he looked at me and the face said everything. He looked sick. He looked sad.
And I looked back at him and said, “No problem, Son. You don’t have to say another word, not another word.”
Professor Fetzer: Oh, Yvonne, my heart goes out to you.
Yvonne Wachter: We’ve been broken ever since. My entire family has been shattered by this. We have no anonymity; we have targets on our backs. We had a huge banner on the front of our home with his picture and his plane saying, “God bless you Capt. Wachter.” Within 20 minutes of that CNN televised interview I had helicopters, police helicopters overhead and a squad car at my door telling me, “Take that banner down. You are now a target.”
And I’m here to tell you much has been made, as well it should have been, about CIA covert agent Valerie Plame having her cover blown by this Administration. Well, what about the crew and their families, the crew of Swede 72 and their families?
Professor Fetzer: And then the necessity of having to rig a cover story of Saddam making his escape and clearly extending that by having him allegedly captured in a spider hole by Kurdish troops. The whole story, we’re going to have to continue because the anguish that goes with this, the deceit and the deception is overwhelming.
This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Dynamic Duo.”
(Commercial break.)
Professor Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer, your host of “The Dynamic Duo” with Kevin Barrett where you can catch Kevin here on Mondays and Fridays and I’m here the rest of the week.
My special guest Yvonne Wachter is telling us a story, astounding, fascinating, disconcerting, profoundly disturbing of how her son’s life was shattered after performing his actions for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in bombing a very precise target in Baghdad in the suburbs on 7 April 2003 and killing Saddam Hussein and his two sons. And that originally led to his being lionized and celebrated and being interviewed on CNN and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, which appears to have precipitated the event during which George W. Bush flew onto an aircraft carrier decorated with a huge banner claiming “Mission Accomplished,” which would appear to have been a celebratory stage for announcing the death of Saddam Hussein.
But where this all appears to have been eclipsed by the realization that the event that they were going to celebrate was a violation of law, a series of executive orders from several presidents in succession — Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and even Ronald Reagan — which many prominent members of the Bush Administration or persons in divisions of influence, such as Oliver North who actually staffed and presented the Executive Order 12333 to President Reagan for his signature had to have known at the time.
The hypocrisy, deceit and deception seems to have known no bounds because Oliver North would then write a column, “Braggadocio,” September 29th, 2006 berating President Clinton for having said that he tried hard to kill Osama bin Laden. And this, Yvonne, I must say is just another stunning story about a life that has been twisted for political purposes by an Administration that has only contempt for the law and no respect for anyone’s life, including those that serve in our own armed forces.
Bush introduces a resolution to attack Iraq
Yvonne Wachter: Well, that’s exactly right. And I’ve been sickened every single day that this war dragged on past “Mission Accomplished.” It didn’t have to be. Those kids should have come home. They succeeded in what the mission was. It is no surprise to me that yesterday President Bush is claiming he believes Saddam was the objective, the target. Indeed he was, long before this ever happened.
In 1998 former Republican Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, in anticipation of a Democrat going out and a Republican coming into the office of the presidency, he introduced House Resolution 19 to eliminate the ban on targeted assassinations. It never went anywhere — excuse me, it went to committee. It died in committee at that point. Again in 2000 after President George W. Bush was inaugurated — I think it was only a day or two after — former Congressman Barr again introduced a House Resolution bill to eliminate the ban on assassination. And it, too, died in committee. This was long before 9/11. There were plans being laid to take out Saddam Hussein back to that date. And I will prove it to you in this regard.
Former Congressman Barr read a letter into the Congressional Record, a letter that he had written to President Clinton, wherein he said he wanted to specifically target Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. And this is what he said in this letter:
“In re: assassination ban” — this is dated August 24, 1998.
“In re: assassination ban. Honorable William J. Clinton, President of the United States, the White House, Washington, DC.
Dear Mr. President” –
And he goes on with the history of ever since the Ford Administration’s Executive Order and Reagan’s Executive Order, and he closes by saying, “I urge you to consider lifting this ban and designing a new system so that the threat posed by individuals proven to be” — and this is what’s missing, see? — “proven to be directly responsible for the deaths of American citizens, such as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein can be eliminated in cases where it is simply impossible to capture them by ordinary means.”
Professor Fetzer: You know, Yvonne, the American people don’t seem to have realized that the government has been lying to us from scratch about the war, and three simple points, at least two of which you have made, establish that: number one, that George Bush himself acknowledged in a press conference in response to a question from a reporter when asked “What did Saddam Hussein have to do with the events of 9/11?” he said, “Nothing.”
Yvonne Wachter: That’s correct.
Professor Fetzer: I thought that word would be the headline in every newspaper and every story on television and radio. Hardly a word was said about it, number one; number two, that a Senate Intelligence Committee released its own report showing that not only was Saddam not in cahoots with Al-Qaeda but he was actually tracking down its leaders to incarcerate or even kill them; and third, a point we have not covered, our F.B.I. — our own F.B.I. — acknowledged last June that it had no hard evidence that tied Osama bin Laden to the events of 9/11. And I say if Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and if Osama had nothing to do with 9/11, then who was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 civilians?
But look how we have been lied to from scratch, from scratch.
Yvonne Wachter: Well, let’s go even broader than that. Of course, who was responsible for the deaths of Americans on domestic soil? How about all the kids in our military who were — oh, this is a bad word. Forgive me. I can’t think of any other word at the moment — but they were hijacked from Afghanistan going after Osama bin Laden to go into Iraq?
Professor Fetzer: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. There’s so much abusive language in this Administration in relation to the war.
“Surge” is not a strategy; it’s a tactic. We have a change in tactics, not in strategy. Strategy is your goal. It’s what you want to accomplish and what you want to avoid. For example, strategy in relation to Iraq might have been to remove Saddam Hussein without destabilizing Iraqi society. That manifestly did not take place. We removed Saddam but we didn’t maintain the stability of Iraqi society.
Another way in which they have politically obfuscated responsibility is to suggest the generals make the political decisions about strategy. The generals aren’t responsible for strategy. We have civilian control, civilian supremacy of the military which has constantly passed the buck to the generals as though they were responsible for determining whether or not increases in troops for the war should be fought longer or harder. That’s really not their role. They have to be given a strategy and then they develop the tactics that are appropriate to it. But they don’t bear the burden of deciding whether or not the war should be fought longer or harder. That is up to the civilian commander.
We’ll be right back with my special guest. This is Jim Fetzer, your host of “The Dynamic Duo.”
(Commercial break.)
Professor Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer, your host of “The Dynamic Duo” with Kevin Barrett where you can catch the Boy Wonder here on Mondays and Fridays and I’m here the rest of the week.
I’m talking with Yvonne Wachter and we’re discussing what her son went through after having taken out Saddam Hussein. He was lionized, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, he was interviewed on CNN, great preparations were made to celebrate “Mission Accomplished,” Saddam having been taken out, even the Vice-President confirmed that his body was pulled from the rubble. And then there was a highly- classified meeting in Washington at Langley, and he discovered that there had to be a cover story — now this is not directly from him — that they had to resurrect Saddam, they had to bring him back from the dead in order to avoid the embarrassment and the illegality of the act for which he had been rewarded. This created the necessity to use one of his doubles in his place.
I always thought it was extremely peculiar, Yvonne, that Saddam Hussein would ever be located or situated in a spider hole beneath ground. This is a man that was used to reigning supreme. He had dozens of castles at his disposal. He would never have condescended to climb into a spider hole to be captured by these Kurdish soldiers.
Joe Vialls, the independent Australian journalist I mentioned earlier, reported already in June of 2004 that the International Red Cross was insisting that the captive Saddam should be turned over to Iraqi authorities, but that American authorities insisted that he should be legally transferred to Iraq but kept under American military control. Joe Vialls speculated at the time that this was almost certainly motivated by knowledge that the Iraqis would recognize him as not being Saddam Hussein but one of his doubles. And, indeed, he also reported that under pressure from Russia, the U.S. allowed Saddam’s wife to visit her husband in Qatar, and as soon as she arrived it took only moments for her to realize that this was not her husband, and she emerged from the confined area asking, insisting, “Where is my husband? Take me to my husband!”
She was given the unconvincing story that he changed a lot during confinement. How absurd!
Yvonne Wachter: Right. I’ve read those reports as well. And though I personally would give credence to what Joe Vialls has said, he has not published in main worldwide recognized media sources. And so I have not republished what he has said. I’ve tried to stick to UPI, AP, Reuters, CNN, FOX, BBC — a lot of the main, stalwart sources of our information.
Professor Fetzer: And yet when I undertook my own independent corroboration I found evidence that confirmed what he was saying from the government’s, our own military sources. Photographs they had identified as Saddam Hussein that did not — in comparison with the Saddam in captivity were not the same.
Yvonne Wachter: Well, a lot of people have asked me, “How could the United States government get away with keeping such a secret? How is it? There must have been thousands of people who would have been involved in something like this.”
Information Operations Manual (11 January 2005)
And very interestingly and quite by chance, I came across a manual that was posted on the Internet from the Air Force. It was authored by former Joint Chief for the Air Force, Gen. John Jumpers. And it’s called “Information Operations Manual, United States Air Force, 11 January 2005.” And on page 11 it goes into lengthy detail about military deception. And this is primarily addressing how we deal with the enemy. And, you know, I understand that. I understand that to catch a rat, you’ve got to be a rat, okay? Working in investigative services, I understand that full well. But suppose for this moment that the people who are being deceived are us, as I think — again, as I stated — the preponderance of evidence supports that that is true: we are being deceived here. Could they not use this same plan on us?
In paragraph four on page 11, it says “A detailed operations security (OPSEC) plan is required and may dictate only a select group of senior commanders and staff officers knows which actions are purely deceptive in nature.”
Well, there’s how. There’s how you can keep the results of that DNA test that they never released, up to six weeks later when they silenced my son, and four weeks after Vice- President Cheney is saying he’s dead and his body was pulled out of the rubble. There’s how. You keep that information quiet. You never publish it.
However, magically, one day, within 24 hours after the PUK, the Kurdish Army working with that master of misinformation Ahmed Chalabi who was on the Pentagon payroll for $340,000 a month, who also gave us Curveball who gave us the phony WMD information — that master of information (sic) Ahmed Chalabi works with the PUK and they lead our forces to this man in the hole who they claim is Saddam Hussein. And, miraculously, within 24 hours they announce — the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi Governing Council formulated by Paul Bremer — announce “We have a 100% DNA match with this Saddam!”
That flies in the face of normal logic and deductive reasoning. But it makes perfect sense that there’s a common thread here, and that is a Pentagon who hires a man they know gives misinformation again, and again, and again.
Professor Fetzer: One of the most common ploys in disinformation is have one source you control issue a report and then have another source discover it as though –
Yvonne Wachter: Yes.
Professor Fetzer: — it were some kind of independent confirmation for a planted story. It’s done all the time. And we know this Administration has specialized in paying reporters to plant stories and even having fake reporters show up for press briefings at the White House itself.
Yvonne Wachter: Sure. How’s this for a direct quote from retired Col. Wayne Downing, speaking with NBC’s Brian Williams on May 20th, 2005. He said, “This is a war of perceptions, and our perceptions are our realities.”
Well so much for the rule of law!
Professor Fetzer: And that’s so consistent with Karl Rove’s attitude that we create our own reality. And while you’re studying what we’ve created, we create yet another reality. It’s all in the management of information: perception, belief, the control of the media. You can see why it’s so indispensable and how Carl Bernstein has dug into it and published an article in Rolling Stone, as far back as 1977, discovering that the CIA was boasting of its successes in influencing the major figures in media, including its greatest successes The New York Times, CBS and Time/Life. It’s a shocking story and the situation today has to be worse than it was then.
Yvonne Wachter: Do you remember when Saddam Hussein, this captured Spider Hole Saddam I call him — Spider Hole Saddam was shown on T.V. in his jail cell in his underwear? Do you remember that picture?
Professor Fetzer: Yes.
Yvonne Wachter: Okay. Do you know who provided that picture? Ahmed Chalabi, member of the Iraqi Governing Council, who owned the newspaper that put that story out.
Professor Fetzer: Why am I not surprised.
Yvonne Wachter: Right. Right. Now I’m saying this — I keep saying “this master of disinformation” again and again and again because this Administration would have us believe that our unimpeachable intelligence agencies — the CIA, Special Ops, Delta and Greyfox — all got it wrong, but Ahmed Chalabi, he got it right!
Professor Fetzer: Yvonne, you begin to wonder if we’ve been told the truth about any aspect of this intervention in Iraq.
This is Jim Fetzer, you host. You’re listening to “The Dynamic Duo.”
(Commercial break.)
The B-1B “Lancer” Stealth Bomber
Professor Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Dynamic Duo” with Kevin Barrett, where you can catch Kevin here on Mondays and Fridays and I’m here Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. My special guest today has been Yvonne Wachter and we are talking about the harrowing experience of her son Chris, in particular about his taking out Saddam Hussein with a B-1 bomber, and being lionized and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, all the events made for celebrating his “Mission Accomplished,” then the whole thing turns out to be reversed because of the realization that it’s in violation of Executive Orders from at least three presidents and, therefore, the action that was going to be celebrated was illegal under the law. And in order to avoid embarrassment, it was necessary to resurrect Saddam by using one of his doubles as a substitute, a point that has been observed in several contexts but never laced together so completely with the events of 7 April 2003.
Yvonne, the effects on your son must have been devastating.
Yvonne Wachter: Well, yes, I mean on all of us. He has fabulous friends in the military who love him to death. I mean, we all do, we love him to death. But he’s a changed man. He is a changed man and he is a man who can’t speak freely. There’s no free speech, you know that. You wear a uniform, you say what you’re authorized to say and nothing more.
I do want to say this in defense of the military, okay? In The New Yorker Magazine, Seymour Hirsch — whom I just love – on May 24th, 2004 wrote an article called, “The Grey Zone.” And he was writing about how the military JAG officers tried to stop Rumsfeld from ordering assassinations.
And Seymour Hirsch writes, “A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida refused to authorize a strike” — the strike he’s talking about was in Afghanistan on a site where they believed Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, to be.
He continues, “By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as ‘kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.’”
He further goes on to describe how Mr. Rumsfeld and his group at the Pentagon sort of did an end-run around all the agencies that would check, double check and triple check any one agency’s plans. And he created — of course, we all have heard about the Office of Special Plans. But he also created what Mr. Hirsch refers to as “a special access program,” or SAP, “subject to the Defense Department’s most-stringent level of security, it was set up with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon.”
So there’s where the commands were coming from, I believe.
And another newspaper in the U.K. also wrote this about the situation involving Mr. Rumsfeld. “He ignored advice from the Pentagon’s Judge Advocate Generals and based his decision instead on an analysis provided by White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales.”
Professor Fetzer: It’s a tight circle, isn’t it? I think history will treat this Administration very unkindly and will be most severe with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales and all the other mediocrities of gross levels of corruption who have done so much to subvert the standing of this great nation in the eyes of the world, squander our military strength, our fiscal policies and our moral standing. It’s a disgrace. And for this man to call himself “the security president” is nothing but a sick joke. It’s tragic.
And listening to the story of your son and the context in which it played out, Yvonne, I must tell you as a former Marine Corps Officer, I am humbled, humiliated and ashamed by my own country that it would treat a fellow officer as your son has been treated.
I would that there were things that I could do to compensate. Could I apologize for our nation? I haven’t the role. I’m not entitled to do that, but I feel that and I express that to you. And I say, I am so sorry.
Yvonne Wachter: Well, I appreciate that. But, you know, we’re all suffering, all of us, every single one of us whether we’ve got a kid in the military or we lost someone on 9/11 — we’re all suffering because we have to analyze everything now. We have to backup. We have to replay those tapes. We have to look at all the evidence.
Let me end this with a little bit of information, because people out there probably want to know who were these doubles or who was this double? It’s interesting that — well, first of all, let me back up and give you three quotes.
On December 13th, 2003, when Spider Hole Saddam was pulled out of the rubble (sic), Donald Rumsfeld said this to a pool of reporters: “Regarding Saddam Hussein, it’s terribly important that he be seen as a captive by the public.”
On December 14th, 2003, Rumsfeld told CNN the following: “In the last analysis, he (Saddam) seemed not terribly brave.”
And on December 17th, 2003 President Bush 41 speaking on Fox News made the following statement about the captured Spider Hole Saddam, “This is a magical moment!”
Was “Saddam” Mikhail Ramadhan?
2 thoughts on “George W. Bush: The “Mission Accomplished” Fiasco”
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