NOVANEWS
A little-noticed blog post by a veteran intelligence reporter averred Tuesday that the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group weighed a plan prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion that sought to discredit Saddam Hussein by portraying him as gay.
According to Jeff Stein, a longtime intelligence reporter who first revealed that FBI officials had eavesdropped on a sitting Democratic congresswoman, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group considered creating a video that would the then-Iraqi leader having intercourse with a teenage boy.
“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” a former CIA official purportedly told Stein. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”
The CIA would have then “flood[ed] Iraq with the videos,” the official added.
A third former CIA official said that the plan was shot down, in part, because others in the agency thought that claiming Saddam had sex with boys would do little to undermine him.
“Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East — nobody cares,” another purported CIA official is quoted as saying. “Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target.
We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos.”
A current U.S. official told Stein he couldn’t confirm or deny the former CIA employees’ claims.
“While I can’t confirm these accounts, if these ideas were ever floated by anyone at any time, they clearly didn’t go anywhere,” the official told Stein.
Stein notes, however, that the CIA did make a video in which a fake Osama Bin Laden enjoys a campfire and the company of his associates while bragging about their juvenile paramours.
“The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.
Eventually, “things ground to a halt,” the other former officer said, because no one could come to agreement on the projects.
They also faced strong opposition from James Pavitt, then head of the agency’s Operations Division, and his deputy, Hugh Turner, who “kept throwing darts at it.”