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Iraq
Witness sez Sammy & Sons, Inc. left before bombs landed on Mansour
2003-05-22
Four witnesses to the April 7 US bombing in Baghdad's Mansour district, as well as a former bodyguard of the family of Saddam Hussein, have told the Los Angeles Times that Qusai Hussein survived the blast, and that his father and older brother most likely did as well. About an hour after the bombing, which targeted Saddam Hussein and his sons, Ali Kashif Ghata, a dentist and resident of Mansour, told the Times he saw a white Peugeot race down the block with Qusai in the front passenger seat with his tail a machine gun between his legs. US officials told the Times that they still have conflicting reports about whether the three Husseins survived the bombing. The Saddam family bodyguard, who declined to be identified, told the Times that Saddam and his sons were at a meeting in Mansour that day, as US intelligence suggested, but the bodyguard was told by colleagues at the scene that all three men left the gathering just before the US military dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on the street, and that Saddam and his older son, Uday, parted company then with Qusai.
That would indicate that all three are alive. I was sure Uday was dead, though...
Posted by:Fred Pruitt

#5  There was an Australian journalist that went to the location that found the hotel pretty much undamaged, but a couple houses next to it had been destroyed. So the bombs probably missed
Posted by: Paul Moloney   2003-05-22 21:09:47  

#4  Didn't the New Yorker article covering the 7th also say that it wasn't the restaurant that was hit but several houses near there?

The BBC ran a report the day after with the correspondent standing outside the intact Al Saa restaurant.

I have not seen a satisfactory explaination of what happened. Did the bombs hit the wrong place or was the wrong restuarant named?
Posted by: Phil B   2003-05-22 19:53:57  

#3  Didn't the New Yorker article covering the 7th also say that it wasn't the restaurant that was hit but several houses near there? I think I have read that two places but I can't remember where. Does that mean we didn't hit the target (whether or not they were there)? Also, Tibor, thanks for the info.
Posted by: Sharon   2003-05-22 15:49:25  

#2  Salam also reported this bombing occurred "the next street over" from his house.
Posted by: Chuck   2003-05-22 12:52:26  

#1  A couple of points:

Salam Pax commented early in the war about how normal Baghdad was despite the bombing, citing as an example that the Al Saa restaurant remained open. This is the restaurant in the Mansour disctrict where Sammy and Sons were supposed to have been targeted (follow the link in Fred's post to see the Al Saa reference). This is proof to me that he is a child of considerable privilege and has strong Baath connections even if he was not exactly pro-Saddam.

Second, the Batchelor & Alexander radio show on WABC Radio in NYC at 10 p.m. Eastern (WABCRadio.com) has a regular guest (at 10:35 every evening) named John Loftus (john-loftus.com), a former intelligence officer and Nazi- and Sami Al-Arian-hunting lawyer, who has been reporting since March 20th that his intellignce contacts told him that we got Sammy & Sons in the initial decapitation strike. He tells the story in amazing detail, and has lots of other interesting, Debka-style information about shenanigans involving S. Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Russia, N. Korea, France, Libya, China and Iran. It's worth listening, because if half of what Loftus says is true, there's a lot of things that are not being reported in the mainstream media.

Posted by: Tibor   2003-05-22 11:31:29  

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