A newly released photo of Saddam Hussein at the point of capture triggered further speculation about who captured him and how. Mona Anis sifts through the evidence "Ladies and gentlemen -- we got him." Thus spoke a triumphant Paul Bremer III at the press conference held in Baghdad on Sunday 14 December 2003. Images of Saddam transmitted in the wake of the event in question mesmerised the world, overshadowing the by then omnipresent image of the Al-Fardous statue toppling over in Baghdad -- the best the American media could muster between 9 April and 14 December to hammer home Saddam's demise. Now that they had Saddam in person, the victory seemed complete. There remained one snag however: the ugly Al-Fardous statue looked more like the notorious dictator than the video clips of the helpless captive. For the images of Saddam under arrest, crushed and bedraggled, showed the former Iraqi president lacking any modicum of perception, something which nobody could claim he lacked in general. And it was the half-crazed, half-intoxicated look on his face that gave rise to instant speculations among Arab viewers concerning the possibility that he was drugged before and after the arrest. That theory gained wider appeal when, on 18 December, the Iraqi newspaper Al-Mo'tamir (mouthpiece of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, the INC) published a picture of Saddam in his prison cell -- the only picture released of Saddam in prison to date -- looking distraught and unfocused. Sitting opposite, on the other hand, Ahmed Chalabi looks remarkably confident, perhaps because his INC has been the main recipient of the millions of dollars dispensed by the US Congress under the terms of the Iraq Liberation Act. The encounter between the two men, we were told, took place on Sunday 14 December, shortly before the Baghdad press conference. Earlier in the day, Bremer and Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the Coalition ground forces in Iraq, accompanied Chalabi and three other members of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) -- Mowaffak Al-Rubaie, Adnan Pachachi and Adel Abdul-Mahdi -- aboard a military helicopter that landed at the undisclosed US military base to which Saddam had been taken. According to Al-Rubaie, Saddam's cell was small; indeed, the Saddam-Chalabi picture reveals what looks more like a rundown bathroom rather than a prison cell. All in all the encounter between Saddam, the four men and the two top American officials lasted for 35-40 minutes, according to an interview Paul Bremer gave to the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat and the Lebanese LBC cable TV this week. What Saddam really said during this time is anybody's guess, since all we have is his adversaries' account of the meeting. Adnan Pachachi was more reticent when talking about his encounter with Saddam than were either Chalabi or Al-Rubaie, who spoke to numerous media outlets and boasted of reprimanding Saddam for his crimes to the point when, towards the end of the encounter, Saddam used foul and colourful language. Nevertheless, both Adnan Pachachi and Al-Rubaie agreed that the man they had seen was muddled. Pachachi -- a senior politician who had been Iraq's foreign minister before Saddam came to power-- said Saddam had looked "tired and haggard". Apparently, Saddam had not recognised Pachachi at the beginning of the interview. When told who the man was, he had asked in bewilderment, "You were the foreign minister of Iraq. What are you doing with these people?" Al-Rubaie, on the other hand, told Al-Ahram Weekly in a telephone interview on 16 December that when they had seen Saddam he looked like a "drunk man". However, Al-Rubaie became angry when he was asked whether it was possible that Saddam had been on some sort of drug during the interview, rejecting such questions as the products of the kind of conspiracy theory typical of the Arab press. The Arab penchant for conspiracy theory notwithstanding, this week Military.com, the online presence of Military Advantage, published a picture of Saddam lying on the ground, looking as good as dead and palpably unconscious, while armed American soldiers surround and take hold of him. Military Advantage, whose advisory board includes two former members of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, is an organisation "offering free resources to serve, connect, and inform the 30 million Americans with a military affinity, including active duty, reservists, guard members, retirees, veterans, family members, defence workers and those considering military careers". The same picture was widely circulated over the Internet and sent as an e-mail message to numerous people with background material provided by one John Weisman. A quick search on the Internet revealed Weisman to be the author of Soar: A Black OPS Novel, a techno- thriller about special operations warriors. The background material supplied with the picture reads as follows: "This photograph of Saddam Hussein in the moment of his capture was e-mailed to me over the New Year weekend by a friend in the Special Forces community, who was damn proud of what his former colleagues in Iraq had accomplished when they pulled the dictator out of his hole. I thought the photo deserved wide dissemination, so I e-mailed it to my colleagues at Military.com, where I write my Black Ops column. While the soldiers in the field may have loved the idea of showing Saddam au naturel, not everyone felt that way. In fact, Military.com received a call from an official asking them to remove the photo for national security reasons." In his message, Weisman goes on to say that he would like to see the photograph posted in every public building "so that Americans can be reminded to thank the American soldiers who put their lives on the line every day" and ends the message with "HORRAH, Army. Bravo Zulus." So much for American military jingoism. This message, however, is the first to come from the USA contributing to speculations about Saddam's state at the point of capture. Various Middle East media outlets, including Israeli ones, began to disseminate material immediately after 14 December challenging the official American version of who arrested Saddam, and when. Yet it was not until a week later that the British Sunday Express, quoting unnamed western intelligence sources, said that Saddam had first been arrested by Kurdish militiamen belonging to Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and only handed to the Americans after being drugged. The name of Qusrat Rasul Ali, a PUK leader, was mentioned in the Arabic and Iranian media in relation to Saddam's arrest. Rasul Ali is said to be the head of a special forces unit hunting down former Ba'athist leaders in Iraq. It was Rasul Ali's unit that arrested Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan in Mosul last August. Barely a month earlier, also in Mosul, the PUK is believed to have been instrumental in locating the villa where Uday and Qusay, Saddam's two sons, were hiding. Indeed, the very first report of Saddam's capture came from Tehran, when Jalal Talabani, visiting the Iranian capital, leaked the details of Rasul Ali's role in Saddam's arrest. Rasul Ali himself went on air on the Iranian satellite station Al-A'lam insisting that "PUK fighters sealed the area off before the arrival of the US forces". In an interview with the Egyptian weekly Akher Sa'a on Wednesday 17 December, Adel Murad, a member of the PUK's political bureau, and editor of Al-Itihad (the mouthpiece of the PUK) confirmed that it was Rasul Ali's unit that collected intelligence information and finally found Saddam's hiding place in Tikrit. Murad said Saddam's arrest had been facilitated by a tip-off from the family of Thabit Sultan, an officer from Tikrit who was executed by the Iraqi regime in 1993. Many sagely parties who never tire of pointing out that as long as Iraq's dictator is in captivity, it matters little who "got him" or how fail to take account of the fact that these very questions will haunt Arab minds for a long time to come. Perhaps it was because the Americans stage-managed the scene of the arrest in a manner reminscent of what British journalist Robert Fisk described as Romans cornering barbarians, that the episode was particularly humiliating to most Arabs. The need to challenge the US stage-managed and no doubt politically expedient version of Saddam's arrest will therefore continue to exist -- if only to bring about a more humanist version giving the Iraqi victims of Saddam's brutal regime a significant role in his ignoble downfall.
