Book Signing

[Dec 5]

Truth to be Exposed at Mendocino Bookstore

by Mitch Clogg

The expression “framing a guilty man” comes to mind. We invaded Iraq in 2003 because, according to such towers of integrity as Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Don Rumsfeld and many, many others, liars and traitors all, because Saddam Hussein had nuclear (or “nucular”) weapons to blow us up with.

Surprise, surprise: he didn’t!

End of story, right?

Wrong.

He had an infant-formula factory. We blew that away. He had aluminum tubing for, they said, enriching uranium or something. Wrong. He had an underground communications hub in downtown Baghdad so he could plan our destruction with his henchmen. Wrong again. It was a bomb shelter. We dropped a bunker-buster on it. Oops. It was actually a bomb shelter, full of moms and kids who took shelter when our bombers came roaring overhead. Concrete and steel reinforcing rods are no match for bunker busters. We killed them all, all those moms and kids in their underground hiding place, every single one of them.

So. The world learned that we had been snookered. You could never trust Saddam. He didn’t have a single nuke in any way, shape or form, so, no WMDs, right?

Wrong! Again: WRONG!

Saddam did, indeed, have weapons of mass destruction. Inspection teams found, removed and destroyed almost all of them, but, by the time of our March 2003 invasion, they had overlooked one major stash. No one in the Bush administration knew it. Their outcries of WMDs were intended as deceptions, made to turn public opinion in favor of attacking Iraq. Little did they know — little did anybody know — the “false” charge of Saddam’s nukes was inadvertently true, but the WMDs were not nuclear weapons as claimed. They were poisonous gas of a kind known to only a few, supplied by us to Hussein and forgotten during the contentious runup to the second Gulf war.

“Midnight In Samarra,” written by Mendocino author and international bestseller Eleanor Cooney, in collaboration with its principal real-life character, Greg Ford, the man who snatched a U.S. shipping tag from one of the huge gas canisters hidden in Iraq that had a damning address of a giant, secretive U.S. firm, the truth about WMDs is revealed in print for the first time anywhere. Ford and Cooney will read and sign books at the Mendocino Hotel (hosted by Gallery Books) on December 5, starting at 6:30 pm, free to all!

An Iraqi colonel escorted Ford - an intelligence agent and medic — into an even deeper bunker at an air base not far from Baghdad. In a very deep, dark hole there was a bunch of very big bombs. They were still in crates. They contained the fixin’s to make VX gas, the deadliest mist ever imagined by the warped mind of man, made in Newport, Indiana from a German-invented formula. It was made for Saddam when we supported him in his stupid war with Iran, his next-door neighbor.

Like the blue-ribbon weapons makers and salesmen we are, we sold ordnance to both sides in that ocean of blood. When they tired of mutual slaughter, Saddam still had VX gas, but it was, again by his sometime ally, the U.S.,“reconfigured” — put in a different package, a different bomb, something more suitable for killing Kurds. (Everybody kills Kurds. They don’t have a true place of their own, so everybody treats them as trespassers. Also, they’re an ethnic class of one, not Arabs, not Persians or Turks, they’re just plain Kurds. They look more like us than most middle easterners, which makes it easy for their unwilling hosts to spot them, and they are not just Muslims, they come in all faiths.)

So we gave Saddam this VX gas in bombs made in Indiana. We didn’t give him nuclear weapons. (In fact, we didn’t “give” him anything. It was all cash on the barrel head, literally. (Iraq had — and has — millions of barrels of oil under its sand. The location of “the world’s biggest” untapped oil reserves keeps changing according to who’s talking. Big Oil has been industrial civilization’s biggest outlaw since it began in Pennsylvania in 1859. With treasures as great as all outdoors, its banditry goes mostly unchecked. Iraq has long been in contention for the “biggest” title, and it was the biggest actual motivator for the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. It’s all in “Samarra,” and the eyes-on expert will be there to tell you about it come Thursday evening at 6:30, at the Mendocino Hotel, free!