Ms. Sofia Taleb Al Souhail
Here's what Bush said.
"Eleven years ago, Safia's father was assassinated by Saddam's intelligence service. Three days ago in Baghdad, Safia was finally able to vote for the leaders of her country -- and we are honored that she is with us tonight."
Lauded as a shining example of why we've spent $200 billion and wasted 1,500 lives and counting, it appears that she doesn't live in Iraq, has been consistently affiliated with right-wing organizations, that her father was killed in Lebanon while planning a coup against Saddam, and that her family claims the US was complicit in his assassination.
Safia Taleb Al Souhail works for the "International Alliance For Justice," which no longer has a website that is functioning.
< www.i-a-j.org. > A cached version of another one, www.a-i-j.org, which is down appears to have been taken over by a defunct porn website. As for www.i-a-j.org, its now a rather generic "antispyware" website.
Safia Taleb Al Souhail published an article in December of 2003 for the group "Foundation For the Defence of Democracies."
The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) is a non-partisan, non-profit policy institute dedicated to:
1. Finding the most effective ways to defeat terrorism--and the totalitarian ideologies used to incite and justify terrorism.
2. Employing strategic communications, education and research to fight terrorism across national, ethnic and religious lines.
3. Promoting freedom and basic human rights for all peoples.
Following is a list of the Board of Directors
Steve Forbes.
Jack Kemp.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
Distinguished Advisors
Newt Gingrich.
R. James Woolsey.
Board of Advisors
Gary Bauer.
Charles Karuthammer, (columnist)
Bill Kristol.
Zell Miller.
Richard Perle.
Donna Brazille. (?)
Frank Lautenberg.
Chuck Schumer.
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/usr_doc/Ongoing_War.pdf
Concerning the article that was publiched, the first paragraph is interesting.
"As we watch UN inspectors search Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, I ask, why are there no UN inspectors investigating Saddam Hussein's crimes against the Iraqi people? Along with hidden caches of biological and chemical weapons, Iraw also has hidden tourture chambers, prisons, and maass graves."
(Safia Taleb Al Souhail)
Notice the reference to Saddam having lots of WMD that he's supposedly hiding, and that the United Nations is an organization that has not done their job.
The article by Safia Taleb Al Souhail goes on to explain how bad Sadaam was for women. Yet, Safia Taleb Al Souhail left Iraq in 1968. She returned to Iraq recently to hold a Iraqi women's conference in Baghdad in July "facilitated by the coalition provisional authority." It seems she was in a group of people that had "returned" to Iraq with the "facitity" of the CPA. This information was available at another website called "womenforiraq.org"
Interestingly, to read more about the conference in Baghdad and you go to another blank page that says "Hopefully /article928.php at www.i-a-j.org will be up again soon. - 1254726158" If you click the "home" button and you're right back at that anti-spyware site. All of these groups are strangely connected to each other, and this one is now defunct.
The article that Safia Taleb Al Souhail wrote claims that
her father was killed in 94. But although Bush said in the SOTU her father "was killed by Sadaam's Intelligence service," that's not quite true. Her father was the leader of a tribe, but was killed in his exile home in Lebannon. How long was he in Lebbanon? Doesn't say, but the rest of the family was living in Jordan for nearly 30 years. The articlde is not clear where Safia lived.
According to the following article,
US Secretly Helped Saddam
Al Bawaba – December 20, 2003
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=1379
The daughter of a prominent Iraqi opposition leader, who was assassinated in Beirut by Saddam Hussein's secret service in 1994 said she would sue the ousted Iraqi president before three international courts, charging that the U.S. was a virtual accomplice in her father's murder.
Nora al Tamimi, (sister of daughter of Safia Taleb Al Souhail) slain Iraqi opposition activist Taleb al Suhail al Tamimi, said from Beirut in a newspaper interview published Saturday that her father had planned a coup d'etat to overthrow Saddam in 1993, operating from Beirut and Amman.
"Zero hour was set for a certain June day in 1993 to stage the coup when Saddam would have been sponsoring an official event in Baghdad," Nora told the London-based Asharq Al Awsat newspaper in an interview conducted at the family house in Beirut.
"But the Americans, who did not want the coup to succeed possibly because they were certain my father would not go along with their polices, tipped off Saddam about the impending putsch by my father and gave the names of his top aides," Nora said. "All of them died in Saddam's torture chambers."
Sheik Taleb Al Tamimi, who led a million-member Central Iraqi tribe called the Bani Tamim, was shot dead April 12, 1994 at his apartment in Beirut's Ein El Tineh district in an assassination officially blamed by the Lebanese authorities on four Iraqi embassy diplomats, who were detained and then released on the grounds they enjoyed diplomatic immunity, Nora recalled.
Saddam has severed Baghdad's diplomatic ties with Beirut upon the detention of the four.
Nora said she plans to sue Saddam at the United Nations, before the International Court of Justice at The Hague and before the world organization of human rights.
Nora said her sister Safia, 38, a human rights activist, has already returned to Iraq and is currently making the needed arrangements in Baghdad to recover the family's bank accounts and property, which were confiscated by Saddam in 1968, when her father fled Iraq.
She said the family would return to Iraq soon with the remains of her father for reburial in his native country.
------------------------------------
The names of these two women are slightly different, but these appear to be the same siblings and clearly their father's death is open to question. The sister of Safia, Nora al Tamimi, blames the United States for not protecting her father and for telling Sadaam about a pending coup attempt because they didn't trust Safia's father.
Safia? Well, what do you want to bet she ends up in some neocon seat of power?
http://captainahab.dailykos.com/story/2005/2/3/61911/26777
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