Saddam’s nuke scientist linked to U.S. shipping terminal
Nov. 2, 2016: It sounds like one of those crazy Internet rumors you need to double-check with the fact-checking websites, but it’s not. It’s real.
WND reported when one of America’s busiest cargo shipping ports was quietly turned over to a United Arab Emirates-based company whose chairman was none other than the brother of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s top nuclear scientist.
Remember the 2006 Dubai ports deal? There was a major controversy in the U.S. when six major U.S. seaports were sold to a UAE company, raising national security concerns about port security.
But nary a peep was raised by a similar deal, secretly negotiated by the Obama administration, that turned over a Port Canaveral terminal to UAE-based Gulftainer, a company whose principals include Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar, who has been called the Middle East’s foremost uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons production expert, and his brother Hamid Jafar, a wealthy Iraqi oilman and chairman of the Crescent Group.
Crescent is the parent company of Gulftainer, which acquired a 35-year lease from Port Canaveral on the Florida coast in June 2014.
Unlike the Dubai ports deal a decade ago, this one got no media coverage and little scrutiny by Congress.
To make sure a full security review wasn’t required, Barack Obama Treasury Secretary Jack Lew suggested a 35-year lease rather than a purchase.
“What could possibly go wrong with giving control of a critical port to a company like that?” asked Frank Gaffney, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy in the Reagan administration.
He told WND, “It’s shocking, but it’s just an example of what can go wrong if nobody is paying attention.”
Saddam’s female assassin squads
Nov. 2, 2000: In an amazing and previously unreported story filed from Copenhagen, Denmark, then-WND international correspondent Anthony LoBaido revealed that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had sent hordes of female assassins to Denmark as well as other European destinations to wipe out Kurdish refugees and defectors fleeing Iraq, and even had installed spies on the Danish Refugee Council, according to the Danish Red Cross.
The assassins infiltrated Iraqi opposition circles to kill and maim leading Kurdish and Iraqi opposition leaders by means ranging from poisonings to car crashes. Graduates of a two-month training course held outside Baghdad, these “Mata Hari” hit squads were code-named Operation Falcon. According to British intelligence, they were staffed by belly dancers, actresses and artists who claim to be seeking asylum.
“The regime is using women because they would raise less suspicion,” said Dr. Ayad Allawi, secretary general of the London-based Iraqi National Accord and a former ally of Saddam. “In our culture, we don’t expect women to spy or kill. This is the most substantial operation we have seen for years.”
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