Posted 11:54 AM by Blah blah

Is Saddam Finally Dead? Storming Saddam's Palace.

The U.S. says they might have finally struck Saddam and his two sons!

'Saddam caught in blast' (The Guardian):

Accordings to the reports President Saddam and his sons Qusay and Uday were seen walking into a restaurant in the al-Mansour district of Baghdad early yesterday afternoon. The meeting, with up to 50 members of the top Ba'ath leadership is thought to have taken place in a bunker either below the restaurant or in an adjacent building. A voice sounding like President Saddam's had been overheard discussing escape routes out of the city. According to one report, his voice was intercepted because he was using an encrypted communication system sold to him by a British company in the 1980s, which British intelligence has since been able to decode.

The belief that the Iraqi leader was at the meeting was reinforced by US intelligence sources within the Iraqi leadership. The intelligence was relayed almost immediately to central command headquarters in Qatar, who sent the co-ordinates to one of its B-1 stealth bombers, which are constantly patrolling the skies over Iraq in search of such targets of opportunity. The devastating strike took place at 3pm Baghdad time on Monday, and left nothing of the restaurant and the adjacent building, except for a deep smouldering crater, which was shown on Arab TV. The buildings were hit by four 2000lb bunker busting bombs, directed to their target by satellite guidance.

Bomber crew told 'this is the big one':

"The crew of a B-1 bomber, told 'this is the big one,' took 12 minutes to reach Baghdad and release four earth-penetrating 900kg bombs on a building where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his sons were believed to be....Baghdad was clouded over so they did not see the four GBU-31 bombs hit their target in a Baghdad residential area, learning only after the mission that the strike was believed to be successful....

The co-ordinates were released from an observer on the ground through the chain of command to the AWACS command plane, a process that took less than an hour. The B-1 was leaving an air refuelling tanker plane over western Iraq when it got the co-ordinates, said Swan.

The first two bombs dropped were satellite-guided weapons with penetrators for hardened targets. They were followed by two more 900kg bombs with a time-delayed fuse designed to detonate 25 milliseconds after impact, Swan said. He said earth penetrator bombs bore three to six metres into the ground, depending on whether they are going through soil or concrete, before exploding."

The military took one of Saddam's "opulent palaces" yesterday (The Guardian). Read what it was like inside. See the slideshow in the New York Times: Storming Saddam's Palace.