WR - Saddam scrubbing toilets!?!

Saddam Scrubbed Toilets in a Baghdad Office!
Wednesday October 15, 2003

IN A desperate bid to keep one step ahead of his American pursuers, the once-mighty Saddam Hussein took a job scrubbing toilets in the Baghdad offices of the U.S. civil administrators of Iraq, sources claim.

Nobody recognized the pathetic-looking janitor until a sharp-eyed intelligence officer scrutinizing his ID photo positively identified him as Saddam -- but by then he'd vanished.

"He looked like some harmless low-level worker," recalls a U.S. Marine guard who serves in the building. "Sometimes when you ordered him to do something, like be sure to get under the toilet rim, he'd mutter under his breath 'damned Americans' or 'I should be in my palace.'

"But we just thought he was a grumpy dude who was a little senile."

The bizarre episode is being kept under wraps by red-faced U.S. officials, who fear news that Saddam spent weeks hiding under their very noses could renew charges of lax security.

But an Iraqi national responsible for hiring maintenance staff for the headquarters confirms that the man -- who gave his name as Omar -- worked in the heavily guarded U.S. offices from July 5 to August 20.

"Of course we noticed the resemblance to Saddam when he came for the job interview," says 36-year-old Ahmed al-Sahaf, director of custodial services.

"He told us that he'd been one of the president's many body doubles and had lost his job after the Americans invaded.

"It sounded like a reasonable explanation at the time and all his papers appeared to be in order. He seemed so hungry and down on his luck, we hired him."

"Omar" was a reliable worker, says his supervisor, though he obviously had no experience doing manual labor and often complained of lower back pain.

On August 20, the day after the U.N. headquarters in Iraq was bombed, word spread that there would be a new round of background checks.

"The next day Omar didn't show up for work and no one ever saw him again," says al-Sahaf. "That created some suspicion and the Americans asked a CIA man to look into it. "

Computer analysis compared Omar's ID photo from an employee file, plus security camera footage of him mopping a men's rest room, to official photos of Saddam.

The analysis established "with a 98 percent degree of certitude" that the mysterious janitor was the Butcher of Baghdad, sources reveal.

"Saddam has a huge ego -- it must have made his blood boil to clean up after American infidels," says Middle East analyst Charles Smythe. "But with his cash running out after spending millions a day bribing owners of various safe houses, his options were obviously running out.

"It looks like he took the desperate gamble of using the oldest trick in the book -- hiding in plain sight, where no one would ever think of looking."