Hi all,

Linda was fascinated by twins of all kinds...regular ol' run-of-the-mill twins , twin souls, astral twins, doppelgangers...and definitely body doubles, like the kind Saddam uses.

Does anybody know much of anything related to the "body doubles" part of this...in terms of anyone else in the world or from history who is believed to have had body doubles?

The movies have gotten into this idea -- there was that Kevin Kline movie where he was kind of drafted to stand in for the president...and Face/Off was somewhat similar, although just as fanciful.

Anyway, here's a story about Saddam's doubles. I wonder what else people think about these things.

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Iraq: Seeing Double In Baghdad -- Saddam Uses Look-Alikes To Disguise His Whereabouts
By Charles Recknagel

As U.S. President George W. Bush calls for a regime change in Baghdad, U.S. officials have said they would have few regrets if Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein were to be killed by his countrymen. But any attempts to target Saddam may be complicated by the fact that the Iraqi president routinely employs look-alikes to take his place at public appearances or to disguise his true whereabouts.

Prague, 9 October 2002 (RFE/RL) -- White House spokesman Ari Fleischer summed up the way many U.S. officials feel about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein when he said he would be happy to see him dead.

Fleischer told a press conference in Washington on 1 October that the simplest solution to the Iraq crisis would be the assassination of Saddam Hussein. U.S. law forbids American agencies from assassinating foreign leaders, so Fleischer said he hoped the Iraqi people would take the matter into their own hands and save the U.S. the cost of a large-scale military operation:

"The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less than that. The cost of war is more than that. But there are many options that the president hopes the world and people of Iraq will exercise themselves of, that gets rid of the threat."

But targeting the Iraqi leader -- who is famous for the attention he pays to his own security -- is no easy task.

For one thing, Saddam is said to never sleep in the same place two nights in a row. During the 1991 Gulf War, his guards were reported to routinely arrive at dusk at the homes of ordinary Iraqi families to demand they prepare a bed for an unexpected visitor. At the last minute, Saddam himself would arrive at one of the homes to spend the night before leaving again early the next morning.

At the same time, the Iraqi leader is reported to make wide use of look-alikes to take his place at public events. The look-alikes not only fulfill some of his duties, their public appearances also hide the Iraqi leader's true whereabouts.

Falih Abdul Jabbar, a sociologist and researcher at London University in England, says the Iraqi public has long known Saddam employs look-alikes. He says the public has become adept at trying to detect which Saddam -- the real one or a stand-in -- comes to official ceremonies:

"People noticed that when the other guy, or 'the second Saddam,' was there, they could detect this very easily by looking at the bodyguards, who seemed careless, sometimes even laughing. They wouldn't do that in the presence of the real Saddam."

He continues: "Another observation by the public was that Saddam is very well-known among the Iraqis to be a camera-monger. He loves the camera and to be in close-up shots. And they notice that when the other guy, his 'spare part,' as they call him, [was there], the cameras would take faraway shots, rather than zoom in. Hence they would deduce this is not the real Saddam."

Experts say that apart from the way the bodyguards and the cameramen behave, there is often little way for the public to detect which Saddam is before them. The reason is that the doubles -- who are chosen from among men who closely look like the president -- have undergone extensive plastic surgery to further refine the resemblance. One man, Abdul-Latif, defected from Iraq in the mid-1990s after years working as a double for Saddam's son Uday. He said he fled partly to avoid undergoing yet another painful operation to make him even more closely resemble his master.

In an effort to learn more about Saddam's use of doubles, the German public television station ZDF recently asked a forensic specialist to make a scientific study of some 30 films of the Iraqi president taken from 1988 to late last month. The expert, Dieter Buhmann of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Saarland University in Homburg/Saar, found that the pictures reveal there are as many as three Saddam doubles who regularly take the president's place.

Buhmann described his work in a recent interview with RFE/RL: "I received 30 films from ZDF made during the period from 1988 to September 21 of this year, and in those films in which the picture quality was particularly good I found three doubles."

Buhmann says he found the doubles by looking for pairs of pictures in which Saddam's pose was essentially the same. Using a computer graphic program, the scientist marked each picture to highlight such features as the length and width of the head, the size of the eyelids and nostrils, and the forms of the ears and chin. By then overlaying the two pictures, he was able to calculate how closely the features matched, indicating whether the person in the pictures was the same man or not.

The forensic expert confirms that extensive cosmetic surgery has been performed to create the doubles, but that there are limits to what surgery can do:

"You can do a lot with cosmetic surgery. You can change the external form of the ear, for example, or of the earlobes -- that is possible. You can also alter the prominent features either to make them more prominent or to remove them."

He continues: "But what you cannot change is the length and width of the complete head, and that is where one detects the doubles."

Looking at the pictures, Buhmann also concluded that Saddam himself has not appeared in public since 1998 -- that is, until he finally reappeared on 21 September of this year. The expert says that means people viewing images of the Iraqi leader should be very careful about deducing anything about his health or other characteristics until they first have determined whether it is Saddam himself or a look-alike.

With at least three doubles apparently taking Saddam's place in public, it may be little wonder that there have been few assassination attempts on Saddam as he moves around the country. He is also well protected.

Top officials who have defected from Iraq say that Saddam is always surrounded by 18 bodyguards, who are extremely well paid and form a living, protective rampart around him. The guards are responsible for shielding various parts of Saddam's body should he be attacked. The tallest bodyguard is assigned to protect Saddam's head, for example.

Abbas Janabi, a former private secretary to Saddam's son Uday, has reported that Saddam's life was saved in 1983 when one of the bodyguards threw himself against Saddam's chest as the president's car was machine gunned by seven assailants. The bodyguard died. In revenge, Saddam is said to have ordered the assailants' hometown of Al-Dijil to be destroyed, with 3,000 people killed and the rest of the 60,000 inhabitants dispersed.

Whether Saddam's bodyguards would similarly protect one of the president's doubles is unknown. But with the chances of catching the real Saddam in public so low, it seems likely that any assassination of the Iraqi leader would have to come not from the Iraqi people -- as outsiders might hope -- but from within Saddam's innermost circle.

(RFE/RL's Friedemann Woelfel and Jolyon Naegele assisted with this article.)

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This is from Radio Free Europe's website...
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2002/10/09102002155130.asp

Maria

Hey Maria

I don't know alot about body doubles in general - but I saw a documentary on Saddam the other day and it said that Saddam's biggest hero was Stalin, who also apparently used body doubles. And a couple times in WWII Churchill and FDR did too. Churchill and FRD's body doubles were apparently very proud of their service - Stalins and Saddams not so much...

Love,
Terri

Hi Maria and Terri

I don't know much about the use of body doubles either ... aside from the fact that it's widely known they have been used to protect political leaders for a long time (such as those mentioned by Terri above).

Where Linda Goodman fits into this picture is with regard to her belief that body doubles are used clandestinely by the CIA for less-than-upright purposes (such as "disappearing" people or replacing prominent leaders with body doubles.) Her conviction in this regard came from her investigation into her daughter Sally's "suicide," which Linda was convinced was a fake suicide staged by the CIA in retaliation for her investigative work into government improprieties.

In Linda's unfinished manuscript detailing her investigations into Sally's mysterious disappearance, she describes how she hired private detectives and others in a massive search for Sally, and to uncover the truth of what really happened to her. In the course of this investigation, she discover that Sally had been replaced by body doubles on several occasions prior to her suicide, and after accumulating massive amounts of evidence from interviews, photographs and other sources, concluded that up to nine different body doubles had impersonated Sally at various times in the months before her disappearance. In fact the title of her proposed book exposing these clandestine operations of the CIA was entitled "Spider Line" - a reference to a tiny biological identifier that was virtually unnoticeable unless you were specifically looking for it, but which unambiguously separated the real Sally from body double impersonators, no matter how closely they resembled her in photographs or in person: a thin line extending from the inner point of each of Sally's eyelids to to about halfway across the lid, horizontally. This "spider line" was visible in every photo of Sally ever taken, including those taken as a child ... but in NONE of the photos purporting to be of Sally that Linda concluded to be of amazingly identical body doubles.

Sadly, the manuscript left behind is very small and incomplete, and there is little record otherwise of Linda's researches. At one point I even interviewed an employee of one of the detective agencies Linda had hired, who dug up her file for me ... but sadly there was little documentation of the details of her search. No one knows for sure what became of the very large body of documentation she was known to have compiled regarding her investigations, which spanned several decades and implicated not only CIA officials but some of the leading political figures of the day. While we don't know much about the details, we do have a pretty good idea of the area she was investigating and some of the conclusions she had reached, from this brief excerpt from the introduction to "Spider Line."

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"Spider Line" will inform the world of the shocking experiments conducted by government agencies, in connection with "mad scientists" of the type of Nazi Dr. Mengele, from American and European Universities. These people have been - and still are - conducting experimentation in cryogenics, cloning, brain implant, super learning, mind control, amnesia and the implanting of false memory, changing identity through medical surgery - and through the use of body doubles, look-alikes and astral twins.

The public must be made aware of what is happening to these pathetic victims, including thousands of the world's young people - a situation which is ongoing, and which will continue, unless such deplorable and inhuman experimentation is halted through exposure and the resulting public outrage.

- Linda Goodman
from the unpublished outline to her proposed book "Spider Line"

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It is spooky to me how much resonance there is between Linda's descriptions of Nazi-like experimentation on young people, with the acceptance of reputable academic institutions around the world, and Cathy O'Brien's testimony about her own tortured existence as a mind-controlled slave of the CIA from childhood ... she also recounts the existence of such widespread experimentation and abuse of children, and the fact that much of it is accomplished under CIA "sponsorship" through government funded top-secret "research projects" at well-respected universities and other institutions. The whole subject is very chilling!

Love,
Greg

Yes, I remember this scenario everytime I hear someone say,
"But Saddam gasses his own people!"

And I think if they only knew what has been done to US citizens we have NO room to criticise.

Don't get me wrong...it's atrocious to hurt ANY citizen!!

And I also remember a quote I read somewhere...."All government is hostile to those governed."

So what's a citizen to do??

I recently came across a picture of a little girl posted on the internet that looked soooo much like my deceased daughter at that age that my husband and I sat there with my daughter's picture and compared every feature with the little girl and FINALLY found a faint difference in the chin.
I emailed the link to all my relatives and they all said it makes you wonder how long cloning has been going on. It was truly uncanny!
No doubt for me anymore that everyone has a double somewhere!

Hi Peggy

Quote:

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"There is indeed a 'plot against the people,' and probably always will be, for government has always been hostile towards the governed. It is not a new story, and the conspirators and conspiracies have varied from era to era, depending on the political or economic situation in their various countries."

Taylor Caldwell
Captains and the Kings

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Although the particular quote is from the modern era, the sentiment could be pulled from any of a dozen or more of the 18th century philosophers whose ideas formed the theory on which the founding fathers crafted the US Constitution. Their answer to your question "What's a citizen to do?" was to form a government so strongly limited by explicit denial of government power, by checks and balances within the government, and by the unhampered ability of the people to restrain the government, that the natural tendency of all governments to gradually consolidate power over their citizens could not be implemented.

Today, the power of this vision is lost on most people, even most Americans, who are not even aware that it is the central premise on which America was founded ... and thus have allowed so many blatant violations of the constitution to be written into law and various "emergency" powers and regulations, that the once-invulnerable constitutional protections that defined America are now essentially powerless in the face of aggressive government ... although the words are still used to stir patriotic emotions by the very forces that the constitution was created to prevent.

In my opinion, the only way to reinstate the protections against coercive government once provided by the constitution is through a grass-roots movement that makes constitutional reformation its number one issue ... and that DEMANDS the election of officials whose number one priority will be the immediate repeal of the various unconstitutional laws enacted mostly in the previous century that have effectively rendered the constitution impotent. The most pernicious of these are the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917 as reinstated and revised in 1933 to create a permanent state of "emergency" (which is still active to this day) under which essentially EVERY constitutional protection is subject to suspension on the discretion and executive order of the President or the Secretary of the Treasury, and the National Security Act of 1947 which created the CIA and granted it both secrecy and immunity from prosecution for ANY ACTS WHATSOEVER by means of invoking "reasons of national security" ... an assertion which NEED NOT BE PROVED and which is effective in any court in the land.

(The 1917 act granted the President broad powers over agents of enemy nations in World War I ... when it was reactivated in 1933, it was amended to place all American citizens within the category of "enemy agents" as defined by the act!)

That's my thought ... that we are not going to get out of this situation until we can find and elect officials who will explicitly commit to restoring the constitution. In fact, every President since Roosevelt has explicitly upheld the emergency suspension of the constitution by reaffiriming in writing, as required, the continuation of the "national emergency." This is no innocent action. They have all known exactly what they were doing.

Love,
Greg