Ex-Iraqi general, noted U.S. Christian writer tell story of WMDs and serving Hussein
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, January 30, 2006
Two evangelical Presbyterians – a retired Iraqi general who served, sometimes defiantly, under Saddam Hussein and a noted U.S. writer – have collaborated in a book that says Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were secretly shipped to Syria shortly before the U.S.-British coalition invaded the country.
After a long embargo, Saddam’s Secrets: How an Iraqi General Defied And Survived Saddam Hussein was released last week and soared by Friday afternoon to 21st on the bestseller list of Amazon.com.
The writers are Georges Sada, who was No. 2 in Hussein’s Air Force and more recently served as the spokesman for Iraq’s prime minister, and Jim Nelson Black, former executive director of The Wilberforce Forum and founder and senior analyst of Sentinel Research Associates in Washington, D.C.
Authors are Presbyterians
Sada is the former president of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Iraq. Black was a member of Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas, one of the largest congregations in the Presbyterian Church (USA), until he and others left in the early 1990s to form a new congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America.
Saddam’s Secrets corroborates what Ariel Sharon said on Dec. 23, 2002, in a television appearance on Israel’s Channel 2: “Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria.”
But Sada gave more detail to that claim. He said Hussein’s Special Republican Guard brigades loaded WMDs onto two converted Iraqi Airways planes that made 56 flights to Syria. He also said they were accompanied by a ground convoy of trucks carrying similar materials.
The flights and convoy escaped international attention because they reportedly occurred at the same time that Iraq was sending relief to Syria for a dam collapse.
In an interview with The Layman Online, Black said the information about the weapons of mass destruction was not originally intended to be part of the book.
Black explained Sada’s reluctance. “He told me, ‘Jim, you know there are people who would pay me $10 million for what I know, and there are people who would kill me,'” Black said.
Black didn’t press the issue. The book they were collaborating on was already strong: the story of a devout Christian general’s service to and defiance of Hussein.
But Sada suddenly changed his mind after watching a Christian television broadcast that laid out the depth of the crisis in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East and decided to tell what he knew about weapons of mass destruction. That changed the dynamics of Saddam’s Secrets: How an Iraqi General Defied And Survived Saddam Hussein, Black says.
Sada’s life and witness
While the weapons issue is the hot topic in Saddam’s Secrets, Sada’s life and witness in an Islamic nation in which Christians account for about 4 percent of the population are the underlying theme.
Sada, who traces his family back to the Assyrians and includes Biblical stories in Saddam’s Secrets about that nation, including the account of Jonah’s conversion of Nineveh, is the son of an Iraqi British Royal Air Force pilot who served when the United Kingdom controlled his nation. As a child, he grew up around planes and pilots and was bitten by the flying bug. He became a fighter pilot and moved up the ranks.
Sada, 65, who fluently speaks Russian, English and several other languages, joined the Iraqi Air Force.
Black, who previous book was Freefall of the American University : How Our Colleges Are Corrupting the Minds and Morals of the Next Generation, says Sada has the swagger of a pilot.
“He’s very gracious and fun,” Black said. “He cracks a smile. He’s self-confident and there’s truth in every bone in his body. This is the irony. Saddam kept Georges around because he obviously was powerless [as a Christian] but was always truthful.”
Black, the author of about 40 books, including collaborations with Billy Graham and Deion Sanders, says Sada risked his life several times while serving under Hussein.
Protecting American prisoners
Iraq’s Georges Sada salutes a Boy Scout at All Saints Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase, Md., in February 2005. Sada preached a sermon to the congregation, which identifies itself as part of the traditional Anglican community.Sada was a hero for American prisoners during the first Gulf War because he risked his life to save their lives. For that, Saddam Hussein sent him to prison.
Air Force Col. David Eberly, who was shot down over Iraq in 1991, says Sada is the Iraqi general who saved him from the “clutches of a madman” – Quasai Hussein, “in every worst way, his father’s son,” according to Christians of Iraq.
Quasai demanded that Eberly, the highest ranking POW during Desert Storm (the first Gulf War), and other captured coalition pilots be classified as war criminals and be killed outright. Sada succeeded in lobbying to save their lives – and getting himself thrown into jail.
“To his personal credit, he saved my life and the lives of the other Americans and the Brits and the Kuwaiti,” Eberly, the highest-ranking POW of Desert Storm, told Christians of Iraq.
Sada ended up being thrown in prison and “suffered greatly for his actions,” says Eberly, who calls his former captor a “terrific individual.”
Aussie leader salutes Sada
In November 2005, Sada spoke to political leaders attending the annual prayer breakfast in the Main Parliament House in Sydney, Australia. In that setting, Sada divulged a plan by Saddam Hussein to drop chemical bombs on Israel.
The Rev. Fred M. Nile, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party in Australia, issued a press release the day before the prayer breakfast, urging his colleagues “to take the opportunity to meet this remarkable Christian.”
- General Sada told us some interesting stories. One story concerned orders he received, when he was the Air Vice Marshal, from Saddam Hussein to equip 96 supersonic fighters – I understand they were Russian aircraft – with chemical bombs which would be dropped on the main population centres of Israel.
- He was given that order in front of a number of defense officials in the regime and he refused to carry it out. He persuaded Saddam Hussein that the Iraqis could not succeed in their mission because they would be “flying blind” while Israel had the “eyes.” He meant that the Israelis had superior military equipment and could identify the aircraft before they reached their targets. However, some of the aircraft could have got through. Sada said that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Some of them were destroyed but a large number were shipped across the border into Syria, where they remain to this day.
“The key fact in this man’s life is that he is a Christian,” Nile said.
Sada takes no credit for his life-risking defiance of the Saddam Hussein. He wears a heavy cross of nails around his neck, symbolic of his belief that whatever he might suffer isn’t because of his own courage but courage that “was given to me by Jesus Christ.”
Recognition in United Kingdom
In September 2003, Sada and Ayatollah Alsadr, the main Shia Muslim leader in Iraq, were named joint winners of the Coventry International Peace Prize, which is awarded by the International Centre for Reconciliation and sponsored by Sir Richard Branson.
The Oxford Center for Mission Studies posted a statement about the recipients, who worked “closely together from their different perspectives for several years in their hope that the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein will one day be replaced by a secular democracy.”
The statement noted that Sada was critical of “coalition forces for keeping both the eastern and western borders of Iraq open for too long enabling extremist elements from Iran and Al-Quaeda units into the country to conduct the current guerrilla-type campaign against British and American soldiers and many Iraqi interests.”
The statement quoted Sada, underscoring the contrasts before the invasion and after, as saying, “About 85 percent of the people welcomed the forces and were happy to get rid of the evil regime of Saddam.”
Ignored by PCUSA
Sada is a devout Christian who doesn’t fit the mold of the official position and lobbying efforts of the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Although Sada is internationally acclaimed for his role in trying to lead Iraq out of its cruelty under Hussein, his name is not mentioned on the PCUSA Web site and his views are antithetical to those of the denomination’s leaders despite the fact that he makes headlines nearly every day.
Sada’s role in protecting American soldiers, defying his former boss, as the chief spokesman for the prime minister of Iraq and addressing the weapons controversy has been widely publicized but ignored by the PCUSA, which has much to say about Iraq, none reflecting Sada’s assessment.
“The good Iraqis and the faithful Iraqis will never forget what the American nation has done for us in liberating our country from evil dictatorship,” Sada once said. “I bow before the American mothers and fathers for their sacrifices – they lost their beloved ones, sons and daughters, in the battle of freedom of Iraq. Freedom is a very dear thing.”
That’s not a statement the PCUSA would publicize in its condemnation of U.S. involvement in Iraq.
PCUSA’s policies on Iraq
On Mideast commentary, the PCUSA frequently follows the lead of the Middle East Council of Churches, an ecumenical movement patterned after the World Council of Churches, and such organizations as the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Center in Jerusalem, a group that often seems more aligned with radical Islamic groups than it does the Christian community. Both are prominently mentioned and quoted on PCUSA Web pages.
The PCUSA leadership has been adamantly opposed to U.S. involvement in Iraq. The 2004 General Assembly declared the war “unwise, immoral and illegal.” That prompted one commissioner, who opposed the statement, as saying that the declaration was tantamount to calling American soldiers in Iraq war criminals. He unsuccessfully urged the General Assembly not to make a statement that was harmful to U.S. servicemen in Iraq.
Ten months earlier, in September 2003, Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick, along with other leaders of the World Council of Churches, signed a statement with similar language. They called the U.S.-British-led war to topple Hussein “immoral, ill-advised and a breach of the principles of the U.N. charter.”
The Washington Office, the lobbying arm for the PCUSA, has weighed in with its conclusion that the administration’s insistence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a lie.
While never mentioning Sada, the PCUSA has promoted its partnership with Presbyterian congregations in Iraq – mostly with five relatively new congregations that “only in the last year or so have … been able to come together under the Assembly of the Presbyterian Churches of Iraq.”
Reviewers praise book
Most of the reviewers on Amazon.com speak highly of the book. “Without exaggeration, I must say that this may be the most important book of the year,” one said. “Sada’s book is a timely warning against complacency towards the terrorist insurgents who would do all they could to neuter America, enslave the Middle East, and cannibalize Iraq.”
“Sada put his faith in God on the line time after time, knowing that Saddam’s unpredictable temper could mean a gun to the temple,” another reviewer wrote. “A remarkable story from a remarkable man.”
The only negative review, as of this morning, was from a writer who didn’t believe Sada was telling the truth. “This book is a conservative’s fantasy of revisionist history,” he said. “Gen. Sada alleges to have knowledge that three years of international investigations have not found, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. … People who buy in to this still think the world is flat.”
Sada currently is the advisor to Iraq’s National Security Council and executive secretary of the Iraqi Institute for Peace.
“There is always a battle between the evil and the goodness,” Sada said in a recent speech. “And we will accept that battle, whatever will be the result. Iraq is going to be a guiding candle in the dark Middle East.”