U.S. Citizen Swaps E-mail With Saddam Hussein
Oct. 23 -- Christopher Love was familiar with the democratizing power of the Internet, but nothing could have prepared him for the shock he received when he logged onto his e-mail at work late last week.
Sitting innocuously in his "inbox" was an e-mail from Saddam Hussein, Iraq's undefeated strongman and until very recently, America's best-known villain.
But Saddam's e-mail, though 10 pages long, was somewhat short on villainy.
Replying to the Pennsylvania software engineer's well-meaning e-mail to the boss of Baghdad pleading for peace after the Sept. 11 attacks, Saddam sent Love a verbose reply expressing, among a great deal of other things, his personal sympathy for the victims of the attacks.
"All I can say is presenting (sic) my condolences to you," wrote Saddam in a message addressed to his "dear brother in the family of mankind." He then included the traditional Islamic condolence: "God has created us and to Him we return. May God give you a long life."
Iraq is the only Arab country not to have condemned the attacks in the United States, which killed more than 5,000 people.
"My jaw dropped," Love told ABCNEWS.com days after receiving Saddam's message, which was dated Oct. 18. Love picked it up from his e-mail inbox the next day, Friday. "I wasn't expecting a response. If you would have asked me what were the odds of my hearing from him, I would have said the odds of winning a lottery were better."
Saddam as a Virtual Pen Pal
The unlikely idea of getting into a cyber correspondence with Saddam Hussein came in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. Earlier this year, Love learned that a friend's father in Baghdad had died because he could not get the penicillin he needed.
Then came the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, and with it, utter devastation. "Things got amplified then," he explained. "I was really upset and I was desperate to do something."
After a simple Web search, Love came across the Web site for the Iraqi News Agency, the country's official news service. He put together a small e-mail to the Webmasters of the INA site, inquiring if it were possible to send an e-mail to Saddam Hussein.
