"My feelings are as usual, we will slaughter them all"

It is the American way: turn the news into an action figure and make some scratch:

Herobuilders.com owner Emil Vicale said he wanted to take advantage of the craze and built the doll of al-Sahaf dressed in trademark army fatigues and black beret to be sold for $35.95.

"We were able to obtain a digital copy of his voice, his sound bites," Vicale said. "We were able to digitize that and impregnate that on a voice chip."

Other dolls sold by the same company include "Saddam Insane," "President G.W.," "Butcher of Baghdad," "British Ally," and "Osama is Drag" — al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden [who also speaks] in a pink dress. [Reuters]

The Herobuilders site describes the Minister:

As reporters in Baghdad sent out pictures of American tanks and armoured cars in the center of Baghdad, Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al Sahhaf, kept up his one man battle against the observable facts. He said there were no American troops in Baghdad, and claimed the Iraqis had already given them a thrashing. In fact, Saddam Hussein's loyal lieutenant was the picture of optimism in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Iraqi regime was crumbling.

Hear doll Volume 1's exhortations for yourself here.

"[My feelings are as usual] We will slaughter them all!"
"They're not even [within] 100 miles [of Baghdad]"
"No I am not scared and neither should you be."
"There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!"

Information Minister Volume 2's (two separate dolls) epithets are:

"We besieged them and have kill most of them."
"My feelings are as usual, we will slaughter them all." [same quote as above]
"They are trapped everywhere in the country."

Check out a Sky.com online video of the Minister here. Based upon his voice in the video, and, much more important, the distinct difference in audio quality between the "We will slaughter them all!" and the other quotations, I hereby posit the theory that "We will slaughter them all!" is in fact a recording of the Information Minister, but the remainder of the quotes were spoken by someone else.

Following up on this theory I phoned Herobuilders.com owner Emil Vicale at his Danbury, Connecticutt office. Confirming the theory, Mr. Vicale indicated that the recordings he had of all the quotes other than "We will slaughter them all!" were in Arabic, and since the doll was being sold primarily to Americans, he had a translation made, and an actor recorded the translations. Mystery solved.

With the recordings on his site, Mr. Vitale is clearly not trying to hide anything. Perhaps Reuters is unaware of the impression that was left by its story, that all of the recordings are genuine:

"We were able to obtain a digital copy of his voice, his sound bites," Vicale said. "We were able to digitize that and impregnate that on a voice chip."

Which is certainly true as far as it goes - I just find it odd that Reuters didn't follow up with the information that another method was used for all but one quote.

Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and former publisher of Blogcritics.org, and former publisher of Technorati.com, which both rule. He is now editor, co-founder, and CEO of The Morton Report.

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