Iraqi President Saddam Hussein urged his people on Saturday to ignore a US plot to topple him, saying the threat was nothing new.
It was Saddam's first reaction to last week's Washington Post report, which said US President George W. Bush had signed an order earlier this year allowing the CIA to conduct covert operations to oust Saddam, broadening an earlier directive.
The Post quoted informed sources as saying the order included permission to use lethal force to capture Saddam.
"Do not give any weight to such a report," Saddam told a group of senior ruling Ba'ath Party members.
"This subject isn't new as it is more than thirty years old," he said, accusing the United States of plotting to topple the Baghdad government since the Ba'ath Party seized power three decades ago.
Bush has branded Iraq a member of an "axis of evil", along with Iran and North Korea, for backing international terrorism and trying to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
US Vice President Dick Cheney said on Thursday Saddam was a "gathering danger" to the United States.
Saddam said he would rather have the United States targeting the leaders of Iraq than its people. Iraq has been under strict UN sanctions imposed after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
"Let them first avoid hitting the people," he said. "Leave the Iraqi people alone by lifting the embargo."
Saddam accused Washington of killing Iraqi civilians and destroying their property -- a reference to no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq patrolled by US and British war planes.
In the past few days, Iraqi officials and media have played down the Washington Post report, but an official Iraqi newspaper said on Saturday Baghdad was taking the US threats seriously.
"We are not scorning these threats, rather we are taking them seriously," the al-Iraq newspaper said in a front-page editorial.
"We know that the next American aggression won't be less than what we had seen before," it said, referring to the US-led 1991 Gulf War, which ejected Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
(China Daily June 24, 2002)
