Recent Articles



































Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards



         


In the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition, the U.S. developed a set of playing cards to help troops identify the most-wanted members of President Saddam Hussein's government, mostly high-ranking Baath Party members or members of the Revolutionary Command Council. The cards were officially named the "personality identification playing cards".

[Top]

About the cards

Each card contains the wanted person's name, a picture if available, and the job performed by that individual. The highest-ranking cards, starting with the aces and kings, were used for the people at the top of the most-wanted list. The ace of spades is Saddam Hussein, the aces of clubs and hearts are his sons Qusay and Uday, and the ace of diamonds is Saddam's presidential secretary deck of cards was first announced publicly in Iraq on April 11th 2003, in a press conference by Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, deputy director of operations at US Central Command. On that same evening Max Hodges, a Houston-based entrepreneur, found and downloaded a high-resolution artwork file for the deck from a Defense Department web server. Discovering the following day that the file had vanished from the military web server he became the first eBay seller to offer the artwork file, in PDF format, which could be used to reproduce the deck . He quickly contracted Gemaco Playing Card Company to print 1,000 decks for about $4,000 and started selling both the decks, in advance of receiving them from the printer, on eBay, Amazon.com and his own web site. When some of his early auctions for a $4 deck of cards quickly rose to over $120 , it didn't take long for other eBayers to jump on the bandwagon and print or order decks of their own to sell. In just a few days hundreds of sellers materalized and the price dropped to just a few dollars per deck.

Texas-based Liberty Playing Card Co. got an order to manufacture the cards for the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait and by claiming to be "the authorized government contractor" quickly became a popular domestic supplier for the commercial market. The U.S. military inadvertently included in the jokers the trademarked Hoyle joker owned by The United States Playing Card Company of Cincinnati, Ohio. Although The U.S. Playing Card company does not object to the government's use of the image, they do object to other companies using the trademarked image. Thus, in some sense, the U.S. military inadvertently granted The U.S. Playing Card Company exclusive rights to manufacture the authentic decks, if the trademarked images on the jokers are considered a requirement for being authentic.

The deck of cards spawned many imitations and parodies, such as decks featuring members of the Bush administration.

Complete decks are good examples of Ephemera because they will have lost their original purpose and their novelty interest in a relatively short time and they will become original printed witnesses of some major historical events.

[Top]

Spades

[Top]

Sources






  View Live Article   This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License