Posted on 07/12/2004 12:46:02 PM PDT by My2Cents
Weapons Grade Uranium Moving in Middle East; Iraqi WMD and Delivery Development Being Undertaken in Libya
Analysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor. The seizure at the end of September 2002 of weapons grade uranium on the Turkish-Syrian border, and the presence of some 20,000 Iraqi technicians and specialists in Libya, working on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile delivery systems, complicates the political posturing of the United States, the United Nations and other governments on the question of sending weapons inspectors to Iraq to verify compliance with UN resolutions and the terms under which the 1991 Gulf War was ended.
Turkish paramilitary police were reported on September 28, 2002, to have seized more than 15 kg (33 pounds) of weapons-grade uranium and detained two men accused of smuggling the material. Officers in the southern province of Sanliurfa, which borders Syria and is about 250km (155 miles) from the Iraqi border, were reportedly acting on information from an informant when they stopped a taxi cab and discovered the uranium in a lead container hidden beneath the vehicle’s seat. Authorities said that they believed the uranium came from an east European country and had a value of about $5-million. Israel Radio quoted Turkish police as saying that the uranium originally came from a former Soviet state.
It was not immediately clear when the seizure operation was carried out. The Turkish Anatolian News Agency only gave the first names of the suspects, which appeared to be Turkish. Police in Turkey seized more than one kg of weapons-grade uranium in November 2001; that had been smuggled into Turkey from an east European nation.
The movement of such large quantities of weapons grade fissionable material meant that evaluations of when countries such as Iraq could field viable nuclear weapons would have to be re-considered. Given the fact that Iraqi and other Arab scientists were now thoroughly familiar with the requirements for nuclear weapons, and had done all of the major engineering, only the production of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium was left as the major challenge. All estimates of the time it would take Iraq, for example, to produce a viable nuclear weapon were based on the local production of the fissionable material on a “milligram by milligram” scale.
At the same time, Libyan sources have told GIS that they believed that it was possible that the bulk of the “heavy engineering” of Iraq’s strategic weapons programs had been undertaken for some years in Libya, rather than in Iraq itself. This included weaponizing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) payloads (biological, chemical and nuclear) for deployment on ballistic missiles, including the NoDong 1 systems acquired from North Korea (DPRK) in 2000.
Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily of November 8, 2000, reported:
“The Libyan acquisition of NoDong-1 SSMs is the result of a joint Egyptian-Iraqi-Libyan crash program to overcome delays in production of indigenous SSMs. Initially, the Egyptians and the Iraqis wanted to expedite the production of their own missile in Libya. Cairo arranged for Tripoli to provide cover for the revival of the Bad’r/Condor program which could no longer take place in Iraq and now also not in Egypt because of the exposure by the US of the North Korean (DPRK) rôle and a consequent US pressure to stop the program. Therefore, the Libyans initiated their relations with the DPRK on behalf of Cairo and Baghdad.”
With the bulk of the major strategic weapons program of Iraq being developed outside the country, UN weapons inspections inside Iraq become meaningless. Even before the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, Libya and Iraq had maintained a close cooperation — reported on extensively at the time by Defense & Foreign Affairs publications — in the flow of defense matériel and technology, often using Sudan as the staging ground.
At the same time, Libya was itself developing its chemical and biological weapons programs on an unfettered basis, having moved its facilities away from those earlier discovered at such facilities as Rabta. These activities have also been documented extensively by GIS Libya sources in Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, and can be found in the Libya Special Reports section of the ISSA website.
Libyan opposition activists inside the country have said that they cannot understand why the US has ignored the Libya-Iraq connection for so long, and why it has toyed with the idea of normalizing relations with the present Libyan leader, Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi and his son, Saif al-Islam, given the continued commitment of Qadhafi to WMD and terrorism. Some Libyan opposition sources have said that, given Qadhafi’s known terminal illness — confirmed to GIS by Qadhafi’s doctors and by other African leaders close to Qadhafi — they may not be able to wait for US support to remove Qadhafi. It was possible, then, that a move against Qadhafi by internal opponents could come even before a US attack on Iraq. If so, this would materially impact Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s ability to utilize his strategic weapons.
What was significant about the November 8, 2000, reports was that the NoDong 1 missiles already operational in Libya were targeted at European cities. These were missiles reportedly partly paid for by Iraq.
It's disappointing that Pres. Bush wasn't more specific today about the link between Saddam and Libya. Either information about this connection, as reported by ISSA, are false, or there is substance to it, and the Administration is sitting on the evidence for some reason.
Ping the usual suspects.
John Loftus was on Fox News yesterday and said that Ghaddafi may actually make some announcements or document releases soon that would verify the existence of an Iraqi WMD program in Libya. He said that Libya was basically an open-market for other countries to do their research and development in.
if this story is going to materialize, it needs to happen soon. doing it in october may make it look like a political stunt. this must be in place before the debates.
BRING IT ON!
catching bin ladin in October would be political stunt too!!!
I think I read yesterday that the report would be ready in September.
Bush administration can't wait too long or it will look staged.
Methinks Mr. Cheney needs to be a bit concerned about his wife's soul.....
If marriage were a STATE issue, then what happened in Mass.? The COURTS over-ruled the will of the people of that STATE.
There is NOTHING to prevent the same from happening from coast to coast without a FEDERAL Amendment to guarantee the fact.
bump
"THE" Reason We Went Into Iraq Fox Matchett-PI transcription FR 5-23-04
***Libya Expected To Announce in September Report That Iraqi WMD DID Exist And Were Develped THERE** Fox 7-11-04
it depends. the Dems would have to make the case that we knew where OBL was all the time, etc. that would be hard to do.
But this Libya thing - its easier to make that case, since if true, it has already occurred and been "in the bag" for some time, its not something new that is occurring right now. so the Dems could more easily say that the release of the information was politically timed.
Related New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/asia/23NUKE.html
you are on the wrong thread with that comment.
How about right after the start of the CommiecRAT convention in Boston?
I agree, but it's a bit off-topic on this thread, don't you think?
that would be fine.
and it has to look like it wasn't a US sponsored revelation. It has to be something that the new iraqi government is seen as uncovering, or some kind of cooperative effort between between Quaddafi and Iraq.
So, this is why Gadaffy was so eager to hand over his WMD's. They were really SayDamn's and he thought he would have been next on the list of countries to be invaded.
He was probably correct in his analysis.
THE PRESIDENT: I want to thank Jeffrey Wadsworth, who's the Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It's not the first time I've met Jeffrey...
I've just had a close look at some of the dangerous equipment secured in this place. Eight months ago, the centrifuge parts and processing equipment for uranium were 5,000 miles away in the nation of Libya. They were part of a secret nuclear weapons program. Today, Libya, America and the world are better off because these components are safely in your care.
These materials are the sobering evidence of a great danger. Certain regimes, often with ties to terrorist groups, seek the ultimate weapons as a shortcut to influence. These materials, voluntarily turned over by the Libyan government, are also encouraging evidence that nations can abandon those ambitions and choose a better way.
[END EXCERPT]
You can bet your last dollar that this will not be widely reported on broadcast, local, or cable news (except possibly on FOX), nor in print media.
Thanks for starting this thread today, My2Cents. I was hoping the president would discuss some of this today.
"But I thought there weren't any Weapons of Mass Destruction!!" </sarcasm>
From THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE IRAQ WAR by Yossef Bodansky (Regan Books, 2004), chapter 3, pp. 51-53:
On January 14, 2003, British police and security forces raided a terrorist safe house in Manchester, ending a several-month-long investigation. A Scotland Yard detective was killed in this raid, which recovered a quantity of ricin – an extremely potent poison. The investigation, begun in the fall 2002 in Israel, involved at its peak the intelligence services of more than six countries. The investigators’ findings provided the “smoking gun” supporting the administration’s insistence on Iraq’s centrality to global terrorism, the availability of operational weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and proof of the close cooperation between Iraqi military intelligence and al-Qaeda.
The data accumulated during this investigation could have provided the casus belli – the justification for war – and urgent imperative to take on Saddam Hussein. Yet in the first of several indecisive and self-contradicting political maneuvers, the Bush administration preferred to accommodate Blair’s pressure to keep Israel at arm’s length, not implicate Arafat, and placate Blair’s fellow West European leaders rather than go public with the findings of the investigation. Despite mounting international criticism and skepticism in the media, the American public was not presented with one of the strongest and most explicit justifications for the war with Iraq.
On the night of September 13, 2003, Israeli Special Forces intercepted and captured a three-man squad attempting to cross the Jordan River and enter the Palestinian territories on their way to Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. The interrogation revealed that they were highly trained members of the Baghdad-based Arab Liberation Front (ALF), sent to conduct spectacular strikes under the banner of Arafat’s Fatah. Specifically, they were dispatched by ALF Chief Muhammad Zaida Abbas, better known as Abu-al-Abbas, to operate directly under the control of Tawfiq Tirawi, chief of the Palestinian Authority’s General Intelligence Service and Arafat’s closest confidant. Abbas and Tirawi were extremely close childhood friends, having grown up together in a village justnorth of Ramallah and ultimately joining Arafat’s fledgling terrorist organization together in the early 1960s.
The three ALF terrorists were trained for several missions, including an operation that involved using shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down civilian airliners as they approached Ben-Gurion Airport and using anti-tank rockets and missiles to ambush convoys – including American groupings on their way to Iraq. They were also there to organize and train Palestinian terrorists – all trusted operatives of Tirawi’s – to assist with operations and intelligence collection inside Israel. The three had been briefed in Baghdad that they would get the missiles, heavy weapons, and explosives they might need from Fatah via Tirawi.
The Israeli interrogators were most interested in what the three had to say about their training: During the summer, they had been trained along with other squads of ALF terrorists at Salman Pak – a major base near Baghdad – by members of Unit 999 of Iraqi military intelligence. They recounted that in an adjacent part of the camp, other teams of Unit 999 were preparing a select group of Islamist terrorists specifically identified as members of al-Qaeda. Although the training was separate, and individuals used code names exclusively, they were able to learn a great deal about the missions of their Islamist colleagues.
The three ALF terrorists told the Israelis that in addition to the myriad special operations techniques taught at Salman Pak, the Islamists also received elaborate training in chemical weapons and poisons, specifically ricin. Moreover, on their way to their operational deployment zones, the Islamists were taken to a derelict complex of houses near Halabja, in Kurdistan, where they conducted experiments with chemical weapons and poisons. The area where the training took place was nominally under the control of Ansar-al-Islam, Osama bin Laden’s Kurdish offshoot. From there, the ALF terrorists recounted, Islamist detachments traveled to Turkey, where they were to strike American bases with chemical weapons once the war [with Iraq] started, and to Pakinsy Gore in northern Georgia (on the border with Chechnya) in order to assist Chechen terrorists as they launched major terrorists operations against Russia. Others were dispatched to train Islamist teams arriving from Western Europe via Turkey in sophisticated terrorism techniques, including the use of chemical weapons and ricin.
Within a week of the capture of the ALF trio, a delegation of senior Israeli military intelligence officers traveled to Washington to brief the White House about their findings. By then, there had already been independent corroborations of the Israeli reports: Turkish security forces, acting on tips provided by Israel, arrested two al-Qaeda operatives studying plans to attack the U.S. air base in Incerlick with chemical weapons, and American intelligence also learned from its own sources about the activities of foreign mujahedein in Georgia’s Pakinsky Gore. Then, on October 23, a group of Chechen and Arab terrorists captured a Moscow theater in the middle of a performance, taking over seven hundred people hostage, rigging the theater with bombs, and threatening to kill everyone in the building. When negotiations failed and the terrorists shot at least one hostage to demonstrate their determination, Russian antiterrorist forces broke into the theater after using a special knockout gas to neutralize the Chechens before they were able to detonate their bombs. The Russian operation was considered a great success, as all the terrorists were killed before they could blow themselves up; however, close to two hundred hostages died from secondary effects caused by the gas, including heart attacks and choking on their own vomit. In any case, the mere occurrence of a spectacular strike in Moscow meant that there could no longer be any doubt about the accuracy of the material provided by the three Palestinians in Israel’s custody.
Still, the White House was reluctant to advertise this evidence because it demonstrated Israeli intelligence’s major contribution to the war on terrorism…[W]hen ricin was discovered in Manchester and all the dots connected, the intelligence Israel had extracted from the terrorists in its custody was proved wholly accurate. Israel had in fact demonstrated to the Europeans why Saddam Hussein has to be toppled, and soon…
Bush's comments about Libya are cryptic at best, wouldn't you agree? And they won't be reported because they are cryptic. Bush needs to hit the media square in the forehead with what we know about the links between Saddam and his own WMD program that was being run out of Libya.
but the key piece is missing from that statement - the link to Iraq.
let's see what happens...
On John Batchelor's radio show last week, Loftus said that Ghaddafi would be making this announcement in September.
That would require lots of heavy equipment to remove all that debris and rock.
At least his remains shouldn't smell to much after 2 1/2 years.
Huh? What's Lynne's soul have to do with WMDs?
That's my belief...What grease spot at the bottom of which crater is bin Laden?
This administration is not going to be burned again by poor intelligence. I suspect they'll wait until Libya makes its own announcement (if, indeed, one is coming) before incorporating it into the President's speeches.
With the economy moving along, and Iraq's own government increasing setting their own course in Iraq, the most powerful issue the left continues to have is that "Bush lied!" on WMDs. He needs to take this issue away from them, and leave them standing with nothing by Nov. 2.
bump for later..
With Bush's speech today concerning the items from Libya and then Libya's report coming in September stating that Iraq was involved, the timing really couldn't be better. Let the Dems continue the "no WMD" mantra and then slap upside the head with the evidence in September. I guarantee you the polls will take a MAJOR leap in Bush's direction when the truth comes out and the Dems look like fools.
On the live thread for the speech, there were widespread complaints that the Fox News network was down nationwide during the speech. Hackers?
My personal opinion --
Anyone who holds a position that promotes or allows homosexual marriage cannot possibly be a Bible-Believing Saved Christian.
A value she obviously (and Dick too - he's not off the hook) forgot to instill in their daughter through her upbringing. Must have been a value Lynne forgot to review while their daughter was growing up....
I'm confused. Is there a link between homosexuality and this thread's topic of WMDs?
Is Dubya playing poker with the RATS? They have everything riding on "Bush lied."
Nice irrelevency.
OK- there was a thread about Lynne Cheney being against the FMA. I had posted on that thread. It showed up on that thread. I even received a couple of replies on that thread.
Now that thread appears to have disappeared and my last couple of posts to that thread now appear on THIS thread?
What the heck is going on (and NO I don't and haven't done any mind-altering drugs!)?
Seems like a rather strange bug....
Interesting.
Good catch,
and good info
from you too, Wolfstar.
Actually, it wouldn't be an issue if the media would TELL THE TRUTH and widely report it. Every leading Democrats in Congress and the Clinton Administration said exactly the same things that the Bush Administration said about Iraqi WMD. So did every major foreign intelligence service. Even the United Nations, which the Left loves so much, kept poking around in Iraq and made a big deal of being booted out in 1998.
Were they all wrong too? Or, as I increasingly believe, everybody in power in the 1990's, including Saddam, kept the WMD fiction going to suit their own agendas. The Iraqi defectors wanted us to overthrow Saddam. Those skimming the Oil-for-Food program wanted the gravy train to continue. Clinton wanted to avoid hard decisions. The Congressional Dems enjoyed having a chance to talk tough about Iraq knowing Clinton would never do anything serious about Saddam.
Perhaps some of Saddam's stuff is in Libya and Syria. Who knows! We don't know a lot of the details. But we sure have more than enough of an overview to see the outlines of the truth.
If ever we needed an honest, fair, investigative media, now is the time. But instead, they are busy playing their own politics and serving their own mostly Leftist agenda. Honestly, my darker side thinks whoever mailed the anthrax came very close to doing us all a favor by targeting Rather, Brokaw and Jennings. Grrrr...
I thought it was my cable TV provider, LOL. But MSNBC carried the speech from beginning to end. FOX went to the speech a little late.
At times, your darker side
REALLY hits one out of the park.
This is one of those times. :)
Only if: (1) there really is a Libyan report coming out, and (2) our media will report it as widely as, oh, the Aby Graib photos. If a report does come out, but our media basically tanks it, most likely voters will never hear about it.
Grin...BTW, am still unsure if I can make it August 1. That's why you haven't heard from me to make plans. Will know later this week and get in touch with you then.
OK.
I know you're TRYING to go.
I saw the speech today and it crossed my mind that boasting about Libya might be counter productive.
It might have been a desirable course for Moamar to sell some nuclear stuff to Al Queada for mega bucks and then give the rest to W and claim credit as a good guy.
When the crap hits the fan Moamar can duck and show the world his clean hands.
Could be. I put nothing past those monsters.
That is strange. Thanks for the explanation.
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