John Loftus Huh. There is no difference between these two inside sources.-Tom
Posted on 05/27/2005 4:16:28 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Char
"Another mystery is Egypt. The U.S. taxpayer has provided some $50 billion in aid to Egypt over the past 30 years. Today Egypt has a military with strong offensive capability although facing no enemy."
Sudan and Libya aren't friendly to Egypt.
Maybe those convoys were transporting something else.
Hm. Ms. Neuworth's breathless style of writing gives one the impression that she's constantly surprised by all sorts of things, including the crunchy bits in her rocky road ice cream.
The intelligence information asserted that North Korea this year transferred components to Iran to assemble a plutonium based nuclear warhead.
We can't sit around playing craps anymore!
The proper response would be, "We genuinely thought the WMDs were there: Israel said Saddam had WMDs; Franc said it; Germany said it; the Russians said it; the UN said it; the IRANIANs said it; the king of Jordan said it; the Pres. of Egypt said it; and the CIA said it. Now, you can blow off one or two, but not ALL of these. Clearly there were WMDs there. Where are they now????
This is exactly what was said, and lo and behold: it did not penetrate! The left ignores it's own inconsistencies, what surprise is it that they ignore factual and reasonable evidence?
As to the first ("We can't sell it to the American public, so why bother?") I agree.
Well said!
"It remains a puzzle why the Bush administration has consistently failed to tell us what was discovered in Libya and to cite this as a legitimate example of an ongoing Iraqi-sponsored WMD program. "
That is because the bush administration didn't want to embrass pakistan the so-called "ally" in the war against terror.Its clear that Libya was able to develop its nuclear weapons programme because of active assistance given to it by pakistan through the A.Q.Khan network.
That's the reason why america has so far shyed away from acknowledging the fact ,that the reason libya choose to give up its nukes was the american invasion of iraq and the removal of saddam!!!!
LOL - gotta remember that one!!
ping
John Loftus Huh. There is no difference between these two inside sources.-Tom
Seems I recollect that just at the start of the war, a convoy of Russians was headed out of Iraq...The convoy was bombed by us and some Russian uppity-ups were killed...Seems the story was they were smuggling WMD records or something similar...
I sometimes wonder why we are there.
I'm not discounting the fact that Saddam is a monster and a danger to the world. Also not discounting that we clearly did the entire world a great favor by getting rid of him, providing something worthwhile takes his place.
Just wondering exactly what the plan was by our guys.
I can see the benefits if it is ultimately successful, but consider it to have been quite the gamble.
ping
Here's an article with details of Russian involvement:
Operation Sarindar, from KGB defector
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10111
"As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency exit." I implemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.
All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction. Chemical weapons, especially those produced in Third World countries, which lack sophisticated production facilities, often do not retain lethal properties after a few months on the shelf and are routinely dumped anyway. And all chemical weapons plants had a civilian cover making detection difficult, regardless of the circumstances.
The plan included an elaborate propaganda routine. Anyone accusing Moammar Gadhafi of possessing chemical weapons would be ridiculed. Lies, all lies! Come to Libya and see! Our Western left-wing organizations, like the World Peace Council, existed for sole purpose of spreading the propaganda we gave them. These very same groups bray the exact same themes to this day. We always relied on their expertise at organizing large street demonstrations in Western Europe over America's "war-mongering" whenever we wanted to distract world attention from the crimes of the vicious regimes we sponsored.
Iraq, in my view, had its own "Sarindar" plan in effect direct from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. Nicolae Ceausescu told me so, and he heard it from Leonid Brezhnev. KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so, too. In the late 1970s, Gen. Primakov ran Saddam's weapons programs. After that, as you may recall, he was promoted to head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, to Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and in 1998, to prime minister. What you may not know is that Primakov hates Israel and has always championed Arab radicalism. He was a personal friend of Saddam's and has repeatedly visited Baghdad after 1991, quietly helping Saddam play his game of hide-and-seek.
The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but it showed them how to make them "disappear." Russia is still at it. Primakov was in Baghdad from December until a couple of days before the war, along with a team of Russian military experts led by two of Russia's topnotch "retired"generals: Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor Maltsev, a former air defense chief of staff. They were all there receiving honorary medals from the Iraqi defense minister. They clearly were not there to give Saddam military advice for the upcoming war—Saddam's Katyusha launchers were of World War II vintage, and his T-72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG fighter planes were all obviously useless against America. "I did not fly to Baghdad to drink coffee," was what Gen. Achalov told the media afterward. They were there orchestrating Iraq's "Sarindar" plan.
The U.S. military in fact, has already found the only thing that would have been allowed to survive under the classic Soviet "Sarindar" plan to liquidate weapons arsenals in the event of defeat in war — the technological documents showing how to reproduce weapons stocks in just a few weeks.
Such a plan has undoubtedly been in place since August 1995 — when Saddam's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who ran Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs for 10 years, defected to Jordan. That August, UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors searched a chicken farm owned by Kamel's family and found more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes containing documentation dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear. Caught red-handed, Iraq at last admitted to its "extensive biological warfare program, including weaponization," issued a "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure Report" and turned over documents about the nerve agent VX and nuclear weapons.
Saddam then lured Gen. Kamel back, pretending to pardon his defection. Three days later, Kamel and over 40 relatives, including women and children, were murdered, in what the official Iraqi press described as a "spontaneous administration of tribal justice." After sending that message to his cowed, miserable people, Saddam then made a show of cooperation with UN inspection, since Kamel had just compromised all his programs, anyway. In November 1995, he issued a second "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure" as to his supposedly non-existent missile programs. That very same month, Jordan intercepted a large shipment of high-grade missile components destined for Iraq. UNSCOM soon fished similar missile components out of the Tigris River, again refuting Saddam's spluttering denials. In June 1996, Saddam slammed the door shut to UNSCOM's inspection of any "concealment mechanisms." On Aug. 5, 1998, halted cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA completely, and they withdrew on Dec. 16, 1998. Saddam had another four years to develop and hide his weapons of mass destruction without any annoying, prying eyes. U.N. Security Council resolutions 1115, (June 21, 1997), 1137 (Nov. 12, 1997), and 1194 (Sept. 9, 1998) were issued condemning Iraq—ineffectual words that had no effect. In 2002, under the pressure of a huge U.S. military buildup by a new U.S. administration, Saddam made yet another "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure," which was found to contain "false statements" and to constitute another "material breach" of U.N. and IAEA inspection and of paragraphs eight to 13 of resolution 687 (1991).
It was just a few days after this last "Disclosure," after a decade of intervening with the U.N. and the rest of the world on Iraq's behalf, that Gen. Primakov and his team of military experts landed in Baghdad — even though, with 200,000 U.S. troops at the border, war was imminent, and Moscow could no longer save Saddam Hussein. Gen. Primakov was undoubtedly cleaning up the loose ends of the "Sarindar" plan and assuring Saddam that Moscow would rebuild his weapons of mass destruction after the storm subsided for a good price."
Thanks for the ping!
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