Posted on 02/20/2003 10:29:31 PM PST by PsyOp
Bump for one of the best documented and informative threads since whitewater and china-gate.
Thanks.
Saddam's 500-ton Uranium Stockpile
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1514595/posts
Iran to process fresh batch of uranium
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1514342/posts
The US has revealed that it removed more than 1.7 metric tons of radioactive material from Iraq in a secret operation last month.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3872201.stm
About that 500 tons of yellow cake...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1447636/posts
Niger document forger in pay of France
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1509091/posts
Lies of Joe Wilson: Part IV, Tenet Corrects the Record
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1458053/posts
The Uranium Joe Wilson Didn't Mention
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1444916/posts
"So, Fatima, what's for dinner?"
"Hakim, dear, I've made you a nice bowl cous-cous in my new cooking pot. It's really neat. It heats food without being put over a flame. I found it in that old warehouse. That Saddam had everything!"
Urban Legends About the Iraq War
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1527364/posts
Urban Legend: The Bush Administration in general, and the Vice President and his office in particular, pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to exaggerate evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Reality: Here is the verdict of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s bipartisan Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq: “The Committee did not find any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform with administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to do so. When asked whether analysts were pressured in any way to alter their assessments or make their judgments conform with administration policies on Iraq’s WMD programs, not a single analyst answered ‘yes.’”
mega-bump
Ping to myself I need more time to digest this.
The Butcher with the Terror Ties
The evidence mounts.
Drip, drip, drip.
Drop by drop, isolated news stories and emerging documents are eroding the popular myth that Saddam Hussein had no connections to Islamofascist terrorists. These revelations undermine war critics’ efforts to whitewash Baghdad’s ancien regime — such as when Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid declared: “There was [sic] no terrorists in Iraq.” Likewise, Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) describes a “nonexistent relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.”
Reid, Levin, and others who dismiss the Baathist-terrorist nexus would struggle to do so if the Bush administration unveiled the evidence tying Hussein to Osama bin Laden and other extremists. President Bush immediately should release papers discussed in the January 9 Newsweek and the January 16 Weekly Standard.
A declassified 2002 Pentagon presentation attained by Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball offers fresh details on a suspected April 8-9, 2001, meeting in Prague between September 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) station chief Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. “No other intelligence reporting contradicts that [deleted] report,” the heavily redacted document states. It adds: “During one visit, al-Ani ordered IIS finance officer to issue funds to Atta.” According to one slide, “Atta also reportedly met with Iraqi Charge d’Affaires Hussein Kanaan.” Also: “Several workers at Prague airport identified Atta following 9/11 and remember him traveling with his brother Farhan Atta.”
A slide headlined “High-Level Contacts, 1990 – 2002” lists numerous meetings and communications among bin Laden, his deputies, and top Iraqi officials. In 1999, the presentation says, “al-Qaida established operational training camp in northern Iraq; also reports of Iraq training terrorists at Salman Pak,” a military base 20 miles south of Baghdad. In 2000, “According to CIA ‘fragmentary reporting points to possible Iraqi involvement’ in bombing USS Cole in October.”
Among the document’s “Findings”: “Some indications of possible Iraqi coordination with al Qaida specifically related to 9/11.”
Is this all fabricated? How much of this presentation is true? Releasing all 60 or so slides for public inspection would help sort this out.
The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes talked to 11 federal officials before concluding that documents U.S. troops captured in Iraq prove that “the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion.” Hayes reports, “Secret training took place primarily at three camps — in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak — and was directed by elite Iraqi military units.” Al-Qaeda-affiliated Muslim fanatics, such as Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army, were among the 8,000 or so murderers instructed between 1999 and 2002.
Handwritten notes, typed forms, computer discs, videos, and other “exploitable items” confirm Hussein’s philanthropy of terror, Hayes says. But America has translated only some 2.5 percent of this huge cache. Federal officials barely discuss what they have learned. Even unclassified papers remain unavailable. Absurd. Having studied some of these artifacts, one intelligence expert says: “As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Hussein’s] support for transregional terrorists.”
Asked by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R., Mich.) to release some texts, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte reportedly told the House Intelligence chairman: “I’m giving this as much attention as anything else on my plate to make this work.”
Earlier this month, Hayes writes, federal immigration judge Anthony Rogers decided to deport Ahmad Mohammed Barodi, a 41-year-old Arlington, Tex., convenience-store owner. Barodi testified in a January 4-5 hearing that he entered America in 1989 on a phony Syrian passport furnished by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB), an Islamic terror group. He admitted to smuggling bogus passports into Saudi Arabia for SMB. According to Justice Department records cited by KTVT, CBS’s Dallas station, the SMB sent Barodi to a “21-day guerrilla warfare training camp” in Iraq in 1982, “with the approval of Saddam Hussein.” The document adds: “Barodi advised that the Iraqi government provided all of the training aids consisting of RPG’s (rocket propelled grenades), firearms and the facility.”
But, skeptics sputter, secular Saddam Hussein never would work with Osama bin Laden or other Islamic zealots. This argument foolishly ignores popularly elected Franklin Roosevelt’s alliance with genocidal dictator Josef Stalin to smash Adolf Hitler. Similarly, republican revolutionary George Washington and super-monarch Louis XVI collaborated to defeat Britain’s King George III. Why wouldn’t Hussein and bin Laden similarly conspire to foil the Great Satan?
Moreover, the Butcher of Baghdad was not as secular as the “no-connection” crowd insists. He added “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”) to the Iraqi flag just before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He also began to pray publicly to bolster his “mosque-cred.” Hayes cites a “SENSITIVE” August 22, 1995, UNSCOM interview with Hussein Kamel, the tyrant’s son-in-law who defected to Jordan that year. Kamel told U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus, “The Government of Iraq is instigating fundamentalism in the country . . . Now Baath Party members have to pass a religious exam.” He added: “They even stopped party meetings for prayers.”
Meanwhile, Dick Cheney gave Hayes a boost Wednesday. As the vice president told radio host Tony Snow: “Steve Hayes is of the view — and I think he’s correct — that a lot of those documents that were captured over there that have not yet been evaluated offer additional evidence that, in fact, there was a relationship that stretched over many years between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda organization.”
To its enormous detriment, Cheney’s comments notwithstanding, the administration has been nearly silent about Hussein’s decades of collusion with Islamic terrorists. The worry, White House aides tell me, is that revealing these ties would generate media criticism and anti-war catcalls. Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita told Hayes that some reporters might discover exculpatory material among these papers, then “we’d spend a lot of time chasing around after it.”
That risk does not excuse paralysis. If the president wrote MoveOn.org a $10,000 check, they would denounce his penmanship. Bush’s detractors never stop complaining, so the administration simply should make its case. If handed the keys to Fort Knox, don’t worry that someone might whine about the wallpaper. Grab the gold.
Administration officials also should remember that the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal resembled an eccentric one-woman show when reporter Claudia Rosett began exposing it. Then the documents tumbled out. Rosett was vindicated — and how! Worldwide probes, resignations, and criminal arrests followed as the contours of this $21 billion shakedown became clear.
Stephen Hayes similarly remains among the few journalists excavating this huge, deliberately concealed story. Now Newsweek has nibbled at the Iraq-terror connection. Other journalists should stop napping and demand that the White House finally document everything it can about Saddam Hussein’s multifarious links to terrorism.
— Deroy Murdock is a New York-based a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Va.. His research on Saddam Hussein’s support for Islamofascism appears at HUSSEINandTERROR.com.
This doesn't make much sense. Revealing documentary evidence would do a lot to silence the critics we're forced to listen to every day.
Personally, I don't trust this Larry DiRita character. He strikes me as being the Pentagon's designated coverup artist.
The problem always revolves around the definition and standard of "proof" or "evidence". The media and the left have raised standards of proof that saddam had wmd's or had a hand in 9/11 that unless he admits it on the stand and can himself show proof that he is telling the truth, they will never accept it.
As for the Czech connection they simply dismiss it by saying the czech intelligence is in the pay of the whitehouse and that the czech government is parroting the whitehouse line in order to keep receiving aid.
In Iraq, unless they find a nuclear bomb assembled, fused and counting down, they will not admit the presence of WMD's.
My daughter is currently an NBC specialist in the US Army. She spent 14 months in Iraq. According to her there was plenty of evidence.
But it's like saying there was a weapon in the house because you foound all the disassembled parts. The left will say there is no gun because it is not assembled, functional and able to fire.
Even after here base was mortared with chemical rounds filled with cyanide, the newsies would not report it. That's a WMD! Fortunately, the shooters had bad aim, the wind was wrong, and assembled the detonator incorrectly so it did not explode. But is not a chemical round filled with cyanide not a chemical weapon?
Water testing in the tigris during the invasion showed the presense of numerous chemical precursor agents.
As for DiRita, I know nothing about him.
Post-Gazette ^ | 02/06/2006 | Jack Kelly
A Syrian sidestep? (Excerpted)
"About those Iraqi WMDs: More signs are pointing to a neighborly transfer."
"Last week a man who had been deputy chief of Saddam Hussein's air force claimed Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war began."
"But Mr. Sada's is only the most recent of a series of accounts by people in a position to speak with authority who say (some of) Saddam's chemical and biological weapons wound up in Syria."
"Last month Moshe Yaalon, who was Israel's top general at the time, said Iraq transported WMD to Syria six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom began."
"Last March, John A. Shaw, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian Spetsnaz units moved WMD to Syria and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley."
"Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong was deputy commander of Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In September 2004, he told WABC radio that 'I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran.'"
"In January 2004, David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group which conducted the search for Saddam's WMD, told a British newspaper there was evidence unspecified materials had been moved to Syria from Iraq shortly before the war."
"Also that month, Nizar Nayuf, a Syrian journalist who defected to an undisclosed European country, told a Dutch newspaper he knew of three sites where Iraq's WMD was being kept. They were the town of al Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria;"
"In an addendum to his final report last April, Charles Duelfer, who succeeded David Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said he couldn't rule out a transfer of WMD from Iraq to Syria."
Ex-Officer Spurned on WMD Claim
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 8, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/27183
A former special investigator for the Pentagon during the Iraq war said he found four sealed underground bunkers in southern Iraq that he is sure contain stocks of chemical and biological weapons. But when he asked American weapons inspectors to check out the sites, he was rebuffed.
David Gaubatz, a former member of the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, was assigned to the Talill Air Base in Nasiriyah at the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. His job was to pick up any intelligence on the whereabouts of senior Baathists and weapons of mass destruction and then send the information to the American weapons inspectors gathering in Baghdad that would later become the Iraq Survey Group. For his intelligence work he received accolades and meritorious service medals in 2003 and prior years. Before the war he helped uncover a spy in the Saudi military. He also assisted with the rescue and repatriation to America of the family of Mohammed Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer who helped save Private Jessica Lynch.
Mr. Gaubatz said he walked the streets of the largely Shiite city of Nasiriyah, interviewing local police, former senior civilian and military leaders in Saddam Hussein's regime, and local civilians.
Between March and July 2003, Mr. Gaubatz was taken by these sources to four locations - three in and around Nasiriyah and one near the port of Umm Qasr, where he was shown underground concrete bunkers with the tunnels leading to them deliberately flooded. In each case, he was told the facilities contained stocks of biological and chemical weapons, along with missiles whose range exceeded that mandated under U.N. sanctions. But because the facilities were sealed off with concrete walls, in some cases up to 5 feet thick, he did not get inside. He filed reports with photographs, exact grid coordinates, and testimony from multiple sources. And then he waited for the Iraq Survey Group to come to the sites. But in all but one case, they never arrived.
Mr. Gaubatz's new disclosures shed doubt on the thoroughness of the Iraq Survey Group's search for the weapons of mass destruction that were one of the Bush administration's main reasons for the war. Two chief inspectors from the group, David Kay and Charles Duelfer, concluded that they could not find evidence of the promised stockpiles. Mr. Kay refused to be interviewed for this story and Mr. Duelfer did not return email. The CIA referred these questions to Mr. Duelfer.
The new information from the former investigator could also end up helping the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which recently reopened the question of what happened to the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Like many current and former American and Israeli officials, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, Peter Hoekstra, says is not convinced Saddam either destroyed or never had the stockpiles of illicit weapons he was said to be concealing between 1991 and 2003.
"I have no doubts the sites were never exploited by ISG. We agents begged and begged for weeks and months to get ISG to respond to the sites with the proper equipment," Mr. Gaubatz said in a telephone interview. He returned to his wife and daughter in July 2003, and then wrote letters about the sites to more senior officials in military intelligence. But he said he never received any satisfactory response and says that to this day the sites have never been fully checked out.
He says the reasons he was given by the survey group were that the areas of the sites were not safe, they lacked manpower and equipment, and at the time the survey group was focusing activities in northern Iraq. "The ISG team was not organized nor outfitted for this mission in my opinion and were only concerned to look in northern Iraq. They were not even on the ground during the first few weeks of the war, and this was the most critical time to go out and exploit sites. I feel very comfortable in saying the sites were never exploited by ISG," he said. In one instance a few inspectors did come out once to follow one lead, Mr. Gaubatz said. But they lacked the equipment and manpower to crack the bunker. "An adequate search would have required heavy equipment to uncover the concrete, and additional equipment to drain the water."
Mr. Gaubatz would not disclose the names of his Iraqi sources, but he said they were "highly credible" by his supervisors. He said some of them were members of the new government and others are now in America. "The four sites were corroborated with more than one source. The sources were deemed highly credible due to access and knowledge of the sites. Many of these sources and ourselves put their lives on the line to assist in identifying WMD. The sources would continuously ask us when the inspectors were going to come to the sites with heavy equipment to uncover the WMD," he said.
Mr. Gaubatz said each site he visited had similar characteristics. "Everything was buried and under water. They would drain canals and parts of the rivers. They would build tunnels underneath and they would let the water come back in," he said. But the water would only be allowed back into the tunnels after concrete walls were installed sealing off the secret caches of unconventional arms, Mr. Gaubatz said. He added that the tunnels in all four sites were wide enough for tractors. One of the giveaways, he said, was that homes near the sites were equipped with gas masks and other items to protect against a chemical weapons attack.
One site outside of Nasiryah, near the main highway in an isolated area featured a rock nearby that said, "Death to America," in Arabic. At this site, Mr. Gaubatz found gas masks, boots, and an imprint of an al-Samoud missile in the ground nearby a canal used to flood the tunnel. Mr. Gaubatz said he could find a wall under the earth and in the water whose dimensions were 50 by 75 feet. Another site near Umm Qasr contained the remnants of military activity as well, Mr. Gaubatz said. He said that former senior Iraqi military officers and local farmers confirmed there was military construction over the course of six months in 2002.
Today, Mr. Gaubatz is the chief investigator for the Dallas County Medical Examiner. On the weekends, he trains Texas state troopers in basic counterterrorism and basic Arabic. When asked about the weapons hunt by his students, he says he tells them, "Before we can say there is no WMD in Iraq, we must first look. I have no doubts WMD was and is still in Iraq."
In the 1970s and 1980s there were several indications about Saddam Hussein’s development of the WMD programs (biological, chemical and nuclear). The Israeli attack on the Iraqi French-made Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 slowed down the progress of the Iraq’s nuclear weapons program but the biological and chemical WMDs were highly developed, due to the Soviet assistance, Iraqi scientists and a sophisticated system of procurement, organized by the Iraqi Intelligence in Western Europe and in other parts of the World. The nuclear weapons program was never abandoned by the regime, and before the first Gulf War (1991) Iraq was very close to producing its own nuclear weapons. (There is some evidence that Saddam could have purchased nuclear technology from Pakistan, through Dr. Khan’s network, and that he has tried to buy nuclear weapons or components from China). The war destroyed the technical base for the production. But the highly skilled scientific and technical personnel (over 200) remained in place, dispersed. The regime managed to save their nuclear fuel, many technical means of production and the blueprints of the nuclear weaponization. The after-war international (UN) control proved ineffective. Iraq also saved an essential part of its biological and chemical warfare technology, materials and personnel. Some of the WMDs, materials, specialists from Iraq have been transferred abroad to continue research and to organize the production abroad: mainly to Sudan, Libya and Algeria but also to the neighboring Syria (with a purpose to strengthen Syrian regime’s offensive capabilities against Israel).
The efforts of the Saddam’s regime to preserve and develop its biological, chemical and even nuclear weapons capabilities have been well documented in a report, submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives by Yossef Bodansky on February 10, 1998 (See: Task Force on Terrorism & Unconventional Warfare, "The Iraqi WMD Challenge — Myths and Reality"). From the very beginning, Saddam Hussein embarked on a policy of concealment and cheating of the UN inspection. Thus the elimination of the Iraqi strategic military programs and the destruction of their technical means have never been completed and fully effective. "Despite Baghdad’s protestations, Iraq does have a small but very lethal operational arsenal of WMD and platforms capable of delivering them throughout the Middle East and beyond." — summarized Yossef Bodansky in 1998 [page 2 of the report]. This capability was possible due to the following actions: (1) dispersing and hiding of WMD materials, technical means, blueprints for the production and personnel in Iraq proper; (2) transfer of a large part of the Iraqi WMD arsenal, technical means, materials for the production and scientific-technological personnel to other countries, mainly to Sudan, Libya and Algeria, and partly to Yemen and Syria; (3) reviving of the sophisticated system of illegal procurement of WMD technology, sub-systems and strategic materials in Western Europe (mainly Germany, Austria and Switzerland), via other countries (Bulgaria, Belarus, the Ukraine, Poland) and in Asia (Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, China).
Iraq was also capable to develop new types of offensive weapons, capable of carrying and dispersing bio and chemical WMDs (like a plastic-plywood drone, range 700 km, GPS navigation system, carrying 30-40 kilograms of bio or chemical warfare agents, launched from the ground, aircraft or from a ship).
The Bodansky report also concludes that the Saddam regime has signed agreements with Sudan, Libya, Algeria about common ventures in the developing of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. These were Saddam’s investments into the future, though his decisions were reluctant and taken under the pressure of the UN inspections and American bombing of Iraq’s "no fly" zones.
The first Gulf War (1991) proved a complete failure of the Soviet conventional weapons systems on the Iraqi battlefields. The Iraqi Army and Air Force had been crushed before they could make use of their WMDs (chemical, biological). The Russian-made SCUD missiles, launched against the Coalition forces and/or against Israel, proved inaccurate in aim and ineffective.
In spite of the huge indebtedness of the Iraqi regime to Russia (over US$ 8.0 billion), the Russian Government decided to invest a new service into the rebuilding of the Iraqi military forces by supplying large quantities of spare parts, components, air-defenses equipment, worth at least US$ 1.0 billion. Secret agreements, signed between the Iraqi Intelligence and the Russian GRU, provided for a "clean up" operation, conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel, to remove some WMDs, materials for production, technical documentation etc. from Iraq, so that the Saddam regime could announce that Iraq was "WMD free". This operation began after the 1991 Gulf War and lasted until weeks before the outbreak of the 2nd war (March 19-20, 2003).
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