Friday, November 16, 2007

Iraq, WMD and the truth

No wonder the mainstream media clowns don't report this.

by StFerdIII



Liberal bias in the media you say? No, of course not! BBC, NBC, CBC, ABC, CNN – the alphabet soup guys are 'impartial' observers and professional 'reporters'. Ha ha. Yeah sure they are. They kind of missed some big issues regarding Iraq didn't they. Minor things pre-2003 like mass murders; torture; regional wars; Jew hatred; the UN's oil for food scam; France and Russia making billions with Hussein etc. So not reporting what really went on with Hussein's WMD arsenal is not a shocking development.

Here is an excerpt from a report by John Loftus [Full article]entitled 'Shattering Conventional Wisdom about Saddam's WMD'. It is 16 pages long so I shortened it down to two and a half. The most trenchant points are below. The bottom line is that Hussein's illegitimate rogue regime had WMD and even as late as 2002 a viable nuclear program.

And in case you think Loftus is a Bush-fascist-neocon-conservative-moron-Jew lover-capitalist-baby eater-racist – consider this. Loftus is a US federal prosecutor, not a Republican and not a supporter of the Iraq war. In fact he thinks the terror war is overblown. He is however, one of the world's most reknown experts on terror and as a Federal prosecutor has been involved in terror cases for the NATO, the CIA and FBI. He is privy to much classified material. His website is Loftus bio

Loftus never supported the invasion, writing, 'On a personal note, as a Democrat, it gives me no pleasure to concede that Bush and Blair were right. As a lawyer, I must conclude from this new documentary evidence and my own interviews that the leaders of the Coalition were completely ignorant of the underground Iraqi WMD facilities, but, in hindsight, I must concede that the discovery of Saddam’s secret nuclear program now provides sufficient legal justification for the use of force. Bush and Blair may have blundered into Iraq based on false evidence and exaggerated analysis, but looking back with the benefit of Saddam’s files; it turns out that they may have done the right thing for the wrong reason. Even a broken watch is right twice a day.'

But don't worry the media won't tell you that.

Excerpted Summary with sources at the end:

[from recently declassified material]

The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990's. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid to late 1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003, but were stolen from under the Americans’ noses and sent to Syria.

Syria is one of eight countries in the world that never signed a treaty banning WMD, and now is the storehouse for much of what remains of Saddam's WMD Empire. This was the target of the recent Israeli air strike. There are only a few people in the world who were close to being right all along about Saddam's WMD. One of them was Yossef Bodansky, a noted intelligence analyst and former director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.[2] On page 496 of Bodansky’s book, "The Secret History of the Iraq War" he makes the astounding assertion that:
".. .The United States had long known that Saddam moved virtually all production capabilities to Libya and Sudan somewhere between 1996 and 1998. Subsequently, in the summer of 2002, with Tehran's consent, the residual chemical weapons production capabilities were shipped to Iran..."[3]

In other words, is Bodansky is right (and he usually is) as late as 2002, Saddam still retained a CW production capability and then sold it to the Iranians on the eve of war.[4] The CIA has now acknowledged that they had a highly-placed spy in Saddam's cabinet who agreed that Saddam had gotten rid of all of his production facilities, but the super spy claimed that Saddam still retained a lethal stockpile of finished chemical weapons in early 2003. The latter information, about the remaining CW stockpile, turns out to have been incorrect, but neither the CIA nor their Iraqi super spy knew it at the time.[5]

Translating shelf miles of documents, however, may take decades. In the meantime, enough of Saddam's secret files have been translated to illustrate one clear trend over time: through the time of Hans Blix and the run-up to the invasion, Saddam had absolutely no intention of destroying his WMD.

The secret planning for banned chemical weapons in 2002 was no last-minute decision of desperation on the eve of war. Rather, it typified Saddam's long, well-thought-out plan to deceive the UN – an ongoing project that went back more than a decade. For example, Saddam's intelligence service sent out a memo in 1997 ordering his staff not to destroy any WMD but to conceal prohibited materials, "hide equipment and documents....make sure that labs are cleaned of any traces of chemical or biological substances."[13] That was the real Saddam: hide the WMD documents, clean up the tell-tale evidence.

...French arms manufacturers, in other words, had been selling to Saddam right up to the opening of the war. They later explained that France had sold the Roland to Syria, and that Syria was not covered by the embargo. The French claimed to be shocked that Syria had sold the Roland to their fellow Ba'athists in Baghdad. It should be noted that, for more than a year prior to the French sale the Israeli press had been publicly exposing Syria as an arms front for Saddam.

.....In terms of WMD, newly released documents from Saddam’s government suggest that the Russians knew exactly what they were doing when it came to hiding illegal weapons. While Russian scientists were working hand-in-hand with Iraqi scientists on WMD, Russian spies inside CENTCOM were warning Saddam how to avoid detection from the UN inspectors. Saddam's secret files also mention an Associated Press reporter who passed information on how the UN inspection teams were being trained.[18] The Russian Ambassador himself handed over many of America's secret war plans.[19]

Most importantly, Saddam’s intelligence services credit Russia’s critical help in misleading the UN into thinking that Iraq was in compliance with the resolution paragraphs requiring destruction of its WMD. “We have succeeded in a few of the UN paragraphs…we have won Russia, ahhh…we have convinced Russia by way of generous accounts.” [20]

It should be noted that France, Russia and China were the three largest exporters of Saddam's oil before the war. They were also, according to the documents now being released, the three nations most involved with illegal weapons sales to Saddam. The oil profits, of course, were huge, and according to minutes from secret meetings, Saddam's intelligence service knew how to dangle the bait of illegal oil profits to, in their words, "commit some nations like France, China, Russia and Japan to economical agreements that make the implementation of the smart sanctions to have negative effect to the interests of these nations."[21] In English the word for this is “bribery” – on a huge scale.

It seemed that nearly everyone in the EU weapons industry had their nose in Saddam's trough. It was an old problem. The German government, for instance, had long dismissed American complaints that German companies were building a poison nerve gas plant for Colonel Qaddafi. Finally, in 1997, the Americans played a recording of a telephone wiretap to the German government. The Libyan plant manager was screaming at his German supplier that the chemical weapons plant he had been sold was leaking and killing his workers.[22]

.....In fact, both the Reagan and Thatcher administrations worked strenuously to forbid the export of even precursor chemicals, as confirmed by the archives of the State Department's Office for Export Controls Cooperation. It was the former Soviet Union that supplied Saddam with 99% of his chemical and biological weapons.[25]

....This intelligence, combined with US satellite photography showing the Spetznatz -cum-civilians loading trucks and tankers with unknown crates and substances, and then driving them in convoys down the Euphrates highway to Al Qaim on the Syrian border provided a clear and comprehensive picture of the Russian evacuation plans. US and British intelligence assets in the immediate area photographed the convoy traffic out of Iraq into Syria.[26]

US spy satellites picked up the convoys on the other side of the border. The Syrians had dug ditches sixty feet deep, and then were observed dumping the contents of the tanker trucks into them at night. The Syrians were then seen filling in the ditches and replanting crops over them before dawn came up. One cynic asked "What were they burying at night? Milk?"
.....Numerous post-war interrogations of Iraqi prisoners confirm that the WMD was rushed across the border just before the Coalition forces arrived. March 2003 must have been the busy season for evacuating the WMD. Apparently there weren't enough Spetznatz drivers to move all the chemicals before the deadline, so Saddam turned to local Iraqi truckers, one of whom later became an informant for the Coalition. A Coalition report on the case says

...More and more of the relevant generals are retired now and are speaking out. Michael Delong, a retired Marine Lt. General, and deputy commander at CENTCOM at the time of the invasion, states unequivocally: "I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran.”

Even David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, told the British press that there was indeed evidence that unspecified WMD material was moved into Syria on the eve of the war, reporting: "We know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program."[30] Most of the American press thought Kay's suggestion of a possible WMD transfer too ludicrous, or inconvenient, to report.

....Moreover the tape describes a laser enrichment process for uranium that had never been known by the UN inspectors to even exist in Iraq, and Saddam's nuclear briefers on the tape were Iraqi scientists who had never been on any weapons inspector’s list. The tape explicitly discusses civilian plasma research which could be used as a cover for military plasma research necessary to build a hydrogen bomb.[34]

...Apparently Saddam, wanting to avoid the UN’s inspection efforts and a repetition of the Israeli raid on his Osirak nuclear reactor, was hiding his new nuclear weapons projects under the Euphrates. Gaubatz describes what he saw immediately after the war when the warehouses were still intact. "The tunnels leading under the river on each side were large enough to drive a tractor trailer through. My local informants described the double series of halls beneath the Euphrates where the WMD had been stored. They even showed me the impression left by an illegal sized missile that had lain on the muddy bank. I have been warned not to go back. Most of the informants I worked with have been killed."

..
In view of these newly discovered documents, it can be concluded, more probably than not, that Saddam did have a nuclear weapons program in 2001-2002, and that it is reasonably certain that he would have continued his efforts towards making a nuclear bomb in 2003 had he not been stopped by the Coalition forces.. The truth is what it is, the facts speak for themselves.

Why has the pro-war establishment in Washington not done more with these potentially persuasive indications that Saddam was indeed pursuing WMD programs until the bitter end? The irony is that the Republicans will not touch this issue and indeed have tried to suppress it.

...As for the mainstream mass media, it by and large has little interest in proving that Bush and Blair might have been correct by accident in at least part of their pre-war assessment, and prefers to drop the entire subject. No one likes to admit they were wrong on such an important story. But Saddam’s files show that the press has so far been wrong indeed.
.....(John Loftus is President of the International Intelligence Summit)
Notes:
[1] There may be a grain of truth to the sand dune story, but it probably refers to Syrian WMD buried under a Syrian sand dune: Document B1AP-2003-000090 describes meetings between Saddam's intelligence agent #801 and Sheikh Adil Mohammed Al-Minished discussing WMD buried in the area of Halab, Syria.
[2] In addition to his ten years of work for the US Congress analyzing classified documents, Mr. Bodansky is the Director of Research for the International Strategic Studies Association and senior editor for the Defense and Foreign Affairs group of publications. He has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins and a senior consultant of for the US Departments of Defense and State. He wrote the international bestseller, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America and published it before 9/11.
[3] U.S. House of Representatives, Report of February 19, 1998, confirmed from classified US intelligence files that Saddam was shifting his WMD programs outside of Iraq.
[4] It may seem incredible that Saddam would sell WMD equipment to his mortal enemy, Iran, but a similar thing happened in the first Iraq war when Saddam sold his entire air force inventory to Iran rather than see it be destroyed by the Americans. Bodansky is not at liberty to discuss classified documents on which this segment of his book was based.
[5] The CIA super spy was alleged to be one of the senior foreign ministers for Saddam. The existence of the mole and his belief that Iraq had no remaining WMD production facilities was revealed in 2007 on the CBS 60 Minutes television program. The CIA officer who appeared on camera (who obviously had not seen the newly released Saddam files) was adamant that Saddam had no such production capability. As discussed infra, Saddam's files indicate otherwise.
[6] Per arrangement with the House Intelligence Committee, the author released a copy of the Saddam WMD tape on the condition that Congress would obtain public confirmation of the voiceprint data from the NSA, which was done. The results were publicly displayed on a special edition of ABC Frontline with Brian Ross shortly before the opening of the February 17, 2006 Intelligence Summit.
[7] The newly released Saddam files show that his brother-in-law, Kemal had buried a few secrets of his own: "A team from the Military Industrialization Commission when Hussein Kemal Hussein was conducting his responsibilities did bury a large container said that it contains chemical material….in the district of Fallujah.. .The container was buried using a fleet of concrete mixers.” Document ISGQ-2003-00004530, Sept. 15, 2000, Memo to Uday Hussein.
[8] Mr. Mauro is founder of WorldThreats.com
[9] CMPC-2003-013956
[10] ISGQ-2003-000444424
[11] ISGQ-2005-00023243
[12] ISGQ 2003-00000847
[13] ISGZ-2004-028947
[14] CMPC-2003-002284
[15] BIAP-2003-0035437
[16] CMPC-2004-000404
[17] CMPC-2003-0062
[18] ISGQ-2005-00026108, Report from Iraqi Intelligence Officer, July 25, 2000 on AP spy on UNMOVIC
[19] CMPC-2003-0000776, an Iraqi intelligence report dated December 15, 2002 confirms that Russian and Turkish scientists at the Badr Company (nuclear) had to be hidden from the UN inspectors. This shows that the Iraqis had advance detailed knowledge of IAEA inspections. Document CMPC-2003-001950 shows that Saddam's intelligence briefings came directly from the Russian Ambassador. He revealed the American's secret war plans, troop locations, etc. The Russians told the Iraqis that they had "sources at the U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar." Document CMPC -2004-001117, Letter from Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister, March 25, 2003, discussion of Russia's passing classified U.S. secrets to Iraq.
[20] ISGQ-20030M0004667
[21] CMPC-2003-006758, March 28, 2001. Memo from Iraqi Intelligence Service
[22] This story was related to the author by an American intelligence officer who participated in the wiretaps but wishes to remain anonymous. It was first published in The Secret War Against the Jews, p. 574 n.30
[23] An excellent history of the problems with degradation of Iraqi chemical weapons can be found at www.globalsecurity.org citing an unclassified CIA report: 071596 cia 72569 72569 Ol.txt
[24] He has led project studies in this area at both CSIS and the Hudson Institute.
[25] Globalsecurity.org provides several excellent declassified studies on the history and provenance of Iraqi WMD.
[26] Saddam’s defense minister publicly decorated both of the Russian generals for their assistance in this project.
[27] In the case of one suspected nuclear site, the Iranian government removed a foot of topsoil not to mention every leaf, tree and blade of grass within a one mile radius. The UN inspectors were given the rather lame explanation that the Mayor had suddenly decided to bulldoze all the old military buildings and make a public park.
[28] Using the Deir al Zour airport as a satellite photo landmark, proceeed southwesterly for several miles to an isolated desert area close by some orchards. Look for the large black building standing near a large stained earth area. Proceed south several hundred yards to find the large rectangular berm surrounding the suspected WMD storage bunkers.
[29] Emailed response to the author, May 5, 2007
[30] Jack Kelley Archives quoting Sunday Telegraph
[31] ISGZ-2004-028179
[32] CMP-2004-002219
[33] This tape is a compilation from other tapes, consisting of eight meetings about WMD stretching over more than a decade.
[34] A member of the survey teams, who wishes to remain anonymous, confirmed that this was a major find, and was consistent with previous Iraqi efforts to hide traces of their nuclear research. Translation summary provided by certified translator.
[35] CMPC-2004-000156.
[36] A full series of the documents on the Cherney investigation can be found at www.intelligencesummit.org.
[37] Open source articles have confirmed that the US Government has discovered that high speed uranium centrifuges generate a signal which can be read by a satellite in outer space. Much as turning on a blender causes static to appear on a television set, the satellite can detect the high speed frequencies generate by a centrifuge.
[38] The Assyrian International News Agency, published by the Reform Party of Syria, does excellent work in tracking advances in Syrian WMD.