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Republican_Man
STV's Premier Conservative
Joined: 26 Mar 2004
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 Tue Feb 07, 2006 8:12 pm |
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Hah hah! More stuff that might just point to WMDs...
| Quote: | Congress's Secret Saddam Tapes
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is studying 12 hours of audio recordings between Saddam Hussein and his top advisers that may provide clues to the whereabouts of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam's voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were provided to his committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military intelligence analyst.
Mr. Loftus will make the recordings available to the public on February 17 at the annual meeting of the Intelligence Summit, of which he is president. On the organization's Web site, Mr. Loftus is quoted as promising that the recordings "will be able to provide a few definitive answers to some very important - and controversial - weapons of mass destruction questions." Contacted yesterday by The New York Sun, Mr. Loftus would only say that he delivered a CD of the recordings to a representative of the committee, and the following week the committee announced that it was reopening the investigation into weapons of mass destruction.
The audio recordings are part of new evidence the House intelligence committee is piecing together that has spurred Mr. Hoekstra to reopen the question of whether Iraq had the biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons American inspectors could not turn up. President Bush called off the hunt for those weapons last year and has conceded that America has yet to find evidence of the stockpiles.
Mr. Hoekstra has already met with a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada, who claims that Saddam used civilian airplanes to ferry chemical weapons to Syria in 2002. Mr. Hoekstra is now talking to Iraqis who Mr. Sada claims took part in the mission, and the congressman said the former air force general "should not just be discounted." Mr. Hoekstra also said he is in touch with other people who have come forward to the committee - Iraqis and Americans - who claim that the weapons inspectors may have overlooked other key sites and evidence. He has also asked the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to declassify some 35,000 boxes of Iraqi documents obtained in the war that have yet to be translated.
"I still believe there are key individuals who have not been debriefed and there are key sites that have never been investigated. I know there are 35,000 boxes of documents that have never been translated. I am frustrated," Mr. Hoekstra said.
He added, "Right now, it's not my job to investigate the specific claims. We are doing this a little with Sada. But we still don't fully understand what happened in Iraq three years after the invasion, three years after we control the country. There are enough people coming to the committee, Sada is not the only one, saying, 'you really ought to look under this rock.' This gives me cause to take up the issue again."
Mr. Hoekstra is one of many who believe the question of what happened to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is still unresolved. Last week Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld voiced similar doubts at the National Press Club. "We have not found them. We also have found a number of things we didn't imagine. We found a bunch of jet airplanes buried in Iraq. Who buries airplanes? I mean, really. So I don't know what we'll find in the months and years ahead. It could be anything," he said.
The former chief of the State Department's Iraq Intelligence Unit, Wayne White, and Mr. Rumsfeld's former undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, have told the Sun they believe the question of what happened to the weapons is still open. The former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, Moshe Ya'alon, told the Sun in December that he believed Saddam sent chemical weapons to Syria before the war in 2002. The last chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, said in the preamble to his final report that looting of sites may have severely weakened his team's ability to piece together a complete picture of Iraq's weapons program.
Mr. Hoekstra said he is not yet prepared to say President Bush was premature in calling off the hunt for the weapons last year, but conceded that his inquiries may lead him to that conclusion if some of the leads offered to his committee check out. He also said the White House has been supportive of his inquiry.
The chairman of the House intelligence panel said he is frustrated with the American intelligence community's lack of curiosity on following up these leads, particularly the story from Mr. Sada. "I talked to one person relatively high up in DNI, and I asked him about this and asked are they going to follow up, and he looked at me and said, 'No we don't think so.' At this point, I guess you guys don't get it.
"I am trying to find out if our postwar intelligence was as bad as our pre-war intelligence, " Mr. Hoekstra said.
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I'm beginning to like the NY Sun 
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"Rights are only as good as the willingness of some to exercise responsibility for those rights- Fmr. Colorado Senate Pres. John Andrews
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Republican_Man
STV's Premier Conservative
Joined: 26 Mar 2004
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| Mon Feb 13, 2006 7:58 pm |
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More news, courtesy of the New York Sun.
| Quote: | Ex-Officer Spurned on WMD Claim
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." |
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"Rights are only as good as the willingness of some to exercise responsibility for those rights- Fmr. Colorado Senate Pres. John Andrews
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webtaz99
Commodore
Joined: 13 Nov 2003
Posts: 1229
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| Tue Feb 14, 2006 9:38 am |
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| Quote: | Congress's Secret Saddam Tapes
.....
Mr. Hoekstra is one of many who believe the question of what happened to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is still unresolved. Last week Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld voiced similar doubts at the National Press Club. "We have not found them. We also have found a number of things we didn't imagine. We found a bunch of jet airplanes buried in Iraq. Who buries airplanes? I mean, really. So I don't know what we'll find in the months and years ahead. It could be anything," he said.
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I am more and more convinced that Saddam and his closest cronies truly believe that somehow they will regain power, or failing that, that Iraq will provide the generic anti-Western jihad weapons for "the big battle".
Also, the idea that we have checked out every possible hiding place in Iraq and verified the non-existence of WMD's borders on insanity.
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"History is made at night! Character is who you are in the dark." (Lord John Whorfin)
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Republican_Man
STV's Premier Conservative
Joined: 26 Mar 2004
Posts: 14823
Location: Classified
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| Tue Feb 14, 2006 5:18 pm |
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True. There are a bunch more NY Sun articles on it as well--including one about a US officer who suspected chemical weapons in an area in Iraq but wasn't allowed to check it out.
So, I think some are still there and most were removed.
You can view that article here.
And Sada? Just to say, he's glad Saddam's on trial and is glad that the regime is gone. No alternative reasoning there.
Another Iraqi general is saying the same thing.
And I don't think these guys are trying to power grab--ESPECIALLY the Christian Sada.
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"Rights are only as good as the willingness of some to exercise responsibility for those rights- Fmr. Colorado Senate Pres. John Andrews
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Kyle Reese
Cadet Gunnery Sergeant
Joined: 21 Apr 2003
Posts: 5672
Location: The United States of America
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| Mon Feb 20, 2006 5:49 pm |
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More good stuff 
| Quote: | Saddam's WMDs: The Russian connection and the coverup
The free world may soon learn it has just been bamboozled by one of the most clever and well-organized propaganda campaigns in the history of this planet. No WMDs in Iraq? That is not the case, according to eyewitnesses and expert intelligence analysts.
Yes, Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction.
Yes, he intended to use them.
Most Americans don't know that, because the public has been spoon-fed the line that multiple intelligence reports around the world got it all wrong, and that there "never were" weapons of mass destruction.
As it turns out, former CIA Director George Tenet was not wrong when he told President Bush it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam had WMDs. At least it was likely accurate at the exact moment he gave that assurance. Shortly thereafter or at about the time he said it, the weapons were removed.
But of course, you already know that, if you've been reading this column or have listened to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or watched Fox News. Much of the rest of the media have cheerfully assisted in the "No WMDs" mantra.
What you might not have known until now is that the Russians helped the Saddam deception of removing the WMD from Iraq prior to the war there. As Lt. General Thomas G. McInerney, a military consultant � said in a conversation with this writer � the Russians "masterfully laid it out into the free world that there were no WMDs. Politically, it was picked up [here at home] by the Democratic Party and other parties throughout Western Europe. It was brilliantly done by the Russians that there were no WMDs. And to this day [that story] has still got legs."
But the facts of the story are different from the false conventional wisdom.
At a private "Intelligence Summit" meeting that began Friday just outside Washington, military analysts and intelligence professionals heard the highlights of twelve hours of taped conversations between Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants. The Iraqi strongman did have a WMD program to include nuclear. How far along he was is another question, McInerney added. But he was still investing in that area. He was supporting terrorism.
General McInerney says Saddam could have had a role in the anthrax attacks in the United States shortly after 9/11 because "it was such a high grade of anthrax that it was not a low-cost energy effort. It was done masterfully."
McInerney adds the latest Russian dots "need to be looked at." They come from many different sources (including from General Jack Shaw who gave a Pentagon insider's account of the Russian connection as he spoke before the Intelligence Summit on Saturday) as well as from Israel and other places around the globe.
Taken together, the dots indicate "there was WMD, [and] that it went out to Syria [three locations] and through Syria on to Lebanon [one location]." The Russian connection was "the orchestrator to move the weapons out. And they had the skill [with a crack team]" and two top generals � "one to help them on the air defense, and one who was to clean this WMD up."
Russian assistance was thorough, to say the least. "The archives and all that were taken out. It was brilliantly done, and then they laid in a program to follow it. And that's the information operations [propaganda] campaign," which General McInerney says was "brilliant." They spread it "into Western Europe, and then to the UN and to the diplomatic world. [And so] it became a part of the political lore that the Democratic Party and our Congress and the administration just backed away from it [the idea that Saddam's Iraq had WMDs]."
General Jack Shaw was Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security at the time this was learned through intelligence sources.
Addressing the three-day conference at a hotel not far from the Pentagon itself, he revealed not only the Russian operation, but the effort � for whatever reason � to cover it up here at home.
When the Cold War ended, Russia's military aid to Iraq and Syria did not. Unlike Germany and Japan at the end of World War II, the free world allies were not able actually to occupy the old Soviet Union and de-communize" it the way Germany was "de-nazified." In Germany, the bums were killed, imprisoned, disgraced, or banished from public office. In Russia, the bums walked free and pulled strings, albeit under different banners. We are paying the price of that in today's Iraq War.
General Shaw explained that Russia not only built up the military arsenals of Iraq and Syria, but also could "provide a pipeline through Syria to funnel weapons to Saddam as the pressure on him increased." Thus, they could "put beyond the reach of an invasion force such munitions [for which] Saddam wanted a safe haven." Or as General Shaw put it, that "assured that the traffic in both directions would be directed and implemented by Russians providing deniability on both sides of the border." Not incidentally, that border has had a 3000-year experience in smuggling.
The chief mischief-maker on the Russian side apparently was General Yevgeny Primakov, who headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, served as Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and as prime minister in 1998. You may remember him as the post-Cold War general who was given to outrageous and threatening outbursts.
Despite Iraq's 8 billion dollar debt to Russia, Primakov convinced the Russian government to invest anew in rebuilding Iraqi military forces after Saddam's humiliating defeat in the Gulf War. "Secret agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU, provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel � to remove WMDs, materials for production, technical documentation, etc., from Iraq, so that the regime could announce that Iraq was 'WMD free.'"
Part of the plan � specifically dealing with chemical weapons � was described by a Romanian intelligence official now living in protective custody after briefing U.S. intelligence for three years. The Russians specified that all chemical/bio weapons were to be burned or buried at sea in the event of potential capture. Just before war against Iraq by the allied coalition, two Russian ships set sail for the Indian Ocean. Shaw says it's not known whether they then headed for Syria or were destroyed. The point is they were out of Iraq and out of the reach of any invasion force.
In addition to undercutting the U.S. rationale for going to war, the Russians also secured important gains for themselves. Shaw says they increased their influence in Syria and "and put themselves in a position to support armed guerilla action in Iraq after the war." This is a reference to the terrorists (or "insurgents" in delicate media-speak) who have been killing innocent Iraqi citizens, as well as American military and civilian personnel.
None of this in any way contradicts the claims made by General Georges Sada � at one time the second highest ranking general in Saddam's air force � who says in his book "Saddam's Secrets" that he knew the dictator moved the weapons out of the country (see my column of January 29). He says they were moved by air. Some at the Intelligence Summit say weapons were also moved out by cattle trucks. McInerney says it is credible that different conveyances were used. "The fact is they probably went out in a combination of different ways."
The biggest puzzle in all this is why the Bush administration has not shouted this story from the rooftops, especially since it puts the lie to the "Bush lied-People died" propaganda. In our interview, General McInerney (you may have seen him as a military analyst on Fox News) said it is as clear as ever that "Russia was number one, China was number two, France was number three in providing [Saddam] conventional weapons. We know that. There's no question on it. It just hasn't been exposed." You will note those three regimes persistently voted in the United Nations against the U.S. efforts to marshal international force against Iraq with something more meaningful than another tired UN Resolution.
General Shaw put it this way to his audience: "The question is not only how badly we got snookered by the Russkis, but why it is in the U.S. interest to continue the cover-up of the real story. It has been suggested that our knowledge of the movement of these weapons is not helpful as we cannot prove what happened without expanding the war. There is also the old intelligence rationale of not blowing your cover, so you can continue to mine your intelligence sources without compromising them."
General McInerney noted that Russia, China, and France are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and perhaps the Bush administration needs them to help in the global War on Terror. "So maybe [the Bush administration] did not want to create a big problem with them."
So General Shaw is asking, "What is the current Bush administration's game plan? Does it have one? And who are the enforcers?"
The three-day Intelligence Summit conference here is a logical outgrowth of the concern on the part of military and intelligence professionals who are frustrated by cover-up after cover-up of the misdeeds of enemies and our so-called "friends" that have left Americans dead, while the bad guys get away with it.
There's much more to be told. One of the main conference participants � Bill Tierney, a onetime former translator � told conferees the cases involving the first (1993) World Trade Center bombing and the (1995) Oklahoma City bombing should be re-opened so as to bring to a closure the glaring inconsistencies and unanswered questions in the accepted versions of those mysteries.
But we'll get to that later. For now, the Russian connection is enough to ponder.
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