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| Iraq |
| Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam's WMD's |
| 2007-11-16 |
| By John Loftus We live in an age of documents. There are no more secrets, only deferred disclosures. Saddam Hussein's secret documents are measured by the shelf-mile and stored inside a secure but dusty facility near U.S. Central Command Headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and in several subsidiary sites. Armed guards protect the unread dossiers. Three shifts of two hundred translators each work around the clock. Perhaps 5% of these captured documents have been studied so far, but their contents are about to shatter much of the conventional wisdom concerning Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a bit chagrinned at the disclosures. The documents show a much more complex history than previously suspected. The "Bush lied, people died" chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMD whatsoever after 1991 - and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. The Neocon diehards insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-trove is still out there somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of Iraq.[1] Each side is more than a little bit wrong about Saddam's WMD, and each side is only a little bit right about what happened to it. 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] After Saddam's brother-in-law Kemal Hussein defected to Jordan in the mid 1990's and exposed some (but not all) of the numerous Iraqi WMD programs, Saddam started over from scratch on WMD production, using a small and secret cadre of new program leaders. Among the newly-disclosed documents are Saddam's actual tape recordings of the meetings of this special group for WMD. The National Security Agency has confirmed[6] that the tapes are authentic and that the voiceprints are unquestionably those of Saddam and his elite WMD advisers. The CIA's super-spy, excluded from this working group, apparently did not know that it even existed. (His voice appears nowhere on the tapes.) He simply could not have known what Saddam was doing with his WMD programs, let alone with his CW stockpile.[7] Most of the audio recordings of the secret WMD group are undated, as the CD on which they were found is a compilation of tapes of various WMD meetings stretching over a decade. But their tone is consistent not only with other recorded WMD meetings but with the newly-released document intelligence archives, many of which are revealed here for the first time through the assistance of author and geopolitical analyst Mr. Ryan Mauro.[8] Mauro cautions that "the recently declassified documents have the potential to shatter any conclusions or judgments about what Saddam Hussein's regime was up to. Until all these documents are translated and analyzed, it is premature to reach any conclusion." 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. In the last year of his regime, Saddam was in fact still trying to expand his chemical weapons capability. In January 2002, his advisors discussed research into a precursor for Sarin nerve gas.[9] In September 2002, for example, only seven months before the war, Saddam's Military Industrial Commission approved the illegal production of the precursor chemicals used to make Tabun nerve gas.[10] Four days later, another office discussed plans to import a banned compound, phosphorus pentasulfate. The UN had required Iraq to prove that it had destroyed all of its stocks of this chemical, which is a precursor for VX nerve gas. Instead, they were importing more of it.[11] In October 2002, Saddam's Director of Planning ordered more than forty tons of various chemicals which, when mixed together, would make Zyclon B – the poison gas used by the Nazis to kill millions of Jews during the Holocaust.[12] Saddam's scientists appear never to have met a poison gas they did not like. 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. Beginning in 1998, Saddam’s staff went into overdrive to conceal their illegal WMD programs: "The researchers [sic] that cannot be declared and that is related with the previous prohibited programs of WMD and how to make sure that information about these researchers will not leak to the outside world."[14] Files from 1999, marked “Top Secret”, confirm that the Iraqi army had a "chemical platoon" that was undergoing training in every form of illegal chemical weapons.[15] By 2001, the regime ensured that their chemical platoons had mobile shower vehicles for decontamination.[16] Similarly, the production of mobile labs (which the Duelfer report concluded had ended in 1997) were still being manufactured in 2002.[17] Rest at link. |
| Posted by:Angereper Ebbater3624 |
| #9 Trucks were also observed driving to Syria, then on to the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon. Does Hizb'allah have access to those? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-11-16 22:48 |
| #8 "Sold another quarter to his Arab neighbors" > Lest we fergit, the Russians themselves publicly claimed that Saddam gave a large quantity of his WMD caches to his former enemy IRAN. They believed the caches were mostly BW + CW [are still "WMDS"], but the Russ could not confirm or deny Radiologicals/NucMats were also given to Iran or other. TRUCKS WERE OBSERVED GOING OVER IRAN BORDER AREAS, WHILE AIR TRANSPORT PLANES ROUTED THRU TEHRAN OR OTHER IRAN PORTS/BASES. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2007-11-16 18:24 |
| #7 According to the Doeffler (?) report, which I read the summary, even Uday and Kusay thought Daddy had WMD's, which they wanted to use on the advancing American troops. Or did I just dream that? |
| Posted by: Bobby 2007-11-16 17:21 |
| #6 Whenever people say "Bush lied, people died! There were no WMD's. We never should have gone into Iraq", I always ask them how long BEFORE the invasion of Iraq did you realize that there were no WMD's? Saddam was required by the cease fire agreement and UN resolutions to account for and destroy all of the WMD's. The UN resolutions did not say that he could play hide and seek with them, and if the UN inspectors couldn't find them, they didn't exist. The resolutions said that Saddam was to account for them. We knew he had them before, since he used them on the Kurds. We didn't know what happened to them. Therefore we were justified in going in to find and remove them. Because we fiddled around trying to get UN approval, Saddam had the time to hide the WMD's and ship them to other countries. |
| Posted by: Rambler 2007-11-16 12:59 |
| #5 We were right. The moonbats were wrong. The war was and is just and would have been even if Hussein had honestly complied with the WMD agreements. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2007-11-16 10:45 |
| #4 Sarin is to humans what bugspray is to roaches. |
| Posted by: gromky 2007-11-16 10:39 |
| #3 Of course everyone chooses to ignore this. "Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contained degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent." Even the 'degraded' military sarin would have been far more lethal than the home brewed stuff put together and released in the Tokyo subway system. Anyone care to have it stored in their basement? Their neighborhood? Their city while it awaits destruction? Care to be downwind when it is? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2007-11-16 10:30 |
| #2 That's me. Lost my cookies. Anyway, another installment of the never ending the saga of the chem/bio/nuc weapons. Look for the next chapter at an airport or stadium near you. 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. |
| Posted by: ed 2007-11-16 09:29 |
| #1 "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 AmericansÂ’ noses and sent to Syria... This was the target of the recent Israeli air strike." Interesting. "Three shifts of two hundred translators each work around the clock." I'm wondering if we don't have better uses for 200 translators. |
| Posted by: Darrell 2007-11-16 09:25 |