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How the U.N. Helped Saddam Buy Allies
17 February 2004
United Press International recently reported the discovery of documents from Saddam Hussein’s oil ministry that show the Iraqi dictator “used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.”

And according to ABC News, allies of Saddam Hussein profited by pocketing the difference between the price of oil under the U.N.’s “Oil for Food” program and the price of oil on the open market. Some of these allies included “a close political associate and financial backer of French President Jacques Chirac”, “Russian political figures” including “the Russian ambassador to Baghdad” and “officials in the office of President Vladimir Putin”, “George Galloway, a British member of Parliament”, and even some—gasp!—”prominent journalists”.

Because the U.N. allowed Saddam Hussein to decide who received contracts under the “Oil for Food” program, he was able to use it as a personal slush fund to pay off his defenders. France and Russia were two of the most stubborn supporters of the Hussein regime, and their friendship was rewarded well: Russian interests got the biggest cut of the loot, while the French came in second. British politician George Galloway, who likes to refer to **** Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice as “the three witches“, personally pulled in nearly $10 million while defending Saddam.

In all, some 270 companies, organizations and individuals in 50 countries profited through the arbitrage of Saddam Hussein’s oil, the price of which was fixed below market by the United Nations.

Audible Silence
Sounds pretty scandalous, right? Kind of makes you wonder why you’re not hearing a little more about it...

Meanwhile, scarcely a day passes without news coverage of our apparent intelligence failures in locating Iraqi weapons. Certainly, we must investigate why we haven’t found anything yet, because we desperately need to plug the holes in our intelligence network before a foe like al Qaeda gets its hands on some devastating weapon. We’d damn well better fix our intelligence apparatus before a suitcase nuke is set off in Times Square.

But it isn’t exactly news that our intelligence is sorely lacking. If I recall correctly, a certain event in the fall of 2001 demonstrated quite vividly the inadequacies of our intelligence systems.

It is news, however, when our so-called allies are caught stabbing us in the back while patting Saddam Hussein on his. But instead, the nightly newscasts prefer to focus on President Bush’s service in the National Guard, something that’s been investigated thoroughly in two previous election cycles even though nobody has produced one credible shred of evidence showing that the president failed to serve any of his obligations. You’d think Peter, Tom or Dan could take just one night off that non-story to investigate why our former allies sold us out. At least then we’d be hearing something new on the news.

In Business with Saddam
Since long before the start of the war, there was plenty of evidence that Saddam Hussein had many beneficiaries in France, Russia and Germany, the three countries that fought hardest to prevent his removal. Our networks just chose not to cover it:

Not only did the French help the Iraqi nuclear program as recently as 1990, they actively undermined the U.N. weapons inspection team, and they even kept the Hussein regime informed of discussions between Jacques Chirac and President Bush. And last October, when 40 rockets were fired at an American government office in Baghdad, it appeared that at least half of them were made by France after the U.N. weapons embargo went into effect in the wake of the first Gulf War. In other words, someone was sneaking French weapons to Saddam Hussein after the U.N. declared it illegal. Who would have done that? Could it have been the French?
In January 2003, two German businessmen were convicted of supplying weapons-making equipment to Saddam Hussein in violation of the U.N. embargo. Apparently, this was just the tip of the iceberg: according to an Iraqi weapons report to the U.N., over 80 German companies were involved in supplying Saddam’s military, some of which were still doing so just months before the war. “Of further embarrassment to Germany is that [...] German companies make up more than half of the total number of institutions listed in the [Iraqi weapons] report,” the BBC noted.
Not surprisingly, Russian military hardware also found its way into Saddam’s hands despite the U.N. ban. Days after the war started last March, President Bush called Russian leader Vladimir Putin to voice concern over evidence that recently-made Russian military equipment was being used against U.S. forces. If true, it wouldn’t be the first time that Russia violated the arms embargo. According to a 1998 article in The Washington Post, “[an] investigation by Russian and American nonproliferation specialists” showed that “top missile experts from Iraq went on a shopping trip to Russia in late 1994 and signed documents to acquire missile engines, technology and services despite the U.N. sanctions against Iraq [...]”
They Were Called Weasels for a Reason
Did Iraqi oil money pay for Russia’s opposition to the U.S.? Is it possible that German businesses lobbied their government to go easy on Saddam? Could it be that Saddam’s payoffs ensured the French would never have supported taking him out, no matter what the circumstances?

If so, then it’s quite a flimsy argument to say that “inept diplomacy” on the part of the Bush Administration is the reason these governments didn’t help us rid the world of one of the most brutal men in human history. Yet the Democratic opposition continues to criticize President Bush for not convincing Saddam Hussein’s trading partners to get off the gravy train. If a President Kerry would have been any more successful at corralling the weasels, I’d like to know how. Bigger bribes? His wife doesn’t have that much money.

Face it: sometimes the interests of other nations are quite different from ours, no matter how much diplomatic hand-shaking and ego-stroking is applied as a lubricant. That’s why it’s so dangerous to follow politicians who think we should let the rest of the world veto our foreign policy decisions.

The United Nations will not defend you. Nor will the Russians, French or Germans. Only the United States will, and only if we continue to control our own destiny. When you pull the lever next November, keep that in mind.

oops forgot all about that until you just said it,,,, saddam bribing the other countries....he did, there were dozens of accounts of him talking with and dealing with france, and RUSSIA, oh now your going to make me go back and do more research, sh1t.

come on old sarge, we were just having a little fun. besides their alive aint they? just kiddin brother.

you know for the most part I wholeheartedly agree with you, my main gripe is lefty's saying we're just like them, when to be like them would mean we'd have to be removing body parts or raping their kids and sh1t,,,we aint nowhere even in the same timezone as that, and i would just like to hear some lefty admit that.

well there aint nothing crazy bad withthose pics madman.

first as a medic I can tell you, like in the first pic the dudes naked right? but what you dont know it that medics, all of us, when there is a wounded person, american gi or iraqi, we cut off all the clothes, its faster than just trying to take them off of them, why do we do that, simple, to see where all the wounds are. Ive treated a naked iraqi prisoner before we sent him to detention center at camp ramadi and brother he looked a hell of a lot worse than that due you linked to.

the biggest smoking gun you had there was the water boarding pics, and you know what, it is more like a water pistol than actual gun.(follow the pun there- funny stuff) anyway... water boarding is definately a psyc trip than anything else, which is the big difference between our "torture" and theirs, water boarding AINT gonna kill ya, theirs will! so see how we're different.....

here's the million dollar scenario for you;

your captured by either the US government or the Insurgents, who would you rather it be questioning you? feel free to say them.

earlier in the post's I read about health care, It is a touchy subject for a lot of people but I dont think that maybe they aren't as informed as they need to be.

Right now people are worried that if they get seriously hurt or deathly sick without insurance that they wont be admitted or cared for at a hospital, and the truth of the matter is that ther are laws that deal with this issue. It is simply not the case.

It gets pretty detailed so I included a link to a very informative site, now let me say that this is in no way a rightwing site at all and the group that sponsors it also advocates for a universal healthcare plan of some sort or another. However the information contained with in the site about the laws is pretty good.

also, some of the things it doesnt go into detail about, and I just wanted to point out that all hospitals, if you are in life or death need ARE OBLIGATED to treat you, now once they have stabalized you if they are not what is called a Health Care Safety Net Provider(obviously it wont say that in it's title of Hospital, and most probably dont advertise the fact either-speculation) then they have the responsibility to transport you to another hospital that is. These hospitals dont provide less help they just have the extra funding that has been paid for by , well, us. which is one of the main reasons healthcare cost so damn much! but anyway check out the site its informative if nothing else.


http://www3.acep.org/patients.aspx?id=25932

http://www.gao.gov/htext/d05646r.html

there is a little over 55,000 illegals in jail right now, your paying for them.


* They were arrested for at least a total of nearly 700,000 criminal
offenses, averaging 13 offenses per alien.

* About 24 percent were drug offenses.

* About 21 percent were immigration offenses.

* About 15 percent were property-related offenses such as burglary,
larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and property damage.

* About 12 percent were for murder, robbery, assault, and sexually
related crimes.

* The remaining 28 percent were for other offenses such as traffic
violations, including driving under the influence; fraud—including
forgery and counterfeiting; weapons violations; and obstruction of
justice.

Results in Brief: What states were they arrested in?



* Eighty percent of all arrests occurred in the following 3 states.

California: 58 percent.

Texas: 14 percent.

Arizona: 8 percent.


and as a Texan, Im quite disappointed by that number!!!

Fortunately, a number of congressmen requested that the General Accountability Office (GAO) investigate and report information on criminal aliens incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails. The resulting GAO report, published in April 2005, revealed that illegal aliens make up 27% of the prison population. (The oft-cited figure of 12 million illegal aliens in the country means that they make up just 4% of the general population.)

Since illegal aliens are unlikely to be committing white-collar crimes, that figure likely underestimates the amount of violent crime committed by illegal aliens. Using the GAO report, Representative Steve King of Iowa points out that 25 Americans, on average, are killed by illegal aliens every day (about evenly split between motor vehicle accidents and outright murder).

Do the math: That works out to more than 9,000 deaths per year, or more than 36,000 deaths over the past four years. That's more than ten times the number of Americans killed in Iraq over the past four years!

willy pete as it is refered to in many cases fanta as you know, is white phosperous, a very combustible nasty gram to whoever is on the receiving side activated by oxygen(or whatever is in air) and will only go dormant again when it is deprived from it.


Convincing enough argument to say yeah we found some but it wasnt enough to say we found some. the stuff has been out there for years, media leans right? having one of th four media outlets on the right does not constitute the mass media leaning to the right.


I know what I know, I know what Ive seen, maybe it is time for others to go over there and see for themselves since they have all the answers anyway.
But thanks for the mature dialog on this topic hkr.

I'll marry you

but it comes with an automatic 1ook life insurance policy for spouses if your sure you wanna risk it?

No actually I dont think.... someone would be going ape about this. You realize how much we keep out of the media, then their willing accomplices anyway, then when you do have people there who indeed have actually seen and tested and came out(which has happened) they are diismissed as cooks.

its never going to be enough for some people is it, unless they open a warehouse full somewhere. the little bits add up to a lot. not to mention all that was taken out of the places when we came rolling in and the guards went rolling out, the people over tere are so poor and without they went robbing anything they could, and now we're treating them for radiation poison.

You people act as tho im some dude who lives down the street from you and doesnt know what Im talking about and seen for myself.

Ive seen sarin gas canisters! IVE SEEN S A R I N gas canisters, so have a lot of other people in iraq with a lot more rank than me, and HAVE came out publically and said as much. Who's were they if not the damn iraqi's? Where there is one there is more! And I didnt realize that there was a number total that had to be associated with actually finding them.

Oh thats only one, see there arent any wmd here.... how dumb.

tons of yellow cake, tons of hard water, tons. documented, proven. and thats just for the nuclear stuff.

tons of chemicals for producing mustard and sarin, discounted by the media as pesticides because they found someone who they could call an expert and put him on the news, well this chemical such and such is used for killing roaches. well no duh- it is also an ingredient for chemical agent, hell what do you think bug killer is anyway?

Its a well known fact that undocumented workers are hired by big business yet how many are busted every year for committing a crime??? ZERO...



symbelmyne,

Stop making sense!!!





for comitting a crime, do some research on that please, there was a piece put out by some gov dept, to do with statistics ....


anyway the long and short of it was about crimes committed by illegals.
I remember that I was totally shocked and said NO WAY thats right, but there it was, i'll have to go and try to find it, there was one on there that said 26 people every day die in motor vehicle crashes involving illegals, there were a lot more, i'll check, but maybe you could to.

back to the marry thing,,,,, are you a conservative, or a liberal.

Bill Clinton’s December 1998 speech justifying air strikes on Iraq:

The international community had good reason to set this requirement. Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: He has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. Unleashing chemical weapons against Iranian troops during a decade-long war. Not only against soldiers, but against civilians, firing Scud missiles at the citizens of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Iran. And not only against a foreign enemy, but even against his own people, gassing Kurdish civilians in Northern Iraq.

The international community had little doubt then, and I have no doubt today, that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.









WASHINGTON, June 29, 2006 – The 500 munitions discovered throughout Iraq since 2003 and discussed in a National Ground Intelligence Center report meet the criteria of weapons of mass destruction, the center's commander said here today.
"These are chemical weapons as defined under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and yes ... they do constitute weapons of mass destruction," Army Col. John Chu told the House Armed Services Committee.

The Chemical Weapons Convention is an arms control agreement which outlaws the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. It was signed in 1993 and entered into force in 1997.

The munitions found contain sarin and mustard gases, Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said. Sarin attacks the neurological system and is potentially lethal.

"Mustard is a blister agent (that) actually produces burning of any area (where) an individual may come in contact with the agent," he said. It also is potentially fatal if it gets into a person's lungs.

The munitions addressed in the report were produced in the 1980s, Maples said. Badly corroded, they could not currently be used as originally intended, Chu added.

While that's reassuring, the agent remaining in the weapons would be very valuable to terrorists and insurgents, Maples said. "We're talking chemical agents here that could be packaged in a different format and have a great effect," he said, referencing the sarin-gas attack on a Japanese subway in the mid-1990s.

This is true even considering any degradation of the chemical agents that may have occurred, Chu said. It's not known exactly how sarin breaks down, but no matter how degraded the agent is, it's still toxic.

"Regardless of (how much material in the weapon is actually chemical agent), any remaining agent is toxic," he said. "Anything above zero (percent agent) would prove to be toxic, and if you were exposed to it long enough, lethal."

Though about 500 chemical weapons - the exact number has not been released publicly - have been found, Maples said he doesn't believe Iraq is a "WMD-free zone."

"I do believe the former regime did a very poor job of accountability of munitions, and certainly did not document the destruction of munitions," he said. "The recovery program goes on, and I do not believe we have found all the weapons."

The Defense Intelligence Agency director said locating and disposing of chemical weapons in Iraq is one of the most important tasks servicemembers in the country perform.

Maples added searches are ongoing for chemical weapons beyond those being conducted solely for force protection.

There has been a call for a complete declassification of the National Ground Intelligence Center's report on WMD in Iraq. Maples said he believes the director of national intelligence is still considering this option, and has asked Maples to look into producing an unclassified paper addressing the subject matter in the center's report.

Much of the classified matter was slated for discussion in a closed forum after the open hearings this morning.




Hey I really like that british video maker guy he's pretty good, I mean besides offering up only the word lies lies lies, he didnt say anything did he, just said we lied, no proof of any lying, this is fun, we should keep it up for awhile longer.

I'll keep providing you with documentation, you keep dismissing it offering up none of your own to support your outlandish claims it'll be fun you'll see. you bring the drinks, i'll bring the chips, we can BBQ, catch a game on the tube, whatever.

dammit

this is an inspector,,, but dont believe him either, believe the dragoon lady, oooowwwoooo , believe the left believe any one , this isnt even on this site, its a figment of your imagination.


New evidence out of Iraq suggests the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction is having better success than is being reported.
Key assertions by the intelligence community widely judged in the media and by critics of President Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all.

But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.

In virtually every case -- chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles -- the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.

The Iraq Survey Group, ISG, whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight.

"There is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."

Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner.

The United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.

Both Duelfer and Kay found Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects."

They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors," the official said.

But while the president's critics and the media might plausibly hide behind ambiguity and a lack of sensational-looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the case of Saddam's ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their silence.

"Where were the missiles? We found them," another senior administration official told Insight.

"Saddam Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions," the first official said. Both senior administration officials spoke to Insight on condition that neither their name nor their agency be identified, but their accounts of what the United States has found in Iraq coincided in every major area.

When former weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States had found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his conclusions made front-page news. But when he detailed what the ISG had found in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last October, few took notice.

Among Kay's revelations, which officials tell Insight have been amplified in subsequent inspections in recent weeks:


A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N." Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn't have a biological-weapons program?

"Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'"

New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.

A line of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, or drones, "not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible limit."

"Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N."

"Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] -- well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles] imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey], Cairo [Egypt] and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates]."
In addition, through interviews with Iraqi scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG learned the Iraqi government had made "clandestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles -- probably the No Dong -- 300-kilometer-range [186 miles] antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment," Kay reported.

In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed the ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents.

The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a "high-speed rail gun," a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky acknowledged to Insight had been intended for "a clandestine nuclear-weapons program."

In taking apart Iraq's clandestine procurement network, Duelfer said his investigators had discovered that "the primary source of illicit financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring countries [and] from kickback payments made on contracts set up through the U.N. oil-for-food program."

What the president's critics and the media widely have portrayed as the most dramatic failure of the U.S. case against Saddam has been the claimed failure to find "stockpiles" of chemical and biological weapons. But in a June 2003 Washington Post op-ed, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus called such criticism "a distortion and a trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security."

The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded that Saddam "probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons [MT] and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents -- much of it added in the last year."

That assessment was based, in part, on conclusions contained in the final report from U.N. weapons inspectors in 1999, which highlighted discrepancies in what the Iraqis reported to the United Nations and the amount of precursor chemicals U.N. arms inspectors could document Iraq had imported but for which it no longer could account.

Until now, Bush's critics say, no stockpiles of CW agents made with those precursors have been found. The snap conclusion they draw is that the administration "lied" to the American people to create a pretext for invading Iraq.

But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English?

Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory?

Stockpiles found

In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority's intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order -- but found all the same.

Douglas Hanson was a U.S. Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and a veteran of Gulf War I. He was an atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer. As a civilian analyst in Iraq last summer, he worked for an operations intelligence unit of the CPA in Iraq, and later, with the newly formed Ministry of Science and Technology, which was responsible for finding new, nonlethal employment for Iraqi WMD scientists.

In an interview with Insight and in an article he wrote for the online magazine AmericanThinker.com, Hanson examines reports from U.S. combat units and public information confirming that many of Iraq's CW stockpiles have indeed been found.

Until now, however, journalists have devoted scant attention to this evidence, in part because it contradicts the story line they have been putting forward since the U.S.-led inspections began after the war.

But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the "finds" Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble.

"Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve agents."

The United Nations was fully aware that Saddam had established his chemical-weapons plants under the guise of a permitted civilian chemical-industry infrastructure. Plants inspected in the early 1990s as CW production facilities had been set up to appear as if they were producing pesticides, or in the case of a giant plant near Fallujah, chlorine, which is used to produce mustard gas.

When coalition forces entered Iraq, "huge warehouses and caches of 'commercial and agricultural' chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists," Hanson writes. "What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches."

Caches of "commercial and agricultural" chemicals don't match the expectation of "stockpiles" of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. "At a very minimum," Hanson tells Insight, "they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly."

Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment's notice. At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to reporters -- with unpleasant results.

"More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a military ammunition dump -- evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."

That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin -- a nerve agent.

Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site.

"Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'"

At Taji -- an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of Columbia -- U.S. combat units discovered more "pesticides" stockpiled in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the standard 55-gallon drum.

Hanson says he still recalls the military sending digital images of the canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry of Science and Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. "They were labeled as pesticides," he says. "Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides stored in ammo dumps."

Again, this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But subsequent tests by the United States disputed that finding.

"If it wasn't a chemical agent, what was it?" Hanson asks. "More pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this old soldier's perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy."

The discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that's the problem: Finding real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn't fit the image the media and the president's critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq's weapons ought to look like. A senior administration official who has gone through the intelligence reporting from Iraq as well as the earlier reports from U.N. arms inspectors refers to another well-documented allegation.

"The Iraqis admitted they had made 3.9 tons of VX," a powerful nerve gas, but claimed they had never weaponized it. The U.N. inspectors "felt they had more. But where did it go?" The Iraqis never provided any explanation of what had happened to their VX stockpiles.

What does 3.9 tons of VX look like? "It could fit in one large garage," the official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would assemble every bit of VX gas his scientists had produced at a single site, that still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of the state of California.

Senior administration officials stress that the investigation will continue as inspectors comb through millions of pages of documents in Iraq and attempt to interview Iraqi weapons scientists who have been trained all their professional lives to conceal their activities from the outside world.

"The conditions under which the ISG is working are not very conducive," one official said. "But this president wants the truth to come out. This is not an exercise in spinning or censoring."

US Marines on the ground.... dont trust them either, they are liars, believe harry reid and nancy pelosi....


U.S. Marines have located a complex of tunnels underneath an Iraqi nuclear complex ? apparently missed by U.N. weapons inspectors ? discovering a vast array of warehouses and bombproof offices that could contain the "smoking gun" sought by intelligence agencies, reported the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
The Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission's Al-Tuwaitha facility is located 18 miles south of Baghdad.

Fox News Channel is reporting that the tunnels may contain weapons-grade plutonium.

"I've never seen anything like it, ever," said Marine Capt. John Seegar. "How did the world miss all of this? Why couldn't they see what was happening here?"

Marine nuclear and intelligence experts say that at least 14 buildings at Al-Tuwaitha indicate high levels of radiation and some show lethal amounts of nuclear residue, according to the Pittsburgh daily. The site was examined numerous times by U.N. weapons inspectors, who found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction.


Marine combat engineers guard Iraqi Atomic Energy Department (Carl Prine/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)


"They went through that site multiple times, but did they go underground? I never heard anything about that," said physicist David Albright, a former International Atomic Energy Agency inspector in Iraq from 1992 to 1997.

In a 1999 report, Albright said, "Iraq developed procedures to limit access to these buildings by IAEA inspectors who had a right to inspect the fuel fabrication facility."

"On days when the inspectors were scheduled to visit, only the fuel fabrication rooms were open to them," he said in the report, written with Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear engineer who defected in 1994. "Usually, employees were told to take to their rooms so that the inspectors did not see an unusually large number of people."

Chief Warrant Officer Darrin Flick, the battalion's nuclear, biological and chemical warfare specialist, said radiation levels were particularly high at a place near the complex where local residents say the "missile water" is stored in mammoth caverns.

"It's amazing," Flick said. "I went to the off-site storage buildings, and the rad detector went off the charts. Then I opened the steel door, and there were all these drums, many, many drums, of highly radioactive material."

Noting that the ground in the area is muddy and composed of clay, Hamza was surprised to learn of the Marines' discovery, the Tribune-Review said. He wondered if the Iraqis went to the colossal expense of pumping enough water to build the subterranean complex because no reasonable inspector would think anything might be built underground there.

"Nobody would expect it," Hamza said. "Nobody would think twice about going back there."

Michael Levi of the Federation of American Scientists said the Iraqis continued rebuilding the Al-Tuwaitha facility after weapons inspections ended in 1998.

"I do not believe the latest round of inspections included anything underground, so anything you find underground would be very suspicious," said Levi. "It sounds absolutely amazing."

The Pittsburgh paper said nuclear scientists, engineers and technicians, housed in a plush neighborhood near the campus, have fled, along with Baathist party loyalists.

"It's going to take some very smart people a very long time to sift through everything here," said Flick. "All this machinery. All this technology. They could do a lot of very bad things with all of this."

Seegar said his unit will continue to hold the nuclear site until international authorities can take over. Last night, they monitored gun and artillery battles by U.S. Marines against Iraqi Republican Guards and Fedayeen terrorists.

The offices underground are replete with videos and pictures that indicate the complex was built largely over the last four years, the Tribune-Review said.

Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clark told reporters she has no specific information about the discovery.

"I'm only aware of the report from the embedded reporter," she said.

Clark was asked about the timeline of testing the material found.

"Every situation is different," she said. "You often have different circumstances. Sometimes things test positive and then it turns out to be negative. We're taking our time and we remain focused on the primary task of winning the war. It doesn't mean we can't do other things; we do. But we will take our time and do it properly."

Iraq began to develop its nuclear program at Al-Tuwaitha in the 1970s, according to the Institute for Science and International Security. Israel destroyed a French-built reactor there in 1981, called "Osiraq," and a reactor built by the Russians was destroyed during the 1991 Gulf War.

In his 2000 book "Saddam's Bombmaker," Hamza revealed Saddam's secret plans for the nuclear complex at Al-Tuwaitha:


From my office window in the Nuclear Research Center, I could see just a slice of what Saddam's oil money had built in less than a decade: a sprawling complex of nuclear facilities, scattered over ten square miles, poised to deliver us the bomb. It was called al-Tuwaitha, in Arabic "the truncheon."
? Below my floor was fifty thousand square feet of office space and laboratories, sparkling with new equipment, where hundreds of technicians were running nuclear experiments. Outside to my left was our chemical reprocessing plant, where we would enrich fuel for a plutonium bomb. Down the street was our domed Russian reactor, newly renovated with Belgian electronic controls, which made it capable of generating radioactive material for nuclear triggers. Past that was our French-supplied neutron generator, and next to that our electronics labs, and then a four-story building that handled spent nuclear fuel, full of hot cells and new remote-controlled equipment overseen by platoons of white-jacketed technicians. All this was a long, long way from the dining room table where we'd scratched out our first memo for a bomb in 1972.

Rising up behind my office, however, was al-Tuwaitha's jewel in the crown, the aluminum dome of the French reactor, glittering in the blue desert sky. Osiraq was the most advanced reactor of its kind, crammed with such up-to-date equipment and technology that visitors were amazed that the French had ever agreed to sell it to us. Little did they know that the acquisition of Osiraq, an incredible feat on its own, was merely a decoy: Saddam wanted us to copy the French design and build another, secret reactor, where we would produce the bomb-grade plutonium beyond the prying eyes of foreign spies and inspectors ? the same thing to him.

But it was not to be. On June 7, 1981, Israel sent eight F-16 warplanes almost 700 miles over Jordanian, Saudi and Iraqi air space for hours without detection. By flying in tight formation, they generated a radar signal resembling that of a commercial airliner. Upon identifying the Osiraq nuclear plant, and catching Iraqi defenses by surprise, the Israeli pilots managed to demolish the reactor in one minute and 20 seconds.

At the time, Israel's audacious preemptive strike was almost universally condemned, but later praised by many for helping thwart Iraq's development of nuclear weapons.

Despite this and other setbacks, says Hamza, Saddam persisted in his quest for a nuclear bomb. In testimony before Congress last August, Hamza ? the architect of Iraq's atom bomb program ? said that if left unchecked, Iraq could have had nuclear weapons by 2005

this guy was only the guy who was making the damn things for saddam, but dont believe him either, just cnn!

Saddam Still Pursuing Nuclear Weapons, Says Iraqi Scientis


By William B. Reinckens
Washington File Correspondent

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's former nuclear weapons expert Khidhir
Hamza said Iraq is only months away from making a workable bomb.

However, Hamza said Iraq must rely on foreign sources for fissile
material.

"I don't think that he will keep it a secret," said Hamza. "Once
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction [WMD] program is capable
of generating a couple of nuclear devices, Saddam will use it to his
own ends," he said. Hamza predicted that Saddam would test one of the
devices and then declare himself "a nuclear power."

Hamza started working in Iraq's nuclear program in the 1970s after
studying physics in the United States; he defected to the West in
1995.

Hamza spoke at a book signing reception at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington on November 2. His book, co-authored
with Jeff Stein, is entitled "Saddam's Bomb Maker: The Terrifying
Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda." The
book was released in the United States November 2 and in Europe in
October.

The Iraqi scientist related how Saddam Hussein hookwinked the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for years, even though Iraq
signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and ratified it in
1969. "That [ratification] made our nuclear-power cover stories
internationally acceptable and justified our major nuclear purchases
with the full backing of the IAEA," Hamza said.

Hamza noted that after the Arab armies were defeated in the 1967 War
with Israel, Iraq started a nuclear program "to have at least parity
with Israel." In 1972, Saddam Hussein approved an initial plan that
led to Iraq's acquisition two years later of a nuclear reactor from
France for a plutonium bomb, he said. At the time, he said, Iraq's
initial investment in the program was $500 million and the program
employed 500 technicians.

Israel's attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor facility in 1981
kicked Saddam's nuclear weapons program into high gear, Hamza said.
"Israel made a mistake in hitting the reactor," he said. Saddam
responded by launching a new eight-year-long secret program in 1982 to
build a nuclear bomb inventory that would eventually cost $10,000
million and employ 7,000 technicians and scientists, Hamza said.

Hamza said Saddam was driven by a desire to make Iraq a nuclear power
and the center of Arab power and unity. Saddam "needed a crude device
to drop on Israel," Hamza said.

After the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq continued with its secret nuclear
weapons development program, says Hamza. The program was eventually
discovered by United Nations inspection teams, who began to dismantle
it until they were ordered to leave Iraq at the end of 1998.

Hamza's book relates how Iraq tested biological and chemical weapons
on human subjects, most of whom were political prisoners, but also on
Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south.

The Iraqi nuclear expert said that while he was working on the nuclear
program, the Iraqi regime recruited Iraqi university students for
clandestine WMD programs and "some of the students died due to
exposure."

Conditions inside Iraq became so bad for the scientists and their
families that many fled, said Hamza. One of the problems for Saddam
today, he said, "is that no one is returning home" to work on the WMD
programs.

Hamza asserted that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) tried
to recruit him to make a bomb and Baghdad had a secret program aimed
at breaking into U.S. and other foreign computer systems.

(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International
Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site:
http://usinfo.state.gov

June 9, 2003, 8:45 a.m.
Saddam Had WMDs
There was no conspiracy, and the press knows it.



he United States has discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I know this because I read it on the front page of the very liberal New York Times. Of course, the Times was only trying to hurt the administration. In the rush to Baghdad during the war, our troops bypassed and failed to secure one of Saddam's key nuclear facilities. That facility was looted by local villagers, who ransacked vaults and warehouses looking for anything of value. Many of the villagers took home radioactive barrels, and are now suffering from radiation poisoning. According to the Times, the looted nuclear facility, "contained ample radioactive poisons that could be used to manufacture an inestimable quantity of so-called dirty bombs."

So in the course of trying to embarrass the administration, the Times has inadvertently raised a very important point in the administration's defense. Saddam's nuclear-weapons program contained sufficient material to pose a serious threat to the United States. In the hands of terrorists, nuclear dirty bombs supplied by Saddam could have rendered landmarks and key sites in American cities uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.

And why did Saddam have a nuclear facility in the first place? It was, of course, part of his effort to produce a nuclear bomb. In fact, the nuclear site reported on by the Times was connected to the facility bombed years before by the Israelis, who had become convinced that Saddam was attempting to build a nuclear weapon. Thank goodness the Israelis acted. Thank goodness we did too.

Now it's true that this was a site that the inspectors knew about. That, however, might not have prevented Saddam from transferring the small amount of nuclear material necessary for a dirty bomb to terrorists. And the Iraqis may well have been carrying out other critical tasks in pursuit of a nuclear bomb at secret facilities. And there was always the danger that, in the absence of regime change, the Europeans would have tired of sanctions and inspections — as they'd done before — and let Saddam complete his nuclear work. The Europeans' renewed interest in sanctions was only prompted by America's preparations to invade, and we could not have kept our troops at the ready forever.

Another serious danger was the possibility that, at a propitious moment some time down the road, Saddam might simply have kicked the inspectors out. After all, that's what the North Koreans did. They waited till we were tied down by our struggle with Iraq, booted the inspectors out, and powered up their nuclear program. Had we failed to invade, Saddam could have waited until a weaker president was in power, and/or until the U.S. was tied down in a war (perhaps with Korea), and simply thrown the inspectors out. After all, he'd done it before.

Prior to the war, it was impossible to tell how close Saddam was to building a nuclear bomb. We hoped and believed that he was still at least a year or two away from success, although the possibility that he might be even closer than that had to be reckoned with. After all, our intelligence had once before proven wrong. We had underestimated the progress of Saddam's nuclear program, as we eventually learned from defectors. But even if Saddam was a couple of years away from a bomb, the need to invade was urgent. The point was precisely to stop Saddam before he got close enough to a bomb to exploit our uncertainty about his capacity and blackmail us. That, after all, is exactly what the North Koreans have been doing for some time.

-500 tons...that's right...TONS...make that 1million pounds of yellow cake uranium. It was found at Saddam's nuclear weapons facility (yup...he had one of those too.)

-1.8 tons of partially enriched uranium found at the same place. You know, the stuff you need to make nukes.

-Hidden centrifuge parts and blueprints.

-Two dozen artillery shells loaded with Sarin and mustard gas.


just some more tid bits.