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Spooks dig for secrets of Saddam As Blair prepares to issue his dossier on Iraq's weapons, Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy assess the quality of intelligence - and the difficulty of obtaining it Peter Beaumont in London and Ed Vulliamy in New York Sunday September 15, 2002 The Observer He is there at almost every official photo-opportunity with Saddam Hussein, a compact and wiry military officer, his khaki shirt rolled up to his elbows, a beret pulled across his brow. A heavy handlebar moustache hangs over a solid jaw, grey with a permanent five o'clock shadow. The recent prominence of...

UN experts are to destroy four plastic containers filled with mustard gas registered by previous UN disarmament inspectors and recently found north of Baghdad. Spokesman Hiro Ueki said chemical experts had visited the Al-Muthanna military site today to prepare for the destruction of the containers. Ten 155 millimetre artillery shells will also be destroyed. "The destruction process will begin tomorrow and is expected to (take) four to five days to complete," he said.

Rats or Humans? Inside Saddam's Extermination Plant(August 29, 2002)This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/ He was introduced as director of research and development at Falluja, one of the remote factories where the United States claims Saddam Hussein could be making chemical and biological weapons. Asked if he had worked on any of Saddam's chemical weapons programs, Dr Mohammed Frah played a straight bat: "In the early 1980s I worked for five years on the chemical and biological programs at Al-Muthanna." This is the name of a critical centre in Saddam's weapons program - a huge pesticide complex that produced...

BEIRUT - Syria's ambassador to Lebanon said on Thursday that Damascus had the option of a "surprise decision" to respond to what it said was an Israeli air strike on a research center on the outskirts of the Syrian capital on Wednesday. Syria could take "a surprise decision to respond to the aggression of the Israeli warplanes," Ali Abdul Karim Ali was quoted as telling a Hezbollah-run news website.

Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, Commander of the IAF, described the chaotic threat facing Israel from its neighbors Tuesday, just hours before jet fighters under his command reportedly hit a major weapons convoy between Syria and Lebanon. Video .....

Israeli warplanes attacked a target on the Lebanese-Syrian border overnight Tuesday, foreign media reported on Wednesday. While some reports said the purported strike was carried out on the Syrian side of the border, according to one source the target was a weapons convoy that had crossed from Syria into Lebanon. The reports come amid rising concern in Israel and the West regarding the sizable chemical weapons stockpile in the hands of an increasingly embattled Syrian regime. Lebanese officials said a dozen Israeli warplanes violated Lebanese airspace on Tuesday and overnight into Wednesday, flying close to the ground in several sorties...

A western diplomat and three regional security sources said Wednesday that Israel Air Force warplanes struck a target on the Syrian-Lebanese border overnight, hours after Lebanon reported a series of three overflights by Israel in its airspace. Israel has expressed increasing concern over the fate of Syrian chemical and conventional weapons as the country slides further into chaos after almost two years of civil war.

NBC reporter Dana Lewis reporting live video from newly discovered PLO terrorist training camp that was discovered in Iraq. It has obstacle course, shooting range, pretty much looks like one of the familiar AlQaeda terrorist training camps. Dana Lewis also reports that this camp is close to the infamous pesticide site and that there are some of the same French pesticide drums (not the others suspected of containing the CW "Cocktail" mixture) at the PLO camp along with gas masks and chemical suits. They're not sure what to make of it and the officer in charge was hesitant to say...

War On Terror: As the regime of Bashar Assad disintegrates, the security of his chemical arsenal is in jeopardy. The No. 2 general in Saddam Hussein's air force says they were the WMDs we didn't find in Iraq. King Abdullah of neighboring Jordan warned that a disintegrating Syria on the verge of civil war puts Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons at risk of falling into the hands of al-Qaida. "One of the worst-case scenarios as we are obviously trying to look for a political solution would be if some of those chemical stockpiles were to fall into unfriendly hands," he...

The latest estimates say that the Assad regime has hundreds of tons of mustard gas, a blister agent, and large stockpiles of sarin and possibly VX, both of which are nerve agents -- all of which can be launched by Scud missiles, artillery, or aircraft, according to Charles Blair, a specialist in chemical and biological weapons at the Federation of American Scientists. "I've heard that Syria has 100 to 200 missiles with nerve agents loaded and ready to go, but that seems extreme," said Blair, noting that the nerve agents are usually stored separately from the weapons and that exact...

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING Strategy site to Obama: End alliance with Israel WASHINGTON — A newsletter-publisher said to have ties with the Obama administration has called on Washington to end its strategic alliance with Israel. George Friedman, publisher of Stratfor, has published a book that called on the Obama administration to reorder U.S. foreign policy. Friedman has argued that the key element of the proposal required the end of U.S. strategic ties with Israel and bolstering of cooperation with the Islamic world, particularly Iran and Pakistan. "The United States must quietly distance itself from Israel," Friedman says in...

Three giant cargo ships are being tracked by US and British intelligence on suspicion that they might be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Each with a deadweight of 35,000 to 40,000 tonnes, the ships have been sailing around the world's oceans for the past three months while maintaining radio silence in clear violation of international maritime law, say authoritative shipping industry sources. The vessels left port in late November, just a few days after UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix began their search for the alleged Iraqi arsenal on their return to the country. Uncovering such a deadly...

As Israel considers allowing Egypt to control the critical Philadelphi corridor along Israel’s border, startling revelations about Egyptian chemical weapons proliferation are coming to light. Egypt secretly helped former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his chemical weapons program, according to a CIA report. The report, authored by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, says that Egypt sent specialists to Iraq in the 1980s to help him manufacture poison gas. Iraq later used the gas against Iranian citizens as well as Iraqi Kurds. The report says that the Iraqi government paid Egypt $12 million, "in return for assistance with production and storage...

Baghdad leaders reveal that coup plot duped MI6 Julie Flint explains how rumours of Saddam's overthrow caused British intelligence to miss vital information about Iraq's weapons programme British intelligence took its eyes off Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes because it had been duped into believing a military coup would leave Sunni Muslims in power in Iraq. Sources in the country say what they missed was a push to convert chemical and biological organisms into dry agents that could be hidden until pressure on the regime was lifted. 'From the second half of 2000, the focus of the British was not on...

Posterboard is up on screen showing translations of what Saddam and Tariq Aziz said on the tapes released this weekend at the Intelligence Summit. It sounds like former UN inspector Tierney is the one reading the translations.

"Relying, apparently, on concrete findings, former top U.S. weapons inspector Dr. David Kay said that "the Iraqis had developed new techniques for drying anthrax - techniques that were superior to anything the United States or the old Soviet Union had. That would make the former regime of Saddam Hussein the most sophisticated manufacturer of anthrax in the world." (Washington Post, 16 septembre 2005)

Turf war keeping lid on evidence of WMD in Iraq? By KATHLEEN PARKER If you thought Democrats and Republicans were politically divided over the war in Iraq, you haven't seen anything yet. The real battle apparently is being waged under the radar between the White House, the intelligence community and Congress. ADVERTISEMENT At the center of the current skirmish is a newly unclassified document released last Wednesday that seems to confirm evidence of WMD in Saddam's Iraq, including both degraded and possibly lethal chemical agents. According to the document, coalition forces have recovered some 500 weapons munitions since 2003 that...

<p>WASHINGTON -- The White House announced yesterday that its inquiry into intelligence failures would include Libya, North Korea, and Iran in addition to Iraq, sparking quick criticism that the panel will be a long-delayed and watered-down examination of the intelligence that the Bush administration cited to justify the war in Iraq.</p>

WASHINGTON — In a "60 Minutes" interview on April 23, Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the CIA's Europe division, made a sensational charge. He claimed that President Bush and his White House ignored intelligence before the invasion of Iraq indicating that Saddam Hussein had no had weapons of mass destruction. On the CBS-TV show, and in subsequent media interviews that appeared throughout the world, Drumheller said that the White House was excited about the fact that the CIA was getting information straight from Naji Sabri, the then Iraqi foreign minister. But when the White House found out this source...

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS - Armed men broke into an upscale Amsterdam home and kidnapped the daughter of a millionaire whose fortune came from selling chemicals, including to Iraq in the 1980s, police said Tuesday. Her children were left unharmed. Police said the gunmen stormed into the home of Claudia Melchers, 37, late Monday and took her away. They said they were treating it as a kidnapping. Melchers, who runs a catering company, is the daughter of Hans Melchers, who owns Melchemie Holland, which supplied chemicals to Iraq in the 1980s. It was unclear whether the kidnapping was related to the company's...