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“I first began to fathom the extent of Nadhmi Auchi's reach and corrupting influence when I was given responsibility for monitoring illegal transfers of technology and munitions to Iraq as well as overseeing all coalition transportation and communications reconstruction in Iraq." ### Barack Obama has been appropriately strident in his condemnation of the mortgage-based financial corruption which nearly led to the collapse of the investment banking system in the United States. But there are some strong smelling financial skeletons in his own closet. Obama has his own personal housing crisis that is tied not into Fanny Mae, but into a...

ERS is still wondering, if its illegal to bring in “looted” items from Iraq, and someone has even been convicted of a crime for doing so -- why is it O-K for Lara Logan to be displaying a few of those same kind of items framed on her office walls at CBS News and have public media stories done about them without any US Customs people paying attention?. We don’t know yet for sure, but we’ll stay on the story until we find out!

For Iraqi Kurdish mathematics teacher Mohammed Aziz, two wrongs can make a right. After decades of forced exile by the Baath party of Saddam Hussein, he is back with a vengeance. Aziz was just four years old in 1975 when his family was evicted from Bawaplawi village, near the northern city of Khanaqin, and Arab settlers grabbed their home. Now schoolteacher Aziz is back and has done to the Arabs what they did to him. "Our homes were taken over by the Arabs without paying us any compensation," Aziz, 37, said at the modest single-storey brick house which he has...

The Democrats' essential argument on Iraq is that Saddam had absolutely nothing to do with Bin Laden. But what this argument overlooks is that Saddam offered Bin Laden safe haven in Iraq in late 1998 and/or 1999 -- the very timeframe during which 9/11 attacks were being planned. In fact, that was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission Report, although it was all but ignored by the mainstream media.

Sarah and Saddam The pit bull with lipstick gave a rousing send-off to U.S. soldiers headed for Iraq: You are going to "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans." Guess what? The establishment reacted with horror! The Washington Post complained the governor did not understand that any idea Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11 was quite discredited, while the McCain camp rushed to explain she was speaking about al Qaeda in Iraq, rather than Saddam.

Sandblasting has restored the exterior of Courthouse 1 and the connecting colonnade to Courthouse 2 on the Anbar Judicial Complex in Ramadi. Photo by USACE. BAGHDAD — The $21.5 million renovation and new construction at the Anbar Judicial Complex in the provincial capital of Ramadi is under way by the Gulf Region Division on palace sites of the Saddam Hussein family.  Courtrooms and judges’ chambers will be located in palace buildings formerly used by Saddam and his infamous sons, Uday and Qusay, at the so-called “Hurricane Point� on the Euphrates River.  Ramadi is one of several Sunni-majority towns along the...

By McCainiacUpdated to include more juicy Clinton quotables - 9/5/08 10:37 amLast night on Fox's O'Reilly Factor: "I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated," Obama said while refusing to retract his initial opposition to the surge. "I’ve already said it’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." Well, Barry... two men DID anticipate the success of the surge -- John McCain and General Petraeus. Obama persists in arguing that the invasion of Iraq was a distraction and unnecessary, while completely ignoring all the events that led us to remove Saddam Hussein. The Iraq War is not...

Do paired dates prove Iraq-al-Qaida connection? Posted: August 21, 20081:00 am Eastern © 2008  In late April 2003, after the fall of Baghdad, CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer replayed an earlier conversation he had had with the Iraqi foreign minister, the wily Tariq Aziz.One overlooked part of this conversation caught the very sharp eye of aspiring filmmaker Chris Kusnell.When Blitzer asked Aziz about the fate of missing U.S. Navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher, Aziz answered that Speicher was killed in a crash on night one of the Gulf War. As proof, Aziz volunteered that Speicher was not among the POWs released...

"This is an interview conducted by freeper Chris Donohoe (April15bendovr) with freeper Joseph Shahda (jveritas) about Saddam regime WMD programs and their relations to terrorism based on his translations of some captured Saddam regime documents. Also he talks about some Al Qaeda-captured documents. On the WMD issue, Joseph Shahda reveals that the documents clearly indicate that the Saddam regime opted to build the precursors required to make chemical weapons rather than the final chemical weapons product. They did this for two reasons. First because these precursors are dual-use materials and Saddam could always claim that they are used for civilian...

Two Russian generals were photographed receiving awards from Saddam Hussein's government for helping Iraqi military forces less than 10 days before the U.S.-led invasion. The two retired officers were identified by the newspaper Gazeta.ru as Col. Gen. Vladimir Achalov and Col. Gen. Igor Maltsev, both former high-ranking officers involved in Soviet rapid-reaction and air defense forces.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 14, 2008 – Iraq was left behind in the information-technology revolution for 25 years under Saddam Hussein’s regime while the rest of the world moved on, a military official said this week. “You’re looking at a nation that has … suffered from 25 years of tyranny under Saddam Hussein and has not had the things that you and I take for granted,” Air Force Col. Karlton Johnson, communications director for Multinational Security Transition Command Iraq, told online journalists and bloggers in an Aug. 12 teleconference. Johnson said the coalition has a 500-day plan to provide the Iraqis modern...

Technical Intelligence in Retrospect: The 2001 Anthrax Letters Powder ------------------------------------------------- Authors: Dany Shoham; Stuart M. Jacobsen --------------------------------------------------- Published in: International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Volume 20, Issue 1 March 2007 , pages 79 - 105 -------------------------------------------- (Weblink : http://newsdetails.blogspot.com/2007/05/technical-intelligence-in-retrospect.html ) -------------------------------------------- EXCERPTS (...) Naturally, the U.S. Intelligence Community first tried to profile the SSP by technically comparing it with past weaponized anthrax powders made by the U.S. Army. But, while the dehydration-based forming of dry powder, weapon-grade, biological material conducted by William Patrick in the U.S. Army during the 1950s relied on freeze drying, and then grinding down the...

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein. Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war. The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in...

This was Lindauer’s first real opportunity to argue her competence to stand trial and deny the delusions claimed by court psychiatrists. Lindauer asserts that she had been a U.S. intelligence asset since working on the Lockerbie case and subsequent antiterrorism efforts. Appearing for the defense, Dr. Godfrey testified under oath that Lindauer told him of her specific concerns about an attack on the United States. She told him that a “massive” attack would occur in the southern part of Manhattan, involving airplanes and possibly a nuclear weapon. The witness said that she mentioned this in the year 2000, which coincided...

The two Rolls Royces and three sports cars were looted after the US-led invasion in 2003, police said... Uday Hussein and his younger brother Qusay were killed in a gun battle with US forces months after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Remember Joe Wilson? He's the diplomat who went to Niger to investigate Bush administration claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium, a raw material used in building nuclear bombs, from Africa. He wrote in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed that he had spent the previous February in Niger, "drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people ... associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." A story that has to be the most underplayed...

'Saddam's deputy' in anti-US call The US blames Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri for attacks on its troops A message purported to be from the fugitive deputy of executed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has called on insurgents to make a final push against US forces. The message attributed to Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri urged Iraqi fighters to "make this year... decisive for victory". The message also called on US President George W Bush to "come clean about the scale of US losses". Ibrahim is the most senior member of Saddam Hussein's regime still at large. The message, aired by Dubai-based satellite broadcaster...

Excerpt from book: “The anthrax spores in the letter to Daschle were so professionally refined, the Central Intelligence Agency believed the powder must have been sent by an experienced terrorist organization, most probably Al Qaeda, as a sequel to the group’s September 11 attacks. During a [October 17] meeting of the White House’s National Security Council that day, Cheney, who was sitting in for the President because Bush was traveling abroad, urged everyone to keep this inflammatory speculation secret. ... They thought Cheney had already been lethally infected. ... *** Cheney in particular was so stricken by the potential for...

For years, the media and Democrats have sold the public an understanding that Gerorge W. Bush fabricated a story that Saddam Hussein had a WMD program in order to justify invading Iraq, which invasion then becomes "based on a lie." About 550 metric tons of yellowcake concentrated uranium were recently shipped out of Iraq. It had been part of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. That much was recently reported by the Associated Press . I wrote an article for American Thinker that commented on that story the day it appeared. That yellowcake stockpile pre-dated 1991, and had been under the UN's...

Hear about the 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq? No? Why should you? It doesn't fit the media's neat story line that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no nuclear threat when we invaded in 2003.

550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium worth millions of dollars were shipped out of Iraq to Canada. The uranium was transported in 37 military flights in 3,500 secure barrels. Though the yellowcake had been in Iraq for some time and had been discovered by the United Nations inspectors after the first Gulf War in during the Senior President Bush’s presidency the material has finally been removed. This is a fact the Democrats don’t want publicized and the MSM will oblige.

US Removes Iraq Uranium-MORE EVIDENCE OF SADDAM WMD PROGRAM Its been all over the press for the past few days. 550 METRIC TONS (that's BIGGER than 5 Rosie O'Donnells) were removed from Bagdad by the US Government: The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans. The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant...

<p>The media have been telling us for years that Saddam had no WMD, so "Bush's War": was based on a "lie." And those who believed Saddam did have WMD or WMD programs were delusional or worse.</p> <p>And multiple devices that could be used in a nuclear weapon.</p>

"Saddam's Killing Fields," an award winning account of the destruction of the Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq and other crimes committed by Saddam's regime in the early 1990s including those committed during the 1991 uprising. Filmed in 1993 by Michael Wood a popular English historian and broadcaster.

WASHINGTON, July 1, 2008 – A new book released by the Army examines the challenging period of transition from conventional combined-arms operations to full-spectrum and counterinsurgency operations in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April 2003. On Point II was written to provide a historical account for future Army leaders on the decisive 18 months following the overthrow of Saddam’s regime, Army Col. Timothy Reese, an armor officer and one of the book’s authors, told online journalists and bloggers in a teleconference yesterday. “We tried to capture the improvisation and ingenuity of the average American soldier as...

One of our readers (Vince1974) reminded us of this January 1999 ABC News special on the ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda posted last year on Powerline.**************************See the Blog for the Video......***********************************When a liberal claims there never was any evidence of a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda (like coordinating attacks in 2002 with AQ number 2 Ayman Zawahiri) don’t believe them. They simply are exposing a deadly ignorance. 3 Responses to “In 1999, Saddam Linked To Al Qaeda”

Yet AGAIN there’s another document showing that Saddam’s regime was not only willing to work with Al Queda groups, but in fact did so.  This time, it’s a 2002 memo from Saddam’s regime to Al Queda’s strategic planner (often described as the real brains of the terror group alliance).The “no ties” myth gets another shovel of dirt on its graveLINKHT Regimeofteror

<p>SARGAT, Iraq, April 4 — MSNBC.com tests reveal evidence of the deadly toxins ricin and botulinum at a laboratory in a remote mountain region of northern Iraq allegedly used as a terrorist training camp by Islamic militants with ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is conducting its own tests at the same area, but has not yet released the results, according to officials in northern Iraq.</p>

SARGAT, Iraq, April 4 — Preliminary tests conducted by MSNBC.com indicate that the deadly toxins ricin and botulinum were present on two items found at a camp in a remote mountain region of northern Iraq allegedly used as a terrorist training center by Islamic militants with ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network. The field tests used by MSNBC.com are only a first step in the evidentiary process and are typically followed by more precise laboratory testing that MSNBC.com has not conducted. U.S. intelligence agents were conducting their own tests in the same area and had not yet released their results,...

Few people realize that the Baath party was actually formed upon the principles and organizational structure of the Nazi party. Iraq, because of its oil and hatred of Jews, was an important battleground between the Axis and Allied powers in World War II. Nazi propaganda was broadcast throughout Baghdad, and Iraqis often went on rampages against Jews throughout the war. One of the most ardent Nazi supporters during WWII was named Khairallah Talfah. Talfah was Saddam's uncle. After the war, many of the key Iraqi Nazi supporters, all of whom evaded prosecution, wound up involved in Saddam's rise to power....

Friends and neighbors, there is a great storm gathering across the World- or perhaps you could call it a gathering of bonfires which threaten to join into a conflagration. When World War One began, it was said"All across Europe, the lights of civilization are being extinguised. We shall not see them relit in our time..."I suggest that now a somewhat opposite process is being started- first one fire of terrorism, then another is being lit- the question is, can we put them out?What follows are links for a quick overview- it's what I could pull quickly from my own collection,...

The Kurdish daily Kurdistani Nwe has published a 2002 letter from the Iraqi presidency that it says proves that there was cooperation between the regime of Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. The letter, which appeared on the paper's front page, was published by the intelligence apparatus of the Iraqi presidency and discussed an intention to meet with Ayman Al-Zawahiri in order to examine a plan drawn up by the Iraqi presidency to carry out a "revenge operation" in Saudi Arabia.

The SurrenderMedia recently misreported (there’s a surprise) that Saddam Hussein had no ties to al-Qaeda, when in fact the report the SurrenderMedia was trying to cover said just the opposite. As I noted at the time the analysis showed Saddam Hussein had long time ties with Ayman Zawahiri, who at the time ran the Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorist group. A group that was integrated into al-Qaeda when Zawahiri joined forces with Bin Laden in the 1990’s. Gateway Pundit has a link to a recent news article out of Iraq showing evidence that Saddam Hussein continued his ties with Zawahiri after...

Izzat Ibrahim Addouri has resurfaced despite a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. By Nicola Nasser Addouri Outlines Anti-U.S. Strategy For the first time since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in April 2003, the deputy of Saddam Hussein, the late President of Iraq, Izzat Ibrahim Addouri has resurfaced, despite a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head, in a lengthy interview with Abdel-Azim Manaf, the editor-in-chief of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Mawqif Al-Arabi, not a mainstream, on May 26 to lay out the strategy and tactics of the Iraqi resistance led by the former ruling party, Al-Baath. Addouri's resurface and...

BUSH'S AMERICA: 100 PERCENT AL-QAIDA FREE SINCE 2001June 11, 2008 In a conversation recently, I mentioned as an aside what a great president George Bush has been and my friend was surprised. I was surprised that he was surprised. I generally don't write columns about the manifestly obvious, but, yes, the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents. Produce one person who believed, on Sept. 12, 2001, that there would not be another attack for seven years, and...

Hours after Senator Clinton dropped out of the race, and the news cycle was swamped with never-ending coverage of the inevitable doing the inevitable something was released under the radar. linkBack in 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee began an investigation into pre-war intelligence regarding Saddam's regime, the threat it posed, and how the intelligence was handled. Democrats on the committee did their best to politicize the investigation and give it the appearance of a precursor to impeachment of President Bush under some sort of Bush Lied conspiracy theory. They did this for purely political purposes despite being contrary to national...

THE SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE has once again released a report claiming that the Bush administration hyped prewar intelligence. The so-called Phase Two report is supposed to investigate the Bush administration's handling of prewar intelligence. In reality, the report is little more than yet another attempt by partisan Democrats to make political hay out of flawed prewar intelligence. (The only Republicans to endorse the report were two of the Senate's most liberal GOP members.) The committee focused exclusively on prewar statements by Bush administration officials, ignoring similar statements by leading Democrats. Therefore, the report is intended to portray the Bush administration...

"Our evidence suggests that Baghdad is strengthening a relationship with al-Qaeda that dates back to the mid-1990s, when senior Iraqi intelligence officers established contact with the network in several countries." "We have some evidence that Iraqi Intelligence has been in contact with elements in the northeastern area. And the al-Qaeda operatives there are in regular contact with other operatives located in Baghdad. The Iraqi government has also received information from other sources alerting it to the presence of al-Qaeda operatives in Baghdad.""We have hard evidence that al-Qaeda is operating in several locations in Iraq with the knowledge and acquiescence of...

WASHINGTON - A new Senate report gives a fresh shot of adrenaline to the election-year debate over the Iraq war. President Bush and his top officials deliberately misrepresented secret intelligence to make the case to invade Iraq, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The panel put a new spin on old charges, comparing claims made in five speeches by top Bush administration officials with intelligence reports. The committee says officials wrongly linked Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks and al-Qaida; claimed Iraq would give terrorist groups chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, and said Iraq was developing drone aircraft to...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration misused intelligence to build a case for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report issued Thursday. The White House exploited its ability to declassify intelligence selectively to bolster its case for war, the committee chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-West Virginia, said in the report. Senior officials disclosed and discussed sensitive intelligence reports that supported the administration's policy objectives and kept out of public discourse information that did not, he said. The report also found that the administration misled the American people about contacts between...

Just look at Syrian and Iranian interference in Lebanon, even though America did not lead the change the way it did in Iraq. And while Gaza and Beirut have fallen to the extremists, Baghdad has not. The reason is the American presence that continues to protect the democratic process. Change with support from the outside, especially the West, is a necessity. First of all, the neighbors would not let these democracies take a breath and second, democracy is a concept that emerged and evolved in the West. For the Middle East it's like importing a medicine that we didn't manufacture....

"I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq — that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11." So spoke Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) on “Fox Sunday” on November 14, 2005, who at the time of his trip was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is now its vice chairman.

By DOUGLAS J. FEITH May 27, 2008; Page A21 In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq. President Bush no longer stressed Saddam's record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president's credibility that had already been...

As the war in Iraq grows more unpopular with increasing number of Americans, Democrats in collusion with the liberal mainstream media, continue to politicize the war by distorting the facts. Claim that President Bush lied about WMD in order to implement a grand strategy by neo-cons well before he took office supposedly aimed at using military force to install democratic regimes friendly to the U.S. throughout the Middle East. However, the left has never adequately answered the following question. If Bush knew there was no WMD, why would he send 150,000 troops into Iraq since his “lie” would be immediately...

BAGHDAD - Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein's best-known lieutenants, accused the Shiite-led government of seeking revenge during a trial Tuesday over the executions of dozens of Baghdad merchants in 1992. Aziz told an Iraqi court, which resumed hearing the case against him and seven co-defendants, that he was proud of being a member of Saddam's Sunni-dominated Baath party and serving under the former dictator. But chief prosecutor Adnan Ali said Aziz and his co-defendants, who include Saddam's ailing cousin known as "Chemical Ali," were responsible for the merchants' deaths and urged the court "to issue the suitable punishment that...

Iraqi security forces under Saddam Hussein executed traders for breaking price controls and then banned their families from giving them proper funerals, a witness in the trial of a top Saddam aide said on Tuesday. Ex-Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, accused of playing a role in the execution of dozens of traders, denied involvement. Aziz, who was the public face of Saddam's regime, went on trial last month. They were executed after being accused of breaking price controls imposed in the wake of U.N. sanctions on Iraq in 1990s. Aziz appeared in court wearing a grey suit and supported by...

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Tuesday he was disappointed in "flawed intelligence" before the Iraq war and was concerned that if a Democrat wins the presidency in November and withdrew troops prematurely it could "eventually lead to another attack on the United States. In an interview with Politico magazine and Yahoo News, Bush also said he gave up golf in 2003 out of respect for U.S. soldiers killed in the war, which has now lasted more than five years. "I didn't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," he said....

May 06, 2008, 4:00 a.m. Writing BlindA response to Andy McCarthy. By Laurie Mylroie In a mixed review of Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness, I criticized the book for slighting the role of states in terrorism. McCarthy’s outsize response — a 3,000-word pejorative/adjective-laden assault in National Review Online — suggests the review hit upon a significant and sensitive point. Extensive name-calling typically obscures a weak argument, or at least attempts to do so, even as this debate involves the national-security issue of the day, including why the United States is engaged in its most serious military campaign in three decades...

For over a year, we have been waging a relentless, nearly solitary battle in apprising the Congress and the American public about a billion dollar boondoggle and scandal: the lack of credible Arabic translators for our national security and intelligence agencies. As a result hundreds have been killed in Iraq from infiltration of our military and civilian intelligence agencies by agents of Islamist terrorists. Our FBI and CIA have been infiltrated by Muslim linguists who have successfully evaded polygraph tests and been able to pass on vital information to terror groups in the Middle East such as Hezbollah. Tens of...

Saddam Hussein confided to his diary that he was afraid of his American captors - because he thought he might catch HIV from them. The Iraqi tyrant, who was hanged in 2006, kept a diary following his capture by US troops three years earlier. In extracts published by the London-based Arab daily Al Hayat, he reveals that he feared catching a sexually transmitted disease from his guards. Saddam said he was concerned to find out that US military guards were using his laundry line to dry their own clothes. He wrote to them to ask them to stop but some...