Report: Syria agrees to hide Iran nukes

Followed by....

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First, cards on the table - I was convinced that SH had (actual, ready to use) WMD and supported the war. Second, regardless of this debate the allies have done the world a massive favour by removing this POS from power and putting him on trial.

However - I have long since accepted that the whole intelligence community lost the plot somewhere around the millenium and made a judgement then looked for evidence, rather than looking for evidence then making a judgement (the first will alwasy be a self serving cycle - particularly if you throw enough money at it).

Had Saddam have had WMD in any significant quantity he would have used them when we invaded. The war could only end with his loss of power which is the same as his death to a dictator. He didn't and he ended up in a rat hole then facing the hangman.

Had we have given up sanctions, taken our eyes off him, not invaded at some point in the future would he have started building WMD again? Yes. Was he lunatic enough to use them if he did? Yes. Am I therefore loosing sleep over this issue? No.

However, I think war supporters need to be careful over how we debate this issue with non war supporters to win the argument. To doggedly stick to claims that somehow all these WMD were there sounds like tin foil hat stuff now. Yess, we can point to the links of some stuff that looked like it may have been used for WMD, or stuff that was left rotting from the Iran-Iraq war era, but this is not what our intelligence told us was there. The President hit the tone exactly right when he made his speech earlier in the week. We should all follow his example.

http://www.nwyc.com/

National Write Your Congressman

However, I think war supporters need to be careful over how we debate this issue with non war supporters to win the argument.

I don't care about any debating with communists (aka the democRATS and Code Pinkos etc). They are not worth the effort. Do what it takes to win the war and let them make @sses of themselves.

We knock the crud out of the Republican Army then let the captured soldiers go instead of incarcerating them. We let insurgents pour over the Syrian and Iranian borders when we more than have the technology needed to shut those borders down.

Who's this "we" you keep talking about?

I already did my thing in Iraq.

Yep, he did and I still am. I head back right after New Year's Day. Been working there almost two years now.

Still think you know so much more about it than we do?

(OK, I'm done with him now....HAHA)

To doggedly stick to claims that somehow all these WMD were there sounds like tin foil hat stuff now.

Tell it to them...

Halabja Sarin Gas Victim

http://www.foia.cia.gov/duelfer/Iraqs_WMD_Vol3.pdf

He did have WMD.
Even ONE sarin or mustard gas shell is proof.

Had Saddam have had WMD in any significant quantity he would have used them when we invaded.

I respectfully disagree.

These are children's remains in Halabja.

This is what would have happened to the people of Baghdad if Saddam had tried to use his WMD's. I am sure the Russians talked strategic sense into Saddam.

Here is a Heritage Foundation commentator's analysis, basically explaining before the fact, why your projection as to Saddam's likely response did not come true (not that he wasn't ruthless and cruel enough to do so)... but that Saddam recognized it was militarily counterproductive.

[ I surmise Saddam's whole strategy was what we have seen, a gamble on the jihadist insurgency guerilla war tactic instead, and for the marxist Soviet-era Fifth Columnists in the West to carry his water for him....which they did in spades. Trying to undermine the Western governmental hawks. ]

Remember the IMMEDIATE Left Wing brou-haha over the unfound WMD's? Even burning their agents in place in the CIA and State Dept. like Valerie Pflame and Joe Wilson?!:

Highly relevant are the considerations laid out by Dexter Ingram, the Heritage analyst, reported well before the Battle for Baghdad:

We recently used a Department of Defense computer model that analyzes the consequence of a nuclear biological or chemical attack (one that accounts for population and weather) to consider one possible scenario. The scenario showed 75 artillery rounds carrying VX nerve gas launched within 10 miles outside of Baghdad under current weather conditions would have little or no effect on coalition troops, but up to 2,200 unprotected civilian living along the Tigris river would be killed and another 33,000 could be injured.

Another danger would be posed to the regular Iraqi army. Depending on the weather, they could find themselves being exposed to an agent released by their own leadership. The ill-prepared Iraqi army is spread throughout Iraq with little or no means of communication, thus making them vulnerable to a breeze carrying sarin gas or some other nerve agent.

Unfortunately, they wouldn't be alone. Such an attack could affect tens of thousands of people, depending on the weather and how the wind is blowing during a release. Most of those killed and badly hurt by whatever poisons Hussein uses would undoubtedly be the men, women and children who live in and around Baghdad.

As Saddam well knows, civilians have no protection against chemical or biological assault. But coalition troops do. Which raises a chilling possibility: That the Iraqi dictator could well decide, now that no hope of escape exists for him and his inner circle, to deploy the ultimate "scorched earth" defense. If he does, God help the poor people of Iraq.

However, I think war supporters need to be careful over how we debate this issue with non war supporters to win the argument.

Yes, we need to carefully, and with unceasing vitriol denounce the BIG LIE that he didn't have them. Goebbels would have been proud of these truth-denying scum...

Bump.

Yess, we can point to the links of some stuff that looked like it may have been used for WMD, or stuff that was left rotting from the Iran-Iraq war era, but this is not what our intelligence told us was there.

This is seriously misrepresenting the facts.

Richard Miniter's book Disinformation gets it right. He documents the Big Lie campaign.

The only way we fail in the PR war for the truth is to fail to fight...or to unilaterally disarm as Colin Powell and George Tenet had GW doing. Powell and Richard Clarke also persist in reiterating these sniping attacks against the facts.

... and made a judgement then looked for evidence, rather than looking for evidence then making a judgement (the first will alwasy be a self serving cycle - particularly if you throw enough money at it).

Some key findings totally undermine your thesis with regard to our intel deficiency. The answer is prosaic, and all the more embarassing because it is in plain sight. Saddam, and his Russian advisers, were simply more clever and cunning than the American MSM Left gives him credit for.

Some telling points from Disinformation (although it should be pointed out that 9 miles of Iraqi Intel docs remain unreviewed, and Kay's team never left the Green Zone according to soldiers on the ground):

David Kay
Kay ran the Iraq Survey Group, a 1,400-man team charged with scour-ing Iraq for stockpiles of WMD. He did not find any. Yet he told a joint session of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in October 2003 that the Iraq Survey Group had “discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq had concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002, including chemical, biological, and nuclear experi-ments.” Kay testified that Iraq had tried to obtain missiles from North Korea on several occasions. He also said that his work was hampered by “six principal factors,” of which the first two were that “from birth, all of Iraq’s WMD activities were highly compartmentalized within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and terror and with deception and denial built into each program,” and “deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans-to-post conflict.”26 What was being dispersed and hidden if there was “no evidence” that Iraq had WMD?

Even anti-war opponents such as Hans Blix's own report makes it clear that something is amiss with regard to the supposedly nonexistent WMD's:

They point to lack of evidence and inconsistencies, which raise question marks, which must be straightened out if weapons dossiers are to be closed and confidence is to arise.” If one keeps reading Blix’s reports, darker realities emerge. The inspectors could not account for Iraq’s 6,500 chemical weapons (which were missing) and couldn’t prove that Iraq had destroyed the anthrax it admitted it had produced. In short, according to Blix, some WMD were most likely still in Iraq’s arsenal. Blix said that inspectors had found evidence that Iraq had been producing VX nerve gas as well as a “mustard gas predecessor,” thiodiglycol.

Here instead is what NEEDS to be trumpeted in Presidential Televised Awards conferences...in PRIME TIME..., with MEDALS to the officers:

Polish general Marek Dukaczewski, Poland’s military intelligence chief, revealed that troops in the Polish-patrolled sector of Iraq had received tips from Iraqis that chemical weapons were sold to terror-ists on the black market. The weapons had been buried to avoid detection, the general told the BBC.5 Polish military officials bought seventeen chemical-weapons warheads from Iraqis for $5,000 each to keep them from Iraq’s so-called insurgents.6 “An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine,” the general said. “All of our activ-ity was accelerated at appropriating these warheads.”7 Tests confirmed that some of the warheads contained cyclosarin, a nerve agent five times more powerful than sarin. These chemical weapons were sup-posed to have been completely destroyed during the 1991–1998 UN inspector regime. Clearly, some WMD survived.
➢U.S. soldiers stormed into a warehouse in Mosul, Iraq, on August 8, 2005, and were surprised to find 1,500 gallons of chemical agents. It was the largest chemical weapons lab found in Iraq.8 The intelligence community remains divided over the origin of those chemical weapons (either from inside Iraq or outside) and whether they were made during Saddam’s regime or after.
➢When a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. convoy on May 17, 2004, it was found to contain the nerve agent sarin.9 Army Brigadier Gen-eral Mark Kimmitt told reporters that an “improvised explosive” was rigged to a 155 mm artillery shell that contained sarin. The shell was a “binary chemical projectile,” in which the two ingredients that pro-duce sarin are separated by a propeller blade that spins while the shell is in flight, mixing the deadly gas to full potency. Since the chemical weapons shell was used as a bomb, and not fired from the barrel of an artillery piece, the internal rotor did not spin and the deadly agent was not widely dispersed. As a result, Kimmitt explained, only traces of sarin were produced and released. The soldiers were briefly hospital-ized and decontaminated. Again, all such chemical weapons warheads were supposed to be destroyed in 1991—yet Saddam’s WMD still threaten the lives of American troops to this day.

"Yes, we need to carefully, and with unceasing vitriol denounce the BIG LIE that he didn't have them. Goebbels would have been proud of these truth-denying scum..."

Do you include the President as part of this conspiracy and 'truth-denying scum' jibe?

Quoted from the whitehouse: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051219-2.html

"THE PRESIDENT: Everybody thought there was weapons of mass destruction, and there weren't any. I felt the same way. We looked at the intelligence and felt certain that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Intelligence agencies around the world felt the same way, by the way. Members of the United States Congress looked at the National Intelligence Estimate -- same intelligence estimate I looked at -- and came to the same conclusion, Wendell.

Any scientist will tell you that once you become obsessed with a hypothesis you will find the evidence you believe proves it, and go paranoid when it doesn't stand peer review. You can post links left right and centre from all kinds of both dubious and credible sources, with a million agendas (most of which is just to find something interesting enough to get published). Me? I'll go with the President.

Yes.

A'hem. Why do you think he has lost so much confidence on the right?

Why do you think the 16 words are STILL in 'question'?

Place not your faith in princes.

I will let the evidence speak for me. And it wasn't 'dubious' or agenda-driven.

Instead, the President has damaged HIS OWN credibility more by his post-invasion smarmy cave-in conduct, rather than the administration's briefings in the run-up to the invasion. It is frankly as if he really doesn't want the job, and doesn't have the stomach for a fight against a cascade of Big Liars..

Oh well. Have a happy christmas.

(Do they make Santa hats in tin foil?)

Merry Christmas yourself.

You don't seem to get it, do you. We really need to go after the Left's Disinformation operations, and you would give up on the strongest area where we can make our case OVERWHELMING.

The polls speak more loudly as to who was the political tin-foil hat wearing fools. Bush, Rove and Card have everybody wearing PC tinfoil hats. And what happened? They sank to 36% in the polls when they should have been at 80%.

This, BushBotIsm you are espousing does not serve any kind of conservative cause well. Especially not the War On Terror. The administration has been proven to be relatively inept because of its politcial blinders and handcuffs, and impotent as a War Command. The liberal inclination...at the top... to let PC rule has ultimately sabotaged everything he thought he could accomplish just by getting up and having his day start at his desk at 7:00 a.m., and going to bed at 9:00 pm.

Despite your inclination to lamely give up and GO ALONG WITH A BLATANT surrender to the Fifth Column media's temporarily successful DISINFORMATION operation (as has the Administration)...the serious adults don't. Rummy needs to be backed to the hilt, and not constantly undermined by the political side of the administration.

Let me give you a further example why we in the Right have little respect for this administration's previous conduct of any kind of political PR campaign...they simply refuse to clean house, or aggressively defend even influence operations against the enemy in the field of operations! Frank Gaffney has a devastating number and depth of stories to tell in that regard in the War on Terror, here is just one recently reported one from three weeks ago:


	December 07, 2005, 1:19 p.m. The Political Front Information is an important tool on the road to victory. In recent days, the prospects of the war for the free world have been buffeted by hysterical reactions to reports that the U.S. military has been secretly paying to place stories in the Iraqi press. The dust-up has caused panic in some circles, with congressmen demanding investigations and officials scurrying for cover. The result, for the moment at least, is an American rout in the war of ideas. This debacle evidently came about because an unidentified military public-affairs officer in Iraq decided to leak to the Los Angeles Times classified information about a sensitive, but highly effective, political-warfare program. It seems that the Lincoln Group, an American company specializing in strategic communications, had been contracted by the Pentagon to ensure that the Iraqi people could obtain information about progress being made in their country — not just be fed a steady diet of demoralizing reports prompted by lethal enemy attacks. Evidently the public-affairs officer objected to the fact that this program did not advertise the provenance of articles that helped provide a more balanced perspective on the struggle in Iraq. Another objection was that Iraqi journalists received American money to get such information into print. The leak precipitated howls of righteous indignation from Western journalists and other critics of the Bush policy in Iraq. The suggestion was that the government was covertly dis-informing news organizations and their audiences for its political purposes. Recent History Repeats Itself The present brouhaha is an all-too-familiar one. In fact, it appears to reprise an earlier effort by Pentagon public-affairs personnel to use highly prejudicial leaks to shut down information operations and other "political warfare" activities outside their purview and control. As documented in my new book, War Footing: Ten Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World , a fledgling program to counter Iranian government propaganda in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein's propaganda throughout the Middle East and South Asia, and disinformation from radical Islamist clerics was launched by Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001. It was to be run by a new Defense Department organization called the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI). OSI was meant to be a component of a broader, government-wide strategic communications campaign, with the mission of assisting government agencies in crafting policy regarding the military aspects of information operations. The new office planned to establish access to information for those in regions dominated by enemy propaganda, such as the jihadist schools of Pakistan — the most fertile recruiting fields for terrorism. Its concept of operations included unique and innovative approaches, developed both internally and with outside experts whose creativity was unhampered by the stifling constraints of bureaucracy. Then as now, some in the Pentagon's civilian and uniformed hierarchy felt threatened by the sort of wide-ranging mandate, out-of-the-box thinking, and bureaucratic agility Secretary Rumsfeld had wisely seen fit to encourage in the Strategic Influence team. On February 13, 2002, an OSI official reported to a senior official in the Pentagon chief 's office: We've had considerable resistance to our plans from the staff within the Pentagon itself. There is an inability to recognize influence campaigns directed at the terrorist's support and recruitment as a legitimate military function. The most resistance comes from Public Affairs and the General Counsel, who seem to have forgotten that five months ago an airliner crashed into our building killing nearly 200 people! I would characterize their objections as looking for reasons not to do something instead of helping us to proceed. [Emphasis in original.] In that instance, the bureaucrats succeeded in strangling the incipient OSI in the crib. In particular, then-Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, who had opposed the Office of Strategic Influence from its inception, succeeded in sabotaging the project by informing the New York Times (incorrectly) that OSI planned to plant lies in the foreign media. American journalists seized upon the Times's report to suggest that the effect, whether intended or not, would be to dis-inform this country's press as well. Clarke then compounded the damage done by her false allegations by telling, in her capacity as the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, OSI officials not to try to set the record straight, thus ensuring that all the news coverage and commentary would be one-sided and negative. Within days, the organization's reputation had been so badly compromised in the press that it had to be shut down. Worse still, the episode made this vital mission so politically radioactive that no comparable institutionalized effort has subsequently been launched to perform it. Penetrating the Iron Curtain Now, those who would deny the United States any capacity for political warfare have evidently set their sights on the Lincoln Group and its efforts in Iraq. They cavil that it violates the principles of a free press for U.S.-prepared material to be disseminated without a Made-in-America label on it. Evidently, they have forgotten that the last time we waged political warfare effectively against a totalitarian ideology bent on our destruction — namely, during the Cold War — this country spent many millions of dollars over decades operating surrogate broadcasting operations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Like Lincoln's products today, those organizations disseminated the truth to people behind the Iron Curtain, without acknowledging that it was made possible by the American taxpayer. While there are, to be sure, far more independent media outlets in Iraq today than were permitted in the Soviet bloc, the dangers associated with publishing or broadcasting the truth are no less real. In that connection, it is worth noting that the monies secretly paid to Iraqi journalists courageous enough in the face of terrorist death threats to bring factual information to their countrymen are not bribes. These payments make it possible for the journalists to provide security and death benefits for their families in the event they are killed — something none of their foreign colleagues reporting in-country would dream of doing without. The absurdity — not to say strategic folly — of denying the United States such well-established and effective tools to help protect and promote freedom is all the more apparent in light of fresh evidence of our enemies' use of political warfare against us. On Monday, the controversial Saudi billionaire and royal, Prince al-Walid bin Talal, made a stunning revelation during a panel discussion at a conference in Dubai on "the Arab and World Media." According to Middle East Online, after criticizing the "pro-Israel" bias of the U.S. media, the Prince "accused Arabs of not being pro-active in fighting the allegedly slanted media." Prince al-Walid then proceeded to reveal an example of the sort of pro-activity he has in mind. He recently purchased roughly 5 percent of the voting stock of NewsCorp, the parent company of Fox News. As Middle Ease Online reported: During last month's street protests in France, the U.S. television network Fox — owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in which Al-Walid himself has shares — ran a banner saying: "Muslim riots." "I picked up the phone and called Murdoch.. . . . (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty," [the Prince] said. "Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots." The fact that millions of dollars are being invested by a Saudi royal for the purpose of waging political warfare against this country — in this case, by his own admission, to effect news coverage that could potentially be negative for Muslims — helpfully clarifies our present situation: We should honor, not excoriate, those who are seeking to wield political-warfare instruments effectively on our behalf — a job made all the more important by our foes' effective use of these instruments against us. In the final analysis, the future of Iraq will be determined by the people of that country. Their willingness to take risks to deny their country to those who would destroy them and us will depend critically upon their assessment of the evidence that progress is being made in that direction. Similarly, the American people must understand the nature of the enemies we face — and the totalitarian ideology that largely animates them. This will require all of us to do a better job of recognizing — and countering — their use of political-warfare instruments against the free world. — Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is a contributor to NRO and the lead author of War Footing: Ten Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World (Naval Institute Press, 2005).



	http://www.nationalreview.com/gaffney/gaffney.asp

Recent History Repeats Itself

Penetrating the Iron Curtain