Posted on 02/05/2003 1:26:20 AM PST by BigWaveBetty
Edited on 07/12/2004 4:00:45 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The Bush administration will disclose new information to the United Nations today on Iraq's mobile biological weapons facilities, as well as evidence linking Baghdad to the al Qaeda terrorist group, U.S. officials said.
The intelligence will be provided to the world body by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell as part of the administration's effort to win support for military action to disarm Iraq of its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
I had hoped everyone at the Guild might appreciate our very own Powell Report Live Thread - started here in the cheese hole so we're not hassled for any reason. From chatter to "don't post that here!" to "how dare you come on to this thread and blah, blah, blah.
At the end of Powell's report and beyond we will have much information to look back at and reference.
Post pictures, post information, post what you think about Powell's report, we appreciate it all.
Link to moutanineers post with all the names, countries and contacts. Thanks!
THE DECISION TO allow Secretary of State Colin Powell to use the electronic intercepts in his speech next Wednesday to the U.N. was described by U.S. intelligence officials as extraordinary. Electronic intercepts by the NSA are considered the most jealously guarded of all U.S. intelligence secrets and government officials are normally loath to even refer to their existence for fear of tipping off targets and drying up invaluable sources of information.
But in this case, officials said, the intercepts are so damning and dramatic that officials say their release outweighs the potential harm—especially given the increased likelihood that the United States will shortly be launching an invasion of Iraq anyway.
“Hold onto your hat. We’ve got it,” said one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the evidence gathered by the NSA.
For the past two months, ever since the U.N. inspectors re-entered Iraq and began searching for weapons of mass destruction, the NSA has been closely monitoring the conversations of Iraqi officials. The NSA intercepts establish conclusively that the Iraqis have been “hiding stuff” from the inspectors, the U.S. intelligence official said. “They’re saying things like, ‘Move that,’ ‘Don’t be reporting that’ and ‘Ha! Can you believe they missed that’,” the official said. “It’s that kind of stuff.”
Other officials cautioned, however, against viewing the intercepts as the long-sought “smoking gun” in the search for Iraq’s purported stockpile of banned weapons. There may still be some ambiguity about what the Iraqis are referring to in some of the conversations. Some of the material being concealed may be precursors to building weapons, or even documents and computer disks as opposed to actual chemical or biological weapons themselves. The transcripts “show that there’s been a pattern of deception,” said another official, who had been briefed on the evidence. “But does that make the case that you have to go to war?” [translation: I'm hiding under my bed if you people start a war!]
One official who had reviewed a transcript of the conversations disputed suggestions that the Iraqis were “joking” about deceiving the inspectors, describing them as “straightforward” discussions that nonetheless clearly showed concealment by the Iraqis in their dealings with the inspectors. A White House aide said the electronic intercepts were only one part of a much broader picture that would include satellite photos and other evidence showing Iraqi noncompliance. “There won’t be a smoking gun, but when people hear it all you’ll see a burning forest,” said one senior administration official.
Powell’s speech will contain “a lot of different pieces of information that add up to painting a compelling picture,” an administration official said. Another official said the administration had evidence that Iraq had set up “deception teams” that were orchestrating the concealment of weapons from the inspectors.
Officials at the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and Vice President Cheney’s office were said to be “working shoulder to shoulder reviewing raw data” to determine precisely how much information can be declassified for use in Powell’s report to the U.N. scheduled for next week.
While precise details have yet to be worked out, officials described the decision to use the intercepts at all as stunning—especially in an administration that has prided itself on its commitment to secrecy in national-security matters. One official said next week’s speech by Powell will amount to the most significant release of this kind of sensitive information since President Ronald Reagan revealed NSA intercepts that linked Muammar Kaddafi to the 1986 La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin.
One argument for releasing the intercepts, officials said, is that the normal reasons against doing so—tipping off the Iraqis to phone lines or cell phones that were being monitored—may not matter if the U.S. military is about to invade anyway. Another argument is that full disclosure, or at least substantial disclosure of the intercepts, will persuade an increasingly skeptical public in the United States and other Western nations about the nature of the case against the Iraqis.
“I’m all for it,” said Rep. Jane Harman of California, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “It’s very important to have popular and multinational support for this effort.” Harmon said the administration’s body of evidence, which has been shared with the intelligence committees, is strong enough that it will accomplish that purpose. If so, Harmon said, she was still hopeful that Iraq would be forced into compliance and war could be averted.
The White House has been regularly receiving the NSA transcripts ever since the inspectors returned to Iraq late last year. The damning nature of some of the transcripts, officials said, explain President Bush’s occasional outbursts of anger at the Iraqis, as well as the willingness by Powell—who had previously cautioned against war—to lay out a damning picture of Iraqi noncompliance in next week’s speech. One official who had dinner with Powell recently said the secretary remarked how “we have a stronger case than many people realize.”
SADDAM Hussein's senior bodyguard has fled with details of Iraq's secret arsenal.
His revelations have supported US President George W. Bush's claim there is enough evidence from UN inspectors to justify going to war.
Abu Hamdi Mahmoud has provided Israeli intelligence with a list of sites that the inspectors have not visited.
They include:
AN underground chemical weapons facility at the southern end of the Jadray Peninsula in Baghdad;
A SCUD assembly area near Ramadi. The missiles come from North Korea;
TWO underground bunkers in Iraq's Western Desert. These contain biological weapons.
William Tierney, a former UN weapons inspector who has continued to gather information on Saddam's arsenal, said Mahmoud's information is "the smoking gun".
"Once the inspectors go to where Mahmoud has pointed them, then it's all over for Saddam," Tierney said.
Tierney, who has high-level contacts in Washington that go to the White House, said the information we publish today on Mahmoud's revelations "checks out, absolutely checks out".
Mahmoud was a mem ber of the elite unit that protects Saddam.
It is called the Murasiq Qun – the "Inner Circle".
He was known as "The Gatekeeper".
Mahmoud is a muscular Saddam lookalike often photographed standing behind Saddam when he is seated, or to his left when on the move.
Last week, Mahmoud was being debriefed at a high-security base in Israel's Negev Desert.
Ariel Sharon, the country's hard-line prime minister, has only allowed snippets of Mahmoud's sensational claims to be shared with the CIA and MI6.
"Sharon intends to shatter the growing anti-war movement," a source close to Mr Sharon said.
"He plans to call all those European leaders who are wavering to let them know how Saddam has continued to fool Hans Blix and his weapons inspectors."
Mahmoud's revelations include locations of five bunkers buried beneath man-made sand dunes.
Stockpiled in the bunkers are warheads identical to the empty shell cases found two weeks ago by the UN inspectors.
Mahmoud said those shells were on their way to be refilled and stored in the bunkers.
A transcript from his debriefing includes:
"Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are also concealed in a tunnel complex deep beneath the sewers of Baghdad and in an underground complex in Ouja, to the north of Tikrit.
"The complex was built five years ago with help from Chinese engineers.
"The entrance to the site is through a house in Tikrit. It is the home of one of Saddam's cousins and is more than half a mile from where the weapons are stored."
In another excerpt from his debriefing, Mahmoud boasts: "I was inside the innermost circle where Saddam eats and sleeps.
"I was among the handful of bodyguards closest to him.
"Very few people are allowed close to Saddam.
"Many of the TV images you see of him were taken years ago. Most people now only speak to him over the phone. He usually calls them.
"If they have to call him back with information he wants, it is passed through his sons (Uday and Qusay) or (Deputy Prime Minister) Tariq Aziz.
"All those close to him have codes, which they use to access the outer circle. But even they can only come so close to Saddam before there is a cut-off point – the Inner Circle. Even Tariq Aziz is checked to see if he is carrying weapons.
"Saddam knows fortunes are being offered to have him assassinated."
Saddam's paranoia increased after Uday, his eldest son, narrowly escaped assassination when gunmen riddled his car with bullets in 1996. Uday was partially paralysed and uses a wheelchair.
To avoid falling victim to even his own bodyguards, Saddam is a walking arsenal.
"He has concealed guns all over his body," Mahmoud said.
"He also has panic buttons to press if he even suspects somebody is about to attack him."
Israeli intelligence sources have hinted that the deal with Mahmoud included smuggling his family out of Iraq.
Mossad agents have done this before.
At the start of Saddam's reign of terror, they persuaded an Iraqi pilot to fly his Russian fighter to Israel – after spiriting out his wife and children.
PUFFY-faced polemicist Christopher "Hellbound" Hitchens claims Bill Clinton, whom he calls a "lousy crook," was working for the CIA when they were at Oxford together. "I think he was a double," Hitchens tells Washington-based right-wing quarterly Doublethink. "Someone was giving information to [the CIA] about the antiwar draft resisters, and I think it was probably him . . . I had every reason to think that Clinton was a creep and a phony.">p> Clinton's rep declined to comment on the allegations.
Meanwhile, Hitchens says he and the former prez "had a girlfriend in common" at the time - although he didn't know it then - "who's since become a radical lesbian. >b>My money's on hillary.] So one of us was doing something wrong, or right."
British-born Hitch goes on to attack Al Gore as a "humble, hollowed-out, humiliated figure," declaring, "I [don't] want a zombie to be president of the United States."
He particularly takes issue with Gore's and Hillary Clinton's stance on Iraq, seething, "[Bleep] them. I really mean it. I have nothing but contempt for them. We are risking people's lives, and all they can be is flippant . . . The thought of these people in power frightens me."
And as for the possibility that Gore or Hillary might yet make a bid for the White House, Hitchens sneers, "I just hope they all get some sort of wasting disease before they can run."
He rips into jokes about President Bush's intellect as "another liberal snig that annoys me a lot these days," adding, "The fact has to be faced: the intellectual candlepower of this administration is a great deal brighter than the Clinton administration . . . [and] the level of professionalism is very much higher."
Speaking of Clinton, the ex-prez will be joining the Rolling Stones onstage [God save us!] at a "free" concert tomorrow in L.A. to raise awareness about global warming. Unlike the band, however, his altruism is going unrewarded.
As we reported last week, megabucks producer/director Steve Bing is paying the Stones' expenses by forking over a sizable check to the concert's sponsor, the Natural Resources Defense Council. But Clinton is getting bupkis for his speech, his rep assures us.
Maybe he needs the Stones' agent. Page Six
Life is like a box of socialist, you never know what you're gonna get.
The Saudi embassy quietly provided the wife of a terror suspect a passport and transit out of the United States in November, after she was subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury in New York investigating her husband's possible links to the al Qaeda terrorist network, diplomatic and law enforcement sources said.
If Dims filibuster, they still lose. (Wash Post Editorial Page wags its finger at them today for their obstruction. LINK)
Ha Ha. That "lightweight" in the White House sandbagged 'em again!
Predicting a big Double win Day for Dubya!
I’m against war because I’m not convinced Iraq is harboring weapons of mass destruction, but even if they are I’m against war because the UN has not authorised it, but if they do I’m against war because an invasion would prove a military fiasco, but even if it didn’t I’m against war because toppling Saddam would destabilise Iraq, but even if it didn’t I’m against war because it will antagonise moderate Arab opinion, but even if.......I'm an idiot because...
Even the NY Times now acknowledges that goody-goody, elitist environmental & animal rights whacko-ism has backfired:
"The War Against the Fur Trade Backfires, Endangering a Way of Life [AND the environment!]"
Seems the Native Canadian Inuit tribes can no longer make a living trapping fur so they've turned to oil & gas development in formerly pristine wildernesses.
Oh, those unintended consequences.
Well, this certainly will give Dubya second thoughts:
Kate Moss is lending her inconsiderable weight to Fashion Against the War, a clique of British pacifists including Jude Law, who are rallying in London next month. By that time, Baghdad could be under U.S. occupation
Intellectual and physical lightweights, they probably wouldn't even be adequate human shields (though I'd be the last to stop them from volunteering). A surprising, but welcome, quote from one of the Hollyweirds:
At Monday's AmFAR dinner, this same Richard Gere startled chairperson Hillary Clinton and the black-tie audience when, speaking publicly about the fight against AIDS, he said: "And there was no help from your husband, Senator, in his eight years in the White House." The gasp could be heard along the Potomac. Cindy Adams
Clinton sycophant Liz Smith also noted Gere's comment and added: "Mrs. Clinton brushed off Gere's inappropriate dig - she's brushed off worse - and gave a typically terrific speech. The woman is a model of composure and intelligence. The event raised more than a million bucks for AmFAR."
• Our friends at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have outdone themselves this time, sending a deferential letter to Yasser Arafat about a Jan. 26 Jerusalem bombing in which a donkey -- but no human beings -- died after being strapped with explosives and detonated.
"Your Excellency," PETA President Ingrid Newkirk wrote in the note faxed on Monday to Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. "We have received many calls and letters from people shocked at the bombing. . . . All nations behave abominably in many ways when they are fighting their enemies, and animals are always caught in the crossfire. The U.S. Army abandoned thousands of loyal service dogs in Vietnam. Al-Qaeda and the British government have both used animals in hideously cruel biological weaponry tests. We watched on television as stray cats in your own compound fled as best they could from the Israeli bulldozers. . . . If you have the opportunity, will you please add to your burdens my request that you appeal to all those who listen to you to leave the animals out of this conflict?"
Yesterday we asked Newkirk if she considered asking Arafat to persuade those who listen to him to stop blowing up people as well. "It's not my business to inject myself into human wars," she replied.
Israeli Embassy spokesman Mark Regev declined to comment on PETA's plea, but told us: "I find it ironic that the Palestinian leaders choose to send donkeys to kill civilians. Surely, the Palestinian people deserve better than the current bunch of asses who run their affairs." washpost
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