Iraq nuclear bomb-making material found in scrap - and What David Kay really said about WMD.

PHILADELPHIA -- Workers at a Dutch scrap metals company discovered a key ingredient for manufacturing nuclear bombs within a cargo of scrap steel bought from the Middle East.

Dock sensors at the Jewometaal Stainless Processing BV facility in Rotterdam, Netherlands, helped workers locate a small canister containing uranium oxide, also known as "yellowcake," an essential ingredient for manufacturing nuclear warheads, according to the Associated Press.

Scientists later confirmed that the material was indeed uranium oxide, which has no other use outside of bomb making.

According to published reports, the discovery was made Dec. 16 but the announcement was delayed by international authorities attempting to trace the sale.

A Jewometaal spokesman told reporters that the Jordanian scrap broker who handled the transaction disavowed knowledge of the material but confirmed that the scrap steel originated in Iraq.

President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq attempted to purchase yellowcake from suppliers in Niger, a claim that later came under fire when documents used by U.S. intelligence agencies as the basis for the statement turned out to be forged.

Saddam's WMD hidden in Syria, says Iraq survey chief By Con Coughlin (Filed: 25/01/2004)

David Kay, the former head of the coalition's hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, yesterday claimed that part of Saddam Hussein's secret weapons programme was hidden in Syria.

In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Dr Kay, who last week resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before last year's war to overthrow Saddam.

"We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."

Dr Kay's comments will intensify pressure on President Bashar Assad to clarify the extent of his co-operation with Saddam's regime and details of Syria's WMD programme. Mr Assad has said that Syria was entitled to defend itself by acquiring its own biological and chemical weapons arsenal.

Syria was one of Iraq's main allies in the run-up to the war and hundreds of Iraqi officials - including members of Saddam's family - were given refuge in Damascus after the collapse of the Iraqi dictator's regime. Many of the foreign fighters responsible for conducting terrorist attacks against the coalition are believed to have entered Iraq through Syria.

A Syrian official last night said: "These allegations have been raised many times in the past by Israeli officials, which proves that they are false."

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Plus http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/25/wirq25.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/25/ixnewstop.html

The assertion that Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction prior to last year’s liberation has been rendered absurd – by United Nations weapons inspectors.

Demetrius Perricos, acting chairman of UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), recently disclosed that his inspectors have been busily tracking shipments of illicit Iraqi WMD components around the world.

The Associated Press announced that UNMOVIC inspectors have found dozens of engines from banned al-Samoud 2 (SA2) missiles, which were shipped out of Iraq as “scrap metal.” Most recently, UNMOVIC agents found 20 SA-2 engines in Jordan, along with a great deal of other WMD materials. Officials discovered an identical engine in a Rotterdam port in the Netherlands and believe as many as a dozen extra SA-2 missile engines alone have been transported out of Iraq and remain unaccounted for. Inspectors believe at least some of these engines have also reached Turkey and hope to search Turkish ports in the near future.

UNMOVIC estimates as much as 1,000 tons of scrap metal a day are leaving Iraq bound for foreign shores.

Besides the SA-2 engines, inspectors also found Iraqi “dual use” technology in Jordan, items purportedly employed in civilian affairs that can be used to create or enhance deadly weapons systems. The New York Times noted that among those items were “fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel - all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons.”

UN spokesman Ewen Buchanan put the threat of “dual use” technology into perspective. “You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter,” Buchanan said. “You can also use it to breed anthrax.”

Before the war, Saddam’s regime cast its possession of “dual use” materials in the most innocent light, a ruse familiar to students of the Cold War. UNMOVIC wisely rejected his sunny assessment.

Today, UNMOVIC inspectors are deeply concerned about the possibility of WMD proliferation. A Reuters news story captures their distress:

‘A number of sites which contained dual-use equipment that was previously monitored by UN inspectors has [sic.] been systematically taken apart,’ said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the New York-based inspectors. ‘The question this raises is what happened to equipment known to have been there.

‘The existence of missile engines originating in Iraq among scrap in Europe may affect the accounting of proscribed engines known to have been in Iraq's possession,’ UNMOVIC said.

The report said the U.N. inspectors also found papers showing illegal contracts by Iraq for a missile guidance system, laser ring gyroscopes and a variety of production and testing equipment not previously disclosed.

Many of the “dual use” components UNMOVIC found in foreign ports had been previous tagged by UN inspectors in Iraq before the war. And transfers are taking place rapidly. During his presentation, Perricos showed the Security Council a picture of a fully developed missile site in May 2003 that had been entirely torn down by February of this year.

Perricos’ June 9 testimony is made all the more credible by the fact that he is hardly a neo-con stalwart. USA Today described his mindset just three months ago: “Demetrius Perricos, acting head of the United Nations weapons inspection program, can't disguise his satisfaction that almost a year after the invasion of Iraq, U.S. inspectors have found the same thing that their much-maligned UN counterparts did before the war: no banned weapons.” Today, Perricos’ smile has disappeared.

(It should be noted that Perricos was honest enough to say the Iraqis were dragging their feet in destroying banned missiles just a month before Operation Iraqi Freedom began. He said at the time that Saddam viewed a partial and halting disarmament as a “way by which the possibility of war is being further avoided.” He added: “I cannot tell whether he genuinely believes in the inspection process or not.” Evidently, the fact that Saddam expelled all UN inspectors during the Clinton administration wasn’t a clue to the UN’s Sherlock Holmes.)

These revelations came during a closed meeting of the UN Security Council held last Wednesday, June 9. However, the investigations are not new. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) launched its own probe into Iraqi WMD transfers a full six months ago, when a Dutch scrap metal company discovered five pounds of yellowcake uranium ore in Rotterdam. The sample was shipped from Jordan but Jordanian officials said the metal originated in Iraq. (Perhaps this is the yellowcake that atomic sleuth Amb. Joe Wilson insisted Iraq never purchased from Niger.) IAEA Director Mohammed El Baradei warned two months ago that evidence of Saddam’s WMDs is being shipped abroad.

Jordan has been the recipient of Iraqi WMDs in the past. Most recently, Jordan seized 20 tons of chemical weapons while foiling an al-Qaeda plot to kill 80,000 people. The stockpile they uncovered contained 70 different kinds of chemical agents, including Sarin and VX gas. (Remember, last month Iraqi insurgents lobbed two chemical weapons at U.S. troops armed with Sarin and mustard gas.)

On April 17, Jordanian King Abdallah claimed these poisons came from Syria – but experts say Syria only has the capacity to produce small amounts of these weapons, not the 20 tons al-Qaeda possessed. Significantly, David Kay and others have said Syria acted as a depository for Saddam’s WMDs. Former Justice Department official John Loftus has made a compelling case that even more WMDs are presently buried in Syria. And these are merely the latest in a long line of WMD discoveries, inside Iraq and out.

You may be forgiven if this is news to you: The mainstream media have chosen to ignore or downplay the significance of the UN’s vindication of President Bush’s policies. In fact, the predictably left-leaning Reuters news service blamed these WMD shipments…on America. Reuters wrote that “the U.S.-led occupation force” had not adequately “protected sites or items that inspectors tagged before the war because of their potential use in weapons of mass destruction.”

Apparently, one must live in Australia to get the truth. The Sunday Times’ headline? “UN uncovers banned weapons.”

The discovery of banned WMD engines should forever silence those who believe Saddam had no stockpile of weapons, or that all such stockpiles were destroyed before the war. Saddam gassed his own people. He had WMDs that miraculously ended up in the hands of Jordanian al-Qaeda terrorists. And now we find his pre-war armory of chemical and biological weapons, including anthrax agents, is being shipped around the world. The fact that these transfers have taken place in an independent Iraq should only reinforce the righteousness of toppling Saddam. In a post-Saddam Iraq, these weapons are being found in shipyards in the Netherlands and Jordan; had Saddam stayed in power, more and more of them may have ended up in the hands of Osama bin Laden. UNMOVIC’s finding is simply further evidence that Operation Iraqi Freedom was justified – and the opposition was willfully ignorant of the threat Saddam Hussein posed to American security.

May as well throw this on the table to:

More Chemical Weapons in Iraq

Mustard and sarin traces found on improvised bombs

Oct. 4, 2004
WORLD NET DAILY

Another chemical weapon has been discovered in Iraq – a 122-mm Borak rocket warhead containing sarin traces, according to an exclusive report in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence newsletter published by WorldNetDaily.com.

The warhead was found earlier this month, and U.S. military commanders believe there are more to be found.

In fact, according to G2B's military sources, chemical attacks are expected in Baghdad.

In May, at least two other projectiles were found with traces of chemical weapons – mustard gas and sarin.

On May 2, the U.S. Explosive Ordnance Disposal team found an improvised explosive device in the Baghdad area. It was later found to be a 155-mm round with a cracked nose in the fuze-well area. The technical escort unit performed testing using a mass spectrometer and found traces of sulfur mustard.

The Army concluded the projectile was most likely an old Iraqi round from the Iran-Iraq war era and not one improvised by anti-U.S. terrorists.

In addition, in a totally separate incident on May 15, the same disposal team found another 155-mm projectile in the Baghdad area that tested positive for the nerve agent sarin. In this case, the round was set up as an IED, but it is not clear the terrorists were aware of the nerve agent inside the projectile.

Again the origin of the round is unknown, but it, too, is believed to be from the Iran-Iraq war era.

In addition, military sources say there has been an increase in the use of coordinated and sophisticated conventional attacks in and around the capital.

These are not "your normal Allah Akbar, spray-n-pray firing" style of attacks, said one source. They sometimes involved improvised explosive devices – or IEDs – that are evolving into deadlier ordnance.

The terrorists are learning that simply burying dozens of antitank mines in the same spot isn't terribly effective on U.S.-led forces.

"Now, there's a shift toward large improvised claymores - which are highly effective," said the source. "They still plan to influence our election by ramping up the violence."

The kill zone on a bomb has less to do with the shrapnel, according to military sources, and everything to do with overpressure. Apparently the shockwave generated by the blasts is the deadlier component.

"People die mostly of blunt trauma as opposed to actual cutting wounds," said a source familiar with the ordnance. Al-Qaida's military commander in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is attempting, U.S. forces believe, to make it untenable for the coalition inside the Green Zone.

"They've brought in professional kidnap teams now," said one source. "Also, they are importing skilled bomb makers and apparently got somebody who knows how to fire a mortar."

There were more IED attacks in September than any other month of the campaign. Country-wide, approximately 60 percent were suicide bombings. In Baghdad, all of them were. The latest technique is for the driver of the car or truck to position himself between vehicles in a convoy then set off the explosive charge.

Military sources say radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had planned to lay low after the his latest battles with U.S. forces, but Iran, his sponsor, has ordered him to resume the attacks. Al-Sadr approved an assassination attempt on Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, who has urged cooperation with the coalition forces.

Al-Sadr is now widely perceived to be an Iranian puppet and part of an overall scheme to annex southern Iraq for Tehran.

Zarqawi, meanwhile, is expected to announce publicly that he is formally merging with al-Qaida.

In addition, sources say, Iran has provided between 300 and 1,000 U.S.-style military uniforms to terrorist forces for future operations.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40754

Here's another bit of information:

Bodansky: Terrorists Seek ‘Mass Casualties on an Unprecedented Scale’

Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2004
Few understand the minds of terror leaders the way Yossef Bodansky does.
Bodanksy was the first expert to significantly warn the West about Osama bin Laden in his 1999 best seller, “Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America.”

Story Continues Below

As director of research at the International Strategic Studies Association and director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the U.S. House of Representatives, Bodansky is one of the world’s most sought-after terror experts.

In an exclusive interview with NewsMax, Bodansky starkly concluded that the U.S. is losing its war on terrorism. In fact, since Sept. 11, he estimates, “the cadres of terror groups have actually tripled since mid-September 2001, and the active support echelons have grown ten-fold.”

Also the best-selling author of “The High Cost of Peace: How Washington's Middle East Policy Left America Vulnerable to Terrorism,” Bodansky has no doubt that America is vulnerable to a major attack before the Nov. 2 elections.

Already, he says, there is talk among Islamic terror groups of an attack on the U.S. homeland yielding “mass casualties on an unprecedented scale.”

While lauding the policies of the Bush administration, he chides U.S. intelligence agencies.

NewsMax caught up with the busy expert as he traveled back to the U.S. from Geneva, Switzerland.

NewsMax: Are the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission sound – or do they miss some critical point?

Bodansky:

I don’t have a specific comment regarding this or that commission, but I think that the MAIN problem of our war on terrorism has so far eluded public debate. So, here goes my rather lengthy overall take:

The United States is losing the war on terrorism despite sound policies, responsible decision-making, and laudable dedication of the armed forces and law enforcement agencies.

Even a cursory examination of the war is not encouraging –

Iraq is going up in flames – the outcome of an escalating grassroots rebellion. A wave of terrorism engulfs Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan is falling apart because of revived fratricidal warfare. Pakistan is on the brink of civil war because of mounting grassroots opposition to Musharraf’s cooperation with the U.S. The Chechens escalate their terrorist war to the heart of Russia. The HAMAS escalates operations beyond the Palestinian theater, as do other Islamist-Jihadist groups in dozens of countries around the world.

The size of the Islamist-Jihadist terrorist forces around the world has tripled since mid-September 2001, and the active support echelons have grown ten-fold. Meanwhile, the hard core of Osama bin Laden’s loyalists have markedly improved their ability to strike out at the heart of the United States and Western Europe.

Despite the formulation of a correct policy by the Bush Administration, the war is in a dire state primarily because the U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly failed the White House by providing scant concrete data and wrong threat analysis.

It has been the wanting of intelligence that has made implementation of the President’s policy virtually impossible, and at times has even aggravated the problems facing the U.S.

The primary flaw of the U.S. intelligence community is the intellectual isolationism and arrogance of the purveyors of knowledge to the White House – that is, the intelligence system of research and analysis.

The current disastrous state of affairs is the outcome of more than a decade of intentional recruitment of like-minded individuals to sustain the course.

Consequently, there emerged an institutional culture – much like the State Department’s culture – that taints and tilts analysis, refusing to confront the possibility of lack of knowledge or errors of judgment.

Within the intelligence community’s analytical elite there is by now a very strong echo-chamber effect. And recent history is full with cases of honest analysts who dared question the party-line (through channels) being fired or forced to resign because they would not toe the line.

The American intelligence community does not tolerate challenge and dissent to the detriment of the national interest.

The gravity of the crisis of the U.S. intelligence community, particularly in view of the mounting quagmire in post-Saddam Iraq, is now widely acknowledged throughout official Washington.

Thus, the harsh criticism of the U.S. intelligence community by the various commissions investigating recent crises is warranted. Moreover, a crucial issue outside their mandate – namely, how come that intelligence community knows so little and comprehends even less – is yet to be addressed.

‘Profound Revamping’

Therefore, the recommendation that there should be a profound reorganization of the intelligence community, including the creation of a new cabinet-level position for an Intelligence Czar and the elimination of the CIA as a single agency through partitioning, is only the first step in what should be a profound revamping of America’s intelligence community and its culture. A profoundly thorough reform is urgently needed.

The current sorry state of affairs cannot continue. If the U.S. is to persevere and prevail in the war on terrorism – and it must ultimately triumph if Western civilization is to survive – it ought to comprehend its foes.

Intelligence is the key to fighting terrorism and subversion. The present U.S. intelligence community has not only failed to meet the challenge, but is failing to learn from its own recent mistakes, adapt and correct its ways of doing business.

Increasing the intelligence budget and reorganizing existing institutions no longer suffices. Urgently needed are changes of priorities and methods – the revamping of the U.S. intelligence culture. The intelligence community’s analysts must be freed from the current institutional stifling, must have greater exposure to the real world, must interact with outside expertise even if dissenting, must increase their reliance on open source-material – at least until viable sources are acquired and developed.

Without such profound intelligence reforms, the United States will keep losing the war on terrorism – an unthinkable prospect.

NewsMax: The 9/11 Commission seems to dismiss any serious nexus between Saddam Hussein, bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. You have voiced, however, what you perceive as a long history of Saddam-bin Laden association. What is the strongest proof of that nexus and why, in your opinion, did the Commission take the relatively dismissive stance they have?

Bodansky:

The mere fact that I’ve discussed in great length the evolution of the Islamist-Jihadist cooperation with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq between the early 1990s and the spring of 1999 in my book “Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America” is in itself telling because the book was published in the summer of 1999 – long before this cooperation became a hot political topic.

I cannot point out to a single specific piece of evidence as “the strongest proof.”

We are dealing with evolving cooperation that started way before Osama bin Laden was a leader and essentially continues – in the form of Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri’s June 2004 formal alliance with Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi after the demise of Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps the multiple source evidence about the training in fall 2002 of al-Qaida terrorists in WMD by Iraqi Military Intelligence Unit 999 in Salman Pack – as described in great detail in my latest book, "The Secret History of the Iraq War" – is the most relevant proof of these relationships.

NewsMax: There have been media reports that bin Laden is no longer running the al-Qaida show – that now, in fact, the network has a life of its own, spawned in part at least by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In your opinion, is this true – is it now a broader and even more insidious war? What could we (the president) have done differently?

Bodansky:

Al-Qaida has always been an amorphous entity.

From an operational point of view, of significance are the terrorist groups run by and/or associated with the International Front for Confronting the Crusaders and the Jews.

There has been a major expansion since winter 2001 with the operational cadres (would-be terrorists) increasing by three-fold and the active support elements increasing by ten-fold.

Most significant is the flow of thoroughly westernized Muslims in Western Europe into the ranks of the would-be terrorists. Moreover, there is an ongoing radicalization and alienation of ever greater segments of the Muslim world even if only a relative few resort to violence.

However, of far greater significance is the fact that there is NO real counter-movement throughout the Muslim world since the fall of 2001. There is no popular movement calling for moderation, modernization, co-existence with the West, etc.

Osama bin Laden has never been in direct operational control over the majority of the Jihadist-Islamist groups.

Ayman al-Zawahiri has controlled, and is still controlling, the key elite terrorist formations committed to spectacular strikes of strategic or global significance.

The marked expansion of the Islamist-Jihadist movement since fall 2001, concurrent with the reduced importance of the Afghan-Pakistani hub, resulted in the growing pronouncement of the regional distinction of the various Islamist-Jihadist groups, particularly those with charismatic commanders and leaders.

Bin Laden, however, remains the undisputed supreme spiritual authority that charts the overall course of the Jihad.

Ideologically and theologically, all of these developments are still the manifestation of the growing alienation of the Muslim world from the West and the grassroots adoption of the call for fateful confrontation bin Laden has been advocating since late 1990s.

By mid-2002, the U.S. preoccupation with Baghdad – the former sacred capital of the Caliphate, as distinct from Saddam Hussein’s secular Iraq – resulted in the eruption of Islamist zeal based on the cataclysmic legacy of the Hulagu Khan syndrome.

I discuss this issue in great detail in the Introduction to "The Secret History of the Iraq War." Needless to say that the subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq and the widespread destruction wrought only aggravated the situation and confirmed bin Laden’s worst-case scenario.

In a nutshell, going to a warranted and justified war to disarm and topple the Saddan Hussein regime, the U.S. completely ignored the much wider and more profound global Islamic ramifications of such a move – particularly the inevitable worldwide Islamist-Jihadist mobilization.

We now pay dearly for this oversight and will continue to do so for generations to come.

NewsMax: You were warning of a massive attack within the U.S. well before 9/11. What is our biggest worry now? Some media report that a dirty-nuke attack is forthcoming. Any solid basis for this? Ridge opines that there likely will be an attack to disrupt our democratic process – anytime in the period from the election right up through the presidential inauguration. Justified?

Bodansky:

There is ample evidence from impeccable sources that the Islamist-Jihadist forces are adamant on striking out before the U.S. elections. Some of the warnings specify a commitment to inflicting mass casualties on an unprecedented scale – perhaps through the use of a nuclear suitcase-bomb (which they definitely have).

At the same time, however, the key terrorism sponsoring states urge prudence – fearing U.S. retribution. Right now, there are intense theological deliberations within the Islamist movement about what to do next. We will surely see the outcome of these deliberations.

NewsMax: You have written that given the available evidence, it is imperative for the U.S. to confront not only the entire question of Iran's terrorism sponsorship, but also the possibility that Iran provided the perpetrators of 9/11 with unique training and expertise. Bush has said that the U.S. is exhaustively looking at Iran’s terror connections. If Bush is re-elected, do you expect to see some dramatic developments regarding this member of the “Axis of Evil”?

Bodansky:

Generally: For as long as the Mullahs’ Regime remains in power, and for as long as the Jihadist culture remains prevalent and dominant in Pakistan (Musharraf’s declared policies not withstanding), the qualitative Islamist-Jihadist war against the U.S.-led West – that is, the lethal, spectacular, strategically significant terrorist strikes – will keep escalating.

Moreover, the overall bitter struggle between the modernity (both values and technology) the West is imposing on the world and Islamdom will continue escalating and expanding until a genuine, indigenous self-reforming movement emerges in Islamdom.

There’s nothing the outside world can do in this respect but fight ceaselessly and resolutely the aggressive violent manifestation of this fateful struggle – Islamist-Jihadist terrorism.

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