Posted on 06/03/2005 8:26:59 AM PDT by robowombat
IMHO - This will probably be part of the dems impeachment charges that they will be bringing up in the next few months. Just a guess.
Indeed some of these left wing lunatics claim that the President did a bait & switch.
Which, of course, is outrageous!
Previously secured items....LOL! Precisely what they'll claim.
I think the UN is fessing up before Bolton gets there and talks bad to them.
They can claim 'previously secured' all they want, but this makes it very difficult to continue the 'Bush Lied' line of attack.
Evidence that Saddam frantically scrapped WMD hardware
Revelations that Saddam moved some of his WMDs and hardware out of the country were further confirmed by Demetrius Perricos, acting chairman of UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), who disclosed that his inspectors had been 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."
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.
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.
As Reuter's reported...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. Where is it now? It's a concern, Buchanan asked.
"...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 had taking place rapidly. During his presentation, Perricos showed the UN Security Council a picture of a fully developed missile site in May 2002 that had been entirely torn down by February of 2003.
Perricos' June 9, 2004, UN testimony was 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.
All these revelations came during a closed meeting of the UN Security Council held on June 9, 2004. However, the investigations are not new. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) launched its own probe into Iraqi WMD transfers a full six months previous to the UNMOVIC report when a Dutch scrap metal company discovered five pounds of yellowcake uranium ore in Rotterdam, according to an April 14, 2004, news report in the Washington Post.
The sample was shipped from Jordan but Jordanian officials said the metal originated in Iraq. (Perhaps this is the yellowcake that atomic sleuth Joe Wilson insisted Iraq never purchased from Niger...the purchase of which had subsequently been re-confirmed by the London Financial Times). Even the once skeptical IAEA Director Mohammed El Baradei warned that evidence of Saddam's WMDs was being shipped abroad.
The real mystery to me is why the Bush Administration, considering all of the abuse heaped upon it by the left, refuses to issue a comprehensive report on the status of Saddam's WMD program prior to the war, and the fate of that program's components during and after the war. The Bush Administration has fueled this carnard that "our intelligence was faulty," which I personally think is a sham.
This may be the real story. It is entirely possible that Saddam scattered, or "proliferated" his WMDs before the US-led invasion, resulting in precisely the thing that the Bush Administration wanted to avoid by going to war against Saddam. Much of Saddam's WMD inventory may be in the hands of Syria, No. Korea, other terrorist states, and perhaps even al-Qaeda. The truth of the fate of Saddam's WMDs may be more terrifying than the lie that "mistakes were made."
Could that be the reason that the UN can't find them now?
Nope. No WMDs whatsoever! Just a bunch of Bush hating libs who refuse to see the truth.
Wasn't this information released on FR 12-18 months ago?
Yes. See my post #27. This is actually old news. The question is, why is the UN revisiting it?
Then why do they have to test them again, all of a sudden? To see if their new "technology" works, of course... ;)
My guess is:
- Kofi wants to look good and make President Bush look bad
- Fuel for the Democratic nominee for the up-coming 2008 presidential elections against the Republicans
- The UN needs to look like it is doing something
All possibilities. Another is that there were a s***load of WMDs that were transferred out of Iraq just prior to and during the war in 2003 that escaped everyone's notice, and this is part of a set-up to devulge that fact.
The U.S. intelligence assessment was discussed publicly for the first time by the director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in a briefing in Washington on Tuesday, October 28.
James Clapper, a retired air force general and a leading member of the U.S. intelligence community, said he linked the disappearance of Iraqi WMD with the huge number of Iraqi trucks that entered Syria before and during the U.S. military campaign to topple the Saddam regime.
"I think personally that the [Iraqi] senior leadership saw what was coming and I think they went to some extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence," Clapper said. "I'll call it an educated hunch."
Officials said the intelligence community assessed that the trucks contained missiles and WMD components banned by the United Nations Security Council.
Clapper said Iraqi officials feared U.S. discovery of Iraqi biological and chemical weapons, and ordered subordinates to conceal and destroy evidence of WMD in early 2003. He said he was certain that components connected to Iraq's biological, chemical and nuclear programs were sent to Syria in the weeks prior to and during the war, which began on March 19.
"I think probably in the few months prior to the onset of combat, there was probably an intensive effort to disperse to private homes, to move documentation and materials out of the country," Clapper said. "But certainly, inferentially, the obvious conclusion one draws is that the certain uptick in traffic [to Syria] may have been people leaving the scene, fleeing Iraq, and unquestionably, I am sure, material."
The chief of the NIMA, which was renamed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in November 2003, acknowledged that U.S. spy satellites did not identify the cargo transported by the Iraqi trucks into Syria. He said that much of the Iraqi WMD remained in the country and was either concealed or destroyed even as the U.S. military captured Baghdad in April.
Clapper said he suspected that the looting throughout Sunni cities in Iraq in April was directed by Saddam loyalists to serve as a diversion for the destruction or transfer of WMD components from government or other installations targeted by U.S. intelligence. The United States has never found biological, chemical or nuclear weapons in Iraq.
"So by the time that we got to a lot of these facilities, that we had previously identified as suspect facilities, there wasn't that much there to look at," Clapper said.
"Based on the evidence we had at the time, I thought the conclusions we reached about the presence of at least a latent WMD program was accurate and balanced," Clapper said.
John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told the Washington Times in October of 2004 that he had received foreign intelligence information that Russian special forces units were involved in removing Saddam Husseins weapons of mass destruction in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. (http://washingtontimes.com/national/20041229-113041-1647r.htm)
A letter written by Shaw to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that information about the covert Russian role in moving Iraqi arms to Syria, Lebanon and possibly Iran was discussed during a meeting that included NGIA head James Clapper, the head of Britains MI6 intelligence service, and the head of a foreign intelligence service that he did not name.
After Shaws disclosures, the Pentagon released spy satellite photographs of Iraqi weapons facilities that showed truck convoys at the plants, apparently in preparation to transport materials.
For his troubles, Shaw was asked to resign from his DoD position in December 2004, due to his exceeding his authority in releasing the story to the media of Russian troop involvement in removing Saddams WMDs.
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