Posted on 04/26/2006 7:44:10 AM PDT by avacado
Germany's leading role in arming Iraq
"Expurgated portions of Iraq's December 7 report to the UN Security Council show that German firms made up the bulk of suppliers for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs..."
"In the summer of 1994, the BND (German Intelligence) conducted a major study to estimate the magnitude of the - as at that time - still undeclared and concealed Iraqi WMD arsenal, relying on sales records in its possession of post-Gulf War German, Austrian, and Swiss exports of technologies, sub-systems and strategic materials to Iraq. It concluded that these exports pointed to several specific weapons programs, ranging from ballistic missile upgrades to poison gas manufacture, which Iraq had not declared and UN inspectors were unaware of and hence, not surprisingly, had failed to discover..."
"In February 2001, the BND compiled a further report.
According to the report:
# Iraq has resumed its nuclear program and may be capable of producing an atomic bomb in three years;
# Iraq is developing its Al Samoud and Ababil 100/Al Fatah short-range rockets, which can deliver a 300kg payload 150km. Medium-range rockets capable of carrying a warhead 3,000km could be built by 2005 - far enough to reach Europe;
# Iraq is capable of manufacturing solid rocket fuel;
# A Delhi-based company, has acted as a buyer on Iraq's behalf. Deliveries have been made via Malaysia and Dubai. Indian companies have copied German machine tools down to the smallest detail and such equipment has been installed in numerous chemicals projects.
# Since the departure of the UN inspectors, the number of Iraqi sites involved in chemicals production has increased from 20 to 80. Of that total, a quarter could be involved in weapons production."
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
but
if it is real,,,
then:
who has the hardware????
who has the technology???
who has the balance of supplies???
interesting bump.
This administration gets high marks for everything except communication. Somehow the president's act at dismantling Iraq's war machine, instead of a life saver, has been whittled down to a failure by the MSM and dems.
Like Lincoln, Bush needs to do what he believes is best and damn the critics and polls and his own worthless party.
ping
Well said. Pretty amazing that it has come to that. President Bush overthrows one of the great threats to Western civilization and he is the "butcher!"
Saddam had to go. Bush removed him. And I support that. I was wanted Saddam removed during the Clinton years.
For him to lie, he would have had to know the BND, CIA, KGB, etc. were all wrong. Two questions:
Accepting the "Bush Lied" premise means our President was simultaneously smarter than the entire world and dumber than a post. Reductio ad absurdum
Exactly true!
The whole "Bush Lied" mantra was invented for liberal sheep who cannot process more than 1 issue at a time. It was meant to be drilled into their heads so that they would not have to think.
It worked.
"In February 2001, the BND compiled a further report.
According to the report:
# Iraq has resumed its nuclear program and may be capable of producing an atomic bomb in three years;
# Iraq is developing its Al Samoud and Ababil 100/Al Fatah short-range rockets, which can deliver a 300kg payload 150km. Medium-range rockets capable of carrying a warhead 3,000km could be built by 2005 - far enough to reach Europe;
# Iraq is capable of manufacturing solid rocket fuel;
# A Delhi-based company, has acted as a buyer on Iraq's behalf.
Bumperoo
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1184172,00.html
Germans accuse US over Iraq weapons claim
An Iraqi defector nicknamed Curveball who wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had mobile chemical weapons factories was last night at the centre of a bitter row between the CIA and Germany's intelligence agency.
German officials said that they had warned American colleagues well before the Iraq war that Curveball's information was not credible - but the warning was ignored.
It was the Iraqi defector's testimony that led the Bush administration to claim that Saddam had built a fleet of trucks and railway wagons to produce anthrax and other deadly germs.
In his presentation to the UN security council in February last year, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, explicitly used Curveball's now discredited claims as justification for war. The Iraqis were assembling "mobile production facilities for biological agents", Mr Powell said, adding that his information came from "a solid source".
These "killer caravans" allowed Saddam to produce anthrax "on demand", it was claimed. US officials never had direct access to the defector, and have subsequently claimed that the Germans misled them.
Yesterday, however, German agents told Die Zeit newspaper that they had warned the Bush administration long before last year that there were "problems" with Curveball's account. "We gave a clear credibility assessment. On our side at least, there were no tricks before Colin Powell's presentation," one source told the newspaper.
Officially, Germany's intelligence agency, the BND, has refused to comment.
The revelation is embarrassing for the Bush administration and appears to bolster the contention that it used dubious intelligence in a partisan manner in the critical few weeks before the invasion of Iraq.
It has now emerged that Curveball is the brother of a top aide of Ahmad Chalabi, the pro-western Iraqi former exile with links to the Pentagon.
According to the Los Angeles Times, it was UN inspectors who came up with the idea that Saddam might have developed mobile factories to try to evade weapons inspections. They asked Mr Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Saddam, to find evidence to support the theory.
Recently, American officials have admitted that Curveball's information was false. Meanwhile, David Kay, who resigned as head of the Iraqi survey group in January after a fruitless nine-month search for weapons of mass destruction, said in an interview that Curveball had been "absolutely at the heart of the matter", but had turned out to be an "out and out fabricator".
US and British intelligence officials have acknowledged since the war that much of the information supplied by Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and other Iraqi groups was wrong. Yesterday, German sources said they were bemused by the idea that they had tricked the US. "We ask ourselves, what are they on about?" one said.
below timeline at same link
1994
Curveball graduates last in his class from engineering school at Baghdad University and is hired to work at the Chemical Engineering and Design Center. [Los Angeles Times, 12/20/2005]
People and organizations involved: Curveball
January 2000 - September 2001
Two German intelligence (BND) case officers debrief Iraqi defector “Curveball” with help from a team of chemists, biologists, and other experts. Curveball claims to have knowledge of a clandestine Iraqi biological weapons program (see November 1999). He speaks to his BND debriefers in Arabic through a translator, and also in broken English and German. Curveball says that he worked for Iraq’s Military Industrial Commission after graduating first in his class from engineering school at Baghdad University in 1994 (He actually graduated last (see 1994)). A year later, he says, he was assigned to work for “Dr. Germ,” British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha, to construct mobile biological weapons labs. But Curveball never says that he actually produced biological weapons or witnessed anyone else doing so and the BND is unable to verify his claims. Curveball’s statements are recorded in German, shared with a local Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) team, and sent to the US, where they are translated into English for analysis at the DIA’s directorate for human intelligence in Clarendon, Va. “This was not substantial evidence,” one senior German intelligence official later recalls in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “We made clear we could not verify the things he said.” The reports are then sent to the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), whose experts analyze the data and share it with artists who use Curveball’s accounts to render sketches. The Clarendon office sends a total of 95 reports to WINPAC during this period. US spy satellites are directed to take pictures of sites named by Curveball as biological weapons facilities. According to a later investigation by the Los Angeles Times, “At the CIA, bio-warfare experts viewed [Curveball’s] reports as sophisticated and technically feasible. They also matched the analysts’ expectations.” [Los Angeles Times, 12/20/2005] The Germans also share some of Curveball’s allegations with the British. However, according to Robin Butler, head of the British inquiry into prewar intelligence, what the Germans provided was “incomplete.” For instance, German intelligence misled them to believe that the alleged mobile weapon labs were capable of producing weapons-grade bio-agents such as anthrax spores, when Curveball’s actual statements only suggested they had the capability to produce a liquid slurry that would not be suitable for bombs or warheads. [Los Angeles Times, 12/20/2005]
People and organizations involved: Central Intelligence Agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst, Defense Intelligence Agency
ping
Thanks for the ping.,,,pinging others....
German Intellegence (BND) Report on Iraq WMD
Release/Translation of Classified PreWar Docs ping. If you want to be added or removed to the ping list, please Freepmail me.
Please add the keyword prewardocs to any articles pertaining to this subject.
Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents
Syria
VERY interesting article! Thanks for posting this!
Thanks for the ping!
Thanks for the ping. The case shall build up to support the POTUS's actions. Eventually well written books shall appear that give all the details in an order and phrasing most readers can understand. The Iraqi regiem was so sneaky and hell bent of rebuilding all their wmd programs once sanctions where lifted. I for one, and I am not being hard head or in self denial, continue to voice the view that they where dumping and burying a lot of stuff as the invasion approached, and we are gaining translated documents from Harmony that support that view.
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