BECKLEY, W.Va. (AP) -- A congressman skeptical of the need for U.S. military action against Iraq says he is flying to Baghdad, hoping to answer questions about a possible invasion and seeking a meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., said he wants to reassure Iraqi citizens that Americans are ``not out to wage war for war's sake.'' ``I'm not going as a secretary of state,'' Rahall said Tuesday. ``I'm not going as a weapons inspector. And I'm not calling upon this administration to do one thing or another. I just have a lot of questions.''
Rahall, who was to leave early Wednesday evening, said he would tell the Iraqi president he should allow United Nations weapon inspectors ``unconditional and unfettered access to his country so we can find answers to a lot of questions the Congress has.''
Among others going is former Sen. James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat.
The trip is sponsored by the Institute for Public Accuracy, a group that says it seeks to foster the point of view of ``those whose perspectives are commonly drowned out by corporate-backed think tanks.''
Rahall said the group, which has been arranging the trip for months, has meetings scheduled with Foreign Minister Naji Sabril [* My note : aka Naji Sabri aka Curveball... who was apparently a paid CIA source-- See CIA's Tyler Drumheller's testimony, book deal and crticisms thereof] and other government leaders, as well as Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector who has become a critic of Washington's Iraq policies. President Bush is campaigning for support in Congress and abroad for military action against the Hussein regime, as his father did more than a decade ago.----- "West Virginia Congressman to Fly to Iraq," Associated Press , Wednesday, September 11, 2002
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the period before the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister Naji Sabri, was a secret paid source of the CIA, "NBC Nightly News" reported on Monday. Citing unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials, NBC said Sabri provided details of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be more accurate than CIA estimates.
Intelligence sources said Sabri was paid more than $100,000 through an intermediary in a September 2002 deal brokered by the French, NBC reported.
Sabri may have thought he was working with the French, but some U.S. intelligence officials believe he knew it was the CIA, NBC said. The CIA questioned Sabri through a go-between [* My note: wonder who this was...] about Saddam's WMD program, the report said.
According to the intelligence sources, Sabri indicated that Saddam had no significant weapons program and that while the deposed Iraqi leader desperately wanted a nuclear bomb it would have taken more time for him to build one than the CIA's several-months-to-a-year estimate, NBC reported.
Both the CIA and Sabri said Saddam had stockpiled chemical weapons, but both were wrong, NBC said.
WMD were the main justification for President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq three years ago, but no such weapons have been found.
Citing intelligence sources, NBC said the CIA's brief relations with Sabri ended after he refused to defect to the United States. The agency had been hoping for a public relations coup, the network said.
Sabri was not named among the former senior Iraqi officials on the U.S. most-wanted list of 55 Iraqi fugitives.
NBC said it found Sabri teaching at a university in the Middle East, but was not revealing his location for security reasons.
Sabri declined to be interviewed or to comment as did the CIA, NBC said, adding that the agency also would not say why it did not listen to Sabri's warnings. A CIA representative had no comment on the report.----------Saddam's foreign minister was CIA source: NBC via Yahoo , Posted on 03/20/2006 6:13:32 PM PST by AZRepublican
In a "60 Minutes" interview on April 23, Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the CIA's Europe division, made a sensational charge. He claimed that President Bush and his White House ignored intelligence before the invasion of Iraq indicating that Saddam Hussein had no had weapons of mass destruction. On the CBS-TV show, and in subsequent media interviews that appeared throughout the world, Drumheller said that the White House was excited about the fact that the CIA was getting information straight from Naji Sabri, the then Iraqi foreign minister. But when the White House found out this source was reliably saying that Saddam had no WMD, Bush and his White House weren't interested. [* Drumheller's lying- Naji Sabri said Iraq was STOCKPILING WMD. He did NOT say Iraq had no WMD- so who is paying Drumheller? Who arranged his book deal?] "He [Sabri] told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program," Drumheller told correspondent Ed Bradley in a segment called "A Spy Speaks Out." "So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam's inner circle that he didn't have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?" Bradley asked. "Yes," Drumheller said, proclaiming himself outraged. According to Drumheller, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice brushed aside the CIA report on what Sabri had to say because "the policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy." Drumheller saw "how the Bush administration time and time again welcomed intelligence that fit the president's determination to go to war and turned a blind eye to intelligence that did not," Ed Bradley said in the introduction to the "60 Minutes" piece. Now it appears Drumheller's claim was untrue, according to the findings of a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation. Rather than undercutting the Bush administration's rationale for invading Iraq, Sabri's account shows how well-founded the intelligence on Saddam's weapons program appeared to be. Ironically, just as Drumheller claimed that Bush ignored the truth about Iraq, the media have ignored the documentation in the Senate report demolishing Drumheller's claim. An addenda to the Senate report on postwar findings about Iraq's WMD program says all the operational documents relating to Sabri indicate he told the CIA just the opposite of what Drumheller claimed. The Senate report refers to Sabri as a source with direct access to Saddam Hussein and his inner circle but does not name him.
"Both the operations cable and the intelligence report prepared for high-level policy-makers [based on interrogation of the source] said that while Saddam Hussein did not have a nuclear weapon, ‘he was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon,'" the Senate report said.
The documents said "Iraq was producing and stockpiling chemical weapons," according to the addendum, signed by Sens. Pat Roberts, R–Kan., Orrin G. Hatch, R–Utah, and Saxby Chambliss, R–Ga. Iraq's weapon of last resort was mobile launched chemical weapons, which would be fired at enemy forces and Israel, the CIA documents said.
Moreover, there is "not a single document relating to this case which indicates that the source said Iraq had no WMD programs," the addenda said. "On the contrary, all of the information about this case so far indicates that the information from this source was that Iraq did have WMD programs."
What the source said was consistent with the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the report said. The report added: "The committee is still exploring why the former chief/EUR's public remarks differ so markedly from the documentation." ...--------http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1700681/posts
FRANCE gave Saddam Hussein's regime regular reports on its dealings with American officials, documents unearthed in the wreckage of the Iraqi foreign ministry have revealed. The first Iraqi files to emerge documenting French help for the regime show that Paris shared with Baghdad the contents of private transatlantic meetings and diplomatic traffic from Washington. The information, said in the files to have come partly from "friends of Iraq" at the French foreign ministry, kept Saddam abreast of every development in American planning and may have helped him to prepare for war. One report warned of an American "attempt to involve Iraq with terrorism" as "cover for an attack on Iraq". Another, dated September 25, 2001 from Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister, to Saddam's palace, was based on a briefing from the French ambassador in Baghdad and covered talks between presidents Jacques Chirac and George W Bush. Chirac was said to have been told that America was "100% certain Osama Bin Laden was behind the September 11 attacks and that the answer of the United States would be decisive". The report also gave a detailed account of American attitudes towards Saddam amid anxiety in Iraq that the country might soon become a target of American reprisals.
"Information available to the French embassy in Washington suggests that there is no intention on the part of the Americans to attack Iraq, but that matters might change quickly," said the document from folders marked France 2001 found by The Sunday Times. "According to French information, a discussion about Iraq is going on in Washington between [secretary of state] Colin Powell and the Zionist [Paul] Wolfowitz [the deputy defence secretary]. Powell was against a military attack on Iraq whereas Wolfowitz was in favour of a strong military operation against Iraq." The report noted that "the Israelis have informed the French ambassador in Washington that they have no evidence of Iraqi involvement in the attacks". ----------- "Dossier reveals France briefed Iraq on US plans ," by Matthew Campbell, The Sunday Times , April 27, 2003
SEPTEMBER 2002 : (RAHALL & ABOUREZK TRIP TO IRAQ COSPONSORED BY FORMER SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT NELSON MANDELA) --Mandela cosponsored [Dem congressmen] Rahall and Abourezk's 9/2002 trip to Iraq -----via FR's Fedora
*****
Occidental Petroleum's Vice President for Middle East business Odeh Aburdene, shares a complex network of relationships with Rock Creek’s Elias Aburdene and Joseph Wilson--notably, all three contributed to Congressman Nick Rahall ----- "What Wilson Didn’t Say About Africa: Joseph Wilson's Silent Partners ," via 112 posted on 04/24/2006 2:25:40 PM PDT by Fedora | To 111
On the Brink An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence By Tyler Drumheller with Elaine Monaghan Carikk & Graf Publishers, a Philip Turner Book
Philip Turner also edited books for Joe Wilson and Murray Waas.
More on name associations with Drumheller's book deal:
HarperCollins bought the book last year, but canceled it after it announced it would publish George Tenet's At the Center of the Storm. Carroll & Graf editor-in-chief Philip Turner then acquired Drumheller's book and plans to publish it this fall as the first book under his eponymous imprint. The publisher and the PRB have gone back and forth on the book's content and, according to Drumheller's agent, Carmen LaVia of the Oscard Agency...
Other books edited by Turner. Wow...Susan McDougal.
Turner will also be publishing "The United States v. I. Lewis Libby," No surprise there.
Drumheller hangs around with all the usual suspects (#24), including Vincent Cannistraro and Larry Johnson of the VIPS, per this article on him exposing him as a liar.
I still say Wilson is also going to end up behind bars before this is all over.