Posted on 08/19/2009 10:37:26 AM PDT by ikez78
Aseel Kami, recently reported for Reuters that some officials in the current Iraqi government are making a push for the return of millions of Saddam Hussein-era Iraq documents (previously the subject of Congressional inquiries and public controversy) that were seized by the U.S. government and other non-government entities following the former regime's fall in 2003. Kami wrote:
The files include intelligence papers on Iraqis kept by Saddam Hussein's feared secret police, information on weapons arsenals, detailed plans of massacres of the regime's enemies and even tapes of songs praising Saddam, officials said.
Some of these files have been made public while others were made available to the authors of The Iraqi Perspectives Project, Duelfer Report and other investigations into Saddam Hussein's activities.
Others just went missing in the chaos and looting in the early months of the U.S.-led invasion which toppled Saddam.
"Dictatorships document everything, from the simplest details to the biggest events in their citizens' lives," said Saad Eskander, director of the national library and archives. He added that he thought some were still with the CIA.
The Iraqi National Library and Archive (found here) is reportedly leading the pursuit of documents though it is likely that Iraq's "Red Museum" will be another party involved in the efforts.
(Excerpt) Read more at regimeofterror.com ...
Iraqdocs ping, Pentagon response at original link
Wow! Just like Obama!
Thanks for the ping!
Others just went missing in the chaos and looting in the early months of the U.S.-led invasion which toppled Saddam.
Marking for later read.
It was interesting (and maddening) that they suddenly pulled documents from the Web before midterm elections on the premise that files contained ‘very sensitive’ classified nuclear technology information, while maintaining at the same time that Iraq did not work on nuclear WMDs.
That’s after anyone, or any group of people, working in parallel with multiple connections, had enough time to download all the files.
Also, I haven’t seen it mentioned, but is not it curious that technologically [relatively] advanced countries like Iraq and Iran would not be working on nuclear WMDs, while technological laggards like Libya and Syria, as we found out, already had active programs.
Talk about non-prolifiration! Libya’s program employed anywhere from 8,000 to as many as 20,000 Iraqis and was dismantled through agreement with US after Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay were killed, and most of us learned about Syrian reactor only after it was bombed by Israelis - an event that evoked few questions and generally was greeted with deafening sound of silence from the major news media.
2. the documents are not ours to keep. We are not doing anything with them anyway as far as I am aware of.
I never understood that. Why doesn't ANYONE in government recognize this as Saddam building nuclear weapons? Just because it wasn’t on his territory doesn’t mean he wasn’t building nuclear weapons.
One of several unheralded successes in Bush’s foreign policy.
Like his father, neither he nor his administration (except, occasionally, when possible, by Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice) beat their chests, expecting to be simply given credit for the successes. But that’s not how it works in politics, and it was very detrimental to his “political capital” as well as his Party whose de facto, not just nominal, leader he was supposed to be. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory seemed to have been a weekly occurrence.
Liberals are always appropriating credit for things that work well that they haven’t had anything to do with or even stood in the way of (e.g. Clinton and welfare reform, economy etc.) and blame the things that inevitably go wrong as the result of their policies on their opposition. Many Republicans, it seems, don’t even know or forgot (under Bushes) how to claim credit for the successes their policies brought about.
Where is that quote from?
CutePuppy was pointing it out. Which was true and reported shortly after GWII started. If you would like for me to look it up I can.
Libyan Weapons of Mass Destruction: Qaddafi Redux? Tel Aviv Notes No. 49 - 2002 September 12, from Israeli INSS.org.il (Institute for National Security Studies) ..... Despite repeated allegations that Libya has sought a nuclear weapons capability, most recently by Israeli and US officials, the country apparently lacks the technical infrastructure to pursue such a program on its own. Thus, the US national intelligence estimate (NIE) presented to Congress in January 2002 notes the acceleration of the nuclear weapon program since 1999 but stresses that Libya still requires substantial foreign assistance. ..... Developing nuclear weapons requires a prolonged effort and a high level of technical know-how. Iraq, which possessed a very sophisticated military industry, invested almost twenty years of effort to achieve nuclear capability and was still several years away from success when its program was derailed by the 1991 Gulf War. Iran, which also has a large defense industry, is believed to be 3-5 years from realizing its nuclear ambitions. Libya, on the other hand, lacks any comparable industrial base. Although it has produced chemical weapons, it appears to have failed miserably in its al-Fatah ballistic missile project, which is a much less complicated undertaking than building a nuclear weapon. The experience of the Iraqi and Iranian projects indicates that a nuclear weapon program needs 10-20,000 skilled workers, with technical expertise in domains like metallurgy, high voltage electrical engineering, explosives, electronics, computerized machining, etc. These need to be drawn from a much larger industrial base, which Libya does not have. Given the improbable character of a Libyan nuclear project, it is possible that what lies behind observed nuclear-related activities is actually collaboration with Iraq, that is, that Libya has allowed Iraq to continue its own nuclear project in Libya in return for some of the product. This would shortcut the development process but would entail the relocation of thousands of Iraqi engineers and scientists to Libya. Even so, it would be necessary to construct the whole industrial base from scratch, something that would take less time than a pure Libyan project, but probably not less than a decade. If this is indeed the case, a joint project will make Libya the second Arab nuclear state – after Iraq. ..... "Libya is going to be the first Arab state with nuclear weapons." That was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s prediction in a special interview for the Jewish New Year. According to Sharon, Iraqi scientists are working there on a nuclear project, with aid from Pakistan, North Korea, and perhaps Saudi Arabia, as well. American officials appear to share his assessment. Zeev Schiff reports in Ha'aretz that the issue was discussed by Israeli and American officials some six months ago. And Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton said in May that the US has no doubt that Libya is continuing its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The Administration believes that Libya stepped up its nuclear-related activities after sanctions were lifted in 1998.
It all was confirmed post-liberation of Iraq, after Libya agreed to dismantle the program. Also, "dual-purpose" aluminum tubes that have been found in Iraq were used in Libyan plant construction.
And this from Judith Miller in OpinionJournal How Gadhafi Lost His Groove. The complex surrender of Libya's WMD - May 16, 2006 ..... While analysts continue to debate his motivation, evidence suggests that a mix of intelligence, diplomacy and the use of force in Iraq helped persuade him that the weapons he had pursued since he came to power, and on which he had secretly spent $300 million ($100 million on nuclear equipment and material alone), made him more, not less, vulnerable. ..... "We needed something bold, something big enough to have impact," he said. "Shock therapy! We knew the Americans would not find yellowcake in Iraq - as we warned them - but that there was yellowcake in Libya, and that this card was worth something." ..... While Col. Gadhafi could have claimed, as Iran now does, that the enrichment equipment was for a peaceful energy program, the pretense was shattered in November when U.S. intelligence gave the Libyans a copy of a compact disc that intelligence agencies had intercepted. According to Saif and Libyan officials in Tripoli, the CD contained a recording of a long discussion on Feb. 28, 2002, about Libya's nuclear weapons program, between Ma'atouq Mohamed Ma'atouq, the head of that clandestine effort, and A.Q. Khan. Denial of military intent was no longer an option. The inspection team returned in December 2003, with even greater access. They were astonished by what they learned during their visits to weapons sites, labs and dual-use and military facilities. Although Libya claimed that it had no biological or germ-weapons-related facilities, and that its chemical capabilities were less than the CIA had feared, U.S. intelligence had underestimated Libya's nuclear progress. ..... Many analysts no longer doubted that Libya could have made a bomb, eventually, if the program had not been stopped and it had found a way to supplement its limited technical expertise. Though most of the rotors for the centrifuges were initially missing (many turned up months later on a ship near South Africa) experts said that had the centrifuges been properly assembled in cascades--always dicey in a technologically challenged state--Libya could have produced enough fuel to make as many as 10 nuclear warheads a year. When Libya dramatically declared on Dec. 19, 2003, that it was abandoning its rogue ways, President Bush and other senior officials praised Libya and Moammar al-Gadhafi, the surviving dean of Arab revolutionary leaders, as a model that other rogue states might follow. In fact, the still largely secret talks that helped prompt Libya's decision, and the joint American-British dismantlement of its weapons programs in the first four months of 2004, remain the administration's sole undeniable - if largely unheralded -intelligence and nonproliferation success.
Part 2 of Judith Miller's article Gadhafi's Leap of Faith - May 17, 2006 ..... The dismantlement mission was completed in record time. In four months, the U.S.-U.K. team managed to airlift 55,000 pounds of the most sensitive documents and nuclear components, including several containers of uranium hexafluoride and two P-2 centrifuges, of some 10,000 that Libya had ordered from the Khan Research Laboratories in Pakistan. By mid-February, the inspection team and a representative from the Hague-based Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, which Libya had finally agreed to join, watched Libyans crush with tanks and bulldozers more than 3,200 unfilled chemical weapons shells they had laid out on the desert floor. By March, the team had sent out by chartered ship over 1,000 tons of additional centrifuge and missile parts, including the five SCUD-C missiles (minus warheads), launchers and related equipment. And Russia had removed 13 kilos of fresh, 80% highly enriched uranium from the Tajura reactor--a uniquely successful joint venture in WMD disarmament. .....
Thank you CutePuppy.
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