Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq

The Washington Post ^ | 5/11/2003 | Barton Gellman

[arjay]

BAGHDAD -- The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants.

[arjay]

If this is true, it is troubling. General Vallely keeps stating on Foxnews that barrels of chemicals were moved into the Baka Valley in Lebanon and hidden there.

Wonder what this will mean.

[oceanview]

this better not be true, they searched an entire country aleady? nobody is going to buy this "intelligence says it was moved to the Bekaa Valley", is this the same intelligence that said it was in Iraq? I think Bush is overplaying his hand here, all this stuff about "polls show people don't care about WMD". some more failures here and negative media attention, then have Saddam pop up in Russia just before the 2004 election, and we've got BIG trouble!

[sackofcatfood]

Last I heard, we had investigated some 5% of the sites unders suspicions.

Not finding anything is reason to *step up* the investigations, not ship out and go home.

[txrangerette]

Makes no sense. Just this past week,
the Pentagon announced a TRIPLING
of the size of this team. Don't
have a link, but I'm sure it was
posted here.

[arjay]

Major Bob Bevelaqua expressed a Green Beret's disgust with the intelligence community on Blustering Bill O'Reilly one night saying that the intel folks are going to have a lot to answer for on this one. I must say the expression on his face was one of disgust.

I sincerely hope we are not giving up the search. I have not seen Bush or Rummy go wobbly on this yet and I really don't think they are going to do so this early in the game.

[woofie]

I remember that well ...1000 more people were to start looking....

[Torie]

If all this stuff was destroyed, don't you think the destroyers will eventually spill the beans, perhaps with some incentivation of some sort? This story is a bit silly. The truth will come out. If Saddam got rid of the stuff earlier on, and then stonewalled rather than bragged about it, then he really is a nutter, and his nutternish did the planet a favor. And there you have it.

[Terp]

Read the article:

The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush administration has said is a larger team.

And I would guess they have the best detection equipment and better trained personnel.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

Perhaps they are just shifting to the Iraq Survey Group, much like they sent the Marines home, so the Army can take over?

[Cold Heat]

This is slanted opinion. It could be true the 75th is being re-deployed, but WMD experts are flowing into the country as we speak.

And yes, I am sure they are dissapointed, but it certainly does not mean the search is winding down. That is obviously a -l-i-e.(stretch)(BS) (whatever)

[Jewels1091]

This is part of a mobile lab that could have been used for manufacturing biological weapons north of the city of Mosul, Iraq (news - web sites), Friday May 9, 2003, according to US forces. (AP Photo/Pfc. Joshua Hutcheson, 101st Airborne Division)

This is a mobile lab that could have been used for manufacturing biological weapons north of the city of Mosul, Iraq (news - web sites), Friday May 9, 2003, according to US forces. (AP Photo/Pfc. Joshua Hutcheson, 101st Airborne Division)

[patriciaruth]

Wonder what this means

Maybe the WP is trying to catch up to the NYT's error rate.

[The Great Satan]

As I suggested to you the other day, the time has come to change the subject.

[FairOpinion]

"General Vallely keeps stating on Foxnews that barrels of chemicals were moved into the Baka Valley in Lebanon and hidden there. "
---

Debka said that about a week ago (see below) and in a more recent article (http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=485)they said that Syria was given a deadline of May 13th to comply with our demands of telling us exactly where they were.

Powell Confronts, Assad Prevaricates

From DEBKA-Net-Weekly 107

May 4, 2003, 12:21 AM (GMT+02:00)
http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=482


Syria is reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources as having secretly disposed of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction by moving them into eastern Lebanon for burial in the Beqaa Valley. Iraq’s biological weapons may be there too. They were interred deep under the heroin poppy and cotton fields in two of the most fertile regions of Lebanon: the valley stretching between Jabal Akroum, the town of al Qbayyat and the Syrian border, and the land lying between the towns of Al Hirmil and al Labwah between the Orontes River and the Syrian frontier.

On February 14, about a month before the start of the war in Iraq, DEBKA-Net-Weekly Issue 97 ran an article captioned “Is Iraq’s WMD cache in Lebanon available to Al Qaeda?” To subscribe to DNW click HERE

Now, our intelligence sources can disclose exclusively that the relocation of Iraq’s WMD systems took place between January 10 and March 10 and was completed just 10 days before the US-led offensive was launched against Iraq. The banned arsenal, hauled in giant tankers from Iraq to Syria and from there to the Bekaa Valley under Syrian special forces and military intelligence escort, was discharged into pits 6-8 meters across and 25-35 meters deep dug by Syrian army engineers. They were sealed and planted over with new seedlings. Nonetheless, their location is known and detectable with the right instruments. Our sources have learned that Syria was paid about $35 million to make Saddam Hussein’s forbidden weapons disappear.

Before US secretary of state Colin Powell arrived in Damascus on Saturday, May 3, the Syrians made the placatory gesture to Washington of speeding and upgrading the handover of Iraqi fugitives from the Saddam regime sheltering in Syria

DEBKA-Net-Weekly has learned from its most exclusive sources that on Monday, April 28, Dr. RihabTaha, a microbiologist known as Dr. Germ, was turned over to the Americans in Iraq. She had directed Iraq’s biological weapons program. Also turned over was Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, who headed Iraq’s anthrax project. No announcement was made of their capture. However, the surrender 24 hours later of Taha’s husband, General Amir Muhammed Rasheed, director of Iraq’s missile development program and best known by his nickname “The Missile Man”, was announced.

The United States is therefore fully apprised of the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of unconventional weapons and has taken custody of the scientists who developed them.

But DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources say Washington was nevertheless far from placated and Powell’s meeting with the Syrian president Saturday was a confrontation. The secretary of state laid down the following demands:

1. A map with the coordinates of the pits holding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

2. Surrender of Saddam’s most senior insiders who fled to Aleppo and Latakiya. After DEBKAfile blew the whistle on April 3, the group staying at the Cote D’Azur De Cham Resort in Latakia was whisked away leaving their families comfortably ensconced there.

3. Handover of the two senior Al Qaeda members now in Damascus. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military and intelligence sources say their names and whereabouts were uncovered by US intelligence units in Iraq.

4. An explanation of Syrian motives in allowing two British terrorists, Assif Hanif, who blew himself up in Tel Aviv on April 30, and Omar Khan Sharif, who ran away, to transit Damascus en route to Israel. (One of the duo spent four months of preparation in the Syrian capital with the Hamas operations officer and associate of Hizballah Imad al-Alami, as reported exclusively by DEBKAfile.)

5. An immediate stop to the military-terrorist activities of the Lebanese Hizballah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Syria and Lebanon. Failure to do so, Powell explained, will result in a painful tightening of economic pressure on Syria, after the loss of $1b in oil revenues from Baghdad.

[FairOpinion]

Don't forget this is an article in the Washington Post, take it with a few pounds of salt.

May guess is that they may have sent home some experts, andchanged the mix of the teams, but I read that they actually tripled the team looking for WMD, and that there are at least a thousand sites we know about, and how many that we don't and we only looked at about 100.

I doubt that we gave up looking for them.

[Maigret]

It is the Washington Post, why would you think it is true? Everything I've heard recently is that just the opposite is true.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

Didn't the Wash.Post run the exclusive article about al-Qaeda's imminent attack on US submarines stationed at Pearl Harbor?

[FairOpinion]

You are right, I read that too.

I think a few particular experts may be reassigned, and the Washington Post is just trying to play it up, just as they played up the big "looting scene" of the Baghdad Museum, which never was.

I think the Democrats are so desperate that even their mainstream news media is reduces to serious slanting of the truth. (just think of CNN who didn't report a lot of facts, so as not to inconvenience Saddam and the NY Times reporter, Blair, who was found to literally make up "facts"). And people here are questioning the accuracy of Debka, while believing the WP, NY Times and CNN. I think it's time to reassess the faith in the various sources.

[rwfromkansas]

The group is leaving to BE REPLACED.

"The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush administration has said is a larger team."

[AntiGuv]

That was the Washington Times:

Terrorists aim at Pearl Harbor