Iraqi War Began Four Days Ago

DebkaFiles ^ | 10 Aug 2002 | DebkaFiles

[greggy]

US Iraq Campaign Has Its First Engagement
DEBKAfileSpecial Military Analysis

10 August: America’s offensive against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq has begun as an exercise in gradualism rather than a D-Day drama. DEBKAfile ’s military sources report that tens of thousands of US, British, French, Netherlands, Australian troops may take part in the campaign, openly or covertly, but not in massive waves that fling themselves telegenically on Baghdad...

Tuesday August 6, at 0800 hours Middle East time, US and British air bombers went into action and destroyed the Iraqi air command and control center at al-Nukhaib in the desert between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The center contained advanced fiber optic networks recently installed by Chinese companies. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources say the raid made military history. For the first time, the US air force used new precision-guided bombs capable of locating and destroying fiber optic systems. The existence of such weaponry was hitherto unknown. Following the destruction of the facility, about 260 miles (415 kilometers), southwest of Baghdad, waves of US warplanes swept in from the Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia and from US aircraft carriers in the Gulf and flew over the Iraqi capital. The Iraqi air force and anti-aircraft system held their fire on orders from above. This deep air penetration told the Americans that the early warning radar system protecting Baghdad and its environs from intrusion by enemy aircraft and missiles was inactive...

Iraq’s military passivity in the face of US-led advances and strikes is beginning to worry the American, Turkish and Israeli high commands. They suspect that Saddam is playing the same fog-of-war game as Washington, so as to put them to sleep and then catch them unawares. Such sudden action could take the form of an Iraqi missile or bomber attack on Israel using warheads loaded with radioactive, chemical or biological materials, a combined missile-terrorist strike to sabotage Saudi oil fields, or a mass terrorist attack in the United States. The sharpest alert to a threat to Iraq’s southern neighbors came not from military intelligence but from international oil dealers, who warned that Saddam Hussein if attacked may well decide to set fire to Saudi and Kuwaiti oil fields, sending oil prices skyrocketing above US$ 40 per barrel....

[stylin_geek]

At some point in a fiber optic network there is a glass/copper interface which would produce some kind of EMF.

[crystalk]

Debka rocks, and I posted this here on the day it happened.

I predicted then that Aug 6, which IIRC is the Hiroshima anniversary, would perhaps in retrospect be viewed as the opening gun of WW III, which would be quite in line with Nostradamus' prediction of 57 years between those two wars.

[windchime]

Note the peculiarly placed arrow sign that directs you to the object in question. Any theories?

[section9]

As if on cue, a story on Saddam's palaces was published in The New York Post today. In its last paragraph, the story went:

U.S. and coalition allies are intensifying preparations. Extensive equipment pre-positioning and expansion projects are under way at bases in Qatar, southern Kuwait and Turkey. Preliminary work also is being be done at an abandoned secret air base inside a Kurdish-controlled region, sources said.

(emphasis added)

Saddam knows this is going on. He has adopted a waiting game, it seems. However, this opens him up to salami tactics.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[DoughtyOne]

LOL. I that the fly zone to the south seemed to be designed so that Iraq would violate it constantly giving a reason for more action. I mean it starts on Baghdad's doorstep.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

RE:43

Pawn to Queen's Bishop four?

[Aric2000]

That is true, but the fact is that they said that it was some new unheard of weapon. Well, we have weapons that can seek out electromagnetic fields etc.

A weapon that would seek out Fiber optic in particular is beyond the realm as far as I am concerned. What will it look for, light leakage? won't be any. How about a frequency signature? Sorry, we are not talking radio waves here, we are talking light, locked in a fiberoptic, there is NO leakage to find.

Debka again talks out it's rearend, telling me that they indeed haven't a clue. I'd get better information from the national enquirer.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

We have porous borders. You've got to believe he's thought about planting a terrorist attack ready to go in this country.

I agree with you on this and the other points you raised. I imagine that a great deal of preparation and contingency planning has been under way since 9-12 -- and earlier, to be fair to the FedGov. Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al. are all brilliant people, who are giving GW sound advice. I might even grudgingly throw Powell into the mix (in the interest of balancing opinions). What's damned frustrating is the failure to take the appropriate steps vis border protection due to PC concerns. Add to that the unnecessary confusion regarding civil rights of US citizens vs non-citizens and combatants. It's just absurd. But I am sure that preventative and post-attack contingency planning and implemtation are moving forward. Insofar as an invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam being a necessary preventative measure, I believe that we will attack when the necessary infrastructure is in place and the proper case has been made to Congress and US allies. My guess is January 03. The longer we wait the more we risk an attack on US soil as you indicated in your piece.

[greggy]

Interesting, considering the fact that the skiffy terrorist-loving Saudis have denied us the use of Prince Sultan Airbase.

The point of the article is that everything we have heard has been propaganda- by everyone. The only thing we know for certain that is not propaganda is the dead Israeli civilians at the hands of terrorist chieftain Arafat.

[stylin_geek]

I agree, the idea such a weapon exists is rather farfetched, however, I was merely pointing out EMF occurs around computers where the fiber connects to the machine. Not to mention fiber switches and routers. Whether or not these devices generate enough of a signal for a weapon to be able to find them is another question.

What I am getting at is the fact the weapon would not necessarily have to rely on or be capable of using the signal in a fiber optic cable for targeting. In fact, from a military point of view, wiping out fiber switches and routers would make more sense, because one punch would knock out multiple parts of a military communications network.

Also, if one did knock out a bunch of fiber optic cable, wouldn't the initial impression be that some kind of new and super secret weapon was available? One with unheard of capabilities? Or, suppose the fiber optic networks were knocked out....how about just plain old good intelligence? Were not some bunkers in Iraq targeted during the Gulf war based on information from the German firms that built them?

[greggy]

The Turkish military came back and denied that report! They said!

I am not saying this is an accurate article, but if it is, what would you expect the Turks to do?

[rwfromkansas]

Okay, I bumped this last night with only scanning before going to bed.

Today I read it. This is very unlikely..........

I am sorry, but waves of planes flying over the Iraqi capitol is not something that can be missed. It is IMPOSSIBLE.

This just can't be accurate.

[Aric2000]

I won't argue the facts that YOU state, but the way that Debka states such BS is so beyond, that is ridiculous.

No doubts in my mind that we could very easily take out thier fiberoptics where they are amplified, switch to copper, etc. But to be able to target the fiber optic itself is just plain silly, and that is what Debka is claiming. Or that is what it sounds like they are claiming.

You cannot pick up any type of signal from the fiber optic cable itself, it does not put out heat, an energy signature, NOTHING. Debka is claiming that we have a weapon that can see this cable, I say that they are full of crap!!

[rightofrush]

Thanks for the clarification.

[greggy]

Then again, nobody noticed the million man Russian army that swept into Afghanistan...again except DEBKA...

I understand what people are saying about debka. I have my own opinions. They are not like most others. They talk about information they get from sources about the plans, before the action. In some cases, the plans change, leaving Debka looking like they made a prediction that did not come true. My own opinion is that they have covered stuff that others first approached weeks later. That says something.

Another thought on Debka is that I have seen them run a headliner that they would remove within hours. This is not one of them. This is a full story and it is still there.

As for the alphabet soup news covering Baghdad being overflown by hundreds of war planes, did the people even know? Or were they too high up in the sky to hear? I don't know.

As for American based broadcasting, the president can control what they put out. If you think we live in a free press society, think again. CNN can have their license yanked with one phone call, all transmitters shut down, if they ever cross the line- and that line is always at the whim of national security defined by the President and his advisors. That I am absolutely certain of.

[greggy]

He has bio weapon capabilities. We have porous borders. You've got to believe he's thought about planting a terrorist attack ready to go in this country.

I was talking with a man just the other day (I won't say anymore than that). He worked for a few months for the FBI right after 9-11- very bright man. I turned the conversation on WMD in major US cities. He said, "We are not concerned with the 6000 sleepers in America." I asked him further about it. The FBI knows of about 6000 sleepers in America and in their estimation (according to this source), none of them are intellectually capable of pulling off anything worse than a dirty bomb- a radiological bomb. But that is their concern.

I don't care about the 6000 that the FBI knows about. I care about the one or two that they don't know about. Did they know about the sleepers flying jets into the towers?

[greggy]

Mass terrorist attack? Then what is Saddam waiting for? Gulf War III, IV, or V?

If he had that capability he would have used it in 1991.

I suspect he is waiting to get nuked so that his response will be retaliatory rather than first strike, thus he is the victim and America is the aggressor. That is the only thing I think Saddam is waiting for. He needs to have a big PR advantage, because he has little technology advantage, and he is hoping for the EU and others to come to his defense within the UN (as they have been for some time now trying to get America to drop the UN sanctions).

[greggy]

What this article fails to mention is that I personally bombed Iraq's air defenses, then I...

I will be certain to let them know what a sloppy job they did...

[greggy]

I'd get better information from the national enquirer.

Please let us know what you dig up!

[greggy]

One last point about my FBI friend. When I asked him about sleepers using e-bombs, he ended the conversation abruptly. Read into that what you want. He may have felt he said too much already and didn't want to continue in general. I don't know. It did give me pause.