Posted on 11/16/2002 5:32:45 PM PST by MadIvan
Saddam Hussein is hiding chemical and biological weapons supplies in mosques and hospitals in an effort to thwart the new United Nations inspection mission to Baghdad, Iraqi dissidents have revealed.
America says the Iraqi leader has also set up highly-trained "clean-up" squads at his most sensitive secret weapons sites to hide evidence and "sanitise" key facilities even as inspectors are on their way.
Saddam was completing his concealment strategy as French and Russian diplomats wrangled with their American and British counterparts at the UN in New York over the Security Council resolution backing the return of the weapons inspectors.
American intelligence has intensified its information-gathering campaign about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme as Washington prepares to provide the inspectors with the data to counter Baghdad's concealment efforts.
In a significant breakthrough, the claims of Adnan al-Haideri, an Iraqi civil engineer who defected to America last year and revealed how Saddam was building underground vaults to hide chemical and biological weapons laboratories, have been backed up by US spy plane missions.
The aircraft are fitted with a device that detects underground voids - such as bunkers and tunnels - through variations in the earth's gravitational field. The device found a void where Mr al-Haideri said there was a subterranean nerve-agent laboratory.
Several scientists responsible for Iraq's WMD programme have been shifted out of the country on false passports already to prevent the inspectors questioning them, leading exiles have told The Telegraph.
In the past fortnight two scientists have been sent to Yemen, two elsewhere in the Middle East and one each to Romania, Malaysia and Singapore, according to the Iraqi National Accord (INA), an opposition group with good contacts within the regime.
Dr Ayad Alawi, the INA's leader, also disclosed that the regime was moving documents and materials from weapons laboratories and a ballistic-missile site into hospitals, schools and mosques in the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk.
The concealment operation is being co-ordinated by Brig Gen Walid al-Nasri, a trusted aide from Saddam's home region of Tikrit who reports directly to Qusay Hussein, the dictator's second son and head of his powerful State Security Organisation.
An official of the US Defence Intelligence Agency said: "They have trained large numbers of personnel in how to deal with an intrusive inspection regime."
These "clean-up" squads have developed methods for rapidly cleaning and sterilising equipment such as fermenters and centrifuges used to manufacture and store chemical and biological agents.
Iraq has also tried to "bury" small-scale weapons-making activity in larger-scale industrial sites.
British and American intelligence have developed a plan for the weapons inspectors that meets a timetable for attack early next year. They want them to look at about 1,000 sites. About 100 are considered certain to contain evidence of illegal activity.
In his first public comments since the UN resolution was passed, Saddam said yesterday that he had accepted the harsh terms to avert a US attack. After again insisting that Iraq was "devoid of weapons of mass destruction", he used typically vituperative language to denounce Israel, America and the "devils" that followed them.
The first test will come on December 8, the deadline set by UN Resolution 1441 for him to declare Iraq's stocks of biological and chemical agents, its nuclear-bomb programme and remaining ballistic missiles.
"If the Iraqis stick with a declaration of 'nil', then it's war," said Dr John Chipman, director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, the London-based think-tank that produced a damning recent dossier on Iraq's weapons programme.
He said that Baghdad would most probably come up with a "middling" declaration.
America, backed by Britain, would argue at the Security Council that an incomplete December 8 declaration would put Baghdad in "material breach" of Resolution of 1441. France and Russia would in turn be expected to contend that the inspectors be given the chance to prove that Saddam was lying.
Despite the growing American military build-up, Pentagon planners would still prefer to launch a closely co-ordinated air and ground offensive after late December, when more than 200,000 US troops would be in the region.
The plan is that US intelligence will provide the UN inspectors with the "killer" data once America is ready for the military finale. The inspectors would then make unannounced spot checks while the US kept the sites under surveillance relayed live by unmanned spy drones.
Washington believes the Iraqis will be seen either trying to conceal weapons material or will be caught out. The UN Security Council will be allowed a short time to debate, but the Pentagon will already have launched the final, brief countdown to war.
the infowarrior
Iraq is over twice the size of New York State.
How is it possible that something could NOT be hidden in an area that size? We can't even locate every residence in a United States census, in a civlized country with roads, in the most mapped nation in history. How can inspectors "inspect" even 1/2 of 1% of an area this size? I mean, I HOPE there is an answer that I am missing here. But I think that I could hide something from hundreds of "inspectors" if I had a nation twice the size of the state of N.Y. to hide it in.
So the pacifists realize Saddam truly is evil. Our friends, the liberal media, have been so effectively filling the airwaves with conspiracy stories about our "true" motives that only CNN cameras showing proof-positive WMD will justify war.
I wish you were Blix. Of course, after you, the all-new Hans Blix, did that, we'd have to offer you political asylum,* since you sure wouldn't be very popular back home in Sweden.
After Saddam's highly insulting Wednesday letter to the UN, stating that he had nada in the way of nuclear, biological, or even chemical weapons, and that Resolution 1441 (the one he supposedly accepted) was in violation of international law, why is Blix running off today to visit Iraq? Blix occasionally talks tough to molify the U.S. and Britain, but actually is against war above all. He has said that parts of 1441 are unrealistic, in effect siding with Saddam on some issues in advance. Blix would rather see (or avert his eyes from) hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians being poisoned gas by Saddam than for a few thousand Iraqi soldiers to be killed in battle.
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*Not an original idea on my part. See:
For the liberals, not even that. The New Yorker magazine, probably the most popular and respected liberal magazine there is, especially in the academic set, reported after 9/11 in horrifying detail on the effect of poison gas on Saddam's own Kurdish civilians. Certainly seeing boxes of chemical weapons (Saddam's minions will say they are drug ingredients or some such) won't move those libs who were not moved by this:
Pan-Arab nationalism + socialism = Baathism, the ruling ideology of Iraq and Syria. The government of Iraq owns the means of production. As for private homes, like in almost every other third world country, people do not have clear title to their land and homes, so there is no "property owner" whose rights Hans Blix would be violating. As for religion, although Saddam does tolerate Islam and Christianity in a formal sense, the government vets the leadership of and fully controls mosques and churches.
For more on the crucial fact and disasterous results of lack of clarity in the third world as to who owns what real estate, see:
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