iraq wmd's - shattering conventional wisdom - loftus

8/8/2019 Iraq WMD's - Shattering Conventional Wisdom - Loftus

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Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam'sWMD's--What top secret Iraqi files disclose.

FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | November 16, 2007 | John Loftus

Posted on Friday, November 16, 2007 5:06:24 AM by SJackson

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1926630/posts

We live in an age of documents. There are no more secrets, only deferred disclosures.Saddam Hussein's secret documents are measured by the shelf-mile and stored inside asecure but dusty facility near U.S. Central Command Headquarters in Doha, Qatar, andin several subsidiary sites. Armed guards protect the unread dossiers. Three shifts oftwo hundred translators each work around the clock. Perhaps 5% of these captureddocuments have been studied so far, but their contents are about to shatter much ofthe conventional wisdom concerning Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a bit chagrinned atthe disclosures. The documents show a much more complex history than previouslysuspected. The "Bush lied, people died" chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMDwhatsoever after 1991 - and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. TheNeocon diehards insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-trove is still outthere somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of Iraq.[1] Each side is more than alittle bit wrong about Saddam's WMD, and each side is only a little bit right about whathappened to it.

The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam's WMD wasdestroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990's. Saddam soldapproximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors duringthe mid to late 1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the lastfew months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclearweapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in2003, but were stolen from under the Americans noses and sent to Syria. Syria is oneof eight countries in the world that never signed a treaty banning WMD, and now is thestorehouse for much of what remains of Saddam's WMD Empire. This was the target ofthe recent Israeli air strike.

There are only a few people in the world who were close to being right all along about

Saddam's WMD. One of them was Yossef Bodansky, a noted intelligence analyst andformer director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and UnconventionalWarfare.[2] On page 496 of Bodanskys book, "The Secret History of the Iraq War" hemakes the astounding assertion that:

".. .The United States had long known that Saddam moved virtually all productioncapabilities to Libya and Sudan somewhere between 1996 and 1998. Subsequently, inthe summer of 2002, with Tehran's consent, the residual chemical weapons productioncapabilities were shipped to Iran..."[3]
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In other words, is Bodansky is right (and he usually is) as late as 2002, Saddam stillretained a CW production capability and then sold it to the Iranians on the eve ofwar.[4] The CIA has now acknowledged that they had a highly-placed spy in Saddam'scabinet who agreed that Saddam had gotten rid of all of his production facilities, butthe super spy claimed that Saddam still retained a lethal stockpile of finished chemicalweapons in early 2003. The latter information, about the remaining CW stockpile, turnsout to have been incorrect, but neither the CIA nor their Iraqi super spy knew it at the

time.[5]

After Saddam's brother-in-law Kemal Hussein defected to Jordan in the mid 1990's andexposed some (but not all) of the numerous Iraqi WMD programs, Saddam started overfrom scratch on WMD production, using a small and secret cadre of new programleaders. Among the newly-disclosed documents are Saddam's actual tape recordings ofthe meetings of this special group for WMD.

The National Security Agency has confirmed [6] that the tapes are authentic and thatthe voiceprints are unquestionably those of Saddam and his elite WMD advisers. TheCIA's super-spy, excluded from this working group, apparently did not know that it even

existed. (His voice appears nowhere on the tapes.) He simply could not have knownwhat Saddam was doing with his WMD programs, let alone with his CW stockpile.[7]

Most of the audio recordings of the secret WMD group are undated, as the CD on whichthey were found is a compilation of tapes of various WMD meetings stretching over adecade. But their tone is consistent not only with other recorded WMD meetings butwith the newly-released document intelligence archives, many of which are revealedhere for the first time through the assistance of author and geopolitical analyst Mr.Ryan Mauro.[8] Mauro cautions that "the recently declassified documents have thepotential to shatter any conclusions or judgments about what Saddam Hussein's regime

was up to. Until all these documents are translated and analyzed, it is premature toreach any conclusion."

Translating shelf miles of documents, however, may take decades. In the meantime,enough of Saddam's secret files have been translated to illustrate one clear trend overtime: through the time of Hans Blix and the run-up to the invasion, Saddam hadabsolutely no intention of destroying his WMD.

In the last year of his regime, Saddam was in fact still trying to expand his chemicalweapons capability. In January 2002, his advisors discussed research into a precursorfor Sarin nerve gas.[9] In September 2002, for example, only seven months before the

war, Saddam's Military Industrial Commission approved the illegal production of theprecursor chemicals used to make Tabun nerve gas.[10] Four days later, another officediscussed plans to import a banned compound, phosphorus pentasulfate.

The UN had required Iraq to prove that it had destroyed all of its stocks of thischemical, which is a precursor for VX nerve gas. Instead, they were importing more ofit.[11] In October 2002, Saddam's Director of Planning ordered more than forty tons ofvarious chemicals which, when mixed together, would make Zyclon B the poison gasused by the Nazis to kill millions of Jews during the Holocaust.[12] Saddam's scientistsappear never to have met a poison gas they did not like.


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The secret planning for banned chemical weapons in 2002 was no last-minute decisionof desperation on the eve of war. Rather, it typified Saddam's long, well-thought-outplan to deceive the UN an ongoing project that went back more than a decade. Forexample, Saddam's intelligence service sent out a memo in 1997 ordering his staff notto destroy any WMD but to conceal prohibited materials, "hide equipment anddocuments....make sure that labs are cleaned of any traces of chemical or biologicalsubstances."[13] That was the real Saddam: hide the WMD documents, clean up the

tell-tale evidence.

Beginning in 1998, Saddams staff went into overdrive to conceal their illegal WMDprograms: "The researchers [sic] that cannot be declared and that is related with theprevious prohibited programs of WMD and how to make sure that information aboutthese researchers will not leak to the outside world."[14] Files from 1999, marked TopSecret, confirm that the Iraqi army had a "chemical platoon" that was undergoingtraining in every form of illegal chemical weapons.[15] By 2001, the regime ensuredthat their chemical platoons had mobile shower vehicles for decontamination.[16]Similarly, the production of mobile labs (which the Duelfer report concluded had endedin 1997) were still being manufactured in 2002.[17]

There can be no doubt that instead of destroying his WMD in 1991, Saddam had a clearintent to revive his WMD production, to expand it and to hide it from the UN inspectorsas late as 2002. So where did the stockpile of chemical weapons go in 2003?

John Shaw knew. He had seen this kind of scam before. This, as the Texans say, wasnot his first rodeo. John (Jack) Shaw, was a distinguished civil servant who was pushedout of the US Department of Defense shortly after the 2004 elections. He was the pointman for tracking the mass of conventional weapons and prohibited technology that wasfound in Iraq. He did his job well, apparently too well for the comfort of some

government officials.

As Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Shaws job was to track illegal sales ofconventional weapons all over the world, but particularly in Iraq. Shipping arms to Iraqwas a direct violation of the UN embargo order and US law. There was a good bit ofthat going on in the run-up to the war. Saddam had a lot of money and European armsmerchants had a lot of weapons to sell, often with a wink and a nod from their homegovernments. Shaw unearthed evidence of a million tons of high explosives andevidence of high tech weaponry - and also, in the course of this work trackingconventional weapons, the scent of WMD.

As an example of Shaws work on illegal conventional weapons sales to Iraq, US troopsdiscovered after the invasion, and reported through his office, that, despite the UNembargo, Saddam had been able to purchase the latest Roland II anti-aircraft missilelauncher, a very effective French weapons platform for shooting down helicopters. Thedate of manufacture stamped on the Rolands was January 2003.

French arms manufacturers, in other words, had been selling to Saddam right up to theopening of the war. They later explained that France had sold the Roland to Syria, andthat Syria was not covered by the embargo. The French claimed to be shocked thatSyria had sold the Roland to their fellow Ba'athists in Baghdad. It should be noted that,


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for more than a year prior to the French sale the Israeli press had been publiclyexposing Syria as an arms front for Saddam.

It is also hard to credit the Russians' claim that they were similarly shocked to discoverthat a corrupt Ukrainian arms dealer had sold scores of Moscow's high tech Kornet anti-tank missiles to Saddam. The Kornet is the only hand held missile in the world that canpenetrate the super-heavy armor of the American main battle tank, the Ml Al Abrams.

Two of the Abrams were knocked out of action by Kornets in Iraq. It was Shaw's unitthat tracked the Kornet. "Its provenance was obvious," Shaw said, "and the Russiansilence in response to our exposure was deafening."

In terms of WMD, newly released documents from Saddams government suggest thatthe Russians knew exactly what they were doing when it came to hiding illegalweapons. While Russian scientists were working hand-in-hand with Iraqi scientists onWMD, Russian spies inside CENTCOM were warning Saddam how to avoid detectionfrom the UN inspectors. Saddam's secret files also mention an Associated Press reporterwho passed information on how the UN inspection teams were being trained.[18] TheRussian Ambassador himself handed over many of America's secret war

plans.[19]

Most importantly, Saddams intelligence services credit Russias critical help inmisleading the UN into thinking that Iraq was in compliance with the resolutionparagraphs requiring destruction of its WMD. We have succeeded in a few of the UNparagraphswe have won Russia, ahhhwe have convinced Russia by way of generousaccounts. [20]

It should be noted that France, Russia and China were the three largest exporters ofSaddam's oil before the war. They were also, according to the documents now beingreleased, the three nations most involved with illegal weapons sales to Saddam. The oilprofits, of course, were huge, and according to minutes from secret meetings,Saddam's intelligence service knew how to dangle the bait of illegal oil profits to, intheir words, "commit some nations like France, China, Russia and Japan to economicalagreements that make the implementation of the smart sanctions to have negativeeffect to the interests of these nations."[21] In English the word for this is bribery on a huge scale.

Under the porous regulations of the UN's Oil-for-Food Program, Saddam had noproblem in diverting food money into weapons purchases, and corrupt UN officialsturned a blind eye, as their 2.2% administrative fee, plus another 0.8% for weapons

inspections, --so 3% altogether -- amounting to $1.9 billion over the course of the1996-2003 program, made the Iraqi "Oil-for-Food Program" the UN bureaucrats' bestcash cow. The French, moreover, controlled the financing mechanism for the programthrough the bank BNP Paribas, all orchestrated by an Anglo-Iraqi who was Saddam'slong time arms merchant.

It seemed that nearly everyone in the EU weapons industry had their nose in Saddam'strough. It was an old problem. The German government, for instance, had longdismissed American complaints that German companies were building a poison nervegas plant for Colonel Qaddafi. Finally, in 1997, the Americans played a recording of a


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telephone wiretap to the German government. The Libyan plant manager wasscreaming at his German supplier that the chemical weapons plant he had been soldwas leaking and killing his workers.[22]

Saddam had similar problems with quality control at his poison gas plants. His WMDcontractors were Russian, and their Chemical Weapons product was of extremely lowquality. It could kill a few thousand Kurds well enough, as was shown by the eyewitness

reports at Saddam's trial, but his poison gas had a short shelf life because ofcontamination introduced through the Russian process.[23]

Perhaps the real reason Saddam destroyed a portion of his chemical weapons stockpilewas that with a shelf life as short as a few months, the weapons just did not workanymore, so he might as well get some good publicity out of it by destroying them forthe ever gullible UN inspectors. Certainly, as Bodansky recounts, some of Saddams CWstill worked during the mid-1990s, and these Saddam sold to Qaddafi, along with agood bit of his Russian-made manufacturing equipment.

Jack Shaw has even more detailed knowledge of what happened to the missing WMD.

It is fair to say that Shaw is a recognized expert in projects dealing with technology andarms transfer in the Middle East.[24] He had been studying the inflow of conventionalweapons into Iraq in 2002 when he came across the simultaneous outflow ofunconventional WMD from Iraq to Syria.. He says he knew a swap when he saw it.

More than any other person, Shaw uncovered the mystery of the disappearance ofSaddams missing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. He is hardly aconspiracy theory type. Shaw has a PhD in International Economic Affairs and hasserved as Inspector General of Foreign Assistance for the U.S. Department of State. Henext served at the Commerce Department as Associate Deputy Secretary and ActingUndersecretary for Technology and Export Administration. Finally, at the time of theIraq war, he held a dual post in the Department of Defense: Deputy Undersecretary forInternational Technology Security and Director, International Armament andTechnology Trade.

As a result of some long-time personal relationships, he was able to develop a workingrelationship with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and seniormembers of the Ukrainian intelligence service. The Ukrainians, part of the Coalition inIraq, gained access to the records of the Russian Spetznatz units that had secretly beenordered to Iraq at the end of 2002. This elite unit of the Russian Special Forces includesa force specially trained to remove all evidence of Russian arms transfers from client

states.

At the February 2006 Intelligence Summit, Shaw spoke publicly for the first time. Hetold how three western spy services discovered that Russian soldiers had beendispatched from Trans-Caspian bases, switched from combat uniforms into civilianclothes, and transited to Iraq. They were not bringing any new weapons into Iraq. TheSpetznatz were smuggling Saddam's stash of heavy explosives and unconventionalweapons out. Shaw has collected all the details of the plan, the identity of the units andtheir commanders, and the dates of their entry and exit of Iraq.


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The conventional wisdom is that the USA and Great Britain supplied Saddam with hischemical weapons equipment during the Iran-Iraq war. The cynical joke goes: "TheUSA has proof of Saddam's WMD: they have the sales receipts." In fact, both theReagan and Thatcher administrations worked strenuously to forbid the export of evenprecursor chemicals, as confirmed by the archives of the State Department's Office forExport Controls Cooperation. It was the former Soviet Union that suppliedSaddam with 99% of his chemical and biological weapons.[25]

Yevgeny Primakov, Saddam's Soviet interface, was both the architect of the Iraqi armsprogram and the overseer of its removal. Primakov, the only-Arab speaking member ofthe old Soviet Politburo, is regarded by many historians as the father of Arab terrorism.During the Cold War, it was Primakov who ultimately called the shots in the Russianclient states of Iraq and Syria. As Primakov became head of the KGB and then PrimeMinister of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin, his influence on Saddam should not beunderestimated. Primakovs reappearance in Iraq in December, 2002, to oversee thecleanup exercise gives a sense of the importance to Russia of the Iraqi weaponsprogram.

Covering up for this was not simply a question of hiding a few Russian scientists orshredding some documents. The Russians had given Saddam biowar samples andchemical precursors, whose molecular signature could possibly be traced back to theirpoints of origin, and the Russians had to get rid of substantial amounts of physicalevidence. That is what the Spetznatz unit was sent to Iraq for in the last months beforethe invasion: to remove the proof that Russia had violated its international treaties bysupplying Saddam with biological and chemical weapons.

According to US and British intelligence, a pair of retired Russian generals was sent toIraq to deliver the bad news to Saddam. At the very end of 2002, the Russians

persuaded a reluctant Saddam that CW and BW, while useful in massacring civilians,would have no impact on the well-equipped American and British forces. Leaving theweapons stockpile lying around would only confirm to the world that the Coalition hadbeen justified in invading Iraq. [25]

Shaw had a dilemma in documenting his evidence. The Ukrainians had gathered andprovided the details of these Russian activities, but could not allow the information tobe traced back to them. Keeping physical control of the documents, they allowed onlythat they be visually reviewed and notes taken. This intelligence, combined with USsatellite photography showing the Spetznatz -cum-civilians loading trucks and tankerswith unknown crates and substances, and then driving them in convoys down the

Euphrates highway to Al Qaim on the Syrian border provided a clear and comprehensivepicture of the Russian evacuation plans. US and British intelligence assets in theimmediate area photographed the convoy traffic out of Iraq into Syria. [26]

US spy satellites picked up the convoys on the other side of the border. The Syrians haddug ditches sixty feet deep, and then were observed dumping the contents of thetanker trucks into them at night. The Syrians were then seen filling in the ditches andreplanting crops over them before dawn came up. One cynic asked "What were theyburying at night? Milk?"


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(For his chemical weapons, Saddam often used what are known as binary chemicalweapons, arms made from two separate liquid compounds that could be mixedtogether to form, for example, VX nerve gas. Buried separately, the components areharmless.)

There is circumstantial evidence that the Spetznatz unit commandeered every Iraqitanker they could get their hands on to move the liquid WMD to Syria: after the

invasion, American charities working in Iraq complained to the press that it was almostimpossible to find a clean water truck in Iraq. Almost every one seemed to have beenflushed out with gasoline a common measure to eliminate traces of WMD chemicals.

Numerous post-war interrogations of Iraqi prisoners confirm that the WMD was rushedacross the border just before the Coalition forces arrived. March 2003 must have beenthe busy season for evacuating the WMD. Apparently there weren't enough Spetznatzdrivers to move all the chemicals before the deadline, so Saddam turned to local Iraqitruckers, one of whom later became an informant for the Coalition. A Coalition reporton the case says

"An Iraqi dissident going by the name of "Abu Abdallah" claims that on March 10, 2003,50 trucks arrived in Deir Al-Zour, Syria after being loaded in Baghdad. After their arrival,Syrian intelligence personnel replaced the drivers. After the contents were put intowarehouses, the Iraqi drivers were given back the vehicles and paid for theaccomplishment of safely transporting the items, with his first shipment on March 1,2003."

"The dissident says that he has a friend who works in a Syrian company that is an Iraqiex-consul for the embassy in Damascus. Abdallah approached his friend who washesitant to confirm the WMD shipment, but did after Abdallah explained what hissources informed him of. The friend told him not to tell anyone about the shipment."

The Coalition spies watched helplessly during the last ten weeks before the outbreak ofwar as the Spetznatz units and Iraqi truckers removed every last piece of Saddam's CWstockpile and drove it into Syria. "We watched it happen," said an intelligence analystwho worked with Shaw, "but there was nothing we could do. Our forces were stillarriving in theater." In addition to satellite reconnaissance, there were Syrian informers.Nizar Nayyouf, a respected Syrian journalist (who was dying of cancer) defected toParis. He brought with him detailed notes and maps drawn by his friends in Syrianmilitary intelligence showing exactly where Saddam's WMD stockpile had been buried.Nayyouf s information was verified by Dutch intelligence, which leaked his maps and

notes to the press. Because Saddam's secret files were not available at that time forpublic corroboration, Nayyouf s disclosures were generally ignored by the westernmedia. But then so were Bodansky and Shaw. I suspect that will all soon change in lightof recent satellite observations of an obscure backwater province in Northeastern Syria,close to the Iraqi border.

The Deir al Zour area of Syria, first described in 2003 as the WMD burial site by theIraqi truckdriver, was once infamous for a different reason. Deir al Zour was the lastdeath site of the Armenian genocide. Hundreds of thousands of deported Armenianscollapsed and died after reaching this isolated corner of Syria at the end of the


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deportation line from their homes in Turkey. Deir al Zour may also enter history as theplace where another genocide was planned, but was barely averted.

Shortly after the Iraqi war began, an Iraqi truckdriver revealed to a CENTCOMinterrogator, that Deir al Zour was the final destination for Saddams WMD, but he hadbeen ignored at the time. However, four years later in 2007, Deir al Zour was namedagain in press reports as the secret site of a partially constructed Syrian nuclear facility.

The Israelis destroyed the facility with an airstrike, but wrapped a thick shroud ofsecrecy about the reason for their raid on Deir al Zour. The New York Times publishedbefore and after satellite photos showing that the Syrians had bulldozed the allegednuclear site and carted away the topsoil after the Israeli raid. These precautions areusually performed only to hide traces of radioactive soil from UN inspectors [27]. AnIsraeli intelligence website, Debka.com, issued a special report claiming that the sameDeir al Zour nuclear site which Israel bombed was also the site where Saddams missingWMD had been stored four years earlier.

Not only did the Israelis independently corroborate the Iraqi truck drivers naming ofDeir al Zour as the burial place for Saddams WMD, Debkafile also explained why the

same Deir al Zour location was chosen by the Syrians four years later for the site oftheir nuclear facility. It was a matter of necessity, not choice. The Israelis claim that thelarge black nuclear processing building had to be constructed close to Saddams WMDstorage area because the Syrians planned to take Saddams highly enriched uraniumout of the storage site and irradiate the Iraqi HEU with North Korean plutonium. Theresult would be a factory to produce enough toxic fuel for thousands of extremelypoisonous dirty bombs. which could be loaded onto warheads and launched at Israel.Had the irradiation plant been completed, Deir al Zour might have became a name asinfamous as Auschwitz.

There are rumors that the Israelis had a local Kurdish construction worker on site as aninformant. He took pictures of the irradiation facility which was dangerously close tocompletion. The Israelis shared them with the US government, which quickly approvedthe Israeli strike. However, the US State Department allegedly asked that the entirematter be shrouded in secrecy as the Deir al Zour nuclear plant placed all theirnegotiations with North Korea and Syria in a very bad light.

If the Israelis are right about the Deir al Zour sites location and dual purpose, then theNew York Times may have missed something very important in their satellite photoresearch and might be looking in the wrong place for the wrong kind of nuclear facility.First, the Israelis described a large black building, not a white one as shown in the

Times photographs. Second, the location was given as close to an airport and anorchard, not by the bank of the Euphrates River. If the Israelis are right, the site theybombed was a nuclear irradiation plant, not a reactor. An irradiation plant can be builtquickly (months vs. years) and does not require access to the huge quantities of waterthat a nuclear reactor would. . Third, and such site would have to be near a highway fortruck access to deliver materials to the nuclear facility construction site. Fourth, forobvious safety and security reasons, it would have to be built in a remote, non-populated area out in the desert. The site location alleged by the New York Timesmeets almost none of these criteria.


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Most importantly, if the Israelis were right, that the same nuclear site was also used forthe storage of Saddams WMD, then there had to be some visible evidence of WMDstorage bunkers in very close proximity to the Deir al Zour nuclear facility. I conductedan extensive close up inspection of the Deir al Zour area using satellite photos fromdifferent angles. I was looking for traces of large disturbances in the dirt out in thedesert but close to a highway. This desert area once contained large numbers of rocksalt mines, which are ideal for the storage of nuclear waste. If there was a storage area

nearby the nuclear facility, any truck-sized entrance hole would have to be visible on asatellite photo.

It may be only an astounding series of coincidences, but there actually is one site inDeir al Zour that does meet all these criteria. I can now confirm for the first time that alarge dirt-covered bunker-like structure containing what appears to be undergroundentrance holes does in fact exist only several hundred yards to the south of a very largebuilding which is well camouflaged and very difficult to spot from the air. This entireenormous structure, roof and walls, appears to have been painted black to blend intothe surrounding patch of dark-stained earth.. The black building site is in a desertedarea on the south side of town, only a few miles from the airport, just off of highway 4

(a major truck highway) and next to an orchard. It is the only black building in all ofDeir al Zour that satisfies all the various criteria alleged by the Israelis. Moreover, thisblack building is in close proximity to what appears to be a disguised military installationa few hundred yards to the south.

This southern site consists of a few very small out buildings guarding a single roadsleading inside the fort-like compound and then forking out to multiple entrances of alarge bunker-like structure. The entire bunker compound is protected by what appearsto be a dry moat and is surrounded by a high walled rectangular berm made ofbulldozed earth. There is no gate; vehicles must drive on a ramp up and over the high

berm wall in order to get inside. This facility appears to have been constructed alongthe lines of a military storage depot for high explosives..

Apparently all armies use similar designs for their ammo dumps. The neat rectangle ofthe bulldozed earthen walls surrounding this storage compound can be seen quitedistinctly in the satellite photo, as well as the large black nuclear facility in thebackground only several hundred yards away. Anyone who downloads Google Earth totheir computer and scans latitude 35.28291072553, longitude 40.05731025.7 can verifyfor themselves that dramatic new evidence does in fact exist to support the Israeliallegations that the place they attacked at Deir al Zour contained both a nuclearprocessing lab as well as the Iraqi WMD storage site.[28] It is quite possible, indeed

likely, that these are the first satellite photographs to show the Syrian resting place forSaddams missing WMD. It is looking more and more likely that Saddam really did haveWMD, and that Deir al Zour is the place they were buried.

Of course, that does not mean that Saddams WMD are there any longer. There is asubsequent satellite photograph, taken during the fall 2007 rainy season, which revealsthat the site has been severely altered in the last several months since the Israeli airstrike. The black building seems to have vanished, so has the entire storage depot.There is not a trace of the giant bunker complex. All of the out buildings havedisappeared. Even the roads connecting to the highway have been completely swept


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away without a trace. Everything is gone, even the dark-stained top soil has beenremoved, and the substrata regarded for a smooth, naturally contoured look. It is as ifnothing had ever existed here before. It appears that the Israelis were correct onceagain, the Syrians destroyed every trace of their secret nuclear plant, and removed allof their stored WMD, just as Saddam had done when he first trucked his WMD to Deiral Zour before and during the war.

Of course, some people had been saying this about Saddam for years.. Even withoutaccess to satellite photos or Saddam's intelligence files, Jack Shaw had built aformidable case that the Spetznatz had pulled off a last-minute rescue and relocation ofSaddam's WMD to Syria. As he later related to Newsmax reporter Charles Smith; "Whilein Iraq I received information from several sources naming the exact Russian units,what they took and where they took both WMD materials and conventional explosives."Shaw called the evacuation procedure by its Russian name "sarindar," the standardoperating procedure for the closing down of Soviet operations in their third world clientstates. Very senior British officials from MI6 independently confirmed Shaw'sconclusions at a high level meeting in London. The Chief of the British SecretIntelligence Service showed Shaw the damning evidence.

As Shaw recalls, "The meeting was convened by the head of MI6 personally to debrief ahigh level Ukrainian delegation. It was the beginning of a six-month collaboration,sharing information regarding weapons transfers to Iraq and Iran." The multi-agency,multi-national meetings were held at the Thameside MI6 Headquarters and at the moresecluded Chesterfield Terrace, the gracious Georgian complex off Pall Mall used byBritish intelligence services.

It was a reunion of friends. Shaw recalled that "[U.S.] General Clapper knew the keyUkrainians from his tour as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] in the early

1980's and 1990's. In fact, they had specifically asked for his involvement." Buildingliaison relationships and trust is always important in these affairs.

Shaw had a much narrower focus of interest than the other participants at the Londonmeetings. He had already observed the broad outlines of the extensive Russian role inthe removal of Iraqi weaponry, and now he wanted the hard, incriminating details fromthe Ukrainian files. "I finally got the promise over tea at the Ukrainians hotel inLondon," Shaw recalls. "For me this was the Rosetta Stone for all arms transfers toIraq. It was the crown jewel of my thirty years of experience with arms transfers in theMiddle East."

Corroborating sources from multiple allied agencies is about as good as it gets in theintelligence game. The Americans still did not believe it. Shaw was stunned when theDIA told him, "Forget about it. It's all Israeli disinformation." Shaw continued with hisinvestigation, not understanding that he was heading into dangerous waters.

A pair of British reporters has recently released a new book Deception, superblydocumenting the history of five successive American administrations in lying toCongress and the American people about the progress that was being made on the

Islamic Bomb. The US State Department knew full well that Pakistan had developednuclear weapons and was selling the technology to Arab countries such as Libya and


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Iran. Like Jack Shaw, a brave American intelligence officer named Richard Barlow triedto expose the nuclear cover-up, and like Shaw, his career was crushed. The Pakistaniproliferation scandal was too sensitive for the Washington bureaucrats to admit publicly.We see a consistent pattern that any government employee who poked his nose intotransfers of nuclear WMD components was made a pariah.

When 377 tons of high explosives, some of which could be used to trigger nuclear

weapons, went missing northwest of Baghdad and the press alleged that it was movedafter the invasion, Shaw leaked his Syrian "sarindar" evacuation information to theFinancial Times and the Washington Times. Shaw recalled that everything he had

surfaced in the press was then confirmed almost immediately by the Pentagon'ssatellite reconnaissance officers, but the top Pentagon leadership tried to kill the storyand muzzle Shaw and his office. A month after the 2004 US election, the Pentagon"reorganized" his office out of existence.

Lt. General Thomas G. Mclnerney, USAF (ret'd) recalls that problem had more to dowith White House politics than the sufficiency of Shaw's proof:

JACK SHAW HAS DONE HIS HOMEWORK AND HAS SHOWN VERY PLAUSIBLY WHERETHE WMD MAY HAVE GONE. UNFORTUNATELY THE IRAQI SURVEY GROUP DID NOTPURSUE HIS RECOMMENDATIONS NOR HAS PRESIDENT BUSH RELEASED OVER 2000HOURS OF SADDAM'S PRIVATE TAPES THAT WOULD SHED GREATER LIGHT ON THEROLE RUSSIA, CHINA AND FRANCE PLAYED IN SUPPORTING SADDAM'S WMDPROGRAM AND ITS WHERE ABOUTS.[29]

In the hide-bound world of military and security bureaucracies, only a retired Generalcan get away with speaking his mind so bluntly. Sadly, it should be understood thateven if Shaw was right, as nearly everyone in the community involved with these affairsnow concedes in private, what could the US Government have done about it? InvadeSyria to retrieve Saddam's WMD? Not at a time when the US was tied down in Iraq. Andnot without the approval of the Security Council, conveniently dominated by Saddam'seconomic allies, countries that could only be embarrassed by further revelations.

More and more of the relevant generals are retired now and are speaking out. MichaelDelong, a retired Marine Lt. General, and deputy commander at CENTCOM at the timeof the invasion, states unequivocally: "I do know for a fact that some of those weaponswent into Syria, Lebanon and Iran.

Even David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, told the British press that there

was indeed evidence that unspecified WMD material was moved into Syria on the eve ofthe war, reporting: "We know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officialsthat a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components ofSaddam's WMD program."[30] Most of the American press thought Kay's suggestion ofa possible WMD transfer too ludicrous, or inconvenient, to report.

A few did not. Ryan Mauro of WorldThreats.com interviewed one such former high-ranking Iraqi official, Ali Ibrahim Al-Tikriti, a personal friend of Saddam. Although hehad left Iraq long before the war, Al-Tikriti said that he was certain that "Saddam'sweapons are in Syria" due to deals that had been cut as far back as the 1980's. After


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the First Gulf War, according to this account, Saddam knew he would eventually haveto ship his WMD program out to other countries to avoid detection. Even after a seniorIraqi general described his role in an airlift of barrels with radioactive markings to Syria,the US State Department ignored the reports. As documented by the British authors in

Deception, the Pakistani connection caused a shroud of silence to fall over anymention of nuclear transfers. It was a subject the Americans devoutly wished to avoid.

Former Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon, also a speaker at the 2006 IntelligenceSummit, confirmed that his government had independently agreed with Shaw'sassessment. They had their own spies in Lebanon and Syria watching the last minutemovement of the WMD out of Iraq. That is what DIA may have had in mind when theybrushed off Shaw's research as "Israeli disinformation." The State Departmentapparently echoed DIA's anti-Israel suspicions, and that was the end of Shaw's WMDinvestigation. (The State Department, like the DIA and the CIA, has long held what isknown in foreign policy circles as an Arabist and status quo approach to Middle Eastpolicy, and all three agencies are fiercely opposed to the Neocon project to shake upthe region. The decision to go to war in Iraq is assessed in America as a victory ofCheneys Office of the Vice President and Rumsfelds Defense Department over these

more conservative agencies.)

Today, four years after the invasion of Iraq, Saddam's secret files are beginning toemerge from the long-neglected warehouses in Kuwait and Qatar. According to Iraqiintelligence files, in January 2003, the Chinese Prime Minister told German ChancellorSchroeder that Chinese Intelligence "says that Iraq has moved it weapons of massdestruction to Syria." Even two months after Iraqi intelligence filed this report about theChinese tracking their movements to Syria, Saddam continued with the WMDevacuation. In March 16, 2003, - only weeks before the war - the Iraqi Army Chief ofStaff ordered the transfer of "Special Ammunition" from the Najaf military depot.[31]

"Special Ammunition" is what Saddam called chemical weapons when he ordered thegassing of the Kurds.[32]

It must be emphasized that no one document mentions both the possession of WMDand the movement to Syria. Moreover, many of Saddam's own tapes and documentsconcerning chemical and biological weapons are ambiguous. When read together as amosaic whole, Saddam's secret files make a persuasive circumstantial case of massiveWMD deception right up to the end, but not that there were any CW or BW remaininginside Iraq on the day the war started. We know that huge quantities were produced,and there is no record of their destruction. But absence of evidence is not evidence.Therefore, at least as to chemical and biological weapons, no individual document or

audiotape contains a smoking gun.

There is no ambiguity, however, about tape ISGQ-2003-M0007379, in which Saddam isbriefed on his secret nuclear weapons project.[33] This meeting clearly took place in2002 or 2003: almost a decade after the State Department claimed that Saddam hadabandoned his nuclear weapons research.

Moreover the tape describes a laser enrichment process for uranium that had neverbeen known by the UN inspectors to even exist in Iraq, and Saddam's nuclear brieferson the tape were Iraqi scientists who had never been on any weapons inspectors list.


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The tape explicitly discusses civilian plasma research which could be used as a cover formilitary plasma research necessary to build a hydrogen bomb.[34]

When this tape came to the attention of the International Intelligence Summit, a non-profit, non-partisan educational forum focusing on global intelligence affairs, theorganization invited a certified translator to present Saddams nuclear tapes to thepublic, and then invited John Shaw and Yossef Bodansky to comment. At the direct

request of the Summit, President Bush promptly overruled his national intelligenceadviser, John Negroponte, a career State Department man, and ordered that the rest ofthe captured Saddam tapes and documents be reviewed as rapidly as possible. TheIntelligence Summit asked that Saddam's tapes and documents be posted on a publicwebsite so that volunteers could help with the translation and analysis.

At first, the public website seemed like a good idea. Another document [35] was quicklydiscovered, dated November 2002, describing an expensive plan to remove radioactivecontamination from an isotope production building. The document cites the return ofUNMOVIC inspectors as the reason for cleaning up the evidence of radioactivity. This isnot far from a smoking gun: there were not supposed to be any nuclear production

plants in Iraq in 2002.

Then a barrage of near-smoking guns opened up. Document after document fromSaddam's files was posted unread on the public website, each one describing how tomake a nuclear bomb in more detail than the last. These documents, dated just beforethe war, show that Saddam had accumulated just about every secret there was for theconstruction of nuclear weapons. The Iraqi intelligence files contain so much accurateinformation on the atom bomb that the translators public website had to be closed forreasons of national security.

Perhaps coincidentally, once Saddam's nuclear files were uncovered, the Presidentdemoted John Negroponte as his National Director of Intelligence and sent him back tothe State Department. Negroponte had publicly and repeatedly denounced theIntelligence Summit, promising that nothing would be found in Saddams files. LikeShaw and Barlow, vengeance upon the Summit would be swift and cruel. TheIntelligence Summit is a non-partisan, non-profit, fully licensed 501c3 educationalcharity. 99% of its staff are volunteers. In order to be fully transparent, the Summitdiscloses all information about its major donors on its tax returns to the IRS, which areavailable to the public for inspection..

Negropontes office sent emails to every government agency denouncing the

Intelligence Summit for accepting a charitable donation from Michael Cherney, anIsraeli who was rumored to have ties to the Russian mafia. Even the Russiangovernment, which has much to gain from discrediting the findings of the Summit, hasacknowledged publicly that the Cherney rumor is false.[36] Mr. Cherney severed all tiesto protect the Summit, but the damage from Negropontes smear campaign was severe.In a blatantly illegal move, Negropontes office implicitly warned federal employees andforeign intelligence services to boycott the next Summit.

Perhaps because of the controversy, the Intelligence Summit was becoming a magnetfor researchers interested in pursuing the new documentary leads to Saddam's WMD.


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In a March 2007 conference, the Summit introduced David Gaubatz, from the US AirForce Office of Special Investigation. Assigned to support the CIA's Iraq Survey Groupin the hunt for Saddam's WMD, he was one of the first weapons hunters to arrive inIraq in April 2003.

Local Iraqi citizens eagerly approached the Arabic-speaking American. Gaubatzeventually made connections with the Iraqi police, who showed him how in the last six

months of 2002 Saddam built four huge cofferdams along the Euphrates River. Deeppits were excavated and huge underground bomb-proof warehouses installed with fivefoot thick concrete ceilings. According to local Iraqi eyewitnesses, at least two of thewarehouses were constructed directly underneath the Euphrates River, connected toeither bank by tunnels large enough to allow the passage of heavy trucks.

Underwater facilities are extremely expensive to construct and are usually built for onlyone precise purpose. The twenty five feet of water overhead would conceal almost allof the radiation emissions from inside the underground warehouses. While the medicalfiles for Gaubatz and his team confirm they were exposed to radiation, they wereunable to enter any of the underground sites to explore the source of the radiation as

the tunnels leading to the surface had been plugged with concrete and filled with water.

Apparently Saddam, wanting to avoid the UNs inspection efforts and a repetition of theIsraeli raid on his Osirak nuclear reactor, was hiding his new nuclear weapons projectsunder the Euphrates. Gaubatz describes what he saw immediately after the war whenthe warehouses were still intact. "The tunnels leading under the river on each side werelarge enough to drive a tractor trailer through. My local informants described the doubleseries of halls beneath the Euphrates where the WMD had been stored. They evenshowed me the impression left by an illegal sized missile that had lain on the muddybank. I have been warned not to go back. Most of the informants I worked with have

been killed."

Gaubatz, twice decorated by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations for his workin Iraq, returned to the United States in 2004. Through either negligence or sabotage,all of his reports on finding the WMD warehouses were lost. Incredibly, no one on theCoalition side guarded the four underwater warehouses during the three years sinceGaubatz discovery, let alone began excavations. By the time Gaubatz discovered thisscandalous error three years later and alerted the government, the CIA reported backthat all four of the warehouses had been systematically looted. It may have been theworst intelligence blunder since 9/11.

Recently discovered among Saddams intelligence files is the actual order to transfer theremaining sensitive military materials, whether completed or not, to the undergroundfacilities. The movement order came just before the invasion of Iraq. This document,which directly confirms Gaubatz eyewitness testimony, also fits into the mosaic of theother nuclear documents describing a secret and ongoing program to develop nuclearweapons and hide them inside Iraq.

Moreover, the date of the movement order suggests that President Bush, who clearlyknew nothing of the specifics of the underground nuclear sites, or even that a nuclearprogram existed in Iraq, may have been accidentally correct about the main point of


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the war. Saddams nuclear documents compel any reasonable person to the conclusionthat, more probably than not, there were in fact nuclear WMD sites, components, andprograms hidden inside Iraq at the time the Coalition forces invaded.

On a personal note, as a Democrat, it gives me no pleasure to concede that Bush andBlair were right. As a lawyer, I must conclude from this new documentary evidence andmy own interviews that the leaders of the Coalition were completely ignorant of the

underground Iraqi WMD facilities, but, in hindsight, I must concede that the discoveryof Saddams secret nuclear program now provides sufficient legal justification for theuse of force. Bush and Blair may have blundered into Iraq based on false evidence andexaggerated analysis, but looking back with the benefit of Saddams files; it turns outthat they may have done the right thing for the wrong reason. Even a broken watch isright twice a day.

In view of these newly discovered documents, it can be concluded, more probably thannot, that Saddam did have a nuclear weapons program in 2001-2002, and that it isreasonably certain that he would have continued his efforts towards making a nuclearbomb in 2003 had he not been stopped by the Coalition forces.. The truth is what it is,

the facts speak for themselves.

Why has the pro-war establishment in Washington not done more with these potentiallypersuasive indications that Saddam was indeed pursuing WMD programs until the bitterend? The irony is that the Republicans will not touch this issue and indeed have tried tosuppress it.

Perhaps some of them are embarrassed by their own intelligence blunders thatpermitted the looting of what might have been Saddam's last nuclear lab. More likely,GOP politicians may be afraid of being portrayed as "kooks" by the press if theyquestion such a settled sacred cow. The news media has voted fairly unanimously onthe WMD issue, after all, and the orthodoxy is possibly too settled for politicians to domuch with these complex half-smoking guns in a sound-bite age. The Democrats,although not usually reluctant to publicize Americas blunders in Iraq, also have noappetite for the issue. Even though they were right that there were no CW and BWinside Iraq when the war began, it now appears most likely that nuclear WMD materialswere still inside Iraq on the first day of the war, still sealed up in the underwater Iraqiwarehouses. Acknowledging this would be uncomfortable.

As for the mainstream mass media, it by and large has little interest in proving thatBush and Blair might have been correct by accident in at least part of their pre-war

assessment, and prefers to drop the entire subject. No one likes to admit they werewrong on such an important story. But Saddams files show that the press has so farbeen wrong indeed.

Inevitably the rest of Saddams files will be translated and made public. History will thenrecord that only a handful of individuals and institutions got it right the first time. Inaddition to Bodansky and Shaw, Lord Butler of the UK deserves credit. His reportconcluded that, while the British may have overestimated Saddam's CW and BWcapabilities, they were absolutely correct when they said that in 2002, Saddam wastrying to purchase uranium ore from three different African nations. The British have


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already found and made public what the Americans so far have missed: right up untilthe end, Saddam was trying to build more WMD.

One question remains. Where are the WMD now? Are they still buried in the bunkers ofDier al Zour ? Who is the present custodian of the contents of Saddams underwaternuclear-weapons lab? Even if those underwater sites were not the source of theradiation to which Gaubatz and his team were exposed, the documents show that

Saddam was still acquiring nuclear components and atom bomb technology right up tothe eve of war. Who has Saddams centrifuges now?

US satellites have detected that Syria is now operating high speed centrifuges typicallyused to enrich uranium ore into weapons grade fuel for an atom bomb.[37] Syria hasno commercial nuclear reactor, nor any natural deposits of uranium ore. What is Syriadoing with nuclear centrifuges?[38] It has been reported that some tens of thousandsof advanced P-2 centrifuges were manufactured in Malaysia for both Colonel Qaddafiand Saddam Hussein. Quaddafi's centrifuges have been accounted for. Saddam'scentrifuges are still missing, and the Intelligence Summit is now asking the USgovernment to make a priority search among the captured Saddam files for documents

about the missing centrifuges, especially those written in Asian scripts.

There is a hidden hand to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. When ColonelQaddafi turned over his atom bomb blue prints, they were written in Chinese. Manyexperts believe that the Peoples Liberation Army of China has been selling thecomponents of the Islamic bomb in return for Arab oil. It is a matter of historical recordthat the Chinese were among the principal beneficiaries of Saddams oil exports.

Now the Chinese, by way of their North Korean proxies, may be implicated in the recentIsraeli air strike on the partly constructed nuclear facility in Syria. How did the Syriansget into nuclear technology so quickly? Perhaps it is a coincidence, but the Chinesehave just announced that they will be build the largest refinery in the Middle East. Thismassive Chinese complex, including dozens of innocuous looking buildings andthundreds of staff, will be located in Deir al Zour, Syria. The game of Chinese tradingsupport for the Islamic bomb in return for Arab oil may not be over.

There is an urgent to need to go through the Kuwaiti warehouses and find Saddamssecret records of dealings with China, North Korea, and Malaysia. Perhaps we have hadthe answer to the Syrian proliferation puzzle all along, sitting in Saddams dustyarchives.

Saddams nuclear files are now settling the main thrust of the WMD controversy asgrounds for the Iraq war, or are at least re-opening the debate, but that is not wherethe story ends. There is another chapter from Saddam's secret files yet to be written:Saddams links to anti-western terror. The conventional wisdom is that Saddam desiredto have closer relations with Al Qaeda, but that these religious terrorists wanted nothingto do with his secular regime. As with the WMD, Saddam himself, as we are learningfrom his recordings, says that the conventional wisdom is wrong.

It is still too early for a conclusive assessment, and many more documents will need tobe analyzed, but it appears that Saddam may have been Al Qaeda's long-term secret


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partner in launching successful terrorist attacks against the western countries.Saddam's secret files contain direct references to aiding anthrax attacks in the UnitedStates, planning the "Blessed July" bombings in London, coordinating the assault on theNational Guard Headquarters in Saudi Arabia, and committing numerous attacks againstIsrael.

If it is true, as a cursory initial reading of these files suggest, that Saddam was the

secret partner of Usama Bin Laden, then the history of terrorism will have to berewritten. Whether the answers gain a wide audience or not, they will soon enough beknown. For we live in an age of documents. There are no more secrets, only deferreddisclosures.

(John Loftus is President of the International Intelligence Summit)

Notes:

[1] There may be a grain of truth to the sand dune story, but it probably refers toSyrian WMD buried under a Syrian sand dune: Document B1AP-2003-000090 describes

meetings between Saddam's intelligence agent #801 and Sheikh Adil Mohammed Al-Minished discussing WMD buried in the area of Halab, Syria.

[2] In addition to his ten years of work for the US Congress analyzing classifieddocuments, Mr. Bodansky is the Director of Research for the International StrategicStudies Association and senior editor for the Defense and Foreign Affairs group ofpublications. He has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins and a senior consultant offor the US Departments of Defense and State. He wrote the international bestseller, BinLaden: The Man Who Declared War on America and published it before 9/11.

[3] U.S. House of Representatives, Report of February 19, 1998, confirmed fromclassified US intelligence files that Saddam was shifting his WMD programs outside ofIraq.

[4] It may seem incredible that Saddam would sell WMD equipment to his mortalenemy, Iran, but a similar thing happened in the first Iraq war when Saddam sold hisentire air force inventory to Iran rather than see it be destroyed by the Americans.Bodansky is not at liberty to discuss classified documents on which this segment of hisbook was based.

[5] The CIA super spy was alleged to be one of the senior foreign ministers for

Saddam. The existence of the mole and his belief that Iraq had no remaining WMDproduction facilities was revealed in 2007 on the CBS 60 Minutes television program.The CIA officer who appeared on camera (who obviously had not seen the newlyreleased Saddam files) was adamant that Saddam had no such production capability. Asdiscussed infra, Saddam's files indicate otherwise.

[6] Per arrangement with the House Intelligence Committee, the author released a copyof the Saddam WMD tape on the condition that Congress would obtain publicconfirmation of the voiceprint data from the NSA, which was done. The results were


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publicly displayed on a special edition of ABC Frontline with Brian Ross shortly beforethe opening of the February 17, 2006 Intelligence Summit.

[7] The newly released Saddam files show that his brother-in-law, Kemal had buried afew secrets of his own: "A team from the Military Industrialization Commission whenHussein Kemal Hussein was conducting his responsibilities did bury a large containersaid that it contains chemical material.in the district of Fallujah.. .The container was

buried using a fleet of concrete mixers. Document ISGQ-2003-00004530, Sept. 15,2000, Memo to Uday Hussein.

[8] Mr. Mauro is founder of WorldThreats.com

[9] CMPC-2003-013956

[10] ISGQ-2003-000444424

[11] ISGQ-2005-00023243

[12] ISGQ 2003-00000847

[13] ISGZ-2004-028947

[14] CMPC-2003-002284

[15] BIAP-2003-0035437

[16] CMPC-2004-000404

[17] CMPC-2003-0062

[18] ISGQ-2005-00026108, Report from Iraqi Intelligence Officer, July 25, 2000 on APspy on UNMOVIC

[19] CMPC-2003-0000776, an Iraqi intelligence report dated December 15, 2002confirms that Russian and Turkish scientists at the Badr Company (nuclear) had to behidden from the UN inspectors. This shows that the Iraqis had advance detailedknowledge of IAEA inspections. Document CMPC-2003-001950 shows that Saddam'sintelligence briefings came directly from the Russian Ambassador. He revealed the

American's secret war plans, troop locations, etc. The Russians told the Iraqis that they

had "sources at the U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar." Document CMPC -2004-001117, Letter from Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister, March 25, 2003, discussion ofRussia's passing classified U.S. secrets to Iraq.

[20] ISGQ-20030M0004667

[21] CMPC-2003-006758, March 28, 2001. Memo from Iraqi Intelligence Service


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[22] This story was related to the author by an American intelligence officer whoparticipated in the wiretaps but wishes to remain anonymous. It was first published inThe Secret War Against the Jews, p. 574 n.30

[23] An excellent history of the problems with degradation of Iraqi chemical weaponscan be found at www.globalsecurity.org citing an unclassified CIA report: 071596 cia72569 72569 Ol.txt

[24] He has led project studies in this area at both CSIS and the Hudson Institute.

[25] Globalsecurity.org provides several excellent declassified studies on the history andprovenance of Iraqi WMD.

[26] Saddams defense minister publicly decorated both of the Russian generals fortheir assistance in this project.

[27] In the case of one suspected nuclear site, the Iranian government removed a footof topsoil not to mention every leaf, tree and blade of grass within a one mile radius.

The UN inspectors were given the rather lame explanation that the Mayor had suddenlydecided to bulldoze all the old military buildings and make a public park.

[28] Using the Deir al Zour airport as a satellite photo landmark, proceed southwesterlyfor several miles to an isolated desert area close by some orchards. Look for the largeblack building standing near a large stained earth area. Proceed south several hundredyards to find the large rectangular berm surrounding the suspected WMD storagebunkers.

[29] Emailed response to the author, May 5, 2007

[30] Jack Kelley Archives quoting Sunday Telegraph

[31] ISGZ-2004-028179

[32] CMP-2004-002219

[33] This tape is a compilation from other tapes, consisting of eight meetings aboutWMD stretching over more than a decade.

[34] A member of the survey teams, who wishes to remain anonymous, confirmed that

this was a major find, and was consistent with previous Iraqi efforts to hide traces oftheir nuclear research. Translation summary provided by certified translator.

[35] CMPC-2004-000156.

[36] A full series of the documents on the Cherney investigation can be found atwww.intelligencesummit.org.

[37] Open source articles have confirmed that the US Government has discovered thathigh speed uranium centrifuges generate a signal which can be read by a satellite in


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outer space. Much as turning on a blender causes static to appear on a television set,the satellite can detect the high speed frequencies generate by a centrifuge.

[38] The Assyrian International News Agency, published by the Reform Party of Syria,does excellent work in tracking advances in Syrian WMD.

Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam'sWMD's

By: John LoftusFrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, November 16, 2007

http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=28874

Finally, there are some definitive answers to the mystery of the missing WMD. Civilianvolunteers, mostly retired intelligence officers belonging to the non-partisanIntelligenceSummit.org, have been poring over the secret archives captured fromSaddam Hussein. The inescapable conclusion is this: Saddam really did have WMD afterall, but not in the way the Bush administration believed. A 9,000 word research paperwith citations to each captured document has been posted online at LoftusReport.com,along with translations of the captured Iraqi documents, courtesy of Mr. Ryan Mauroand his friends.

This Iraqi document research has been supplemented with satellite photographs anddozens of interviews, among them David Gaubatz who risked radiation exposure tolocate Saddams underwater WMD warehouses , and John Shaw, whose brilliantdetective work solved the puzzle of where the WMD went. Both have contributedsubstantially to solving one of the most difficult mysteries of our decade.

The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a bit chagrinned atthese disclosures. The documents show a much more complex history than previouslysuspected. The "Bush lied, people died" chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMD
http://97.74.65.51/bioAuthor.aspx?AUTHID=2243http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=28874http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=28874http://97.74.65.51/bioAuthor.aspx?AUTHID=2243


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whatsoever after 1991 - and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. TheNeocon diehards insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-trove is still outthere somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of Iraq. Each side is more than a littlebit wrong about Saddam's WMD, and each side is only a little bit right about whathappened to it.

The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam's WMD was

destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990's. Saddam soldapproximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors duringthe mid to late 1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the lastfew months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclearweapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehousesbeneath the Euphrates River. Saddams entire nuclear inventory was later stolen fromthese warehouses right out from under the Americans noses. The theft of theunguarded Iraqi nuclear stockpile is perhaps, the worst scandal of the war, suggestinga level of extreme incompetence and gross dereliction of duty that makes the HurricaneKatrina debacle look like a model of efficiency.

Without pointing fingers at the Americans, the Israeli government now believes thatSaddam Husseins nuclear stockpiles have ended up in weapons dumps in Syria.Debkafile, a somewhat reliable private Israeli intelligence service, has recently publisheda report claiming that the Syrians were importing North Korean plutonium to be mixedwith Saddams enriched uranium. Allegedly, the Syrians were close to completing awarhead factory next to Saddams WMD dump in Deir al Zour, Syria to producehundreds, if not thousands, of super toxic dirty bombs that would pollute whereverthey landed in Israel for the next several thousands of years. Debka alleged that it wasthis combination factory/WMD dump site which was the target of the recent Israeli air

strike in Deir al Zour province..

Senior sources in the Israeli government have privately confirmed to me that the recentNew York Times articles and satellite photographs about the Israeli raid on an allegedSyrian nuclear target in Al Tabitha, Syria were of the completely wrong location. Armedwith this knowledge, I searched Google Earth satellite photos for the rest of theprovince of Deir al Zour for a site that would match the unofficial Israeli descriptions:camouflaged black factory building, next to a military ammunition dump, between anairport and an orchard. There is a clear match in only one location, Longitude 35degrees, 16 minutes 49.31 seconds North, Latitude 40 degrees, 3 minutes, 29.97seconds East. Analysts and members of the public are invited to determine for

themselves whether this was indeed the weapons dump for Saddams WMD.

Photos of this complex taken after the Israel raid appear to show that all of thebuildings, earthern blast berms, bunkers, roads, even the acres of blackened topsoil,have all been dug up and removed. All that remains are what appear to be smoothedover bomb craters. Of course, that is not of itself definitive proof, but it is extremelysuspicious.

It should be noted that the American interrogators had accurate information about apossible Deir al Zour location shortly after the war, but ignored it:


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"An Iraqi dissident going by the name of "Abu Abdallah" claims that on March 10, 2003,50 trucks arrived in Deir Al-Zour, Syria after being loaded in Baghdad. Abdallahapproached his friend who was hesitant to confirm the WMD shipment, but did after

Abdallah explained what his sources informed him of. The friend told him not to tellanyone about the shipment."

These interrogation reports should be re-evaluated in light of the recently opened Iraqi

secret archives, which we submit are the best evidence. But the captured documentevidence should not be overstated. It must be emphasized that there is no onecaptured Saddam document which mentions both the possession of WMD and themovement to Syria.

Moreover, many of Saddam's own tapes and documents concerning chemical andbiological weapons are ambiguous. When read together as a mosaic whole, Saddam'ssecret files certainly make a persuasive case of massive WMD acquisition right up to afew months before the war. Not only was he buying banned precursors for nerve gas,he was ordering the chemicals to make Zyklon B, the Nazis favorite gas at Auschwitz.However odious and well documented his purchases in 2002, there is no direct evidence

of any CW or BW actually remaining inside Iraq on the day the war started in 2003. Asstated in more detail in my full report, the British, Ukrainian and American secretservices all believed that the Russians had organized a last minute evacuation of CWand BW stockpiles from Baghdad to Syria.

We know from Saddams documents that huge quantities of CW and BW were in factproduced, and there is no record of their destruction. But absence of evidence is notevidence of absence. Therefore, at least as to chemical and biological weapons, theevidence is compelling, but not conclusive. There is no one individual document oraudiotape that contains a smoking gun.

There is no ambiguity, however, about captured tape ISGQ-2003-M0007379, in whichSaddam is briefed on his secret nuclear weapons project. This meeting clearly tookplace in 2002 or afterwards: almost a decade after the State Department claimed thatSaddam had abandoned his nuclear weapons research.

Moreover the tape describes a laser enrichment process for uranium that had neverbeen known by the UN inspectors to even exist in Iraq, and Saddam's nuclear brieferson the tape were Iraqi scientists who had never been on any weapons inspectors list.The tape explicitly discusses how civilian plasma research could be used as a cover formilitary plasma research necessary to build a hydrogen bomb.

When this tape came to the attention of the International Intelligence Summit, a non-profit, non-partisan educational forum focusing on global intelligence affairs, theorganization asked the NSA to verify the voiceprints of Saddam and his cronies, inviteda certified translator to present Saddams nuclear tapes to the public, and then invitedleading intelligence analysts to comment.

At the direct request of the Summit, President Bush promptly overruled his nationalintelligence adviser, John Negroponte, a career State Department man, and orderedthat the rest of the captured Saddam tapes and documents be reviewed as rapidly as


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possible. The Intelligence Summit asked that Saddam's tapes and documents be postedon a public website so that Arabic-speaking volunteers could help with the translationand analysis.

At first, the public website seemed like a good idea. Another document was quicklydiscovered, dated November 2002, describing an expensive plan to remove radioactivecontamination from an isotope production building. The document cites the return of

UNMOVIC inspectors as the reason for cleaning up the evidence of radioactivity. This isnot far from a smoking gun: there were not supposed to be any nuclear productionplants in Iraq in 2002.

Then a barrage of near-smoking guns opened up. Document after document fromSaddam's files was posted unread on the public website, each one describing how tomake a nuclear bomb in more detail than the last. These documents, dated just beforethe war, show that Saddam had accumulated just about every secret there was for theconstruction of nuclear weapons. The Iraqi intelligence files contain so much accurateinformation on the atom bomb that the translators public website had to be closed forreasons of national security.

If Saddam had nuclear weapons facilities, where was he hiding them? Iraqi informantsshowed US investigators where Saddam had constructed huge underwater storagefacilities beneath the Euphrates River. The tunnel entrances were still sealed with tonsof concrete. The US investigators who approached the sealed entrances were laterdetermined to have been exposed to radiation. Incredibly, their reports were lost in thepostwar confusion, and Saddams underground nuclear storage sites were leftunguarded for the next three years. Still, the eyewitness testimony about the sealedunderwater warehouses matched with radiation exposure is strong circumstantialevidence that some amount of radioactive material was still present in Iraq on the day

the war began.

Our volunteer researchers discovered the actual movement order from the Iraqi highcommand ordering all the remaining special equipment to be moved into theunderground sites only a few weeks before the onset of the war. The date of themovement order suggests that President Bush, who clearly knew nothing of thespecifics of the underground nuclear sites, or even that a nuclear weapons program stillexisted in Iraq, may have been accidentally correct about the main point of the war: thediscovery of Saddams secret nuclear program, even in hindsight, arguably providessufficient legal justification for the previous use of force.

Saddams nuclear documents compel any reasonable person to the conclusion that,more probably than not, there were in fact nuclear WMD sites, components, andprograms hidden inside Iraq at the time the Coalition forces invaded. In view of thesenewly discovered documents, it can be concluded, more probably than not, thatSaddam did have a nuclear weapons program in 2001-2002, and that it is reasonablycertain that he would have continued his efforts towards making a nuclear bomb in2003 had he not been stopped by the Coalition forces. Four years after the war began,we still do not have all the answers, but we have many of them. Ninety percent of theSaddam files have never been read, let alone translated. It is time to utterly reject theconventional wisdom that there were no WMD in Iraq and look to the best evidence:


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Saddams own files on WMD. The truth is what it is, the documents speak forthemselves.

John Loftus is President of IntelligenceSummit.org, which is entirely free ofgovernment funding, and depends solely upon private contributions for itssupport. The full research paper on Iraqi WMD, along with the supportingdocuments and photographs can be found at www.LoftusReport.com
http://www.loftusreport.com/http://www.loftusreport.com/

iraq wmd's - shattering conventional wisdom - loftus

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