Report: U.S suspects Iraqi WMD in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley

This jibes with General Wesley Clark's theory about Iraqi WMD. If this is true, is it even worth pursuing? Can we risk Iraqi WMD falling into the hands of terrorists who will no doubt use them against Israel? If this happens, Israel will no doubt attack Syria.

This is a very scary scenario that could play out soon, if this report is true.

Report: U.S suspects Iraqi WMD in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley
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SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Monday, August 25, 2003
U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have finally been located.

Unfortunately, getting to them will be nearly impossible for the United States and its allies, because the containers with the strategic materials are not in Iraq.

Instead they are located in Lebanon's heavily-fortified Bekaa Valley, swarming with Iranian and Syrian forces, and Hizbullah and ex-Iraqi agents, Geostrategy-Direct.com will report in Wednesday's new weekly edition.

U.S. intelligence first identified a stream of tractor-trailer trucks moving from Iraq to Syria to Lebaon in January 2003. The significance of this sighting did not register on the CIA at the time.

U.S. intelligence sources believe the area contains extended-range Scud-based missiles and parts for chemical and biological warheads.

Mutually-lucrative Iraqi-Syrian arms transactions are nothing new. Firas Tlas, son of Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas, has been the key to Syria's rogue alliance with Iraq. He and Assad made hundreds of millions of dollars selling weapons, oil and drugs to and from Iraq, according to the May 13, 2003 edition of Geostrategy-Direct.com.
The CIA now believes a multi-million dollar deal between Iraq and Syria provided for the hiding and safekeeping of Saddam's strategic weapons.

Not surprisingly, U.S. inquiries in Beirut and Syria are being met with little substantive response, U.S. officials said.

 

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times has joined their staff, and he is considered by many to be the finest investigative reporter in his field. I think the website is very credible.

Of course, all of their stories are based on frontline intelligence, so they are susceptible to deliberate disinformation.

Time will tell on this one.

 

I agree. If this is true, I don't know why we are waiting around.

We should give Assad 2 hours notice, and tell him that if he intervenes, he dies. Somehow, I think he will choose his dictatorship over a grave.

btw, the great thing about this thread is that since the Libs have fallen in love with Wesley Clark, they can't berate me for posting this article. If they tell me that I am nuts, they are calling their new love interest Wesley nuts as well, since Clark advanced this very same theory.

Oh, it is a yellow dog conundrum, I tell ya'.

 

Grizzled, why didn't he cooperate with UN inspectors then? He would still be in power if he played ball.

 

CIA Adviser Kay Amasses Evidence of Saddam’s WMD

DEBKAfile Updates DEBKA-Net-Weekly 118 July 25 Exclusive

August 2, 2003, 10:42 PM (GMT+02:00)




US President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard are preparing a rejoinder to quell the domestic credibility crises Iraqi WMD skeptics have whipped up in their countries, with the help of anti-American, anti-war factions in politics and foreign intelligence services – particularly in some parts of Europe, such as Russia, Netherlands, France, Germany, Denmark and even the UK.

That rejoinder will draw on the paper and on-the-ground evidence amassed day by day by a new coalition intelligence research project launched a month ago under Dr. David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector, to winkle out hard evidence of Saddam Hussein’s proscribed weapons programs.


Thursday, July 31, Dr. Kay reported to the US Senate Intelligence Committee that his 1,400-strong team of American, British and Australian researchers had found in just over a month’s operation physical evidence of Iraqi activity on weapons of mass destruction. Without going into detail, Kay told the senators that the most progress had been made on biological weapons.

He was responding to the concern voiced by Senator Jay Rockefeller (Dem.-West Virginia) that the searches were being diverted away from finding the actual weapons. “Signs of a weapons program are very different from the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that were a certainty before the war,” said Rockefeller. “We did not go to war to disrupt Saddam’s weapons program, we went to war to disarm him.”

The Kay team spent the first month of its mission sorting into three batches what he described as “an estimated seven and-a-half miles of documents”, many of them collected by US military from Iraqi official buildings, but many others handed over by Iraqi civilians.

The data yielded is substantial:

Batch One: Records of Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear programming with notes on budgets, manpower and procurement requirements. Detailed are the Saddam regime’s plans, productions processes and timetables for WMD development as well as special programs for concealing it all from UN inspectors for twelve years. Saddam’s officials hid these thousands of documents from the United Nations Blix-ElBarardei inspection team and left them out of the voluminous “full accounting” Baghdad submitted to the UN Security Council before the war.

Batch Two: This group, which also consists of many thousands of pieces of paper, tracks the implementation of the WMD programs with time schedules and assessments of progress made in each category and inventories the stocks building up in the illegal arsenal. Scientists or engineers would often win bonuses for notable progress in their work.

Batch Three: This pile offers leads to locations where forbidden weapons may have been concealed when the records were drawn up and ways to access them, including the evidence of the transfer to Syria by Saddam’s agents of large parts of the forbidden program.

After talking in secret to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay declared there was a “truly amazing” deception program to throw UN weapons off the trail. We have people who participated in deceiving UN inspectors now telling us how they did it.”

The public remarks made by the three coalition leaders Bush, Blair and Howard will soon bear the imprint of these findings and their expert evaluation by CIA analysts. General elections are very much on the minds of all three and their campaign managers. The Australian prime minister, for instance - DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources in Canberra have learned – is thinking of calling a snap election at year’s end to catch his Labor Party rivals off guard, confident that the proof of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction will come to light in time for him to pull off a victory at the polls.

In addition to sifting through and collating mountains of paper, Kay team scouts are also crisscrossing Iraq to examine sites and test tips received from local “human intelligence”, which has proliferated since the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein in Mosul on July 22. They are pinpointing unmarked mass graves scattered around Iraq from which more than 300,000 bodies of Saddam’s victims have thus far been disinterred.

One of the most horrendous discoveries so far is the secret graveyard of convicts abused as human guinea pigs of Saddam’s illegal programs. Kay sent a special team out to Baquba, northeast of Baghdad after a collection of videotapes was discovered in Iraqi central intelligence archives, on some of which Iraqi officers talked freely with dates and locations about prisoners and detainees subjected to biological and chemical weapons experiments. Some involved toxic chemicals or gases; others were infected with germs in varying quantities, their symptoms recorded from stage to stage until their death.

At Baguba, the burial site most frequently mentione, Kay’s scouts uncovered the remains of 3,000 men and women who had succumbed to mysterious causes of death. Autopsies and forensic examinations are in progress to establish these causes.

An important objective of the whirlwind tour of Iraq carried out by deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz last month was to match up the Kay team’s findings with the administration’s PR and political strategy initiatives. The former UN inspectors’ appearances before the Senate committees this week, together with published photos of Wolfowitz visiting Iraqi mass graves, were part of the administration’s new offensive. It signaled an attempt to shift the public debate away from the questions surrounding Iraqi WMD as the justification of war and focus it on the horrors of the overthrown regime’s reign of repression, terror and human rights crimes. Stress is being laid on exposing how a criminal regime applied forbidden weapons for clandestine experimentation on incarcerated victims, the unmarked mass graves providing strong evidence of the ex-ruler’s active development and use of non-conventional weapons against his own people.

This new strategy was unveiled by US secretary of state Colin Powell, when he talked to the editorial staff of the Washington Times on Tuesday, July 22. He said:

“As more graves are opened, as more mass killings are made known and as Mr. Kay completes his work in Iraq searching for the evidence needed to make clear to everybody that we knew what we were talking about with respect to weapons of mass destruction, I think this issue of what was in the State of the Union address will fade into insignificance.”

Were those 16 words really a gaffe?

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources report a fresh piece of data obtained by the Bush administration may well tilt this controversy too. The White House initially admitted that the president’s assertion in his State of the Union that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium from Niger was based on false intelligence. The buck passed round from the CIA to Britain’s MI5, then Italian intelligence and finally, Condoleezza’s deputy at the National Security Council, Stephen Hadley.

Our Washington sources now reveal that, according to the new data reaching the White House from “very friendly” intelligence services operating in Africa, the US president got it right the first time. Saddam’s agents had indeed gone on a uranium purchasing mission to a number of African countries on the dates mentioned.

What went wrong was that the documentary evidence - handed to Bush by Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in confidence, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly now reveals, had been doctored by anti-American, anti-war factions in Italian intelligence in such a way that it would be discovered and appear to be fabricated. They plotted to bring the three war leaders into disrepute by manipulating them into committing an untruth while also souring the warm relations between the Italian prime minister and the White House.

The identities of the Italian intelligence plotters were at the center of the two days of private talks held by Bush and Berlusconi at the presidential ranch in Crawford, Texas July 20 and 21. The Italian prime minister brought with him the results of a private investigation. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources reveal that the agents who falsified the intelligence documents were also involved in staging the mass anti-war demonstrations that swept across Europe ahead of the American invasion of Iraq and accompanied the UN Security Council war debate.

They worked with accomplices in Russian, British, French, Dutch and German intelligence and allies in Africa in an anti-coalition front.

British microbiologist Dr. David Kelly, whose suicide on July 18, threw the Blair government into crisis, had been appointed to a position on Kay’s team of WMD hunters as an expert on biological arms and a former arms inspector. A few days before he was due to leave for Iraq, he was caught up in the political maelstrom raging in Britain around the unconventional weapons dossier Blair presented before going to war in Iraq. Kelly, who shunned politics, found the storm too violent for him to handle.

Now that Bush, Blair and Howard are regrouping, with Berlusconi’s help, to restore their fortunes, their hidden foes are shifting ground. The war leaders are arming themselves with information of Saddam’s deceit over his weapons of mass destruction that is too solid to be shouted down as outright lies. The charge is now toned down to “issuing inaccurate statements just before the war’ - language cautious enough to cool the rhetoric in the debate between the champions and opponents of the Iraq war.

Bush and Blair have urgent need of new ammunition. The American president’s popularity rating is falling at an alarming rate. Blair is in even direr straits. A majority of Britons want him to resign. His fate hangs on the judicial commission investigating the untimely death of Dr. Kelly finding that the BBC lied in the Kelly case, not 10 Downing Street. But, like Bush, he is impatiently waiting for the Kay team to produce evidence to bear out his portrayal of Saddam Hussein as a ruthless developer of illegal weapons. Combined, the two events might partly swing public sentiment back behind him.

The Australian prime minister has taken a sharp drop in popularity but no mass defection to the opposition Labor Party. Like Bush and Blair, Howard believes that once Australians are convinced the Iraqi WMD threat was genuine they will flock back to him, a reversal that would show up in a timely early election.

 

You read the Weekly World News while being anally probed?

Strange.

 

DEBKA-Net-Weekly, in its last issue on July 11, defined two tough questions posed by the current military situation in Iraq as being:

1. What is stopping the American army from going into Saddam Hussein’s fortified underground bases around Samarra, capturing the former ruler and his sons and removing the threat posed by the enclave to the Bush administration’s overall plans for the Middle East and global war on terror?

2. Why have US forces allowed Saddam’s forces a free hand to plague them with attacks in the Baghdad-Ramadi-Falluja-Balad triangle, when those attacks have clearly tipped over from irregular warfare into well-prepared professional military operations?

On Sunday, July 5, General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that despite the string of deadly attacks on coalition forces, “the resistance in Iraq is far from monolithic or nationwide, instead appearing fragmented and limited to a small triangular area from Baghdad to the north and west.”

Three days later, the chief US civil administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, voiced the opposite view: “The continuing attacks are the work of professional assailants and loyalists of Mr Hussein and possibly terrorists who appear in some cases to have had military training.”

These divergent appraisals by two top American strategists on Iraq mean either that the Bush administration cannot make up its mind how to handle the post-war situation, or else it has come to a decision but neglected to inform US personnel in the field.

Whichever it is, up until the publication of this issue, our sources found no US forces in Iraq venturing into the enclave in which Saddam, his sons and high command are thought to be holed up in well-prepared underground citadels. No American troops are to be seen Samarra which remains dominated pro-Saddam loyalists.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources have several explanations for this omission:

1. The first is a scenario. US Task Force 20, the unit formed to catch Saddam Hussein and sons and locate his unconventional weapons, hopes to put them to sleep by letting them believe they are gaining control in Iraq – and then, when they are off guard, pounce. Based on this premise, US forces are getting ready for the final battle well out of sight in other parts of the country.

2. The Americans may be short of precise intelligence on the ex-ruler’s subterranean fortresses and facilities, his precise whereabouts in the system and its secret openings. They also need to know more about his battle strength. US surveillance and intelligence teams may well be on covert missions in the target zone looking for this information.

3. Like the last days before the war, American and foreign go-betweens are seeking access to people close to Saddam so as to explore the possibility of negotiating his surrender without a battle. We have received exclusive information that such contacts are indeed taking place mixed rather than encouraging results. High-ranking Bush administration officials have been told that while the prospect of American forces raiding their underground hideouts strikes profound dread in the hearts of the men around the Saddam, the same men are gaining courage day by day and venturing to hope that their leader will eventually prevail.

This mood is having a psychological effect not only on Saddam loyalists, ex-military, Baathists and Sunni Muslims. Non-Sunni religious and ethnic figures across the country have been infected with enough uncertainty to keep a close watch on Samarra to see what happens.

4. The determining factor holding American military hands may be the indications found by US intelligence that Saddam Hussein has gone underground with the portion of his chemical and biological weapons that were not smuggled out to Syria.

On January 17, 2003, DEBKA-Net-Weekly No. 93 published a verbatim interview in Amman, Jordan, with a former Saddam bodyguard we called Jassem Abdulla, a pseudonym to protect him from assassination by Saddam’s agents.

Following is an excerpt from that interview:

Where are the weapons of mass destruction?

In the desert. It is a vast expanse, and they have cameras,,, the minute someone approaches, such as UN personnel, they move to another place. Tikrit is closest to the site. Weapons are also located in Baghdad.

There's a place called Ouja near Tikrit. (Ed. Between Tikrit and Samarra.) It’s a peninsula of sand dunes. I saw with my own eyes bunkers that move from place to place inside the dunes, underground. It is simply unbelievable; it is done by remote control.

Twenty-five people went there in 1994. We were told they were Americans, but the truth is we really didn't know who they were. They were there for four years, until 1998. In early 1991, they worked there and built weapons of mass destruction. But I don't know what's exactly there now. No one saw them. They came by car, with maps. It was strange, because we thought sanctions were in place, but they came and built the complex. Immediately afterwards, they brought the bombs and weapons systems. They built a ceiling and put chemical and biological weapons inside. The Russians followed, and there were Chinese in there too. The Russians tested the strength of the structure. They fired at it and set off explosions. But nothing happened to the Chinese inside. They did not die. I saw the Chinese leave the complex one by one and in one piece.”

This testimony has been borne out by subsequent intelligence probes in Iraq. However, the most intense efforts to reach that hidden cache have thus far been defeated.

Firstly, in mid-April, Task Force 20 began scouring the country for Iraqi officers and personnel involved in concealing the forbidden weapons or secreting them out of the country to Syria. The force received hundreds of leads. By the time a team arrived at a suspect location, it was invariably bare of contents. The Bush administration is still hunting for solid proof of Saddam’s possession of WMD since testimony by his top regime officials and scientists will not satisfy the skeptics.

Secondly Many of the officers and men of the Special Republican Guards listed as operators of chemical and biological warfare systems, who denied knowledge of their whereabouts in earlier interrogations, have recently disappeared from their homes. Some have turned up around Samarra.

A key deterrent to a major US assault on Saddam’s subterranean bases in the Samarra enclave is the possibility of him letting loose with the toxic weapons cached with him. According to every intelligence estimate, Saddam has never used his weapons of mass destruction outside Iraq. Even during the Iraq-Iran war that ended in 1989, he waited till Iranian troops invaded before attacking them with poison gas. He is unlikely to pass up the opportunity of fighting off an American assault inside Iraq with unconventional weapons.

Washington’s options as seen by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military experts are as tough as its dilemmas:

A. Unconventional warfare, including tactical nuclear weapons, would be the surest and most efficient way to overcome the Saddam enclave and wipe out the burgeoning military threat it poses to US forces in the country. That option is unthinkable. Washington cannot become the first power to use weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In any case, although Saddam, his illegal weapons and all his works would be wiped out for good, so too would the proof needed to convince American and world opinion that the Bush administration had good reason, namely the unconventional weapons in the hands of the Iraqi ruler, for going to war in the first place. Mistrust of Washington’s motives would only gain ground.

B. A massive conventional assault on the Saddam enclave might work, but it might equally expose US troops to the risk of Iraqi chemical or biological warfare. Substantial military reinforcements would also be called for, a contentious issue in Washington.

C. Washington might be better off not attacking the enclave at all but casting it into isolation by means of a protracted siege.

Most experts agree that Washington’s current state of indecision is the worst possible course. It opens the way for Saddam to grasp the initiative, decide what happens next and determine whether to engage in a fight to the finish or make a run for it.

This would leave Washington sunk in exactly the same quandary as it faced ten days before going to war.

The uncertainty also has a detrimental effect on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the prospects of dragging it out of stalemate. Syrian president Bashar Assad and Hizballah chairman Haasan Nasrallah are heavily invested in both conflicts. So too is Yasser Arafat, who is matching his steps with Saddam Hussein and waiting for the outcome of the coming round of warfare in Iraq. Any gains by the deposed Iraqi ruler will encourage Arafat to further wreck the slim chances of progress in the exchanges between Mahmoud Abbas and Israel.

As it is, terrorist groups on the West Bank and Gaza Strip do not bother to hide their preparations to revive their suicide assaults immediately after the agreed ceasefire ends in two months. Hamas, undeterred by the roundup of 20 operatives out of thousands in a timid operation by Abbas’ internal security minister Mohammed Dahlan, has been testing over the Mediterranean the range of the thousand or more Qassam surface missiles accumulated during the period of relative calm. In Ramallah, Arafat’s terrorist masterminds have been busy too. His allies in the southern Gaza Strip are smuggling in a fresh supply of weapons and explosives from Egypt while keeping up the level of shootings and bombings. IDF forces are constrained by adjusted rules of engagement from destroying the smuggling tunnels, as well as going after West Bank terrorist gangs. Thus, the general level of attacks may have dropped, but the situation is far from being a truce. In the last two weeks, gunmen have sniped at Israeli road workers, a suicide attack was carried out in Yabets village inside Israel, a taxi driver was taken hostage by Arafat’s Fatah and an Irish bomb expert imported to improve the performance of Arafat’s bombers so that he can escalate his campaign to mega-attacks in Israeli cities.

 

Sam, that story seems FAR more probable than your assertion that there are no WMD to be found.