due to a lack of funding? $300 billion isn't enough? As I said, I will keep an open mind until I hear the report.
here's the Sun article i referred to above. http://www.nysun.com/article/27183 -- Ex-Officer Spurned on WMD Claim BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun February 8, 2006 URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/27183 A former special investigator for the Pentagon during the Iraq war said he found four sealed underground bunkers in southern Iraq that he is sure contain stocks of chemical and biological weapons. But when he asked American weapons inspectors to check out the sites, he was rebuffed. David Gaubatz, a former member of the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, was assigned to the Talill Air Base in Nasiriyah at the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. His job was to pick up any intelligence on the whereabouts of senior Baathists and weapons of mass destruction and then send the information to the American weapons inspectors gathering in Baghdad that would later become the Iraq Survey Group. For his intelligence work he received accolades and meritorious service medals in 2003 and prior years. Before the war he helped uncover a spy in the Saudi military. He also assisted with the rescue and repatriation to America of the family of Mohammed Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer who helped save Private Jessica Lynch. Mr. Gaubatz said he walked the streets of the largely Shiite city of Nasiriyah, interviewing local police, former senior civilian and military leaders in Saddam Hussein's regime, and local civilians. Between March and July 2003, Mr. Gaubatz was taken by these sources to four locations - three in and around Nasiriyah and one near the port of Umm Qasr, where he was shown underground concrete bunkers with the tunnels leading to them deliberately flooded. In each case, he was told the facilities contained stocks of biological and chemical weapons, along with missiles whose range exceeded that mandated under U.N. sanctions. But because the facilities were sealed off with concrete walls, in some cases up to 5 feet thick, he did not get inside. He filed reports with photographs, exact grid coordinates, and testimony from multiple sources. And then he waited for the Iraq Survey Group to come to the sites. But in all but one case, they never arrived. Mr. Gaubatz's new disclosures shed doubt on the thoroughness of the Iraq Survey Group's search for the weapons of mass destruction that were one of the Bush administration's main reasons for the war. Two chief inspectors from the group, David Kay and Charles Duelfer, concluded that they could not find evidence of the promised stockpiles. Mr. Kay refused to be interviewed for this story and Mr. Duelfer did not return email. The CIA referred these questions to Mr. Duelfer. The new information from the former investigator could also end up helping the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which recently reopened the question of what happened to the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Like many current and former American and Israeli officials, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, Peter Hoekstra, says is not convinced Saddam either destroyed or never had the stockpiles of illicit weapons he was said to be concealing between 1991 and 2003. "I have no doubts the sites were never exploited by ISG. We agents begged and begged for weeks and months to get ISG to respond to the sites with the proper equipment," Mr. Gaubatz said in a telephone interview. He returned to his wife and daughter in July 2003, and then wrote letters about the sites to more senior officials in military intelligence. But he said he never received any satisfactory response and says that to this day the sites have never been fully checked out. He says the reasons he was given by the survey group were that the areas of the sites were not safe, they lacked manpower and equipment, and at the time the survey group was focusing activities in northern Iraq. "The ISG team was not organized nor outfitted for this mission in my opinion and were only concerned to look in northern Iraq. They were not even on the ground during the first few weeks of the war, and this was the most critical time to go out and exploit sites. I feel very comfortable in saying the sites were never exploited by ISG," he said. In one instance a few inspectors did come out once to follow one lead, Mr. Gaubatz said. But they lacked the equipment and manpower to crack the bunker. "An adequate search would have required heavy equipment to uncover the concrete, and additional equipment to drain the water." Mr. Gaubatz would not disclose the names of his Iraqi sources, but he said they were "highly credible" by his supervisors. He said some of them were members of the new government and others are now in America. "The four sites were corroborated with more than one source. The sources were deemed highly credible due to access and knowledge of the sites. Many of these sources and ourselves put their lives on the line to assist in identifying WMD. The sources would continuously ask us when the inspectors were going to come to the sites with heavy equipment to uncover the WMD," he said. Mr. Gaubatz said each site he visited had similar characteristics. "Everything was buried and under water. They would drain canals and parts of the rivers. They would build tunnels underneath and they would let the water come back in," he said. But the water would only be allowed back into the tunnels after concrete walls were installed sealing off the secret caches of unconventional arms, Mr. Gaubatz said. He added that the tunnels in all four sites were wide enough for tractors. One of the giveaways, he said, was that homes near the sites were equipped with gas masks and other items to protect against a chemical weapons attack. One site outside of Nasiryah, near the main highway in an isolated area featured a rock nearby that said, "Death to America," in Arabic. At this site, Mr. Gaubatz found gas masks, boots, and an imprint of an al-Samoud missile in the ground nearby a canal used to flood the tunnel. Mr. Gaubatz said he could find a wall under the earth and in the water whose dimensions were 50 by 75 feet. Another site near Umm Qasr contained the remnants of military activity as well, Mr. Gaubatz said. He said that former senior Iraqi military officers and local farmers confirmed there was military construction over the course of six months in 2002. Today, Mr. Gaubatz is the chief investigator for the Dallas County Medical Examiner. On the weekends, he trains Texas state troopers in basic counterterrorism and basic Arabic. When asked about the weapons hunt by his students, he says he tells them, "Before we can say there is no WMD in Iraq, we must first look. I have no doubts WMD was and is still in Iraq."
this is incorrect. The Duelfer report, as well as the SCSI report both concluded Iraq's WMD programs were furhter along than we suspected. true, stockpiles were not discovered, but that's not the same as saying there were no WMD programs. it's fine if you're content to retreat to your smug little ironic cubby hole. personally, not findng WMD has me much more worried than if we had found them. at least then we'd know where they are.
Yes, because if anybody has an agenda to cover-up finds of WMD's in Iraq - it's the Bush Administration. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if there were antiquated, decomposed artillery shells left over from the Iran-Iraq war somewhere that have yet to be catalogued. Of course only a fool would thnk that this justified the war in Iraq.
Here's a Sun article on the above tapes: http://www.nysun.com/article/27110 -- Congress's Secret Saddam Tapes BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun February 7, 2006 URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/27110 The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is studying 12 hours of audio recordings between Saddam Hussein and his top advisers that may provide clues to the whereabouts of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam's voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were provided to his committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military intelligence analyst. Mr. Loftus will make the recordings available to the public on February 17 at the annual meeting of the Intelligence Summit, of which he is president. On the organization's Web site, Mr. Loftus is quoted as promising that the recordings "will be able to provide a few definitive answers to some very important - and controversial - weapons of mass destruction questions." Contacted yesterday by The New York Sun, Mr. Loftus would only say that he delivered a CD of the recordings to a representative of the committee, and the following week the committee announced that it was reopening the investigation into weapons of mass destruction. The audio recordings are part of new evidence the House intelligence committee is piecing together that has spurred Mr. Hoekstra to reopen the question of whether Iraq had the biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons American inspectors could not turn up. President Bush called off the hunt for those weapons last year and has conceded that America has yet to find evidence of the stockpiles. Mr. Hoekstra has already met with a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada, who claims that Saddam used civilian airplanes to ferry chemical weapons to Syria in 2002. Mr. Hoekstra is now talking to Iraqis who Mr. Sada claims took part in the mission, and the congressman said the former air force general "should not just be discounted." Mr. Hoekstra also said he is in touch with other people who have come forward to the committee - Iraqis and Americans - who claim that the weapons inspectors may have overlooked other key sites and evidence. He has also asked the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to declassify some 35,000 boxes of Iraqi documents obtained in the war that have yet to be translated. "I still believe there are key individuals who have not been debriefed and there are key sites that have never been investigated. I know there are 35,000 boxes of documents that have never been translated. I am frustrated," Mr. Hoekstra said. He added, "Right now, it's not my job to investigate the specific claims. We are doing this a little with Sada. But we still don't fully understand what happened in Iraq three years after the invasion, three years after we control the country. There are enough people coming to the committee, Sada is not the only one, saying, 'you really ought to look under this rock.' This gives me cause to take up the issue again." Mr. Hoekstra is one of many who believe the question of what happened to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is still unresolved. Last week Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld voiced similar doubts at the National Press Club. "We have not found them. We also have found a number of things we didn't imagine. We found a bunch of jet airplanes buried in Iraq. Who buries airplanes? I mean, really. So I don't know what we'll find in the months and years ahead. It could be anything," he said. The former chief of the State Department's Iraq Intelligence Unit, Wayne White, and Mr. Rumsfeld's former undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, have told the Sun they believe the question of what happened to the weapons is still open. The former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, Moshe Ya'alon, told the Sun in December that he believed Saddam sent chemical weapons to Syria before the war in 2002. The last chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, said in the preamble to his final report that looting of sites may have severely weakened his team's ability to piece together a complete picture of Iraq's weapons program. Mr. Hoekstra said he is not yet prepared to say President Bush was premature in calling off the hunt for the weapons last year, but conceded that his inquiries may lead him to that conclusion if some of the leads offered to his committee check out. He also said the White House has been supportive of his inquiry. The chairman of the House intelligence panel said he is frustrated with the American intelligence community's lack of curiosity on following up these leads, particularly the story from Mr. Sada. "I talked to one person relatively high up in DNI, and I asked him about this and asked are they going to follow up, and he looked at me and said, 'No we don't think so.' At this point, I guess you guys don't get it. "I am trying to find out if our postwar intelligence was as bad as our pre-war intelligence, " Mr. Hoekstra said.
allow me to highlight two passages: The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam's voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were provided to his committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military intelligence analyst. He has also asked the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to declassify some 35,000 boxes of Iraqi documents obtained in the war that have yet to be translated. "I still believe there are key individuals who have not been debriefed and there are key sites that have never been investigated. I know there are 35,000 boxes of documents that have never been translated. I am frustrated," Mr. Hoekstra said.
No, you're wrong. Key Findings: Now - that isn't all of them - there's a laundry list of "consolation" findings more favorable to the admin about infrastructure and suspicous plans and laden with speculation and conjecture - but those really don't mean much. Likewise, similar statements occur w/respect to nuclear and biological. As for the "wah wah the weapons are in Syria" that you still read on crank right wing websites. Honestly basso, you're the same guy who was putting faith in patently absurd 'reports' about shoulder launched RPG WMD's - so you can go ahead and pretend that the botox in your refrigerator is a nuclear bomb - but don't expect people to take it seriously.
Sam, i've long since given up having you, or any of your compadres, take anything seriously WRT iraqi WMD. i really don't care, and i'm not interested in convincing you. i imagine you'd still find a way to deny it if an iraq nuke went off on wall street.
If a nuke went off on Wall Street, I'm sure the Bush Administration would use all of the power it had to try to prove to the American people that the nuke came from Iraq, whether it did or not.
Since Iraqi nukes don't, never have, and never will exist in my lifetime, most likely - yeah I'd be skeptical - based on the information I've read in the GOVERNMENT'S OWN REPORT, which happened (shockingly) to be written in terms most favorable to itself- which STILL ruled out WMD programs of any consequence. You're right though, you will never convince me to take bogus reports from wing nut crack pots seriously. Ever. ....but if it was one of those "bazooka nukes" you were regaling us about maybe I would think twice. Now that's a weapon I'd like to see in the next Battlefield patch.
There are plenty of security issues that we should be taking seriously. Iraqi nukes is not even on the list. In fact, just bringing it up is a distraction from real threats and evidence that you are not serious about national security.
Do you ever work? Seriously. With your rants and postings accounting for roughly 11 paragraphs per day, plus obviously lurking at other people's posts, I'm sceptical.
ABC News has issued a press release, the tapes will be discussed on World News Tonight. Coupla excerpts: One of the most dramatic moments on the 12 hours of tape comes when Saddam predicts --during a meeting in the mid 1990s -- a terrorist attack on the United States. "Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans a long time before August 2nd and told the British as well & that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction." Saddam goes on to say such attacks would be difficult to stop. "In the future, what would prevent a booby trapped car causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?" But he adds that Iraq would never do such a thing. "This is coming, this story is coming but not from Iraq." Also at the meeting was Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who says Iraq was being wrongly accused of terrorism. "Sir, the biological is very easy to make. It's so simple that any biologist can make a bottle of germs and drop it into a water tower and kill 100,000. This is not done by a state. No need to accuse a state. An individual can do it." AND In one pivotal tape-recorded meeting, which occurred in late April or May of 1995, Saddam and his senior aides discuss the fact that UN inspectors had uncovered evidence of Iraq's Biological Weapons program--a program the existence of which Iraq had previously denied. At one point, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law and the man who was in charge of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction efforts can be heard on the tapes, speaking openly about hiding information from the UN. "We did not reveal all that we have," Kamel says in the meeting "not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct."
Did you hear that 5 or so of the largest ports in America (not Houston, but N.O, NY, LA & others) will soon be under the auspices of a company out of the U.A.E? Probably wouldn't be too difficult for a jihadi to get a job, and access to sensitive security info...
One of the most dramatic moments on the 12 hours of tape comes when Saddam predicts --during a meeting in the mid 1990s -- a terrorist attack on the United States. "Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans a long time before August 2nd and told the British as well & that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction." Saddam goes on to say such attacks would be difficult to stop. "In the future, what would prevent a booby trapped car causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?" But he adds that Iraq would never do such a thing. "This is coming, this story is coming but not from Iraq." I read this yesterday but could not find the link today. This could be the anti-smoking gun that the right was not really looking for.
People on one side of the aisle will entirely dismiss this. People on the other will say it means everything. I love American politics.
