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 Inexplicable
Actions on Iraqi WMD
Truth held hostage to intractable bureaucracy...
[Rachel Neuwirth] 4/10/06
For President
Bush successfully to confront the growing nuclear threat
posed by Iran, he will need a credible military option
like the one he had earlier in confronting Iraq and Saddam
Hussein. To be credible, that option would also require
the solid backing of the American people along with the
Congress. Securing that backing now could pose a problem.
Many people currently believe that Iraq was not allied
with al-Qaeda and that Iraq had no WMD. Even worse, Bush’s
adversaries have asserted that Bush knew there were no
WMD and, still worse, that he deliberately lied to mislead
us into a war with Iraq. If widely believed, this charge
will undermine Bush’s credibility in confronting
Iran.
Public
opinion is already turning sour on President Bush because
of our ongoing difficulty in Iraq. In addition the president’s
poll numbers are below 40% for multiple reasons, including
his failure to secure our borders, his failure to control
spending, and his perceived failure over the Katrina hurricane,
among others. His insistence on pursuing the Dubai U.A.E.
ports deal, despite the strong opposition of 80% of the
American people and most of Congress, has further eroded
his support. If we need to disarm Iran by military means,
can President Bush still mobilize sufficient political
support to launch another major war? Will his opponents
refrain from exploiting his political vulnerabilities to
the maximum for their own political advantage?
Much
depends on his credibility with the American people. In
a previous
article, three major issues were raised that
required answers. (“Nagging Questions About the War
in Iraq”, a 05-29-05 article, archived on www.MiddleEastSolutions.com ) The three issues were: What was Saddam hiding from the
arms inspectors? What did Saddam ship to Syria just prior
to the war? What weapons did Libya’s Colonel Khaddaffi
relinquish to America? It seemed strange that the Bush Administration
declined to answer these questions and thereby refute the
charges by his critics.
Since that time more information has surfaced supporting
the belief that Saddam Hussein indeed had WMD and moved them
elsewhere, probably to Syria, just before the war.
On February
17, 2006 a meeting was held, sponsored by www.intelligencesummit.org.
At that time a translation of audio tapes made previously
by Saddam Hussein, was made public. The tapes indicate that
Saddam Hussein did indeed have WMD and revealed how he fooled
the weapons inspectors. Excerpts from a story,
Embarrassing questions for Bush, by Rachel Ehrenfeld & Alyssa
Lappen of 2/27/06 on WorldNetDaily.com follow.
“In the second week of February, several government
agencies ˆ handling national security issues ˆ began
a massive campaign to disrupt and discredit a major
counter-intelligence conference whose participants
and speakers included former
and current top U.S. and foreign government, security,
defense and intelligence officials and experts.”
“The
Feb. 17, 2006 conference in Arlington, Va., was organized
by
the Intelligence Summit, a young, private, nonprofit
and nonpartisan organization, headed by former U.S.
prosecutor John Loftus. Since its planning began a year
in advance,
the conference attracted hundreds of government officials,
security analysts, intelligence, counter-terrorism
officers and corporate executives to speak and attend
hundreds of
sessions over three days.”
“Ten days before the conference was scheduled to begin,
the organizers announced that tapes of Saddam Hussein's cabinet
meetings discussing Iraq's WMD and nuclear weapons would
be released at the conference. Immediately thereafter, the
listed participants begin to receive telephone calls, e-mails,
faxes and even telegrams from anonymous "friends" in
several U.S. government agencies, strongly advising
them against attending.”
“The
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Pete
Hoekstra, R-Mich.,
confirmed two days before the conference
began that the tapes were authentic. Yet, the intimidating
e-mails and telephone calls from government officials
to conference participants only intensified. This is
puzzling
especially since the tapes confirm the early statements
of the administration regarding Iraq's possession of
WMD.”
In another
intelligence revelation ex Iraqi General Georges Sada recently
published
his book Saddam’s
Secrets. He explains how Saddam moved his WMD to Syria, with
Russian help, just before the war.
The following
is from an introduction to the book.
“If you thought Saddam Hussein was merely a threat… then
you have no idea! In this astonishing expose, Iraqi General
Georges Sada exposes Saddam’s plans to destroy Israel,
hide weapons of mass destruction, and control the Arab world.
Georges Sada was one of Saddam’s top generals
and foremost military advisors, yet he defied Saddam
Hussein and lived
to tell about it.
--A truth-teller in a government that made the truth dangerous
--A devout Christian in a Muslim country
--A
man who stood up for what was right… even at the
risk of his own life.
In
his eye-opening expose, General Sada shares his bizarre
yet
amazing journey
as an insider to one of history’s
most sinister regimes.
“As much as General Sada’s book discloses secrets
that only those closest to Saddam would know, the motivating
force in his own life is no secret. He is a modern-day Daniel
in a spiritually volatile land, and yet he rose to the top
of his field and became one of Hussein’s most
trusted advisors---because Saddam knew Sada would always
tell him
the truth.
As
an eyewitness to history, Sada paints a painfully truthful
picture of
Hussein and his country that is at once personal
and alarming, truthful and compelling, candid and sobering.
It is a story guaranteed to send shock waves around the world!”
Only
one of Saddam’s
many audio tapes has been translated (after years of being
ignored) and authenticated, and it
supports claims that Saddam did indeed have WMD. There is
also General Sada, a former Iraqi Air Force General and his
first hand testimony. Despite this new information there
is no rush to seek the full truth. Meanwhile the belief persists
that there were no WMD in Iraq and that President Bush lied.
The next
report may
begin to explain the inexplicable.
“Who'll
Let the Docs Out? Bush wants to release the Saddam
files but his [national] intelligence chief [John
Negroponte] stalls.
By Stephen
F. Hayes” 03/20/2006, Volume 011, Issue
25 of the WeeklyStandard.com
A few excerpts follow plus a few comments:
On February 16, President George W. Bush assembled a small
group of congressional Republicans for a briefing on Iraq.
Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser
Stephen Hadley were there, and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay
Khalilzad participated via teleconference from Baghdad. As
the meeting was beginning, Mike Pence spoke up. The Indiana
Republican, a leader of conservatives in the House, was seated
next to Bush.
"Yesterday, Mr. President, the war had its best night
on the network news since the war ended," Pence said.
"Is this the tapes thing?" Bush
asked, referring to two ABC News reports that included
excerpts of recordings
Saddam Hussein made of meetings with his war cabinet
in the years before the U.S. invasion. Bush had not seen
the newscasts
but had been briefed on them.
Pence
framed his response as a question, .... “ There
are 3,000 hours of Saddam tapes and millions of pages
of other documents that we captured after the war.
When will
the American public get to see this information?”
Bush
replied that he wanted the documents released.
He turned to Hadley and
asked for an update. Hadley explained that
John Negroponte, Bush's Director of National Intelligence, "owns
the documents" and that DNI lawyers were deciding
how they might be handled.
Bush
told Hadley to expedite the release of the Iraq
documents. "This
stuff ought to be out. Put this stuff out." The
president would reiterate this point before the meeting
adjourned.
.....
Negroponte never got the message. Or he is choosing to ignore
it. He has done nothing to expedite the exploitation of the
documents. And he continues to block the growing congressional
effort, led by [Rep. Pete] Hoekstra, [the Michigan Republican
who chairs the House Intelligence Committee] to have the
documents released.
Officials involved with DOCEX--as the U.S. government's
document exploitation project is known to insiders--tell
The Weekly Standard that only some 3 percent of the 2 million
captured documents have been fully translated and analyzed.
No one familiar with the project argues that exploiting these
documents has been a priority of the U.S. intelligence community.
The Russians declared early in the U.N. process that they
preferred inspections to war. Perhaps we now know why. Still,
it is notable that at precisely the same time Russian intelligence
was training Iraqi operatives, senior Russian government
officials were touting their alliance with the United States.
This
one tape shows deep Russian involvement in
training Iraqis and supporting
Saddam Hussein even after 9/11. Despite
President Bush’s clear request to release
this information to the American people John
Negroponte, and the intelligence
community, continue to evade and delay carrying
out the President’s
request. Three years after the war only 3 percent
of captured documents and 12 hours out of 3,000
hours of Saddam’s
tapes have been processed, suggesting willful
blindness. As mentioned earlier certain U.S.
officials launched “...a
massive campaign to disrupt and discredit a major
counter-intelligence conference....” It
seems that they do not want to embarrass other
governments such as Russia. (Note that in recent
days
there has been some movement to release more
of this information but the quantities are massive
requiring laborious, time-consuming,
translation and analysis.) Additional information
about WMD continues to emerge. See this link.
It is astonishing and troublesome, but not new, that the
bureaucracy can get away with running its own foreign policy
in opposition to that of the president. This action, by un-elected
officials, weakens America and emboldens our enemies as we
confront a highly aggressive regime that may possess nuclear
weapons and the inclination to use them against us. ONE
*Bertram
Cohen contributed to this article.
copyright
2006 Rachel Neuwirth
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