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| Iraq |
| Interview with Gaubatz: I found SaddamÂ’s WMD bunkers |
| 2007-04-20 |
| Melanie Phillips interviews Gaubatz. New info compared to Sun article from last year It’s a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It’s also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there never were any WMD programmes in Saddam’s Iraq to justify the war ostensibly waged to protect the world from Saddam’s use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong. Saddam’s WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war. You may be tempted to dismiss this as yet another dodgy claim from a warmongering lackey of the world Zionist neocon conspiracy giving credence to yet another crank pushing US propaganda. If so, perhaps you might pause before throwing this article at the cat. Mr Gaubatz is not some marginal figure. He’s pretty well as near to the horse’s mouth as you can get. Having served for 12 years as an agent in the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, Mr Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was hand-picked for postings in 2003, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Nasariyah in Iraq. His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against US forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies. Between March and July 2003, he says, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq — two within Nasariyah, one 20 miles south and one near Basra — which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear programme and UN-proscribed missiles. He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true. This was, in the first place, because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them. Three of them were bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates. They had been constructed through building dams which were removed after the huge subterranean vaults had been excavated so that these were concealed beneath the river bed. The bunker walls were made of reinforced concrete five feet thick. Much more at link. ‘The problem was that the ISG were concentrating their efforts in looking for WMD in northern Iraq and this was in the south,’ says Mr Gaubatz. ‘They were just swept up by reports of WMD in so many different locations. But we told them that if they didn’t excavate these sites, others would.’ That, he says, is precisely what happened. He subsequently learnt from Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also known to these intelligence agencies. The worst-case scenario has now come about. Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands of a rogue terrorist state — and one with close links to Iran. When Mr Gaubatz returned to the US, he tried to bring all this to light. Two congressmen, Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Curt Weldon, were keen to follow up his account. To his horror, however, when they tried to access his classified intelligence reports, they were told that all 60 of them — which, in the routine way, he had sent in 2003 to the computer clearing-house at a US airbase in Saudi Arabia — had mysteriously gone missing. These written reports had never even been seen by the ISG. One theory is that they were inadvertently destroyed when the computer’s database was accidentally erased in the subsequent US evacuation of the airbase. Mr Gaubatz, however, suspects dirty work at the crossroads. It is unlikely, he says, that no copies were made of his intelligence. And he says that all attempts by Messrs Hoekstra and Weldon to extract information from the Defence Department and CIA have been relentlessly stonewalled. In 2005, the CIA held a belated inquiry into the disappearance of this intelligence. Only then did its agents visit the sites — to report that they had indeed been looted. Mr Gaubatz’s claims remain largely unpublicised. Last year, the New York Times dismissed him as one of a group of WMD diehard obsessives. The New York Sun produced a more balanced report, but after that the coverage died. According to Mr Gaubatz, the reason is a concerted effort by the US intelligence and political world to stifle such an explosive revelation of their own lethal incompetence. After he and an Iraqi colleague spoke at last month’s Florida meeting of the Intelligence Summit, an annual conference of the intelligence world, they were interviewed for two hours by a US TV show — only for the interview to be junked after the FBI repeatedly rang Mr Gaubatz and his colleague to say they would stop the interview from being broadcast. The problem the US authorities have is that they can’t dismiss Mr Gaubatz as a rogue agent — because they have repeatedly decorated him for his work in the field. In 2003, he received awards for his ‘courage and resolve in saving lives and being critical for information flow’. In 2001, he was decorated for being the ‘lead agent in a classified investigation, arguably the most sensitive counter-intelligence investigation currently in the entire Department of Defence’ and because his ‘reports were such high quality, many were published in the Air Force’s daily threat product for senior USAF leaders or re-transmitted at the national level to all security agencies in US government’. More on political angle at link. |
| Posted by: KBK |
| #5 interesting train of thought Moose! We know that We don't know what the back room deals were between the Big Powers, before the start of Iraqi Freedom. |
| Posted by: RD 2007-04-20 23:03 |
| #4 Actually, it is believable, but for a strange reason. The big picture. Russia was as close to an ally as Saddam had, and they were probably part and parcel of any WMD programs that he had. Including "surety" of those programs. So before we invaded, we told Russia that our finger was on the nuclear trigger, and if so much as a single WMD was used against us, we would drop a nuke on Baghdad. However, we made the Russians a deal. If *they* were to transport Iraq's WMDs out of theater, to Syria, and *bury* them there, then we would not connect the dots implicating Russia, or use any kind of WMDs ourselves. Early on, Israeli intelligence was jumping up and down and waving its hands about Russian trucks taking tons of crap to Syria for burial. We ignored them for the best of all reasons, because we already knew. The US was also involved in another direction. By the UNSC resolution 1441, we could enter Iraq to search for WMDs and to protect those individuals who were looking for them. So for the first year or two we went hunting for WMDs we DID NOT want to find. And when we found some old ones, we made them disappear, because had we "found" some, it would be an invitation to the IAEA and the UN to poke around with us. So we kept looking and looking, and not finding. So yes, undoubtedly there were some serious WMD facilities in Iraq, if not a tunnel complex city beneath Baghdad as was suspected at the start of the war. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-04-20 22:36 |
| #3 Glenmore, have you seen these videos? *Video Proof, Iraqi Gen. Georges Sada the No. 2 ranking officer in Saddam's Air Force Verifies The Removal of WMD in 2002 Iraqi Gen. Georges Sada: Saddam Moved Large Amounts of WMD to Syria in 2002 before OP Iraqi Freedom. |
| Posted by: RD 2007-04-20 22:24 |
| #2 I know what you're saying, and googling Graubatz turns up a guy who appears to be at least a bit of a braggart. OTOH, I recollect a report from a guy who had seen deep shafts in an island in one of the rivers and surmised that WMD were down there. It would be interesting to get Hoekstra and Weldon's current take on this. Either those structures are there, or they aren't. And if they are, and are empty, what was in them? What do you make of this: Secret bunkers held chemical weapons, says Iraqi exile Don't forget the Iraqi general who provided details of the transfer to Syria. |
| Posted by: KBK 2007-04-20 22:20 |
| #1 As I mentioned on Captain's Quarters, my BS meter pegged out as I read this story. The situation as described would have been too big, known about by too many people both inside Iraq and around the world for this one guy to be the only information source. Think how easily secrets are leaked that are known to far fewer people. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2007-04-20 21:04 |