Debka Alert - take with a grain of salt, but.... caught this via LGF. EFL - read it all, as they say
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 Husseinâs 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 monthâs 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.
| I'd guess that a lot of that evidence was built on evidence that briefly appeared, then was pooh-poohed and dropped from sight... |
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. âSigns of a weapons program are very different from the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that were a certainty before the war,â said Rockefeller. âWe did not go to war to disrupt Saddamâs weapons program, we went to war to disarm him.â
| Now he's disarmed, ain't he? |
The Kay team spent the first month of its mission sorting into three batches what he described as âan estimated seven and-a-half miles of documentsâ, 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 Saddamâs chemical, biological and nuclear programming with notes on budgets, manpower and procurement requirements. Detailed are the Saddam regimeâs plans, productions processes and timetables for WMD development as well as special programs for concealing it all from UN inspectors for twelve years. Saddamâs officials hid these thousands of documents from the United Nations Blix-ElBarardei inspection team and left them out of the voluminous âfull accountingâ 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 Saddamâs agents of large parts of the forbidden program.
| If that's true, Syria's next on the list... |
After talking in secret to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay declared there was a âtruly amazingâ 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.â
| Now that they don't have to worry so much about being bumped off or having their families bumped off... |
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-Weeklyâs sources in Canberra have learned — is thinking of calling a snap election at yearâs end to catch his Labor Party rivals off guard, confident that the proof of Saddamâs 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 âhuman intelligenceâ, 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 Saddamâs 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 Saddamâs 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, Kayâs 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.
Ahhh another reference to Syria having much of the WMD transferred... moving on up on the "next" list, along with Iran and Soddy |