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| Iraq | ||||
| Cordesman says there’s no evidence Sammy tried to arm terrorists ... | ||||
| 2003-11-16 | ||||
| Via WaPo. The CIA’s search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found no evidence that former president Saddam Hussein tried to transfer chemical or biological technology or weapons to terrorists, according to a military and intelligence expert. They also have yet to locate any actual weapons stockpiles, even the stuff that was declared during the 1990s. We also evidently have at least one of al-Qaeda’s top 20 saying that they got help from Iraq. Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provided new details about the weapons search and Iraqi insurgency in a report released Friday. It was based on briefings over the past two weeks in Iraq from David Kay, the CIA representative who is directing the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq; L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator there; and military officials. "No evidence of any Iraqi effort to transfer weapons of mass destruction or weapons to terrorists," Cordesman wrote of Kay’s briefing. "Only possibility was Saddam’s Fedayeen [his son’s irregular terrorist force] and talk only." Um, if they were talking about handing out WMDs to the Saddam Fedayeen, this would imply that there were weapons to hand out to begin with. Just an interesting point to note.
Likely due to the fact that we have in custody numerous al-Qaeda members, including apparently one of the top brass, saying that Sammy was helping them out with chem/bio warfare. We already saw that Abu Khabab and Co were more than ready to use that with the dead dogs and then there’s Zarqawi’s nastiness in Europe last year to consider. That makes the results of their working relationship thus far extremely troubling in of itself. Last Thursday, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith defended the administration’s prewar position at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The idea that we didn’t have specific proof that he was planning to give a biological agent to a terrorist group," he said, "doesn’t really lead you to anything, because you wouldn’t expect to have that information even if it were true. And our intelligence is just not at the point where if Saddam had that intention that we would necessarily know it." That much can be seen in the inability to recover WMDs to date. Either Sammy was bluffing or they were moved, either way he was very good at hiding things from the CIA. Yesterday, allegations of new evidence of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda contained in a classified annex attached to Feith’s Oct. 27 letter to leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were published in the Weekly Standard. Feith had been asked to support his July 10 closed-door testimony about such connections. The classified annex summarized raw intelligence reports but did not analyze them or address their accuracy, according to a senior administration official familiar with the matter. Raw intel is still intel and unless the whole thing is a pack of lies if even half of that was true it’s extremely concerning. One might be interested to see the contrast between the anti-war crowds unwillingness to accept Ibn Shaykh al-Libi’s claims in regards to Iraq to the US but swallow hook, line, and sinker Zubaydah and Khalid’s. During the recent Baghdad briefing, Cordesman noted that Kay said Iraq "did order nuclear equipment from 1999 on, but no evidence [has turned up] of [a] new major facility to use it." So much for no nuclear program post-1991. Although there was no evidence of chemical weapons production, Kay said he had located biological work "under cover of new agricultural facility" that showed "advances in developing dry storable powder forms of botulinum toxin," Cordesman wrote. Gee, that sounds a lot like WMD production, maybe that should go in the headline somewhere. Nah ... During his Nov. 1-12 trip, Cordesman visited Baghdad, Babel, Tikrit and Kirkuk, where he met combat commanders and staff in high-threat areas. Reporting on his briefing by Bremer, Cordesman said 95 percent of the threat came from former Hussein loyalists while most foreign terrorists, who entered Iraq before the war, arrived from Syria, with some from Saudi Arabia and only "a few from Iran." Bremer "felt Syrian intelligence knows [of the volunteers] but is not proactive in encouraging [them]." He also said there was "no way to seal borders with Syria, Saudi [Arabia] and Iran. Too manpower intensive." Most of Ansar al-Islam is coming in from Iran and they’ve been behind most of the big booms to date, so if there’s just a few then they’ve sure gotten a lot more professional than they were before or during the war.
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| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #3 Perhaps it is useful for the writer of this story to understand that when fighting terrorists, if you know about an act or an intention to commit an act, it is the same as performing the act yourself if you take no measures to notify the putative targets. |
| Posted by: badanov 2003-11-16 12:03:40 PM |
| #2 They also said Hussein "made officers read ’Black Hawk Down’ [Mark Bowden’s book about the fatal downing of U.S. helicopters in Somalia a decade ago] to try to convince them U.S. would have to leave if major casualties." Just one problem here - there's a different guy in the Oval Office. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2003-11-16 4:12:12 AM |
| #1 --During the recent Baghdad briefing, Cordesman noted that Kay said Iraq "did order nuclear equipment from 1999 on, but no evidence [has turned up] of [a] new major facility to use it."-- Now why would they need a "new" major facility, why wouldn't an "old" facility suffice?? |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2003-11-16 3:04:25 AM |