We were right. Cuz' i said so. There.

[notyoueither]

Then you disagree with KH and I. You are doubly blind, or damned, or something.

[notyoueither]

Incidently, if you think that he had no capability, once sanctions were off, when he sat on billions in oil revenues, you have to be a moron of Universal proportions.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Serving at the time, thank you very much.

There's no indication of that in the article, at least not in the part you quoted.

I found it funny that said article is connected to The Sunday Telegraph, seeing how they fabricated stories of having all those secret documents wrt Saddam's BCN weapons and programmes.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Then you disagree with KH and I. You are doubly blind, or damned, or something.

You are just jealous that you didn't have such sharp foresight.

[notyoueither]

Actually, I was saying at the time that they were going in to secure a base to operate from should it ever be necessary to deal with Syria or Iran, and that once they got the place under control they could withdraw bases from SA.

We shall see who had what foresight.

[Edan]

Originally posted by Tripledoc

Regarding constructing WMD evidence. Some would implicate the Office of Special Plans, staffed by Jews, Pentagon.

And why did no one listen to Scott Ritter, the weapons inspector. Why did he not get any airtime on US media.
Of course his book in which he pointed to the manipulation was reviewed here, And it got bad a review (by a Jewish journalist), claiming that it was inaccurate and false . It appears it was not.

I knew it was the joos. Even when it was the sharks, I knew it was the joos!

[Edan]

Of all the criticisms levelled against the war, that there were no WMDs does not bother me. It was Saddam's responsibility to destroy Iraqs WMDs and to show the documentation of that destruction - which he didn't. Evereone with access to intelligence data apart from Scott Ritter (who had his own credibility problems) said Saddam either had WMDs or we simply didn't know if he did. I have no qualms in not giving Saddam the benefit of the doubt.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


There's no indication of that in the article, at least not in the part you quoted.

I found it funny that said article is connected to The Sunday Telegraph, seeing how they fabricated stories of having all those secret documents wrt Saddam's BCN weapons and programmes.

Here. Here's a 'pure' source. They claim scepticism too, but they have some other interesting things to say...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1102097,00.html

Iraqi says he was source for 45-minute claim

Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday December 8, 2003
The Guardian

An Iraqi officer has claimed he warned British intelligence about Saddam's Hussain's weapons of mass destruction programme.
The officer, identified only as Lieutenant Colonel Al-Dabbagh and said to be head of a frontline air defence unit in the western desert, told the Sunday Telegraph he warned MI6 that Iraqi forces could use chemical or biological weapons on the battlefield against invading forces in less than 45 minutes.

He claimed that the only reason the weapons were not used was because most of the Iraqi army did not want to fight for Saddam.

Intelligence officials said yesterday that they could not comment on the story. However, Whitehall sources distanced themselves from Lt Col Al-Dabbagh's claims, which do not chime with evidence that was presented to the Hutton inquiry.

Lt Col Al-Dabbagh said he spied for a London-based exile group, the Iraqi National Accord.

It is thought that he will not be the last officer to claim to be the source of the 45-minute claim.

Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, told the Hutton inquiry that the information contained in the dossier relating to the 45-minute claim came from a single "established and reliable" source serving as a senior officer in the Iraqi army.

But Brian Jones, a former senior member of the Defence Intelligence Staff, said MI6's informant on the 45-minute claim was a secondary source.

On Friday, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, former chairman of Whitehall's joint intelligence committee, attacked the way the dossier warned that Saddam could "deploy" weapons of mass destruction with 45 minutes. It spoke of an "imminent" or "current" threat, he said, pointing out that the press and the public came to alarming conclusions.

He added: "This illustrates an iron law about the way drafting committees work." The drafters, he said, lost sight of what words meant to the ordinary reader.

and then

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1131991,00.html

Iraqi who gave MI6 45-minute claim says it was untrue

David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor
Tuesday January 27, 2004
The Guardian

The government's dogged insistence that Saddam Hussein was able to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of the order being given suffered two serious blows yesterday as ministers braced themselves for the findings of the Hutton inquiry.
As the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, was once again forced to defend the justification for going to war, the Iraqi exile group in London which claims to have supplied MI6 with the intelligence about Saddam's 45-minute capability admitted that the information might have been completely untrue.

Nick Theros, the Washington representative of Iyad Allawi, who headed the Iraqi National Accord in exile, said it was raw intelligence from a single source, part of a large amount of information passed on by the INA to MI6.

He told the Guardian: "We were passing it on in good faith. It was for the intelligence services to verify it."

The admission came as David Kay, who resigned as the coalition's chief weapons inspector in Iraq on Friday, accused the intelligence agencies of failing to detect that Saddam's weapons programme was in disarray as a result of corruption and increasingly erratic leadership.

Mr Straw admitted that it was "disappointing" that the inspectors had not found evidence of the weapons, but said the war with Iraq was more justified today than it had been when MPs voted for the invasion.

"We were never saying that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United Kingdom... The serious and current threat [was] to the world, and that was absolutely true, and I remain convinced it was," he told the BBC Radio 4 programme Today.

The claim that Saddam could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes was highlighted by Tony Blair's preface to the dossier issued by the government in September 2002 in the run-up to the war.

It was also at the heart of the row between Downing Street and the BBC after doubt was cast on its accuracy by the government weapons scientist David Kelly.

But Mr Theros said the information now seemed to be a "crock of ****". "Clearly we have not found WMD," he said.

Mr Theros works with his father, a former US ambassador, to promote the political affairs of Mr Allawi, who is now a member of the Iraqi governing council in Baghdad.

He said the Iraqi officer who claims to have been the original source of the intelligence had in fact never seen inside the purported chemical weapons crates upon which his 45-minute claim was based.

The former INA spy, who calls himself Lieutenant Colonel al-Dabbagh, although this is not his full name, is now said to be "in hiding".

At the time, he says, he commanded a frontline unit.

He told the Sunday Telegraph and NBC television that before the September 2002 dossier was published he smuggled out sketchy intelligence about WMD to MI6 via a general in Baghdad working for the INA.

He said one of Saddam's senior officials told a meeting of air defence commanders "probably sometime in the spring" that an arsenal of unspecified secret weapons would be used for battlefield defence against US invaders.

"They told us that [coalition troops] cannot pass across Iraq because we will use everything from the knife to nuclear weapons to defend ourselves."

The colonel says his unit later took delivery of an unspecified number of crates which appeared to contain short-range weapons, such as rocket-propelled grenades.

They were supposedly to be fired from civilian jeeps as a last-ditch defence by Saddam loyalists wearing gas masks.

Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, did not deny in evidence to the Hutton inquiry that the intelligence for the 45-minute WMD claim came second-hand from a single source who was a senior Iraqi army officer.

Further damage to Downing Street's case for going to war came from Dr Kay, who said yesterday that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had failed to recognise that Iraq had all but abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical or biological weapons after the first Gulf war.

He told the New York Times that his team discovered that Iraq had plunged into what he called a "vortex of corruption" around 1997 and 1998.

Iraqi scientists realised that they could go to Saddam and present plans for weapons programmes and receive large amounts of money, without making good their promises.

For myself, I'm not sure how that last bit hurts the case for war based on WMD, considering that the ****ers even had Saddam convinced. My head spins with the possibilities.

He knew that she knew that he knew that he was lying... no, that's not it. He knew that he knew that he knew that he was lying... no, that's not it. She knew that she knew that he knew that he was lying... :crazy:

[Chemical Ollie]

If you believe in witches, a broom in the corner is evidence enough - Hans Blix

[Tripledoc]

Originally posted by Edan
I knew it was the joos. Even when it was the sharks, I knew it was the joos!

You can speak newspeak and call them neocons or Israelis if you wish.

The spies who pushed for war

Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force

Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian

As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.
It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.

This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.

According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.

The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.

Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.

How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from could have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election prospects, which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more Americans die in Iraq and the reasons for the war are revealed, his victory in 2004 no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.

The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" and trying to "rewrite history". But the Democratic leadership kept up its questions over the White House role.

The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.

Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.

An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of visits" but said there was nothing unusual about that.

Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he was there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."

Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.

Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.

In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.

William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.

The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.

There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.

"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.

As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".

"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."

In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.

"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."

The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."

Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.

In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.

The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.

The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence operation would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price for allowing it to help steer the country into war.

A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at least, was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival organisation.

As he prepares for re-election, Mr Bush may opt to tough it out, rather than acknowledge the severity of the problem by firing loyalists. But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms.

[MikeH]

The whole thing is ridiculous.

Even if he had loads of WMDs filling warehouses across Iraq we had no right to invade. So in a way this debate is irrelevant. We were wrong no matter what we found. And whilst we're doing a "we told you so" us "evil anti-American Eurocoms" were also against the war because we knew we'd be bogged down getting troops killed trying to "win the peace" for years to come.

The fact is that what little evidence there was, fed to us by anti-Saddam Iraqis and Iraqi disinformation was massively inflated by the US and UK governments when it was given to the general public.

Then they invaded with no sensible plan for what to do once Saddam was gone.

It was a total balls-up from beginning to end.

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by reds4ever
Speaking from a British point of view, there really needs to be some top-level resignations in our government IMHO.

[Ted Striker]

What's interesting is that Powell is talking about withdrawing troops THIS YEAR. He is saying that the Iraqis should be responsible for their own security.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/12/powell.troops.iraq/index.html

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
Hindsight is 20/20. I remember the first Gulf war, and worrying about the use of chemical weapons on Israel. Since Saddam refused to comply with the UN regulations regarding inspections, what conclusions can you draw from that?
If they were concerned about their world reputation, why not allow inspectors to do a proper job?

Don't forget Saddam had domestic matters to attend as well. He had to show to his population that he was strong. So he tried to kick out the inspectors when he believed he could go away with it.

What I find interesting is just how much grist those opposed to Bush received in their oil-for-food program with Iraq. No wonder France, and Germany opposed that program's cessation.

1. Duh
2. Like most of the damning evidence found by the Yanks in Iraq, the evidence incriminating America's friends has been kept quiet. To say France and Germany profited from this corrupt program is most certainly true. To say they were the only, or the biggest profiteers is taking conclusion from incomplete info (cuz the info available for the public won't be complete before the next 30 years)

If they were so concerned about the welfare of the citizens of Iraq under the embargo, why would they seek to profit off the arrangements?

Hint: they weren't concerned with the welfare of the Iraqi people, but for their own petty interests. Just like the US, Russia, Iraq, and pretty much everybody involved in the whole mess.

They are enforcing embargos and no-fly zones.

Sure. So sending terrorists strike NY, and preparing to nuke some American target is the way to make the Yanks go away
Maybe that's just myself, but I imagine the best strategy for Saddam to have the Yanks stop it is to fall under the radar, and to use the bribed contacts to make trade open once again.

From France, undubitably bypassing the embargo by selling oil.

Froö France, specifically. My, my country must be the heart of evil

How did the French have a programme so discreet as their oil-for-food? The Americans aren't God. They can't see or know everything that Saddam was doing.

1. Oil-for-food wasn't discreet. It was a UN program that couldn't change because of the terrible inertia inherent to all UN decisions. Whenever the French attempted to change the programme, the Yanks made it clear it was a no. I guess the opposite was the same when the Yanks wanted to change it.

So Bush must be a puppet, eh? A puppet of the so-called Bushies, who are the real leaders.

I do not know, but I don't exclude the possibility. Bush is the PR guy of a complete team, he is the guy charged with winning elections (under the advice of Karl Rove). I don't know how much weight he has in the decision making when the team is taking one. I don't think he is entirely a puppet, nor do I think he is a mastermind. I would rather imagine he is an arbiter between different points of views, and he has nearly always supported the POV of Cheney and Rumsfeld, while nearly always opposing the POV of Powell.

Who are these Bushies Spiffor? I assume Paul Wolfowitz would be found among them, would he not?

Their identity is not a secret. Look at the list of senior members of the cabinet, and you have it. The Bushies are the ruling team that was bundled with Bush's election.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Straybow
It wasn't the confirmed presence of WMDs, it was Saddam's clear intent to use what he claimed he had and what intelligence indicated he was attempting to get, and would get as soon as embargos and other punishments were lifted.

It isn't our fault that Saddam was all bluff. When people threaten that kind of stuff you take them seriously as far as intelligence can support. That's the risk Saddam took by bluffing, and I don't shed one tear over the decision.

Saddam took the threat seriously. He accepted Blix's conditions. He provided the huge amount of data the Americans demanbded via the UN, despite the American demand being close to technically impossible in the small time granted.

Saddam did all that he could do to appease you guys, but you were never content, and for a reason: you wanted your demands to be unmeetable, so that you'd have a good excuse to go to war. That's why you finally made a two-days ultimatum, that you broke after one day.

The WMDs had nothing to do with the war. It was a propaganda stunt whose only aim was to gather support. Now that this propaganda stunt has proven to be a lie, you can rationalize the war with other excuses, if you so wish.