Larry Elder (conservative radio host) joins Dave Rubin to discuss Conservatives, Libertarians, Black Lives Matter, systemic racism, Hollywood liberal bias, and more.
Segmented Portions of the Above
Black Lives Matter, Racism: A Conservative Perspective ~ Isolated
Conservatives, Libertarians, and the Iraq War ~ Isolated
War on Drugs, Hollywood Liberal Bias ~ Isolated
In this first excerpt of some great commentary by Dr. Thies, we see the last minute appealing by Trump to the fringes of both parties:
In saying George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Donald Trump possibly reveals his general election strategy: appeal to truthers as well as to birthers. As discussed in a prior blogpost, about half of Democrats are truthers, and about half of Republicans are birthers. All that is missing from combining the kook segments of the electorate of both the right and the left with economic nationalism and xenophobia, is promising free stuff. Thus, the perfect opponent to the Donald in the general election would be Bernie Sanders. But, did Bush lie about weapons of mass destruction?
To say Bush lied is to say that the Bush administration knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. But, weapons of mass destruction were indicated by intelligence. Even so, as an assessment by the Defense Department said, “Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based largely—perhaps 90%—on analysis of imprecise intelligence.” In real time, Colin Powell famously accepted the conclusion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and attempted to persuade the UN Security Council of this. But, in his 2014 book, It worked for me, Powell says he should have been more skeptical. He says he failed to smell this out….
In this second post by Professor Thies
adds to the depths Trump will pander:
At Saturday’s debate, Donald Trump said, “You call it whatever you want. I will tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none. And they knew there were none.”….
Trump’s statement was taken as the popular accusation, “Bush lied,” as in “Bush lied, thousands died,” the slogan of Code Pink and other left-wing critics of the administration.
As an aside, I point out in depth the fact that there were WMDs in Iraq, HERE.
One Minute Version:
HotAir asks in their title a question: Did Trump damage his chances by accusing Bush of lying about Iraq? — to which they respond:
Ace says yes. I’m not convinced.
If Donald Trump is right, and George W. Bush deliberately schemed with his neo-con advisers to “lie” us into a phony war with Iraq, what does that say about the average Republican voter who supported Bush from 1999, voted for him, defended him through the recount, cried with him on 9/11, agreed with him on Iraq, defended him from ceaseless liberal attacks on him during the war, defended him from Obama’s never-expiring “Blame Bush” blame-shifting, etc.?
If Trump is right, then we’re not just wrong to have supported him. If Trump’s right, we’re goddamned rubes and fools to have defended this Actual Hitler-Level Monster for going on 17 years now…
This is a long way of saying Trump specifically and completely contradicted a belief that 75-80% of Republicans have about Bush — that he was a fundamentally decent man, perhaps overwhelmed by a very difficult period, who made an erroneous decision based on incomplete information — and instead offered a new belief, that Bush deliberately lied about Iraq’s WMD’s, a position that 75-80% of Republicans have long not only rejected but have been actively hostile towards…
I think Trump, who has been a past-master at getting people to buy-in to a very low-cost premise — “Let’s Make America Great Again” — just made a very high cost premise central to buying into him.
[….]
I think that, at this stage of the game, if you’re still open to Trump then nothing he says about Bush or Iraq is going to sway you. If you’ve sat through 20 Ted Cruz commercials a day in South Carolina attacking him as a phony conservative, a pro-choicer, and a parasite using eminent domain to prey on the working class, “Bush lied” isn’t the straw that’ll break the camel’s back. If anything, it’s all part of Trump’s Republican reboot. Trumpmania is a catharsis, repudiating the establishment and its idols (except Reagan, who’s simply too sanctified). If Bush gets caught up in that, eh. That’s all part of Year Zero. If Trump ends up paying a price for this, I think it’s more likely to come after he’s the nominee and some segment of conservatives decides that they can’t in good conscience support him in the general. “Bush lied!” will be part of a long list of disqualifying Trump positions for those righties once the time comes to make their break. For most Republicans it’ll be absorbed and put aside — but keep an eye on what happens this week as Dubya hits the trail for Jeb. The fact that he’ll be right there in front of South Carolinians, reminding them of how much they like him, makes Ace’s theory stronger than I would otherwise expect.
Of course the Left charges us (the United States)with quite a few provably false, or at most, inflated charges in regards to the the United States arming Iraq.
Weaponry
A quick refutation of another familiar “mantra” we hear connected to this topic, and one most at the rally in the video above most assuredly accept, is that the U.S. supplied the bulk of weapons that Iraq has and used. This just isn’t the case, the the graphic below points out (click it to enlarge it for better viewing):
Agents of Mass Destruction
The story goes that the United States provided chemical weapons to Iraq. The proof is the photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983. In an excellent Yahoo Answers question:
Some reasonable parameters were added to this original question. Here they are:
When these requests are added, the best answer certainly is the best answer: 
This comes from my afterword of my WMD Page:
… A similar myth, that the U.S. provided Iraq with chemical and biological weapons is equally off base. Iraq requested Anthrax samples from the US government, as do nations the world over, for the purpose of developing animal and human vaccines for local versions of Anthrax. Nerve gas doesn’t require technical help, it’s a variant of common insecticides. European nations sold Iraq the equipment to make poison gas.
Here is some on-depth info on the hand-shake:
Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984
….His December 1983 tour of regional capitals included Baghdad, where he was to establish “direct contact between an envoy of President Reagan and President Saddam Hussein,” while emphasizing “his close relationship” with the president [Document 28]. Rumsfeld met with Saddam, and the two discussed regional issues of mutual interest, shared enmity toward Iran and Syria, and the U.S.’s efforts to find alternative routes to transport Iraq’s oil; its facilities in the Persian Gulf had been shut down by Iran, and Iran’s ally, Syria, had cut off a pipeline that transported Iraqi oil through its territory. Rumsfeld made no reference to chemical weapons, according to detailed notes on the meeting [Document 31].
Rumsfeld also met with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, and the two agreed, “the U.S. and Iraq shared many common interests.” Rumsfeld affirmed the Reagan administration’s “willingness to do more” regarding the Iran-Iraq war, but “made clear that our efforts to assist were inhibited by certain things that made it difficult for us, citing the use of chemical weapons, possible escalation in the Gulf, and human rights.” He then moved on to other U.S. concerns [Document 32]. Later, Rumsfeld was assured by the U.S. interests section that Iraq’s leadership had been “extremely pleased” with the visit, and that “Tariq Aziz had gone out of his way to praise Rumsfeld as a person” [Document 36 and Document 37].
Rumsfeld returned to Baghdad in late March 1984. By this time, the U.S. had publicly condemned Iraq’s chemical weapons use, stating, “The United States has concluded that the available evidence substantiates Iran’s charges that Iraq used chemical weapons” [Document 47]. Briefings for Rumsfeld’s meetings noted that atmospherics in Iraq had deteriorated since his December visit because of Iraqi military reverses and because “bilateral relations were sharply set back by our March 5 condemnation of Iraq for CW use, despite our repeated warnings that this issue would emerge sooner or later” [Document 48]. Rumsfeld was to discuss with Iraqi officials the Reagan administration’s hope that it could obtain Export-Import Bank credits for Iraq, the Aqaba pipeline, and its vigorous efforts to cut off arms exports to Iran. According to an affidavit prepared by one of Rumsfeld’s companions during his Mideast travels, former NSC staff member Howard Teicher, Rumsfeld also conveyed to Iraq an offer from Israel to provide assistance, which was rejected [Document 61].
Although official U.S. policy still barred the export of U.S. military equipment to Iraq, some was evidently provided on a “don’t ask – don’t tell” basis. In April 1984, the Baghdad interests section asked to be kept apprised of Bell Helicopter Textron’s negotiations to sell helicopters to Iraq, which were not to be “in any way configured for military use” [Document 55]. The purchaser was the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. In December 1982, Bell Textron’s Italian subsidiary had informed the U.S. embassy in Rome that it turned down a request from Iraq to militarize recently purchased Hughes helicopters. An allied government, South Korea, informed the State Department that it had received a similar request in June 1983 (when a congressional aide asked in March 1983 whether heavy trucks recently sold to Iraq were intended for military purposes, a State Department official replied “we presumed that this was Iraq’s intention, and had not asked.”) [Document 44]
During the spring of 1984 the U.S. reconsidered policy for the sale of dual-use equipment to Iraq’s nuclear program, and its “preliminary results favor[ed] expanding such trade to include Iraqi nuclear entities” [Document 57]. Several months later, a Defense Intelligence Agency analysis said that even after the war ended, Iraq was likely to “continue to develop its formidable conventional and chemical capability, and probably pursue nuclear weapons” [Document 58]. (Iraq is situated in a dangerous neighborhood, and Israel had stockpiled a large nuclear weapons arsenal without international censure. Nuclear nonproliferation was not a high priority of the Reagan administration – throughout the 1980s it downplayed Pakistan’s nuclear program, though its intelligence indicated that a weapons capability was being pursued, in order to avert congressionally mandated sanctions. Sanctions would have impeded the administration’s massive military assistance to Pakistan provided in return for its support of the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.)
In February 1984, Iraq’s military, expecting a major Iranian attack, issued a warning that “the invaders should know that for every harmful insect there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it whatever the number and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide” [Document 41]. On March 3, the State Department intervened to prevent a U.S. company from shipping 22,000 pounds of phosphorous fluoride, a chemical weapons precursor, to Iraq. Washington instructed the U.S. interests section to protest to the Iraqi government, and to inform the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that “we anticipate making a public condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons in the near future,” and that “we are adamantly opposed to Iraq’s attempting to acquire the raw materials, equipment, or expertise to manufacture chemical weapons from the United States. When we become aware of attempts to do so, we will act to prevent their export to Iraq” [Document 42].
The public condemnation was issued on March 5. It said, “While condemning Iraq’s chemical weapons use . . . The United States finds the present Iranian regime’s intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations and the moral and religious basis which it claims” [Document 43].
Later in the month, the State Department briefed the press on its decision to strengthen controls on the export of chemical weapons precursors to Iran and Iraq, in response to intelligence and media reports that precursors supplied to Iraq originated in Western countries. When asked whether the U.S.’s conclusion that Iraq had used chemical weapons would have “any effect on U.S. recent initiatives to expand commercial relationships with Iraq across a broad range, and also a willingness to open diplomatic relations,” the department’s spokesperson said “No. I’m not aware of any change in our position. We’re interested in being involved in a closer dialogue with Iraq” [Document 52]….
Yet another unfounded swipe at the Iraq War. John Van Huizum lives in a bubble where if he has come to a conclusion years ago… that’s it! History forever stays right where John wants it to stay. Here is an excerpt of John’s (click to enlarge it) article shows a complete lack of history. 
I doubt he think any differently about Vietnam based on his 1970’s conclusions. It wouldn’t matter that after 1990 — the fall of the Wall — 100,000 of thousands of Soviet era documents were now being translated and reviewed by military historians and good books based on MORE historical documents. Because these new documents support the traditional (and not the Left’s reasoning) for entering and fighting this proxy war of WWIII (the Cold War), this new information is rejected from the matrix of the left’s consciousness. But that is neither here-nor-there.
So, let’s deal with some of the contentions in John’s excerpted article. Firstly he notes that there were insufficient reasons for going to war.
May I remind him there were many U.N. Resolutions against Iraq that were almost all not met:
Official U.N. resolutions aside, Bush went to Congress and made his case with these and many other points. One point being that Iraq was firing almost everyday on our fighter pilots in the no-fly zone. In the cease fire of the First Gulf War, this was enough — under international law — to RESUME aggression.
But I also argue very forcefully that WMDs (and AMDs) were found in Iraq. And I made a case for it via a debate with a professor of history from the University of Michigan. The ever growing case for it can be found here on my WMD PAGE. Another site that is more in-depth than my own is this one. On it we find an even more in-depth quoting of Democrats — in other words, not Cheney — making Bush’s case:
~ President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998.
~ President Clinton, Jan. 27, 1998.
~ Sen. Joe Biden (D, DE), Feb. 12, 1998
~ Sen. Tom Daschle (D, SD), Feb. 12, 1998
~ Madeleine Albright, Feb. 18, 1998.
~ Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb. 18, 1998.
~ Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens. Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others Oct. 9, 1998.
~ Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998.
~ Madeleine Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999.
~ Letter to President Bush, Signed by Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL) and others, Dec, 5, 2001.
~ Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002.
~ Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002.
~ Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002.
~ Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002.
~ Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002.
~ John Edwards (D, NC), Oct. 7, 2002
~ Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002.
~ Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002.
~ Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct. 10, 2002.
~ Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct. 10, 2002.
~ Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002.
~ Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003.
Nope, no one named Dick Cheney there.
Now, on to my second grievance with John’s ignorance of history. And it has to do with God’s existence and war. While I will grant him that Islam has inherent to it properties that make them go to war… constantly, their whole history.
John Quincy Adams is worth reading at greater length on the topic, as he provides some insight into what has been going on in Iraq now that Obama has prematurely removed our troops:
▼ In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, […..] Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST. – TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE…. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant … While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.
Winston Churchill deserves a longer hearing too:
▼ “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.
Islam has not changed over the centuries. All that has changed is that never before have we been ruled by people who take Islam’s side against us.
(Click to enlarge)
Other religions do not. But the Left typically will think religion is the main catalyst for war throughout history. This is not the case. Let me repeat that, this is NOT the case.
A recent comprehensive compilation of the history of human warfare, Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documents 1763 wars, of which 123 have been classified to involve a religious conflict. So, what atheists have considered to be ‘most’ really amounts to less than 7% of all wars. It is interesting to note that 66 of these wars (more than 50%) involved Islam, which did not even exist as a religion for the first 3,000 years of recorded human warfare. Even the Seven Years’ War, widely recognized to be “religious” in motivation, noting that the warring factions were not necessarily split along confessional lines as much as along secular interests.
So I would argue the further you get from the Judeo-Christian ethic/God, the more violent a culture gets. As we become more secularized, we (Judeo-Christian adherents) meet snorts and ridicule: 
“No culture is perfect – far from it. But all healthy cultures reward virtue and punish vice, encourage what is noble and beautiful and discourage what is base and tawdry, promote liberty, and restrain license. [Every young man] must now dwell in a perverse anti-culture in which his attempt to practice the demanding virtue of purity meets less than approval. It meets snorts of disdain and ridicule.”
Anthony Esolen, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity (Charlotte, NC: Saint Benedict Press, 2014), 54.
We know that our Constitution was founded for a particular people, which is what the left want a “living/breathing” constitution which is based in a different worldview than those who wrote it: “Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and practice” ~ Woodrow Wilson.
“…we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
All this is lost on John however… it is like teaching a new trick to a very old dog. But people are entitled to their opinions… just not their own facts.
This is the shorter description of why the Bush admin didn’t take the offensive during all the scurrilous attacks against it on WMDs. The longer reading by Larry Elder of the NYT’s article can be found at my YouTube channel, HERE. My VERY in-depth discussion of WMD’s (or AMDs if you wish) is HERE.
For more clear thinking like this from Larry Elder… I invite you to visit: http://www.larryelder.com/ ~AND~ http://www.elderstatement.com/
New Introduction (5-2015)
Contents
Intelligence & First Hand Knowledge
Defining a WMD
Reasons for Entering Iraq
Concluding Thoughts
“A Facebook” Postscript
Other Posts/Mantras:
Why this post? Originally this was a debate in a forum involving a professor of history from the University of Michigan during the beginning years of the Iraq War. The forum this particular debate took place in shut down and so I lost a bulk of my responses to the professor. No matter, what i did save has transformed into a continuing response to the many past [and still popular] mantras from the left regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).
While I have updated this post rececently, there shouldn’t be too many more updates needed for it. You see, when the New York Times (NYTs) caves on the issue, the Left is then forced — yes forced — to reason through the issue. Voltaire said “once the people begin to reason, all is lost.” And it is because the progressive democrat lives by emotion… simple, rudimentary, brutish responses to their environment. Deep thinking is a hand in cards they will never get.
Enjoy this rework of one of my most classic posts. It looks NOTHING like the previous version.
The NYTs
The NYT’s has written two major articles on the Iraq war in the past couple years. (See also Yahoo News.) The only reason they would ever consider going back on their previous position that Bush lied, people died, is for the simple reason they can still blame the Bush administration for improperly handling the WMDs they did find. I happen to agree with the NYTs on this… in the rush to secretly dispose of these weapons, safety was not an issue, and many of our troops that handled and disposed of them have fallen ill.
Simply put, the State Department/Department of Defense had insurgents streaming into the country with deep terrorist ties. And they did not want these “questionable” characters getting their hands on and smuggling out of the country very dangerouse ordinance. So the Defense Department had the top brass (from Bush down) play dumb on WMDs so there wasn’t a mad-rush on these weapons.
The operation code name was “Avarice.” Here is a snippet from the article (h/t The Blaze) showing that there were in fact WMDs in Iraq… as does the rest of this in-depth post!
The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.
The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
[….]
Neither the C.I.A. nor the soldiers persuaded the man to reveal his source of supply, the officials said. “They were pushing to see where did it originate from, was there a mother lode?” General Zahner said.
Eventually, a veteran familiar with the purchases said, “the guy was getting a little cocky.”
At least once he scammed his handlers, selling rockets filled with something other than sarin.
Then in 2006, the veteran said, the Iraqi drove a truckload of warheads to Baghdad and “called the intel guys to tell them he was going to turn them over to the insurgents unless they picked them up.”
Not long after that, the veteran said, the relationship appeared to dry up, ending purchases that had ensured “a lot of chemical weapons were destroyed.”
NewsMax comments on the above and below NYT’s articles:
The New York Times reported for the first time in October that during a seven-year time frame, from 2004 to 2011, soldiers serving in Iraq encountered the abandoned chemical weapons, calling it “a largely secret chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.”
When the NYT’s eats crow… the case is made!
Larry Elder & the NYTs
Larry Elder reads from the NYT’s article, mentioned above and below, and he really gives this issue a thorough going through. Following Larry Elder is a Breitbart snippet on the topic:
Here is Breitbart’s excerpt:
In Wednesday’s edition of The New York Times, a report from C.J. Chivers, which is accompanied by a video, details U.S. forces in Iraq finding thousands of chemical weapons during the Iraq war.
“From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule,” Chivers wrote. “In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.”
Chivers report details “a pattern of secrecy” and raises concern of the possibility of other hidden chemical weapons leftover from Hussein’s rule possibly falling into the hands ISIS.
Below is the New York Times short documentary detailing many of these soldiers talking about improperly disposing of these chemical weapons.
NYTs Video
I only have one issue with the video worth mentioning. The video asserts that the U.S. supplied biological and major munitions to Iraq… A chart near the end of this post shows the amount of weaponry sold to Iraq from 1973-to-1990 by country.
(This and other mantras can be quickly linked to in the “Contents” area above.)
The dislike for Rumsfeld came out as the video was talking about this arming of Iraq while showing even Rumsfeld’s “hand shake” with Saddam Hussein. In other words, the impression given in the short documentary was that the U.S.A. sold Saddam these weapons because Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam. That’s their evidence.
Here is the NYT’s video:
Islamic State Aquisitions
The below includes some pictures of sites and weapons caches that have recently been acquired by the Islamic State (I.S.). The following picture is a picture of the four main WMD manufacturing sites captured by I.S. in Iraq:
The jihadist group bringing terror to Iraq overran a Saddam Hussein chemical weapons complex Thursday, gaining access to disused stores of hundreds of tons of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin. 
(Gateway Pundit) ISIS terrorists showed off a captured SCUD missile today in Raqqa, Syria (to the right, click to enlarge). Scud is a series of tactical ballistic missiles developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The name Scud has been widely used to refer to these missiles and the wide variety of modern variants.
Libertarian Republican emboldens the above evidence with the newest report that undermines many of the characters he deals with on his site and political world:
…Let’s cue up our friendly left-libertarian, shall we. Choose your favorite lefty-libertarian from Cato, Reason, Libertarian Party, LewRockwell.com, Ron Paul movement, antiwar.com, Jesse Ventura-ite, Alex Jones-iac, whichever.
“Bh-bh-bh-bh-bbbbbbb-but, Saddam never had WMD, Bush lied, people died… Cheney, Halliburton… Bbbbush, warmonger, No WMD… Building 9… Building 9… what about Building 9…”
And now this, breaking news from the AP, via PJ Media, “ISIS has seized thousands of rockets with Chemical Warheads”:
Iraq has informed the United Nations that the Islamic State extremist group has taken control of a vast former chemical weapons facility northwest of Baghdad where 2,500 chemical rockets filled with the deadly nerve agent sarin or their remnants were stored along with other chemical warfare agents. (Emphasis added.)
Iraq’s U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim said in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon circulated Tuesday that “terrorist” groups entered the Muthanna site June 11 and seized weapons and equipment from the protection force guarding the facility.
Did You Catch That?
I will ask again, for LR’s sake, Did You Catch That?
WikiLeaks!
This comes mainly by way of Wired Magazine, However, the picture they show in their article I have had for YEARS! And the cunundrum is this for the left. WIKI Leaks is loved by the left, mainly, because “the WikiLeaks cables because they make America look bad” (Daily Caller).
But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.
[…..]
In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base.
Three months later, in northern Iraq, U.S. scouts went to look in on a “chemical weapons” complex. “One of the bunkers has been tampered with,” they write. “The integrity of the seal [around the complex] appears intact, but it seems someone is interesting in trying to get into the bunkers.”
THAT BEING SAID, the Left is now having to admit that there were WMDs in Iraq if they believe Wiki Leaks. It is a double edged sword in other words. This is a thorn in the side of the activist Left! They support Julian Assange releasing classified, United States [and other government] information ~ B-U-T ~ at the same time it refutes their long-held position on the reasons behind the Iraq war: 
Newsbusters explains how the “WikiLeaks” massive dump of classified documents show that WMDs were found.
But at Wired Magazine’s Danger Room (HTs to Ace and Gateway Pundit via an e-mail), Noah Shachtman identifies substantial contrary evidence in the WikiLeaks docs to add that what has already been accumulated. Shachtman tries to minimize the impact by overstating the Bush administration’s actual position, but that doesn’t change what the WikiLeaks docs contain:
WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results
[….]
An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.
…The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these newly-WikiLeaked documents. Skeptics will note that these relatively small WMD stockpiles were hardly the kind of grave danger that the Bush administration presented in the run-up to the war.
Sorry, Mr. Shachtman, the “diehards” are those on the left who have never backed away from “no WMDs” claim, which has once again (previous examples here, here, here, and here, to identify just a few) been proven to be demonstrably false.
[….]
Gateway Pundit wonders: “Do you suppose this will make any headlines?” Prognosis: Doubtful. There’s too much at stake in protecting the left’s folklore.
I want to comment on the picture Wired Magazine used in their article. This is a picture of some viles. In reading the CIA report on them from years ago these were recovered from a safehouse in the initial months of sweeping homes in the suburbs of the capital. I used “it” in concert with a Daily News article found in their Sunday Viewpoint entitled, “Altered Reality: Look Past The Dogma and You’ll See the WMDs” (October 26, 2003, p. 3):
Picture Used
1) A clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.
2) A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.
3) Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.
4) New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.
5) Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists’ homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).
6) A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.
7) Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.
8) Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km – well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.
9) Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles –probably the No Dong — 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.
Shells
May I can also add here that 750 shells with sarin gas were found. As well as 500 shells with mustard gas in them. Some say that these were old and abandoned. This doesn’t mean, however, that they were harmless. One sites discussion about this topic has a commentator astutely noting: “These are 500 shells, 15 shells like this killed 5,000 Kurds. There is a difference between degraded and harmless.” Only in the Left’s vernacular does this equal no WMDs. Scurrilous politics on display if there ever were. Two things come to my mind, and they are two slogans I heard all the time.
Intelligence & First Hand Knowledge
This next section will have subheading and deal with some solid information dealing with or adding to the already water-tight screed above. It will deal with those with first hand knowledge of operations of hiding and smuggling out of Iraq WMDs. Or intelligence known through reporters from the area.
Senior Syrian Journalist
A senior Syrian journalist reports Iraq’s WMD located in three Syrian sites:
(Debka… link dead, preserved at Free Republic) Nizar Nayuf is a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, said in a letter Monday, January 5, to Dutch newspaper “De Telegraaf,” that he knows the three sites where Iraq’s WMD are kept. The storage places are:
✦ Tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria. These tunnels are an integral part of an underground factory, built by the North Koreans, for producing Syrian Scud missiles.
✦ Iraqi chemical weapons and long-range missiles are stored in these tunnels.
✦ The village of Tal Snan, north of the town of Salamija, where there is a big Syrian airforce camp. Vital parts of Iraq’s WMD are stored there.
✦ The city of Sjinsjar on the Syrian border with the Lebanon, south of the city Homs.
Najoef writes that the transfer of Iraqi WMD to Syria was organized by the commanders of Saddam Hussein’s Special Republican Guard, including General Shalish, with the help of Assif Shoakat, Bashar Assad’s cousin. Shoakat is the CEO of Bhaha, an import/export company owned by the Assad family.
In February 2003, a month before America’s invasion in Iraq, DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly were the only media to report the movement of Iraqi WMD, the efforts to bring them from Iraq to Syria, and the personal involvement of Bashar Assad and his family in the operation.
Najoef, who has won prizes for journalistic integrity, says he wrote his letter because he has terminal cancer.
#2 Man
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein’s air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.
(The New York Sun) Hussein’s air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed. The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, “Saddam’s Secrets,” released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.
“There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Mr. Sada said. “I am confident they were taken over.”
Mr. Sada’s comments come just more than a month after Israel’s top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam “transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria.”
Democrats have made the absence of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a theme in their criticism of the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in 2003….
Below is Larry Elder interviewing General Sada (3-31-2011). Don’t you see this is information that undermines heavily the idea that WMDs didn’t exist? They were being moved to Syria… what was being moved? Lies? Myths?
Jordan
Quite a few years ago Jordanian officials thwarted a chemical attack on their soil. In fact, it would have been successful minus faulty equipment giving authorities time enough to discover the plot. (AMMAN, Jordan [CNN]) ~ Jordanian authorities said Monday they have broken up an alleged al Qaeda plot that would have unleashed a deadly cloud of chemicals in the heart of Jordan’s capital, Amman.
The plot would have been more deadly than anything al Qaeda has done before, including the September 11 attacks, according to the Jordanian government. Among the alleged targets were the U.S. Embassy, the Jordanian prime minister’s office and the headquarters of Jordanian intelligence. U.S. intelligence officials expressed caution about whether the chemicals captured by Jordanian authorities were intended to create a “toxic cloud” chemical weapon, but they said the large quantities involved were at a minimum intended to create “massive explosions.” Officials said there is debate within the CIA and other U.S. agencies over whether the plotters were planning to kill innocent people using toxic chemicals.
At issue is the presence of a large quantity of sulfuric acid among the tons of chemicals seized by Jordanian authorities. Sulfuric acid can be used as a blister agent, but it more commonly can increase the size of conventional explosions, according to U.S. officials. Nevertheless, U.S. intelligence officials called the capture of tons of chemicals that together could create several large conventional explosions “a big deal.” The plot was within days of being carried out, Jordanian officials said, when security forces broke it up April 20.
In a nighttime raid in Amman, Jordanian security forces moved in on the terrorist cell. After the shooting stopped, four men were dead. Jordanian authorities said. They said at least three others were arrested, including Azmi Jayyousi, the cell’s suspected ringleader, whom Jordanian intelligence alleges was responsible for planning and recruiting. On a confession shown on state-run Jordanian television, Jayyousi said he took orders from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a suspected terrorist leader who has been linked to al Qaeda and whom U.S. officials have said is behind some attacks in Iraq.
“I took explosives courses, poisons high level, then I pledged allegiance to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to obey him without any questioning,” Jayyousi said. Jordanian intelligence suspects Jayyousi returned from Iraq in January after a meeting with al-Zarqawi in which they allegedly plotted to hit the three targets in Amman. In a series of raids, the Jordanians said, they seized 20 tons of chemicals and numerous explosives. Also seized were three trucks equipped with specially modified plows, apparently designed to crash through security barricades.
The first alleged target was the Jordanian intelligence headquarters. The alleged blast was intended to be a big one. “According to my experience as an explosives expert, the whole of the Intelligence Department will be destroyed, and nothing of it will remain, nor anything surrounding it,” Jayyousi said….
….A Jordanian government scientist said the plot had been carefully worked out, with just the right amount of explosives to spread the deadly cloud without diminishing the effects of the chemicals. The blast would not burn up the poisonous chemicals but instead produce a toxic cloud, the scientist said, possibly spreading for a mile, maybe more.
The Jordanian intelligence buildings are within a mile of a large medical center, a shopping mall and a residential area. “And there is no one combination of antidote to treat nerve agent, choking agent and blistering agent,” the scientist said. Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, has been accused of plotting chemical attacks before, and authorities said it would not be his first attempt to strike Jordan. In 2000, a Jordanian court charged him in absentia with planning to blow up a hotel and attack tourist destinations.
U.S. officials have said he was behind the 2002 assassination of American diplomat Lawrence Foley, who was gunned down outside his home in Amman. According to the televised confessions, $170,000 came from Zarqawi via messengers from Syria.
20 Plane Loads
Relief Web is the global hub for time-critical humanitarian information on Complex Emergencies and Natural Disasters connected with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. They reported in an article, “Iraq sends 20 planeloads of aid to Syrian victims of dam collapse,” the following on June 9th, 2002:
(BAGHDAD, June 9 [AFP]) – Iraq said Sunday it has sent 20 planeloads of humanitarian assistance to Syria to help victims of Tuesday’s Zeyzoun dam collapse in the north of the neighboring country. “Iraqi Airways planes have made 20 flights to Damascus until today to take foodstuffs and pharmaceutical products to the victims,” Transport Minister Ahmad Murtada Ahmad told the official INA news agency.
Planes continued to take off from Baghdad’s international airport on Sunday in the airlift put in place on Thursday at the request of President Saddam Hussein, Ahmad said.
Iraq’s Health Minister Omid Medhat Mubarak added that the sanctions-hit country would also send teams of specialized doctors, surgeons and chemists to Syria….
Twenty planeloads containing “humanitarian aid” while he [Saddam] was under U.N. Sanctions and he didn’t have enough food for his own people who dies of malnutrition and lack of medical assistance. How gullible are we ~ well, the Left is VERY gullible. Come on. We know from the previous three stories that these plane loads were likely something else.
Defining WMDs
Question: what was Faisal Shahzad (the “Time-Square Bomber”) and Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab (the “Dingaling Bomber”) charged with?
They were charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction! If we found WMDs in New York and Detroit… surely we found them in Iraq. What I have attempted above is a pretty airtight case that WMDs did exist, maybe not in the form found in the movie Spies Like Us, with a Iraqi standing over a mobile ICBM control panel with a nuclear warhead… about to press the launch button. WMDs nonetheless.
I believe the Bush administration could have made a better case in arguing that one of the reason we were going in were for Agents of Mass Destruction (AMDs). But this is neither here-nor-there since I feel the case above is sound for there being WMDs as well as AMDs. I will also point out a reason or two for us to enter Iraq even if WMDs were not part of the argument.
This next portion is taken from a series I do in responding to a local writer in a small journal. The original post is entitled, “Concepts: Are We Insane? Nope, Just You Van Huizum.“
U.N Resolutions
Yet another unfounded swipe at the Iraq War. John Van Huizum lives in a bubble where if he has come to a conclusion years ago… that’s it! History forever stays right where John wants it to stay. Here is an excerpt of John’s (click to enlarge it) article shows a complete lack of history.
I doubt he think any differently about Vietnam based on his 1970’s conclusions. It wouldn’t matter that after 1990 — the fall of the Wall — 100,000 of thousands of Soviet era documents were now being translated and reviewed by military historians and good books based on MORE historical documents. Because these new documents support the traditional (and not the Left’s reasoning) for entering and fighting this proxy war of WWIII (the Cold War), this new information is rejected from the matrix of the left’s consciousness. But that is neither here-nor-there.
So, let’s deal with some of the contentions in John’s excerpted article. Firstly he notes that there were insufficient reasons for going to war.
May I remind him there were many U.N. Resolutions against Iraq that were almost all not met:
….See Additional UN Security Council Statements…
Official U.N. resolutions aside, Bush went to Congress and made his case with these and many other points. One point being that Iraq was firing almost everyday on our fighter pilots in the no-fly zone. In the cease fire of the First Gulf War, this was enough — under international law — to RESUME aggression….
Regime Change
This next audio is a challenging call into the Michael Medved Show when his guest, Paul Wolfowitz, gets into some of the history that started with Bush Sr., was ignored by Bill Clinton, and finally considered reasonable by “Dubya’s” team:
This next section deals with the idea that we heard a lot of during the war, and it is this: “there were no connections with Al Qaeda and Saddam.” Alternatively, there is a weaker version of this, “there were no support [state sponsored terrorism] given to terrorism/terrorists by Saddam/Iraq.”
This next section will deal with these mantras from the Left. The first example being very simple.
Al-Zarqawi
Here is a WIKI bio excerpt explaining who Al-Zarqawi is to catch the younger generation up with history:
…[he] was a militant Islamist from Jordan who ran a paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan. He became known after going to Iraq and being responsible for a series of bombings, beheadings, and attacks during the Iraq War.
He formed al-Tawhid wal-Jihad in the 1990s, and led it until his death in June 2006. Zarqawi took responsibility, on several audio and video recordings, for numerous acts of violence in Iraq including suicide bombings and hostage executions. Zarqawi opposed the presence of US and Western military forces in the Islamic world, as well as the West’s support for the existence of Israel. In late 2004 he joined al-Qaeda, and pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. After this al-Tawhid wal-Jihad became known as Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, also known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and al-Zarqawi was given the al-Qaeda title, “Emir of Al Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers”.
In September 2005, he declared “all-out war” on Shi’ites in Iraq, after the Iraqi government offensive on insurgents in the Sunni town of Tal Afar. He dispatched numerous suicide bombers throughout Iraq to attack American soldiers and areas with large concentrations of Shia militias. He is also thought to be responsible for the 2005 bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan. Zarqawi was killed in a targeted killing by a Joint US force on June 7, 2006, while attending a meeting in an isolated safehouse approximately 8 km (5.0 mi) north of Baqubah. One United States Air Force F-16C jet dropped two 500-pound (230 kg) guided bombs on the safehouse.
Again, he was hiding out in and training terrorist fighters in, and eventually killed in… wait for it… in Iraq!
The Weekly Standard reports that, before the invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi ran a “terrorist haven” in Kurdish northern Iraq.[33] According to a March 2003 British intelligence report, Zarqawi had set up “sleeper cells” in Baghdad before the Iraq war. The report stated “Reporting since (February) suggests that senior al Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has established sleeper cells in Baghdad, to be activated during a U.S. occupation of the city…These cells apparently intend to attack U.S. targets using car bombs and other weapons. (It is also possible that they have received [chemical and biological] materials from terrorists in the [Kurdish Autonomous Zone]),…al Qaeda-associated terrorists continued to arrive in Baghdad in early March.”[34]
(Replaced WIKI’s dead links with good ones)
CONNECTIONS
These news items show that Saddam was very busy on the Syrian border, and that some chemical weapons made it into Jordan from Syria via a network of Al Qaeda that led right to Iraq. The Telegraph explains in a bit more detail:
THE United States once described Abu Nidal as “the world’s most dangerous terrorist”. It was not an exaggeration. In a grisly campaign stretching over two decades and three continents, his Fatah Revolutionary Council (FRC) was responsible for the deaths of perhaps 1,000 people in 20 countries, usually at the behest and in the pay of this or that Middle East regime. (The Economist)
Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, was murdered on the orders of Saddam Hussein after refusing to train al-Qa’eda fighters based in Iraq, The Telegraph can reveal.
Despite claims by Iraqi officials that Abu Nidal committed suicide after being implicated in a plot to overthrow Saddam, Western diplomats now believe that he was killed for refusing to reactivate his international terrorist network.
According to reports received from Iraqi opposition groups, Abu Nidal had been in Baghdad for months as Saddam’s personal guest, and was being treated for a mild form of skin cancer.
While in Baghdad, Abu Nidal, whose real name was Sabri al-Banna, came under pressure from Saddam to help train groups of al-Qa’eda fighters who moved to northern Iraq after fleeing Afghanistan. Saddam also wanted Abu Nidal to carry out attacks against the US and its allies.
When Abu Nidal refused, Saddam ordered his intelligence chiefs to assassinate him.
A Conversation
In one forum a detractor starts out a thread with the following:
There’s no evidence Saddam Hussein had ties with al-Qaida, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence that Democrats say undercuts President Bush’s justification for invading Iraq. Bush administration officials have insisted on a link between the Iraqi regime and terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Intelligence agencies, however, concluded there was none…
But another responded with this to again, set the historical record straight:
Except for the following from the 9/11 Report… Hmm..someone isn’t telling the truth.
What was the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda?
The Commission specifically finds that Saddam’s regime “tolerated and may have even helped” Ansar al-Islam, an al Qaeda sponsored group in northern Iraq affiliated with senior al Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who continues to be responsible for terrorist attacks inside Iraq today. The Commission’s mandate did not include a more thorough examination of Zarqawi, his pre-war activities in Baghdad , or his activities and his associates’ activities in Iraq until the present day. Some of the extensive, known pre-9/11 contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda catalogued by the Commission are:The Commission catalogs some of the extensive contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. The report demonstrates that there were “friendly contacts” and, at different times, both Iraq and al Qaeda proactively sought to develop closer ties. Before 9/11, the Commission believes this relationship had not yet grown into a “collaborative operational relationship” for “carrying out attacks against the United States .” (chapter 2, § 2.5, page 66)
Abu Nadil’s “hit” list from the same forum:
The CIA failed to note that Abu Nidal, terrorist chief responsible for well over 100 attacks against western and Israeli interests, was alive and well and in Baghdad as late as August, 2002. Here are a few of his more memorable operations:
Stephen Hayes
Stephen Hayes compiled much of the above connections in his book, The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.
Almost two years after his writing it, some more information came out that supported his position.
(Arrggh! I will first post here the appearance of Stephen Hayes from Hannity and Colmes <<This video is gone.)
Replacements for the above missing video can be found at a C-SPAN has an extended book interview where Stephen Hayes takes calls. There is also a full manuscript of this missing video which was Stephen Hayes appearance on Hannity and Colmes at Fox News one can read. Hayes was also on Special Report with Brit Hume.
There is also this audio of Lt. Col. Buzz Patterson responding to a question. It is bad audio (hard to find and very old), so I apologize. PLEASE check you audio levels BEFORE listening to this… it is very loud and tinny sounding.
Here is an excellent interview of Stephen Hayes by National Review (or, a portion thereof) reagrding his book:
NRO: Your new book is on connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Isn’t that all a neocon myth? Isn’t bin Laden on record dissing Saddam? Secular Saddam, meanwhile, was no Islamic fundamentalist or extremist? Did anti-American hatred trump all?
Stephen F. Hayes: If the Iraq-al Qaeda connection is a neocon myth, those neocons are even more resourceful than the conspiracy theorists suggest and they sure have got a lot of unlikely people making their arguments. Evan Bayh, Democrat from Indiana, has described the Iraq-al Qaeda connection as a relationship of “mutual exploitation.” Joe Lieberman said, “There are extensive contacts between Saddam Hussein’s government and al Qaeda.” George Tenet, too, has spoken of those contacts and goes further, claiming Iraqi “training” of al Qaeda terrorists on WMDs and provision of “safe haven” for al Qaeda in Baghdad. Richard Clarke once said the U.S. government was “sure” Iraq had provided a chemical-weapons precursor to an al Qaeda-linked pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Even Hillary Clinton cited the Iraq-al Qaeda connection as one reason she voted for the Iraq War.
Saddam was, for a time, an avowed secularist. He began to use Islamist language during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and stepped it up during the first Gulf War. By the mid-1990s, when his son-in-law Hussein Kamel defected (and was later killed when he foolishly returned to Iraq), Saddam was interrupting Baath-party meetings for prayers. 
Bin Laden has dissed Saddam several times. And I would certainly never argue that they were buddies. It was an on-again, off-again relationship based, as Bayh says, on mutual exploitation and a common enemy.
NRO: Who is Ahmed Hikmat Shakir?
Hayes: Shakir is one of the most intriguing and puzzling potential links between Iraq and al Qaeda. He was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where U.S. intelligence officials believe the planning for the attacks on the U.S.S. Cole and September 11 took place. Shakir was working, ostensibly, for Malaysian Airlines as a VIP greeter. He told associates that he got the job through a contact at the Iraqi embassy and the same contact determined his schedule. Shakir escorted one of the 9/11 hijackers (Khalid al Mihdhar) to the meeting and left his airport “job” days after the meeting broke up. Making things even more interesting, Defense Department investigators recently found Shakir’s name — with a slight spelling discrepancy — on three separate lists of Saddam Fedayeen officers. He was captured twice after September 11 — once in Qatar, once in Jordan — and let go. The Iraqi government reportedly showed a keen interest in his release. What was he doing at the meeting? How did he know the hijackers? And what, exactly, was his relationship to the Iraqi regime? He may have been a bit player, but it sure would be nice to know more. I hope the 9/11 Commission includes a discussion of Shakir in its final report.
NRO: What is the Feith memo and how important is it?
Hayes: The Feith Memo is a report that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee last fall, in response to a request by that panel to see information the Pentagon gathered on Iraq-al Qaeda connections. Analysts in the DoD policy shop pored over old intelligence, gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies, and unearthed some interesting nuggets — some of them from raw intelligence reports and others from finished intelligence products. CIA Director George Tenet was asked about the Feith Memo at a Senate hearing in March and distanced his agency from the Pentagon analysis. He submitted another version of the document to the committee with some “corrections” to the Pentagon submission. My understanding is that there were but a few such adjustments and that they were relatively minor (although my book challenges two of the most interesting reports in the memo). Some of the stuff — telephone intercepts, foreign-government reporting, detainee debriefings, etc. — is pretty straightforward and most of the report tracks with what Tenet has said publicly; it just provides more detail. That said, there were two items that seemed to require more explanation and, when weighed against available evidence, seem questionable.
NRO: Mike Isikoff from Newsweek and others have tried to discredit some of your reporting on these connections. Do you concede any of their points?
Hayes: Well, Isikoff is a very good investigative reporter and I have long respected his work. We simply disagree on much of this. Intelligence reporting is quite subjective, of course, and lends itself to various interpretations. My problem with so much of the media reporting on this issue is that most journalists have chosen not to investigate the connection, and seem too eager to dismiss them. Why? This wasn’t the case in the late 1990s, when Iraq-al Qaeda connections were more widely reported in the establishment press. After I first wrote about the Feith Memo, the Pentagon put out a statement designed to distance itself from any alleged leak of classified intelligence. It was a classic non-denial denial — virtually devoid of content. It was something any veteran Washington reporter would dismiss without a second thought. But reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post, typically quite cynical about anything that comes from the Pentagon’s public- affairs shop, suddenly found it a remarkably credible source.
NRO: It’s been suggested by Isikoff and others that some of the evidence turns up nowadays is forged, that you can’t take it on its face value. To what extent is the evidence you present corroborated by other evidence, other documented meetings, etc?
Hayes: I think they’re right on that point — and it’s almost never a good idea to take these things at face value. There was a report that surfaced in December 2003 that suggested that Mohammed Atta had been in Baghdad during the summer of 2001. And, a little too conveniently, the very same document claimed that the U.S. was seeking uranium from Niger. There’s little question that the three-page report was forged. (An interesting side note: That document came not from Ahmed Chalabi, but from CIA favorite Iyad Allawi, the new Iraqi interim prime minister. Allawi has long argued that there was a significant relationship between Saddam’s Mukhabarat and al Qaeda.)
Much of the evidence in the book comes from open sources — media reporting, court documents, interviews, etc. With respect to the information from the Feith Memo, many of the bullet points corroborate one another or previous intelligence on the relationship. For instance, the U.S. intelligence community has long believed that bin Laden met with the deputy director of Iraqi intelligence, Faruq Hijazi, in the mid-1990s. When we captured Hijazi, we asked him about the meeting. Bin Laden, he reported, asked for anti-ship limpet mines and training camps in Iraq.
NRO: Did Mohammed Atta meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague — multiple times?
Hayes: I wish we knew. Atta was in Prague under very strange circumstances in May 2000. What’s unclear is whether he returned, as initially reported, in April 2001. If he did, it wasn’t under his own name. But news reports claiming that the meeting couldn’t have taken place because U.S. intelligence has documentation placing him in the U.S. are not accurate. One of the things I report in the book is that both George Tenet and Condoleezza Rice say privately that they believe the April 2001 meeting took place.
NRO: What is the strongest evidence that Iraq was a collaborator in the Sept. 11 attacks?
Hayes: Probably the Shakir story, which is far from conclusive. But it seems to me that the presence of a suspected Saddam Fedayeen officer at a key 9/11-planning meeting can’t be dismissed. There have been additional recent developments in the Atta story reported by Edward Jay Epstein. If those turn out to be true, they would be significant. I’m trying, but as yet have been unable to prove or disprove them.
NRO: What’s the deal with Richard Clarke? Why is he so adamant to defend Iraq vis-à-vis al Qaeda?
Hayes: I put that question to a top Bush-administration official not long ago. This person said: “If Iraq was involved with al Qaeda, whether they were involved with 9/11 or not, the whole counterterrorism policy of the 1990s was a failure.” And we all know who was responsible for the counterterrorism policy of the 1990s. One thing that perplexes me about Clarke was his expressed certainty that there was an Iraqi hand in al Qaeda chemical weapons production in the Sudan in the late-1990s. (Top Clinton advisers — several of them now working for John Kerry — continue to believe that today.) And Clarke’s current views (no connection) certainly put him at odds with CIA Director George Tenet. …
From this we can see that the typical bumper sticker statements/mantras we heard projected from street corners in close proximity to the Whole Foods market I worked at just never took into account much of anything, except, that is, these persons almost crazed dislike of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush (BDS: Bush Derangement Syndrome).
Impeachment
An example comes from an almost elated exclamation about Kucinich’s “attempt” to start impeachment of Bush and friends, via a friend of mine on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Actually, this comes from a friend who is a local blogger and “political nemesis.” (Every good guy [me] has to have a villain [Kimba] in his life.):
(The World According to Kimba) Breathtaking in that I believe some, if not most of the charges to be true. Although certainly not all of the charges constitute or necessitate a call for impeachment (as was the case when [Kucinich] offered up articles of impeachment for Dick Cheney last year), they do add up to quite a record for a sitting administration, and I for one, am glad he got them on the record…. Obviously, the political climate these days in Washington are such that they will not touch this hot potato and let King George II serve out his full second term without incident. But, what does it say for our regard for the law, not to mention the constitution, when we refuse to prosecute for wrongs committed against the public good? (emphasis added)
Often times people don’t follow their logic to the end… for instance, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski reads from a NYT’s op-ed that slams the Bush-Iraq war. The problem is, as Joe Scarborough points out, that every intelligence agency and a well-respected CIA head (not to mention leading Democrats) — and even Saddam himself… said they had WMDs. And they did, as this extensive post clearly shows. Unfortunately the file was corrupted near the end so when Joe was making his best points there is a bit of audio missing (around the 13:37 mark). This video segues into the next section nicely to support the points Joe Scarborough was making :
Bush Lied/People Died
One thing I have heard and gave an example of is the Left saying and truly believing that Bush lied about WMDs. If this is the case, what about these other politicians?
If Bush lied about WMDs, then what did President Bill Clinton do when he said: “If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program” (Feb. 17, 1998).
Or how about Madeline Albright, John F. Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and the like? Here is an article via the L.A. Daily News (2-21-2004)
Democrats Lied
MAYBE I’ve been living in a time warp — a Rip Van WinkIe who fell asleep and missed the past four years.
The Democratic candidates running to replace President George W. Bush, including the front runner, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., claim Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction — that Iraq was Bush’s war and that he got us into it for purely personal political purposes. Saddam was never a threat to the United States.
Did I misread or misunderstand what Democrats said prior to the current campaign for the White House? Note the following pronouncements and the people who uttered them:
a) “Iraq is a long way from the USA but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.” ~ Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Feb. 18, 1998
b) “We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.” ~ Former Vice President Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
c) “In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.” ~ Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct. 10, 2002
d) “Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction. So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real.” ~ Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23, 2003
e) “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.” ~ Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002
f) “The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons…” ~ Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002
g) “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.” ~ Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998
h) “He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.” ~ Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998
So now these Democrats say President Bush lied about Iraq and about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction, that there never were any such weapons and that he took us to war for his own political interests?
In the two years since Sept. 11, President Bush has liberated two countries, crippled the Taliban and al-Qaida, forced Libya to open its doors to inspectors without firing a shot, and captured a terrorist who slaughtered 300,000 of his own people at a cost of 600 American lives, while preventing another 9-11 terrorist attack here in the United States.
Now who’s credible and who’s not? The record speaks for itself.
So now these Democrats say President Bush lied about Iraq and about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction, that there never were any such weapons and that he took us to war for his own political interests?
Restated
In other words, German, Italian, Saudi, Jordanian, Australian, the CIA, MI6, French, Russian, Israeli, and most other intelligence agencies all lied. So did, then, Bill Clinton, Madeline “Anti-Semite” Albright, Al “Internet” Gore, Hillary “What Difference Does It Make” Clinton, John “Reporting for Winter Soldier Duty” Kerry, Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy, Robert “KKK” Byrd, Nancy “See What’s In the Bill” Pelosi, and Sandy “Socks” Berger. Not to mention the head of the operation to get rid of WMDs to Syrian, Saddam’s 2nd in command of his air-force. Or the Jordanians who foiled a chemical attack many years ago, tracing these WMDs (really AMDs) through Syria back to Iraq. How bout the head of Saddam’s nuclear program hiding stuff under his garden?
And ISIS getting their hands on WMDs must also be a lie by the Bush admin… deep into Obama’s presidency… that is, his imperial presidency.
Ohh the mantras that still fly from the professional left today (my head hurts). Imperialist presidencies only happen if you have an “R” after your name (liberal professors be damned); and WMDs designation in Iraq only count in the media if the President has a “D” after his name.
Bob Woodward
Here is Bob Woodward, a legend in investigative reporting, pointing out that while one can argue if going to ware in Iraq intially was a bad idea, one could not say that Bush lied:
HOST CHRIS WALLACE: I want to turn to a different subject in the time we have left and that is the politics of Iraq which has gotten a lot of attention in the last couple of weeks with Jeb Bush, with Marco Rubio and with a bunch of other people and these questions of was it was a mistake to go in in 2003, was it a mistake to get out in 2011, and what impact this could have both in the Republican race and also the Democratic race. …
WOODWARD: Iraq is a symbol and you certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake but there’s a kind of line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq and lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD and he (Bush) was the one who was skeptical. And if you tried to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier and finally at that end people were saying, hey look, it’ll only take a week or two and early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months and so Bush pulled the trigger.
A mistake, certainly, can be argued and there’s an abundance of evidence but there was no lie in this that I could find.
This next section will reintroduce some more information on WMDs being found in Iraq as a support for my point to be found about Bush lying… and it will show just how bad the logic of the Left is. Again, these positions the Left holds to are emotional in there basis, and so, are not typically drawn out to their logical conclusion. I will do that.
WMDs II
So what are some of the examples that counter the Left’s claims and bolster the Bush administration as well as the intelligence agencies from Germany, Russia, France, Israel, Britain, China, Jordan, as well as others showing that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (Saddam even saying he had them)? Well let’s see… the following short list below is from the book, Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror, by Richard Miniter:
Mahdi Obeidi
How about the fact that Mahdi Obeidi (Saddam’s head nuclear scientist) buried a prototype of his gas centrifuge, the most direct and efficient route to enriching uranium, in his backyard in Baghdad. Hence the name of his book, The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind. You can see a two part presentation from Dr. Obeidi in PART 1, there are many more that follow.
So the question becomes, if the belief is that Bush knowingly mislead the American public in order to get us into war. First, lets revisit what a lie is:
Which Is It?
But this poses a problem for the Left. Why? Well, because the Left repeatedly says that Bush is dumb. But wait. Was Bush and his administration soo clever as to trick/deceive Democrat leaders, Western and Middle-East based intelligence agencies, Saddam Hussein, and the like?
So:
a) IS BUSH AN IDIOT?
b) OR DID HE LIE?
AGAIN, Bush, while being called a dunce or ignoramus by the left is s-o-o-o-o intelligently diabolical that he got every United States intelligence agency and every major intelligence agency in the world ~ not to mention every Democrat ~ to lie for him as well. So is Bush still the “dunce of the class,” as the Left paints him; or is he so intelligent that he fooled the world, as the Left paints him. Which is it? Or are both views partisan?
If Bush lied, then he must have known there were no weapons in Iraq. However, if you say you believe something to be true, and it ultimately becomes false, that’s not called a “lie,” that’s called a “mistake” – a mistake that would have been made by the CIA (and the world) that was beyond the Bush’s control.
If Bush was as diabolical as the some of the Left made him out to be… why don’t we have evidence of him “planting” evidence in Iraq so he could go out and point to the examples to tell the Media and Democrats to “speak to the hand”? Instead, as the NYTs points out, he kept his mouth shut in the onslaught of his detractors so that the Defense Department could destroy WMDs as they found them so they wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Instead of being diabolical, or dumb, or of questionable character… Bush sounds pretty damn noble! However, I have shown there was no mistake. I have yet for someone to show me that this cumulative case can be taken from its lofty place here at my blog. And may I say that I have not seen such a case made yet on this World Wide Web.
#2 Man ~ a Second Time
Let’s hear how the above issues play out in real conversation, and I would entreat the reader to listen to the entire call. One may not like the term “little girl,” but this gets explained near the end.
(Video Description) This broadcast was made before we declared war on Saddam Hussein. The caller is an Iraqi who asks a anti-war organizer a pointed question about leaving Saddam in power. The clip is 6 minutes long and she never answers the question.
According to Georges Hormis Sada, an Iraqi General who served under Saddam Hussein, Saddam is the only world leader to use weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He also states that the WMD’s were flown to Syria before the Invasion of Iraq began. He states that in his book “Saddam’s Secrets: How an Iraqi General Defied and Survived Saddam Hussein.”
The U.S. was ready to pull out once the new Iraqi government was established and elections were up and running, but once it was evident that surrounding factions and civil war threatened to collapse the new republic, the U.S. decided to stay in and eliminate all threats to the new freedom that they fought so hard to allow the Iraqi citizens to live under. That is the point of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The sooner we get the job done, the sooner we can pull out without any trouble. Support our troops, why don’t you?
Iraq is Not Bush’s Fault
Larry Elder gives “10 Reasons Why Iraq’s Bloodbath Is Not ‘W’s’ Fault.” In this article he goes through some of the convoluted thinking that Voltaire preferred. I only import over a few of his points, however, I also import one of Elder’s videos that compliment his article well. This video can be found over at his blog, The Elder Statement:
2) Nearly everybody assumed Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Of the newspaper editorials that opposed the war, not one challenged the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.
President George W. Bush relied on the same intelligence — and on the same CIA director — as did President Bill Clinton. Kenneth Pollack, Clinton’s Persian Gulf adviser, said not one government intelligence analyst disagreed with the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.
“The intelligence community,” said Pollack, “convinced me and the rest of the Clinton Administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the U.N. inspectors in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. … The U.S. intelligence community’s belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction predated Bush’s inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. … Germany … Israel, Russia, Britain, China and even France held positions similar to that of the United States. … In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.”
3) Saddam Hussein did possess stockpiles of WMD. James Clapper, the current director of National Intelligence, said in 2003 that materials for WMD had “unquestionably” been moved out of Iraq, to Syria or perhaps other countries, in an effort to “destroy and disperse” evidence just before the war began.
One of Saddam’s top generals, Georges Sada, in his book called “Saddam’s Secrets,” said truck convoys and 56 airplane flights moved tons of WMD into Syria.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in December, 2002, said, “Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria.”
4) Had we not invaded, Saddam Hussein would have soon restarted his chemical and biological program — and resumed his pursuit for a nuclear capability. After the war started, Bush sent David Kay, a weapons hunter, to locate the assumed stockpiles of WMD. Kay found no stockpiles, but he did find that Saddam had the intent and the ability to restart his WMD program as soon as the heat was off.
5) George Bush did not “rush” America into the war. He obtained a consensus — a resolution from the House, a resolution from the Senate and a resolution from the United Nations. There was a 15-month run-up before the war, during which time Saddam could have declared what he did or did not do with the WMD.
6) Americans supported the Iraq War, overwhelmingly at least at first. Gallup found 76 percent of Americans supported the Iraq War when the military action began, about the same percentage that supported the first Persian Gulf War.
[….]
8) We were greeted as liberators in Iraq. The New York Times Iraq reporter John Burns said: “The American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it.” In April, 2003, the New York Daily News reported, “Jubilant crowds chanted, ‘Thank you, Bush’ and showered troops with yellow and pink flowers, exactly as administration hawks had promised.”
Conclusion
What was discovered in Iraq were dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment, chemicals, and specialists to make it happen that Iraqi concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002 and was the final straw in the U.S. military’s back. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG (Iraq Survey Group) has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.
This caused the United States and a larger coalition than the First Gulf War to resume (not preempt) military operations. Just the fact alone that Iraq was firing on our Air Force jets in the no-fly zones was reason enough to resume (not preempt) operations based on the cease fire agreement brokered by the United Nations via the first war.
There are other peripheral issues that I have already dealt with that touch this issue in some way, like yellow cake uranium, or the cost of the war and contracts given to Halliburton. However, these issues are easily dismissed, at least for those that do not project their psychoses onto Bush and Cheney.
A Facebook Postscript
This was a confrontation via my Facebook. Enjoy the conversation:
HIM
Benghazi, so funny. Your boy starts a fake war which takes over 4000 lives and caused post traumatic things for the rest of their lives and you guys keep talking about Benghazi. The fact that you guys have respect for dick cheney says it all. You can post all you want but the fact remains that the Bush administration was an abomination on every level. Democrats had to vote yes because of the Bush propaganda machine. They would have been called anti- American with all the fake hysteria the right created. I did not watch the Benghazi video you posted because there is no need, Do you guys not have any memory of Reagan and all his dealings with terrorists, I guess not.
ME
How was the war fake [John Doe]?
HIM
Saddam was not the enemy, Bush Jr had to clean up the mess his father started
ME
That is the reason the war was fake?
HIM (3-responses)
ego
wmds never existed
The right loves a war machine because they make money
ME
Ego is the reason you have to say the Iraq war was fake. Are you a psychotherapist? You interviewed Dubya to have this authority to say this?
WMDs did exist, in fact, I am working on rewriting my WMD page right now for smoother reading.
Here is a snippet: “The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein’s air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.”
Here is the interview with him: http://youtu.be/eQ9CgDEPlHE
You love bumper stickers that are nothing more than a reflection of ego:
That isn’t an argument, that is a t-shirt.
HIM
Sean, post all you want the fact is they are liars.
ME
Y-O-U can ignore facts, but ISIS (as reported by CNN) has captured and gained access to disused stores of hundreds of tons of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin. This was last week.
They exist now… as I type. They were found by our men in Dubya’s action, and there is first hand eyewitness evidence WMDs existed. But go to your bumper sticker statements.
HIM
The Bush administration called it Operation Iraq Liberation which stands for OIL, They later changed it after everyone realized the lies. There is a reason he has stayed out of the spotlight, he has no answer for his lies.
Bumper sticker, funny. The right only has comical comebacks
ME
We didn’t get any oil, or paid back for the operation?
I have shown you this in the past [John Doe], which is that other countries, like China, got the contracts with Iraq.
That was it… these guys paint themselves into a corner with motivations that they think was behind the war and none of it is true… so you end up with them fantasizing positions and they bow out of the conversation because there is no evidence to back up their slogans.
Karl Rove slams Dennis Kucinich and the still wacko view that “Bush lied and people died” conspiracy theory. See my WMD “page” that grew from a debate with a professor of history at Michigan U: https://religiopoliticaltalk.com/wmd/
CNN reports the following (via Drudge Report):
The United States gave the go-ahead Friday to deploy Patriot anti-ballistic missiles to Turkey along with enough troops to operate them as the heavily embattled government in neighboring Syria again vehemently denied firing ballistic missiles at rebels.
The United States has accused Damascus of launching Scud-type artillery from the capital at rebels in the country’s north. One Washington official said missiles came close to the border of Turkey, a NATO member and staunch U.S. ally.
Syria’s government called the accusations “untrue rumors” Friday, according to state news agency SANA. Damascus accused Turkey and its partners of instigating rumors to make the government look bad internationally.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta signed the order while en route to Turkey to send two Patriot missile batteries and 400 U.S. troops to operate them. The surface-to-air interceptors will help in “dealing with threats that come out of Syria,” Panetta said after landing at Incirlik Air Base, a U.S. Air Force installation about 80 miles from Syria’s border…
This may sound cut-n’-dry, but as we see via DebkaFiles, the Middle-East has an “Ace” up its sleeve to make one cringe:
By the blacklisting Tuesday, Dec. 11, of the Jabhat al-Nusra group fighting in Syrian rebel ranks as “a foreign terrorist organization” and affiliate of al Qaeda in Iraq, Washington faces four quandaries:
1. The 10,000 fighters of this al Qaeda affiliate are the best-trained and most professional component of the Syrian rebel front;.
2. Jabhat al-Nusra fields 3,000 fighters out of the mostly Free Syrian Army’s 14,000 rebels fighting in and around Aleppo. They also constitute the assault force’s spearhead.
3. The Islamists are at the sharp front edge of the rebel force battling for control of the Syrian army’s biggest chemical weapons store at Al Safira, near Aleppo. Thursday morning, Dec. 12, they were just a kilometer from the base’s northwestern perimeter fence and advancing fast. By week’s end, Jabhat al-Nusra jihadis may have smashed into the base and seized control of the chemical stocks and Scud D planes standing there armed with chemical warheads.
The imminence of this peril forced Bashar Assad’s hand into sending Scud jets against rebel-held areas in an effort to stop their advance on the base.
4. This al Qaeda affiliate is also better armed and equipped than any other Syrian rebel force, thanks to the generous financial and logistical aid laid on by Persian Gulf sources, especially in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait.
The difficulty here is that those three Gulf Arab states are also American allies in the war against Assad and the most important contributors to the US-sponsored Friends of Syria, a forum which met in Marrakesh Wednesday and formally recognized the umbrella Syrian opposition coalition of exiled groups as the legitimate government of Syria.
Reporters inside Syria reported that when the Jabhat al-Nusra fighters heard this news, they declared 700 of their number had died… laughing.
But as the vicious civil war of nearly two years and more than 40,000 dead approached another dangerous peak, no one was laughing in Damascus or Washington.
debkafile’s military sources point to the next crisis looming ahead: If Assad fails to stop the al Qaeda fighters from reaching Al-Safira and its poison gas stores – and an al Qaeda affiliate succeeds for the first time in arming itself with chemical weapons – the United States will have to mount an air assault – not on Assad’s army but on the Syrian rebel forces fighting him, because if they do manage to seize control of the base, rebel fighters may decide to send the chemicals-tipped missiles against Assad regime centers in Damascus.
The fall of al Safira would then transform the Syrian civil conflict into a chemical missile war.
This post will be intimately connected with my main post on WMDs as well as its update. ATLAS SHRUGS H/T. WikiLeaks is helping and hurting us… here is a help for the masses:
Many of us have been reporting on Iraq’s WMD for years. But don’t expect the propagandists and left-o-media to revise their lies or deliberate obfuscations to advance their treacherous agenda.
WikiLeaks is confirming Iraq’s WMD. **crickets hospitalized from chirping exhaustion****
RUSSIA moved Saddam’s WMDs- Atlas Shrugs, February 2006
Congress’s Secret Saddam Tapes and WMD – Atlas Shrugs, February 2006
Iraqi WMD Mystery Solved- Atlas Shrugs, March 2006
Iraq’s WMD’s Secreted to Syria – Atlas Shrugs, December 06
WMD in Iraq Crickets Chirping – Atlas Shrugs, March 2006
Iraq: WMD –Do Nukes Count? – Atlas Shrugs, Fevruary 2006
IRAQ’S WMD FOUND AT UN – Atlas Shrugs, August 2007
9/6 REPORT: Saddam’s WMD in Syria – Atlas Shrugs, April 2008
550 Metric Tons Of Yellowcake Removed From Iraq, July 2008
Wikileaks: WMD program existed in Iraq prior to US invasion Jim Kouri, The Examiner
The release by Julian Assange’s web site Wikileaks of classified documents reveals that U.S. military intelligence discovered chemical weapons labs, encountered insurgents who were specialists in the creation of toxins, and uncovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, Washington, DC officials and the news media have ignored this information.
One of the WikiLeaks document dumps reveals that as late as 2008, American troops continued to find WMD in the region.
There are numerous mentions of chemical and biological weapons in the WikiLeaks documents, however the U.S. media appear only interested in those portions of the leaked material that highlight actions that are viewed as embarrassing for the U.S. military such as the accusation that U.S. commanders were aware of abuse and “torture” of prisoners by Iraqi soldiers and police officers.
The U.S. Defense Department continues to demand that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange immediately return the stolen military documents in his possession, including recent documents that created another stir when published, according to Elaine Wilson of American Forces Press Service.
The department also wants the whistle-blowing web site to permanently delete all versions of these documents, which contain classified and sensitive information, from its web site, computers and records, Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters during a Pentagon briefing.
WikiLeaks documents don’t reveal evidence of a massive weapons program by Saddam Hussein — the Bush administration’s leading rationale for invading Iraq — or some enormous stockpile of WMD, but do reveal that chemical weapons did vanish from the Iraqi battlefield.
According to the latest WikiLeaks document “dump,” Saddam’s toxic arsenal, significantly reduced after the Gulf War, remained intact. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict and may have brewed up their own deadly agents, according to the WikiLeaks web site.
During that time, former Iraqi General Georges Sada, Saddam’s top commander, detailed the transfers of Iraq’s WMD. “There [were] weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Mr. Sada said. “I am confident they were taken over.”
Gen. Sada’s comments came just a month after Israel’s top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, claimed that Saddam Hussein “transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria.”
in 2004, for example, American special forces members secretly purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard which have been used since World War I. Following testing in a military lab, the chemical was then secured and transferred to a secret location.