New Proof Emerges That Saddam Had No WMD Ambitions

Bottom Line Up Front:  Today's U.N.'s WMD snafu is a reminder of the unusual change in U.N. reporting regarding Saddam's WMD program.

New proof has emerged that Saddam had no WMD ambitions! Okay, that was sarcastic, but it is pretty ironic that dangerous chemical weapons taken at an Iraqi chemical weapons plant in 1996 by weapons inspectors were found in an office in the United Nations in New York City today.

Why ironic? As late as 2004 the U.N. weapons inspectors officially reported that Iraq had no WMD after 1994.  The chemicals found at the U.N. today are from 1996 and are the kind used as lethal weapons during World War I.

Even more ironic is that 1996, the year these chemicals were taken from Iraq and stored in the U.N. as souvenirs, the infamous Oil for Food programme was begun by the U.N.

So a year after Operation Iraqi Freedom had begun, a war which U.N. WMD inspectors resisted, they reported there were no WMD after 1994 knowing WMD were found in Baghdad in 1996. Enter Oil for Food. Hmmmmm….

David Kay, top U.S. weapons inspector who headed the Iraq Survey Group, addressed a Congressional committee in October 2003, saying:

-Some WMD personnel crossed borders in the pre/trans conflict period and may have taken evidence and even weapons-related materials with them.

-Any actual WMD weapons or material is likely to be small in relation to the total conventional armaments footprint and difficult to near impossible to identify with normal search procedures. It is important to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two car garage.

In their final report, David Kay and the Iraq Survey Group Final Report (Global Security) announced:

On Feb. 14, 2003:

"Saddam issues directive banning private companies and individuals from importing WMD materials or producing WMD."

That was weeks before the start of the invasion.  Even John Bolton serving as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security voiced grave concerns about Syria's WMD capabilities. in Sept. 2003 to Congress.

Confusing?  Here's how it looks chronologically.

TIMELINE:

• 1996: Chemical agents found in Baghdad, moved to U.N. office
• 1996: U.N. began corrupt Oil for Food programme that lined Saddam’s pockets with billions in kickbacks.
• 2003, Feb 14:  on the eve of war Saddam "issues directive banning private companies and individuals from importing WMD materials or producing WMD”, according to the Iraq Survey Group/David Kay.
• 2003, March: U.S. invaded Iraq.
• 2003, Sept. 16:  John Bolton as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security address Congress concerning Syria's WMD capabilities.
• 2003, Oct: Kay and ISG told Congress WMD may have moved over Iraq's border.
• 2004, March: U.N. reports Iraq had no WMD after 1994.
• 2007, Aug: U.N. finds WMD from 1996 in their NYC building.

Maybe the extent of the U.N.'s relationship with Saddam is still being covered up.  No matter what, the one lesson learned from recent history is that the U.N. is corrupt and everything from it should be doubted.

OTHERS BLOGGING:  Wake Up America  Protein Wisdom 

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Comments

[CalPatriot]

Your posts are so good.

[AubreyJ]

Now THAT's some good reporting, Amy...

Have a nice weekend...
AubreyJ.........

[Goat]

Amy, those of us with brains know he had them and used them on his own people. We nailed most of it but much can be hidden there. Heck we have dug up a MIG or two. Are the weapon systems we recover from the old regime going back to the Iraqi soldiers? Yon has posted about some armored units but not much. I know we hit them pretty hard but there has to be a lot to build from. Are we just destroying ammo dumps or redistributing to the local police and IAS? I have to admit a growing affection for the Iraqi people after following Mike Yon for a couple years. I would rather have them as neighbors than some of the trash that permeates my neighborhood here in the US and it ain't the Mexicans or blacks, it is white trash methheads that are killing my community.

[Donald Douglas]

I'm with AubreyJ! Darn good post!

[Amy Proctor]

General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He wrote:

Russia Hid Saddam's WMDs
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
Washington Times | 10/2/2003

On March 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the U.S.-led "aggression" against Iraq as "unwarranted" and "unjustifiable." Three days later, Pravda said that an anonymous Russian "military expert" was predicting that the United States would fabricate finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov immediately started plying the idea abroad, and it has taken hold around the world ever since.

As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency exit." I implemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.

All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction. Chemical weapons, especially those produced in Third World countries, which lack sophisticated production facilities, often do not retain lethal properties after a few months on the shelf and are routinely dumped anyway. And all chemical weapons plants had a civilian cover making detection difficult, regardless of the circumstances.

The plan included an elaborate propaganda routine. Anyone accusing Moammar Gadhafi of possessing chemical weapons would be ridiculed. Lies, all lies! Come to Libya and see! Our Western left-wing organizations, like the World Peace Council, existed for sole purpose of spreading the propaganda we gave them. These very same groups bray the exact same themes to this day. We always relied on their expertise at organizing large street demonstrations in Western Europe over America's "war-mongering" whenever we wanted to distract world attention from the crimes of the vicious regimes we sponsored.

Iraq, in my view, had its own "Sarindar" plan in effect direct from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. Nicolae Ceausescu told me so, and he heard it from Leonid Brezhnev. KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so, too. In the late 1970s, Gen. Primakov ran Saddam's weapons programs. After that, as you may recall, he was promoted to head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, to Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and in 1998, to prime minister. What you may not know is that Primakov hates Israel and has always championed Arab radicalism. He was a personal friend of Saddam's and has repeatedly visited Baghdad after 1991, quietly helping Saddam play his game of hide-and-seek.

The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but it showed them how to make them "disappear." Russia is still at it. Primakov was in Baghdad from December until a couple of days before the war, along with a team of Russian military experts led by two of Russia's topnotch "retired"generals: Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor Maltsev, a former air defense chief of staff. They were all there receiving honorary medals from the Iraqi defense minister. They clearly were not there to give Saddam military advice for the upcoming war—Saddam's Katyusha launchers were of World War II vintage, and his T-72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG fighter planes were all obviously useless against America. "I did not fly to Baghdad to drink coffee," was what Gen. Achalov told the media afterward. They were there orchestrating Iraq's "Sarindar" plan.

The U.S. military in fact, has already found the only thing that would have been allowed to survive under the classic Soviet "Sarindar" plan to liquidate weapons arsenals in the event of defeat in war — the technological documents showing how to reproduce weapons stocks in just a few weeks.

Such a plan has undoubtedly been in place since August 1995 — when Saddam's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who ran Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs for 10 years, defected to Jordan. That August, UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors searched a chicken farm owned by Kamel's family and found more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes containing documentation dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear. Caught red-handed, Iraq at last admitted to its "extensive biological warfare program, including weaponization," issued a "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure Report" and turned over documents about the nerve agent VX and nuclear weapons.

Saddam then lured Gen. Kamel back, pretending to pardon his defection. Three days later, Kamel and over 40 relatives, including women and children, were murdered, in what the official Iraqi press described as a "spontaneous administration of tribal justice." After sending that message to his cowed, miserable people, Saddam then made a show of cooperation with UN inspection, since Kamel had just compromised all his programs, anyway. In November 1995, he issued a second "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure" as to his supposedly non-existent missile programs. That very same month, Jordan intercepted a large shipment of high-grade missile components destined for Iraq. UNSCOM soon fished similar missile components out of the Tigris River, again refuting Saddam's spluttering denials. In June 1996, Saddam slammed the door shut to UNSCOM's inspection of any "concealment mechanisms." On Aug. 5, 1998, halted cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA completely, and they withdrew on Dec. 16, 1998. Saddam had another four years to develop and hide his weapons of mass destruction without any annoying, prying eyes. U.N. Security Council resolutions 1115, (June 21, 1997), 1137 (Nov. 12, 1997), and 1194 (Sept. 9, 1998) were issued condemning Iraq—ineffectual words that had no effect. In 2002, under the pressure of a huge U.S. military buildup by a new U.S. administration, Saddam made yet another "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure," which was found to contain "false statements" and to constitute another "material breach" of U.N. and IAEA inspection and of paragraphs eight to 13 of resolution 687 (1991).

It was just a few days after this last "Disclosure," after a decade of intervening with the U.N. and the rest of the world on Iraq's behalf, that Gen. Primakov and his team of military experts landed in Baghdad — even though, with 200,000 U.S. troops at the border, war was imminent, and Moscow could no longer save Saddam Hussein. Gen. Primakov was undoubtedly cleaning up the loose ends of the "Sarindar" plan and assuring Saddam that Moscow would rebuild his weapons of mass destruction after the storm subsided for a good price.

[Amy Proctor]

The U.N. reported in 2004 that there were no WMD after 1996 no matter when they were developed. When my husband arrived in Baghdad in May 2003, WMD in missile type cannisters were found buried in the back yards of Baath Party officials. I saw them being unearthed by coalition troops (Marines) on CNN. Who knows when they were actually made but the U.N. claimed they did not exist. Clearly this was not the case.

[KEvron]

DELETED

[Amy Proctor]

Dear KEvron,

The U.N. reported THERE WERE NO WMD IN IRAQ AFTER 1996. The U.N. found WMD in Iraq in 2006 (and it has been found after that as well). The potential existed therefore that they could be used by Saddam. This is not a difficult concept.

In order to help you with your Compulsive-Obessive Disorder, I will be putting comments on moderation and hopefully the fact that your comments will not be seen by anyone will help you overcome your compulsion to harrass women. God help you in your life.

[Mwalimu Daudi]

More inconvenient WMDs from Iraq to go along with the 500+ that were announced last year.

Right now the "official truth" is that there were no WMDs in Iraq. But one wonders - is there a critical mass of found Iraqi WMDs that will cause the MSM and the anti-war movement to change their tune from "Bush lied about WMDs" to "Bush screwed up and failed to gather all of Saddam's WMDs"? When can we expect Hilly the Hun to castigate Bush for not invading Iraq within 15 minutes of taking the oath of office in 2001?

[Amy Proctor]

Joe Wilson started the false "Bush lied" lie. Sadly that falsehood is easily perpetuated because a 2 word slogan is easier than a well articulated paragraph.

When David Kay, top U.S. weapons inspector who headed the Iraq Survey Group, addressed a Congressional committee in October 2003 (as I cited in the entry), he said:

-Some WMD personnel crossed borders in the pre/trans conflict period and may have taken evidence and even weapons-related materials with them.

-Any actual WMD weapons or material is likely to be small in relation to the total conventional armaments footprint and difficult to near impossible to identify with normal search procedures. It is important to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two car garage.

Essentially, WMD are small quanitities of chemical, nuclear or biological agents, not 50 foot missiles. That's why the viles/jars/box of WMD found at the U.N. is so dangerous. We know that anthrax can be a WMD and all that is needed is small dusting to kill people.

[Goat]

Amy, much of what I have found is that SH shipped out what he had to Lebanon and Syria or buried it in the desert. I have also seen that his own folks were just leading him on in many ways to keep the greenbacks flowing. Was your husband around when they were digging MIGs out of the sand? Did those MIGs go back to the ISF or were they destroyed or are they in holding? I would be interested to know, heck its been at least three years since those pics were posted.

[BB-Idaho]

Analysis has been completed: according to the FBI, the WMD consisted of cleaning compounds. *sigh*