Work Your Brain — Terrorism Edition

• The 9/11 Timeline — To mark the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, ThinkProgress has created a comprehensive timeline documenting the key events since September 11, 2001. Their timeline charts five threads:
  • The steady increase in international terrorism and the growth of al Qaeda
  • The campaign to block and obstruct the work of the 9/11 Commission, and the failure to carry out the commission’s recommendations
  • The failure to stablize and rebuild Afghanistan
  • The downgrading of the hunt for Osama bin Laden
  • The steady decline of America’s image abroad
• ABC’s ‘Path’ Not Taken — Ruth Marcus @ TheWashingtonPost.com writes a scathing review of ABC’s “Path to 9/11″ mini-series that was fraught with inaccuracies and blantant flaws.
  

  The docudrama is an inherently flawed form, one that invites embroidery. The irony of “The Path to 9/11″ is that this dramatic license was so unnecessary, given the richly detailed narrative in a document available to the docudrama’screators. It was called “The 9/11 Commission Report.”

  Hat tip: John in DC @ AmericaBlog

• More

  Tags: terrorism, ABC, Keith Olbermann, George W. Bush, 9/11, Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Memorial, World Trade Center, Mark Juergensmeyer, al-Qaeda, 9/11 Commission, Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, Condi Rice, George Tenet, Saddam Hussein, al-Zarqawi

  comments See also in Politics & Causes, In the News, Geekery, Blogging & Other Blogs, Featured, 9-11 & Terrorism, Iraq & Afghanistan, Conspiracy Theories, The Middle East

News Quickies — 09/06/06

• Due to last month’s terror alert, British Airways is claiming a £40m ($75.9m) loss.  Between August 10th and 17th, it cancelled 1,280 flights and incurred costs of hotels, catering and recovering baggage for stranded passengers. [“ BA says terror alert cost it £40m” (BBC News)]
• “A coalition of 300 Iraqi tribal leaders on Saturday demanded the release of Saddam Hussein so he could reclaim the presidency and also called for armed resistance against U.S.-led forces.” Yikes! [“A Demand for Hussein’s Release” (WashingtonPost.com)]
• On the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, CNN will replay their coverage of the day’s events on the Internet.  Viewers will be able to watch how events unfolded starting at 8:30am, just minutes before the first reports of the first airplane hitting the World Trade Center started, all the way until midnight in real time.  For the day, the usually for-fee service will be free. [”CNN.com to replay 9/11 attacks coverage” (Yahoo!News)]

Tags: British Airways, airport security, terror alert, Saddam Hussein, Iraq, 9/11, CNN, WTC

Iraq: Better or Worse?

Remember when Right-wingers used to make the argument that the war was justifiable because of all of those people Saddam had killed? Remember how the death toll under all of those years under Saddam was much worse than anything we could do?

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — More than 14,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq in the first half of this year, an ominous figure reflecting the fact that “killings, kidnappings and torture remain widespread” in the war-torn country, a United Nations report says.

Killings of civilians are on “an upward trend,” with more than 5,800 deaths and more than 5,700 injuries reported in May and June alone, it says.

The report, a bimonthly document produced by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, covers May and June, and includes chilling casualty figures and ugly anecdotes from the insurgent and sectarian warfare that continues to rage despite the establishment of a national unity government and a security crackdown in Baghdad.

[…]

Figures from the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad and the Ministry of Health show that the total number of civilians killed from January to June was 14,338.

In late June, the Ministry of Health “acknowledged information stating that since 2003 at least 50,000 persons have been killed in violence and stated the number of deaths are probably under-reported.” the report says.

“The Baghdad morgue reportedly received 30,204 bodies from 2003 to mid-2006. Deaths numbering 18,933 occurred from ‘military clashes’ and ‘terrorist attacks’” between April 5, 2004, and June 1, 2006.

The report also notes the probes by the United States into the alleged killings of 24 civilians in Haditha by U.S. troops as well the deaths caused by military operations throughout the country.

[…]

The killing of a U.S. soldier on Monday — which occurred at 12:55 p.m. (0955 GMT) in western Baghdad — brought the number of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq war to 2,548. The soldier was from Multi-National Division Baghdad. [“U.N.: 14,000 Iraqis killed in 2006″ (CNN.com)]

Is it better or worse yet? I’m really feeling that maybe it’s worse.

Tags: Iraq, Saddam Hussein, death toll

Bush Sold Us The War Based On The Biggest Sand Toilets In The World

So, back to those missing WMD we never found…remember when Bush told us that we found evidence of mobile biological laboratories in Iraq which further proved Sadaam was up to no good? Apparently they were just “the biggest sand toilets in the world” and Bush knew it and yet he like the incorrect “evidence” he had Libby leak to Judy Miller, he pushed the “find” of the trailers on the media as a victory of the war.

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories. [“Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case For War” (The Washington Post)]

Tags: George W. Bush, WMD, Saddam Hussein, Washington Post, lie, Conspiracy Theories, Iraq

The "Newest" Downing Street Memo

Yesterday, lots of leftist blogs were talking about The New York Times reporting on the “latest” memo revealing President Bush and Tony Blair’s nefairious plans to go to war in Iraq no matter what, even if it meant *gasp* tricking the world somehow.

Stamped “extremely sensitive,” the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair’s most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book “Lawless World,” which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president’s sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was “unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.” Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

[…]

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”

It also described the president as saying, “The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam’s W.M.D,” referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea. [”Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says” (The New York Times)]

The information about the Downing Street Memos has been out for almost a year, but only now that George W. Bush’s approval ratings are in the toilet does the New York Times see fit to cover them.

[…]

In February 2002, a half-million people marched in New York City because we knew that this president was going to take us into a war based on lies. The denizens of Left Blogistan knew that this president was going to take us into a war based on lies. When the Downing Street memo first came out, the British, and anyone who bothers to read anything other than the New York Post and the New York Sun and watch anything other than Fox News, knew for certain the kind of chicanery in which Bush and Blair engaged in order to get us into this war.

And now the rest of the country should know. The question is whether they will still choose not to know, because to know is to be obligated to get involved with the political processes necessary to do something about it.[“Late isn’t always better than never” (Brilliant at Breakfast)]

So the New York Times is running a big story headlined Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says, as if it’s news. The only real news here is that they’re treating it like it’s news. As it happens, The Guardian covered the story in February, as did a whole lot of bloggers, many of whom had been covering a little thing known as The Downing Street Memos for, ahem, quite some time. Suffice it to say, the reaction to the Times‘ piece is a bit, uh, jaded in some quarters. [“Is It Really “News” If It’s Not New?” (Shakespeare’s Sister)]

O.K. So, I kind of feel the whole thing is a non-event. Really, look around. It’s the next day and no one is really talking about it. It’s kind of yesterday’s non-news already.

Do I think it’s real? Yes.

However, I think that no one’s listening — particularly to The New York Times. The right wing won’t put any credit into anything The New York Times publishes that doesn’t feed their agenda because they insist it’s a liberal-biased rag despite the fact that Judy Miller apparently was being hand fed stories for years by the White House. The left doesn’t trust the Times because of the whole Judy Miller thing. Really, the Times has lost quite a bit of credibility on both sides.

Ayway, Shakespeare’s Sister is right, this isn’t news. It’s preaching to a tired, frustrated choir. The people who need to hear it aren’t listening and don’t want to know. They can’t know because they can’t be wrong. There can’t be any truth in what those memos say, not a shred, because then they wouldn’t be able to be so self-righteous.

Tags: Iraq, Downing Street Memo, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, New York Times, Judy Miller, politics, WMD, Saddam Hussein, Conspiracy Theories

Tired of Spinning

I know it seems like I’ve been preoccupied lately with my depression and depression in general and my birthday and my new puppy. (Have you seen my new puppy?) However, believe it or not, I’ve been keeping up with the news and online back and forths when my internet wasn’t down. I’ve even added a few new voices to my online daily reads.

To be kind of honest, I’m just a little tired of all of the arguing and excitement even among people who are supposed to be on the same side of the political fence. There’s only so long you can live on high alert before you burn out.

And mostly, I’m tired of the spin. I feel like I’ve been on one of those sit-n-spins for 5 years and I feel a little ill. At this point I don’t know what to trust anymore or what the truth is or even what those “facts” Big Dog insists are the only thing you can trust are.

It always amazes me how extremely differently the left and right interpret “the facts” whatever they are.

For example, here are two interpretations of a recent story concerning documentation that may show a possible connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Ladin from a liberal blog and a conservative blog.

Liberal: Middle Earth Journal

Yes, after three years of pouring through tens of thousands of documents found in dusty basements of Saddam’s pleasure palaces, investigators have found two or three documents where some low level lackey has hinted that Saddam may have considered cooperating with OBL’s agents in the war on terror. As we’ve pointed out here in the past, OBL and Hussein clearly had one thing in common - the enemy of my enemy is maybe, kind-of, sort-of my friend. Neither was any fan of the United States. But, of course, OBL is a fanatical Muslim while Hussein had no use for people of that ilk. He was a self-centered, heretical dictator interested only in his own power and control.

Conservative: One Big Dog

In recently released papers the association between Hussein and bin Laden is disclosed. These papers are written by Iraqi officials and start sometime in 1995 and go through to 1997. The papers discuss an association between the two terrorists, an association that the 9/11 Commission denies. Leftists every where to this day harp on the “fact” that there was no association between these two killers.

[…]

Moonbats are such that if they repeat something long enough they begin to believe it and they influence their drones to believe it. Even in the face of evidence they can not grasp the reality of the situation.

That last bit is particularly funny to me because both sides say the same thing about each other. Kind of makes me think that no one knows what’s really going on anymore. I think everyone is making it up now and hoping someone buys their bullshit at this point.
In case, you’d like to check out what they’re actually talking about, the liberal’s reacting to a post found here and the conservative is reacting to an article found here, but it’s the same story sort of. Personally, at this time, I have no comment about the actual story. I’m still waiting for all of the facts to come out. I don’t think it’s enough to get over-exited either way.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get all riled up over something any minute now. Some Senator will say something or pass something that will piss me off. Or some moron will try to make Wicca the official religion of Los Angeles. Or someone will take a bank full of puppies hostage. It’s just that every where I go there are other bloggers already all riled up doing just as good a job pointing out the insanity and stupidity of our government. Some are really mean about it too. And if they aren’t nitpicking about the other party, they’re nitpicking about their own party or about other liberal bloggers. Oy.

Personally, I’m mostly waiting for someone else to realize that we need to stop whining and start actually doing something about it. I can’t do it all by myself. I’ve already called and volunteered my services for the 2006 campaign, but I’m just one person.

Tags: politics, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden

Congress Is Dead

With everything going on in the blogsphere, in national politics, in women’s rights, in the Middle East, in Iraq in particular, in the world in general, I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed the last few days. Politics in particular has made me particularly restless the last three or four days. I’ve been debating a personal rebellion, a political mutiny. However, what I’ve come to realize is that it’s hard to defect from a party when you don’t belong to one. You just can’t up and flounce out of the room with a dramatic slam of the door behind you if you weren’t in there in the first place.

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Tags: Congress, George W. Bush, Russ Feingold, politics, Bill Clinton, 9/11, Democrats, Republicans, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan

Iraq Is As Bad Now As Under Saddam

I know that rightwingers seem to think that liberals take pleasure when bad things happen in Iraq in Afghanistan. That’s such a stupid theory. After all, we’re the ones that didn’t want anyone to die in the first place.

Anyway, I’m sure they think we’re pleased as pink with the lastest news from John Pace, former director of Human Rights for the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq. He’s been saying that human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein and the level of extra-judicial executions and torture is up; morgue workers are being threatened by both government military and insurgents not to investigate deaths.

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Tags: Iraq, Saddam Hussein, U.N., human rights abuses

Miller Didn’t Start The Fire

I’ve been thinking about Donklephant’s post by Callimachus this morning called “______ Lied”. The post itself has a liberal-biased tilt, but the original column, It Wasn’t Just Miller’s Story seems to be straight reporting to me and I think it’s something that many of us die-hard anti-Iraq-War-Bill-Clinton-loving liberal try very, very hard to ignore or forget.

The truth is that the fear of Suddam Huissen’s potential to wage nuclear destruction on his neighbors and the world didn’t start in January 2001 or even after September 11, 2001.

Here are a few past headlines from The New York Times:

• “Iraq Has Network of Outside Help on Arms, Experts Say”(November 1998)
• “U.S. Says Iraq Aided Production of Chemical Weapons in Sudan”(August 1998)
• “Iraq Suspected of Secret Germ War Effort” (February 2000)
• “Signs of Iraqi Arms Buildup Bedevil U.S. Administration” (February 2000)
• “Flight Tests Show Iraq Has Resumed a Missile Program” (July 2000) [“It Wasn’t Just Miller’s Story”]

It’s important to note here that despite recent accusations and theories that Judith Miller single-handedly convinced the American public that an invasion of Iraq was not only necessary but the right thing to do, she shared a byline on only one of these articles, the rest were written by others. Also, The New York Times wasn’t the only paper making these Clinton-era claims; The Washington Post’s archives contains similar articles.

Clinton administration officials, intelligence officials, U.N. weapons inspectors, and international analysts at the time claimed that Iraq would be “capable within months — and possibly just weeks or days — of threatening its neighbors with an arsenal of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons;” it was believed that Iraq was “still hiding tons of nerve gas” and was “seeking to obtain uranium from a rogue nation or terrorist groups to complete as many as four nuclear warheads.” It was believed that Hussein spent $120 billion in oil revenue and “devoted his intelligence service to an endless game of cat and mouse to hide his suspected weapons caches from United Nations inspections.” He was reportedly “scouring the world for tools to build new weapons” and there were concerns that he was closer to building a nuclear weapon than he was in 1991.[“It Wasn’t Just Miller’s Story”]

Heck, the Clinton administration was so worried about Iraq’s growing nuclear program, that they bombed Iraq for four days in 1998 .

From 1998 through 2000, the Times editorial page warned that “without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year” and that “future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again.” Otherwise, Iraq could “restore its ability to deliver biological and chemical weapons against potential targets in the Middle East.” “The world,” it said, “cannot leave Mr. Hussein free to manufacture horrific germs and nerve gases and use them to terrorize neighboring countries.”

[…]

The Times was not alone, of course. On Jan. 29, 2001, The Post editorialized that “of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous — or more urgent — than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade’s efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf,” including “intelligence photos that show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.”

[…]

As we wage what the Times now calls “the continuing battle over the Bush administration’s justification for the war in Iraq,” we will have to grapple with the stubborn fact that the underlying rationale for the war was already in place when this administration arrived.[“It Wasn’t Just Miller’s Story”]

If the danger from Hussien and Iraq was so immenent, why did we as a nation wait so long?

If the danger from Hussein and Iraq was so real, why did we struggle to find allies to back us up?

If Hussein really is the insane dictator, willing to use chemical warfare on his own people — which we know is true — why then did he not use these weapons of mass distruction on American troops marching toward Baghdad? One argument the right likes to give is that Hussein shipped them to other countries to hide them, but I question why he would make WMD and then not use them during a time of war?

If there were WMD and real proof of them, why did the Bush administration try to discredit Joseph Wilson, a retired diplomat, when he refuted their claims of evidence that Iraq had bought uranium from Nigeria? Why would they need to if the evidence was so strong?

I have a lot of questions, but somehow I don’t think we’ll ever know the whole truth.

Tags: Judy Miller, Saddam Hussein, Bill Clinton, Iraq, George W. Bush, politics, WMD, Joe Wilson

Good News From Iraq

I’ve been keeping an eye out for good news articles of any kind as I’ve been very depressed lately about the state of the world and the overwhelming negative news in print and on t.v. I’m happy to report that I’ve found one that certainly is good news to those of us interested in protecting the environment and in helping repair the damage wrought in Iraq.

In the early 90’s, to punish rebellious Iraqis, Saddam Hussein had the marshlands drained to almost nothing by building a network of channels and dykes to redirect the water elsewhere. By 2002, satellite images revealed the marshlands had shruck to 10% of their original coverage area. This forced many marshland residents into camps in Iran.

“The near-total destruction of the Iraqi marshlands under the regime of Saddam Hussein was a major ecological and human disaster, robbing the Marsh Arabs of a centuries-old culture and way of life as well as food in the form of fish and that most crucial of natural resources - drinking water,” United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) executive director Klaus Toepfer said in a statement. [“Water returns to Iraqi marshlands” (BBC News)]

Immediately after the fall of Saddam’s regime, people began breaching the dykes to allow water back into the marshlands. Then 2003 was an excellent water year, reportedly, which helped greatly.

It’s now estimated that the marshlands around 37% of the marshlands have been restored!

There is still quite a bit to do obviously, but drinking water and sanitation projects are under way in a UN-funded project. It will probably take years to restore the area but so far there’s been a positive improvement and that is a good thing.

Tags: Iraq, Saddam Hussein, U.N.

Where In The World Are Saddam’s Nuclear & Bioweapons Scientists Now?

There’s a rather unsettling article over at Mother Jones today by Kurt Pitzer called “In the Garden of Armageddon.” The onsite blurb reads: “They were Iraq’s only real WMDs. The U.S. refused to secure them. Now Saddam’s nuclear and bioweapons scientists are dispersed and more dangerous than ever.”

He said his name was Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, and he showed me a printout of a prewar Washington Post story in which he was named as one of the Iraqi weapons scientists whom the U.S. government had very much wanted to interview…

… He had tried contacting U.S. troops, but they had rebuffed him and threatened him with arrest if he showed up again…

…At first I didn’t know whether to believe him. But that night, at his urging, I dialed the Washington number of David Albright, a former American member of the United Nations weapons inspections team in Iraq. When I explained who had given me his name, the line went silent for a moment.

“You are actually talking to Obeidi?” Albright finally asked. “Where is he? What did he say?”…

…Albright had met Obeidi in Iraq in the 1990s, when the U.N. inspectors were dismantling Saddam’s WMD programs. Saddam had kept Obeidi’s identity secret longer than that of any other scientist, Albright said. If anyone could say for sure what had happened to Iraq’s nuclear program, it was him…Obeidi repeated to Albright what he had told me — that the Iraqi nuclear program had been dead since the start of U.N. weapons inspections in 1991. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with caution.

“David, there are some things the inspectors never found,” he said. “I am speaking of some important materials and documents. But I am afraid of saying more until I can be sure of my safety.” [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

Albright promised Obeidi to contact the intelligence community on his behalf. This was a few days after the U.S. took Baghdad.

Just weeks earlier, before the invasion, President Bush had railed against Saddam for intimidating his WMD scientists and hiding them from inspectors. Colin Powell had appeared before the United Nations Security Council and warned that Obeidi’s centrifuge program posed a threat to the world. It was hard to explain why, having gone to war ostensibly to get control of Iraq’s dangerous knowledge, the United States was now doing so little to follow through. [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

Despite the U.S.’s claims of concern that Iraq might have the capability to develop WMD and had done so and despite the fact that Obeidi had “blueprints and prototype pieces for building centrifuges to enrich uranium to bomb grade” buried in his garden — on Saddam’s son’s orders — it would be more than a month before any U.S. official showed an interest.

This was why Obeidi was so anxious. On any given day he might be arrested by U.S. forces who would consider him a “bad guy,” or killed by Saddam loyalists who would see him as a collaborator, or kidnapped by some other country interested in what he knew. The decision to come forward had been a hard one…

…The scientists who pulled it off are very gifted men and women, many of whom are now out of work. Their names are still being kept secret by the international agencies familiar with their work. But a source close to one of those agencies recently said that of the 200-some scientists at the top of its nuclear list, all but three remain unaccounted for. In a country with porous borders, where everyone — but especially those associated with the former regime — is in danger every day, many experts say at least some scientists are bound to be tempted to sell their knowledge to the highest bidder. And as the Pakistani network exposed last year shows, the nuclear black market is alive and well…

…Nobody knows how many Iraqi scientists may have been lured over the borders into Iran, Syria, or beyond. Nobody knows because no one is keeping tabs. But several observers agree that so little attention is being paid to Iraq’s scientists, the war may actually have increased the chances of nuclear capabilities proliferating beyond the country’s borders. Between its unemployed scientists and the disappearance of large amounts of WMD-related materials from former weapons sites, Iraq now poses a nightmare scenario, according to Ray McGovern, who spent 27 years analyzing intelligence for the CIA and afterward cofounded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. “The danger is much more acute, both from the proliferation side and the terrorism side,” McGovern says. “Before we invaded, there was no evidence that Iraq had any plan or incentive to proliferate. They didn’t even have a current plan to develop WMDs. They just hadn’t been doing it. Now, my God, we have a magnet attracting all manner of foreign jihadists to a place where the WMD expertise is suddenly unprotected. It just boggles the mind.”

IRAQI SCIENTISTS have good reason to fear what might happen if they offer to cooperate with the United States. Obeidi’s former boss and Saddam’s top science adviser, General Amer al-Saadi, turned himself in to U.S. authorities just before I met Obeidi. He was promptly jailed and kept in custody for at least two years; a military spokesman told the Associated Press last year that the U.S. was also detaining up to a dozen other scientists. The chemist Mohammed Munim al-Izmerly — also said to have worked on Iraq’s former WMD programs — was taken into custody for questioning in April 2003. Ten months later his body was dropped off in a U.S. body bag at a Baghdad hospital. He had been killed by a blow to the head. [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

So, eventually, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA tracked Obeidi down and the DIA summoned him. He met first with the DIA which instructed him not to talk to the CIA. So much for communication and cooperation between intelligence agencies, eh? But then, Obeidi’s fears came true — First the CIA sent armed operatives to his home who took away samples of his secret document cache.

Then, early on the morning of June 3, 2003, more than a dozen soldiers jumped over Obeidi’s garden wall, kicked in his front door, and put him and his family facedown on their living room floor at gunpoint. Obeidi’s wife and children watched as he was handcuffed and put in a Humvee. Evidently, the Army had finally caught wind of Obeidi’s significance — and, just as evidently, the troops knew nothing of their own intelligence agencies’ contacts with him. [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

Fortunately for him, the CIA intervened and had him released. He smartly went public and gave an interview to CNN and the CIA quickly arranged for he and his family to be moved to safety so he could be interrogated.

And then of course, there had been one of the really big goof-ups of the CIA…

On June 26, the CIA posted a press release about Obeidi’s cache — the most valuable WMD evidence the U.S. has yet obtained in Iraq — on its official website. It also put up digital photos of the components and even one of the key centrifuge diagrams. The pictures, which Albright says could be “incredibly useful” to any regime trying to start a covert nuclear program, were online for almost a week — long enough to be downloaded and made freely available on the Internet — before the agency took them down. Literally buried for 12 years, some of Saddam’s hoard of nuclear knowledge got out because of the U.S. government, not in spite of it.

“Before we invaded, there was no evidence that Iraq had any plan or incentive to proliferate,” says former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. “Now, my God, we have a magnet attracting… jihadists to a place where the WMD expertise is suddenly unprotected. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with these guys for months,” says former weapons inspector David Albright. “But by now they’re probably so jaded and suspicious that they want nothing to do with the U.S.” [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

The International Atomic Energy Agency compiled a list in the 1990’s of participants in Saddam’s WMD program. The list had 2,000 names on it. Most of these people are unaccounted for and the border of Iraq are obviously open. Certainly anyone with the experience or knowledge these scientists and technicians would be valuable to any country or organization wishing to jumpstart their nuclear weapons program — Iran and al-Q come to mind. These people could probably name their price on the black market. That doesn’t sound like the world is safer now, does it? Imagine a 9-11 but with nuclear weapons.

“The proliferation risk is higher than it was before, and a chaotic situation means this technology is going to spread,” says Robert Baer, who spent 21 years as a case officer with the CIA in the Middle East. If the administration had been serious about neutralizing Saddam’s weapons program, he says, “the troops would have been securing equipment at weapons sites as they invaded, and they would have been looking for scientists…. It tells you that this war had nothing to do with WMDs.” [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

Whether or not you believe that Saddam had WMD at the time the U.S. invasion of Iraq began, you have to admit that obviously it was complete chaos once we got to Baghdad. We set our sights on getting Saddam no matter the cost and didn’t worry about securing weapons armories (from which insurgents would steal to rage their war against the U.S.) and we didn’t think too hard on the people we needed to find, the people who knew enough to be a danger to the world and a treasure to terrorists or anti-U.S. countries. More proof that we didn’t go in with a good solid plan.

Read the whole story

Pitzer and Obeidi cowrote The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind, which is currently available in hardback.

I’ll be adding that to my wishlist, I think.

Tags: Saddam Hussein, WMD, Iraq, Conspiracy Theories, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi

Saddam’s Capture Fabricated?

According to the story below, the capture of Saddam Hussein, which America and the World witnessed on video tape and broadcast across all our t.v. sets, was a fabrication of a production team after the real capture, which occurred the day before. Here’s my question: If what Ex-Sgt. Rebeh is telling the truth, why the lie? His version sounds much more heroic for our side than the version we saw, which was anti-climatic in my personal opinion.

Ex-Sgt. Nadim Abou Rabeh, of Lebanese descent, was quoted in the Saudi daily al-Medina Wednesday as saying Saddam was actually captured Friday, Dec. 12, 2003, and not the day after, as announced by the U.S. Army.

“I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced,” Abou Rabeh said.

“We captured him after fierce resistance during which a Marine of Sudanese origin was killed,” he said.

He said Saddam himself fired at them with a gun from the window of a room on the second floor. Then they shouted at him in Arabic: “You have to surrender. … There is no point in resisting.”

“Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam’s capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well,” Abou Rabeh said.

Abou Rabeh was interviewed in Lebanon. [“Ex-Marine Says Public Version of Saddam Capture Fiction” (13 WHAM - Rochester, NY)]

Believe it or not, as much as I love good conspiracy stories, I just don’t understand the motive of why Saddam’s capture would be fabricated or why this Rabeh would lie. One of them has to be incorrect, but which and why?

Hat tip to Political Jackass

Tags: Saddam Hussein, Conspiracy Theories, Iraq