Resolving the WMD Mystery
If you've been wondering why Main Stream Media hasn't been yipping about Bush lying about Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction lately, this is why:
There they sit. Forty-eight thousand boxes containing thousands upon thousands of documents from the Saddam Hussein regime stacked variously to the heavens, entirely filling a desert warehouse where Central Command has its headquarters in Qatar—a message in a bottle writ as large as Wal-Mart. Three years since U.S. soldiers swept into Baghdad and began collecting pages out of Saddam's playbook on a regime allegedly involved in terrorism, in propagating weapons of mass destruction, and in plotting deadly war against the United States, that regime's written and audiotaped record remains largely unexamined, barely translated, and—until this month—grossly underestimated.
Some choice excerpts from the article in World Magazine:
Sorting wheat from chaff is "long, slow, and tedious, but this is what intel is," said Bill Tierney, an Army linguist who helped jumpstart the document dumping in February by publicizing 12 hours of Saddam on tape he had translated from Arabic to English. The recordings, released at the national Intelligence Summit in Washington last month, include Saddam discussing a previously undisclosed nuclear weapons program and promising in the mid-1990s that the United States would be visited in the future by "terrorism with weapons of mass destruction." This latest set of disclosures, Mr. Tierney told WORLD, "is a haystack. And there are definitely jewels hiding in it, but it is difficult to find them."
Faced with mounting pressure from Congress and the media to allow public access to some of the estimated millions of printed records and over 500 hours of audiotape, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte agreed March 16 to release select documents. Within days the directorate posted 125 separate items at its Foreign Military Studies Office website (fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm) and added to a roster of terrorism-related documents already available in a West Point database (www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony_docs.asp).
Exhibit B
Nuclear capabilities became a topic of discussion in a 1995 meeting with Saddam, vice president Tariq Aziz, and top military officials. An incomplete audiotape of the meeting runs over 62 minutes and begins with Saddam, Mr. Aziz, a Lt. Gen. "Amir" and others discussing how to dodge and parry their way through an upcoming report to the UN Security Council from UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus. "Sir . . . one could be suspicious of it [the Biological Program] if we concentrate on it [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and the trafficking effort and dodging everything in regards to it," a nervous Lt. Gen. Amir explains.
Exhibit D
A handwritten dossier dated Aug. 17, 2002, confirms an operational cell of al-Qaeda inside Iraq and identifies its key member as Ahmed Fadil Nizal Al Khalaylah—also known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the current leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. Saddam's regime, from the document, seems little concerned about the terrorist's presence—even though tolerating known terrorists violated UN resolutions—and less surprised, perhaps with reason. Another memo, dated Sept. 15, 2001, and from Afghanistan, notes a relationship between al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Baghdad, and a Dec. 1, 2001, memo reports on "the status of rumors" of 3,000 Fedayeen Saddam from Anbar Province who were dispatched "in an unofficial capacity to Afghanistan and have joined the mujahidin to fight with and aid them in defeating the American Zionist Imperialist attack."
The issue of WMD may at last be put to rest when these documents are finally translated. To read the entire article click here
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/11671
Also Stephen Hayes from The Weekly Standard has been writing about the Harmony database(where the documents are stored) for many months.
weeklystandard.com
There they sit. Forty-eight thousand boxes containing thousands upon thousands of documents from the Saddam Hussein regime stacked variously to the heavens, entirely filling a desert warehouse where Central Command has its headquarters in Qatar—a message in a bottle writ as large as Wal-Mart. Three years since U.S. soldiers swept into Baghdad and began collecting pages out of Saddam's playbook on a regime allegedly involved in terrorism, in propagating weapons of mass destruction, and in plotting deadly war against the United States, that regime's written and audiotaped record remains largely unexamined, barely translated, and—until this month—grossly underestimated.
Some choice excerpts from the article in World Magazine:
Sorting wheat from chaff is "long, slow, and tedious, but this is what intel is," said Bill Tierney, an Army linguist who helped jumpstart the document dumping in February by publicizing 12 hours of Saddam on tape he had translated from Arabic to English. The recordings, released at the national Intelligence Summit in Washington last month, include Saddam discussing a previously undisclosed nuclear weapons program and promising in the mid-1990s that the United States would be visited in the future by "terrorism with weapons of mass destruction." This latest set of disclosures, Mr. Tierney told WORLD, "is a haystack. And there are definitely jewels hiding in it, but it is difficult to find them."
Faced with mounting pressure from Congress and the media to allow public access to some of the estimated millions of printed records and over 500 hours of audiotape, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte agreed March 16 to release select documents. Within days the directorate posted 125 separate items at its Foreign Military Studies Office website (fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm) and added to a roster of terrorism-related documents already available in a West Point database (www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony_docs.asp).
Exhibit B
Nuclear capabilities became a topic of discussion in a 1995 meeting with Saddam, vice president Tariq Aziz, and top military officials. An incomplete audiotape of the meeting runs over 62 minutes and begins with Saddam, Mr. Aziz, a Lt. Gen. "Amir" and others discussing how to dodge and parry their way through an upcoming report to the UN Security Council from UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus. "Sir . . . one could be suspicious of it [the Biological Program] if we concentrate on it [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and the trafficking effort and dodging everything in regards to it," a nervous Lt. Gen. Amir explains.
Exhibit D
A handwritten dossier dated Aug. 17, 2002, confirms an operational cell of al-Qaeda inside Iraq and identifies its key member as Ahmed Fadil Nizal Al Khalaylah—also known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the current leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. Saddam's regime, from the document, seems little concerned about the terrorist's presence—even though tolerating known terrorists violated UN resolutions—and less surprised, perhaps with reason. Another memo, dated Sept. 15, 2001, and from Afghanistan, notes a relationship between al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Baghdad, and a Dec. 1, 2001, memo reports on "the status of rumors" of 3,000 Fedayeen Saddam from Anbar Province who were dispatched "in an unofficial capacity to Afghanistan and have joined the mujahidin to fight with and aid them in defeating the American Zionist Imperialist attack."
The issue of WMD may at last be put to rest when these documents are finally translated. To read the entire article click here
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/11671
Also Stephen Hayes from The Weekly Standard has been writing about the Harmony database(where the documents are stored) for many months.
weeklystandard.com
posted by sallyann | 12:36 PM
3 Comments:
A former Democratic senator and 9/11 commissioner says a recently declassified Iraqi account of a 1995 meeting between Osama bin Laden and a senior Iraqi envoy presents a “significant set of facts,” and shows a more detailed collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
In an interview yesterday, the current president of the New School University, Bob Kerrey, was careful to say that new documents translated last night by ABC News did not prove Saddam Hussein played a role in any way in plotting the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Nonetheless, the former senator from Nebraska said that the new document shows that “Saddam was a significant enemy of the United States.” Mr. Kerrey said he believed America’s understanding of the deposed tyrant’s relationship with Al Qaeda would become much deeper as more captured Iraqi documents and audiotapes are disclosed.
I'm glad to hear Bush was not lying. Mission Accomplished and now on to North Korea, Pakistan, India and China.
I'm glad to find that Bush was not lying. Mission Accomplished. Now on to North Korea, Pakistan, India, Iran and China.
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