Defiance of Tyranny

Posted 1:49 AM by Steve
Finally saw Bill O'Rielly vs. Micheal Moore

What a let down. It was like watching a high-school fight. Both guys were so wound up and so afraid of making a mistake they ended up play pat-a-cake and having a piss poor debate!

Bill was correct in his assertion that Micheal Moore is both WRONG and disingenuous in his assertion that Bush lied about WMD in regards to Iraq. But....Bill wasn't right either!!!!

David Kay's interim report is quite clear. It says:

"we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war."

"From birth all of Iraq's WMD activities were highly compartmentalized within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and terror and with deception and denial built into each program;
Deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans-to-post conflict;
Post-OIF looting destroyed or dispersed important and easily collectable material and forensic evidence concerning Iraq's WMD program. As the report covers in detail, significant elements of this looting were carried out in a systematic and deliberate manner, with the clear aim of concealing pre-OIF activities of Saddam's regime;
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"

"The environment in Iraq remains far from permissive for our activities, with many Iraqis that we talk to reporting threats and overt acts of intimidation and our own personnel being the subject of threats and attacks. In September alone we have had three attacks on ISG facilities or teams: The ISG base in Irbil was bombed and four staff injured, two very seriously; a two person team had their vehicle blocked by gunmen and only escaped by firing back through their own windshield; and on Wednesday, 24 September, the ISG Headquarters in Baghdad again was subject to mortar attack."

Vials: A total of 97 vials-including those with labels consistent with the al Hakam cover stories of single-cell protein and biopesticides, as well as strains that could be used to produce BW agents-were recovered from a scientist's residence.

Burned Documents Found at SAAD Center: An exploitation team on a recent mission to the SAAD Center, part of the Baghdad New Nuclear Design Center, found massive looting and the remnants of deliberately destroyed documents. Other documents were left untouched, however, and recovered by the team

Storage room in basement of Revolutionary Command Council Headquarters. Burned frames of PC workstations visible on shelves. All rooms sharing walls with this storage room were untouched from fire or battle damage.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The basement historical files were systematically selected and destroyed.

"We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. 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 has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:

*A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

*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.

*Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

*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.

*Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

*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.

*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.

*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 through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

*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.

*In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work.

The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence - hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use - are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts. For example,

On 10 July 2003 an ISG team exploited the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) Headquarters in Baghdad. The basement of the main building contained an archive of documents situated on well-organized rows of metal shelving. The basement suffered no fire damage despite the total destruction of the upper floors from coalition air strikes. Upon arrival the exploitation team encountered small piles of ash where individual documents or binders of documents were intentionally destroyed. Computer hard drives had been deliberately destroyed. Computers would have had financial value to a random looter; their destruction, rather than removal for resale or reuse, indicates a targeted effort to prevent Coalition forces from gaining access to their contents.

All IIS laboratories visited by IIS exploitation teams have been clearly sanitized, including removal of much equipment, shredding and burning of documents, and even the removal of nameplates from office doors.
Although much of the deliberate destruction and sanitization of documents and records probably occurred during the height of OIF combat operations, indications of significant continuing destruction efforts have been found after the end of major combat operations, including entry in May 2003 of the locked gated vaults of the Ba'ath party intelligence building in Baghdad and highly selective destruction of computer hard drives and data storage equipment along with the burning of a small number of specific binders that appear to have contained financial and intelligence records, and in July 2003 a site exploitation team at the Abu Ghurayb Prison found one pile of the smoldering ashes from documents that was still warm to the touch.

Moore was wrong that WMD or the "imminent threat" theory was the only reason that justified the war in Iraq. Three basic reasons were given by the Bush administration:

1. Iraq's terror ties.

2. Iraq's WMD programs.

3. Iraq's humanitarian conditions.

Moore made it seem as if a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq was preposterous. Since he is so intelligent (hee-hee) I can only assume that this was completely disingenuous. The following facts are undisputed and among the evidence presented to the 9/11 commission:

1985: The mastermind behind the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, Abu Abbas, was harbored and welcomed by the Iraqi regime.

1988: More than 5,000 Kurdish men, women and children are massacred in the village of Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s forces using weapons of mass destruction.

1992: Iraqi intelligence documents list Osama Bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset.

1993: A non aggression pact between Iraq and al-Qaeda is formed. The rift between secular and Islamic extremists in the Middle East has all but disappeared.

1994: Deputy Director of Iraqi intelligence confirms that Osama Bin Laden requested arms and training from Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime.

1995: Abu Hajer al Iraqi, a senior al-Qaeda leader, met with Iraqi intelligence officials.

1996: A phone call between al-Qaeda-supported Sudanese military officials and the head of Iraq’s chemical weapons program was intercepted by the NSA.

1997:Abu Abdallah al Iraqi, a member of al-Qaeda, went to Iraq to help in obtaining weapons of mass destruction.

1998: The Clinton administration’s justice department indicted Iraq for providing “assistance” to al-Qaeda’s weapons development program.

1999: A senior Clinton administration counter terrorism official said that the U.S. government was “sure” Iraq had supported al-Qaeda chemical weapons programs in the Sudan.

1999-2000: September 11th hijacker Khalid al Mihdhar was photographed with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Kuala Lumpur en route to a meeting at which the terrorist attacks of the USS Cole and the World Trade Center were planned and discussed.

2001: Satellite images show al-Qaeda members traveling to a compound in Iraq, a compound financed in part, by the Iraqi regime.

September 11th, 2001: The World Trade Centers in Manhattan, in the heart of New York City become ground zero for the worst terror attacks in American history. Attacks were carried out by members of al-Qaeda.

2002: Senior al Qaeda member, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, operated openly in Baghdad and received medical attention with the knowledge and approval of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.

2003: Prior to the war in Iraq, it was suspected that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq harbored and supported Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi weapons expert who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center attack. This was confirmed in documents found in postwar Iraq.

So, in conclusion, the WMD programs DID in fact exist and the connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq is rock solid. We need to look no further that the mass graves and the torture chambers found in Iraq to determine that the Bush administration's third assertion was true as well.