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Saddam's Terror Training Camps
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| Fir3start3r |
Interesting indeed...
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Saddam's Terror Training Camps
What the documents captured from the former Iraqi regime reveal--and why they should all be made public.
by Stephen F. Hayes
01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17
THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.
The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.
The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.
The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.
Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million "exploitable items" have been thoroughly examined. That's 2.5 percent. Despite the hard work of the individuals assigned to the "DOCEX" project, the process is not moving quickly enough, says Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who helped lead the document exploitation effort for 18 months. "At this rate," he says, "if we continue to approach DOCEX in a linear fashion, our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff."
Most of the 50,000 translated documents relate directly to weapons of mass destruction programs and scientists, since David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group--who were among the first to analyze the finds--considered those items top priority. "At first, if it wasn't WMD, it wasn't translated. It wasn't exploited," says a former military intelligence officer who worked on the documents in Iraq.
"We had boxloads of Iraqi Intelligence records--their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information," says the former military intelligence officer. "In an insurgency, wouldn't that have been helpful?"
How many of those unexploited documents might help us better understand the role of Iraq in supporting transregional terrorists? How many of those documents might provide important intelligence on the very people--Baathists, former regime officials, Saddam Fedayeen, foreign fighters trained in Iraq--that U.S. soldiers are fighting in Iraq today? Is what we don't know literally killing us?
ON NOVEMBER 17, 2005, Michigan representative Pete Hoekstra wrote to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Hoekstra is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He provided Negroponte a list of 40 documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan and asked to see them. The documents were translated or summarized, given titles by intelligence analysts in the field, and entered into a government database known as HARMONY. Most of them are unclassified.
For several weeks, Hoekstra was promised a response. He finally got one on December 28, 2005, in a meeting with General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence. Hayden handed Hoekstra a letter from Negroponte that promised a response after January 1, 2006. Hoekstra took the letter, read it, and scribbled his terse response. "John--Unacceptable." Hoekstra told Hayden that he would expect to hear something before the end of the year. He didn't.
"I can tell you that I'm reaching the point of extreme frustration," said Hoekstra, in a phone interview last Thursday. His exasperated tone made the claim unnecessary. "It's just an indication that rather than having a nimble, quick intelligence community that can respond quickly, it's still a lumbering bureaucracy that can't give the chairman of the intelligence committee answers relatively quickly. Forget quickly, they can't even give me answers slowly."
On January 6, however, Hoekstra finally heard from Negroponte. The director of national intelligence told Hoekstra that he is committed to expediting the exploitation and release of the Iraqi documents. According to Hoekstra, Negroponte said: "I'm giving this as much attention as anything else on my plate to make this work."
Other members of Congress--including Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Senators Rick Santorum and Pat Roberts--also demanded more information from the Bush administration on the status of the vast document collection. Santorum and Hoekstra have raised the issue personally with President Bush. This external pressure triggered an internal debate at the highest levels of the administration. Following several weeks of debate, a consensus has emerged: The vast majority of the 2 million captured documents should be released publicly as soon as possible.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon's role in expediting the release of this information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. "He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop," says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.
The main worry, says DiRita, is that the mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. "There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to 'prove' that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we'd spend a lot of time chasing around after it."
This is a view many officials attributed to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. (Cambone, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed.) For months, Cambone has argued internally against expediting the release of the documents. "Cambone is the problem," says one former Bush administration official who wants the documents released. "He has blocked this every step of the way." In what is perhaps a sign of a changing dynamic within the administration, Cambone is now saying that he, like his boss, favors a broad document release.
Although Hoekstra, too, has been pushing hard for the quick release of all of the documents, he is currently focusing his efforts simply on obtaining the 40 documents he asked for in November. "There comes a time when the talking has to stop and I get the documents. I requested these documents six weeks ago and I have not seen a single piece of paper yet."
Is Hoekstra being unreasonable? I asked Michael Tanji, the former DOCEX official with the Defense Intelligence Agency, how long such a search might take. His answer: Not long. "The retrieval of a HARMONY document is a trivial thing assuming one has a serial number or enough keyword terms to narrow down a search [Hoekstra did]. If given the task when they walked in the door, one person should be able to retrieve 40 documents before lunch."
Tanji should know. He left DIA last year as the chief of the media exploitation division in the office of document exploitation. Before that, he started and managed a digital forensics and intelligence fusion program that used the data obtained from DOCEX operations. He began his career as an Army signals intelligence [SIGINT] analyst. In all, Tanji has worked for 18 years in intelligence and dealt with various aspects of the media exploitation problem for about four years.
We discussed the successes and failures of the DOCEX program, the relative lack of public attention to the project, and what steps might be taken to expedite the exploitation of the documents in the event the push to release all of the documents loses momentum.
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TWS: In what areas is the project succeeding? In what areas is the project failing?
Tanji: The level of effort applied to the DOCEX problems in Iraq and Afghanistan to date is a testament to the will and work ethic of people in the intelligence community. They've managed to find a number of golden nuggets amongst a vast field of rock in what I would consider a respectable amount of time through sheer brute force. The flip side is that it is a brute-force effort. For a number of reasons--primarily time and resources--there has not been much opportunity to step back, think about a smarter way to solve the problem, and then apply various solutions. Inasmuch as we've won in Iraq and Saddam and his cronies are in the dock, now would be a good time to put some fresh minds on the problem of how you turn DOCEX into a meaningful and effective information-age intelligence tool.
TWS: Why haven't we heard more about this project? Aren't most of the Iraqi documents unclassified?
Tanji: Until a flood of captured material came rushing in after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom [in October 2001], DOCEX was a backwater: unglamorous, not terribly career enhancing, and from what I had heard always one step away from being mothballed.
The classification of documents obtained for exploitation varies based on the nature of the way they were obtained and by whom. There are some agencies that tend to classify everything regardless of how it was acquired. I could not give you a ratio of unclassified to classified documents.
In my opinion the silence associated with exploitation work is rooted in the nature of the work. In addition to being tedious and time-consuming, it is usually done after the shooting is over. We place a higher value on intelligence information that comes to us before a conflict begins. Confirmation that we were right (or proof that we were wrong) after the fact is usually considered history. That some of this information may be dated doesn't mean it isn't still valuable.
TWS: The project seems overwhelmed at the moment, with a mere 50,000 documents translated completely out of a total of 2 million. What steps, in your view, should be taken to expedite the process?
Tanji: I couldn't say what the total take of documents or other forms of media is, though numbers in the millions are probably not far off.
In a sense the exploitation process is what it is; you have to put eyes on paper (or a computer screen) to see what might be worth further translation or deeper analysis. It is a time-consuming process that has no adequate mechanical solution. Machine translation software is getting better, but it cannot best a qualified human linguist, of which we have very few.
Tackling the computer media problem is a lot simpler in that computer language (binary) is universal, so searching for key words, phrases, and the names of significant personalities is fairly simple. Built to deal with large-scale data sets, a forensic computer system can rapidly separate wheat from chaff. The current drawback is that the computer forensics field is dominated by a law-enforcement mindset, which means the approach to the digital media problem is still very linear. As most of this material has come to us without any context ("hard drives found in Iraq" was a common label attached to captured media) that approach means our great-grandchildren will still be dealing with this problem.
Dealing with the material as the large and nebulous data set that it is and applying a contextual appliqué after exploitation--in essence, recreating the Iraqi networks as they were before Operation Iraqi Freedom began--would allow us to get at the most significant data rapidly for technical analysis, and allow for a political analysis to follow in short order. If I were looking for both a quick and powerful fix I'd get various Department of Energy labs involved; they're used to dealing with large data sets and have done great work in the data mining and rendering fields.
TWS: To read some of the reporting on Iraq, one might come away with the impression that Saddam Hussein was something of a benign (if not exactly benevolent) dictator who had no weapons of mass destruction and no connections to terrorism. Does the material you've seen support this conventional wisdom?
Tanji: I am subject to a nondisclosure agreement, so I would rather not get into details. I will say that the intelligence community has scraped the surface of much of what has been captured in Iraq and in my view a great deal more deep digging is required. Critics of the war often complain about the lack of "proof"--a term that I had never heard used in the intelligence lexicon until we ousted Saddam--for going to war. There is really only one way to obtain "proof" and that is to carry out a thorough and detailed examination of what we've captured.
TWS: I've spoken with several officials who have seen unclassified materials indicating the former Iraqi regime provided significant support--including funding and training--to transregional terrorists, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar al Islam, Algeria's GSPC, and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Did you see any of this?
Tanji: My obligations under a nondisclosure agreement prevent me from getting into this kind of detail.
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Other officials familiar with the captured documents were less cautious. "As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein's] support for transregional terrorists," says one intelligence official.
Speaking of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence officer says: "There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and there was an equipment connection. It may have been the case that the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] support for AI was meant to operate against the [anti-Saddam] Kurds. But there is no question IIS was supporting AI."
The official continued: "[Saddam] used these groups because he was interested in extending his influence and extending the influence of Iraq. There are definite and absolute ties to terrorism. The evidence is there, especially at the network level. How high up in the government was it sanctioned? I can't tell you. I don't know whether it was run by Qusay [Hussein] or [Izzat Ibrahim] al-Duri or someone else. I'm just not sure. But to say Iraq wasn't involved in terrorism is flat wrong."
STILL, some insist on saying it. Since early November, Senator Carl Levin has been spotted around Washington waving a brief excerpt from a February 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of Iraq. The relevant passage reads: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control."
Levin treats these two sentences as definitive proof that Bush administration officials knew that Saddam's regime was unlikely to work with Islamic fundamentalists and ignored the intelligence community's assessment to that effect. Levin apparently finds the passage so damning that he specifically requested that it be declassified.
I thought of Levin's two sentences last Wednesday and Thursday as I sat in a Dallas courtroom listening to testimony in the deportation hearing of Ahmed Mohamed Barodi, a 42-year-old Syrian-born man who's been living in Texas for the last 15 years. I thought of Levin's sentences, for example, when Barodi proudly proclaimed his membership in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and again when Barodi, dressed in loose-fitting blue prison garb, told Judge J. Anthony Rogers about the 21 days he spent in February 1982 training with other members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood at a camp in Iraq.
The account he gave in the courtroom was slightly less alarming than the description of the camp he had provided in 1989, on his written application for political asylum in the United States. In that document, Barodi described the instruction he received in Iraq as "guerrilla warfare training." And in an interview in February 2005 with Detective Scott Carr and special agent Sam Montana, both from the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, Barodi said that the Iraqi regime provided training in the use of firearms, rocket-propelled grenades, and document forgery.
Barodi comes from Hama, the town that was leveled in 1982 by the armed forces of secular Syrian dictator Hafez Assad because it was home to radical Islamic terrorists who had agitated against his regime. The massacre took tens of thousands of lives, but some of the extremists got away.
Many of the most radical Muslim Brotherhood refugees from Hama were welcomed next door--and trained--in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Spanish investigators believe that Ghasoub Ghalyoun, the man they have accused of conducting surveillance for the 9/11 attacks, who also has roots in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, was trained in an Iraqi terrorist camp in the early 1980s. Ghalyoun mentions this Iraqi training in a 2001 letter to the head of Syrian intelligence, in which he seeks reentry to Syria despite his long affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Reaching out to Islamic radicals was, in fact, one of the first moves Saddam Hussein made upon taking power in 1979. That he did not do it for ideological reasons is unimportant. As Barodi noted at last week's hearing, "He used us and we used him."
Throughout the 1980s, including the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam cast himself as a holy warrior in his public rhetoric to counter the claims from Iran that he was an infidel. This posturing continued during and after the first Gulf war in 1990-91. Saddam famously ordered "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) added to the Iraqi flag. Internally, he launched "The Faith Campaign," which according to leading Saddam Hussein scholar Amatzia Baram included the imposition of sharia (Islamic law). According to Baram, "The Iraqi president initiated laws forbidding the public consumption of alcohol and introduced enhanced compulsory study of the Koran at all educational levels, including Baath Party branches."
Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law who defected to Jordan in 1995, explained these changes in an interview with Rolf Ekeus, then head of the U.N. weapons inspection program. "The government of Iraq is instigating fundamentalism in the country," he said, adding, "Every party member has to pass a religious exam. They even stopped party meetings for prayers."
And throughout the decade, the Iraqi regime sponsored "Popular Islamic Conferences" at the al Rashid Hotel that drew the most radical Islamists from throughout the region to Baghdad. Newsweek's Christopher Dickey, who covered one of those meetings in 1993, would later write: "Islamic radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa and Asia converged on Baghdad to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American aggression." One speaker praised "the mujahed Saddam Hussein, who is leading this nation against the nonbelievers." Another speaker said, "Everyone has a task to do, which is to go against the American state." Dickey continued:
Every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a "secular Baathist ideologue" who has nothing do with Islamists or with terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they're talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam's version of it.
In the face of such evidence, Carl Levin and other critics of the Iraq war trumpet deeply flawed four-year-old DIA analyses. Shouldn't the senator instead use his influence to push for the release of Iraqi documents that will help establish what, exactly, the Iraqi regime was doing in the years before the U.S. invasion?
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
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| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
Interesting indeed...
Other officials familiar with the captured documents were less cautious. "As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein's] support for transregional terrorists," says one intelligence official.
Speaking of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence officer says: "There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and there was an equipment connection. It may have been the case that the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] support for AI was meant to operate against the [anti-Saddam] Kurds. But there is no question IIS was supporting AI."
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. |
Okay, but what about the current training camps that are being used to train the insurgents to kill our troops? What do we have to say about those? Nothing.
All this is, is an attempt to further justify an unjust, illegal and immoral war in which the public was (and still is being) duped into supporting.
So, how about the camps that the CIA had set up in order to train assassins from all over the world? Saddam was an evil tyrant, no doubt - but we are supposed to be a bulwark for democracy. What's democratic about a country that has to constantly lie and decieve it's people in order to pursue it's own selfish goals? For that question I know that I have no answers.
http://www.democracynow.org/article...e=thread&tid=25
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/40/055.html
http://www.soaw.org/new/
| quote: | On January 21, 2001, SOA’s name was changed to WHISC. But only the name changed—its mission and its shame continue. No one really believes the name change made a difference.
McCoy’s study did not include data from the year 2001 or later. The Bush administration will not allow this data to be released because of “national security” concerns. That means future researchers will not be able to reveal such embarrassing statistics about SOA/WHISC. McCoy observes regretfully that the Bush administration’s move means “studies such as this one could not be updated, and it may become increasingly difficult for researchers to apply their tools to vital social and political questions.”
Every November, opponents of the School of the Americas gather for a massive demonstration outside the gates of this school for terrorism. They carry crosses and banners with names of people murdered by SOA graduates. They sing and pray and chant. Some cross the line painted on a street outside the gates of Fort Benning, committing civil disobedience.
Dozens of the demonstrators—like 68-year-old Sister Caryl Hartges from Wisconsin—end up serving time in federal prisons as a result. She crossed the line last year, on her fifth trip to the demonstrations. Sister Caryl served her time. And she’ll be back to protest the School of the Americas again this November 22, because, as she explains: “It has do with the call of the Gospel, which is a call for justice, which sometimes takes precedence over the law of the land.”
http://www.americas.org/item_15 |
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| Fir3start3r |
I think the real problem is, they've only just started hitting the tip of the iceburg and a lot more digging has to be done.
One could say they were premature sure, but the justification appears to be buried in the mountains of documents being found.
I have no doubt there are currents ones (training camps) too, but good luck getting access to actual documents on those lol!
The CIA training camps no doubt will probably be there but then we're talking about a different timeline then when Communism was the big threat, not terrorism.
There's a fine line for sure though... |
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| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
I have no doubt there are currents ones (training camps) too, but good luck getting access to actual documents on those lol!
The CIA training camps no doubt will probably be there but then we're talking about a different timeline then when Communism was the big threat, not terrorism.
There's a fine line for sure though... |
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.ph...eign_terrorists
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,84291,00.html
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/...ghanistan.camp/
What you fail to cover is that there are (or at least, were) training camps in India, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Syria, Bosnia, Myanmar, etc.
Before the second Iraq war, we had troops and air support covering the no-fly zones in Iraq as well as enough satellite imagery to make your head spin. So we're just now finding out about these camps? I find that rather hard to believe.
Anyway, all we're doing is further committing ourselves to another neverending war much like that of the current drug war. With our heavyhanded tactics, we're creating more terrorists than we will ever be able to fight. There are dozens of terrorist organizations around the world, but fighting them with bullets is not the answer to our problems as it's more or less a war of ideologies.
If we haven't stopped all of the drugs from coming into our country after decades of fighting it, how could we ever expect to stop EVERY evil terrorist plot from coming to fruition? If several tons of marijuana can easily make it's way into our cities on a daily basis despite all of our law and drug enforcement efforts, what's to stop a couple of suitcase nukes from being detonated in heavily populated civilian areas?
You have to pick your battles.
This war really isn't about making us any safer, just as the drug war isn't about ending either the flow or the consumption of drugs. There's too much of a profit to be had in both. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
Hayes is quite the interesting character. I dunno if you've just ran across him with your apparent discovery of Weekly Standard, the end-all be-all Bush Brown Nosing publication, but he has a bit of a shoddy record attempting to connect Saddam to al Qaeda:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200406300014
I anticipate this new connection to be shot down soon, just as his others were blown apart through careful fact checking. But that's just my own prediction, of course..... |
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| ogvh5150 |
"Well even though we thought Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction and never found them, he did have "terrorist" training camps, honest he really did, look we got proof."
Training comes from experience:
| quote: | CIA Training of Islamists Haunts GIs in Iraq
Commentary, Peter Dale Scott,
Pacific News Service, Nov 26, 2003
Editor's Note: A technique to shoot down helicopters that CIA operatives taught to mujahideen and Arab Islamists in Afghanistan in the 1980s is being used in guerrilla attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.
The recent downing of U.S. Black Hawk helicopters in Iraq is yet another example of how the aid supplied by the CIA to Islamist terrorists in the 1980s has contributed to the escalation and spread of terrorism everywhere in the world.
At least two of the U.S. Black Hawk helicopters that crashed in Iraq recently were brought down by the same sophisticated technique -- by taking out the ship's vulnerable tail rotor with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG).[1] As right-wing columnists and Web sites have been quick to point out, this is exactly the technique that brought down three Black Hawks in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993. Three weeks after this devastating attack, the United States pulled out of Somalia, an event Osama bin Laden has cited as proof that America can be defeated.
But no one to date has pointed out what Mark Bowden, author of the best account of that battle, "Black Hawk Down," reported: that the Somalis on the ground had been trained by Arabs who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. As Bowden wrote, it was these Arabs who taught that the best way to bring down a helicopter with an RPG was to shoot for the tail rotor (which keeps the helicopter from spinning by countering torque from its main rotor).[2]
We now know that the Arab trainers of the Somalis were members of al Qaeda.
In his book on al Qaeda, "Holy War," Peter Bergen said of the Mogadishu battle: "A U.S. official told me that the skills involved in shooting down those helicopters were not skills that the Somalis could have learned on their own."[3] In other words, the training that the United States supplied to Islamists in the Afghan War in the 1980s, when the emphasis was on bringing down Soviet helicopters, is still coming back to haunt the United States today. That training, according to author George Crile, author of "Charlie Wilson's War," about the CIA's arming of Islamists during the Afghan War, even included "urban terror, with instruction in car bombings, bicycle bombings, camel bombings, and assassination."[4]
One trainer of the Somalis, Egyptian-born Ali Mohamed, was also a veteran of U.S. Special Forces and the CIA. While allegedly still on the U.S. payroll, Mohamed had been recruiting and training Arabs for the U.S.-supported Afghan War, at the al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.[5] This served as the main American recruiting center for the network that after the war became known as al Qaeda.[6]
In 1993, the year of Mogadishu, Mohamed was picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada in the company of an al Qaeda terrorist. Almost certainly he would have been arrested; but Mohamed insisted that the RCMP put in a phone call to his FBI handler. The call quickly secured his release.
The Toronto daily Globe an! d Mail later concluded that Mohamed "was working with U.S. counter-terrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993."[7] Mohamed, who was implicated along with al-Kifah veterans in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was arrested again after the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. Escaping trial by a negotiated plea, he was in a U.S. prison as late as 2001.[8] His service to al Qaeda is clear and admitted; it is not clear that he has done anything to benefit the United States.
It is now over 10 years since the first U.S. Black Hawks were downed by hits on the tail rotor with RPGs. U.S. pilots have developed countermeasures, by quickly cutting off their engines to avoid a fatal spin. But in March 2002 the same technique was used again effectively by al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in Afghanistan. In Operation Anaconda of that month, RPGs, by hitting the tail rotors, incapacitated several U.S. Army Apache helicopters.
It is of course easy in retrospect to challenge the wisdom of having imparted such skills to jihad-waging Islamists. These were extremists who, even at the time, made it clear they despised the West almost as much as they did the Soviet Union. But what remains is the dangerous system whereby small numbers of policy-makers, acting at the very highest levels of secrecy, are able to make ill-considered decisions that will have long-term, tragic effects worldwide.
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[1] Los Angeles Times, 11/19/03; Africa Cape Times, 11/16/03.
[2] Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999), 110.
[3] Bergen, Holy War, 82.
[4] Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, 335.
[5] Independent, 11/1/98.
[6] Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, told the BBC that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden. In his words, “In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there. I returned to the US, I complained to the State Dept here, to the General Accounting Office, to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and to the Inspector General's office. I was met with silence. What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets” (BBC, November 6 2001; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1645527.stm).
[7] Globe and Mail, 11/22/01. Cf. San Francisco Chronicle, 11/4/01: `Mohamed "clearly was a double agent," Larry C. Johnson, a former deputy director in the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism and a onetime CIA employee, said in an interview. Johnson said the CIA had found Mohamed unreliable and severed its relationship with him shortly after Mohamed approached the agency in 1984. Johnson faulted the FBI for later using Mohamed as an informant, saying the bureau should have recognized that the man was a high-ranking terrorist, deeply involved in plotting violence against the United States and its allies. "It's possible that the FBI thought they had control of him and were trying to use him, but what's clear is that they did not have control," Johnson said. "The FBI assumed he was their source, but his loyalties lay elsewhere."’
[8] In his statement “Mohamed admitted he had trained some of the persons in New York who had been responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.” (Statement of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois; U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, “Protecting Our National Security from Terrorist Attacks,” 10/21/03, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/200...fitzgerald.html).
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| quote: | Originally posted by ogvh5150
Back in 2002, following the trauma of 9-11, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted there would be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large. How could he be so sure of that? Perhaps because these attacks would be instigated on the order of the Honorable Mr. Rumsfeld. According to Los Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, writing Oct. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld set out to create a secret army, "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" network that would "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception," to stir the pot of spiraling global violence.
According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization--the "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)"--would actually carry out secret missions designed to provoke terrorist groups into committing violent acts. The P2OG, a 100-member, so-called "counter-terrorist" organization with a $100-million-a-year budget, would ostensibly target "terrorist leaders," but according to P2OG documents procured by Arkin, would in fact carry out missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among "terrorist groups"--which, according to the Defense Secretary's logic, would subsequently expose them to "counter-attack" by the good guys. In other words, the plan is to execute secret military operations (assassinations, sabotage, "deception") which would intentionally result in terrorist attacks on innocent people, including Americans--essentially, to "combat terrorism" by causing it!
This notion is currently being applied to the problem of the Iraqi "insurgency," it seems. According to a May 1, 2005 report by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine, two of the top US advisers to Iraqi paramilitary commandos fighting the insurgents are veterans of US counterinsurgency operations in Latin America. Loaning credence to recent media speculation about the "Salvadorization" of Iraq, the report notes that one adviser currently in Iraq is James Steele, who led a team of 55 US Army Special Forces advisers in El Salvador in the 1980s. Maass writes that these advisors "trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses."
The current senior US adviser at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which Maass writes "has operational control over the commandos," is former top US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official Steve Casteel, who worked "alongside local forces" in the US-sponsored "Drug War" in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, "where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cocaine cartel."
The US "drug war" in Latin America also serves as a cover for ongoing counterinsurgency, employing terrorist methods to achieve two aims: one, actually combating genuine insurgency; two, the ratcheting up of a "strategy of tension," heightened social violence designed to induce fear among the citizenry and the subsequent call for greater "security."
The Provocateur State: Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi "Insurgents"--and Global Terrorism? |
| quote: | Originally posted by ogvh5150
"Funding is tough to come by these days," he says. "The biggest downside to a war in Iraq is what you could do with that money. What does a war in Iraq cost a week? A billion? Maybe a billion a day? The budget for the National Cancer Institute is four billion. That has to change. It needs to become a priority again.
"Polls say people are much more afraid of cancer than of a plane flying into their house or a bomb or any other form of terrorism. It is a priority for the American public."
Fighting cancer is new mission for Armstrong
People will ignore this when someone else has to play boogeyman.
CASUALTY OF WAR: THE U.S. ECONOMY
James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, July 17, 2005
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost taxpayers $314 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office projects additional expenses of perhaps $450 billion over the next 10 years.
That could make the combined campaigns, especially the war in Iraq, the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years, causing even some conservative experts to criticize the open-ended commitment to an elusive goal. The concern is that the soaring costs, given little weight before now, could play a growing role in U.S. strategic decisions because of the fiscal impact.
"Osama (bin Laden) doesn't have to win; he will just bleed us to death," said Michael Scheuer, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA who led the pursuit of bin Laden and recently retired after writing two books critical of the Clinton and Bush administrations. "He's well on his way to doing it."
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, has estimated that the Korean War cost about $430 billion and the Vietnam War cost about $600 billion, in current dollars. According to the latest estimates, the cost of the war in Iraq could exceed $700 billion.
Put simply, critics say, the war is not making the United States safer and is harming U.S. taxpayers by saddling them with an enormous debt burden, since the war is being financed with deficit spending.
One of the most vocal Republican critics has been Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who said the costs of the war -- many multiples greater than what the White House had estimated in 2003 -- are throwing U.S. fiscal priorities out of balance.
"It's dangerously irresponsible," Hagel said in February of the war spending.
He later told U.S. News & World Report, "The White House is completely disconnected from reality." He added that the apparent lack of solid plans for defeating the insurgency and providing stability in Iraq made it seem "like they're just making it up as they go along."
The Democrats have also raised concerns about the apparent lack of an exit strategy and the fast-rising costs, particularly since President Bush has chosen to pay for the war with special supplemental appropriations outside the normal budget process. Some Democrats have insisted that, to cover war costs, the president should propose comparable reductions in other government programs, in part to be fiscally responsible and in part to make the price of the war more tangible.
CASUALTY OF WAR: THE U.S. ECONOMY
Don't forget we're still paying for the Civil War. |
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| Spacey Orange |
| for better or for worse, this 'evidence' you cite to defend the war does not matter. support for the war now depends upon the costs (in lives and dollars), not whether Bush was justified or not in the use of force. |
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| ogvh5150 |
I am not defending the war. I never have and never will.
This administration justified an invasion of Iraq over the existence of weapons of mass destruction only later to say that there are none.
Since they lied once they're trying to lie now and I don't buy it.
Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me twice, shame on me |
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| Fir3start3r |
| quote: | Originally posted by ogvh5150
I am not defending the war. I never have and never will.
This administration justified an invasion of Iraq over the existence of weapons of mass destruction only later to say that there are none.
Since they lied once they're trying to lie now and I don't buy it.
Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me twice, shame on me |
Not sure I understand.
How to you lie about actual government documents? |
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| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
Not sure I understand.
How to you lie about actual government documents? |
Are you referring to all of the cherry-picked, unverified intelligence reports that the neo-cons (Cheney in particular) used as factual evidence to make their case for war?
| quote: | Soldier for the Truth
Exposing Bush’s talking-points war
by Marc Cooper
Busting the liars: Karen Kwiatkowski
After two decades in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, now 43, knew her career as a regional analyst was coming to an end when — in the months leading up to the war in Iraq — she felt she was being “propagandized” by her own bosses.
With master’s degrees from Harvard in government and zoology and two books on Saharan Africa to her credit, she found herself transferred in the spring of 2002 to a post as a political/military desk officer at the Defense Department’s office for Near East South Asia (NESA), a policy arm of the Pentagon.
Kwiatkowski got there just as war fever was spreading, or being spread as she would later argue, through the halls of Washington. Indeed, shortly after her arrival, a piece of NESA was broken off, expanded and re-dubbed with the Orwellian name of the Office of Special Plans. The OSP’s task was, ostensibly, to help the Pentagon develop policy around the Iraq crisis.
She would soon conclude that the OSP — a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld — was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.”
Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.
Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on active duty, took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was posted on the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth, America’s most decorated veteran.
As war inevitably approached, and as she neared her 20-year mark in the Air Force, Kwiatkowski concluded the only way she could viably resist what she now terms the “expansionist, imperialist” policies of the neoconservatives who dominated Iraq policy was by retiring and taking up a public fight against them.
She left the military last March, the same week that troops invaded Iraq. Kwiatkowski started putting her real name on her Web reports and began accepting speaking invitations. “I’m now a soldier for the truth,” she said in a speech last week at Cal Poly Pomona. Afterward, I spoke with her.
L.A. WEEKLY: What was the relationship between NESA and the now-notorious Office of Special Plans, the group set up by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney? Was the OSP, in reality, an intelligence operation to act as counter to the CIA?
KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: The NESA office includes the Iraq desk, as well as the desks of the rest of the region. It is under Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Bill Luti. When I joined them, in May 2002, the Iraq desk was there. We shared the same space, and we were all part of the same general group. At that time it was expanding. Contractors and employees were coming though it wasn’t clear what they were doing.
In August of 2002, the expanded Iraq desk found new spaces and moved into them. It was told to us that this was now to be known as the Office of Special Plans. The Office of Special Plans would take issue with those who say they were doing intelligence. They would say they were developing policy for the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the invasion of Iraq.
But developing policy is not the same as developing propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And actually, that’s more what they really did. They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon — to try and make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United States.
You retired when the war broke out and have been speaking out publicly. But you were already publishing critical reports anonymously while still in uniform and while still on active service. Why did you take that rather unusual step?
Due to my frustration over what I was seeing around me as soon as I joined Bill Luti’s organization, what I was seeing in terms of neoconservative agendas and the way they were being pursued to formulate a foreign policy and a military policy — an invasion of a sovereign country, an occupation, a poorly planned occupation. I was concerned about it; I was in opposition to that, and I was not alone.
So I started writing what I considered to be funny, short essays for my own sanity. Eventually, I e-mailed them to former Colonel David Hackworth, who runs the Web page Soldiers for the Truth, and he published them under the title “Insider Notes From the Pentagon.” I wrote 28 of those columns from August 2002 until I retired.
There you were, a career military officer, a Pentagon analyst, a conservative who had given two decades to this work. What provoked you to become first a covert and later a public dissident?
Like most people, I’ve always thought there should be honesty in government. Working 20 years in the military, I’m sure I saw some things that were less than honest or accountable. But nothing to the degree that I saw when I joined Near East South Asia.
This was creatively produced propaganda spread not only through the Pentagon, but across a network of policymakers — the State Department, with John Bolton; the Vice President’s Office, the very close relationship the OSP had with that office. That is not normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes. Then there was the National Security Council, with certain people who had neoconservative views; Scooter Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff; a network of think tanks who advocated neoconservative views — the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles Krauthammer — was very reliable. So there was just not a process inside the Pentagon that should have developed good honest policy, but it was instead pushing a particular agenda; this group worked in a coordinated manner, across media and parts of the government, with their neoconservative compadres.
How did you experience this in your day-to-day work?
There was a sort of groupthink, an adopted storyline: We are going to invade Iraq and we are going to eliminate Saddam Hussein and we are going to have bases in Iraq. This was all a given even by the time I joined them, in May of 2002.
You heard this in staff meetings?
The discussions were ones of this sort of inevitability. The concerns were only that some policymakers still had to get onboard with this agenda. Not that this agenda was right or wrong — but that we needed to convince the remaining holdovers. Colin Powell, for example. There was a lot of frustration with Powell; they said a lot of bad things about him in the office. They got very angry with him when he convinced Bush to go back to the U.N. and forced a four-month delay in their invasion plans.
General Tony Zinni is another one. Zinni, the combatant commander of Central Command, Tommy Franks’ predecessor — a very well-qualified guy who knows the Middle East inside out, knows the military inside out, a Marine, a great guy. He spoke out publicly as President Bush’s Middle East envoy about some of the things he saw. Before he was removed by Bush, I heard Zinni called a traitor in a staff meeting. They were very anti-anybody who might provide information that affected their paradigm. They were the spin enforcers.
How did this atmosphere affect your work? To be direct, were you told by your superiors what you could say and not say? What could and could not be discussed? Or were opinions they didn’t like just ignored?
I can give you one clear example where we were told to follow the party line, where I was told directly. I worked North Africa, which included Libya. I remember in one case, I had to rewrite something a number of times before it went through. It was a background paper on Libya, and Libya has been working for years to try and regain the respect of the international community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back and change it and change it. They’d make me delete the quotes from intelligence so they could present their case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat to its neighbors and that Libya was still a belligerent, antagonistic force. They edited my reports in that way. In fact, the last report I made, they said, “Just send me the file.” And I don’t know what the report ended up looking like, because I imagine more changes were made.
On Libya, really a small player, the facts did not fit their paradigm that we have all these enemies.
One person you’ve written about is Abe Shulsky. You describe him as a personable, affable fellow but one who played a key role in the official spin that led to war.
Abe was the director of the Office of Special Plans. He was in our shared offices when I joined, in May 2002. He comes from an academic background; he’s definitely a neoconservative. He is a student of Leo Strauss from the University of Chicago — so he has that Straussian academic perspective. He was the final proving authority on all the talking points that were generated from the Office of Special Plans and that were distributed throughout the Pentagon, certainly to staff officers. And it appears to me they were also distributed to the Vice President’s Office and to the presidential speechwriters. Much of the phraseology that was in our talking points consists of the same things I heard the president say.
So Shulsky was the sort of controller, the disciplinarian, the overseeing monitor of the propaganda flow. From where you sat, did you see him manipulate the information?
We had a whole staff to help him do that, and he was the approving authority. I can give you one example of how the talking points were altered. We were instructed by Bill Luti, on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, on behalf of Abe Shulsky, that we would not write anything about Iraq, WMD or terrorism in any papers that we prepared for our superiors except as instructed by the Office of Special Plans. And it would provide to us an electronic document of talking points on these issues. So I got to see how they evolved.
It was very clear to me that they did not evolve as a result of new intelligence, of improved intelligence, or any type of seeking of the truth. The way they evolved is that certain bullets were dropped or altered based on what was being reported on the front pages of the Washington Post or The New York Times.
Can you be specific?
One item that was dropped was in November [2002]. It was the issue of the meeting in Prague prior to 9/11 between Mohammed Atta and a member of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence force. We had had this in our talking points from September through mid-November. And then it dropped out totally. No explanation. Just gone. That was because the media reported that the FBI had stepped away from that, that the CIA said it didn’t happen.
Let’s clarify this. Talking points are generally used to deal with media. But you were a desk officer, not a politician who had to go and deal with the press. So are you saying the Office of Special Plans provided you a schematic, an outline of the way major points should be addressed in any report or analysis that you developed regarding Iraq, WMD or terrorism?
That’s right. And these did not follow the intent, the content or the accuracy of intelligence . . .
They were political . . .
They were political, politically manipulated. They did have obviously bits of intelligence in them, but they were created to propagandize. So we inside the Pentagon, staff officers and senior administration officials who might not work Iraq directly, were being propagandized by this same Office of Special Plans.
In the 10 months you worked in that office in the run-up to the war, was there ever any open debate? The public, at least, was being told at the time that there was a serious assessment going on regarding the level of threat from Iraq, the presence or absence of WMD, et cetera. Was this debated inside your office at the Pentagon?
No. Those things were not debated. To them, Saddam Hussein needed to go.
You believe that decision was made by the time you got there, almost a year before the war?
That decision was made by the time I got there. So there was no debate over WMD, the possible relations Saddam Hussein may have had with terrorist groups and so on. They spent their energy gathering pieces of information and creating a propaganda storyline, which is the same storyline we heard the president and Vice President Cheney tell the American people in the fall of 2002.
The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt them because they are blatantly false and not based on any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice President’s Office were critical in this propaganda effort — to convince Americans that there was some just requirement for pre-emptive war.
What do you believe the real reasons were for the war?
The neoconservatives needed to do more than just topple Saddam Hussein. They wanted to put in a government friendly to the U.S., and they wanted permanent basing in Iraq. There are several reasons why they wanted to do that. None of those reasons, of course, were presented to the American people or to Congress.
So you don’t think there was a genuine interest as to whether or not there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
It’s not about interest. We knew. We knew from many years of both high-level surveillance and other types of shared intelligence, not to mention the information from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush said he didn’t know.
The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn’t have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent — a billion dollars! — by David Kay’s group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn’t find anything, they didn’t expect to find anything.
So if, as you argue, they knew there weren’t any of these WMD, then what exactly drove the neoconservatives to war?
The neoconservatives pride themselves on having a global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And there were three reasons why they felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq.
One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit.
The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter — to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important — that is, if you hold that is America’s role in the world. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us in.
The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 — selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren’t very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro.
The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it’s not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar.
At the time you left the military, a year ago, just how great was the influence of this neoconservative faction on Pentagon policy?
When it comes to Middle East policy, they were in complete control, at least in the Pentagon. There was some debate at the State Department.
Indeed, when you were still in uniform and writing a Web column anonymously, you expressed your bitter disappointment when Secretary of State Powell — in your words — eventually “capitulated.”
He did. When he made his now-famous power-point slide presentation at the U.N., he totally capitulated. It meant he was totally onboard. Whether he believed it or not.
You gave your life to the military, you voted Republican for many years, you say you served in the Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it feel like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old bosses?
Know what it feels like? It feels like duty. That’s what it feels like. I’ve thought about it many times. You know, I spent 20 years working for something that — at least under this administration — turned out to be something I wasn’t working for. I mean, these people have total disrespect for the Constitution. We swear an oath, military officers and NCOs alike swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. These people have no respect for the Constitution. The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum that is a subversion of the Constitution. A pre-emptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not what this country stands for.
What I feel now is that I’m not retired. I still have a responsibility to do my part as a citizen to try and correct the problem.
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/13/news-cooper.php |
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| Trancer-X |
Curveball
| quote: | CIA Analysts Concerned About Faulty Iraq WMD Source Were “Forced to Leave,” Report Says
CIA analysts who expressed concern about the agency’s top source for information about prewar Iraq’s alleged biological weapons programs were “forced to leave” the unit that led analysis of the source’s claims, the presidential Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction said yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 28).
Allegations that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was building mobile biological weapons laboratories were based almost solely on information provided by an Iraqi defector identified as “Curveball,” according to the New York Times.
CIA officials in fall 2002 had never met the defector, who had been providing information through German intelligence officials. With the Bush administration weighing the possibility of an invasion of Iraq, a senior CIA official asked Germany to grant direct access to Curveball. The official was told Curveball had suffered a nervous breakdown, according to the commission report.
“You don’t want to see him because he’s crazy,” the official recalled being told.
There were serious concerns that Curveball might be a “fabricator,” the official learned.
Several senior CIA officials then quietly attempted to stop the United States from using information from Curveball, eventually taking their concerns to then-Deputy Director John McLaughlin and then-Director George Tenet.
The concerns were not relayed to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who used information supplied by Curveball about Iraq’s alleged mobile biological weapons laboratories in his presentation outlining the U.S. case for war at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003.
The night before Powell’s speech, Tenet called the division chief responsible for Iraq intelligence at his home, at which time the official said he told Tenet the Curveball information “has problems,” the Times reported.
Tenet said, “Yeah, yeah,” and then mentioned that he was exhausted, the report states.
Tenet later told the commission said the division chief had not given him such a warning (David Barstow, New York Times, April 1).
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issue...1.html#C4D854F2 |
| quote: | German Intelligence reveals Curveball information was distorted by Bush administration
Highlight:
Five officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, have revealed that the information gathered from their prisoner, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, was exaggerated by President Bush and Colin Powell.
- The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.
- "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case.
- Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year.
- Curveball said he hated Americans, the Germans explained.
- As a result, the DIA --- like the BND --- never tried to check Curveball's background or verify his accounts before sending reports to other U.S. intelligence agencies.
- Moreover, Curveball was "very emotional, very excitable," the doctor told one colleague.
- And although it was early morning, Curveball smelled of liquor and looked "very sick" from a stiff hangover.
- "He was between two worlds, sometimes cooperative, sometimes aggressive," said the BND supervisor.
- MI6 cabled the CIA that British intelligence "is not convinced that Curveball is a wholly reliable source" and that "elements of [his] behavior strike us as typical of ...
- Despite the lack of access or any new reports from Curveball, U.S. intelligence sharply upgraded its assessments of Iraq's biological weapons before the war.
- In March 2004, Killip quit, protesting that the CIA was covering up the truth.
- Rod Barton, an Australian intelligence officer and another bio-weapons expert, also quit over what he said was the CIA's refusal to admit error.
- "Of course the trailers had nothing to do with Curveball," Barton wrote in a recent e-mail.
- After U.S troops failed to find illicit Iraqi weapons in the days and weeks after the invasion, the CIA created the Iraq Survey Group to conduct a methodical search in June 2003.
http://www.counterthink.org/015549.html |
| quote: | "This was not substantial evidence," a senior German intelligence official said. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."
(...)
"We were shocked," the German official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven. ... It was not hard intelligence."
In an interview, Powell said CIA Director George Tenet and his top deputies assured him before the Feb. 5, 2003, speech that intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid." Since then, Powell said, the case "has totally blown up in our faces."
Powell said no one warned him veterans in CIA's clandestine division, including the European division chief, voiced growing doubts about Curveball's credibility.
(...)
"The Iraqis were all laughing when we asked about him," a former CIA investigator said. "They were saying, 'This guy? You've got to be kidding.'"
(...)
U.N. Disproved His Information
U.N. weapons inspectors were the first to disprove Curveball's claims.
On Feb. 8, three days after Powell's speech, U.N. Team Bravo left its Baghdad hotel to conduct the first search of Curveball's alleged former work site. U.N. records show that the U.S.-led team spent 3 1/2 hours at Djerf al Nadaf.
The doors were locked. So Boston microbiologist Rocco Casagrande crawled through a hole in the wall. Inside, he scraped five samples from the walls and floor and tested them for bacterial or viral DNA. The results all came back negative.
Also, Curveball's description of the facility turned out to be faulty.
The U.N. inspectors "could find nothing to corroborate Curveball's reporting," the CIA's Iraq Survey Group reported in October 2004, more than a year after the invasion.
U.N. weapons teams also raided the other sites Curveball had named. They found no evidence of germ trucks or anything else suspicious.
On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix, chief U.N. inspector, told the Security Council that searches had found "no evidence" of mobile biological production facilities in Iraq. It drew little notice at the time.
The invasion of Iraq began two weeks later.
http://www.tampatrib.com/News/MGBJS1KT8GE.html |
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| ogvh5150 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
Not sure I understand.
How to you lie about actual government documents? |
Same way they lied to you they had proof Saddam had those pesky WMD's. Come on now, you don't actually believe that story do you? They're desperately trying to fish for information. They have to sell the story so we can stay in Iraq. The search for WMD's is over officially. Now you have a growing public opinion questioning why we should stay. So you see this story about some training camps.
Who cares that Saddam had training camps. The US has them here and abroad as well. Saddam tortured people as well but unfortunately so do other countries including the US.
If you point a finger there are three pointing back at you
The Post reports that the CIA now has four times as many spies in Iraq as it planned — 300 — making it the largest CIA station in the world, and the largest foreign station since the Saigon office during the Vietnam war.
Rebels: Top Iraq Terrorist Dead
Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot Cached site here
The Devil in the Details: The CIA and Saddam Hussein
How the CIA put the Baath in power
How Western greed created Hussein's Iraq (TA Thread)
In fact, according to Brom, these sources were utterly compromised by Israeli intelligence, which made the case for starting the war and kept it going as long as necessary. The retired general described Israel as a “full partner” in U.S. and British intelligence failures that exaggerated Iraqi President Saddam Hussain’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs in the lead up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Israeli intelligence sources and political leaders provided “an exaggerated assessment of Iraqi capabilities,” raising “the possibility that the intelligence had been manipulated,” wrote Brom, former deputy chief of planning for the Israeli army.
Israeli Intel given to US
CIA report finds no Zarqawi-Saddam link
(1998) Officials: Iran Messages About Anti-Saddam Plot Led to FBI Probe of CIA
Combine the article about the 300 spooks with this:
A new classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.
Iraq May Be Prime Place for Training of Militants, C.I.A. Report Concludes
The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media
William Colby Director of Central Intelligence
CIA
Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind
General William Westmoreland United States Army
You furnish the pictures and I will furnish the war
William Randolph Hearst
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media
Noam Chomsky
On the death of former CIA DCI Colby from wikipedia:
On April 27, 1996, Colby died in an apparent boating accident near his home in Rock Point, Maryland. He reportedly did not mention any canoeing plans to his wife, nor was it normal for him to go boating at night. Colby's body was eventually found, underwater, on May 6, 1996. The lifevest his friends said he usually wore was missing. The body was found 20 yards from the canoe, after the area had been thoroughly searched multiple times. The subsequent inquest found that he died from drowning and hypothermia after collapsing from a heart attack or stroke and falling out of his canoe. He was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery on May 13, 1996.
The remake of The Manchurian Candidate pays homage to this odd event with the death of a rival Senator who confronts evidence of mind control. |
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