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The diplomat
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Terre Haute, IN USA
Sep 1999
time: 23:20
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quote:
Russia tied to Iraq's missing arms
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.
John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.
"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."
Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.
Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.
The Russian involvement in helping disperse Saddam's weapons, including some 380 tons of RDX and HMX, is still being investigated, Mr. Shaw said.
The RDX and HMX, which are used to manufacture high-explosive and nuclear weapons, are probably of Russian origin, he said.
Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita could not be reached for comment.
The disappearance of the material was reported in a letter Oct. 10 from the Iraqi government to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Disclosure of the missing explosives Monday in a New York Times story was used by the Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, who accused the Bush administration of failing to secure the material.
Al-Qaqaa, a known Iraqi weapons site, was monitored closely, Mr. Shaw said.
"That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Mr. Shaw said. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."
The Pentagon disclosed yesterday that the Al-Qaqaa facility was defended by Fedayeen Saddam, Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi military units during the conflict. U.S. forces defeated the defenders around April 3 and found the gates to the facility open, the Pentagon said in a statement yesterday.
A military unit in charge of searching for weapons, the Army's 75th Exploitation Task Force, then inspected Al-Qaqaa on May 8, May 11 and May 27, 2003, and found no high explosives that had been monitored in the past by the IAEA.
The Pentagon said there was no evidence of large-scale movement of explosives from the facility after April 6.
"The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd Infantry Division's arrival at the facility," the statement said.
The statement also said that the material may have been removed from the site by Saddam's regime.
According to the Pentagon, U.N. arms inspectors sealed the explosives at Al-Qaqaa in January 2003 and revisited the site in March and noted that the seals were not broken.
It is not known whether the inspectors saw the explosives in March. The U.N. team left the country before the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, 2003.
A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq reveal that Saddam's government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to provide security for Iraq's Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.
The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to U.S. and Western demands, this official said.
A small portion of Iraq's 650,000 tons to 1 million tons of conventional arms that were found after the war were looted after the U.S.-led invasion, Mr. Shaw said. Russia was Iraq's largest foreign supplier of weaponry, he said.
However, the most important and useful arms and explosives appear to have been separated and moved out as part of carefully designed program. "The organized effort was done in advance of the conflict," Mr. Shaw said.
The Russian forces were tasked with moving special arms out of the country.
Mr. Shaw said foreign intelligence officials believe the Russians worked with Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence service to separate out special weapons, including high explosives and other arms and related technology, from standard conventional arms spread out in some 200 arms depots.
The Russian weapons were then sent out of the country to Syria, and possibly Lebanon in Russian trucks, Mr. Shaw said.
Mr. Shaw said he believes that the withdrawal of Russian-made weapons and explosives from Iraq was part of plan by Saddam to set up a "redoubt" in Syria that could be used as a base for launching pro-Saddam insurgency operations in Iraq.
The Russian units were dispatched beginning in January 2003 and by March had destroyed hundreds of pages of documents on Russian arms supplies to Iraq while dispersing arms to Syria, the second official said.
Besides their own weapons, the Russians were supplying Saddam with arms made in Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria and other Eastern European nations, he said.
"Whatever was not buried was put on lorries and sent to the Syrian border," the defense official said.
Documents reviewed by the official included itineraries of military units involved in the truck shipments to Syria. The materials outlined in the documents included missile components, MiG jet parts, tank parts and chemicals used to make chemical weapons, the official said.
The director of the Iraqi government front company known as the Al Bashair Trading Co. fled to Syria, where he is in charge of monitoring arms holdings and funding Iraqi insurgent activities, the official said.
Also, an Arabic-language report obtained by U.S. intelligence disclosed the extent of Russian armaments. The 26-page report was written by Abdul Tawab Mullah al Huwaysh, Saddam's minister of military industrialization, who was captured by U.S. forces May 2, 2003.
The Russian "spetsnaz" or special-operations forces were under the GRU military intelligence service and organized large commercial truck convoys for the weapons removal, the official said.
Regarding the explosives, the new Iraqi government reported that 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or high-melting-point explosive, and 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or rapid-detonation explosive, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, were missing.
The material is used in nuclear weapons and also in making military "plastic" high explosive.
Defense officials said the Russians can provide information on what happened to the Iraqi weapons and explosives that were transported out of the country. Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. |
http://www.washtimes.com/national/2...22637-6257r.htm
Why can't you admit the truth that the explosives were removed before the invasion?
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Ramo
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Austin, Texas, USA
Oct 1999
time: 23:20
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Because the claim is entirely based on a single person who hadn't provided any evidence, the Pentagon spokesman rejected the idea, and the Russians contradicted the claim:
quote:
The Russian embassy in Washington rejected the claims as “nonsense”, saying there were no Russian military in the country at the time.
Mr Shaw, who heads the Pentagon’s international armament and technology trade directorate, has not provided evidence for his claims and the Pentagon distanced itself from his remarks.
“I am unaware of any particular information on that point,” said Larry Di Rita, Pentagon spokesman. |
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a4bc50c6-2...000e2511c8.html
Why do you bother posting anything from the Moonies? They're hacks, not journalist.
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Ramo
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Austin, Texas, USA
Oct 1999
time: 23:20
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Those hack claims have already been refuted. In this thread. In response to your own posts. Multiple times.
To repeat:
quote:
The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.
Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.
"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already." |
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/p...print&position=
quote:
AR: Was there a search at all underway or was, did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?
LLJ: No. There wasn't a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. |
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ar...0_24.php#003804
As for the roads supposedly being secure, no one has said that the roads have been secure for the past year and a half. In fact, no one has said how secure the roads were initially. How many troops were posted? How many check points? In fact, this claim is contradicted by eye-witness Iraqis employed at the place, who describe an "orgy of looting."
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Drachasor
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quote:
Originally posted by Patroklos
Allawi government has said the explosives are missing, and that the DON'T KNOW when they went missing. Why exactly would Allawi know anyting about clandestine Russian activities prior to the war. He could agree with me and I would still say he was talking out of his ass.
And why the hell would I believe the first hand reports of three seperate inspection by US Special Forces who are probobly the most skilled at their profession in the world. |
Hello? The 101st Airborne didn't inspect ANYTHING. How many times do you have to read the news before you comprehend it. No inspection was done until late May.
HMX explosives are still uncertain.
In any case, the fact the Bush Administration already admitted it didn't and doesn't have the troops necessary to secure all the compounds containing dangerous explosives is a pretty shocking admission.
-Drachasor
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Ramo
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Austin, Texas, USA
Oct 1999
time: 23:20
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quote:
Allawi government has said the explosives are missing, and that the DON'T KNOW when they went missing. |
They said that they KNOW the explosives went missing after April 9, 2003. Scott McClellan has conirmed this earlier. Further, the head of the science ministry KNOWS that the explosives were not moved before the invasion.
In addition, the IAEA has strong evidence that they were not moved earlier than a week before the invasion, and certainly not before January. And now David Kay has said, "I must say, I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war, and we didn't spot it on satellite or UAV. That is, because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south, was a road that was constantly under surveillance. I also don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry it off in the dead of night or during the day and not use the road network."
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRI.../27/wbr.01.html
quote:
Why exactly would Allawi know anyting about clandestine Russian activities prior to the war. He could agree with me and I would still say he was talking out of his ass. |
As I said, the Pentagon itself has denied this story any credibility (in addition to the Russians, and in addition to the story being all on one man's words - who has a vested interest in lying). In addition to be ludicrous on its surface.
quote:
And why the hell would I believe the first hand reports of three seperate inspection by US Special Forces who are probobly the most skilled at their profession in the world. |
I'm still waiting for these "first hand reports." As far as I can see Boykin, who was taken off the field and given a job in the Defense Department called the War on Terror a religious Crusade, is the only person who has confirmed the existence of these inspections, as reported by the Moonies.
The Washingon Times have carried plenty of hack pieces on this story, including two other claims by the media about inspections revealing the explosives gone, and they ended up being totally wrong, taking material out of context, etc. So I'm not confident about their new "evidence."
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Ramo
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Austin, Texas, USA
Oct 1999
time: 23:20
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New evidence backing up the Times story (again courtesy of Josh Marshall  ):
As I just pointed out, David Kay has said:
quote:
I must say, I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war, and we didn't spot it on satellite or UAV. That is, because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south, was a road that was constantly under surveillance. I also don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry it off in the dead of night or during the day and not use the road network. |
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRI.../27/wbr.01.html
What the units from the 3rd found:
quote:
In the first of yesterday's discoveries, the 3rd Infantry Division entered the vast Qa Qaa chemical and explosives production plant and came across thousands of vials of white powder, packed three to a box. The engineers also found stocks of atropine and pralidoxime, also known as 2-PAM chloride, which can be used to treat exposure to nerve agents but is also used to treat poisoning by organic phosphorus pesticides. Alongside those materials were documents written in Arabic that, as interpreted at the scene, appeared to include discussions of chemical warfare.
This morning, however, investigators said initial tests indicated the white powder was not a component of a chemical weapon. "On first analysis it does not appear to be a chemical that could be used in a chemical weapons attack," Col. John Peabody, commander of the division's engineering brigade, told a Reuters reporter with his unit. |
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...4¬Found=true
The AP added:
quote:
A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives. The finding would be consistent with the plant's stated production capabilities in the field of basic raw materials for explosives and propellants. |
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/n...readiness01.htm
And RDX and HMX are white powders:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milit...-nitramines.htm
Looks like the soldiers found it after all.
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Mordoch
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Denver, Colorado
Jan 2002
time: 05:20
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The problem is that the Pentagon disagrees with the Washinton Times story.
The Pentagon is now saying they have absolutely no intelligence to support the Washington Times claim, this includes all sorts of Pentagon officials a CNN reporter interviewed.
Donald Rumsfeld was part of a WABC radio interview that made just a few hours ago, and said that he lacked any information to verify the story. The Pentagon has also said John Shaw was "not speaking for the Pentagon". I know the Lou Dobbs program on CNN repeats in a couple hours if you want to see the report.
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28-10-2004 16:38
Invade France!
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