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EducateWorthington.org

The 912 Project - Glenn Beck

912 Group of Central Ohio

Please let me know if you'd like your link added

[Edmund Burke]

I think we need a single thread to bring together all the evidence that supports President Bush's decision to invade Iraq.  Let's start with a piece from Tech Central Station:

____________________________________________
The Iraq -- Al Qaeda Connections
 
By Richard Miniter  Published   09/25/2003  
 
Every day it seems another American soldier is killed in Iraq. These grim statistics have become a favorite of network news anchors and political chat show hosts. Nevermind that they mix deaths from accidents with actual battlefield casualties; or that the average is actually closer to one American death for every two days; or that enemy deaths far outnumber ours. What matters is the overall impression of mounting, pointless deaths.

That is why is important to remember why we fight in Iraq -- and who we fight. Indeed, many of those sniping at U.S. troops are al Qaeda terrorists operating inside Iraq. And many of bin Laden's men were in Iraq prior to the liberation. A wealth of evidence on the public record -- from government reports and congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers -- attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam going back to 1994.

Those who try to whitewash Saddam's record don't dispute this evidence; they just ignore it. So let's review the evidence, all of it on the public record for months or years:

* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.

* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.

* Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell.

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man.

(Why are all of those meetings significant? The London Observer reports that FBI investigators cite a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, which "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.")

* As recently as 2001, Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports.

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'"

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

*The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.

* In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell.

* That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.

*Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post.

* Mohammad Atef, the head of al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to Iraq."

* Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddam's regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.

* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad.

* Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad."

* After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq.

Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden.

In fact, there are plenty of "Stalin-Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists and Muslim dictators. Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common purposes and interlocking needs. They shared a powerful hate for America and the Saudi royal family. They both saw the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had repeatedly vowed to avenge. Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on the holy sands of Arabia. Al Qaeda's avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam.

The most compelling reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives have testified in federal courts that the terror network was always desperate for cash. Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (the Egyptians made more). One al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor.

Bin Laden's personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization. Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as some imagine. Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001 wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small school district, not a global terror conglomerate. Meanwhile, Forbes estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion.

So a common enemy, a shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden. CIA Director George Tenet recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B. In the hands of al Qaeda, this would be a fearsome weapon in an enclosed space -- like a suburban mall or subway station.

Mr. Miniter is a senior fellow at the Center for the New Europe and author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery) which is now on the New York Times' bestseller list.



Copyright © 2004 Tech Central Station - www.techcentralstation.com

[Edmund Burke]

Then there is this.  Not very good playground equipment, unless we are talking about VERY dangerous children.  This is near Baghdad.[/size]

[Edmund Burke]

And then there is this, direct from the horse's mouth (the UN commission in charge of WMD).  Seems a lot of dangerous junk has been shipped out of Iraq over several months.

________________________________________________
UN inspectors: Saddam shipped out WMD before war and after

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Friday, June 11, 2004

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program.

The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.

UNMOVIC acting executive chairman Demetrius Perricos told the council on June 9 that "the only controls at the borders are for the weight of the scrap metal, and to check whether there are any explosive or radioactive materials within the scrap," Middle East Newsline reported.
"It's being exported," Perricos said after the briefing. "It's being traded out. And there is a large variety of scrap metal from very new to very old, and slowly, it seems the country is depleted of metal."

"The removal of these materials from Iraq raises concerns with regard to proliferation risks," Perricos told the council. Perricos also reported that inspectors found Iraqi WMD and missile components shipped abroad that still contained UN inspection tags.

He said the Iraqi facilities were dismantled and sent both to Europe and around the Middle East. at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. Destionations included Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey.

The Baghdad missile site contained a range of WMD and dual-use components, UN officials said. They included missile components, reactor vessel and fermenters – the latter required for the production of chemical and biological warheads.
"It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for," Ewen Buchanan, Perricos's spokesman, said. "You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter. You can also use it to breed anthrax."

The UNMOVIC report said Iraqi missiles were dismantled and exported to such countries as Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey. In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, an SA-2 surface-to-air missile, one of at least 12, was discovered in a junk yard, replete with UN tags. In Jordan, UN inspectors found 20 SA-2 engines as well as components for solid-fuel for missiles.

"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," Buchanan said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors."

UN inspectors have assessed that the SA-2 and the short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missile were shipped abroad by agents of the Saddam regime. Buchanan said UNMOVIC plans to inspect other sites, including in Turkey.

In April, International Atomic Energy Agency director-general Mohammed El Baradei said material from Iraqi nuclear facilities were being smuggled out of the country.
 

[Edmund Burke]

And then there is this funny little plot in Jordan...my oh my, since Syria can't produce these chemicals, I wonder where they came from?  Hmm...

___________________________________________________
Officials: Chemical Attacks Thwarted in Jordan

Sunday, April 18, 2004

AMMAN, Jordan — An Al Qaeda-linked terrorist cell recently dismantled in Jordan was plotting to detonate a chemical bomb capable of killing thousands of people and to attack the U.S. Embassy and prime minister's office with poison gas, officials said Saturday.

Officials close to the investigation told The Associated Press that several terror suspects arrested in Jordan last month have confessed the plots were hatched by Jordanian militant Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, thought to be a close associate of Al Qaeda boss Usama bin Laden.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the terrorist cell was planning to attack Jordan's secret service — the General Intelligence Department — with a chemical bomb that would have killed as many as 20,000 people and caused large-scale destruction within a half-mile radius.

Jordan's King Abdullah II said this week in a published letter of thanks to his intelligence chief, Gen. Saad Kheir, that the arrests of the terror cell members have "saved thousands of lives."

In his letter, Abdullah said that had the chemical bomb plot not been uncovered, Jordan would have seen "a crime that would have been unprecedented in the country in terms of the size of explosives mounted on the vehicles and the methods of carrying out the attacks or the civilian locations chosen."

On Saturday, the officials told the AP that the terror cell was also apparently planning to carry out simultaneous poison gas attacks against foreign diplomatic missions, including the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy in Amman, vital Jordanian public establishments like the prime minister's office and unspecified civilian targets.

They declined to elaborate, but stressed the plot had been foiled with the arrests late last month and earlier this month of an unspecified number of terrorist suspects.

Jordanian officials say the arrests occurred after suspected militants entered Jordan from neighboring Syria in at least three vehicles filled with explosives, detonators and raw material to be used in bomb-making.

Syrian officials have denied the claims.

Among those arrested last week were two Palestinian militants identified as Suleiman Darweesh and Muwafaq Adwan, thought to be close associates of al-Zarqawi.

Another Palestinian militant, Azmi al-Jayoussi, is thought to be at large.

U.S. officials have offered a $10 million reward for al-Zarqawi's capture, saying he is trying to build a network of foreign militants in neighboring Iraq to work on Al Qaeda's behalf.

Al-Zarqawi is suspected of connection to about a dozen high-profile attacks in Iraq, including the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in August and Shiite religious ceremonies last month. Moroccan authorities believe he may have helped guide the Madrid train bombings. U.S. and Jordanian law enforcement say he funded the Oct. 2002 assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan.

Jordan, a moderate Arab nation with close ties to America and a peace treaty with Israel, has been targeted by Al Qaeda and other terrorists. Twenty-two Islamic extremists were convicted of plotting to attack U.S. and Israeli tourists during the kingdom's millennium celebrations.
 

[Edmund Burke]

And then of course there is this one stray shell with a sarin warhead...old and unmarked, true.  Hmm...can we assume that where there's one there's more?  Almost certainly.

_______________________________________________________
Tests Confirm Sarin in Baghdad Roadside Bomb (from Fox News)

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

WASHINGTON  — Comprehensive testing has confirmed the presence of the chemical weapon sarin (search) in the remains of a roadside bomb discovered this month in Baghdad, a defense official said Tuesday.

The determination, made by a laboratory in the United States that the official would not identify, verifies what earlier, less-thorough field tests had found: the bomb was made from an artillery shell designed to disperse the deadly nerve agent on the battlefield.

The origin of the shell remains unclear, and finding that out is a priority for the U.S. military, the defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Some analysts worry the 155-millimeter artillery shell, found rigged as a bomb on May 15, may be part of a larger stockpile of Iraqi chemical weapons that insurgents can now use. But no more have turned up, and several military officials have said the shell may have been an older one that predated the 1991 Gulf War.  

Click Here to Read the Weapons of Mass Destruction Handbook

It likewise is not known whether the bombers knew they had a chemical weapon. Military officials have said the shell bore no labels to indicate it was anything except a normal explosive shell, the type used to make scores of roadside bombs in Iraq.

No one was injured in the shell's initial detonation, but two American soldiers who removed the round had symptoms of low-level nerve agent exposure, officials said last week.

The shell was a binary type, which has two chambers containing relatively safe chemicals. When the round is fired from an artillery gun, its rotation mixes the chemicals to create sarin, which is supposed to disperse when the shell strikes its target.

Since it was not fired from a gun but was detonated as a bomb, the initial explosion on May 15 dispersed the precursor chemicals, apparently mixing them in only small amounts, officials said then. In battle, such shells would have to be fired in great numbers to effect a large body of troops.

Iraq's first field-test of a binary-type shell containing sarin was in 1988, U.S. defense officials have said.

Saddam's government only disclosed the testing and production after Iraqi weapons chief Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid (search), Saddam's son-in-law, defected in 1995. Saddam's government never declared any sarin or shells filled with sarin remained.

Saddam's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (search) was the Bush administration's chief stated reason for invading Iraq. U.S. weapons hunters have been unable to validate the prewar intelligence.

Some trace elements of mustard agent (search), an older type of chemical weapon, were detected in an artillery shell found in a Baghdad street this month, U.S. officials said previously. The shell also was believed to be from one of Saddam's old stockpiles.

 

[Edmund Burke]

And what about all these terrorist training camps that have been found -- perhaps Saddam was only "fixin'" to go into the terrorist business?

_________________________________________________________________
Marines Discover Terror Training Camp Near Baghdad (Fox News)

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq  — U.S. forces came upon a recently abandoned terrorist training camp on the outskirts of Baghdad where recruits were apparently taught how to make bombs and what to do if they got captured, the Marines said Wednesday.

The extensive camp consisted of about 20 permanent buildings on 25 acres south of the city and was operated by the Iraqi government and the Palestine Liberation Front, said Marine spokesman Cpl. John Hoellwarth.

Among the documents found were filled-out questionnaires that included such questions as "What type of missions would you like to carry out?" according to Hoellwarth. He said many recruits wanted to carry out suicide missions.

The camp included an obstacle course and what appeared to be a prison, to teach terrorists what to do if captured and interrogated, Hoellwarth said.

Recruits were also apparently taught how to make bombs, he said. The Marines found chemicals, beakers and pipes.

Hoellwarth said uniforms and gas masks were also left behind, along with bread and other food, suggesting the place had been used fairly recently.

 

[White House Suggests Media Explain Cover Up of Saddam Atrocity Video]

White House Suggests Media Explain Cover Up of Saddam Atrocity Video

By Jeff Gannon
Talon News
June 18, 2004

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan denied that the White House had a role in keeping a gruesome video of atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein's regime from the media. When asked by Talon News on Thursday to explain the virtual news blackout of the horrific images of Iraqis being beheaded, tongues being cut out, and fingers being chopped off, McClellan said that he'd "leave it to the media to address those issues."

McClellan pointed out that Saddam Hussein has a long history of brutal crimes against his own people and his neighbors.

"It is important to remind people of the atrocities that Saddam Hussein's regime committed," McClellan said.

The press secretary indicated that he thought the information in the video would emerge at Saddam's trial.

"It's important to remember that this was a regime that had mass graves, torture rooms, and rape rooms, and engaged in the kinds of atrocities that no one should stand for," McClellan told Talon News. "And I don't think the Iraqi people will ever let people forget those atrocities."

The video was shown at a June 8 event at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington, DC think tank. It was part of a presentation and panel discussion that included former Pentagon official Richard Perle, AEI scholar Michael Ledeen, and several victims of Saddam's torture. Those victims had recently been guests of President Bush in the Oval Office, having been brought to the United States to receive prosthetic hands to replace ones severed by the members of Iraq's brutal regime.

The four-minute video is a small fraction of the footage held by the Pentagon that documents the horrors of Saddam Hussein's regime. It is available on the AEI web site.

Television networks have yet to broadcast the video and few news outlets have reported on the video at all, instead filling their reports with details of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Deborah Orin, Washington Bureau Chief for the New York Post, reported that the New York Times has written 177 stories on Abu Ghraib -- over 40 of them on the front page, but have yet to write a single story about the victims who participated in the AEI event.

One of the victims, 47 year-old Hassam Ghadar Kavam, said, "I feel very disappointed that the media till now didn't show Saddam's crimes against humanity. These type of actions or crimes, by themselves, they should be enough to silence those who defend Saddam Hussein."

He added, "I question why we see only these films in special projections in special meetings and not be open to the public for the rest of the people to see it, and I hope that will happen soon."

Another of the men, Nazar Abdul Rava Jhudi, a 41 year-old Baghdad resident, warned that many of those who committed atrocities are still at large.

"They took our hands. They amputated parts, and they took it to be shown to Saddam Hussein directly," Jhudi said. "[T]hey are the same people who are killing the American soldiers right now."

The Abu Ghraib photos have obscured the prison's nightmarish past, only mentioned in passing by the Western media. Few Americans or Iraqis are aware that under Saddam Hussein, some 30,000 people were executed there and countless more were tortured and mutilated.

Veronique Rodman, a spokesman for AEI, told Talon News that the event was lightly attended, despite their usual process that directly contacts over 40 assignment desks of national news organizations. Rodman did not recall exactly which news agencies sent reporters at the time of the interview, but did mention that Al Jazeera sent a cameraman.

Perle commented on the sparse attendance, saying, "I've been in many meetings related to Iraq over the last few years. This room was generally full and the room next to it full. It isn't today. I think it's obvious that the interest on the part of the press in this story is a good deal less than the interest on the part of the press in other stories, including obviously stories about Abu Ghraib today."

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) addressed the subject of media bias in a press release following his recent visit to the newly liberated country of 25 million people.

He said, "I can assure you that you're not getting a balanced perspective from the media."

King is concerned about the demoralizing effect on American troops of the negative reporting on Iraq.

King reported that Chief Warrant Officer Alan Ruzicka of Cedar Rapids told him, "U.S. public support is the most important weapon our troops can have. We'll win this faster if we can get the media to follow the traditional Iowa way-straight up-the black and white truth."

King also quoted Captain Ken Richards of Des Moines as saying, "The U.S. news media is the only ally of al Qaeda and the insurgents."

The Iowa congressman said, "While our soldiers are in the Middle East fighting the worldwide war on terror, the liberal press corps is acting as the enemy within."

King believes that the media is determined to defeat President Bush, even at the cost of losing the war in Iraq and consequently the war on terror.

He said, "We can lose this war, and if it is lost, it will be lost at home, not in Iraq. All it takes is for the American public to lose faith in our leaders and our cause."

 

Dain, this is a great thread.

Putin gave President Bush intellegence that Iraq was planning to attack the US.

"After Sept. 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, the Russian special services, the intelligence service, received information that officials from Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States and outside it against the U.S. military and other interests," Putin said

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...?nav=rss_nation

Reasons for going to war. Note there are far far far more reasons given than just WMDs. But then again we knew Liberals have to lie to make their point.

I have reluctantly concluded, along with other coalition leaders, that only the use of armed force will accomplish these objectives and restore international peace and security in the area. I have also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. United States objectives also support a transition to democracy in Iraq, as contemplated by the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-338).

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/21/...prj.irq.letter/
 

[Besides the SA-2 engines, inspectors also found Iraqi “dual use” technology in Jordan, items purportedly employed in civilian affairs that can be used to create or enhance deadly weapons systems. The New York Times noted that among those items were “fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel - all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons.”]

Love that photo of Bush...his blood might be blue, but the boy is pure Texican!  West Texas'll do that to ya, padna!

Here's a FrongPage Mag article that gives more detail about shipments of WMDs out of Iraq.  It's pretty extensive, actually.  I've added emphasis at key points.

__________________________________________________
Exporting Saddam's WMDs
By Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 18, 2004


The assertion that Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction prior to last year’s liberation has been rendered absurd – by United Nations weapons inspectors.

Demetrius Perricos, acting chairman of UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), recently disclosed that his inspectors have been busily tracking shipments of illicit Iraqi WMD components around the world.

The Associated Press announced that UNMOVIC inspectors have found dozens of engines from banned al-Samoud 2 (SA2) missiles, which were shipped out of Iraq as “scrap metal.” Most recently, UNMOVIC agents found 20 SA-2 engines in Jordan, along with a great deal of other WMD materials. Officials discovered an identical engine in a Rotterdam port in the Netherlands and believe as many as a dozen extra SA-2 missile engines alone have been transported out of Iraq and remain unaccounted for. Inspectors believe at least some of these engines have also reached Turkey and hope to search Turkish ports in the near future.

UNMOVIC estimates as much as 1,000 tons of scrap metal a day are leaving Iraq bound for foreign shores.

Besides the SA-2 engines, inspectors also found Iraqi “dual use” technology in Jordan, items purportedly employed in civilian affairs that can be used to create or enhance deadly weapons systems. The New York Times noted that among those items were “fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel - all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons.”

UN spokesman Ewen Buchanan put the threat of “dual use” technology into perspective. “You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter,” Buchanan said. “You can also use it to breed anthrax.”

Before the war, Saddam’s regime cast its possession of “dual use” materials in the most innocent light, a ruse familiar to students of the Cold War. UNMOVIC wisely rejected his sunny assessment.

Today, UNMOVIC inspectors are deeply concerned about the possibility of WMD proliferation. A Reuters news story captures their distress:

‘A number of sites which contained dual-use equipment that was previously monitored by UN inspectors has [sic.] been systematically taken apart,’ said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the New York-based inspectors. ‘The question this raises is what happened to equipment known to have been there.

‘Where is it now? It's a concern,’ Buchanan asked.

‘The existence of missile engines originating in Iraq among scrap in Europe may affect the accounting of proscribed engines known to have been in Iraq's possession,’ UNMOVIC said.

The report said the U.N. inspectors also found papers showing illegal contracts by Iraq for a missile guidance system, laser ring gyroscopes and a variety of production and testing equipment not previously disclosed.

Many of the “dual use” components UNMOVIC found in foreign ports had been previous tagged by UN inspectors in Iraq before the war. And transfers are taking place rapidly. During his presentation, Perricos showed the Security Council a picture of a fully developed missile site in May 2003 that had been entirely torn down by February of this year.

Perricos’ June 9 testimony is made all the more credible by the fact that he is hardly a neo-con stalwart. USA Today described his mindset just three months ago: “Demetrius Perricos, acting head of the United Nations weapons inspection program, can't disguise his satisfaction that almost a year after the invasion of Iraq, U.S. inspectors have found the same thing that their much-maligned UN counterparts did before the war: no banned weapons.” Today, Perricos’ smile has disappeared.

(It should be noted that Perricos was honest enough to say the Iraqis were dragging their feet in destroying banned missiles just a month before Operation Iraqi Freedom began. He said at the time that Saddam viewed a partial and halting disarmament as a “way by which the possibility of war is being further avoided.” He added: “I cannot tell whether he genuinely believes in the inspection process or not.” Evidently, the fact that Saddam expelled all UN inspectors during the Clinton administration wasn’t a clue to the UN’s Sherlock Holmes.)

These revelations came during a closed meeting of the UN Security Council held last Wednesday, June 9. However, the investigations are not new. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) launched its own probe into Iraqi WMD transfers a full six months ago, when a Dutch scrap metal company discovered five pounds of yellowcake uranium ore in Rotterdam. The sample was shipped from Jordan but Jordanian officials said the metal originated in Iraq. (Perhaps this is the yellowcake that atomic sleuth Amb. Joe Wilson insisted Iraq never purchased from Niger.) IAEA Director Mohammed El Baradei warned two months ago that evidence of Saddam’s WMDs is being shipped abroad.

Jordan has been the recipient of Iraqi WMDs in the past. Most recently, Jordan seized 20 tons of chemical weapons while foiling an al-Qaeda plot to kill 80,000 people. The stockpile they uncovered contained 70 different kinds of chemical agents, including Sarin and VX gas. (Remember, last month Iraqi insurgents lobbed two chemical weapons at U.S. troops armed with Sarin and mustard gas.)

On April 17, Jordanian King Abdallah claimed these poisons came from Syria – but experts say Syria only has the capacity to produce small amounts of these weapons, not the 20 tons al-Qaeda possessed. Significantly, David Kay and others have said Syria acted as a depository for Saddam’s WMDs. Former Justice Department official John Loftus has made a compelling case that even  more WMDs are presently buried in Syria. And these are merely the latest in a long line of WMD discoveries, inside Iraq and out.

You may be forgiven if this is news to you: The mainstream media have chosen to ignore or downplay the significance of the UN’s vindication of President Bush’s policies. In fact, the predictably left-leaning Reuters news service blamed these WMD shipments…on America. Reuters wrote that “the U.S.-led occupation force” had not adequately “protected sites or items that inspectors tagged before the war because of their potential use in weapons of mass destruction.”

Apparently, one must live in Australia to get the truth. The Sunday Times’ headline? “UN uncovers banned weapons.”

The discovery of banned WMD engines should forever silence those who believe Saddam had no stockpile of weapons, or that all such stockpiles were destroyed before the war. Saddam gassed his own people. He had WMDs that miraculously ended up in the hands of Jordanian al-Qaeda terrorists. And now we find his pre-war armory of chemical and biological weapons, including anthrax agents, is being shipped around the world. The fact that these transfers have taken place in an independent Iraq should only reinforce the righteousness of toppling Saddam. In a post-Saddam Iraq, these weapons are being found in shipyards in the Netherlands and Jordan; had Saddam stayed in power, more and more of them may have ended up in the hands of Osama bin Laden. UNMOVIC’s finding is simply further evidence that Operation Iraqi Freedom was justified – and the opposition was willfully ignorant of the threat Saddam Hussein posed to American security.

 

It's pretty extensive, actually.  I've added emphasis at key points.
 

I love this idea of emphasizing the key points (especially for someone like me that's forced to scan the articles because of time constraints.

9/11 Commission Fails to Connect Terror Dots
Friday, June 18, 2004
By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
The 9/11 Commission’s (search) conclusion that “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States” does not augur well for the rest of the panel’s inquiry.  

If the members of the commission could not connect dots that are all too obvious – or recognize their staff’s inability to do so – it seems likely that their work will fall short in other important areas as well.

The commission has allowed itself to be used as a political instrument by critics of President Bush and his liberation of Iraq.  This is the ineluctable result of the shortcomings of its staff report, so brilliantly illuminated by Andrew McCarthy in an essay published today by National Review Online.

 
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,123124,00.html

Images Show Iran May Be Hiding Nuke Plants
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,123081,00.html

Images Show Iran May Be Hiding Nuke Plants
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,123081,00.html

Images Show Iran May Be Hiding Nuke Plants
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,123081,00.html

[my determination that further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq, nor lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.]

This is the letter Bush sent to Congress:

Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)

On March 18, 2003, I made available to you, consistent with section 3(B) of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), my determination that further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq, nor lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

I have reluctantly concluded, along with other coalition leaders, that only the use of armed force will accomplish these objectives and restore international peace and security in the area. I have also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. United States objectives also support a transition to democracy in Iraq, as contemplated by the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-338).

Consistent with the War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148), I now inform you that pursuant to my authority as Commander in Chief and consistent with the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1) and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), I directed U.S. Armed Forces, operating with other coalition forces, to commence combat operations on March 19, 2003, against Iraq.

These military operations have been carefully planned to accomplish our goals with the minimum loss of life among coalition military forces and to innocent civilians. It is not possible to know at this time either the duration of active combat operations or the scope or duration of the deployment of U.S. Armed Forces necessary to accomplish our goals fully.

As we continue our united efforts to disarm Iraq in pursuit of peace, stability, and security both in the Gulf region and in the United States, I look forward to our continued consultation and cooperation.

Sincerely,

GEORGE W. BUSH

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/21/...prj.irq.letter/