BOMBSHELL, but really we knew this, didnt we?

[Peregrinator]

Damn Pergy, you got tiny boob in your sig.

Have you been reading the marathon thread?

 

[Peregrinator]

Which enclave?

 

[Fagin]

Have you been reading the marathon thread?

No I haven't.

 

[Peregrinator]

No I haven't.

Take a look at the last couple pages.

 

[busybody..]

enclave ( P ) Pronunciation Key (nklv, n-)
n.
A country or part of a country lying wholly within the boundaries of another.
A distinctly bounded area enclosed within a larger unit: ethnic enclaves in a large city.


if you have follwed my postings on several threads you will have seen many references to enclaves thruout Euro-pee

I have no intention of going thru them again

Soory

 

[Peregrinator]

enclave ( P ) Pronunciation Key (nklv, n-)
n.
A country or part of a country lying wholly within the boundaries of another.
A distinctly bounded area enclosed within a larger unit: ethnic enclaves in a large city.


if you have follwed my postings on several threads you will have seen many references to enclaves thruout Euro-pee

I have no intention of going thru them again

Soory

But you claim they are not subject to the laws of the country they are in, and you have never named one for which that is true. You made it up, just like the media outlets you're always bitching about.

 

[busybody..]

let me say again

When Sean says my links are "no good" he is saying in fact that the NEWS reported IS A LIE

When I say someone's opinion piece is bogus or biased, is different then what he is doing

My assumption is that EVEN you can differentate between them

Since however you are a SIMPLETON I will give you a simple example


Lets assume the drunk on the street, who has ZERO credibility say that the Yankees beat the Angels 3-2, that is either fact or not and can be verified easily. The fact that it comes from a totally unreliable source is not relevant


Lets say a brilliant man gives his opinions about a topic, despite the source, his opinions CAN be disputed for a variety of reasons!

 

[Peregrinator]

BB, would you like to tell me which Muslim enclaves in Europe are not subject to the law of the country that they're in?

Here's the question you can't answer, Dreidel Boy. Spin and squirm all you want.

 

[busybody..]

But you claim they are not subject to the laws of the country they are in, and you have never named one for which that is true. You made it up, just like the media outlets you're always bitching about.

1- As I have said, THAT post was taken from an article

2- I dont recall where it said that THEY were NOT subject to the law of the land!!!!!!!!!!!!!!




(Having said THAT, My postings in many threads have had direct proof from PAPERS in the local areas ranging from France, Netherlands, Germany and England where the LAWS of that country are being openly FLOUTED and for all purposes the police cannot enforce the laws. But NO ONE will ever ADMIT the laws dont apply, but it is so, DE FACTO)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[busybody..]

Here's the question you can't answer, Dreidel Boy. Spin and squirm all you want.

show me where in the article it said the LAWS DONT APPLY?????????????

and in the post above^^^^^^^^^^^^^^the issue was addressed!

 

[Fagin]

Take a look at the last couple pages.

Hehe...Titties, titties everywhere!

Yes there were.

 

[Peregrinator]

Who wrote this piece? It's also opinion, and since you're keeping the author secret I can only conclude it's some lunatic. So what if some nutcase agrees with you? At least Blumenthal cites a source of some kind.


What enclave? Post it, or admit you made it up.

Still no answers.

 

[busybody..]

Who wrote this piece? It's also opinion, and since you're keeping the author secret I can only conclude it's some lunatic. So what if some nutcase agrees with you? At least Blumenthal cites a source of some kind.

If you read the piece

You would see that the author had his own source at STATE

just as did Blummy


Blummy is a NUT

 

[Peregrinator]

Who wrote this piece? It's also opinion, and since you're keeping the author secret I can only conclude it's some lunatic. So what if some nutcase agrees with you? At least Blumenthal cites a source of some kind.

If you read the piece

You would see that the author had his own source at STATE

just as did Blummy


Blummy is a NUT

What author? You made it up, or the author is such a crazed whacko that you're afraid to admit it.

 

[busybody..]

What author? You made it up, or the author is such a crazed whacko that you're afraid to admit it.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/

 

[Peregrinator]

http://www.powerlineblog.com/

Claremont Institute, huh?


No bias there, certainly.

And which enclave in Europe is not subject to the law of the land?

 

[busybody..]

.

And which enclave in Europe is not subject to the law of the land?

I find this question repeated DISINGENIOUS!

1- I have answered it many times

2- To continue to harp on this and having basically ignored 300 other posts that have made very significant points

is once again just plain fucking DISINGENIOUS!


Sorta like saying I wont date that SUPER DUPER HOT MODEL cause he 3rd cousin twice removed has a neighbor who once walked near a dog that barked at a child

So dont ask again, unless you are willing to accept the answer I gave SEVERAL times

Look again

 

[busybody..]

Muslim Prisoner Demands Oxen, Camel
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court says that prisons should serve special meals to Muslim criminals—meals including oxen and camel: State hasn’t justified withholding Muslim feast-day meats.

BOSTON - The state’s highest court has ruled that the state prison system has failed to justify denying a Muslim inmate special feast-day meats, such as oxen and camel.

In a unanimous ruling Friday, the Supreme Judicial Court said officials at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center had failed to show why providing the proper meats to Rashad Rasheed on certain holidays was a burden.

The decision reversed a Superior Court judge who dismissed Rasheed’s claim without a trial. The case now goes back to Superior Court for review.

The SJC ruling noted that the state Constitution goes further than the U.S. Constitution to protect the religious freedom of prisoners, The Boston Globe reported. ...

Rasheed, a practicing member of the Nation of Islam, has been serving a life sentence since 1975. A Department of Correction spokeswoman, Diane Wiffin, would not disclose why Rasheed was in prison and his lawyer, Neil McGaraghan, said he didn’t know why.

Rasheed sued in 2000 after the state signed a contract with a new food vendor that began providing lamb and fish to Muslim prisoners on two Islamic holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. Rasheed said the meals were inappropriate.

On the first holiday, which marks the end of Ramadan, Rasheed’s faith requires that he eat the meat of cows, oxen, or camels. On the second holiday, which celebrates the pilgrimage to Mecca, he is required to eat specially slaughtered cattle.

 

[busybody..]

More Damning Documents On Saddam
Posted 4/7/2006

Origins Of War: The latest in a stream of eye-opening Iraqi documents shows Saddam Hussein's regime was planning suicide attacks on U.S. interests six months before 9-11. Why won't Washington get the word out?

Last month the Pentagon began releasing records captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Among the documents is a letter dated March 11, 2001, written by Abdel Magid Hammod Ali, one of Saddam's air force generals.

According to an unofficial translation, Page 6 of the letter asks for "the names of those who desire to volunteer for suicide mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American interests."

Assuming the document's accuracy, this shows that Saddam's regime was not only providing aid and support for terrorist organizations of other countries. It was also planning its own bombings directed at U.S. facilities and personnel.

As counterterrorism consultant Dan Darling wrote last week on the Weekly Standard's Web site, that would mean Russian intelligence services under Vladimir Putin were better informed about Iraq's terrorist abilities than the U.S. spy community.

Though little noticed by the press, during a July 2004 visit to Kazakhstan the Russian president said that between 9-11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received . . . information that official organs of Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the U.S. and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations."

This new document, said Darling, "would seem to refute a long-standing contention among members of the U.S. intelligence community that Iraq ceased its involvement in international terrorism after its failed 1993 plot to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush." Darling cites former National Security Council official Richard Clarke's book "Against all Enemies," which contends that the NSC, the CIA and the FBI all agreed Iraq posed no terrorist threat to the U.S.

Equally embarrassing to our spies is another newly released document from 1999 detailing plans for a "Blessed July" operation.

According to the English translation on the Foreign Military Studies Office's Joint Reserve Intelligence Center Web site, Saddam's older son Uday ordered 50 members of the fanatical "Fedayeen Saddam" group to stage bombings and assassinations in Iraq and Europe — including London, where 10 people were assigned.

Excerpts from a long, recently declassified report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Iraqi Perspectives Project will be published in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Looking at the "Blessed July" document, Foreign Affairs notes this "regime-directed wave of 'martyrdom' operations against targets in the West (was) well under way at the time of the coalition invasion."

The Pentagon has obviously been sitting on a treasure trove of paper incriminations against Saddam's regime. So far, just a minuscule amount of the more than 3,000 hours of tape recordings of Saddam and 48,000 boxes of intelligence documents has been translated and deciphered.

What has come out so far has confirmed Americans' worst fears about Saddam's evil regime. To review:

Saddam is heard on a 1997 tape predicting terrorism would soon be coming to the U.S., while his son-in-law — who was in charge of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction — gloats about lying to U.N. weapons inspectors to hide the extent of Iraq's WMD program.

Saddam, in a tape made in 2000, talks with Iraqi scientists about his plans to build a nuclear device. He discusses Iraq's plasma separation program — an advanced uranium-enrichment technique completely missed by U.N. inspectors.

An Iraqi intelligence document, released just two weeks ago, describes a February 1995 meeting between Saddam's spies and Osama bin Laden. During that meeting, bin Laden offered to conduct "joint operations" with Iraq. Saddam subsequently ordered his aides to "develop the relationship" with the al-Qaida leader.

A fax, sent on June 6, 2001, shows conclusively that Saddam's government provided financial aid to Abu Sayyaf guerrillas in the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf is an al-Qaida offshoot co-founded by bin Laden's brother-in-law.

These are just a few of the revelations about Saddam and terrorism to be found in a handful of documents and tapes. When all are fully translated, we're betting the terror links will be clear, damning and irrefutable.

At present, we're relying too much on translations by bloggers and other amateurs. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., says the White House has been dragging its feet for fear of embarrassing supposed allies (such as Russia) whose links with Saddam would come under scrutiny.

These documents make it even plainer who our enemies are and why we're at war. The administration should move to get out accurate translations so Americans can better understand why we fight.

 

[busybody..]

Continuing to bring you info on the document release and showing the TERROR SH was involved in

I know some of you care

I know that if the TERROR guys would explode a NUKE in the middle of YOUR city, some of you would still support em


Read


The world outside

There's a fascinating article in the Weekly Standard which grants a glimpse into the shadow war between state-sponsored terrorists and their pursuers. The accounts, based on documents captured in Afghanistan and Iraq, describe Saddam Hussein's support for the Abu Sayyaf terror group in the Philippines.

Up to this point, those materials have been kept from the American public. Now the proverbial dam has broken. On March 16, the U.S. government posted on the web 9 documents captured in Iraq, as well as 28 al Qaeda documents that had been released in February. Earlier last week, Foreign Affairs magazine published a lengthy article based on a review of 700 Iraqi documents by analysts with the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. Plans for the release of many more documents have been announced. And if the contents of the recently released materials and other documents obtained by The Weekly Standard are any indication, the discussion of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq is about to get more interesting. ...

The documents indicated that Iraqi support for the Abu Sayyaf was handled through an Iraqi Embassy cell consisting of Ambassador Salah Samarmad, Third Secretary Ahmad Mahmud Ghalib , most likely an Iraqi intelligence officer and author of the "security report"; and Iraqi intelligence informers Muhammad al-Zanki, Abu Ahmad, and Omar Ghazal among others. Their reports record a roller-coaster relationship with the Mindanao-based terrorist organization. The Iraqis supported the Abu Sayyaf up until they kidnapped twenty civilians from a beach resort in Palawan in June 2001, an operation which netted three Americans: Guillermo Sobrero and the couple Tim and Marcia Burnham. Sobrero was subsequently beheaded; Tim Burnham died in the rescue attempt. The Iraqis briefly suspended their support and covered their tracks as the kidnapping became international news but resumed their assistance shortly thereafter. As the Weekly Standard put it: "Why did the Iraqis begin funding Abu Sayyaf, which had long been considered a regional terrorist group concerned mainly with making money? Why did they suspend their support in 2001? And why did the Iraqis resume this relationship and, according to the congressional testimony of one State Department regional specialist, intensify it?" The post-September 11 stages of Saddam's relationship with the Abu Sayyaf are exemplified in a 2002 operation which successfully killed an American soldier and attempted to kill Filipino children in a school playground.

... a young Filipino man rode his Honda motorcycle up a dusty road to a shanty strip mall just outside Camp Enrile Malagutay in Zamboanga City, Philippines. The camp was host to American troops stationed in the south of the country to train with Filipino soldiers fighting terrorists. The man parked his bike and began to examine its gas tank. Seconds later, the tank exploded, sending nails in all directions and killing the rider almost instantly. The blast damaged six nearby stores and ripped the front off of a café that doubled as a karaoke bar. The café was popular with American soldiers. And on this day, October 2, 2002, SFC Mark Wayne Jackson was killed there and a fellow soldier was severely wounded. Eyewitnesses almost immediately identified the bomber as an Abu Sayyaf terrorist.

One week before the attack, Abu Sayyaf leaders had promised a campaign of terror directed at the "enemies of Islam"--Westerners and the non-Muslim Filipino majority. And one week after the attack, Abu Sayyaf attempted to strike again, this time with a bomb placed on the playground of the San Roque Elementary School. It did not detonate. Authorities recovered the cell phone that was to have set it off and analyzed incoming and outgoing calls.

As they might have expected, they discovered several calls to and from Abu Sayyaf leaders. But another call got their attention. Seventeen hours after the attack that took the life of SFC Jackson, the cell phone was used to place a call to the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Hisham Hussein. It was not Hussein's only contact with Abu Sayyaf. "He was surveilled, and we found out he was in contact with Abu Sayyaf and also pro-Iraqi demonstrators," says a Philippine government source, who continued, "[Philippine intelligence] was able to monitor their cell phone calls. [Abu Sayyaf leaders] called him right after the bombing. They were always talking."

An analysis of Iraqi embassy phone records by Philippine authorities showed that Hussein had been in regular contact with Abu Sayyaf leaders both before and after the attack that killed SFC Jackson. Andrea Domingo, immigration commissioner for the Philippines, said Hussein ran an "established network" of terrorists in the country. Hussein had also met with members of the New People's Army, a Communist opposition group on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist groups, in his office at the embassy. According to a Philippine government official, the Philippine National Police uncovered documents in a New People's Army compound that indicate the Iraqi embassy had provided funding for the group. ...

Interestingly, an Abu Sayyaf leader named Hamsiraji Sali at least twice publicly boasted that his group received funding from Iraq. For instance, on March 2, 2003, he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that the Iraqi regime had provided the terrorist group with 1million pesos--about $20,000--each year since 2000.

Equally interesting are revelations that the Iraqi intelligence cell and their contacts feared something called "The Office", which was apparently a counter-terrorist cell tasked with hunting them down. One conversation with an Iraqi informer went this way:

As the conversation begins, Abu Ahmad tells his embassy contact that he doesn't know where Omar Ghazal is and would have told the embassy if he did. He then tells the embassy contact that when he called Omar Ghazal's aunt to check on his whereabouts, she used a word in Tagalog--walana--which means "not here." But Abu Ahmad says its connotations are not good. "That word is used when you target one of the personnel who are assigned to complete everything (full mission). Then they announce that he is traveling and so on, and that's what I'm afraid of." The Iraqi embassy contact asks him to elaborate. "I have been exposed to that same phrase before, when I asked about an individual, and later on I found out that he was physically eliminated and no one knows anything about him."

The embassy official assures Abu Ahmad that Iraqi intelligence has also lost track of Ghazal, and became alarmed when he abruptly stopped attending soccer practice at a local college. Abu Ahmad fears the worst. "I'm afraid they might have killed him and I'm very worried about him," he says, according to the report. "The method that those people use is terrible and that's why I refuse to work with them."

The Iraqi embassy official interrupts Abu Ahmad. "Who are they? I would like to know who they are."

"Didn't I tell you before who they are?"

"No."

"The office group," says Abu Ahmad.

"Which office?" asks his Iraqi embassy handler.

"A long time ago the American FBI opened up an office in the Philippines, under American supervision and that there are Philippine Intelligence groups that work there. The goal of the office is to fight international terrorism (in the Philippines of course) and they have employees from various nationalities that speak of peace and international terrorism and how important it is to put an end to terrorism. The office also has other espionage affairs involving Arab citizens to work with them in order to provide them with information on the Arabs who are living in the Philippines and also for other spying purposes."

Abu Ahmad had plans to strike back at America in his own way.

Abu Ahmad tells his Iraqi embassy contact, Ghalib, that "the office" was trying to recruit an Arab to monitor Arab citizens in the Philippines. The Iraqi embassy contact suggests that Abu Ahmad volunteer for the job. Abu Ahmad says he had other plans. "I am leaving after I finish selling my house and properties and will move to Peshawar [Pakistan]. There I will be supplied with materials, weapons, explosives, and get married and then move to America. Do you know that there are more than one thousand Iraqi extremists who perform heroism jobs?" The speaker presumably means martyrdom operations.

There's more in the Weekly Standard article about how Iraqi intelligence had long been in contact with members of the Saudi "opposition" -- including a certain Osama Bin Laden. But that's another story.

Commentary


The normal Tagalog for "he is not at home" is something along the lines of "umalis siya". However, the words "wala na", spoken in hollow tones with pregnant pauses before and after the phrase can be translated as "he's is no more". Whether or not Omar Ghazal is still in the land of the living, or as Abu Ahmad believes, suffered a fate worse than death at the hands of the Office is something left unsettled. But then this is not a glimpse into a gentle world. In this universe people blow up motorcycle bombs in front of cheap cafes where dirt-poor people spend a few American cents drinking beer and plant explosive devices in school playgrounds where kids line up for a pitiful snack of candied banana on a stick. All before the invasion of Iraq.

 

[busybody..]

I hope you losers appreciate I bring you up to date on this shit


Wowie Zahawie
Sorry everyone, but Iraq did go uranium shopping in Niger.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 10, 2006, at 4:43 PM ET


In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.)

At a later 1995 U.N. special session on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Zahawie was the Iraqi delegate and spoke heatedly about the urgent need to counterbalance Israel's nuclear capacity. At the time, most democratic countries did not have full diplomatic relations with Saddam's regime, and there were few fully accredited Iraqi ambassadors overseas, Iraq's interests often being represented by the genocidal Islamist government of Sudan (incidentally, yet another example of collusion between "secular" Baathists and the fundamentalists who were sheltering Osama Bin Laden). There was one exception—an Iraqi "window" into the world of open diplomacy—namely the mutual recognition between the Baathist regime and the Vatican. To this very important and sensitive post in Rome, Zahawie was appointed in 1997, holding the job of Saddam's ambassador to the Holy See until 2000. Those who knew him at that time remember a man much given to anti-Jewish tirades, with a standing ticket for Wagner performances at Bayreuth. (Actually, as a fan of Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung in particular, I find I can live with this. Hitler secretly preferred sickly kitsch like Franz Lehar.)

In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore. It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report. In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein's long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious. Italian intelligence (which first noticed the Zahawie trip from Rome) found it difficult to take this view and alerted French intelligence (which has better contacts in West Africa and a stronger interest in nuclear questions). In due time, the French tipped off the British, who in their cousinly way conveyed the suggestive information to Washington. As everyone now knows, the disclosure appeared in watered-down and secondhand form in the president's State of the Union address in January 2003.


Continue Article

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If the above was all that was known, it would surely be universally agreed that no responsible American administration could have overlooked such an amazingly sinister pattern. Given the past Iraqi record of surreptitious dealing, cheating of inspectors, concealment of sites and caches, and declared ambition to equip the technicians referred to openly in the Baathist press as "nuclear mujahideen," one could scarcely operate on the presumption of innocence.

However, the waters have since become muddied, to say the least. For a start, someone produced a fake document, dated July 6, 2000, which purports to show Zahawie's signature and diplomatic seal on an actual agreement for an Iraqi uranium transaction with Niger. Almost everything was wrong with this crude forgery—it had important dates scrambled, and it misstated the offices of Niger politicians. In consequence, IAEA Chairman Mohammed ElBaradei later reported to the U.N. Security Council that the papers alleging an Iraq-Niger uranium connection had been demonstrated to be fraudulent.

But this doesn't alter the plain set of established facts in my first three paragraphs above. The European intelligence services, and the Bush administration, only ever asserted that the Iraqi regime had apparently tried to open (or rather, reopen) a yellowcake trade "in Africa." It has never been claimed that an agreement was actually reached. What motive could there be for a forgery that could be instantly detected upon cursory examination?

There seem to be only three possibilities here. Either a) American intelligence concocted the note; b) someone in Italy did so in the hope of gain; or c) it was the product of disinformation, intended to protect Niger and discredit any attention paid to the actual, real-time Zahawie visit. The CIA is certainly incompetent enough to have fouled up this badly. (I like Edward Luttwak's formulation in the March 22 Times Literary Supplement, where he writes that "there have been only two kinds of CIA secret operations: the ones that are widely known to have failed—usually because of almost unbelievably crude errors—and the ones that are not yet widely known to have failed.") Still, it almost passes belief that any American agency would fake a document that purportedly proved far more than the administration had asked and then get every important name and date wrapped round the axle. Forgery for gain is easy to understand, especially when it is borne in mind that nobody wastes time counterfeiting a bankrupt currency. Forgery for disinformation, if that is what it was, appears at least to have worked. Almost everybody in the world now affects to believe that Saddam Hussein was framed on the Niger rap.

According to the London Sunday Times of April 9, the truth appears to be some combination of b) and c). A NATO investigation has identified two named employees of the Niger Embassy in Rome who, having sold a genuine document about Zahawie to Italian and French intelligence agents, then added a forged paper in the hope of turning a further profit. The real stuff went by one route to Washington, and the fakery, via an Italian journalist and the U.S. Embassy in Rome, by another. The upshot was—follow me closely here—that a phony paper alleging a deal was used to shoot down a genuine document suggesting a connection.

Zahawie's name and IAEA connection were never mentioned by ElBaradei in his report to the United Nations, and his past career has never surfaced in print. Looking up the press of the time causes one's jaw to slump in sheer astonishment. Here, typically, is a Time magazine "exclusive" about Zahawie, written by Hassan Fattah on Oct. 1, 2003:

The veteran diplomat has spent the eight months since President Bush's speech trying to set the record straight and clear his name. In a rare interview with Time, al-Zahawie outlined how forgery and circumstantial evidence was used to talk up Iraq's nuclear weapons threat, and leave him holding the smoking gun.

A few paragraphs later appear, the wonderful and unchallenged words from Zahawie: "Frankly, I didn't know that Niger produced uranium at all." Well, sorry for the inconvenience of the questions, then, my old IAEA and NPT "veteran" (whose nuclear qualifications go unmentioned in the Time article). Instead, we are told that Zahawie visited Niger and other West African countries to encourage them to break the embargo on flights to Baghdad, as they had broken the sanctions on Qaddafi's Libya. A bit of a lowly mission, one might think, for one of the Iraqi regime's most senior and specialized envoys.

The Duelfer Report also cites "a second contact between Iraq and Niger," which occurred in 2001, when a Niger minister visited Baghdad "to request assistance in obtaining petroleum products to alleviate Niger's economic problems." According to the deposition of Ja'far Diya' Ja'far (the head of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear weapons program), these negotiations involved no offer of uranium ore but only "cash in exchange for petroleum." West Africa is awash in petroleum, and Niger is poor in cash. Iraq in 2001 was cash-rich through the oil-for-food racket, but you may if you wish choose to believe that a near-bankrupt African delegation from a uranium-based country traveled across a continent and a half with nothing on its mind but shopping for oil.

Interagency feuding has ruined the Bush administration's capacity to make its case in public, and a high-level preference for deniable leaking has further compounded the problem. But please read my first three paragraphs again and tell me if the original story still seems innocuous to you.

 

[SweetLayla]

Damn Busybody.....I am not even going to comment on this one....I am dropping in to send kisses....but I am outta here before I get dragged back into the doghouse

 

[busybody..]

I expect you to read it all!

 

[SweetLayla]

I expect you to read it all!

Bite me!

 

[busybody..]

Talking Trailer Trash
By Clinton W. Taylor
Published 4/14/2006 12:07:03 AM
So those Iraqi mobile bioweapons labs, or weather-balloon hydrogen plants, or EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicles, or whatever they were, are back in the news. The Washington Post suggested that when President Bush declared that they were biological weapons factories, he was ignoring an expert report arguing that they were not, in fact, WMD-related. Several blogs (e.g., here, here, here, and here) jumped on the Post to point out that buried within the Post's article is a note that a joint CIA/DIA report identifying the trailers as biological weapons factories arrived the next day.

The Post article describes the report as "unequivocal in its conclusions" that the trailers were not bioweapons labs, and mentions the report being written by "a secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now." Later on, the Post describes two teams of military experts looking over the trailers as well.

Curiously, on June 7, 2003, the New York Times had already described three teams looking over the trailers in Iraq. Two of the teams were in agreement that the trailers were WMD labs, but the third, more senior team was not at all "unequivocal," but "divided sharply over the functions of the trailers." Given that the dissenting experts with "direct access to the evidence" whom the Times quotes were both British and American experts, and the Post also describes the secret team as being made up of "nine civilian U.S. and British experts," the Post's scoop on the "secret" third team is looking less, well, scoopy, and more like a rehash of information mostly in the public domain for nearly three years. (See also George Gooding at Seixon.com, who got the scoop on the Post's non-scoop.)

In any case, over the course of 2003 consensus moved toward the conclusion that the trailers were hydrogen plants, and not bioweapons labs, and the 2004 Duelfer report ultimately embraced the finding of the "secret" technical team.


SCOOP OR NOT, I'M GLAD the story came up again. The whole incident left a nagging question that has bothered me for years now: if these vehicles were just innocuous balloon-juice factories, why were the Iraqis so scared of them?

Flash back to February 5, 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the U.N. General Assembly about Iraq's WMD program. He played audio of an intercepted phone call between an Iraqi Brigadier General and a Colonel, dated November 26, 2002, and showed slides of their transcribed conversation:



COL: About this committee that is coming...
GEN: Yeah, yeah...
COL: ...with Mohamed El Baradei [Director, International Atomic Energy Agency]
GEN: Yeah, yeah.
COL: Yeah.
GEN: Yeah?
COL: We have this modified vehicle.
GEN: Yeah.
COL: What do we say if one of them sees it?
GEN: You didn't get a modified...You don't have a modified...
COL: By God, I have one.
GEN: Which? From the workshop...?
COL: From the al-Kindi Company
GEN: What?
COL: From al-Kindi.
GEN: Yeah, yeah. I'll come to you in the morning. I have some comments. I'm worried you all have something left.
COL: We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left.
GEN: I will come to you tomorrow.
COL: Okay.


That sure got the General's attention, didn't it? There was something about the mention of a "modified vehicle" from the "al-Kindi Company" that made him want to visit this colonel's site, wherever it was, "in the morning." That would be November 27, the first day that IAEA and UNSCOM inspections resumed. And on the very first day of the inspections, this general was rushing out to tend to this particular vehicle.

Probably because of those darned hydrogen generators. Yeah? Yeah.

The reference to "Al-Kindi" is very important, by the way. There are two Al-Kindis that relate to this story. One of them is the Al-Kindi Research Complex, "one of the largest and most secret arms project in Iraq," located in Mosul. It looks like they mainly did missile research there, but also did nuclear and chemical weapons research at some point. This location is important because one of the two vehicles was found on their lot in April 2003. It's also important because the 2003 CIA report on the biolabs mentions that "Senior Iraqi officials of the al-Kindi Research, Testing, Development, and Engineering facility in Mosul were shown pictures of the mobile production trailers, and they claimed that the trailers were used to chemically produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons." That's a logical answer for a technician in a rocketry plant that had missile test facilities, a wind tunnel, and a launch range.

The other Al-Kindi Company is located in Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad. Its full name is the Al-Kindi Company for the Production of Veterinary Vaccines. According to UNMOVIC, it is a declared and monitored site which produces a "variety of viral and bacterial veterinary vaccines, using basic glassware and techniques."

Whether or not they were asked about the trailers is not in the unclassified CIA report.


Clinton W. Taylor is a lawyer and Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. He is tracking the story of the Taliban at Yale at Townhall.com's Nail Yale blog.