PussyMan: US intelligence found no evidence WMD moved from Iraq

[VeriSexy]

WASHINGTON (AP) As the hunt for weapons of mass destruction dragged on unsuccessfully in Iraq, top Bush administration officials speculated publicly that the banned armaments may have been smuggled out of the country before the war started.

Whether Saddam Hussein moved the WMD deadly chemical, biological or radiological arms is one of the unresolved issues that the final U.S. intelligence report on Iraq's programs is expected to address next month.

But intelligence and congressional officials say they have not seen any information never ''a piece,'' said one indicating that WMD or significant amounts of components and equipment were transferred from Iraq to neighboring Syria, Jordan or elsewhere.

The administration acknowledged last week that the search for banned weapons is largely over. The Iraq Survey Group's chief, Charles Duelfer, is expected to submit the final installments of his report in February. A small number of the organization's experts will remain on the job in case new intelligence on Iraqi WMD is unearthed.

But the officials familiar with the search say U.S. authorities have found no evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein transferred WMD or related equipment out of Iraq.

A special adviser to the CIA director, Duelfer declined an interview request through an agency spokesman. In his last public statements, he told a Senate panel last October that it remained unclear whether banned weapons could have been moved from Iraq.

''What I can tell you is that I believe we know a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria. There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points,'' he said. ''But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say.''

Last week, a congressional official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said suggestions that weapons or components were sent from Iraq were based on speculation stemming from uncorroborated information.

President Bush and top-raking officials in his administration used the existence of WMD in Iraq as the main justification for the March 2003 invasion, and throughout much of last year the White House continued to raise the possibility the weapons were transferred to another country.

For instance:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in early October he believed Saddam had WMD before the war. ''He has either hidden them so well or moved them somewhere else, or decided to destroy them ... in event of a conflict but kept the capability of developing them rapidly,'' Rumsfeld said in a Fox News Channel interview.

Eight months earlier, he told senators ''it's possible that WMD did exist, but was transferred, in whole or in part, to one or more other countries. We see that theory put forward.''

Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed concern the WMD would be found. However, when asked in September if the WMD could have been hidden or moved to a country like Syria, he said, ''I can't exclude any of those possibilities.''

And, on MSNBC's ''Hardball'' in June, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said: ''Everyone believed that his programs were more active than they appeared to be, but recognize, he had a lot of time to move stuff, a lot of time to hide stuff.''

Since the October report from Duelfer, which said Saddam intended to obtain WMD but had no banned weapons, senior administration leaders have largely stopped discussing whether the weapons were moved.

Last week, the intelligence and congressional officials said evidence indicating somewhat common equipment with dual military and civilian uses, such as fermenters, was salvaged during post-invasion looting and sold for scrap in other countries. Syria was mentioned as one location.

However, the U.S. intelligence community's 2002 estimate on Iraq indicated there were sizable weapons programs and stockpiles. The officials said weapons experts have not found a production capability in Iraq that would back up the size of the prewar estimates.

Among a series of key findings, that estimate said Iraq ''has largely rebuilt missile and biological weapons facilities damaged'' during a 1998 U.S.-British bombing campaign and ''has expanded its chemical and biological infrastructure under the cover of civilian production.''

Although the U.S. had little specific information, the estimate also said Saddam probably stockpiled at least 100 metric tons, possibly 500 metric tons, of chemical weapons agents ''much of it added in the last year.''

http://www.boston.com/dailynews/017/...no_evid:.shtml

[VeriSexy]

OLDER NEWS

Report: No Iraq WMDs Made After '91

WASHINGTON ? The chief U.S. arms inspector in Iraq has found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (search) production by Saddam Hussein's (search) regime after 1991.

But the final report by Charles Duelfer (search) concluded that, although the weapons stockpiles were destroyed, Saddam?s government was looking to begin a WMD program again.

The Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003 on the grounds that its WMD programs posed a threat to American national security.

In his report, Duelfer concluded that Saddam's Iraq had no stockpiles of the banned weapons, but he said he found signs of idle programs that Saddam could have revived once international attention waned.

"It appears that he did not vigorously pursue those programs after the inspectors left," a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity, ahead of the report's Wednesday afternoon release by the CIA.

U.S. officials also said the report shows Saddam was much farther away from a nuclear weapons program in 2003 than he was between 1991 and 1993; there is no evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda exchanged weapons; and there is no evidence that Al Qaeda and Iraq shared information, technology or personnel in developing weapons.

The White House continued to maintain that the findings support the view that Saddam was a threat.

"We knew the dictator had a history of using weapons of mass destruction, a long record of aggression and hatred for America," President Bush (search) said in a speech Wednesday in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. "There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks. In the world after Sept. 11, that was a risk we could not afford to take."

Duelfer was presenting his findings Wednesday to the Senate Armed Services Committee (search). His team compiled a 1,500-page report after his predecessor, David Kay, who quit last December, also found no evidence of weapons stockpiles.

The CIA officially released the Duelfer report about 3 p.m. EDT Wednesday on its Web site, though some of its conclusions were leaked to the media in advance.

Partisans on both sides of the aisle didn't waste time reacting to Duelfer's conclusions.

"The Duelfer report is yet another example that there really are two Americas," said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif. "There's the one that exists in the Bush fantasy world, and then there's the real America. In the Bush fantasy world, they still claim that Iraq was an imminent threat with weapons of mass destruction."

But Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said the report didn't really offer any new insights.

"I really don't think (the report) changes anything," Roberts said. "Everybody made the wrong assumption (about the WMD threat)."

Duelfer concluded that Saddam's regime hoped to convince the world it had complied with the United Nations resolutions implemented after the first Gulf War and wanted the U.N. to lift the strict sanctions against the country.

Duelfer, a special consultant to the director of Central Intelligence on Iraqi WMD affairs, found Saddam wasn't squirreling away equipment and weapons and hiding them in various parts of the country, as some originally thought when the U.S.-led war in Iraq began, officials said.

Instead, the report finds that Saddam was trying to achieve his goal by retaining ?intellectual capital? ? in other words, keeping weapons inspectors employed and happy and preserving some documentation, according to U.S. officials.

Duelfer and the multi-national Iraq Survey Group (ISG) (search), which also worked on the report, say it?s still not known whether Iraq moved weapons caches to Syria or other countries.

The ISG is still poring over thousands of official Baathist documents that have yet to be translated. Currently, some 900 linguists have been hired and are working in Qatar to get the job done.

About 35 to 50 ?old, decayed? chemical and biological shells have been found in Iraq so far, all of which are said to have been produced in the 1980s.

Saddam was importing banned materials, working on unmanned aerial vehicles in violation of U.N. agreements and maintaining industrial capability that could be converted to produce weapons, officials have said. Duelfer also describes Saddam's Iraq as having had limited research efforts into chemical and biological weapons.

Duelfer's report will come on a week that the White House has been defending a number of issues involving its Iraq policy and the war there.

Remarks this week by L. Paul Bremer (search), former U.S. administrator in occupied Iraq, suggested he'd argued for more troops in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, when looting was rampant.

A spokesman for Bush's re-election campaign said Bremer indeed differed with military commanders.

Bush's election rival, Democrat John Kerry (search), pounced on Bremer's statements that the United States "paid a big price" for having insufficient troop levels.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the Duelfer report "will continue to show that he [Saddam] was a gathering threat that needed to be taken seriously, that it was a matter of time before he was going to begin pursuing those weapons of mass destruction."

But Vice President Dick Cheney (search) said in an Aug. 26, 2002 speech, 6 1/2 months before the invasion, that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."

On Wednesday, the White House also continued to assert that there were clear ties between Saddam before the invasion and the Al Qaeda-linked terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (search).

But a CIA report recently given to the White House found no conclusive evidence that Saddam had given al-Zarqawi support and shelter before the war, according to ABC News and Knight-Ridder.

The CIA report did not make final conclusions about a Saddam-Zarqawi tie, but does raise questions about the Bush administration's assertions that al-Zarqawi found a safe harbor in Baghdad before the invasion ? and raises questions about whether Saddam even knew al-Zarqawi was there.

During Tuesday night's debate, Cheney said "there is still debate over this question." But he added: "At one point, some of Zarqawi's people were arrested. Saddam personally intervened to have them released."

In a speech on Oct. 7, 2002, Bush laid out what he described then as Iraq's threat:

?"It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."

?"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas."

?"Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles ? far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and other nations ? in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work. "

What U.S. forces found:

?A single artillery shell filled with two chemicals that, when mixed while the shell was in flight, would have created sarin. U.S. forces learned of it only when insurgents, apparently believing it was filled with conventional explosives, tried to detonate it as a roadside bomb in May in Baghdad. Two U.S. soldiers suffered from symptoms of low-level exposure to the nerve agent. The shell was from Saddam's pre-1991 stockpile.

?Another old artillery shell, also rigged as a bomb and found in May, showed signs it once contained mustard agent.

?Two small rocket warheads, turned over to Polish troops by an informer, that showed signs they once were filled with sarin.

?Centrifuge parts buried in a former nuclear scientist's garden in Baghdad. These were part of Saddam's pre-1991 nuclear program, which was dismantled after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The scientist also had centrifuge design documents.

?A vial of live botulinum toxin, which can be used as a biological weapon, in another scientist's refrigerator. The scientist said it had been there since 1993.

?Evidence of advanced design work on a liquid-propellant missile with ranges of up to 620 miles. Since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq had been prohibited from having missiles with ranges longer than 93 miles.

FOX News' Ian McCaleb, Bret Baier, Catherine Donaldson-Evans and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,134625,00.html

[VeriSexy]

OLDER NEWS

No evidence Iraq stockpiled WMDs

Two days after resigning as the Bush administration's top weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay said Sunday that his group found no evidence Iraq had stockpiled unconventional weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March.

He said U.S. intelligence services owe President Bush an explanation for having concluded that Iraq had.

"My summary view, based on what I've seen, is we're very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons," he said on National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition." "I don't think they exist."

It was the consensus among the intelligence agencies that Iraq had such weapons that led Bush to conclude that it posed an imminent threat that justified the U.S.-led invasion, Kay said.

"I actually think the intelligence community owes the president rather than the president owing the American people," he said.

"We have to remember that this view of Iraq was held during the Clinton administration and didn't change in the Bush administration," Kay said.

"It is not a political 'gotcha' issue. It is a serious issue of 'How you can come to a conclusion that is not matched in the future?'"

Other countries' intelligence agencies shared the U.S. conclusion that Iraq had stockpiled such weapons, though most disagreed with the United States about how best to respond.

Powell: Violations justified war
Asked if Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States at the time of the invasion, Kay said, "Based on the intelligence that existed, I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat."

Although his team concluded that Iraq did not possess large amounts of weapons of mass destruction ready for use, that does not necessarily mean it posed no imminent threat, he said. "That is a political judgment, not a technical judgment."

Secretary of State Colin Powell defended the administration's moves Sunday. "Military action was justified by Iraq's violation of 12 years of U.N. resolutions," he said in an interview with First Channel Russia during a visit to Moscow.

"Iraq had the intent to have weapons of mass destruction and they had previously used weapons of mass destruction. They had programs to develop such weapons," Powell said.

"And what we were trying to find out was what inventory they actually had, and we are still examining that question."

Saddam Hussein was given the opportunity to divulge what his country was doing but chose not to do so, which resulted in the U.S.-led campaign to oust him, Powell said.

"And the world is better off, the Iraqi people are better off, because Saddam Hussein is gone," Powell said. "And we will continue to make sure we find all elements of his weapons of mass destruction programs and whatever weapons there might be."

Powell made the Bush administration's case that Saddam's regime possessed such weapons in a presentation to the U.N. Security Council last year.

Other failures
The discovery that Iran and Libya had nuclear programs also appears to have caught intelligence agencies by surprise, Kay said.

The Iranian program was uncovered not by intelligence agencies but by Iranian defectors, he said.

Libya's program contained a number of international clues, such as a connection to Pakistan and plants in Malaysia. "It was, in many ways, the biggest surprise of all, and it was missed," Kay said.

Last June, when he was appointed to lead the U.S. effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Kay expressed confidence they would be found.

Despite his group's failure to unearth such weapons, those predictions have not embarrassed him, he said.

"They're coming back to haunt me in the sense of why could we all be so wrong? ... It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information."

Kay said he would not submit a final report on his work in Iraq, since the task of searching for weapons will continue, led by Charles Duelfer, a longtime weapons inspector who replaces Kay as the new CIA special adviser. (Full story)

Despite not finding any WMD, Kay said his team found that the Iraqi senior leadership "had an intention to continue to pursue their WMD activities. That they, in fact, had a large number of WMD-related activities."

Kay predicted investigators would find that Iraqi scientists were "working on developing weapons or weapons concepts that they had not moved into actual production."

Kay alleges Syria connection
Kay also raised the possibility -- one he first discussed in a weekend interview with "The Sunday Telegraph" of London -- that clues about banned weapons programs might reside across Iraq's western border.

"There is ample evidence of movement to Syria before the war -- satellite photographs, reports on the ground of a constant stream of trucks, cars, rail traffic across the border. We simply don't know what was moved," Kay said.

But, he said, "the Syrian government there has shown absolutely no interest in helping us resolve this issue."

Kay acknowledged that the truth might never be revealed. Widespread looting in Baghdad after the invasion destroyed many government records. "There's always going to be unresolved ambiguity here."

Kay said he resigned after his resources were diverted to other work from the exclusive goal of searching for unconventional weapons.

"It's very hard to run organizations with multiple missions, particularly if one half is controlled by the Defense Department and one half is controlled by the CIA. ... I thought that was the wrong thing to do."

Kay said he would like to write a book dealing with the issue of proliferation and intelligence.

"I'm not doing a Paul O'Neill," he said, referring to the former Bush treasury secretary who was the primary source for "The Price of Loyalty," a recent book that said the Bush administration was planning to invade Iraq almost from the time Bush took office.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/...sprj.nirq.kay/

[Dalai lama]

uhmmm ok?

[VeriSexy]

Originally Posted by Dalai lama

uhmmm ok?

This thread is for Pussyman

[Tania]

lol...

[VeriSexy]

Bump for pussyman

[directfiesta]

It is not because there is not 4 naked girls in my bed, that they don't exist....
If I jump in the bed, I am sure that I will fuck at least 4 girls....
So they exist and are in my bed...

[TheMob]

bump for pussyman, he oughta read this

[David!]

Sorry VeriSexy, I did not notice this thread.
Here are some sources for my "theory"
The first one is from a Lebanese American:
http://www.2la.org/syria/iraq-wmd.php
The second one is from an Arab American running a well known website:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=36463
Both articles date back to early 2004.
I believe that the only reason why the US is not acknowledging that Syria has Iraq's wmd is that according to the Bush doctrine, if it is known that Syria has wmd, then the US must "help" Syria get rid of them.
At this time, the US cannot afford a 3rd front, so nothing will be done until at least the middle of the year when a new government has been established in Iraq.

[DEA - banned for life]

there was no wmd ..why would they find any?