Saddam was a year away from atomic bomb

fossten

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NYT: Saddam Was a Year Away From Atomic Bomb
Posted by Al Brown on November 3, 2006 - 01:55.

In a story apparently designed to attack the Bush administration less than a week away from the midterm elections, the New York Times has instead delivered a stunning November Surprise to the Democrats: Saddam Hussein's regime was perhaps only a year away from developing nuclear weapons at the time of the US invasion.

The story is critical of the government for posting captured Iraqi documents on the internet hoping that researchers and amateurs would translate many of them. The paper says that some of the documents pertained to Hussein's atomic program and speculates that the information could have been useful to the Iranians.

Deep within the article is this astonishing paragraph [emphasis added]:

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
If Hussein, who used chemical weapons against his own citizens, had remained in power he could have had a nuclear weapon three years ago. The New York Times has just destroyed three years of myth-making by anti-war activists.

Jim Geraghty sums it up nicely in National Review Online:

I'm sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?

Hat tip: Stop the ACLU.

Game, set, match.

*owned* :N :bow:
 
Yeah, but if you really think this story is going to hurt the DNC or help the RNC, the author is sipping the Kool-Aid pretty deep.

The NY Times just dropped this story on a Friday? Why, so now it will dominate the Sunday news cycle this weekend. Also, it's near impossible to respond to the story because most people don't follow the news on Saturday.

The story is probably the result of another leftist in the Intelligence Community leaking information.

The story really should be about how the Intelligence community might have carelessly declassified sensitive information. Instead, they are making it a way to bludgeon the Republicans on the Intelligence committe that said to make some of the 43,000 boxes of information public.

Of course, they didn't pick the information, they just said put the stuff up that wasn't sensitive.

But there's no time to frame the story accurately. The Times did this on purpose. How many more examples of the NY TIMES having a political agenda do we need.

I don't know if the story will change anything, but I know that there's nothing positive to come of it. Most people know that Hussein had a program. In response to this, they'll just say "Yeah, but that was in the early 90s, that doesn't count." Just as they've said to every other bit of evidence that was more than 5 years old.

I assume this is the story being refered to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/w...&ex=1163134800&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print
 
My take on this is that all those who accused Bush of lying to get us into war just got their heads handed to them.
 
fossten said:
My take on this is that all those who accused Bush of lying to get us into war just got their heads handed to them.

On the contrary.....

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation’s spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents — most of them in Arabic — would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence.

Seems to me the plan by repugs to "vindicate" BuSh on Iraq by enlisting help via the internet backfired.

Percy's assertion that Saddam was "a Year Away From Atomic Bomb" is unfounded. All that statement was referring to was the same "flawed inteligence" that was used by the BuSh administration that led us there in the first place. YES, he had plans for nukes....... ON PAPER. However the technology he ruled in his labs was NOWHERE CLOSE.
 
The articles I've seen say that Saddam was a year away at the time of desert storm, not the current invasion, so no, it does not redeem shrubby.
 
Saddam Hussein himself could stand right in front of you Kool-Aid drinkers and, in broken English, say "Bush was right - I planned everything, and the WMDs are buried in the Bekaa valley - come, I show you now" and you losers would say that he was part of a Karl Rove plot to save Bush's presidency.

Talk about pearls before swine...you moonbats take the cake.
 
fossten said:
Saddam Hussein himself could stand right in front of you Kool-Aid drinkers and, in broken English, say "Bush was right - I planned everything, and the WMDs are buried in the Bekaa valley - come, I show you now" and you losers would say that he was part of a Karl Rove plot to save Bush's presidency.

Talk about pearls before swine...you moonbats take the cake.

Fossie, you really need to get couseling for that pent up hostility you have. Such a hater. tsk tsk.
 
fossten said:
Saddam Hussein himself could stand right in front of you Kool-Aid drinkers and, in broken English, say "Bush was right - I planned everything, and the WMDs are buried in the Bekaa valley - come, I show you now" and you losers would say that he was part of a Karl Rove plot to save Bush's presidency.

Talk about pearls before swine...you moonbats take the cake.

And you are a moonbat for thinking Saddam would do such a thing and for still thinking we actually found the WMDs that were so "threatening to the US" that the BuSh administration was claming was justification for going into Iraq in the first place.
 
You may want to read this, although I doubt it'll do you any good.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Russia Hid Saddam’s WMD’s
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
Washington Times | October 2, 2003

On March 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the U.S.-led "aggression" against Iraq as "unwarranted" and "unjustifiable." Three days later, Pravda said that an anonymous Russian "military expert" was predicting that the United States would fabricate finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov immediately started plying the idea abroad, and it has taken hold around the world ever since.

As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency exit." I implemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.

All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction. Chemical weapons, especially those produced in Third World countries, which lack sophisticated production facilities, often do not retain lethal properties after a few months on the shelf and are routinely dumped anyway. And all chemical weapons plants had a civilian cover making detection difficult, regardless of the circumstances.

The plan included an elaborate propaganda routine. Anyone accusing Moammar Gadhafi of possessing chemical weapons would be ridiculed. Lies, all lies! Come to Libya and see! Our Western left-wing organizations, like the World Peace Council, existed for sole purpose of spreading the propaganda we gave them. These very same groups bray the exact same themes to this day. We always relied on their expertise at organizing large street demonstrations in Western Europe over America's "war-mongering" whenever we wanted to distract world attention from the crimes of the vicious regimes we sponsored.

Iraq, in my view, had its own "Sarindar" plan in effect direct from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. Nicolae Ceausescu told me so, and he heard it from Leonid Brezhnev. KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so, too. In the late 1970s, Gen. Primakov ran Saddam's weapons programs. After that, as you may recall, he was promoted to head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, to Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and in 1998, to prime minister. What you may not know is that Primakov hates Israel and has always championed Arab radicalism. He was a personal friend of Saddam's and has repeatedly visited Baghdad after 1991, quietly helping Saddam play his game of hide-and-seek.

The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but it showed them how to make them "disappear." Russia is still at it. Primakov was in Baghdad from December until a couple of days before the war, along with a team of Russian military experts led by two of Russia's topnotch "retired"generals: Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor Maltsev, a former air defense chief of staff. They were all there receiving honorary medals from the Iraqi defense minister. They clearly were not there to give Saddam military advice for the upcoming war—Saddam's Katyusha launchers were of World War II vintage, and his T-72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG fighter planes were all obviously useless against America. "I did not fly to Baghdad to drink coffee," was what Gen. Achalov told the media afterward. They were there orchestrating Iraq's "Sarindar" plan.

The U.S. military in fact, has already found the only thing that would have been allowed to survive under the classic Soviet "Sarindar" plan to liquidate weapons arsenals in the event of defeat in war — the technological documents showing how to reproduce weapons stocks in just a few weeks.

Such a plan has undoubtedly been in place since August 1995 — when Saddam's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who ran Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs for 10 years, defected to Jordan. That August, UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors searched a chicken farm owned by Kamel's family and found more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes containing documentation dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear. Caught red-handed, Iraq at last admitted to its "extensive biological warfare program, including weaponization," issued a "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure Report" and turned over documents about the nerve agent VX and nuclear weapons.

Saddam then lured Gen. Kamel back, pretending to pardon his defection. Three days later, Kamel and over 40 relatives, including women and children, were murdered, in what the official Iraqi press described as a "spontaneous administration of tribal justice." After sending that message to his cowed, miserable people, Saddam then made a show of cooperation with UN inspection, since Kamel had just compromised all his programs, anyway. In November 1995, he issued a second "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure" as to his supposedly non-existent missile programs. That very same month, Jordan intercepted a large shipment of high-grade missile components destined for Iraq. UNSCOM soon fished similar missile components out of the Tigris River, again refuting Saddam's spluttering denials. In June 1996, Saddam slammed the door shut to UNSCOM's inspection of any "concealment mechanisms." On Aug. 5, 1998, halted cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA completely, and they withdrew on Dec. 16, 1998. Saddam had another four years to develop and hide his weapons of mass destruction without any annoying, prying eyes. U.N. Security Council resolutions 1115, (June 21, 1997), 1137 (Nov. 12, 1997), and 1194 (Sept. 9, 1998) were issued condemning Iraq—ineffectual words that had no effect. In 2002, under the pressure of a huge U.S. military buildup by a new U.S. administration, Saddam made yet another "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure," which was found to contain "false statements" and to constitute another "material breach" of U.N. and IAEA inspection and of paragraphs eight to 13 of resolution 687 (1991).

It was just a few days after this last "Disclosure," after a decade of intervening with the U.N. and the rest of the world on Iraq's behalf, that Gen. Primakov and his team of military experts landed in Baghdad — even though, with 200,000 U.S. troops at the border, war was imminent, and Moscow could no longer save Saddam Hussein. Gen. Primakov was undoubtedly cleaning up the loose ends of the "Sarindar" plan and assuring Saddam that Moscow would rebuild his weapons of mass destruction after the storm subsided for a good price.

Mr. Putin likes to take shots at America and wants to reassert Russia in world affairs. Why would he not take advantage of this opportunity? As minister of foreign affairs and prime minister, Gen. Primakov has authored the "multipolarity" strategy of counterbalancing American leadership by elevating Russia to great-power status in Eurasia. Between Feb. 9-12, Mr. Putin visited Germany and France to propose a three-power tactical alignment against the United States to advocate further inspections rather than war. On Feb. 21, the Russian Duma appealed to the German and French parliaments to join them on March 4-7 in Baghdad, for "preventing U.S. military aggression against Iraq." Crowds of European leftists, steeped for generations in left-wing propaganda straight out of Moscow, continue to find the line appealing.

Mr. Putin's tactics have worked. The United States won a brilliant military victory, demolishing a dictatorship without destroying the country, but it has begun losing the peace. While American troops unveiled the mass graves of Saddam's victims, anti-American forces in Western Europe and elsewhere, spewed out vitriolic attacks, accusing Washington of greed for oil and not of really caring about weapons of mass destruction, or exaggerating their risks, as if weapons of mass destruction were really nothing very much to worry about after all.

It is worth remembering that Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, chose to live in a Soviet gulag instead of continuing to develop the power of death. "I wanted to alert the world," Sakharov explained in 1968, "to the grave perils threatening the human race thermonuclear extinction, ecological catastrophe, famine." Even Igor Kurchatov, the KGB academician who headed the Soviet nuclear program from 1943 until his death in 1960, expressed deep qualms of conscience about helping to create weapons of mass destruction. "The rate of growth of atomic explosives is such," he warned in an article written together with several other Soviet nuclear scientists not long before he died, "that in just a few years the stockpile will be large enough to create conditions under which the existence of life on earth will be impossible."
The Cold War was fought over the reluctance to use weapons of mass destruction, yet now this logic is something only senior citizens seem to recall. Today, even lunatic regimes like that in North Korea not only possess weapons of mass destruction, but openly offer to sell them to anyone with cash, including terrorists and their state sponsors. Is anyone paying any attention? Being inured to proliferation, however, does not reduce its danger. On the contrary, it increases it.

General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He is currently finishing a new book, Red Roots: The Origins of Today's Anti-Americanism.
 
JohnnyBz00LS said:
And you are a moonbat for thinking Saddam would do such a thing and for still thinking we actually found the WMDs that were so "threatening to the US" that the BuSh administration was claming was justification for going into Iraq in the first place.

What an absolutely asinine thing to say. Like Saddam is such a good guy, he wouldn't do "such a thing." Like he also didn't murder hundreds of thousands of people through various means including poisonous gas, right?

And you still cling stupidly to the fable that Bush was the only one who believed there were WMDs and that Saddam was a threat. Never mind that Clinton, all the Dems and Reps in Congress, the Brits, and half the world all believed the same thing. Never mind the SIXTEEN United Nations resolutions that Saddam violated. Never mind the constant violation of the no-fly zone rules. Nope, you believe it was an illegal invasion for oil.

You, sir, just proved my point. You ignore the facts so that your delicate little bubble of hatred doesn't pop. I suppose you still believe Karl Rove was the leaker, too.
 

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