[Most of this stuff is old hat for those of us who followed the issue.]
The release by Julian Assange’s web site Wikileaks of classified documents reveals that U.S. military intelligence discovered chemical weapons labs, encountered insurgents who were specialists in the creation of toxins, and uncovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, Washington, DC officials and the news media have ignored this information.
One of the WikiLeaks document dumps reveals that as late as 2008, American troops continued to find WMD in the region.
There are numerous mentions of chemical and biological weapons in the WikiLeaks documents, however the U.S. media appear only interested in those portions of the leaked material that highlight actions that are viewed as embarrassing for the U.S. military such as the accusation that U.S. commanders were aware of abuse and “torture” of prisoners by Iraqi soldiers and police officers.
[..] WikiLeaks documents don’t reveal evidence of a massive weapons program by Saddam Hussein — the Bush administration’s leading rationale for invading Iraq — or some enormous stockpile of WMD, but do reveal that chemical weapons did vanish from the Iraqi battlefield.
According to the latest WikiLeaks document “dump,” Saddam’s toxic arsenal, significantly reduced after the Gulf War, remained intact. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict and may have brewed up their own deadly agents, according to the WikiLeaks web site.
During that time, former Iraqi General Georges Sada, Saddam’s top commander, detailed the transfers of Iraq’s WMD. “There [were] weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Mr. Sada said. “I am confident they were taken over.”
Gen. Sada’s comments came just a month after Israel’s top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, claimed that Saddam Hussein “transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria.”
in 2004, for example, American special forces members secretly purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard which have been used since World War I. Following testing in a military lab, the chemical was then secured and transferred to a secret location.
Meanwhile, also in Iraq, U.S. recon soldiers inspected a suspected “chemical weapons” plant:
-
“One of the bunkers has been tampered with,” they write. “The integrity of the seal [around the complex] appears intact, but it seems someone is interested in trying to get into the bunkers.”
During the a battle in Fallujah, American forces claim they discovered a “house with a chemical lab … substances found are similar to ones (in lesser quantities located a previous chemical lab.” The following day, there was a call in another part of the Fallujah requesting “explosives experts to dispose of a chemical[weapons] cache.”
In addition, an armored vehicle came upon “155mm rounds filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance.” Initial tests were inconclusive. But later, “the rounds tested positive for mustard.”
Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he’s a columnist for The Examiner (examiner.com) and New Media Alliance
What planet are you living on?
Better take another look around. We’re fighting them in all the streets of North America. Lucky we still got streets.
Finally I hear a voice of sanity about this subject. This has been one of my study areas for years – falling in the general area of personality manipulation.
It’s true, the PC Idea of torture is ridiculous. First of all, subjects can be tested to see if they lie and give the appropriate Pavlovian response or simply tortured no matter the response. Also by looking for “Yes or no” physiological responses under torture , you can find out anything in the world without the subject even speaking.
It seems that only in 2004 or something like that, did reality reverse itself and the theme of every war movie and virtually all common sense in personal interaction of human persuasive history I had ever seen was declared “something that didn’t work”.
Seeing the inanity of PC thought is mind numbing..
As I argued with PC people a few years ago,it became apparent that they didn’t care the facts at all . They were only concerned that if you said it worked then that (to them) authorized you do do it (it doesn’t). Therefore the conclusion (that flies in the face of all common sense) HAD to be that it “didn’t work” regardless if it did or not.
But the thing is that torture is not about “getting something to work” – that is a superficial idea of what is happening.
It is actually about personality destruction or reconstruction.
The method or purpose of “torture” (actually induced metal breakdown by any means) is to neither get the subject to tell the truth or lie but to break the person. The real torturer does not work to get an identity/consciousness to to say something as an intact identity, they work to destroy the identity.
After that , truth , lies reality, fantasy , it’s all the same the subject belongs to the interrogator like a marionette.
IPCRESS, the “Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under Stress”, is real.
I studied this – the real articles on torture are swarmed under a million PC American articles but they are there – and in real articles are the reports of torturers themselves. Every single torturer that has emerged – such as from the third world, (I have an article with reports from three ex torturers from three different countries) – to tell their tales has said that they can and have broken anybody.
…
If you want to know about torture you study the real thing and listen to torturers, not the fantasies of those with no real world experience or who have never investigated the reality .
In WW 2 and probably today – the allies did not give their people suicide pills for nothing If an agent or whomever was captured and faced Nazi torture – they allies assumed everything was compromised within 24 hours or sooner.
—-
Actually there is a more appropriate reason not to torture – not because it works or doesn’t work – whatever that means but because a compassionate mature empathetic human being exercises the right of free will and decides not to do evil.
This idea of humanity of course cannot be found in a computer – it is found in the definition of what makes a realized . actualized human being
The last thing is that when I searched on the internet under torture a few years ago, the results were all about so-called American “torture” which is amateur and minuscule compared to the real users in the world.
What goes on in other countries you don’t wanna know even if you could – but some when some information emerges like recent exposes from Chile (this decade)- they put Vlad the Impaler and the Nazis to shame – but no leftist paid them any attention.
Which is the whole theme here, leftists totally distort and redefine the realities of the world and to place themselves at the center of these absurd fantasies.
Poor Julian must have thought he was getting really lucky with those two women.
“Wow, I am such a stud! Two beautiful women want to have sex with me together! Va VA voom!”
So the women go the the cop shop the next day to press rape charges…
Congratulations to Julian for the technical feat of raping two women simultaneously.
Smell like CIA or something? Hmmmm…
The final products may not take up much room, and yes, would be degraded by now — but the raw, unprocessed components are another matter. During the run-up to the invasion, Debka did indeed report convoys of trucks, apparently of Russian manufacture, headed for the Syrian border. And Bill Gertz, who is no slouch when it comes to unearthing accurate intel, had similar findings.
If in fact these were (among other things) WMD’s, then Bush’s fear, I suspect, would have been less focused on al-Qa’eda than on Hezb’ollah. Consider:
At the time, Syria was still shopping around for a sponsor to take the place of the now-defunct USSR, and had been sending inquiries to the USA. However, the notion that Damascus might be discovered to have Saddam’s WMD’s would have soured any possible relation with Uncle Sam. So, if Syria were to maintain effective control of them while retaining “plausible deniability,” the materials would have to be stored somewhere nearby — yet not on actual sovereign Syrian soil.
Eh voilà, Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley — a Hezb’ollah redout. The WMD’s would have to be transferred there shortly after arriving in Syria, in order to leave Damascus with the appearance of clean hands.
The feelers to the US subsequently came to nothing, but it’s an odds-on bet that if there were WMD’s, that’s where they’d be — even now. The fact that Hezb’ollah hasn’t tried using them — e.g., during the summer of 2006 — probably has, more than anything else, to do with Syria’s relationship with Hezb’ollah.
Remember, too, Eagle, that just four months before the outbreak of open hostilites, Iran took up the slack that Syria had been seeking for a sponsor — and the two countries signed a pact of alliance.
And if in fact Bush had that kind of info, he might well want to keep it quiet for as long as practically possible, especially since it’s entirely possible [I venture to suggest, likely] that Hezb’ollah has had sleeper cells in this country [USA] for the past dozen years or more.
There’s one other thing that I never hear anybody talk about, but it’s entirely conceivable to me that, while in custody, Saddam may have told US agents what became of the WMD’s (or components, etc), in return for assurances that his execution would be swift & businesslike — unlike the kinds for which his name was legendary. US agents could just as easily have been “otherwise occupied” at various moments before his actual trial, its various adjournments or even the time of execution….
In a place like Iraq, torture [and if I use the word, I don’t mean “water boarding” — I mean torture] is standard operating procedure. It’s essential — endemic — to Arab culture, and especially Iraqi culture. It’s expected. Saddam would’ve had no illusions about what he was facing.
We know also that he had long since displayed a pattern of behavior of hiding his toys when things got hot…. For example, at the time of the Gulf War [1991], he sent several squadrons of [French-made?] fighters over the border for safe-keeping in IRAN — this, after after the eight-yr-long, horribly bloody Iran-Iraq War!
It certainly does scare the crap out of them — and gives the lie to the defeatist Left’s (perversely) fond assertion that Islamic terrorists are “unstoppable” because they’re “not afraid to die.” What load of fetid dingo’s kidneys that is! You bet they’re afraid to die.
Finally, I think the claim that coercive methods (whether they entail real torture or water-boarding or anything else intended to induce a response that the subject might not otherwise provide) ‘will only elicit false intel,’ is basically disingenuous. Those who point to CIA stats, etc, are — I believe — playing a nasty little PC game that involves mixing apples & oranges.
There are times when a subject is tortured not for the purpose of eliciting the truth (e.g., to reveal accurate enemy troop movements & positions, etc) — but, rather for the express purpose of getting him to LIE. For example when the USS Pueblo was captured in North Korean waters in January 1968, and Pyongyang had Cmmdr Lloyd Bucher & the crew tortured, to induce them to make (falsely) incriminating statements that could be used for diplomatic purposes against their own country.
And they made the false ‘confessions’ under torture. Yet, if you take a look at the group photo that was taken of them by their captors to go along with the confession, you can plainly see the guys squatting down in the front row extending downward (near the bottom of the photo) the “finger” — as in impudicus indigitus, the “impudent finger”; know the one I mean? — in order to signal that their confessions were bogus.
John McCain & Jeremiah Denton were both tortured by the North Vietnamese for the same purpose: to get them to lie, not to give them the facts.
I recall a line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — who, after serving honorably & bravely in the Great Patriotic War against the Third Reich, was subsequently sent to Siberia for making an oblique, uncomplimentary reference to the “man with the moustache.” Stalin sent Solzhenitsyn to Siberia for that little slip. Anyway, I forget the actual wording of the line, but the gist of it was that the difference between the Nazis & the Commies was that the former tortured you to get the truth — while the latter did it to get you to lie. And of course, it worked — for both of them.
Are you one of those who KNOWS that Iraq “had no WMDs” without being able to explain what happened to the WMDs the entire world knew he had in 1991 – as evidenced by 17 UNSC resolutions between 1991 and 2003? Not only had Iraq used them against Iran and their own people, but Saddam had agreed in the cease-fire agreement of 1991 that he had them.
The mainstream media had too much invested in their campaign against Bush and their claims that he had “lied”.
The primary concern was not about Iraq’s direct strike capability, other than against Israel. Bush’s concern was about the WMDs getting into the hands of Al Qaeda whom EVERYONE expected would strike the US AGAIN after 9/11.
Bill Clinton had appeased Al Qaeda by considering them as common criminals throughout the 90’s, which emboldened them and the attacks escalated to the attack on 9/11. Bush immediately re-classified them as terrorists and made them defend themselves in their own backyard or we would be fighting them in the streets of America by now. Now the feckless Obama has reclassified the terrorists as a “man caused disaster” and outlawed waterboarding them.
I would waterboard every terrorist we captured, and Julian Assange as well. This is a safe, physician assisted procedure that draws no blood, leaves no scars and inflicts no pain. It just scares the crap out of them, and it never failed, even against suicidal jihadis who wanted to die by violent means. Those who say that detainees provide false intel under such interrogation methods make no sense, because they would be subject to more of the same procedures or worse once they were found to be lying, and why would they want that?
Maybe. Maybe not. Chemical and biological WMDs enough to wipe out major cities do not take up much volume and may even be hidden somewhere in Iraq. They are almost certainly degraded by now. The point is that everyone knew he had them in 1991 and the legal basis for the regime change was his refusal to account for them as he had agreed to do in the cease fire agreement of 1991. We still don’t know for sure what happened to them, other than what we are now hearing through Wikileaks.
Debka said many times the WMD was transferred to Syria.
Actually the Bush Admin. did put information to the back pages. They even found nuclear bomb plans and equipment buried in n a scientists garden.
But they decided that because they did not have a smoking gun IE evidence of immediate strike capability as they had claimed they decided to smother all discussion because they already had enough egg on face in the media.
And of course Saddam was playing cat and mouse with WMD inspectors – He was fabulously oil wealthy – it was just a matter of time before he weaseled a WMD attack.
Anyone who thinks Saddam was WMD free is close to being foolish if not altogether. WMD were moved out to Syria among other places during the months preceding the 2003 invasion. The US was warned of this by Israel while this was happening.
I doubt that the Bush Administration would have buried information such as this, which was favorable to Bush.