Post April 26, 2004
By Kenneth R.
Timmerman
New evidence out of Iraq suggests
that the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) is having better success than is being
reported. Key assertions by the intelligence community that were
widely judged in the media and by critics of President George W. Bush
as having been false are turning out to have been true after all. But
this stunning news has received little attention from the major
media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no
weapons" have been found.
In virtually every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic
missiles - the United States has found the weapons and the programs
that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N.
weapons inspectors.
The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), whose intelligence analysts are managed
by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy
chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of
cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council
resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight. "There
is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed,
but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were
unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."
Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress
that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed
Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council
Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious
consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its
weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner. The
United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as
one justification for going to war.
Both Duelfer and Kay found that Iraq had "a clandestine network of
laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to
continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons
[BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison
laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human
subjects." They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges"
whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons
program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before
the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors," the
official said.
But while the president's critics and the media might plausibly hide
behind ambiguity and a lack of sensational-
looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the case of
Saddam's ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their
silence. "Where were the missiles? We found them," another senior
administration official told Insight.
"Saddam Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam
dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions,"
the first official said. Both senior administration officials spoke
to Insight on condition that neither their name nor their agency be
identified, but their accounts of what the United States has found in
Iraq coincided in every major area.
When former weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January
that the United States had found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons
in Iraq, his conclusions made front-page news. But when he detailed
what the ISG had found in testimony before the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence last October, few took notice. Among Kay's
revelations, which officials tell Insight have been amplified in
subsequent inspections in recent weeks:
* A prison laboratory complex that may have been
used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi officials working
to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to
declare to the U.N." Why was Saddam interested in testing
biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn't have a
biological-weapons program?
* "Reference strains" of a wide variety of
biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of
a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a
senior administration official said. "But it has been written off
[by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'"
* New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella
and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and
aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.
* A line of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or
drones, "not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and
an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a
range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217
miles] beyond the permissible limit."
* "Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel
propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a
capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and
that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal
from the U.N."
* "Plans and advanced design work for new
long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers
[621 miles] - well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit
[93 miles] imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer
range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the
Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey], Cairo [Egypt]
and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates]."
* In addition, through interviews with Iraqi
scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG learned the
Iraqi government had made "clandestine attempts between late 1999 and
2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to
1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles -
probably the No Dong - 300-kilometer-range [186 miles]
antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment,"
Kay reported.
In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed that the
ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants
capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents. The ISG
also found a previously undeclared program to build a "high-speed
rail gun," a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons
materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium
stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad,
which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky
acknowledged to Insight had been intended for "a clandestine
nuclear-weapons program."
In taking apart Iraq's clandestine procurement network, Duelfer said
his investigators had discovered that "the primary source of illicit
financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through
government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring
countries [and] from kickback payments made on contracts set
up through the U.N. oil-for-food program"
[see
"Documents Prove U.N. Oil
Corruption," April 27-May
10].
What the president's critics and the media widely have portrayed as
the most dramatic failure of the U.S. case against Saddam has been
the claimed failure to find "stockpiles" of chemical and biological
weapons. But in a June 2003 Washington Post op-ed, former chief U.N.
weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus called such criticism "a distortion and
a trivialization of a major threat to international peace and
security."
Lt. Gen. Amer Rashid al-Obeidi (left)
and Lt. Gen. Amer Hamoodi al-Saddi (right) speak to an unidentified
French intelligence officer at the Baghdad International Arms Fair in
April 1989, and another French officer listens in (behind al-Saadi,
facing camera)
The October 2002 National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded
that Saddam "probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and
possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents -
much of it added in the last year." That assessment was based, in
part, on conclusions contained in the final report from U.N. weapons
inspectors in 1999, which highlighted discrepancies in what the
Iraqis reported to the United Nations and the amount of precursor
chemicals U.N. arms inspectors could document Iraq had imported but
for which it no longer could account. Until now, Bush's critics say,
no stockpiles of CW agents made with those precursors have been
found. The snap conclusion they draw is that the administration
"lied" to the American people to create a pretext for invading
Iraq.
But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was
anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted
warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in
serried rows, with labels written in English? Or did they think that
a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of
nerve gas in an abandoned factory? In fact, as recent evidence made
public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional
Authority's (CPA's) intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those
stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice
working order - but found all the same.
Douglas Hanson was a U.S. Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20
years, and a veteran of Gulf War I. He was an atomic demolitions
munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical
defense officer. As a civilian analyst in Iraq last summer, he worked
for an operations intelligence unit of the CPA in Iraq, and later,
with the newly formed Ministry of Science and Technology, which was
responsible for finding new, nonlethal employment for Iraqi WMD
scientists.
In an interview with Insight and in an article he wrote for the
online magazine AmericanThinker.com, Hanson examines reports from
U.S. combat units and public information confirming that many of
Iraq's CW stockpiles have indeed been found. Until now, however,
journalists have devoted scant attention to this evidence, in part
because it contradicts the story line they have been putting forward
since the U.S.-led inspections began after the war.
But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly
undramatic nature of the "finds" Hanson and others have described.
The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles"
look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble.
"Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson
says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula
(organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve
agents."
The United Nations was fully aware that Saddam had established his
chemical-weapons plants under the guise of a permitted civilian
chemical-industry infrastructure. Plants inspected in the early 1990s
as CW production facilities had been set up to appear as if they were
producing pesticides - or in the case of a giant plant near Fallujah,
chlorine, which is used to produce mustard gas.
When coalition forces entered Iraq, "huge warehouses and caches of
'commercial and agricultural' chemicals were seized and painstakingly
tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists," Hanson writes. "What
was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our
ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of
these caches."
Caches of "commercial and agricultural" chemicals don't match the
expectation of "stockpiles" of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that
is precisely what they are. "At a very minimum," Hanson tells
Insight, "they were storing the precursors to restart a
chemical-warfare program very quickly." Kay and Duelfer came to a
similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built
new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of
chemical and biological weapons at a moment's notice.
At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides
at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area,
Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker
complex" that was shown to reporters - with unpleasant results. "More
than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and
two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a
nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a
proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc.,
and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence.
Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to
disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders
about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by
securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet
underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a
military ammunition dump - evidently nothing more than a coincidence
in the eyes of the ISG."
That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable
CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of
Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the
United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the
4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance
identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin - a nerve
agent. Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles,
gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix
chemicals at the site. "Of course, later tests by the experts
revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that
everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were
obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the
reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that
'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'"
At Taji - an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of
Columbia - U.S. combat units discovered more "pesticides" stockpiled
in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer
than the standard 55-gallon drum. Hanson says he still recalls the
military sending digital images of the canisters to his office, where
his boss at the Ministry of Science and Technology translated the
Arabic-language markings. "They were labeled as pesticides," he says.
"Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides stored in ammo
dumps."
Again, this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells
filled with a mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for
blister agents. But subsequent tests by the United States disputed
that finding. "If it wasn't a chemical agent, what was it?" Hanson
asks. "More pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this old
soldier's perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my
mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy."
The discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that's the
problem: Finding real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn't fit the
image the media and the president's critics carefully have fed to the
public of what Iraq's weapons ought to look like.
A senior administration official who has gone through the
intelligence reporting from Iraq as well as the earlier reports from
U.N. arms inspectors refers to another well-documented allegation.
"The Iraqis admitted they had made 3.9 tons of VX," a powerful nerve
gas, but claimed they had never weaponized it. The U.N. inspectors
"felt they had more. But where did it go?" The Iraqis never provided
any explanation of what had happened to their VX stockpiles.
What does 3.9 tons of VX look like? "It could fit in one large
garage," the official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would
assemble every bit of VX gas his scientists had produced at a single
site, that still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of
the state of California.
Senior administration officials stress that the investigation will
continue as inspectors comb through millions of pages of documents in
Iraq and attempt to interview Iraqi weapons scientists who have been
trained all their professional lives to conceal their activities from
the outside world.
"The conditions under which the ISG is working are not very
conducive," one official said. "But this president wants the truth to
come out. This is not an exercise in spinning or censoring."
For more on WMD, read "Iraqi
Weapons in Syria"
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for
Insight.
email the
author
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight and author of The French Betrayal of America, just released from Crown Forum.
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