Comments Posted By Russ
Displaying 1 To 8 Of 8 Comments
BUCHANAN'S NEW BOOK: "PREPARE YE FOR THE END"
So if America is doomed, what is to be done? Maybe secession is the answer. We tried it before, with disappointing results, but now things are different. Combine California with Baja to the south (Mexico would have to cooperate) and Oregon and Washington to the north and next thing you know we've got Califorington with President Terminator to lead us! Pat would not be too pleased. Way too brown, no English to speak of (poor pun, sorry) and Christian only to the extent that Roman Catholics are Christian ---that's a dig at you, Pat.
Comment Posted By russ On 16.12.2007 @ 19:59
ANN COULTER: CONSERVATIVE LOUT
try and name one time when those dem. figures used language as abrasive and offensive as coulter. the reason no one on the left blogs ever says anything about the dem. leaders is that they never say anything like the filth coulter spews.
Comment Posted By russ On 7.06.2006 @ 16:10
Good for you, rightwingnuthouse for coming down on the side of us ordinary people who use the net. Those people who apparently think the free market is a governmental system, like democracy (which it is not) or a religion, or the answer to all economic problems, are misguided.
Capitalism needs regulation in order to work well and to benefit everyone, otherwise it is just teeth and claws in a free market jungle.
We need Congress to regulate the companies who would impose a fast lane and a slow lane on the net and give the fast lane to the boys with the big bucks and leave the rest of us in the dust. The internet playing field should be level for everyone.
Comment Posted By Russ On 11.06.2006 @ 21:13
IMPEACHMENT BANDWAGON STARTS TO ROLL
You say: "Lewis Lapham, the iconoclastic intellectual whose lucid, well written essays and columns have been a source of inspiration and thought provoking debate to two generations of American liberals"...
Since when has ANY liberal come up with a thought let alone a lucid & intellectual thought?
Comment Posted By russ On 27.02.2006 @ 16:34
CIA PLOT TO DESTROY THE MOONBATS
Let me guess...
These clueless & parasitic moonbats probably wouldn't appreciate the following: Give War a Chance by Edward Luttwak, right?
Comment Posted By russ On 27.02.2006 @ 16:53
New questions on Saddam, WMD
Published February 20, 2006
The Washington TimesMore information has surfaced in recent days about Saddam Hussein and his
weapons of mass destruction programs, and the possible roles of Syria and
Russia in spiriting WMD and massive arsenals of conventional munitions out
of Iraq prior to the start of the war three years ago.
The new information includes audio recordings of 12 hours of
conversations from the early 1990s through 2000 involving Saddam Hussein
and his top aides, in which Saddam discusses how to conceal Iraqi weapons
programs from U.N. inspectors and the possibility that the United States
could be the target of terrorist attacks. The recordings were provided by
Bill Tierney, an Arabic speaker, who worked during the mid-1990s for the
United Nations Special Commission that was responsible for overseeing
Iraq's disarmament.
One new piece of information revealed on the tapes, released Saturday
by Mr. Tierney at the Intelligence Summit, a private conference held in
Arlington, is that Saddam was actively working on a plan to enrich uranium
using a technique known as plasma separation. This is particularly
worrisome because of the date of the conversation: It took place in 2000,
nearly five years after Iraq's nuclear programs were thought to have
stopped.
Perhaps most disturbing of all, according to Mr. Tierney, was the fact
that the Iraqi scientists briefing Saddam about the uranium enrichment
plan in 2000 "were totally unknown" to U.N. weapons inspectors. The plasma
program also appears to have escaped the attention of the Iraq Survey
Group, which reported two years ago that it had ended back in the late
1980s.
Mr. Tierney points out that the 12 hours of information that he has
translated thus far is just a small fraction of the hundreds of hours of
tape recordings and other raw intelligence data collected after the fall
of Saddam.
Another speaker at the conference was John Shaw, former deputy
undersecretary of defense for international technology security, who
charged that Saddam's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were moved
by Russian special forces into Syria and Lebanon. According to Mr. Shaw,
former Russian intelligence boss Yevgeny Primakov came to Iraq in December
2002 in order to supervise "cleanup" operations to remove WMD production
materials from the country. This operation, carried out by GRU military
intelligence and Russian "spetsnaz," or special forces, troops, was
designed to make it possible for critics of the war to be able to claim
that Iraq had had no WMD. Mr. Shaw claims that officials in the Pentagon
and the CIA, who were fearful of alienating Moscow, actively worked to
discredit his efforts to bring this story to light, and that some derided
it as "Israeli disinformation."
It is apparent that the American public has much more to learn about
Moscow, Damascus and WMD and precisely when Saddam's nuclear weapons
programs actually stopped.Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
Comment Posted By Russ On 20.02.2006 @ 12:40
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Ex-Official: Russia Moved Saddam's WMD
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Sunday, Feb. 19, 2006
A top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein's
weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the
first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein "cleaned up" his weapons of mass
destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from discovering them.
"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the
Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy
Undersecretary of Defense John. A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately
sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org)
"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that
were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence
of its existence," he said.
Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S.
government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy undersecretary of
defense for international technology security when the events he described today
occurred.
He called the evacuation of Saddam's WMD stockpiles "a well-orchestrated
campaign using two neighboring client states with which the Russian leadership
had a long time security relationship."
Shaw was initially tapped to make an inventory of Saddam's conventional weapons
stockpiles, based on intelligence estimates of arms deals he had concluded with
the former Soviet Union, China and France.
He estimated that Saddam had amassed 100 million tons of munitions –- roughly 60
percent of the entire U.S. arsenal. "The origins of these weapons were Russian,
Chinese and French in declining order of magnitude, with the Russians holding
the lion's share and the Chinese just edging out the French for second place."
But as Shaw's office increasingly got involved in ongoing intelligence to
identify Iraqi weapons programs before the war, he also got "a flow of
information from British contacts on the ground at the Syrian border and from
London" via non-U.S. government contacts.
"The intelligence included multiple sitings of truck convoys, convoys going
north to the Syrian border and returning empty," he said.
Shaw worked closely with Julian Walker, a former British ambassador who had
decades of experience in Iraq, and an unnamed Ukranian-American who was directly
plugged in to the head of Ukraine's intelligence service.
The Ukrainians were eager to provide the United States with documents from their
own archives on Soviet arms transfers to Iraq and on ongoing Russian assistance
to Saddam, to thank America for its help in securing Ukraine's independence from
the Soviet Union, Shaw said.
In addition to the convoys heading to Syria, Shaw said his contacts "provided
information about steel drums with painted warnings that had been moved to a
cellar of a hospital in Beirut."
But when Shaw passed on his information to the Defense Intelligence Agency and
others within the U.S. intelligence community, he was stunned by their response.
"My report on the convoys was brushed off as ‘Israeli disinformation,'" he said.One month later, Shaw learned that the DIA general counsel complained to his own
Comment Posted By Russ On 19.02.2006 @ 12:29
superiors that Shaw had eaten from the DIA "rice bowl." It was a Washington
euphemism that meant he had commited the unpardonable sin of violating another
agency's turf.
The CIA responded in even more diabolical fashion. "They trashed one of my Brits
and tried to declare him persona non grata to the intelligence community," Shaw
said. "We got constant indicators that Langley was aggressively trying to
discredit both my Ukranian American and me in Kiev," in addition to his other
sources.
But Shaw's information had not originated from a casual contact. His
Ukranian-American aid was a personal friend of David Nicholas, a Western
ambassador in Kiev, and of Igor Smesko, head of Ukrainian intelligence.
Smesko had been a military attaché in Washington in the early 1990s when Ukraine
first became independent and Dick Cheney was secretary of defense. "Smesko had
told Cheney that when Ukraine became free of Russia he wanted to show his
friendship for the United States."
Helping out on Iraq provided him with that occasion.
"Smesko had gotten to know Gen. James Clapper, now director of the Geospacial
Intelligence Agency, but then head of DIA," Shaw said.
But it was Shaw's own friendship to the head of Britain's MI6 that brought it
all together during a two-day meeting in London that included Smeshko's people,
the MI6 contingent, and Clapper, who had been deputized by George Tenet to help
work the issue of what happened to Iraq's WMD stockpiles.
In the end, here is what Shaw learned:
In December 2002, former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB
general with long-standing ties to Saddam, came to Iraq and stayed until just
before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003;
Primakov supervised the execution of long-standing secret agreements, signed
between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU (military intelligence), that
provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military
personnel to remove WMDs, production materials and technical documentation from
Iraq, so the regime could announce that Iraq was "WMD free."
Shaw said that this type GRU operation, known as "Sarandar," or "emergency
exit," has long been familiar to U.S. intelligence officials from Soviet-bloc
defectors as standard GRU practice;
In addition to the truck convoys, which carried Iraqi WMD to Syria and Lebanon
in February and March 2003 "two Russian ships set sail from the (Iraqi) port of
Umm Qasr headed for the Indian Ocean," where Shaw believes they "deep-sixed"
additional stockpiles of Iraqi WMD from flooded bunkers in southern Iraq that
were later discovered by U.S. military intelligence personnel;
The Russian "clean-up" operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and
Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq "under the
command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov
and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and psing as civilian commercial
consultants."
Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported on Oct. 30, 2004, that Achatov and
Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from Iraqi Defense Minister
Sultan Hashim Ahmed in a Baghdad building bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during
the first U.S. air raids in early March 2003.
Shaw says he leaked the information about the two Russian generals and the
clean-up operation to Gertz in October 2004 in an effort to "push back" against
claims by Democrats that were orchestrated with CBS News to embarrass President
Bush just one week before the November 2004 presidential election. The press
sprang bogus claims that 377 tons of high explosives of use to Iraq's nuclear
weapons program had "gone missing" after the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, while
ignoring intelligence of the Russian-orchestrated evacuation of Iraqi WMDs;
The two Russian generals "had visited Baghdad no fewer than 20 times in the
preceding five to six years," Shaw revealed. U.S. intelligence knew "the
identity and strength of the various Spetsnaz units, their dates of entry and
exit in Iraq, and the fact that the effort (to clean up Iraq's WMD stockpiles)
with a planning conference in Baku from which they flew to Baghdad."
The Baku conference, chaired by Russian Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei
Shoigu, "laid out the plans for the Sarandar clean-up effort so that Shoigu
could leave after the keynote speech for Baghdad to orchestrate the planning for
the disposal of the WMD."
Subsequent intelligence reports showed that Russian Spetsnaz operatives "were
now changing to civilian clothes from military/GRU garb," Shaw said. "The
Russian denial of my revelations in late October 2004 included the statement
that "only Russian civilians remained in Baghdad." That was the "only true
statement" the Russians made, Shaw ironized.
The evacuation of Saddam's WMD to Syria and Lebanon "was an entirely controlled
Russian GRU operation," Shaw said. "It was the brainchild of General Yevgenuy
Primakov."
The goal of the clean-up was "to erase all trace of Russian involvement" in
Saddam's WMD programs, and "was a masterpiece of military camouflage and
deception."
Just as astonishing as the Russian clean-up operation were efforts by Bush
administration appointees, including Defense Department spokesman Laurence
DiRita, to smear Shaw and to cover up the intelligence information he brought to
light.
"Larry DiRita made sure that this story would never grow legs," Shaw said. "He
whispered sotto voce to journalists that there was no substance to my
information and that it was the product of an unbalanced mind."
Shaw suggested that the answer of why the Bush administration had systematically
"ignored Russia's involvement" in evacuating Saddam's WMD stockpiles "could be
much bigger than anyone has thought," but declined to speculate what exactly was
involved.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney was less reticent. He thought the
reason was Iran.
"With Iran moving faster than anyone thought in its nuclear programs," he told
NewsMax, "the administration needed the Russians, the Chinese and the French,
and was not interested in information that would make them look bad."
McInerney agreed that there was "clear evidence" that Saddam had WMD. "Jack Shaw
showed when it left Iraq, and how."
Former Undersecretary of Defense Richard Perle, a strong supporter of the war
against Saddam, blasted the CIA for orchestrating a smear campaign against the
Bush White House and the war in Iraq.
"The CIA has been at war with the Bush administration almost from the
beginning," he said in a keynote speech at the Intelligence Summit on Saturday.
He singled out recent comments by Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East
analyst, alleging that the Bush White House "cherry-picked" intelligence to make
the case for war in Iraq.
"Mr. Pillar was in a very senior position and was able to make his views known,
if that is indeed what he believed," Perle said.
"He (Pillar) briefed senior policy officials before the start of the Iraq war in
2003. If he had had reservations about the war, he could have voiced them at
that time." But according to officials briefed by Pillar, Perle said, he never
did.
Even more inexplicable, Perle said, were the millions of documents "that remain
untranslated" among those seized from Saddam Hussein's intelligence services.
"I think the intelligence community does not want them to be exploited," he
said.
Among those documents, presented Saturday at the conference by former FBI
translator Bill Tierney, were transcripts of Saddam's palace conversations with
top aides in which he discussed ongoing nuclear weapons plans in 2000, well
after the U.N. arms inspectors believed he had ceased all nuclear weapons work.
"What was most disturbing in those tapes," Tierney said, "was the fact that the
individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special
Commission."
In addition, Tierney said, the plasma uranium programs Saddam discussed with his
aids as ongoing operations in 2000 had been dismissed as "old programs"
disbanded years earlier, according to the final CIA report on Iraq's weapons
programs, presented in 2004 by the Iraq Survey Group.
"When I first heard those tapes" about the uranium plasma program, "it
completely floored me," Tierney said.
The American Thinker
A second Iraqi former commander confirms WMDsSlowly, very slowly, we are beginning to discover what happened to the WMDs of
Comment Posted By Russ On 18.02.2006 @ 15:29
Saddam. The left and the antique media have made it an article of faith that
there never were any WMDs, and that “Bush lied.†So deep is their investment in
a political position premised on this conclusion that they will pay no attention
to contrary evidence.
Via Peter Glover’s website Wires from the bunker, we learn of an interview
between Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a southern regional commander for Saddam
Hussein’s Fedayeen militia in the late 1980s and a personal friend of the
dictator and Ryan Mauro of Worldthreats.com.
Only two weeks ago, General Sada, formerly Sadaam’s no 2 Air Force Commander,
told the New York Sun that Sadaam’s WMD was moved to Syria just six weeks before
the US-led invasion. Now Ali Ibrahim confirms this and explains the underlying
strategy of Saddam:
I know Saddam’s weapons are in Syria due to certain military deals that were
made going as far back as the late 1980’s that dealt with the event that
either capitols were threatened with being overrun by an enemy nation. Not to
mention I have discussed this in-depth with various contacts of mine who have
confirmed what I already knew. At this point Saddam knew that the United
States were eventually going to come for his weapons and the United States
wasn’t going to just let this go like they did in the original Gulf War. He
knew that he had lied for this many years and wanted to maintain legitimacy
with the pan Arab nationalists. He also has wanted since he took power to
embarrass the West and this was the perfect opportunity to do so. After Saddam
denied he had such weapons why would he use them or leave them readily
available to be found? That would only legitimize President Bush, who he has a
personal grudge against. What we are witnessing now is many who opposed the
war to begin with are rallying around Saddam saying we overthrew a sovereign
leader based on a lie about WMD. This is exactly what Saddam wanted and
predicted.
Moreover, Ali Ibrahim debunks other shibboleths of the left, including the
allegation of no ties between al Qaeda terror and Saddam:
As far as Al-Qaeda is concerned this support was limited for a long time,
mainly due to the fact that Al-Qaeda had the hopes of creating an Islamic
empire while Saddam wanted a secular Arab nationalist empire. They only really
came to terms in the mid-90’s due to the fact that both knew they shared the
same short term enemy. Once they came to terms on this Saddam provided
Al-Qaeda with intelligence support and whatever money or munitions they could
provide. Saddam has had very long standing contacts in the black market as
well as with Moscow and would provide whatever munitions he could through
these contacts.
He also addresses the claim that the US bears responsibility for bringing Saddam
to power and for armning him with WMDs:
This is absolutely ludicrous. I was in the Ba’athist Revolution who received
support from the Soviet Union because of the socialist ideology behind it. The
Soviet Union openly supported and backed the Ba’athist revolution in Iraq at
the time and I am sure you can find news articles about it in European press
agencies and others at the time. I was there helping with the revolution and
worked on two occasions with Soviet KGB officials to help train us, much like
the United States did with the Taliban during the Soviet campaign in
Afghanistan. The United States never directly gave us any WMDs but rather
ingredients. They were not mixed and these ‘ingredients’ could have been
easily used for commercial use but were rather used to build low life chemical
weapons.
The tape recordings of Saddam discussing WMDs are said by Ryan Mauro of
Worldthreats.com to be a “smoking cannon.†If all of this information proves
out, the left in the US and UK are going to face an awful reckoning. As usual,
it will take some time for the new information to travel from the blogosphere to
the alternative media, and finally into the antique media.
Thomas Lifson 2 15 06
UPDATE: Reader David Bell writes:
In debunking the myth that the U.S. funded, armed and equipped Saddam and
therefore is somehow responsible for him, Gen. Sada, unfortunately,
perpetuates another. Namely, that the U.S. “trained†the Taliban. He says the
Soviets trained the Iraqis “much like the U.S. did with the Taliban during the
Soviet campaign in Afghanistan.†The U.S. had a role in equipping and training
some anti-SovietAfghan forces in northern Afghanistan during the Soviet
invasion, but these people later become the Northern Alliance that fought
against the Taliban, which was a largely Arab-led movement. The U.S. never
trained or in any other wat supported the Taliban or forces that later turned
into the Taliban. This is just as big a myth of the Left as the story that the
U.S. trained and equipped Saddam.
I can’t indpendently confirm this, but it sounds consistent with my vague
memories.
