Since working with Iraqi General Georges Sada on the book, Saddam's Secrets, I have often been asked to speak about what I learned about the WMD in Iraq and whether or not chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons were ever a genuine threat. On one such occasion I had the privilege of addressing the Exchange Club on Capitol Hill, meeting in a conference room of the United States Senate. Below are remarks and notes from that address. ........................................... Weapons of Mass Denial An Address to the Exchange Club on Capitol Hill, July 13, 2006 By Jim Nelson Black The report prepared by Charles Duelfer and the Iraq Inspection Team, released in October 2004, offered little news about WMDs. But that report provided enormous detail on the corruption in the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. It described how Saddam Hussein abused the program, which provided more than $11 Billion in illicit funds between 1996 and 2003, and allowed Saddam’s corrupt regime to flaunt U.S. efforts to contain Saddam’s weapons programs. [1] Among the findings documented in the Duelfer Report are the fact that:
Terrorist Training Camps Beginning in January 2006, Stephen Hayes published a series of articles in The Weekly Standard about the documents captured from the Iraqi regime, which made some startling revelations. [2] Among them:
All of which is a clear refutation of the theory that Saddam was a secularist who would not support or give aid to religious and national minorities. Saddam was a supporter and funder of terrorism of any variety from the very start. It was reported yesterday (July 12, 2006, CNS News Service) that the House Intelligence Committee also has documents on Iraqi Intelligence Service letterhead confirming that Saddam purchased Anthrax and Mustard Gas as recently as 2000. The documents also make clear an ongoing relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Apparently U.S. Intelligence has known about all this for years, but nobody bothered to tell the American people! Did you know:
The point is, all the information we’ve seen so far is very damning, but Nay-sayers in Congress and the Media are having a field day, and the U.N., the CIA, the Intelligence Community, and the White House have been anything but helpful in uncovering what was really going on in Iraq prior to the U.S. and Coalition Invasion in March of 2003. Apparently they decided that you and I couldn’t handle the Truth. One More Discovery: The Taliban Connection Another member of the Iraq Survey Group, Ray Robison, provided a lengthy translation of another important document (as reported by the Fox News Channel on June 16 of this year) detailing the close relationship between Saddam Hussein and the Taliban government of Afghanistan. [3] This document describes in great detail (some 76 pages) the coordinated efforts of intelligence operatives from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (with the support of Saddam) to undermine U.S. and other international policies. According to this document — which was a top secret notebook of an operative of the Iraqi Intelligence Service — Saddam was in league with the Taliban throughout the 1990s, and especially during the last four years leading up to the war in 2003. Saddam was sending government officials, intelligence operatives, radical clerics, and arms and explosives specialists, as well as members of the Association of Islamic Scholars, between Iraq and these other countries to encourage terrorism and develop strategies for terrorism that could work against the United States and its allies. What’s the point? The point is that there’s nothing new in the news that Saddam was aiding and abetting terrorism from day-one, hiding weapons of mass destruction, and doing his best to acquire more. Saddam Hussein was a thug, an assassin who killed, maimed, and intimidated his way to the seat of power. And everybody in the world knew it in January of 1991 and they knew it in March of 2003.
Plus two important books by Iraqi scientists: The Bomb in My Garden and Saddam’s Bomb Maker, detailing their work on nuclear programs in Iraq. Both these works are described briefly in Saddam’s Secrets. And lest we forget: Saddam Hussein is the guy who ordered the chemical-weapons attack on the Kurds in 1983 that killed 8,000 innocent civilians. He ordered the chemical-weapon attack at Halabja in 1988, carried out by his cousin, “Chemical Ali,” killing another 5,000 innocent men, women, and children; and the attack at Anfal that killed at least 182,000. General Sada says in this book:
Weapons of Mass Denial The national media trumpeted the conclusion of the Duelfer Report that no WMD stockpiles were found in Iraq after the 2003 Invasion. What they didn’t tell you was that Duelfer said that only 0.25% of the more than 10,000 known weapons caches had even been examined—at all. So how many is that? … 25 Caches. On the basis of 25 caches, the message was broadcast around the world that Bush Lied—Saddam had No WMDs. Well, tell that to Bill Tierney, who was also a member of the Iraq Study Group and a weapons inspector. I have spoken to Bill on several occasions. He speaks fluent Arabic and worked very closely with Iraqi informants on the ground in Iraq, and he tells me that when he had information that specifically identified caches that were known to the informants to hold WMDs, his superiors refused to authorize a search. They blew him off because … they didn’t want to know. It’s a proven fact that enormous quantities of chemical, biological, and nuclear components cataloged by Weapons Inspectors in December 1998 simply disappeared—reported to be “unaccounted for” in the official reports of the United Nations inspectors. What sort of components?
The Information War It’s been said that the first casualty of War is the Truth. That maxim has never been truer than in this war. I was an officer in Vietnam, a Public Information Officer, and I escorted many of the big–name broadcasters and reporters who filed stories from there (You would know their names.), and I saw first-hand how the media mangles the truth. In “Saddam’s Secrets” my task, as a writer and researcher, was to help an Iraqi General tell the truth in a compelling way for an American audience. So I did my research. I checked him out. What I learned was that this is a man of truth—a man of his word. I don’t believe Georges Sada is capable of telling a lie—and that trait nearly got him killed on many occasions. Time permitting, let me relate one or two stories from the book:
In the book Saddam’s Secrets General Sada describes how 56 sorties of WMD were ferried out of Iraq to Damascus, Syria in November 2002, four months before the U.S. invasion, using a 747 Jumbo Jet and three 727s. He received firsthand confirmation of these facts from the pilots who actually flew those sorties and from the ground crews that coordinated the transfer of cargo. That’s the truth. Will it make a difference? Will anybody believe it? Who knows?
[1] Reported by Claudia Rosett, “Saddam’s Sugar Daddy,” in National Review, October 7, 2004, the same week the Duelfer Report was released. [2] Stephen F. Hayes, “Saddam’s Terror Training Camps,” The Weekly Standard, Jan. 16, 2006. [3] Ray Robison, “Documents Support Saddam-Taliban Connection,” Fox News Channel, June 16, 2006. * * * | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
