Voting 2008...

[Tiamat]

And no, I don't normally come across as a conspiracy theorist. Just check me out on one thing: watch to see how the Republican hard-core views Sarah Palin over the next two years.

Over the next two years? Hell, the media turned on her in less than two DAYS.

[Boss Out of Town]

And no, I don't normally come across as a conspiracy theorist. Just check me out on one thing: watch to see how the Republican hard-core views Sarah Palin over the next two years.

Over the next two years? Hell, the media turned on her in less than two DAYS.

To clarify, the media gushed over her the first few days, then discovered that she was an ignoramus:

Ignoramus
Ig`no*ra"mus\, n. [L., we are ignorant. See Ignore.]

1. (Law) We are ignorant; we ignore; -- being the word formerly written on a bill of indictment by a grand jury when there was not sufficient evidence to warrant them in finding it a true bill. The phrase now used is, "No bill," "No true bill," or "Not found," though in some jurisdictions "Ignored" is still used. --Wharton (Law Dict. ). Burn.

2. (pl. Ignoramuses.) A stupid, ignorant person; a vain pretender to knowledge; a dunce. [Sense of "ignorant person" came from the title role of George Ruggle's 1615 play satirizing the ignorance of common lawyers.]

This confounded a lot of them, as they were used to kissing up to Republicans, no matter how odd or nasty they were (ref. Rudy Guiliani, Karl Rove).

Katie Courics interview with Palin was not supposed to be difficult. Couric is a noted soft touch on interviews. By the end of it, though, you can read the appalled expression on Couric's face. Apparently she'd never met anyone quite as . . . uninformed and lacking in introspection . . . as Sarah Palin.

There is a current spew of nasty talking points going around about Palin, some of which might not be dependable. They are apparently being spread by staffers from the McCain campaign seeking revenge for Palin's . . . er . . . "contribution" to McCain's defeat. Hey, you guys picked her, we didn't! Whether she will still be around in two or four years is an interesting question. I haven't yet seen anyone voicing a plausible plan for re-creating the Republican party that existed before Gingrich & company trashed it.

[Graybeard]

And no, I don't normally come across as a conspiracy theorist. Just check me out on one thing: watch to see how the Republican hard-core views Sarah Palin over the next two years.

Over the next two years? Hell, the media turned on her in less than two DAYS.

Yeah, but that's what the media do. They must match the attention span, and the desire for stimulus, of the people who buy their product, after all, and with the public's attention span roughly equaling that of an ADHHHHD kid the day after Halloween, two days is about the right cycle time. Political kingmakers have a more distant horizon -- exactly as distant as the next presidential election, more or less...

[Itterind]

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. (http://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."


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 posing 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."

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."


Iraq Is the War on Terror

As the administration stays curiously mum, the evidence that it was right mounts.
The Bush administration evidently believes revisiting the case for toppling Saddam Hussein is a political loser. That this conclusion — which, of course, has played in the media like a tacit admission of guilt — is a terrible miscalculation becomes clearer with each passing day. As journalists, scholars, and analysts pore over more of the intelligence haul seized when U.S. forces toppled the Iraqi regime, the case for removing an America-hating terror-monger responsible for the brutal torture and murder of — literally — tens of thousands of people looks better and better. Still, the administration maddeningly refuses to go on offense in its defense.

This is at least the second occasion of this politically suicidal default. Top administration officials also gratuitously handed their critics a cudgel when, for reasons still explicable only by panic, they retracted — and, indeed, apologized for — an entirely accurate assertion in the president's 2003 State of the Union Address.

As Michael Ledeen recounted here on NRO a few days ago, President Bush's claim that the Iraqi regime had sought uranium in Africa was not only true and, as the British parliamentary investigation later concluded, "well-founded"; it was probably an understatement. Christopher Hitchens observes — based on the Duelfer Report — that Iraq's efforts to acquire uranium from Niger stretch back a quarter century. Unless you are inclined to believe Saddam was interested in procuring goats in 1999 when he dispatched a high-ranking emissary to that cash-starved but uranium-rich African nation — a nation with which he had previously done uranium business — there can be little doubt that nuclear-weapons development was the impetus.

Now, onto suicidal default, chapter two. The president's poll numbers are plummeting, largely due to the success the opposition has had in portraying Iraq as a misadventure — a diversion from the "real" war on terror, disintegrating into a chaotic mess of dubious nation-building. Why? Because the administration put most of its eggs in a shaky WMD basket; failed to make and sustain the case — i.e., the abundantly supportable case — that Saddam was both a committed terrorist and terrorist-abettor; and has since allowed Iraq to be etched as the test-case for its Middle East democracy project rather than as a logical phase of the war on terror. Even today, if you ask most Americans, "What does Iraq have to do with the war on terror?" you'll get a blank stare — if not a curt "Nothing." Why should it be otherwise? That, effectively, has been the administration's own answer.

All the while, the evidence continues to mount that Saddam was a gathering threat against the United States — just as the president said he was. And the mounting has now been accelerated by the recent public availability of intelligence files — which the administration, for some reason, refused for years either to make available or to use in its own much needed defense.

Already, thanks to diligent work by the likes of Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard (author of The Connection and numerous articles about Iraq and al Qaeda), Tom Joscelyn (find his website here), Ed Morrissey (of Captain's Quarters), and Edward Jay Epstein (find his website here) we have seen, among other things:

direct contacts between high-ranking Iraqi regime officials and both Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri (bin Laden's top deputy);
an apparent payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars by Iraq to Zawahiri in 1998;
elaborate mentions of Iraq in bin Laden's infamous 1998 fatwa calling for the murder of all Americans, anywhere they could be found — the fatwa that presaged the bombing of the U.S. embassies five months later;
an Iraqi al Qaeda member held in Guantanamo Bay, charged with traveling to Pakistan with an Iraqi Intelligence official in August 1998 (the same month the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed) to study the possibility of bombing the American and British embassies there;
the attempt by Iraq to recruit jihadists in the late 1990s to bomb an American target, Radio Free Europe, in Prague;
the continued insistence to the 9/11 Commission by top Clinton officials (including President Clinton himself) that the retaliatory strike against the al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan following the embassy bombings was justified by intelligence indicating that the target was home to a joint chemical weapons venture of Iraq, al Qaeda and Sudan;
the Clinton administration so convinced of an asylum arrangement between Iraq and al Qaeda that its top counter-terrorism official, Richard Clarke, opined to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger in 1999 that bin Laden would "boogie to Baghdad" if things became too hot for him in Afghanistan (it wouldn't, after all, have been a first: Saddam was already harboring one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers);
the still open allegation that Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001, during the plotting stages of the 9/11 attacks;
the still unexplained presence of an Iraqi intelligence operative, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, at the initial January 2000 planning meetings in Kuala Lampur for the 9/11 attacks;
the recent revelation that Saddam's regime was, since at least 1994, conducting training for thousands of terrorists — training which, from 1998 forward, drew in thousands of jihadists from outside Iraq;
the recent revelation that Saddam's son Uday ordered preparations in 1999 for a wave of "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]"; and
the exercises in January 2003 — on the eve of the U.S. invasion — known as "the "Heroes' attack," which was designed to prepare regional terror units to fight exactly the kind of insurgency war that has been waged against coalition forces for the last three years.

Now, the intelligence haul has produced another notable disclosure — which is startling only if you continue to gulp the popular Kool-aid that depicts Iraq as nothing more than a disastrous Bush blunder. About a week ago, Morrissey (crediting Iraq scholar Laurie Mylroie) published a striking memorandum, apparently authored by an Iraqi air-force general in March 2001. The memo, excerpted below (italics are mine), sought volunteers for suicide missions against American targets:

In the Name of God the Merciful The Compassionate
Top Secret
The Command of Ali Bin Abi Taleb Air Force Base
No 3/6/104
Date 11 March 2001
To all the Units
Subject: Volunteer for Suicide Mission

The top secret letter 2205 of the Military Branch of Al Qadisya on 4/3/2001 announced by the top secret letter 246 from the Command of the military sector of Zi Kar on 8/3/2001 announced to us by the top secret letter 154 from the Command of Ali Military Division on 10/3/2001 we ask to provide that Division with the names of those who desire to volunteer for Suicide Mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American Interests and according what is shown below to please review and inform us.

Air Brigadier General
Abdel Magid Hammot Ali
Commander of Ali Bin Abi Taleb Air Force Base
Air Colonel
Mohamad Majed Mohamadi.

Morrissey has now confirmed the translation through two experts, working independently. Assuming the document is authentic, it is a powerful confirmation of what was already palpable: The Iraqi dictator who attempted to murder a former U.S. president in 1993, who assiduously attacked the U.S. in his state-controlled media, who colluded with the terrorist network that attacked the U.S. throughout the 1990s, who defied sanctions and expelled weapons inspectors, who shot at U.S. planes in the no-fly zone throughout the 1990s, and who conducted frenetic terrorist training in preparation for a bloody, long-term insurgency against the U.S., was a threat to the United States.

The question lingers: Would an Iraqi air-force general in 2001 have had good reason to think he could get volunteers from within the Iraqi ranks for suicide missions?

There's good reason to think the answer to that question is "yes." As Tom Joscelyn points out to me, the new memorandum on which Morrissey has reported should be considered in conjunction with another piece of information that has attracted little media attention. This one comes from the December 2002 Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

One section of that Report (at pp. 209-13) studied what the U.S. intelligence community had, prior to 9/11, in the way of "Intelligence Information on Possible Terrorist Use of Airplanes as Weapons." Over a seven-year period, the joint inquiry found there were at least twelve such indications. Included among them was this one (p. 211):

In February 1999, the Intelligence Community obtained information that Iraq had formed a suicide pilot unit that it planned to use against British and U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf. The CIA commented that this was highly unlikely and probably disinformation.


Nevertheless, the new memo, coupled with the finding by the joint inquiry, does underscore that: (a) our intelligence in Iraq (and elsewhere) was very poor; (b) that intelligence was not sufficient for making categorical conclusions about Iraq's intentions (including the absurd claim, made by many in intelligence circles, that Saddam would never collaborate with jihadists); (c) it is wishful thinking to conclude, as do many Bush critics, that President Clinton intimidated Saddam into foreswearing attacks against the U.S. by a 1993 air strike against an empty Iraqi-government building (in "retaliation" for the attempt to murder the first President Bush); and (d) it is critical for the historical record and the legacy of American military operations in Iraq to continue translating and studying the intelligence trove we have seized.

Most important for present purposes: The evidence is there, as it has always been, to prove that removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power was a significant advance in the war on terror. But all the evidence in the world proves nothing unless the administration gets out and makes the case. Publicly. Those who have given their lives to a noble cause deserve nothing less.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

[Boss Out of Town]

Wow. Sort of a roster of high-end right-wing conspiracy buffs.

Geez, guys, even Dick Cheney has given up on the Saddam-was-an-evil-genius-jihadist theory.

[Graybeard]

What, pray, causes the resurrection of this particular moldy oldie? Note the date at the top of that thing.

[Boss Out of Town]

I've got some friends who apparently belong to this faction. When I pointed out the true situation in Iraq, they both referred to a "colonel" who was coming back to give them word. There is a continuing belief in some circles that there really were WMDs in Iraq, that Saddam was behind 9/11, etc. It includes some senators and military officers.

Even this far along, something like a third of all Americans think Saddam had something to with the air liners plot. They share an inability to distinguish among foriegners swarthier than themselves. It never registers that a quasi-communist, secular nationalist party like the Baathists is politically the opposite of an Islamic jihadist.

It's like the people I used to know who thought Kennedy's assassination was plotted by the CIA and the KGB working together. Presumably for the international military-industrial complex.

Or maybe the Illuminati. They were kind of fuzzy about that.

FNORD

[Viking-Sensei]

I fear Itterind's account may have been hijacked by a conspiracy theory spambot, just due to the odd format (no introductory "Here's a thing I found relevant" message) and the wall-of-textism involved. I sent him a PM - if I don't hear back shortly, I'll hit him with an email too.

[Boss Out of Town]

I fear Itterind's account may have been hijacked by a conspiracy theory spambot, just due to the odd format (no introductory "Here's a thing I found relevant" message) and the wall-of-textism involved. I sent him a PM - if I don't hear back shortly, I'll hit him with an email too.

How the heck does that even work? I've never been hijacked by anything, and I've been on the Internet for . . . well, a really long time.

Meanwhile, political news from Illinois:

1) Is Blago really that crooked, that arrogant, and that stupid? Yup. Dumb as a box of rocks and a lot dirtier.With a little luck, he'll get a jail cell next to his Republican predecessor, George Ryan.

2) Did Barack have anything to do with him? Nope. Obama made his career outside the Chicago machine and Blago hated his guts. Like many crooked politicians, he is particularly resentful of honest pols who do better than they are. Obama's been avoiding contact with him for two years or so.

3) Are all Illinois politicians that crooked? A majority of them. Overall, corruption isn't as bad as Washington, Louisiana, or Arkansas, as Illinois politicians have a tradition of covering their criminal behavior by actually trying to do their jobs properly. Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago was famous for that. He dished out power and patronage, fixed elections, made his friends rich, but didn't keep much money for himself and always made sure the garbage was collected and the streets were plowed.

4) How do you manage to be an honest politician in Illinois? As in Washington, by staying clean personally and not pushing too hard to learn things that would oblige you to call the cops. Lincoln did, Obama did it, so did Paul Simon, Dick Durbin, and Peter Fitzgerald. They have a problem with the gossipy nature of the modern news media. Obama has had contact with a lot of crooked people in Illinois. He's had contact with a lot of crooked people in Washington, and even had lunch with that slimy weasel in the White House a couple of weeks ago. All and all, an Illinois politician is like an Illinois hog farmer: no matter how clean you try to be, the pigs shit on your shoes from time to time. You just have to scrape it off quickly.

5) How good a prosecutor is Patrick Fitzgerald? The best. Peter Fitzgerald was our last Republican senator, a rich conservative who served only one term. As a parting gift to the people of Illinois, he recommended a bunch of out-of-state honest prosecutors to the president for positions in Illinois, men not part of the system, hard to buy off. Patrick Fitzgerald is a straight-arrow, fearless, tough workaholic who has bagged terrorists and mobsters in New York, two Illinois governors and their henchmen, and Scooter Libby. We expect big things of him after January 20, 2009. Obama's keeping him on in Illinois.

[Itterind]

Hey guys, I've been a bit bitter about the election (though Obama is getting much better) so I posted this here. I can verify it is I who did so.

Sorry, I'll try to be more clear next time.

I've ADHD and Asbergers, so I'm not always very good at leading in. I even started it's own thread until I realized I posted it here and that it wasn't the Yellowcake post I might've made in some forum a month or two ago or so. Nor was it an attempt to troll. I think I wanted Democrats to know about is what, today I posted for a more neutral reason: I want to know how you feel about these documents, so I'll read up on your responses tomorrow.
I'm quite open to that it might be crock today after seeing how you guys are disposed, but I think it might be true. I'll brb tomorrow.



I think this topic is relevant for Voting 2008 as it continues to drag down the Republican Party.

Regards,
- J