THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

if you would not mind, would provide a source other than General Franks that confirms that there were convoys that went to Syria from Iraq?

Syria Storing Iraq's WMDs
By Bill Gertz
Washington Times | October 29, 2003

...

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said vehicle traffic photographed by U.S. spy satellites indicated that material and documents related to the arms programs were shipped to Syria.

...

Gen. Clapper said the judgment was based on analysis of spy satellite photographs and was not proof of "what was going on inside of buildings."

...

Convoys of vehicles, mostly commercial trucks, were spotted going into Syria from Iraq shortly before the start of the war March 19 and during the conflict, he said.

GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT INTELLIGENCE BRIEF
U.S. intel: WMD went to Syria last year
Evidence includes satellite photographs of Iraqi convoys

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: January 30, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Editor's note: WorldNetDaily brings readers exclusive, up-to-the-minute global intelligence news and analysis from Geostrategy-Direct, a new online newsletter edited by veteran journalist Robert Morton and featuring the "Backgrounder" column compiled by Bill Gertz. Geostrategy-Direct is a subscription-based service produced by the publishers of WorldTribune.com, a free news service frequently linked by the editors of WorldNetDaily.

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

The U.S. intelligence community has found evidence Syria received Iraqi missiles and WMD in late 2002 and early 2003, U.S. officials said, according to Geostrategy-Direct, the global intelligence news service.

The evidence includes satellite photographs of Iraqi convoys believed to be bringing missiles and WMD into Syria as well as assertions from Iraqi officials that ousted leader Saddam Hussein ordered such a transfer.

Still, the agencies fail to agree that sufficient evidence has been obtained to press the issue with the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad.

Importantly, CIA Director George Tenet shares this view, officials said.

As a result, the Bush administration and senior members of Congress have reached different conclusions over whether Syria obtained Iraqi WMD. The administration has determined the intelligence evidence remains insufficient, while senior staffers and members of Congress said the evidence is enough to press Syria to open its facilities to inspection.

"I think that there is some concern that shipments of WMD went to Syria," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said.

David Kay, who resigned last week from the CIA-sponsored Iraq Survey Group, went further. Kay said Iraqi officials told his investigators that WMD was sent to Syria before the war in Iraq.

"We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," Kay told the London Daily Telegraph. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."

In his State of the Union address on Jan. 20, President George W. Bush did not identify Syria as a U.S. adversary or a country having missiles and WMD programs. The president did cite Iran and North Korea, both of which have supplied systems to Damascus.

In December, Bush signed into law the Syria Accountability Act. The law calls for a virtual trade embargo on Syria for its occupation of Lebanon, WMD program and harboring of terrorist groups.

But Vice President Dick Cheney said Iraq had assembled WMD on portable platforms, a development that would have enabled the transfer of assets to other parts in or outside the country. In an interview with National Public Radio, Cheney did not cite Syria as receiving weapons from Saddam.

"We've found a couple of semi-trailers at this point, which we believe were in fact part of a [WMD] program," Cheney said. "I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction."

So far, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell have rejected the prospect that Iraqi biological and chemical weapons or missiles were sent to Syria. They echoed U.S. assessments that Saddam would not have trusted Assad with Iraq's missile and WMD assets.

"I have seen no hard evidence to suggest that is the case, that suddenly there were no weapons found in Iraq because they were all in Syria," Powell said. "I don't know why the Syrians would do that, frankly, why it would be in their interest. They didn't have that kind of relationship with Iraq."

March 31, 2003
Syria defies U.S.; more volunteers stream into Iraq
Despite American warnings, in the last few days Damascus has expedited the passage of volunteers wishing to join the Iraqis in their war against the Americans. Thousands of volunteers, most of them Syrians, are thronging to the Mosul and Kirkuk regions in north Iraq.

Ha'aretz

It started with a few dozen volunteers, mostly from the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Damascus allowed them to cross the border to Iraq at the official border passes in its control. This went on until one of the volunteers' buses was hit in Iraq by a missile from an American plane, killing five passengers.

A few days ago American Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Damascus of transferring weapons to Iraq, but did not mention the volunteers. Yesterday the United States warned Syria and Iran again not to cooperate with terrorism and with Saddam Hussein's regime.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said at the AIPAC convention on Sunday that Syria will have to make a critical choice: "Syria can continue direct support for terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein, or it can embark on a different and more hopeful course. Either way, Syria bears the responsibility for its choices, and for the consequences."

The administration made it clear yesterday that since that equipment delivery from Syria to Iraq - which according to Rumsfeld consisted mainly of night-vision goggles - no further deliveries had been observed.

The dozens of volunteers who first passed from Syria to Iraq came mostly from Lebanon and from the Palestinian refugee camps in it. Damascus let them cross into Iraq through the official border passes, and became the first state bordering with Iraq to permit the passage of volunteers. One of the buses driving the volunteers in Iraq was hit by an American missile and five of its passengers were killed.

Recently, the Syrians invited journalists to two border passes on the Iraqi border, claiming they are closed. Now it appears this was a deception. The volunteers are brought to the border far away from the official crossings and allowed to pass over on foot. Nearby, on the Iraqi side of the border, trucks await them.

The trucks do not go east toward Baghdad but northeast, to the Mosul and Kirkuk regions, on routes still free of American military activity. It is not known who receives these people when they arrive, where they stay or how they are organized.

At first, Palestinians and Lebanese were dominant among the volunteers, but as their numbers increased, the number of Syrians among them grew. Now the stream of volunteers is estimated at thousands. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said in an interview two days ago that some 4,000 volunteers had arrived in Iraq from various Arab states. He did not say where they came from, but it is known that the Iranians, Jordanians and Turks do not permit the passage of volunteers to Iraq.

In the past, America has taken a lenient view of the Syrian aid to Iraq. A few months ago, Haaretz first reported of the Syrian military purchases for Iraq in various East European states. The equipment and weapons reached Syria's Atkia harbor and were transferred in convoys to Iraq. To this day, the exact quantities of arms, tank engines and planes transferred to Iraq by the Syrians are not known.

Washington kept its criticism down because the CIA estimated it was better to receive intelligence from Syria on Al-Qaida activities. Apparently this information helped the Americans in the past to crack Al-Qaida cells in Germany and Spain. After the war started, the Pentagon became more critical toward Damascus and the displeasure was reflected in Rumsfeld's accusations against Syria. However, it is not clear whether the Americans will try to intercept the movement of volunteers to Iraq.

Posted By Harry at March 31, 2003 07:01 PM | TrackBack

I don't know, gel, I have been a little bored lately. Not that I want a big horrible thing to happen but it would be nice to have something new and interesting to talk about.

I am glad that the snottiness has died down along with the posters but still does it have to be either one or the other?

1. Shiite Iraq Al-Hayat: Muhammad Husain Adili, the...
Shiite Iraq

Al-Hayat: Muhammad Husain Adili, the Iranian ambassador to the United Kingdom, said Thursday that his government had leant substantial help to the United States in fostering a "calm atmosphere" for the holding of elections on Jan. 30 in Iraq. He revealed that Iran had contacted Sunni Arab groups with which it had influence and attempted to convince them that the elections were in Iraq's best interest. He offered Iran's help in future, as well, in helping establish security in the Middle East, where Iranian and US interests coincide.

As I predicted, the United Iraqi Alliance not only has 51 percent of seats on its own, but has already made a coalition [Arabic link] with some smaller parties. The three representatives of the Cadres and Chosen Party that is close to Muqtada al-Sadr will join the large coalition, as will the 3 deputies of the Turkmen National Front and a few independents. Only twelve lists were seated in parliament in the end, and most of them have joined the Shiite fundamentalist coalition. If the UIA can come to an agreement with the Kurds, it can easily form a government and then rule parliament.

In a startling development to which the Western press is paying little attention, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq has won the provincial governments in 8 of the 18 provinces in the country, including Baghdad. Over-all Shiite lists won 11 of the 18. Sadrists won Wasit and Maysam, and perhaps one other. Dawa doesn't appear to have run well at the provincial level. The Kurds won several of the northern provinces, including Ta'mim (where Kirkuk is) and Ninevah. The Iraqi Islamic Party won Anbar province, even though it withdrew from the elections. (It couldn't properly withdraw because the ballots had already been printed.) But only 2 percent of the residents of Anbar voted, so the IIP victory doesn't mean much.

The UIA is looking to given Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, former national security adviser, an important post. It will definitely sack interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan, who is vehmently anti-Iranian.

Behind the walls of Ward 54
They're overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatized combat vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them.

Quote:

Behind the walls of Ward 54
They're overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatized combat vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/18/walter_reed/index.html

revel wrote:

I don't know, gel, I have been a little bored lately. Not that I want a big horrible thing to happen but it would be nice to have something new and interesting to talk about.

I am glad that the snottiness has died down along with the posters but still does it have to be either one or the other?

Sistani and others will be trying to insure a rapid departure for our troops .... after all, the U.S. presence is the reason for the insurgency. Bush will say 'ok I'll send 5000 home but because of Syria and Iran's hostile stature he won't feel it would be a good move if he were to yank everyone.
This will go back and forth til about the middle of March .... all this time the Sunnis will continue to extract thier pound of flesh from our troops in payback for Falluja. Sistani will call for a peaceful protest and a million or so Shiites will hit the streets. Bush will pull another 'bring em on' stunt ..... and they will .... hundreds of thousands of Sunni and Shias will try to convince George that pulling out might be the best thing .......... what will George do?

"Those infidel Wahhabis, those Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) followers, they did this because they hate Shiites," said Sari Abdullah, a worshipper at the al-Khadimain mosque who was injured by shrapnel from the explosion. "They are afraid of us. They are not Muslims. They are infidels."

The axis of oil

Vice President Dick Cheney's former company is back in the news again.

"Only weeks before Halliburton made headlines by announcing it was pulling out of Iran -- a nation George W. Bush has labeled part of the 'axis of evil' -- the Texas-based oil services firm quietly signed a major new business deal to help develop Tehran's natural gas fields," reports Newsweek. "Halliburton's new Iran contract, moreover, appears to suggest a far closer connection with the country's hard-line government than the firm has ever acknowledged.

"The deal, diplomatic sources tell NEWSWEEK, was signed with an Iranian oil company whose principals include Sirus Naseri, Tehran's chief international negotiator on matters relating to the country's hotly-disputed nuclear enrichment program -- a project the Bush administration has charged is intended to develop nuclear weapons.

"There are few matters more sensitive for Halliburton than its dealings with Iran. The company, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, last year disclosed that it had received a subpoena from a federal grand jury in Texas in connection with a Justice Department investigation into allegations that the firm violated U.S. sanctions law prohibiting American companies from directly doing business in Iran. (U.S. firms are barred from doing direct business in Iran, but under a confusing quilt of federal regulations, their foreign subsidiaries may do so as long as they operate 'independently' from U.S. management.)

"Documents disclosed by the company indicate that the Justice Department probe into Halliburton's Iran dealings, like a separate Justice investigation into alleged foreign bribes paid by a Halliburton-connected consortium to officials in Nigeria, cover the period that Cheney was Halliburton CEO.

"There have been no allegations that Cheney was directly involved in any of the conduct that is under scrutiny by Justice, although as Halliburton CEO, Cheney repeatedly and forcefully criticized the U.S. sanctions laws restricting business in Iran, arguing that they caused U.S. firms like Halliburton to lose business to international competitors."

Doesn't sound like the firm will be losing any biz on this one -- Halliburton, according to Newsweek, expects to net "between $30 million and $35 million over the next several years."

"I am not going to give you a number for it because it's not my business to do intelligent work."

US fights back against 'rule by clerics'
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - Given the widespread Sunni boycott of Iraq's January 30 elections for a National Assembly, with voting concentrated among the Kurdish north and Shi'ite south, the polls served more as a referendum to prove Shi'ite and Kurd strength.

This can be seen in the results of the polls released on Sunday, with the Shi'ite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance capturing 48% of the vote and the Kurdish alliance 26%.

Now it emerges that there is a strong movement in southern Iraq for the establishment of autonomous Shi'ite provinces as a precursor to introducing vilayet-e-faqih (rule by the clergy) in the whole country.

Of these calls for autonomy or federalism, the most disconcerting for US authorities is the call for religious rule. Already, leading Shi'ite clerics in Iraq are pushing for "Islam to be recognized as the guiding principle of the new constitution".

To head off this threat of a Shi'ite clergy-driven religious movement, the US has, according to Asia Times Online investigations, resolved to arm small militias backed by US troops and entrenched in the population to "nip the evil in the bud".

Asia Times Online has learned that in a highly clandestine operation, the US has procured Pakistan-manufactured weapons, including rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, ammunition, rockets and other light weaponry. Consignments have been loaded in bulk onto US military cargo aircraft at Chaklala airbase in the past few weeks. The aircraft arrived from and departed for Iraq.

February 18, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Our Friends, the Torturers
By BOB HERBERT

The United States has long purported to be outraged over Syria's bad behavior, the latest flash point being the possible Syrian involvement in the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.

From the U.S. perspective, Syria is led by a gangster regime that has, among other things, sponsored terrorism, aided the insurgency in Iraq and engaged in torture. So here's the question. If Syria is such a bad actor - and it is - why would the Bush administration seize a Canadian citizen at Kennedy Airport in New York, put him on an executive jet, fly him in shackles to the Middle East and then hand him over to the Syrians, who promptly tortured him?

The administration is trying to have it both ways in its so-called war on terror. It claims to be fighting for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and it condemns barbaric behavior whenever it is committed by someone else. At the same time, it is engaged in its own barbaric behavior, while going out of its way to keep that behavior concealed from the American public and the world at large.

The man grabbed at Kennedy Airport and thrown by American officials into a Syrian nightmare was Maher Arar, a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. No one, not even the Syrians who tortured him, have been able to present any evidence linking him to terrorism.

He was taken into custody on the afternoon of Sept. 26, 2002, and was not released until Oct. 5, 2003. He was never charged, and when he wasn't being brutalized, he spent much of his time in an unlit, rat-infested cell that reminded him of a grave.

Government officials know that this kind of activity is not just wrong but reprehensible, which is why they won't admit publicly to the policy that permits them to kidnap individuals like Mr. Arar and send them off to regimes known to engage in torture. The policy is known as extraordinary rendition, which is an extreme variation of a little-known but longstanding legal principle called rendition. Rendition most commonly refers to the extrajudicial transfer of individuals from a foreign country to the United States for the purpose of answering criminal charges.

Think, for example, of a drug kingpin who is abducted in Colombia and brought to the U.S. to stand trial for trafficking. The defendant is said to have been "rendered" to justice in the U.S.

The courts here have tended to overlook the circumstances surrounding the seizure of such suspects. But upon arrival in the U.S., the normal rules of due process in criminal proceedings kick in, and the suspect is entitled to a fair trial.

In extraordinary rendition there are no rules. The person seized, presumably a terror suspect, is thrust into a highly secret zone of utter lawlessness, with no rights whatever. The entire point of this atrocious exercise is to transfer the suspect to a regime skilled in the art of torture. It's as if a cop picked up a suspect on the street and handed him over to the Mafia to extract a confession. One's guilt or innocence is not relevant. No legal defense is permitted. If a mistake is made, too bad.

U.S. officials knew what they were doing when they gave the signal to ship Mr. Arar to Syria. As far back as 1996, the State Department had this to say in a report about human rights in Syria:

"Former prisoners and detainees have reported that torture methods include electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; the forced insertion of objects into the rectum; beatings, sometimes while the victim is suspended from the ceiling; hyperextension of the spine; and the use of a chair that bends backwards to asphyxiate the victim or fracture the spine."

According to the State Department, torture was most likely to occur at one of the many detention centers run by the Syrian security forces, "particularly while the authorities are trying to extract a confession or information about an alleged crime or alleged accomplices."

Extraordinary rendition is antithetical to everything Americans are supposed to believe in. It violates American law. It violates international law. And it is a profound violation of our own most fundamental moral imperative - that there are limits to the way we treat other human beings, even in a time of war and great fear.

E-mail: [email protected]

How about this, dys...(posted by HofT)

Quote:

US fights back against 'rule by clerics'
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - Given the widespread Sunni boycott of Iraq's January 30 elections for a National Assembly, with voting concentrated among the Kurdish north and Shi'ite south, the polls served more as a referendum to prove Shi'ite and Kurd strength.

This can be seen in the results of the polls released on Sunday, with the Shi'ite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance capturing 48% of the vote and the Kurdish alliance 26%.

Now it emerges that there is a strong movement in southern Iraq for the establishment of autonomous Shi'ite provinces as a precursor to introducing vilayet-e-faqih (rule by the clergy) in the whole country.

Of these calls for autonomy or federalism, the most disconcerting for US authorities is the call for religious rule. Already, leading Shi'ite clerics in Iraq are pushing for "Islam to be recognized as the guiding principle of the new constitution".

To head off this threat of a Shi'ite clergy-driven religious movement, the US has, according to Asia Times Online investigations, resolved to arm small militias backed by US troops and entrenched in the population to "nip the evil in the bud".

Asia Times Online has learned that in a highly clandestine operation, the US has procured Pakistan-manufactured weapons, including rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, ammunition, rockets and other light weaponry. Consignments have been loaded in bulk onto US military cargo aircraft at Chaklala airbase in the past few weeks. The aircraft arrived from and departed for Iraq.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GB15Ak02.html

Army Destroyed Mock Execution Pictures

Fri Feb 18, 7:44 AM ET Politics - AP


By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Pictures of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan (news - web sites) posing with hooded and bound detainees during mock executions were destroyed after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq (news - web sites) to avoid another public outrage, Army documents released Friday by the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites) show.


The results of an Army probe of the photographs were among hundreds of pages of documents released after the ACLU obtained a federal court order in Manhattan to let it see documents about U.S. treatment of detainees around the world.


The ACLU said the probe shows the rippling effect of the Abu Ghraib scandal and that efforts to humiliate the enemy might have been more widespread than thought.


"It's increasingly clear that members of the military were aware of the allegations of torture and that efforts were taken to erase evidence, to shut down investigations and to humiliate the detainees in an effort to silence them," ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said.


The Army did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment.


The probe of the pictures in Afghanistan began after a CD found there during a July office cleanup contained pictures of uniformed soldiers pointing guns at bound and hooded detainees.

The investigation showed that the pictures were taken in and around Fire Base Tycze in southern Afghanistan, according to the documents, which blacked out the identities of those interviewed.


An Army specialist told investigators that similar photographs were destroyed after images of torture at Abu Ghraib were leaked to the media.

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