Saddam and the French Connection

[whottt]

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com

Saddam and the French Connection

FRASER NELSON, FRASER NELSON AND JAMES KIRKUP


Key points

• Saddam bribery revealed
• WMD said to have been destroyed
• Blair accepts mistake over WMD

Key quote
"Just as I have had to accept that the evidence now is that there were not stockpiles of actual weapons ready to be deployed, I hope others have the honesty to accept that the report also shows that sanctions weren’t working"- Tony Blair - Edit: Forget that sentiment from a democrat if there's a presidential election at stake - Whottt

SADDAM HUSSEIN believed he could avoid the Iraq war with a bribery strategy targeting Jacques Chirac, the President of France, according to devastating do ents released last night.

Memos from Iraqi intelligence officials, recovered by American and British inspectors, show the dictator was told as early as May 2002 that France - having been granted oil contracts - would veto any American plans for war.

But the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which returned its full report last night, said Saddam was telling the truth when he denied on the eve of war that he had any weapons of mass destruction (WMD). He had not built any since 1992.

The ISG, who confirmed last autumn that they had found no WMD, last night presented detailed findings from interviews with Iraqi officials and do ents laying out his plans to bribe foreign businessmen and politicians.

Although they found no evidence that Saddam had made any WMD since 1992, they found do ents which showed the "guiding theme" of his regime was to be able to start making them again with as short a lead time as possible."

Saddam was convinced that the UN sanctions - which stopped him acquiring weapons - were on the brink of collapse and he bankrolled several foreign activists who were campaigning for their abolition. He personally approved every one.

To keep America at bay, he focusing on Russia, France and China - three of the five UN Security Council members with the power to veto war. Politicians, journalists and diplomats were all given lavish gifts and oil-for-food vouchers.

Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister, told the ISG that the "primary motive for French co-operation" was to secure lucrative oil deals when UN sanctions were lifted. Total, the French oil giant, had been promised exploration rights.

Iraqi intelligence officials then "targeted a number of French individuals that Iraq thought had a close relationship to French President Chirac," it said, including two of his "counsellors" and spokesman for his re-election campaign.

They even assessed the chances for "supporting one of the candidates in an upcoming French presidential election." Chirac is not mentioned by name.

A memo sent to Saddam dated in May last year from his intelligence corps said they met with a "French parliamentarian" who "assured Iraq that France would use its veto in the UN Security Council against any American decision to attack Iraq."

Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, last night said again that he was wrong to suggest Saddam had WMD - but asked the British public to accept that Iraq would probably have acquired such weapons if he had not acted.

However, the ISG uncovered millions of pages of do ents and, after interviewing scores of captured Iraqis - including Mr Aziz - the report lays out what it says is were plans to end the United Nations sanctions then start to acquire weapons.

Saddam, it says, even fooled his own military chiefs into believing that he had WMD. Edit: Believe it or not he fooled John Kerry and John Edwards to...they're just lying about it now to get elected so they can turn us into Europes bootlickers - Whottt. This was designed to deter uprising from rebel Iraqis, on whom he deployed mus gas in 1988, and aggressors in the Middle East.

Speaking during his trip to Ethiopia last night, the Prime Minister referred to his speech last week where he admitted being "wrong" in the main part of his case for war but right to see a gathering threat in Iraq.

"Just as I have had to accept that the evidence now is that there were not stockpiles of actual weapons ready to be deployed, I hope others have the honesty to accept that the report also shows that sanctions weren’t working," he said.

[whottt]

Gee, I wonder who Saddam was planning on getting the material for WMD from...

Who's been proliferating Nuclear Weapons in Asia ? Well two out of the three main veto countries on the UN security counsel...who built the last Nuclear reactor in Iraq? The third main veto country on the UN security counsel.

Open your eyes. This is an economic cold war with Europe, and WWIII, all rolled into to 1. I do not want a guy whose major accomplishment in life, was quitting a war and selling out his fellow soldiers to antiwar sentiment to advance his own political career, running this country.

The one real truth in all of this is that America was attacked by terrorists...we have been declared war upon by Islamic terrorists, it's not a ploy to incrase our influence in the middle east...we have crazy as that want to blow us up running around all over the world..... That's the reality, it's not political manuvering.

[Yonivore]

I'm tellin' ya, the French stink more than usual...we may have to nuke 'em.

[exstatic]

Scotsman? Isn't that a budget hostelry like Motel6?

[whottt]

There goes another crat pissing on one of our allies again...

[SpursWoman]

Scotsman? Isn't that a budget hostelry like Motel6?

I'll bet they've seen a lot of French--something.

[IcemanCometh]

[whottt]

Should I keep going? Or are you going to



You David Robinson, America, Whiteboy hating dumbass?

[IcemanCometh]

so rummy is just as bad as chirac. hooray. those who live in glass houses should not prance around in diapers smearing poop on the walls

[Nbadan]

So the crust of this article is...

The ISG confirmed last autumn that they had found no WMD,

and

they found no evidence that Saddam had made any WMD since 1992

but...

A memo (I wonder if it was super script??)sent to Saddam dated in May last year from his intelligence corps said they met with a "French parliamentarian" who "assured Iraq that France would use its veto in the UN Security Council against any American decision to attack Iraq."

So, Saddam didn't have any WMD's and hadn't had any in over a decade. Before the war, the Bush adminstration relied heavily on the human intelligence of Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was being groomed by the administration to be Awalli, before the buck stopped on him because of the whole, well, lack of WMD thing. Now the administration is saying that Chalabi was spying for the Iranians at the time, and Iraq is stuck with what most of the people of Iraq consider a puppet of the U.S. running things, and the * administration is wondering why the Iraqi don't trust us anymore?

However, none of that matters cause look over here, the Russians, French, and everyone else who didn't join the coalition of the less-willing (and even some who did, although we won't mention that) were cheating on the Food for Oil program. Shame on them. Shame on them.

l

[whottt]

Ahh the hypochracy...the Bush Administation relied on intelligence? We have a government of checks and balances...the Bush administration can't do anything like this without the approval of Congress.

Kerry and Edwards supported the war based on the same evidence. So did Britain. The intelligence was supplied by the CIA and MI6.

I might add...the CIA director nominated by Clinton...

[Nbadan]

Kerry and Edwards supported the war based on the same evidence. So did Britain. The intelligence was supplied by the CIA and MI6.

I might add...the CIA director nominated by Clinton...

A CIA director who had his hands tied by the NeoCons and the Office Of Special Plans. This is why Tenet didn't get fired for all the mistakes made in Iraq, at least, until he refused to quit playing the NeoCon game. Then he had to go.

[whottt]

What a huge load of BS.

Tenet was 100% certain Iraq had WMD and he pushed for this.

Everyone thought Saddam had WMD, as this article shows. It's total BS to make this a democrat VS republican issue. Saddam was even trying to appear as if he had them in order to control his own people.

[Nbadan]

According to Raymond McGovern, the CIA veteran who founded Vips, Tenet originally tried to resist enormous pressure from Bush, Cheney and deputy defence secretary Paul Dundes Wolfowitz to come up with information to justify war with Iraq. 'But when Tenet sat like a potted plant behind Colin L. Powell at the United Nations Security Council [in February], that was the cave-in.'

Still, the CIA's inquiry will remain secret. Besides, observers say that the individuals conducting the investigation are probably unwilling to accuse the administration of deception or lying anyway.

In Congress some Democrats are pushing hard for a broad investigation. But because the Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and thus both intelligence committees, a full-scale investigation has already been ruled out in favour of a few closed-door hearings.

More promisingly, however, the congressional inquiries have asked for a list of statements made by senior US officials, with back-up intelligence attached to support each statement.

The flat-out, alarmist statements from Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will provide grist for the mill. As long ago as August 2002, in the speech that kicked off the US campaign against Iraq, Cheney told a meeting of the US Veterans of Foreign Wars: 'There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.' The relevant back-up do ent for this speech, which will almost certainly reveal glaring contradictions between official pronouncements and the underlying intelligence, will also remain classified. But there's no doubt that it will be leaked to reporters.

Disinfopedia

[Marcus Bryant]

http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0410070836.asp

The Age of Terror
Confronting France.

By John J. Miller & Mark Molesky
National Review

EDITOR'S NOTE: Last year, shortly before the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, Vice President Cheney asked the French ambassador a pointed question: "Is France an ally or an adversary of the United States?" In the 1980s, President Reagan wondered the same thing.

Here's an excerpt from the new book by NR's John J. Miller and his co-author Mark Molesky, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France. (For more information on the authors and their book, plus daily commentary on French politics and history, visit their website here.)

In March of 1986, the government of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi sent an urgent order to its agents in Europe: Launch terrorist attacks inflicting "maximum and indiscriminate casualties" on American civilian and military targets. Although the United States decoded the ghastly message and went on alert, a bomb exploded early in the morning of April 5 in the bathroom of La Belle, a West Berlin discotheque patronized by American GIs. The blast killed two U.S. Army sergeants and a Turkish woman. Another 229 people, including 78 Americans, were injured. There could be no doubt about Qaddafi's involvement. A few days before the detonation, British intelligence had intercepted a cable from Libya's bureau in East Berlin boasting of "a joyous event" that was about to occur. After the attack, the British intercepted another indiscreet communiqué in which Qaddafi's henchmen gleefully reported on their success and even mentioned the time it had taken place.

Here at last was a clear set of fingerprints. The Americans had suspected for a long time that Libya was sponsoring terrorism, but until the West Berlin bombing they had lacked irrefutable evidence. Within days of the deadly explosion, President Ronald Reagan called for a hard-hitting response and asked the Pentagon to draw up a list of potential targets in Libya, included military facilities and terrorist training camps. "We're going to defend ourselves," Reagan promised at an April 9 press conference.

Defending the United States, however, would require international cooperation. Aware of her role as America's staunchest ally, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher immediately granted Reagan's request to unleash U.S. Air Force planes based in Great Britain. "The U.K. came through like gang-busters," said Navy secretary John Lehman.

The French were not so cooperative. President Francois Mitterand flatly denied permission for U.S. warplanes to fly over his country on their way to Libya. "The refusal upset me," wrote Reagan in his memoirs, "because I believed all civilized nations were in the same boat when it came to resisting terrorism." Others remembered the incident with more anger: "Everyone connected with the attack was furious with [Mitterand's] casual refusal," wrote Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.

Reagan believed that economics lay behind the rebuff: "France conducted a lot of business with Libya and was typically trying to play both sides." Whatever the motive, French obstruction proved more of an inconvenience than an impediment. American planes on their way to Libya were forced to take a much longer route around the Iberian Peninsula and through the Straits of Gibraltar, adding about 1200 extra miles to the journey and six or seven hours of additional flight time. (Spain also refused to let American planes into its airspace because it did not then support military responses to terrorism.) For American pilots based in Britain, the operation lasted more than 14 hours from takeoff to touchdown, making it the longest fighter mission in U.S. history.

Although two American airmen were killed over Tripoli, the mission was a success. The attack on Libya weakened Qaddafi at home and reduced the number of terrorist incidents linked to him in later years. (There were two awful exceptions: The bombings of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and UTA Flight 772 over Niger in 1989.) Reagan showed that a swift and muscular response to terrorism could work. Yet France remained defiant. In a fit of moral equivalence following the raid, the foreign ministry announced that it "deplores the intolerable escalation of terrorism which has led to an action of reprisal which in itself renews the chain of violence."

The war on terrorism is often said to have begun on September 11, 2001, but in truth it began decades earlier. In a fundamental way, 9/11 was a new Pearl Harbor awakening Americans to a serious and ongoing problem that the Europeans had failed to contain. The twin challenges of Islamic radicals committing terrorist atrocities and rogue states plotting to acquire weapons of mass destruction could no longer be overlooked. What would happen if a man like Qaddafi got his hands on a nuclear device? Surely the result would be much worse than a Berlin disco bombing. During the post-Cold War era, however, the Americans and the French would spend much of their time not arguing about how to confront these menaces, but whether to confront them at all. In the end, they would find themselves bitterly confronting each other.


— The story continues in Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France, by John J. Miller and Mark Molesky.

[exstatic]

Reagan showed that a swift and muscular response to terrorism could work.

You'll notice that Ronnie was actually too smart to get bogged down with ground troops, too. We never invaded Libya.

[Marcus Bryant]

Oddly, Qaddafi remained in power.

[exstatic]

Oddly, he was not longer a threat. Strategic destruction of technical infrastructure will do that to you. The current adminstration isn't that smart, though.

[Marcus Bryant]

He didn't have a weapons program? That's a new one.

Oh well, time for me to stop bothering to reply to your nonsense. I guess I should return to being a "professional student" here at the office.

[exstatic]

He didn't have a weapons program? That's a new one.

If he did, it wasn't seen as any kind of threat by:

1) the remaining portion of the Reagan term
2) Bush I
3) Bush II (so far, anyway)

That nice bombing run seemed to do the trick.

[Nbadan]

The question remains, If the Bush administration knew where the WMD's were, as many of them were saying before the war, why didn't they do like both Clinton and Reagan chose to do and just hit the suspected locations with surgical missile stikes? Saddam was s , but he was once our s . Was invading Iraq just to get him worth it?

[Yonivore]

"The question remains, If the Bush administration knew where the WMD's were, as many of them were saying before the war, why didn't they do like both Clinton and Reagan chose to do and just hit the suspected locations with surgical missile stikes? Saddam was s , but he was once our s ."

Well, the obvious response to that question is, "did they know where all of them were and were the knowledgeable about probable acts of retaliation that Saddam Hussein might execute with weapons caches of which we were not aware?

"Was invading Iraq just to get him worth it?"

I disagree with the premise that invading Iraq was "just to get him."

[Marcus Bryant]

Qaddafi had a weapons program. He gave it up after he saw Hussein pulled out of a hole in the ground.

As for Hussein, the Clinton administration believed that bin Laden would end up in Iraq if they went after him in Afghanistan, a possibility which was unappetizing since...they thought Hussein had WMDs and was willing to work with whoever would hit at the US, including Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

With regards to the WMDs, the world believed that Hussein had them. The Clinton administration believed he had them. John Kerry and John Edwards believed he had them. Etc.

So either the Clinton administration was wrong about Hussein, or perhaps when they had to actually govern they took Hussein seriously instead of declining into a bunch of disingenious conspiratorial nutjobs.

Some of you act as though a president usually has access to a complete view of what is going on. That is naive and foolish. This is not some academic study, a case that you can sit around and deliberate for months or years with all of the vital information easily accessible and totally accurate. John Kerry had access to the same information that the president did and presumably what had been available to the Clinton administration. All of them believed he possessed such weapons, desired to use such weapons against the US, and desired to procure the WMDs he didn't have.

Even Hussein's own military did not know if they had WMDs or not.

Now we find out that Hussein had made a concerted effort to bribe member nations (and influential individuals in those nations) of the UN Security Council with the goal of getting rid of the sanctions imposed on Iraq. If those sanctions were done away with, then Hussein would have become more problematic, and we know, thanks to the 9/11 Commission, that he was offering to assist al Qaeda.

It's easy to criticize decisions made with the benefit of time and 100% hindsight. It's quite another to critique the actual judgements in the context of not knowing what we know now.

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

Oddly, Qaddafi didn't give up his weapons program until we saw him hand Saddam his ass on a platter.