View Full Version : 380 tonnellate di esplosivo convenzionale
Lucio Virzì
25-10-2004, 14:46
D'accordo, si cercavano le WOMD, le armi chimiche, le batteriologiche.. ma levargli ste 380 tonnellate di esplosivo ad alto potenziale sembrava brutto?
10:10 Scomparse 380 tonnellate esplosivo da deposito
Il governo iracheno ad interim ha avvertito gli Stati Uniti e gli ispettori internazionali nucleari della scomparsa di quasi 380 tonnellate di un potente esplosivo convenzionale usato per abbattere edifici, realizzare testate missilistiche e far detonare armi nucleari. Lo scrive oggi il New York Times, spiegando che l'esplosivo si trovava in un deposito del centro militare iracheno di al Qaqaa, ormai abbandonato, dove ancora ieri erano in azione saccheggiatori.
LuVi
IpseDixit
25-10-2004, 15:01
Bè adesso... poco alla volta lo ritrovano, un botto quà un botto la :rolleyes:
Originariamente inviato da IpseDixit
Bè adesso... poco alla volta lo ritrovano, un botto quà un botto la :rolleyes:
hai perfettamente ragione...
:rolleyes:
Originariamente inviato da Lucio Virzì
D'accordo, si cercavano le WOMD, le armi chimiche, le batteriologiche.. ma levargli ste 380 tonnellate di esplosivo ad alto potenziale sembrava brutto?
10:10 Scomparse 380 tonnellate esplosivo da deposito
Il governo iracheno ad interim ha avvertito gli Stati Uniti e gli ispettori internazionali nucleari della scomparsa di quasi 380 tonnellate di un potente esplosivo convenzionale usato per abbattere edifici, realizzare testate missilistiche e far detonare armi nucleari. Lo scrive oggi il New York Times, spiegando che l'esplosivo si trovava in un deposito del centro militare iracheno di al Qaqaa, ormai abbandonato, dove ancora ieri erano in azione saccheggiatori.
LuVi
Fa molta più notizia un'ogiva che avrebbe potuto ospitare una testata chimica sepolta sotto 23 metri di argilla e sabbia che non 380 tonnellate di esplosivo tradizionale.
E poi, scusa, nessuno è andato in Iraq a cercare la dinamite, o sbaglio?
:boh:
Da NYT: (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/international/middleeast/25bomb.html?hp&ex=1098763200&en=fd35fdf4b6d46d61&ei=5094&partner=homepage):
Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 25, 2004
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/25/international/bomb650.jpg
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.
The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.
The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."
Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.
American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.
The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material, and larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.
The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it. The other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain.
"This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a proliferation risk," one senior Bush administration official said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Sunday evening that Saddam Hussein's government "stored weapons in mosques, schools, hospitals and countless other locations," and that the allied forces "have discovered and destroyed perhaps thousands of tons of ordnance of all types." A senior military official noted that HMX and RDX were "available around the world" and not on the nuclear nonproliferation list, even though they are used in the nuclear warheads of many nations.
The Qaqaa facility, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, was well known to American intelligence officials: Mr. Hussein made conventional warheads at the site, and the I.A.E.A. dismantled parts of his nuclear program there in the early 1990's after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. In the prelude to the 2003 invasion, Mr. Bush cited a number of other "dual use" items - including tubes that the administration contended could be converted to use for the nuclear program - as a justification for invading Iraq.
After the invasion, when widespread looting began in Iraq, the international weapons experts grew concerned that the Qaqaa stockpile could fall into unfriendly hands. In May, an internal I.A.E.A. memorandum warned that terrorists might be helping "themselves to the greatest explosives bonanza in history."
Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, a senior official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology wrote that the stockpile disappeared after early April 2003 because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."
In an interview with The Times and "60 Minutes" in Baghdad, the minister of science and technology, Rashad M. Omar, confirmed the facts described in the letter. "Yes, they are missing," Dr. Omar said. "We don't know what happened." The I.A.E.A. says it also does not know, and has reported that machine tools that can be used for either nuclear or non-nuclear purposes have also been looted.
Dr. Omar said that after the American-led invasion, the sites containing the explosives were under the control of the Coalition Provisional Authority, an American-led entity that was the highest civilian authority in Iraq until it handed sovereignty of the country over to the interim government on June 28.
"After the collapse of the regime, our liberation, everything was under the coalition forces, under their control," Dr. Omar said. "So probably they can answer this question, what happened to the materials."
Officials in Washington said they had no answers to that question. One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives were stored was listed as a "medium priority" site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured during the invasion. "Should we have gone there? Definitely," said one senior administration official.
In the chaos that followed the invasion, however, many of those sites, even some considered a higher priority, were never secured.
A No Man's Land
Seeing the ruined bunkers at the vast Qaqaa complex today, it is hard to recall that just two years ago it was part of Saddam Hussein's secret military complex. The bunkers are so large that they are reminiscent of pyramids, though with rounded edges and the tops chopped off. Several are blackened and eviscerated as a result of American bombing. Smokestacks rise in the distance.
Today, Al Qaqaa has become a wasteland generally avoided even by the marines in charge of northern Babil Province. Headless bodies are found there. An ammunition dump has been looted, and on Sunday an Iraqi employee of The New York Times who made a furtive visit to the site saw looters tearing out metal fixtures. Bare pipes within the darkened interior of one of the buildings were a tangled mess, zigzagging along charred walls. Someone fired a shot, probably to frighten the visitors off.
"It's like Mars on Earth," said Maj. Dan Whisnant, an intelligence officer for the Second Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. "It would take probably 10 battalions 10 years to clear that out."
Mr. Hussein's engineers acquired HMX and RDX when they embarked on a crash effort to build an atomic bomb in the late 1980's. It did not go smoothly.
In 1989, a huge blast ripped through Al Qaqaa, the boom reportedly heard hundreds of miles away. The explosion, it was later determined, occurred when a stockpile of the high explosives ignited.
After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the United Nations discovered Iraq's clandestine effort and put the United Nations arms agency in charge of Al Qaqaa's huge stockpile. Weapon inspectors determined that Iraq had bought the explosives from France, China and Yugoslavia, a European diplomat said.
None of the explosives were destroyed, arms experts familiar with the decision recalled, because Iraq argued that it should be allowed to keep them for eventual use in mining and civilian construction. But Al Qaqaa was still under the authority of the Military Industrial Council, which ran Iraq's sensitive weapons programs and was led for a time by Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein's son-in-law. He defected to the West, then returned to Iraq and was immediately killed.
In 1996, the United Nations hauled away some of the HMX and used it to blow up Al Hakam, a vast Iraqi factory for making germ weapons.
The Qaqaa stockpile went unmonitored from late 1998, when United Nations inspectors left Iraq, to late 2002, when they came back. Upon their return, the inspectors discovered that about 35 tons of HMX were missing. The Iraqis said they had used the explosive mainly in civilian programs.
The remaining stockpile was no secret. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the arms agency, frequently talked about it publicly as he investigated - in late 2002 and early 2003 - the Bush administration's claims that Iraq was secretly renewing its pursuit of nuclear arms. He ordered his weapons inspectors to conduct an inventory, and publicly reported their findings to the Security Council on Jan. 9, 2003.
During the following weeks, the I.A.E.A. repeatedly drew public attention to the explosives. In New York on Feb. 14, nine days after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented his arms case to the Security Council, Dr. ElBaradei reported that the agency had found no sign of new atom endeavors but "has continued to investigate the relocation and consumption of the high explosive HMX."
A European diplomat reported that Jacques Baute, head of the arms agency's Iraq nuclear inspection team, warned officials at the United States mission in Vienna about the danger of the nuclear sites and materials once under I.A.E.A. supervision, including Al Qaqaa.
But apparently, little was done. A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal." It is unclear whether troops ever returned.
By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by titanic blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.
Other HMX bunkers were untouched. Some were damaged but not devastated. I.A.E.A. experts say they assume that just before the invasion the Iraqis followed their standard practice of moving crucial explosives out of buildings, so they would not be tempting targets. If so, the experts say, the Iraqi must have broken seals from the arms agency on bunker doors and moved most of the HMX to nearby fields, where it would have been lightly camouflaged - and ripe for looting.
But the Bush administration would not allow the agency back into the country to verify the status of the stockpile. In May 2004, Iraqi officials say in interviews, they warned L. Paul Bremer III, the American head of the occupation authority, that Al Qaqaa had probably been looted. It is unclear if that warning was passed anywhere. Efforts to reach Mr. Bremer by telephone were unsuccessful.
But by the spring of 2004, the Americans were preoccupied with the transfer of authority to Iraq, and the insurgency was gaining strength. "It's not an excuse," said one senior administration official. "But a lot of things went by the boards."
Early this month, Dr. ElBaradei put public pressure on the interim Iraqi government to start the process of accounting for nuclear-related materials still ostensibly under I.A.E.A. supervision, including the Qaqaa stockpile.
"Iraq is obliged," he wrote to the president of the Security Council on Oct. 1, "to declare semiannually changes that have occurred or are foreseen."
The agency, Dr. ElBaradei added pointedly, "has received no such notifications or declarations from any state since the agency's inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in March 2003."
A Lost Stockpile
Two weeks ago, on Oct. 10, Dr. Mohammed J. Abbas of the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology wrote a letter to the I.A.E.A. to say the Qaqaa stockpile had been lost. He added that his ministry had judged that an "urgent updating of the registered materials is required."
A chart in his letter listed 341.7 metric tons, about 377 American tons, of HMX, RDX and PETN as missing.
The explosives missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe. The Iraqi letter identified the vanished stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, which stands for "high melting point explosive," 141.2 metric tons of RDX, which stands for "rapid detonation explosive," among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, which stands for "pentaerythritol tetranitrate." The total is roughly 340 metric tons or nearly 380 American tons.
Five days later, on Oct. 15, European diplomats said, the arms agency wrote the United States mission in Vienna to forward the Iraqi letter and ask that the American authorities inform the international coalition in Iraq of the missing explosives.
Dr. ElBaradei, a European diplomat said, is "extremely concerned" about the potentially "devastating consequences" of the vanished stockpile.
Its fate remains unknown. Glenn Earhart, manager of an Army Corps of Engineers program in Huntsville, Ala., that is in charge of rounding up and destroying lost Iraqi munitions, said he and his colleagues knew nothing of the whereabouts of the Qaqaa stockpile.
Administration officials say Iraq was awash in munitions, including other stockpiles of exotic explosives.
"The only reason this stockpile was under seal," said one senior administration official, "is because it was located at Al Qaqaa," where nuclear work had gone on years ago.
As a measure of the size of the stockpile, one large truck can carry about 10 tons, meaning that the missing explosives could fill a fleet of almost 40 trucks.
By weight, these explosives pack far more destructive power than TNT, so armies often use them in shells, bombs, mines, mortars and many types of conventional ordinance.
"HMX and RDX have a lot of shattering power," said Dr. Van Romero, vice president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, or New Mexico Tech, which specializes in explosives.
"Getting a large amount is difficult," he added, because most nations carefully regulate who can buy such explosives, though civilian experts can sometimes get licenses to use them for demolition and mining.
An Immediate Danger
A special property of HMX and RDX lends them to smuggling and terrorism, experts said. While violently energetic when detonated, they are insensitive to shock and physical abuse during handling and transport because of their chemical stability. A hammer blow does nothing. It takes a detonator, like a blasting cap, to release the stored energy.
Experts said the insensitivity made them safer to transport than the millions of unexploded shells, mines and pieces of live ammunition that litter Iraq. And its benign appearance makes it easy to disguise as harmless goods, easily slipped across borders.
"The immediate danger" of the lost stockpile, said an expert who recently led a team that searched Iraq for deadly arms, "is its potential use with insurgents in very small and powerful explosive devices. The other danger is that it can easily move into the terrorist web across the Middle East."
More worrisome to the I.A.E.A. - and to some in Washington - is that HMX and RDX are used in standard nuclear weapons design. In a nuclear implosion weapon, the explosives crush a hollow sphere of uranium or plutonium into a critical mass, initiating the nuclear explosion.
A crude implosion device - like the one that the United States tested in 1945 in the New Mexican desert and then dropped on Nagasaki, Japan - needs about a ton of high explosive to crush the core and start the chain reaction.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/25/international/bomb650.jpg
"Gentili signori, vi informiamo di avere smarrito 338 tonnelate di esplosivo custodite nei "nostri depositi".
Coi migliori saluti."
Vedi come si fanno le cose, quando sei ad alto livello, e te ne puoi fregare delle responsabilità ?
Pensa, al contrario, a come sarebbe la faccenda se vai a denunciare lo smarrimento della patente :D
Lucio Virzì
25-10-2004, 20:08
Originariamente inviato da Quetzal
"Gentili signori, vi informiamo di avere smarrito 338 tonnelate di esplosivo custodite nei "nostri depositi".
Coi migliori saluti."
Vedi come si fanno le cose, quando sei ad alto livello, e te ne puoi fregare delle responsabilità ?
Pensa, al contrario, a come sarebbe la faccenda se vai a denunciare lo smarrimento della patente :D
Non ho parole... :rolleyes:
IpseDixit
25-10-2004, 23:41
Originariamente inviato da lucio68
Fa molta più notizia un'ogiva che avrebbe potuto ospitare una testata chimica sepolta sotto 23 metri di argilla e sabbia che non 380 tonnellate di esplosivo tradizionale.
Mi sa che prima o poi farà notizia anche questo esplosivo
tatrat4d
26-10-2004, 15:17
Da Drudgereport (che si rifà ad NBC news):
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX MON OCT 25 2004 22:45:05 ET XXXXX
NBCNEWS: CACHE OF EXPLOSIVES VANISHED FROM SITE IN IRAQ BEFORE TROOPS ARRIVED...
The NYTIMES urgently reported on Monday in an apprent October Surprise: The Iraqi interim government and the U.N. nuclear agency have warned the United States that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives are now missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.
[The source behind the NYT story first went to CBSNEWS' 60 MINUTES last Wednesday, but the beleaguered network wasn't able to get the piece on the air as fast as the newspaper could print. Executive producer Jeff Fager hoped to break the story during a high-impact election eve broadcast of 60 MINS on October 31.]
Jumping on the TIMES exclusive, Dem presidential candidate John Kerry blasted the Bush administration for its failure to "guard those stockpiles."
"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration," Kerry said.
In an election week rush:
**ABCNEWS Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 4 Times
**CBSNEWS Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 7 Times
**MSNBC Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 37 Times
**CNN Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 50 Times
But tonight, NBCNEWS reported: The 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives were already missing back in April 10, 2003 -- when U.S. troops arrived at the installation south of Baghdad!
An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.
According to NBCNEWS, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.
"The U.S. Army was at the site one day after the liberation and the weapons were already gone," a top Republican blasted from Washington late Monday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers.
Dem vp hopeful John Edwards blasted Bush for not securing the explosives: "It is reckless and irresponsible to fail to protect and safeguard one of the largest weapons sites in the country. And by either ignoring these mistakes or being clueless about them, George Bush has failed. He has failed as our commander in chief; he has failed as president."
A senior Bush official e-mailed DRUDGE late Monday: "Let me get this straight, are Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards now saying we did not go into Iraq soon enough? We should have invaded and liberated Iraq sooner?"
Top Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart fired back Monday night: "In a shameless attempt to cover up its failure to secure 380 tons of highly explosive material in Iraq, the White House is desperately flailing in an effort to escape blame. Instead of distorting John Kerry’s words, the Bush campaign is now falsely and deliberately twisting the reports of journalists. It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous."
Why is the U.N. nuclear agency suddenly warning now that insurgents in Iraq may have obtained nearly 400 tons of missing explosives -- in early 2003?
NBCNEWS Jim Miklaszewski quoted one official: "Recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes this announcement appear highly political."
Developing...
http://www.drudgereport.com/nbcw.htm
Lucio Virzì
26-10-2004, 15:23
"Before"? Da qualche altra parte ho letto il contrario.
tatrat4d
26-10-2004, 15:25
Originariamente inviato da Lucio Virzì
"Before"? Da qualche altra parte ho letto il contrario.
Ecco, appunto. Questa troupe (si scrive così?) della NBC sostiene che sia sparito prima. Basta attendere e non dovrebbe essere così difficile scoprire la versione esatta.
Beh, è come se l'avesse detto la Foxx...
tatrat4d
26-10-2004, 16:53
Originariamente inviato da GioFX
Beh, è come se l'avesse detto la Foxx...
CNN può andare? Dammi il tempo di trovare.
P.S.
1) Fox aveva la notizia da prima del NYT
2) Quando cita altre fonti sarà possibile fidarsi anche di Drudge?
tatrat4d
26-10-2004, 16:54
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/iraq.explosives/
si, ma la fonte è sempre NBC, tati... :O :p
tatrat4d
26-10-2004, 18:29
Originariamente inviato da GioFX
si, ma la fonte è sempre NBC, tati... :O :P
Tanto basta a fare cambiare scaletta all'amico Rather :D
Paracleto
28-10-2004, 00:34
la notizia ovviamente si è rivelata infondata
tanto da far dire al consigliere in politica estera di kerry (Richard Holbrooke) "'Non sappiamo i fatti'
WSJ: (http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/?id=110005812)
One possibility is that it's a relative non-story. Several hundred tons of missing high-grade explosives may seem like a big deal. But that has to be viewed in the context of the hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives the U.S. has already seized and the many thousand tons more that may remain hidden.
The second possibility is that the story is every bit as important as Mr. Kerry alleges, just not in the way he means. Al-Qaqaa is known to have been one of the sites where Saddam pursued his nuclear projects in the 1980s; throughout the 1990s it remained under control of Hussein Kamal's Military Industrial Council, the umbrella ministry tasked with developing Iraq's WMD capabilities. That seems like reasonable evidence that Saddam remained bent on developing a nuclear bomb, retained at least some of the ingredients to make one and therefore posed a "grave and gathering threat" to the peace of the world.
si è rivelata infondata?!? ma hai letto il documento UFFICIALE fotocopiato? certo, infondata solo perchè un sito di destra che riprende il giornale più conservatore di tutti che da una propria opinonione sul valore di 380 tonnellate di armi su molte di più che secondo loro i soldati americani avrebbero sequestrato... ma fammi il piacere!
In effetti, se mi permettete un'esagerazione, sarebbe un po' come se dicessero "che cosa volete che sia una testata atomica iraniana visto che noi ne abbiamo a centinaia".
tatrat4d
28-10-2004, 13:22
Si tratta di nuovo di una notizia presa da Drudge (e peggio ancora del Washington Times), ma per completezza la posto. Poi ognuno si faccia l'idea che vuole.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20041028-122637-6257r.htm
Russia tied to Iraq's missing arms
By Bill Gertz
Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.
John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.
"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."
Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.
Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.
The Russian involvement in helping disperse Saddam's weapons, including some 380 tons of RDX and HMX, is still being investigated, Mr. Shaw said.
The RDX and HMX, which are used to manufacture high-explosive and nuclear weapons, are probably of Russian origin, he said.
Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita could not be reached for comment.
The disappearance of the material was reported in a letter Oct. 10 from the Iraqi government to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Disclosure of the missing explosives Monday in a New York Times story was used by the Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, who accused the Bush administration of failing to secure the material.
Al-Qaqaa, a known Iraqi weapons site, was monitored closely, Mr. Shaw said.
"That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Mr. Shaw said. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."
The Pentagon disclosed yesterday that the Al-Qaqaa facility was defended by Fedayeen Saddam, Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi military units during the conflict. U.S. forces defeated the defenders around April 3 and found the gates to the facility open, the Pentagon said in a statement yesterday.
A military unit in charge of searching for weapons, the Army's 75th Exploitation Task Force, then inspected Al-Qaqaa on May 8, May 11 and May 27, 2003, and found no high explosives that had been monitored in the past by the IAEA.
The Pentagon said there was no evidence of large-scale movement of explosives from the facility after April 6.
"The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd Infantry Division's arrival at the facility," the statement said.
The statement also said that the material may have been removed from the site by Saddam's regime.
According to the Pentagon, U.N. arms inspectors sealed the explosives at Al-Qaqaa in January 2003 and revisited the site in March and noted that the seals were not broken.
It is not known whether the inspectors saw the explosives in March. The U.N. team left the country before the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, 2003.
A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq reveal that Saddam's government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to provide security for Iraq's Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.
The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to U.S. and Western demands, this official said.
A small portion of Iraq's 650,000 tons to 1 million tons of conventional arms that were found after the war were looted after the U.S.-led invasion, Mr. Shaw said. Russia was Iraq's largest foreign supplier of weaponry, he said.
However, the most important and useful arms and explosives appear to have been separated and moved out as part of carefully designed program. "The organized effort was done in advance of the conflict," Mr. Shaw said.
The Russian forces were tasked with moving special arms out of the country.
Mr. Shaw said foreign intelligence officials believe the Russians worked with Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence service to separate out special weapons, including high explosives and other arms and related technology, from standard conventional arms spread out in some 200 arms depots.
The Russian weapons were then sent out of the country to Syria, and possibly Lebanon in Russian trucks, Mr. Shaw said.
Mr. Shaw said he believes that the withdrawal of Russian-made weapons and explosives from Iraq was part of plan by Saddam to set up a "redoubt" in Syria that could be used as a base for launching pro-Saddam insurgency operations in Iraq.
The Russian units were dispatched beginning in January 2003 and by March had destroyed hundreds of pages of documents on Russian arms supplies to Iraq while dispersing arms to Syria, the second official said.
Besides their own weapons, the Russians were supplying Saddam with arms made in Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria and other Eastern European nations, he said.
"Whatever was not buried was put on lorries and sent to the Syrian border," the defense official said.
Documents reviewed by the official included itineraries of military units involved in the truck shipments to Syria. The materials outlined in the documents included missile components, MiG jet parts, tank parts and chemicals used to make chemical weapons, the official said.
The director of the Iraqi government front company known as the Al Bashair Trading Co. fled to Syria, where he is in charge of monitoring arms holdings and funding Iraqi insurgent activities, the official said.
Also, an Arabic-language report obtained by U.S. intelligence disclosed the extent of Russian armaments. The 26-page report was written by Abdul Tawab Mullah al Huwaysh, Saddam's minister of military industrialization, who was captured by U.S. forces May 2, 2003.
The Russian "spetsnaz" or special-operations forces were under the GRU military intelligence service and organized large commercial truck convoys for the weapons removal, the official said.
Regarding the explosives, the new Iraqi government reported that 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or high-melting-point explosive, and 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or rapid-detonation explosive, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, were missing.
The material is used in nuclear weapons and also in making military "plastic" high explosive.
Defense officials said the Russians can provide information on what happened to the Iraqi weapons and explosives that were transported out of the country. Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.
Paracleto
28-10-2004, 22:38
Originariamente inviato da GioFX
si è rivelata infondata?!? ma hai letto il documento UFFICIALE fotocopiato? certo, infondata solo perchè un sito di destra che riprende il giornale più conservatore di tutti che da una propria opinonione sul valore di 380 tonnellate di armi su molte di più che secondo loro i soldati americani avrebbero sequestrato... ma fammi il piacere!
anche ABC (http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=204304&page=1)è filonazista?
"non sappiamo i fatti"
ma giofx si
lui li sa
mi piace un casino che uelli che dicevano che le armi non c'erano ora dicono che c'erano (e viceversa)
paracleto paracleto, quello che dice è un cazzata e lo sai, perchè provochi così gratuitamente? :confused:
Paracleto
28-10-2004, 22:54
Originariamente inviato da Korn
paracleto paracleto, quello che dice è un cazzata e lo sai, perchè provochi così gratuitamente? :confused:
provoco?
dove?
Originariamente inviato da Paracleto
mi piace un casino che uelli che dicevano che le armi non c'erano ora dicono che c'erano (e viceversa)
Paracleto
28-10-2004, 23:15
perchè?
dove sta la provocazione?
le armi non c'erano
ecco, sono sparite le armi sotto gli occhi di quei mammalucchi degli americani
non lo sto mica dicendo io
anacleto, ma ci sei o ci fai?!?
parliamo di armi non convenzionali chimiche, batteriologiche e nucleari (quelle che la casa bianca chiama Weapons of Mass Destruction) o armi convenzionali?
Vediamo se ci arrivi...
Lucio Virzì
29-10-2004, 10:51
Originariamente inviato da GioFX
anacleto, ma ci sei o ci fai?!?
parliamo di armi non convenzionali chimiche, batteriologiche e nucleari (quelle che la casa bianca chiama Weapons of Mass Destruction) o armi convenzionali?
Vediamo se ci arrivi...
Appunto. ;)
Paracleto
29-10-2004, 21:58
Originariamente inviato da Lucio Virzì
D'accordo, si cercavano le WOMD, le armi chimiche, le batteriologiche.. ma levargli ste 380 tonnellate di esplosivo ad alto potenziale sembrava brutto?
10:10 Scomparse 380 tonnellate esplosivo da deposito
Il governo iracheno ad interim ha avvertito gli Stati Uniti e gli ispettori internazionali nucleari della scomparsa di quasi 380 tonnellate di un potente esplosivo convenzionale usato per abbattere edifici, realizzare testate missilistiche e far detonare armi nucleari. Lo scrive oggi il New York Times, spiegando che l'esplosivo si trovava in un deposito del centro militare iracheno di al Qaqaa, ormai abbandonato, dove ancora ieri erano in azione saccheggiatori.
LuVi
vediamo se ci arrivate da soli ;)
beh certo, hanno trovato dell'esplosivo che può essere utilizzato anche per relaizzare una bomba H, ma allora, anche il titanio usato negli armamenti convenzionali può essere utilizzato per le WMD... mhhh, com'è che non ho sentito alcun giubilo di gioia da parte di Bush? com'è che i servizi segreti che avevano confermato di non aver trovato un tubo non hanno detto nulla in merito a questo caso?
Paracleto
30-10-2004, 00:48
Originariamente inviato da GioFX
beh certo, hanno trovato dell'esplosivo che può essere utilizzato anche per relaizzare una bomba H, ma allora, anche il titanio usato negli armamenti convenzionali può essere utilizzato per le WMD... mhhh, com'è che non ho sentito alcun giubilo di gioia da parte di Bush? com'è che i servizi segreti che avevano confermato di non aver trovato un tubo non hanno detto nulla in merito a questo caso?
com'è che non lo hanno mai detto, di non avere trovato un tubo?
c'erano dei rapporti ben chiari, e non è nemmeno questione di secoli fa
Originariamente inviato da Paracleto
com'è che non lo hanno mai detto, di non avere trovato un tubo?
c'erano dei rapporti ben chiari, e non è nemmeno questione di secoli fa
Ma stai scherzando, dico, vero?!?
http://forum.hwupgrade.it/showthread.php?s=&threadid=646162&perpage=20&highlight=record&pagenumber=4
CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/06/iraq.wmd.report.ap/index.html)
Official: No WMD stockpiles in Iraq
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Contradicting the main argument for a war that has cost more than 1,000 American lives, the top U.S. arms inspector reported Wednesday that he found no evidence that Iraq produced any weapons of mass destruction after 1991. He also concluded that Saddam Hussein's weapons capability weakened during a dozen years of U.N. sanctions before the U.S. invasion last year.
Contrary to prewar statements by President Bush and top administration officials, Saddam did not have chemical and biological stockpiles when the war began and his nuclear capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing, according to the report by Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group.
Duelfer's findings come less than four weeks before an election in which Bush's handling of Iraq has become the central issue. Democratic candidate John Kerry has seized on comments this week by the former U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, that the United States didn't have enough troops in Iraq to prevent a breakdown in security after Saddam was toppled.
The inspector's report could boost Kerry's contention that Bush rushed to war based on faulty intelligence and that sanctions and U.N. weapons inspectors should have been given more time.
Saddam a threat
But Duelfer also supports Bush's argument that Saddam remained a threat. Interviews with the toppled leader and other former Iraqi officials made clear to inspectors that Saddam had not lost his ambition to pursue weapons of mass destruction and hoped to revive his weapons program if U.N. sanctions were lifted, the report said.
"There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," Bush said in a campaign speech in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, defending the decision to invade. "In the world after Sept. 11, that was a risk we could not afford to take."
A top Democrat in Congress, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, said Duelfer's findings undercut the two main arguments for war: that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that he would share them with terrorists like al-Qaeda.
"We did not go to war because Saddam had future intentions to obtain weapons of mass destruction," Levin said.
Traveling in Africa, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday that the report shows that Saddam was "doing his best" to get around the United Nations' sanctions. For months, Blair has been trying to defend his justification for joining the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in the face of heavy criticism from some in his own party.
Duelfer presented his findings in a report of more than 1,000 pages, and in appearances before Senate committees.
The report avoids direct comparisons with prewar claims by the Bush administration on Iraq's weapons systems. But Duelfer largely reinforces the conclusions of his predecessor, David Kay, who said in January, "We were almost all wrong" on Saddam's weapons programs. The White House did not endorse Kay's findings then, noting that Duelfer's team was continuing to search for weapons.
Duelfer found that Saddam, hoping to end U.N. sanctions, gradually began ending prohibited weapons programs starting in 1991. But as Iraq started receiving money through the U.N. oil-for-food program in the late 1990s, and as enforcement of the sanctions weakened, Saddam was able to take steps to rebuild his military, such as acquiring parts for missile systems.
However, the erosion of sanctions stopped after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Duelfer found, preventing Saddam from pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
Duelfer's team found no written plans by Saddam's regime to pursue banned weapons if U.N. sanctions were lifted. Instead, the inspectors based their findings that Saddam hoped to reconstitute his programs on interviews with Saddam after his capture, as well as talks with other top Iraqi officials.
The inspectors found Saddam was particularly concerned about the threat posed by Iran, the country's enemy in a 1980-88 war. Saddam said he would meet Iran's threat by any means necessary, which Duelfer understood to mean weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam believed the use of chemical weapons against Iran prevented Iraq's defeat in that war. He also was prepared to use such weapons in 1991 if the U.S.-led coalition had tried to topple him in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday that Saddam "had the intent and capability" to build weapons of mass destruction, and that he was "a gathering threat that needed to be taken seriously, that it was a matter of time before he was going to begin pursuing those weapons of mass destruction."
But before the war, the Bush administration cast Saddam as an immediate threat, not a gathering threat who would begin pursuing weapons in the future.
For example, Bush said in October 2002 that "Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more." Bush also said then, "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, said Wednesday that Duelfer's findings showed there is "no evidence whatsoever of the threats we were warned about." He spoke after Duelfer gave a closed-door briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said Duelfer showed Iraq's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction had degraded since 1998. But Roberts called the report inconclusive on what happened to weapons stockpiles Saddam is believed to have once possessed.
Interviews with Saddam left Duelfer's team with the impression that Saddam was more concerned about Iran and Israel as enemies than he was about the United States. Saddam appeared to hold out hope that U.S. leaders would ultimately recognize that it was in the country's interest to deal with Iraq as an important, secular, oil-rich Middle Eastern nation, the report found.
The Iraq Survey Group will continue operations and may prepare smaller reports on issues that remain unresolved, including whether weapons had been smuggled out of Iraq and about intelligence that Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs.
----
U.S. Weapons Inspector: Iraq Had No WMD
By KATHERINE PFLEGER SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Fallen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but left signs that he had idle programs he someday hoped to revive, the top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq (news - web sites) concludes in a draft report due out soon.
According to people familiar with the 1,500-page report, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, will find that Saddam was importing banned materials, working on unmanned aerial vehicles in violation of U.N. agreements and maintaining a dual-use industrial sector that could produce weapons.
Duelfer also says Iraq only had small research and development programs for chemical and biological weapons.
As Duelfer puts the finishing touches on his report, he concludes Saddam had intentions of restarting weapons programs at some point, after suspicion and inspections from the international community waned.
After a year and a half in Iraq, however, the United States has found no weapons of mass destruction — its chief argument for going to war and overthrowing the regime.
An intelligence official said Duelfer could wrap up the report as soon as this month, but noted it may take time to declassify it. Those who discussed the report inside and outside the government did so Thursday on the condition of anonymity because it contains classified material and is not yet completed.
If the report is released publicly before the Nov. 2 elections, Democrats are likely to seize on the document as another opportunity to criticize the Bush administration's leading argument for war in Iraq and the deteriorating security situation there.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) has criticized the president's handling of the war, but also has said he still would have voted to authorize the invasion even if he had known no weapons of mass destruction would be found there.
Duelfer's report is expected to be similar to findings reported by his predecessor, David Kay, who presented an interim report to Congress in October. Kay left the post in January, saying, "We were almost all wrong" about Saddam's weapons programs.
The new analysis, however, is expected to fall between the position of the Bush administration before the war — portraying Saddam as a grave threat — and the declarative statements Kay made after he resigned.
It will also add more evidence and flesh out Kay's October findings. At that time, Kay said the Iraq Survey Group had only uncovered limited evidence of secret chemical and biological weapons programs, but he found substantial evidence of an Iraqi push to boost the range of its ballistic missiles beyond prohibited ranges.
He also said there was almost no sign that a significant nuclear weapons project was under way.
Duelfer's report doesn't reach firm conclusions in all areas. For instance, U.S. officials are still investigating whether Saddam's fallen regime may have sent chemical weapons equipment and several billion dollars over the border to Syria. That has not been confirmed, but remains an area of interest to the U.S. government.
The Duelfer report will come months after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing assessment of the prewar intelligence on Iraq.
After a yearlong inquiry, the Republican-led committee said in July the CIA (news - web sites) kept key information from its own and other agencies' analysts, engaged in "group think" by failing to challenge the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and allowed President Bush (news - web sites) and Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) to make false statements.
The Iraq Survey Group has been working since the summer of 2003 to find Saddam's weapons and better understand his prohibited programs. More than a thousand civilian and military weapons specialists, translators and other experts have been devoted to the effort.
----
Nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/05rumsfeld.html?oref=login)
Rumsfeld Sees Lack of Proof for Qaeda-Hussein Link
By THOM SHANKER
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that he had seen no "strong, hard evidence" linking Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, although he tempered his comment by noting that stark disagreements on that issue remained among American intelligence analysts.
"I have seen the answer to that question migrate in the intelligence community over the period of a year in the most amazing way," Mr. Rumsfeld said when asked about ties between Mr. Hussein and the terror network run by Osama bin Laden. Senior administration officials cited the existence of ties between them as a rationale for war on Iraq.
"Second, there are differences in the intelligence community as to what the relationship was," Mr. Rumsfeld said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."
Relationships among terrorists and terrorist networks are complicated to track, Mr. Rumsfeld said, because "in many cases, they cooperate not in a chain of command but in a loose affiliation, a franchising arrangement almost."
He said that even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist leader blamed for some of the most violent attacks inside Iraq since the end of major combat operations, probably had no formal allegiance to Mr. bin Laden, although "they're just two peas in a pod in terms of what they're doing."
The extent of Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda has been subjected to intense and often contentious scrutiny, especially this campaign season. While Mr. Rumsfeld often has cited C.I.A. reports of murky ties, including the presence of Qaeda operatives in Iraq, he has not been as adamant on the issue as other senior administration officials, in particular Vice President Dick Cheney.
"There is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives," Mr. Rumsfeld said in November 2002. "They have occurred over a span of some 8 or 10 years to our knowledge. There are currently Al Qaeda in Iraq.''
But even when discussing intelligence pointing to Iraq- Qaeda links, he has noted the absence of certainty. In September 2002, he warned that it was not always possible for the government to satisfy a public desire for "some hard evidence" of Iraq's ties to terrorist networks. "We have to face that fact that we're not going to have everything beyond a reasonable doubt," he said.
Mr. Rumsfeld's comments were made one day before Mr. Cheney is to meet Senator John Edwards in a vice-presidential campaign debate, during which the topic of administration statements on Iraq-Qaeda ties are likely to come up.
Mr. Rumsfeld issued a statement late last night in which he stated, "I have acknowledged since September 2002 that there were ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq."
That assessment, he said in the statement, was based on points provided by George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, to describe the C.I.A.'s understanding of the Qaeda-Iraq relationship. Those points, Mr. Rumsfeld said, included evidence of Qaeda members in Iraq, reports of senior-level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade and of possible chemical and biological agent training, and of information that Iraq and Al Qaeda discussed safe haven opportunities in Iraq.
In his speech yesterday, Mr. Rumsfeld praised a weekend offensive by the First Infantry Division and members of the new Iraqi security force that chased insurgents from Samarra. He said the offensive should serve as a warning to other guerrillas holding territory before elections scheduled for January.
In the face of a tenacious insurgency, he said, "your first choice is to talk and to gather people together.
"And that's what they tried in some areas, and it worked, and in some areas it didn't," he added. "And the next thing you have to do is have the threat of force. And finally you may have to use force. And that's what happened in Samarra."
Mr. Rumsfeld also gave an impassioned defense of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan for his actions in support of the military effort to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan and for serving as a voice of moderation in the Muslim world.
----
Nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/politics/12panel.html?hp):
Final 9/11 Report Is Said to Dismiss Iraq-Qaeda Alliance
By PHILIP SHENON
Published: July 12, 2004
WASHINGTON, July 11 - The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is nearing completion of a final, probably unanimous report that will stand by the conclusions of the panel's staff and largely dismiss White House theories both about a close working relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda and about possible Iraqi involvement in Sept. 11, commission officials said.
The report, which is expected to be made public several days before the panel's mandated deadline of July 26, will also probably be unwelcome at the White House because it will document management failures at senior levels of the Bush administration that kept the government from acting aggressively on intelligence warnings in the spring and summer of 2001 of an imminent, catastrophic terrorist attack, the officials said.
Campaign advisers to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, have said they eagerly await the commission's report, believing it will damage President Bush by showing that he and his senior aides were inattentive to dire threats before Sept. 11 and may have misled the nation about the reasons for the war in Iraq.
At the commission's request, the White House in April declassified and made public an intelligence report given to Mr. Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 - 36 days before the attacks - that was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
Commission members said the final report would not single out government officials by name for intelligence or law enforcement blunders before Sept. 11. But they said the report would criticize several agencies for their performance in both the Bush and Clinton administrations, especially the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and call for an overhaul of the nation's counterterrorism efforts.
The officials declined to detail the report's recommendations but said they would call for a shakeup of the F.B.I.'s domestic counterintelligence program and for equally broad changes at the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, possibly by adding to the authority of the director of central intelligence to oversee the work of agencies beyond the C.I.A.
The panel's expected call for change at the C.I.A. would be bolstered by the findings of a Senate intelligence committee report that was made public on Friday, which blamed the agency for systematically exaggerating the evidence that Iraq had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing nuclear arms, the central justification for last year's invasion.
"We don't need to point fingers in our report, because people will be able to judge the facts for themselves," said John F. Lehman, a Republican commissioner who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration.
Mr. Lehman has said that he expects the commission's work to result in "revolutionary" changes in the government's intelligence community. "The editorializing has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk as the facts before us have expanded and expanded and expanded," he said.
Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic commissioner who is a former House member from Indiana, said he expected the final report to be unanimous and to call for "dynamic and dramatic changes in the intelligence community - changes in tradecraft and also nuts-and-bolts changes."
The panel's staff created controversy last month with an interim report that largely discounted theories about close ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, another major justification cited by the Bush administration for invading Iraq.
The staff report found that there was "no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States" and that repeated contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship."
The staff also said that it did not believe a widely circulated report from Czech intelligence that a ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer in April 2001, suggesting Iraqi involvement in the attacks.
The findings were in marked contrast to statements by President Bush and, more often, Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been the administration's lead spokesman in arguing that an alliance existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Though Mr. Cheney insisted that he had no major differences with the commission and that the debate was being mischaracterized in news reports, the vice president responded to the staff report last month by telling a television interviewer that "there clearly was a relationship" between President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Al Qaeda and that "the evidence is overwhelming," noting that he "probably" had access to intelligence information not reviewed by the commission. He also insisted that the Czech intelligence report might be credible.
Despite initial suggestions from the commission's leaders that they might rewrite the staff report to limit its conclusions that discounted a possible Iraq-Qaeda tie, commission members and the panel's chief spokesman said last week that the panel had decided to stand by the staff in the final report.
That reasoning was bolstered last week by the findings of the Senate intelligence committee, which cited several classified intelligence reviews prepared by the C.I.A. after Sept. 11 that suggested that evidence of a close relation between Iraq and Al Qaeda was "murky" and at times contradictory. The Senate committee said the C.I.A. had "reasonably concluded" that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda "did not add up to an established formal relationship" between Mr. Hussein and the terror network.
''We believe we have seen everything now that the vice president has seen and we continue to stand on the staff statements," said Al Felzenberg, a commission spokesman.
He suggested that the commission's final report would go further than interim staff reports in documenting contacts over the years between Iraqi government and military officials and Al Qaeda's leadership. This may placate the White House to some extent by showing extensive communication between Iraq and Qaeda leaders.
"We expect the final report to enumerate on some of the contacts that were made between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and there were a number of points of contacts,'' Mr. Felzenberg said.
Commission members met in Washington last week to decide on the final wording of several chapters of the report. Several said afterward that they were increasingly optimistic that any differences between the five Democratic and five Republican members could be set aside and that they could agree on a unanimous report and on recommendations for overhauling the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and other counterterrorism agencies.
They noted, however, that they had not concluded their deliberations of some of the central policy recommendations, and that those issues were so contentious that they could prove to be a stumbling block to a unanimous report.
''We're still working through final iterations, but I think that on the main points, there seems to be consensus,'' said Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor who is a Democratic member of the panel. ''This commission operates on a very collegial basis, and I have found that talking through these issues has produced much more that we find in common than in opposition.'' Mr. Roemer said his "optimism is growing every day" about the possibility of a unanimous report.
The commission is trying to complete its work and publish the final report sometime during the week of July 18, to avoid being overshadowed by news from the Democratic convention, which opens on July 26.
Mr. Felzenberg said that the White House - through the office of Andrew H. Card Jr., President Bush's chief of staff - appeared ready to move quickly to declassify chapters of the report as they are completed by the commission. "I can say it's going smoothly," he said.
Under a procedure established by the commission last year, the White House has reviewed and declassified 17 interim staff reports released by the commission at a series of public hearings since January.
The commission has said that as it completes chapters of its final report, they will be given to the White House for a final security review. Commission officials said that since so much of the final report is built upon information in interim reports that have already been declassified, the final review process would be relatively straightforward.
Mr. Felzenberg said that the commission's staff investigators had essentially finished their work, though they would keep gathering information until shortly before publication of the final report.
The White House said last week that Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, had recently provided the panel with written answers to a final set of questions submitted by the commission. The White House and the commission would not describe the issues raised by the panel in its questions to Ms. Rice.
Paracleto
31-10-2004, 14:03
dunque
senza essere esperti di statistica (ma applicando il semplice buon senso) non è difficile rendersi conto dell'assurdità di quel dato. Se poi si maneggiano bene numeri e percentuali si è in grado di smontarlo ancor più efficacemente: è il caso - tra gli altri - di Shannon Love (qui (http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002543.html) e qui (http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002546.html)) e di Fred Kaplan (qui (http://www.slate.com/id/2108887/)). Se a questo punto qualcuno decidesse di fidarsi delle cifre dell'Iraq Body Count (più ragionevoli senza dubbio ma non per questo reali), farebbe meglio a leggersi prima i quattro post a confutazione che David Adesnik ha dedicato questa settimana alla sua metodologia di calcolo (one (http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_10_24_oxblog_archive.html#109860216580368293), two (http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_10_24_oxblog_archive.html#109860541027361911), three (http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_10_24_oxblog_archive.html#109860640355410670), four (http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_10_24_oxblog_archive.html#109894741346683398)).
Slate spiega perché lo scoop del New York Times non è vero (http://slate.msn.com/id/2108888/)
ovviamente, ripeto, quella dell'esplosivo si è rivelata l'ennesima vaccata, il pentagono ha detto di avercelo in mano, ma i media italiani controllati da berlusconi filtrano questo genere di messaggi che potrebbero essere dannosi per il governo in carica...
ma perchè mai dovrei credere a dei blogger più di una testata giornalistica?
Originariamente inviato da Proteus
Per una semplice questione di aritmetica e buonsenso, quando le notizie descrivono eventi esagerati ed assai improbabili, anche se statisticamente possibili ma con margini ridicoli, divengono sospette.
Cosa sarebbe esagerato ed improbabile, il documento del governo Allawi?
Prendiamo un evento a caso: terremoto in Turchia: 12.000 morti. Un sito qualsiasi dice che sono troppi e spara una cifra di 2.000, devo dar ragione a quest'ultimo?!?
quindi il documento per te è falso?
Paracleto
01-11-2004, 23:05
edit
cannato post
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