by Qutb » Thu Oct 06, 2005 12:45 pm
<!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://ftrsummary.blogspot.com/2005/10/ftr-527-death-trap-part-ii.html" target="top">Dave Emory</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> quotes more of the article on his website:<br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>14. “ ‘You are actually talking to Obeidi?’ Albright finally asked. ‘Where is he? What did he say?’ Albright had met Obeidi in Iraq in the 1990s, when the U.N. inspectors were dismantling Saddam's WMD programs. Saddam had kept Obeidi's identity secret longer than that of any other scientist, Albright said. If anyone could say for sure what had happened to Iraq's nuclear program, it was him. The next day we dialed didn't seem to have much of a plan for dealing with Saddam's WMD scientists.” (Idem.)<br><br>15. Obeidi had buried critical documents about Saddam’s nuclear program in his back yard. “So we waited. A dapper 59-year-old, Obeidi arrived every day to greet me wearing an elegant abiyaa robe. When he felt especially nervous, we met in clandestine locations: by lamplight at my translator's home or in the courtyard of an Iraqi acquaintance. At other times, we sat on plastic lawn chairs in his garden, trying to figure out how he could avoid arrest by U.S. troops, as his wife and daughters served us cookies and tea. Every now and again, he would drop hints about the secrets he wanted to reveal. Then one day, he gestured toward a spot in the garden. Buried under the lotus tree next to his rosebushes a few feet from where we sat, he said, was the core of Saddam's nuclear quest: blueprints and prototype pieces for building centrifuges to enrich uranium to bomb grade. Twelve years earlier, he had buried them on orders from Saddam's son Qusay-presumably, he said, to use them to restart a bomb program someday.” (Idem.)<br><br>16. Obeidi also had some of the hardware stored in his buried cache of blueprints—together with the drawings, they comprised a critical cache of knowledge. “Obeidi dug up the cache a few days later. When he showed me the four prototypes, his hands shook. The machine parts looked alien, like pieces of a futuristic motorcycle, most of them small enough to fit inside a briefcase. He explained that these components and the three-foot-high stack of diagrams were still immensely valuable—and immensely dangerous. They represented the core knowledge it would take to jump-start a covert bomb program, anywhere in the world. This was why Obeidi was so anxious. On any given day he might be arrested by U.S. forces who would consider him a ‘bad guy,’ or killed by Saddam loyalists who would see him as a collaborator, or kidnapped by some other country interested in what he knew. The decision to come forward had been a hard one.” (Ibid.; pp. 42-43.)<br><br>17. Obeidi asked why the Americans were not more interested in securing the documents and the many Iraqi scientists who possessed crucial know-how about WMD’s. Indeed, why aren’t they?! “The news from Albright over the satellite phone was discouraging. U.S. intelligence on the ground was hopelessly disorganized, and there was no guarantee that American troops wouldn't imprison Obeidi even if he offered to help them. As the days wore on he felt the clock ticking, and sometimes his fear and exasperation would show through. ‘Why aren't they more interested in finding out what I have to offer?’ he once asked in the textbook English he had learned as a student at the Colorado School of Mines in the 1960s. ‘I can answer many of their questions. Surely for a great nation like the United States, it is no big deal to offer me security in exchange for everything I want to divulge. Why don't they want to help me?’” (Ibid.; p 43.)<br><br>18. “I didn't have an answer. Just weeks earlier, before the invasion, President Bush had railed against Saddam for intimidating his WMD scientists and hiding them from inspectors. Colin Powell had appeared before the United Nations Security Council and warned that Obeidi's centrifuge program posed a threat to the world. It was hard to explain why, having gone to war ostensibly to get control of Iraq's dangerous knowledge, the United States was now doing so little to follow through. It’s not as if the administration hasn't talked about the danger posed by Saddam's WMD scientists. Whether Iraq had actual weapons or just ‘capabilities’ it didn't matter, it has long argued: Even mere capabilities could leak out to terrorist groups or the states that support them. During the presidential campaign, John Kerry and President Bush reached a rare point of agreement when both named the spread of nuclear weapons as the No. 1 danger facing the United States.” (Idem.)<br><br>19. “As it happens, Saddam's nuclear centrifuge program during the late 1980s was one of the most efficient covert nuclear efforts the world has ever seen. The scientists who pulled it off are very gifted men and women, many of whom are now out of work. Their names are still being kept secret by the international agencies familiar with their work. But a source close to one of those agencies recently said that of the 200-some scientists at the top of its nuclear list, all but three remain unaccounted for. In a country with porous borders, where everyone—but especially those associated with the former regime—is in danger every day, many experts say at least some scientists are bound to be tempted to sell their knowledge to the highest bidder. And as the Pakistani network exposed last year shows, the nuclear black market is alive and well.” (Idem.)<br><br>20. Analyst Anne Harrington framed the critical issue concerning Saddam’s WMD scientists: “ ‘Weapons don't make themselves, says Anne Harrington, director of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control at the National Academies. ‘Somebody has to interpret how to take military doctrine and intent and make it real. Materials, particularly nuclear materials, are not something you scoop out of the dirt. The human element is critical in all of this.’” (Ibid.; pp. 43-45.)<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>Ray McGovern is worried:<br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Nobody knows how many Iraqi scientists may have been lured over the borders into Iran, Syria, or beyond. Nobody knows because no one is keeping tabs. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>But several observers agree that so little attention is being paid to Iraq’s scientists, the war may actually have increased the chances of nuclear capabilities proliferating beyond the country’s borders. Between its unemployed scientists and the disappearance of large amounts of WMD-related materials from former weapons sites, Iraq now poses a nightmare scenario, according to Ray McGovern</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->, who spent 27 years analyzing intelligence for the CIA and afterward co-founded Veteran Intellingence Professionals for Sanity. ‘The danger is much more acute, both from the proliferation side and the terrorism side,’ McGovern says. ‘Before we invaded, there was no evidence that Iraq had any plan or incentive to proliferate. They didn’t even have a current plan to develop WMD’s. They just hadn’t been doing it. Now, my God, we have a magnet attracting all manner of foreign jihadists to a place where the WMD expertise is suddenly unprotected. It just boggles the mind.’<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>(...)<br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>22. “Iraqi scientists have good reason to fear what might happen if they offer to cooperate with the United States.’ Obeidi's former boss and Saddam's top science adviser, General Amer al-Saadi, turned himself in to U.S. authorities just before I met Obeidi. He was promptly jailed and kept in custody for at least two years; a military spokesman told the Associated Press last year that the U.S. was also detaining up to a dozen other scientists. The chemist Mohammed Munim al-Izmerly— also said to have worked on Iraq’s former WMD programs—was taken into custody for questioning in April 2003. Ten months later his body was dropped off in a U.S. body bag at a Baghdad hospital. He had been killed by a blow to the head.” (Idem.)<br><br>23. “In the weeks after the invasion, I got to know Obeidi quite well. He was no Dr. Strangelove. He loved science and the pure logic of an engineering challenge, and his eyes would light up when we talked about early Mesopotamian art or American history. He said he detested Saddam and lamented how the Baathists had turned the best minds of his generation toward destructive ends. What he cared about more than anything was the welfare of his wife and four grown children. But as the U.S. occupation wore on, that seemed an increasingly elusive goal.” (Idem.)<br><br>24. “More than a month after our first meeting, our satellite phone calls had failed to produce any kind of safe-haven offer from Washington. Operatives from the Defense Intelligence Agency as well as the CIA had tracked Obeidi down through third parties, summoned him to their respective headquarters, and demanded that he surrender all he knew. The DIA agents threatened to imprison him, he told me, and then asked that he not speak to anyone at the CIA; soon afterward, the CIA sent armed agents to his home and took away a sample of his documents; promising to safeguard his family. Then, early on the morning of June 3, 2003, more than a dozen soldiers jumped over Obeidi's garden wall, kicked in his front door, and put him and his family facedown on their living room floor at gunpoint. Obeidi's wife and children watched as he was handcuffed and put in a Humvee. Evidently, the Army had finally caught wind of Obeidi's significance—and, just as evidently, the troops knew nothing of their own intelligence agencies' contacts with him.” (Idem.)<br><br>25. “Obeidi escaped the fate of his former boss when the CIA intervened with the Army and got him released. Knowing that he was a marked man, he decided that his only hope was to go public. He consented to an interview with CNN, and soon afterward the CIA whisked him and his family off to Kuwait, where he underwent weeks of interrogations.” (Idem.)<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>This is incredible:<br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>26. Note that the <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>CIA posted information on its website that could prove “incredibly useful” to anyone seeking to develop WMD’s</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. “On June 26, the CIA posted a press release about Obeidi's cache—the most valuable WMD evidence the U.S. has yet obtained in Iraq—on its official website. It also put up digital photos of the components and even one of the key centrifuge diagrams. The pictures, which Albright says could be ‘incredibly useful’ to any regime trying to start a covert nuclear program, were online for almost a week-long enough to be downloaded and made freely available on the Internet—before the agency took them down. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Literally buried for 12 years, some of Saddam's hoard of nuclear knowledge got out because of the U.S. government, not in spite of it</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->.” (Idem.)<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>Incompetence, or...? What's going on here? <br><br> <p><!--EZCODE FONT START--><span style="color:black;font-family:century gothic;font-size:x-small;"><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Qutb means "axis," "pole," "the center," which contains the periphery or is present in it. The qutb is a spiritual being, or function, which can reside in a human being or several human beings or a moment. It is the elusive mystery of how the divine gets delegated into the manifest world and obviously cannot be defined.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--></span><!--EZCODE FONT END--><br><br></p><i></i>
