KEEPING ‘DUBYA’ IN THE CROSS-HAIRS
By Marilyn M. Brannan, Assoc. Editor
Unravelling The New World Order

“Bush in The Cross-Hairs” appears to be the sport of choice for liberals and the anti-war bunch here and abroad right now. George W. Bush has been under heavy fire for alleged “intelligence failures” related to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as have two of his strongest allies in the war, the prime ministers of Australia and Great Britain. Under intense election year pressure, President Bush agreed to set up a bipartisan committee to investigate the problems in U.S. intelligence gathering. Tony Blair and John Howard, also under intense pressure, will likely set up inquiry commissions, as well.

Since Dr. David Kay resigned as chief WMD hunter, two very small “bytes” from Kay’s final report have been excerpted and gleefully exploited by Bush haters and political opponents. They consist of (1) Kay’s assertions of a “probable absence of stockpiles” and (2) a general assessment that “we were all wrong” about certain implications of the intelligence on which we relied. In the minds of Bush’s enemies, those two bytes—alone and out of context—constitute an irrefutable pronouncement that the U.S. and Coalition forces embarked on the war based on intelligence that was at best deeply flawed and at worst, based on lies that they attribute to George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Since David Kay began talking to the media, interested politicians have been rephrasing his assessments as to the “probable absence of stockpiles” by dropping the word “probable,” and replacing “no stockpiles” with “no WMD.” These disingenuous alterations have given rise to convenient sound-byte slogans that erode public confidence in George W. Bush and U.S. credibility at home and abroad.

As for the impending probes, the DEBKAfile intelligence organization observed on February 2, “The CIA and other intelligence bodies accused of flawed performance do not look particularly dismayed by the prospect of facing these probes. They point to the cause of the political flap, Dr. Kay, as contradicting himself more than once in the numerous interviews he has given since he quit as head of the Iraq Survey Group.”

DEBKAfile said in early February that they have gone back to their most reliable intelligences sources in the U.S. and the Middle East and that they all stick to their guns. These sources have consistently maintained that Saddam Hussein’s unconventional weapons programs existed on the eve of the invasion and that quantities of forbidden materials were moved to Syria. Regardless of what Dr. Kay may choose to say now, DEBKA says at least one of these sources knows first-hand that Dr. Kay was given information pertaining to the transfer of Iraqi WMD to Syria—information that included dates, types of vehicles, and their destinations.

Further, this source says, the Bush administration, its intelligence agencies, and Dr. Kay were all provided with Syrian maps marked with the coordinates of the secret weapons storage sites. The largest one is said to be located in a desolate, marshy region south of the Syrian town of Al Qamishli near the place where the Iraqi, Syrian, and Turkish borders come together. Small quantities are said to be hidden in the vast plain between Al Qamishli and Az Zawr. A third quantity is said to be underground in the Lebanese Beqaa Valley on the Syrian border.

Those transfers, along with the information that a Syrian engineering corps had been detailed to dig hiding places for the weapons, were revealed by DEBKAfile in February 2003, before the war began.

One senior intelligence source has apparently confirmed this again, emphasizing that Dr. Kay knows exactly what was contained in the tanker trucks crossing from Iraq into Syria in January 2003. Kay’s job gave him access to satellite photos of the convoys, and instruments used by spy planes would have identified dangerous substances and tracked them to their underground hiding places. Further, that source says, “There exists a precise record of the movement of chemical and biological substances from Iraq to Syria.”

In a January 25, 2004, interview with a reporter from the Telegraph, Kay stated, “We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons. But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam’s WMD program.”

In later interviews, the last being on February 1 with Wolf Blitzer of CNN, Kay was vague, claiming there was no way of knowing what those convoys contained because of the lack of Syrian cooperation. Why the change of tune? We don’t know.

Minute Quantities of Bio-substances a “Menace”
The second week in February, numerous trans-Atlantic flights from Europe to the U.S. were cancelled due to evidence of an al Qaeda plot to plant anthrax or smallpox in the planes’ cabins and/or plant poison chemicals in the cargo. This leads to an obvious question: If minute quantities of weaponized biological or chemical substances delivered in this manner are menacing enough to trigger a major alert, why would Saddam need large “stockpiles” to pose an imminent threat to world security or his immediate neighbors? Wouldn’t a few dozen test tubes of bio substances, or a few dozen barrels of chemical substances serve his purposes?

With that in mind, the huge flap over the failure to find large “stockpiles” of WMD begins to show itself for what it is: a politically calculated maneuver to distill all “war issues” into a single demand: “Show us the stockpiles of WMDs that Saddam had, or admit that we should not have removed him from power!”

The Al Qaeda Connection
Another issue that Bush haters and the anti-war bunch like to drag into every discussion of the war on terrorism is the claim that, although al Qaeda is acknowledged to have masterminded the attack on the Twin Towers on 9-11, there is no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq. Therefore, they reason, the U.S. and Coalition forces should not have gone to war against Saddam Hussein.

DEBKA has long maintained that ex-Jordanian terror master Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the key director of al Qaeda’s chemical, biological and radioactive warfare programs. In late 2000, DEBKA reported he was operating WMD labs under the supervision of Iraqi intelligence in the northern Iraqi town of Bayara. Since then, Zarqawi has masterminded and claimed credit for some of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Iraq. Zarqawi is described by the DEBKA intelligence group as “the embodiment of the link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda” that goes back four years, long before the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Very recently, The New York Times published a story pertaining to a 17-page document that American intelligence officials believe was written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the same Jordanian terrorist mastermind identified by DEBKA as the link between Saddam and al Qaeda. The document was directed to senior members of al Qaeda and constitutes an urgent request for help from them in instigating a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq. The Times reported the document was seized in a mid-January raid on a known safe house for al Qaeda in Baghdad, and that it did not pass through Iraqi groups that have provided unreliable information in the past (“U.S. Says Files Seek Qaeda Aid in Iraq Conflict,” The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2004).

According to the GeoStrategy-Direct intelligence service, Iraq has attracted a range of new Sunni insurgency groups that specialize in suicide attacks against U.S. and allied interests. The Ansar Al Sunni Army is believed to be the most prominent of the new Sunni groups. Sources say Ansar was established by al Qaeda in September 2003.

While the bloody attacks continue and the death toll mounts in Iraq, the three “commissions of inquiry” will likely plod along simultaneously in the U.S., the UK, and Australia as politicians pore over intelligence assessments of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in the days leading up to the war. And in the meantime, DEBKA says, “the actual weapons will continue to molder undisturbed in the ground of Syria and Lebanon.”