Swedish researchers claim to have found proscribed weapons in Iraq

[the_sam]

http://blogs.salon.com/0001561/2003/08/03.html#a3148

"A group of Swedish researchers, travelling to Iraq without the knowledge of the Swedish government, is announcing that they have found missiles for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in a house in Baghdad."

Also:

"...these scientists have also received information that Saddam had a programme for production of anthrax weapons even while the latest inspections were going on. Sellström is presented as a well-renowed expert in the field who has worked with Hans Blix. A TV production about the find will be presented on Swedish TV tonight."

[joeybee12]

1. I tend to doubt this...

...because the media here would have jumped on this to exonorate the chimp.

[the_sam]

4. Just broke a few minutes ago

I think.

[the_sam]

2. My Thoughts

First of all, it would be very difficult, I think, to hide an entire missile in a house.

Secondly, having a program to develop anthrax is very different from having anthrax. And even if they did have anthrax, it's militarily ineffective.

I won't be satisfied unless they turn up evidence that Iraq was very close to developing nukes and intended to use them.

[matt819]

3. Let me get this straight

UN inspectors could find nothing.

The US military and intelligence agencies could find nothing.

But a group of Swedish researchers find missiles in a house in Baghdad.

Give me a break.

[aquart]

12. Is it a very BIG house?

Our missiles of mass destruction are in silos and other big things, right?

Being symbolic penises, they tend to be large.

[termo]

29. a sling of mass destruction...

range: 50 m
:o)

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. If this is...

An organisation run by who I think, go to http://www.counterpunch.org and read the article on this guy.

A real turd.

[bicentennial_baby]

7. Isn't he the guy

that Bushco wanted to head the inspection team instead of Blix? I think it is...makes sense now, eh?

[papau]

6. "built for the Iran war" plus Documents on a program?

The CIA is getting desparate on where to plant information.

And "built for the Iran war" is Reagan time.

[caribmon]

9. Getting conflicting reports here.

Rolf Ekeus is a Swedish diplomat. From 1978 to 1983 he was a representative to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva and he has worked on various other disarmament committees and commissions.

Between 1991 and 1997 he was director of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq, the United Nations disarmament observers in Iraq after the Gulf War. In late July 2002 he reportedly said in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper that during his time in this position he attempted to resist attempts by the United States to use the Commission to perform espionage. His successor as director was Richard Butler. Iraq suspended the inspections in 1998 after claiming that it was a cover for espionage.

Ekeus later became Sweden's ambassador to the United States and the chairman of the board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

[ze_dscherman]

15. Iraq did not suspend the inspections

Inspectors were withdrawn prior to the 1998 bombings on Baghdad.

[IndianaGreen]

20. The sales invoice has Rumsfeld's name on it

and they also found a cake and a Bible signed by Reagan. Oh, wait, that was what Ollie North did in Iran.

[leftyandproud]

8. results to be released:

October, 2004

[Emillereid]

10. Remember the reason for the war was that Hussein was an imminent threat

-- the fact that he used no WMDs when he was cornered tells me that there was no imminent threat, even some suspicious stockpiles turn up. Besides as Ritter keeps telling us, the quality of Hussein stockpiles was poor and would have lost most of their potency.

[workersunite]

26. Imminenet threat?

Who said so?

[HFishbine]

34. Bush, blair, cheney, rumsfeld

Weren't you paying attention?

[caribmon]

11. Puppet?

29 June 2003


"Iraq's Real Weapons Threat" by Rolf Ekeus

Column by Former Head of UN Inspections Effort in Iraq

Rolf Ekeus was Executive Chairman of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq from 1991 to 1997. A former Swedish ambassador to the United States, he is now chairman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. This article, first published June 29, 2003, in The Washington Post, is in the public domain, no republication restrictions.

Iraq's Real Weapons Threat
By Rolf Ekeus

With no weapons of mass destruction as yet found in Iraq, the political criticism directed against President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair is mounting. Before the war, the two leaders publicly declared that the Iraqi regime had not only procured and produced such weapons but still retained them with the intention to use them. This was considered a good reason for a military operation against Iraq -- an outright casus belli.

A United Nations inspection team, before the war, and the U.S. military, after the war, have been searching Iraq and have not come up with anything that can remotely be called weapons of mass destruction. Is it now time to join the game of blaming Bush and Blair for an illegitimate or illegal war? Let us first consider some facts in a complicated picture.

Chemical weapons were used by Iraq in its war against Iran (1980-88). Arguably that use had a decisive effect on the outcome: It saved Iraq from being overwhelmed by a much larger Iranian army. Furthermore, Iraq made use of chemical bombs in air raids against the Kurdish civilian population in northern Iraq. Nerve gases, such as sarin, and mustard gas immediately and painfully killed many thousands of civilians. More than 100,000 later died or were crippled by the aftereffects.

These reminders illustrate that Iraq's acquisition and use of chemical weapons were carried out in pursuit of two strategic goals, namely to halt Iran's possible expansion of its sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf region and to suppress internal opposition. The war started by Iraq in 1980 was directed against its historical enemy, Iran. In strategic terms and over generations, Iraq/Mesopotamia had been positioned as a gatekeeper of the Arab nation against repeated Persian expansion westward, a threat that had become acute with the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. All the emirates and states in the gulf region, ruled by Arabs of traditionalist Sunni Muslim orientation, considered Persian nationalism and expansionism a constant problem, especially after Iran's Shiite revolution.

For Saddam Hussein, the self-styled, self-promoted defender of the Arab nation, "the Iranian beasts," to quote Tariq Aziz in a conversation with me -- not the United States or Israel -- were the eternal enemy of Iraq. With its population of more than 64 million, Iran constituted a challenge that Iraq, with its 24 million inhabitants, could not match with conventional military means. By using chemical weapons to gas and kill the "human waves" of young, poorly protected Iranian attack forces, the Iraqi army repeatedly saved itself from being overwhelmed. And thus it became conventional wisdom, nourished by the Iraqi leadership, that only nonconventional weapons could guarantee that Iraq would prevail in an armed conflict with Iran.


<SNIP>

http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/arms/03070223.htm

[punpirate]

13. Following links to a partial...

... translation, one blogger sez:

The TV team and the experts visited buildings and locations pointed out by the Iraqi
scientists. They describe the production of WMD's as small-scaled but copious.
"We visited about ten locations. Everything was looted, but only for chairs and tables — not
documents. We found a lot of documents and blueprints, and also material and boxes." ...
The evidence will be presented in a series of books, which Wera Maria Cedrell currently are
writing together with the American journalist Nate Thyer and an Iraqi member of the
Governing Council." (Note: It's of course difficult to assess the reliability of this story. It should be noted that
World Television Network doesn't even seem to have a site of their own and the only former mention of Wera Maria
Cedrell I can find is in a dispatch on a meeting with Iraq's former information minister.)

From: http://watch.windsofchange.net/

In the portions of the story translated, there is no mention of missiles, but rather only of documents and materials. Think I'm going to Google this fellow mentioned, Nate Thyer. I don't recall a journalist of any note by that name, but, then, I don't get out much....

[shirlden]

21. Bio for Nate Thayer

He sounds like the real thing in this bio

http://www.icij.org/about/thayerbio.html

[the_sam]

14. Also, keep in mind...

Scientists might be tempted to say what they think the Americans want to hear.

[dragonquest8]

16. OMG!!!!! WE ARE DOOMED

CHIMP WINS

[Gin]

17. The missle was in a house with a retractable dome...ready to fire at

the US...that is what my "sources" told me... a book will be out in a few weeks.

[NickB79]

23. What model of missile?

A missile itself is NOT a WMD. And, Iraq wasn't banned from producing missiles unless said missiles went beyond a certain range (100 km, I think). So, unless this is a Scud, or the warhead was filled with chemical or biological weapons, it can't be considered a WMD.

[termo]

30. 150 km

anyway... 1 SCUD is not a real threat to the US / UK, the range is more than 150km but just take a world map.
4000-5000 km range would have been a real threat.

[caribmon]

18. How's your Swedish?

"Bildbeviset mot Saddam"

Nu finns bilder på fynden som kan bevisa att Saddam Hussein hade massförstörelsevapen.
Expressen kan i dag som enda tidning i världen publicera de sensationella bilderna. Av upphovsrättsliga skäl kan bilderna tyvärr inte visas på Expressen.se.
I största hemlighet har experter från svenska försvaret rest till Irak för att granska materialet - utan att regeringen Persson känt till det.
<SNIP>

http://www.expressen.se/expressen/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=442&a=51623

The story is there... on a legitimate Svenske Krant site.

More just in - translation here

http://watch.windsofchange.net/

[antineocon1]

19. Blix found these seem kind of warheads and was unsure they were

wmd. They have to have chemicals in them to be considered wmd. Furthermore, a program is not the same as actual wmd.

[mbperrin]

22. I want the thousands of missiles ready to go in 45 minutes!

I want the thousands of tons of toxins! I want the thousands of tons of all the WMDs! By God, I was told there were nukes pointed at us, that there were ships on the ocean hauling disease, death and pestilence to us, and I want that!

Hey, I didn't even know Estes made WMD kits!

[papau]

24. Debka - the source of report - says bio papers and bodies of prisoners

http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=533

who may have been used for bio experiments.

no data on timing of deaths or if even one shows bio.

and most important - since we all know and say Saddam was evil - no data on actual weapons ready to go, or even of current weapons production facility, or of even current weapons storage facility.

We get old line of "hidden in Syria" - as if there is anything suggesting this besides it being the first plausible thought Condi had.

And no WMD as we approach day 100 of our control of Iraq.

Debka/Bush/Blair/CIA would now appreciate if - per Debka - we would all stop saying Bush lied and folks died, and instead focus on Saddam evil/bad, and we therefore tone down our comments to Bush and Blair and Howard were "issuing inaccurate statements just before the war"

Not that Debka is spinning. - nah --

[Star]

25. Meet the Real WMD Fabricator

A Swede Called Rolf Ekeus

<snip>
It's fortunate for Ekeus's reputation among the genteel liberal crowd that public awareness of what he really knew about Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons is still slight. In fact Ekeus was perfectly well aware from the mid-l990s on that Saddam Ussein had no such weapons of mass destruction. They had all been destroyed years earlier, after the first Gulf war.

Ekeus learned this on the night of August 22, l995, in Amman, from the lips of General Hussein Kamel, who had just defected from Iraq, along with some of his senior military aides. Kamel was Saddam's son-in-law and had been in overall charge of all programs for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

That night, in three hours of detailed questioning from Ekeus and two technical experts, Kamel was categorical. The UN inspection teams had done a good job. When Saddam was finally persuaded that failure to dispose of the relevant weapons systems would have very serious consequences, he issued the order and Kamel carried it out. As he told Ekeus that night, "All weapons, biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed." (The UNSCOM record of the session can ne viewed at http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.pdf). In similar debriefings that August Kamel said the same thing to teams from the CIA and MI6. His military aides provided a wealth of corroborative details. Then, the following year, Kamel was lured back to Iraq and at once executed.

Did Ekeus immediately proclaim victory, and suggest that sanctions could be abated? As we have seen, he did not. In fact he urged that they be intensified. The years rolled by and Iraqi children by the thousand wasted and died. The war party thumped the drum over Saddam's WMDs, and Kamel's debriefings stayed under lock and key. Finally, John Barry of Newsweek unearthed details of those sessions in Amman and in February on this year Newsweek ran his story, though not with the play it deserved. I gather that when Barry confronted Ekeus with details of the suppressed briefing, Ekeus was stricken. Barry's sensational disclosure was mostly ignored.

And Ekeus's rationale for suppressing the disclosures of Kamel and his aides? He claims that the plan was to bluff Saddam and his scientists into further disclosures. Try to figure that out.

For playing the game, the way the US desired it to be played, Ekeus got his rewards: a pleasing welcome in Washington when he arrived there as Swedish ambassador, respectful audiences along the world's diplomatic circuits. To this day he zealously burnishes his "credibility" with long, tendentious articles arguing that Bush and Blair had it right. He betrays no sign of being troubled by his horrible role. He will never be forced to squirm in hearings by Democratic senators suddenly as brave as lions. He won't have to wade through raw sewage to enter the main hospital in Baghdad and watch children die or ride in a Humvee and wait for someone to drop a hand grenade off a bridge and blow his head off.


<snip>

http://www.iraqwar.ru./iraq-read_article.php?articleId=14279&lang=en

[goforit]

27. Looks like Poppy bush is working hard!!!...Fixing it up for W!!!

With Poppy being the richest man in the world,
I guess all these Countries are working hard for the baby boy!!!

:puke:

[Lithos]

28. That's not a missile

At best it is a drop bomb. Plus I am very curious about the propellor (wooden?) at the nose and what appears to be a painted canopy at the top.

I think this is more the result of someone needing a scoop more than any viable find.

L-

[htuttle]

33. It has little wheels visible in the lower picture

Last picture in the article here:
http://www.nettavisen.no/servlets/page?section=3&item=279515

It looks like one of the infamous balsa wood 'drones of death' without the wings attached!


....(time passes)...

Actually, I'm not sure that the piece with what appears to be a painted canopy is actually attached to the little bomb-looking thing below it.

[StandWatie]

31. o0o0o0o0

quite the find :eyes:

I made better model airplanes when I was a kid.

[HFishbine]

32. What are...

"missiles for weapons of mass destruction?"

Are these missles on which a weapon of mass destruction could be placed? If so, big whoop. The inspectors where in the process of destroying such missles when Bush pulled them out.

[Brian Sweat]

35. Reeks of disinformation.

What scientist? What are their names?