[A-List] US imperialism: Iraq

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

For those who don't know or who have forgotten, I forward "Ian Bruce's"
articles on a regular basis because, for a journalist working on a
provincial newspaper, he has seemingly endless access to information,
rumours and disinformation peddled by spooks. I leave it to you to make up
your minds about the quality of their content. No endorsement is remotely
implied. All I will say is that even when the object of the article is
clearly ideological, as in this case, it is useful in revealing what our
masters would have us think. Finnish television broadcast a very good German
documentary yesterday on peace campaigners at Faslane, Scotland, where even
the illegality of Trident nuclear submarines under Scots law prevents public
access to bases deemed unlawful. Apparently national security applies in
some cases much more strongly than in others, although it's fair to say that
British weaponry is, formally at least, subject to the imprimatur and nihil
obstat of the US -- witness yesterday's article concerning the Pentagon's
"security fears" over Thales, the French contractor bidding for Ministry of
Defence contracts.


Iraq: 'Cheat and retreat' tactics may again make the job impossible
IAN BRUCE
The Herald, 19 November 2002

SADDAM Hussein's "ministry of deceit", the special security service
responsible for safeguarding his germ warfare and nerve gas stockpiles,
delayed, lied to, and physically obstructed UN inspectors for seven years
after the Gulf war in 1991.

It took investigators more than a year to uncover Baghdad's nuclear weapons
programme. Then they were stunned by the advanced stage it had reached,
despite concentrated bombing and constant surveillance. Iraq was perhaps six
to 10 months from fielding a crude but effective warhead.

The regime's tactics of "cheat and retreat" involved denying all knowledge
of forbidden items such as growth medium for biological weapons like plague
or anthrax and then conceding possession when inspectors stumbled across
hard evidence.

Documents and computer disks charting the course of purchases, experiments,
and field tests went missing. Inspectors heading for sensitive sites found
their routes blocked by buses suffering from mysterious outbreaks of
multiple punctures.

On one occasion, an Iraqi minder hurled himself on a UN official in the
cockpit of a helicopter, almost crashing the aircraft and killing himself in
the process, to prevent the filming of vehicle movement around a suspected
weapons site.

Four years on, Iraq has refined its techniques of concealment and deception.
Magnetic anomaly detectors fitted to satellites have pinpointed underground
networks of tunnels and storage bunkers built since the last inspectors
trooped out of the country, worn down by frustration and attrition.

The equipment, designed to locate Soviet missile submarines hiding in the
ocean's depths, works by identifying the kind of magnetic disturbance
created by objects that mar the pattern of the earth's magnetic fields.
Subterranean caverns fit the bill and are being mapped from space.

More problematically, according to the CIA, Saddam has put his germ
laboratories on the road in 18-wheeler commercial trucks to avoid discovery.
Wile Sarin and VX nerve gases have to be produced in tons to represent an
effective battlefield threat, anthrax or botulinum toxin capable of killing
hundreds of thousands is measured in litres.

A CIA spokesman said yesterday: "There are a lot of tractor-trailer rigs in
Iraq. The country runs on black market goods flowing in by road from Turkey,
Jordan, and Syria. Finding the target vehicles could be compared to the task
US police faced trying to track down the white van they believed was being
used by the Washington sniper."

Iraq has also been dispersing its key scientists to prevent them being
interviewed by the UN teams. At least seven of the elite group of about 100
core physicists, bioengineers, and chemists have flown out to Romania,
Yemen, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Gulf states on false passports in the
past two weeks.

Almost half of the rare breakthroughs that allowed a partial removal of
Saddam's weapons of mass destruction last time round came as a result of
painstaking questioning sessions with scientists and cross-checking of their
answers against declared lists of equipment and ingredients for arms
production.

The 250-strong UN inspectorate has another major disadvantage. More than 75%
of its manpower will be encountering Iraqi bureaucracy and duplicity for the
first time. Veterans of previous search tours say it can take months to
adjust to the frustrations.

On the plus side, the digital revolution since the 1998 UN exit has produced
hand-held detectors capable of "sniffing" minute residues of the chemicals
needed for biowar production or the manufacture of nerve gases.

It has also bought time for high-resolution commercial satellite
surveillance of the country, a vital prelude to drawing up a list of between
750 and 1000 suspect sites for snap inspection visits.

All of Saddam's 72 presidential palaces - exempt from searches in the
1991-98 tours because they were "sovereign territory" - are now also fair
game. In the end, identifying "material breaches" that would trigger a US
attack will not be easy.