Recorded Sep­tem­ber 18, 2005
REALAUDIO
See also FTR #471 Death Trap

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Mr. Emory sug­gested that the U.S. was falling into a trap laid by the Under­ground Reich, in which this coun­try would find itself fight­ing a drain­ing and (ulti­mately) anni­hi­lat­ing war against the Mus­lim peo­ples of what the Third Reich’s geopoliti­cians called “The Earth Island.” The For The Record pro­grams num­ber­ing in the late “390’s” and run­ning up to num­ber 400 dis­cuss this sce­nario at length and in detail. In FTR#471 and FTR#502, we exam­ined how the unfold­ing of the Iraqi mis­ad­ven­ture appears to be bear­ing out these fears. In this pro­gram, we exam­ine how the US inva­sion has helped bring about an Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ist gov­ern­ment in Iraq—one aligned with Iran. After review­ing the Dooms­day rela­tion­ship between Sad­dam and al Qaeda, we exam­ine the ter­ri­fy­ing fail­ure of the US to secure Saddam’s WMD sci­en­tists, thereby actu­ally increas­ing the dan­ger of WMD tech­nol­ogy spread­ing beyond Iraq’s bor­ders. This, of course, is pre­cisely the sce­nario the U.S. was ulti­mately sup­posed to be going to war to pre­vent. Will this fail­ure to secure Saddam’s WMD sci­en­tists actu­ally accom­plish what the war was osten­si­bly being fought to prevent—the dis­sem­i­na­tion of WMD tech­nol­ogy to ter­ror­ists, al Qaeda in par­tic­u­lar?! The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at Hitler’s pro­jected use of the Mus­lim nations as proxy war­riors for the Reich, as well as the recruit­ing boon that the war has been for al Qaeda and related elements.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The story of Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, the devel­oper of Saddam’s cen­trifuge pro­gram; the way in which the US inva­sion has actu­ally scat­tered Saddam’s WMD sci­en­tists, most of whom are unac­counted for; the CIA’s fool­ish dis­play of cap­tured Iraqi nuclear tech­nol­ogy on its web­site; the agree­ment between Sad­dam and bin Laden to share WMD infor­ma­tion, so that bin Laden’s forces could act as a “back-up” for Sad­dam in the worst-case sce­nario of the U.S. remov­ing him from power—a sce­nario which came true.

1. The pro­gram begins by pre­sent­ing a col­umn by Robert Scheer, which not only chron­i­cles the extent to which the Iraq inva­sion has become a quag­mire, but under­scores the fact that that coun­try is becom­ing an Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ist state with very close ties to Iran. It is worth not­ing that even though it is Shi­ite, Iran main­tains very close ties to the Al Taqwa milieu. For more about the Iran/Al Taqwa ties, see—among other programs–FTR#’s 343, 352, 354, 371. Key Nazi oper­a­tive Fran­cois Genoud (dis­cussed below in para­graph #36 and him­self very close to the Al Taqwa milieu) paid for the Aya­tol­lah Khomeini’s exile in France, as dis­cussed in FTR#352. “WHO LOST Iraq? Some­day, as a frag­mented Iraq spi­rals fur­ther into reli­gious mad­ness, ter­ror­ism and civil war, there will be a bipar­ti­san inquiry into this blun­der­ing intru­sion into another people’s his­tory.”
(“Iraq’s Fig-Leaf Con­sti­tu­tion” by Robert Scheer; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 8/31/2005; P. B7.)

2. “The cru­cial ques­tion will be why a ‘pre­emp­tive’ Amer­i­can inva­sion — which has led to the deaths of nearly 2,000 Amer­i­cans, roughly 10 times as many Iraqis, the expen­di­ture of about $200 bil­lion and incal­cu­la­ble dam­age to the United States’ global rep­u­ta­tion — has had exactly the oppo­site effect pre­dicted by its neo­con­ser­v­a­tive spon­sors. No amount of crow­ing over a fig leaf Iraqi con­sti­tu­tion by Pres­i­dent Bush can hide the fact that the hand of the region’s auto­crats, theocrats and ter­ror­ists is stronger than ever.” (Idem.)

3. “ ‘The U.S. now has to rec­og­nize that [it] over­threw Sad­dam Hus­sein to replace him with a pro-Iranian state,’ said regional expert Peter W. Gal­braith, the for­mer U.S. ambas­sador to Croa­tia and an adviser to the Iraqi Kurds. And, he could have added, a pro-Iranian state that will be repres­sive and unsta­ble.” (Idem.)

4. “Think this is an exag­ger­a­tion? Con­sider that arguably the most pow­er­ful Shi­ite polit­i­cal party and mili­tia in today’s Iraq, the Supreme Coun­cil for the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq and its affil­i­ated para­mil­i­tary force, the Badr Brigade, was not only based in Iran but was set up by Washington’s old arch-foe, Aya­tol­lah Ruhol­lah Khome­ini. It also fought on the side of Iran in the Iran-Iraq war and was recog­nized by Tehran as the gov­ern­ment in exile of Iraq.” (Idem.)

5. Note that Ahmad Chalabi—a prob­a­ble dou­ble agent for Iran—approves of the Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ist con­sti­tu­tion and is an impor­tant fig­ure in the new gov­ern­ment. In FTR#502, we exam­ined dis­in­for­ma­tion pre­sented by a Chalabi-selected agent nick­named “Curve­ball” and nur­tured by the BND (the Ger­man for­eign intel­li­gence ser­vice and the suc­ces­sor to the Rei­hard Gehlen Nazi spy out­fit). That dis­in­for­ma­tion was the basis for the US claim that Sad­dam was devel­op­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion, as well as the ratio­nale for the war itself. “Or that for­mer exile Ahmad Cha­l­abi is now one of Iraq’s deputy prime min­is­ters. The con­sum­mate polit­i­cal oper­a­tor man­aged to main­tain ties to Iran while gain­ing the devoted sup­port of Don­ald Rumsfeld’s Pen­ta­gon, charm­ing and manip­u­lat­ing Belt­way pol­i­cy­mak­ers and lead­ing U.S. jour­nal­ists into believ­ing that Iraq was armed with weapons of mass destruc­tion. Cha­l­abi is thrilled with the draft con­sti­tu­tion, which, if passed, will prob­a­bly expo­nen­tially increase ten­sion and vio­lence between Sun­nis and Shi­ites. ‘It is an excel­lent doc­u­ment,’ said Cha­l­abi, who has been accused by U.S. intel­li­gence of being a spy for Iran, where he keeps a vaca­tion home.” (Idem.)

6. “What an absurd out­come for a war designed to cre­ate a com­pli­ant, uni­fied and sta­ble client state that would be pro-American, laissez-faire cap­i­tal­ist and unal­lied with the hated Iran. Of course, Bush tells us again, this is ‘progress’ and ‘an inspi­ra­tion.’ Yet his relent­less spin­ning of manure into silk has worn thin on the Amer­i­can pub­lic and sent his approval rat­ings tum­bling. Even sup­port­ers of the war are start­ing to real­ize that rather than strength­en­ing the United States’ posi­tion in the world, the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion have led to abject humil­i­a­tion: from the Abu Ghraib scan­dal, to the guer­rilla insur­gency expos­ing the lim­its of mil­i­tary power, to an elec­tion in which ‘our guy’ — lyad Allawi — was defeated by rad­i­cals and reli­gious extrem­ists.” (Idem.)

7. “In a new low, the U.S. pres­i­dent felt obliged to call and plead with the head of the Supreme Coun­cil for the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion, Abde­laziz Hakim, to make con­cessions to gain Sunni sup­port. Even worse, he was sum­mar­ily rebuffed. Nev­er­the­less, Bush had no choice but to eat crow and like it. ‘This is a doc­u­ment of which the Iraqis, and the rest of the world, can be proud,’ he said Sun­day, through what must have been grit­ted teeth. After all, this docum

ent includes such demo­c­ra­tic gems as ‘Islam is the offi­cial reli­gion of the state and is a basic source of leg­is­la­tion,’ and ‘No law can be passed that con­tra­dicts the undis­puted rules of Islam,’ as well as socialist-style pro­nounce­ments that work and a decent stan­dard of liv­ing are a right guar­an­teed by the state. But the fact is, it could estab­lish Khomeini’s ghost as the patron saint of Iraq and Bush would have lit­tle choice but to endorse it.” (Idem.)

8. “Even many in his own party are rebelling. ‘I think our involve­ment there has desta­bi­lized the Mid­dle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the fur­ther desta­bi­liza­tion will occur,’ said Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel last week, one of a grow­ing num­ber of Repub­li­cans who get that ‘we should start fig­ur­ing out how we get out of there.’ Not that our ‘what-me-worry?’ pres­i­dent is the least bit trou­bled by all this adverse blow­back from the huge, unnec­es­sary gam­ble he took in invad­ing the heart of the Arab and Mus­lim worlds. ‘What is impor­tant is that the Iraqis are now ad­dressing these issues through debate and dis­cus­sion, not at the bar­rel of a gun,’ Bush said.” (Idem.)

9. “Wrong again, George. It was the bar­rel of your gun that mid­wifed the new Iraq, which threat­ens to com­bine the insta­bil­ity of Lebanon with the reli­gious fanati­cism of Iran.” (Idem.)

10. Unfor­tu­nately, both the pro-war and anti-war sides have got­ten it wrong with regard to Saddam’s rela­tion­ship with Al Qaeda. Although there is no indi­ca­tion that Iraq or Sad­dam were involved with 9/11, the two enti­ties did have a “dooms­day back-up” arrange­ment. Sad­dam and bin Laden worked out an arrange­ment in which Iraq—in order to pro­vide for a pay­back capa­bil­ity if the U.S. ousted the Baathist dictator—gave infor­ma­tion about WMD’s to bin Laden’s peo­ple. Al Qaeda, in turn, was to act as a back-up unit for Saddam’s Iraq, strik­ing at the United States if it knocked out Sad­dam. Of course, pre­cisely that sce­nario has tran­spired. “It appears, how­ever, that this ver­sion is the pub­licly admis­si­ble one, the one that can pass polit­i­cal muster. Accord­ing to the same sources, there was another sce­nario more in keep­ing with the cal­cu­lat­ing men­tal­ity of Sad­dam Hus­sein and his secret ser­vices. In 1998, after declin­ing all offers that had been made to them through offi­cial diplo­matic chan­nels, those ser­vices are reported to have estab­lished a secret oper­a­tional ‘con­nec­tion’ with bin Laden in Manila and in Kash­mir. It was indeed dif­fi­cult for Iraq to ignore an Arab like Osama bin Laden who so effec­tively humil­i­ated the Amer­i­cans.’ Colonel Khairal­lah al Takir­iti, the brother of the head of Mukkhabarat, the intel­li­gence ser­vices, is reported to have been named case offi­cer for the con­nec­tion. The arrest of two Mor­roc­can asso­ciates of bin Laden in Rabat on Novem­ber 11, 1998, made it pos­si­ble to estab­lish to estab­lish the link with cer­tainty. Accord­ing to West­ern sources, the Iraqi ser­vices have sought to secure the assis­tance of bin Laden’s net­works, in case Iraq were again to be attacked by the United States, in order to carry out attacks against Amer­i­can tar­gets in Arab coun­tries.”
(In the Name of Osama Bin Laden; by Roland Jacquard; Copy­right 2002 [SC]; Duke Uni­ver­sity Press; ISBN 0–8223-2991–3; pp. 112–113.)

11. “Accord­ing to Arab sources, in antic­i­pa­tion of a fore­see­able rever­sal of alliances in Kabul, bin Laden had been in dis­creet con­tact since Sep­tem­ber 2000 with asso­ciates of Oudai Hus­sein, another of Saddam’s sons; the ground for agree­ment was the anti-Israeli and anti-American bat­tle. Bin Laden and the Iraqis are said to have exchanged infor­ma­tion about chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons, despite the oppo­si­tion of some of the Bagh­dad lead­er­ship, includ­ing Tarik Aziz” (Ibid.;p. 113.)

12. In light of the “Dooms­day back-up” arrange­ment men­tioned above, it is par­tic­u­larly fright­en­ing to con­tem­plate how the fail­ure to secure Saddam’s WMD sci­en­tists has poten­tially exposed the U.S. to exactly the sce­nario Con­doleeza Rice and com­pany were using as a ratio­nale for war—a “mush­room cloud” smoking-gun. Was this all due to incom­pe­tence, or (as Mr. Emory sus­pects) was incom­pe­tence manip­u­lated by Under­ground Reich ele­ments in order to put the U.S. in a posi­tion to be destroyed and/or sub­ju­gated?! A piv­otally impor­tant arti­cle from Mother Jones mag­a­zine dis­cusses the alarm­ing fail­ure to secure the sci­en­tists. The arti­cle revolves around the story of Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, the man in charge of the Iraqi nuclear cen­trifuge pro­gram. (In FTR#395, we saw how that pro­gram evolved from the Third Reich’s nuclear devel­op­ment pro­gram.) “I met the mas­ter­mind of Sad­dam Hussein’s for­mer nuclear cen­trifuge pro­gram out­side the Pales­tine Hotel in Bagh­dad a few days after U.S. troops took over the city in 2003. Despite the mid­day heat he was dressed in a sport coat and tie, which made him look incon­gru­ous amid a scruffy crowd of pro­test­ers gath­ered to shout slo­gans at the U.S. Marines guard­ing the hotel. He said his name was Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, and he showed me a print­out of a pre­war Wash­ing­ton Post story in which he was named as one of the Iraqi weapons sci­en­tists whom the U.S. gov­ern­ment had very much wanted to inter­view. His eyes darted ner­vously back and forth between the pro­test­ers and the tense-looking Marines inside the cor­don of con­certina wire.”
(“In the Gar­den of Armaged­don” by Kurt Pitzer; Mother Jones; Setptember/October/2005 [Vol. 30, Num­ber 5.]; p. 42.)

13. “Min­utes ear­lier he had approached a pho­tog­ra­pher friend of mine on the street, say­ing he wanted to reach out to Wash­ing­ton with some impor­tant infor­ma­tion about Saddam’s nuclear pro­gram. It was a des­per­ate move. He had tried con­tact­ing U.S. troops, but they had rebuffed him and threat­ened him with arrest if he showed up again. Now he wanted to know if I could use my satel­lite phone to help him. At first I didn’t know whether to believe him. But that night, at his urg­ing, I dialed the Wash­ing­ton num­ber of David Albright, a for­mer Amer­i­can mem­ber of the United Nations weapons inspec­tions team in Iraq. When I explained who had given me his name; the line went silent for a moment.” (Idem.)

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.)

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 whe

re 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.)

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.)

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.)

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.)

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.)

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.)

21. As noted by for­mer CIA ana­lyst Ray McGov­ern, the war may actu­ally have increased the pos­si­bil­ity of nuclear tech­nol­ogy pro­lif­er­at­ing beyond Iraq. Was this intended by the Under­ground Reich from the begin­ning? “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. 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, 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.’ [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.]”

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.)

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.)

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 thei

r 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.)

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.)

26. Note that the CIA posted infor­ma­tion on its web­site that could prove “incred­i­bly use­ful” to any­one seek­ing to develop WMD’s. “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. 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. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.]” (Idem.)

27. “Obeidi now lives with eight fam­ily mem­bers in a U.S. city that he asked me not to name. His son and three daugh­ters are learn­ing Eng­lish and look­ing for jobs, and he occa­sion­ally gives talks to groups of gov­ern­ment offi­cials. He seems more relaxed than he did when I first met him, as though he is finally able to shed some of the fear and pres­sure of life in Bagh­dad. But the thought of his for­mer col­leagues still weighs heav­ily on his mind. One day as we were eat­ing falafel from plas­tic plates in the food court near his new Amer­i­can home, sit­ting anony­mously among the shop­pers, he asked me why he was still the only Iraqi sci­en­tist whom the United States had seen fit to take out of harm’s way.” (Ibid.; p. 46.)

28. “ ‘There are a num­ber of peo­ple who could be brought here, at least tem­porar­ily, and make pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tions to this soci­ety,’ he said. ‘These are very edu­cated and skill-full sci­en­tists. Surely this great nation could, absorb a few more tal­ented peo­ple.’” (Idem.)

29. “Dur­ing the 1990s, the Inter­na­tional Atomic Energy Agency and other watch­dog groups com­piled lists of key par­tic­i­pants in Saddam’s WMD pro­grams. The IAEA roll call alone included about 2,000 names. One of the few that has been made pub­lic is that of Dr. Paris Abdul Aziz, a mild-mannered engi­neer who over­saw a staff of more than 200 work­ing on the nuclear cen­trifuge pro­gram. I met him in Obeidi’s gar­den, and he told me that in the days after the inva­sion, he had gone to Saddam’s for­mer Repub­li­can Palace to offer coop­er­a­tion to the U.S. mil­i­tary on behalf of him­self and other top nuclear sci­en­tists. But U.S. offi­cials only wanted to know if he knew where Sad­dam was hid­ing and where they might find WMD stock­piles. They never asked him back for another inter­view. Today, no one seems to know where he is. ‘We’ve been try­ing to get in touch with these guys for months,’ Albright says. ‘But by now they’re prob­a­bly so jaded and sus­pi­cious that they want noth­ing to do with the U.S.’” (Idem.)

30. “An even greater con­cern is the flight risk posed by sci­en­tists one level down: the tech­ni­cians who have pre­cise, hands-on knowl­edge of how to man­u­fac­ture WMD com­ponents. Their exper­tise is price­less, espe­cially to a covert pro­gram look­ing for engi­neers who know how to put the pieces together. A source with close ties to intel­li­gence on the issue recently told me of the case of a female sci­en­tist who worked in Saddam’s cen­trifuge pro­gram, most likely Dr. Widad Hat­tam al-Jabbouri. In the 1980s, Jab­bouri had mas­tered one of the most trou­ble­some aspects of the uranium-enriching machine: the mag­netic upper bear­ing that holds the cen­trifuge rotor as it spins at super­sonic speeds. Her exper­tise on clas­si­fied mag­net tech­nol­ogy was deep, and extremely valu­able. ‘From what we have learned she has ended up at a uni­ver­sity in Syria,’ the source said. ‘Appar­ently the Syr­i­ans basi­cally set up a refuge for senior sci­en­tists, espe­cially those with Baathist con­nec­tions, who couldn’t get any work in Iraq.’” (Idem.)

31. “This does not nec­es­sar­ily mean that Jab­bouri is work­ing on a weapons pro­gram in Dam­as­cus. The Syr­ian govern­ment has stated that it has no nuclear pro­gram, despite the sus­pi­cions of many inter­na­tional experts. But her move to Syria under­scores how loose a grasp the U.S. has on Iraq’s WMD knowl­edge. ‘The pro­lif­er­a­tion risk is higher than it was before, and a chaotic sit­u­a­tion means this tech­nol­ogy is going to spread,’ says Robert Baer, who spent 21 years as a case offi­cer with the CIA in the Mid­dle East. If the admin­is­tra­tion had been seri­ous about neu­tral­iz­ing Saddam’s weapons pro­gram, he says, ‘the troops would have been secur­ing equip­ment at weapons sites as they invaded, and they would have been look­ing for sci­en­tists.... It tells you that this war had noth­ing to do with WMDs.’” (Idem.)

32. “Shortly after the inva­sion of Iraq, Anne Har­ring­ton, then the deputy direc­tor of the Pro­lif­er­a­tion Threat Reduc­tion Office of the State Department’s Non-Proliferation Bureau, began plan­ning a trip to Iraq to meet for­mer WMD sci­en­tists and help them get to work on rebuild­ing the coun­try. Har­ring­ton had a leg­endary track record of work­ing with sci­en­tists from the for­mer Soviet Union. In 1997, she had cut through the red tape of diplo­macy and sent an email directly to the head of the State Research Cen­ter for Virol­ogy and Biotech­nol­ogy in Siberia. The con­tact led to increased U.S. gov­ern­ment funds to help for­mer Soviet bioweapons sci­en­tists apply for civil­ian projects at home rather than sell their exper­tise on the black mar­ket. Anne believed this was the most impor­tant thing to do,’ says Carl Phillips, a bio­log­i­cal weapons expert from Texas Tech Uni­ver­sity who signed on to help Har­ring­ton in Iraq. ‘She believed in going over and putting our boots on the ground to find these peo­ple, and she was fear­less.’” (Ibid.; pp. 46–47.)

33. “Har­ring­ton and Phillips pro­posed a $20 mil­lion plan to reach out to sci­en­tists in Bagh­dad. Their plan didn’t go over well with the Pen­ta­gon, which at that point con­trolled the interim gov­ern­ment of Iraq; Phillips remem­bers being fold that as a con­di­tion for going, they had to agree not to make a for­mal request for the $20 mil­lion. Once they got to Bagh­dad, Har­ring­ton was aghast at the scale of the loot­ing. Her $20 mil­lion would be a mere drop in the bucket. ‘You can’t just put some­body in a lab,’ she notes. ‘Not when they don’t have a micro­scope.’” (Ibid.; p. 47.)

34. Note that cur­rent U.S. ambas­sador to the U.N. was respon­si­ble for derail­ing Harrington’s project—an extremely mod­est one when con­sid­ered against the back­drop of the bil­lions of dol­lars in graft that have gone down the tubes in Iraq. “In the end, even Harrington’s drop in the bucket evapo­rated—never mind that the State Depart­ment had made an offi­cial announce­ment allo­cat­ing the $20 million—and Har­ring­ton and Phillips had to make do with $2 mil­lion scraped together from emer­gency funds. Albright says re­sponsibility for the rever­sal lies with John Bolton, then the State Department’s under­sec­re­tary for arms con­trol and inter­na­tional secu­rity. ‘All of this was going to land on Bolton’s desk,’ he notes. ‘And he was in the camp that thinks all these sci­en­tists are crim­i­nals.’ Other pro­grams to help Iraqi scientists—including a Depart­ment of Energy pro­gram coor­di­nated through San­dia National Lab­o­ra­to­ries in New Mexico—have also come up short. ‘There are tens of thou­sands of sci­en­tists and engi­neers in need of
a job,’ says Dr. Arian Pre­gen­zer, a senior sci­en­tist at Sandia’s Coop­er­a­tive Mon­i­tor­ing Cen­ter. ‘We esti­mated it would be a $50-million-a-year project. That money has not mate­ri­al­ized from any­place.’” (Idem.)

35. “Phillips ended up work­ing on his own in Iraq, trav­el­ing in a civil­ian car to make con­tact with any WMD sci­en­tists he could find; so far, he’s been able to set up a small cen­ter that employs eight for­mer weapons researchers. Har­ring­ton, for her part, resigned from the State Depart­ment this past spring, partly in frus­tra­tion over the lack of funds. ‘When the most we could squeeze out of the sys­tem was two $2 mil­lion grants,’ she says, ‘it made us sit back and scratch our heads a lit­tle bit and say, ‘Didn’t we go to war because they had peo­ple who could pro­duce weap­ons of mass destruc­tion?’ It’s a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to square that cir­cle.’” (Idem.)

36. In his last will and tes­ta­ment, Hitler saw alliance with the Mus­lim world as a key to future Nazi world dom­i­na­tion. Note, in par­tic­u­lar, the way in which he fore­saw the “col­lec­tive polit­i­cal will” of the Mus­lim nations as a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor. The Fuehrer felt that a trans­gres­sion against one Mus­lim coun­try is per­ceived as a trans­gres­sion against all. Eval­u­ate the accu­racy of his remarks against the back­ground of the infor­ma­tion con­tained in para­graph #37, below. Note also that this polit­i­cal will and tes­ta­ment was bequeathed to Fran­cois Genoud. Although he died in 1996, Genoud’s name crops up sig­nif­i­cantly in a num­ber of impor­tant respects in the con­text of the events of 9/11. For an overview of Genoud’s career, see FTR#453. For more infor­ma­tion about Genoud and 9/11, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 343, 354, 371, 456, 498, 499. “Adolf Hitler declared in his ‘Tes­ta­ment’, reported by Mar­tin Bor­mann: ‘All of Islam vibrates at announce­ment of our vic­to­ries. [...]. What can we do to help them [...], how can it be to our inter­est and our duty? The pres­ence next to us of the Ital­ians [...] cre­ates a malaise among our friends of Islam, [...] it hin­ders us from play­ing one of our bet­ter cards: to sup­port the coun­tries oppressed by the British. Such a pol­icy would excite enthu­si­asm through­out Islam. It is, in effect, a par­tic­u­lar­ity of the Mus­lim world that what touches one, whether good or ill, is felt by all the oth­ers. [...] The peo­ple ruled by Islam will always be nearer to us than France, in spite of the kin­ship of blood’...”
(Tes­ta­ment of Hitler, Head­quar­ters of the Fuhrer, Feb­ru­ary 4 to April 2, 1945, pref­ace by Fran­cois Genoud; noted as Foot­note #8 in: “The Reds, The Browns and the Greens” by Alexan­dre Del Valle; Occi­den­talis; 12/13/04; p. 10.)

37. Echo­ing the views of Hitler on the col­lec­tive behav­ior of the Mus­lim nations, it appears that sen­ti­ment for bin Laden and al Qaeda has increased since the U.S. invaded Iraq, falling into the “Death­trap” that Sad­dam had arranged with Osama. Whether some of Saddam’s WMD exper­tise does indeed find its way into the hands of al Qaeda or related ele­ments remains to be seen. “The U.S.-led inva­sion of Iraq has accel­er­ated the of bin Laden’s anti-Americanism among once local Islamic mil­i­tant move­ments, increas­ing dan­ger to the United States as the al Qaeda net­work is becom­ing less able to mount attacks, accord­ing to senior intel­li­gence offi­cials at the CIA and the State Depart­ment. At the same time, the Sunni Tri­an­gle has become a train­ing ground for for­eign Islamic jihadists who are slip­ping into Iraq to join for­mer Sad­dam Hus­sein loy­al­ists to test them­selves against U.S. and coali­tion forces, these offi­cials say. . . .”
(“Spread of Bin Laden Ide­ol­ogy Cited” by Wal­ter Pin­cus; Wash­ing­ton Post; 4/4/2004; p. 1.)