(H/T – JammieWearingFool)
The Spectator‘s Melanie Phillips has the tale of Dave Gaubatz, who spent some time in Nasariyah, Iraq looking for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Let’s start right in the meat of the story:
Between March and July 2003, he says, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq "” two within Nasariyah, one 20 miles south and one near Basra "” which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear programme and UN-proscribed missiles. He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true.
This was, in the first place, because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them. Three of them were bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates. They had been constructed through building dams which were removed after the huge subterranean vaults had been excavated so that these were concealed beneath the river bed. The bunker walls were made of reinforced concrete five feet thick.
"˜There was no doubt, with so much effort having gone into hiding these constructions, that something very important was buried there’, says Mr Gaubatz. By speaking to a wide range of Iraqis, some of whom risked their lives by talking to him and whose accounts were provided in ignorance of each other, he built up a picture of the nuclear, chemical and biological materials they said were buried underground.
"˜They explained in detail why WMDs were in these areas and asked the US to remove them,’ says Mr Gaubatz. "˜Much of this material had been buried in the concrete bunkers and in the sewage pipe system. There were also missile imprints in the area and signs of chemical activity "” gas masks, decontamination kits, atropine needles. The Iraqis and my team had no doubt at all that WMDs were hidden there.’
There was yet another significant piece of circumstantial corroboration. The medical records of Mr Gaubatz and his team showed that at these sites they had been exposed to high levels of radiation.
Mr Gaubatz verbally told the Iraq Study Group (ISG) of his findings, and asked them to come with heavy equipment to breach the concrete of the bunkers and uncover their sealed contents. But to his consternation, the ISG told him they didn’t have the manpower or equipment to do it and that it would be "˜unsafe’ to try.
"˜The problem was that the ISG were concentrating their efforts in looking for WMD in northern Iraq and this was in the south,’ says Mr Gaubatz. "˜They were just swept up by reports of WMD in so many different locations. But we told them that if they
didn’t excavate these sites, others would….
Needless to say, before the CIA finally showed up in 2005 (after the ISG “conveniently” lost all 60 of Gaubatz’s written reports), somebody else showed up to cart off the contents of these weapons, specifically the Syrians and Russians. Gaubatz tried to get the news out, but he was frustrated. I’ll let Phillips continue:
Mr Gaubatz’s claims remain largely unpublicised. Last year, the New York Times dismissed him as one of a group of WMD diehard obsessives. The New York Sun produced a more balanced report, but after that the coverage died. According to Mr Gaubatz, the reason is a concerted effort by the US intelligence and political world to stifle such an explosive revelation of their own lethal incompetence.
After he and an Iraqi colleague spoke at last month’s Florida meeting of the Intelligence Summit, an annual conference of the intelligence world, they were interviewed for two hours by a US TV show "” only for the interview to be junked after the FBI repeatedly rang Mr Gaubatz and his colleague to say they would stop the interview from being broadcast….
So we know that it’s the policy of the federal government to disavow any knowledge of these 4 bunkers. The Democrats in Congress have been asked to investigate by John Loftus, the organizer of the Intelligence Summit, but they’re not touching this with a 10-foot pole. Why? I’ll leave you with the money quote from Phillips:
The Republicans won’t touch this because it would reveal the incompetence of the Bush administration in failing to neutralise the danger of Iraqi WMD. The Democrats won’t touch it because it would show President Bush was right to invade Iraq in the first place. It is an axis of embarrassment.
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