So There WERE WMD in Iraq After All!

Speech ceases to be free when it becomes a lie. The American media has lied to us again.

What we have learned from the Ukrainians:

In December 2002, former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, came to Iraq and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Primakov supervised the execution of long-standing secret agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU (military intelligence), that provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel to remove WMDs, production materials and technical documentation from Iraq, so the regime could announce that Iraq was "WMD free."

Shaw said that this type GRU operation, known as "Sarandar," or "emergency exit," has long been familiar to U.S. intelligence officials from Soviet-bloc defectors as standard GRU practice.

In addition to the truck convoys, which carried Iraqi WMD to Syria and Lebanon in February and March 2003 two Russian ships set sail from the port of Umm Qasr headed for the Indian Ocean, where they hid additional stockpiles of Iraqi WMD from flooded bunkers in southern Iraq that were later discovered by U.S. military intelligence personnel.

The Russian clean-up operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants.

And the American media knew all this!Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored Intelligence Summit in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org),"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence."

Furthermore, Shaw says he leaked the information about the two Russian generals and the clean-up operation to Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz (who reported on Oct. 30, 2004, that Achatov and Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in a Baghdad building bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first U.S. air raids in early March 2003) in October 2004 in an effort to "push back" against claims by Democrats that were orchestrated with CBS News to embarrass President Bush just one week before the November 2004 presidential election.

At that time the press reported bogus claims that 377 tons of high explosives of use to Iraq's nuclear weapons program had vanished after the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, while ignoring intelligence of the Russian-orchestrated evacuation of Iraqi WMDs.

There's more to all this, of course, but the upshot of it all is the hatred of the American media for the current administration. We just can't believe what we read in the press!

The latest brouhaha about the administration "selling" the security of American ports to the Arabs is a classic example of misinformation. The truth is that an Arabian company is trying to buy a British company that owns a single terminal in each of six American ports -- terminals used by cruise ships. The way it's reported in the press, you'd think the Bush administration was selling the ports to the Arabs. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Somehow, someway we MUST make the American media responsible for their reporting. Speech ceases to be free when it becomes a lie.