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Hey, about those missing explosives, y'all -- There's more.
Googling a name passed to me by my favorite American Poet,
Russ
Vaughn, led to two March 2004 news items which have direct bearing on the
NYTrogate matter I mentioned
here and
here. The following quotes are from a
Washington Times
guest column
written by Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former
acting chief of Communist Romania’s espionage service. A roughly concurrent
Front Page Magazine
interview with Mr. Pacepa contains further background information. Mr.
Pacepa's remarks address missing WMDs, but as you read you will see that they
also provide a very likely explanation for the disappearance of the Al Qaaqaa
material.
On March 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the U.S.-led
"aggression" against Iraq as "unwarranted" and "unjustifiable." Three days
later, Pravda said that an anonymous Russian "military expert" was predicting
that the United States would fabricate finding Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov immediately started plying
the idea abroad, and it has taken hold around the world ever since.
As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB,
it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam
Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his
hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states
always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass
destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency
exit."
[...]
Iraq, in my view, had its own "Sarindar" plan in effect direct
from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. ... KGB chairman Yury
Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so too. In the
late 1970s, Gen. Primakov ran Saddam's weapons programs. ...
The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but it showed them how to
make them "disappear." Russia is still at it. Primakov was in Baghdad from
December until a couple of days before the war, along with a team of Russian
military experts led by two of Russia's topnotch "retired" generals,
Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor Maltsev, a
former air defense chief of staff. ... "I did not fly to Baghdad to drink
coffee," was what Gen. Achalov told the media afterward. They were there
orchestrating Iraq's "Sarindar" plan.
[...]
Gee, y'all, do you suppose there could have been anything besides nerve gas
and anthrax spores that the Russians wouldn't have wanted to leave where the
American military was going to find it? Hmmm...
Update: "The Truth Laid Bear" and "Wizbang" continue to stay on top of
this
here,
here, and here.
This post even got a
link from TTLB!
Update: Power Line has
extensive coverage on
the latest developments as well, posted tonight at 22:57.
Update: Captain's Quarters also has a good informative
post on
this subject. posted just under two hours ago.
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