Does ISIS Possess Saddam Hussein’s WMDs?
An interview with Ken Timmerman by Mike Bates and Jerry Gordon (April 2016)
Donald Trump with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, South Carolina Townhall, February 18, 2016
Following his South Carolina victory, GOP Presidential front runner Donald Trump was on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace on February 21, 2016 when the subject of the War in Iraq came up. Trump contended it was a disaster. He pointed toward the result, Iran taking over Iraq and its oil reserves, something he alleges would stop if he were elected President. Trump was on record in an interview with Howard Stern in September 2002 tentatively supporting the Iraq war, but later questioning its cost. Wallace’s question was triggered by an exchange with Anderson Cooper of CNN during the South Carolina town hall on February 19th. His comment about WMDs in Iraq caught a wave of attention. In the exchange with Cooper he said:
“There are a lot of people that think that – look, bottom line, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and there were none, and they knew there were none,” he added. “There were no weapons of mass destruction.”
Watch Trump’s interview with FoxNews’ Chris Wallace on this YouTube Video.
Dr. Jill Bellamy
Dr. Jill Bellamy, noted bio defense expert, member of the UN Counterterrorism Advisory Council and Founding Director of Warfare Technology Analytics was a featured guest on The Lisa Benson Show on Sunday, February 28, 2016. The subject of Saddam Hussein’s bio WMD came up. In our first NER interview with Dr. Bellamy in December 2007 we raised this issue. Here was our exchange with Bellamy:
Gordon: We heard that some of the late Saddam Hussein’s Bio-warfare research and pathogens may have been transferred to Syria during Operation Enduring Freedom. Is that accurate to your knowledge, and who facilitated the transfer? What types of bio-warfare agents and materials might have been transferred?
In response to that question she drew attention to one of the major figures in the late Ba’athist dictator’s bio-warfare program, Dr. Rihab Taha, a UK trained microbiologist and expert in plant toxins. Bellamy also addressed ISIS and their possible acquisition of scientists and technicians for creation of laboratories to weaponize viral agents. She mentioned Dr. Taha as someone who was engaged in bio weapons work for the late Saddam Hussein. She was released by the interim Iraqi government. The question arose as to what she was involved in as a devoted Ba’athist nationalist in Iraq and where she might be now.
Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center in a highly secure facility near Damascus.
This writer and host Lisa Benson of the eponymous Radio Show on National Security later on Sunday, February 21, 2016 interviewed Ken Timmerman, investigative journalist, President of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, author of New York Times best seller, Countdown to Crisis, Shadow Warriors and Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened at Benghazi. We brought up Trump’s assertions about Saddam Hussein’s WMD.
Further in 2008, NBC reported secret US Operation McCall transferred more than 550 metric tons of “yellow cake” uranium discovered in Iraq that was to be used for higher grade enrichment to Canada. Good thing, because if not transferred it might have ended up in the hands of ISIS courtesy of those former Ba’athist officers.
Timmerman also drew attention to Saddam Hussein era connections to ISIS’ use of chemical weapons in both Iraq and Syria against Kurdish Peshmerga and Syrian Kurdish YPG forces. Our colleague Ilana Freedman asserted that ISIS may have perpetrated the 2013 Sarin gas attack in a Damascus suburb killing over a thousand Syrian civilians. Timmerman said that ISIS is a “blend of former Iraqi Ba’athist officers and Al Qaeda in Iraq Jihadists. Those former Ba’athist officers knew where those WMD caches were located in both Iraq and Syria.”
As to who may have perpetrated the media lie about there was no WMD in Iraq, Timmerman’s 2007 book, Shadow Warriors (see pp. 285-286) suggests that it was the late Tyler Drumheller, former European division chief of the CIA’s Director of Operations, who went on 60 Minutes with the late Ed Bradley and lied about information obtained from a Saddam Hussein era, Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri.
Corroboration of former Iraqi Ba’athist WMD experts involvement with ISIS came in February 2016, when US Special Forces captured Sleiman Daoud al-Afari. A Christian Science Monitor article on March 10, 2016 wrote:
al-Alfari as having “worked under Saddam Hussein as a chemical and biological weapons expert, is being questioned by American military officials in Erbil, Iraq, Mr. al-Afari has told American interrogators that ISIS is weaponizing mustard gas by loading the powder into artillery shells. ISIS likely hopes to frighten Iraqi troops by threatening to employ the gas on the battlefield but does not have the logistical expertise or resources to carry out the kind of chemical attacks that terrorized the anti-Assad Syrians or the Kurds under Saddam Hussein.
ISIS has used mustard gas in 12 confirmed cases and three suspected cases, but information from al-Afari has aided US plans to locate and destroy two weapons centers.
Against this background, this writer and Mike Bates, host of Northwest Florida Talk Radio program “Your Turn” on 1330amWEBY interviewed Timmerman on the back story on Saddam Hussein’s WMD.
Mike Bates: Good afternoon and welcome to Your Turn. This is Mike Bates. This first hour of today’s edition of Your Turn, we’ll be speaking with Jerry Gordon, who is in the studio with me. Jerry is the senior editor of the New English Review and its blog, The Iconoclast. Welcome, Jerry.
Jerry Gordon: Glad to be back, Mike.
Mike Bates: And joining us by telephone is Ken Timmerman, author of the book Dark Forces: The Truth about What Happened in Benghazi, Ken Timmerman, welcome.
Ken Timmerman: Thanks for having me on, Mike. It’s a pleasure.
Operation McCall?
The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq, published in 1992. I had a passage in the book about how Iraq was extracting natural uranium from phosphate ore at a factory which I identified in the book. There was this reviewer from The Wall Street Journal, Gerald Seib, who is still around. He said, “This guy, Timmerman needs a science editor because nobody would ever process phosphates to get uranium. There is so little in it. It cost so much and uses so much electricity, we gave it up after the Manhattan Project in 1945.” He ridiculed it. It was the only bad review the book received. I gave the information to Swedish Ambassador Rolf Ekeus, who was the head of the U.N. Arms Inspectors at that time in 1992. He sent his inspectors to the site. It was called Alqaum and guess what they found? In the center of a phosphates plant, they found a uranium processing facility exactly as I had written. So Saddam was doing things that nobody expected, that the wise men, the smart people said could never happen, could never exist. That is the media mindset that led to this notion there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
FBI Special Agent George Piro, who was his interrogator when he was in captivity, said that Saddam Hussein feared an Iranian attack more than he feared an American attack. He didn’t have weapons of mass destruction but he lied about it because he wanted his enemies, specifically the Iranians, to believe that he did so that they wouldn’t attack. Is there any truth to that? Because if that is true, then how could he have had the weapons that he didn’t have but he said he did just to fool the Iranians?
Shadow Warriors. Bush was sabotaged from inside his own administration by the CIA and the State Department. It is an extraordinary story. He did not understand that the man he appointed to be his representative in Iraq, Paul Bremer, was a State Department official, who actually undid his entire strategy and turned the liberation of Iraq literally overnight, into an occupation. Bremer arrived in May of 2003 in Baghdad. Instead of handing over the reins of government, which had been the strategic plan of the United States that had been devised by the Pentagon and the State Department. The plan was to go in there, smash Saddam, smash his armies, and hand over government to an Iraqi governing council and get out. Instead of doing that, Bremmer fired the Iraqi governing council and became the viceroy of Baghdad. Meanwhile, there were 300,000 Iraqi young men who he also fired from the army without pay were running around the country with guns. All of a sudden a month later, there was an insurrection, and Bremer was sitting there scratching his head and saying, “Oh, gee. What happened here?” It was so predictable, so obvious, and Bremer just jettisoned the whole strategy and he never got reprimanded by the President and he should have been.
Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 in Congress and through the Bush Administration to support the Iraqis to take over from Saddam Hussein. He undid that in two days when he arrived in Bagdad without any consultation. I can tell you, there were people in the Administration whom I knew, and that I worked with at the time – I wrote about this – they were absolutely stunned and didn’t know what to do. Rumsfeld would not go to the mat, would not fight it. However, he said, “Hey, this is not my problem. He is the president’s emissary, not mine.” Rumsfeld caved as well.
Gordon: Ken, in your book, Shadow Warriors, you go into a great deal of detail about who torpedoed the whole question of were there WMDs. The question is who was the rogue CIA agent who basically created the media lie on WMDs?
Tyler Drumheller. He was a senior CIA officer first in Italy and then back in the United States where he was running the European desk for the director of operations. I go into great detail about how he falsified reports about Niger uranium, which became one of the accusations against the Bush Administration. That they claimed Saddam Hussein was, going after uranium in Niger. In fact, those were false reports put into the intelligence food chain by Tyler Drumheller knowing that they were false. Because he wanted to trip up the President. By the way, he died recently. This is the guy who went on in 2011 and 2012 to work with Sid Blumenthal in Libya funneling fake intelligence to Hillary Clinton about Benghazi. That is just to let you know that what goes around comes around.
Gordon: Where did Drumheller reveal this lie on national media?
Timmerman: Yes, they knew that some of the reports were false. The people on the ground, the CIA officers in Italy and their Italian counterparts knew it was false. It was injected into the intelligence slipstream by Tyler Drumheller on purpose knowing that the reports were false.
Bates: The way the president said it was true. I believe it was the Czech intelligence. Am I right on that country?
Timmerman: No, it was the Italians.
Bates: I knew it was a foreign intelligence agency that said he sought this information. Had he just said the Iraqis sought to purchase uranium that would have been perhaps a lie or an untrue statement.
Timmerman: No. It was accurate that they were seeking it.
Bates: Where was the false intelligence that was planted?
Timmerman: It was not accurate that they acquired it.
Bates: Sought is accurate, acquired is inaccurate.
Timmerman: Correct.
Rihab Taha. You interviewed her husband, I believe. Am I correct in that regard?
Amer Rashid al-Ubaidi. He was the oil minister at one point. His real job was building ballistic missiles and helping the Iraqis to enhance their weapons production capabilities.
Dr. Jill Bellamy, where did she go? Her answer was Syria. She went there to essentially replicate what she had been doing heading Saddam Hussein’s biological agent WMD program. The other comment Dr. Bellamy made was the fact that when people talk about where the stockpile of bio agents are – well, they can fit into a suitcase. However, what is more important is the person who has knowledge of weaponizing bio WMDs. That is an interesting story because it shows the connection between the Ba’athists in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and the Ba’athists inside Syria, under the Assad family.
Bates: The Assad government of Syria does have chemical weapons. What is their source?
Timmerman: They got rid of most of them with the aid of the Russians. They agreed to put them on Russian ships send them out to be incinerated and get rid of them. However did they keep some behind? Undoubtedly, they did. They got rid of the bulk of their chemical weapons stockpiles, not biological agents, if they had them, and not what was remaining of their nuclear program.
Gordon: I have viewed pictures taken inside the Syrian Scientific Research Center with U.S. equipment engaged in fermentation activities with a visiting Russian woman, among their scientists.
The Syrian Scientific Research Center has always been a favorite of mine. I first started writing about it in the 1980s. It was called CERS at that point under its French acronym, the Centre D’Etudes et de Recherches Scientifiques, which is just the French translation. The reason we called it CERS is because the French built the facility in a government to government deal in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Gordon: Where did the equipment came from?
Timmerman: The equipment at that point came from France, Germany, and some of it from the United States before we had export controls.
Gordon: Absolutely correct.
Bates: What is the danger, Ken, that these chemical weapons in Syria, or for that matter, Iraq, will fall in the hands of ISIS?
Timmerman: Some of them already have and ISIS has used them on the battlefield. They have used them against the Kurds. The Kurds understand this all too well. Remember, they were horribly gassed by Saddam in 1988 just at this time of year, the anniversary of the Halabja attacks in March of 1988. They also used them in Syria. I believe that they tried to use them in 2013, but did not have the skills. Some of them blew up in their own faces, injuring civilians in areas that they controlled.
Gordon: Amazing story and nasty heritage between these two countries.
Gordon: Is that the ultimate stay behind strategy?
Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, up until he was killed in April 2015 was working with the Sunni tribes and then the AQI jihadis. That was their stay behind strategy. They knew that they could unite the Sunni tribes against Iran. What they really are afraid of is the Iranian encroachment in Iraq, just as Saddam Hussein was. They continued to fight against that. That is why ISIS has gained such a strong foothold in Iraq to bar the door to the Iranians.
Bates: So Ken, who do you blame for the rise or creation of ISIS?
Nouri Al-Maliki with the Iranians behind him, to push us around because the Iranians wanted us out. This was an Iranian victory in Iraq.
Bates: Exactly. President Obama campaigned on getting us out of Iraq, and the cost ended up being quite high. We are still paying that price.
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