Chris Hedges, CIA?

[MinM]

http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5&prgDate=10-15-2002

On October 15, 2002, on the eve of the Congressional authorization vote to attempt to give Bush legitimacy in attacking Iraq, Chris Hedges appeared on NPR's "Talk of the Nation".

But it was a very different Chris Hedges persona to the Chris Hedges that we are familiar with today.

I have never trusted Hedges, despite his seminary bona fides & authorship credentials, based entirely on my memory of this NPR show...

It's funny that you mention this. Going through some radio stations on my smart phone Saturday allowed me to stumble upon a Chris Hedges interview. A rather strident Chris Hedges as a matter of fact. Much more so than his past appearances it seemed.

When I say stumbled upon -- it was from CBC Radio -- via a Louisville NPR Station -- via tuneIn Radio.

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/day6 ... _15059.mp3

http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/day6.xml

Is it inconceivable that Chris Hedges may actually have grown as a person in the ten years since 2002? That the burgeoning collection of obvious betrayals of the Bush Administration, the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the craven and evident manipulation of the ubiquitous terror alerts in those days served as catalysts of change for Mr. Hedges? ...

That may very well explain it. That and having to suffer some other fools during that time may not have done much for his disposition either.

[Nordic]

But I, for one, don't trust Chris Hedges.

A serious question for you: Who do you trust?

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

No, Hedges is surfing his mid-life epiphany about what he'd been used for over many career years.
He was used as a cred prop, much like Edward R. Morrow for Pearl Harbor and the Cold War...until Ed became head of USIA, that is.
So Hedges is pissed and disgusted. He's refinding his Christian ethics.

But he's also probably been threatened regarding how close to the electric fence he can go before bad things happen to his family. He knows all about the CIA from years of being in the center of their wars. But he can't point at them. He uses euphemisms and his frustration about this inability to tell the whole truth causes him to take it out on the perceived betrayal of institutiional Left allies, the same allies that the CIA sabotaged..

These accusations against him as being CIA that have suddenly appeared are due to his last essay taking on the ADL and AIPAC.
So they retaliated to peel away some of his supporters. He went up to the electric fence. Naughty naughty.
His writing is exactly the kind of stuff the CIA squelches and retaliates against with counterpropaganda and disinformation.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/aip ... _20120304/

Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday night in Washington, D.C., at the Occupy AIPAC protest, organized by CODEPINK Women for Peace and other peace, faith and solidarity groups.

The battle for justice in the Middle East is our battle. It is part of the vast, global battle against the 1 percent. It is about living rather than dying. It is about communicating rather than killing. It is about love rather than hate. It is part of the great battle against the corporate forces of death that reign over us—the fossil fuel industry, the weapons manufacturers, the security and surveillance state, the speculators on Wall Street, the oligarchic elites who assault our poor, our working men and women, our children, one in four of whom depend on food stamps to eat, the elites who are destroying our ecosystem with its trees, its air and its water and throwing into doubt our survival as a species.

What is being done in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, is a pale reflection of what is slowly happening to the rest of us. It is a window into the rise of the global security state, our new governing system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” It is a reflection of a world where the powerful are not bound by law, either on Wall Street or in the shattered remains of the countries we invade and occupy, including Iraq with its hundreds of thousands of dead. And one of the greatest purveyors of this demented ideology of violence for the sake of violence, this flagrant disregard for the rule of domestic and international law, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

I spent seven years in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I lived for two of those seven years in Jerusalem. AIPAC does not speak for Jews or for Israel. It is a mouthpiece for right-wing ideologues, some of whom hold power in Israel and some of whom hold power in Washington, who believe that because they have the capacity to war wage they have a right to wage war, whose loyalty, in the end, is not to the citizens of Israel or Palestine or the United States but the corporate elites, the defense contractors, those who make war a business, those who have turned ordinary Palestinians, Israelis and Americans, along with hundreds of millions of the world’s poor, into commodities to exploit, repress and control.

We have not brought freedom, democracy and the virtues of Western civilization to the Muslim world. We have brought state terrorism, massive destruction, war and death. There is no moral distinction between a drone strike and the explosion of the improvised explosive device, between a suicide bombing and a targeted assassination. We have used the iron fist of the American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan and ensure that the Muslim world remains submissive and compliant. We have supported a government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza and is daily stealing larger and larger portions of Palestinian land. We have established a network of military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and we have secured basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. We have expanded our military operations to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And no one believes, except perhaps us, that we have any intention of leaving.

And let us not forget that deep inside our secret world of offshore penal colonies, black sites, and torture and interrogation centers, we practice the cruelty and barbarity that always accompanies unchecked imperial power. There were scores of graphic pictures and videos from the prison in Abu Ghraib that were swiftly classified and hidden from public view. And in these videos, as Seymour Hersh reported, mothers who were arrested with their young sons, often children, watched in horror as their boys were repeatedly sodomized. This was filmed. And on the soundtrack you hear the boys shrieking. And the mothers were smuggling notes out to their families saying, “Come and kill us because of what is happening.”
We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. It is we who legitimize the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads, suicide bombers and radical jihadists. The longer we drop iron fragmentation bombs and seize Muslim land, the longer we kill with impunity, the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate.

“If you gaze into the abyss,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “the abyss gazes into you.”

I am no friend of the Iranian regime, which helped create and arm Hezbollah, is certainly meddling in Iraq, has persecuted human rights activists, gays, women and religious and ethnic minorities, embraces racism and intolerance, and uses its power to deny popular will. And yes, it is a regime that appears determined to build a nuclear weapon, although I would stress that no one has offered any proof this is occurring. I have spent time in Iranian jails. I was once deported from Tehran in handcuffs. But I do not remember Iran orchestrating a coup in the United States to replace an elected government with a brutal dictator who for decades persecuted, assassinated and imprisoned democracy activists. I do not remember Iran arming and funding a neighboring state to wage war against our country. Iran never shot down one of our passenger jets, as did the USS Vincennes—nicknamed Robocruiser by the crews of other American vessels—when in June 1988 it fired missiles at an Airbus filled with Iranian civilians, killing everyone on board. Iran is not sponsoring terrorist strikes within the United States, as our intelligence services and the Israeli intelligence services currently do in Iran. We have not seen five of our top nuclear scientists since 2007 murdered on American soil. The attacks in Iran include suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and “targeted assassinations” of government officials and other Iranian leaders. What would we do if the situation were reversed? How would we react if Iran carried out similar acts of terrorism against us?

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[fruhmenschen]

About 2 years ago I sat down with Maine artist Robert Shetterly and VFP Maine president Dud Hedrick
to interview Chris Hedges who had come to speak in Maine.
My BS meter never moved from zero when interviewing Hedges.
I think we know who the real perp is here, eh?

[lupercal]

^that may well be so. Personally though I tend to think he's a water carrier, unwitting or more likely directly, a la Alex Cockburn and other sheepdipped "leftists":

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2012/03/avaaz-sponsoring-fake-reporting-from-syria.html#c6a00d8341c640e53ef016763703841970b

Who woulda thunk it?

Fuck Chris Hedges. Like Juan Cole, he most likely is a CIA asset/perp.

Chris Hedges plays up the antiwar angle but he's insincere and has ulterior motives. Posted by: Walter Wit Man | Mar 5, 2012 11:17:04 AM | 95*

* comment 95

For instance, here's Chris Hedges the CIA stooge pretending to oppose U.S. imperialism, but subtly justifying it instead:

"It is we who legitimize the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads, suicide bombers and radical jihadists." [Uh, Ahmadinejad has suicide bombers and jihadis? Really Hedges you fucking stooge?]

"I am no friend of the Iranian regime, which helped create and arm Hezbollah, is certainly meddling in Iraq, has persecuted human rights activists, gays, women and religious and ethnic minorities, embraces racism and intolerance, and uses its power to deny popular will. And yes, it is a regime that appears determined to build a nuclear weapon, although I would stress that no one has offered any proof this is occurring. I have spent time in Iranian jails. I was once deported from Tehran in handcuffs." [Ah, yes, our hero was put in handcuffs by the regime. Just like with Occupy Wall Street, Chris Hedges was personally arrested and has street cred. If it's anything like his Occupy stunt it his expulsion from Iran was probably a U.S. psy op. Chris Hedges is simply establishing his bona fides so that liberals trust him. Don't fall for it.] [Also note that Hedges personally assures us the regime is determined to build a bomb. Fuck you Hedges you punk ass liar.]

"[T]he morally bankrupt clerics [] are ordering the beating and murder of demonstrators." [You know this how, Hedges? Marie Colvert? Tyler Hicks? Your CIA buddies?]

"The uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Occupy Wall Street to our gathering outside AIPAC’s doors in Washington are the same primal struggle for sanity, peace and justice . . . ." [No mention of U.S. involvement in these uprisings. Being a perp I'm sure Hedges is fully aware of Western clandestine efforts but is purposely pretending the 'Arab Spring' is an organic uprising/protest.]

Chris Hedges is lying. He's a perp. Don't trust him. He obviously is tasked with a role in Occupy Wall Street. Like a CIA agent helping organize the Arab Spring, Hedges is attempting to be a gatekeeper for U.S. protests.

Posted by: Walter Wit Man | Mar 5, 2012 11:31:37 AM | 97*

This strikes me as a reasonable critique and I tend to agree with its conclusions. Hedges has a good stump speech that he gives at every opportunity, or used to, but his analysis, what there is of it, seems more standard-issue NYT-CIA, and the objects of his wrath, when he identifies them, turn out to be Dems, Dem voters, Dem candidates, and foreign US-CIA targets as often as not. So whether he's on the payroll directly or not he's carrying water for the perps IMHO.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Ech. There isn't a factual rational assertion anywhere in "Wlater Wit Man's" ad hominem troll post.
It's just bald character assassination with nothing behind it...except it's own anti-Hedges agenda.

Timing. Hedges has been scorching fascism and took on AIPAC this week. duh.

Remember, I'm as vigilant against CIA mind-fuckery as anyone you'll read online, most likely.
I've been reading Hedges mindful of his former NYTimes position to see where he fits in the Big Game.

He's found his better self and gone way off The Reservation. And that's a problem for the Boyz.

[compared2what?]

Deleted w/ apologies.

Off to the lounge.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Contrast what Hedges writes - who he accuses of what - with
the mealy-mouthed gatekeeping and disinfo
from Russ Baker, Thom Hartmann, Jane Mayer, Chip Berlet.

A world of difference.

[lupercal]

Ech. There isn't a factual rational assertion anywhere in "Wlater Wit Man's" ad hominem troll post.
It's just bald character assassination with nothing behind it...except it's own anti-Hedges agenda.

Timing. Hedges has been scorching fascism and took on AIPAC this week. duh.

Remember, I'm as vigilant against CIA mind-fuckery as anyone you'll read online, most likely.
I've been reading Hedges mindful of his former NYTimes position to see where he fits in the Big Game.

He's found his better self and gone way off The Reservation. And that's a problem for the Boyz.

Could be Hugh, but too much psychology usually indicates a failure of logic, and the logical conclusion based on the reasonable evidence provided in OP quote is that Hedges is a crap purveyor. Hedges, as quoted by Walter Wit: "The uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Occupy Wall Street. . . are the same primal struggle for sanity, peace and justice. . ."

Total crap. You know it, I know it, and I have little doubt that Hedges knows it. In my view he's a demagogue. When he gets on the horn to demand 90% upper-bracket income taxes let me know.

As for AIPAC, it's not exactly a popular favorite, and Hedges isn't running for any office so for all we know he's carrying water on that one too, or just burnishing his trompe-l'oeil lefty credentials.

[wintler2]

.. Hedges, as quoted by Walter Wit: "The uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Occupy Wall Street. . . are the same primal struggle for sanity, peace and justice. . ."
Total crap. You know it, I know it, and I have little doubt that Hedges knows it. In my view he's a demagogue. ...

You're not really going to push the "entire arab spring = cia plot" line are you?
Its already been a bumpy week for the conspiritards.

[Sounder]

My inclination is to ignore threads like this, but habit takes over as I notice many pages and can only wonder why. So I look at the last page and find myself agreeing with Hugh, WTF did the world stop spinning? So OK, read some from the middle, I hate this gossip shit but must admit that folk here still do say interesting things. Wombat says it best though.


HMW wrote...

No, Hedges is surfing his mid-life epiphany about what he'd been used for over many career years.
He was used as a cred prop, much like Edward R. Morrow for Pearl Harbor and the Cold War...until Ed became head of USIA, that is.
So Hedges is pissed and disgusted. He's refinding his Christian ethics.

But he's also probably been threatened regarding how close to the electric fence he can go before bad things happen to his family. He knows all about the CIA from years of being in the center of their wars. But he can't point at them. He uses euphemisms and his frustration about this inability to tell the whole truth causes him to take it out on the perceived betrayal of institutiional Left allies, the same allies that the CIA sabotaged..

These accusations against him as being CIA that have suddenly appeared are due to his last essay taking on the ADL and AIPAC.
So they retaliated to peel away some of his supporters. He went up to the electric fence. Naughty naughty.
His writing is exactly the kind of stuff the CIA squelches and retaliates against with counterpropaganda and disinformation.

[temp-monitor]

But I, for one, don't trust Chris Hedges.

A serious question for you: Who do you trust?

That question has the potential to take this thread off-topic, but off the top of my head, the first two who spring to mind, even when I disagree with them: Michael Parenti, Dave Emory.

[temp-monitor]

Here's a possible rule-of-thumb for who to trust, a litmus test -- and the beauty of it is that it takes the official mainstream taboo against public acknowledgment of conspiracy as an authentic political factor, and turns it into an advantage:

If a public figure is unwilling to acknowledge the reality of conspiracy or deep politics as a historic reality and ongoing political phenomena in all nations, then that person simply cannot be trusted.

[The Consul]

The CIA is Everywhere. Long time ago...I hit one in the head with a snowball. If Chris Hedges is CIA, then so am I, but I have no way of knowing either way for sure.

[brekin]

How Did Iraq Get Its Weapons? We Sold Them
by Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0908-08.htm

THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.

Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.

Classified US Defense Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.

The Senate committee's reports on 'US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq', undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis -- the micro-organism that causes anthrax -- were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.

One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers' City, a military complex in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.

The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.

The Senate report also makes clear that: 'The United States provided the government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programs.'

Iraqi biological weapons program

A UN weapons inspector in Iraq in 2002.

Saddam Hussein (1937-2006) initiated an extensive biological weapons (BW) program in Iraq in the early 1980s, in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972. Details of the BW program — along with a chemical weapons program — surfaced only in the wake of the Gulf War (1990–91) following investigations conducted by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) which had been charged with the post-war disarmament of Saddam's Iraq. Because of this UN disarmament program, more is known today about the once-secret bioweapons program in Iraq than that of any other nation.

FRONTLINE #1714

"Spying on Saddam"

Airdate: April 27, 1999

Produced by Stephen Talbot

NARRATOR: Last December President Clinton ordered the bombing of Iraq to punish Saddam Hussein for failing to cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors. Saddam survived the four-day bombing, but the U.N. inspection program he defied might not.

Since the end of the Gulf War, UNSCOM, the U.N. weapons inspection team, has been searching out and destroying Iraq's deadly arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and confronting the Iraqi authorities who tried to stop them.

SCOTT RITTER: [to Iraqi official] If you don't give us immediate access to this, it's going to be null and void! Do you want that?

NARRATOR: The Iraqis accuse the weapons inspectors of really being spies for the West. Now one of UNSCOM's own inspectors is saying the U.N. team was infiltrated by the CIA and fatally compromised.

SCOTT RITTER: In the end, the United States took over the whole program. UNSCOM wasn't in control of anything. It became a United States operation, not a United Nations operation.

RICHARD HAASS, Former Adviser to President Bush: These charges have done UNSCOM, the United States and indeed, I would think, most of the civilized world, a great disservice.

Tonight on FRONTLINE, the story of UNSCOM, a story of spies, Saddam, and his secret weapons.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... cript.html


A NATION CHALLENGED: THE SCHOOL; Defectors Cite Iraqi Training For Terrorism
By CHRIS HEDGES
Published: November 8, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/08/world ... gewanted=2

Two defectors from Iraqi intelligence said yesterday that they had worked for several years at a secret Iraqi government camp that had trained Islamic terrorists in rotations of five or six months since 1995.They said the training in the camp, south of Baghdad, was aimed at carrying out attacks against neighboring countries and possibly Europe and the United States.

The defectors, one of whom was a lieutenant general and once one of the most senior officers in the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, said they did not know if the Islamic militants being trained at the camp, known as Salman Pak, were linked to Osama bin Laden.
They also said they had no knowledge of specific attacks carried out by the militants. But they insisted that those being trained as recently as last year were Islamic radicals from across the Middle East. An interview of the two men was set up by an Iraqi group that seeks the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein.

The defectors said they knew of a highly guarded compound within the camp where Iraqi scientists, led by a German, produced biological agents.
''There is a lot we do not know,'' the former general, who spoke on condition that his name not be printed, admitted. ''We were forbidden to speak about our activities among each other, even off duty. But over the years you see and hear things. These Islamic radicals were a scruffy lot. They needed a lot of training, especially physical training. But from speaking with them it was clear they came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. The gulf war never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this.''

The reports mesh with statements by Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, a captain in the Iraqi Army who emigrated to Texas in May after working as an instructor for eight years at Salman Pak, located at a bend in the Tigris.
United Nations arms inspectors suspected that such activities, including simulated hijackings carried out in a Boeing 707 fuselage set up in the camp, were going on at Salman Pak before they were expelled from Iraq in 1998. But this is the first look at the workings of the camp from those who took part in its administration.

Dr. Richard Sperzel, former chief of United Nations biological weapons inspection teams in Iraq, said the Iraqis had always told the inspectors that Salman Pak was an anti-terror training camp for Iraqi special forces.
''But many of us had our own private suspicions,'' he said. ''We had nothing specific as evidence. Yet among ourselves we always referred to it as the terrorist training camp.''

The former lieutenant general, who acknowledged his involvement in some of the worst excesses of President Hussein's government, including direct involvement in the execution of thousands of Shiite Muslim rebels after an uprising that followed the 1991 gulf war, spent three days in Ankara being interviewed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He said the decision by the C.I.A. to include Turkish intelligence officials in the interview led him to fear for his safety. He has since fled Turkey, where he sought asylum, and was interviewed in another Middle Eastern country.

The assertions of terrorism training by the Iraqi defectors is likely to fuel one side of an intense debate in Washington over whether to extend the war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government of Afghanistan to include Iraq.
The Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group headed by Ahmed Chalabi in London, helped arrange the meeting and interview with the defectors and supports that side of the Washington debate. The group was involved in an abortive C.I.A. attempt to build an alliance in northern Iraq to oust Mr. Hussein. The collapse of the effort soured relations between the Iraqi National Congress and some senior officials in the State Department and the C.I.A.

American officials confirmed that they had met with the former general in Turkey but said they had not learned all that much from him. They said it was unlikely that the training on the fuselage was linked to the Sept. 11 hijackings in the United States.
The camp is overseen by the highest levels of Iraqi intelligence, and those who worked there were compartmentalized into distinct sections. On one side of the camp, these men said, young Iraqis who were members of Fedayeen Saddam, or Saddam's Fighters, were trained in espionage, assassination techniques and sabotage.

The other side of the camp, separated by a small lake, trees and barbed wire, was where the Islamic militants were trained. The militants spent a great deal of time training, usually in groups of five or six, around the fuselage of the 707. There were rarely more than 40 or 50 Islamic radicals in the camp at one time.
''We could see them train around the fuselage,'' said one of the defectors, a former Iraqi sergeant in the intelligence service who spent nearly five years at the camp. ''We could see them practice taking over the plane.''

The former general, wearing a black suit and sporting a gold ring on each index finger, said the terrorist teams were trained to take over a plane without using weapons.
Although the Islamic militants were carefully segregated from the Iraqi units, there was haphazard contact, he said.

''One day after work my car broke down as I was leaving the camp,'' the general said, ''and a Toyota van filled with these Islamic fighters came out behind me. The driver was a man I knew, and he got out to help push the car. There were various nationalities on the van, including an Egyptian who, unlike the rest, was clean shaven. Six of them came out to help. They finally towed my car to a gas station.''

The general gave a wry smile and answered what he knew would be the next question.
''No,'' he said of the Egyptian, ''he was not Mohamed Atta.'' Mr. Atta is thought to have been the leader of the September hijackers.
The general said that one day when he questioned Lt. Gen. Jassim Rashid al-Dulaimy, who he said was overseeing the terrorist training, about the lanky German who worked in the biological unit, he was told that he was ''the man who caused all our problems in 1991.''

The section where biological agents are said to have been produced was bombed by coalition warplanes during the gulf war, the general said.
The report of Iraqi ties with Islamic radicals comes on the heels of an announcement by the Czech interior minister, Stanislav Gross, who said Mr. Atta had met with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi diplomat identified by the Czech authorities as an intelligence officer, in April.

There are unexplained gaps and absences, some as long as 15 months, during Mr. Atta's stay in Hamburg, Germany, suggesting that he may have been training abroad.
Many of the trainers in the Salman Pak camp are notorious figures in their own right. The chief trainer, Abdel Hussein, nicknamed ''The Ghost,'' was involved in several assassinations outside Iraq, as was General Dulaimy, who has been implicated in the assassination in Beirut of an Iraqi opposition leader, Sheik Taleb al-Suhail, in 1994.

The general, who said he does not stay in the same place for more than one night because of a fear of retaliation by Iraqi agents, said General Dulaimy had boasted of his assassinations, including the one in Lebanon.
''He heads a special assassination unit called the School of the Lion's Den,'' he said. ''It is supposedly only for those who have hearts of lions. He is a very skilled and brave man, and he is trusted by the regime.''

The interviews for this article were obtained by The New York Times and the PBS series ''Frontline.'' Sections will be broadcast tonight in a ''Frontline'' documentary about Iraq in association with The Times.

Photo: Shabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, a captain in the Iraqi Army who emigrated to Texas, displaying what he says is a map of a camp in Iraq where Islamic terrorists were trained, possibly for attacks against the United States. (Frontline/WGBH)(pg. B2)

Iraq Survey Group
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Survey_Group

The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) was a fact-finding mission sent by the multinational force in Iraq after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to find the alleged weapons of mass destruction alleged to be possessed by Iraq that had been the main ostensible reason for the invasion. Its final report is commonly called the Duelfer Report. It consisted of a 1,400-member international team organized by the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to hunt for the alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological agents, and any supporting research programs and infrastructure that could be used to develop WMD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Survey_Group

David Kay resigns

On 23 January 2004, the head of the ISG, David Kay, resigned his position, stating that he believed WMD stockpiles would not be found in Iraq. "I don't think they existed," commented Kay. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the nineties." In a briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay criticized the pre-war WMD intelligence and the agencies that produced it, saying "It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing."[1] Sometime earlier, CIA director George Tenet had asked David Kay to delay his departure: "If you resign now, it will appear that we don't know what we're doing. That the wheels are coming off."[2]

Kay told the SASC during his oral report the following, though: "Based on the intelligence that existed, I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat. Now that you know reality on the ground as opposed to what you estimated before, you may reach a different conclusion-—although I must say I actually think what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than, in fact, we thought it was even before the war."

Kay's team established that the Iraqi regime had the production capacity and know-how to produce chemical and biological weaponry if international economic sanctions were lifted, a policy change which was actively being sought by a number of United Nations member states. Kay also believed some components of the former Iraqi regime's WMD program had been moved to Syria shortly before the 2003 invasion,[3] though the Duelfer Report Addenda (see below) later reported there was no evidence of this.

On 6 February 2004, George W. Bush convened the Iraq Intelligence Commission, an independent inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the Iraq war and the failure to find WMD. This was shortly followed by the conclusion of a similar inquiry in the United Kingdom, the Butler Review, which was boycotted by the two main opposition parties due to disagreements on its scope and independence.[4] In 2003, the US-sponsored search for WMD had been budgeted for $400 million, with an additional $600 million added in 2004.

Kay's successor, named by CIA director George Tenet, was the former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who stated at the time that the chances of finding any WMD stockpiles in Iraq were "close to nil.

Duelfer Report

On 30 September 2004, the ISG released the Duelfer Report, its final report on Iraq's purported WMD programs. Among its conclusions were:

* Saddam Hussein controlled all of the regime’s strategic decision making.
* Hussein's primary goal from 1991 to 2003 was to have UN sanctions lifted, while maintaining the security of the regime.
* The introduction of the Oil-for-food program (OFF) in late 1996 was a key turning point for the regime.
* By 2000-2001, Saddam had managed to mitigate many of the effects of sanctions and undermine their international support.
* Iran was Iraq's pre-eminent motivator.
* The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) judged that events in the 1980s and early 1990s shaped Saddam’s belief in the value of WMD.
* Saddam ended his nuclear program in 1991. ISG found no evidence of concerted efforts to restart the program, and Iraq’s ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after 1991.
* Iraq destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile in 1991, and only a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions were discovered by the ISG.
* Saddam's regime abandoned its biological weapons program and its ambition to obtain advanced biological weapons in 1995. While it could have re-established an elementary BW program within weeks, ISG discovered no indications it was pursuing such a course.
* Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability, which was essentially destroyed in 1991, after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized. Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability—in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks—but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical chemical warfare (CW) capabilities.