I normally like to post good news here however it is often that I find some important information that is not so good. This is one of those occasions. It seems that one of the most ruthless gangs from Central america has made it's way to the USA. I know they have been here for many years but the antee has been upped. Now it looks as though they may have an alliance with Al Quaida. Check out the story here. For more detailed information on this dangerous and super violent gang you can click here.
Another important story you will not hear on CBS, ABC, NBC or the rest of the old media was actually reported by the New York Times last weekend. It seems that the illusive facilities to create WMD from Iraq were actually there and were then spirited away during the first days of the war to a neighboring state. Hmmm, seems like me and a zillion other people have been saying this all along but Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and the Dims in Washington were not quite bright enough to figure this one out. Well, perhaps they really knew it but had another agenda. Naaa, that couldn't be true could it??? The link may not work so I will give you the full story. The real story here is that this is meant to be critical to the Bush administration yet it actually verifies what they said all along about Sadaam's WMD program. Looks like the NYT has shot themselves right in the foot here.
By: James Glanz and William J. Broad
NYT March 13, 2005
In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting.
The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away.
Dr. Araji said his account was based largely on observations by government employees and officials who either worked at the sites or lived near them.
"They came in with the cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites," Dr. Araji said. "They knew what they were doing; they knew what they want. This was sophisticated looting."
The threat posed by these types of facilities was cited by the Bush administration as a reason for invading Iraq, but the installations were left largely unguarded by allied forces in the chaotic months after the invasion.
Dr. Araji's statements came just a week after a United Nations agency disclosed that approximately 90 important sites in Iraq had been looted or razed in that period.
Satellite imagery analyzed by two United Nations groups - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or Unmovic - confirms that some of the sites identified by Dr. Araji appear to be totally or partly stripped, senior officials at those agencies said. Those officials said they could not comment on all of Dr. Araji's assertions, because the groups had been barred from Iraq since the invasion.
For nearly a year, the two agencies have sent regular reports to the United Nations Security Council detailing evidence of the dismantlement of Iraqi military installations and, in a few cases, the movement of Iraqi gear to other countries. In addition, a report issued last October by the chief American arms inspector in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, told of evidence of looting at crucial sites.
The disclosures by the Iraqi ministry, however, added new information about the thefts, detailing the timing, the material taken and the apparent skill shown by the thieves.
Dr. Araji said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on unconventional weapons. After the invasion, occupation forces found no unconventional arms, and C.I.A. inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
Dr. Araji said he had no evidence regarding where the equipment had gone. But his account raises the possibility that the specialized machinery from the arms establishment that the war was aimed at neutralizing had made its way to the black market or was in the hands of foreign governments.
"Targeted looting of this kind of equipment has to be seen as a proliferation threat," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a private nonprofit organization in Washington that tracks the spread of unconventional weapons.
Dr. Araji said he believed that the looters themselves were more interested in making money than making weapons.
The United Nations, worried that the material could be used in clandestine bomb production, has been hunting for it, largely unsuccessfully, across the Middle East. In one case, investigators searching through scrap yards in Jordan last June found specialized vats for highly corrosive chemicals that had been tagged and monitored as part of the international effort to keep watch on the Iraqi arms program. The vessels could be used for harmless industrial processes or for making chemical weapons.
end
This is just part of the article but you may get the point from it. If these so called looters could come in and move all this equipment right under out noses hard hard would it have been to move out WMD at the same time or in the months prior to this.
Gotta run, more on this to come!
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