October 13, 2003

Irresponsible, Indefensible and Idiotic

Tennessee Congressman Jimmy Duncan of Knoxville thinks the United States should snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and abandon the people of Iraq, in order to save a little money.

Rep. Jimmy Duncan maintains he has found little reason to change his opposition to the war in Iraq, so it comes as no surprise that he plans to reject President Bush's request for $87 billion to finish the job.

Duncan, a fiscal conservative, worries that the cost of the war will continue to mount. He said it was unconscionable for lawmakers to approve additional funding when the nation's economy remains unstable. He said the president should declare the war over and bring the troops home.

''Most of my constituents believe that the first obligation of the United States Congress is to American taxpayers and citizens,'' Duncan said. "I don't think we should be spending billions in any country except our own.''

Duncan noted that so far there has been no discovery of weapons of mass destruction or credible evidence of programs to produce them. That along with an absence of any firm connection between Iraq and al-Qaida, the terrorist group deemed responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, reinforces his belief that he made the right decision last October, he said.

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:

A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.

Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization and Saddam Hussein's regime shared direct contact as early as 1998, according to top-secret Iraqi intelligence documents obtained by the Star. The documents, discovered yesterday in the bombed-out headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's most feared intelligence service, amount to the first hard evidence of a link long suspected by the United States but dismissed as fiction by many Western leaders.

The handwritten file, three pages in all, relates to the arrival of a secret envoy sent by bin Laden to Iraq in March, 1998, apparently to establish a clandestine relationship with the Iraqi regime. The purpose of the trip was "to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden," according to the final page of the Iraqi document, a handwritten letter dated Feb. 19, 1998.