OP/ED: Official Who Tied Russia to Iraqs WMD is Ousted by Pentagon

A Pentagon official, John A. Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, and formerly an aide to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was dismissed from his job for disclosing information that Russia was tied to the dissapearance of Iraq's WMD. According to Mr. Shaw he was asked to resign for "exceeding his authority" by releasing the information to the public. Mr. Shaw also states that this information on the Russian involvement in moving the weapons from Iraq, was discussed with retired Air Force Lt. Gen. james clapper, the head of Great Britain's MI6, and another foreign intelligence officer whose name Mr. Shaw did not disclose.



Mr. Shaw is also allegating that several department of defense figures are corrupted and have been working on suppresing the information he had uncovered. In his allegations he singled out Mr. Rumsfeld's chief of staff, Larry DiRita. Dirita denied any of the charges and stated that Mr. Shaw was directed to produce evidence to the DoD inspector general, and he has provided none.

As i was searching for any evidence that would validate any of the allegations of Mr. Shaw, I also found the following information.

According to the Russian website www.gazeta.ru, former Soviet generals have also admitted that, just days before the beginning of the U.S.-led campaign against Iraq, they received state awards from Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. These are senior retired Soviet officers, General (three-star) Vladimir Achalov and General (also three-star) Igor Maltsev. Achalov, former Soviet deputy defense minister, participated in the failed putsch against then-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. He was also the Soviet airborne-troops commander and the last Soviet commander-in-chief of the rapid-reaction forces. Maltsev, who is considered a leading authority in air defense, was the chief of the Main Staff of the Soviet Air Defense. He is also a pardoned 1991 coup plotter.

Russian defense sources in Moscow told NRO that both retired generals had to obtain permission from top-level Russian political and military authorities to perform their advisory roles. Thus Russia's official denials that the Kremlin did not know about the "mission to Baghdad" can only sound hollow.

Excerpted from.
www.nationalreview.com...

Now, there are also allegations that Mr. Shaw has dealt in some shady businesses, but i am not sure what to make of the following information, since at least part of what Mr. shaw says, seems to be true as the national review link above clearly demonstrates.

The Washington Times dropped to the bottom of the integrity scale by leading with a story that definitively blamed the loss of hundreds of tons of high explosives (HE) on the Russian military. Their story was based mainly on the views of one controversial Pentagon staffer, John A. "Jack" Shaw.

Earlier this year Shaw was reportedly involved in a controversy involving the former Iraqi golden boy and now criminal, Ahmed Chalabi. The scandal involved the awarding of cell phone contracts to three companies with close ties to Chalibi. According to the L.A. Times, he was put under investigation by the FBI.

Excerpted from.
www.washingtondispatch.com...





Related News Links:
www.nationalreview.com
www.2la.org
www.washtimes.com


[edit on 31-12-2004 by Banshee]

There are many stories of Russian complicity in violating the UN arms embargo in place prior to the Invasion of Iraq such as,

Evidence of Russian Arms in Iraq

WASHINGTON -- US officials have found evidence corroborating White House allegations that Russian companies sold Saddam Hussein high-tech military equipment that threatened US forces during the invasion of Iraq last March, a senior State Department official said yesterday.

The official said the United States has found proof that Russian companies exported night-vision goggles and radar-jamming equipment to Iraq, the official said. The evidence includes the equipment itself and proof that it was used during the war, according to the official. Such exports would violate the terms of United Nations sanctions against Iraq.

"We have corroborated some of that evidence," the official told a group of reporters.

While insisting that the matter is "now in the past," he said that the Bush administration "never received entirely satisfactory explanations" of its charges, and that the issue "is still a sensitive one in the relationship."

"It's an issue that, shall we say, did not do much for strengthening trust," the official added.

This article was from January of 2004 and lends credence to Shaws allegation of a desire to suppress embarrassing information in regards to Russia and its role in pre-war Iraq.

Then there is this story from Otober 28, 2004 directly speaking of Russian role in helping Iraq move its WMD to other countries just before the start of the war as alledged by Shaw.

Washinton Times

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.
John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

Probably the very story that got shaw in trouble at the pentagon.

Also in 1998,
Iraq Sought Russian Arms Technology

After the Iraqi officials' visit, Orlov and Potter said, the middleman Gharbiyeh remained in Moscow completing the deals, and returned to Baghdad in early 1995 where "he drafted new contracts with his Iraqi sponsors based on the November protocols." The contracts with the Karama company alone totaled more than $65 million, they said.

They also recount how Gharbiyeh returned to Russia to purchase the gyroscopes from a missile destruction factory in Sergiyev Posad, a town north of Moscow. According to the authors, he went so far as to have the gyroscopes tested and certified at a special facility in Moscow. He then arranged for the export out of Moscow's lone international airport of 800 sensitive missile gyroscopes and accelerometers to Amman.

The gyroscopes were seized in November 1995 in Amman by Jordanian authorities acting on intelligence information from U.N. disarmament experts. The discovery of the gyroscopes was an early and significant indication that Iraq was attempting to acquire forbidden weapons during the U.N. disarmament inspections. Iraqi authorities later arrested Gharbiyeh in Baghdad after the defection to Jordan of Hussein Kamel Hassan Majeed, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, who was later assassinated upon his return to Iraq. The reason for Gharbiyeh's arrest is unclear, and his whereabouts are unknown.

Orlov and Potter said not all of the gyroscopes have been accounted for. The devices came from Russia's SS-N-18 missiles. Of the 800 components that arrived in Amman, 240 were strategic missile gyroscopes and 240 were accelerometers. However, only 120 gyroscopes and 120 accelerometers were seized in Jordan, they said. An additional 33 gyroscopes and 26 accelerometers were pulled out of the Tigris River in Baghdad by U.N. arms inspectors on Dec. 9, 1995. That means about 180 gyroscopes and accelerometers -- enough for 30 missile guidance systems -- are unaccounted for, they said.

Russia given its extreme need for foreign exchange in the 1990's surely had to motive to sell any and all weapons technology it could manage to "cash" paying customers such as Saddam Hussien flush with money from the UN oil for food program.

The need for a political "deal" for the US to not divulge Russias complicity shoud be apparent to all when Russias cooperation is now needed in the war on terror.

Maybe one of the reasons "no wmd was found" and "no follow up on Syrias role" have as yet happened from an official US standpoint.

Why is that good man fired, doesn't Rumsfeld want to invade Syria? and get the "told you so WMD" ?????

oh wait there is not enough oil in Syria to pay for the invasion...


[edit on 31-12-2004 by Countermeasures]

Great Find Muaddib


There are alot of questions about the WMD that many foreign Intell services believed to be there. And plenty of countries *cough France * sold them stuff up untill the eve of the war. Now the question is why fire the guy??

Rumsfield is a egocentric guy. Perhaps the intel is very very real, but he did fire him for gettin out of line, not so much what he said, but how he said it etc. or this was orchestrated to send a message to Putin. Notice how he really backed off of hte Ukraine situation even after he had to eat crow?

That's a very interesting post.

It seems Mr Shaw is raking up stuff the US would rather keep buried. They don't want to stir up their relationship with Russia in public.

One point I would make though is that the original post talks about WMD, but there are no details of what these were? Later theres talk of High Exploseives, but this isn't really the same thing. Wpi;d be interesting to know just what the Russians took away with them.

The high explosives which were, and in a way still are a controversy, are used on atomic weapons mostly, as well as construction sites.... Valhall gave us the account of a friend of hers who is an expert in these explosives, and if my memory serves me, his opinion was that if these explosives were found in Iraq they were up to no good and were to be used for wmd. These would be like discovering trigger mechanisms that can only be used in atomic weapons.

We also found discrepancies in the amounts of explosives that were reported by the Iraqi interim government and the amount of explosives that IAEA last reported before the war. The new interim government of Iraq reported amounts of explosives exceeding what the documents of IAEA reported before the war, meaning that more explosives were acquired by Saddam after the UN sanctions were put in place. This fact, together with the evidence we now have that Russia, China, France, Germany and some other countries were making illegal deals with Iraq through the OFF program, (Oil For Food program) and were selling to Saddam/Iraq illegal weapons and materials which were banned by the UN sanctions. Also, we know that many of the UN staff were directly involved, and were making money with these illegal deals, including Anan (the Secretary General to the UN) his son, and many other members of the UN.

Another thing I found is that UNMOVIC, the group which claimed to have found no real evidence of a wmd program in Iraq, was paid with the dirty money from OFF, which is why i think their findings were so different from what the UNSCOM group found up to 1999. Both UNMOVIC and UNSCOM were UN commissions that investigated Iraq's wmd programs.

UNSCOM was the first group which found many discrepancies on what Saddam/Iraq were reporting with their wmd programs and found tons of these weapons were missing. The UNMOVIC commission came later, it was paid off with money from OFF (Oil For Food) and in the overall, even though they reported many banned materials, including banned rockets, said they did not have definitive proof that there were any wmd programs or stockpiles in Iraq after the first gulf war. Knowing that so many members of the UN staff are corrupted and they were bribed by Saddam, I think it is more than safe to conclude that the UNMOVIC commission was also corrupted and bribed. They were being paid with the same dirty money from OFF which made richer so many people in those countries which opposed the war, meanwhile 560,000 Iraqis, mostly children, died from the peaceful UN sanctions, appart from the 500,000 to 1,000,000 Iraqis which Saddam killed.



[edit on 1-1-2005 by Muaddib]

If they had satellite photographs of the trucks getting ready to move the stuff then why don't they know where the stuff is. Didn't somone think to follow them? Maybe a spy plane or satellite follow the trucks to see where they are going. I don't belive this crap for a minute anyways. If they had them I gurantee we would have made sure to know at all times where they were.

Originally posted by Hoppinmad1
If they had satellite photographs of the trucks getting ready to move the stuff then why don't they know where the stuff is. Didn't somone think to follow them? Maybe a spy plane or satellite follow the trucks to see where they are going. I don't belive this crap for a minute anyways. If they had them I gurantee we would have made sure to know at all times where they were.

This thread by Agent47 discusses your question in great detail, makes for some interesting reading.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by Hoppinmad1
If they had satellite photographs of the trucks getting ready to move the stuff then why don't they know where the stuff is. Didn't somone think to follow them? Maybe a spy plane or satellite follow the trucks to see where they are going. I don't belive this crap for a minute anyways. If they had them I gurantee we would have made sure to know at all times where they were.

You believe whatever you want to believe, the evidence is there to prove that your suspicion is wrong...

Satellites are not controlled by us as many people seem to think....
They follow an orbit and we can only see areas that they are passing over. Many times do we have to wait until one of the satellites crosses an area for us to see what is happening there.

Using aircraft for reconnaissance missions is almost the same, we have to know more or less the areas that we want to look at. The border of Syria and Iraq is immense....is not like we have only 5 miles to cover....and there is also the tunnels that exist in these borders... You can find reference to those tunnels in one of the links that Phoenix gave above.

Many people are naive to think things are simple, well they never are.

If you look at the article I gave from National Review you will see that one of the retired generals who is still working for the Russians was involved in the "supposed communist plot" in Russia back in 1991.....

I can't believe so many people can't see through that sham.... those communist plotters were all pardoned..... Most Russian officials that were in power when the world knew that the U.S.S.R. was communist are still in power, or the power was given to who they thought would be the best leaders in Russia, like Putin.....who was a member of the KGB back in the days.

I do believe that we don't want this to be public knowledge because we can't really have a war yet with Russia, i think our government is trying to avoid this, although Russia and China seem to be working together pretty hard for a confrontation with the US to happen....

Now we are taking care of those countires which the Russian and Chinese government, among others, are using to fight against the west.

It doesn't sound possible but all the evidence seems to point to this or something like it.

---edited to add comment and correct errors---

[edit on 1-1-2005 by Muaddib]