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The closing days of June bring closer than ever before the danger of Iraqi Baathist guerrillas and al Qaeda letting loose with chemical and biological weapons which most authoritative sources believe they secretly possess. The menace is not limited to Iraqs borders.
A spate of terrorist strikes in Ankara, Antalya, Istanbul and its international airport augurs ill for the 44 world leaders planning to hold their annual NATO summit in Istanbul Monday and Tuesday, June 28-29. The attacks were small in scale and strenuously played down by the Turkish authorities. Nonetheless they marked out the extended reach of the two dangerous organizations and were anxiously watched across the entire Middle East.
The Istanbul summits agenda is dominated by three items of business: 1) Washingtons request for troops and military instructors to train and equip the close to quarter of a million recruits the US administration has enlisted to the new Iraqi army, police and the security forces. 2) A decision on the flag under which the instructors corps will operate UN or NATO. 3) The Bush Middle East Initiative for democratic and economic reform.
Jittery Turkish forces will start breathing only after the flock of world leaders heads for home Tuesday and the security limelight switches back to Baghdad where, a few hours later, the US formally transfers national sovereignty, though not military control, to the interim Iraqi government.
Saturday morning, June 26, a suicide bombers explosive charge blew up prematurely, killing the killer and injuring three at the entrance of the small Hatipoglu hotel in the Antalyan town of Alanya. Local Turkish officials described the incident as a gas explosion in the hotels air-conditioning system that killed a Turkish woman tourist. Western counter-terror sources affirm it was a terrorists work accident.
Friday night, June 25, Turkish police discovered a bomb operated by remote control under a jeep in Istanbul international airports parking section and blew it up by controlled explosion before any harm was caused. The airport authorities denied the incident from first to last.
Thursday, June 24, a bomb exploded not far from the Ankara Hilton where President George W. Bush is due to stay from Saturday night, injuring three and pointing to a chink in the security shield thrown around the US president and other world leaders in Turkey. Bush arrived ahead of the NATO summit for weekend talks with Turkish leaders. Also Thursday, four Turks were killed in a bus blast in Istanbul hastily attributed by Turkish officials to a far left fringe group.
The Ankara Hilton and Istanbul bus bombs were drowned out by the ferocious terrorist attacks against Iraqi police and US targets across five Iraqi cities that claimed more than 100 Iraqi lives, three of them US soldiers, and injured 320 on that same Thursday. The blasts of ten exploding cars were accompanied by the clatter of mortar shells, recoilless grenades, hand grenades and automatic weapons wielded by bands of men in black, the uniform of the dreaded Saddams Fedayeen.
American counter-terror experts comment that the planners who scheduled the NATO summit and Iraqs transition in such close proximity, albeit 1,613 km apart, were governed by political objectives rather security judgment.
Turkish police are taking extreme security precautions across the country, but Turkeys barn door is wide open.
Baghdad and Istanbul are connected by a comfortable modern road system; northern Iraq has good rail and aviation links with Turkey; if the money is right, sophisticated smuggling networks will whisk men, weapons and explosives clandestinely across the border with no questions asked. The border region is seething with a violent admixture of Iraqi guerrillas, Arab fighters from around the Middle East, al Qaeda cells, Turkish Kurdish guerrillas pledged to wage a terror war against Ankara and Turkish extremist groups working with al Qaeda in Iraq, Iran and the Hizballah in Lebanon. This motley assortment of anti-Western elements dominates the lawless border region. For them, slipping back and forth past American and Turkish forces is a cake walk. There is not much to bar them from mounting synchronized terrorist actions in Baghdad and Istanbul or for that matter anywhere else in the Middle East where a partner in the Bush democracy vision, for instance Jordan, Kuwait or Israel, may be targeted.
It would not be the first time Iraqi guerrillas carried out extraterritorial operations in Qaedas service. In mid-April, a band was apprehended preparing a large chemical attack on behalf of their fundamentalist allies in Amman. Then, on April 21, Iraqi guerrillas were contracted to execute the double bomb car assault on Saudi General Intelligence headquarters in Riyadh which is charge of fighting terrorism, killing nine Saudi intelligence officers some very senior - and injuring 125. The Iraqis crossed in to the kingdom via Kuwait.
Five weeks later, on May 29, al Qaeda again drew on its Iraqi partners-in-terror for aid in its hostage-taking shooting operation in the eastern Saudi town of Khobar that ended in the slaughter of nine foreign oil workers taken hostage and another 13 deaths. Iraqis drove the cars into Saudi Arabia via Kuwait bringing with them weapons and explosives.
Sources quotes senior counter-terror official as saying: In the current situation, no security authority in any Middle East country or even Europe can take it for granted that his sector is not targeted by an Iraqi or al Qaeda terrorist cell. Turkish towns come immediately to mind, but so too do Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Rome and London.
US and Turkish security planners hope they can ward off a long-range mortar or improvised rocket barrage on the Ankara Hilton or the Istanbul hotel hosting the US President, on the lines of the Iraqi insurgents blast against Baghdads Rashid Hotel during visits by US officials. They also fear hijacked airliners crashing into one of the hotels hosting the US president like the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.
The unspoken menace hanging over every scenario is provided by the unmarked 155-mm artillery shell containing sarin nerve gas that a US convoy encountered on May 15 on the road to Baghdad airport. Washington and the US military command in Iraq do not doubt, according to our military and intelligence sources, that the Baath guerrillas, the al Qaeda terrorists swarming in Fallujah and around the Sunni Triangle and the Shiite rebel Moqtada Sadr have access to Saddams leftover caches of sarin and mustard gas and know how to pack the toxic substances into explosive charges.
The prevailing intelligence assumption today, according to our sources, is that the terrorists will bring these banned weapons out around the date of the transition - the last week of June or early July - and use them in Iraq or outside the country.
This danger was directly addressed by Charles Duelfer, head of the US Iraqi Survey team assigned with the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, in an interview with Fox TV on Thursday, June 24. He revealed the discovery by his group of at least ten or twelve artillery shells filled with sarin and mustard, adding that they are finding new WMD evidence almost every day. Even if the shells had degraded over time, he stressed, they were still capable of killing dozens of people. He warned both soldiers and civilians in Iraq to carry gas masks and have access to chem-bio suits. Instructions to this effect have been issued to American troops in Iraq.
Originally posted by Kathianne
Debka's right about 30% of the time, but hey keep your eyes opened.
Originally posted by ajwps
Yep Debka Files report events that are usually reported about three days prior to making it to world news sources.
Debka is much like Drudge Report. Who broke the Monica/Clinton story. Was it ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN that picked up on the Drudge report or vice versa?
Who first reported that the Iraqi WMD were hidden in the Bekk'a valley of Lebanon and some buried in Syria long before they are now becoming known to the world?
Originally posted by ajwps
Yep Debka Files report events that are usually reported about three days prior to making it to world news sources.
Debka is much like Drudge Report. Who broke the Monica/Clinton story. Was it ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN that picked up on the Drudge report or vice versa?
Who first reported that the Iraqi WMD were hidden in the Bekk'a valley of Lebanon and some buried in Syria long before they are now becoming known to the world?
Debka is excellent on reporting on Israeli. Very good on the ME. Little less so for here and Europe, but he/they have their ear to the ground, so I wouldn't discount what they say.
June 27, 2004
I'VE WRITTEN -- both here and elsewhere -- about the importance of a decentralized response to terrorism and disasters. Winds of Change has a post on disaster preparedness, and you might also find this earlier article of mine on the subject useful. You might want to read this, too. And go here, and scroll up, for personal survival tips from Amy Langfield.
posted at 09:12 AM by Glenn Reynolds
Originally posted by Kathianne
This was brought up during the night and I responded about my thoughts on Debka:
Now I find this, Lotsa links:
http://instapundit.com/
Maybe something is up?
Originally posted by Comrade
That's a great Blog. I really like this one as well:
http://www.indcjournal.com/
You absolutely have to check out the Moonbat series... this guy goes to protests and has a whole video series on "Moonbats in the Midst". Hilarious.
Start here...
http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/000524.php
:
Originally posted by Kathianne
Debka is excellent on reporting on Israeli. Very good on the ME. Little less so for here and Europe, but he/they have their ear to the ground, so I wouldn't discount what they say.
Don't remember which outlet picked up the Drudge Report on Clinton.
Originally posted by ajwps
Matt Drudge was the source that broke the story about Bill and Monica affair.
Originally posted by freeandfun1
This is like the third time a thread has been started on this but each time it has gotten little attention. I hope this time we can at least start discussing this.
As I said in my first post on this matter, I believe the WMD's are in Fallujah. Keep your eyes on that place. Danger Will Robinson - Danger!
Originally posted by Kathianne
I know that, you said it earlier, the question you asked me is which of the mainstream media picked up on it. I don't recall.
Originally posted by freeandfun1
This is like the third time a thread has been started on this but each time it has gotten little attention. I hope this time we can at least start discussing this.
As I said in my first post on this matter, I believe the WMD's are in Fallujah. Keep your eyes on that place. Danger Will Robinson - Danger!
Here is an instance when I agree with you!Originally posted by ajwps
It is my belief that this thread topic of WMDs with Saddam will receive more and more attention the closer November 04 comes.
If any rational person believes that Saddam Husein rid himself of WMD's because the UN asked him kindly to do so, then they will believe anything that the New York Times, CNN and the Los Angeles Times says.
The PT Barnum quote remains fully operational to this day. There is a sucker born born every minute.
Oh, I agree about Syria too. But something strange is going on in Fallujah. Suddenly we backed out of that city for some uknown reason. I think we might have been threatened with the use of chemical weapons or something like that. Notice we didn't back down in the South against al Sadr. There is something going on in Fallujah that made us back down there pretty quickly.Originally posted by Kathianne
I think that's a real possibility. So too is Syria.
Originally posted by freeandfun1
Oh, I agree about Syria too. But something strange is going on in Fallujah. Suddenly we backed out of that city for some uknown reason. I think we might have been threatened with the use of chemical weapons or something like that. Notice we didn't back down in the South against al Sadr. There is something going on in Fallujah that made us back down there pretty quickly.
Zarquawi or whatever his name is recently threatened to use chemical weapons on an Arabic website. I saw the story on CNN once but not again since.
Originally posted by freeandfun1
Oh, I agree about Syria too. But something strange is going on in Fallujah. Suddenly we backed out of that city for some uknown reason. I think we might have been threatened with the use of chemical weapons or something like that. Notice we didn't back down in the South against al Sadr. There is something going on in Fallujah that made us back down there pretty quickly.
Zarquawi or whatever his name is recently threatened to use chemical weapons on an Arabic website. I saw the story on CNN once but not again since.
Originally posted by ajwps
The answer to that question of why the Coalition has backed out of Fallujah may not be as mysterious as you think. The US Air Force has bombed the city and killed a number of militants. Do you think that the Coalition wants their soldiers in this city if there is something afoot that is akin to WW2's Dresden. An all out air destruction of this city where this Zarquawi (with a 10 milliion dollar bounty on his head) is thought to be holed up in a Mosque hiding from superior forces. All he and his brave insurgents can do is kill from ambush.
How would you feel about the Air Force destroying this city with fire from the sky?
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040625174533.zungzg41.html
Originally posted by Kathianne
My memory may be faulty, but isn't it in the area of chemical/phamaceutical plants? Perhaps Pegwinn can help us out here.
With that aside, I really think it was more a matter of politicos interference. Seems to me the Marines were none too happy about it. Just my opinion.
Originally posted by ajwps
Kathianne what makes you think that a city with chemical or pharmaceutical plants simply is the only city in which WMD projectiles are stored for use against the infidel army arrayed against them?
No I think that the US military and colation forces are more likely to fight this battle for a new Iraq in a conventional manner in which the enemy forces are simply annihilated along with the innocent collateral citizens of Fallujah.
