After watching the ABC “Nightline” report on Wednesday, which provided a sneak preview of some the Saddam tapes featured by the bi-partisan Intelligence Summit over the weekend, I found a few things to be clear:  ABC, working from what some experts believe was a bad translation* and providing viewers with no chronological or global context for the snatches of audio (for instance, it would have been useful to know where the US was in their plans for Iraq, or what the UN was saying at the time of a given clip), chose to frame the story, fairly predictably, I’d say, as inconclusive; and other intel officials have concluded that the tapes tell us nothing new—that they are consistent with the findings of the Duelfer Report, which noted that Saddam had gotten rid of his WMD but maintaining the capability to reconstitute the weapons programs as soon as the international community turned its attention elsewhere.

After watching the “Nightline” report, I noted that what we learned—from Saddam’s own lips—was that the inspections weren‘t working, regardless of whether or one concludes Hussein was stockpiling biological and chemical weapons:  again and again, we heard Saddam and his aides discoursing on how they were able to fool inspectors with subterfuge and misdirection.  And, if you believe some of the alternate translations, Saddam’s admission that Iraq would never use such chemical or biological attacks on the US (a conclusion favored by ABC and Newsweek), actually supports the Bush administration’s fears—and our primary reason for invading Iraq:  that the greatest danger posed by Iraq was Saddam’s willingness to farm these weapons out to terrorist groups for use, removing Iraq’s state fingerprints. 

Listening to the tapes, you are left with one of two choices:  you either believe Saddam was a self-important (though largely internationally impotent) iron-fisted ruler who posed no threat to the US, for all his bluster to the contrary; or else you believe him to be precisely the man he’s always been:  a murderous tyrant who would use whatever means at his disposal—including alliances of convenience—to attack the US and its interests.

But there’s more even than that.  Not being talked about much are the stories of two former Iraqi commanders who insist weapons stockpiles—which, critics of the Bush administration are forced to argue, either never existed (which the Kurds would naturally dispute) or else were voluntarily destroyed under orders from Hussein (or, if you prefer, by those risking their lives by hiding from him the fact of their destructions) shortly after the Gulf War—were removed to Syria and the existence of the programs scrubbed before the invasion, a story that is consistent with some of the findings by inspectors:  equipment buried in rose gardens, dual use facilities sanitized, etc.

Also not being talked about is a story from the Intelligence Summit detailing a claim by former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw claiming that Russia helped Saddam move his weapons to Syria and hide evidence of their existence.  From Newsmax (which, regardless of what you think of it as a source, is here simply reporting on the Summit):

A top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein “cleaned up” his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from discovering them.

“The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon,” former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored “Intelligence Summit” in Alexandria, Va.

“They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence,” he said.

Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S. government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security when the events he described today occurred.

He called the evacuation of Saddam’s WMD stockpiles “a well-orchestrated campaign using two neighboring client states with which the Russian leadership had a long time security relationship.”

Shaw was initially tapped to make an inventory of Saddam’s conventional weapons stockpiles, based on intelligence estimates of arms deals he had concluded with the former Soviet Union, China and France.

He estimated that Saddam had amassed 100 million tons of munitions – roughly 60 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal. “The origins of these weapons were Russian, Chinese and French in declining order of magnitude, with the Russians holding the lion’s share and the Chinese just edging out the French for second place.”

But as Shaw’s office increasingly got involved in ongoing intelligence to identify Iraqi weapons programs before the war, he also got “a flow of information from British contacts on the ground at the Syrian border and from London” via non-U.S. government contacts.

“The intelligence included multiple sitings of truck convoys, convoys going north to the Syrian border and returning empty,” he said.

Shaw worked closely with Julian Walker, a former British ambassador who had decades of experience in Iraq, and an unnamed Ukranian-American who was directly plugged in to the head of Ukraine’s intelligence service.

The Ukrainians were eager to provide the United States with documents from their own archives on Soviet arms transfers to Iraq and on ongoing Russian assistance to Saddam, to thank America for its help in securing Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, Shaw said.

In addition to the convoys heading to Syria, Shaw said his contacts “provided information about steel drums with painted warnings that had been moved to a cellar of a hospital in Beirut.”

But when Shaw passed on his information to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and others within the U.S. intelligence community, he was stunned by their response.

“My report on the convoys was brushed off as ‘Israeli disinformation,’” he said.

One month later, Shaw learned that the DIA general counsel complained to his own superiors that Shaw had eaten from the DIA “rice bowl.” It was a Washington euphemism that meant he had commited the unpardonable sin of violating another agency’s turf.

The CIA responded in even more diabolical fashion. “They trashed one of my Brits and tried to declare him persona non grata to the intelligence community,” Shaw said. “We got constant indicators that Langley was aggressively trying to discredit both my Ukranian-American and me in Kiev,” in addition to his other sources.

But it was Shaw’s own friendship to the head of Britain’s MI6 that brought it all together during a two-day meeting in London that included Smeshko’s people, the MI6 contingent, and Clapper, who had been deputized by George Tenet to help work the issue of what happened to Iraq’s WMD stockpiles.

In the end, here is what Shaw learned:

# In December 2002, former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, came to Iraq and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

# Primakov supervised the execution of long-standing secret agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU (military intelligence), that provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel to remove WMDs, production materials and technical documentation from Iraq, so the regime could announce that Iraq was “WMD free.”

# Shaw said that this type GRU operation, known as “Sarandar,” or “emergency exit,” has long been familiar to U.S. intelligence officials from Soviet-bloc defectors as standard GRU practice.

# In addition to the truck convoys, which carried Iraqi WMD to Syria and Lebanon in February and March 2003 “two Russian ships set sail from the (Iraqi) port of Umm Qasr headed for the Indian Ocean,” where Shaw believes they “deep-sixed” additional stockpiles of Iraqi WMD from flooded bunkers in southern Iraq that were later discovered by U.S. military intelligence personnel.

# The Russian “clean-up” operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq “under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants.”

# Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported on Oct. 30, 2004, that Achatov and Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in a Baghdad building bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first U.S. air raids in early March 2003.

# Shaw says he leaked the information about the two Russian generals and the clean-up operation to Gertz in October 2004 in an effort to “push back” against claims by Democrats that were orchestrated with CBS News to embarrass President Bush just one week before the November 2004 presidential election. The press sprang bogus claims that 377 tons of high explosives of use to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program had “gone missing” after the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, while ignoring intelligence of the Russian-orchestrated evacuation of Iraqi WMDs.

# The two Russian generals “had visited Baghdad no fewer than 20 times in the preceding five to six years,” Shaw revealed. U.S. intelligence knew “the identity and strength of the various Spetsnaz units, their dates of entry and exit in Iraq, and the fact that the effort (to clean up Iraq’s WMD stockpiles) with a planning conference in Baku from which they flew to Baghdad.”

# The Baku conference, chaired by Russian Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu, “laid out the plans for the Sarandar clean-up effort so that Shoigu could leave after the keynote speech for Baghdad to orchestrate the planning for the disposal of the WMD.”

# Subsequent intelligence reports showed that Russian Spetsnaz operatives “were now changing to civilian clothes from military/GRU garb,” Shaw said. “The Russian denial of my revelations in late October 2004 included the statement that “only Russian civilians remained in Baghdad.” That was the “only true statement” the Russians made, Shaw ironized.

The evacuation of Saddam’s WMD to Syria and Lebanon “was an entirely controlled Russian GRU operation,” Shaw said. “It was the brainchild of General Yevgenuy Primakov.”

The goal of the clean-up was “to erase all trace of Russian involvement” in Saddam’s WMD programs, and “was a masterpiece of military camouflage and deception.”

Just as astonishing as the Russian clean-up operation were efforts by Bush administration appointees, including Defense Department spokesman Laurence DiRita, to smear Shaw and to cover up the intelligence information he brought to light.

“Larry DiRita made sure that this story would never grow legs,” Shaw said. “He whispered sotto voce [quietly] to journalists that there was no substance to my information and that it was the product of an unbalanced mind.”

Shaw suggested that the answer of why the Bush administration had systematically “ignored Russia’s involvement” in evacuating Saddam’s WMD stockpiles “could be much bigger than anyone has thought,” but declined to speculate what exactly was involved.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney was less reticent. He thought the reason was Iran.

“With Iran moving faster than anyone thought in its nuclear programs,” he told NewsMax, “the administration needed the Russians, the Chinese and the French, and was not interested in information that would make them look bad.”

McInerney agreed that there was “clear evidence” that Saddam had WMD. “Jack Shaw showed when it left Iraq, and how.”

Former Undersecretary of Defense Richard Perle, a strong supporter of the war against Saddam, blasted the CIA for orchestrating a smear campaign against the Bush White House and the war in Iraq.

“The CIA has been at war with the Bush administration almost from the beginning,” he said in a keynote speech at the Intelligence Summit on Saturday.

He singled out recent comments by Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East analyst, alleging that the Bush White House “cherry-picked” intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq.

“Mr. Pillar was in a very senior position and was able to make his views known, if that is indeed what he believed,” Perle said.

“He (Pillar) briefed senior policy officials before the start of the Iraq war in 2003. If he had had reservations about the war, he could have voiced them at that time.” But according to officials briefed by Pillar, Perle said, he never did.

Even more inexplicable, Perle said, were the millions of documents “that remain untranslated” among those seized from Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services.

“I think the intelligence community does not want them to be exploited,” he said.

Among those documents, presented Saturday at the conference by former FBI translator Bill Tierney, were transcripts of Saddam’s palace conversations with top aides in which he discussed ongoing nuclear weapons plans in 2000, well after the U.N. arms inspectors believed he had ceased all nuclear weapons work.

“What was most disturbing in those tapes,” Tierney said, “was the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special Commission.”

Of course, the tapes are now available online, and each of you is invited to listen to them (and those of you who speak Arabic are welcome listen to them untranslated (there are 8 files in all). 

Unfortunately, the laying of the groundwork over the last several years of the “official” story about a Iraq having no WMDs—a story that has ossified into historical fact, and is now part of the established record or the war—has already been so widely accepted that at least half of the electorate (and particulary, the vocal the anti-Bushies) will dismiss it out of hand by impugning the players: Tierney, Shaw, Perle [Fukuyama’s lengthy critique of neoconservatism, the majority of which argument Andrew Sullivan is aligning himself, is particularly interesting insofar as it seems to pine for the days of foreign policy realism and the coddling of dictators for stability; in that sense, Fukuyama not far away from today’s mainstream party Democrat on foreign policy, who in turn is approaching the neo-isolationist tendencies of Pat Buchanan and his ilk; for rejoiners, see Rick Moran, James Joyner, Roger Simon, and Condi Rice (via Greg Djerejian)], and Loftus.  Similarly, they’ll dismiss the stories of former Iraqi commanders Georges Sada and Ali Ibrahim (see, too, “Nizar Nayuf (Nayyouf-Nayyuf), a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, who on January 5 wrote the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, to say he knows the three sites where Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) are kept”) who will be painted as either opportunistic purveyors of misinformation, or else intel plants meant to muddy the waters.

So powerful has this narrative become, in fact, that just to be on the safe side, even those of us on the right who remain skeptical about the pristine condition of Saddam’s Iraq despite our “rush” to war (and despite the unearthing of chem suits, etc, in our advance to Baghdad) are approaching revelations from the Intelligence Summit with a healthy dose of dubiousness (in fact, several conservatives, like Debbie Schlussel, pulled out of the Summit)—most especially because two of the prime players involved, organizer John Loftus and former spook Bill Tierney, have, in the past, proven to go a bit heavy on the tinfoil headgear.

For my part, I’m going to break with my more cautious right-leaning brethren and warn that, because we have been conditioned to fear looking eager and foolish with regard to the WMD situation in Iraq, we should maintain our skepticism while also keeping our minds open.

Many of us are now convinced that the Security Council roadblock thrown up by the French was a product of their involvement in the Oil for Food scandal.  To a lesser extent, we believed the same of Russia. 

So before we are too quick to dismiss all this as the chasing of ghosts, we might want to decide how reliable we find former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John Shaw and his sources; we also might wish to factor our (quite warranted) distrust of the entrenched CIA bureaucracy into the mix:  how much of what we believe or disbelieve now about Saddam’s WMD program has to do with the finessing of the narrative by Langley.

And finally, this:  is it plausible, as others have speculated, that the need for a strong international coalition to deal with Iran’s accelerated nuclear ambitions has convinced many in the US foreign policy camp to eat crow on WMD—at least for the time being—in exchange for promises of assistance from those countries who we know may have been participating in backroom deals with Saddam?

I don’t know.  But I think it a mistake to dismiss out of hand some of what the Summit exposed simply because we wish to distance ourselves from the nutjobs and appear, by comparison, sane and evenhanded.  Which is only to say that in our care to maintain our intellectual honesty, we need to guard against allowing our skepticism to overwhelm our curiousity.

(Here’s CNN’s report on the Summit; and to save you some digging, here’s some “dirt” on Shaw, which, read a particular way, bolsters his tale.  For more on this story, see PJ WMD Files—which right now features Andrew Marcus’ interview with Congressman Hoekstra, chairman of the Select House Intelligence Committee.)