The Spectator.co.uk - ‘I found Saddam’s WMD bunkers’It would be easy to be dismissive of this.It’s a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It’s also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there never were any WMD programmes in Saddam’s Iraq to justify the war ostensibly waged to protect the world from Saddam’s use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong. Saddam’s WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war.
Easy, and wrong.
Before the invasion, I came up with a design doodled on a slow day that would provide secure, hidden storage of a whole lot of stuff Saddam wouldn't want found, with very quick access when desired.
Build a rectangular, concrete lined pit, 10 feet wide and as long as you'd like. Mold in stairs for easy access. Take a 10 foot by 10 foot steel plate it over with a steel plate, maybe a couple of inches thick, In the middle of the opening for the bunker, embed a howitzer barrel pointed up. Load the howitzer barrel with a blank charge. Fix up a rod about the diameter of the barrel, weld it to the bottom of the steel plate, and slap a reinforcing collar (and maybe some struts) to reinforce the attachment and keep the rod from punching through the steel plate when triggered. Run an electrical ignitor into the charge, make sure the wires go outside to a predetermined point and you've got good continuity. After all, you DO want it to pop when you want access. Load up the bunker, grease the shaft, lower it down into the howitzer barrel, align so the corners match, then slap a foot of sand on top and forget about it until needed.
When desired, dig out the wires at the predetermined point, and apply sufficent current to blow the ignitor. Charge goes off, expelling the metal shaft, forcing the steel plate off with a bang and a shower of sand.
Presto - you have a pop-top bunker. Sweep the stairs, and you're open for business.
Saddam buried planes - why was it so inconceivable that he wouldn't bury other stuff? And if I can come up with the idea of a pop-top bunker, (there's other ways to do it - take a look at the silo door opening system of a Minuteman launcher for one example - anything that'll move a hundred-ton chunk of steel and concrete several hundred feet in a second or two won't have a problem with a couple of dozen tons of sand.) why wouldn't Sadam's engineers have been able to come up with something similar?
Could be they did. Read the whole article - you'll be surprised. And it wouldn't be at all surprising as far as I'm concerned if the search for WMDs were redirected at a critical point - after all, it'd just be damn embarrasing for Bush if no WMDs were found, considering how much emphasis the media put on them and how little emphasis was put on other reasons...
The writer of the piece, "Melanie Phillips" seems to be a bit on the conservative side and not at all tolerant of govermental foolishness.
Hat tip to Instapundit, and OTPU, who pointed this out to me Friday evening.
J.
Comments (1)
One of the indicators of this is from a man I would class as 'troubled': Michael Ware. That said his on-the-ground knowledge of having talked with a wide segment of ex-Saddamists indicates that Saddam had the WMD industry *mothballed*. That is extremely troubling as it indicates that everyone is missing something in Iraq, with such bunkers being only one such instance. Another is a buried area in which one of Saddam's sons had an entire *warehouse* of chemical equipment encased in concrete and buried. Residents have since complained of chemical leaching from the area.
Another venue is the Russian special forces for WMDs that came in a few months before the conflict started and went to the various WMD sites. That info comes from the FMSO document analysis, along with some prior photos of Saddam with Russian weapons and munitions experts from a few years before the war.
Finally there are the convoys of trucks headed to Syria, just prior to the invasion. A very strange thing for long convoys of tractor trailer rigs to be shuttling between Iraq and Syria. Syria has many eminent hiding places and ability to integrate such equipment into their *own* WMD infrastructure. I give their basic list of places, with backup analysis, and a bit of 'how-to-do-it' on finding underground complexes in active use. Suffice it to say that Syria, by going slow but continued growth, has a much worse capability than Iraq had, at its height, mostly due to the readily available raw materials.
Given more than a few weeks to prepare, and the abilities of a Nation available, I can think of a few good ways to hide such things so that they are very, very difficult to find no matter how many people you have to scour the countryside.
Those that wish to decry pre-war INTEL have to join this real world in which INTEL is never 100% certain, always has caveats attached and has multiple outlooks on the same data set of which some are seen as much more likely than others. That said the *known* equipment, stores, stocks and such that Saddam had have never been accounted for properly, and the 'dual use' equipment has shown up as missing. Plus a few places that *did* produce such are clean... forensically cleaned. By professionals.
My odds-on favorite guess for the equipment is Syria. The chemical stocks and such are much more amenable to underground storage, especially in a dry climate. The scientists are also notable by their absence. As are the individuals who worked at such facilities at *any* time.
Where is the equipment?
And where are the people who worked at the facilities?
My guess is we will find out in a pretty gruesome fashion, because ideology and politics are going in front of common sense. And survival instincts.
Posted by ajacksonian | April 27, 2007 1:24 PM
Posted on April 27, 2007 13:24