Throughout the war coverage, there seems to have been a number of statements reporting “inside” type information, attributed to “intelligence sources”. Is it inferable from this that coalition intelligence has a mole inside the Iraqi command structure? Would this be plausible? If not, where the heck else is intelligence getting their information? Just curious, as the whole “intelligence” game is completely and utterly alien to me.
(And of course, please no comments about the unreliability of the Bush propaganda machine)
I am no expert on the issue but sig-int(signal intellegence or intercept) is a big thing within the military.
Basically the armed forces and the CIA have ways to intercept signals from the bad guys. Messages can be picked up and translated. Knowing what the other guys are talking about and planning is a very handy thing to know.
For example the US banned computer companies from selling 128 bit encryption(SP?) software to certain countries. The reason, at the time, was that the US couldn’t break 128 in a reasonable time so the government didn’t want it to spread to un-friendly countries. (Note, this was back in 1994)
As far as the “Bush propaganda machine” goes, sig-int has been around long before Bush. I doubt that Sadam has such a tight communication system that the US cannot break it. Listening in on what Iraqi commanders are plotting is surely happening.
There is also the possibility that some of Iraqi officers realize that they are going to lose the war and are trying to play both sides.
Totally IIRC, but the government only really stopped enforcing the 128 rule becasue they realized it was impossible to enforce. People anywhere in the world could download readily available, free, and reliable 128 encryption, so there is no point in adding expense for major U.S. companies such as Microsoft who want to export their software without re-writing.
To my knowledge, nobody has the ability to successfully decode 128-bit encryption in a reasonable amount of time, we’ve just given up on attempting to control it.
Then again, the Iraqi’s are probably not communicating with every available security measure. For instance, their telephones are probably vulnerable to Sig-Int.
And this info may be enough to get vague, non-specific information handed down by Mr. Hussein.
A lot of “according to US intelligence sources” news report over the last 2 years have been plants, you know, phony reports. Intended to sway people politically.
I don’t trust any such reports at all anymore. In particular, any reports on Iraq and authorization of WMD (which the OP might be referring to) are highly dubious.
Oddly enough, I have had this same suspicion. very weird you said that.
Also, on NPR this afternoon, I hear we had an active mole program since the gulf war, and that they operate on or near the 3rd ring away from saddam. even 3rd ring is very impressive.
News reports said an Iraqi insider who knew where Saddam was going to sleep last week was the one who gave intel on his whereabouts that led to the Tomahawk strike that may or may not have killed him/injured him.
OK, but I think this applies to any President at war, not just Bush.
More important, in my mind is the question of who’s playing who? Deception is possible at every step of the way. The mole could be two timing, the loyal Iraqis could be tricking the mole by feeding him incorrect information, the story could be a plant by the Americans or British in order to decieve the Iraqis about what they know. Those are just a few scenarios I can picture and I’m sure there a lot more that I can’t imagine. I haven’t even mentioned how false intelligence could be used to affect civilians in the United States and other countries (and I’m picturing both Iraqi and Coalition motives for doing this).
I still find it extraordinary that it would be possible to harm Saddam by a nightime bombing. Surely he would be in nuclear bunkers, far below the earth, during the dark hours?
As an aside, my original comment about the “unreliability of the Bush propaganda machine” wasn’t meant to imply an opinion either way, just that I didn’t want the thread to get hijacked into whether or not media sources would deliberately report lies to further a political agenda. (I probably phrased that a little ambiguously)
But of course this still leaves completely open the possibility of deliberate misinformation on the part of the US for strategic purposes in the intel game.
The mind boggles at all these double-crossing possiblities.
Saddam has survived as long as he has by sleeping in a different location every night. He sleeps in very strong bunkers, but not impenetrable. Our bunker busters can claw their way through 20 feet of concrete before going off - I don’t imagine many bunkers are built to withstand that kind of damage, and I also imagine that he can’t really build a new bunker without a ton of low-level construction workers knowing where it is - Thus, he has to rely on pre-built ones.
Take heart – even if Saddam wasn’t killed or mortally wounded by the 3/19 (3/20 in Iraq) raid, he will surely suffer the effects of all that depleted uranium exploding and vaporizing all around him.
Unfortunately, so will many others throughout Iraq, in the years to come. (And I’m a hawk re. this war.)
As for the OP, it has been reported (as truth? as propoganda?) that Delta Force teams members have tapped into Saddam’s private phone lines running through Baghdad.
There also are reports that many of Saddam’s bunkers are 300 feet deep and beneath schools, churches, mosques, etc. – and that they began construction as early as 1979.
As for how the bombs got in the particular bunker targeted, some reports say that they were used in succession; delayed-fuse bunker-busters first, followed by cruise missiles aiming for the rubble pile.
See, here’s a prime example of my utter ignorance on these matters… does this imply that there really are allieds who are/were covertly in Baghdad sneaking around doing shit? (I realize a lot of this is pure speculation.) Already I’ve got quite an education on bunker busters.
I dunno about the Tomahawks; I was referring to the “bunker busters,” which rely in part on their incredible density (depleted uranium, or “DU,” works as an armor penetrator due to its very heavy mass) to do their stuff. I can’t remember where I read it (and I’m reading tons about the war), but I came across that detail just the other day.
This issue (of the public health risk posed by DU) just came up in a Centcom press conference in the past 24 hours; the Brig. General who was doing the Q&A brushed off the impact [pardon the pun] to both the Iraqis and to the veterans of Gulf War I of DU use. Of course, many American & allied veterans would beg to differ.
There seems to be a lot of unnecessary concern over depleted uranium use by the military. According to what appear to me to be reasonably unbiased sources (such as WHO), radioactivity is a very minor concern (uranium is only mildly radioactive, and depleted uranium has had much of the radioactive isotopes removed). The main medical concern seems to be chemical toxicity (heavy metal poisoning) when DU is present in significant quantity.
When people speak of nuclear bunkers , they are a misnomer. Nothing can stop a nuke from ruining your day if you have one that lands on top of you. So nuke shelters are based on surving a near miss and after effects.
The bunker busters are a weapons with multiple shaped charges to blast down to different levels depending on both charge and downward kinetic energy.
I don’t believe that it was a cruise missile that took him for a ride to the hospital , more like a bunker buster dropped by one of the stealth fighters. According to Fox news ,several days later , the gossip was that a UAV , probably a global hawk was orbiting bagdad and watched as workers frantically dug through the rubble and saddam was taken via ambulance with an oxygen mask to an undisclosed location.
Probably that palace that was leveled over the last several days.
