06-04-2013, 11:13
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חבר מתאריך: 13.11.04
הודעות: 16,823
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לא טק"ק... אבל עדיין עירקי...
The CIA Actually Thought Saddam Had Drones Full of Bioweapons
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/201...one-bioweapons/
ה "האיום"
These drones would “threaten” Iraq’s neighbors, U.S. forces stationed in the Persian Gulf, “and if brought close to, or into, the United States, the US homeland.” (Emphasis in the original.) An analysis of what the document called “special intelligence” allegedly gave reason to believe there was an “Iraqi UAV procurement network” working on buying commercially available mapping software to target America at home with its indigenous drones. At the United Nations, Powell elaborated that Iraq was “developing and testing spray devices that could be adapted for UAVs” to unleash deadly bioweapons.
המציאות
Ten years to the day after the invasion, the bio-drone allegation reads like something out of a fever dream. Saddam had no drone program of any significance. He built something called the RPV-30A, or “al-Quds,” (shown above) a drone with a 24-foot wingspan (shown above) in a few different iterations starting in the late 1990s. When Iraq showed it off to reporters shortly before the invasion, likely as a propaganda ploy, John Burns of the New York Times mocked it as “something out of the Rube Goldberg museum of aeronautical design than anything that could threaten Iraq’s foes.”
Needless to say, it was never weaponized for biological-weapon distribution. Iraq’s biological weapons stocks had mostly been destroyed years before. No nation, in fact, has ever stocked drones with bio-weapons. The estimate actually pre-dated the first-ever drone strike, in Yemen by a U.S. Predator drone, in November 2002. A postwar investigation sponsored by the CIA ultimately concluded that the al-Quds drone program was actually “an initiative to meet an Iraqi military desire for airborne electronic warfare platforms.”
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