I find that they are whining a bit too much here, dont you think?
MOSCOW (AP) – Russia’s foreign minister accused the United States on Monday of having “hidden political motives” for a report that said Moscow turned over information on American military plans to Saddam Hussein during the invasion of Iraq.
Sergey Lavrov’s comments were the first formal statement from President Vladimir Putin’s government about the Pentagon report, though a spokesman for Russia’s foreign spy agency over the weekend denied the report’s allegations.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will discuss the matter with Lavrov when the foreign ministers of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany meet in Berlin on Thursday, the State Department said. The ministers will be discussing what to do about Iran’s suspect nuclear program.
The Pentagon report released Friday said two captured Iraqi documents indicate that Russia obtained information from sources “inside the American Central Command” in Qatar. Russia passed battlefield intelligence to Saddam through the former Russian ambassador in Baghdad, Vladimir Titorenko, according to the Pentagon report.
The unclassified report does not assess the value or accuracy of the information Saddam got or offer details on Russia’s information pipeline. Moscow fiercely opposed the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam.
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service dismissed the claims over the weekend as “baseless accusations,” and Lavrov reiterated that dismissal Monday.
“How this was done allows one to speculate that this has hidden political motives and that this is being done in connection with Iraq, but I can hardly be sure of it,” Lavrov said.
“It is unclear to us why the international community has to learn about such facts regarding Russian intelligence cooperation in Iraq from the media.”
Hmmm, whats the motive….what could it be. Say maybe to expose some of the backroom dealings and the double talking by the Russians that could of very well put thousands of our troops at risk.
Good enough reason?
Is any of this news surprising? No. It is Russia after all. They can whine and cry all they want but as more documents are released the more we find how deep in bed the 3 stooges (Russia, France, & Germany) were with Saddam.? To top it all off they already supplied much of the hardware that killed our troops:
A Pentagon report on weapons found in Iraq after the war revealed a staggering amount of armaments, almost all foreign-made.
The report, first disclosed in a new book by one of this column’s writers, Bill Gertz, reached this stark conclusion: “Foreign munitions were used against coalition forces during the war and continue to be a potential source of explosives for improvised explosive devices still being used to kill U.S. soldiers.”
According to the report cited in “Treachery: How America’s Friends and Foes are Secretly Arming Our Enemies,” 24 nations supplied armaments to Saddam Hussein. The total amount was between 650,000 tons and 1 million tons. By contrast, the entire U.S. military arsenal is between 1.6 million and 1.8 million tons.
The big three arms suppliers were Russia (and the Soviet Union), China and France: Russia supplied 122 different types of arms and a total of nearly 13 million items; China had provided 19 different types of arms and almost 380,000 items; France had supplied 12 different armaments and more than 115,000 items.
As I stated in an earlier post it appears that our already tenuous relationship just got a bit weaker. An argument can be made that most everyone saw this coming with the rise in power by Putin, a former spook. But to have supplied this tyrant our operational plans of invasion all so they could get cheap oil really pisses me off.
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Brilliant stuff guys. You know, if I didn’t see it here I wouldn’t even know it existed, such that MSM avoids it like the plague.
So okay, we’re the ones who went to war illegally? (after what…12 violated and ignored U.N. resolutions?)Beyond that, everyone conveniently turns a blind eye to the arming of Saddam and the Russian’s obvious hand in this pre-invasion mess. Looks like the cold war never really ended for the Russians.
There’s GOT to be some way to get this into the MSM. I mean a few weeks back I saw interviewwd on the Daily Show a former Iraqi airforce officer saying quite plainly that yes, Saddam had WMDs and yes, he indeed moved them to Syria. This man witnessed it and wrote a frickin book about it. The liberal audience was dead silent…no one knew what to say. And that was that. Haven’t heard about it since till I came here.
Pathetic.
Oh look, it’s almost time for more Abu Gharaib photos to be released, I gotta go.