IIS Top Secret doc proves intent to hide prohibited items from UN

Ray: Proving intent. Some would believe (or at least claim to believe) that Saddam wanted to comply with UN mandates to get the sanctions removed. This document shows without a doubt (unless proven inauthentic) that this is not the case. The IIS demonstrates that not only is it procuring prohibited items but providing secret facilities to hide them from the UN. I also believe that this demonstrates proof that Iraq did hide prohibited items from the UN which were not found. I have seen nothing about these computers in UN reports. Please let me know if anyone finds a reference to this in the literature. CMPC-2003-015065.pdf

Translator’s notes:
-Document CMPC-2003-015065 is composed of 35 pages of memos between different intelligence directorates regarding the procurement of new computers.
- Page 3/35 is translated. It is dated January 1st 1999.

                    Top secret

Presidency of the Republic
Directorate of Intelligence

To: Director of the Intelligence service
Subject: Providing a secret location

In view of the upcoming execution of the computer installation project which is going to be contracted and because the mentioned computers are advanced and highly capable on the  technological level they are therefore part of the equipment which the UN has prevented its import to the country. Because we are worried that UN inspection teams might visit the Directorate’s headquarters and while searching the computers’ building they will find those advanced computers which in the future will store the data of the different directorates of Intelligence.
Therefore we propose the following:
Provide a secret house for the new computer which would be close to the headquarters….
(Translator’s notes: the remaining of the page deals with the technicalities of the operation.)

Ray: From Secretary Powell's UN briefing

"Tell me, answer me, are the inspectors to search the house of every government official, every Baath Party member and every scientist in the country to find the truth, to get the information they need, to satisfy the demands of our council?

Our sources tell us that, in some cases, the hard drives of computers at Iraqi weapons facilities were replaced. Who took the hard drives. Where did they go? What's being hidden? Why? There's only one answer to the why: to deceive, to hide, to keep from the inspectors.

Numerous human sources tell us that the Iraqis are moving, not just documents and hard drives, but weapons of mass destruction to keep them from being found by inspectors."

Comments

[Rodrigo de Mendoza]

"In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work. The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence - hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use - are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts. For example,

* On 10 July 2003 an ISG team exploited the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) Headquarters in Baghdad. The basement of the main building contained an archive of documents situated on well-organized rows of metal shelving. The basement suffered no fire damage despite the total destruction of the upper floors from coalition air strikes. Upon arrival the exploitation team encountered small piles of ash where individual documents or binders of documents were intentionally destroyed. Computer hard drives had been deliberately destroyed. Computers would have had financial value to a random looter; their destruction, rather than removal for resale or reuse, indicates a targeted effort to prevent Coalition forces from gaining access to their contents."

http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2003/david_kay_10022003.html