The American Spectator

br> GEN: You didn’t get a modified…You don’t have a modified… br> COL: By God, I have one. br> GEN: Which? From the workshop…? br> COL: From the al-Kindi Company br> GEN: What? br> COL: From al-Kindi. br> GEN: Yeah, yeah. I’ll come to you in the morning. I have some comments. I’m worried you all have something left. br> COL: We evacuated everything. We don’t have anything left. br> GEN: I will come to you tomorrow. br> COL: Okay. /blockquote>

That sure got the General’s attention, didn’t it? There was something about the mention of a “modified vehicle” from the “al-Kindi Company” that made him want to visit this colonel’s site, wherever it was, “in the morning.” That would be November 27, the first day that IAEA and UNSCOM inspections resumed. And on the very first day of the inspections, this general was rushing out to tend to this particular vehicle.

Probably because of those darned hydrogen generators. Yeah? Yeah.

The reference to “Al-Kindi” is very important, by the way. There are two Al-Kindis that relate to this story. One of them is the Al-Kindi Research Complex, “one of the largest and most secret arms project[s] in Iraq,” located in Mosul. It looks like they mainly did missile research there, but also did nuclear and chemical weapons research at some point. This location is important because one of the two vehicles was found on their lot in April 2003. It’s also important because the 2003 CIA report on the biolabs mentions that “Senior Iraqi officials of the al-Kindi Research, Testing, Development, and Engineering facility in Mosul were shown pictures of the mobile production trailers, and they claimed that the trailers were used to chemically produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.” That’s a logical answer for a technician in a rocketry plant that had missile test facilities, a wind tunnel, and a launch range.

The other Al-Kindi Company is located in Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad. Its full name is the Al-Kindi Company for the Production of Veterinary Vaccines. According to UNMOVIC, it is a declared and monitored site which produces a “variety of viral and bacterial veterinary vaccines, using basic glassware and techniques.”

Whether or not they were asked about the trailers is not in the unclassified CIA report.