"You act like this is common knowledge"
I have not seen any credible claim that Iraq under Saddam had given up their WMD programs. Many scientists were interviewed that said they were paid to the end to do work on WMD programs. Many scientists took US military and other US investigators to the various components of the WMD programs they had stored at home at the request of the government.
Iraq's WMD Secreted in Syria, Sada Says
By IRA STOLL -
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.
The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.
"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."
Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."
nysun.com
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Iraqi Chemical Weapons
In a briefing for journalists reported on October 29, 2003, the director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency said satellite images showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion in March 2003. Retired Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper Jr. said he believed "unquestionably" that illicit weapons material was transported into Syria and perhaps other countries. He said "I think people below the Saddam- Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse. ... I think probably in the few months running up to the onset of the conflict, I think there was probably an intensive effort to disperse into private hands, to bury it, and to move it outside the country's borders."
In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph published on January 25, 2004, Dr. David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, said there was evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before the start of the war to overthrow Saddam. "We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."
globalsecurity.org
Also:http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/syria/cw.htm
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Jack Kelly: A Syrian sidestep?
About those Iraqi WMDs: More signs are pointing to a neighborly transfer
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Last week a man who had been deputy chief of Saddam Hussein's air force claimed Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war began.
Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).
Special Republican Guard brigades loaded yellow barrels with the skull and crossbones sign on each barrel onto two airliners from which the seats had been removed, Georges Sada said. There were 56 flights in all.
"Saddam realized this time the Americans are coming," Mr. Sada told The New York Sun, one of a handful of news organizations which took note of what he had to say.
There are grounds for skepticism. Mr. Sada was deputy chief of the Iraqi air force during the first Gulf War, not the more recent one, and his account of the movement of WMD to Syria is secondhand.
Mr. Sada said he was told of the WMD transfer by the pilots of the two airliners, who approached him after Saddam was captured.
But Mr. Sada's is only the most recent of a series of accounts by people in a position to speak with authority who say (some of) Saddam's chemical and biological weapons wound up in Syria.
Last month Moshe Yaalon, who was Israel's top general at the time, said Iraq transported WMD to Syria six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.
Last March, John A. Shaw, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian Spetsnaz units moved WMD to Syria and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.
"While in Iraq I received information from several sources naming the exact Russian units, what they took and where they took both WMD materials and conventional explosives," Mr. Shaw told NewsMax reporter Charles Smith.
Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong was deputy commander of Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In September 2004, he told WABC radio that "I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran."
In January 2004, David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group which conducted the search for Saddam's WMD, told a British newspaper there was evidence unspecified materials had been moved to Syria from Iraq shortly before the war.
"We know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program," Mr. Kay told the Sunday Telegraph.
Also that month, Nizar Nayuf, a Syrian journalist who defected to an undisclosed European country, told a Dutch newspaper he knew of three sites where Iraq's WMD was being kept. They were the town of al Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria; the Syrian air force base near the village of Tal Snan, and the city of Sjinsar on the border with Lebanon.
In an addendum to his final report last April, Charles Duelfer, who succeeded David Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said he couldn't rule out a transfer of WMD from Iraq to Syria.
"There was evidence of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initiated by a Syrian security officer, and ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved. In the judgment of the working group, these reports were sufficiently credible to merit further investigation," Mr. Duelfer said.
In a briefing for reporters in October 2003, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper Jr., who was head of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency when the Iraq war began, said satellite imagery showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion.
"I think the people below Saddam Hussein and his sons' level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse," Lt. Gen. Clapper said.
You haven't heard much about these reports, because they contradict the meme that Saddam either had no WMD, or destroyed it well before the Iraq war began.
The captured files of the Iraqi intelligence service, still mostly untranslated, could shed light on what did happen to Saddam's WMD.
John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor, said a civilian contractor who has been among those examining the Mukhabarat files has found audiotapes of meetings in Saddam's office where WMD was discussed. The contractor, a former military intelligence analyst, will make the tapes public Feb. 17 at a conference sponsored by Intelligence Summit, a private group that Mr. Loftus heads.
Mr. Loftus wouldn't disclose the identity of the contractor in advance of the conference, but said his tapes have been verified by the National Security Agency. "This isn't a smoking gun. It's a smoking cannon," he said.
Those who have bet their political futures that Saddam had no WMD may be starting to sweat.
postgazette.com;
"SOUGHT/BOUGHT? Who ... cares? "
There are a lot of partisan leftwingers who still take it on faith that Joe Wilson was not the liar.
"all one has to do is look at the actual documents from the Niger Embassy to see what crude forgeries they truly were"
We dispatch a wanna be diplomat to Niger to tell them that if they are cooperating with our enemy they will be in big trouble so please tell me if you have been cooperating with our enemy. Nigerians have proven quite clever in their various scams. Why would any intelligent person expect them to provide evidence of Yellowcake sales to Iraq? |
