As the regime of Bashar Assad disintegrates, the security of his chemical arsenal is in jeopardy. The No. 2 general in Saddam Hussein’s air force says they were the WMDs we didn’t find in Iraq.
King Abdullah of neighboring Jordan warned that a disintegrating Syria on the verge of civil war puts Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons at risk of falling into the hands of al-Qaida.
“One of the worst-case scenarios as we are obviously trying to look for a political solution would be if some of those chemical stockpiles were to fall into unfriendly hands,” he said.
The irony here is that the chemical weapons stockpile of Syrian thug Assad may in large part be the legacy of weapons moved from Hussein’s Iraq into Syria before Operation Iraqi Freedom.
If so, this may be the reason not much was found in the way of WMD by victorious U.S. forces in 2003.
In 2006, former Iraqi general Georges Sada, second in command of the Iraqi Air Force who served under Saddam Hussein before he defected, wrote a comprehensive book, “Saddam’s Secrets.”
It details how the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria in advance of the U.S.-led action to eliminate Hussein’s WMD threat.
As Sada told the New York Sun, two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, and special Republican Guard units loaded the planes with chemical weapons materials.
There were 56 flights disguised as a relief effort after a 2002 Syrian dam collapse.
There were also truck convoys into Syria. Sada’s comments came 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.”
Both Israeli and U.S. intelligence observed large truck convoys leaving Iraq and entering Syria in the weeks and months before Operation Iraqi Freedom, John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told a private conference of former weapons inspectors and intelligence experts held in Arlington, Va., in 2006.
According to Shaw, ex-Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, went to Iraq in December 2002 and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
Clicked the link and got a 404 error
Same error on my end : (
OMG DOES THIS MEAN THAT BUSH WAS RIGHT. COLIN POWELL CAN NOW SAY HE DID NOT LIE AFTERALL.
Another Vet and I have been telling all of you that this happened. It was not much of a secret in Iraq.
Finally, the truth about this can no longer be ignored. Both countries run by Baathists, yet our complicit, anti-American, Leftist media just whistled past the obvious.
Which, I think, would explain why Putin is sending ships and possibly marines; to secure and quietly bring home the WMD’s Russia gave Saddam and wants kept quiet. Unfortunately, the present regime in DC would love for this to happen so that a) the WMD’s are in “safer” hands and b) they can keep up the flagrant lie that said WMD’s did not exist. Could this be what “O” intends to be “more flexible” about?
Sorry guys… minor HTML programming error on my part. The “continue reading” link above is fixed, and you can read the full story at Investors Business Daily here.
Link with pic from National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency of two trucks parked outside one of the 56 bunkers of the Al Qa Qaa Explosive Storage Complex
The huge tractor-trailer convoys from Iraq to Syria at the time of the war was a huge smoking gun. The NGA is on record stating they tracked the trucks from arms depots to Syria.
@Jim – The operative word is stockpile. We found WMD’s, their precursors and production facilities in Iraq. Just not huge stockpiles or atomics.
@ JustAl – We are going to see how it plays out. Makes some good geopolitical theatre. Western Civ MO is to secure Syrian WMDs one way or another, absent securing they will be destroyed.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy but there’s been noise that the Rus flotilla made port call in Cyprus yesterday.
@mossomo: The Left would not have accepted the existance of Saddam’s WMDs if they had been found shrink wrapped and palletized in warehouses. Saddam had used them three times before and had employed experts to develop more. Iraqi VX gas was seized in Jordan when an Al-Qeada in Iraq supported plot to attack Jordan’s royal family and Military Command was broken up. There were reports in the last sixty days claiming that Assad had used chem-weapons on rebel villages. The media went blank on these reports in a suspect manner. Perhaps realizing that Assad’s WMD’s didn’t spring fully formed from thin air, they want to avoid publicly acknowledging the truth that Saddam was the source of these weapons.
When the media shape facts to fit their agenda they are no more than extensions of the morally bankrupt office holding frauds that they support.
I wasn’t a disbeliever that they had been shipped to Syria, I was just looking for more proof and it seems to have arrived.
ACTUALLY THIS OLD NEWS. I HAVE THE LINK TO FRONTPAGEMAG.COM
JUNE 18,2004 MY SON AND I FIGHT ABOUT THIS ISSUE ALL THE TIME. HE CANNOT BELIEVE THAT BUSH’S PEOPLE WOULD NOT HAVE USED IT
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=12587
Even Bill Clinton knew Saddam had WMD’s and tried to tell his fellow Dems they were wrong to say he didn’t.
And other Democrats agreed with Clinton, long Before George W Bush was President. The failure to find WMDs (when the world knew he had used them on his own people,) doesn’t prove they didn’t exist, only that they were not found.
@JIM:
One could always successfully argue that Bush didn’t lie, if one directly read the vital primary documents. For that one needed time and focus.
I read both Iraq Survey Group Reports cover to cover including all exhibits and appendixes, published essays by David Kay and Charles Dueffler, the full Senate Joint Intelligence Committee Report including all exhibits and appendixes and a substantial number of Iraq Intelligence Service files (in translation of course). Without doubt Bush and Cheney were straight shooters in this regard.
I found that the evidence just did not matter to those with whom I spoke. In fact no actual evidence seemed admissable. One needed skill and determination to make the argument. I’ll tell you, I was good. But the evidence did not matter. My interlocutors invariably either simply refused to examine the primary evidence and dismissed it out of hand. It was enough to make one cynical. Not rarely they direct extreme personal anger at my dissent. no matter the venue
Yet President Clinton (and Susan Rice) did indeed lie in early 1994 about the Genocide in Rwanda. His lie was calculated and political. Perhaps as many as 960,000 people died, 250,000 or more of those were brutally gang raped before being hacked to death. There is evidence that French paramilitary personal assisted in the coordination and facilitation of this holocaust too.
It does not matter what the evidence is and so I now fear this will all end in tears…
@Mike O’Malley
Facts are quite the inconvenience when they conflict with Liberal narratives. Truth fares no better.
European mercenaries have been involved in almost every outbreak of violence in central Africa in the post colonial times. Mobutu used them in the Congo and Katanga and they fought for and against him. Dennard and Schramme are two that come to mind. Krueger the ambassador to Burundi during the Rwandan Genocide was a classmate of my mother and has written about his observations, which is all he did as he like Clinton sat on his hands and watched it happen. Ambassadors usually have some power to act and bring assets to bear in conjunction with the security agencies and the military as they did in Laos and the Congo. Instead he bemoaned the massacres that he took no action to stop. Dead Rwandans don’t vote Democrat and Clinton couldn’t be bothered by anything as trifling as a tribal war.
“Bush lied, people died.” sounds much better to liberal/progressives than “Oops, we were wrong”.
Don’t expect any liberal/progressive to actually check the facts and come to a logical conclusion regarding them.