WMD

Issues & Insights
Saddam Had WMD


Justifying The War: Most in the media are ignoring the words of Saddam himself and his aides on 12 hours of captured tapes saying that Iraq's WMD were moved to Syria. But they aren't the only ones saying it.
For example, three months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, Israeli intelligence detected Iraq moving large amounts of military materiel into Syria, another Baathist dictatorship — materiel that could have included Saddam's WMD.
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.
On Jan. 25, 2004, Nizar Nayouf, a Syrian journalist who recently defected to France, told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf that chemical and biological weapons were smuggled from Iraq into Syria when Saddam realized an American invasion was imminent.
Nayouf said he knew of at least three Syrian sites where Saddam's WMD were kept. One was in tunnels under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria, part of an underground factory built by North Korea for producing a Syrian version of the Scud missile. Others were in the village of Tal Snan, adjacent to a Syrian air base, and in Sjinsjar, on the Syrian-Lebanese border.
Nayouf's claims were in effect confirmed two months earlier in a briefing to reporters on Oct. 20, 2003, by officials of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in Washington. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of NIMA when the Iraq War began, said satellite imagery showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion.
Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, who was deputy commander of Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom, told WABC radio in September 2004: "I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran."
In an interview with the London Telegraph in January 2004, David Kay, former head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), said he uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom.
"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," Kay told the Telegraph. "Precisely what went to Syria, and what happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."
Charles Duelfer, Kay's successor as ISG head, testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Oct. 6, 2004, that "a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria."
"There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points," said Duelfer. "We've got a lot of data to support that, including people discussing it. But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say."
Jordan's King Abdullah may have an opinion on that. In April 2004, his country foiled a plot that involved five vehicles carrying a combined total of 20 tons of chemical weapons laced with conventional explosives.
The weapons would have released a cloud of poison gas sufficient to kill 80,000 people and, in Abdullah's words, "would have decapitated the government." The trucks were intercepted 75 miles inside the Jordanian border. They were coming from — you guessed it — Syria.
Still more answers may lie in the 35,000 boxes of documents that Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Committee on Intelligence, says he's trying to get translated and released into the public domain. He told Fox News' Neil Cavuto recently that "we verified that it is Saddam's voice on these tapes" and that the "12 hours of tape is only the tip of the iceberg."
We wish Hoekstra Godspeed in getting out this vital information pertaining to U.S. involvement in Iraq. No one knows for sure, of course, what those documents will reveal.
One thing is certain: There won't be any leaks on the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

BaldGOP