Flashback: Chemical Weapons In Syria Include WMDs Shipped From Iraq

@Greg: Nobody would be getting rid of their legal munitions. What they would be doing would be decentralizing ordnance away from normal storage points—which would be totally obvious targets for impending air strikes—and distributing it as rapidly as possible to defensive positions where it would be utilized against invading military forces. That’s what the satellite picture most likely shows happening. It’s exactly what would be expected, with an invasion imminent.

You really need to read before you react on a keyboard, Greg. Those were *inspection sites* that were being sanitized before inspectors got there. “Decentralizing?” OMG… We came upon weapons caches, but enough to account for “decentralizing” all this stuff? Get serious. Pie in the sky speculation.

Did you even click on the interview with Sada? Forget that it’s Hannity. I’m with you that he’s a worthless idiot. But I’m not interested in Hannity’s words… Sada’s. And those echo what was in his book. The man knew what was going on during the lead up to OIF. And had you read, you’d know that a lot of cargo was transferred to jets, as well as moving on the ground. I’ll also mention that Sada is related to Assad via marriage. No lack of insight there either.

The February 11, 2009 article date is puzzling. A lot of what was taken as “evidence” in 2003 later came under a cloud of doubt. As the article, which I presume actually dates from 2003, concedes, “With no smoking gun, Powell was forced to connect a set of circumstantial dots for the Security Council, reports CBS News Chief White House Correspondent John Roberts.” At this point I’ll only consider evidence itself, not the 2003 conclusions that were supposedly based on it.

The “..spy satellite photos showed a chemical weapons lab surrounded by cargo trucks and a forklift” was not under a cloud of doubt. The “solid evidence” that “…scientists were told to hide prohibited items in their homes; that other items were stashed in cars driven around the countryside to avoid detection; and that Saddam’s son, Qusay, had ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from palaces” was not under a cloud of doubt. The “… intercept in which an Iraqi officer tells a subordinate to erase all references to “nerve agents” from over-the-air, or wireless, communications” was not under a cloud of doubt.

What was under a cloud of doubt, at that time, was Saddam’s ties to AQ affiliated terrorists… which was later proven true by more documentation you refuse to read.. the Iraqi Perspectives Report and the confiscation of the diary and Harmony documents by the ISG. Check… ties to bad guys.

Nor what was shrouded in a cloud of doubt was terrorist camps hosted on Saddam’s soil. Nor was it in doubt that he was purchasing Samoud missiles, illegally, on the black market as even the UNMOVIC findings provided.

Then add Charles Duelfer’s report saying that even in to 2005, the CIA couldn’t rule out the transfer of WMD to Syria.

But on the question of Syria, Mr. Duelfer did not close the books. “ISG was unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war,” Mr. Duelfer said in a report posted on the CIA’s Web site Monday night.

He cited some evidence of a transfer. “Whether Syria received military items from Iraq for safekeeping or other reasons has yet to be determined,” he said. “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.”

But Mr. Duelfer said he was unable to complete that aspect of the probe because “the declining security situation limited and finally halted this investigation. The results remain inconclusive, but further investigation may be undertaken when circumstances on the ground improve.”

Arguing against a WMD transfer to Syria, Mr. Duelfer said, was the fact that all senior Iraqi detainees involved in Saddam’s weapons programs and security “uniformly denied any knowledge of residual WMD that could have been secreted to Syria.”

“Nevertheless,” the inspector said, “given the insular and compartmented nature of the regime, ISG analysts believed there was enough evidence to merit further investigation.”

What was in doubt was where the WMDS were hidden. And since he was busy “sanitizing” inspection sites, as we saw on satellite photos prior to the run up, that shouldn’t surprise anyone. He was moving things out at Christmas time, and the US OIF forces didn’t arrive until March.

And since by then, the ill informed and gullible – ahem – believed that the only reason the US went in to Iraq was for WMDs, the rallying cry went up that Saddam wasn’t a threat because… gosh darn, what was moved, couldn’t be found. Well duh…

Precisely what in the Powell evidence are you under the mistaken assumptions was cloudy, Greg?

Now, allow me to point you to another article (that you probably won’t read) which shows you how razor thin and not so sharp points against WMD being moved are. And this is from a leftist source, The Atlantic Wire, who recaps the WMD evidence from pro and con sides.

What does the pro side have? Satellite photos documenting the movements, documents seized by the ISG, statements from former Saddam officials, UNMOVIC discovered illegal missiles acquired after 1998 and purchased on the black market. Lots of evidence, but nope… no pictures of Assad at the Syrian border, signing a bill of lading. But even officials at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (where Clapper was working in 2003) documented truck movement to the Syrian border. Why do you think he came up with the idea of Syria as a destination?

What does your naysaying side have? That it’s not “logical” that Saddam would give up his WMDs with a war approaching…. like he’d dare to use proscribed materials on the US military in front of the world, after spending a decade pretending he was adhering to UN resolutions? Don’t think so.

A few other points being spun by the same guy, Kris Alexander?

Why, in 2003, would Saddam give up the worst threat he could make against his people?

Because he’d have to survive as Iraq’s leader after a second battle with the US military. He can make more chem weapons faster than you can bake a wedding cake. No biggie.

Third, the Iraqi Ba’athists and Syrian Ba’athists are far from allies. Syria’s Allawites are minority Shiites and proxies to Iraq’s arch-enemy Iran.

Anyone that has spent a nanosecond studying Islamists and methods know that they align within different factions to fight a common enemy. In the case of Saddam, he had few logical places to send his precious stash. It had to be a place inaccessible to the US and UN, and had to be within a reasonable distance. Certainly not to Iran. Syria was the second mostly likely destination. Shia vs Sunni, my foot. The argument of a novice.

Fourth, from a U.S. military perspective, the transfer would have been impossible to hide.

Newsflash… it wasn’t hidden and was detected. However the US couldn’t do a thing about stopping, detaining, searching or seizing anything. All that’s left if for the amateurs to spin the contents.

In other words, the weight of the former – satellite photos, found caches, proscribed missiles, documentation, former Saddam official statements, etal – far outweighs the “not logical” spin used in opposition.

Oddly enough, the naysayers wanted to depend upon “logic” for Iraq, but all “logic” for Syria – and why there is no reason for Assad to deploy CW – flies out the window.

At this point I’ll only consider evidence itself, not the 2003 conclusions that were supposedly based on it. Imaginative dot connecting was used to sell the war, both at home and internationally.

This is your main problem, Greg. You discard all the “evidence” and prefer to fly with the emotional “it ain’t logical” spin instead. As long as you function on partisan emotion instead of factual documentation, you will remain not credible.

A round of up those who not only believed that Saddam moved his WMD, but moved them to Syria, was in an article in the Toledo Blade back in 2006, after the release of Sada’s book. It was not one lone Obama appoint that you don’t trust “100% of the time”.

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 were 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,” General Clapper said.

You discount “evidence” because it’s not a smoking gun, and instead trend to the “logical” despite it’s illogic, Greg. Please do not continue to babble about “evidence” when you discount all evidence before your nose. This is all partisan emotion for you. And your lack of historic knowledge show that to be the case.

@Greg: Current events are more relevant.

Doesn’t occur to you that current events may be related to past events? Or doesn’t that fit in to the illogic of your “logic”?