Nov 16 2007

Saddam’s Nuclear WMD In Syria, Chemical WMD In Iran, Others To Russia

Published by at 1:10 pm under All General Discussions,Iran,Iraq,Syria

Well if this is all true then there is going to be some serious rewriting of the “conventional wisdom” when it comes to Saddam’s WMDs:

Saddam Hussein’s secret documents are measured by the shelf-mile and stored inside a secure but dusty facility near U.S. Central Command Headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and in several subsidiary sites. Armed guards protect the unread dossiers. Three shifts of two hundred translators each work around the clock. Perhaps 5% of these captured documents have been studied so far, but their contents are about to shatter much of the conventional wisdom concerning Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a bit chagrinned at the disclosures. The documents show a much more complex history than previously suspected. The “Bush lied, people died” chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMD whatsoever after 1991 – and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. The Neocon diehards insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-trove is still out there somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of Iraq.[1] Each side is more than a little bit wrong about Saddam’s WMD, and each side is only a little bit right about what happened to it.

The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam’s WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990’s. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid to late 1990’s. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam’s nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003, but were stolen from under the Americans’ noses and sent to Syria. Syria is one of eight countries in the world that never signed a treaty banning WMD, and now is the storehouse for much of what remains of Saddam’s WMD Empire. This was the target of the recent Israeli air strike.

This would explain how a nuclear reactor began to rise up in Syria and needed to be taken out by Israel recently. With only 5% of Saddam’s secret documents analyzed no one knows what the real answer will be. The fact is Saddam had WMDs and was selling them off to people clearly aligned with terrorists:

In other words, is Bodansky is right (and he usually is) as late as 2002, Saddam still retained a CW production capability and then sold it to the Iranians on the eve of war.[4] The CIA has now acknowledged that they had a highly-placed spy in Saddam’s cabinet who agreed that Saddam had gotten rid of all of his production facilities, but the super spy claimed that Saddam still retained a lethal stockpile of finished chemical weapons in early 2003. The latter information, about the remaining CW stockpile, turns out to have been incorrect, but neither the CIA nor their Iraqi super spy knew it at the time.[5]

So, as of 2002 Saddam had chemical weapons and sold is production capabilty to the Iranians – and the “slam dunk” CIA were under the impression he retained a stockpile of completed CW weapons. And he did have WMDs which the Russians had pulled out before the attack – which explains a lot about Putin last minute warning to the US about terrorist attacks. And apparently Saddam restarted all of his WMD efforts late in the Clinton administration – when he booted the inspecors:

Among the newly-disclosed documents are Saddam’s actual tape recordings of the meetings of this special group for WMD.

The National Security Agency has confirmed[6] that the tapes are authentic and that the voiceprints are unquestionably those of Saddam and his elite WMD advisers. The CIA’s super-spy, excluded from this working group, apparently did not know that it even existed.

Geez, will those in denial at least take Saddam’s OWN WORD for his efforts on WMDs? Here is the bottom line:

Translating shelf miles of documents, however, may take decades. In the meantime, enough of Saddam’s secret files have been translated to illustrate one clear trend over time: through the time of Hans Blix and the run-up to the invasion, Saddam had absolutely no intention of destroying his WMD.

This information is not only going to shatter the liberal conventional wisdom about Iraq, it will totally shake up the Democratic Presidential contest. Hindsight seems to be showing us going into Iraq was the right thing for many reasons now.

7 responses so far

7 Responses to “Saddam’s Nuclear WMD In Syria, Chemical WMD In Iran, Others To Russia”

  1. kathie says:

    AJ, how do you know this, and why haven’t we seen this information in print? President Bush would never have sent men to die for a whim even tho the dems try to portray him in this light, I will never believe it in a million years.

  2. AJStrata says:

    Kathie,

    The information has been out there for a long time – as the article points out. The reason it is not in the news? Denial and efforts by the media to direct the course of our elections.

  3. irandom says:

    That makes sense as the Russians were busy stealing ammunitions after the invasion. I did hear a former inspector and translator say he knew of a facility near the Euphrates, but the US needed Russian cooperation and didn’t want it to be known.

  4. mporter2007 says:

    As evidence of anything, that essay is ridiculous. (The link you give doesn’t work, but this looks to be another copy.) And the basic scenario is just absurd. He destroyed one quarter of his arsenal, he sold one quarter of it, Russia repossessed one quarter of it, and Syria stole the remainder? It’s a patchwork Frankenstein of a conspiracy theory.

    But let’s consider some of the alleged evidence, such as “tape ISGQ-2003-M0007379, in which Saddam is briefed on his secret nuclear weapons project”. You may read the transcript here, starting at slide 100. It’s Saddam being briefed by some of his nuclear scientists, about plasma research. Yes, they mention it has weapons applications. They also mention it has other applications. It is even true that the preservation of Iraqi nuclear research had value for the day when Iraq was free to make WMDs again. But it is emphatically not a discussion of a “secret nuclear weapons project”.

    Or consider the quote from “dissident” Abu Abdallah. Context can be seen here: it’s not a secret prewar document, it is a postwar document of unspecified origin, saying some drivers took an unknown cargo across the border to Syria. – Actually, that blog is probably a good place to go if you want to judge the nature of the evidence provided by all these untranslated documents.

    Anyway, let’s consider the other sources in this essay. Debka.com, Yossef Bodansky, John Loftus’s Intelligence Summit – these are not exactly irreproachable sources! What you get from them is unsourced rumor, aggregated into tall tales which a certain audience enjoys. Completely unreliable.

    If you want to think for yourself about Iraqi WMD programs, I’d say there are two facts, right in the open, which might need explaining: the Libyan nuke program, and the anthrax letters which followed 9/11. But all this other stuff is just banal (the tape transcripts) or hearsay. You can do much better than this.

  5. AJStrata says:

    mporter2007,

    No that is not the post I referred to. The one I linked to is definitely gone. You can do a search at AINA on “secret documents” and the story shows up in the search results, but the link is broken. You might have to find it in a cache’d copy someplace.

    I don’t find Loftus credible, Debka somewhat more but would not trust them without some independent verificstion. The satellite photos exist though, seen them.

  6. dave m says:

    If you go to that report and gooogle earth the coordinates he gives,
    35.2803 North (latitutde) and 40.0583 East (longitude)
    you’ll see something out in the desert with a dark plume of discoloration around it.