Posted on 12/15/2005 5:14:36 AM PST by mal
Saddam Hussein moved his chemical weapons to Syria six weeks before the war started, Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom says.
The assertion comes as President Bush said yesterday that much of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was incorrect.
The Israeli officer, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. "He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria," General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. "No one went to Syria to find it."
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
Why has the administration refused to make this case?
Some day, the world and Paul Harvey may have "the rest of the story".
Leni
The ones that Saddam didn't sell to terrorists.
Because we would have to go to the places in Siria where they buried the WMD, and we want to finish Iraq first. As long as the WMD are buried, they aren't going to hurt anyone.
Because it then would be compelled to go into Syria and get them....... This is bad?
Mike
It’s really too bad about Duelfer’s work being “cut short” because of Zarqawi. The trail of WMD isn’t cold. It leads to Syria and the Bekka Valley of formerly Syrian-occupied Lebanon, according to a Syrian defector to US intelligence. Gen. Tommy Franks himself leans this way, telling the media that "Two days before the war, on March 17 [2003], we saw through multiple intelligence channels - both human intelligence and technical intelligence, large caravans of people and things, including some of the top 55 [most wanted] Iraqis, going to Syria." What was so important to move to Syria immediately before the War with the top regime officials? Duelfer’s next stop should have been Damascus. With Syrian President Bashar Assad now admitting that he has stockpiles of WMD, perhaps it should be ours.
"Why has the administration refused to make this case?"
My guess is that 'somebody' helped move them and outing the WHO would open another can of worms, and our liberals would demand a public display of "INTEL". Could well be that making the case would endanger real "covert" entities.
Head up: Every time I ask that question, a segment of people come along to tell me how wrong I am to even ask. It's considered "negative" to even ask this simple question.
For the lurkers, some other WMD information to digest:
Charles Duelfer said he can't rule out the possibility that Iraq's WMD were secretly shipped to Syria before 3/03 citing sufficient credible evidence that the WMD were moved.
Duelfer made the findings in an addendum to his final report last year.
It was well known that Syria was a major conduit for obtaining UN-banned materials for Iraq. Several senior US officials have seen intelligence which shows it is likely that Iraq's WMD went to Syria.
Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, the dputy commander of CentCom, wrote in his book "Inside CentCom" that intelligence reports pointed to WMD movement into Syria.
John Shaw, then the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told The Times in October 2004 that Russian special forces and intelligence troops worked with Saddam's intel services to move WMD to Syria.
Before changing his mind again (ala John Kerry), David Kay, the UN weapons inspector, told Tom Brokaw in July 2003 that based on millions of pages of internal Iraqi government documents recovered from Saddam's regime, he was convinced that Iraq had WMD which were taken out of the country before the war. Among the documents which have been translated:
- corresponsence between various Iraqi organizations giving instructions on how to hide WMD;
- chemical agent purchase orders dated 12/01;
- WMD protection suits and instructions on how to hide chemicals;
- ricin research; and
- a memo from the Iraqi Intelligence Service on how to hid information from a UN inspection team.
Bill Clinton, perhaps remembering his own rhetoric about the danger that Iraq's WMD program posed to not just the region but the United States, said in a July 2003 interview on Larry Kind that "it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for" in Iraq.
In June 2004, UNMOVIC's executive Chairman, Demetrius Perricos, detailed the exprt of thousands of tons of missile components, nuclear reactor vessels and formentors for WMD warheads and the discovery of some of these items, with UN inspection tags still on them, as far away as Turkey, Holland and Jordan.
"According to a July 10, 2004, Washington Post article on the Senate Intelligence Committee findings about Wilson's investigatory trip to Niger, Africa, unanimously agreed by all committee senators, including Democrats, “The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts.
And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address.
”In March, 2003, when U.S. tanks rolled into Iraq, 500 tons of yellow cake uranium was found at the Iraqi nuclear research center of al-Tuwaitha. This included 1.8 tons of partly enriched uranium. On June 23, 2004, the U.S. military, working with the U.S. Department of Energy removed this material to the US where is held at an unnamed Department of Energy facility."
Best I can figure is they're not ready to march against Syria yet. Maybe they're flipping a coin between Syria and Iran.
I believe it was the best thing he could have done, the weapons will be found, and when they are, he will be the only one entitled to any credit. Nobel peace price? probably not, but history will treat him well.
Because the Dems can make it look bad on the President.
They could say we allowed WMD's to cross from Iraq to Syria and we did nothing to stop them. They could say the President didn't show enough strength to stop the flow of WMD's. Remember the convoys going to Syria?
Why don't the Democrat leftist lunatic traitors call on their friend the UN to investigate by sending an inspection team to Syria?
Maybe I'm naiive or underinformed, but I haven't heard anyone ask where the physical eveidence of the destruction of the WMDs is. The UN certified that he had large stockpiles during the Clinton administration; if they were destroyed, where were they destroyed? Shouldn't there be some physical evidence of same? Where's the broken gun?
In the News/Activism forum, on a thread titled Saddam's WMD Moved to Syria, An Israeli Says, Quilla wrote:
He's not the only one making that claim:
It’s really too bad about Duelfer’s work being “cut short” because of Zarqawi. The trail of WMD isn’t cold. It leads to Syria and the Bekka Valley of formerly Syrian-occupied Lebanon, according to a Syrian defector to US intelligence. Gen. Tommy Franks himself leans this way, telling the media that "Two days before the war, on March 17 [2003], we saw through multiple intelligence channels - both human intelligence and technical intelligence, large caravans of people and things, including some of the top 55 [most wanted] Iraqis, going to Syria." What was so important to move to Syria immediately before the War with the top regime officials? Duelfer’s next stop should have been Damascus. With Syrian President Bashar Assad now admitting that he has stockpiles of WMD, perhaps it should be ours.
Source.
Thanks a million for the link. Great article for lunchtime reading!
"Why has the administration refused to make this case?"
I suspect Syria has been penciled into the Middle East re-arrangment schedule for sometime after the 2006 US elections.
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