Did Saddam's WMD Go To Syria? Part IV

Saddam’s “Special Weapons” went by air to Syria, Belarus, and possibly Russia and Libya as well. They went by ground to Syria, and they went by sea to points unreported. The plan was called “Sarindar” (“Emergency Exit”), and wasn’t much different in general strategic terms from the American flight from Saigon, South Vietnam. Just as US embassy officials shredded and burned documents in Saigon, and again in Tehran, Kabul, and a dozen other fallen nations, the Russians and others did what they could to move, hide, and/or destroy their sensitive documents, equipment that they’d provided to Saddam’s Regime, and allegedly his WMD and WMD equipment as well. “By air, by land, and by sea” That is the claim made by Gen. Sada, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Shaw, and Gen. Ibrahim, Ariel Sharon, Israeli intelligence, and many more.

Clandestine movements by air and land have been discussed. The story of “Sarindar” by sea follows. Allegedly two Russian ships left the Umm Qasr port in the months before the war and went to the Indian Ocean. On board were supposedly some of Saddam’s WMD chemical precursors. According to the “Sarindar” plan, they were to be taken to a deep part of the ocean and dumped. It is completely impossible to fathom that Russian ships could enter the Persian Gulf, dock in Iraq, load up and pass through the Persian Gulf again, then into the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean all within 100 miles of between one and three entire American aircraft carrier battleships as well as two Marine Amphibious Assault task forces. There is no way that those two ships were not monitored by dozens-perhaps even hundreds-of American and Coalition warships. What is known for certain is that just before the war, mainstream media reported that two Russian warships and a tanker were positioned off the Persian Gulf allegedly to monitor the situation. More likely they were there to ensure that none of the Coalition naval forces threatened to board the Russian ships. In fact, from March 20 onward the Coalition stopped and seized all ships bound for Iraq (often under the disguise of being part of the Oil-For-Food program). Those that were in fact found to be carrying humanitarian supplies had their cargos delivered by the US military instead.

Now, opponents of the war often like to parse words and rhetorically argue that the war was about WMD and not WMD precursor chemicals. Compare Saddam to the late Timothy McVeigh. Both committed mass murder, both belonged in prison. Had Timothy McVeigh worked in the prison autoshop and been caught with a gallon of gasoline in his locker as well as a few pounds of fertilizer, would that have been a threat? Absolutely! He used those chemicals to make the bomb that used to commit mass murder, and similarly Saddam used different combinations of different chemicals to commit mass murder.

The Duelfer Report, after action reports from US Forces, and even mainstream media have all shown photos and video of the thousands and thousands of empty artillery shells positioned at chlorine plants, pesticide plants, and “former” chemical weapons manufacturing plants. While empty artillery shells are not an imminent threat, they could be filled in hours and turned into WMD. Most of Saddam’s program had been redesigned to make fresh, potent chemical and biological weapons in hours in some cases, and so the issue becomes his intent.

Did he intend to make fresh WMD with chemical precursors-like those allegedly dumped by Russian ships? The Duelfer Report says absolutely yes, and it makes that claim based on interviews with regime leaders as well as Saddam and his history of doing so. Having said all that, some chemicals-like chlorine and pesticides-are dual use and do have non-military uses, but other chemicals do not. For example SCUD missile fuel is unique to SCUD missiles. Hans Blix’ UNMOVIC couldn’t even explain why Saddam’s regime was making SCUD missile fuel. When the war started, this chemical was gone. Perhaps deep-sixed in the Indian Ocean? Missing also are the binary chemical agents that Saddam could only have used to combine and make fresh nerve agent before loading into empty artillery shells and rockets, or the illegal missiles he was found to have by post-war investigations (at least 22 of these illegal missiles were fired at Coalition forces. None had chemical warheads, but post-war investigations did find that the missiles had been widened to fit SCUD warheads of which there remain several missing chemical warheads).

By air, by land, and by sea, Saddam paid the Russians and Syrians to get rid of his illegal WMD, WMD equipment, documents, and people. That Saddam once had horrific weapons is not in debate. Many were destroyed or decayed, and the Duelfer Report lists them in great detail, but it also lists many Remaining Unresolved Disarmament Issues. For someone to claim that all of Saddam’s weapons were destroyed and not moved out of Iraq in the 15-month “rush-to-war”, then that someone must be able to present greater evidence of the destruction of those remaining Unresolved Disarmament Issues-evidence greater than the mounting pile that suggests they were removed from Iraq. When someone claims that Saddam destroyed all his anthrax and other chemical and biological agents, and the war was one big “Bush lie” about WMD, they need only be asked to provide some evidence of its destruction: contaminated sand, witnesses, documentation, photos, any evidence. Fact is, for thousands of liters, there is no evidence of destruction by Saddam, but there is evidence it was moved. These terrible weapons do not simply vanish on their own, and given that a tablespoon of some can kill hundreds of thousands…it seems to me that they should be accounted for rather than dismissed to fit a political agenda.

Part one here
Part two here
Part three here

You need to read this.
You don’t need Stockpiles.

This UN Inspector had this theory.....

Why Saddam had no WMD stockpiles
by Graham Pearson

“...Three months later, when asked why no WMD had been found since the end of the war, Rolf Ekeus said that his feeling ‘is very clearly that the Iraqi policy long before the war was to build capability to develop its capabilities to produce weapons for the situation, for the conflict situation, not to produce for storage and create a problem of storage management.’ Furthermore he considered that Saddam ‘decided years ago that it was unwise to store mustard gas and other unstable and corrosive poisons in barrels, and also difficult to conceal them. Therefore, rather than store large stocks of weapons of mass destruction, he would adapt the program to retain an infrastructure (laboratories, equipment, trained scientists, detailed plans) that could “break-out” and ramp up production when required. The model is Japanese “just in time” manufacturing, where you save on inventory by making and delivering stuff in immediate response to orders.’

http://www.asanltr.com/newsletter/05-5/articles/055b.html

U.S. Corporations Keeping Biowarfare Work Secret

by Sherwood Ross

Global Research, June 23, 2007

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6131

A number of major pharmaceutical corporations and biotech firms are concealing the nature of the biological warfare research work they are doing for the U.S. government.

Since their funding comes from the National Institutes of Health, the recipients are obligated under NIH guidelines to make their activities public. Not disclosing their ops raises the suspicion they may be engaged in forbidden kinds of germ warfare research. According to the Sunshine Project, a nonprofit arms control watchdog operating out of Austin, Texas, among corporations holding back information about their activities are:

Abbott Laboratories, BASF Plant Science, Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont Central Research and Development, Eli Lilly Corp., Embrex, GlaxoSmithKline, Hoffman-LaRoche, Merck & Co., Monsanto, Pfizer Inc., Schering-Plough Research Institute, and Syngenta Corp. of Switzerland.

In case you didn’t know it, the White House since 9/11 has called for spending $44-billion on biological warfare research, a sum unprecedented in world history, and an obliging Congress has authorized it. Thus, some of the deadliest pathogens known to humankind are being rekindled in hundreds of labs in pharmaceutical houses, university biology departments, and on military bases. An international convention the U.S. signed forbids it to stockpile, manufacture or use biological weapons. But if the U.S. won’t say what’s going down in those laboratories other countries are going to assume the worst and a biowarfare arms race will be on, if it isn’t already. Sunshine says failure to disclose operations also puts corporate employees involved in this work at risk. Only 8,500, or 16%, of the 52,000 workers employed at the top 20 U.S. biotech firms work at an NIH guidelines-compliant company, Sunshine says.

Francis Boyle, an international law authority at the University of Illinois, Champaign, says pursuant to national strategy directives adopted by Bush in 2002, the Pentagon “is now gearing up to fight and ‘win’ biological warfare without prior public knowledge and review.” Boyle said the Pentagon’s Chemical and Biological Defense Program was revised in 2003 to endorse “first-use” strike in war. Boyle said the program includes Red Teaming, which he described as “plotting, planning, and scheming how to use biowarfare.”

Besides the big pharmaceutical houses, the biowarfare buildup is getting an enthusiastic response from academia, which sees new funds flowing from Washington’s horn of plenty. “American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agenda, researchers, institutes and laboratories to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the Pentagon and the CIA,” Boyle says. What’s more, the Bush administration is pouring billions in biowarfare research while some very real killers, such as influenza, are not being cured.In 2006, the NIH got $120 million to combat influenza, which kills about 36,000 Americans annually but it got $1.76 billion for biodefense, much of it spent to research anthrax. How many people has anthrax killed lately? Well, let’s see, there were those five people killed in the mysterious attacks on Congress of October, 2001 -— attacks that suspiciously emanated from a government laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md.

One would think the FBI might apprehend the perpetrator whose attack shut down the Congress of the United States but nearly six years have gone by and it hasn’t caught anybody. Seem a bit odd to you? Some folks suspect the anthrax attack was an inside job to panic the country into a huge biowarfare buildup to “protect” America from “terrorists.” That is, of course, just what happened.

Milton Leitenberg, of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, though, says the risk of terrorists and nonstate actors using biological agents against the U.S. “has been systematically and deliberately exaggerated” by administration scare-mongering.

And molecular biologist Jonathan King of Massachusetts Institute of Technology says, “the Bush administration launched a major program which threatens to put the health of our people at far greater risk than the hazard to which they claimed to have been responding.” King added President Bush’s policies “do not increase the security of the American people” but “bring new risk to our population of the most appalling kind.”

In the absence of any credible foreign threat, Sunshine’s Hammond said, “Our biowarfare research is defending ourselves from ourselves. It’s a dog chasing its tail.” Sadly, it looks more and more every day like a mad dog.

For more on this subject, see the author’s article in the July/August issue of The Humanist magazine. Sherwood Ross has worked as a reporter for major dailies and wire services. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

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