DoD Report: 50 Trucks Carried Iraqi WMD To Syria

Sweetness & Light ^ | July 28, 2006 | N/A

[okie01]

Sam, I am a bit skeptical on this one. A convoy of fifty trucks just before the invasion? We had to have been monitoring that place constantly, plus our guys on the ground.

Fifty trucks is a long convoy, tough to miss on satelite images.

Recall that there were reports that reconnaisance (satellite and aerial) detected these convoys.

[AFPhys]

Yes, it is the same document. I thought I'd pinged you when I placed PREWARDOCS for indexing this, but I guess not. Anyway, here is one DEBKA link regarding these same shipments, but I know I saw some other DEBKA stuff from much earlier, but I've not run across it yet. NOTE that the WMDs were taken out of Iraq in the interim period between the stupid UN's dumb "resolutions" and the US finally taking care of business.
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from http://www.debka-net-weekly.com/issue.pl?username=&inumber=176#640
October 08, 2004: The Duelfer Report
Still No Closure on WMD Issue


“Adams once said: facts are stubborn.” This quote came from Senator Edward Kennedy of the US Senate Armed Forces Committee when he questioned the Iraqi Survey Group’s leader Charles Duelfer on October 6 on the massive report he had just presented to the committee. He was referring to the conclusion reached by the ISG that in the moment of time before the US-led invasion, no weapons of mass destruction stockpiles were present in Iraq. Duelfer concealed his indignation with difficulty when the senator termed “speculative” his judgment that Saddam Hussein intended restarting his WMD programs when UN sanctions were lifted. That is not speculation, the ISG leader protested, but analysis based on exhaustive work on the ground by many people, some of whom paid with their lives.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly does not propose to join the argument between Kennedy and Duelfer, or step into the political debate between Republicans and Democrat on the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War. Both claim that the new report supports their respective positions. The John Kerry camp argues that it demolishes the claims made by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney of WMD in Iraq prior to the war. The Republicans pounce on Duelfer’s conclusion that Saddam Hussein was determined to develop weapons of mass destruction and was therefore a threat.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources have checked and rechecked the data published on these pages and finds it as solid – or as “stubborn” - as ever. Therefore, they reiterate that the reason the ISG found no evidence of WMD stockpiles in Iraq in 2003 was that most of Saddam’s banned materials, equipment and vehicles were shipped by convoy to Syria between January 10 and March 10, 2003.

The transfer was supervised by Saddam’s son Uday at the Iraqi end.

The former Syrian defense minister’s son Fares Tlas took charge of the convoys as they crossed the border.

As we reported at the time, Tlas directed most of the trucks to the El Jazeera desert in northern Syria for interment at secret sites in the al Jazeera-Qaratshuk region enclosed by the Iraqi-Syrian-Turkish border triangle southeast of Syrian al-Qamishli. Smaller quantities were buried somewhere in the vast area between the Syrian towns of Az Zawr and Al Qamishli. A third small batch was concealed somewhere in the Lebanese Beqaa Valley.

Our most reliable intelligence sources, some of whom took part in working sessions with Duelfer’s predecessor as ICG leader, David Kay, in Washington, Iraq, and other places, report that he was given not only the dates of the transfer, but descriptions of the vehicles in the convoy. One senior source claimed that Dr Kay knew exactly what was in the tankers that crossed from Iraq into Syria on those dates because after the war he had access to maps and coordinates marked with the hiding places, satellite photos of the convoys and information on their contents as recorded on the instruments of spy planes.

On the basis of all this information, Dr. Kay is known to have conferred with military and intelligence heads in various Middle East countries. Our sources have no information on whether Dr.Duelfer had access to the same data as Dr. Kay. All they know is that every inquiry conducted up until today stops at the Iraqi-Syrian border.

Duelfer could not say “definitively” whether Iraq had transferred WMD out of the country before the 2003 war. Kay also left the question open. At the time, he said there was no way of settling the question without cooperation from Syria.

Another question wide open is why Washington has never taken action to insert Iraqi Survey Team experts or US special forces into northern Syria to inspect the sites marked as WMD hiding places. Possible reasons are reluctance to go to war with another Arab state after Iraq, fear of heavy US casualties or even a suspicion that banned materials may have decayed too far for identification.

That question ties in with another which is far less controversial.

Since well before March 2003, Syria has been home to the Iraq Baath’s rear logistic and financial infrastructure, hosting also al Qaeda and al Qaeda bases for dispatching fighters, weapons and explosives committed to fight and blow up Americans in Iraq. Yet never was any US military or even covert action ordered on Syrian soil, but for an isolated incident when a busload of Hizballah terrorists was bombed.

The only new piece of information reaching us on this subject is that Syrian military intelligence officers in Lebanon have begun liquidating agents who operated the secret corridor of anti-US fighting men and arms into Iraq. Syrian military intelligence runs this corridor. At some time it was a two-lane channel, also carrying senior Iraqi Baath officials back and forth between Iraq and Syria.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources, one of the agents given the chop most recently was Ismail Khatib, from Lebanese Majdal Anjar, an important border town under Syrian army control. He was singled out last month as one of the members of an al Qaeda Palestinian ring rounded up by the Lebanese authorities for plotting a series of bomb blasts against foreign embassies in Beirut. He was later reported to have died of a heart attack in a Beirut hospital on September 27 or 28.

His family who collected the body claimed he died of torture, sparking riots in his home town.

The information our sources have garnered on this episode are as follows.

Ismail Khatib did not belong to the al Qaeda Palestinian ring, but to a salfit sect headed by the Lebanese Sheikh Ibrahim Amema. Before the war, the sect members were deployed in Fallujah and Baghdad as the hub through which Syrian military intelligence activated its smuggling networks between Syria and Iraq. Hatim was one of the heads of the network. He recently returned home from Iraq to take up a new post as recruiter of fighting strength for the anti-American insurgency in Iraq.

His fellow townsmen in Majdal Anjar were incensed over his death, setting up roadblocks on the Beirut-Damascus highway, burning the local police station and threatening to seal the Lebanese-Syrian border. They carried placards bitterly accusing the Syrians of exploiting the town for the Iraq war and then murdering their helpers for the sake of a deal with the Americans.

It is clear to them that Syria is covering its tracks to conceal the volume of its clandestine cross-border trade with the Saddam regime, including very possibly the convoys carrying Saddam Hussein’s vanished weapons of mass destruction.

[Michael.SF.]

OK.

Then why is the Bush Admin. silent on these points?

I do believe that we are winning the WOT and that Iraq is in much better shape then is being portrayed. However, we are in grave danger of losing the war on the home front due in a large part to a lack of a presentation of the facts to the American people.

And please do not blame the media, as they slant all news the way they want it slanted. A clear, concise, summary with loads of evidence, properly presented to America cannot be kept quiet.

Sorry, but President Bush is getting beat on a presentation of the facts to us, while the Democrats are controllinbg the perception of the events surrounding this and other topics.

[Michael.SF.]

Thanks, that has been pointed out to me previously.

[AFPhys]

AH: Here we are: a DEBKA synopsis of their reports of convoy traffic moving WMDs out of Iraq while the UN dithered:
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http://www.debka-net-weekly.com/issue.pl?username=&inumber=131#507

The heavy traffic detected by General Clapper’s satellites was reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly on three different dates.

DNW 97, February 14, 2003, a little over a month before the war began, disclosed: “In the last two weeks, our military sources discovered that Iraq staged a major removal of its forbidden weapons systems, sending them overland by truck to Lebanon via Syria.”

DNW 106, April 25, 2003, 10 days after the capture of Baghdad, reported: “Though on the run, he (Saddam) retains control of sufficient stocks of unconventional weapons, intelligence, assets and money to wage war on the United States from bases and hideouts outside Iraq, where some of his WMD systems are also tucked away.”

Those systems, of course, had been hidden in Syria.

DNW 107, May 2, the day after President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq at an end, pointed to Syria as “having secretly disposed of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction” by hiding them in three places – two in the Lebanese Beqaa and one in Syria. The first site is located in a valley stretching between the Jabal Akroum Mountains and the Lebanese town of al Qabayyat and the Syrian border; the second at a point lying between the Lebanese towns of al Labway and Hirmil between the Orontes River and the Lebanese-Syrian border.

The third site is Syria’s underground military industrial facilities near Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city.

[GretchenM]

It will be deinied to the end.

Right there next to the Holocaust.

[CedarDave]

Probably my biggest criticism of the administration is their failure to proclaim the high ground when they have it, as in the examples you cite. Connecting the dots with what happened to the WMDs that were there is a no brainer IMO. Yet silence. Even if the evidence is not 100 percent conclusive, it would be to their advantage to plant doubts in the mind of the public to counter the constant clamor by the press and the left there were no WMDs and Bush lied.

[SE Mom]

WMD ping

[Para-Ord.45]

" no wmds no wmds la-la -la i`m not listening "

[ol' hoghead]

According to Aboutislam.com, Muharram was from March 4 til April 2, 2003. Muharram 10 would be March 10.

[diverteach]

I'd bet my next paycheck that these are the "Surpises" that Iran and Hezbollah keep refering to.

[ol' hoghead]

make that March 14

[John Lenin]

I notice all the RAT trolls are showing up on this thread.

[mjaneangels@aolcom]

Place marker to read a little later.

[pyx]

Fifty trucks is a long convoy, tough to miss on satelite images.

The translation says the trucks totaling fifty (50) arrived in groups. There could have been 12 groups of four trucks. Tractor trailers as you show in your picture were not specified. They could have been straight trucks (5 ton) arriving in groups and again smaller groups of straight trucks would not be as noticable. Or there may have been combinations of straight trucks and tractor trailers including even covered rolloff flatbeds trailers. Various combinations and permutations are possible and the translation does not specify.

Whose to say that we don't have satellite images, even if there was one huge 50 tractor trailer long convoy ? If such satellite images did exist, they would THANKFULLY be classified so that even the New York Slimes and other LEFTIST organs couldn't leak them to their allies who want to destroy America.

[Michael.SF.]

All valid points.

Regarding your tagline, read that in context with my post #63. The Left is beating us on the War of Words on this issue and we are not doing enough to get the information out to those who need to hear it.

[Michael.SF.]

Excellent point.

That cocky POS in Iran would not make the claims he has if he did not have something under his robe.

[John Lenin]

I believe we knew all along the weapons went to Syria but timing is everything because we announce we know where they went it's up to the US to take action. tick-tock

[Michael.SF.]

Might help if Bush, Rice, Rove, Snow, anyone in the Administration would push the point.

Amen to that.

[Michael.SF.]

I believe we knew all along the weapons went to Syria but timing is everything because we announce we know where they went it's up to the US to take action. tick-tock

You make a good point. Also something to consider:

W has been taking so much heat on this MWD thing, that the next time we take action on it the proof will be 100% infallable.

He may be laying low until that 100% proof is known to all, but that is a hugely risky course of action. I would still be more comfortable if he came out and provided much more info to everyone on what we do know about the MWD's.

Of course, then the left will start whining about how he did not do enough about it.