Those WMDs

Recently, more and more has come out about WMDs in Iraq. Of course, the dem/leftists would have you believe that these weapons never existed, even though Saddam used them against his own population and Iran. ABC recently aired some tapes of Saddam, where he discusses WMDs and his nuclear program as late as 2000.

"News that Saddam had an ongoing enrichment program comports with the account of Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, the nuclear physicist who ran Iraq's nuclear centrifuge program.

After turning himself in to U.S. forces in July 2003, Dr. Obeidi revealed that he had successfully hidden centrifuge parts and blueprints from U.N. weapons inspectors on Saddam's orders.

Despite the staggering implications of the audiotaped uranium revelation, only one mainstream media outlet had covered the news as of Monday morning.

Noting that Saddam's enrichment program was "totally unknown to U.N. weapons inspectors," the Washington Times editorialized on Monday: "It is apparent that the American public has much more to learn about . . . . precisely when Saddam's nuclear weapons programs actually stopped." "

There has been more reported on Iraq's attempts to enrich uranium using a technique called plasma separation.

There has also long been speculation that Iraq's WMDs were moved to a friendly country, Syria being the likeliest place.

""The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org).

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.

Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S. government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security when the events he described today occurred.

He called the evacuation of Saddam's WMD stockpiles "a well-orchestrated campaign using two neighboring client states with which the Russian leadership had a long time security relationship." "

A former Iraqi General, Georges Sada also claims that Iraq's WMDs were moved to Syria and that Syria has given some of them to al-Qaeda. I have some reservations about his claims, as I do with anyone hawking a book.


Joe Mariani has an excellent article on this subject. You need to read, Iraq's WMD Redux. I will post an excerpt here. Also, be sure to see Joe's blog, Guardian WatchBlog.

"The idea that every inch of Iraq has been examined and pronounced clean is ludicrous. Reports are still coming in of storage sites that were completely ignored by the Iraq Survey Group, which concentrated heavily on previously known WMD storage sites. Simple common sense would tell anyone that a place marked on every inspector's map "WMD Storage Facility" might not be the best place to hide your WMDs. Instead, something like buried and locked concrete bunkers not marked on any map might be a more likely location. Lo and behold, several such sites were reported to the ISG, and totally ignored.

David Gaubatz, a former member of the U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, was assigned to do intelligence research. He was shown four sealed underground concrete bunkers in southern Iraq with the tunnels leading to them deliberately flooded. His sources told him that the facilities had contained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. He filed reports with photographs, grid coordinates, and testimony from multiple sources. But the ISG never unsealed the bunkers. "We agents begged and begged for weeks and months to get ISG to respond to the sites with the proper equipment," Gaubatz told the New York Sun. Yet the ISG felt comfortable filing a final report, in effect closing the case."

Too bad none of these revelations fit into the world view of the MSM. Some good investigative reporting is really needed here. - Sailor