New Light On Saddam's WMDs

Ahh, the continued questions about Saddam Hussein's WMD program....

One of the biggest mistakes the Bush Administration made in Iraq, in my not too humble opinion was to publicize the fact that Saddam Hussein had an ongoing WMD program....and then take nineteen months piddling around with Kofi Anan and the rest of the `oil for food' cabal at the UN trying to get yet another UN resolution before doing anything about it.

I've often said that given that amount of time to hide, sell or otherwise dispose of anything Saddam had, I'd be surprised if we actually did find anything like that in Iraq. And, after putting two and two together,given what I've heard from some of my sources in the region, as well as what some of Saddam's own people have said publicly, I was always pretty sure that Basher Assad and Syria were one of the primary destinations. It's not well known, but among other things, Saddam had leased a luxurious villa in the Syrian Mediterranean port of Latakia on a long term lease for himself and his family, just down the road from Basher Assad's own complex.He was obviously planning to settle in there, but simply got caught in Iraq before he could get himself out.

Ted at the fine site Israpundit alerted me to a piece he crossposted by John Loftus, President of IntelligenceSummit.org, an independent intel think tank. It's a great article that summarizes a 9,000 word research paper, with actual citations to those captured documents from Saddam's own archives....the ones the Bush Administration hasn't seen fit to bother translating yet. And his conclusions? Saddam really did have WMDs after all, but not in the way the Bush administration believed:

"This Iraqi document research has been supplemented with satellite photographs and dozens of interviews, among them David Gaubatz who risked radiation exposure to locate Saddam’s underwater WMD warehouses , and John Shaw, whose brilliant detective work solved the puzzle of where the WMD went. Both have contributed substantially to solving one of the most difficult mysteries of our decade.

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. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam’s entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right out from under the Americans’ noses. The theft of the unguarded Iraqi nuclear stockpile is perhaps, the worst scandal of the war, suggesting a level of extreme incompetence and gross dereliction of duty that makes the Hurricane Katrina debacle look like a model of efficiency."

Not only that, but the untranslated documents were posted on a public website at the express orders of President Bush...and later had to be removed hastily when it was discovered that the documents, among other juicy tidbits, contained explicit instructions on how to make a nuclear bomb!

Absolutely a must read for Joshua's Army members.