Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam's WMD's

Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam's WMD's
By John Loftus
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, November 16, 2007

Finally, there are some definitive answers to the mystery of the
missing WMD. Civilian volunteers, mostly retired intelligence officers
belonging to the non-partisan IntelligenceSummit.org, have been poring
over the secret archives captured from Saddam Hussein. The inescapable
conclusion is this: Saddam really did have WMD after all, but not in
the way the Bush administration believed. A 9,000 word research paper
with citations to each captured document has been posted online at
LoftusReport.com. This document research has been supplemented with
dozens of interviews.

The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a
bit chagrinned at these disclosures. The documents show a much more
complex history than previously suspected. The "Bush lied, people
died" chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMD whatsoever after 1991
- and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. The Neocon
diehards insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-
trove is still out there somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of
Iraq. Each side is more than a little bit wrong about Saddam's WMD,
and each side is only a little bit right about what happened to it.



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.


Without pointing fingers at the Americans, the Israeli government now
believes that Saddam Hussein's nuclear stockpiles have ended up in
weapons dumps in Syria. Debkafile, a somewhat reliable private Israeli
intelligence service, has recently published a report claiming that
the Syrians were importing North Korean plutonium to be mixed with
Saddam's enriched uranium. Allegedly, the Syrians were close to
completing a warhead factory next to Saddam's WMD dump in Deir al
Zour, Syria to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of super toxic
"dirty bombs" that would pollute wherever they landed in Israel for
the next several thousands of years. Debka alleged that it was this
combination factory/WMD dump site which was the target of the recent
Israeli air strike in Deir al Zour province..


Senior sources in the Israeli government have privately confirmed to
me that the recent New York Times articles and satellite photographs
about the Israeli raid on an alleged Syrian nuclear target in Al
Tabitha, Syria were of the completely wrong location. Armed with this
knowledge, I searched Google Earth satellite photos for the rest of
the province of Deir al Zour for a site that would match the
unofficial Israeli descriptions: camouflaged black factory building,
next to a military ammunition dump, between an airport and an orchard.
There is a clear match in only one location, Longitude 35 degrees, 16
minutes 49.31 seconds North, Latitude 40 degrees, 3 minutes, 29.97
seconds East. Analysts and members of the public are invited to
determine for themselves whether this was indeed the weapons dump for
Saddam's WMD.


Photos of this complex taken after the Israel raid appear to show that
all of the buildings, earthern blast berms, bunkers, roads, even the
acres of blackened topsoil, have all been dug up and removed. All that
remains are what appear to be smoothed over bomb craters. Of course,
that is not of itself definitive proof, but it is extremely
suspicious.


It should be noted that the American interrogators had accurate
information about a possible Deir al Zour location shortly after the
war, but ignored it:

"An Iraqi dissident going by the name of "Abu Abdallah" claims that on
March 10, 2003, 50 trucks arrived in Deir Al-Zour, Syria after being
loaded in Baghdad. ...Abdallah approached his friend who was hesitant to
confirm the WMD shipment, but did after Abdallah explained what his
sources informed him of. The friend told him not to tell anyone about
the shipment."


These interrogation reports should be re-evaluated in light of the
recently opened Iraqi secret archives, which we submit are the best
evidence. But the captured document evidence should not be overstated.
It must be emphasized that there is no one captured Saddam document
which mentions both the possession of WMD and the movement to Syria.


Moreover, many of Saddam's own tapes and documents concerning chemical
and biological weapons are ambiguous. When read together as a mosaic
whole, Saddam's secret files certainly make a persuasive case of
massive WMD acquisition right up to a few months before the war. Not
only was he buying banned precursors for nerve gas, he was ordering
the chemicals to make Zyklon B, the Nazis favorite gas at Auschwitz.
However odious and well documented his purchases in 2002, there is no
direct evidence of any CW or BW actually remaining inside Iraq on the
day the war started in 2003. As stated in more detail in my full
report, the British, Ukrainian and American secret services all
believed that the Russians had organized a last minute evacuation of
CW and BW stockpiles from Baghdad to Syria.


We know from Saddam's documents that huge quantities of CW and BW were
in fact produced, and there is no record of their destruction. But
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Therefore, at least as
to chemical and biological weapons, the evidence is compelling, but
not conclusive. There is no one individual document or audiotape that
contains a smoking gun.

There is no ambiguity, however, about captured tape ISGQ-2003-
M0007379, in which Saddam is briefed on his secret nuclear weapons
project. This meeting clearly took place in 2002 or afterwards: almost
a decade after the State Department claimed that Saddam had abandoned
his nuclear weapons research.

Moreover the tape describes a laser enrichment process for uranium
that had never been known by the UN inspectors to even exist in Iraq,
and Saddam's nuclear briefers on the tape were Iraqi scientists who
had never been on any weapons inspector's list. The tape explicitly
discusses how civilian plasma research could be used as a cover for
military plasma research necessary to build a hydrogen bomb.

When this tape came to the attention of the International Intelligence
Summit, a non-profit, non-partisan educational forum focusing on
global intelligence affairs, the organization asked the NSA to verify
the voiceprints of Saddam and his cronies, invited a certified
translator to present Saddam's nuclear tapes to the public, and then
invited leading intelligence analysts to comment.

At the direct request of the Summit, President Bush promptly overruled
his national intelligence adviser, John Negroponte, a career State
Department man, and ordered that the rest of the captured Saddam tapes
and documents be reviewed as rapidly as possible. The Intelligence
Summit asked that Saddam's tapes and documents be posted on a public
website so that Arabic-speaking volunteers could help with the
translation and analysis.

At first, the public website seemed like a good idea. Another document
was quickly discovered, dated November 2002, describing an expensive
plan to remove radioactive contamination from an isotope production
building. The document cites the return of UNMOVIC inspectors as the
reason for cleaning up the evidence of radioactivity. This is not far
from a smoking gun: there were not supposed to be any nuclear
production plants in Iraq in 2002.

Then a barrage of near-smoking guns opened up. Document after document
from Saddam's files was posted unread on the public website, each one
describing how to make a nuclear bomb in more detail than the last.
These documents, dated just before the war, show that Saddam had
accumulated just about every secret there was for the construction of
nuclear weapons. The Iraqi intelligence files contain so much accurate
information on the atom bomb that the translators' public website had
to be closed for reasons of national security.

If Saddam had nuclear weapons facilities, where was he hiding them?
Iraqi informants showed US investigators where Saddam had constructed
huge underwater storage facilities beneath the Euphrates River. The
tunnel entrances were still sealed with tons of concrete. The US
investigators who approached the sealed entrances were later
determined to have been exposed to radiation. Incredibly, their
reports were lost in the postwar confusion, and Saddam's underground
nuclear storage sites were left unguarded for the next three years.
Still, the eyewitness testimony about the sealed underwater warehouses
matched with radiation exposure is strong circumstantial evidence that
some amount of radioactive material was still present in Iraq on the
day the war began.

Our volunteer researchers discovered the actual movement order from
the Iraqi high command ordering all the remaining special equipment to
be moved into the underground sites only a few weeks before the onset
of the war. The date of the movement order suggests that President
Bush, who clearly knew nothing of the specifics of the underground
nuclear sites, or even that a nuclear weapons program still existed in
Iraq, may have been accidentally correct about the main point of the
war: the discovery of Saddam's secret nuclear program, even in
hindsight, arguably provides sufficient legal justification for the
previous use of force.

Saddam's nuclear documents compel any reasonable person to the
conclusion that, more probably than not, there were in fact nuclear
WMD sites, components, and programs hidden inside Iraq at the time the
Coalition forces invaded. In view of these newly discovered documents,
it can be concluded, more probably than not, that Saddam did have a
nuclear weapons program in 2001-2002, and that it is reasonably
certain that he would have continued his efforts towards making a
nuclear bomb in 2003 had he not been stopped by the Coalition forces.
Four years after the war began, we still do not have all the answers,
but we have many of them. Ninety percent of the Saddam files have
never been read, let alone translated. It is time to utterly reject
the conventional wisdom that there were no WMD in Iraq and look to the
best evidence: Saddam's own files on WMD. The truth is what it is, the
documents speak for themselves.

John Loftus is President of IntelligenceSummit.org, which is entirely
free of government funding, and depends solely upon private
contributions for its support. Mr. Loftus' full research paper on
Iraqi WMD can be found at www.LoftusReport.com.

More evidence of what despicable liars the
leaders of the Democrat Party are. Worse
are the morons that spread the Democrat
manure like the brain dead morons they are.
.

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