Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Not so fast on that "no WMDs" claim....

Interesting FrontPage article by Caroline Glick today... The Proliferation Dodge is a must read, and echoes what I've been hounding on now for months. That being those Iraqi government documents seized after our 2003 entry - finally getting translations and published - are revealing more about Saddam, his relationships with the global Islamic jihad movement, and his WMD programmes.

Over the weekend former federal prosecutor and the head of the non-governmental International Intelligence Summit, John Loftus, released a report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. His report was based on a private study of captured Iraqi documents. These were the unread Arabic language documents that U.S. forces seized, but had not managed to translate after overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003.

After a prolonged battle between Congress and then director of U.S. National Intelligence John Negroponte, President George W. Bush ordered those documents posted on a public access Web site last year. They were taken down after it was discovered that among the Iraqi documents were precise descriptions of how to build nuclear weapons.

As Loftus summarized, "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 1990s. 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."

Loftus then cites Israeli sources who claim that the Iraqi nuclear program was transferred to the Deir az Zour province in Syria.

Loftus's report jibes with a report published on the Web site of Kuwait's Al Seyassah's newspaper on September 25, 2006. That report, which I noted last November, cited European intelligence sources and claimed that in late 2004 Syria began developing a nuclear program near its border with Turkey. Syria's program, which was run by President Bashar Assad's brother Maher and defended by an Iranian Revolutionary Guards brigade, had by mid-2006 "reached the stage of medium activity." The Kuwaiti report stated that the Syrian nuclear program was based "on equipment and materials that the sons of the deposed Iraqi leader, Uday and Qusai transferred to Syria by using dozens of civilian trucks and trains, before and after the U.S.-British invasion in March 2003." The program, which was run by Iranians with assistance from Iraqi scientists and scientists from the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, "was originally built on the remains of the Iraqi program after it was wholly transferred to Syria."



Glick goes on in this exemplary report - pointing out how complacent leaders fail the world's security when they demonstrate a severe lack of interest in pursuing the informational truths, and downplay their actual existence.

Stellar stuff... truly stellar. Will the media ever admit their premature "there were no WMDs" rallying cry was in error? Will Pelosi and Reid ever apologize for their blatant lies?

Or will this all be chalked up to disbelievers refusing to recognize the documents are genuine because it's not only inconvenient, but proves the Iraq action was warranted? Oh no! Could it be Bush was correct? How dastardly...

Probably the latter. And it is these attitudes that will be the death of us all.

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