The Return of the Iraqi WMD Controversy

As the situation in Syria worsens, governments around the world have suddenly begun to worry about chemical and biological weapons held by the Assad regime.  Israel reveals particular concern.  A report in The National explains:

Syria has the world's biggest stockpile of chemical weapons and its missiles and rockets can reach any part of Israel, the deputy head of Israel's military said....Syria has not declared its chemical weapons stocks so the exact size of the arsenal is unknown.

Now, news reports speak to a reported effort by Syria to move their stockpiles.  The Daily Beast reports:

Obama administration officials tell The Daily Beast that the CIA has sent officers to the region to assess Syria's weapons program. One major task for the CIA right now is to work with military defectors to find out as much information on Syria's weapons of mass destruction, according to one U.S. official with access to Syrian intelligence.

Significantly, further down in the article, the following information appears:

Whether or not sensitive weapons technology was moved to Syria is a hotly disputed question in the intelligence community. James Clapper, now the Director of National Intelligence and formerly the director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, said in 2003 that he believed materials had been moved out of Iraq in the months before the war and cited satellite imagery.

Ah hah!  The plot thickens.  The failure to find large stockpiles of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) became the Democrat Party mantra justifying condemnation of the Iraq war.  Here's more about General James Clapper's opinion published in an October 2003 report:

The director of a top U.S. spy agency said Tuesday that he believes that material from Iraq's illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war.

The official, James Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the U.S. invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material "unquestionably" had been moved out of Iraq.

Do you now see where we're headed here?  Breitbart.com makes it very clear:

In 2006, former Iraqi general, Georges Sada, who served under Saddam Hussein before he defected, wrote a comprehensive book detailing how the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria, before the US-led action to eliminate Saddam Hussein's WMD threat, by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.

As far back as 2005, Iraqi intelligence documents unearthed after the fall of Saddam Hussein revealed significant efforts by Hussein to stockpile and hide WMD efforts.  For reasons unknown, the Pentagon refused to make such findings public.  Even the NY Times in 2005 reported the existence of WMD.  However, the main stream media filter and a mysterious reluctance on the part of the Bush administration to plead their case resulted in a perception that no such weapons ever existed, and the Iraqi war was based on a huge lie..

However, as Breitbart reporter Eli Lake makes clear:

If - and many of us believe when - the Assad regime decides to use these bio-chemical weapons; these WMD, against the rebels, and if the spent shells are found to possess Iraqi markings of manufacture, anti-war Democrats and Progressives here in the United States will have been complicit in what is tantamount to genocide, and all in pursuit of political gain; all so they could arrogantly chant "Bush lied and people died."

[...]

If I were in Harry Reid's shoes I would be very nervous at the prospect of spent shells proving out Gen. Sada's claims.

We'll just have to wait and see.


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