Don't Be Surprised When Iraqi WMD Found (Rush)

I don't know if you heard about this, because it has not been widely reported. Terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda were poised to detonate a chemical bomb in the heart of Amman, Jordan, that would have killed 20,000 people and contaminated a large area. King Abdullah praised Jordan's intelligence service for foiling a crime never before seen in the kingdom of Jordan. The target was a headquarters of the general intelligence department on a hill in Amman.

King Abdullah was to be in America to meet with President Bush, but decided not to come because of this threat. Where this story gets interesting is that King Abdullah of Jordan says that the vehicles carrying these explosives, the chemical bomb, were smuggled over the border from neighboring Syria. Syria is denying this, but these are weapons of mass destruction.

Syria is a transit point for weapons of mass destruction. The whole subject of where are the weapons of mass destruction remains a focal point of mine. It remains an area of heightened curiosity, because I do not believe that they have been destroyed. I do not believe that Iraq never had them. I think Iraq had them. I think Iraq was working on them. I don't think the world's intelligence agencies are as woefully incompetent and bad and inept as the whole weapons of mass destruction issue would lead us to believe.

There are some things missing from buildings in Iraq, and there's too much speculation out there about how some of this stuff can be miniaturized and transported out of the country easily. Syria is an obvious place, and many people I respect have pointed to the Bekaa Valley as a place as well. We're not going to invade Syria any time soon to find out, but this is the second example of weapons of mass destruction-type coming out of Syria.

Now, they had to get to Syria somehow. I just want to keep your mind open to the possibility that these weapons of mass destruction from Iraq are somewhere, and they've not been destroyed. They haven't just vanished into the ether, and I'm going to make a prediction to you that all of the liberals and critics of the president who have harped on this and jumped on this have once again jumped the gun. They are a little premature here because we don't know yet what, if anything, did happen to those weapons of mass destruction, despite knowing that they did exist. So keep your hats on and don't be surprised down the road what is learned at some point.

Yellow cake uranium has been found at junk yards in Rotterdam and that's exactly what Iraq was looking for. This stuff could have been disbursed over the years to any number of places, and if you think that an Al-Qaeda related group is going to blow up Amman, Jordan with weapons that were procured from Syria, if you think that Al-Qaeda is not related to what all was going on in Iraq, and the Middle East, then you are engaged in blindness or wishful thinking. That is the position of the left, and that's why they can't be trusted to be placed in a leadership position.

"then why didn't we go after Egypt and Saudi Arabia? All of the identified hijackers came from those 2 countries. Apparently they were harboring terrorists. But we didn't attack them."

What would make you think that we MUST treat the terrorist problem the same way in every country? The Saudi situation is a lot more delicate. So?

"Instead we attacked Iraq which had nothing whatsoever to do with 911. "

Just for the sake of arguement why does Iraq need to have anything to do with 911?

"So America is going to stay in Afghanistan forever, to make sure the Taliban doesn't return? Are we going to stay in every country of the world to make sure that terrorists never form anywhere? "

It would be nice if we don't have to face this but we do.

"So how did we choose Iraq?

Mainly, because we beleived they had WMD that they would sell to terrorists.

"Iraq would be the least likely country in the Middle East if their support for Islamic fundamentalism and harboring of terrorists were the criteria we were using."

I would not say that. We and every other nation believed that Saddam had WMD. After 911 it became crystal clear what can happen if you wait too long to deal with a threat. As Bush said there was no smoking gun but if you wait for it to smoke it means you have been shot and it is too late. In addition Saddam tried to kill Bush 41, he thumbed his nose at the UN, he was a danger to his neighbors, he was a murdering tyrant, and so were his macabe and evil sons.

The chemicals absolutely came from Syria AND there is substantial evidence (even though the media wants to ignore it) that they came from Iraq.

The curious lack of curiosity about WMD
By Larry Elder

"Week after week after week after week," said Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., about President Bush's rationale for going to war with Iraq, "we were told lie after lie after lie after lie." Were we?

Jordan recently seized 20 tons of chemicals trucked in by confessed al Qaeda members who brought the stuff in from Syria. The chemicals included VX, Sarin and 70 others. But the media seems curiously incurious about whether one could reasonably trace this stuff back to Iraq. Had the terrorists released a "toxic cloud," Jordanian officials say 80,000 would have died!

So, I interviewed terrorism expert John Loftus, who once held some of the highest security clearances in the world. Loftus, a former Army officer, served as a Justice Department prosecutor. He investigated CIA cases of Nazi war criminals for the U.S. attorney general. Author of several books, Loftus once received a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

John Loftus: There's a lot of reason to think (the source of the chemicals) might be Iraq. We captured Iraqi members of al Qaeda, who've been trained in Iraq, planned for the mission in Iraq, and now they're in Jordan with nerve gas. That's not the kind of thing you buy in a grocery store. You have to have obtained it from someplace.

Larry Elder: They couldn't have obtained it from Syria?

Loftus: Syria does have the ability to produce certain kinds of nerve gasses, but in small quantities. The large stockpiles were known to be in Iraq. The best U.S. and allied intelligence say that in the 10 weeks before the Iraq war, Saddam's Russian adviser told him to get rid of all the nerve gas. It would be useless against U.S. troops; the rubber suits were immune to it. So they shipped it across the border to Syria and Lebanon and buried it. Now, in the last few weeks, there's a controversy that Syria has been trying to get rid of this stuff.

They're selling it to al Qaeda is one supposition. We know the Sudanese government demanded that the Syrian government empty its warehouse in Khartoum where they've been hiding illegal missiles along with components of weapons of mass destruction. But there's no doubt these guys confessed on Jordanian television that they received the training for this mission in Iraq. . . . And from the description it appears this is the form of nerve gas known as VX. It's very rare, and very tough to manufacture . . . one of the most destructive chemical mass-production weapons that you can use. . . . They wanted to build three clouds, a mile across, of toxic gas. A whole witch's brew of nasty chemicals that were going to go into this poison cloud, and this would have gone over shopping malls, hospitals . . .

Elder: You said that the Russians told Saddam, "There is going to be an invasion. Get rid of your chemical and biological weapons."

Loftus: Sure. It would only bring the United Nations down on their heads if they were shown to really have weapons of mass destruction. It's not generally known, but the CIA has found 41 different material breaches where Saddam did have a weapons of mass destruction program of various types. It was completely illegal. But no one could find the stockpiles. And the liberal press seems to be focusing on that.

Elder: It seems to me that this is a huge, huge story.

Loftus: It's embarrassing to the (press). They've staked their reputations that this stuff wasn't there. And now all of a sudden we have al Qaeda agents from Iraq showing up with weapons of mass destruction.

Elder: David Kay said, in an interim report, that there was a possibility that WMD components were shipped to Syria.

Loftus: A possibility? We had a Syrian journalist who defected to Paris in January. The guy is dying of cancer, and he said, "Look, my friends in Syrian intelligence told me exactly where the stuff is buried." He named three sites in Syria, and the Israelis have confirmed the three sites. They know where the stuff is, but the problem is that the United States can't just go around invading Arab countries. . . . We know from Israeli and defectors' intelligence that the son of the Syrian defense minister was paid 50 million bucks to bring the stuff across the border and bury it.

Elder: Why would al Qaeda attack Jordan?

Loftus: Jordan is an ally of the United States. It's at peace with Israel. And Jordan has a long history of trying to prosecute terrorists. . . . There are a lot of reasons. . . . They want to make an example of them. They want to terrorize as many of the Arab states as possible. This is sort of a political dream for the president. The worst nightmare is al Qaeda gets weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. And it looks like it's coming true.

A Syria/Iraq/al Qaeda/WMD connection? Why, this calls for a congressional investigation.
[All emphasis added].

Hmmm. Interesting. I didn't think that Iraq had ANYTHING to do with Al Qaeda.

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