DoD Report: 50 Trucks Carried Iraqi WMD To Syria

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Good, bad... I'm the guy with the gun. [bang!]

Not sure how trustworthy any opposition sources can be...

I'm sure our one party media will have a field day investigating this development.

Might help if Bush, Rice, Rove, Snow, anyone in the Administration would push the point.

I bet there's a mad scramble at 60 Minutes to get this story on the air this weekend...not.

I'm sure our one party media will have a field day investigating this development.

(Just ~~kidding~~ dreaming of course.)

Agreed!
If President Bush were to revisit the issue and bring forth all the documentation the libs head would explode or they would just ignore it. I believe they would do the latter or I would buy stock in duct tape there'd be alot of exploding heads.

Ah, breaker one-nine, this here's the Rubber Duck. You gotta copy on me, Pig Pen, c'mon?

Uh, Breaker One-Nine, this here's the Rubber Duck
You got a copy on me Pig-Pen? C'mon

Uh, yeah 10-4 Pig Pen, fer sure, fer sure
By golly it's clean clear to Flag-Town, C'mon

Uh, yeah, that's a big 10-4 Pig-Pen,
Yeah, we definitely got us the front door good buddy,
Mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a convoy

Then what is that a picture of? ;)

Beat me by a minute and a half! I hate you GPA!

Didn't Colin Powell show satellite photographs of these trucks leaving known WMD sites to the UN before the war started in 3/03?

I think he won't because the standard of proof required will keep going up and up to the point of a row of nuclear tipped ICBM. MSM and Democrats are not going to look at this honestly and in good faith.

Beat me by a minute and a half! I hate you GPA!

LOL. Show me trucks, I spout C.W. McCall reflexively.

I'm curious what Moharram 10th translates to on the normal calendar. Spec Op folks were already in Iraq weeks before the war. Rehearsals for raids on suspected WMD sites were no doubt conducted months in advance and those sites monitored by satellite. Any convoy of 50 trucks is going to be suspicious whether it leaves one of those sites or not. Even a convoy of 10 trucks is going to be suspicious if it's crossing into Syria soon before the war. Keep in mind that Arabs tend to exaggerate wildly. A convoy of 50 trucks filled with WMD might be, in reality, 2 bongo trucks full of watermelon.

50 trucks is a hell of a long line of trucks. It would have been pretty hard for us to miss during pre-war surveillance.

John Loftus has been talking about this for over 3 years now....

Indeed. We here at FR were talking about the caravans of cars trucks and limos that were streaming into Syria weeks before the US led coalition went in to kick Sadaam's butt.

Anyone with a brain knew what was in those trucks.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20041028-122637-6257r.htm

Russia tied to Iraq's missing arms

By Bill Gertz

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."

Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.

Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.

The Russian involvement in helping disperse Saddam's weapons, including some 380 tons of RDX and HMX, is still being investigated, Mr. Shaw said. The RDX and HMX, which are used to manufacture high-explosive and nuclear weapons, are probably of Russian origin, he said.

Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita could not be reached for comment.

The disappearance of the material was reported in a letter Oct. 10 from the Iraqi government to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Disclosure of the missing explosives Monday in a New York Times story was used by the Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, who accused the Bush administration of failing to secure the material.

Al-Qaqaa, a known Iraqi weapons site, was monitored closely, Mr. Shaw said.

"That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Mr. Shaw said. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."

The Pentagon disclosed yesterday that the Al-Qaqaa facility was defended by Fedayeen Saddam, Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi military units during the conflict. U.S. forces defeated the defenders around April 3 and found the gates to the facility open, the Pentagon said in a statement yesterday.

A military unit in charge of searching for weapons, the Army's 75th Exploitation Task Force, then inspected Al-Qaqaa on May 8, May 11 and May 27, 2003, and found no high explosives that had been monitored in the past by the IAEA.

The Pentagon said there was no evidence of large-scale movement of explosives from the facility after April 6.

"The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd Infantry Division's arrival at the facility," the statement said.

The statement also said that the material may have been removed from the site by Saddam's regime.

According to the Pentagon, U.N. arms inspectors sealed the explosives at Al-Qaqaa in January 2003 and revisited the site in March and noted that the seals were not broken.

It is not known whether the inspectors saw the explosives in March. The U.N. team left the country before the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, 2003.

A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq reveal that Saddam's government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to provide security for Iraq's Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.

The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to U.S. and Western demands, this official said.

A small portion of Iraq's 650,000 tons to 1 million tons of conventional arms that were found after the war were looted after the U.S.-led invasion, Mr. Shaw said. Russia was Iraq's largest foreign supplier of weaponry, he said.

However, the most important and useful arms and explosives appear to have been separated and moved out as part of carefully designed program. "The organized effort was done in advance of the conflict," Mr. Shaw said. The Russian forces were tasked with moving special arms out of the country.

Mr. Shaw said foreign intelligence officials believe the Russians worked with Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence service to separate out special weapons, including high explosives and other arms and related technology, from standard conventional arms spread out in some 200 arms depots.

The Russian weapons were then sent out of the country to Syria, and possibly Lebanon in Russian trucks, Mr. Shaw said.

Mr. Shaw said he believes that the withdrawal of Russian-made weapons and explosives from Iraq was part of plan by Saddam to set up a "redoubt" in Syria that could be used as a base for launching pro-Saddam insurgency operations in Iraq.

The Russian units were dispatched beginning in January 2003 and by March had destroyed hundreds of pages of documents on Russian arms supplies to Iraq while dispersing arms to Syria, the second official said.

Besides their own weapons, the Russians were supplying Saddam with arms made in Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria and other Eastern European nations, he said.

"Whatever was not buried was put on lorries and sent to the Syrian border," the defense official said. Documents reviewed by the official included itineraries of military units involved in the truck shipments to Syria. The materials outlined in the documents included missile components, MiG jet parts, tank parts and chemicals used to make chemical weapons, the official said.

The director of the Iraqi government front company known as the Al Bashair Trading Co. fled to Syria, where he is in charge of monitoring arms holdings and funding Iraqi insurgent activities, the official said.

Also, an Arabic-language report obtained by U.S. intelligence disclosed the extent of Russian armaments. The 26-page report was written by Abdul Tawab Mullah al Huwaysh, Saddam's minister of military industrialization, who was captured by U.S. forces May 2, 2003.

The Russian "spetsnaz" or special-operations forces were under the GRU military intelligence service and organized large commercial truck convoys for the weapons removal, the official said.

Regarding the explosives, the new Iraqi government reported that 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or high-melting-point explosive, and 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or rapid-detonation explosive, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, were missing.

The material is used in nuclear weapons and also in making military "plastic" high explosive.

Defense officials said the Russians can provide information on what happened to the Iraqi weapons and explosives that were transported out of the country. Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

********************

So, HAVE they had any explanation from Russia?

I was not being facetious. I was simply saying had they moved in a convoy of that size we would have spotted it. The WT article confirms that we saw them, this is an indicator of the content.

The circumstantial evidence builds!

You don't have to bunch 'em all up.