Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam's WMD's--What top secret Iraqi files disclose.

We live in an age of documents. There are no more secrets, only deferred disclosures. Saddam Hussein's secret documents are measured by the shelf-mile and stored inside a secure but dusty facility near U.S. Central Command Headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and in several subsidiary sites. Armed guards protect the unread dossiers. Three shifts of two hundred translators each work around the clock. Perhaps 5% of these captured documents have been studied so far, but their contents are about to shatter much of the conventional wisdom concerning Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a bit chagrinned at the 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.[1] 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, but were stolen from under the Americans’ noses and sent to Syria. Syria is one of eight countries in the world that never signed a treaty banning WMD, and now is the storehouse for much of what remains of Saddam's WMD Empire. This was the target of the recent Israeli air strike.

There are only a few people in the world who were close to being right all along about Saddam's WMD. One of them was Yossef Bodansky, a noted intelligence analyst and former director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.[2] On page 496 of Bodansky’s book, "The Secret History of the Iraq War" he makes the astounding assertion that:

".. .The United States had long known that Saddam moved virtually all production capabilities to Libya and Sudan somewhere between 1996 and 1998. Subsequently, in the summer of 2002, with Tehran's consent, the residual chemical weapons production capabilities were shipped to Iran..."[3]

In other words, is Bodansky is right (and he usually is) as late as 2002, Saddam still retained a CW production capability and then sold it to the Iranians on the eve of war.[4] The CIA has now acknowledged that they had a highly-placed spy in Saddam's cabinet who agreed that Saddam had gotten rid of all of his production facilities, but the super spy claimed that Saddam still retained a lethal stockpile of finished chemical weapons in early 2003. The latter information, about the remaining CW stockpile, turns out to have been incorrect, but neither the CIA nor their Iraqi super spy knew it at the time.[5]

After Saddam's brother-in-law Kemal Hussein defected to Jordan in the mid 1990's and exposed some (but not all) of the numerous Iraqi WMD programs, Saddam started over from scratch on WMD production, using a small and secret cadre of new program leaders. Among the newly-disclosed documents are Saddam's actual tape recordings of the meetings of this special group for WMD.

The National Security Agency has confirmed[6] that the tapes are authentic and that the voiceprints are unquestionably those of Saddam and his elite WMD advisers. The CIA's super-spy, excluded from this working group, apparently did not know that it even existed. (His voice appears nowhere on the tapes.) He simply could not have known what Saddam was doing with his WMD programs, let alone with his CW stockpile.[7]

Most of the audio recordings of the secret WMD group are undated, as the CD on which they were found is a compilation of tapes of various WMD meetings stretching over a decade. But their tone is consistent not only with other recorded WMD meetings but with the newly-released document intelligence archives, many of which are revealed here for the first time through the assistance of author and geopolitical analyst Mr. Ryan Mauro.[8] Mauro cautions that "the recently declassified documents have the potential to shatter any conclusions or judgments about what Saddam Hussein's regime was up to. Until all these documents are translated and analyzed, it is premature to reach any conclusion."

Translating shelf miles of documents, however, may take decades. In the meantime, enough of Saddam's secret files have been translated to illustrate one clear trend over time: through the time of Hans Blix and the run-up to the invasion, Saddam had absolutely no intention of destroying his WMD.

In the last year of his regime, Saddam was in fact still trying to expand his chemical weapons capability. In January 2002, his advisors discussed research into a precursor for Sarin nerve gas.[9] In September 2002, for example, only seven months before the war, Saddam's Military Industrial Commission approved the illegal production of the precursor chemicals used to make Tabun nerve gas.[10] Four days later, another office discussed plans to import a banned compound, phosphorus pentasulfate. The UN had required Iraq to prove that it had destroyed all of its stocks of this chemical, which is a precursor for VX nerve gas. Instead, they were importing more of it.[11] In October 2002, Saddam's Director of Planning ordered more than forty tons of various chemicals which, when mixed together, would make Zyclon B – the poison gas used by the Nazis to kill millions of Jews during the Holocaust.[12] Saddam's scientists appear never to have met a poison gas they did not like.

The secret planning for banned chemical weapons in 2002 was no last-minute decision of desperation on the eve of war. Rather, it typified Saddam's long, well-thought-out plan to deceive the UN – an ongoing project that went back more than a decade. For example, Saddam's intelligence service sent out a memo in 1997 ordering his staff not to destroy any WMD but to conceal prohibited materials, "hide equipment and documents....make sure that labs are cleaned of any traces of chemical or biological substances."[13] That was the real Saddam: hide the WMD documents, clean up the tell-tale evidence.

Beginning in 1998, Saddam’s staff went into overdrive to conceal their illegal WMD programs: "The researchers [sic] that cannot be declared and that is related with the previous prohibited programs of WMD and how to make sure that information about these researchers will not leak to the outside world."[14] Files from 1999, marked “Top Secret”, confirm that the Iraqi army had a "chemical platoon" that was undergoing training in every form of illegal chemical weapons.[15] By 2001, the regime ensured that their chemical platoons had mobile shower vehicles for decontamination.[16] Similarly, the production of mobile labs (which the Duelfer report concluded had ended in 1997) were still being manufactured in 2002.[17]

There can be no doubt that instead of destroying his WMD in 1991, Saddam had a clear intent to revive his WMD production, to expand it and to hide it from the UN inspectors as late as 2002. So where did the stockpile of chemical weapons go in 2003?

John Shaw knew. He had seen this kind of scam before. This, as the Texans say, was not his first rodeo. John (Jack) Shaw, was a distinguished civil servant who was pushed out of the US Department of Defense shortly after the 2004 elections. He was the point man for tracking the mass of conventional weapons and prohibited technology that was found in Iraq. He did his job well, apparently too well for the comfort of some government officials.

As Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Shaw’s job was to track illegal sales of conventional weapons all over the world, but particularly in Iraq. Shipping arms to Iraq was a direct violation of the UN embargo order and US law. There was a good bit of that going on in the run-up to the war. Saddam had a lot of money and European arms merchants had a lot of weapons to sell, often with a wink and a nod from their home governments. Shaw unearthed evidence of a million tons of high explosives and evidence of high tech weaponry - and also, in the course of this work tracking conventional weapons, the scent of WMD.

As an example of Shaw’s work on illegal conventional weapons sales to Iraq, US troops discovered after the invasion, and reported through his office, that, despite the UN embargo, Saddam had been able to purchase the latest Roland II anti-aircraft missile launcher, a very effective French weapons platform for shooting down helicopters. The date of manufacture stamped on the Rolands was January 2003.

French arms manufacturers, in other words, had been selling to Saddam right up to the opening of the war. They later explained that France had sold the Roland to Syria, and that Syria was not covered by the embargo. The French claimed to be shocked that Syria had sold the Roland to their fellow Ba'athists in Baghdad. It should be noted that, for more than a year prior to the French sale the Israeli press had been publicly exposing Syria as an arms front for Saddam.

It is also hard to credit the Russians' claim that they were similarly shocked to discover that a corrupt Ukrainian arms dealer had sold scores of Moscow's high tech Kornet antitank missiles to Saddam. The Kornet is the only hand held missile in the world that can penetrate the super-heavy armor of the American main battle tank, the Ml Al Abrams. Two of the Abrams were knocked out of action by Kornets in Iraq. It was Shaw's unit that tracked the Kornet. "Its provenance was obvious," Shaw said, "and the Russian silence in response to our exposure was deafening."

In terms of WMD, newly released documents from Saddam’s government suggest that the Russians knew exactly what they were doing when it came to hiding illegal weapons. While Russian scientists were working hand-in-hand with Iraqi scientists on WMD, Russian spies inside CENTCOM were warning Saddam how to avoid detection from the UN inspectors. Saddam's secret files also mention an Associated Press reporter who passed information on how the UN inspection teams were being trained.[18] The Russian Ambassador himself handed over many of America's secret war plans.[19]

Most importantly, Saddam’s intelligence services credit Russia’s critical help in misleading the UN into thinking that Iraq was in compliance with the resolution paragraphs requiring destruction of its WMD. “We have succeeded in a few of the UN paragraphs…we have won Russia, ahhh…we have convinced Russia by way of generous accounts.” [20]

It should be noted that France, Russia and China were the three largest exporters of Saddam's oil before the war. They were also, according to the documents now being released, the three nations most involved with illegal weapons sales to Saddam. The oil profits, of course, were huge, and according to minutes from secret meetings, Saddam's intelligence service knew how to dangle the bait of illegal oil profits to, in their words, "commit some nations like France, China, Russia and Japan to economical agreements that make the implementation of the smart sanctions to have negative effect to the interests of these nations."[21] In English the word for this is “bribery” – on a huge scale.

Under the porous regulations of the UN's Oil-for-Food Program, Saddam had no problem in diverting food money into weapons purchases, and corrupt UN officials turned a blind eye, as their 2.2% administrative fee, plus another 0.8% for weapons inspections, --so 3% altogether -- amounting to $1.9 billion over the course of the 1996-2003 program, made the Iraqi "Oil-for-Food Program" the UN bureaucrats' best cash cow. The French, moreover, controlled the financing mechanism for the program through the bank BNP Paribas, all orchestrated by an Anglo-Iraqi who was Saddam's long time arms merchant.

It seemed that nearly everyone in the EU weapons industry had their nose in Saddam's trough. It was an old problem. The German government, for instance, had long dismissed American complaints that German companies were building a poison nerve gas plant for Colonel Qaddafi. Finally, in 1997, the Americans played a recording of a telephone wiretap to the German government. The Libyan plant manager was screaming at his German supplier that the chemical weapons plant he had been sold was leaking and killing his workers.[22]

Saddam had similar problems with quality control at his poison gas plants. His WMD contractors were Russian, and their Chemical Weapons product was of extremely low quality. It could kill a few thousand Kurds well enough, as was shown by the eyewitness reports at Saddam's trial, but his poison gas had a short shelf life because of contamination introduced through the Russian process.[23]

Perhaps the real reason Saddam destroyed a portion of his chemical weapons stockpile was that with a shelf life as short as a few months, the weapons just did not work anymore, so he might as well get some good publicity out of it by destroying them for the ever gullible UN inspectors. Certainly, as Bodansky recounts, some of Saddam’s CW still worked during the mid-1990’s, and these Saddam sold to Qaddafi, along with a good bit of his Russian-made manufacturing equipment.

Jack Shaw has even more detailed knowledge of what happened to the missing WMD. It is fair to say that Shaw is a recognized expert in projects dealing with technology and arms transfer in the Middle East.[24] He had been studying the inflow of conventional weapons into Iraq in 2002 when he came across the simultaneous outflow of unconventional WMD from Iraq to Syria.. He says he knew a swap when he saw it.

More than any other person, Shaw uncovered the mystery of the disappearance of Saddam’s missing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. He is hardly a conspiracy theory type. Shaw has a PhD in International Economic Affairs and has served as Inspector General of Foreign Assistance for the U.S. Department of State. He next served at the Commerce Department as Associate Deputy Secretary and Acting Undersecretary for Technology and Export Administration. Finally, at the time of the Iraq war, he held a dual post in the Department of Defense: Deputy Undersecretary for International Technology Security and Director, International Armament and Technology Trade.

As a result of some long-time personal relationships, he was able to develop a working relationship with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and senior members of the Ukrainian intelligence service. The Ukrainians, part of the Coalition in Iraq, gained access to the records of the Russian Spetznatz units that had secretly been ordered to Iraq at the end of 2002. This elite unit of the Russian Special Forces includes a force specially trained to remove all evidence of Russian arms transfers from client states.

At the February 2006 Intelligence Summit, Shaw spoke publicly for the first time. He told how three western spy services discovered that Russian soldiers had been dispatched from Trans-Caspian bases, switched from combat uniforms into civilian clothes, and transited to Iraq. They were not bringing any new weapons into Iraq. The Spetznatz were smuggling Saddam's stash of heavy explosives and unconventional weapons out. Shaw has collected all the details of the plan, the identity of the units and their commanders, and the dates of their entry and exit of Iraq.

The conventional wisdom is that the USA and Great Britain supplied Saddam with his chemical weapons equipment during the Iran-Iraq war. The cynical joke goes: "The USA has proof of Saddam's WMD: they have the sales receipts." In fact, both the Reagan and Thatcher administrations worked strenuously to forbid the export of even precursor chemicals, as confirmed by the archives of the State Department's Office for Export Controls Cooperation. It was the former Soviet Union that supplied Saddam with 99% of his chemical and biological weapons.[25]

Yevgeny Primakov, Saddam's Soviet interface, was both the architect of the Iraqi arms program and the overseer of its removal. Primakov, the only-Arab speaking member of the old Soviet Politburo, is regarded by many historians as the father of Arab terrorism. During the Cold War, it was Primakov who ultimately called the shots in the Russian client states of Iraq and Syria. As Primakov became head of the KGB and then Prime Minister of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin, his influence on Saddam should not be underestimated. Primakov’s reappearance in Iraq in December, 2002, to oversee the cleanup exercise gives a sense of the importance to Russia of the Iraqi weapons program.

Covering up for this was not simply a question of hiding a few Russian scientists or shredding some documents. The Russians had given Saddam biowar samples and chemical precursors, whose molecular signature could possibly be traced back to their points of origin, and the Russians had to get rid of substantial amounts of physical evidence. That is what the Spetznatz unit was sent to Iraq for in the last months before the invasion: to remove the proof that Russia had violated its international treaties by supplying Saddam with biological and chemical weapons.

According to US and British intelligence, a pair of retired Russian generals was sent to Iraq to deliver the bad news to Saddam. At the very end of 2002, the Russians persuaded a reluctant Saddam that CW and BW, while useful in massacring civilians, would have no impact on the well-equipped American and British forces. Leaving the weapons stockpile lying around would only confirm to the world that the Coalition had been justified in invading Iraq.25

Shaw had a dilemma in documenting his evidence. The Ukrainians had gathered and provided the details of these Russian activities, but could not allow the information to be traced back to them. Keeping physical control of the documents, they allowed only that they be visually reviewed and notes taken. This intelligence, combined with US satellite photography showing the Spetznatz -cum-civilians loading trucks and tankers with unknown crates and substances, and then driving them in convoys down the Euphrates highway to Al Qaim on the Syrian border provided a clear and comprehensive picture of the Russian evacuation plans. US and British intelligence assets in the immediate area photographed the convoy traffic out of Iraq into Syria.[26]

US spy satellites picked up the convoys on the other side of the border. The Syrians had dug ditches sixty feet deep, and then were observed dumping the contents of the tanker trucks into them at night. The Syrians were then seen filling in the ditches and replanting crops over them before dawn came up. One cynic asked "What were they burying at night? Milk?"

(For his chemical weapons, Saddam often used what are known as “binary chemical weapons”, arms made from two separate liquid compounds that could be mixed together to form, for example, VX nerve gas. Buried separately, the components are harmless.)

There is circumstantial evidence that the Spetznatz unit commandeered every Iraqi tanker they could get their hands on to move the liquid WMD to Syria: after the invasion, American charities working in Iraq complained to the press that it was almost impossible to find a clean water truck in Iraq. Almost every one seemed to have been flushed out with gasoline – a common measure to eliminate traces of WMD chemicals.

Numerous post-war interrogations of Iraqi prisoners confirm that the WMD was rushed across the border just before the Coalition forces arrived. March 2003 must have been the busy season for evacuating the WMD. Apparently there weren't enough Spetznatz drivers to move all the chemicals before the deadline, so Saddam turned to local Iraqi truckers, one of whom later became an informant for the Coalition. A Coalition report on the case says

"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. After their arrival, Syrian intelligence personnel replaced the drivers. After the contents were put into warehouses, the Iraqi drivers were given back the vehicles and paid for the accomplishment of safely transporting the items, with his first shipment on March 1, 2003."

"The dissident says that he has a friend who works in a Syrian company that is an Iraqi ex-consul for the embassy in Damascus. 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."

The Coalition spies watched helplessly during the last ten weeks before the outbreak of war as the Spetznatz units and Iraqi truckers removed every last piece of Saddam's CW stockpile and drove it into Syria. "We watched it happen," said an intelligence analyst who worked with Shaw, "but there was nothing we could do. Our forces were still arriving in theater." In addition to satellite reconnaissance, there were Syrian informers. Nizar Nayyouf, a respected Syrian journalist (who was dying of cancer) defected to Paris. He brought with him detailed notes and maps drawn by his friends in Syrian military intelligence showing exactly where Saddam's WMD stockpile had been buried. Nayyouf s information was verified by Dutch intelligence, which leaked his maps and notes to the press. Because Saddam's secret files were not available at that time for public corroboration, Nayyouf s disclosures were generally ignored by the western media. But then so were Bodansky and Shaw. I suspect that will all soon change in light of recent satellite observations of an obscure backwater province in Northeastern Syria, close to the Iraqi border.

The Deir al Zour area of Syria, first described in 2003 as the WMD burial site by the Iraqi truckdriver, was once infamous for a different reason. Deir al Zour was the last death site of the Armenian genocide. Hundreds of thousands of deported Armenians collapsed and died after reaching this isolated corner of Syria at the end of the deportation line from their homes in Turkey. Deir al Zour may also enter history as the place where another genocide was planned, but was barely averted.

Shortly after the Iraqi war began, an Iraqi truckdriver revealed to a CENTCOM interrogator, that Deir al Zour was the final destination for Saddam’s WMD, but he had been ignored at the time. However, four years later in 2007, Deir al Zour was named again in press reports as the secret site of a partially constructed Syrian nuclear facility. The Israelis destroyed the facility with an airstrike, but wrapped a thick shroud of secrecy about the reason for their raid.on Deir al Zour . The New York Times published before and after satellite photos showing that the Syrians had bulldozed the alleged nuclear site and carted away the topsoil after the Israeli raid. These precautions are usually performed only to hide traces of radioactive soil from UN inspectors[27]. An Israeli intelligence website, Debka.com, issued a special report claiming that the same Deir al Zour nuclear site which Israel bombed was also the site where Saddam’s missing WMD had been stored four years earlier.

Not only did the Israelis independently corroborate the Iraqi truck driver’s naming of Deir al Zour as the burial place for Saddam’s WMD, Debkafile also explained why the same Deir al Zour location was chosen by the Syrians four years later for the site of their nuclear facility. It was a matter of necessity, not choice. The Israelis claim that the large black nuclear processing building had to be constructed close to Saddam’s WMD storage area because the Syrians planned to take Saddam’s highly enriched uranium out of the storage site and irradiate the Iraqi HEU with North Korean plutonium. The result would be a factory to produce enough toxic fuel for thousands of extremely poisonous “dirty bombs.” which could be loaded onto warheads and launched at Israel. Had the irradiation plant been completed, Deir al Zour might have became a name as infamous as Auschwitz.

There are rumors that the Israelis had a local Kurdish construction worker on site as an informant. He took pictures of the irradiation facility which was dangerously close to completion. The Israelis shared them with the US government, which quickly approved the Israeli strike. However, the US State Department allegedly asked that the entire matter be shrouded in secrecy as the Deir al Zour nuclear plant placed all their negotiations with North Korea and Syria in a very bad light.

If the Israelis are right about the Deir al Zour site’s location and dual purpose, then the New York Times may have missed something very important in their satellite photo research and might be looking in the wrong place for the wrong kind of nuclear facility. First, the Israelis described a large black building, not a white one as shown in the Times’ photographs. Second, the location was given as close to an airport and an orchard, not by the bank of the Euphrates River. If the Israelis are right, the site they bombed was a nuclear irradiation plant, not a reactor. An irradiation plant can be built quickly (months vs. years) and does not require access to the huge quantities of water that a nuclear reactor would. . Third, and such site would have to be near a highway for truck access to deliver materials to the nuclear facility construction site. Fourth, for obvious safety and security reasons, it would have to be built in a remote, non-populated area out in the desert. The site location alleged by the New York Times meets almost none of these criteria.

Most importantly, if the Israelis were right, that the same nuclear site was also used for the storage of Saddam’s WMD, then there had to be some visible evidence of WMD storage bunkers in very close proximity to the Deir al Zour nuclear facility. I conducted an extensive close up inspection of the Deir al Zour area using satellite photos from different angles. I was looking for traces of large disturbances in the dirt out in the desert but close to a highway. This desert area once contained large numbers of rock salt mines, which are ideal for the storage of nuclear waste. If there was a storage area nearby the nuclear facility, any truck-sized entrance hole would have to be visible on a satellite photo.

It may be only an astounding series of coincidences, but there actually is one site in Deir al Zour that does meet all these criteria. I can now confirm for the first time that a large dirt-covered bunker-like structure containing what appears to be underground entrance holes does in fact exist only several hundred yards to the south of a very large building which is well camouflaged and very difficult to spot from the air. This entire enormous structure, roof and walls, appears to have been painted black to blend into the surrounding patch of dark-stained earth.. The black building site is in a deserted area on the south side of town, only a few miles from the airport, just off of highway 4 (a major truck highway) and next to an orchard. It is the only black building in all of Deir al Zour that satisfies all the various criteria alleged by the Israelis. Moreover, this black building is in close proximity to what appears to be a disguised military installation a few hundreds yards to the south.

This southern site consists of a few very small out buildings guarding a single roads leading inside the fort-like compound and then forking out to multiple entrances of a large bunker-like structure. The entire bunker compound is protected by what appears to be a dry moat and is surrounded by a high walled rectangular berm made of bulldozed earth . There is no gate, vehicles must drive on a ramp up and over the high berm wall in order to get inside. This facility appears to have been constructed along the lines of a military strorage depot for high explosives..

Apparently all armies use similar designs for their ammo dumps. The neat rectangle of the bulldozed earthen walls surrounding this storage compound can be seen quite distinctly in the satellite photo, as well as the large black nuclear facility in the background only several hundred yards away. Anyone who downloads Google Earth to their computer and scans latitude 35.28291072553, longitude 40.05731025.7 can verify for themselves that dramatic new evidence does in fact exist to support the Israeli allegations that the place they attacked at Deir al Zour contained both a nuclear processing lab as well as the Iraqi WMD storage site.[28] It is quite possible, indeed likely, that these are the first satellite photographs to show the Syrian resting place for Saddam’s missing WMD. It is looking more and more likely that Saddam really did have WMD, and that Deir al Zour is the place they were buried .

Of course, that does not mean that Saddam’s WMD are there any longer. There is a subsequent satellite photograph, taken during the fall 2007 rainy season, which reveals that the site has been severely altered in the last several months since the Israeli air strike. The black building seems to have vanished, so has the entire storage depot. There is not a trace of the giant bunker complex. All of the out buildings have disappeared. Even the roads connecting to the highway have been completely swept away with out a trace. Everything is gone, even the dark-stained top soil has been removed, and the substrata regarded for a smooth, naturally contoured look. It is as if nothing had ever existed here before. It appears that the Israelis were correct once again, the Syrians destroyed every trace of their secret nuclear plant, and removed all of their stored WMD, just as Saddam had done when he first trucked his WMD to Deir al Zour before and during the war.

Of course, some people had been saying this about Saddam for years.. Even without access to satellite photos or Saddam's intelligence files, Jack Shaw had built a formidable case that the Spetznatz had pulled off a last-minute rescue and relocation of Saddam's WMD to Syria. As he later related to Newsmax reporter Charles Smith; "While in Iraq I received information from several sources naming the exact Russian units, what they took and where they took both WMD materials and conventional explosives." Shaw called the evacuation procedure by its Russian name "sarindar," the standard operating procedure for the closing down of Soviet operations in their third world client states. Very senior British officials from MI6 independently confirmed Shaw's conclusions at a high level meeting in London. The Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service showed Shaw the damning evidence.

As Shaw recalls, "The meeting was convened by the head of MI6 personally to debrief a high level Ukrainian delegation. It was the beginning of a six-month collaboration, sharing information regarding weapons transfers to Iraq and Iran." The multi-agency, multi-national meetings were held at the Thameside MI6 Headquarters and at the more secluded Chesterfield Terrace, the gracious Georgian complex off Pall Mall used by British intelligence services.

It was a reunion of friends. Shaw recalled that "[U.S.] General Clapper knew the key Ukrainians from his tour as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] in the early 1980's and 1990's. In fact, they had specifically asked for his involvement." Building liaison relationships and trust is always important in these affairs.

Shaw had a much narrower focus of interest than the other participants at the London meetings. He had already observed the broad outlines of the extensive Russian role in the removal of Iraqi weaponry, and now he wanted the hard, incriminating details from the Ukrainian files. "I finally got the promise over tea at the Ukrainians hotel in London," Shaw recalls. "For me this was the Rosetta Stone for all arms transfers to Iraq. It was the crown jewel of my thirty years of experience with arms transfers in the Middle East."

Corroborating sources from multiple allied agencies is about as good as it gets in the intelligence game. The Americans still did not believe it. Shaw was stunned when the DIA told him, "Forget about it. It's all Israeli disinformation." Shaw continued with his investigation, not understanding that he was heading into dangerous waters.

A pair of British reporters has recently released a new book “Deception”, superbly documenting the history of five successive American administrations in lying to Congress and the American people about the progress that was being made on the “Islamic Bomb.” The US State Department knew full well that Pakistan had developed nuclear weapons and was selling the technology to Arab countries such as Libya and Iran. Like Jack Shaw, a brave American intelligence officer named Richard Barlow tried to expose the nuclear cover-up, and like Shaw, his career was crushed. The Pakistani proliferation scandal was too sensitive for the Washington bureaucrats to admit publicly. We see a consistent pattern that any government employee who poked his nose into transfers of nuclear WMD components was made a pariah.

When 377 tons of high explosives, some of which could be used to trigger nuclear weapons, went missing northwest of Baghdad and the press alleged that it was moved after the invasion, Shaw leaked his Syrian "sarindar" evacuation information to the Financial Times and the Washington Times. Shaw recalled that everything he had ‘surfaced’ in the press was then confirmed almost immediately by the Pentagon's satellite reconnaissance officers, but the top Pentagon leadership tried to kill the story and muzzle Shaw and his office. A month after the 2004 US election, the Pentagon "reorganized" his office out of existence.

Lt. General Thomas G. Mclnerney, USAF (ret'd) recalls that problem had more to do with White House politics than the sufficiency of Shaw's proof:

JACK SHAW HAS DONE HIS HOMEWORK AND HAS SHOWN VERY PLAUSIBLY WHERE THE WMD MAY HAVE GONE. UNFORTUNATELY THE IRAQI SURVEY GROUP DID NOT PURSUE HIS RECOMMENDATIONS NOR HAS PRESIDENT BUSH RELEASED OVER 2000 HOURS OF SADDAM'S PRIVATE TAPES THAT WOULD SHED GREATER LIGHT ON THE ROLE RUSSIA, CHINA AND FRANCE PLAYED IN SUPPORTING SADDAM'S WMD PROGRAM AND ITS WHERE ABOUTS.[29]

In the hide-bound world of military and security bureaucracies, only a retired General can get away with speaking his mind so bluntly. Sadly, it should be understood that even if Shaw was right, as nearly everyone in the community involved with these affairs now concedes in private, what could the US Government have done about it? Invade Syria to retrieve Saddam's WMD? Not at a time when the US was tied down in Iraq. And not without the approval of the Security Council, conveniently dominated by Saddam's economic allies, countries that could only be embarrassed by further revelations.

More and more of the relevant generals are retired now and are speaking out. Michael Delong, a retired Marine Lt. General, and deputy commander at CENTCOM at the time of the invasion, states unequivocally: "I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran.”

Even David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, told the British press that there was indeed evidence that unspecified WMD material was moved into Syria on the eve of the war, reporting: "We know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program."[30] Most of the American press thought Kay's suggestion of a possible WMD transfer too ludicrous, or inconvenient, to report.

A few did not. Ryan Mauro of WorldThreats.com interviewed one such former high-ranking Iraqi official, Ali Ibrahim Al-Tikriti, a personal friend of Saddam. Although he had left Iraq long before the war, Al-Tikriti said that he was certain that "Saddam's weapons are in Syria" due to deals that had been cut as far back as the 1980's. After the First Gulf War, according to this account, Saddam knew he would eventually have to ship his WMD program out to other countries to avoid detection. Even after a senior Iraqi general described his role in an airlift of barrels with radioactive markings to Syria, the US State Department ignored the reports. As documented by the British authors in “Deception,” the Pakistani connection caused a shroud of silence to fall over any mention of nuclear transfers. It was a subject the Americans devoutly wished to avoid.

Former Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon, also a speaker at the 2006 Intelligence Summit, confirmed that his government had independently agreed with Shaw's assessment. They had their own spies in Lebanon and Syria watching the last minute movement of the WMD out of Iraq. That is what DIA may have had in mind when they brushed off Shaw's research as "Israeli disinformation." The State Department apparently echoed DIA's anti-Israel suspicions, and that was the end of Shaw's WMD investigation. (The State Department, like the DIA and the CIA, has long held what is known in foreign policy circles as an “Arabist” and “status quo” approach to Middle East policy, and all three agencies are fiercely opposed to the Neocon project to shake up the region. The decision to go to war in Iraq is assessed in America as a victory of Cheney’s Office of the Vice President and Rumsfeld’s Defense Department over these more conservative agencies.)

Today, four years after the invasion of Iraq, Saddam's secret files are beginning to emerge from the long-neglected warehouses in Kuwait and Qatar. According to Iraqi intelligence files, in January 2003, the Chinese Prime Minister told German Chancellor Schroeder that Chinese Intelligence "says that Iraq has moved it weapons of mass destruction to Syria." Even two months after Iraqi intelligence filed this report about the Chinese tracking their movements to Syria, Saddam continued with the WMD evacuation. In March 16, 2003, - only weeks before the war - the Iraqi Army Chief of Staff ordered the transfer of "Special Ammunition" from the Najaf military depot.[31] "Special Ammunition" is what Saddam called chemical weapons when he ordered the gassing of the Kurds.[32]

It must be emphasized that no one document 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 make a persuasive circumstantial case of massive WMD deception right up to the end, but not that there were any CW or BW remaining inside Iraq on the day the war started. We know that huge quantities were produced, and there is no record of their destruction. But absence of evidence is not evidence. Therefore, at least as to chemical and biological weapons, no individual document or audiotape contains a smoking gun.

There is no ambiguity, however, about tape ISGQ-2003-M0007379, in which Saddam is briefed on his secret nuclear weapons project.[33] This meeting clearly took place in 2002 or 2003: 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 civilian plasma research which could be used as a cover for military plasma research necessary to build a hydrogen bomb.[34]

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 invited a certified translator to present Saddam’s nuclear tapes to the public, and then invited John Shaw and Yossef Bodansky 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 volunteers could help with the translation and analysis.

At first, the public website seemed like a good idea. Another document[35] 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.

Perhaps coincidentally, once Saddam's nuclear files were uncovered, the President demoted John Negroponte as his National Director of Intelligence and sent him back to the State Department. Negroponte had publicly and repeatedly denounced the Intelligence Summit, promising that nothing would be found in Saddam’s files. Like Shaw and Barlow, vengeance upon the Summit would be swift and cruel. The Intelligence Summit is a non-partisan, non-profit, fully licensed 501c3 educational charity. 99% of its staff are volunteers. In order to be fully transparent, the Summit discloses all information about its major donors on its tax returns to the IRS, which are available to the public for inspection..

Negroponte’s office sent emails to every government agency denouncing the Intelligence Summit for accepting a charitable donation from Michael Cherney, an Israeli who was rumored to have ties to the Russian mafia. Even the Russian government, which has much to gain from discrediting the findings of the Summit, has acknowledged publicly that the Cherney rumor is false.[36] Mr. Cherney severed all ties to protect the Summit, but the damage from Negroponte’s smear campaign was severe. In a blatantly illegal move, Negroponte’s office implicitly warned federal employees and foreign intelligence services to boycott the next Summit.

Perhaps because of the controversy, the Intelligence Summit was becoming a magnet for researchers interested in pursuing the new documentary leads to Saddam's WMD. In a March 2007 conference, the Summit introduced David Gaubatz, from the US Air Force Office of Special Investigation. Assigned to support the CIA's Iraq Survey Group in the hunt for Saddam's WMD, he was one of the first weapons hunters to arrive in Iraq in April 2003.

Local Iraqi citizens eagerly approached the Arabic-speaking American. Gaubatz eventually made connections with the Iraqi police, who showed him how in the last six months of 2002 Saddam built four huge cofferdams along the Euphrates River. Deep pits were excavated and huge underground bomb-proof warehouses installed with five foot thick concrete ceilings. According to local Iraqi eyewitnesses, at least two of the warehouses were constructed directly underneath the Euphrates River, connected to either bank by tunnels large enough to allow the passage of heavy trucks.

Underwater facilities are extremely expensive to construct and are usually built for only one precise purpose. The twenty five feet of water overhead would conceal almost all of the radiation emissions from inside the underground warehouses. While the medical files for Gaubatz and his team confirm they were exposed to radiation, they were unable to enter any of the underground sites to explore the source of the radiation as the tunnels leading to the surface had been plugged with concrete and filled with water.

Apparently Saddam, wanting to avoid the UN’s inspection efforts and a repetition of the Israeli raid on his Osirak nuclear reactor, was hiding his new nuclear weapons projects under the Euphrates. Gaubatz describes what he saw immediately after the war when the warehouses were still intact. "The tunnels leading under the river on each side were large enough to drive a tractor trailer through. My local informants described the double series of halls beneath the Euphrates where the WMD had been stored. They even showed me the impression left by an illegal sized missile that had lain on the muddy bank. I have been warned not to go back. Most of the informants I worked with have been killed."

Gaubatz, twice decorated by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations for his work in Iraq, returned to the United States in 2004. Through either negligence or sabotage, all of his reports on finding the WMD warehouses were lost. Incredibly, no one on the Coalition side guarded the four underwater warehouses during the three years since Gaubatz discovery, let alone began excavations. By the time Gaubatz discovered this scandalous error three years later and alerted the government, the CIA reported back that all four of the warehouses had been systematically looted. It may have been the worst intelligence blunder since 9/11.

Recently discovered among Saddam’s intelligence files is the actual order to transfer the remaining sensitive military materials, whether completed or not, to the “underground facilities.” The movement order came just before the invasion of Iraq. This document, which directly confirms Gaubatz eyewitness testimony, also fits into the mosaic of the other nuclear documents describing a secret and ongoing program to develop nuclear weapons and hide them inside Iraq.

Moreover, 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 program existed in Iraq, may have been accidentally correct about the main point of the war. 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.

On a personal note, as a Democrat, it gives me no pleasure to concede that Bush and Blair were right. As a lawyer, I must conclude from this new documentary evidence and my own interviews that the leaders of the Coalition were completely ignorant of the underground Iraqi WMD facilities, but, in hindsight, I must concede that the discovery of Saddam’s secret nuclear program now provides sufficient legal justification for the use of force. Bush and Blair may have blundered into Iraq based on false evidence and exaggerated analysis, but looking back with the benefit of Saddam’s files; it turns out that they may have done the right thing for the wrong reason. Even a broken watch is right twice a day.

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.. The truth is what it is, the facts speak for themselves.

Why has the pro-war establishment in Washington not done more with these potentially persuasive indications that Saddam was indeed pursuing WMD programs until the bitter end? The irony is that the Republicans will not touch this issue and indeed have tried to suppress it.

Perhaps some of them are embarrassed by their own intelligence blunders that permitted the looting of what might have been Saddam's last nuclear lab. More likely, GOP politicians may be afraid of being portrayed as "kooks" by the press if they question such a settled sacred cow. The news media has voted fairly unanimously on the WMD issue, after all, and the orthodoxy is possibly too settled for politicians to do much with these complex half-smoking guns in a sound-bite age. The Democrats, although not usually reluctant to publicize America’s blunders in Iraq, also have no appetite for the issue. Even though they were right that there were no CW and BW inside Iraq when the war began, it now appears most likely that nuclear WMD materials were still inside Iraq on the first day of the war, still sealed up in the underwater Iraqi warehouses. Acknowledging this would be uncomfortable.

As for the mainstream mass media, it by and large has little interest in proving that Bush and Blair might have been correct by accident in at least part of their pre-war assessment, and prefers to drop the entire subject. No one likes to admit they were wrong on such an important story. But Saddam’s files show that the press has so far been wrong indeed.

Inevitably the rest of Saddam’s files will be translated and made public. History will then record that only a handful of individuals and institutions got it right the first time. In addition to Bodansky and Shaw, Lord Butler of the UK deserves credit. His report concluded that, while the British may have overestimated Saddam's CW and BW capabilities, they were absolutely correct when they said that in 2002, Saddam was trying to purchase uranium ore from three different African nations. The British have already found and made public what the Americans so far have missed: right up until the end, Saddam was trying to build more WMD.

One question remains. Where are the WMD now? Are they still buried in the bunkers of Dier al Zour ? Who is the present custodian of the contents of Saddam’s underwater nuclear-weapons lab? Even if those underwater sites were not the source of the radiation to which Gaubatz and his team were exposed, the documents show that Saddam was still acquiring nuclear components and atom bomb technology right up to the eve of war. Who has Saddam’s centrifuges now?

US satellites have detected that Syria is now operating high speed centrifuges typically used to enrich uranium ore into weapons grade fuel for an atom bomb.[37] Syria has no commercial nuclear reactor, nor any natural deposits of uranium ore. What is Syria doing with nuclear centrifuges?[38] It has been reported that some tens of thousands of advanced P-2 centrifuges were manufactured in Malaysia for both Colonel Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein. Quaddafi's centrifuges have been accounted for. Saddam's centrifuges are still missing, and the Intelligence Summit is now asking the US government to make a priority search among the captured Saddam files for documents about the missing centrifuges, especially those written in Asian scripts.

There is a hidden hand to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. When Colonel Qaddafi turned over his atom bomb blue prints, they were written in Chinese. Many experts believe that the People’s Liberation Army of China has been selling the components of the Islamic bomb in return for Arab oil. It is a matter of historical record that the Chinese were among the principal beneficiaries of Saddam’s oil exports.

Now the Chinese, by way of their North Korean proxies, may be implicated in the recent Israeli air strike on the partly constructed nuclear facility in Syria. How did the Syrians get into nuclear technology so quickly? Perhaps it is a coincidence, but the Chinese have just announced that they will be build the largest refinery in the Middle East. This massive Chinese complex, including dozens of innocuous looking buildings and thundreds of staff, will be located in Deir al Zour, Syria. The game of Chinese trading support for the Islamic bomb in return for Arab oil may not be over.

There is an urgent to need to go through the Kuwaiti warehouses and find Saddam’s secret records of dealings with China, North Korea, and Malaysia. Perhaps we have had the answer to the Syrian proliferation puzzle all along, sitting in Saddam’s dusty archives.

Saddam’s nuclear files are now settling the main thrust of the WMD controversy as grounds for the Iraq war, or are at least re-opening the debate, but that is not where the story ends. There is another chapter from Saddam's secret files yet to be written: Saddam’s links to anti-western terror. The conventional wisdom is that Saddam desired to have closer relations with Al Qaeda, but that these religious terrorists wanted nothing to do with his secular regime. As with the WMD, Saddam himself, as we are learning from his recordings, says that the conventional wisdom is wrong.

It is still too early for a conclusive assessment, and many more documents will need to be analyzed, but it appears that Saddam may have been Al Qaeda's long-term secret partner in launching successful terrorist attacks against the western countries. Saddam's secret files contain direct references to aiding anthrax attacks in the United States, planning the "Blessed July" bombings in London, coordinating the assault on the National Guard Headquarters in Saudi Arabia, and committing numerous attacks against Israel.

If it is true, as a cursory initial reading of these files suggest, that Saddam was the secret partner of Usama Bin Laden, then the history of terrorism will have to be rewritten. Whether the answers gain a wide audience or not, they will soon enough be known. For we live in an age of documents. There are no more secrets, only deferred disclosures.

[1] There may be a grain of truth to the sand dune story, but it probably refers to Syrian WMD buried under a Syrian sand dune: Document B1AP-2003-000090 describes meetings between Saddam's intelligence agent #801 and Sheikh Adil Mohammed Al-Minished discussing WMD buried in the area of Halab, Syria.

[2] In addition to his ten years of work for the US Congress analyzing classified documents, Mr. Bodansky is the Director of Research for the International Strategic Studies Association and senior editor for the Defense and Foreign Affairs group of publications. He has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins and a senior consultant of for the US Departments of Defense and State. He wrote the international bestseller, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America and published it before 9/11.

[3] U.S. House of Representatives, Report of February 19, 1998, confirmed from classified US intelligence files that Saddam was shifting his WMD programs outside of Iraq.

[4] It may seem incredible that Saddam would sell WMD equipment to his mortal enemy, Iran, but a similar thing happened in the first Iraq war when Saddam sold his entire air force inventory to Iran rather than see it be destroyed by the Americans. Bodansky is not at liberty to discuss classified documents on which this segment of his book was based.

[5] The CIA super spy was alleged to be one of the senior foreign ministers for Saddam. The existence of the mole and his belief that Iraq had no remaining WMD production facilities was revealed in 2007 on the CBS 60 Minutes television program. The CIA officer who appeared on camera (who obviously had not seen the newly released Saddam files) was adamant that Saddam had no such production capability. As discussed infra, Saddam's files indicate otherwise.

[6] Per arrangement with the House Intelligence Committee, the author released a copy of the Saddam WMD tape on the condition that Congress would obtain public confirmation of the voiceprint data from the NSA, which was done. The results were publicly displayed on a special edition of ABC Frontline with Brian Ross shortly before the opening of the February 17, 2006 Intelligence Summit.

[7] The newly released Saddam files show that his brother-in-law, Kemal had buried a few secrets of his own: "A team from the Military Industrialization Commission when Hussein Kemal Hussein was conducting his responsibilities did bury a large container said that it contains chemical material….in the district of Fallujah.. .The container was buried using a fleet of concrete mixers.” Document ISGQ-2003-00004530, Sept. 15, 2000, Memo to Uday Hussein.

[18] ISGQ-2005-00026108, Report from Iraqi Intelligence Officer, July 25, 2000 on AP spy on UNMOVIC

[19] CMPC-2003-0000776, an Iraqi intelligence report dated December 15, 2002 confirms that Russian and Turkish scientists at the Badr Company (nuclear) had to be hidden from the UN inspectors. This shows that the Iraqis had advance detailed knowledge of IAEA inspections. Document CMPC-2003-001950 shows that Saddam's intelligence briefings came directly from the Russian Ambassador. He revealed the American's secret war plans, troop locations, etc. The Russians told the Iraqis that they had "sources at the U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar." Document CMPC -2004-001117, Letter from Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister, March 25, 2003, discussion of Russia's passing classified U.S. secrets to Iraq.

[22] This story was related to the author by an American intelligence officer who participated in the wiretaps but wishes to remain anonymous. It was first published in The Secret War Against the Jews, p. 574 n.30

[23] An excellent history of the problems with degradation of Iraqi chemical weapons can be found at www.globalsecurity.org citing an unclassified CIA report: 071596 cia 72569 72569 Ol.txt

[24] He has led project studies in this area at both CSIS and the Hudson Institute.

[25] Globalsecurity.org provides several excellent declassified studies on the history and provenance of Iraqi WMD.

[26] Saddam’s defense minister publicly decorated both of the Russian generals for their assistance in this project.

[27] In the case of one suspected nuclear site, the Iranian government removed a foot of topsoil not to mention every leaf, tree and blade of grass within a one mile radius. The UN inspectors were given the rather lame explanation that the Mayor had suddenly decided to bulldoze all the old military buildings and make a public park.

[28] Using the Deir al Zour airport as a satellite photo landmark, proceeed southwesterly for several miles to an isolated desert area close by some orchards. Look for the large black building standing near a large stained earth area. Proceed south several hundred yards to find the large rectangular berm surrounding the suspected WMD storage bunkers.

[33] This tape is a compilation from other tapes, consisting of eight meetings about WMD stretching over more than a decade.

[34] A member of the survey teams, who wishes to remain anonymous, confirmed that this was a major find, and was consistent with previous Iraqi efforts to hide traces of their nuclear research. Translation summary provided by certified translator.

[36] A full series of the documents on the Cherney investigation can be found at www.intelligencesummit.org.

[37] Open source articles have confirmed that the US Government has discovered that high speed uranium centrifuges generate a signal which can be read by a satellite in outer space. Much as turning on a blender causes static to appear on a television set, the satellite can detect the high speed frequencies generate by a centrifuge.

[38] The Assyrian International News Agency, published by the Reform Party of Syria, does excellent work in tracking advances in Syrian WMD.

If you want to post wacko theories, please go over to DU; they love them there.

I can back up everything I have said with new stories.

There was an accident where a chemical warhead being mounted to a SCUD missile in Syria killed Iranians involved in the process.

North Korean is shipping their latest missiles to Syria.

There have been numerous reports of Saddam's equipment being shipped to Syria and this article itself confirms not only Syria's involvement with Saddam's WMDs but Iran's as well.

My theories are based upon verifiable facts and the abilities of the United States Armed Forces.

Are you prepared to say that we cannot do it or would not do it if we had to?

Didn’t read it all but, what little I did read explains a lot!!

Bump and DOUBLE bump for later read!!

P.S. - Great find, SJackson. Thanks for posting!!

“I believe we did, using stealth bombers”

I’ve had that feeling all along, as well.

Of course B-2’s could do it but claiming that conventional fighters somehow had the capability had the added bonus of shaking up Syria, Iran, and Russia.

Confirmation of much that has already been known and/or suspected.

And I don’t think the Israelis needed American stealth bombers to take out Syria’s air defense, nor that we could keep such an operation secret for long. The Israelis were probably using an Electromagnetic Pulse Weapon. According to Syria their equipment just went dead right before the Israelis flew overhead.

I’ve had that feeling all along, as well.
Of course B-2’s could do it but claiming that conventional fighters somehow had the capability had the added bonus of shaking up Syria, Iran, and Russia.

Better watch what you say or newbies that have been here for a month will demand that you go join the DU for speaking your mind here.

Damn! Why hasn’t the Administration weighed in on this?

They gave up, either you're honest enough to admit that everyone on the face of the planet "KNEW" Saddam had WMD's before the war or you're not...Remember 'A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still'....

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