[ RadSafe ] What Happened to Saddam's WMD?

[Franta, Jaroslav]

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1195127544177&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Nov 19, 2007
Our World: From AMIA to Armageddon
By CAROLINE GLICK 

<snip>
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 US forces seized, but had not managed to translate after overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003. 

After a prolonged battle between Congress and then director of US 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 US-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." These reports and several others like them which have surfaced over the past several years tell us interesting and disturbing things. 

FIRST, THEY show just how difficult it is to gather accurate information on the status of weapons of mass destruction programs. 

From the 1991 Gulf War until the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs were a top issue on the international agenda. And yet, year in and year out, UN inspectors, who were on the ground throughout most of the period, failed to provide an accurate picture of those programs. Indeed, the documents and reports regarding the transfer of those programs to Syria show those inspection reports were wildly off the mark. 
<snip>
<end>












CONFIDENTIAL AND PRIVILEGED INFORMATION NOTICE

This e-mail, and any attachments, may contain information that
is confidential, subject to copyright, or exempt from disclosure.
Any unauthorized review, disclosure, retransmission, 
dissemination or other use of or reliance on this information 
may be unlawful and is strictly prohibited.  

AVIS D'INFORMATION CONFIDENTIELLE ET PRIVILÉGIÉE

Le présent courriel, et toute pièce jointe, peut contenir de 
l'information qui est confidentielle, régie par les droits 
d'auteur, ou interdite de divulgation. Tout examen, 
divulgation, retransmission, diffusion ou autres utilisations 
non autorisées de l'information ou dépendance non autorisée 
envers celle-ci peut être illégale et est strictement interdite.