27-28 February 2006

Saddam Hussein had WMD. It has been a fact, and is a fact. The greatest lie of all in the events of the last 3 years is the mantra of the left: "Bush lied." The Left lied. The IslamoFascists lied. The enemies of freedom, including (especially) those in the USA, lied. It is a tragedy of untold proportions that a nation at war against the adherents of the most fundamentalist version of Islam has been successfully torn apart, its ability to trust, its desire to stand together in unity, its patriotic love of country nearly destroyed. And done at the very time that the people most desperately need to believe in themselves, and in one another. This is the tragedy, that a war we are winning is being lost, and done by the ability of our enemies to get half of our people to believe them rather than their own leaders.

But Saddam had them. I said last week that I would say more about the issue, so here goes. First, I relate the article, published in Investor's Business Daily today (second part of a series begun on Friday), that dealt in graphic detail about the multiple sources of information about the discovery that Saddam's WMD stockpiles, materials, and equipment for making said weapons were taken out of Iraq in the period December 2002--March 2003 and stored in warehouses in Syria and the Bekaa Valley bordering Syria and Lebanon, and with the approval of the Syrian government. Consider this: that information has been provided by at least two former high-ranking officials in Saddam's regime, a former U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant general with high-level command responsibility at the time of the initial Iraq War in 2003, a general in charge at the time of Mosad, Israeli intelligence, the former head of the U.S. satellite spy system (himself a former U.S. Air Force general), former senior U.N. weapons inspectors, former members of the Iraq Survey Group, Jordan's King Abdullah and, as if that wasn't enough, actual finds of limited amounts of Iraqi WMD materials, and most of all, now, the first of the recorded tapes of Saddam Hussein's in-office conversations along with those of his top associates. All elicit the same conclusion, George Bush was absolutely justified in launching the war against Iraq.

But let me bring forward the information for you to read and judge for yourself. My thanks to Powerline, and Investor's Business Daily for the information I needed. First, the appropriate parts of the IBD article.

"Inconveniently for critics of the war, Saddam made tapes in his version of the Oval Office. These tapes landed in the hands of American intelligence and were recently aired publicly.

The first 12 hours of the tapes — there are hundreds more waiting to be translated — are damning, to say the least. They show conclusively that Bush didn't lie when he cited Saddam's WMD plans as one of the big reasons for taking the dictator out.

Nobody disputes the tapes' authenticity. On them, Saddam talks openly of programs involving biological, chemical and, yes, nuclear weapons.

War foes have long asserted that Saddam halted his WMD programs in the wake of his defeat in the first Gulf War in 1991. Saddam's abandonment of WMD programs was confirmed by subsequent U.N. inspections.

Again, not true. In a tape dating to April 1995, Saddam and several aides discuss the fact that U.N. inspectors had found traces of Iraq's biological weapons program. On the tape, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, is heard gloating about fooling the inspectors.

"We did not reveal all that we have," he says. "Not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct."

There's more. Indeed, as late as 2000, Saddam can be heard in his office talking with Iraqi scientists about his ongoing plans to build a nuclear device. At one point, he discusses Iraq's plasma uranium program — something that was missed entirely by U.N. weapons inspectors combing Iraq for WMD.

This is particularly troubling, since it indicates an active, ongoing attempt by Saddam to build an Iraqi nuclear bomb.

"What was most disturbing," said John Tierney, the ex- FBI agent who translated the tapes, "was the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special Commission (or UNSCOM, the group set up to look into Iraq's WMD programs)."

Perhaps most chillingly, the tapes record Iraq Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz talking about how easy it would be to set off a WMD in Washington. The comments come shortly after Saddam muses about using "proxies" in a terror attack.

9-11, anyone?

In short, let us repeat: President Bush was right. We had to invade to disarm Saddam — otherwise, he would have completely reconstituted his chemical, nuclear and bio-weapons programs when inspectors left.

Saddam probably knew better than to use them himself against the U.S. But it's likely he wouldn't have hesitated giving one or more to terror groups with which he had routine contact.

Lest you think we're making the case entirely based on these tapes, let us assure you that other evidence — mounting by the day — points to the same conclusion.

We've been very impressed by the story told by Georges Sada, the former No. 2 in Iraq's air force. He has written a book, "Saddam's Secrets," that details how the Iraqi dictator used trucks, commercial jets and ships to remove his WMD from the country. At the time, the move went largely undetected, because Iraq pretended the massive movement of materiel was to help Syrian flood victims.

Nor is Sada alone. Ali Ibrahim, another of Saddam's former commanders, has largely corroborated Sada's story.

So how was Saddam able to use his "cheat and retreat" tactics without being found out? He had help, according to a former U.S. Defense Department official.

"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," said John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense, in comments made at an intelligence summit Feb. 17-20 in Arlington, Va.

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special ops) units out of uniform that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.

That was in the first installment of the IBD series, on Friday (2/24). On today's IBD edition the other sources of information, supporting those conclusions, are cited concerning Saddam's activities, including his Osama bin Laden connection:

For example, three months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, Israeli intelligence detected Iraq moving large amounts of military materiel into Syria, another Baathist dictatorship — materiel that could have included Saddam's WMD.

Last month, Moshe Yaalon, who was Israel's top general at the time, said Iraq transported WMD to Syria six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

On Jan. 25, 2004, Nizar Nayouf, a Syrian journalist who recently defected to France, told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf that chemical and biological weapons were smuggled from Iraq into Syria when Saddam realized an American invasion was imminent.

Nayouf said he knew of at least three Syrian sites where Saddam's WMD were kept. One was in tunnels under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria, part of an underground factory built by North Korea for producing a Syrian version of the Scud missile. Others were in the village of Tal Snan, adjacent to a Syrian air base, and in Sjinsjar, on the Syrian-Lebanese border.

Nayouf's claims were in effect confirmed two months earlier in a briefing to reporters on Oct. 20, 2003, by officials of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in Washington. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of NIMA when the Iraq War began, said satellite imagery showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, who was deputy commander of Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom, told WABC radio in September 2004: "I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran."

In an interview with the London Telegraph in January 2004, David Kay, former head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), said he uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"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," Kay told the Telegraph. "Precisely what went to Syria, and what happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."

Charles Duelfer, Kay's successor as ISG head, testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Oct. 6, 2004, that "a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria."

"There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points," said Duelfer. "We've got a lot of data to support that, including people discussing it. But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say."

Jordan's King Abdullah may have an opinion on that. In April 2004, his country foiled a plot that involved five vehicles carrying a combined total of 20 tons of chemical weapons laced with conventional explosives.

The weapons would have released a cloud of poison gas sufficient to kill 80,000 people and, in Abdullah's words, "would have decapitated the government." The trucks were intercepted 75 miles inside the Jordanian border. They were coming from — you guessed it — Syria.

Still more answers may lie in the 35,000 boxes of documents that Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Committee on Intelligence, says he's trying to get translated and released into the public domain. He told Fox News' Neil Cavuto recently that "we verified that it is Saddam's voice on these tapes" and that the "12 hours of tape is only the tip of the iceberg."

Powerline goes on to remind us of the fact that Saddam Hussein's connection with Al Qaeda, if not with the 9/11/2001 attacks, is long and well-established, including his training of many thousands of terrorist mujaheddin in three different terrorist bases, including in the use of chemical WMD, referring to a major article done on 6th January concerning a story released by Stephen Hayes of the Daily Standard.

The bottom line is that President Bush told the truth, and the world wide Left has been guilty of protracted lying themselves.

One good piece of news comes from The Counterterrorism Blog. It appears that Said Hussaini, the mastermind of the horrific attack on the Atocha rail station in Madrid that killed 192 in March 2004, as well as that of major attacks in Morocco, has been captured. Apparently the story discloses that a great deal of cooperation between American intelligence operatives and European agencies resulted in his capture at the Syria-Iraq border. It appears that he had been very busy recruiting mujaheddin for Mr. Bin Laden's jihadi army, traveling in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria before his apprehension. It is no doubt amazing what is going on that we will rarely know, if ever.

Well, that's all for now. Hasta la vista.