Where the WMDs Are: Saddam's #2 Speaks

This is another story that's heating up the blogosphere, which Michelle Malkin states the "MSM won't be covering." No kidding. In doing so, they'd have to admit that they, too, screwed up, and that our intelligence agencies were correct.

The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.

The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.

"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."

Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."

Democrats have made the absence of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a theme in their criticism of the Bush administration's decision to go to war in 2003. And President Bush himself has conceded much of the point; in a televised prime-time address to Americans last month, he said, "It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong."

Said Mr. Bush, "We did not find those weapons."

I'm going to bypass the book the man wrote, and focus on what he's said. I'm not going to jump on the president for his misstatement. We have found WMDs in Iraq, just not in the stockpiles we believed would be there. Below is a list of the WMDs and components located in Iraq, thus far, from Richard Miniter's "Disinformation".

--In a secret operation on 23 June, 2004, US forces seized 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium in a nuclear facility in Iraq, according to BBC News.

--Polish general Marek Dukaczewski revealed that troops in the Polish-patrolled sector of Iraq had received tips from Iraqis that chemical weapons were sold to terrorists on the black market. The weapons had been buried to avoid detection, according to BBC News.

--US soldiers stormed into a warehouse in Mosul, Iraq, on 8 August, 2005, and were surprised to find 1500 gallons of chemical agents. It was the largest chemical weapons lab found in Iraq.

And those are the three biggies discovered after the invasion. So, I'm not too happy with the president disavowing the exsitence of these weapons. They were found, the Left is wrong, the MSM is wrong. But in an interview on Sean Hannity's show, and the one from the New York Sun, Mr. Sada is stating that those weapons were moved to Syria.

As a matter of fact, on 18 June, 2004, Rod D. Martin penned a story in the World Tribune where the UN admitted they knew that Saddam had smuggled his WMDs out of Iraq into Syria. We knew they went missing before our invasion, and Mr. Sada has confirmed that many of Saddam's agents worked feverishly to smuggle out of Iraq the worst weapons in his stockpile.

This has been a contentious issue from the start. But, as more information comes out--from Mr. Sada, from Richard Miniter, from journalists just covering stories, and not realizing their overall relevance--we'll be here to connect the dots for the American people; the same dots that should have been connected by our elected representatives. Too bad partisanship took a front seat over the truth. And this is one issue that should be pressed by the New Media. We can find this information (It took me less than ten minutes to find the news stories linked above), but no one in office cares to pay attention to them.

Iraq had them. They were moved. There is little contention left on this issue. And chalk it up as one more notch against the Left in their downward spiral.

Publius II