Weapons of Mass Destruction (assorted articles)

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Surprised? No, you didn't get this report from the Big Media, or from the government, either. But, more and more information is surfacing that says that the so-called "missing WMDs" are not missing after all. But, the fact that we know exactly which country now has them creates a difficult scenario for the present Administration. Nevertheless, the evidence points to Syria as the recipient of most of Saddam's WMD's, just prior to the present war in Iraq. The problem is that such knowledge could eventually involve a new war with Syria -- a dreaded thought -- hence, the denials by government officials and complete lack of coverage by the Big Media. Read on....

"Where were the missiles? We found them.... We have had six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being moved into Syria before the war. In every case, the US intelligence community sought to discount or discredit those reports."" -- Senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, March 2004

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"Saddam Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions." --Former State Department official and deputy chief of the UN-led arms-inspection teams, March 2004

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"Look, I want to make it clear. Who knows if a month from now, three months from now, you find some weapons? You may." --Sen. John Kerry, flip-flopping (again) on WMDs, April 27, 2004

April 26, 2004

New evidence out of Iraq suggests that the US effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is having better success than is being reported. Key assertions by the intelligence community that were widely judged in the media and by critics of President George W. Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all. But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.

The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the UN-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under UN Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight. "There is a long list of charges made by the US that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."

Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of UN Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner. The United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.

Both Duelfer and Kay found that Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects." They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the UN inspectors," the official said.

But while the president's critics and the media might plausibly hide behind ambiguity and a lack of sensational-looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the case of Saddam's ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their silence. "Where were the missiles? We found them," another senior administration official told Insight.

"Saddam Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions," the first official said. Both senior administration officials spoke to Insight on condition that neither their name nor their agency be identified, but their accounts of what the United States has found in Iraq coincided in every major area.

When former weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States had found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his conclusions made front-page news. But when he detailed what the ISG had found in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last October, few took notice. Among Kay's revelations, which officials tell Insight have been amplified in subsequent inspections in recent weeks:

• A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi officials working to prepare the UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN" Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn't have a biological-weapons program?

• "Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'"

• A line of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, "not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible limit."

• "Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN."

• "Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] -- well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles] imposed by the UN Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey], Cairo [Egypt] and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates]."

• In addition, through interviews with Iraqi scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG learned the Iraqi government had made "clandestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles -- probably the No Dong -- 300-kilometer-range [186 miles] antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment," Kay reported.

In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed that the ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents. The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a "high-speed rail gun," a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky acknowledged to Insight had been intended for "a clandestine nuclear-weapons program."

In taking apart Iraq's clandestine procurement network, Duelfer said his investigators had discovered that "the primary source of illicit financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring countries [and] from kickback payments made on contracts set up through the UN oil-for-food program" [see "Documents Prove UN Oil Corruption," April 27-May 10, http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=657739].

What the president's critics and the media widely have portrayed as the most dramatic failure of the US case against Saddam has been the claimed failure to find "stockpiles" of chemical and biological weapons. But in a June 2003 Washington Post op-ed, former chief UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus called such criticism "a distortion and a trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security."

The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded that Saddam "probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents -- much of it added in the last year." That assessment was based, in part, on conclusions contained in the final report from UN weapons inspectors in 1999, which highlighted discrepancies in what the Iraqis reported to the United Nations and the amount of precursor chemicals UN arms inspectors could document Iraq had imported but for which it no longer could account. Until now, Bush's critics say, no stockpiles of CW agents made with those precursors have been found. The snap conclusion they draw is that the administration "lied" to the American people to create a pretext for invading Iraq.

But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English? Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide US troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory? In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA's) intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found -- not all at once, and not all in nice working order -- but found all the same.

Douglas Hanson was a US Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and a veteran of Gulf War I. He was an atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer. As a civilian analyst in Iraq last summer, he worked for an operations intelligence unit of the CPA in Iraq, and later, with the newly formed Ministry of Science and Technology, which was responsible for finding new, nonlethal employment for Iraqi WMD scientists.

In an interview with Insight and in an article he wrote for the online magazine AmericanThinker.com, Hanson examines reports from US combat units and public information confirming that many of Iraq's CW stockpiles have indeed been found. Until now, however, journalists have devoted scant attention to this evidence, in part because it contradicts the story line they have been putting forward since the US-led inspections began after the war.

But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the "finds" Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble. "Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve agents."

The United Nations was fully aware that Saddam had established his chemical-weapons plants under the guise of a permitted civilian chemical-industry infrastructure. Plants inspected in the early 1990s as CW production facilities had been set up to appear as if they were producing pesticides -- or in the case of a giant plant near Fallujah, chlorine, which is used to produce mustard gas.

When coalition forces entered Iraq, "huge warehouses and caches of 'commercial and agricultural' chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists," Hanson writes. "What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches."

Caches of "commercial and agricultural" chemicals don't match the expectation of "stockpiles" of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. "At a very minimum," Hanson tells Insight, "they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly." Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment's notice.

At Karbala, US troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to reporters -- with unpleasant results. "More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a military ammunition dump -- evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."

That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin -- a nerve agent. Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. "Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'"

At Taji -- an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of Columbia -- US combat units discovered more "pesticides" stockpiled in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the standard 55-gallon drum. Hanson says he still recalls the military sending digital images of the canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry of Science and Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. "They were labeled as pesticides," he says. "Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides stored in ammo dumps."

Again, this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But subsequent tests by the United States disputed that finding. "If it wasn't a chemical agent, what was it?" Hanson asks. "More pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this old soldier's perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy."

The discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that's the problem: Finding real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn't fit the image the media and the president's critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq's weapons ought to look like.

A senior administration official who has gone through the intelligence reporting from Iraq as well as the earlier reports from UN arms inspectors refers to another well-documented allegation. "The Iraqis admitted they had made 3.9 tons of VX," a powerful nerve gas, but claimed they had never weaponized it. The UN inspectors "felt they had more. But where did it go?" The Iraqis never provided any explanation of what had happened to their VX stockpiles.

What does 3.9 tons of VX look like? "It could fit in one large garage," the official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would assemble every bit of VX gas his scientists had produced at a single site, that still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of the state of California.

Senior administration officials stress that the investigation will continue as inspectors comb through millions of pages of documents in Iraq and attempt to interview Iraqi weapons scientists who have been trained all their professional lives to conceal their activities from the outside world. "The conditions under which the ISG is working are not very conducive," one official said. "But this president wants the truth to come out. This is not an exercise in spinning or censoring."

On Dec. 24, 2002, nearly three months before fighting in Iraq began, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accused Saddam Hussein's regime of transferring key materials for his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs to Syria in convoys of 18-wheel trucks to hide them from UN weapons inspectors. "There is information we are verifying, but we are certain that Iraq has recently moved chemical or biological weapons into Syria," Sharon told Channel Two television in Israel.

Before talking about this on Israeli television, Sharon gave detailed information to the Bush White House on what Israel knew and what it suspected. Insight has learned, however, that once the information was handed over to the US intelligence community, officials at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) swept it aside as lacking credibility.

In May 2003, just as major combat operations in Iraq were winding down, new reports surfaced in Israel, this time alleging that convoys of Iraqi water tankers carrying WMD components crossed the border into Syria repeatedly between Jan. 10 and March 10. The tankers reportedly were met by Syrian special forces and escorted to the heroin poppy fields of a Syrian-controlled area in Lebanon's Bekáa Valley, where their contents were dumped into specially prepared pits and buried. Again, INR discounted the reports, US officials tell Insight.

Reports of Iraqi WMD winding up in Syria were not just coming from the Israelis. In October 2003, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, revealed that vehicle traffic photographed by US spy satellites indicated that material and documents related to Saddam's forbidden WMD programs had been shipped to Syria before the war.

It was no surprise that the United States and its allies had not found stockpiles of forbidden weapons in Iraq, Clapper told a breakfast briefing given to reporters in Washington. "Those below the senior leadership saw what was coming, and I think they went to extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence," he said. "We have had six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being moved into Syria before the war," a senior administration official tells Insight. "In every case, the US intelligence community sought to discount or discredit those reports."

This January, after he returned to Washington from Iraq, where for six months he had served as the CIA's top gun with the Iraq Survey Group hunting for Saddam's banned weapons, David Kay said he had uncovered evidence that weapons material had been moved to Syria shortly before the war. "We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he told the Sunday Telegraph in London. "But 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. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."

Another piece of this puzzle was provided by a Syrian intelligence officer in letters smuggled to an antiregime activist living in Paris named Nizar Nayouf. In one letter the source identified three locations in Syria where WMD materials had been buried under an agreement between the Syrian and Iraqi leadership. Two of the sites were specially dug underground bunkers and tunnels. The third site was a factory operated by the Syrian air force in the village of Tal Sinan, located between the cities of Hama and Salimiyyah. In a follow-up letter dated Jan. 7, Nayouf's source provided more details on these locations, along with a map, and alleged that some of the weapons had been moved out of Iraq in ambulances.

So are Saddam's WMD stockpiles in Syria? When Insight asked the CIA if it was investigating these and other reports, a spokesman acknowledged there was "some evidence that way" and that the United States was "looking at all types of possibilities," but vigorously discouraged further inquiries. Administration officials tell Insight that the refusal to report on Syria's complicity with Saddam's regime stems from a "pro-Syria bias in the State Department and some elements of the intelligence community, whose threshold for evidence on Syria is suspiciously high."

Shoshana Bryen regularly escorts groups of retired US military flag officers (admirals and generals) to Israel for meetings with senior Israeli political and military leaders, as well as intelligence officials. "We went to Israel just before the war and just after," she tells Insight. "Both times, Israeli intelligence officials told us, yes, WMD were definitely in Iraq, and that they had been sent to Syria." The Bush administration was trying to downplay these reports, she believes, "because if Iraqi weapons are in Syria, we're going to have to do something about it, and they don't want another war."

At least one of the al-Qaida plotters arrested in Jordan earlier this month as part of a weapons of mass destruction plot that Jordanian officials say could have killed 80,000 people revealed on Monday that he was trained in Iraq before the US invaded in March 2003.

In a confession broadcast on Jordanian television, the unnamed WMD conspirator revealed: "In Iraq, I started training in explosives and poisons. I gave my complete obedience to [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi," the al-Qaida WMD specialist whose base of operations was in Iraq. Excerpts from the WMD conspirator's confession broadcast by ABC's "Nightline" late Monday show that the WMD plot was planned and trained for in Iraq more than a year before the US invasion, with the terror suspect admitting, "After the fall of Afghanistan, I met Zarqawi again in Iraq."

US forces vanquished the Taliban government in Kabul in December 2001 -- 15 months before the US invasion of Iraq. "Some of the details appear to be fairly significant in terms of the planning," reported "Nightline's" Chris Bury: "$170,000, a lot of meetings, getting instructions from people in Iraq, people inside Syria. This doesn't appear to be a mom-and-pop operation," he added.

Al-Zarqawi, who also ran a camp for Jordanian recruits in Afghanistan, has been linked to a series of terrorist plots, including the attack in Madrid last month, the bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad last summer, and the 2002 killing of an American diplomat in Jordan. On Monday al-Zarqawi took credit for the attacks on Iraq's oil terminals in Basra over the weekend, "Nightline" said. The attack, though interrupted before it could do maximum damage, killed three US soldiers.

The Jordan chem-bomb plot was to be executed in three stages, according to a video re-enactment released by Jordanian officials. The first stage was to involve a car carrying several al-Qaida operatives, who would approach the gates of the Jordanian security service in Amman and gun down the facility's armed guards. The car would be quickly followed by a specially equipped track laden with conventional explosives that would break through the security service gate and crash into the main building.

In the third stage, the plot called for three tanker trucks to follow the breakthrough vehicle, loaded with a combined total of 20 tons of chemical weapons laced with conventional explosives. One truck was to crash into the security headquarters, another the US Embassy nearby. A third was to hit a building within a few hundred yards of the other two targets, the Jordanian video showed. The ensuing cloud of poison gas could have killed 80,000 people, Jordanian officials said, an estimate that was revised upward from an anticipated death toll of 20,000 last week.

In film footage broadcast by "Nightline," Jordanian television showed hundreds of plastic containers that had been removed from the trucks that Jordanian officials said were filled with chemical weapons. Jordan's King Abdullah said last week that the five trucks originated from Syria and were intercepted just 75 miles from the Syrian border. Syria has long been suspected as a repository of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

April 29, 2004

While the Washington press corps seems to have missed it, WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg has been playing a clip of Sen. John Kerry in his biggest flip-flop yet -- showing the presumptive Democratic nominee suddenly admitting that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction may soon turn up.

It's quite a turnaround for Kerry, who just a few weeks ago was complaining: "George Bush sold us on going to war with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass destruction. But we still haven't found them.... We were misled about weapons of mass destruction." Key Kerry backer Howard Dean has been even more adamant, insisting to CNN earlier this month: "There were no weapons of mass destruction.... This is Bushgate, which is far more serious than Watergate."

But Tuesday night (4/27/04) on MSNBC's "Hardball," Kerry retreated. "It appears, as they peel away the weapons of mass destruction issue -- and we may yet find them," he told host Chris Matthews. "Look, I want to make it clear. Who knows if a month from now, three months from now, you find some weapons? You may."

Coincidentally or not, Kerry's reversal came a day after the Jordanian government announced that WMDs from Syria were part of an al-Qaida plot to kill 80,000 people in Amman with poison gas. At least one of the plotters has admitted he was trained in Iraq. The top Democrat's flip-flop also followed news that a suspected weapons of mass destruction production facility in Baghdad -- disguised as a perfume factory -- unexpectedly blew up, killing two GIs who were searching the plant.

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) - Al-Qaida plotted bombings and poison gas attacks against the US Embassy and other targets in Jordan, two conspirators said in a confession aired Monday on Jordanian state television. Azmi al-Jayousi, identified as the head of the Jordanian cell of al-Qaida, appeared Monday in a 20-minute taped program and described meeting Jordanian militant Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi in neighboring Iraq to plan the foiled plot.

A commentator said the plotters wanted to kill "80,000" Jordanians and had targeted the prime minister's office, intelligence headquarters and the US Embassy. Another Jordanian suspect, car mechanic Hussein Sharif Hussein, was shown saying al-Jayousi asked him to buy vehicles and modify them so that they could crash through gates and walls. US officials have offered a $10 million reward for al-Zarqawi's capture, saying he is a close associate of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and is trying to build a network of foreign militants in neighboring Iraq to work on al-Qaida's behalf. His whereabouts are unknown.

A Web site known for publicizing messages from Muslim extremists on Monday carried a purported claim of responsibility from al-Zarqawi for suicide boat attacks against Gulf oil terminals Saturday that killed three Americans and disabled Iraq's biggest terminal for more than 24 hours. "I have pledged loyalty to Abu-Musab to fully be obedient and listen to him without discussion," al-Jayousi said in the Jordanian television segment. He said he first met al-Zarqawi in Afghanistan, where al-Jayousi said he studied explosives, "before Afghanistan fell." He said he later met al-Zarqawi in Iraq, but was not specific about when.

The videotape also showed still photographs of al-Jayousi and nine other suspects. The commentator said four of those pictured had been killed in clashes with security forces. Al-Jayousi said he received about $170,000 from al-Zarqawi to finance the plot and used part of it to buy 20 tons of chemicals. He did not identify the chemicals, but said they "were enough for all the operations in the Jordanian arena." Images of what the commentator said were vans filled with blue jugs of chemical explosives were included in the broadcast.

Hussein, the car mechanic, said he met al-Jayousi in 1999 but did not clearly say when the terror plans were laid out. The bearded Hussein, looking anxious, said al-Jayousi told him the aim was "carrying out the first suicide attack to be launched by al-Qaida using chemicals" and "striking at Jordan, its Hashemite (royal family) and launching war on the Crusaders and nonbelievers."

Officials said they had arrested the suspects in two raids in late March and early April. Last week, officials said four other terror suspects believed linked to the same conspiracy were killed in a shootout with police in Amman. Government officials have said the suspects plotted to detonate a powerful bomb targeting Jordan's secret service and use poison gas against the prime minister's office, the US Embassy and other diplomatic missions. Had the bomb exploded, it could have killed at least 20,000 people and wrecked buildings within a half-mile radius, the officials have said. No trial date has been set in the case.

Airing suspects' confessions before their trial is unusual in Jordan. In 1998, six men accused of affiliation with a militant group confessed on television to planting a bomb that exploded outside an Amman hotel. Five years later, a court found them innocent. The unusual move may be an attempt to answer critics who claim the government has exaggerated the terror danger to justify tightening security. Officials in Jordan, a moderate Arab nation with close ties to the United States and a peace treaty with Israel, say the kingdom has been repeatedly targeted by al-Qaida and other militant groups.