I guess Obama found Saddam's WMDs right where Bush said they were.

As Congress holds hearings to determine whether or not it will vote to authorize President Barack Obama to use military force in the Syrian civil war, it's hard not to think of the Bush administration's arguments for military intervention in Iraq 10 years ago.

The justification at that time was to disarm then-dictator Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime of alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) — namely chemical and biological weapons. Of course, long after military operations began and continued into the next decade, those weapons were never found.

However, even back then, there were accusations from several sources that Hussein had smuggled his WMDs over the border into Syria long before coalition forces began the Iraqi invasion. Today, there is now video evidence  of chemical and biological weapons having been used in Syria to kill countless victims. While the blame game rages on as to who actually used said weapons, Assad forces or rebel fighters, many seem to have forgotten to ask a very important question: Where did these chemical weapons come from?

Was the Bush administration right all along? Could these indeed be the very same WMDs that intelligence agencies from around the world claimed were in Hussein’s possession which he then transferred over to Syria?

The earliest account of Hussein having hidden his WMDs in Syria came in January of 2004. Nizar Nayouf, an award-winning Syrian journalist who was granted political asylum in France, said in a letter to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf not only that he knew Iraq’s WMDs were being hidden inside Syria, but that he could pinpoint precisely where they were being kept. According to Nayouf’s witness, described as a senior source inside Syrian military intelligence he had known for two years, Iraq’s WMDs were in tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria, in the village of Tal Snan, north of the town of Salamija, and in the city of Sjinsjar on the Syrian border with the Lebanon, south of the city of Homs. Nayouf claimed that the transfer of Iraqi WMDs to Syria was organized by the commanders of Hussein’s Iraqi Republican Guard with the help of General Dhu al-Himma Shalish and Assef Shawkat, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and brother-in-law, respectively.

We know for a fact that Shalish had a working relationship with Hussein long before the war in Iraq. The Syrian government awarded Shalish and his company, SES International Corporation, exclusive rights on contracts to supply the Iraqi market with goods from construction materials to detergent. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Shalish and SES helped the former Ba’athist regime access weapons systems by issuing false end-user certificates to foreign suppliers that listed Syria as the final country of destination. SES International then transshipped the goods to Iraq, and Shalish was subsequently sanctioned by the U.S. for procuring defense-related goods for Hussein in violation of sanctions against Iraq.

When two sources from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) — a 1,400-member team organized by the Pentagon and CIA — spoke with the Washington Times in August 2004, they reported that Hussein periodically removed guards on the Syrian border and replaced them with his own intelligence agents who supervised the movement of banned materials between the two countries. The shift was followed by the movement of trucks in and out of Syria suspected of carrying materials banned by UN sanctions. Once the shipments were made, the agents would leave and the regular border guards would resume their posts.

A similar claim was made by Lieutenant General Moshe Ya’alon in December of 2005, a former Israeli military officer who served as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces from July 2002 to June 2005. “(Hussein) transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria” six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom started, according to Ya’alon. “No one went to Syria to find it.”

Just a month later in January 2006, the Iraqi general who served as the No. 2 official in Hussein’s air force, Georges Sada, claimed Iraq moved WMDs into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into two civilian aircrafts in which the passenger seats were removed, as well as in multiple ground convoys of trucks.

“There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Sada stated. “I am confident they were taken over [to Syria].”

Read More: Policy Mic

Where did Syria get their hands on WMDs?

 

Many people have wondered where Bashar al-Assad of Syria got those chemical weapons that Defense Secretary Panetta discussed in a press conference today, December 6, 2012. According to NYTimes.com. Secretary Panetta stressed:

“The president of the United States has made very clear that there will be consequences, there will be consequences if the Assad regime makes a terrible mistake by using these chemical weapons on their own people.”

The question has popped up several times the past few weeks, "Are those the missing WMD's from the Iraq War?" The question actually has been discussed for several years, and some impressive voices have made the case that Saddam Hussein sent large shipments of weapons to Syria before the war.
According to an article in the Atlantic Wire July 27, 2012, President Obama’s Director of National Security, James Clapper, has been outspoken about the transfer of materials from Iraq.

“As director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Clapper said in 2003 that satellite images showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq to Syria "unquestionably" show that illicit weapons were moved out of Iraq.”

According to the Washington Times, Both the United States and Israel have photographs of materials leaving Iraq during this window of time being disputed, around 2004.

John A. Shaw, a senior Pentagon technology security official during the Bush administration, however, said he believed that some Iraqi weapons and materials were covertly shipped out of Iraqi factories with the help of the Russians. Satellite images released in 2004 by the Pentagon also showed Russian vehicles loading goods at Iraqi factories, but the nature of their cargo has not been determined.

The Atlantic Wire and other publications have referred to George Sada’s testimony regarding Saddam Hussein’s efforts to remove the WMD’s from Iraq. George Sada was one of Saddam’s top men in the air force, and he recalls how airplanes were stripped down to carry weapons to Syria.
Many others refuse to accept these credible arguments, and it could be because it would vindicate the Bush Administration for their actions in the Iraq War. It would be ironic if a Democratic administration discovered the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction.

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Wikileaks: WMD program existed in Iraq prior to US invasion

US did find Iraq WMD

There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after all.
The massive cache of almost 400,000 Iraq war documents released by the WikiLeaks Web site revealed that small amounts of chemical weapons were found in Iraq and continued to surface for years after the 2003 US invasion, Wired magazine reported.
The documents showed that US troops continued to find chemical weapons and labs for years after the invasion, including remnants of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons arsenal -- most of which had been destroyed following the Gulf War.
In August 2004, American troops were able to buy containers from locals of what they thought was liquid sulfur mustard, a blister agent, the documents revealed. The chemicals were triple-sealed and taken to a secure site.
Also in 2004, troops discovered a chemical lab in a house in Fallujah during a battle with insurgents. A chemical cache was also found in the city.

Courtesy: NY Post

Wikileaks: WMD program existed in Iraq prior to US invasion

The release by Julian Assange's web site Wikileaks of classified documents reveals that U.S. military intelligence discovered chemical weapons labs, encountered insurgents who were specialists in the creation of toxins, and uncovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, Washington, DC officials and the news media have ignored this information.
One of the WikiLeaks document dumps reveals that as late as 2008, American troops continued to find WMD in the region.
There are numerous mentions of chemical and biological weapons in the WikiLeaks documents, however the U.S. media appear only interested in those portions of the leaked material that highlight actions that are viewed as embarrassing for the U.S. military such as the accusation that U.S. commanders were aware of abuse and "torture" of prisoners by Iraqi soldiers and police officers. 


READ MORE Courtesy: examiner.com