Iraq's WMD's Position Ratted Out by Sick, Dying Syrian Journalist...If we can believe

[Richard G]

Debka version:
A senior Syrian journalist reports Iraq’s WMD located in three Syrian sites.

Nizar Najoef, a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, said in a letter Monday, January 5, to Dutch newspaper “Di Telegraaf,” that he knows the three sites where Iraq’s WMD are kept. The storage places are:

1. Tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria. These tunnels are an integral part of an underground factory, built by the North Koreans, for producing Syrian Scud missiles. Iraqi chemical weapons and long-range missiles are stored in these tunnels.

2. The village of Tal Snan, north of the town of Salamija, where there is a big Syrian airforce camp. Vital parts of Iraq’s WMD are stored there.

3. The city of Sjinsjar on the Syrian border with the Lebanon, south of the city Homs.

Najoef writes that the transfer of Iraqi WMD to Syria was organized by the commanders of Saddam Hussein’s Special Republican Guard, including General Shalish, with the help of Assif Shoakat , Bashar Assad’s cousin. Shoakat is the CEO of Bhaha, an import/export company owned by the Assad family.

In February 2003, a month before America’s invasion in Iraq, DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly were the only media to report the movement of Iraqi WMD, the efforts to bring them from Iraq to Syria, and the personal involvement of Bashar Assad and his family in the operation.

Najoef, who has won prizes for journalistic integrity, says he wrote his letter because he has terminal cancer.


Original Story: http://archief.telegraaf.nl/artikel.fpl?id=365971&pagina=0&query=Nizar%20Najoef&alleenrecent=on&bron=alles

[Earthborn]

The original story tells nothing about terminal cancer or someone being sick and dying. And let's use the 48 hour rule for this to be confirmed, especially since it comes from De Telegraaf.

[a_unique_person]

As I have said before, I would expect the intelligence that is used to start a war to be of pretty high quality. Even if this story is true, the Bush regime is dammned, because it could not back up it's claim that it new Saddam had WMD. If it new that he had them, it would have also known where they were.

[corplinx]

Originally posted by a_unique_person
If it knew that he had them, it would have also known where they were.

Is it impossible to know if someone has something if you don't know exactly where it is?

For instance, I hang out with you at a bar. I notice you are male. I see you go in the men's restroom. I see you buy condoms. Then your boyfriend walks in the bar and says "a_unique_person is endowed with such that a mutant Clydesdale would be envious to look upon it".

Now, the point is, I can say pretty safely that there is something in your pants even though in reality it is so small I can't tell from glancing at the front.

[Crossbow]

Well, I do not believe this story.

If one wants to see a factual account of the Iraqi WMD program, then I suggest that they read the account of it which in this morning's Washington Post that clearly shows just how limited it was.

In short, the Iraqis certainly wanted WMDs (long-range missiles, germ warfare agents, nuclear weapons, etc.), but they did not have them.

Go figure!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60340-2004Jan6.html

Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper
Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage

...

Tamimi's covert work, which he recounted publicly for the first time in five hours of interviews, offers fresh perspective on the question that led the nation to war. Iraq flouted a legal duty to report the designs. The weapons they depicted, however, did not exist. After years of development -- against significant obstacles -- they might have taken form as nine-ton missiles. In March they fit in Tamimi's pocket, on two digital compact discs.

...

Taha, according to the same debriefing account, said Iraq had no access to smallpox. Ali's research halted after 45 days, with the August 1990 outbreak of war in Kuwait, and did not resume. And Taha, like all those in custody, continues to assert that biowar programs ceased entirely the following year.

...

"We could have done a lot in this lab, but the fact is that this lab never existed," Ali said.

...

The most significant point in Amin's letter, U.S. and European experts said, is his unambiguous report that Iraq destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons. Amin reminded Qusay Hussein of the government's claim that it possessed no such arms after 1990, then wrote that in truth "destruction of the biological weapons agents took place in the summer of 1991."

It was those weapons to which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred in the Security Council on Feb. 5 when he said, for example, that Iraq still had an estimated 8,500 to 25,000 liters of anthrax bacteria.

...

Iraqi artillery units relied on hydrogen-filled weather balloons to measure wind and temperature, which affect targeting. Munqith Qaisi, then a senior manager at Saad Co. and now its American-appointed director-general, said the trailers used a chemical -- not biological -- process to make hydrogen from methanol and demineralized water.

...

A sad look crossed Abdul Noor's face when he tried to explain his bafflement at suspicions that Iraq had secretly rebuilt -- "reconstituted," as the Bush administration put it in the summer and fall of 2002 -- a nuclear weapons program. He and his colleagues still know what they learned, Abdul Noor said, but their material condition is incomparably worse than it was when they began in 1987. "We would have had to start from less than zero," he said, with thousands of irreplaceable tools banned from import. "The country was cornered," he said. "We were boycotted. We were embargoed. The truth is, we disintegrated."

...

Saddam Hussein ordered this work, but where would we get the materials?" said an Iraqi general who declined to be named and who kept close tabs on Tamimi's missile designs. "This was the case in every field. People would prepare reports under the order of Saddam Hussein and the supervision of the people around Saddam Hussein. But it was not real."