Oh yeah...we forgot. There's one other Baathist dictatorship in the Middle East. Gee whiz...I wonder where the WMDs went? Demolishing the WMD Myth By David Thibault CNSNews.com Editor in Chief January 30, 2006 This isn't the type of commentary about weapons of mass destruction that you have seen so often over the last 18 months, from media liberals like the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, who at every turn have insisted that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs or links to al Qaeda when he was routed from office by U.S. and coalition military forces in 2003. Armed only with the conclusions of United Nations and Bush administration-appointed weapons inspectors that no significant WMD caches had been discovered in Iraq, these media misfits and the liberal apparatus in Congress has had a field day castigating President Bush for his decision to invade Iraq. Nobody states the Democrats' weak-kneed response (What would F.D.R. and Harry Truman think?) better than the Massachusetts Democratic senator that the party entrusted with its presidential nomination in 2004 - John Kerry. "Let's be clear: there is no question that Americans were misled into war in Iraq. Simply put, they were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when he did not," Kerry proclaimed on Nov. 14, 2005, in a speech -- and you have to give him points for audacity here -- meant to honor American veterans. The website of U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House minority leader, still claims in a release dated Jan. 12, 2005, that "President Bush has refused to concede what has been obvious for months: the primary justification for the invasion of Iraq was not supported by fact." Enter Georges Sada, one of Saddam Hussein's top generals and military advisors, whose book, "Saddam's Secrets - How an Iraqi General Defied and Survived Saddam Hussein," is causing quite a stir and may or may not be giving Kerry and Pelosi heartburn. Sada is unsparing in his criticism of Republican President George H. W. Bush for failing to finish the job in the first Persian Gulf War and rid the world of Saddam. And he blasts away at Democratic President Bill Clinton for his weak responses to terrorist attacks and the Saddam threat in the 1990s. Not only does Sada praise the current President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, stating that U.S.-led coalition forces "did us a great service," he demolishes the myth that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no international threat. Sada details a frightening passage in which Saddam asked for his advice about attacking Israel with chemical weapons -- the nerve gases Tabun, Sarin 1 and Sarin 2. He also explains how Saddam managed to smuggle his weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq and into Syria, following a natural disaster in northwestern Syria on June 4, 2002. "[W]hen Syrian president Bashar al-Assad asked for help from Jordan and Iraq, Saddam knew what he would do." Sada writes. "For him, the disaster in Syria was a gift, and there, posing as shipments of supplies and equipment sent from Iraq to aid the relief effort, were Iraq's WMDs." The author confirmed these details with one of the pilots of the 747 jets that were gutted on the inside in order to store the WMDs, before being flown from Iraq to Syria. Sada has much more to say in the book, the first substantive, reliable account of how Saddam made fools of the international community, U.S. liberal politicians and the media establishment who were determined to create the self-fulfilling prophecy that there were no WMDs in Iraq. We know that that these groups and individuals did it for political gain -- it hasn't worked so far -- instead of using their common sense and pointing the finger at the real enemy. Sada's book, while adding crucial details on how Saddam got rid of his WMDs, was no news flash to Cybercast News Service. Please read our own comprehensive account, reported by Scott Wheeler on Oct. 4, 2004, of Saddam's procurement of weapons of mass destruction as well as his extensive links to al Qaeda. It should not surprise any of our readers to learn that Gen. Sada is scheduled to meet on Monday, Jan. 30, with a member of my cracker-jack staff, Sherrie Gossett. During his speech last Nov. 14, Kerry tried to explain the "distinction between being wrong and being dishonest." Kerry, Pelosi and most Democrats in the House and Senate should have a pretty fair idea now about what's wrong and dishonest, because they've been both.
Issues & Insights Gunsmoke On ABC Posted 2/15/2006 WMD: Did Saddam Hussein possess weapons of mass destruction? We've always thought so. But proof positive may soon be forthcoming if secret tapes of the Iraqi dictator turn out to be real. The tapes in question, 12 hours in all, represent recordings of Saddam Hussein discussing the possibility of a terrorist attack on Washington, D.C., and the use of WMD. The tapes are held by John Loftus, a former U.S. prosecutor, who says they were given to him by a "former American military intelligence analyst." Loftus will officially reveal the tapes on Saturday, during the opening session of the Intelligence Summit, a private conference of former defense and intelligence officials from around the world. ABC News' "Nightline" scheduled a preview of the tapes for broadcast Wednesday night. Loftus insists the tapes provide the "smoking gun" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Meanwhile, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., head of the House Intelligence Committee, said the tapes are authentic and show "Saddam had a fixation on weapons of mass destruction and he had a fixation on hiding what he was doing from the U.N. inspectors." That's not surprising, since the recordings fit with what we already know: that Saddam had a program to make WMD and likely had some stockpiled — though he also probably shipped them to Syria or Libya shortly before the March 6, 2003, U.S. attack. That scenario has become clearer in recent days, as two former Iraqi military commanders have come forward to admit that, yes, Saddam had WMD and hid them. Two weeks ago, we wrote here about Georges Sada, the former No. 2 in Saddam's air force who says Saddam moved his WMD to Syria six weeks before the U.S. invaded — a claim bolstered by Western intelligence at the time. Now Sada's claim has been confirmed by Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a key commander of Saddam's Fedayeen militia and a close, hometown acquaintance of the former dictator, who says this was all part of Saddam's plan. Ibrahim told Worldthreats.com: "What we are witnessing now is many who opposed the war to begin with are rallying around Saddam saying, 'We overthrew a sovereign leader based on a lie about WMD.' This is exactly what Saddam wanted and predicted." Yes, it worked. Americans have heard repeatedly that "Bush lied" about WMD in Iraq to justify war. War critics agree that Saddam once had WMD, but they contend he destroyed them when sanctions were imposed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In fact, inspectors did find WMD — 53 of them, to be exact, according to the Duelfer Report, the CIA's 1,500-page account of its intelligence mistakes in Iraq. And that report concluded: "We have clear evidence of his intent to resume WMD production as soon as (U.N.) sanctions were lifted." U.N. arms inspector David Kay's report found much the same thing: "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the (U.N.) during the inspections that began in late 2002." It'll be interesting to hear what's on Loftus' tapes. They may indeed be a "smoking gun." If so, the case that so many have made against the war for so long will have been blown out of the water.
Someone spin for me why this guy has these tapes that were "given" to him by someone else and yet it has taken this long for them to surface...2 years after the official red-faced admission by W's admin. that "we don't have proof of WMDs." "The tapes are held by John Loftus, a former U.S. prosecutor, who says they were given to him by a "former American military intelligence analyst." Loftus will officially reveal the tapes on Saturday, during the opening session of the Intelligence Summit, a private conference of former defense and intelligence officials from around the world. ABC News' "Nightline" scheduled a preview of the tapes for broadcast Wednesday night."
Not having "proof" of WMDs is not the same thing as the WMDs never existed; which is what the lib/Dems have been saying for five years. Remember "Bush lied, kids died?" How about, "He started the war to avenge his daddy?" Or "Bush/Cheney took our country to war to increase the value of Haliburton stock?" Or pick em... There are literally thousands and thousands of hours of these tapes which haven't even been translated yet, as they sat in warehouses waiting to be processed and I'm sure that all of them, like these first releases, will reveal the depths to which the lib/Dems have sunk. With our nation at risk, they played politics with the safety of our people to try and reestablish their old failed policies of Jimmy Carter that created this problem in the first place. The WMDs were there and now they're in Syria. Sadam had many links with all of the international terrorists, because he was one of them and he knew of the 9/11 attacks before they occurred. He actively engaged in hiding WMDs from UN inspectors and he handed out billions of bribes to our "friends" in Germany, France and Russia to keep the ruse going. The real enemy and target of these Islamo-fascists is us. Not Israel, not Europe: us...you know...the Great Satan. Just once, I'd like to see the Democrats be on our side. The only time they were ever on America's side in wartime, was when they held the White House. They have sided with everybody from Mao Tse Tung to the Confederate States of America when they don't. How about a little help? Isn't this their country too? ................TP
I know this will never happen and democrats won't care how many Iraqi generals spill it about sending the WMDs to Syria or anyplace. They are locked into the Bush lied. But I would love to see the Syrians come clean and admit that they have the WMD's and even bring in CNN, Tim Robbins, Richard Dreyfus, Michael Moore and Howard Dean and show them the actual weapons. It'd be hilarious to see them spin and cough and sputter. Like I said it's never going to happen. Terry
That's the beauty of these audiotapes. As they're slowing translated, processed and released over a period of years, they will put the lie to everything that the Democrats have been saying for the last decade and reinforce the fact that they can't be trusted with our national security. In the latest tapes, Sadam talks about using the lib/Dems and other critics in the West to his own advantage and predicts in advance everything that they eventually did...