Saddam’s WMD in Syria?

The Jerusalem Post is suggesting that very case.

An upcoming joint US-Israel report on the September 6 IAF strike on a Syrian facility will claim that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein transferred weapons of mass destruction to the country, Channel 2 stated Monday.

Furthermore, according to a report leaked to the TV channel, Syria has arrested 10 intelligence officials following the assassination of Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh.

Commenting at JustOneMinute, Clarice asked some pointed questions:

Why didddam (did Saddam) give Russian Gen Primakov a medal just before the invasion. Why did Saddam's ex-General Duda say the WMDs had been transported to Syria? Why did Syria make no complaint to the UN or anyone else about the attack?

In an article penned over two years ago, Kenneth Timmerman wrote:

A top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein's weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein "cleaned up" his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from discovering them.

"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org).

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.

There is a lot more detail in the article but here is the final conclusions:

In the end, here is what Shaw learned:

In December 2002, former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, came to Iraq and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Primakov supervised the execution of long-standing secret agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU (military intelligence), that provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel to remove WMDs, production materials and technical documentation from Iraq, so the regime could announce that Iraq was "WMD free."

Shaw said that this type GRU operation, known as "Sarandar," or "emergency exit," has long been familiar to U.S. intelligence officials from Soviet-bloc defectors as standard GRU practice.

In addition to the truck convoys, which carried Iraqi WMD to Syria and Lebanon in February and March 2003 "two Russian ships set sail from the (Iraqi) port of Umm Qasr headed for the Indian Ocean," where Shaw believes they "deep-sixed" additional stockpiles of Iraqi WMD from flooded bunkers in southern Iraq that were later discovered by U.S. military intelligence personnel.

The Russian "clean-up" operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq "under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants."

Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported on Oct. 30, 2004, that Achatov and Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in a Baghdad building bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first U.S. air raids in early March 2003.

Clarice’s last question is in my opinion the most important one. We spend a lot of time and intellectual energy analyzing what is being said but often the most important messages are what’s NOT being said.

I challenge anyone to cite an example of Israel attacking a target in an Arab country that did not result in immediate outrage from the Arab League and the United Nations.

Remember Operation Opera in 1981 when Israel bombed the French built Iraqi nuclear facility?

At the time, the attack was widely criticized. Israel responded that its actions were self-defensive and thus justifiable under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Many critics, however, rejected the applicability of "pre-emptive self-defense" in the absence of any imminent armed attack. France, in particular, was outraged over the loss of a French national as a result of the attack, and since the raid diplomatic ties between France and Israel have remained strained.

The United Nations Security Council strongly condemned the attack as a clear violation of the Charter and that Iraq was entitled to appropriate redress for the destruction caused. The resolution further called upon Israel to place its own nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards.[4] The United States supported this resolution as it condemned the action, not the nation. Their response was to, temporarily, withhold a contingent of aircraft already promised to Israel.

The silence of Syria and the Cabal of despots at the United Nations is deafening.

Hat Tip to my buddy Crotchety Old Bastard @ http://crotchetyoldbastard.com