SHATTERING CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ABOUT SADDAM’S WMD’S
By John Loftus
Front Page Magazine, CA
?GUID=F715A709-2614-4EA5-967C-F6151F94A364
Nov 16 2007
Finally, there are some definitive answers to the mystery of the
missing WMD. Civilian volunteers, mostly retired intelligence officers
belonging to the non-partisan IntelligenceSummit.org, have been poring
over the secret archives captured from Saddam Hussein.
The inescapable conclusion is this: Saddam really did have WMD after
all, but not in the way the Bush administration believed. A 9,000
word research paper with citations to each captured document has been
posted online at LoftusReport.com. This document research has been
supplemented with dozens of interviews.
The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a
bit chagrinned at these disclosures. The documents show a much more
complex history than previously suspected. The "Bush lied, people died"
chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMD whatsoever after 1991 –
and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. The Neocon diehards
insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-trove is
still out there somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of Iraq. Each
side is more than a little bit wrong about Saddam’s WMD, and each
side is only a little bit right about what happened to it.
The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam’s
WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990’s.
Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile
to his Arab neighbors during the mid to late 1990’s. The Russians
insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before
the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam’s nuclear
weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition
forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in
enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam’s
entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right
out from under the Americans’ noses. The theft of the unguarded Iraqi
nuclear stockpile is perhaps, the worst scandal of the war, suggesting
a level of extreme incompetence and gross dereliction of duty that
makes the Hurricane Katrina debacle look like a model of efficiency.
Without pointing fingers at the Americans, the Israeli government
now believes that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear stockpiles have ended up
in weapons dumps in Syria. Debkafile, a somewhat reliable private
Israeli intelligence service, has recently published a report claiming
that the Syrians were importing North Korean plutonium to be mixed
with Saddam’s enriched uranium. Allegedly, the Syrians were close
to completing a warhead factory next to Saddam’s WMD dump in Deir
al Zour, Syria to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of super toxic
"dirty bombs" that would pollute wherever they landed in Israel for
the next several thousands of years. Debka alleged that it was this
combination factory/WMD dump site which was the target of the recent
Israeli air strike in Deir al Zour province..
Senior sources in the Israeli government have privately confirmed to
me that the recent New York Times articles and satellite photographs
about the Israeli raid on an alleged Syrian nuclear target in Al
Tabitha, Syria were of the completely wrong location. Armed with this
knowledge, I searched Google Earth satellite photos for the rest of the
province of Deir al Zour for a site that would match the unofficial
Israeli descriptions: camouflaged black factory building, next to a
military ammunition dump, between an airport and an orchard. There is
a clear match in only one location, Longitude 35 degrees, 16 minutes
49.31 seconds North, Latitude 40 degrees, 3 minutes, 29.97 seconds
East. Analysts and members of the public are invited to determine for
themselves whether this was indeed the weapons dump for Saddam’s WMD.
Photos of this complex taken after the Israel raid appear to show that
all of the buildings, earthern blast berms, bunkers, roads, even the
acres of blackened topsoil, have all been dug up and removed. All that
remains are what appear to be smoothed over bomb craters. Of course,
that is not of itself definitive proof, but it is extremely suspicious.
It should be noted that the American interrogators had accurate
information about a possible Deir al Zour location shortly after the
war, but ignored it:
"An Iraqi dissident going by the name of "Abu Abdallah" claims that on
March 10, 2003, 50 trucks arrived in Deir Al-Zour, Syria after being
loaded in Baghdad. …Abdallah approached his friend who was hesitant
to confirm the WMD shipment, but did after Abdallah explained what
his sources informed him of. The friend told him not to tell anyone
about the shipment."
These interrogation reports should be re-evaluated in light of
the recently opened Iraqi secret archives, which we submit are
the best evidence. But the captured document evidence should not
be overstated. It must be emphasized that there is no one captured
Saddam document which mentions both the possession of WMD and the
movement to Syria.
Moreover, many of Saddam’s own tapes and documents concerning
chemical and biological weapons are ambiguous. When read together
as a mosaic whole, Saddam’s secret files certainly make a persuasive
case of massive WMD acquisition right up to a few months before the
war. Not only was he buying banned precursors for nerve gas, he was
ordering the chemicals to make Zyklon B, the Nazis favorite gas at
Auschwitz. However odious and well documented his purchases in 2002,
there is no direct evidence of any CW or BW actually remaining inside
Iraq on the day the war started in 2003. As stated in more detail in
my full report, the British, Ukrainian and American secret services
all believed that the Russians had organized a last minute evacuation
of CW and BW stockpiles from Baghdad to Syria.
We know from Saddam’s documents that huge quantities of CW and BW
were in fact produced, and there is no record of their destruction.
But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Therefore, at least
as to chemical and biological weapons, the evidence is compelling,
but not conclusive. There is no one individual document or audiotape
that contains a smoking gun.
There is no ambiguity, however, about captured tape ISGQ-2003-M0007379,
in which Saddam is briefed on his secret nuclear weapons project. This
meeting clearly took place in 2002 or afterwards: almost a decade
after the State Department claimed that Saddam had abandoned his
nuclear weapons research.
Moreover the tape describes a laser enrichment process for uranium
that had never been known by the UN inspectors to even exist in Iraq,
and Saddam’s nuclear briefers on the tape were Iraqi scientists who
had never been on any weapons inspector’s list. The tape explicitly
discusses how civilian plasma research could be used as a cover for
military plasma research necessary to build a hydrogen bomb.
When this tape came to the attention of the International Intelligence
Summit, a non-profit, non-partisan educational forum focusing on global
intelligence affairs, the organization asked the NSA to verify the
voiceprints of Saddam and his cronies, invited a certified translator
to present Saddam’s nuclear tapes to the public, and then invited
leading intelligence analysts to comment.
At the direct request of the Summit, President Bush promptly overruled
his national intelligence adviser, John Negroponte, a career State
Department man, and ordered that the rest of the captured Saddam tapes
and documents be reviewed as rapidly as possible. The Intelligence
Summit asked that Saddam’s tapes and documents be posted on a public
website so that Arabic-speaking volunteers could help with the
translation and analysis.
At first, the public website seemed like a good idea. Another document
was quickly discovered, dated November 2002, describing an expensive
plan to remove radioactive contamination from an isotope production
building. The document cites the return of UNMOVIC inspectors as the
reason for cleaning up the evidence of radioactivity. This is not
far from a smoking gun: there were not supposed to be any nuclear
production plants in Iraq in 2002.
Then a barrage of near-smoking guns opened up. Document after document
from Saddam’s files was posted unread on the public website, each
one describing how to make a nuclear bomb in more detail than the
last. These documents, dated just before the war, show that Saddam had
accumulated just about every secret there was for the construction
of nuclear weapons. The Iraqi intelligence files contain so much
accurate information on the atom bomb that the translators’ public
website had to be closed for reasons of national security.
If Saddam had nuclear weapons facilities, where was he hiding them?
Iraqi informants showed US investigators where Saddam had constructed
huge underwater storage facilities beneath the Euphrates River. The
tunnel entrances were still sealed with tons of concrete. The US
investigators who approached the sealed entrances were later determined
to have been exposed to radiation. Incredibly, their reports were lost
in the postwar confusion, and Saddam’s underground nuclear storage
sites were left unguarded for the next three years.
Still, the eyewitness testimony about the sealed underwater warehouses
matched with radiation exposure is strong circumstantial evidence
that some amount of radioactive material was still present in Iraq
on the day the war began.
Our volunteer researchers discovered the actual movement order from the
Iraqi high command ordering all the remaining special equipment to be
moved into the underground sites only a few weeks before the onset of
the war. The date of the movement order suggests that President Bush,
who clearly knew nothing of the specifics of the underground nuclear
sites, or even that a nuclear weapons program still existed in Iraq,
may have been accidentally correct about the main point of the war:
the discovery of Saddam’s secret nuclear program, even in hindsight,
arguably provides sufficient legal justification for the previous
use of force.
Saddam’s nuclear documents compel any reasonable person to the
conclusion that, more probably than not, there were in fact nuclear
WMD sites, components, and programs hidden inside Iraq at the time the
Coalition forces invaded. In view of these newly discovered documents,
it can be concluded, more probably than not, that Saddam did have a
nuclear weapons program in 2001-2002, and that it is reasonably certain
that he would have continued his efforts towards making a nuclear
bomb in 2003 had he not been stopped by the Coalition forces. Four
years after the war began, we still do not have all the answers, but
we have many of them. Ninety percent of the Saddam files have never
been read, let alone translated. It is time to utterly reject the
conventional wisdom that there were no WMD in Iraq and look to the
best evidence: Saddam’s own files on WMD. The truth is what it is,
the documents speak for themselves.
John Loftus is President of IntelligenceSummit.org, which is
entirely free of government funding, and depends solely upon private
contributions for its support. Mr. Loftus’ full research paper on
Iraqi WMD can be found at