They existed, and probably still exist, though in other hands.  Again, this comes to us from the Wikileaks espionage, but it at least confirms what we already knew (and what the media wouldn’t tell us nor the Left believe).

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.

Granted, this was not the huge weapons program that many national intelligence services thought was going on, but it wasn’t nothing, either.

WikiLeaks documents don’t reveal evidence of a massive weapons program by Saddam Hussein — the Bush administration’s leading rationale for invading Iraq — or some enormous stockpile of WMD, but do reveal that chemical weapons did vanish from the Iraqi battlefield.

According to the latest WikiLeaks document "dump," Saddam’s toxic arsenal, significantly reduced after the Gulf War, remained intact. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict and may have brewed up their own deadly agents, according to the WikiLeaks web site.

During that time, former Iraqi General Georges Sada, Saddam’s top commander, detailed the transfers of Iraq’s WMD. "There [were] weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."

The shift to Syria has long been discussed, but now at least we see more evidence that the diplomatic and intelligence communities all believe this.

Worth a read to see what other things our troops found in Iraq, especially if you didn’t see any of that reported in the media.

The question of where Saddam Hussein’s WMDs went that the whole world believed were there has been knocked around since at least 2004, with the most popular answer being Syria.  There was some evidence of it, that the MSM cheerfully ignored, but it’s back in the news today because President Obama’s pick for replacement of the Director of National Intelligence believes this is true. 

Ryan Mauro of Pajamas Media has an article today about new satellite imagery that is lending new credence to this thought.  Worth a read.

Syria helping out a friend in need.

Syria has signed a pledge to store Iranian nuclear weapons and missiles.

The London-based Jane’s Defence Weekly reported that Iran and Syria signed a strategic accord meant to protect either country from international pressure regarding their weapons programs. The magazine, citing diplomatic sources, said Syria agreed to store Iranian materials and weapons should Teheran come under United Nations sanctions.

“Just stash them next to the ones from Hussein.” This gives a little more credence to the idea that Saddam hid his WMDs there as well.

WMD update:

Saddam 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, U.S. investigators have discovered.

The recent discovery by the Bush administration’s Iraq Survey Group (ISG) is fueling speculation, but is not proof, that the Iraqi dictator moved prohibited weapons of mass destruction (WMD) into Syria before the March 2003 invasion by a U.S.-led coalition.

…

The ISG is a 1,400-member team organized by the Pentagon and CIA to hunt for Saddam’s suspected stockpiles of WMD, such as chemical and biological agents. So far, the search has failed to find such stockpiles, which were the main reason for President Bush ordering the invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam.

But there is evidence of unusually heavy truck traffic into Syria in the days before the attack, and with it, speculation that some of the trucks contained the banned weapons.

The ISG report is due to Congress next month. Their findings might just quiet down the “Where are the WMDs?” rhetoric. That is, if the press covers it.

Where do a Syrian journalist, a Syrian military intelligence officer, the US intelligence community, David Kay, a former analyst for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a former CIA Middle East analyst, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon all believe some of Saddam’s WMDs are? Syria. Have you heard this in the mainstream media? If not, why not?

Just in case this is glossed over on the nightly news, here’s some new information on the Iraq WMD issue. Tapes and documents are being translated, and more details have come out today.

In addition to the captured tapes, U.S. officials are analyzing thousands of pages of newly translated Iraqi documents that tell of Saddam seeking uranium from Africa in the mid-1990s.

“Uranium from Africa”. Gosh, that phrase really sounds familiar.

The documents also speak of burying prohibited missiles, according to a government official familiar with the declassification process.

But it is not clear whether Baghdad did what the documents indicate, said the U.S. official, who asked not to be named.

“The factories are present,” an Iraqi aide tells Saddam on one of the tapes, made by the dictator in the mid-1990s while U.N. weapons inspectors were searching for Baghdad’s remaining stocks of weapons of mass destruction.

“The factories remain, in the mind they remain. Our spirit is with us, based solely on the time period,” the aide says, according to the documents. “And [inspectors] take note of the time period, they can’t account for our will.”

Whether or not it was acted on, it was certainly planned and intended. But there is further information that indeed Hussein was in the WMD biz.

Mr. [Bill] Tierney [who translated the tapes for the FBI] said that the quote from the Saddam aide, and scores of others, show Saddam was rebuilding his once-ample weapons stocks.

“The tapes show that Saddam rebuilt his program and successfully prevented the U.N. from finding out about it,” he said.

There also exists a quote from the dictator himself, who ordered the tapings to keep a record of his inner-sanctum discussions, that Mr. Tierney thinks shows Saddam planned to use a proxy to attack the United States.

Of course he’d use a proxy. That way the anti-war Left would continue to insist that he had no ties to terrorism. Hussein knew his audience.

And stay tuned…

There is more to come. House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, told The Washington Times that about 500 hours of additional Saddam tapings are still being translated and analyzed by the U.S. In addition, in Qatar, U.S. Central Command’s forward headquarters in the Persian Gulf, sit 48,000 boxes of Iraqi documents, of which the military has delivered 68 pages to the committee.

“I don’t want to overstate what is in the documents,” Mr. Hoekstra said. “I certainly want to get them out because I think people are going to find them very interesting.”

He said the office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, is now weighing the congressman’s request to release 40 of the 68 pages.

Of the tapes released so far, Mr. Hoekstra said, “Everything [Saddam] is doing is saying, ‘Let’s take it and hide it’ with a clear intent. ‘As soon as this is over, we’re going to be back after this.’ ”

The article goes on to cite the evidence that the WMDs may indeed have been shipped to Syria, citing satellite photos. Even the Duelfer report acknowledged this possibility. Because, after all, this was a murderous dictator we’re talking about.

Mr. Tierney said he thinks the regime poured chemical weapons into lakes and rivers and sent other stocks over the border to Syria. Mr. Tierney served as a U.N. weapons inspector in the 1990s.

“The ISG, they were lied to in a very systematic way,” he said. “Lying. They were very good at it.”

But will the press notice, and will the Left care?

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

Another former Baathist member and former high-ranking General in Hussein’s army has come out to say that he understands that Iraq’s WMDs have been moved to Syria.

[Ali Ibrahim] Al-Tikriti says he knows Saddam’s weapons are in Syria because of contingency plans established as far back as the late 1980s, in the event either Damascus or Baghdad were taken over.

“Not to mention, I have discussed this in-depth with various contacts of mine who have confirmed what I already knew,” he said.

Saddam, after lying for so many years, knew the U.S. eventually would come for the weapons, he said, and wanted to maintain legitimacy with pan-Arab nationalists.

Also, he had “wanted since he took power to embarrass the West, and this was the perfect opportunity to do so,” al-Tikriti said.

“After Saddam denied he had such weapons, why would he use them or leave them readily available to be found?” he said. “That would only legitimize President Bush, who he has a personal grudge against.”

What we are witnessing now, he said, “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.”

What I find interesting was his motivation to leave the Baathists.

Al-Tikriti said he turned against the Baath Party after his wife stood up to him and questioned his brutal tactics.

“This really made me think, because no one has ever even considered to question the tactics of myself or any others and lived to tell about it,” he said. “This courageous move made me think deep and hard.”

If you’re a married man, or about to be one (as one of our Stones is), this bit of advice is always timely. Listen to your wife. Yeah, you can always come up with a bad biblical example (Adam, for instance) but typically a man’s wife is a source he should tap more often.

And women, you can stand by your man, but stand up to him, too.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out. Comments welcome.)

If the #2 guy in Saddam’s air force had information about WMDs in Iraq, would you believe him?

Even if he didn’t say what you wanted him to?

The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein’s air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.

The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, “Saddam’s Secrets,” released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.

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

But don’t you think we would have noticed that; a bunch of trucks or planes heading to Syria for no good reason? Mr. Sada tells us what Saddam was doing while the UN fiddled.

Mr. Sada, 65, told the Sun that the pilots of the two airliners that transported the weapons of mass destruction to Syria from Iraq approached him in the middle of 2004, after Saddam was captured by American troops.

“I know them very well. They are very good friends of mine. We trust each other. We are friends as pilots,” Mr. Sada said of the two pilots. He declined to disclose their names, saying they are concerned for their safety. But he said they are now employed by other airlines outside Iraq.

The pilots told Mr. Sada that two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, Mr. Sada said. Then Special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes, he said, including “yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel.” The pilots said there was also a ground convoy of trucks.

The flights – 56 in total, Mr. Sada said – attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.

“Saddam realized, this time, the Americans are coming,” Mr. Sada said. “They handed over the weapons of mass destruction to the Syrians.”

But can we believe this guy?

In his visit to the Sun yesterday, Mr. Sada was accompanied by Terry Law, the president of a Tulsa, Oklahoma based Christian humanitarian organization called World Compassion. Mr. Law said he has known Mr. Sada since 2002, lived in his house in Iraq and had Mr. Sada as a guest in his home in America. “Do I believe this man? Yes,” Mr. Law said. “It’s been solid down the line and everything checked out.”

Said Mr. Law, “This is not a publicity hound. This is a man who wants peace putting his family on the line.”

Mr. Sada acknowledged that the disclosures about transfers of weapons of mass destruction are “a very delicate issue.” He said he was afraid for his family. “I am sure the terrorists will not like it. The Saddamists will not like it,” he said.

They won’t be the only ones who won’t like it. Folks won’t give up their “Bush lied!” meme without a fight.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

Restating the obvious:

The CIA’s chief weapons inspector said he cannot rule out the possibility that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were secretly shipped to Syria before the March 2003 invasion, citing “sufficiently credible” evidence that WMDs may have been moved there.

Inspector Charles Duelfer, who heads the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), made the findings in an addendum to his final report filed last year. He said the search for WMD in Iraq — the main reason President Bush went to war to oust Saddam Hussein — has been exhausted without finding such weapons. Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s.

Again, Saddam had WMDs. The only question right now is where they are. If they’re in Syria, proving that will be difficult.

But on the question of Syria, Mr. Duelfer did not close the books. “ISG was unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war,” Mr. Duelfer said in a report posted on the CIA’s Web site Monday night.

He cited some evidence of a transfer. “Whether Syria received military items from Iraq for safekeeping or other reasons has yet to be determined,” he said. “There was evidence of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initiated by a Syrian security officer, and ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved. In the judgment of the working group, these reports were sufficiently credible to merit further investigation.”

But Mr. Duelfer said he was unable to complete that aspect of the probe because “the declining security situation limited and finally halted this investigation. The results remain inconclusive, but further investigation may be undertaken when circumstances on the ground improve.”

Ending the investigation with a “we don’t know, and right now we can’t know” shouldn’t give Democrats anything to get smug over. Regardless of where they are, stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons simply disappeared. If that’s good enough for Democrats, I’d submit that’s exactly the reason they can’t be trusted with national security.

Looks like no one in Iraq knew anything about moving WMDs to Syria.

The U.S.-led group that scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction has found no evidence Iraq hid such weapons in Syria before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, according to a final report on the investigation.

The 1,700-member Iraq Survey Team, responsible for the weapons hunt, also said in a report released late on Monday it found no Iraqi officials with direct knowledge of a transfer of weapons of mass destruction developed by former President Saddam Hussein.

However…

The new report posted on the CIA Web site said: “Based on evidence available … it is unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place. However ISG was unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials.”

It said investigators “found no senior policy, program or intelligence officials who admitted any direct knowledge of such movement of WMD.”

“Indeed, they uniformly denied any knowledge of residual WMD that have been secreted to Syria,” the report said.

The big question has been, since the UN and all these other countries knew they did exist (at least for the reason that Iraq had used them before), where did they go? Hope all these Democrats who’ve put down the whole WMD issue feel safe with this uncertainty.