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On March 20, the twits at FrontPageMag.com
interviewed Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, a retired U.S. Air Force
pilot, who stated without a doubt that Saddam shipped WMD off
to Syria on the eve of the Iraq invasion. McInerney was referring
to documents he believes prove that Saddam was hiding his horrible
weapons. Of the 600 documents that have been released to the
public thus far, none, I repeat none, say that Saddam shipped
off his WMD to secret hiding spots.
It is clear that McInerney,
a Fox News (sic) commentator, and the FrontPage conspiracy nuts
are desperate to find evidence that WMD existed in Iraq prior
to the invasion three years ago. They are also hoping to uncover
ties between bin Laden and Saddam. Many of the documents they
hope will uncover these claims contain forgeries, rumors, and
disinformation. In short, they aren't the most reliable sources.
Nonetheless, here's an example
of the hearsay propped up by McInerney:
"Yes, [Saddam shipped
off WMD] to three locations in Syria and one in Lebanon [Bekaa
Valley] in the September-December 2002 time frame. This information
was provided by Jack Shaw, the former deputy undersecretary of
defense for international technology security. He charged that
Saddam's stockpiles of WMD were moved by a Russian Spetznatz
team headed by Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence
chief, who came to Iraq in December 2002 to supervise the final
cleanup."
I suppose if Jack Shaw says
it's true, it must be. Right. Here's a guy who in December 2002
released a report of Saddam's alleged crimes, but as Noam Chomsky
noted at the time,
"It was drawn almost entirely
from the period of firm U.S.-UK support, a fact overlooked with
the usual display of moral integrity. The timing and quality
of the dossier raised many questions, but those aside, Straw
failed to provide an explanation for his very recent conversion
to skepticism about Saddam Hussein's good character and behavior."
On the flip side of the translation
game, Saddam noted over and again that Iraq had no WMD in 2002.
In several of the documents now available on the Web in English,
Saddam Hussein is quoted as saying to his deputies:
"[The UN inspectors] destroyed
everything and said, 'Iraq completed 95 percent of their commitment.
We cooperated with the resolutions 100 percent and you all know
that, and the 5 percent they claim we have not executed could
take them 10 years to [verify]. Don't think for a minute that
we still have WMD. We have nothing."
McInerney and other war supporters
have attempted to interpret the Arabic material that has yet
to be released in English. Letting the amateurs slug it out is
not likely to produce anything of quality or truth. Yet, many
conservative bloggers have tried to nail down Saddam's ties to
bin Laden by highlighting documents that seem to refer to a 1995
meeting between bin Laden and an Iraqi intelligence officer in
the Sudan. However, many intelligence officials claim such documents
must be taken with a grain of salt. Conversations were recorded
over the radio; others were only passed along by secondhand sources
but none have produced any direct link between Saddam and
a-Qaeda. Even so, a meeting between in the mid-1990s doesn't
mean Saddam had anything to do with 9/11, or that the two were
in cahoots against the U.S.
Besides, if a smoking gun did
exist, wouldn't the Bushies be the first to point it out? Why
would they need an ex-fighter pilot on David Horowitz's neocon
site and a few right-wing bloggers to uncover the truth? As with
most of Bush's PR, the release of these documents is only meant
to boost his dismal poll numbers.
Searching out justifications
for the Iraq invasion are all the war's backers seem to have
left. I guess they all failed to read David Kay's report on the
matter of WMD. Even Charles Duelfer, another war supporter like
Kay who sought Saddam's nonexistent arsenal and wrote a report
about it, is convinced Saddam didn't have squat even before the
first bombs dropped in 2003.
Now, I think it is pretty simple
(but obviously hard for the war supporters to grasp): if Saddam
didn't have WMD before the war began, then he didn't have any
WMD to ship off to Syria and hide. That means there was nothing
to destroy, either.
Nada. Zilch.
It's just more fabrications
from the seekers of the nonexistent smoking gun. The only thing
smoking right now, however, is the war crowds' continued lies
and smoldering reputations.
Joshua Frank edits the radical news blog www.BrickBurner.org
and is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George
W. Bush, published by Common Courage Press (2005). Josh can be
reached at BrickBurner@gmail.com.
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