UN Confirms: WMD smuggled out of Iraq? UPDATED

UPDATE: Bumped to top! *** Scroll down for new posts ***

Bumped to top for this update from Jason at Generation Why: Documents May Reveal Iraq had WMDs and Ties to Al-Qaida

There is a project underway in Doha, Qatar where several intelligence analysts, together with several dozen translators, most of them from Jordan, are sifting through millions of pages of documents unearthed in Iraq after the toppling of the regime.

Many of the documents from Doha had been entered into a database known as HARMONY. HARMONY is a thick stew of reports and findings from a variety of intelligence agencies and military units, and alongside the Iraqi documents were reports from contributing U.S. agencies. Go read the whole thing.

END UPDATE

Hmmm, took a walk over to the Political Teen to see the Clinton video everyone is talking about. I couldn’t get it to run, but I didn’t really need to; I DO remember the event. I DO remember that President Clinton was adamant that Saddam had run out of chances. Just like I remember him doing nothing after the USS Cole was bombed.

More interesting to me was this article from June, 2004 – linked to in the comments section: UN Confirms: WMD Smuggled out of Iraq. Another one of those stories, like this one which a news hound like me never saw, for some reason.

Late last week, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) briefed the Security Council on Saddam’s lightning-fast dismantling of missile and WMD sites before and during the war. UNMOVIC executive chairman Demetrius Perricos detailed not only the export of thousands of tons of missile components, nuclear reactor vessels and fermenters for chemical and biological warheads, but also the discovery of many (but not most) of these items – with UN inspection tags still on them — as far afield as Jordan, Turkey and even Holland.

Notably absent from that list is Iraq’s western neighbor Syria, ruled by its own Baath Party just like Saddam’s and closed to even the thought of an UNMOVIC inspection. Israeli intelligence has been reporting the large-scale smuggling of Saddam’s WMD program across the Syrian border since at least two months before the war. Syria has long been the world’s foremost state-sponsor of terrorism.

Perricos highlighted the proliferation danger to the Security Council, as well he should: UNMOVIC has no idea where most of the WMD material is today, just that it exists and it’s gone; and anything in Syria is likely to be in Jerusalem or New York tomorrow.

This is the biggest news story of 2004 so far. Yet you haven’t heard about it, have you?

You probably haven’t heard about Canada’s Prime Minister Paul Martin either — a socialist and no friend of America. Addressing a group of 700 university researchers and business leaders in Montreal last month, Martin stated bluntly that terrorists have acquired WMDs from Saddam. “The fact is that there is now, we know well, a proliferation of nuclear weapons, and that many weapons that Saddam Huseein had, we don’t know where they are…. [T]errorists have access to all of them,” the Canadian premier warned.

The tip of this terrorist sword was scarcely deflected on April 26th, when Jordanian intelligence broke up an al Qaeda conspiracy to detonate a large chemical device in the capital city of Amman…Over twenty tons of chemical weapons were seized from the conspirators, who were just days away from carrying out their plot.

One wonders where CNN and USA Today think twenty tons of nerve gas and sarin came from: Chemical Weapons-Mart? Yet their coverage, like most major media outlets, mentioned not a word about Saddam’s smuggled WMDs, which — according to liberal dogma — “don’t exist.”

Even though the UN says they do exist, now spread around the world.

It’s not just the UN. Bill Clinton says they exist, even after the war: in a July 2003 interview with Larry King, the ex-president uncharacteristically defended George Bush, saying “it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there [was]…a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for” in Iraq. Every intelligence agency in the world — French, British, German, Russian, Czech, you name it — agreed before the war; Jordanian intelligence can certainly confirm their opinion today.
…
…many on the left consider George W. Bush’s defeat more urgent than al Qaeda’s, his political death more essential than the possible physical death of millions of Americans.

I would love to have an actual NEWS article to back all of this up, but as we know, the press doesn’t cover this stuff. Anything that supports President Bush or mucks up a template goes unreported, these days.

UPDATE: Jimmie Bise provides a newslink, bless him!

AMMAN, Jordan (CNN) — Jordanian authorities said Monday they have broken up an alleged al Qaeda plot that would have unleashed a deadly cloud of chemicals in the heart of Jordan’s capital, Amman.

The plot would have been more deadly than anything al Qaeda has done before, including the September 11 attacks, according to the Jordanian government.

Among the alleged targets were the U.S. Embassy, the Jordanian prime minister’s office and the headquarters of Jordanian intelligence.

U.S. intelligence officials expressed caution about whether the chemicals captured by Jordanian authorities were intended to create a “toxic cloud” chemical weapon, but they said the large quantities involved were at a minimum intended to create “massive explosions.”

Officials said there is debate within the CIA and other U.S. agencies over whether the plotters were planning to kill innocent people using toxic chemicals.

And then there is this – the UN being unhappy because you know, we took nearly two tons of Uranium Out of Iraq without a permit, or something. H/T Confederate Yankee.
– First Posted November 17 – Bumped to top November 18.