Bush Lied

JVeritas' translations

of Saddam's captured documents

What Democrats said about WMD

George Bush didn't lie about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. Saddam did and the Political Left carried his water with their "Bush lied, people died" mantra.

I believe several questions need to be answered to blunt the false charges repeatedly made by the Political Left.

1. Did Saddam ever possess WMD? (Yes)
2. Did Saddam have an active WMD program? (Yes)
3. Were WMD's the reason for the invasion? (No)
4. Were WMD's found in Iraq? (Yes)
5. Where did the WMD's that weren't found in Iraq go? (Syria and Lebanon)

Did Saddam ever possess WMD?

Allegations of Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons had been frequent during the Iraq-Iran War. One of the instances reported by Iran has been conclusively verified by The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) report on Iraq's use of chemical weapons during the Iraq-Iran War. The report, requested by the U. N .Secretary-General, is dated May 1984.

"There have been reports of chemical warfare from the Gulf War since the early months of Iraq's invasion of Iran. In November 1980, Tehran Radio was broadcasting allegations of Iraqi chemical bombing at Susangerd. Three and a quarter years later, by which time the outside world was listening more seriously to such charges, the Iranian Foreign Minister told the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that there had been at least 49 instances of Iraqi chemical-warfare attack in 40 border regions, and that the documented dead totalled 109 people, with hundreds more wounded. He made this statement on 16 February 1984, the day on which Iran launched a major offensive on the central front, and one week before the start of offensives and counter-offensives further south, in the border marshlands to the immediate north of Basra where, at Majnoon Islands, Iraq has vast untapped oil reserves. According to official Iranian statements during the 31 days following the Foreign Minister's allegation, Iraq used chemical weapons on at least 14 further occasions, adding more than 2200 to the total number of people wounded by poison gas."

"One of the chemical-warfare instances reported by Iran, at Hoor-ul-Huzwaizeh on 13 March 1984, has since been conclusively verified by an international team of specialists dispatched to Iran by the United Nations Secretary-General. The evidence adduced in the report by the UN team lends substantial credence to Iranian allegations of Iraqi chemical warfare on at least six other occasions during the period from 26 February to 17 March 1984."

Did Saddam have an active WMD program?

In early September, 2005, Iraq Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari kicked off a three-day U.S. visit by flatly asserting that there is "no doubt" the government of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Zebari, an Iraqi Kurd, dismissed the doubts that have been rampant in the Western press over trumped-up intelligence reports. "We are all convinced that Saddam had WMD, because Saddam used WMD on us Iraqis. We have no doubt that he had them, because he used them. Of this, there is no doubt," he said.

If anyone still has doubts of Saddam Hussein's WMD capabilities, Zebari said, they can visit Iraq. "The weapons plants are still there. Many of them were looted, but they are still there," he said.

National Intelligence Estimates are the intelligence community's "most authoritative written judgments concerning national security issues," in the explanatory words of the latest such estimate. The reports pool information from the nation's 19-odd intelligence agencies, each of which analyzes and challenges, if necessary, what others contribute. The process may take several months. The result is designed to be as reliable as intelligence can get.

In 2002, there was a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that said, in part: "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

In May 2007, upon the release of his book, "At the Center of the Storm," George Tenet said, "We told the president what we did on Iraq WMD because we believed it."

Were WMD the reason for the invasion?

Absolutely not -- the real argument for war against Iraq was not that Saddam Hussein could not be deterred even if he possessed WMD. The argument was that Iraq should be transformed, irrespective of security considerations. This is a traditional liberal tenet.

The first – and last – rationale presented for the war by the Bush administration in every formal government statement about the war was not the destruction of WMD but the removal of Saddam Hussein, or regime change. This regime change was necessary because Saddam was an international outlaw. He had violated the 1991 Gulf War truce and all the arms control agreements it embodied, including UN resolutions 687 and 689, and the 15 subsequent U. N. resolutions designed to enforce them. The last of these, UN Security Council Resolution 1441, was itself a war ultimatum to Saddam giving him "one final opportunity" to disarm -- or else. The ultimatum expired on December 7, 2002, and America went to war three months later.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore had themselves called for the removal of Saddam by force when he expelled the U. N. weapons inspectors in 1998, a clear violation of the Gulf truce. This was the reason Clinton and Gore sent the "Iraqi Liberation Act" to Congress that year; it is why the congressional Democrats voted in October 2002 to authorize the president to use force to remove him; and it is the reason the entire Clinton-Gore national security team, including the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence, supported Bush when he sent American troops into Iraq in March 2003.

The "Authorization for the Use of Force" bill, passed by majorities of both parties in both Houses, is the legal basis for the president’s war, which Democrats have since betrayed along with the troops they sent to the battlefield.

The Authorization bill begins with 23 "whereas" clauses justifying the war. Contrary to the critics of the Bush administration, only two of these clauses refer to stockpiles of WMD.

On the other hand, twelve of the reasons for going to war refer to U. N. resolutions violated by Saddam Hussein. Even if these indisputable facts were not staring "Bush-lied folks" in the face, the destruction of WMD could not have been the "first rationale" for the war in Iraq for this simple reason: On the very eve of the war, the president gave Iraq an option to avoid a conflict with American forces. On March 17, two days before the invasion, Bush issued an eleventh-hour ultimatum to Saddam: leave the country or face war. In other words, if Saddam had agreed to leave Iraq, there would have been no American invasion. It is one of the most revealing features of the Democrats’ crusade against George Bush that they blame the war on him instead of Saddam.

The argument that Bush manipulated the facts about Iraqi WMD to pursue a war policy that was aggressive and unfounded is demonstrably false. Bush acted on the consensus of every major intelligence agency -- including the British, the French, the Russian, the German and the Jordanian agencies -- all of whom believed that Saddam had WMD. In other words, he cannot reasonably be accused of inventing the existence of Saddam’s WMD, although that is precisely what the demagogues on the Left do on an almost daily basis.

Since every Democratic senator who voted for the war was provided by the administration with a copy of the intelligence data on Saddam’s WMD, the charge that they were deceived is both cynical and hypocritical, as well as false.

Were WMD's found in Iraq?

The head of the U.S. team conducting the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq announced on Thursday that his group has uncovered at least ten more artillery shells filled with banned chemical weapons and is finding new WMD evidence "almost every day." "We've found ten or twelve Sarin and Mustard rounds," said Charles Duelfer, who replaced David Kay as head of the Iraq survey group earlier this year after Kay concluded that WMDs were unlikely to be found.

The discovery of a chemical weapons factory in Mosul with 1,500 gallons of chemicals might reignite the debate over whether Saddam Hussein possessed a storehouse of chemical weapons ready for use in war. Mosul was Saddam's backyard. His sons were killed there, and the story reports that the military is trying to determine "whether the expertise came from foreign fighters or members of Saddam Hussein's former security apparatus."

On June 21, 2006, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., read from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, the following: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

PowerLine Blog reports that the Butler Report, which reviewed issues relating to pre-war intelligence on Iraq, has important information on the subject of Saddam's efforts to purchase uranium in Africa, the subject of the famous "sixteen words" and of Joe Wilson's mendacious campaign against the Bush administration.

These are the relevant paragraphs on African uranium:

Para 492 -- In the course of the first Gulf war, the facilities involved in this indigenous route were severely damaged. Subsequently, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervised the dismantlement of all the facilities that Iraq had built to process, enrich and fabricate uranium, and removed all potentially fissile material. Some unprocessed uranium ore was left in country, but under IAEA safeguards and subject to regular inspections. Iraq would therefore have had to seek imports of uranium or uranium ore if it wished to restart its nuclear programme covertly.

Para 493 -- In early 1999, Iraqi officials visited a number of African countries, including Niger. The visits were detected by intelligence, and some details were subsequently confirmed by Iraq. The purpose of the visit was not immediately known. But uranium ore accounts for almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports. Putting this together with past Iraqi purchases of uranium ore from Niger, the limitations faced by the Iraq regime on access to indigenous uranium ore and other evidence of Iraq seeking to restart its nuclear programme, the JIC judged that Iraqi purchase of uranium ore could have been the subject of discussions and noted in an assessment in December 2000 that: ...unconfirmed intelligence indicates Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium.

Para 494 -- There was further and separate intelligence that in 1999 the Iraqi regime had also made inquiries about the purchase of uranium ore in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this case, there was some evidence that by 2002 an agreement for a sale had been reached.

Para 495 -- During 2002, the UK received further intelligence from additional sources which identified the purpose of the visit to Niger as having been to negotiate the purchase of uranium ore, though there was disagreement as to whether a sale had been agreed and uranium shipped.

Para 497 -- In preparing the dossier, the U. K. consulted the U. S. The CIA advised caution about any suggestion that Iraq had succeeded in acquiring uranium from Africa, but agreed that there was evidence that it had been sought.

Para 499 -- We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well -founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that: The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, was well-founded.

503. From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:

     a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

     b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.

     c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium and the British Government did not claim this.

     d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it. Until reminded by Barcepundit, I had forgotten that, in addition to trying to buy uranium from Niger, Iraq had also tried to obtain uranium from Congo, and may have succeeded in doing so. So the "sixteen words" were doubly true.

Where did the WMD's that weren't found in Iraq go?

On Sunday (November 13, 2005), Jay Rockefeller, then the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and, as such, was privy to our deepest secrets, told Chris Wallace: "I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq -- that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11."

So, with this heads-up, the Iraqis began to make plans to transfer their WMD, materiel and other evidence of these programs to neighboring countries.

On January 17th, 2003, Saddam Hussein signed a secret agreement with Syria. Iraq would send three CDs of formulas and technical information about weapons including nuclear explosions; 3 test-tubes full of anthrax and botulinum spores; and detailed analysis of tests carried out with these weapons on people, to Syria, in exchange for Syria harboring Iraqi scientists, technicians and their information.

By the end of February, three Iraqi microbiologists and a small group of technicians would be at safety in Syria, and a top nuclear physicist and his team soon arrived in early March. Syria made $35 million off of this deal as well. The bulk of the weapons would later be transferred between January and March 2003 from Baghdad, Tikrit and al-Qaim.

Saddam Hussein shipped his WMD stockpiles to his brother Ba'athists in Syria for safekeeping several months prior to the March 2003 invasion that toppled his regime. The underlying strategy was self-evident: go limp before U.S. forces, discard uniforms and blend into the civilian population, and then, with al Qaeda's help, launch the post-war "insurgency" with the aim of inflicting enough casualties on Coalition troops, in combination with the apparent absence of the WMD that were the leading, if far from only, justification for the war, that American left-wing elites would turn against the mission, force a Vietnam-style retreat, and allow Saddam to return triumphantly to power with his arsenal in hand.

Some would be stored among Syria's own weapons, particularly at an army base north of Damascus, while the rest was shipped to Lebanon's Bekka Valley, where they were put in holes 20-26 feet across and 82-115 feet deep. The holes were dug in poppy and cotton fields, in the valley stretching between Jabal Akroum, the town of al-Qbayyat and the Syrian border. Weapons were also hidden at the area between the towns of al-Hirmil and al-Labwah between the Orontes River and the Syrian border. According to several sources, Israeli satellite photos, given to the West, prove this.

The Iraq survey chief, David Kay, the former head of the coalition's hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, yesterday claimed that part of Saddam Hussein's secret weapons program was hidden in Syria. In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Dr Kay, who last week resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before last year's war to overthrow Saddam. "We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."

The Iraq Survey Group also referred to recovered Iraqi Intelligence Documents describing the transport of WMD materials to Syria from Iraq prior the invasion "sufficiently credible".

It has been confirmed across the board that 18-wheelers were seen going into Syria before the war, crossing the border soon after Iraqi intelligence replaced the border guards and cleared nearby areas for their passage. There are also eyewitness reports of the trucks going into Syria, and eyewitness reports of their burial in Lebanon. The trucks with the weapons were tracked to three locations in Syria and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, currently controlled by the Syrians, Iranians and Hezbollah.

These maps and satellite images document the Syrian WMD Programs Locations 36°02'02"N 37°21'03"E Open sources report that there are at least three Syrian facilities currently engaged in producing Chemical Weapons, located near Damascus, Hama, and Safira village (in the Aleppo area).

Glazov: What exactly is the evidence that Iraq moved its WMD into Syria? Mauro:

Satellite photos of the movements confirm that the WMD in Syria are at military bases, while the ones in Lebanon are buried. A fourth site in Syria, the al-Safir WMD and missile site, should also be looked at. From spring to summer 2002, there was a lot of construction here involving the expansion of underground complexes. We have tremendous testimony as well, by General Georges Sada, the former second-in-command of Saddam's Air Force that 56 flights took place on converted Iraqi Airways planes in the summer of 2002 to transport weapons, along with a ground shipment. He claims to know the pilots involved. A second Iraqi general, Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, confirmed in detail the movement of WMD into Syria. He claims his sources for this include Iraqi scientists and others in the regime that were very close to him even after he defected. He confirmed to me that Russian vehicles, including ones equipped to handle hazardous materials, were used.

The Italian media also reported that their intelligence services had information indicating that an Iraqi medium-range al-Hussein missile on a truck moved into Syria, and in the early stages of the war, was spotted briefly coming into Iraq, operating its radar overnight, and returning to Syria. Most reports about the transfer indicate missiles were included in the transfers.

A second source, "Saddam of Iraq vs Asad of Syria," reports that Nizar Nayuf (Nayyouf-Nayyuf), a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, said in a letter Monday, January 5, to Dutch newspaper “De Telegraaf,” that he knows the three sites where Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) are kept. The storage places are:

1-- Tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria. These tunnels are an integral part of an underground factory, built by the North Koreans, for producing Syrian Scud missiles. Iraqi chemical weapons and long-range missiles are stored in these tunnels.

2 -- The village of Tal Snan, north of the town of Salamija, where there is a big Syrian air force camp. Vital parts of Iraq's WMD are stored there.

3 -- The city of Sjinsjar on the Syrian border with the Lebanon, south of Homs city.

Nayouf writes that the transfer of Iraqi WMD to Syria was organized by the commanders of Saddam Hussein's Special Republican Guard, including General Shalish, with the help of Assif Shoakat , Bashar Assad's cousin. Shoakat is the CEO of Bhaha, an import/export company owned by the Assad family. In February 2003, a month before America's invasion in Iraq, very few are aware about the efforts to bring the Weapons of Mass Destruction from Iraq to Syria, and the personal involvement of Bashar Assad and his family in the operation.

Nayouf, who has won prizes for journalistic integrity, says he wrote his letter because he has terminal cancer. Click here for Satellite Images of the Syrian-Iraq's WMD Locations.

First Message from the Syrian source to Nizar Nayouf

First messages from a Syrian Source, WMD Location "Dear Nizar. We received confirmations that the Iraqi weapons, which were moved to Syria by the help of General Zoul-Himla Chalich are now hidden in three places inside Syria:

First place: a tunnel dug in the mountain close to the Al-Baïdah village, which is roughly two kilometers from Misyaf village. This place is under the 489 Safety cipher Documents' office control .

Second place: the factory of the Air Armed Forces in the village of Tal Sinan, between the town of Hama and Salamiyyah. This factory is under the Air Force control. Third place: the location of Shinsar, 40 kilometers south of Homs, two kilometers east of the Homs - Damascus road. There are underground tunnels there, controlled by Brigade 661 of the armed air Forces. It is a Brigade of air Patrol. The tunnels are several tens of meters deep. The weapons were transported in large wooden cases and barrels, under the supervision of the General Zoul-Himla Chalich and the son of his brother Assef, who works at Al-Bachaer company. The company is owned by the Assad family and has offices in Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad. This company also undertook the illegal Iraqi oil importation in Syria, and supplied weapons to Saddam. I will try to send you all the new information as i get . Take care and be safe." http://www.2la.org/syria/iraq-wmd.php

Conclusion

The "Bush lied" lie has been repeated so often that even responsible lefties have come to believe it to be true and the sole reason for the Iraq War -- they are deluded -- but there is nothing new in that.

The final nail in the coffin of this lie comes from no less a source than The New York Times, no friend of President Bush or the War in Iraq.

On Friday, November 3rd, 2006, The New York Times confirmed in print, that in 2002, Saddam Hussein’s "scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, in as little as a year away" -- game, set and match.

Had the United States not implemented the policy outlined in Clinton's "Iraqi Liberation Act" and eliminated this threat, today we would be facing a nuclear armed Iraq.

Additional Evidence

Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam's WMD's